Nothing To See, Move Along...

November 12th and nearly 80 degrees here.

But we're just hysterical lie-brals and besides Al Gore is fat.

How Much Now?

I still, from time to time when I'm lurking RW blogs, hear about how Clinton's team "trashed" the White House and stole all the W's off the keyboards of the computers before they left the place for George W.'s occupation.

How much do you want to be this story, how Obama took a 200 million dollar a day vacation in India during our great depression, will become a similar lie repeated over and over by the Wingnuts?

Sadly, Yes

Don't I wish I'd never heard crap like this before:

[T]hey said on the back of your Social Security card, there's a number. That number indicates the bank that bought you when you were born based on a projection of your life's earnings' -- I'm gonna try and not laugh here -- 'and you are collateral. We are all collateral for the banks. I have this look like, 'What the heck are you talking about?' I'm trying to hide that look and look clueless. I figured clueless was better than argumentative. So they said, 'You don't know this?! You are a member of Congress, and you don't know this?!'"

Frequently I'll get some student who wants to write on a topic nearly as, ah, interesting as this one.  Luckily, I'm also teaching the art of evaluating sources and the necessity of citing sources, so I can put on my serious face and say, well, you can certainly choose that topic if you like, but bear in mind...

Sadly, however, most people in this country are not being made to investigate or evaluate their sources.  Which totally explains the Tea Party.

Oh Noes! Bitches!

I don't know if you've heard about the latest Right-Wing Hissy Fit, but Amanda at Pandagon has an excellent analysis (and the comments are instructive too):  seems Obama appeared on the View.

Well, now, of course through the lens of the RW that is Evil, since anything Obama does is Evil is you are in their camp.

But why it is evil, that is what may flummox you, though only until you think it over.

It's evil not just because he's on a talk show, and that talk show is run by (ick) girls; but also, oh, also, because he could have gone to speak the Boy Scouts instead.

Well, see, that's just wrong.  Pick speaking to adult women over talking to male children?

Tsk.  Where are his priorities?

They're Not Racist!

More Charming behavior from our fellow citizens: A Latino student in TX was mocked and tormented by his English teacher for wearing a jersey from a Mexican sports team. She pulled him up to the front of the class and delivered a long lecture about Mexicans, while repeatedly pointing at him -- Mexicans being the real racists, Mexicans always wanting handouts, and so on.

Hey, but at least she devivered her racist diatribe in a nice clear American accent!

Don't Go Using That S-Word Here!

Via Joe.My.God, we find a Republican senator in Iowa who only upholds family values so long as the families look like his family.  No shock there, I guess.

Iowa, you'll remember, is one of the places in America, where everyone has equality, where the state has actually allowed (some of) its citizens (some) equality, in that gay folk can marry there.

This has Senator Bartz all bent, and apparently no related issue is too small for him to get bent over.

The current point he's all warped on is a change in the language by the Department of Natural Resources in the rules for camping at the state parks.

Apparently in Iowa they charge for the campsite.  Doesn't matter how many people are sleeping on or using the campsite.  Only one tent per campsite is allowed.  So far so good.  An exception is granted, however, for families that are camping, for obvious reasons -- mom, dad, three or four kids, you might well need a couple of tents, and mom and dad don't want to have to put the kids on a separate site that might well be some distance away, depending on the campground.

Anyway, the previous rule said "husband and wife"; the new rule will say "spouse"; this, according to Senator Bartz, cannot pass unchallenged.

Bartz says he wants to be “vigilant” and keep state agencies from writing rules that extend new benefits to gay couples. “A lot of the advocates of gay marriage in Iowa have said, ‘It doesn’t affect anything. Nothing has changed,’” Bartz says. “The reality of it is that everything is changing.”

Let's not have parents camping safely with their kids -- I mean, unless they're straight white Christian parents.  That's the kind of family values Senator Bartz can get behind.

Oh, Well, Then...

Guess we'll let bygones be bygones.

