Teen Angels

Here's a list, just released by the CDC, of teen pregnancy rates per 1000, by state:

1. Mississippi 55
2. New Mexico 52.9
3. Arkansas 52.5
4. Texas 52.2
5.Oklahoma 50.4
6. Louisiana 47.7
7. Kentucky 46.2
8. West Virginia 44.8
9. Alabama 43.6
10. Tennessee 43.2
11. South Carolina 42.5
12. Arizona 42.4
13. Georgia 41.4
14. Kansas 39.2
15.Wyoming 39
16. Nevada 38.6
17. Alaska 38.3
17. North Carolina 38.3
19. Indiana 37.3
20. Missouri 37.1
21. Montana 35
22. South Dakota 34.9
23. Ohio 34.2
24. Colorado 33.4
25. Idaho 33
26. Illinois 33
27. Hawaii 32.5
28. Florida 32
29. California 31.5
30. Nebraska 31.1
31. Delaware 30.5
32. Michigan 30.1
33. North Dakota 28.8
34. Iowa 28.6
35. Oregon 28.1
36. Utah 27.9
37. Virginia 27.4
38. Maryland 27.2
39. Pennsylvania 27
40. Washington 26.7
41. Wisconsin 26.2
42. New York 22.6
43. Minnesota 22.5
44. Rhode Island 22.3
45. Maine 21.4
46. New Jersey 20.3
47. Connecticut 18.9
48. Vermont 17.9
49. Massachusetts 17.1
50. New Hampshire 15.7

Isn't hard to notice, is it, that from highest to lowest is pretty much a trip from the reddest of the red, the Christianist, we're-the-ones-with-family-values, abstinence-only states, to the bluest of the blue, liberal, anti-family not-real-American ones.

Not that it means anything.

(Important side note: when singing that song [I do like to sing], I changed the opening line to "That fateful night we parked the car upon the railroad track; I tied you down, you broke away, I dragged you screaming back."

Supreme Irony

If you parse President Obama's comments regarding the Supreme Court and the ACA, they're hardly as egregious as the RWS™ would have us believe. Still, it'd have been better to have stayed out of it, even if all he said, basically, was that he was confident (I'm not) they'd uphold the law.

But if his decision to address them more or less directly was imprudent, the reaction to it from the right is, well, re-fucking-diculous. At the time of the arguments in court, I commented (as have others -- nothing I say is unique, even if it's first, which it generally isn't) on the blatantly political tone of Scalia's questions. Abandoning any pretense of judicial impartiality, he sounded like a right-wing talking point in black robes. Suddenly the party that's decried "judicial activism" for decades, that's listened, of late, to a potential leader call for the arrest of judges with whom he disagrees and has remained silent -- suddenly that party thinks judicial activism is the greatest thing since sliced Reagan.

Democrats, of course, aren't above criticism; they've done pretty much a one-eigthy on the subject themselves. But at least "their" judges, as in Roe v. Wade, tried to fit a constitutional argument into their positions. Scalia, and Roberts, and Alito, seemed to be arguing the wisdom of the health care law, and its politics. Which is decidedly not their job. The Constitution doesn't say laws must be smart.

If he'd listened to liberals and included a public option in the law, Barack Obama wouldn't be in this position now. Nobody, other than every Republican just a few years ago, likes the idea of mandates (Newt still does). But it is what it is; and now an undisguisedly politicized Supreme Court will decide, likely by a 5-4 vote as usual, whose preferred meanings get applied to the words of the Constitution. Humpties vs Dumpties.

In the meantime, the party that until only very recently has viewed the federal judiciary as literal criminals is rising to its defense, now that they think it might activate in their general direction.

What a politically fucked-up country we've become. And though there's blame to go around, I'd say it falls mostly on teabaggRs, RWS™, and Republicans' concept of governance, ever since Newt Gingrich became Speaker.

By a lot more than 5-4.

Don't Worry

Yep, nothing to worry about. Just keep listening to Fox "news" and turn the sound to eleven.

WASHINGTON — It’s been so warm in the United States this year, especially in March, that national records weren’t just broken, they were deep-fried.

Temperatures in the lower 48 states were 8.6 degrees above normal for March and 6 degrees higher than average for the first three months of the year, according to calculations by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That far exceeds the old records.

