Let it snow

It snows in New Jersey, as I guess we all know and yet as we enter the second decade of the 21st century, we're still arguing who has the responsibility to do what and with which and for whom. Some New Jersey people are quite angry with Republican governor Chris Christie who said of the recent heavy blizzard:

“If someone is snowed into their house, that’s not our responsibility.”

I think they have the right to be staggered by such a statement. Earthquake, flood, wildfire, tornadoes, hurricanes; disasters man made and natural: for all these things the government to which New Jersey taxpayers contribute their money has no responsibility. As if to emphasize the point and flaunt the banner of limited government, Christie proudly said:

“I had a great five days with my children. I promised that.”

when the going gets tough, the rich and powerful go to Disney World.

When the Republicans abandon their posts, Partying while New Orleans drowns, for example, is more than simple misprision. Playing Nero when things burn or flood or get buried is an affirmation of core Republican values, amongst which is "every man for himself" when it comes to questioning the need to rescue the elderly, the helpless, the children from being cut off from food and medical care and a needed paycheck.

No, we can't afford it, quacks the gubernatorial duck and can't be bothered with it either, and besides, I need to ride the teacups and get my picture taken with Mickey Mouse.

We expect this. I'm a bit more surprised at the blog comments from the tea suckers and Republican Chia pets who seem to think the inability of a State that gets snow every year to deal with that snow well enough to ensure public safety, is something they can blame on President Obama. After all, the President also takes vacations. That's what we need to be angry about say the trolls.

I know. It's hard to follow such a stroke of stupid with any further comments. It sucks the air out of the room, but that's what we've become in America: a cesspool of non-sequitur and duplicity, vast and deep. A pit full of dogs tearing ourselves apart for the profit of others. We're able to absolve Bush of any criticism in setting an all time record for vacation days, including those care-free parties he attended, playing air guitar while New Orleans drowned, but Obama? That's different, the boy should have been out there with a shovel while Christie did his heckuva job on the water slide in Orlando. Hell it's his duty to keep his government hands out of our lives, isn't it?

Wikileaks - Nothing new here

Even before I took my little Christmas vacation from blogging about politics, I avoided saying anything about Wikileaks. I thought it might be prudent to wait and see if any of the revelations might actually be as damaging as some people (even, for example, Bill Clinton) were claiming.

But since even the US government has admitted that nobody is going to die because of any of the information Wikileaks has released, I think it's reasonably safe to point out one fact that the international media has, for the most part, been glossing over.

There was a time when this was exactly what reporters did. From the Pentagon Papers to Watergate, reporters used to live for this kind of thing. (On the other hand, perhaps our boys and girls in the media are just jealous that they've been taking dictation from whichever politician wanted to spread their message, and not bothering even with basic fact checking on any of these overblown claims, for fear of losing their all-important "access" to the Halls of Power.

Most of what Wikileaks has thrown out into the public view has been the type of "secrets" that everybody already knew. Diplomats make fun of each other and insult heads of state? No shit. And to be honest, the fact that the Secretary of State ordered diplomats to gather information on other countries? What's new there? That's pretty much how it's been done since Ramses II made peace with the Hittites.

And most of us already knew the fact that the Obama administration has been preventing attempts to investigate the Bush administration for war crimes and the torture of prisoners.

So what else did Julian Assange tell us? The Pope didn't let the Vatican cooperate in investigations into rapist priests? Wow, there's a revelation - how many different ways can you say "no shit"?

Afghanistan is already a quagmire? That wasn't anything we haven't known for centuries - wasn't it Alexander the Great that first broke that piece of news?

China hacked Google? Yeah, knew that.

So, why is it that right-wing idiots keep claiming that Assange should be killed?



Because the US government has been embarrassed?

After documentary evidence of what people already knew has come to light, maybe some people deserve to be embarrassed.

Reforming the Senate's Filibuster Rules and Practices

It's possible that on January 5^th, the still Democratic-majority Senate will take up a procedural matter that could prove to be important.  We know about the much-lamented, increasingly used filibuster, whereby it takes 60 votes to attain cloture on debate so that a simple up-or-down vote on a bill can occur.  It's even worse than that since senators can obstruct things at several points along the way, not just when it comes time to decide on whether to allow a vote.  I've heard it reported that all Democratic senators now agree that Majority Leader Harry Reid ought to bring up the matter on the first day of the new session.  Senator Reid has said in the past that reforming the filibuster is something he wants to do, so who knows?  It could happen this time.  The idea seems to be that at the first meeting every two years, senators can change their procedural rules with a simple majority -- the three-fifths-for-cloture and two-thirds-to-amend-the-rules elements of Senate Rule XXII supposedly aren't in effect at that initial moment.  If so, a senatorial "big bang" could give us a new political universe.  The Senate's site is excellent, by the way, and their rules are available at Rules of the Senate.  They even offer materials dedicated to key topics, as they do for Cloture.

