Christmas Poetry

'Twas the night before Christmas, and alone on his land, Dick Cheney was stirring with a gun in his hands. He was plotting to steal children's gifts from an underground lair, in hopes that his evil would make people care. He would sneak into houses and torture the weak, just like old times. If they tried to object, the CIA would accuse them of crimes. Old Cheney set off, his heart black as night, with hopes that his evil soon would take flight. He arrived at a house with malice and hate, hoping his victims had not stayed up late. He crawled down the chimney in one stealthy flight, hoping not to be seen in the moon's shimmering light. He saw the names Sasha, Malia, and glanced at his map. Old Cheney had wandered straight into a trap. The Obama girls' stockings were hung by the fire with care, in hopes that Joe Biden soon would be there. Cheney was panicked and felt a terrible chill. Fear shook his world. Old Cheney felt ill. He could feel his pulse pound, at he least he did before he collapsed to the ground. When Cheney awoke, he was alone in a room. His mood was uneasy, with just a touch of dark gloom. Three masked men approached from the door. A strong twist of irony soon was in store. Tied to a board, a rag in his mouth and a mask on his head, Cheney was fearful that soon he'd be dead. The waterboard trick didn't look all that fun. Cheney sobbed like a girl and soiled his pants before it was done. As Cheney lay huddled and covered in poo, he could hear a faint voice call from the blue. "The favor's repaid, and all is quite well. Perhaps your war crimes won't land you hell." The voice that he heard was that of Saint Nick. "Merry Christmas you douchebag named Dick!" Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Creative Solutions

Congressional Republicans have announced a new series of policy initiatives known as "Solutions for Another Universe." The policy document itself is relatively short. All of the initiatives can fit on this blog with plenty of space to spare. The document contains no numbers or budgetary estimates whatsoever. Numbers and facts were excluded to allow more space for congressional Republicans to accuse random people of communism-socialism-fascism-terrorism-homosexualism-brown peopleism. Senator John Cornyn (Lunatic-Texas) praised the policy initiatives as "bold new steps in the direction of hysterical, meaningless absurdity." Senator Cornyn also extended his thanks to loyal Republican voters. "The Republican Party will continue to reach out to all white, rural, poorly-educated, hate-filled Americans. These policy initiatives will speak to a narrow, out-of-touch with reality segment of white southerners. We're all very excited about the Republican Party's continuing march down the path of irrationality and overwhelming stupidity."

Let's take a look at these much-celebrated initiatives.

In order to address the issue of global warming (which is a hoax, like mathematics, gravity, and brown people), Republicans have proposed that all Americans stop reading books. This will allow them to stop thinking about global warming. Republicans have also proposed their version of a clean energy bill which calls for an increase in the number of Americans burning coal, styrofoam, and car tires to produce energy.

In economic policy, Republicans have proposed tax cuts for wealthy Americans and de-regulation of all economic activities. These tax cuts and de-regulation will produce balanced budgets, new ponies, and free chocolate chip cookies well into the future.

In foreign policy, Republicans are calling for military invasions of Syria, Pakistan, Iran, Nigeria, Venezuela, Mexico, and a scary brown country to be named later. With these military invasions, America will exterminate any and all traces of evil in the world. Those countries that are predominantly non-Christian will be forcibly converted in order to facilitate the speedy destruction of worldwide evil.

The last policy proposal is a statement that reads as follows. "LALALALALALALALALA, GEORGE W. BUSH IS STILL THE PRESIDENT! LALALALALALALALALALALALALALALA!"

Republicans are confident that these new initiatives will bear electoral fruit. Only time will tell.

Conservatives love fear and stupidity (mostly stupidity).

In December 2003, a self-proclaimed scientist named Dennis Montgomery convinced the Central Intelligence Agency that he could predict terrorist attacks by pulling terrorist-produced "bar codes" from Al Jazeera television broadcasts. Using his proprietary technology, those bar codes could be translated into longitudes and latitudes and flight numbers. He claimed that terrorist leaders were using that data to direct their compatriots about the next target. The CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology believed Montgomery's assertion. The CIA in turn convinced the Department of Homeland Security to raise the terror alert level to Orange (high). Such an increase meant that on December 21, 2003, fighter jets were mobilized to patrol the skies over Manhattan. Thousands of heavily-armed police walked the streets of New York City in body armor. Dozens of French, British, and Mexican flights were canceled. Armed air marshals were placed on unspecified flights. Dennis Montgomery's predictions prompted a full-scale military response by a government already obsessed with hysterical fear. There was a discernible problem with such a response. Dennis Montgomery had no scientific training. His entire story about being able to predict terror attacks using secret bar codes was full-blown nonsense. No such technology existed in 2003 and no such technology exists today. You would have a better chance of locating a unicorn or a leprechaun, although I imagine that George W. Bush probably allocated funds for investigations regarding both mythical creatures. As Playboy Magazine reported yesterday, one man was responsible for a colossal and expensive scam.

