The following comment appeared in the New York Times in response to a Paul Krugman column criticizing Republican Rep. Paul Ryan's budget proposal:
Congressman Ryan is from one of the wealthiest Wisconsin districts, just across border from Illinois and a favored bedroom area for wealthy commuters from Chicago. He's representing the wealthy voters to whom everyone not one of them is invisible.
Congressman Ryan proposed earlier budgets in which he would have eliminated the health care for children (CHIPS.) His constituents didn't protest. As far as they're concerned, Americans working for a living are lucky to be employed and should have worked harder and studied harder.
His constituents pay to keep him in office because he'll carry their water: make it possible for the strong to prey on those who lack their wealth and connections. It's something the working people in this nation fiercely fought to overcome in the 1930s, 1940s, and even into the 1950s.
I still recall when my father was a petroleum company executive during a refinery strike during my younger years and him telling how he had to low-crawl to his car after his month of working to keep the refinery operating. I remember the wives of the workers in that strike coming to our rural home with their children, and asking for food and toilet paper. I recall my mother answering the door with a revolver in one hand hidden behind her back. I recall us setting up a a pantry in the garage and my mother telling them she couldn't feed them all but would help in emergencies. I recall my father expressing amazement that after low-crawling to the car, the union workers opened the gate and waved him out. I remember his consternation when my mother showed him the garage pantry and explained why they'd waved him out. She said the strike was between the men, and union or not, she'd always share her food with mothers and children. I remember our house being shot at and seeing the bullet holes in the living room window.
I recall one of my father's friends over one evening talking to him about a railroad strike. He told of how union workers had been found along the rail bed beaten black and blue. About that moment he looked up and remarked to my father that "little ears were nearby" and he'd better stop or there'd be nightmares. I was sent to bed.
I recall the news stories on WGN radio about acid being thrown into truckers' faces during trucking strikes.
I recall the death threats sent to my parents about kidnapping and killing me. I recall at age 7 people in Halloween masks attacking the windows on my bedroom and I then recall being taken to St. Louis where a large black German Shepherd named Windy and I were trained together for my protection. I recall the annual re-training through my eleventh year. That probably had a lot to do with my father regularly took me overseas with him.
That is the era back to which Congressman Ryan and his bought, phony, grass-root supporters want to take us: the era of real class warfare. It's sick. They're morally corrupt.
From President Truman forward, every Democratic President has reduced the national debt as a percentage of the nation's GDP. Since Truman forward, ONLY TWO Republican Presidents have reduced the nation's debt as a percentage of GDP: President Eisenhower in both terms and President Nixon in his first term. That's it. Since then, Republican Presidents have always increased the national debt as a percentage of GDP.
Congressman Ryan's budget isn't the least bit serious. It's not a budget to build a great nation. It's a delusion concocted by his vanity egged on by the thought of accolades and personal riches from this nation's wealthiest. Congressman Ryan's budget has all the scope, insight, and foresight one might find in the Christmas wish list of a sheltered, spoiled child.
Juan Cole was an early, articulate, and prescient opponent of the Iraq War. His blog, Informed Comment, became the go-to place for those of us seeking to construct a knowledgeable case against the war. Professor Cole supports the intervention in Libya, and explains why here.
Cole analyzes differences in the left over the intervention as a matter of cognitive dissonance: On the one, the left supports the efforts of ordinary people to free themselves from tyranny; on the other, it opposes as imperialism military intervention in their lives. In the case of Libya, Cole believes that the opportunity to rid the Libyan people (and the world, for that matter) of the sociopathic predations of Muammar Qaddafi is paramount and must be exploited.
The responses opposing Cole's position are depressingly predictable, illustrating a doctrinaire intellectual vacuity that substitutes sloganeering for critical thinking. To be fair, the left is hardly alone on that score...
Where Citizen K. rants, the New York Times' Timothy Egan -- who lives here in Seattle's Seward Park neighborhood -- offers a cool defense of President Obama's style. I have wondered that the same "progressives" who rightly despised President Bush's strutting and preening continuously gripe that Obama doesn't act in the same way. (The Nation doesn't publish an issue without someone blasting the president for not rearing up on his hind legs and blaring like a rogue elephant.) Apparently, bluster and certitude are just fine so long as it is the bluster and certitude of the left.
The New York Times calls her "the last movie star," and they're probably right. Born in 1932 in London to American parents, Elizabeth Taylor became an international star at age 12 with her winning turn in 1944's, National Velvet. As seemed to happen often, Taylor's presence inspired her leading man -- in this case, Mickey Rooney -- to do some of his best work. Rock Hudson was never better than as Bick Benedict in Giant, and Montgomery Clift was at his considerable best in A Place in the Sun.
The tabloid headlines and legendary marital brawls obscured Taylor's impressive range: She played and played well characters created by Tennessee Williams, John O'Hara, Edward Albee, Dylan Thomas, and William Shakespeare. She made her mark in family movies and smoldered in sprawling epics and soap operas. She played it for laughs in Father of the Bride as naturally as she evoked pity and disgust in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.
To me, though, Elizabeth Taylor is first and foremost Leslie Benedict, the brash Maryland debutante who over the course of 201 minutes becomes the seasoned partner of a Texas rancher. (I grew up a mile from the main gate of the King Ranch, upon which Giant is based.) Over the course of the movie, the outsider becomes an insider while her principles and wit remain intact, a combination that causes her husband Bick Benedict (Hudson) to conclude that he won't understand her if he lives to be 90 (or a 100 or 150, one suspects). Taylor takes advantage of Giant's to show her character as arch, sardonic, wondering, overwhelmed, determined, warm, sympathetic, feminine, and maternal. She shifts moods as easily and naturally as you or I might change shirts. It's a bravura performance, all the more so as their isn't a trace forced or self-conscious.
Whatever the misfortunes of your personal life, Liz, you were not only one of the greats, you just may be the last of them...
Don't miss this 1949 Times profile of 16-year old "soft-spoken, rather quiet, almost shy" Elizabeth Taylor...
The savage fight scene from Giant, followed by the closing:
At 6'8", Gene Conley was big enough to be that rare athlete to play two professional sports. From 1952-63, the three-time All Star took the mound for the Boston and Milwaukee Braves, the Philadelphia Phillies, and the Boston Red Sox. For good measure, he put in six years with the Knicks and Celtics of the NBA (spaced out between 1952 and 1964), where he was a capable rebounder off the bench.
By 1964, Conley's strong right arm had given out. As he stared bleakly at the end of his sports career, he determineded to give it one more shot. Conley called Cleveland Indians executive Gabe Paul, who agreed to let Conley pitch for an Indians minor league club in order to see if there was anything left.
