News bombards my brain from TV, radio, emails, tweets, Facebook, and yes, even from the newspaper. Money to state colleges in Pennsylvania, money to Medicaid recipients, money to public broadcasting, money to the National Writing Project, and money to hundreds of other basic programs, all now lie under a legislative axe.
The National Writing Project is one of the many cuts that made my stomach curdle. In America we give teachers too few tools, too few opportunities for genuine professional development, too few opportunities to be part of a meaningful collegial organization. The National Writing Project (NWP) has provided all of the above and more for thousands of teachers, yet in order to appear fiscally prudent, legislators have cut funding to this most valuable organization.
An old family expression, “That was penny wise and pound foolish,” can easily be applied to such an egregious action as cutting funding to NWP. Many of the projects teachers collaborate on through the NWP are volunteer projects. For a project to be accepted by NWP, a teacher must demonstrate the capacity of the project to provide benefit to a wide range of students. Therefore, many students nationwide benefit from teacher research and project development and collaborations of NWP teacher leaders for discount rates.
For over thirty years NWP’s cost-effective, wide range, productive investment in our education system was valued. Legislators, from Congress up to the President, need to ignore the “slash-the-budget-taxes-don’t-do-any-good” fad and find the courage to raise taxes for programs, like the National Writing Project, that work.
(This post started as a comment in response to three fine articles by our esteemed colleagues, Sheria, Nameless Cynic, and Shaw Kenawe. The subject is important enough to merit more commentary.)
Three decades ago, political scientist Theodore J. Lowi authored a ‘themed’ textbook titled, American Government: Incomplete Conquest. Although it received little attention at the time, its main ideas have special relevance today:
If the first problem facing our cave-dwelling forbearers was survival, the second, according to Lowi, was government. No matter how enlightened any form of government appears in theory, all governments have a primordial mean streak, an instinct to lash out and violate their own laws and principles - especially in times of war or national emergency. Consider the suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, and the concept of eminent domain, as examples. Make no mistake. All governments reserve the right to violate your rights or confiscate your property. Furthermore, no matter whom you elect, someone will control your life; and your choice at the ballot box is a choice between competing visions of governance.
This weekend, I watched an interview of Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels on MSNBC - keeping these ideas of Theodore Lowi in mind. Here is the gist of Daniels: A Chicken Little argument on deficits and spending framed as existential threats to freedom and prosperity. When the interviewer suggested a moratorium on social issues, Daniels invoked the words of Ronald Reagan: “Results, not rhetoric.”
Daniels gave a sky-is-falling, no compromise, non-negotiable performance that embodies his vision of authoritarian control. It is the same script followed by GOP governors in Ohio, New Jersey, and Wisconsin, among others. Between the lines, there is a master strategy at work framed long ago in the shadowy backrooms of GOP think tanks.
A Chicken Little argument is a coin with two sides. The side facing up is the fear factor warning of dire consequences and demanding urgent action. The facedown side masks the intent behind the fear: To preclude an open and honest debate and stifle dissent. In other words, when the sky is falling, there is no time to discuss the legitimacy of the claim.
On closer examination, is the sky actually falling? If the state of emergency is about the state of the budget, why are fiscal conservatives pushing a radical social agenda such as this? Which comes first: Chicken Little’s eggs or the almighty dollar?
H/T to Shaw Kenawe for this Joel Pett cartoon
In retrospect, we know the union-busting controversy in Wisconsin is not about budgets. We know Governor Walker’s predecessor forecast a $121.4 million budget surplus. We know Walker created a bogus shortfall by giving tax breaks to employers at levels far too low to spur real job growth (source). A classic Republican tactic, Walker eviscerated tax revenues as an excuse to gut a traditional Democratic power base.
In due course, Wisconsin Republicans forced union-busting provisions through the state legislature by stripping them from the budget bill, thus sidestepping a quorum requirement. This tactic exposed the deception behind the rhetoric: Union-busting does not balance state budgets … confirmed by none other than Wisconsin GOP Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald in this astonishing admission:
If we win this battle, and the money is not there under the auspices of the unions, certainly what you’re going to find is President Obama is going to have a much difficult, much more difficult time getting elected and winning the state of Wisconsin.
