They'd Better Tell Scalia

The National Right to Life Committee is an organization devoted to saving the lives of the unborn (or so they claim, and I'll give them the benefit of the doubt). They are so committed to saving the lives of the unborn that they have no regard for facts. Take this example, from one of their communiques in which they attack President Obama for supposedly seeking to stifle their First Amendment rights:

[...] the U.S. Constitution recognizes a virtually unlimited right to freedom of political speech for both individuals and groups of individuals. Without this, it wouldn’t be the America we know. But Barack Obama isn’t satisfied with that expression of our rights. He offended some by openly criticizing the Supreme Court ruling in his 2010 State of the Union message. He challenged Congress to find a way to overcome the Supreme Court’s broad protection of free speech in the Citizens United case. So now Obama supports the “DISCLOSE Act,” which used a different tack to limit the free speech rights of Americans. Unable to directly ban certain kinds of political speech, the “DISCLOSE Act” uses the strategy of punishing those who want to participate with groups of fellow-minded Americans and help their groups spread a political message. It does this by going after the donors and members of groups, subjecting them to disclosure requirements others are allowed to ignore.

That's how freely the NRLC plays with fact. I emphasized a couple of sentences that I find particularly offensive, and which I will stop short of openly calling lies because it might be that Carol Tobias, NRLC President, might simply be ignorant or too lazy to check the facts.

That the Citizens United ruling is one that upholds freedom of speech is only accepted by those who equate free speech with money. Many Constitutional experts vehemently disagreed with the ruling, and many intellectual, politicians, concerned citizens were appalled by the Court's decision, which was actually a rather disgraceful example of what Conservatives love to decry as judicial activism because the Court's majority expanded the ruling well beyond the limited question before the Court (as noted in Justice Stevens's 90-pages long dissent.), to establish previously non-existent rights.

But that is not the point of my distaste for the NRLC's letter. The origin of the distaste lies in the two sentences I emphasized above.

The purpose of the DISCLOSE Act is not, as the NRLC maintains, "to limit the free speech rights of Americans", nor to punish "those who want to participate with groups of fellow-minded Americans". The DISCLOSE Act would simply require that the names of the corporations, organizations, and individuals who make political contributions in excess of the limits established by the Act should be public. The rationale of the Act in setting these monetary limits is that if the American public could know which moneyed and powerful interests are behind a certain group, Super PAC, etc., it would be in a better position to evaluate the agendas that might drive a commercial, a message, an op-ed, and so on.

The idea that the identity of donors to political and legislative causes should be public is not exclusively a progressive cause. In a recent appearance on CNN's Piers Morgan show, Justice Scalia defended both the Citizens United ruling AND the basic ideas behind the DISCLOSE act (even though he did not specifically mention the Act itself.) And this is what Mother Jones magazine points out in an article about Scalia's dissent with Republicans on the issue of disclosure:

Scalia has expressed similar sentiments before, most notably in a 2010 case where anti-gay rights advocates in Washington State were attempting to block disclosure of signatories to a petition on the grounds that compelling them to do so violated their First Amendment rights. The Supreme Court disagreed, and in a concurring opinion Scalia wrote that "There are laws against threats and intimidation; and harsh criticism, short of unlawful action, is a price our people have traditionally been willing to pay for self-governance." Requiring people to stand up in public for their political acts fosters civic courage, without which democracy is doomed. For my part, I do not look forward to a society which, thanks to the Supreme Court, campaigns anonymously and even exercises the direct democracy of initiative and referendum hidden from public scrutiny and protected from the accountability of criticism. This does not resemble the Home of the Brave.

So there, Carol Tobias, President of the NRLC, and those who--like her--think that President Obama's support of the DISCLOSE Act is an act of intimidation intended to stifle the voice of organizations like the NRLC: Your right of free speech is protected so extensively that it extends to the right to misinform your members and the American Public. Those who support it {DISCLOSE) only wish that the people who fund your distasteful spin had the cojones to identify themselves.

