City on a hill, still

Tom Levenson over at Balloon-Juice.com has something interesting to say about Vice President Joe Biden’s speech given yesterday at the memorial service for the slain MIT police officer, Sean Collier*.  Bolded statements are my doing.

But Biden did limn a present realit [sic] as well, in that we still live in a country where a ruling like Hamdan v. Rumsfeld can be both heard and decided against the government. I live in a town where police officers tackled a cop-killer in the midst of a gun battle, in the hopes of keeping him alive long enough to face a court. Here in Boston, Dzokhar Tsarnaev was charged as a common criminal, read his rights (not fast enough for some, but still) and will in fact face civilian charges. This country are [sic] so far from perfect it sometimes feels like we’re [sic] can only approach perfection the long way round — but that’s in the nature of cities on hills. I’m pretty sure Joe had something like this in mind when he spoke yesterday.

And I have next to no doubt at all that he was scolding that claque of Republican leaders who seem to have lost all courage, John McCain, Lindsay Graham, Kelly Ayotte, and all the rest. They’ve been up on their hind legs since Friday, bellowing the urgency of making sure Tsarnaev face a jury-rigged military tribunal system, and damned be the American constitutional system and any faith in the power of a jury of Americans to do and be seen to have done justice.

That rebuke is what this speech was about, beyond the pure duty of comfort that Biden handled so well in the first, longer section of his remarks. He was telling a failed Republican party that America is something other than [sic] hollow republic the Bush-Cheney regime sought to build. He was as well talking to the broader audience through the TV set, making the case (again!) that there is an alternative to a government based on authority granted out of fear. He was reminding everyone in earshot that the way the Republicans ran the republic — and would do again, if they get the chance — is not just an error; it’s un-American. This was powerful stuff, and inside the political ring, it was [sic] had the power to hurt, a nut-cutting blow.

See, McCain and Company want Tsarnaev, who is a citizen, to be sent to Guantonomo and to be stripped of all his rights.  Why is it the Republicans are so interested in their own rights (see Rand Paul’s statement about drones and hot tubs**) but not all that interested in the rights of “those other” American citizens.  Hmmmmm, it couldn’t be because they ARE considered “other”, could it?

Besides the fear motive, all of this trumpeting originates from the conservative idea that our government is broken and that the only way to fix it is to step outside the rules.  Conservatives often propose letting some supposedly benevolent strong man or men (ala, G.W. Bush and Dick Cheney, but not Pres. Obama, ad oculos) take control of things and take away our rights.  Hell, they’re the main reason, and I mean Cheney specifically*** and his buddies, for the expansion of Executive power in the U.S.  Were it not for them, no current President (who is in office is irrelevant here) would have the ability to start a war and tell Congress afterward or allow the killing of an American citizen without benefit of Due Process or use military tribunals and indefinite detention for civilians.  This was never and never will be a liberal idea.****

Nevertheless for all of the Republican and, quite frankly, Democratic enabled transgressions of our values, we’re still shining on that hill just not as bright as we were before our ill-advised jaunt into Iraq and our fear-fueled foray into torture.  And we are certainly not as bright as we could be and never will be if we don’t remain true to our values.

Notes:

*  Look at his young face, it’s hard not to be angry.  It was hard looking at the photos and video of the bomb victims.  I still can’t look at the picture of that sweet little boy who was killed. I understand their anger.  I don’t understand their throwing our values out the window because of it.  That’s not what grown ups are supposed to do and it sure as hell isn’t what the leaders of the free world are supposed to do.

**Rand does not want to be viewed in his hot tub by a government drone but is A-Okay with drones shooting people in commission of a crime, which goes waaaaayyyy beyond what the police would do.  In fact, Levenson above gives an excellent example of how the police met deadly force with restraint in order to serve the larger goal of justice.  Drones can’t do that and Rand Paul should know better and he probably does.  See he only wants drones to “provide justice” to everyone else but he and his clique.  Stupid man must not have studied history or he was too busy smoking dope to remember that such power never, ever remains targeted at just the people you want it to.  First they came for the Jews, then they came for gypsies, then they came for…..etc, etc, etc.

***Cheney openly admits in interviews and in writing that way back when he was in the Nixon Administration that he supported and pushed for the expansion of Executive Power in a variety of ways.  And when in office he claimed Executive Privilege over the tapes/minutes of his meeting with Oil Executives back in 2003-2004.

****Although not a liberal idea, conservatives will claim that liberal Presidents have not minded using that expanded Executive Privilege.   First, I don’t think we’ve ever had a truly liberal President, maybe Carter? President Obama is not a liberal.  He is a centrist Democrat.  He not only claims this but anyone on the left can categorically tell you, he is not a liberal Democrat and never has been.  Second, every President, regardless of Party, has taken advantage of the expansion of power given to the office because it makes their job easier.  As President Obama said during his interview with Jon Stewart, it’s Congress’ and the Supreme Court’s job to take those powers away and they SHOULD do that.  The branches must balance one another out.  But Congress and SCOTUS, filled with Republicans, will continue to give the Executive Branch more and more power because at some point one of their party will be in office and they REALLY like taking advantage of such things (e.g., waterboarding with impunity) because democracy inconveniently gets in the way of their profiteering….um, I mean governing.

Crap is King***

If you’ve followed me for a while you might remember back during the Presidential election that I predicted that our Glorious Fourth Estate, the Mainstream Media (MSM for short) would “lay down like a worn out hooker” when it came to holding our politicians feet to the fire and doing their damn job.  Well, the MSM has gone far beyond that.  They’re actually now participating in the screwing and what’s worse, they seem to be enjoying it.

I’m talking about how they handled the effects of Sequestration–you the know the across the board cut in Federal spending to the tune of $85 billion that occurred because Congressional Republicans refused to have any constructive dialogue with the President about what should be cut.  They had a lot of political motivation to avoid the conversation about spending cuts.  First, they didn’t want to be seen a compromising with President Obama in any way (it’s been that way since before he even took office actually) in order to keep their base happy.  Second, they could continue to point to the deficit and debt (two different things BTW) blaming the Democrats and supposed uncontrolled spending while doing absolutely nothing to solve said problem.  Third, they could go home and honestly tell their constituents that they personally did not vote to take away the funding for their food stamps, HUD loans, etc, etc because those things went away precisely because no vote was taken.  Fourth, they could further gin up the base by focusing on “nontroversies”* with issues like Benghazi, the President’s nominees, sovereignty issues with VAWA, Obamacare birth control mandate, suspension of White House tours, First Family spending taxpayer money on dog walker, etc, etc, etc.

It all usually starts with one crazy ass quote from a Republican in Congress about a nontroversy (see “dog walker” quote above).  It’s like blood in the water.  The MSM zooms right in and it becomes a feeding frenzy.  So while the GOP and the MSM are engorging themselves on such easy pickings, the real world keeps on turning, real problems are happening, and the only people who know about it are the ones who are suffering from those problems (and some few of us who actually pay attention).  With the sequestration for instance there are a lot of things that will affect the daily lives of Americans.  Low income families will receive less child care subsidies.  This will mean that struggling parents will have to choose between working less or leaving their child at home alone.  Fewer seniors will have access to “Meals on Wheels” and more of them are likely to suffer from hunger as a result putting a greater strain on private charities who are already overwhelmed.  Federal workers will have smaller paychecks and they will spend less.  Less consumption means a slower growing economy.  Industries that depend on government contracts, like aerospace and ship builders, will let people go increasing unemployment rates and ensuring that some families will be plunged back into financial insecurity and all that entails.  States like Virginia and Maryland who depend on those industries will be hit much harder in comparison to other states.

Those don’t apply to you?  What about the waiting we tolerate in airports?  Nobody likes it but you’d better get used to it because there will be fewer air traffic controllers.  There will also be fewer flights which means the prices on the flights that remain will go up.  This means that the cost of doing business (much less personal travel) will go up.  Do you see what I’m saying?  Americans are just now starting to see the impact of the Sequestration.  Americans SHOULD have known ahead of time. Then they would have been able to put pressure on Congress to behave responsibly and make the right choices. But they didn’t because the MSM was too busy in the mutual masturbatory experiment that politics and journalism has become in this country to pay attention to the “real news”.  Don’t believe me? Look at the chart at the bottom of this post (via JM Ashby from http://thinkprogress.org/)

Now, add to that fact that Wall Street isn’t overly concerned with the effects of Sequestration.  And Wall Street includes the very powerful and few wealthy individuals and companies that own all of the media in the U.S. and are trying every day to acquire more of it.  Here’s one example:  The incredibly wealthy, very conservative plutocratic Koch brothers, of Tea Party fame, have been actively looking to purchase several major newspapers in the wake of Romney’s loss in the 2012 Presidential election.  The theory among conservatives is that their messaging and how they distributed that messaging didn’t work so if they can control the media, they’re more likely to get their message out to more people.  They can’t and won’t accept the fact that it wasn’t their messaging, it was their policies.  They think if they can somehow polish their turd policies enough, they can put them out there, all shiny and new seeming without any interference from, you know, the truth.  Even though the MSM is very little concerned with the truth as I’ve show time and time again.  No need to purchase them outright.  Just let them continue doing the increasingly shitty job they’ve been doing for years.

So here’s how it breaks down.  There is the “let them eat cake” attitude of the wealthy, particularly the ones who own the MSM.  There is the greed of the MSM who will do anything to get higher ratings than their competitors.  And there is the hunger for power of the GOP.  What it all adds up to is a big collective, “meh” about issues that REALLY matter to the American people.  If the monied classes had really been worried about Sequestration the MSM would surely have been trumpeting their fears so loudly the Krenim** out near the Andromeda nebula would have heard them and the DOW would have declined significantly.    There are theories as to why Wall Street is okay with Sequestration centering around the fact that economists don’t believe that it will derail our economic recovery.  And I agree, it won’t.  Because ultimately the U.S. economy is big enough and diverse enough to make it through this round of idiotic austerity.  Ultimately, it doesn’t matter to the rich either way.  They get richer no matter what happens to the rest of us.  This last Recession is the final proof of that.  But the economy WILL slow down.

However, “derailing” isn’t the same as “slowing down” to everyone.  The wealthy are up in the first class cars where they have plenty of room and can move from the passenger car to a dining car complete with a restaurant and bar.  They have comfy seats with plenty of food and drink, and several clean male and female lavatories with an attendant to provide a freshly laundered towel or breath mint or whateverthefuckelse they might have a fancy for.  If the train slows down they might be late to have supper at an exclusive restaurant, miss a meeting to buy yet another company, or give up their seats to the opening night of a musical.  The poor are crammed into uncomfortable, hot, smelly cars like cattle and aren’t allowed to move from car to car.  They only have what food and water they brought with them and barely enough of that for the normal length of the journey.  They have to share small cramped dirty  unisex bathrooms and there’s nobody to help them with anything but there is a conductor who comes by periodically to ensure that everyone has a ticket otherwise it’s “out you go”!   The slow down will cause the poor to miss that very important job interview, the doctor appointment at the free clinic, the next train that gets them home in time to pick up their kid from daycare before a $5 a minute late fee is imposed that they can’t pay for the daycare they can no longer afford because of reduced subsidies, etc, etc.    If the train slows down, the wealthy get to have another martini and are inconvenienced.  The poor go hungry,  their discomfort and stress increases, and it significantly impacts their lives.

It’s the MSM’s job to inform “the rest of us” about these kind of things.  They’ve stopped doing their job and are now participating in their own victimization, which in the end makes the American people the real victims.  Congratulations American MSM!  You’ve gone from being a tired hooker to become one of the perps in a “gangbang”.  You must feel so proud.   But hey, viewership is up, so huzzah!

MSM Coverage of Sequestration Effects v White House Tours

NOTES: 

*A controversy that does not exist until created for political gain. A contraction of non and controversy

**Obscure Star Trek Voyager reference, sorry couldn’t resist

***A kudos to anyone who can figure out the title reference

Green eggs and ham

The media, both left and right, seem to be in a tizzy because the U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said that hypothetically the President could authorize drones to kill Americans on American soil. Here are some salient questions we should all be asking ourselves:

• This power is new…..how?
• Why are drones different from any other killing machine?
• Why has it been okay to give this power under previous Presidents but not this one?
• If we’re so concerned why don’t we get Congress to limit the Executive Branch’s war powers since that is the best and longest lasting protection we can hope for?

Apparently Mistermix over at Balloon Juice agrees…..

I don’t understand why using drones to kill an American is any different from using a helicopter, tank, fighter jet, humvee or some other conveyance to deliver deadly force. If Congress doesn’t like the way the President could use force on Americans within our borders, I believe there’s something called the “war power” that can be used to limit it. But instead we get a green eggs and ham discussion (from a drone? on a plane? in a train? from a car? on a bike? from a trike?) and intimations of a grim meathook future “where Predator drones are roaming American skies looking for American citizens to strike at, regardless of the reason” from serious conservatives like Mataconis, just because a new killing machine has been invented. We’ve got plenty of killing machines, so how about we concentrate on regulating the killing?

Can’t see the cliff for the vaginas

My mind has been on women’s issues more and more lately and I’m not sure why.  I suspect it is because over the last few years the reality of being a single parent has really hit me, particularly in the pocketbook, and that reality through the prism of being female just makes societal offenses that much more noticeable.  With that context in mind, you can imagine how I reacted to the story that women pay $151 billion more than men for services, products….well, just about everything!

I knew that there were some things that were unfair but this shows everything…even our mortgages and car loans. That just blew my mind.  So the next time a man bitches about how poor he is because he has to pay child support, I’m going to say “just shut up”.  Because there is no way in hell what the average man pays in child support (not alimony, but child support) covers the actual cost of what he would have spent on that child if had he stayed married.  And it has been proven, time and time again, that after a divorce a man’s income increases on average 43% and a woman’s decreases about 38%.  Now we find out that not only will she make less, she’ll have to pay more for everything AND she is more likely to have the kids the majority of the time (although the custody time thing is slowly changing).

So that story just primed the pump, as it were and really prepared me to hear the misogyny and financial patriarchy loud and clear in other stories.  For instance, if you watched, listened or read about the State of the Union speech, you would know that the President made a pledge to expand preschool to every child in the nation.

No sooner were the words out of his mouth before conservative bloggers, TV pundits and anonymous commenters just about everywhere online were screaming “Soshulism!” and telling us how preschool doesn’t even work so why do it.  Except, it does work.  In fact, a now famous longitudinal study found that the effect of preschool versus those who did not experience it were profound.  Kids who attended preschool were less likely to be arrested, less likely to have been on welfare, earned significantly more money, and were more likely to graduate from high school and to own a home than those children who had not attended preschool.    Other studies have found similar good results….but hey, let’s just leave those poor kids in the projects to fend for themselves, because that ALWAYS turns out well and we NEVER have to pay any taxes to take care of them later, right?!

To add insult to injury, the preschool proposal was cast by some conservatives as some kind of giveaway and some really emphasized that it was a special gift to women.  As if we’re the only ones with a stake in having kids under the age of 5 ready for school and safe.  It’s a gift to the entire nation if we can reduce the number of kids who end up in prison and increase the number of healthy workers who pay taxes and participate in our Democracy.  Sounds like a damn fine investment to me.  But wait, I know they don’t like to invest in “other people’s” children.  If that’s the case they need to go live on a deserted island because there isn’t a single civilized society on the planet that doesn’t insist that people actually give a shit about “other people’s” kids.  That’s why it’s called a society.

Okay, so that all really irked me and then I read this little gem of a story.   The conservative tea party Super-Pac and advocacy group, Freedom Works, seems to have a blind spot when it comes to treating women respectfully–big surprise, right?  If you don’t believe me, check out this article about a sex tape with Hilary Clinton and a panda that Freedom Works president, Matt Kibbe, took the time out of his busy schedule to make.  Family values, my ass…..

How about society-wide family values that understands that it matter if we invest in some basic preparation and skill set to start out in life with for everyone’s kids.  Because in truth the rich and upper middle classes can afford this kind of thing.  The rest of the nation can’t.  And it isn’t doing us any good in the increasingly competitive global marketplace.

Furthermore, there is more proof that the effects of poverty and wealth last more than just one generation.    According to Jason Long of Wheaton College and Joseph Ferrie of Northwestern University,

An analysis of three generations shows that in both America and Britain the effect of high (or low) incomes in one generation lasts for at least two more.

I’ve harped on this several times before….what happens to my financial status will affect my grandchildren. Now apply this to what happened to the freed slaves in America.  Think of the millions of people who dropped out of the Middle Class or who are now barely clinging to their Middle Class status as the result of the recent Recession.  The rich, who were predominately not affected by the Recession and of whom many actually increased their wealth, are thinking this kind of thing doesn’t matter, they are sorely mistaken.  The gap between the 1% and the rest of us has been growing and if that gap is not decreased and if the Middle Class doesn’t recover, this Democracy is going to fall.  It’s as simple as that.

So, yeah, I’m an example of a much, much larger trend.  The trend that shows us that the patriarchy, particularly the financial disadvantages of women and minorities and minority women and therefore their children, has some very negative and long lasting consequences.  I can see the big picture here.   Can you?  Can the conservatives?  No, I suspect they aren’t looking any further than my vagina because I heard today that Indiana is now considering not one but two forced transvaginal probes for women who have the nerve to get an abortion.   Conservatives need to stop worrying about our vaginas and start worrying about how this nation is slowly getting destroyed by bigotry, ignorance, the predatory rich and their greedy corporations.

Congress needs a diaper change

Temper tantrums, however fun they may be to throw, rarely solve whatever problem is causing them.

                                                                              ― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can’t Avoid

1. Did you know that 60% of Republicans support a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants? They do so long as President Obama’s name is not associated with it. If the President supports it or pushes for it, that support drops to 39%. Since when did a good idea stop being good idea because you don’t like the messenger? For example, I despise Sarah Palin but if she actually supported a good policy idea that I also supported, I wouldn’t stop supporting it if I found out we agreed. That’s what grown ups do.

2. A journalist over at The Week, Taegan Goddard, is actually proposing that the President “…consider reverse psychology and propose the opposite of what he really wants.” Why? Because it has finally become clear to some in the media that the Republicans are simply opposing anything the President supports without any thought to the actual merits of the policy idea and by their own admission! See #1 above. How many of you are parents and resorted to using reverse psychology on your toddler in order to get compliance on something? So instead of demanding that the Republicans in Congress act like grown ups and do their damn jobs, the burden of compliance (caving to GOP demands) or manipulation (reverse psychology) is being placed on the President. I would go with demanding adults act like adults, but that’s just me.

3. Which leads me to this story…..Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said,

Here’s my belief: let’s take Obamacare and put it on the table,” he said. “If you want to look at ways to find $1.2 trillion in savings over the next decade, let’s look at Obamacare. Let’s don’t destroy the military and just cut blindly across the board.

Since Obamacare has significantly slowed the rate of healthcare cost increases and saved us all about $1.5 billion (if not more) in the first year of implementation and if that continues could save as much as $15 billion or more in the next decade, how does this proposal make any sense whatsoever?  We can’t find $1.2 trillion in Obamacare and even if we could, it would defeat the purpose of the law AND cost about 40 million people the healthcare coverage that is now available to them.  Graham and his Republican ilk would want to make these paltry (at least to them cuts) rather than making smart cuts from incredibly bloated segments of the government like the military.  Heck, even the military doesn’t want or need all the extra funds and equipment Congress is trying to give them.

The REAL solution to sequestration, which would be like taking a hatchet to the budget, is for Congressional Republicans to get off their butts and start making bipartisan decisions on the surgical cuts that need to be made and not let the sequestration occur at all.  So the solution to sequestration is for Graham and his colleagues to do their damn jobs!   But wahhhhhh, baby wants to do it his way!!!!!!!!!!!!  If baby can’t have it his way, then the budget can just get hacked up indiscriminately.  The “scorched earth” approach is effective in war but not so effective in governing. Of course, immature minds can’t understand this.

I get sooooo tired of having to remind them to put down their binky, take their thumb out of their mouths (or asses, which is more likely when we’re talking about Congress) and grow up.