As Lowi reminds us, citizens go to the polls to choose between competing visions of governance, and freedom is in the eye of the beholder.
Let us put naivety aside as we consider the rivalry between Democrats and Republicans. If the contest seems asymmetrical to us, it is because the GOP conducts politics with a primordial mean streak as if it were a sovereign entity engaged in actual war. No longer a contest between rivals, politics has devolved into a contest to win by any and all means necessary (even in violation of democratic principles); and the weapons of partisan warfare are fear, deceit, pandering, legislative chicanery, and ruthless guerilla assaults against the assets of the opposition party.
Consider the asymmetry between union busting and the Citizens United decision. If Citizens United opened the door to unlimited corporate funding of political speech, events in Wisconsin have closed the door on union funding for Democrats. All told, union busting, Gonzo-gate, voter caging, voter ID cards, and the smear of Acorn are manifestations of a GOP master plan to eliminate traditional bases of Democratic support.
In theory, true democracy is predicated on choice, and choice connotes a policy debate between rivals. If one party, however, employs ruthless tactics to cripple the opposition beyond viability, what we have left is essentially a one party system with only token opposition. In other words: A democracy in name only. Wisconsin is where the GOP changed the dynamics of democratic engagement from contest to conquest. Wisconsin is where Chicken Little crossed the road to fascism.
No, no, no - we just can't believe scientists when they tell us about the dangers of radiation any more than you can trust them about climate change. The only way to evaluate data is through the kind of transubstantiation wherein facts turn to Fox feces and vice versa.
Take people like Lyin' Bill O'Reilly. You can have all the data and expertise of a hundred lifetimes studying nuclear engineering, the effects of low-dose radiation on humans and global wind patterns, but you can't be sure which way the wind blows unless you ask Bill and Bill, the Holy Father of Denialism likes to say no. It's so much easier than being informed and of course Fox Folk can feel superior by just saying no to things they're too dumb or lazy or ignorant to understand - things that might cost them something or change their convenient opinions or save their country.
Tsunami, Earthquake -- what's the connection? None at all, it was God, the same guy who makes the tides go up and down. What did you think it was, the moon? Who put the moon there anyway, and gravity? That liberal hoax?
But of course Denialism, you know that cheap, imitation conservative intellect thing; Bill is hardly the only prophet. Take Beck who got his knowledge of plate tectonics from sleeping in a cheap motel and has the nerve to speak for God to John McCain who laughed out loud at the very concept of nuclear safety when his opponent stressed the need to put away the gasoline before playing with matches. "Blah, blah, blah;" perhaps the most intelligent thing he said in that whole campaign.
Just say no and let's repeal "Obamacare" says Mike Huckabee who's been clogging the arteries of my flatscreen for the last few days. "It will do irreparable damage to our country" and never mind that Massachusetts and Hawaii are still with us while countless Americans have to resort to buying their medications from Canada and Mexico while Republicans in the private health care business ship their profits to the Caymans to avoid exposing them to taxes and communism. It's "against the will of the people" and never mind that they not only supported it but wanted more of it than they got.
Just say no - it's just not a laughably stupid approach to drug use, it's an epitaph.
What can you say about Michelle Bachmann that hasn't already been said about Charles Manson, Emperor Norton, or that guy in the laundromat fondling himself and muttering as he watches a dryer full of Power Ranger sheets tumble around and around and around?
Understand that I have no verifiable evidence for this, but I have to assume that at some point in her childhood, Michelle Bachmann was told “you’re so pretty” by an older man as he touched her inappropriately. And that‘s why she adopted this “wide-eyed lunatic” persona, as a defense mechanism. Because a high-functioning paranoid schizophrenic would have a hard time getting reelected even in the rural parts of Minnesota, where the population is so thin on the ground that sometimes a close relative is the only sexual partner available when the snows close in.