No sense pointin' fingers, right? What's a few trillion dollars and a couple thousand dead soldiers and a hundred thousand slaughtered civilians, more or less, among friends?

Right-Wing Thugs

I was holding a conference with a student in my office the other day, discussing the rhetoric of persuasion, and somehow Fox News and talk radio came up.  "Well, yes," I said.  "But really that's not how you want to argue."

She looked dubious.

"No, really," I said.  "It's not effective, in the long run."

She did not seem convinced.

"I know it's very nearly all you hear," I said, and bit my tongue hard to keep from adding, in Arkansas, "but in fact if you move out of that certain realm, talk radio and cable network news, up into serious journalism and academic discourse, you'll find less ad hominem attacks and strawmen and," I managed not to say crap, "fake data, and more, well, more of an attempt, at least, to reach the truth through argument."

She smiled politely:  no doubt remembering everything her preacher had told her, warning her about socialist/atheist professors like me, who would try to lure her away from the paths of righteousness with my wily ways.

I repressed a sigh.  "Anyway," I said, handing her back her draft.  "Find better sources."

Jon Stewart Takes Down Glenn Beck

So Funny.

Via Joe.My.God.

Teabaggers are Teabagging

Or, This is what happens when you let children play with politics--or, you know, chainsaws and flamethrowers.

...even if Pawlenty gets away with claiming that it’s just a metaphor, his meaning---the overall meaning of CPAC this year---couldn’t be clearer. They’re encouraging their followers to literally believe the only legitimate party is the Republican party, and that this is true even if Democrats win fair and square. How conservatives rationalize this is all over the map. “Jokes” about repealing women’s suffrage are part of this narrative, since women, especially Unwomen (aka, the unmarried) can’t make the “correct” choices. At the big teabaggers’ convention, Tom Tancredo floated the idea of literacy tests, which along with the Palin speak about Real Americans® establishes a racist narrative where non-white voters are considered illegitimate. Questioning the patriotism of the “liberal elite” rounds off the trifecta of rationalizations.


WTF? Do these people not listen to what is coming from their mouths? Have they read no history? Can they not think two weeks -- shit, two days -- into the future? Outside of their own small window of experience?

Well, no, obviously not, or they would not say these things they say.

Also, I admit, I am working with an advantage: I have been in the houses of some of these Teabaggers. I know that they own no books. I know that they do not read. I have spoken with them, asked them questions. I know their body of knowledge is, to use the kindest terms, neither broad nor deep. Even when they have good hearts, and a few of them do indeed have good hearts, their limits curtail them.

You can't make good decisions about your route when you can't see the entire landscape. These folk won't open Mapquest. Shit, they don't even know the program exists. Knowing about their Daddy's backyard was good enough for Daddy and it's good enough for them too.

Yow.

I heard about the Daily Kos poll awhile back, but somehow I miss this bit.  Here's Republicans on whether contraception -- not abortion, mind you, not the Morning-After Pill, but plain, flat, contraception, as in the Pill and the condom and such as that -- should be made illegal.  And yes, you're reading that right.  31% say yes.

QUESTION: Should contraceptive use be outlawed?

	YES	NO	NOT SURE
All	31	56	13
Men	32	54	14
Women	30	58	12
White	32	55	13
Other/Ref	22	64	14
18-29	27	64	9
30-44	29	60	11
45-59	31	56	13
60+	33	53	14
NE	27	60	13
South	34	53	13
MW	29	55	16
West	29	59	12
Def	32	55	13
Vote	31	56	13
Not Like	30	58	12
Def Not	29	59	12
Not Sure	28	59	13

What? Racist? Not the Right!

Via Joe-My-God, a must-see segment from my BFF Rachel Maddow about the Teabaggers and their racist evil.

Absolutely

The Significance of the Franken Amendment; or, Why the Republican Party Should Be Set on Fire, Beaten With Shovels, Stomped to Bits, Shoveled Under, and Forgotten About Forever.