The magnitude of how unusual the year has been in the U.S. has alarmed some meteorologists who have warned about global warming. One climate scientist said it’s the weather equivalent of a baseball player on steroids, with old records obliterated.

“Everybody has this uneasy feeling. This is weird. This is not good,” said Jerry Meehl, a climate scientist who specializes in extreme weather at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.

(Here's a map of the 15,000 high temperature records set in the US last month.)

If there are humans around in a century or so, or when the alien overlords finally arrive and dig around in the rubble, surely there'll be amazement that on the planet there was one country among all others where climate change denial was dominant, and remained so, the hotter it got. Where it was possible to predict a person's denialism by his or her membership in a single political party; where that party not only rejected the truth in this matter, but, in astounding numbers, rejected science altogether. And they'll stagger away (feet protected from the burbling asphalt), stunned, realizing that this was occurring not in the Dark Ages, nor when the Catholic Church was killing people for saying the earth revolved around the sun; but in a so-called enlightened period, when the discoveries of science were causing a technological revolution, reaching into outer space, wiping out diseases that had killed millions of people for generations.

And yet, here we are, the United States of America, the formerly great, the cradle of discovery and invention, where its universities were once envied around the world, where education was sought after -- and is now derided. Where experts were turned to for their ideas -- and now the whole idea of expertise is laughed at unapologetically, as political strategy, by a party that's hitched its future to ignorance, because its ideas would never be accepted without it. An entire political party whose foundation is disbelief in science. It's simply incomprehensible. Now. In the twenty-first century.

If I didn't have a kid with a fabulous fiancé and the prospect of grandkids, I'd say efforts to save this place were a waste of time.

Feather, Knocked Over By

It's not that we didn't already know, but the guy who lied us into invading Iraq has recently admitted that virtually everything he said -- which was the foundation of President Cheney's rationale for going there, and Colin Powell's sad performance at the UN -- was made up. Lies, deliberate lies.

The defector who convinced the White House that Iraq had a secret biological weapons programme has admitted for the first time that he lied about his story, then watched in shock as it was used to justify the war.

Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, codenamed Curveball by German and American intelligence officials who dealt with his claims, has told the Guardian that he fabricated tales of mobile bioweapons trucks and clandestine factories in an attempt to bring down the Saddam Hussein regime, from which he had fled in 1995.

Gee, poor Dick and Colin: how could they have known? Because the head of CIA Europe told them not to trust him, that's how!!

Tyler Drumheller, who says he warned the head of the US intelligence agency before the 2003 invasion of Iraq that Curveball might be a liar, said the confession would be a final wake-up call for the hawks who continued to believe that there had been WMD but that the CIA had been "too stupid" to find them.

"The interesting part for me is that he has recanted what he said, which is fascinating in the sense that I think there are still a number of people who still thought there was something in that. Even now," he said.

Well, it's not like the hyping of lies had any real consequences, other than a few hundred thousand lives and a couple trillion USD lost. It's not as if it's had any adverse effects on the lives of tens of thousands of surviving soldiers and wrecked the economy. I mean, after all: we got a fine democracy out of the deal, showed Iran a thing or two, made Muslims around the world love us. Right?

And here we are arguing over whether our current president, who saved the auto industry, passed a law to provide health care to millions of uninsured, is overseeing a (too-slow, but undeniable) turnaround of the economy, is deliberately trying to destroy America. While the name of George W Bush has virtually disappeared from the lips of the RWS™ and it's as if Mitt Romney never heard of the guy.

Alternate Universe

Mostly in response to commenters, I've referred here to the "I know you are but what am I" defense, to which they resort when faced with unpleasant reality. In a blog such as this, that approach to discourse is more amusing than significant; it reveals the lack of serious argument on that side, and at worst is sort of pathetic. If quite representative of what they've got.

But what is it when the Republican candidate for president -- all political Republicans, nowadays, but especially their default leader -- adopt that tactic as central strategy? At what point will even their supporters plant palm on face? (The answer, of course, is "never." Because they've been Fox-bred to ignore their own ignorance. Even so, it's pretty amazing that their leaders figure they can get away with it.) Mitt Romney, more times than I can count, has taken it to ionospheric levels. Not that he admits to believing in atmospheric science.