There is a considerable back story to go along with this particular incident and with Dennis Montgomery, but you can read more about him in the Playboy article (http://www.playboy.com/articles/the-man-who-conned-the-pentagon-dennis-montgomery/index.html?page=1). Montgomery is currently embroiled in a number of lawsuits. He stands accused of bouncing a one million dollar check in Las Vegas. He and his wife filed for bankruptcy in June 2009. To summarize, Dennis Montgomery is not a trustworthy character. The more pertinent question should be asked. How did an obvious liar/buffoon convince the American security apparatus to act with such irrationality? The answer lies in the overall atmosphere of America under the incompetent administration of the learning-disabled hillbilly George W. Bush, which conservatives/Republicans have done their very best to preserve even after the hillbilly's departure. Hysterical fear coupled with a general disregard for factual reality made Dennis Montgomery's claim seem creditable, much in the same way that fear and a loose relationship with reality were responsible for dragging America into two senseless, endless, bloody, expensive, and unwinnable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. George W. Bush and his factually-handicapped acolytes in the CIA, the Department of Defense, and Fox News made such Dennis Montgomery-esque blunders possible by constantly manipulating information, pumping the general public full of nonsensical fear, and blatantly lying at every available opportunity. Dennis Montgomery was just one symptom of the underlying disease. America suffered the effects of a stupid virus for eight years and the source of the epidemic sat in the White House. It should be noted that the virus had no business being in the White House, after losing the 2000 election by 500,000-plus popular votes and cheating during a recount.

The entire Dennis Montgomery episode would be hilarious if it weren't so sad and embarrassing. Secret bar codes taken from television broadcasts? Hidden within those bar codes, secret geographic coordinates that represent future targets? Would a person be required to wear a tinfoil hat during the decoding process? Seriously, the whole thing is preposterous, but again, the Dennis Montgomery incident was a Bush Junior administration microcosm-absurd claims taken at face value, repeated as fact despite evidence to the contrary, and actions taken that ultimately brought about disastrous future consequences that could have been avoided. Stupid, rich, conservative white men are excellent comedic targets, with their general distaste for facts, evidence, and reality, but the laughing eventually stops when people notice the damage inflicted by a George W. Bush or a Dick Cheney. The Dennis Montgomery story might be worthy of a chuckle, but I certainly don't hear anybody laughing after the past eight years.

The Real News

Hold the presses!!! Stop what you are doing and listen in. Forget Health Care, forget poverty, forget unemployment, forget the Eggo Waffles that aren't in the freezer, forget Tiger Wood, and definitely forget Nanci Pelosi's appalling and uncomfortable laughter; the news is in. 2010 Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame inductees include ABBA. That's right, Dancing Queen will be forever immortalized by this epic endeavor. May Acid Rock live in infamy forever.

Lieberman's List of Demands

This just in-Joe Lieberman has announced his intention to filibuster healthcare reform, regulatory reform, judicial nominees, cap and trade, and simple procedural votes unless he receives a puppy, a slice of cheesecake with cherries, a Playstation 3, NCAA Football 2010 to go with his new Playstation 3, a Nerf N-Strike Vulcan EBF-25 Blaster, and Beyonce's album "I Am...Sasha Fierce" from the Democratic caucus. Harry Reid has stated that he will meet with Lieberman on Monday and immediately provide each and every item on Lieberman's outlandish and illogical list of demands. Vice President Biden, when asked for comment, responded with mild disbelief. "Seriously? What the *&%$ is going on in the Senate? What's next? Does he want his face carved in Mount Rushmore as well? Can somebody explain to me why that horse's ass hasn't been kicked out of the caucus? I don't even...I'm just so...Mother%$#*ing corporate *^&#sucking lobbyist *@&#bag! I'm taking a personal day tomorrow! No, no, seriously, have Michelle explain to him why I'm more than a little frustrated. This is bull*&^%! If I wanted to work for a white collar crime syndicate, I'd be a Republican. Unbelievable!"

Why We Can't All Just Get Along

It is an unfortunate reality we live in today. People don't agree on everything. Point made, lets move on (and not like the website). Joking aside, The line between liberalism and conservatism is drawn in an unmovable mountain called Responsibility. Most Americans would have a minor myocardial infarction just hearing the word uttered. Wives use the phrase to scare little kids into eating their broccoli. Why at the thought of personal responsibility Americans run to their Lawyers house, rouse a small army of lowly legal assistants armed with pitchforks and paperwork and suit the nearest city council for their rights to be babysat through life. UH. Sad sad sad world.
That is the dividing line between liberalism and conservatism, and that is why we can't all just get along.