You'll remember this is the amendment that seems like a slam-dunk to most people with any sort of sense -- Federal money shouldn't go to companies that write clauses into their contracts allowing employees to freely rape other employees?  (The actual wording is more that we withhold defense contract money from companies that restrict employees from taking sexual assault cases to court.)

This amendment passed, as it should have, and handily.  OTOH, 30 -- THIRTY -- white male Republican Senators voted against it.  

WTF?

 

(These would be, I imagine, the same white male Republican Senators who are verklempt about Federal dollars paying for abortions.  What do you think?  Who gets to control women -- that's the issue here.  Not the dollars. From Daryrl in the comments: 

So federal funds subsidizing abortions is bad but federal funds subsidizing rape is A-OK?)

(Via The Washington Monthly)

Bad Economy Blues Part II

Krugman's column in the NYTimes today is worth reading -- well, it almost always is, but today especially.  He's talking about the need for more stimulus.  The bit that's been done already has helped some, and, as Krugman admits in the column, that's nice; but nowhere near enough.

What I keep hearing from Washington is one of two arguments: either (1) the stimulus has failed, unemployment is still rising, so we shouldn’t do any more, or (2) the stimulus has succeeded, G.D.P. is growing, so we don’t need to do any more. The truth, which is that the stimulus was too little of a good thing — that it helped, but it wasn’t big enough — seems to be too complicated for an era of sound-bite politics.

Of course, we've got the Teabag fringe, wailing (now, not when Bush was running us into debt paying for that useless war) about how our grandchildren will be SADDLED with DEBT!!!1!; but, as Krugman also notes, this is classic pennywise thinking.

Deficit hawks like to complain that today’s young people will end up having to pay higher taxes to service the debt we’re running up right now. But anyone who really cared about the prospects of young Americans would be pushing for much more job creation, since the burden of high unemployment falls disproportionately on young workers — and those who enter the work force in years of high unemployment suffer permanent career damage, never catching up with those who graduated in better times.

And, as I'll point out, to anyone who isn't living in that Winger alt.world (we'll just make up the planet we want to live in, where global climate change isn't happening, and the Iraq War is being won, and Reagan Was a Great President), things are dire out here in the actual world. Yesterday I had the third student of this semester alone drop out of school b/c she could no longer afford to be a student.  This one was a junior -- the other two had been underclassmen.

Rent and debt and food and health costs and fuel prices are so high these students are not able to stay in school.  It's not tuition.  It's the cost of living.  My freshman who quit mid-semester said he just couldn't spare the time off work.  (He works at Sonic, by the way.)

We're eating our seed corn.  For what?  To pay for a useless war?  To make health insurance executives even richer?  To prop up some demented old white guy's notion of what this country should be?

When will this be enough?

Right-Wing Attempts To Think

...About Health-Care Reform.

Only they aren't any better at thinking that over than at much else, apparently. This Robert Broadus argues that he should not have to be taxed for health care, see, because of the bill of rights, which he believes means he should not have to pay taxes for health care if he doesn't want to, since he has not been buying health insurance, which has been saving him (he says) $2,500/year and he's been doing fine with that.

"What if you get sick?" he is asked.

"What if you break a leg?" he is asked.

"Who pays then?"

Of course, we would -- his fellow citizens -- unless his family is filthy rich -- which, since he says earlier he's been helping to support them, I somehow doubt is the case.

So if he gets sick, his fellow taxpayers will foot the bill, because I really doubt he will just eat his gun. But that's not the point! He's a free citizen! We can't MAKE him pay for a health care system just because he might use it some day!

And J.T. Plumber and Fox News, of course, love this fella to bits.

That's what passes for bold thinking on the Right these days.

The Right and Socialized Medicine

As you know, I lurk on the Right-Wing blogs (as much as I can bear to).  I used to comment, on the few blogs over there that allow comments (many of them do not, which I speculate has to do with their authoritarian natures: no one is allowed to speak in this house but Daddy), except, well, no matter how polite and reasonable I attempted to be (and I swear! I swear! I tried polite and reasonable!) I always ended up being banned, almost always for the high crime of using that evil tool, reason, against them.