How does a guy who spent 33% more time at Harvard than Obama, who has 100% more degrees from there than Obama, whose sons schooled there, who's donated tens of thousands to the university, whose advisers include lots and lots of Harvard people (including two current professors), feel he can slam Obama for "spending too much time at Harvard"? How does a guy who has embraced the Ryan budget, which privatizes Medicare (which, by definition, "ends Medicare as we know it"), accuse President Obama of wanting to end Medicare?

Easily, is how. Without a second's worth of embarrassment is how. That Mitt Romney is capable of saying anything, no matter how detached from truth, is clear. Its explantation: like congestion of the pampiniform plexus, it's just part of life. But the fact that his supporters, which soon enough will include the entire Republican party (when they get to the fifth stage of grief and accept the fact that there's, finally, no alternative), haven't a problem with it? Now that, that needs an explanation.

Electricity In The Air

When I saw Bob Lutz, former GM chairman, on Bill Maher's show recently, I was surprised to see what a right-wing nutjob he is. Global warming denier, reflexive Obama hater, the usual. Obviously a smart guy, but brainless.

So this whole RWS™ thing about the Chevy Volt, Lutz' baby, is pretty weird. Or would be, if it weren't so typical: insane ranting, based completely on falsehood. There's a good opinion piece on it in the NYT:

For months, the conservative propaganda machine — including Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, and Neil Cavuto, the Fox News business editor — had been mocking the Volt, and linking it to President Obama, who has long touted the promise of electric cars...

What is the connection between President Obama and the Volt? There is none. The car was the brainchild of Bob Lutz, a legendary auto executive who is about as liberal as the Koch brothers. The tax credit — which is part of the reason conservatives hate the car — became law during the Bush administration.

“It’s nuts,” said Lutz, when I spoke to him earlier in the week. “This is a significant achievement in the auto industry. There are so many legitimate things to criticize Obama about. It is inexplicable that the right would feel the need to tell lies about the Volt to attack the president.”... Although he remains deeply conservative, Lutz told me that he has become disenchanted with the right’s willingness to spread lies to aid the cause.

So there's one guy, anyway, who finds his side's use of lies disturbing. Not quite a trend, but it does show it's possible. Now, if regular people (like PT and Seaspray?) could ever acknowledge it, I'd start to believe ("start" in the sense that a journey of a thousand miles...) that Republicans are capable of demanding better of their leaders. That the coming campaign would be a battle of actual ideas.

But that would mean that several impossibilities would have come to pass; that Rs would try to make a case that, against all evidence (including pretty damn recent stuff), tax cuts for the wealthy and deregulation of banks and corporations will finally make our economy tick; that they'd plainly state how they'd deal with the millions of Americans who'll be uninsured if they eliminate the ACA, showing their work behind their claim that using emergency rooms is a workable solution. And that they'd come up with a real plan for controlling health care costs; or that they'd show how "market forces" will suddenly apply to health care, when they never have.

It'd mean that they'd have specified what the government will look like if the Ryan budget becomes law; namely, that they'd address -- specifically, honestly, with real numbers -- the math that shows the devastated government left after their planned tax cuts, military spending increases, and why people should want it. And they'd tell us exactly which tax loopholes they plan to close and how far that will go to reduce deficits. Using, again, those pesky numbers.

And Mitt would have stopped lying about President Obama and would have begun to address his objections to his actual record, while proposing workable and actual alternatives. Then, voters would be in a position to choose between two very different, non-distorted, clearly-stated, and thoughtfully argued views of our future.

Wouldn't that be something? And, for Democrats, it oughta be like shooting fish in a duck.

Dust To Dust

Really worth watching, especially today, while so many are missing the point.

His Lips Are Moving: Mitt's Lying

I believe I may have mentioned (about a thousand times) the fact that Mitt Romney lies the way other people breathe. The only way his lies will end is if his supporters demand it; if they expect him to treat them like adults; if they let him know they'd like an election about ideas.

In other words, it never will.

Deconstructing Delusion

If there was such a thing as "Bush derangement syndrome," as defined by Fox "news" tool and former shrink Chas. Krauthammer, then what to call the right's reaction to President Obama?