I know there are pros and cons on this issue and it's one of those "be careful what you wish for" things.  I've written about it in the past, in my limited capacity as an ignorant lizard who, inexplicably, follows human politics.  The biggest "con" is that if we were to do away with the filibuster altogether, a future majority Republican Senate would then be able to eliminate or at least greatly diminish programs like Social Security and Medicare.

PREDICTIONS, PREDILECTIONS, AND RESOLUTIONS

Every year, folks make predictions or resolutions
for the New Year. Have you made any yet?

(Next year, I plan to switch from
soccer games to hedge funds.)

If this be Treason. . .

The Republicans like to use the word Tyrant a lot. Perhaps it's the same sort of tendency you find in liars and cheats and thieves of other types who use those words to describe those who threaten to expose them. Perhaps not, but I've noticed of late that there have been a lot of calls for summary and extra-legal executions coming from Right wing writers and hate shouters like good ol' love thy neighbor Mike Huckabee or Foxboy Tucker Carlson who "personally" would like to have had Michael Vick put up against a wall and shot even though dear justice loving Tucker professes to be -- you guessed it -- a Christian. Pardon me, but I'm confused.

If you find it hard to reconcile what you think you know about Jesus and non-judgmentalism and forgiveness with summary executions for animal cruelty, perhaps you're unaware of the overriding moral imperative of the Values Party: anything we do to undermine Obama and the Democrats is patriotic and is justified through patriotism because our word is law, not your damned Constitution. Barack Obama praised the NFL's Eagles for giving quarterback Michael Vick a second chance and of course Barack Obama is the Tyrant Prince of Darkness so if he does anything, it's a bad thing. Vick must die, even if those animal rights people are bleeding heart liberals and even if you don't give a damn about dogs.

Last Wednesday in my local paper, I suffered through a tortuous justification of summary execution for treason of the fellow who leaked those diplomatic cables to Wikileaks, the essence of which was that: had he leaked different information under different circumstances at a different time, some terrible thing might have happened. That's the basis of Mike Huckabee's equally loathsome demand for twisting the treason definition to allow the Republicans to kill their critics for the crime of informing the public that our allies aren't our allies and the government doesn't know what it's doing.

Of course if someone were lying about the failures of our government, that would be different. They'd get a regular show on Fox like Huckabee and Beck, make the big bucks and none would dare call it treason. The truth is what makes it bad, you see.

Never mind that something is exposed that would cause us to hang a foreigner the way we did an Nuremberg for, if we do it, it's not a crime. A bit like saying that if your aunt had had wheels instead of legs she'd have been a bus and so she can be sued for not picking you up at the bus stop this morning even if you don't ride the bus and she has legs anyway -- and you'd see the logic of that if you weren't a damned Libtard lover of tyranny.

Pfc. Bradley Manning, the fellow who embarrassed the military with his Afghanistan videos of course should be put up against the same wall for revealing the incompetence of Government, the lies, cover ups and perhaps the slaughter of innocents because after all, anything that doesn't cover up our misdeeds is treason unless the deeds have political importance for Republicans -- then anything is fair game and lawbreakers are heroes and patriots. Are you starting to get it? Criticizing the government is treason because it helps the enemy and there's always an enemy, don't you know -- except when the elite does it, of course, and you know who they are.

Yes, the government is corrupt, incompetent and can't do anything and so we're against it as long as that's actually false. If it's true and you prove it, you're a traitor and should be shot without due process. That's not tyranny -- a middle class tax cut is tyranny, ending insurance company abuse is tyranny, taking deadly contaminated meat off the shelves is tyranny, ending bigotry against law abiding citizens is tyranny, addressing schoolchildren on TV is Tyranny as bad as anything Pol Pot ever did. Making BP pay for their incompetence is tyranny and if you don't agree, the unelected leaders at Fox want you dead and aren't embarrassed to suggest that you be killed. Sic semper tyrannis.

