Proving The Adage

Even the most loathsome of people can on occasion say or do the right thing. In the case of today's Republican leaders, props to two of the most usually repulsive: Lindsey "they'll kill us all" Graham and Ben "Obama's a sociopath/Nazi" Carson. The former called for the Confederate flag to be removed from the capital of his state, while the latter stated the obvious, which, in today's version of that party is wholly unexpected and unusual, no matter the topic. The murders in South Carolina were racially motivated, he allowed, alone among his fellow presidential contenders, far as I know.

S.C. Governor Nikki Haley called for the removal of the flag, too, so other than her years of defending it, good for her. She made a point of saying racists should feel free to flag their own property, of course, but she's in a state where not reassuring such people could cost her the next election.

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Also, The Sun Rises In The East

Isn't this about as obvious a thing as there is?

A recent survey of law enforcement agencies nationwide found that police consider right-wing attacks like last week's mass shooting at a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina to be a greater threat than Islamic extremism...
... 

The survey, conducted last year by Kurzman and David Shanzer of Duke University, in collaboration with the Police Executive Research Forum, found that 74 percent of law enforcement agencies ranked anti-government extremism among the top three terror threats they faced. 

By contrast, threats linked to groups like al-Qaeda registered at that same level among only 39 percent of the 382 agencies surveyed...

Anyone recall when the Justice Department, under Eric Holder, said the same thing and the right-wing screamers went nuts? Maybe this time, since it's cops, they'll listen.

Yeah. Sure they will.

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E Unum, Pluribus Of The Crazy

In this amazing interview (amazing, in part, because it's a podcast from Marc Maron's garage and because he spent an entire hour there, but mostly because it's pretty darn good) the president said a lot of really important and even inspiring things. Guess what one word -- one word which, in context was nearly bland -- the right wing screamers have focused on.

To quote CPP, these truly are the mole people.

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US Health Care In A Nutshell

I was happy to hear AG Loretta Lynch announce the arrest of hundreds of healthcare fraudsters, including docs, nurses, and various suppliers. But really, that's small potatoes. The real ripoff of health care dollars is totally legal, and by design.

Want to know why I and so many others were disappointed when President Obama went with a conservative plan for health care reform? Need evidence that insurance companies are sucking untold amounts of money from the system and putting it into the pockets of investors? Think that has nothing to do with the cost of health care in the US? Believe that the ACA is making it tough on insurers? Yeah. Right.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Health insurer Cigna Corp. has rejected a $47 billion offer to be acquired by its larger rival, Anthem Inc., saying the terms of the bid are inadequate and "woefully skewed in favor of Anthem shareholders." 

Cigna's sharply worded rejection came just one day after Anthem went public with its cash-and-stock offer, which amounts to about $184 for each Cigna share or about an 18 percent premium on Cigna's closing stock price on Friday.

What a shameful situation. As people still struggle to afford access to health care in the US, dollars meant to pay for that care are being handed over, right in front of all of us, to insurance CEOs and investors. It makes no damn sense. It's a scam and a travesty.

Billions. They'd pay billions to get in even deeper on the racket. Rejected because it's not enough of a ripoff from premium payers, too little of a windfall for investors.

And Obama's a socialist.

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The Donald. Duck!!

The more I think about it, the more I believe it's possible Donald Trump could get the R nomination. For one thing, Fox "news" seems to be falling all over the guy, giving him a full hour on Hannity, and Bill O'Reilly featuring his "first" interview.

He's the exact teabagger paradigm: bluster, wild statements, America-fuck-yeah braggadocio, pursuit of the superficial, ignorance of facts, pushing of resentment and hatred of the "other," paranoid claims about President Obama, crude, thin-skinned, hyper-inflated ego, and, most important of all, pushing the feel-good if brainless notion that there are simple, bumper-sticker-ready solutions to each and every one of our problems, including pretending they don't exist at all.

I think his star will rise steadily, especially in the early voting primary states, where he's just their kind of guy. And, were he to get the nomination, and if he were in a debate with any of the D prospects, he'd look like an idiot to anyone who knows anything, and like the reincarnation of Jesus (whose teachings they ignore), Ronald Reagan (whose failings they deny), and every one of the founding fathers (of whose writings they know nothing, really) to everyone else.

Donald Trump, in other words, is the perfect symbol of the America half the country desires. And, sadly, of how much of the world sees us.

That he paid people to attend his rally doesn't change the fact that he seems to have Fox in his pocket. I suppose I'm only half serious, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if he, at least, wins a couple of primaries. If there's plenty of time for him to make a fool of himself (or, by dropping out to continue his TV show, of his believers), he's already done so enough that if that sort of thing mattered, he'd already have been laughed off the stage.