I've never denied my powerfully negative thoughts about the Bush presidency, but I can reel off a long list of things he actually did to win my solid disapproval. With teabaggRs, and their soon-to-be nominee, the picture they draw of Obama has nearly nothing to do with what, in the world of reality (not a familiar place to them, I'll warrant), he has or has not done. No one needed to lie about George Bush's devastatingly damaging presidency to hate what he did. Not so, when it comes to the right and our president. I've listed their departures from factuality too many times here to repeat them now. Suffice it to say: it encompasses pretty much everything they say or believe about him (or, in the case of Mitt Romney, likely doesn't believe but says anyway).

I just read something that helps explain the disconnect.

From Andrew Sullivan's site, a comment from a reader, who points to this quote from James Baldwin:

"An identity is questioned only when it is menaced, as when the mighty begin to fall, or when the wretched begin to rise, or when the stranger enters the gates, never, thereafter, to be a stranger: the stranger's presence making you the stranger, less to the stranger than to yourself."

Makes sense.

LLAP

C'mon... How can anyone not like the guy?

Question

Does anyone recall judges of the Fifth Circuit getting panty-bunched when Newt Gingrich said he'd defund federal courts and arrest judges with whose decisions he disagreed?

Just asking.

Broccoli

I'd thought of it in the same terms, as defenders of the ACA in court seemed stumped by Scalia's question about broccoli: the government can conscript you, tell you to jump the f*ck out of a plane and put you in the brig if you don't. Seems like paying a hundred bucks a year penalty for not spending several thousand on insurance is pretty small ... broccolini.

But the better answer is that broccoli sales act the way capitalism works: if you don't buy it, it's a good thing for me, because as demand drops, the price goes down. Health insurance is the opposite. Your not buying it penalizes me.

So, whether or not the government could compel you to buy broccoli, there's no reason for it to do so. But, in the case of financial activity that represents one fifth of the economy, the government has a right -- an obligation -- to bring rationality to an out-of-kilter health care system in which it's decidedly not the case that "the market decides." After all, it has a constitutional duty to promote the general welfare.

Back beyond memory, when the Republican party included a non-zero number of thinkers, they realized this. That's exactly why they came up with the idea of a mandate to buy insurance. What, after all, is more conservative than telling people there's no more free ride? Or, for that matter, handing a few million customers to their corporate donors?

It tells you all you need to know about the current Republican party that they made a 180º shift as soon as that black guy moved into that white house: their ideas are meaningless, and as deeply rooted as moss. One could hope that, were they to take over all branches of government, when they'd no longer have a need to lie and do nothing but do nothing, they'd reconsider what constitutes good governance. Hope away: political stupidity and pandering has become a way of life for them, and I can no more forsee them returning to rationality than I'd predict enlarging polar ice caps absent reduction of carbon emissions.

The providing of health care -- which every other civilized country in the world considers fundamental to governance -- has become, like the age of the earth, believing in evolution and climate change, a matter of political leaning. Think of it: whether millions of women will have access to breast cancer screening, whether parents of children with birth defects or practically any childhood illness will have medical coverage for them, whether you'll be able to get insurance if you lose your job and have had prior illness, will depend on which party has control after November. For something so basic, so clearly of national importance, to be up for debate at all, much less split exactly along party lines -- unbelievable.

Like pretty much everything else about politics, ever since Newt Gingrich was Speaker and the purpose of Republican politics stopped being about creating common good, and became about power for its own sake. Destroying the other side for sport. While rationalizing highway robbery. Literally.

Sheep Dip

It's been plain for a long time that teabaggRs in Congress feel certain that they can say any damn thing they want and their Foxified sheep won't consider it baaaaaad. I don't know which is more depressing to contemplate: that they peddle unmitigated crap constantly, stuff that makes no sense no matter how you look at it, and do it over and over and over; or that hordes of their sheeply believers accept it without baaaaating an eye. Read Krugman's latest:

... The trouble with the budget devised by Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, isn’t just its almost inconceivably cruel priorities, the way it slashes taxes for corporations and the rich while drastically cutting food and medical aid to the needy. Even aside from all that, the Ryan budget purports to reduce the deficit — but the alleged deficit reduction depends on the completely unsupported assertion that trillions of dollars in revenue can be found by closing tax loopholes.

... to make his numbers work Mr. Ryan would, by 2022, have to close enough loopholes to yield an extra $700 billion in revenue every year. ... So which specific loopholes has Mr. Ryan, who issued a 98-page manifesto on behalf of his budget, said he would close?