The Alternate (Red State) Reality

For the past year, there has been a steady stream of insanity coming from the Fox News enthusiasts, asserting that Barack Obama doesn't really belong in the White House because ACORN stole the 2008 presidential election, that poor people are responsible for the current economic recession, that liberals are conspiring to murder the elderly and small children, that a series of undisclosed prison camps are being assembled, and that Democrats are responsible for the debt of the past eight years. In the month of August 2009, America was treated to hysterical, screaming, conservative white people bitter about losing the last election, at town hall events, defending what they believed to be the Constitution with slogans like "Keep the government out of Medicare." The protesters were probably unaware that Medicare is a government-run program. Yeah...who would've thought? A factually-handicapped Fox News viewer seems like an oxymoron. The same element (angry, hysterical, screaming, conservative white people bitter about losing the last election) has hurled endless accusations about healthcare reform being a path to unmanageable debt. The alternate reality, more accurately, the unreality of conservatives might be hilarious to watch, but the consequences for governance (endless gridlock, refusal to accept results of democratic elections) have been and will continue to be detrimental for American society.

In one striking example of conservative unreality passing for a logical explanation (at least in the world of college dropout conservative commentators like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Sean Hannity), red state voters will tell you a fairy tale about the financial crisis. Paul Krugman has a decent synopsis.

"Talk to conservatives about the financial crisis and you enter an alternative, bizarro universe in which government bureaucrats, not greedy bankers, caused the meltdown. It’s a universe in which government-sponsored lending agencies triggered the crisis, even though private lenders actually made the vast majority of subprime loans. It’s a universe in which regulators coerced bankers into making loans to unqualified borrowers, even though only one of the top 25 subprime lenders was subject to the regulations in question.

Oh, and conservatives simply ignore the catastrophe in commercial real estate: in their universe the only bad loans were those made to poor people and members of minority groups, because bad loans to developers of shopping malls and office towers don’t fit the narrative.

In part, the prevalence of this narrative reflects the principle enunciated by Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” As Democrats have pointed out, three days before the House vote on banking reform Republican leaders met with more than 100 financial-industry lobbyists to coordinate strategies. But it also reflects the extent to which the modern Republican Party is committed to a bankrupt ideology, one that won’t let it face up to the reality of what happened to the U.S. economy."

So, conservatives believe (in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence, because facts, evidence, and reality have never unduly influence conservative thinking) that impoverished people, government bureaucrats, and the Community Reinvestment Act are responsible for the current economic crisis, not unregulated financial transactions, irresponsible mortgage lenders, or dishonest investment bankers. SIGH...sometimes the truth is exhausting. That probably has something to do with liberals suffering from constant fatigue.

The conservative mythology regarding the financial crisis is just one example of unapologetic alternate reality. The current healthcare reform discourse has been colored by conservative hyperbole and outright dishonesty. Prominent conservatives (Sarah Palin, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Laura Ingraham, Bill Kristol, Betsy McCaughey, Senator Tom Coburn, Senator Chuck Grassley, Representative Virginia Foxx, and Representative Michele Bachmann) have asserted that healthcare reform is conspiracy designed to murder elderly people and children, describing such diabolical mechanisms as "death panels." These assertions were repeatedly debunked by creditable news organizations (the Associated Press, Reuters, the New York Times, factcheck.org to name just a handful). The absence of truth didn't stop conservatives from repeating such lies without pause. The whole shameful death panel episode clearly demonstrates that conservatives have been divorced from reality during the healthcare debate, which is all the more reason not to take their corporate-friendly, anti-majority suggestions seriously in crafting a final legislative product I might add.

Then there's the overall state of electoral denial on the part of conservatives during and after the 2008 election, up to and including this very moment. Conservatives seem to believe that it's still 2002. Fox News talks about the silent majority as if John McCain and Sarah Palin won the election. Republican senators act as if they are entitled to control of legislative business. Explain to a conservative that medical bills are responsible for sixty-three percent of all personal bankruptcies (New York Times, Tara Parker Pope, June 4th, 2009) as an obvious reason for passing healthcare reform based on widespread public dissatisfaction with for-profit, corporate healthcare and there's a good chance that the conservative will tell you that the general public wants tax cuts for the rich and financial de-regulation before any other legislative action. The conservative will give this response despite the fact that there is no reality-based evidence for such a statement.

Republicans in Congress have been asserting for the entire first year of Barack Obama's presidency that he has no reason to believe that the agenda he campaigned on should be enacted. Again, it's as if the red state silent majority won the election, even though facts and reality contradict such an obvious fantasy. The truth is that Republicans don't have public majorities to speak of. Barack Obama won the presidential election by 9.5 million votes. Democrats control the House of Representatives and the Senate because there were elections. Democrats won the overwhelming majority of those elections. The truth hurts, almost as much as losing an election hurts, but that's how representative democracy works. Try explaining that to the average Glenn Beck acolyte and you will receive a blank stare. Conservatives only prefer democracy and its subsequent results when the candidate that they prefer is installed by the Supreme Court after losing the election. This hysterical conservative anger about Barack Obama's agenda stems from severe bitterness and a complete disregard for factual reality. Like I said, the truth hurts. This brings us to another unhealthy red state voter obsession-unvarnished bigotry and its constant public visibility whenever conservatives voice their unhinged, fact-free opinions.