On The Folly of Mainstream Religion

Greta Christina has written a lenghty, irate, appropriately righteous piece about the complete folly easily discernible in William Lane Craig's defense of genocide and infanticide. Read the whole article, it's worth it.

To whet your appetite, here's my favorite passage:

[A]theists are commonly accused of moral relativism: of thinking that there are no fundamental moral principles, and that all morality can be adapted to suit the needs of the moment.

But it isn't atheists who are saying, "Well, sure, genocide seems wrong... but under some circumstances, it actually makes a certain amount of sense." It isn't atheists who are saying, "Well, sure, infanticide seems wrong... but looked at in a certain light, it really isn't all that bad." It isn't atheists who are prioritizing an attachment to an ancient ideology over the clearest moral principles one can imagine: the principle that entire races ought not to be systematically exterminated, and the principle that children ought not to be slaughtered.

I have just one question for William Lane Craig: how do you muster such sophistry that allows you to defend the sanctity of life and, at the same time, defend the extermination of innocents?

Poor People and Fair Shares

Think Progress reports that Sen. Hatch (R-UT) thinks that the tax system is unfair because it doesn’t tax poor people enough.

Of all the Stupid, Horrible, Idiotic Things That Excrementous Republicans Say (which you can find under the label SHITTERS on this blog) this has to be one of the most horrible and offensive.

Poor people do not pay income tax for a reason: they have no money to pay income tax. In fact, income tax is the one tax they do not pay, but they do pay withholdings on their paycheck for Social Security and Medicare, not to mention sales tax on everything they buy. They may be too poor to buy health insurance but not poor enough to fall under Medicaid. They are paying near $4 a gallon for gas, they pay car registration and other fees as the richest among us, and they eat crap that will kill them more quickly because it's all they can afford.

So, yes, the poor have it made. Let's tax them a bit more, so we can continue subsidies for the oil companies and pass tax breaks for yacht owners. Because, as every good Republican knows, a rising tide lifts all boats, including the yachts owned by minimum wage earners.

Fuck you, Sen. Hatch. I mean it.

Those Who Elected This Other Douchebag Should Also Be Ashamed

Douchebaggery is a favorite Republican trait that some Democrats seem eager to embrace. Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-FL) embodies Republican douchebaggery to a tee. To understand what I mean, just watch these two clips from last night's The Daily Show.

The Daily Show - Friends Without Benefits
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire,The Daily Show on FB

The Daily Show - Friends Without Benefits - 9/11 Responders
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire,The Daily Show on FB

Sensible people often decry the fact that too many politicians waste a lot of time tackling non-issues, such as the birthers who claim that President Obama has not released his long-form birth certificate. But the real problem is that there are as many politicians who proudly come up with crackpot ideas, like Congressman Stearn's, that do affect the lives of Americans in dramatic and destructive ways. The fact that even a usually sensible politician like Rep. Waxman (D-CA), who has often been on the right (left) side of many issues, are quick to jump on the bandwagon of stupidity is demoralizing to say the least. How Rep. Waxman could be so wrong about such a ridiculous idea as the Stearns amendment to the Zadroga Bill is a question the congressman will have to answer to his conscience and to those who voted for him.

Those Who Elected This Douchebag Should Be Ashamed

Douchebag is probably not a strong enough epiteth for this piece of work who goes by the name of Paul LePage, Governor of the crazy state of Maine. What did he do to deserve me calling him names? For starters, LePage is in favor of relaxing Maine's child labor laws. Yes, because at a time where unemployment is still rampant, what the country needs is for children to enter the workforce and the clock being turned back to the 19th century.

But perhaps I misunderstand LePage. Perhaps he is a humanitarian and a realist who knows that if Republican wish-list policies are implemented, only the children of patrician class will be able to afford private school 20 years from now (there would no longer be any public schools), and everybody else had better get ready for a life of toil that should begin at 14 or earlier and end at 75 or later, since Republicans are also hell-bent on destroying Social Security.