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Papa Do Preach

Following up on this morning's post, if this doesn't confirm the idiocy of Jeb and all the other climate change deniers, minimizers, and simplifiers, I don't know what does. Admittedly, I'll not likely read the entire 184 pages. But this summary, by the estimable Charles P Pierce, is pretty convincing that the current Pope is, in most things, a fine, fine, man:

 ...In the 184 pages of Laudato Si, Papa Francesco has called them all out—the climate deniers, the plutocrats who stand behind them, the system of extraction and consumption from which the latter profit, the political leaders who bow before them and refuse to confront the very real crisis, and anyone else who marinates in apathy while the crisis first overwhelms the poorest of the poor, as most crises usually do. 

He wrote: 

"The idea of infinite or unlimited growth, which proves so attractive to economists, financiers and experts in technology ... is based on the lie that there is an infinite supply of the earth's goods, and this leads to the planet being squeezed dry at every limit." ...

If, like me, you don't plan to plow through the whole encyclical (great word, by the way), at least read Charlie's take on it. Not much more need be said. Except how shameful today's Republican party has become, and that I hope some of them live to see the consequences of their selfishness and stupidity; and, much too late, to be forced to admit how damaging it's become.

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Unforced Error

President Obama's statement on the murders in Charlotte will, predictably as higher temperatures and floods, be fodder for the right wing screamers, and entirely negate the central truth of his message:

In a statement at the White House, President Barack Obama mourned the victims and lamented the steady stream of mass shootings he has had to address while in office. "Once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun," he said. "At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence doesn’t happen in other countries." (emphasis mine.)

Damn.

He did add this, but it won't matter:

"It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency. And it is in our power to do something about it. I say that recognizing the politics in this town foreclose a lot of those avenues right now. But it would be wrong for us not to acknowledge it," he said.

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Jeb Bush Is An Idiot, And Other Obvious Things

Quoth the smart one:

“I hope I’m not going to get castigated for saying this by my priest back home, but I don’t get economic policy from my bishops or my cardinals or my pope,” said Bush, a devout Catholic. He added that he wanted to see exactly what the pope recommended “before I pass judgment, but I think religion ought to be about making us better as people, less about things [that] end up getting into the political realm.”

Right. So let's keep religious stuff out of the political realm and vicey versy, is what you're (cough Schiavo cough) saying? And shut up, your holiness, on birth control and abortion. Right, Jeb?

Wild guess here: Jeb doesn't really have a problem with the latter two, pontifically. He's down with "moral issues," even if they're based on a particular religious creed, and even when it's advocated as public policy. So, I'd like to hear him explain, why isn't being good stewards of God'd gift of our planet a moral issue, or a religious one? In what way doesn't it make us better people to protect our planet, and save it for future generations? And why shouldn't religious leaders speak out about such an affront to God?

Well, of course, lifting the corner of the rug, Jeb squares the circle (metaphors, mixed) by saying "we really don't know" what's causing climate change. So everybody just shut up about it. Especially you, Frankie the Pope. Just shut up.

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Catching Up On The News

I don't have anything useful to say about either of the stories of the week, but I'm pretty sure the following takes on them are wrong:

Fox News Blames CNN And Obama For Dallas Police Department Attack 

Glenn Beck: Rachel Dolezal Controversy Paving The Way For Internment Camps

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What Words?

Traitorous? Seditious? Anti-Constitutional? Tyrannical? Fascist? Not to mention hate-filled, homophobic, hypocritical, stupid, dangerous, and deeply unAmerican.

... Fearing a huge setback to their cause, opponents of same-sex marriage, including some of the major contenders for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination, are darkly warning that they will not "honor" an adverse Supreme Court decision. Some are calling for civil disobedience. Others are moving to strip the Supreme Court of its authority to decide whether gay couples should be allowed to marry, while others have questioned whether the court has that jurisdiction in the first place. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) has said that such a decision would be "fundamentally illegitimate."
Those who are merely calling for a new constitutional amendment to enshrine marriage as between one man and one woman now seem almost quaint in their desire to use the ordinary constitutional process to counter the Supreme Court...

The article goes on to quote many prominent Republicans, including several of their presidential (chief law enforcer!) wannabees, all of whom happily demonstrate their lack of understanding of how our democracy, with its checks and balances, works. Or maybe they do understand but just, in the end, don't like it. Don't like it one damn bit. Because what's the good of government, anyway, if you don't always get your theocratic narrow-minded uninformed way? (These are, of course, the same sort of people who accuse President Obama of being a tyrant.)

These are undeniably awful people, who haven't the least idea about what makes America great, nor, despite their flag waving, love for its most fundamental principles. And it's time their teabagging voters woke up to what's going on and put a stop to it.