That does not, however, mean that I think she's sane and hiding it, like some of the commenters here seem to be positing. Hers is a special kind of bugfuckery only found where the gene pool is frighteningly shallow.
Yes, she did graduate from Winona State University, but she then went on to Oral Roberts University for her graduate studies in law. (Yes, Oral Roberts University, founded by televangelist and comic book publisher Oral Roberts, widely known for casting God as a loan shark and thug.)
This is not a storied academic career.
Bachmann is more than happy to drive blindly into the Alleys of Madness, seeing conspiracy theories at every turn. She claims that Obama is promoting "gangster government" and the healthcare bill is hiding $105 billion that Congress had no way of knowing about. (That would be the funds built into the bill to allow it to operate, something Bachmann's own party has been pretending to care about.)
No way of knowing about, unless they'd actually read the bill. (Of course, this isn't the first time that Bachmann has proven that she'll willingly make shit up about healthcare, so it's difficult to see why she gets airtime to wave around her colostomy bag of lies. But there she is.)
When Michelle Obama took a completely non-controversial stand in favor of breastfeeding, Bachmann (whose shriveled mammaries could only produce battery acid and liquid fear at this stage) started emitting harpy-like shrieks accusing the Obamas of creating a "nanny state." (If nothing else, the word she was looking for was "wetnurse" - a nanny is a completely different job.)
And now she went in front of an audience in New Hampshire, to inform them that "you're the state where the shot was heard around the world in Lexington and Concord."
She, of course, later went on to claim that she simply "made a mistake," and "should've said Massachusetts rather than New Hampshire."
Which is complete horsecrap. Yes, she should have said Massachusetts instead of New Hampshire. And she should have said it when she wasn't talking to a crowd from New Hampshire. And she shouldn't have repeated it the next fucking day.
That hollow space behind her eyes allows concepts entirely unrelated to reality take root. When even Chris Matthews (a man who practically wet himself over Bush's flightsuit codpiece) can take her apart without even trying hard, that shows the breadth of this woman's rambling inanity.
The money shot here? "People on the right who've gotten into this anti-intellectual cant, as if not knowing anything is somehow knowing everything." A topic for a future time.
A friend just drove back from Orlando and reported seeing billboards proclaiming, once again, that the "end of the world" was at hand. I'm never quite sure what these idiots mean by "the world;" whether it's human life, the habitability of the planet or perhaps the existence of existence itself which would be a problem far too complex to discuss, even amongst sane and intelligent people. Let's say I don't really suspect these apocalyptic birdbrains of either virtue.
Might I remind you, if you're one of these folks, that the recent quake and tsunami is insignificant when compared to things that happen regularly on this our only planet? But of course you may be one of those New Earth, 6 day creation idiots, but even then it's pretty small as compared with the explosion of the Santorini volcano or Krakatoa. Even in human times, the ancients weren't as populous and certainly didn't build nuclear power plants. But why discuss reality when the tantalizing lure of doom has the lemmings in thrall?
People have been predicting these things for as long as we have records; some to sell normative religion and others for what seems to be the pure thrill of it. Is there some inherited "daddy's going to whip your ass when he gets home" instinct or is it put there by our Mesopotamian religious heritage? I suspect the former since it creeps up in Norse mythology as well, but who knows? It persists because it makes money and gives power, at least temporarily -- particularly for those prophets who offer early destruction and provide dates and times. Some of those have to suggest mass suicide to avoid embarrassment as time inevitably rolls on past the deadline.
I can't wait for 2012, which I suspect won't mean the "end of an error" or the end of anything really important. 1982 came and went at the same petty pace and the end of the last millennium passed as smoothly as last Wednesday. I'm willing to bet we'll stop attributing all that cosmic wisdom to the Mayans by 1/1/13 but of course, I can't lose that bet, can I?
