Horrifying. This is what we get when the far right gets a free pass from the mainstream media. How about nightly fact checks on the evening news programs? These people are dangerous (the so-called journalists on the far right) when they inflame potential domestic terrorists so they can drive up ratings with their "info-taiment" shock talk, and then run from the responsibility when one of these nut jobs actually takes everything they've been saying as fact and starts building bombs or firing off shots.
Do they have the right to say the things they do? Well, I suppose they do. But the mainstream media, more so, has the responsibility of challenging what they say, from Fox News to Glenn Beck and beyond. Instead, they ignore it, or even worse, take it seriously and start reporting on the same "stories" these dangerous anti-journalists are fabricating without any real reporting to clarify fact and to separate truth from fiction.
When, not if, but when we have the next OKC, I'll be blaming the major mainstream news outlets as much as I'll be blaming the right wing "info-tainment" outlets. Perhaps even more so, because they truly are dropping the journalism ball where Beck and folks make it very clear that they are pandering to their viewers and listeners for the sake of the holy dollar and have little real interest in actually being journalists.
A lot of these folks cite the Bible for their political philosophies, well here's one for them:
Romans 13 (NSV): 1 Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. 2 Therefore he who resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. 3 For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of him who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, 4 for he is God's servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain; he is the servant of God to execute his wrath on the wrongdoer. 5 Therefore one must be subject, not only to avoid God's wrath but also for the sake of conscience. 6 For the same reason you also pay taxes, for the authorities are ministers of God, attending to this very thing. 7 Pay all of them their dues, taxes to whom taxes are due, revenue to whom revenue is due, respect to whom respect is due, honor to whom honor is due.
Monday, November 25, 2013
When does it become too much? Some tea partiers are now calling for Obama’s “legal” assassination
Tuesday, October 08, 2013
Shutdown Blues & The Promise of Reform in 2014
Yes, it’s been quiet here, as I warned it would be after the election. There may be another post on that later.
Shutdown. Blah, blah… All the stuff from the webs. Been posting a ton of stuff on the Facebook page about this…
But this is where we may see some change in the future. Maybe things needed to get this bad in D.C. before real change in Congress was possible.
First, a little about how this happened, in my eyes, at least.
The Tea Partiers who are pushing this are concerned about jobs, this is a job retention strategy. Their jobs, yes, self-preservation, yes, but that’s what it is.
The districts that elected them want to see some action against Obama and Obama care is about the only real policy / legislation they can find true fault with. If they don’t do what they are doing, a lot of these radicals will be voted out and replaced with another round of amateurs who will flounder in futility as badly as the current crop of self proclaimed patriots.
Now, yes. Anger against the GOP over this fiasco may cost some Republicans from more balanced, moderate districts their jobs in 2014, but it won’t be the far, far right minority.
This may be enough to toss the House back to the Dems, which may actually lead to a functioning Congress for a while.
But it doesn’t fix the problem. The real problem is the procedural rules in both houses. These arcane and, often, insane rules emerged over decades as one party or the other struggled against the domination of the other.
A silver lining to come out of all of this may be that rules reform could be a real winning campaign issue in 2014. Usually, when the minority party comes into power, they, for many reasons, leave this stuff.
However, I think candidate that campaign on reform could really do well in 2014, which may or may not lead to reform actually happening, but let’s cross one bridge at a time here. For the GOP, this may be a critical strategy. Yeah, my party broke the country, but I want to fix it. Depending on how bad things get, this may be the only strategy they have.
If this comes to pass, then this current fiasco may lead to some really positive change down the road. And it really will take a disaster to make such change possible. But maybe it will be worth it, in the long run.
For there to be any hope of reform, though, things are going to have to get a lot worse first. If this stalemate is resolved soon, and if we end up not defaulting on our debts, then the electorate will have forgotten these events 13 months from now. Sad but true.
And make no mistake, this is exactly why this is happening right now.
I am not rooting for disaster. But, if it comes, then this will be my happy thought as I rummage through the dumpsters trying to keep the boys fed.
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
GOP: Selling the American Dream and Winning Elections
This morning on OPB, the local NPR radio station, they had a brief clip from the president of the Portland State University Republicans...