LePage belongs in hell, but not the imaginary one that Christians believe in; a real one, where he should lose everything he has earned so far and has to make ends meet for the rest of his life on minimum wage, with no benefits, no Medicaid, and no Social Security to boot. Let him experience in the present a little taste of the future he wants to help build for future generations of Maine children.

CEOs v. Teachers, as Seen Through The Talking Asses of Fox News Corp

Courtesy of The Daily Show.

The situation could be FUBAR, We Could Have Had President McCain

You know, I am no big fan of President Obama. I think he is duplicitous and weak, and just another president in a big line of corporate water-carriers that goes all the way back to Reagan. (I called Obama a water-carrier and not a "corporate slave" lest the sensitive ones around take offense and cry shame, though if we were white I would have no problem doing so.) But I do recognize that things could always be worse. For example, we could have had President McCain. How bad would that have been? Take this as a telling example:

Right now there’s a certain amount you pay into Social Security, and then after that it’s not taxed. There’s a number of things you can do to that are pretty simple and are pretty gradual keep the system from going bankrupt which basically it already is, because we’ve already spent the money that’s in the Social Security trust fund. It’s a Ponzi scheme that Bernie Madoff would be proud of.

As Zaid Jilani quickly and correctly pointed out in his post on Think Progress,

A Ponzi scheme involves fraudulently manipulating investors’ money without being able to pay them back; meanwhile, Social Security is a program that has successfully managed Americans’ money since its inception and has guaranteed them safe retirements.

Indeed, it must be that Republicans are only capable of viewing any program that treats Americans as if we were all on the same boat, rather than a few on yachts and most of the rest on rafts, as a "Ponzi scheme". (You know the analogy that a rising tide lifts all boats, the disingenuous argument Republicans love to make to justify trickle down economics, don't you?)

Take Ponzi scheme as a synonym for socialism, or "redistribution of wealth" in the Republican vocabulary. It is really a very good/bad sign of which side Republicans are on. When it comes to making sure that Ponzi schemes are not possible, they obstruct any attempt at regulation of the financial industry, but when the issue is to make sure that Americans can retire with some peace of mind they have no trouble calling Social Security a Ponzi scheme. They are truly evil.

The Neocons' Smear Campaign Against El-Baradei

The neocons are sharpening their knives. They are after Mohamed El-Baradei, the Egyptian leader that many Egyptians (and foreign observers) would like to see lead Egypt in the post-Mubarak era.

The reason for the neocons' hostility towards El-Baradei is that he was the Director General of the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency during the days that led to the Iraq War. El-Baradei, along with Hans Blix, his predecessor at the IAEA, stated that IAEA inspectors had not found any evidence of WMDs in Iraq. Remember that the danger of WMDs was cited by the Bush Administration as the original pretext for the invasion of Iraq. The IAEA, of course, was right and, the neocons never forgave the agency for interfering with the U.S. criminal war plans on Iraq.

To make matters worse, El-Baradei wrote this in an op-ed published by the New York Times in February 2004:

We must abandon the unworkable notion that it is morally reprehensible for some countries to pursue weapons of mass destruction yet morally acceptable for others to rely on them for security -- and indeed to continue to refine their capacities and postulate plans for their use.

In other words, if the U.S., Russia, Israel, France, etc., all have nukes, it is harder to tell Iran or North Korea, or other countries that are considered dangerous by the international community, to discontinue their nuclear weapon programs. Seems reasonable to me.

In 2005, El-Baradei and the IAEA were the joint recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize, for their "efforts to prevent nuclear energy from being used for military purposes and to ensure that nuclear energy, for peaceful purposes, is used in the safest possible way". As El-Baradei's entry in Wikipedia says, ElBaradei donated all his winnings to building orphanages in his home city of Cairo. How dangerous.

The shameful thing about the attacks on El-Baradei is that even conservatives who cannot strictly be labeled as neocons are joining in the bashing. As Think Progress reports, Sen. McCain and former House Speaker Gingrich have respectively accused El-Baradei of not being a friend of the United States and of being a figurehead for the Muslim Brotherhood.