During the 2008 election, Sarah Palin made a habit of accusing Barack Obama of aiding and abetting terrorism. Like so many other popular conservative assertions, Sarah Palin's accusation had no basis in reality. Barack Obama was a child when Bill Ayers was planting bombs. Fox News and its hate-spewing commentators have pursued a fanatical vendetta against ACORN, accusing the organization of stealing the 2008 election and operating as a criminal enterprise. It’s only a minor coincidence that ACORN is staffed overwhelmingly by less-than-wealthy liberal brown people that don't often vote for Republicans. Glenn Beck has asserted that Democrats in Congress and Barack Obama are attempting to pursue reparations. I'm unaware of any such legislation with that goal currently being considered by Congress, but the people at Fox News seem absolutely certain. To hear conservatives complain about Barack Obama's agenda is to hear a laundry list of racial grievances. Conservatives fear that illegal immigrants (code for brown people) will receive healthcare. Conservatives fear that redistribution of wealth will occur and that welfare queens (code for brown people) will unfairly benefit. Conservatives fear that ACORN (extremely obvious code for brown people) will use the census to dismantle democracy. All of these fears are above and beyond nonsensical, but they are enunciated by prominent conservatives for the purpose of stoking irrational white racial fear.

I don't remember conservatives being quite so outraged about deficits that amounted to 5.1 trillion dollars under George W. Bush. I also don't remember conservatives being so deeply opposed to government action when it came to waging two wildly unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Are deficits acceptable as long as they go towards tax cuts for the rich and wars that result in the killing of impoverished brown people? I certainly don't remember conservatives voicing their outrage about corruption as KBR collected twelve billion dollars at taxpayer expense for their less-than-quality services (war-profiteering) in Iraq. It should be noted that the Department of Defense refused to approve approximately 1 billion dollars worth expenses for KBR in 2008. Translation-KBR attempted to steal a billion dollars from taxpayers (The Spoils of War, Vanity Fair, Michael Shnayerson, August 7th, 2008). By comparison, ACORN has received approximately 53 million dollars in federal funds since 1994 (CBS News, September 12, 2009. Maybe in the conservative alternate reality, a billion is less than 53 million. Or more likely, the average Fox News viewer believes that corporations owned by wealthy, conservative, white southerners are entitled to steal taxpayer money while organizations staffed largely by poor brown people should be denounced and investigated.

Bill Maher wasn't on the right track. He was right. "Not all Republicans are bigots, but the chances are good that if you're a bigot in America today, you're a Republican."

Conservatives/Republicans can project their hatred with great intensity, but it won't wash away their dishonesty. Screaming that the brown president and his scary brown allies are out to destroy America without any factual evidence to support such outlandish claims constitutes bigotry. I don't think that the Tea Parties are a manifestation of intolerance and hatred. They are manifestations of hatred and intolerance, featuring signs that equate healthcare reform and Barack Obama to fascism and (as is so often the case for any conservative event), screaming, hysterical, poorly-educated white people. The conservative movement is overwhelmingly comprised of angry white people for a reason. Just glance at an average Barack Obama voter and an average John McCain voter and the truth becomes abundantly clear.

All of this conservative fantasy-based fury has created one very visible product in American governance-gridlock. Gridlock is the by-product of unreality. Conservatives have been bent on stopping any and all progress in the Barack Obama presidency. They are not interested in governance. They are obsessed with bitterness, hatred, and anger. The fact that their actions may result in immense human suffering by large segments of the American public hasn't bothered them in the least. Conservatives are not only in active denial about reality. They are seeking to undermine reality for years to come, much in the same way that the previous hillbilly administration attempted to undermine reality. In every public policy debate, conservatives seek to demagogue without hesitation. With no agreed-upon set of facts, the Ann Coulters and Glenn Becks of the world can invent their own facts for every situation. Conservatives don't believe in facts, just irreconcilable assertions, and this allows them to live in a comfortable fantasy world where tax cuts create balanced budgets, endless wars qualify as peace, and poverty is cured with prayer. Such beliefs might be comforting to the average red state voter, but they definitely don't produce comfortable policy for a majority of Americans.

Jim Inhofe-Unpopular Global Buffoon

Jim Inhofe (Lunatic-Oklahoma) showed up in Copenhagen today in his capacity as America's chief global warming denier/unapologetic moron to assert that global warming is a hoax and that the United Nations is responsible for spreading the global warming myth. Don't tell the melting Himalayan Glacier or the melting ice sheets near Antarctica and Greenland about the hoax Jim. They're really committed to the lie.