Her main argument for the GOP and Romney, her main attraction to the GOP, was her perception that the Republicans’ primary ethic was success through hard work. She said that this fit well with her family's worldview, since her parents were immigrants who achieved "the American Dream." She also felt the Republicans were more pro-American, more patriotic.
So, through all of the noise and clatter, what she is taking from the campaigns so far is that the idea of working really hard to achieve success is a Republican ethic. I suppose, for the Democrats’ ethics, she probably shares Romney’s stated view on 47% of America, though, to be fair, she did not mention the Democrats at all.
This is how the GOP gets so many to vote for them, to vote against their best interests. The message is to work hard, keep doing what you are doing, and we’ll get the government to quit supporting those who aren’t working as hard and to remove those who are standing in your way on the path to success.
I would spend the morning collecting stats and historical trends from Republican Congresses and Presidencies, but lets face it… For voters like this young woman, those stats mean nothing. They had her at "work brings freedom."
To be fair, this sounded like the ideas of someone very young who has not really had any real world experience. I don’t know, but it’s what she sounded like to me.
Now, I have no problem with people who are Republicans because they feel that the specific policies and platforms, economic plans, etc. are right for America. I usually disagree with them, but they have their vote and I have mine.
What bothered me here was that she did not talk about economic plans or specific ideas on solving real issues our country was facing, she spoke only of vague generalities and meaningless, emotional slogans. And, to her, the GOP is the party supporting the American Dream.
Of course, this young woman’s vote was probably never up for grabs this year. Her reasons for being a Republican may be silly, but she is one and it is unlikely that she ever considered voting for Obama this year. Party faithful tend to look for reasons to continue to support their candidate, even through disaterous campaigns, rather than looking for reasons to switch their vote to the other guy.
But this clip still tells me a lot about how this election is going, and how recent elections have gone down.
To me, this is a really clear example of how the two parties different ideas distill down to many people, dripping down through incompetent or biased media sources, through tea party / extremist sloganeering, to arrive, stripped of any meaning or sense, to wash and water the preconceived biases of the ordinary voter who does not spend hours, not even every day, but every election, picking their party and candidate…
This election will be decided by 5% of the voters in five or so states. If they have not made up their mind yet, they are probably relying on semi-hysterical and mostly meaningless sound bites on the evening and morning news shows, vague notions bantered about by late night comics, Facebook graphics, and water cooler talking points for their information.
What is distilling down to these people is important. It will decide this election. It is easy to laugh and dismiss people who sound like this student sounded this morning, and that is a huge mistake because whichever candidate does the best job at targeting voters like her, albeit ones who have not made up their minds, will win every time.
Historically, the Republicans have the process down. The Democrats are slowly catching up, but still tend to fall into the trap that they can win on the intelligence and strength of their ideas and that sound bites are petty and worthless. No, they can’t win this way.
It is why so many Democrats were baffled by Romney’s “defeat” of Obama in the first debate. Obama brought the facts, Romney brought the persona, and Romney “won.”
As much as I hate to say it, to win, the Democrats must become masters of the very broken, very evil, sound bite and slogan driven PR machine that removes all thought and depth from their arguments and promises everyone success and happiness and ponies as a reward for voting Democrat.
Unfortunately, for the last twelve years or more, the Democrats seem incapable of actually winning elections. The only times they actually win, including the mid-term congressional elections as well as the presidency, is when the GOP screws up so bad that the voters come crawling back to give the Dems one more chance.
Before the first debate, the widening lead in the polls was not due to the strength of the Democrats’ arguments, but due to the ineptness of the Romney campaign. He seems silly, I am not voting for him! Tax codes? Health care? Foreign policy? Nope. Mitt looked silly. Now that Mitt doesn’t seem so silly, these voters are torn again.
This election will be decided by Leno and Letterman and the like, not even by Fox News or The Daily Show, whose viewers were never really in play to start with. The candidate who wins will be the one who provides the least fuel for the jokes, not by the campaign that offers the best, or, at least, the most coherent, ideas for the future of our country. It is sad and it is why, I can’t see for a long time, calling this blog anything but Democracy In Distress.