Both accusations are unfounded. As Think Progress points out, to say that he is not a friend of the United States ignores the fact that El-Baradei has lived and taught in the United States (at New York University) and that he has no history of anti-American rhetoric. But I guess that what Sen. McCain is saying about El-Baradei's not being a friend of the U.S. is true, if you live under the assumption that a friend should never tell you that you made up the reasons to launch a war on another country, and that true friends should go along with your criminal plans instead.

As for Gingrich's accusation that El-Baradei as president of Egypt would be a "disaster", I guess what he is saying is that it'd be better to have a ruthless dictator in charge for U.S. interests in the region. However, that doesn't make his prediction that El-Baradei would be a disaster any more true than my prediction that Gingrich will turn into a pillar of salt if he does not stop making unfounded statements.

Lastly, the frenzy to condemn the Muslim Brootherhood as a dangerous Islamist organization is ludicrous. In fact, after the recent bombing of a church in Alexandria, Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood condemned the terrorist act as an attack on all Egyptians. Why, they even offered to stand in front of churches to protect them against further attacks. Dangerous, eh?

Of course, that won't keep Christian fundamentalists in this country, and the neocons who pander to them, from painting them as the most dangerous enemy of the United States, one so powerful that the group it has infiltrated the U.S. government, presumably with the goal of bringing Sharia Law to our shores. I guess I side with Gov. Howard Dean on the subject of dangerous radicalism. Dean rejects the right-wing's attempts to single out "radical Islam" as a threat, and reminds us instead that "radical anything is what's bad". And that, my friends, includes Christians, politicians, and all of those who are quick to exploit falsehoods for their cause.

The Lie of 2010 and the Sack o' Shit Who Came Up With It

Lie of the Year 2010: "Government Takeover". On that, more at the bottom of the post. But first things first: Let's talk about the sack o' shit first.

If you are very good at a job that requires you to be ready to lie at the drop of a hat, are you a brilliant professional of an unethical sack of shit? I pick the latter option.

The sack of shit that I refer to is Frank Luntz, an unethical douche of a pollster and opinion maker who has helped Repuglycans come up with some of the most doublespeak-ish expression in our recent political lives, as I showed in a post entitled One of America's Most Dangerous People Is Back. When I say "unethical douche", I am expressing an opinion only as far as the word douche goes. On the adjective unethical, I am backed by the opinion of The Executive Council of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, who found that Luntz had "violated the Association's Code of Professional Ethics and Practices." And that was a formal violation of ethics, not to count all the deceitful and leading phrases that Luntz engineered over the years, of which you can find a few examples in my post referenced above.

Luntz, who always appears as a reasonable individual, a mask that hides the true intellectual mercenary sleazeball he is, also engineered what Politifact, an independent fact-checking organization, chose as the Lie of the Year for 2010: the phrase "government takeover" aimed at scaring people away from supporting health care reform.

It is my unshakable conviction that people like Luntz are both instrumental and complicit in the preventable deaths of thousands of Americans who will die for lack of adequate health services, services that in fact should be a pillar of any civilized country. But not in the United States of America. Where is hell when you need it?

Worst Persons In The World

Keith Olbermann said last night that he is, once again reconsidering the format and name of his "Worst Persons in the World" segment. Here's my suggestion: Call it "Piece of Shit du-jour" and make Rush Limbaugh (henceforth "Limpballs") its sole feature. The man is a sewer-mouthed piece of shit anyway, so chances the segment will upset anyone with a brain more developed than a fly's are next to none.

This is what the piece of shit du-jour said today, talking about the perpetrator of Tucson's slaughter of the innocents:

"Mr. Loughner... has the full support of a major political party in this country... the Democrat party is attempting to find anybody but him to blame." On behalf anyone who is not a rabid consumer of the shit peddled daily by the likes of Limpballs, Hannity, Sarah Beyond the Palin, and other esteemed Fox News contributors, I say to Rush Limpballs: Fuck you, you piece of shit du-jour.