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Do It Yourself

I've had lots of people tell me, while disagreeing with something fundamentally true, like the value of vaccines or the role of mankind in climate change or the bogosity of homeopathy et al, that "I do my own research." Like this person:

... "The meningitis originated in a left ear infection, which was reportedly left untreated by conventional antibiotic therapy," Terzian wrote in his report.

A simple antibiotic to treat the ear infection would have saved the victim's life, Terzian added.

The child's mother, Christine Delozier, told investigators that she didn't believe in vaccinations or other aspects of modern medicine, not because of any religious beliefs, but from her own upbringing and her own research...

What a load of crap. "Own research." Unless she has a lab somewhere, where she runs tests of antibiotics, or she's done some prospective double-blind studies of her own, what it means is she searched the omni-informational internet until she found a couple of assertions that conformed to her preconceptions. Your "own research" can lead you anywhere you'd like to go, nowadays. Without at least a rudimentary ability to evaluate what you find, the term is meaningless, except as a way to convince yourself you know something you don't.

This is precisely why the Republican attempts to ruin public education, to banish understanding of science to the "pit of hell" whence it came are so frightening. You don't have to be a scientist to be able to recognize pseudoscience and "alternative" medicine woo, but you do have to have had some teaching on it. I don't suppose the climate change deniers give much of a shit about some kid who dies because her mother has no idea how to tell sense from nonsense, but the results were inevitable. Their fight against science is deliberate; the more people who understand what it's about, the fewer there will be to believe their lies, whether about climate change, birth control, pollution, and so many others.

Ignorance is their aim, and they've been remarkably effective at spreading it, oozing from the mouths of their leaders, fomented 24/7 on their propaganda networks. I'll allow that they'd prefer not be considered responsible for deaths such as this, nor are they their direct aim; what they want is a substrate of gullible voters through whom they can push their plutocratic plans. But that level of gullibility requires careful cultivation. Idiocy such as this, based on knowing nothing about real research, is the unavoidable result.

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The Blinders Leading The Blinded

Honest to god/gods, I can't understand the reflexive, inevitable, and pervasive right-wing response to all incidents of police vs (black) citizen violence: it's always entirely excusable, the recipients of said violence are always at fault.

Clearly the left wing has jumped the gun in a couple of instances before all the facts are in. But this latest one? A bunch of teenage girls at a swimming pool, acting like teenagers? The cop feared for his life? C'mon! Seriously?

Megyn Kelly has informed us the girl who got thrown to the ground and kneed was "no saint, either." She knows this, how? She defines this, how? The girl, maybe, had some words to share as she walked away. Shouldn't cops be able to hear some unpleasant words, tolerate a little sass, if that's what there was, from a teenage girl ferchrissakes, without going literally ballistic?

Either that cop has serious anger management issues or is seriously a racist. Doesn't matter: he's in the wrong business, and it's sorta too bad he resigned, to keep his pension, rather than being fired. I've said it before: I respect the job cops do, and the ones I've met, working in ERs, having one as a neighbor, are really good people. It's a scary job. But is it so hard to accept, as with humans in all walks of life, that there are a few bad ones? That even, in fact, in some cities, in some departments, there might be cultures inimical to good policing?

The point here, again, is this: Is there no amount of unnecessary police violence against unarmed black citizens that might be unacceptable to such people as Megyn Kelly and all the right wing screamers? In every situation is "fearing for his life" a legitimate excuse? Why is it that such people on the right can't bring themselves to question the actions of police in any event, most especially this one? Does it threaten their bogus narrative that there's no racism in the US since we elected the president they can't stand no matter what he says or does but not because he's black of course?

These people are poisonous. They're making it impossible -- deliberately, no doubt -- to discuss racial issues in a meaningful way. Not to mention any important issue at all. I think they're killing us.

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More Columny

Here's my latest newspaper column, on the sexy subject of infrastructure:

Megyn “Benghazi!” Kelly, of Fox “Benghazi!” “news” would like you to know that people who “politicize” the Amtrak crash in Philadelphia are “despicable.” By which she means those who’ve pointed out the disasters waiting to happen as our infrastructure putresces from years of neglect. By which I mean the suicidal Republican obsession with budget cuts in order to pay for tax breaks for their wealthy benefactors. Oops. Did I politicize? 

Crazy times. You can’t discuss obvious racial disparities without being accused of “playing the race card” or being “divisive.” You can’t react to the latest (nearly daily) incidence of a child finding an unattended gun and shooting someone without being characterized as a gun-confiscator. (Can we stop calling those events accidents, by the way?) And now you can’t point to the irrational path down which Republican economic policies are dragging us without being tagged as a despicable politicizer. Question: how do you discuss the results of political policy without “politicization?”