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Friday, June 22, 2012
God, Politics, Education, & Evolution: Some recent articles
It has been a while since I‘ve posted. Life has been busy and the election is in it’s early summer slump. Even the barbs Romney and Obama are throwing at each other feel weak and half-hearted… But maybe that is just me. Maybe I am just weak and half hearted about the election right now. I am sure that I’ll get more fired up as we get further into the VP selection process and closer into the conventions.
Anyway, here’s a collection of recent articles on religion, politics and education from AlterNet…
In the 30 years since Gallup started asking people whether they believe humans evolved, evolved under the guidance of God, or were created fully formed by God, the percentage of people adhering to the creationist view has actually gone up slightly over time, and now stands at 46 percent of the population. This is just the tip of the iceberg of a growing problem of public rejection of science. At the same time, there’s been a steady rise in people who believe that humanity evolved without any supernatural guidance, and now stands at 15 percent. What this seeming conflict suggests is that the issue is getting more polarized, as people feel they either have to pick Team Evolution or Team Creationism.
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The Tea Party has only intensified social pressure on conservative-leaning Americans to shun anything perceived as irreligious or academic. Science has always had a political edge to it, but the culture wars ramped up by the Tea Party have taken the problem to a whole new level.
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According to a study published in American Sociological Review, since 1974, conservative trust in science has been in a free-fall, declining 25 percent. In 1974, conservatives were the most pro-science group, higher than liberals and moderates. Now they’re the least pro-science group of all, with liberals showing the most trust in science.
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Any liberal who focuses on economic issues should pay close attention, because in many ways, the war on science is a war on the most vulnerable among us.
The public’s resistance to evolution might not seem like a big deal at first, since the main result of conservative activism is that high school biology programs give up teaching evolution, while universities retain their evidence-based curriculum. In fact, Kevin Drum argued in Mother Jones that creationism in schools didn’t really matter because, “knowledge of evolution adds only slightly to a 10th-grade understanding of biology.”
The problem with that is that someone who doesn’t get proper education early tends to lag behind for the rest of their educational career, and the 10th-grader who doesn’t get real biology courses will often be too far behind her better-educated peers in college to even consider a career in science. How many potential doctors and scientists are being lost because they didn’t have the economic advantage of going to a private school that did provide a proper education, but instead went to a public school that dished out creationist propaganda?
As PZ Myers argued, the poor public education in science means that a shrinking portion of the American public is going into careers in science. Americans from working class backgrounds who go into these careers are far more likely to use their education and career contacts to return to their communities and improve the economic and health conditions back home. But with these declining numbers of American scientists, that possibility is being shut down.
The public’s rejection of global warming is even more dangerous for working class and poor people. It’s well-understood that poorer people bear the brunt of environmental destruction, since they can’t afford to move out of polluted areas that are linked to health issues like asthma and cancer.
My brilliant husband, a sociologist and political theorist, refuses to get upset about the poll. It’s quite annoying, actually. He thinks questions like these primarily elicit affirmations of identity, not literal convictions; declaring your belief in creationism is another way of saying you’re a good Christian. That does rather beg the question of what a good Christian is, and why so many think it means refusing to use the brains God gave you. And yes, as you may have suspected, according to the Pew Research Center, evangelicals are far more likely than those of other faiths to hold creationist views; just 24 percent of them believe in evolution. Mormons come in even lower, at 22 percent, although official church doctrine has no problem with evolution.
…rejecting evolution expresses more than an inability to think critically; it relies on a fundamentally paranoid worldview. Think what the world would have to be like for evolution to be false. Almost every scientist on earth would have to be engaged in a fraud so complex and extensive it involved every field from archaeology, paleontology, geology and genetics to biology, chemistry and physics. And yet this massive concatenation of lies and delusion is so full of obvious holes that a pastor with a Bible-college degree or a homeschooling parent with no degree at all can see right through it.