I already expressed this thought on this blog, in this post, and I will unashamedly do it again here: "My wife tells me that it is not good to wish for people to die, but I will take Rush Limbaugh as my mulligan. Let's be unequivocally clear: I am not advocating for anyone to kill him, but an oxycontin overdose?" Never underestimate the evil power of an evil individual on the psyche of the feeble-minded. This country, this planet, will be better off the day Rush Limbaugh croaks.

---

P.S. I understand that calling Rush Limpballs "a sewer-mouthed piece of shit" makes me sound sewer-mouthed myself (and in some people's eyes, no doubt, also a piece of shit.) If that's the case, stop reading here, because it's gonna get worse.

There is a difference between calling a spade a spade, as I did in calling Rush Limpballs a piece of shit, and using one's mouth, as Limpballs does day after day after day, to regurgitate evil and--most importantly--patently false shit, about your political opponents. Limpballs will twist facts until they are unrecognizable, indistinguishable from the smoking lump of human excrement that Limpballs himself is.

The Great Republican Pro-Life Hyprocrisy

It is a well-known fact that, for many Republican anti-abortion politicos, “life begins at conception and ends at birth.” So says, Carol Joffe, professor at the University of California, San Francisco.

That quip is well-exemplified by the ongoing Republican effort to block funding for essential health care for 9/11 responders. Read Carol Joffe's article to get your blood to boil, then write the Republican Senators like Tom Coburn and Jon Kil who are beyond shameful in their politicking on such a vitally important issue of humanity.

Politicians should not be punished for holding ideas antithetical to our own, but for the hypocrisy they openly display when they defend their turf against all reason.

One Pseudo-Democratic Senator I Would Gladly Lose

Even if it meant losing the Senate, Kent Conrad's is one pseudo-Democrat who needs to go in 2012. Hopefully he will be ousted by a better Democrat, but if he loses his re-election bid to a Republican, little or nothing would be lost. (He already fought agains the Public Option and now he is fighting for the Deficit Commission's draconian cuts to services.)

Read Barbara Morrill's Daily Kos post on Veterans' Day rhetoric and you will understand why.

How Great A President Was Ronald Reagan? This Great!

For those who regard Ronald Reagan as an example for our young people to follow (and conversely consider Jimmy Carter's presidency a failure), I offer this picture...



Circled in the photo are the solar panels that President Carter had installed on the roof of the West Wing in 1977, and that President Reagan chose to have removed in 1986. Here's how:

Then came “a clear, calculated campaign by the [Department of Energy] in the years of the Reagan administration to crush the solar energy program of the federal government” according to Denis Hayes, an expert on solar energy who worked for the government at the time. According to another expert involved in Carter’s original solar panel installation, Reagan’s Administration “felt that the equipment was just a joke… and he had it taken down.” [From The Forgotten History Blog]

President Carter, regarded as a failure of a president by many Americans, promoted renewable energy in 1977. Germany, now the world leader in solar energy technology, lit up to the idea of solar panels 24 years later, in 2001. China has overtaken the U.S. in the production and adoption of solar technology. In the United States we have a class of ignorant, idiotic, and dangerous politicians who spend their time pushing for new oil exploration in ANWR and right outside of Arches and Canyonlands in Utah, and who allow fracking in their states.

That is the legacy to our generation of that revered president, Ronald Reagan. Without him, who knows, the United States may well have been on the road to less and less dependence from foreign oil, and the manufacturing sector could have benefited from substantial public investments in renewable energy. Why, there may even have been no 9/11.

And the right wants him carved on the face of Mt. Rushmore?

The High Road Not Taken

Christians extremists like to make much of the supposed vitriol poured upon them by New Atheists (the moniker which christian extremists like to use for individuals like Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris.) They bemoan lack of respect for religion by these new atheists, their irrational rejection of god, and so on and so forth. They claim for themselves the high moral ground, and extol the works of like-minded people who deride atheists and, in general, all enemies of christianity.