Senator Inhofe was greeted by...well, nobody. I know, what a shocker. His aides had to rustle up a small media crowd so that Inhofe would have an audience for his policy pronouncements. In what may be the single most accurate Jim Inhofe description ever, a Der Spiegel reporter told Inhofe: "You're ridiculous." Simple, descriptive, elegant, and accurate. It's a description that American conservatives have become used to hearing, particularly over the past eight years. Clearly, they are making their best effort to justify such a description well into the future.

Suck it Matthews.

Chris Matthews accused the dirty liberals ("the netroots" is the term that he used) of being uninterested in the business of governing because various liberal enthusiasts (Matt Taibbi, Markos Moulitsas, Joan Walsh, Jane Hamsher) at Daily Kos, Huffington Post, Firedoglake and Salon have been critical of the corporate influence on the Senate's healthcare reform package. Let's just get this out of the way right now. %$#& you Chris Matthews! %$#& you! When we (the dirty, uninterested liberals) were voicing our full disagreement with the two senseless, endless, unwinnable, bloody, expensive debacles in Afghanistan and Iraq, you were living in studio fantasy camp, talking about George W. Bush's status as a glorious war-fighter. It's not that we think we were right. It's that we were right. We knocked on millions of doors in millions of neighborhoods across America to get Barack Obama and congressional Democrats elected for the purpose cleaning up the damage left behind by the incompetent hillbilly regime of Bush Junior. Where were you for the first four years of that horrendous fiasco Chris? Hmm?

I generally refrain from assaulting other Democrats/liberals. For those unaware, Chris Matthews was a speechwriter for the Jimmy Carter administration. Having said that, you and your fivehead are severely out of order Matthews. Check your tone and remember that we (the dirty, hyper-partisan liberals) are the activists and staffers that drive the blue state agenda. We brought the illegal, pseudo-administration of George W. Bush to its knees by making the criminals from Texas wildly unpopular by publicizing their gross mismanagement and numerous criminal actions (illegal wiretapping, torturing prisoners of war, squandering trillions of dollars on tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy, waging two disastrous and unpopular wars). We are the foot soldiers that make the progressive military function. Keep that in mind before you throw any more stones from your glass house.

The New, the Old, and the Downright Dirty Tactic

Demagoguery. The word is itself scary. The tactic has been used by politicians for years but has recently come to light for the younger generations in terms of terrorism, patriotism, pauperism, and (for lack of a better term) alienism. All of these terms strike fear in the heart of middle America. And lets face it folks, Middle America is where the votes and support for a candidate and agendas come from. So it seems that the the side that strikes the most fear into this class can win the election. Obama won on the fear of partisanship and racism, and McCain lost because of the lack of fear for terrorisism. While the strategey is legal, is it Ethical? Is it right that Americans should be fed demagoguery in order to gain a vote for an election? Should we be swayed now for healthcare based on the fear that the babies born poor poeple (who, by the way, are not just minorities) cannot afford the abortion for that they want due to the casual sex they have had without the (not-so) lasting commitment of a marriage? Should we vote for Cap and Trade because some misbegotten owner of a failing media outlet campaigning for global whining isnt seeing his shares rise quite the same as Exxon's? No. No. NO NO NO. That is my answer. That is what Americans know and have been trying to express, and that is what The Hill has been ignoring. Lets bring back that Silent Majority and fight these government intrusions on the American People.
Now before my words are so twisted and manipulated that it is said I am happy with the current state of America, where hard working poeple go home pennyless, and uninsured Americans are discarded as lepors. I am not happy with the current system of compensation, banking, investing, and taxing. I am not happy that children do go home hungry, and that parents see those kids as mearly a check from the government. I am not happy that it has come to a moment in time that Americans cannot support charitities that can help the poor and needy. It seems to me that the age of responsiblity has passed and America is now in the age of Government entitlement.
The majority of Americans now have grown up on, and accepted the War on Poverty. My theory is, why am I entiltled to someone else's earnings? Why? Most modern Liberals have made their fortunes off teaching America that wealth and capitolism is wrong. From Noam Chomsky to Micheal Moore, Americans have been fed the lunicay that the very thought of America is that the poor are somehow entitled to the vast wealth that capitolism has produced for Americans. Now I may be crazy, but for most readers if you were offered $1,000 would you not accept? Now say that to get that $1,000 you had to go and steal the money out of your neighbors house who worked his way through life and now owns his own company, making him a rich man. Now can you truely say you are entiled to his $1,000 dollars, despite having done nothing to in regards to earning that $1,000 dollars. Again, I may be crazy.
Despite this, Americans have been taught that Government entitlement and redistribution is the name of the game, and that, for little or no work, you can have a share of taxpayer money you have not earned. I have used no scare tactics relating these Radical Ideas to you. I have not called anyone a coporate shill, a racists, sexists, marixist, communist, socialist, terrorist.
It comes down to my point of Ethics. If you dont like the current payrate you have every right to invent a new system. No motivation to endure the hardships of euntrepenuership, then you aren't entitled to anything!!!
Yours for thought. Enjoy.