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Kenneth Miller, a biology professor at Brown University and practicing Catholic who is a leading voice against creationism, agrees with Princehouse. “Science education has been remarkably ineffective,” he told me. “Those of us in the scientific community who are religious have a tremendous amount of work to do in the faith community.” Why bother? “There’s a potential for great harm when nearly half the population rejects the central organizing principle of the biological sciences. It’s useful for us as a species to understand that we are a recent appearance on this planet and that 99.9 percent of all species that have ever existed have gone extinct.” Evangelical parents may care less that their children learn science than that they avoid going to hell, but Miller points out that many of the major challenges facing the nation—and the world—are scientific in nature: climate change and energy policy, for instance. “To have a near majority essentially rejecting the scientific method is very troubling,” he says. And to have solidly grounded science waved away as political and theological propaganda could not come at a worse time. “Sea-level rise” is a “left-wing term,” said Virginia state legislator Chris Stolle, a Republican, successfully urging its replacement in a state-commissioned study by the expression “recurrent flooding.”
One counterfeit idea that circulates with frustrating stubbornness is the claim that America was founded as a Christian nation. It’s one of the Christian Right’s mantras and a favorite talking point for televangelists, religious bloggers, born-again authors and lobbyists, and pulpit preachers.
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Unlike some of the wackier positions taken by evangelicals—think Rapture—the claim that America was founded as a Christian nation has gone relatively mainstream. This is the case largely because the media-savvy Christian Right is good at getting across its message. A 2007 First Amendment Center poll revealed that 65 percent of Americans believe the founders intended the United States “to be a Christian nation”; over half of us think that this intention is actually spelled out somewhere in the Constitution.
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So the notion that America was founded as a Christian nation is widespread. In the currency of ideas, it’s the ubiquitous penny. But like an actual penny, it doesn’t have a lot of value. That so many people think it does is largely because they don’t stop to consider what “founded as a Christian nation” might signify. Presumably the intended meaning is something like this: Christian principles are the bedrock of both our political system and founding documents because our founders were themselves Christians. Although wordier, this reformulation is just as perplexing because it’s not clear what’s meant by the term founders. Just who are we talking about here?
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Americans in the late colonial and early republic years were often caught in a worldview clash between Christianity on the one hand and the Enlightenment on the other. Some reacted by clinging to their Christian faith and blasting Enlightenment “infidelity” with jeremiads, while others, as Jonathan Edwards grumbled in 1773, “wholly cast off the Christian religion and are professed infidels.” College students at Yale, Princeton, Harvard, King’s (present day Columbia), William and Mary, and Dartmouth gleefully embraced, at least for a while, the Enlightenment’s anti-biblical religion of Deism. In the 1790s, thanks largely to the efforts of Deist crusader Elihu Palmer, militant Deism—which rejected miracles, revelation, the authority of Scripture, and the divinity of Jesus—enjoyed a spurt of rather astounding popularity. But many people who lived at the founding of the nation tried to steer a middle course that combined, even if awkwardly at times, elements from both Christian and Enlightenment worldviews. This made for any number of nuanced possibilities when it came to Christian commitment, all of them much more complex than the Christian Right would prefer to acknowledge.
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The Founding Fathers weren’t all Christian. Some, of course, were: Patrick Henry (Episcopalian), John Hancock (Congregationalist), John Jay (Episcopalian), and Sam Adams (Congregationalist), for example, were all devout and pretty conventional Christians. But the big players in the founding of the United States—such men as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams, and probably Alexander Hamilton—weren’t. Each of them was much more comfortable with a deistic understanding of God than a Christian one. For them, the deity was an impersonal First Cause who created a rationally patterned natural order and who was best worshiped through the exercise of reason and virtue. Most of them may have admired the ethical teachings of Jesus (although Paine conspicuously did not), but all of them loathed and rejected the priestcraft and superstition they associated with Christianity.
Despite this, the Christian Right insists on adopting these men (aside from Paine) as Christian founders. The usual justification is that each of them (again, except Paine) belonged to an established Christian denomination. But as we’ve already seen, formal membership by itself wasn’t then (or now) a fail-safe measure of an individual’s religious beliefs.
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None of the founders, for example, used conventional Christian language when writing or speaking about God. Instead, the terms they favored—Supreme Architect, Author of Nature, First Cause, Nature’s God, Superattending Power—were unmistakably deistic. (One of the Christian Right’s most telling blind spots is its failure to pick up on the founders’ obviously non-Christian nomenclature.) Another indicator of their lack of conventional Christian commitment is the fact that while all of them had been baptized as infants, an initiation that of course made them nominally Christian, none who were members of denominations that offered the sacrament of Confirmation sought it as adults. Moreover, they generally did not take Communion when it was offered, nor did they typically involve themselves in church activities. Even when they did, it was no clear signal that they were orthodox Christians. George Washington, for example, served on the vestry in several Episcopalian parishes. But he avoided Confirmation and Communion, never used give-away Christian terms such as Lord or Redeemer, and rarely even referred to Jesus by name. Finally, none of them gave the slightest hint in their personal letters or diaries that they considered themselves committed Christians.
