Category: politics

politics

Calling an asshat an asshat

My buddy Ben Carson is back.

Ben Carson says he would rather talk about discrimination against Christians than discrimination against gays. … “Christians face a lot of discrimination,” he added. “I wish we could talk more about that.”

Being discriminated against is not the same as being judged and held accountable for bigoted asshattery, Ben. 

Seriously, I’m so damned tired of hearing “Christians” (and I’m putting that in quotes because, even though I’m not one, I do understand those getting the most media attention do not necessarily represent the viewpoints of all) whine over their butthurt for being called judgemental hateful assholes when they are, in fact, being judgemental hateful assholes. Bigots who selectively pick and choose convenient “deeply held religious beliefs” to shield their bigotry while ignoring other teachings of their faith that cover things like “live and let live” are still bigots and deserve the ire and derision of a modern and tolerant society. They should be shamed and called-out and they will either learn to shut up and keep their horrible thoughts to themselves (as we are taught when we’re little kids — if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all) or they’ll be shunned and marginalized and pushed out of polite conversations. 

Of course, the real issue with Carson’s whiny pity party is that Christians are not being discriminated against. Not in the United States because, you know, it’s illegal and all. But it’s perfectly legal now in North Carolina for Christians to discriminate against literally anyone else. Even Christians working for the state conducting the people’s business and performing services to which all citizens are entitled can refuse to perform them if they have “sincerely held religious objections.” Hey Ben, that’s discrimination. When you walk into a state office and are told NO, you can’t do a perfectly legal thing the people behind you in line can do because the person on the other side of the counter thinks their sky friend doesn’t like you and your homosexuality or biracialness or Muslimness or whatever, we call that discrimination. It’s the literal definition. 

The thing is, Ben, being an intolerant bigot of such a magnitude that you’d deny people access to public services because of who they are is, in fact, a choice. The kind of choice people in same-sex marriages don’t have in deciding who they need to be with to be happy, complete people. If someone — anyone, Christian or atheist or Republican or Green Party member — decides to be an asshat, it is the duty of others to call them that.

Ben, if you really believe, as you say, that the Constitution protects everyone’s equal rights and against discrimination, you should be first in line decrying the codification of religious intolerance in North Carolina. But you aren’t. You’re too busy pretending everyone hates you because you’re Christian. You’re too busy pretending to be a victim so you can stop talking about those who really are. That, my friend, makes you an asshat. 

current events politics

Relative nightmare

Republican candidate for governor of Minnesota Jeff Johnson, in response to the decision of Preferred One to leave the state’s health insurance marketplace MNsure, said yesterday,

Six out of 10 people who’ve purchased insurance through MNsure will now have to go through the nightmare process of purchasing another plan all over again.

This is, to be clear, the same “nightmare process” all consumers of heath insurance have to go through at some point (like, when they change jobs or their employer changes plans). It’s the same “nightmare” my company asked our employees to endure several times over the years we’ve owned it as we faced double-digit date increases on top of double-digit rate increases, all in search of a lower cost solution. It’s the same “nightmare” that was allowed to live following the passage of the Affordable Care Act.

Does it suck? Yes. It is especially unique? No. It’s a feature built-in to the American health care system.

A real “nightmare” would be having a family member with a chronic illness and not being able to get insurance. Or getting into an accident or discovering cancer without having access to affordable, effective insurance. Both those issues are largely resolved under the ACA.

Sounds like Preferred One made a business bet and lost. Happens all the time. Good thing there’s a marketplace where those affected can go and get new insurance.

current events politics

Tyrannical

AdamSerwer_2014-Aug-12

One of the arguments against stronger gun control laws groups like the National Rifle Association like to put out there is that we, as a population, need our firearms to protect ourselves from tyranny. Just like the Minutemen, presumably. 

A couple questions.

First, how are the events and the actions of the police in Ferguson not tyrannical? I’m no expert having never lived under tyranny, but I’m guessing it looks a lot like what’s above. Put those guys in red coats and imagine they’re in Boston Common and not suburban St. Louis (that the black dude’s black is actually historically accurate) and maybe you’ll think so, too.

Nice rideSecond, we as an untrained and unarmored population are going to defend themselves against the militarized SWAT teams of today? Let alone the National Guard or the regular Army? These guys are equipped for Mogadishu, not Main Street. 

Bonus questions: Where’s the NRA in all this? Where’s the concern for our liberties being crushed under the boot of ruthless authority? What happened to our First Amendment rights to assumable and speak? 

Final question. Where the fuck is the outrage? 

history politics

The thing that never happened and probably wouldn’t have mattered even if it did

Audio has been released of Bill Clinton telling a group of Australian politicians that he had a chance, while in office, to kill Osama Bin Laden — recorded September 10, 2001. Said the former president…

I nearly got him. And I could have killed him, but I would have to destroy a little town called Kandahar in Afghanistan and kill 300 innocent women and children, and then I would have been no better than him. And so I didn’t do it.

… The thing that never happened and probably wouldn’t have mattered even if it did

history politics

Well-intentioned ignorance

“Today, [Cliven] Bundy revealed himself to be a hateful racist,” said Harry Reid because, you know. 

Reid is partly wrong. Nothing in what Bundy said or how he said it or what he’s said subsequently suggests he’s hateful. He’s not spouting David Duke-isms here. What he is is ignorant. Profoundly and painfully ignorant, of both how life works outside his experience and of our history.

I don’t think anyone can have a complete view of race issues in this country, particularly regarding those of African Americans, without thoroughly studying the Civil War. The issues that led up to it, what happened during, and Reconstruction. It is the single most important event in the history of our people and, in many ways, the questions it raised and the flaws it exposed in us are not resolved to this day. No conversation about the experience of African Americans in this country can happen outside that frame of reference. Even though it’s 150-year-old news. It’s a painful reality, but that debt of human suffering has not yet been paid. Not by half.

If Bundy actually thinks anyone would be better off under slavery, then he’s bought off on the enduring and most popular vision of it perpetrated by fiction like Gone with the Wind. That’s made pretty clear by his suggestion that slaves had a “family life” worth envying by modern African Americans. Absurd. Watch 12 Years a Slave. That’s reality. That’s slavery.

It may be the case that the underlying notion of Bundy’s ridiculous comments (that welfare and state support perpetuate rather than resolve issues of poverty and hopelessness) were made with sincerity and without malice, but the aperture through which he’s seeing the world is fatally flawed. Unfortunately, his opinions regarding welfare are not far removed from a lot of conservatives who are now shunning him. That’s an indictment of the results of two centuries of collective shame. Of thinking we’ve moved past racism because Barack Obama.

“And I think really the media seems to have given President Clinton a pass on [the Lewinsky affair].”

OK. First of all…I mean, come on. Really, Rand? You’re going to drag out the stained blue dress after all this time? Gee, can’t imagine why.

Two, dude, I was there. I remember how the media gave Clinton “a pass.” Suggesting he wasn’t anything but absolutely savaged by the press is farcical.

Via

Gay Rights Movement in Uncharted Territory

Reinhardt wrote that government actions that treat people differently based on sexual orientation “are subject to heightened scrutiny,” like actions singling out racial minorities or women. And he concluded that lawyers aren’t free to strike jurors just because they are gay. That differential treatment, he said, violates the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.

That seems so patently obvious to me it’s hard to believe it’s even at issue. Singling out people because they’re gay is like singling out the left-handed or blue-eyed.

media politics

Freely speaking

Phil Robertson got kicked off Duck Dynasty (at least for a little while) because of something he said. What he said really isn’t important to this discussion, but A&E felt sufficiently disturbed by it to give him the boot. 

And instantly, everyone lost their shit.

Fox News and their ilk cranked up their industrial-scale outrage machine and cried to the heavens about the sorry nature of “free speech” in our culture. Except there’s nothing in this event that suggests there’s anything at all wrong with the price of speech in America.

Consider…

  • Robertson was asked by GQ what he thought to be sinful and he was able to answer, presumably, from his heart.
  • GQ was able to publish the account (to great effect, undoubtedly).
  • A&E was able to exercise their right to expression by canning Robertson.
  • Due to the massive popularity of Duck Dynasty, Robertson will undoubtedly have the opportunity to return to television (assuming he’s permanently off the show and the show falls apart without him) when another network exercises their right to free expression and picks him and his family up.
  • Fox and the rest of the media nabobs are contributing mightily to the problem of greenhouse gasses by talking this thing into its atomic sub-particles.
  • Several friends I have on Facebook have an opinion on the matter and are not shy about sharing it freely (let alone how the kerfuffle has added to the Twitter firehose of expression).
  • Lastly, remember that our Supreme Court have elevated money to be the equivalent of speech and Robertson is terrifically wealthy meaning he has more potential “speech” at his disposal than likely all the people who will read these words combined (yeah, I don’t get a lot of traffic). Nothing that has happened will materially change his fortunes for very long (if at all).

The First Amendment restricts the government’s ability to stifle speech, not citizens and their corporate counterparts. A&E is freely enjoying their speech now as much as Robertson was in the GQ interview or MSNBC was when they canned Martin Bashir and Alec Baldwin (where was the outrage over free speech for Bashir, I wonder?).

“Free speech” isn’t freedom from having to deal with the consequences of what you say. It isn’t carte blanche to say whatever you want wherever you want regardless of your relative visibility in the media. It is not a freedom to be bigoted with no strings attached. It never has been and was not intended as such.

So, as far as I can tell, speech it still free as a bird here in the USA.

politics

Nullify the nullifiers

Welcome to anarchy

Saw this on Facebook this morning. Yeah. Funny stuff.

You’d think folks in Kentucky would remember the last time their elected leaders started picking and choosing which federal laws there were going to obey and which they weren’t.

Lincoln didn’t start fighting the Civil War because he wanted to free the slaves. That’s what happened, eventually, but the reason the war started was because Lincoln knew that nullification was the acid that dissolved democracies. We are a nation of people bound together by laws and the customs by which those laws are made. This can only have meaning and function when we all agree that the laws and customs mean something. A state cannot decide what is or is not Constitutional. A state cannot make laws that nullify those lawfully made by Congress. To allow them to (or to even pretend like they can) is a sickening and dangerous slope that calls into question the very ideal our country is founded upon.

I know. Big words. But it’s true.

This is also the exact reason demands from the Tea Party Republicans in the House to defund or delay or in any way change one whisker of the Affordable Care Act must be totally rejected. They’re not, as was the case in the late 90’s, balking at a budgetary disagreement between the Congress and the president. Those disagreements were germane to that shutdown. What they’re trying to do is nullify the ACA by first shutting most of the government down and then by perhaps breaking the Full Faith and Credit of the United States. 

The process must be followed. Laws are changed all the time by those who win elections. Don’t like the ACA? Get more of your guys in congress than the other party and then get your guy in the White House. That’s how the democratic process works in our country. Over 600,000 Americans died to keep it that way

politics

Vote generic!

From Politico, reporting on a new Public Policy Polling poll:

In a survey of 24 seats, Republicans fall behind in 17 head-to-head matches against “generic Democrat candidates” among registered voters and lag in an additional four districts when respondents are told the Republican candidate supported the shutdown, according to the surveys by Public Policy Polling that were funded by the liberal group, MoveOn.org.

Yeah. Except lots of people will vote for a generic candidate they can make up in their head over a real guy. Most of these representatives don’t even have opponents yet. The vote for them is more than a year away.

On the other hand, PPP is a really top-notch polling outfit, regardless of political leaning and the sponsor of this poll. Hopefully, it’ll be enough to scare a few members into pushing for a clean CR vote and a raising of the debt ceiling. Either way, it’ll be a bonanza for everyone’s fund-raising.