The Rapture idiots, followers of the lunatic of Patmos are still passionately with us, because gibbering John offers more of an "any time now" promise with clues like: "wars and rumors of wars" that obtain to every moment in history, just like earthquakes, floods, famines and outbreaks of disease. Since there's a new crop to replace the ever disappointed dimwits, perhaps nothing short of a true planetary catastrophe will rid us of them.
There are times when I wish for it, particularly if I survive long enough to watch the expression on their non-raptured faces. But I look forward to being here for a number of years, watching them reshuffling the cards, re-reading the entrails, consulting omens and shamans in their shameless way, world without end.
My heart weeps. For those lost in the pounding earthquake or the monstrous tsunami that followed. For those injured and for those who came out unscathed but will forever be scarred by survivor’s guilt.
The chattering heads are already in full flight – what this will mean to Japan’s economy and the global economy. And about the nuclear plants and radioactive fallout. About buildings and roads and towns that no longer exist. And let us not forget the idiot bimbo from some college campus who obviously doesn’t do much studying on Daddy’s dime so she has plenty of time to make fun of the Japanese students frantically calling anyone they can think of trying to get news of family and friends.
My heart weeps because these people have no heart beyond the hard little nugget that keeps them living and breathing in their own insular world.
What devastation nature has wrought on this little piece of Mother Earth. It all happened so fast and so violently, most people didn’t have a chance to blink, let alone fully comprehend what was happening. My heart weeps because the world did not stop as one great sea of humanity and mourn the loss of fellow human beings, not even for one minute. The official death toll is more than 4,300. More than 8,000 people are still missing. Some 430,000 people are in temporary shelters, too worried about daily survival to think about the future.
So right now I would like anyone who reads this to stop for one minute and mourn for the lost and those who survived but must now find a way to rebuild their shattered lives. We can give our fellow human beings one minute, can’t we?
I say Qaddafi, you say Gadhafi, but some still refuse to call him a bad guy. Chavez, Castro, a bunch of tyrants and a few other dodgy regimes trying to curry favor with Iran oppose any foreign efforts to aid rebels in Libya, while others insist we need to establish a "no fly" zone right now.
As President Eisenhower once said
" In only two efforts of endeavor do the amateurs consider themselves more competent than the professionals -- in the field of military strategy and the ancient profession of prostitution."
In the case of those now slamming Obama for not already having launched a military operation in support of Libyan rebels, those amateur Generals may well be more expert in prostitution than military operations, because if the President does decide to send in the bombers and fighters he'll surely be chastised as thoroughly as he was for hesitating -- and by the same people. For Republicans, of course, it would be a crime to make their base pay a dime for this, a sin to let NPR have a penny, but when it comes to another war, there will always be billions left to borrow and squeeze out of the serfs.
Make no mistake, establishing air superiority in Libya means attacking air bases, anti-aircraft and radar sites and that can easily involve civilian as well as military casualties -- and of course it will put our pilots in harm's way on yet another front. It will also give Qaddafi support from his friends at home and abroad who will portray it as an effort by the West to get at his oil and will feed paranoia in surrounding countries. I won't elaborate about our financial situation other than to point out once again, that it seems easier for the traditional armchair generals to borrow and spend for such a hugely expensive venture abroad than to dissuade them from swiping pensions from little old lady school teachers and shutting down birth control providers.
Of course yesterday's statement by the Arab League of support for intervention certainly does allay some fears that we'd be making things worse, but to me, that begs the question of why rich, well-armed countries like Saudi Arabia can't have a very large hand in keeping the Libyan tyrant from calling in air strikes on rebel strongholds. Certainly we and NATO allies need to show support for the end of Qaddafi's reign by the Libyan people, but do we really always need to be the Big Dog with the big guns and the bottomless pockets?
The Republican members of the Wisconsin Senate on Wednesday passed the budget repair bill without the Democrats, by stripping the fiscal elements out of the bill, which meant that they no longer needed a quorum, and could pass it without any Democrats present.
Now, weirdly, the taking away the union's right to collective bargaining was left in the bill that was passed. Which means one of two things: either Walker has been lying all this time by saying that collective bargaining was bankrupting the state, or the Senate just passed an unconstitutional bill and will now be spending more of the budget on defending it in court. I wonder which result Walker prefers?
Likely, neither one. See, Scott Walker believes that God talks to him personally; he claims to have actually heard the voice of Jesus telling him what to do, in the manner of delusional psychopaths throughout history. And you can almost believe that with his attempts to ass-rape the teachers. He's just judging them strictly.
1Not many of you should become teachers, my fellow believers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly. 2 We all stumble in many ways. Anyone who is never at fault in what they say is perfect, able to keep their whole body in check. (James 3:1-2)
OK, admittedly, this isn't presented as a good thing, but a case of other people's unreasonable attitudes towards teachers. But there it is.
It is frightening that the highest executive in our state suffers from the delusion that God dictates his every move. Consider the personal and historic devastation inflicted by fanatics who think they are acting in the name of their deity. (Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation)
Of course, this biblical perspective doesn't explain Walker cozying up to the Koch Brothers. Maybe he feels that the eye of the needle that will get them into Heaven is located somewhere in Wisconsin - he's just trying to save their immortal souls.
There's a certain cold-blooded logic to Walker setting himself up so that he can sell the Wisonsin power industry to the Koch brothers for two dollars per plant. After all, many of Winconsin's coal burning power plants require millions of dollars in upgrades to make them compliant with environmental regulations. Let the multi-billionaire Koch brothers pick up the tab.
Here it is, early March, and the average low temperature in northern Wisconsin has been hovering between 10 and 15 degrees Fahrenheit (remember, that page is updated daily - YMMV). The average temperature in the state drops to 5 degrees F in the winter; the lowest temperature ever recorded in the state was -55 degrees Fahrenheit, on February 4, 1996 at Couderay).
So if a couple of 80-year-old Social Security recipients freeze to death because they can't pay the newly-privatized energy bills? Hey, it's not the state's fault, right? (And it's that much less drain on that damned Social Security system that the Republicans can't seem to destroy. So that has to be another bonus right there! Right?)
There have been times when I thought that I was being overly defensive and paranoid in my belief that the GOP's primary focus is to ensure that Obama is not re-elected in 2012. I haven't been totally satisfied with all of the president's decisions and there are some with which I fundamentally disagree such as the latest executive order that continues to allow the detention of so-called enemy combatants indefinitely without benefit of charges or trials. Can we say "Gulag" boys and girls? However, in spite of my criticism of some of the president's actions, I still support his overall agenda.
I have questioned whether my cynical perspective on the motives of the GOP was born of my ongoing support for the president. Not any more, the Walker coup in Wisconsin has confirmed my belief that the GOP is determined to defeat Obama at all costs. That's what this attack on unions was about. Destroy the power of unions and destroy the base that overwhelmingly supported Obama in 2008.
A post by a fellow blogger, who writes under the handle, Shaw Kenawe, included a repost of a HuffPo piece, Governor Walker's Coup D'EtatRobert Reich, former Secretary of Labor, and current professor at Berkeley. Reich sums up in a single paragraph a clear explanation of the coup staged by Walker and the GOP members of the Wisconsin state legislature to usurp the power of unions or in other words strip away the bargaining powers of the working class.
Governor Scott Walker and his Wisconsin senate Republicans have laid bare the motives for their coup d'etat. By severing the financial part of the bill (which couldn't be passed without absent Democrats) from the part eliminating the collective bargaining rights of public employees (which could be), and then doing the latter, Wisconsin Republicans have made it crystal clear that their goal has had nothing whatever to do with the state budget. It's been to bust the unions.
However, the truly damning evidence is in the words of Wisconsin Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, a close ally of Governor Walker in the state legislature. In an interview with Fox News' Megyn Kelly, Fitzgerald acknowledged that the union busting is really about defeating President Obama in 2012.
Fitzgerald: If we win this battle, and the money is not there under the auspices of the unions, certainly what you're going to find is President Obama is going to have a much difficult, much more difficult time getting elected and winning the state of Wisconsin.