Being Pro-Life While Killing Reality

Senator Ben Nelson (Corporate Shill-Nebraska) is the latest senseless impediment in the Senate to passing something, anything called healthcare reform. His objections stem from the possibility that poor people might be able to obtain access to abortions if healthcare reform passes. He is adamantly pro-life, as if that means anything anymore. Perhaps the corporate-friendly senator can explain how denying health insurance to poor children or denying prenatal healthcare to pregnant women would be considered pro-life. It's not as if poor children need health insurance, even though a study by Heather Rosen, MD, a research fellow at Harvard Medical School, determined uninsured children are over three times more likely to die from their trauma-related injuries than are commercially insured children, even after adjustment for other factors such as age, gender, race, injury severity and injury type. What Nelson is referring to as a compromise is absurd and blatantly discriminatory, and it just so happens that poor people will bear the brunt of such discrimination. Poor women are already discriminated against by the status-quo (the Hyde Amendment). Middle-class women are able to pay for abortions out-of-pocket. The unfairness should be obvious. Women that can afford to have abortions (as well as access to birth control in general) are able to exercise control over their lives while poor women will continue to suffer in a cycle of poverty and desperation as they are forced to provide for children that they can't possibly afford. Is that pro-life?

This only illustrates the dishonesty and callousness of the Fox News enthusiasts. The voting public is constantly being bombarded with proclamations by hysterical, angry, conservatives wielding pictures of fetuses, demanding that America embrace the pro-life position because they are the only people that truly value life, just like they are the only people that truly display patriotism, as well as being the only people that accurately reflect the views of real America (rural, white, poorly-educated, bigoted, angry about the 21st century). Somehow, promoting tax cuts for the wealthy that bankrupt the entire nation, waging endless wars against impoverished brown people that result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and refusing to provide basic social insurance (access to healthcare for example) to poor people qualifies a person as being pro-life.

I suppose it's similar to those other well-known truths. Conservative, hysterical, angry, bigoted white people are the only true patriots in this country because they listen to Toby Keith and demand that Mexicans be deported on sight. By the same token, conservative, hysterical, angry, bigoted white people must be right when they say that real America didn't vote for Barack Obama and that means that he doesn't really deserve the title of President Obama, because he's not really the President. The truth is as self-evident as can be.

Now that I think about these matters, the more it makes sense. I believe that conservatives believe the assertions commonly repeated on Fox News. In the mind of the average red state voter, I'm sure that he/she believes that patriotism is best defined by Toby Keith's music, that Barack Obama didn't really win the election, and that being pro-life means denying basic opportunities for a better quality of life to poor/brown people, waging endless war against non-English speaking, non-Christian brown people, all while defending the imaginary rights of fetuses. Clearly, I've been confused the entire time.

Misplaced Priorities

Americans have choices to make about what they want for themselves and their children. To assert that we can't afford healthcare reform is to make such a choice. I would argue that such an assertion is a colossal mistake in light of the other, far more expensive choices that have been made with taxpayer money over the past eight years. More to the point, those alternative policy choices (tax cuts for the wealthy and funding endless, senseless, unwinnable, bloody, expensive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq) have been wasteful and ineffective on an extreme scale. For opponents of healthcare reform to be critical of cost sounds powerfully hypocritical or powerfully uninformed after the past eight years. Spending trillions of dollars on tax cuts for the wealthy and wars that bankrupted the nation were perfectly acceptable in the Fox News viewing community under the previous administration, but now they are concerned about the cost of policy action. The deficit hawks of 2009 are far too late to the fiscal responsibility party and the average American has suffered because such tardiness.

While the business of enacting major social welfare legislation is never easy in the face of corporate resistance, healthcare reform specifically has been hampered by national priorities (misplaced as they often are) within government. Consider the well-known fact that the United States has the largest military-industrial complex in the entire world, larger than the next closest ten nations COMBINED. The cost of such a military has routinely hovered around 500 billion dollars or more in the past decade. In 2008, defense spending amounted to an obscene 636 billion dollars (a single year). The estimated cost of healthcare reform is 895 billion over ten years. That means that the American taxpayer is on the hook for over six trillion dollars over ten years in terms of defense spending. By contrast, healthcare reform will cost less than a trillion dollars over the same period of ten years, and healthcare reform is under attack by American conservatives for being too expensive. Um…

There is another entirely appropriate comparison to be made when we consider the overall cost-benefit analysis of healthcare reform. Healthcare reform in 2009 would cost far less (895 billion) than the two rounds of tax cuts (2.1 trillion dollars over 8 years, with benefits largely flowing to the wealthy) and two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (1.3 trillion dollars over 8 years) under George W. Bush that bankrupted America in a way previously unseen. President Barack Obama pointed this out in his State of the Union address on September 9th, 2009. Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and the National Priorities Project also made this distinction clear by detailing the potential social investment power of one trillion dollars. A trillion dollars could have built 8 million additional housing units, could have hired 15 million public school teachers for one year, could have paid for 120 million children to attend a year of Head Start, could have insured 530 million children with healthcare for one year, or provided 43 million students with 4-year scholarships at public universities.