One such work contains the following vile garbage directed at atheism: "Atheism is simply incompatible with a life well-lived (shalom)." Or, perhaps even worse, this:

The descent into atheism is caused by a complex of moral-psychological factors, not a perceived lack of evidence for God’s existence. The atheist willfully rejects God, though this is precipitated by immoral indulgences and typically a broken relationship with his or her father. Thus, the choice of the atheist paradigm is motivated by non-rational factors, some of which are psychological and some of which are moral in nature.

The last paragraph is insulting on so many levels that I don't even know where to begin: "descent into atheism"? "precipitated by immoral indulgences" and "typically, by a broken relationship with his or her father"? "the choice of the atheist paradigm [is] motivated by non-rational factors"?

And how about this gem? "The hardening of the atheist mind-set occurs through cognitive malfunction".

You can find the above examples of atheist-directed hatred in James S. Spiegel's The Making of an Atheist: How Immorality Leads to Unbelief. The above excerpts represent sufficient waiver of the obligation to read the whole work before one can declare it complete nonsense even if it were not so sanctimoniously insulting as it is. It instantly earns a place in the Daily Fuel's Hall of Eternal Shame.

There is no higher delusion in this world than the belief that a moral life can only be lived by those who believe in a very specific god who, in his infinitely puzzling wisdom, issued such edicts as "Anything living in the water that does not have fins and scales is to be detestable to you" or "And the swine, though he divide the hoof, and be clovenfooted, yet he cheweth not the cud; he [is] unclean to you. Of their flesh shall ye not eat, and their carcase shall ye not touch; they [are] unclean to you."

You know, most christians have found a way to get past these risible commands. As they fall, one by one, time will eventually win the fight against all other christian superstitions, one way or another. Until the last one finally and deservedly falls.

Too Crooked To Exist

Read this post from Think Progress: Transocean to give shareholders $1 billion while trying to cap its responsibility for Gulf spill at $27 million. . If it does not get your blood boiling, nothing will.

Now I ask you: Why does this not the top news in all newspapers, newscasts, and over the Internet?

What I find particularly insulting and infuriating is that for years we have had to listen to the mouthpieces of the Conservative establishman rail against "entitlements", which, in their irritating jargon, means things like Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, unemployment benefits, public education, anything that serves the interest of the lower- and middle-class ans interferes with the right of corporations and their executives to amass ungseemly amounts of money. It seems to me that, more and more, the consensus view is that the only true entitlements to be protected are the unfettered profits of the corporations that have corrupted the political process to the point of making a mockery of what the Founding Fathers might have had in mind when they gave birth to this briefly fair, once great country.

In this land that lies prostrate at the feet of its true god, Mammon, the only thing which never comes up for discussion is the matter of why corporations should be able to continue reaping profits born of corruption, malfeasance and a worship of profit that could not be less patriotic if it tried. When the preferred way of protecting corporate wealth is to lay off workers, to shield the corporation agains legitimate lawsuits, to bribe politicians into submission, to game the system at every juncture, where is all the fucking rage that should bring these thieves to their knees and back to earth? Why don't we start rising against corporate entitlements?

A corporation fighting to cap damages against itself while at the same time rushing to distribute its ill-gotten gains on its sharholders should not be allowed to exist. Call it Too Crooked To Exist. May it burn itself to the bottom of the ocean, along with its damned fucking rigs.

Christopher Monckton, Lord Crockofshit, Global Warming Denier

I gladly link to this post, A Christopher Monckton Reality Check, because quite a few people, including--alas--some close to me, have bought into some of the despicable and disingenuous rhetoric propagated by the likes of "oh Lord" Monckton.

Christopher Monckton is a hack, a shill for the worst element of the energy industry, he talks out of his ass, and is a dangerous participant to the global warming/climate change debate.

If you are thinking of reading anything he published, or watching anything he is in, do yourself a favor: do a one-eighty and read Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming, which--incidentally--covers some of the fake controversy instigated by our Lord Crockofshit.

Truly a National Shame

Arizona's Governor Jan Brewer signed into law a cruel and stupid bill that may very well be struck down as unconstitutional even by the currently conservative Supreme Court. As President Obama rightly said today, "failure to act responsibly at the Federal level will only open the door to irresponsibility by others." In other words, the Administration and Congress need to come up with reasonable and equitable laws to prevent the freaks that live in the nation's woodwork to usurp federal powers and come up with insane laws like the one Gov. Brewer signed today. Amen.

The debate leading up to today's signing ceremony has been accompanies by some of the most insensitive, stupid and racist remarks in memory, such as Rep. Bilbray (R-CA) saying that illegal immigrants can be identified "just by looking at their clothes."

And, as Kos at the Daily Kos says, it will lead to an explosion of lawsuits.

But while Kos anticipates that "that within a year, virtually every town and county in the state will be getting sued by xenophobic teabaggers" (because, as Kos explains, the law "allows residents to sue their municipalities if they believe local cops aren't doing enough to target and jail undocumented immigrants"), I hope that there will be a torrent of lawsuits by Hispanic citizens whose Fourth Amendment rights (against illegal searches) and Fourteenth Amendment rights (equal protection) will undoubtedly be violated when overzealous law enforcement agents ask them for proof of citizenship. In a country where there there is no federal law mandating that individuals are required to provide proof of citizenship, as Mark Evans of TucsonCitizen.com notes, it will be interesting to see how Arizona's law enforcement agencies go about trying to enforce an unenforceable law. You know someone royally f***ed things up when Gov. Huckabee is the voice of reason on the right.

For an analysis of the many ways in which Arizona SB-1070 is a gigantic discriminatory cockup, read the ACLU of Arizona's section by section take-down of the bill. (PDF reader required).

Jefferson Quotes, True and False

"The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not," warned Thomas Jefferson.

First of all, it is not known that this is an actual quote from Thomas Jefferson. It does not exist in any of his writings according to the Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia. I say it because the person who used the quote on his blog has been rather sloppy with facts in the past (more about him at the end of this post), and my suspicions about the attribution of the quote were confirmed by a quick Google search which led me here.

What I find offensive about the quote is not just its incorrect attribution, but the fact that it is presumably being used to condemn "Obama care". (I can say with a reasonable amount of certainty given the context (the blog) and the user of the quote (again, more on him to follow).

As it happens, the quote seems aimed at eliciting in readers the worst feelings about what the American Right likes to call redistribution of wealth (which non-millionaires like me call what it is, i.e. progressive taxation) by implying that it rewards laziness over industry and entrepreneurship. Of course, this is--for the most part--sheer bullshit, but it helps that the people peddling it have the biggest megaphones.

Redistribution of wealth aimed at ensuring that as many of our fellow Americans (and legal aliens) can enjoy affordable access to a basic human right, i.e. the right enjoy a minimum level of health care services without risking bankruptcy or death, a right that is recognized by all civilized countries, should be accepted rather unbegrudingly by your average moneyed interests. It is the part of the social contract between the haves and the haves-not that guarantees, among other things, that the latter will not take to the streets and burn down the palaces of the former in exchange for a fair standard of living, which includes the ability to put a roof over one's head, to feed one's family, to go to affordable quality school, to be treated equally before the law regardless of income levels (yeah, right!) and, yes, to be able to receive good and affordable treatment in doctor's offices and hospitals.

But the picture that the Right astutely and disingenuously painted of the health insurance reform that Congress trudgingly and clumsily passed days ago is in keeping with the quote given at the top of this post, that is that Congress and the President are taking from "those who are willing to work and give to those who would not."

It takes some truly despicable people to subscribe to and to promote the fantastic idea that this health insurance reform bill is a handout to those who don't deserve it because they are too lazy to go get it. Many of the uninsured or under-insured have a job. In fact, some even have more than one, but they still cannot afford health insurance for themselves or their families because of the outrageous cost of premiums or of deductibles and copays. You don't have to believe me. You can visit the many websites that document this known fact, like the ones listed below.