Anyway, now I mainly just lurk.

Here is what I have discovered about socialized medicine. 

The Right-Wing seems to hate and fear socialized medicine for a couple of reasons.

(1) It will "be like the post office," by which they mean, well, I don't know.  What's wrong with the post office?  I love the post office. For less then fifty cents they bring letters from anywhere in the country right to my door.  For far less than ten bucks, they bring books, DVDs, toys, exotic foods -- well, you get the picture -- again, right to my door.  They don't require me to be home, either, as UPS and Fed Ex frequently do.  They'll leave the package in my parked car, if I leave it unlocked, or tucked out of sight behind my stoop wall.

When I go into the post office, my post office folk are friendly and efficient.  They remember not only me but the kid and that she likes science and manga.  If the line is getting long, as it always is around lunch and three o'clock (redneck rushhour, mr. delagar calls this) they do what they can to sort things and move them along, though of course they can only do so much -- at lunch, some of them are eating, too, and at all times, only so many of them are on shift.

And I am living in a small city, less than a hundred thousand people.  Some of the Right-Wing folk might be living in bigger places.  I suspect, though, that their main complain is that, where they live, the post office is staffed by "those" people.  You know -- N.O.C.D.*  

Which is what they're afraid of -- that if socialized medicine comes, why, Black and Brown people might easily get put into positions where they could be telling good White People to stand in line!  What to Do!  Denying WHITE PEOPLE the right to -- to -- 

Well, it doesn't matter.  World Turned Upside Down, that's the point here.

(You can tell this is what they're worried about by reading between the lines of their screeds.  They almost never openly say "black people" when they're speaking about their experience with the post office or their experiences with public hospitals.  But watch for code words -- "fingernails this long," or "that hair," or "popping that gum the way they do"-- dogwhistle terms they all understand.)

(2) Poor people will get medicine too.  This is bad.  Some of them come right out and say this.  We can't give the poor access to medicine because then they'll survive and who wants this?  Others pretend to care about the poor, but, as in Doctor Wife Mom's blog, you can see she really only wants medicine going to her tribe -- rich white people with health insurance.  (In other posts she's been snitty and angry about nasty slutty women -- she's careful not to say black women -- who have dozens of abortions, using abortions, she claims, as birth control.  She says she's seen plenty of these women in her years as a doctor.)

People without health insurance, or people without money?  Well, they're really not on Doctor Wife Mom's radar.  I'm guessing she doesn't even really consider them people.  They're not in her Tribe, are they?  How could they be people, then?  People in her Tribe need the Best Medical Care Evah, which means no rationing, no Socialized Medicine, no sparing of any attempt to squeeze even an extra second, damn the cost, full speed ahead....but those poor (brown) people over there across the county that can't afford to pay the $1500.00 it would cost for a day in the ER, and so can't get this nifty wonderful care that's been keeping her Daddy going?  Well, she just can't see them at all.  

(Which this is what's been happening to one of my students -- I'm not drawing that figure out of a hat.  She's a black woman with three kids, two hers and one a niece she's taken in.  She had chest pains back in May, went to the ER, because she has no health insurance.  She works a minimum wage job 30 hours a week and goes to school part time.  They work her up, run some tests.  She gets a bill a few days later for just over 1500 dollars, which did I mention she's got three kids in the house and is working for minimum wage?  So the next time she gets chest pains, guess what she does?  She lies down and waits for them to go away.**)