A Brief History of Pretty Much Everything

TEA TALES RETOLD FOR MODERN TIMES

BEST FISHES AND SEASON FEEDINGS FROM OCTOPUS

THE CONGRESS EVERYONE LOVES TO HATE

Remarkable!  Moments after I left a comment under tnlib’s latest post, I found this story at the NBC News website, The Do-Something Congress:

This Congress … accomplished more, legislatively, than any other Congress since the 1960s (the Great Society) or the 1930s (the New Deal). In the past two years, it has:

• expanded the safety net with the health-care law;
• invested billions in the nation's roadways, airports, schools, and green technologies with the stimulus;
• reformed the nation's financial system with financial reform;
• passed billions in tax cuts for Americans with the stimulus and the extension of the Bush-era tax cuts
• expanded civil rights with the repeal of "Don’t Ask, Don't Tell."

And in its final piece of business, the Senate is currently working on one of the White House's top foreign-policy goals: ratification of the New START treaty with Russia. Then throw in all of the other legislation enacted this Congress, like credit-card reform and the Lilly Ledbetter anti-pay-discrimination act.

(…)

Yet as we -- and others -- have pointed out before, political power in Congress comes and goes.  What truly matters is what you do with it when you have it.

To repeat what I said earlier under tnlib’s post:

If Jane Hamsher had her way, Congressional Democrats and Republicans would be locked in mortal combat, and none of this would have happened.

There is much to be admired in the patient and pragmatic approach – in contrast to being dogmatic and self-sabotaging. I will say this of folks who allow themselves to get angry in any debate: If you feel you must trade on anger to win an argument, then you have defaulted on any claim to win by persuasion.

So Jane, how is that hopey changey thing working out for you? It works quite well, IMHO.

How the Far-Left Mirrors the Far-Right

The left, including this writer, has made a career out of denouncing right-wing extremism, mainly the Tea Party and those Republicans more interested in destroying a president – and in the process, the country – than they are in working to solve the very serious problems facing our country.

Liberals justifiably mock the right’s ignorance of basic civics, the country’s history and the Constitution; after all, part of being a responsible citizen is in knowing these things. Signs with misspelled words advocating “English Only” are met with derision; posters with the swastika are met with outrage. The right’s lies, distortions and hypocrisy are greeted with a mixture of ridicule and outrage and held under the microscope by non-partisan fact-checking organizations – along with those from the left.

Harsh criticism is leveled at the racism implicit in signs at Tea Party rallies and on billboards, on edited photographs, in emails and snail mail, and on social networks. Nowhere is this more exemplified than in their tasteless personal attacks on the current President and First Family; even the children are subjected to racist insults. These character defects should and do attract scorn from most decent Americans, regardless of political persuasion.

But do I detect an echo? Can it be said that the far-left is sounding like the extremists on the right and adopting some of those very same character flaws we so vigorously reject and condemn?

The Bloggerhood: Free Speech and Hypocrisy

Very early on in my blogging career I read about how Pam, a conservative over at The Oracular Opinion, stepped in to help her friend Shaw at Progressive Eruptions who had to have surgery and needed help to keep her blog running. Liberal bloggers applauded her acts of kindness; right wingers all but tarred, feathered and ran Pam out of Blogger Town on a rail. Her crime? Aiding and abetting the enemy.

A liberal who used the name Blackwaterdog was hounded off Daily Kos by a loud, noisy chorus of ugly rhetoric. She started her own blog appropriately named The Only Adult in the Room. But the “purists” weren’t satisfied; they wanted to annihilate her. This dehumanizing effort was led by none other than Salon’s Glenn Greenwald, a good buddy of Jane Hamsher’s at FireDogLake. Her crime? Posting positive picture diaries of the President and First Family’s activities.

Not everyone may be drawn to the content on The Only Adult but does this give her critics the right to compare her to Nazi propagandist, Leni Riefenstahl? Sound familiar?

The blatant hypocrisy and the total disregard for a person’s right to free expression because their speech is not agreeable with another’s is deplorable and unacceptable. But sadly, I see many comment zones turning into war zones with the far-left resorting to personal insults when disagreeing with more pragmatic liberals who in most cases share the same ideals but not the approach.

Sentamental History

I would have been surprised had the main street media not started attacking President Obama the moment he opened his eyes on the morning after the inauguration. But I was dumbfounded at the attacks from the so-called professional progressive blogs. They began mildly enough but very quickly their rhetoric turned into a cacophony of ugly vitriol not unlike that heard from the far-right. Even worse, professional and non-professional far-left bloggers resort to the same kinds of tasteless personally degrading labels that they criticize the right for using.