There wasn't.
In this memorable passage from Donald Honig's Baseball Between the Lines, Conley recounts his final realization that he was through:
So I started a game. We were playing Greensboro, North Carolina. Those kids came up to the plate and started knocking line drives all over the place. I tried flooring a few of them but they weren't impressed; I didn't have enough on the ball to scare anybody. After four or five innings they had to take me out.
I called Gabe Paul the next day.
"Gabe," I said, "I tried but I can't do it."
"I thought that might be the case," he said. "I guess you just had to get it out of your system."
"Well," I said, "It's out."
When I walked away from that telephone I was really shocked. There was no more fooling myself. It was all over and I knew it. Not only that, I didn't have a job, nothing to go back to. The basketball was about over, too. So I was pretty depressed.
I wandered around for a while, a lost soul on the streets of this town in North Carolina. Then I walked into a church and sat down in the back, all by myself. There was a service going on. After the singing this Baptist minister started preaching. All of a sudden it hit me real hard and I caved in and started crying. I just sat there in that last row and cried and cried, trying to keep my head down so as not to upset anybody. Then I felt a hand on my shoulder and I looked up. An elderly Southern gentleman was standing there gazing down at me.
"What's the matter, son?" he asked. "Did you lose your mother?"
I shook my head, the tears still running. "No sir," I said. "I lost my fastball."
Paul Krugman writes that GOP staffers recently jeered at the part of a Kaiser Permanente presentation that discussed the importance of preventive health care. (It's a "slush fund," apparently.) Claiming that there is no such thing as preventive health care is the medical equivalent of saying that the world is flat, yet I've seen this showing up more and more in the comments that I monitor. There are even cherry-picked references to a CBO study. (Funny how conservatives like the CBO just fine when they can distort it to in their own interests.)
The thing is, Americans have relatively ineffective preventive health because we practice it in the context of our commitment to heroic medicine. There's much more to the concept than a yearly physical and PSA (which may not do that much good, anyway). We don't really practice what is known as population health, which includes outcomes, determinants, interventions, and policies that impact the health of a group. A group can be as small as the total number of patients in a given practice and as large as the entire population of a country, and be based on condition, locale, demographics, or some combination of the three.
At the end of the first quarter of school, my team made a presentation based on steps that could be taken to reduce the number of pediatric asthma admissions to a rural emergency department in an area with a heavy migrant worker population. We set a goal (50% reduction, based on research) and designed a program based on ED clinical staff training, patient education, check-in and check-out procedures (wherein, for example, no one left without what's called an Asthma Action Plan), home mitigation strategies, and primary care followup. We minimized other possibilities because of budget limitations and likely behavioral restrictions on the families. This is the idea behind preventive care based on population, although it doesn't address public policies that might improve outcomes even further (such as improving air quality eroded by a high concentration of pesticides).
So, if someone tells you that preventive health care doesn't work, the chances are that they don't know what it is and that they're unaware that we really don't practice it here.
These people are nuts. But it has been fun watching Orrin Hatch humiliate himself by sucking up to them. I mean, I thought these people were all for family values and against gay sex. But here they are: Making old Orrin give them exactly what they tried to crucify Bill Clinton for.
If there's a better American song than this one, I'd like to hear it. Here's a Brit performing an aching rendition. Away, I must away:
Kris Kristofferson looks like singing "i'm gonna sit right here until I die" with Johnny Cash fulfills a bucket wish list. It tore me up every time I heard her drawl that southern drawl:
The Dean was the ultimate insider, a man with an almost childlike faith in the senior elected officials he courted and befriended. Although he often wrote in broad strokes about the stultifying ideological partisanship that has paralyzed Congress and especially the Senate, he rarely named names out of a seeming reluctance to offend. While Broder often criticized presidents, one had the feeling that it was because he saw them as DC blow-ins unworthy of the noble men and women of the legislative branch.
Broder was a throwback, an American innocent at home who never really understood the corruption of Congress by corporate lobbyists and money. To do so would have offended his sense of the politician's noble calling to represent the people. He never explored the gap, or even the possibility of a gap, between the calling and the reality: That might have made him unwelcome at the highest levels of the DC party circuit. No gap -- especially when it wasn't really real -- was worth missing out on martinis with Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer.
He valued compromise, even though compromises almost never hold. He cranked out column after column with an almost Talmudic weighing of issues, only to conclude that there was no conclusion other than to wait and see. Somewhere along the line, he mistook an absence of point of view for intellectual integrity, and too often settled for pabulum. Today, this passes for a balanced perspective.
Although Broder was once an undeniably fine reporter, the DC political and social whirl informed his views as a columnist, and he seemed more anxious to not offend his friends (and to parrot their opinions) than to actually analyze. He too often dealt in stereotypes and believed in his own importance, never a good thing for a supposed observer. Nonetheless, he was a rare voice of civility. Even though that came with a paucity of actual insight, I suppose it will be missed...
Citizen K. wrote critically of Broder here and here...
Sullivan's Travels, Preston Sturges' pre-war masterpiece, concerns a movie director (Joel McCrea) who has tired of making light comedies and wants to make a film about the downtrodden forgotten man. So, like William Powell in My Man Godfrey, he goes incognito as a hobo, but finds that no matter what he does, he winds up back in Hollywood. Several plot twists later with the help of The Girl (Veronica Lake), Sullivan succeeds in becoming a hobo only to wind up on a chain gang serving time for manslaughter. Here, he learns the value of laughter and decides that possibly he has been contributing after all. Like any Sturges film, Sullivan's Travels is satiric and sharply observed, though this time the satire informs a powerful social message. Many regard this as Sturges' best film.
In this famous scene, Jesse Lee Brooks leads a congregation in "Go Down, Moses" as the convicts arrive to see a Disney cartoon:
Dr William Hsaio, perhaps the world's foremost expert in the implementation of new health care systems, has delivered a report to the Vermont General Assembly recommending that the state adopt single payer health care based on a hybrid means of financing. Financing would stem from an employer-employee payroll deduction; benefits would be comprehensive and come with a low co-pay. It leaves Vermont Medicare and Medicaid intact, apparently because eliminating them would greatly complicate implementation. The General Assembly is expected to pass some version of Hsiao's proposal. The state would then request a waiver from the Affordable Care Act, which the Obama administration would almost certainly grant.
Implementation of a single payer program would be a health care reform development on the scale of Medicare and the Affordable Care Act. Hsiao estimates (conservatively, he says) that Vermont will save 25% of expected health care costs between 2015 and 2024. If the plan delivers as promised, pressure will grow on other states to reduce costs by expanding coverage and benefits. HealthMatters details the proposal here.
[The knight] had gone but a few paces into the wood, when he saw a mare tied to an oak, and tied to another, and stripped from the waist upwards, a youth of about fifteen years of age, from whom the cries came. Nor were they without cause, for a lusty farmer was flogging him with a belt and following up every blow with scoldings and commands, repeating, "Your mouth shut and your eyes open!" while the youth made answer, "I won't do it again, master mine; by God's passion I won't do it again...
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age.
Twenty-sixth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States
The Washington Post reports that New Hampshire Republicans have prepared legislation limiting the voting rights of college students on the grounds that students are "foolish" and "just vote their feelings," causing them to inevitably vote liberal. This, apparently, must be suppressed for the good of the state and the country. Another Republican cites "youthful idealism" as justification, complaining that young people are inexplicably "...focused on remaking the world, with themselves in charge, of course, rather than with the mundane humdrum of local government."
Citizen K. sometimes can't resist shooting fish in a barrel and this is one of those times. One might forgiven for thinking that the the phrases "foolish," "just vote their feelings," and "focused on remaking the world, with themselves in charge" might, say, apply to the teabaggers behind all of this foolishness. One might also be forgiven that were the shoe on the other foot, conservatives would be screaming bloody murder and accusing liberals of eviscerating the Constitution.
Which brings me to another point: Once again, Republicanists mount a frontal assault on the document they profess to revere as much as the Bible. The Twenty-sixth Amendment is as clear on the matter of voting age as the Fourteenth is on citizenship birthright. It doesn't say, as New Hampshire Republicans would apparently prefer, that the voting rights of citizens eighteen are older "shall not be abridged unless they are college students." The meaning and intent is quite clear, and it's not "keep your mouth shut and your eyes wide open."
Voter suppression to prevent youthful idealism? God knows that we wouldn't want too much youthful idealism. That will kill a country, every time.
From the newly published Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Eltis and Richardson):
[The Africans are] so crowded, in such disgusting conditions, as the very ones who transport them assure me, that they come by six and six, with collars around their necks, and those same ones by two and two with fetters on their feet, in such a way that they come imprisoned from head to feet, below the deck, locked in from outside, where they see neither sun nor moon, [and] that there is no Spaniard who dares to stick his head in the hatch without becoming ill, nor to remain inside for an hour without the risk of great sickness. So great is the stench, the crowding and the misery of that place. And the [only] refuge and consolation that they have in it is [that] to each [is given] once a day no more than half a bowl of uncooked corn flour or millet, which is like our rice, and with it a small jug of water and nothing else, except for much beating, much lashing, and bad words. This is that which commonly happens with the men and I well think that some of the shippers treat them with more kindness and mildness, principally in these times...[Nevertheless, most] arrive turned into skeletons.
"Description of Africans on a Slave Ship (1627)," in W. D. Phillips, Jr. Slavery from Roman Times to the Early Transatlantic Trade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).
The Atlas is a remarkable volume, everything a reference book should be: Focused and detailed with informative and ideally designed graphics and maps that explicate its six parts: Nations Transporting Slaves from Africa, 1501-1867; Ports Outfitting Voyages in the Transatlantic Slave Trade; The African Coastal Origins of Slaves and the Links between Africa and the Atlantic World; The Experience of the Middle Passage; The Destinations of Slaves in the Americas and Their Links with the Atlantic World; and Abolition and Suppression of the Transatlantic Slave Trade.
One map shows that the direction of sea currents and prevailing winds caused slavers to take a longer but easier voyage from central Africa as opposed to points further north. Another details the flow of slaves from specific African ports (and the number of slaves from each) to their destination ports in the New World. Still another breaks down the demographics of age and gender of captives on typical voyages.
Each page is the turn of a screw, slowly revealing until undeniable the official complicity of European nations in the deliberate design and perpetration of a horror that lasted for over three-and-a-half centuries. For the captives who survived the Middle Passage to be sold into slavery, the horror had only begun, and would be passed down from generation to generation.
The slavers and their investors, though, pocketed their profits and began preparations for more voyages to the central African coast. This included taking out insurance that protected "The Insurers from any loss or damage from the Insurrection of Negroes" but that otherwise specified a precise value for human life "computed on the nett Amount of the Ship Outsett & Cargo -- Negroes valued at Thirty Pounds p Head." Of course, to the slavers and slaveowners, these were not human lives: They were nothing more than commodities of labor valued at 30 pounds per unit.
They looked so domestic. Just a young couple crazy about each other, strolling a New York City street with the confidence that the world was their oyster. The near mundaneness of the image belied the brilliance of the music within, but once you heard the music within, you took a second look at the cover. Suddenly, it portrayed something else: A portrait of a young man as an artist who had just changed popular music forever and his (somewhat reluctant, it turned out) muse. She clings to him smiling and proud as he whispers something secret -- a private witticism, perhaps, a sweet nothing, or a tale of the Village night. The images of the cars behind them futilely attempt to freeze the image in late 1962 or early 1963, but the music had already demolished the mere temporal pretensions of a camera: It's already immortal. And Suze, you feel, knows it. The smile says, "This record? He couldn't have done it without me."
Suze Rotolo is gone, succumbing to lung cancer at age 67. She inspired Bob Dylan's interest in the political world and became the subject of some of his greatest songs. Here's, Dylan's friend Ramblin' Jack Elliot sings one of them (music begins around 3:30):
A unionized public employee, a member of the Tea Party, and a CEO are sitting at a table. In the middle of the table is a plate with a dozen cookies on it. The CEO reaches across and takes 11 cookies, looks at the tea partier and says, "Watch out for that union guy, he wants a piece of your cookie.
This is not just some academic exercise for me. I am trying to actually shrink scope and size of government. If Harry Reid comes back and says no spending cuts, no nothing, at that point I feel I have no choice given what I ran on, given what I got 70 percent of the vote on, I have to shut down the government.
Representative Todd Rokita (R-IN)
I? I?! I have to shut down the government?! Who died and made Todd Rokita king?
Rokita, all of 40 years old, has apparently crowned himself King of the United States of America. During the day, he's the freshman representative from Indiana's 4th district, a gerrymandered sprawl wrapped around the spine of western Indiana. Rokita, who claims to oppose gerrymandering, represents -- according to the Cook Report -- one of the most Republican districts in the country.
Moreover, while no doubt opposing every piece of legislation important to African-Americans, Mr Rokita has urged Republicans to reach out to that constituency. Pointing out that 90% of African-Americans vote Democratic, he once wondered aloud, "How can that be? Ninety to 10. Who's the master and who's the slave in that relationship? How can that be healthy?" (He later apologized for the remark.) However, as a stalwart opponent of nonexistent voter fraud: As Indiana's Secretary of State, Rokita instituted a requirement that voter's produce a photo I.D., which has the effect of suppressing African-American turnout. How can that be healthy?
The boy king has apparently decided that getting the vote of 139, 788 Hoosiers in one most Republican districts (94.8% white) in the country entitles him to personal free rein to shut down the government. This is not only a signature of teabagger provincialism and self-importance, it shows how disconnected from reality these people are. More than 75,000 of Rokita's constituents receive Social Security; his casual threat to personally shut down the government threatens each and every one of them with not receiving their monthly deposit. But, I suppose you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, and King Todd does have an imagined potential personal affront from Harry Reid to stew about.
The rest of us, though, have to worry about the man who would be king.
-Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
Snyder adds:
Ideologies also tempt those who reject them. Ideology, when stripped by time or partisanship of its political and economic connections, becomes a moralizing form of explanation for mass killing, one that comfortably separates the people who explain from the people who kill. It is convenient to see the perpetrator just as someone who holds the wrong idea and is therefore different for that reason. It is reassuring to ignore the importance of economics and the complications of politics, factors that might in fact be common to historical perpetrators and those who later contemplate their actions. It is far more inviting, at least today in the West, to identify with the victims than to understand the historical setting that they shared with perpetrators and bystanders in the bloodlands. The identification with the victim affirms a radical separation from the perpetrator. The Treblinka guard who starts the engine or the NKVD who pulls the trigger is not me, he is the person who kills someone like myself. Yet it is unclear whether this identification with victims brings much knowledge, or whether this kind of alienation from the murderer is an ethical stance. It is not at all obvious that reducing history to morality plays makes anyone moral.
Unfortunately, claiming victim status does not itself bring sound ethical choices. Stalin and Hitler throughout their political careers to be victims. They persuaded millions of other people that they, too, were victims: of an international capitalist or Jewish conspiracy. During the German invasion of Poland. a German soldier believed that the death grimace of a Pole proved that Poles irrationally hated Germans. During the famine, a Ukranian communist found himself beleagureed by the corpses of the starved at his doorstep. They both portrayed themselves as victims. No major war or act of mass killing in the twentieth century began without the aggressors or perpetrators first claiming innocence and victimhood. In the twenty-firsr century, we see a second wave of aggressive wars with victim claims, in which leaders not only present their peoples as victims but make explicit references to the mass murders of the twentieth century. The human capacity for subjective victimhood is apparently limitless, and people who believe they are victims can be motivated to perform acts of great violence. The Austrian policeman shooting babies at Mahileu imagined what the Soviets would do to his children.
The victims were people; a true identification with them would involve grasping their lives rather than grasping at their deaths. By definition the victims are dead, and unable to defend themselves from the use that others make of their deaths. It is easy to sanctify policies or identities by identifying with the victims. It is less appealing, but morally more urgent, to understand the actions of the perpetrators. The moral danger, after all, is never that one might become a victim, but that one might be a perpetrator or a bystander [italics added]. It is tempting to say that a Nazi murderer is beyond the pale of understanding. Outstanding intellectuals and politicians -- for example, Edward Benes and Ilya Ehrenburg -- yielded to this temptation during the war. The Czechoslovak president and the Soviet-Jewish writer were justifying revenge upon the Germans as such. People who called others subhuman were themselves subhuman. Yet to deny a human being his human character is to render ethics impossible.
To yield to this temptation, to find other people to be inhuman, is to take a step toward, not away from, the Nazi position. To find other people incomprehensible is to abandon the search for understanding, and thus to abandon history.
Cleve Loney had had enough. The taciturn Montana state legislator had sat quietly as Democrats criticized Republican legislation that, if passed, would nullify federal laws impacting gun ownership and law enforcement jurisdiction and would state with unadorned, down home common sense that global warming is good for business. Governor Brian Schweitzer described Republican plans as "toxic" and reminiscent of the Civil War. When House Minority Leader Jon Sesso questioned whether Montana politicians could wisely interpret the Constitution, Cleve Loney saw an opening. The quiet man gathered his thoughts (such as they are) and stood tall.
"I don't intend for us to secede from the Union," he said reassuringly. "But I will tell you," he added with sage if wildly wrong determination, "it is up to us. We are the people to decide."
Well.
I -- and I'm certain that President Obama, too -- will certainly sleep better knowing that an obscure Montana politician has decided not to rend the Union asunder. Yet, anyway. Of course, this issue was settled in blood some time ago, and neither Montana nor any other state has the right to unilaterally secede.
Part of me, though, says let them secede if they want to. It would take less than a year for the whole country to discover just exactly how dependent Montana and everyone else is on the federal government.
For starters, Montana would have to be self-sustaining: It has no port, and neither Canada nor the United States would recognize its status. So there will be no way for food and other imports to get in or for exports to get out.
There would be no Social Security or Medicare. The state that ranks 43rd in per capita income but is the 6th oldest in age would be on its own in terms of keeping its retirees housed, fed, and cared for.
There will be no federal support of the University of Montana or Montana State University. Tuition and fees would rise to such levels that the schools might as well close their doors, leaving a state in which less than 20% of its population has a bachelor's degree even worse off. In the process, the lovely college towns of Bozeman and Missoula would wither and die.
Montana does not have a medical school and, under the circumstances, the University of Washington would be unlikely to accept applicants from there. Moreover, health sciences programs tend to have a heavy dependency on federal grants. Montana would quickly lose any semblance of being able to meet the health care needs of its people.
Montana receives $1.58 from the federal government for every $1.00 it contributes in taxes. The teabagger plan to address that 37% dropoff would make for interesting reading.
Equally interesting will be the plan to assume the responsibilities of the 21,000 federal employees in Montana, including national park rangers, biologists, forest management, and fish and wildlife specialists.
Go ahead, Montana -- secede. You'll make for a great object lesson.
Having been caught off guard by President Obama's announcement that he would not enforce the odious Defense of Marriage Act, the right uncharacteristically took a day to articulate a typically incoherent response. But fear not: They've found their footing. The president's announcement, it seems,
is a needless distraction from the pressing business of turning the economy around and creating jobs. Never mind that the first thing the new Republican house majority accomplished was to introduce and approve socially conservative legislation, or that the only thing they've proposed to do about jobs is to eliminate them;
along the same lines, the announcement polarizes the country at a time when we should be acting as one. Never mind that the Defense of Marriage Act polarized by design or that, since Obama's election, every public act and utterance by conservatives has been deliberately divisive;
a cynical political ploy by a cynical president who doesn't care any more about gay rights than...than...well, we do. Never mind that securing a political advantage by supporting gay rights is an impossibility if, as conservatives insist, they represent majority sentiment;
is an arrogant power grab, that unilaterally declaring the act unconstitutional only shows Obama's contempt for the Constitution. Never mind that Obama declared no such thing: The announcement is in response to an opinion issued by Attorney General Eric Holder that the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional. Once an AG -- the executive branch makes such an unambiguous statement, the POTUS had better have a good reason not to follow through;
Moreover, one of the initial actions of House Republicans was to pass a rule requiring that all legislation passed by Congress include a Constitutional justification. The Attorney General's office is certainly better positioned than the legislative branch to make such a determination -- true conservatives would applaud this effort to rein in state overreach.
Once again, these people show that they don't like government except when they like it. When they do, any effort to contravene them is by definition an arrogant, unconstitutional power grab. To be fair, they know more than a little about arrogant, unconstitutional power grabs.
Police attack striking truck drives in Minneapolis, 1934
With a chilling echo of the days when state governments called out the police to attack striking workers, Indiana Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Cox has urged police to "use live ammunition" in dealing with fellow Wisconsinites. When asked to confirm his advice, Cox replied "You're damn right," no doubt assuring him of heroic status among the peace-loving teabaggers who urged "Second Amendment remedies" should they not get their way via the democratic process and who howled in incoherent rage at Civil Rights hero John Lewis. The Wisconsin demonstrators include school teachers, policemen, and fire fighters.
You of organized labor and those who have gone before you in the union movement have helped make a unique contribution to the general welfare of the Republic–the development of the American philosophy of labor. This philosophy, if adopted globally, could bring about a world, prosperous, at peace, sharing the fruits of the earth with justice to all men.
President Dwight Eisenhower, December 5, 1955
The only good Union is a dead union.
Comment on RSRedState
Months from now, when this is enacted and people realize it’s not the end of the world. Not all, but I think the vast majority, including the vast majority of the public employees, will realize this was not nearly as bad as they thought it was going to be.
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (R)
In these tough times, I think people are going to feel that this is not that much to ask. Everyone is going to have to pitch in.
Jeff Fitzgerald (R-Naturally) Speaker of the Wisconsin State Assembly
There's pitching in and then there's Wisconsin governor Scott Walker's undisguised plan to eviscerate collective bargaining rights -- only the most publicized latest Republican assault on the democratic process. Governor John Kasich of Ohio has readied similar legislation, and Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey openly boasts of the hatred that New Jersey firefighters have for him. Ten years ago, in the wake of 9/11, publicly disdaining firefighters would have been unthinkable. Times have certainly changed.
As Rachel Maddow points out, things have fallen into place for conservatives. With the Citizen's United Supreme Court decision having allowed unlimited campaign contributions to overflow the coffers of Republican candidates, the Republicans can now unleash an offensive against public employee unions, the prime institutional source of Democratic party money. Meanwhile, flush with their success in destroying ACORN, Republicans continue the suppression tactics designed to prevent Democratic constituencies from voting. Combined, the Republicans hope these three tactics will provide near-permanent electoral success even as the demographics of the country shift against them.
The Republican Jobs Agenda has become all too clear: An underpaid, disenfranchised workforce too discouraged and too exhausted for political activism but all too useful in serving the dwindling privieged tier of affluent white collar workers and financiers. The working class victims of the RJA will be uneducated by design, will lack technical and financial skills, and will find themselves in a constant scramble to stay fed by the non-nutritional food choices available to them. Continually squeezed funding for education and public safety and the deregulation of the environment will ensure that they exist with daily stresses of low income, inadequate learning, the threat of violence, and air unfit to breath. In short, their vision for most Americans is a combination of Blade Runner and Soviet bread lines.
Add 1984 to the mix as well: As consumers of unrelenting propaganda, the groups that comprise this "thrifty working class" will each resent the existence of the other and blame the other for their plight, much as today's middle class whites -- what is left of them -- are encouraged to fear minority groups. As always, they will find psychological safety by supporting the Great Lies they absorb as revealed truth.
The end of collective bargaining would be a catastrophe for every person who has a boss and who ever will have a boss. It would devastate an already tottering democratic process. The question, of course, is why anyone -- even Republicans -- would want that. For the answer, look no further than the frozen steppes of ideology. In this respect, Republicanism has become indistinguishable from Stalinism: The party and the country (and, if they have their way, the state) are one, and what is good for one is and should be good for the other. Opposition to Republicanism is opposition to Americanism and therefore unworthy of good faith treatment. Lies and half-truths are not only justified, they're a necessity in dealing with people who attack your way of life.
And the biggest threat to this is the Great Satan of redistribution. Essentially, Republicanists see government as agent created by liberals through which the hard-earned money of white conservatives is redistributed to underserving minorities (often euphemized as the "poor," complete with quotation marks). That's why conservatives claim without shame that the tax rates should be adjusted to collect more from the poor and middle class -- after all, they've been stealing from their betters for years.
Fixation on the supposed redistribution values of liberals illuminates Republicanism's commitment to the distribution of scarce resources to winners and losers, with the losers seen as their political opposition. Thus, politics is no longer a means to attain a greater societal good (however defined) but a strategy for marginalizing opponents economically, psychologically, and politically. Under this perspective, it is desirable to transfer wealth from and to neutralize the power of one's perceived enemies because it prevents them from doing the same to you. There is no concept that the opposition is any more capable or desirous of acting in the general interest than conservatives are. In fact, a critical component of rationalizing the drive toward a divided society of winners and losers is the conviction that "they" will do it if "we" do not, except that then "we" will be the losers. And since "we" equals America, our policies mean a victory for America against the enemy within, whereas consigning "them" to servitude is just desserts.
This explains why the right constantly whines about being victims of its own tactics, except that it doesn't identify them as such. Hence, whites are victims of racism and hate speech and Barack Obama is the one who perpetrates violent rhetoric (because out of the total sum of his public utterances, there is apparently one in which he quotes a line from the 1987 movie The Untouchables. Apparently, this easily overshadows every sick remark from Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh, not to mention the vile signs and speeches of the teabaggers.)