I'll say it again. We have choices to make regarding the overall welfare of America. The choices that have been made by a handful of slow-witted, silly, rich, conservative white men over the past eight years were undoubtedly the wrong choices, and the great majority of Americans have suffered because of those choices. To look forward and claim that our social welfare policy choices (healthcare, education, infrastructure) absolutely have to be constrained by cost is to deny reality and to ignore previous mistakes. There will be further disagreement about healthcare reform, regulatory reform, and entitlement spending in the years ahead, but what is not in dispute is how America got here. Endless spending on two disastrous wars and two equally disastrous rounds of tax cuts brought America to its financial knees. The time has come to reorganize our priorities. If we want Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and basic public services that define a developed nation to survive, we have to stop squandering trillions of dollars on tax cuts for the wealthy and endless wars that inflame anti-American sentiment around the globe. Stop listening to the Joe Liebermans, John McCains, and Fox News commentators that sent us into this collective quagmire in the first place. The arsonists are in no position to accuse the firefighters of wasting water.

This is one of those pivotal moments where we make a collective decision about what is important to us. If access to healthcare, education, and a middle-class quality of life really are important to the vast majority of Americans (and I suspect that they are), we have to decide that we will spend the money to achieve those goals. If tax cuts for a tiny minority of wealthy people and endless, unpopular wars are more important, then the status-quo will be entirely acceptable. Make up your mind America, and soon, because time really is money.

Reasonable or Unreasonable?

In order to illustrate the fundamental divide in the current policy debate, we can look at how both sides of the ideological aisle are conducting internal discourse. Liberals are debating cost-control measures for health insurance and how to expand access to healthcare for tens of millions of uninsured Americans. Conservatives (featured in this clip are two senators, Jim DeMint, Lunatic-South Carolina and Sam Brownback, Lunatic-Kansas, as well as Representative Michele Bachmann, Lunatic-Minnesota) are praying for God to defeat liberals in this Family Research Council Anti-Healthcare Reform Prayercast. When I say that conservatives lack meaningful policy solutions to major social problems, with their lack of solutions being so obvious that they rely on hysterical hate-filled prayer instead of rational discussion and an honest exchange of ideas, I'm not confused. Liberals are pinning their hopes on reasonable persuasion, facts, evidence, and reality. Conservatives are praying for God to defeat social progress. Hmm...

Let's take a look at the clip.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AZAWKfbmvE&feature=player_embedded

The Long Battle

The current battle for healthcare reform has brought American progressives no amount of frustration and disappointment. Endless compromises have been made with corporate interests in an effort to make the Senate version of healthcare reform more acceptable to the insurance industry and their armies of lobbyists bent on price-gouging the public for another century. Ben Nelson (Corporate Shill-Nebraska) wants an amendment banning access to abortions because forcing poor people to have children that they can’t afford to provide for is obviously good policy. Blanche Lincoln (Corporate Shill-Arkansas) is deeply concerned about healthcare reform being deficit-neutral (although she wasn’t quite as concerned about deficit neutrality when she voted for George W. Bush’s tax cuts in the neighborhood of 2.1 trillion dollars that bankrupted America along with two wars that were paid for entirely with deficit spending as well). Joe Lieberman (Corporate Shill-Connecticut) doesn’t like the public option or the Medicare buy-in proposal because both mechanisms might provide competition with the health insurance companies (his wife Hadassah is a well-known beneficiary of corporate health insurance money in her public relations work) and drive down long-term costs for American consumers. Allowing people to buy affordable health insurance through the public option or Medicare is just too offensive for health insurance executives. This sort of corporate protectionism from certain lobbyist-friendly senators was entirely foreseeable. Achieving a victory (healthcare reform) in this legislative battle was never going to be easy. Corporate, for-profit health insurance has been and is well-protected by conservative Democrats and Republicans in Congress hell-bent on maintaining the destructive status-quo. Gridlock and set-backs were inevitable. I am just as disappointed as the next Huffington Post/New York Times reader with the current quagmire.