Faces of Maryland's Uninsured Project
Pennsylvania Health Law Project (PDF file)
The Uninsured (New York Times Editorial)
National Association of Free Clinics (PDF file)

These data are not hard to find, so not finding them is probably due to a combination of dishonesty and willful refusal to acknowledge that the picture they paint is definitely not one of lazy unemployed people whose goal is to mooch health care from those who work.

Consider that, as reported by USA Today, "the percentage of all employers offering health insurance in the past eight years peaked in 2000 at 69% and has fallen steadily since, hitting 60% this year [2007], according to an annual survey of employers by the non-partisan Kaiser Family Foundation. Among small firms of three to nine workers, the percentage offering insurance has dropped even more — from 58% in 2001 to 45% this year" [again, 2007, which is when the article I quoted was published. And that was BEFORE the worst of the unemployment crisis hit.)

More recent [PDF] data from the Kaiser Family Foundation shows that since 1999 the cost of premiums has increased by 131% and that the cost of worker contributions has increased at more or less the same rate (128%). It also confirms the drop in number of business, particularly small businesses (between 3 and 9 employees) who are willing or able to offer health care benefits.

All these data help to dismantle the meme, propagated by the right and embraced by those who are angry and vulnerable (the ignorant, the uneducated and the fearful), that the bill is aimed at building a constituency of leeches who will vote for Democratic candidates to keep their "entitlements"*, the kind of bullshit that the right seeks to convey every day using inflammatory and demonstrably false rhetoric, aided by seemingly authoritative but fabricated quotes like the one at the top of this post.

Which brings me to the person who used the quote as a means of corroborating his despicable and false message. Sloppiness is an annoying trait and if the use of the quote above was simply a matter of sloppiness it would be bad enough. But I fear that we are dealing with something more sinister than sloppiness in this case, that is a willful attempt to mislead those who are vulnerable and inclined to be misled. This is particularly despicable when it comes from a member of academia (though not very reputable academia, to be sure) like the individual who runs The Constructive Curmudgeon, where the quote was posted. An educator is not supposed to mislead but to enlighten.

Let me leave you with a true quote by Thomas Jefferson: "To unequal privileges among members of the same society the spirit of our nation is, with one accord, adverse." Apply that concept, liberally if you will, to the topic of health care.

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* This is an accusation that has now been leveled against Democrats for 3 quarters of a century. Consider the following quote from H.L. Mencken, written on the eve of the 1936 election, about the New Deal:
"Its chief practical business is to search out groups that can be brought into the [Democratic Party] machine by grants out of the public treasury, which is to say, out of the pockets of the rest of us." [Sam Tanenhaus, The Death of Conservatism] You know how bad the New Deal turned out to be for Americans, don't you?

NBC Olympics Coverage Sucks, Once Again

I could go on and on and on to explain why NBC Olympics Coverage sucks. I won't. Suffice it to say that when I was a kid, in Italy, when the Olympics started I went "underground", only two resurface about two weeks later after watching hundreds of hours of live coverage of every conceivable contest.

Since I moved to the United States nearly 20 years ago, I have come to the conclusion that NBC is run by a bunch of morons who think that people will sit mesmerized by their "brilliant", tape-dalayed packaging of competitions that have ended hours before, making it nearly impossible for anyone who lives in the age of the Internet to watch a competition without knowing the results.

Not only that: they package races and matches in such a way that you can only know in which 5-6 hours span the competition you wish to watch will be shown, forcing you (only theoretically) to sit through 5-6 hours of unwatchable crap and commercials in order for you to enjoy the one race you were really interested about.

NBC = No brains corporation.

I just hope one day ABC/ESPN will snatch the broadcast rights from this incompetent, idiotic crowd.

Boycott FedEx

Chris Hedges's recent article explains why you should join him (and me) in boycotting FedEx.

FedEx is just one of countless American (and global) companies that view labor as a necessary evil to be kept to a minimum and to be reduced to serfdom.

Reading the article sparks one unavoidable question: Could what happened to Dean Henderson have happened in any civilized country? The answer is no, because civilized countries have universal health care (for my less sophisticated readers universal does not equate government-run.)