In an earlier column I mentioned poverty, listing some approaches I consider doomed to failure. Because I’m not brilliant enough to have ideas of my own, I didn’t propose any. Yet I heard from people who reFoxively accused me of tax-and-spend liberalism, despite the fact that I’d mentioned nothing of the sort. Because considering problems government ought to address implies money might need to be spent, programmed outrage results as if by a rubber hammer on the patellar tendon. Question the carefully maintained construct that we can get along just fine by ignoring all problems that require monetary outlay, and expect responses on a par with that which results from pointing out the science behind anthropogenic climate change, or the real age of the earth: changing the subject, obfuscation, or “la la la, I can’t hear you.” 

It began with Ronald Reagan, of course: the idea that government is the problem, that tax cuts magically solve everything, that we can have what we need without paying for it, that privatizing everything but the use of our pudenda is the path to paradise. It’s not. (tinyurl.com/psxuu94) Or, in the case of infrastructure, that we can just pretend it away. It’s the perfect message for a nation given to rationalizing hard stuff out of existence, banning expert testimony, even, as per the governor of Florida, disallowing the use of certain sciencey words. Who wouldn’t want to believe that by paying less in taxes there would be nights of prosperity and days of jubilee? Show me where and when, and I’m on my way.

By definition, government budgets are political documents. Read the one just passed, without a single Democratic vote, by Republicans in the US House of Representatives, and ask yourself if it isn’t wholly about priorities of that party. (tinyurl.com/kejxfse) Tax cuts for the wealthy, spending cuts for the poor, spending increases (not paid for!) for defense, drastic reductions in Medicare and Medicaid. Of course it’s political. Of course it’s impossible to discuss the impact without mentioning the politics of those who wrote it. What’s despicable, I guess, to people like Megyn Kelly, is pointing to predictable -- or, in the case of Kansas, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Amtrak, actual -- consequences. It’s factually indefensible, not to mention patriotically irresponsible, to perpetuate the mythology of Reaganomics.  

Today’s Republican leaders like to suggest that governments ought to budget the way families do. Okay, consider homeowners with punctured pipes and rotting roofs. Let’s wonder whether, especially with current interest rates, a responsible family wouldn’t do needed repairs even if it required borrowing money; and let’s imagine the consequences of ignoring the problems. Then let’s agree that it would be inexplicable and self-destructive were that family to gather the money together only to donate it to the owner of a gated mansion down the road. To say that reflects the Republican budget is not to stretch the analogy. Marco Rubio, considered by some to be the brightest and most promising among the R presidential contenders, recently suggested that even if manmade climate change is real, it’d cost too much money to do anything about it. (tinyurl.com/o8uvtpb) 

That’s the current Republican path to our future, folks. If this is Yogi’s fork in the road, I’m not taking it.  

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Poor Timing, Bad Hand-Eye Coordination

Glenn "They're gonna kill me" Beck credits God and Rick Perry, not necessarily in that order, for ending the Texas drought by sending killer floods.

Glenn Beck returned from vacation today and noted that upon his return flight back to Texas, he was astonished to see the extent of the flooding that devastated large parts of the state during his absence. After co-host Stu Burguiere mocked the idea that the flooding, or the preceding drought, could in any way be attributed to climate change, Beck noted that it was actually former Gov. Rick Perry's 2011 prayer proclamation that ended Texas' drought... 

So He dithered for a few years (admittedly a blink of an eye in God-years), allowing more misery till he could get around to it, probably attending to a certain amount of smiting somewhere else, likely over gay marriage, or maybe helping some high school team win a championship, and eventually got on the ball by killing a bunch of people and wiping out the belongings of countless others; but halle-the-fk-lujah, right?

I dunno. If Beck's right, God isn't all that good at microsurgery, which raises obvious questions in my mind. Flooding the whole world in the good old days wasn't exactly precision work. I think he needs more time in the simulator.

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Today's Brand Of Conservatism In Extremis

Overseer of the conservative paean to Reaganomics and teabaggerism that is Kansas, Sam Brownback has taken the ultimate step:

On Thursday, Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback signed a bill that threatens the entire state's judiciary with destruction if it rules against a law he favors. Brownback has spent much of his tenure attempting to curb the state supreme court and consolidate power in the executive branch. Thursday's startling maneuver suggests the deeply conservative governor has no compunction about simply obliterating separation of powers when another branch of government gets in his way.

In his contempt for the most fundamental idea of separation of powers he's far from alone in his party. Nor is it the case with oversight in general. I wonder when those who claim President Obama is a fascist dictator will weigh in on this adventure.

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