In acknowledging our collective disappointment with the current course of healthcare reform, progressives/liberals should exercise historical perspective. Our policy victories have always been harder to achieve (and always will be harder to achieve) as a matter of history. Conservatives defend the status-quo, usually in the face of overwhelming evidence that the status-quo is detrimental to the majority of the American public. Their goals are, by nature, easier to achieve. Doing nothing to improve the quality of life for a majority of Americans is a conservative specialty. American conservatives have always been the voice of inertia or outright regression in major policy battles, and 2009 is no exception. Conservatives have been the most vocal opponents of healthcare reform for the past year because that’s what conservatives do best-disregard facts, evidence and reality. The conservative war against reality takes various forms, all with the same end goal in mind-enriching a tiny minority at the expense of the majority. One obvious example-tax cuts and de-regulation are the current conservative answers for every economic policy question. Never mind that tax cuts and de-regulation bankrupted the American treasury and sent the economy into a fiery tailspin under the incompetent leadership of George W. Bush. That sort of fact-based reality hasn’t stopped conservatives from asserting that tax cuts and de-regulation will make healthcare more affordable in 2009. That has been the conservative alternative in the healthcare reform debate. I know…the whole thing would be funny if it weren’t so powerfully absurd, but that’s the basic conservative mantra. Do nothing or attempt to reverse progress.

The vast majority of legislative accomplishments that make life worth living in America have been progressive/liberal crusades. On that same note, those same accomplishments have been opposed tooth and nail by conservatives. Liberals championed the abolition of slavery. Conservatives fought and lost a war in hopes of preserving their right to oppress people of color. Liberals fought for women’s suffrage. Conservatives asserted that women couldn’t be trusted to make such complex political decisions. Liberals fought to end the exploitation of working people by demanding shorter work days, greater workplace safety, minimum wages, and the right to form unions. Conservatives opposed such efforts as communist-socialist rabble-rousing. Liberals fought for Civil Rights. Conservatives called Martin Luther King Jr. a communist conspirator and denounced the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as unnecessary government interference. Liberals fought to create Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid as a way of ensuring some measure of comfort and middle-class lifestyle for Americans. Conservatives denounced those institutions as communist-socialist conspiracies designed to kill the elderly. There’s no mysterious pattern. Conservatives have opposed social progress every step of the way, across the spectrum of American history and they have done so without apology. Liberals have always had to fight harder and longer in order to achieve even the most miniscule progress.

When Sarah Palin asserts that healthcare reform is a communist-socialist conspiracy designed to murder the elderly and small children, she is not unique. She is channeling a well-worn conservative strategy, the same strategy that Ronald Reagan employed when he denounced Medicare as a socialist-communist conspiracy in 1961. When a random Fox News commentator accuses healthcare reform proponents of class warfare, he is not voicing an original thought. Progressives/liberals are always waging class warfare according to conservatives, because allowing poor people access to healthcare is class warfare, just like expecting people to pay taxes for public services is class warfare, or enforcing commonsense regulations designed to protect the environment is class warfare. Any policy that aims to protect the welfare of the majority at the minor expense of the wealthy minority is class warfare according to conservatives. The point is that 2009 is no exception to the historical rule. Progressives/liberals are exasperated from fighting what seems to be an endless battle against opponents (conservatives in Congress and the general public) that are completely unconstrained by reality and deeply entrenched in the halls of power. The historical pattern is strong in 2009.

The whole thing is enough to make even the most loyal Jon Stewart fan throw up their hands in disgust, but we and our predecessors have been here before. Joe Lieberman, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Roger Ailes, and armies of corporate lobbyists are tedious opponents, but defeating lunatics, hate-mongers, and greedy plutocrats is a progressive/liberal gift. Before progressives/liberals unfurl the flag of surrender and move to Sweden in 2010, recall that no victory against the forces of anti-reality and the status-quo has ever been easy.

I’m not pleased with the Senate version of healthcare reform. There have been far too many compromises with the forces of corporate greed for my taste. Reconciliation should have been used from the very beginning. This first year of Barack Obama’s presidency has been difficult to say the least. I get it. We’re tired and angry. That doesn’t mean that we should put down our metaphorical swords and battle armor in a giant sigh of exhaustion. Remember those that came before us. Healthcare reform won’t be easy to swallow in its current form, with its lack of cost-control and lack of competition for the health insurance monopoly, but it’s another small step towards better policy institutions. That’s the real gift of American progressives/liberals-our ability to create lasting institutions that improve the quality of life for the majority Americans. If you get the feeling that conservatives aren’t particularly good at creating such institutions, you’re right. Conservatives are much better at creating mythology and fantasy. With such a strong distaste for fact-based reality, conservatives depend heavily on their comforting fantasies to justify otherwise absurd positions. Ronald Reagan won the Cold War single-handedly. Tax cuts for the wealthy will create balanced budgets. De-regulation creates widespread prosperity. Global warming is a conspiracy. Christian prayer (CHRISTIAN prayer, no Muslims or Jews) will solve major social ills like poverty, lack of access to healthcare, and lack of education. These are all popular American conservative policy positions. All of them are demonstrably untrue, but again, truth and reality have never been popular with conservatives. The Fox News viewers don’t need any help creating fantasy. