The ‘DSM Constant' of American Politics

By Octopus

This is more afterthought than post because I had promised myself a blogging break of 6 to 8 weeks. My reason for taking a hiatus: I am moving to new quarters and need time off to pack up my clamshells and move to a new reef. Regardless, I still scan the blogosphere and respond to articles that catch my fancy. Such as this one from Swash Zone Emeritus tnlib who writes: Letter to a whiny young Democrat, based on this column by Mark Morford:

See what happens when you wallow in hollow disappointment and refuse to vote in a rather important mid-term election, all because your pet issues and nubile ego weren't immediately serviced by a mesmerizing guy named Barack Obama just after he lured you into his web of fuzzyhappy promises a mere two years ago, back when you were knee-high to a shiny liberal ideology?

Well, now you know. This is what happens: The U.S. House of Representatives, the most insufferable gaggle of political mongrels this side of, well, the rest of Congress, reverts to GOP control like a brain tumor reverts to a more aggressive form of cancer, and everything gets bleaker and sadder and, frankly, a whole lot nastier.

I am not in a position to single out “whiny young Democrats” for special derision because, after all, they did give President Obama an electoral victory in 2008 (for which I am eternally grateful). And while I do consider Fire Doggers a whiny and bratty bunch, I do not necessarily consider them young.

I do not have a handle on who stayed away from the polls. Conventional wisdom states: Mid term elections are always “off” years, and this was known in advance. I recall what David Axelrod said even before the inauguration. Axelrod expected substantial mid term losses, which he cited as good reason for pushing the most contentious legislation first – such as healthcare reform – while the President still held Congressional majorities.

Perhaps there is misplaced blame going around. Do you blame bratty young Democrats who did not go to the polls, or do you blame voters who did and enabled idiots and proto-fascists to win elections?  Let me rephrase the question: Do you blame bystanders at the crime scene or the mugger in handcuffs?

Case in point:  Paul LePage won the Maine governorship with a mere 38% of the vote. I consider 38% the DSM Constant of American politics – the anxiety-addled rabble, oppositional-defiant bagheads, and obsessive hand-wringing reactionaries whose repetition compulsions cause them to repeat the same self-defeating behaviors and elect the same psychopaths who brought everyone to ruin in the first place.

I should also point out that the USA has always been a “half savage” country where politics runs on high octane sleaze.  Nevertheless, point taken.  Perhaps next time, voters will be more motivated to counteract the DSM Constant by going to the polls.

Cry Havoc

If there's anything being shoved down our throats these days, it's the claim that health care reform is being shoved down our throats. It's all part of the game the minority party is playing by trying to make you think the Democrats won the White House by some sort of fluke and that the desire for health care reform wasn't what Obama's majority of voters were hoping for.

It's been a year now and the screaming hasn't let up for a moment, but a recent poll shows that half the country favors the Patient Protection And Affordable Care Act, whether or not you call it ObamaCare and only 43% think it's "too liberal."

It would be amusing of course if the bumper sticker bumpkins did get their "end of an error" by electing Mitt Romney who like the rest of them is giving us that old soft shoe about just how terrible the new law is because as the unimpaired remember, Mitt only a few years ago was hoping his new Massachusetts health care reform would go nationwide. It's easy to call a politician like that a whore, but it's unfair to whores and I don't want to distract from his fellow streetwalker who has been spending a fortune with TV ads warning us of the holocaust, the disaster, the calamity, the apocalypse sure to wipe us from the earth if we have to have health insurance rather than hope the emergency room can cure our cancer or heart disease -- at public expense. I mean never mind the war, conquest, famine and death -- this is health care!

In GOP we trust

By Capt. Fogg

There are a few things that seem to be endless about the American Lie Machine and its quest to rephrase our founding principles, rewrite our documents and refashion us into the government by divine right the colonists left behind. The endless assault on the First Amendment is one of them.

Congressman J. Randy Forbes (R-VA), the founder and chairman of the Congressional Prayer Caucus, sponsored a bill to make "In God We Trust" the official motto on the United States of America, giving unlawful support to an unspecified, but intentionally Christian God and allowing and encouraging the carving of religious credos into the stone of our institutions and establishing state Theism contrary to the letter and intent of the US Constitution. He was troubled by a pattern of omitting God from the nation's heritage, said he. Could a talking snake be any more devious? Of course omitting God is not the same thing as preventing state recognition of Forbes' god and that's the forbidden and worm eaten fruit we're being offered and that some of us are deluded and befuddled enough to bite into.

"There is a small minority who believes America does not have the right to trust in God, who believes the United States should not affirm trust in God, and who actively seek to remove any recognition of that trust,"

But the writers of the constitution weren't a small minority and had no intention whatever of forbidding the free exercise of religion by citizens -- only of forbidding the government officially to recognize any religion, sect, denomination or cult as preferred. But as I said, it's devious. There is nothing in our laws and no credible movement to prevent any American from trusting in any God or gods or principles or making statements to that effect -- or from ignoring them. There is the First Amendment to prevent the government from doing so.

Although Republicans are notorious for portraying the government as an alien force, separate from the people and their interests, it's interesting to see how in this instance, they're quite willing to see the people and the government as congruent or identical because equivocation is the armature about which is built this grotesque idol. But of course not paying for you to engrave your God on the wall I paid for isn't a rejection of anything but the government's right to do so, which is the precise intent of our constitution. There is no official God or official gods in the United States, no official belief -- and this legislation furthers only the intent to create one.

Forbes claims that the resolution is meant to affirm the importance of God in the heritage of the United States, but refuses to address the question of who the "we" are. If he's talking about the people as people, perhaps he's right, at least in the sense of a majority of them, but to a good number of Americans for whom the right to be irreligious, atheistic or pagan is protected, this resolution is an exclusion act. There is no me in that we.

Small minority? I'm not so sure, what with the penalties attendant to disbelief and doubt and unsanctioned belief, but so what? A small minority of Americans are of African descent or Jewish decent or indigenous descent or Chinese descent and the triumph of our democracy is to protect their rights, their numbers notwithstanding. I might say that a large minority of Republicans are asserting that intellectual minorities don't have the same rights when it comes to private thought and this mumbling against "small minorities" is nothing but an attempt to marginalize intellectual non-conformism.

In God We Trust isn't all that historical anyway. Although some, but not all US coins have had it stamped on them since about 1864 as part of the attempt to give a boost to the unpopular war, the motto only became "official" in 1956, shortly after the Knights of Columbus and other religious lobbyists convinced Dwight Eisenhower it would help give Americans another reason to hate and fear Communism.

The first appearance of "In God is our trust" was in Francis Key's poem, later set to an old drinking song and made into an anthem which didn't become official until the 1930's, by which time there wasn't much left of Jefferson's bones to be furiously gyrating in his coffin. That he would do so is of course contested by the plethora of Church funded revisionist historians like All About History who make statements saying President Thomas Jefferson wrote,

"The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time" and "Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are of God?"

which words, of course, Jefferson never spoke or wrote. Perhaps you can see why the GOP stands against public education, science and history -- and for the Christian Bible and Christian government. Perhaps somewhere, the shade of Galileo is wryly smiling and George III, Rex Dei Gratia is giggling because the long upward climb to freedom is sliding back into the reeking sump from which it emerged.

Fox News has learned. . .

By Capt. Fogg

No they haven't.

Alex Jones' Prison Planet website is the kind of place you expect to find very right wing viewpoints and so when I find agreement that Fox News lies, I feel good about it. It gives me a defense when people behind the Fox curtain accuse me of being a far-left Commie/Liberal liar, which seems to be the best they can do, considering all the evidence that Fox is indeed a lie factory and propaganda machine -- more than just simply being affiliated with and a sponsor of the GOP.

"The latest example comes from Fox News, who completely manufactured the claim that Gaddafi was using western journalists as human shields to prevent fighter jets from bombing his compound,"

writes blog editor Paul Joseph Watson today.

In a piece entitled, EXCLUSIVE: Libyans Use Journalists as Human Shields, Fox News’ Jennifer Griffin & Justin Fishel wrote, says Watson:

“An attack on the compound of Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi on Sunday had to be curtailed because of journalists nearby, Fox News has learned.”

But there’s a problem, he says. One of the CNN journalists supposedly used by Gaddafi as a human shield subsequently appeared on CNN and labeled the claim,

“Outrageous and absolutely hypocritical. The idea that we were some kind of human shields is nuts,” CNN international correspondent Nic Robertson told Wolf Blitzer.

"Fox News has proven itself to be a complete tool of the US military-industrial complex. Nothing it now reports about the attack on Libya can ever be trusted."

says Prison Planet, QED -- and who can dispute it?

Penny Wise and Pound Foolish

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.

Wisconsin is where Chicken Little crossed the road …

By Octopus

(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.

Resources for political action:

1. Contribute to Act Blue
2. Join Working America, an advocacy group for non-union members who support the labor movement.
3. National Conference of State Legislatures: Recall Information Page
4. Website to Recall the Republican Eight
5. Website to Recall Scott Walker

Just say no

By Capt. Fogg

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.

Bachmann to the Future

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.

The end, again -- and again

By Capt. Fogg

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.

WATASHI NO KOKARO WA NAKU

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?