(3) It will cost a lot of money, which will raise taxes.  Waaah!  Those Lie-brals are so stupid for calling it "Free" health care!  Okay, first, who is saying that socialized medicine is "free"?  Second, yes, taxes, boogah-boogah.  You know what else we pay taxes for? Roads, the FDA, the military, National Parks, the Supreme Court, hundreds of other things we want and need.  Socialized medicine is something most of us want and need.  Also, does anyone think we are not paying for medical care now?  Some sources I've seen say we're paying one-fifth of our GNP for the lousy medical care we get now.  I know a huge chunk of my personal income goes straight to medical care -- first the insurance, that comes off the top, and then I write a dozen checks to the various doctors I owe money to, around town (the surgeon who did my shoulder, the three separate dentists we are always in hock to, the orthodontist, the anesthesiologist I am still paying off, for my surgery which was done in December, the check to the clinic for my daughter's test, from three years ago, I'm still paying those off...) -- and this isn't counting the money for our prescription drugs and the little incidental medical expenses that keep coming up: mr. delagar needs a new CPAP machine, or the kid loses a filling...so you know what?  Slightly higher taxes?  Do you think I actually care?

What they're really worried about, of course, is Brown people getting something for nothing.  Brown people don't pay taxes -- it's a Right-Wing article of faith.  So if we have socialized medicine, well, all those NOCD people will be getting a free ride!  Bad enough they get a free education and all that free welfare!  Now they'll get free X-Rays and free chemotherapy, oh, you can just see steam coming out of the wingnut ears.

*In England, this was Not Our Class, Dear.  In America, of course, it's Not Our Color, Dear.

**Our school has a clinic for students; I set her up with this.

The War Criminals Who Ran Our Country

As amusing as the Tea-Baggers are, don't lose sight of the facts.

While they're out in their lawn chairs ranting because the evil Maobama is giving tax cuts to the middle class and raising taxes 3% on the wealthy (and this is somehow socialism/the Apocalypse/the Rebirth of Hitler's Reign), more and more of what their party did while they were telling the rest of us to shut up, because if we objected to one thing Bush did we (a) hated Freedom and (b) suffered from Bush Derangement syndrome, is leaking out.

Here: go look at this.

Tell me if you can read it without hating America just a tiny bit.

They're upset about fucking taxes?  Fuck them.

Oh?  And by the way?  Fuck them.

Stupid and Evil

I saw this on Rachel Maddow last night, but Fred over at Slacktivist has put it into an excellent post.

Anyone with any moral compass knows, from the first time they watch a bug or a frog or a grasshopper being tortured by a fellow six-year-old (or whatever your formative experience was--- mine was watching the kid next door set fire to a caterpillar) that torture is wrong.

But here, we have it explained to us in detail why torture is wrong, why Bushco screwed up so badly: not only did they torture this man, this prisoner in our custody, but they tortured him knowing they would get bad results; they spent millions of our dollars to get those bad answers; and then they spent hundreds of hours pursuing those bad answers: hours that might have been used productively, pursuing, oh, I don't know, actual criminals?  Actual evil-doers?

Assuming those exist.

I guess they do now, that Bushco has tortured them into existence.

Palin

A White Bear's more reasoned response to Palin has made me step back and rethink my own response to Palin over the past few weeks.

Because, you know, it's not just that I disagree with her -- though I do, on every bit of every single political issue she has spoken on so far, except, well, let me think here, what now?

Title IX: she spoke highly of Title IX. I give her props for that.

And from what I hear she was nice to the woman who cut her hair. (But OTOH that woman was a nice white Christian just like her.)

Where was I?

Here's my point. I also disgree with McCain on every one of these issues and he has not sent me into a gibbering fury of sputtering posts. Why am I off my leash over Palin and not him?

It's because she's a woman, obviously, because she got fed to us feminists as a woman and we're supposed to embrace her as our champion: but certainly I should be angry at McCain for that, not her?

I suppose I'm angry at her for going along with it. (Collaborator! Weasel!)

Still doesn't make sense. She's only the tool. He's the patriarchy, and those like him.

So I'm going to step back and shut up and try to get some balance here.

Cancel What Now?

I had been dealing with my own various crises all day yesterday, and so didn't get to link into the 'sphere until like six last night.

What's the first thing greets my cheery gaze?

McCain has canceled what now?

I began laughing hysterically. Oh, boy, I bet he has.

What's the next announcement? Bush cancels election? Wouldn't be prudent! Not at this time!

(Also: See Dave. B/c McCain isn't ever done with the lying.)