The obvious conclusion is that it’s a stretch to call the leading founders “Christians,” particularly of the evangelical sort. Most of them may not have been contemptuously anti-Christian (although Paine certainly was, with Jefferson a close second), but neither did they have much use for Christianity. They had so little regard for its central tenets, in fact, that they couldn’t square it with their consciences to salt their public statements with even an occasional Christian phrase. In this way they displayed an integrity that few vote-hungry politicians in our day feel moved to emulate. Revealingly, only a handful of their contemporaries seemed particularly bothered by their obvious indifference to Christianity, and those who made a big deal of it generally did so more for political reasons—as when Federalists attacked the “infidel” Jefferson in the presidential elections of 1800 and 1804—than from any sense of outraged orthodoxy. Then as now, what pretended to be a religious battle was often a political one.
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In the Constitution, no mention whatsoever of God is made except in the document’s date (“Done ... in the year of our Lord ...”), an inexplicable oversight if its framers intended it to lay the foundation for a Christian nation. The Declaration of Independence does use religious language, but the religion is obviously Deism rather than Christianity. God is referred to as “Nature’s God,” the “Creator” of the physical “Laws of Nature” in addition to the “unalienable [moral] Rights” to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. To interpret the document as even suggestively Christian is sheer fantasy or worse. On the contrary, both it and the Constitution clearly serve as precedents for the famous passage in the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli—one which the Christian Right loves to hate—which affirms that “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.” The treaty, which sealed a routine diplomatic agreement between the U.S. and the Muslim state of Tripolitania, was unanimously ratified by the Senate and publicly endorsed and signed by President John Adams. That it was passed without debate or dissent attests to the fact that neither the president nor senators found its denial of a Christian foundation to the nation objectionable.
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Sunday, February 19, 2012
Code Speak: Politics, bigotry, & the problem with Santorum
Before the Florida primary, I mistakenly believed that Rick Santorum was done.
Can’t we just be done with him? Please?
The Anyone But Romney camp has got them selves into a pickle… They have to decide between the walking contradiction of Newt Gingrich and Santorum, whose issues as a general election candidate may be just as awkward, but in a very different way...
Republicans and the Culture Wars: Why It Won't Work This Year - The Daily Beast:
Then there’s Rick Santorum, who, by all rights, should dominate the values battlefield. He’s got the loving wife, the passel of kids, the goofy-dad vibe. And, let’s face it, the man has never met a policy issue he didn’t see through the prism of family values. Tax reform? Regulatory reform? Deficit spending? As Rick tells it, the first step toward addressing any of these problems is to reinstate the ban on sodomy.
On pure piety points, no one can beat Rick. We’re talking here about a guy who has said he would use the presidential bully pulpit to warn of how contraception tempts even married couples to get busy in ways contrary to God’s will. This, of course, is part of the problem. Opposing abortion is one thing. Opposing contraception even among married folks doesn’t make Rick seem like a paragon of moral virtue so much as a refugee from the 16th century.
This excerpt touches on the real problem with Santorum without actually landing on it. It is not Santorum’s beliefs that are necessarily troubling to the far right, it is the way he communicates them. He either has made a decision at some point in his career to ignore the generally accepted code speak of the conservative social agenda, or he just doesn’t understand it.
If the former, then this is, perhaps, a bold though politically difficult approach to campaigning for him. If the latter, then he may be too stupid to be president. Not that that has stopped voters before.
What do I mean by code speak? Well, on gay rights, instead of calling them “special rights,” he focuses instead on the idea that homosexuality is a sin. Sure, a lot of non-politicians focus on the Biblical rather than the political points of this issue, but usually those are not people running in statewide elections, let alone wanting to run in a national general election.
Likewise, the new contraception debate (really, have we drifted that far to the right?)…
Instead of talking about the economics of health care, or even the questionable argument about religious freedom for faith-based organizations, Santorum, in the past, hit a straight moral line drive with the argument that contraception was bad for families. Of course, this was before the debate raised like an oily sludge to the surface of the election cycle, and at the time he said that he was not in favor of legislating this brand of morality, but times and political climates can and do change…
This sort of right wing code speak becomes very troubling to me when the President is being discussed. I know the issues that most on the right have with Obama have nothing to do with his race, but… All the claims about the President being a Muslim, a non-native citizen, and even a socialist… In a different day and age, how many of the people making so much noise about these non-issues wouldn’t bother? Instead, thirty plus years ago, they would just be making noise about getting the black man out of the White House.
Not everyone, don’t get me wrong. But I am sure that some percentage of those making these sorts of arguments about the President are just using these non-issues as code speak about his race.
While I disagree with Santorum at a fundamental level on just about every issue and take exception to almost every word that comes out of his mouth, at least he is not that kind of slime. I have no doubt that his issues with Obama have a lot more to do with wanting his job than with the color of the President’s skin.
The bigoted, racist kind of slime out there who do have that problem should be worried, though, because Santorum does not play their game and, in the unlikely event that he secures the GOP nomination, his inability to use proper conservative code speak will slay any chances at victory in November.
Only by using code speak to portray religious and moral beliefs as legitimate political issues can one who seems to believe that birth control is a refuge for loose women with low morals succeed in gaining acceptance outside of the far right conservative primaries.
Of course, Santorum’s failure to grasp the necessity of right wing code speak is not his only problem, beyond failing to understand how to discuss social issues, he really doesn’t seem to understand which aspects of these issues really engage people in the first place:
But it’s not just that the senator’s positions are out of touch with the mainstream electorate (a mere 8 percent of Americans think birth control is immoral; 84 percent of U.S. Catholics think you can use it and still be a good Catholic). It’s that the guy is simultaneously too pious and too pathetic.
Take his views on gay rights. Plenty of people object to gay marriage, but Santorum has long come across as a bit of a clown on the entire subject of homosexuality. It’s some combination of his whiny manner and his slightly-too-colorful blatherings about how “sodomy” is kinda like polygamy or incest but not quite so bad as man-on-dog action. With that kind of commentary, small wonder Dan Savage decided to execute his devastating lexical takedown of the senator.
Perhaps saddest of all, when things get uncomfortable, Santorum crumbles. Pressed recently about a section of his 2005 book, It Takes a Family, that laments “radical feminists” undermining the family by pushing women to work outside the home, the senator pleaded ignorance and claimed the bit had been written by his wife.
To be sure, this whole Serious Candidate business is new to Santorum.
Here’s to crumbling and blaming it on your wife. That sells really well in the heartland.
The problem the rest of us will have if Santorum became president should resolve itself any time now. I am just surprised he’s made it this far.
But not really. I still am not convinced that the GOP can bring itself to nominate a Mormon, er… I mean someone who flip flops on all the issues they hold dear while being responsible for the rough draft of the “anti-American” and “Socialist” Obama death panel plan.
Unfortunately, the only other sane choice they had this year was another, lesser known Mormon, er… I mean someone who endorsed the President’s anti-Amercian, Nazi Communist agenda by actually working for the guy. Ambassador to China or closet communist?
Huntsman's failure to launch and the Anyone But Romney crusade, it surely couldn’t have anything to do with faith, could it? I am sure that for most primary voters, the politics do come first. Unfortunately, I am sure that there are a few out there who obscure their true feelings with political code phrases.
A skill Santorum seems to lack.
Related Posts
Sunday, November 27, 2011
A dysfunctional system goes Super… And fails.
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| From 2011-11 (Nov) |
On Howard Kurtz’s Reliable Sources this morning, Kurtz was asking if the media was over-hyping and over-blowing the consequences of the “Super Committee's” failure to come up with a debt reduction plan.
He asks if all these “terrible things” that may happen as a result of this failure are “just media hype?”
In these teasers for the segment, it seemed to me that he was missing the real punch line here, but after a weak panel discussion on the topic, he did get to the point I feel needs to be made.