You may well wonder how someone with $5,000,000,000 under Republicans can be a loser with $4,995,000,000 billion under Democrats. In this case, the interests of society suddenly become convenient: The wealthy man's economic freedom has been diminished by the forced transfer of his money to people who don't deserve it because their poverty is their own fault. Thus, the act of taxing wealth strikes a body blow against personal liberty and encourages indolence like this man's:
It was the summer of 1971. I looked dubiously at one line of the contents of the envelope. No, it wasn't my draft lottery number: This was something of more immediate concern. H. M. King High had sent out fall class assignments, assigning me to Mr. Maddox's American History class. Students -- at least some of us -- derided Mr. Maddox for an approach to pedagogy that was both orthodox and unorthodox, but always in the service of rote learning. I showed the paper to my mother, whose brow furrowed.
Nonetheless, worse things had happened. It was still 1971, I was still 16, I was still exploring rock-and-roll, I was still college-bound, and there were still girls everywhere I looked. Life was good, all things considered. If Mr Maddox wanted to start off the school year by teaching us to memorize the Declaration of Independence by learning to sing it, well, it was only an hour out of a bustling day.
"The Wonderful D. O. I.," he called it, and he performed it with gusto: "WHEN in the course (WHEN in the course) OF human events (OF human events) IT becomes necessary (IT becomes necessary)..." I'll never forget it. How could I?
Having taught us The Wonderful D. O. I., Mr. Maddox set us to work writing an outline of the textbook, which we turned in periodically for a grade. This was the plan for the rest of the year. I don't recall anything about the book itself, but it couldn't have been that bad: Nothing in it made me want to ask my parents, "Is this true?", as so much of junior high history had.
One day about six weeks into class, I received a summons to the office of the school counselor, an ascetic, resentful woman with the unlikely name of Helen Troy. Miss Troy glared balefully (a formidable expression reserved for all students regardless of race, class, color, or creed. Miss Troy was a firm believer in equal opportunity) while informing me that I had been transferred to another teacher's class. My mother, it seemed, had been working assiduously to that end for some time.
I returned to class and gathered my books. Mr. Maddox, with a somewhat defeated look, shook my hand and said that he thought that the other class would be better for me. I nodded uncertainly, and left.
My new American History teacher, Mrs. Cooper, had a reputation for pushing her students to think critically within the limits of the unsettled combination of the 11th-grade intellect and half her class in miniskirts. Her reputation was merited, and in fact she did her job a little too well: At the end of the school year, the school board declined to renew her contract (overruling the school principal). While I was learning The Wonderful D. O. I., she had taught via a simulation that the post-Civil War South might not have been the most hospitable place for black Americans.
Mrs. Cooper, who had roots in Kingsville, was not going anywhere. Plus, she liked her job and wasn't at all understanding about the necessity to fire anyone who raised uncomfortable truths. (Years later my father disclosed that he had heard a local doctor ask "Why did she have to bring up the niggers?") So, she sued and eventually prevailed.Ten years later, she returned to her old job. (You can read a summary of the suit here, under "Academic Freedom," and the legal details here.)
The Coopers were family friends, and I remember her husband angrily pointing out that a well-known reactionary teacher had worn to school -- of all things -- a "Belles for Bush" headband in support of H. W.'s failed 1970 senatorial campaign. This woman was genuinely hateful: I once witnessed her corner a black student and demand to know why she shouldn't call him "boy."
I myself had sat through a long-winded exhortation from a speech teacher about the endless virtues of a book called A Texan Looks at Lyndon, a right-wing screed by one J. Evetts Haley. (John Birch was Adlai Stevenson in comparison to J. Evetts Haley.) Anyway, these teachers "taught" on in no danger of losing their positions.
Next to them, Mr. Maddox wasn't so bad. His students were, at least, memorizing the most resounding sentence in American political prose:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.
He didn't qualify it, nor did he seek to minimize it. No, Mr. Maddox unabashedly told his students -- most of whom were Hispanic unaccustomed to hearing Anglo adults call them equal -- that this sentence was "wonderful," when there were no doubt many residents of Kingsville who secretly found it subversive. You couldn't fire anyone for teaching The Wonderful D. O. I., though.
Mr. Maddox must have known that most of his students were not college bound and that anything they took away from his class would be a plus. He didn't have the skills to teach as Mrs. Cooper had, but he stayed within his game and didn't stack the deck. I carried the parting look he gave me in the recesses of my mind until recently, when I realized I had sold him short. Hey, if someone is going to make a fetish of something, better "all men are created equal" than the Second Amendment.
The New York Times has a useful interactive graphic on President Obama's 2012 budget here. It doesn't include percentages, so I've provided them below. Also, the graphic misleads regarding Social Security: The program also pays for itself, meaning that while it is part of the budget, it does not contribute to the debt. Key areas of expense by percent of the budget (rounded):
Health and Human Services: Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services: 30%
Social Security Administration: 22%
Treasury: Interest on the National Debt: 13%
Defense - Military Programs: Operations and Maintenance: 8%
Defense - Military Programs: Military Personnel: 4%
Defense - Military Programs: Procurement: 3.5%
Agriculture: Food and Nutrition Service: 3%
Labor: Employment and Traning Administration: 3%
Agriculture: Farm Service Agency: 2.5%
Office of Personnel Administration: 2%
Transportation: Federal Highway Administration: 2%
Treasury: Internal Revenue Service: 2%
Veteran's Administration: Benefits Programs: 2%
Other Defense Civil Programs: Military Retirement: 1.5%
Veteran's Administration: Veteran's Health Administration: 1.5%
All other departments are budget at less than 1%.
I'm no financial analyst, but this looks to me as if (a) we're for some reason armed to the teeth, and (b) we're getting older without preparing for it (or the debt wouldn't be so high while Medicare costs increase). Plus, it appears that for every dollar we spend on weapons, we spend more than two maintaining them.
The debate -- such as it is -- over our aging population is all wrong. Conservatives see it as opportunity to gut Social Security and Medicare, two programs they've been sharpening their knives for since becoming law. The real question, though, is this: How will we as a nation deal with the requirements of an aging population while keeping the social contracts implied by Social Security and Medicare? Is the answer really to put elders on their own at a time when the next generation of Americans faces the possibility of limited prospects?
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States...
From Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States
The latest gambit from conservatives eager to start gutting the Fourteenth Amendment and its unambiguous elevation of the federal government over the states with guarantees of equal protection and due process is, of course, to deny citizenship to American-born children of undocumented workers.
The argument goes that the clear intent of the Fourteenth Amendment is to secure citizenship rights for newly freed slaves, and that it was never meant to apply to anyone else. The more erudite conservatives might add that the Fourteenth Amendment overturned the Dred Scott Decision and that it was also aimed at curbing southern abuses of the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery. Therefore, it's a minor matter to edit the amendment to exclude any U.S.-born child of illegal immigrants from the rights and responsibilities of American citizenship.
However, there are some problems with the conservative position. In the first place, the Supreme Court has already held (United States v. Wong Kim Ark) that the citizenship clause does apply to anyone born in the United States and may not be interpreted as limited to former slaves. Moreover, Wong specifically holds that Congress may not act to override the Fourteenth Amendment, which renders bills as those introduced by Rep. Nathan Deal (R-GA) as so much grandstanding. (For the record, Deal's legislation bears such august titles as the "Citizenship Reform Act," and the "Birthright Citizenship Act.")
Then there's the nature of the conservative position itself, which unsurprisingly reveals the right as either intellectually incoherent, cynical opportunists, or both.
Conservatives oppose the Affordable Care Act as being unconstitutional, in part because the Constitution is silent on the question of health care. (No doubt, as there was no such concept in 1789.) In the case of the ACA, conservatives hew to a strict originalist line that permits determination of constitutionality only on the basis of the text of the document.
Unfortunately for conservatives, Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment is silent on the matter of intent. It doesn't use the words "slave" or "slavery," much less refer to the Dred Scott Decision or the Thirteenth Amendment. If you want to overturn the ACA on the basis of a strict textual reading, then you can't suddenly claim to divine framer intent behind Section 1 and hope to maintain any notion of integrity. (Unless of course you are a cynical opportunist and don't give a rat's ass about intellectual honesty as long as what you say suits your purpose.)
Much as conservatives won't admit it, the Fourteenth Amendment is clearer on citizenship by birthright than the Second is on gun ownership. Language can't be much plainer than this:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States...are citizens of the United States...
"All persons," not "All persons except." Following the conservative line of strict adherence to the text, one can quite plausibly assert that if the framers had meant "former slaves," the amendment would specify "former slaves." As it doesn't, the door is left open for additional possibilities. For example, perhaps the country paid a debt to the foreign-born children of immigrant soldiers who died fighting for the Union. Or perhaps the framers looked ahead as well as back and wanted to ease the path to citizenship for the children of the immigrants they knew would be necessary to ignite the great American economic engine untethered by the Civil War. These possibilities can't be refuted by anyone who relies on a textual reading (other than, of course, by the usual ad hominem attacks on America-hating libtards.) This is the direction you take when you read intent into arguably the most direct sentence in the entire Constitution.
When it comes to the Fourteenth Amendment, conservatives are hoist on their own petard -- a position that must seem familiar to them by now...
Can anyone think of a greater or equal sense of dislocation than going from sipping a margarita in Makawao (Maui) to standing in the freezing rain at Sea-Tac Airport a few hours later?...
The lyrics, Ringo, the lyrics! You did write them, after all!...
Last night, we had dinner at Merriman's, one of Maui's premier restaurants. Located in the resort of Napili, Merriman's unassuming exterior belies both its menu and the splendid view of the Pacific from its bar and dining room. As I ate warm crusted surfing goat cheese (Kula strawberries, Maui onions, strawberry and garden mint vinaigrette), Kahua Ranch naturally raised lamb, and white chocolate-filled malasadas (with Maui Oma coffee caramel cream dipping sauce), I glanced around the room at the hundred or so exclusively white patrons.
Have dinner in a place like this, I thought, and you can see who has the money in this country.
This proves nothing, some will object. Maybe Maui isn't a preferred vacation destination for African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans.
Maybe it is and maybe it isn't, but there are plenty of native Hawaiians living on Maui: The closest any of them get to Merriman's is as a parking valet. We have a servant class in this country, something that is rarely more evident than when one goes on vacation, where it is always the predominant local ethnic minority that parks car, cleans rooms, launders linen, washes dishes, and carries bags for the white guests.
They're conspicuously absent, though, when it comes to waiting tables in expensive restaurants. When the service job pays well, suddenly the most obvious members of the servant class are nowhere to be found. Perhaps there's something intimate about relationship between the server and the patron about to order an expensive meal that subtly directs high-end restaurants to populate that part of the servant class with smiling, familiar white faces.
And I, I partake in this feast, this American dream meant for the likes of me but not for others. Am I simply enjoying life as should we all, or am I inevitably bowing to the demons of race and class?...
Today, we drove the winding roads along the mountains of West Maui, which is surely one of the most breathtaking and -- with its plethora of dips, sudden rises, and hairpin turns on cliff's edge -- hair raising roads in the country. We stopped often to watch pods of whales that had maneuvered themselves in close to shore, the babies breaching, adults fluking, and everyone spouting, the abrupt boom of an adult fin slapping the water carrying across the surface and on up to us.
In Hotel Honolulu, Paul Theroux describes Hawaii thus:
Hawaii is hot and cold volcanoes, clear skies, and open ocean. Like most Pacific islands it is all edge, no centre, very shallow, very narrow, a set of green bowls, turned upside down in the sea, the lips of the coastline surrounding the bulges of porous mountains. This crockery is draped in a thickness of green so folded it is hidden and softened. Above the blazing beaches were the gorgeous green pleats of the mountains.
Man, do I love this place! Hawaii even has compulsory employer-provided health insurance for anyone who works at least twenty hours a week. Believe it or not, everyone here seems pretty laid back despite this blatant theft of their "freedoms" by the state. How could they be so blind? They're living in a police state and don't even know it. It's a frightful price to pay for the knowledge that when you're sick you can go to the doctor or the hospital and worry only about your illness...
Eleven years ago, my youngest son came home from school the first day back after Christmas and asked if we could go to Hawaii over mid-winter break. Neither my wife nor I had ever had much interest in going to the 50th state, in part because everyone in the northwest who doesn't ski goes there. But it turned out that I could get tickets and a place to stay on Maui. I still don't know how I pulled that off: Getting to Hawaii from Seattle during midwinter break takes the same degree of advance planning as going to Yellowstone in the summer.
Well, we had a great time, and I've been going there off and on ever since. And for me, February is the month to go because that's when the humpbacks migrate to LaHaina Bay to calve. There are so many that you can't help but see them from the beach, from the hotel room, from any boat ride taken. My inner seven-year old comes out, I guess, because they are what I most look forward to.
That, and fresh frozen mangorita from the H'aile M'aile General Store in the part of Maui called Upcountry, near the western slope of the Haleakala volcano. It's not the kind of drink I usually order, but someone talked me into it once and I'm glad they did.
A young friend is currently pursuing an advanced degree in Middle Eastern studies. His take on the events in Egypt:
There are definitely a few interesting observations on consensus opinion among the professors and students in my department with strong ties to Egypt, whether through academic expertise, long-term residency, or nationality. First, most everybody has assumed, or at least hoped, this would not end well for Mubarak since the president of Tunisia abdicated. The vast levels of hatred of Mubarak and his cronies throughout the Arab world cannot be overstated enough. The level of corruption in Egypt is truly astronomical and pervades really all levels of government and business. Likely any remotely decent job in the country is filled on the basis of patronage or corruption (and even if this weren't true, everybody assumes it is true). Egypt also suffers from a huge lack of opportunities for my generation. There are millions of Egyptian recent college graduates with no jobs and no real prospects for future employment. Therefore they delay getting married and continue living in crowded slum apartments well into their thirties. This is a common problem in the region, for example, the Tunisian who set himself on fire and set off their protests was a well educated college graduate who had been selling fruits and vegetables from a cart for years because he could find no other job, and he was protesting a highly uneducated policewoman, appointed to her position because of some patronage connection, confiscating his cart. However, Egypt suffers these problems most acutely.
Another crucial observation is the widespread trust in the military by the Egyptian people. The military is not seen as merely a tool of the regimes' power, like the police (especially the mukhabarat, or secret police) and has a fairy widespread membership in their enlisted and officer ranks. This is in stark contrast to countries like Syria and Saudi Arabia. For example, most key positions in the Syrian military and state security apparatuses are held by Alawites, a tiny minority religion from a specific geographic area of Syria that the president's family belongs to. Furthermore, the military absolutely did not like Mubarak's attempts to designate his son as heir apparent. In an incredibly corrupt society, the Egyptian military is seen as a (relatively) fair arbiter of power and everybody I've talked to seems to trust the military to get rid of Mubarak. Whether or not this will lead to a civilian government or yet another military coup (it is worth mentioning that Mubarak, Sadat, and Nasser were all army officers) is the only question. Many also say the army will never allow the Muslim Brotherhood to lead Egypt.
Finally, the most debate concerns the regional implications. If the Muslim Brotherhood were to take power in Egypt (something that I think is highly unlikely for numerous reasons, its more a threat being wielded by Israeli hawks rather than a serious claim), the Egypt-Israeli peace treaty could be threatened. However, I can't imagine the Egyptian military turning away their multi-billion dollar yearly bribes by the U.S., much of which is diverted by the top military and civilian leadership into their Swiss bank accounts, to keep the peace. The bigger question is will this movement continue in other Arab countries. Lebanon and Yemen barely have governments to be angry at, and any protests you see there are likely from other long-standing country specific problems. People are always obsessed with the possibility of the al-Assad family falling and democracy spreading to Syria. However, Syria has been in the process of progressive reforms for the last seven years and many Syrians see their social and employment prospects improving rather than getting worse. There is also less corruption, or at least obvious corruption, and the president is much better liked among Syrians than Mubarak. Most importantly, the Syrian security service has a much tighter stranglehold on the country than in Egypt, which, while an authoritarian dictatorship, can't really be described as a police state in the same way Syria can.
Where I see the strongest likelihood of this movement spreading is in Jordan, which has a serious demographic problem of tons of angry citizens of Palestinian descent who significantly outnumber the ruling Heshemites. It is also worth mentioning that for all the talk of the importance of Mubarak to the U.S., I think Jordan is significantly more important. We only really support Mubarak because of Isreal, however, our State department, CIA, and DoD have incredibly strong relationships with their Jordanian counterparts and Jordan is of crucial importance to Iraq.
Finally, I'm sure this goes without saying, but do try and watch al-Jazeera English for coverage, and if not, the BBC. AJE easily has the most comprehensive English language news coverage in the whole region. As the major US news agencies have been pulling people out of the Middle East to cut costs, AJE has been investing huge amounts of resources on their bureaus in the region. Reuters also has a good liveblog.
In response to this recent story, a conservative commenter repeated the standard Republican canard that the deficit had skyrocketed under Barack Obama, it presumably having been under control before then. I responded by explaining that while, yes, the deficit had risen dramatically in 2009, the federal government fiscal year had begun on October 1, 2008. Which essentially lays the 2009 deficit at the feet of the final Bush budget. I then enumerated the main contributors to the deficit: two unfunded wars, unfunded Medicare Part D, TARP, etc.
The commenter responded by calling me a liar.
Upon which it occurred to me that this exchange was emblematic of the two-year rhetorical food fight that passes for public discourse in this country. The bones of it are this:
A conservative repeats an unfounded right-wing talking point about Barack Obama
A liberal refutes the assertion with facts that require some effort to put across
Challenged by facts, the conservative denies reality by making an ad hominem attack on the liberal.
This dynamic plays out over and over. Here's another one:
Ireland's fiscal calamity is due to its socialist economy and welfare state.
That might be the case were Ireland socialist, but it isn't: This is a crisis of capitalism, not a cautionary tale about socialism.
You are a socialist elitist libtard.
Or:
Obama is a socialist because he socialized the auto industry.
No, he didn't. Two of the three auto companies were temporarily and partially nationalized. That's a different thing altogether. Plus, the auto companies asked the federal government to step in.
How does it feel to be a tool of union bosses?
One side assumes an error of fact and responds appropriately. The other assumes duplicity and responds as if personally attacked.
Read the conservative comments on MSNBC some time: They are basically one unfounded assertion after another, without the slightest effort at providing supporting evidence. One of the latest is to ascribe every piece of negative economic news about health care to the Affordable Care Act, without bothering to account for medical inflation. (The ACA has barely begun to take effect, so any attribution of negative impact is bound to be an overstatement.) Then there are the obvious attempts to spread rumors. Take this one: The health care law has caused private physician practices and long-term care facilities all over the country to close. No evidence is cited of this because there is no evidence of it.
Which is no surprise, as conservatives, like Pavlov's, dog, have been trained by their masters at Fox News and on talk radio to respond to reality with a snarl. (Although surely their mouths water first.) There's no such thing as debate in conworld: Only attacks on their wallets and way of life. Well, their wallets are being attacked, just not by who they think. As for their precious way of life -- the one in which shooting and God are equal moral values -- they've somehow drawn the contorted conclusion that anyone who doesn't want to share it is attacking it.
Seriously, does Mark Holwager actually believe that gay marriage is going to bring Sodom and Gomorrah to Monroe City, Indiana (pop. 548). Or that regulating firearms in Washington, D.C., will keep him from shooting? Do the Cosgrays fret that $33,000,000.00 in federal grants will end Life As They Know It in White County? Or that a blogger in Redmond, WA hates them with every fiber of his being? Apparently, they do.
It's old news, I suppose, but conservatives have gone from hiding behind a distortion of facts to showing blatant contempt for them. That's a fact.
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