“Obama should be like LBJ was” or “Obama needs to do what FDR did” is not too far removed from “I want my country back.” The glaring but simple reality is that we can’t go back in time; our country is facing a different set of problems with a different cast of characters. More obviously, Obama is not like LBJ, just as LBJ wasn’t like JFK, and JFK wasn’t like HST, and HST wasn’t like FDR, and so on.

We get our kicks out of mocking the extreme right for its ignorance of history but the far-left can be just as ignorant of and blind to documented historical facts.

FACT: When legislation for Social Security was introduced, Franklin D. Roosevelt dropped the national health care provision that was originally included. Why did he – gasp! – compromise/sell-out/cave? Because at that time and place in our history, he wisely understood that the Republicans would say NO to health care reform and in the process kill Social Security as well.

I wonder if anyone on the far-left during those gloomy dark days of the Great Depression accused FDR of being corrupt, a puppet, inept or a snake oil salesman.

FACT: The Social Security Act, signed by FDR in 1935, only covered workers in commerce and industry. In 1937 the Federal Insurance Contribution Act (FICA) was passed; it required workers to pay taxes to support the Social Security system. In 1939 Social Security was expanded to include dependents and survivors. Not until nearly 25 years later in 1950 was it expanded to cover dependents and survivors. In 1956 Disability Insurance was created and has been expanded over the years.

FACT: LBJ never would have succeeded in getting civil rights legislation passed had it not been for Republican support. The Dixiecrats, led by Strom Thurmond, did everything in and out of the book to block it. Obama is not only burdened with the yellow Blue Dogs, he is faced with an unprecedented concrete wall of well-organized obstruction from the opposition – and now he has the far-left participating in the drive to bring his presidency – and thus the country – to its knees.

The lessons here should be obvious. Not every president can get everything he may have promised during a campaign; a foolish attempt to win no doubt but no more foolish than voters who take such promises at face value. Politics has never been a “take all or nothing” kind of game. Passing legislation is in fact the “art of compromise.” The “all or nothing” school of thought is not only unrealistic, the end result is nothing.

Bloggers Get Down and Dirty

The extremes on both sides of the political spectrum have a penchant for chanting infantile slogans: “I have a right to free speech” from the right translates into “I have a right to disagree with the president” or “I have a right to criticize the president” from the left. Yes and yes, but that is not the issue.The issue is not in the message but in the way it is delivered, the language.

Vicious epithets directed at the President of our United States are limited only by their crude imaginations. One side is just as repugnant, tasteless and vile as the other. Epithets from the right include: Spoiled Brat, Obama Bin Lyin, Half-breed Muslim, Barack Hussein Obama, No Clue Balls Obama, Robbing Hood, Nazi, Terrorist, Barack the Magic Negro.

What’s the difference between that kind of toilet tank talk and this used by far-left bloggers? Barack Bush, Nel, HomophObama, Pootie Tang, the Black Mr. Rogers, House Negro.

I can’t help but wonder if there is a connection between the use of such invectives and the fact that Obama is the first black president.

Headlines such as “Barack Obama the Anatomical Wonder. We’re Looking for Organ and Skeletal Donors for Barack Obama” (from one of my favorite blogs no less) and crude – as in content and production videos such as this one.

Other Mirror Images

Who cares what the majority thinks?
It’s all about “me”, not about “we”.
My preferences are more important than yours.
The president is ignoring our side.
I only listen to Glenn Beck or Keith Olbermann.
What party of NO? What obstructionism?
Our country is on the verge of collapse. It’s the eve of destruction.
If I can’t have it all and NOW, I’m staying home.
I’m not paranoid. What denial?
Who? Me Whine?

. . . I know we liberals like to say that we don't march lock-step with our leaders as do the GOPers, but where does it say we have to destroy them with the same sort of dehumanizing invective and emasculating and emotional strafing that the far right uses on Obama? I have seen over my lifetime a radicalization of our politics and the extremes in both parties by true believers will keep us in a constant state of combat instead of making some sort of arrangement to get done the very important work that this country needs to get done.

I wish I had said this but I didn’t. It was included in an email from Shaw at Progressive Eruptions. I owe her a debt of gratitude for her insight and willingness to guide me and keep me on track.

There are several reasons I don’t visit right-wing sights: the epithets, the hysterics, the distortion of facts, the sniping, and the doomsday mentality. Maybe I’m just uncomfortable with extremes because I find myself visiting fewer and fewer far-left sites these days. I truly feel both extremes have a humanitarian problem and that if they don’t become more realistic and less pugnacious - more willing to give and take – it will not be because of Obama that this country collapses.