None. Not one. He has, however, categorically ruled out any move to close the major loophole that benefits the rich, namely the ultra-low tax rates on income from capital. (That’s the loophole that lets Mitt Romney pay only 14 percent of his income in taxes, a lower tax rate than that faced by many middle-class families.)

[...]

... But has any major political figure ever premised his entire fiscal platform not just on totally implausible spending projections but on claims that he has a secret plan to raise trillions of dollars in revenue, a plan that he refuses to share with the public?...

Now, the House Republican budget isn’t about to become law as long as President Obama is sitting in the White House. But it has been endorsed by Mr. Romney...

For all but those who figure they already have theirs and simply don't give a crap about anyone else or about securing a future for this country, the coming election ought to be a no-brainer. I've said it a million times, but since not many listen to me, we can only hope that it gets said louder and clearer, overer and overer, by people to whom many more ears are lent.*

It ought not be close. Whether or not you think Barack Obama is too hard on gay marriage or too soft; too hawkish or too dovish; has tried to do too much or too little; you can't look at the choice that faces us in the general election and not see the starkness. On the one hand is a party that has never produced a budget that stands to the most minimal of scrutiny, but which, if it did, would devastate everything that's important to our future, in the name of preserving tax cuts for the very wealthy. It's plain. They don't deny it. They revel in the amount of spending they'd cut for health care, support programs, education, infrastructure (while increasing defense spending, which already totals way more than every other country on the planet, combined); it's just not important to them. And, overtly and proudly, they want a return to corporatocracy, unfettered by regulations on how they produce products or how they influence government. And, of course, to theocracy, where your love life is their business, and where teaching science is NOT the country's business.

And on the other hand are Barack Obama and Democrats, at least attempting to find a balance between spending cuts and revenue increases, considering it important both to reduce deficits and to provide the basic things that a country needs to survive beyond its current generations. And, by thoughtful regulation, trying to find that other balance, between stimulating business and having them be entirely free, once again, to tank the economy.

Voting for Romney -- and, for that matter, any Republican in Congress -- means making a conscious and specific decision that this country is better off maintaining -- increasing, actually -- the amount of money in the hands of the very wealthy by taking it from everyone else and thus denying such things as decent education, access to affordable healthcare, the ability to build and maintain roads and bridges and dams, research (and, yes, though they cost next to nothing, women's health access through Planned Parenthood; and NPR and the NEA). You have to have agreed that balancing the budget is priority number one and that doing so in a way that would raise any taxes at all, no matter the devastation to the country, is simply off the table. You need to acknowledge what R budget priorities would do, and to make the argument that their kind of "balance" a good thing.

And, as Krugman says (and as anyone with at least one eye and four neurons can see), you have to sign on to a plan that doesn't come close to doing even that.

Except for the devastation part.

_____________________________

*Looks like Obama might do that very thing. Let's hope he reads this first.

A Good War

Speaking of Saint Ronnie, as I just was, in one of my less-than-finest moments, this recent article from America's Finest News Source reminded me of his finest hours:

Citing the country's long history of winning wars against sovereign nations with actual standing armies, the Pentagon's top brass repeatedly assured reporters they would "completely wipe the floor" with such an opponent if given the chance, and promised they would make America "very, very proud."

[...]

"We'd be really grateful if the United States became embroiled in a war requiring us to bomb munitions factories, engage in aerial dogfights, or torpedo battleships," said Marine Corps commandant Gen. James Amos, noting that when it comes to facing actual armies with actual naval and air weaponry, the U.S. is "great at that stuff." "I guarantee it would be an absolute slam dunk for us."

"Come on," the four-star general added, "we really, really need this."

Let us recall that Ronald Reagan, no doubt hunkering commander-in-chiefly in the war room, boldly sent the full force of American military might against our existential and towering foe, Grenada, protecting for another generation the rights of mediocre students to attend medical school. As the historic victory was secured, he proclaimed to a grateful land that, once again, America was "walking tall."

After Vietnam, it was just what we needed.

And thus was set in stone (age) the love of Rs for mythology, pyrotechnics, and dumb. Reaganomics, after all, failed out of the gate and forever after. But war? The guy had a gift.

(And, yes, I know what The Onion is. Like The Daily Show, it's often closer to the bone than many legit news media.)

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