The real story here is how the failure of the “Super Committee,” which was set up to actually succeed without a lot of the procedural chains that bind the rest of Congress, brings into sharp relief the fact that, in Kurtz’s words, “nobody seems to be able to get anything done in Washington.”
He points out how this failure “highlight[s] the utter dysfunction of Washington.”
To me, this is the real story here. Of course Congress will find a way to avert the “disaster” of across the board budget cuts, of course tax codes will remain ridiculously full of loop holes for the richest individuals and corporations… Of course the traditional and non-traditional media will make a lot of noise about small political maneuvers that distract everyone from the real issues and problems facing our country and binding our system…
Nothing much will change. Few real problems will be solved (or even mentioned), problems manufactured for use as political weapons will be howled about…
And nothing much will change.
This is the story that is not being covered.
I saw this quote earlier, from Andrew Sullivan, explaining the Occupation and Tea Party movements…
"The theme that connects them all is disenfranchisement, the sense that the world is shifting deeply and inexorably beyond our ability to control it through our democratic institutions. You can call this many things, but a “democratic deficit” gets to the nub of it. Democracy means rule by the people—however rough-edged, however blunted by representative government, however imperfect. But everywhere, the people feel as if someone else is now ruling them—and see no way to regain control."
The system has become nearly impossible to change. The far right’s reaction is to just break it. The left wallows in ineptitude. The center rolls its eyes and simmers in a weak broth of futility.
For awhile, I’ve been thinking that if I ever took a sign to an Occupation event, it would be this:
The Status-Quo is
working for someone.
Is it working for you?
What is the solution? Well, there are no big universal fixes. But this is the conversation that we need to be having.
Finally, I loved this quote from Kurtz this morning: “miillions and millions unemployed and that is becoming an old story and that does bother me.”
Exactly. It should bother everyone.
Related Posts
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Ronald Reagan and Obama both said the same thing about taxes for the wealthy
Thanks to Aleshia on Facebook for spotting this clip.
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This is not our grandparents' Republican Party... |
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Who funds the U.S. government: Comparison Chart - Total Reported Income Vs. Total Income Taxes Paid (2007)
But who can afford to fund the government? The fact of the matter is that, while the top 25% earners in the country pay 86.6% of the taxes, a percentage that drives conservative wild, just asking the bottom 75% to "pay their fair share" is not a workable solution.
While it sounds good on paper, at the end of the day, the bottom 75% can't afford it. Small percentage changes in the tax rate for most Americans have a dramatic effect on their day to day lives, much more so than it does for the wealthiest members of society.
And at a certain point, taxes become uncollectable. Are we really going to ask someone to choose between paying their tax bill and putting food on the table for their children? Those are taxes that won't get paid and then we'll be sending good money after bad trying to collect and prosecute those damn, poor and lazy tax evaders that are not pulling their weight in society.
And if we are asking the average American to give more of their money to the government instead of spending their money in the free market, how are the top 25% going to keep earning their money? Raising prices to compensate for smaller sales? Double tapping the purchasing power of the average American and driving the economy even further into the darkness?
Blah... Too burned out for a thoughtful, well written argument on this topic today, but I did want to look into the facts and to offer a couple splintered fragments of my humble opinion..
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
WTF!?!?! Tea Party Nation asks businesses to stop hiring as expression of tea party solidarity
Daily Kos: Tea Party Nation asks businesses to stop hiring as expression of tea party solidarity:
'via Blog this'
Cut and paste because I can't type with fists....
Resolved that: President Obama has seized what amount to dictatorial powers to bypass our Congress, and that because the Congress is controlled by a Progressive socialist Senate that will not impeach one of their kind, they have allowed this and yielded what are rightfully congressional powers to this new dictator. [...]
Resolved that: The current administration and Democrat majority in the Senate, in conjunction with Progressive socialists from all around the country, especially those from Hollywood and the left leaning news media (Indeed, most of the news media.) have worked in unison to advance an anti-business, an anti-free market, and an anti-capitalist (anti-individual rights and property ownership) agenda. [...]
I, an American small business owner, part of the class that produces the vast majority of real, wealth producing jobs in this country, hereby resolve that I will not hire a single person until this war against business and my country is stopped.