The selfish unmitigated gall of these efforts to bring down the unions to further the political ambitions of the GOP in the 2012 presidential election should galvanize not only progressives but any working class American. I mean working class in the broadest sense. If you get up and go to work for someone else on a regular schedule then you're working class.
I find the opposition of American employees to unions unfathomable. Some of the earliest unions in America arose in the 19th century out of the efforts of women to fight against intolerable sweatshop working conditions--long hours, low wages, and a lack of safety precautions in the workplace. All of the power lay with the employers who could simply fire a single worker who dared complain and easily replace her. Then there was the whole issue of child labor and the lack of a term to even describe sexual harassment in the workplace. The labor movement grew because there was a need for it.
Governor Walker has argued that unions with their unreasonable demands are responsible for the deficit in his state. Bull feathers, and we all know that bulls don't have feathers.
What are those unreasonable demands that unions make on behalf of their members? Cost of living wage increases, decent pensions, and health care benefits. According to the Walker line of thinking, it's the unreasonable demands of unions regarding pensions and health car benefits that are driving state deficits. It appears that in order to resolve the deficit that laborers should do without retirement pensions and health insurance. What's even crazier than this proposition is that so many people who are wage earners seem to think that this is a good idea. The reasoning appears to go like this, "Those union folks make too much money; they learn to need to get by like the rest of us."
Brilliant logic folks! The bullies down the road beat your butt every day. Someone tries to intervene. Suggests that you walk another path after school and offers to walk it with you. You make certain that the bullies are aware of your new route and then they beat the crap out of you and your new friend. You're satisfied because now you and your would be rescuer are in the same boat. I don't know how to say this gently: That's just plain stupid!
A living wage, safe working conditions, and benefits have not always been the norm. We need to think long and hard about returning to the "good old days" of nonexistent or powerless labor unions. To quote that icon, Mae West, "Goodness had nothing to do with it."
In case you may think that Fitzgerald has been misquoted, a little video clip of him being hoisted on his own petard:
said R___. It was back in '08 during the "drill baby drill," cheap energy at any cost nonsense. He's an engineer, like many of my friends and aquaintances and you would think he'd share a concern with proper design and planning of nuclear facilities but then, as now, if Obama is for it, the Republicans area against it.
Then there was J___, an ex military man with several graduate degrees who told me in robotic tones that "we don't need any more government regulation" when I mentioned that a bit of responsible enforcement of the rules might have prevented the inevitable Gulf blow out disaster.
It really is like arguing with robots, because humans can, at least in theory, learn from experience. Robots need programming and repeat what they are programmed to repeat. It's not quite exclusively American, of course and R___ is Swiss after all. The overall safety of nuclear power is a question subject to debate, preferably between those with a great deal of technical expertise and not unduly influenced by those with a great deal of financial interest in building them. There will always be a danger, of course and there will always be an increasing need for energy pace the neo-Luddites and those who think we can feed and house the world's population using pre-industrial revolution technology, but building a nuclear plan on a coastline and in an earthquake zone seems to this layman a triumph of short sighted greed.
I read with horror this morning of a radiation leak and explosion at the Fukushima Daiichi plant resulting from the emergency backup power system being installed where it could -- and did - flood. Of course the plant is located so as to put a great many people in a danger zone and they've had to be evacuated. Odds are that the current plan to flood the reactor with sea water will succeed, and so far the leak is small, or so they say, but it's not really the kind of risk most people would subject themselves to voluntarily. People other than my Republican friends, that is.
I'm concerned enough that I live just down the coast of Florida from a nuclear facility. I'm part of a group organized to provide emergency communications should all else fail and an 'incident' occur and we have regular drills that are based on frightening scenarios. I'd rather they hadn't built it on the coast and within yards of the sea. Tsunamis aren't common here, but hardly impossible and hurricanes with storm surges happen all too often, but the convenience of having a large labor supply, saving money and cutting corners made the site attractive -- and of course we don't need no more Gummint regulation, do we?