Sunday, October 16, 2011
Class Warfare: Occupy Together Videos
Well, guess what... This is what class warfare looks like. Maybe if we had those discussions, for real, over the last ten years, we wouldn't have reached this point.
Monday, October 10, 2011
Freaks and, uh, more freaks... Republicans in 2012
While I have yet, in my voting life, to actually pull the elephant lever for President, I always root for them to have a serious, competent candidate for the job. I would argue this happened in 1992 (in hind sight), 1996, and (questionably) in 2008. While this current freak show of a Republican field might be "good" for the Democrats a year from now, it is BAD for our country.
And, make no mistake, my money says that Herman Cain will get the nomination before Romney. The primary voters will vote black before Mormon. That is the dirty little not-so-secret secret of the 2012 election so far. And if he does get the nomination, expect many on the wacko right to stay home in November.
Who knows, maybe Huntsman can pull it together? I do not know too much about him yet, but he seems the least vile of the bunch. Romney wasn't too bad until his swerve to the far right, past the nicely trimmed lawns of Conservative Lane into the tall razor wire fences surrounding the armed compounds in Crazy Town. Unfortunately, Huntsman also suffers from Romney's small L.D.S. problem.
Blah...
The GOP's sad, intolerant 2012 field - Yahoo! News: "At the weekend's Values Voters Summit, Republican presidential candidates and conservative kingmakers proved that bigotry is among their chief values
...
Huntsman, as Tish Durkin argued, has qualities that ought to recommend him — among them, that: "He's not Romney... He's not crazy... He's not swearing on a stack of Bibles." Yet these very qualities are disqualifying in today's Republican Party. Huntsman doesn't want, or can't get, a séance with Donald Trump, who's become the grinning Joker of today's GOP. And Huntsman won't get a second look or a second chance — not this time around.
There's persistent resistance to Romney — on the shameful ground of religious bigotry and on the defensible ground of doubts about his sincerity, his personality, and his principles. The result: The extremism and pratfalls of his opponents, which should benefit the Mitt-man by making him seem relatively sensible and reasonable, have generated a miasma that's enveloping the Romney campaign. Not only has he toed a bright right line on social issues; he's adopted the GOP habit of fact-free argument — almost certainly the easy reaction of someone who's already treated his public life as record-free.
Mitt Romney will be ill-prepared for this contest. He will enter the general election burdened by the craziness to which he's had to kowtow. The primaries are also stripping away the strands of his already threadbare character. And they're leaving him on the wrong side of the great dividing line of 2012 — for the privileged, not ordinary people."
Sunday, October 09, 2011
Wednesday, October 05, 2011
A sad headline for Mitt Romney
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Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Man Charged With Possessing 4,000 Pounds Of Explosives, Saying 'We Will Be Mercenaries' | TPMMuckraker
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Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Stupid voters enable broken government - CNN.com
...
"Each time Rep. Michele Bachmann insinuates falsehoods into her arguments, as she did earlier this month on the "Today Show" by suggesting HPV vaccinations cause mental retardation, I think: A group of people on auto-pilot in Minnesota did this to us."
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
House unexpectedly defeats spending bill - Yahoo! News
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Monday, September 19, 2011
Breitbart: Conservatives ‘outnumber’ liberals, ‘and we have the guns’ | Raw Replay
Hell, if we are truly at war with these people, then I'd say our democracy is very much in distress. Maybe they should be looking more at workable solutions then at conquering everyone who disagrees with them.
Breitbart: Conservatives ‘outnumber’ liberals, ‘and we have the guns’ | Raw Replay: "Speaking to a Massachusetts tea party group recently, conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart made some comments that are raising eyebrows online this week, telling the small gathering of Republicans that he sometimes wants to “fire the first shot.”
“I’m under attack all the time,” he said. “The call me gay. There are death threats… There are times when I’m not thinking as clearly as I should, and in those unclear moments, I always think to myself, ‘Fire the first shot. Bring it on.’ Because I know who’s on our side.
“They can only win a rhetorical and propaganda war. They cannot win. We outnumber them in this country and we have the guns… I’m not kidding. They talk a mean game, but they will not cross that line because they know what they’re dealing with. ”
Breitbart added that “major named people in the military” will sometimes “grab” him and say, “Thank you for what you’re doing, we’ve got your back.”"
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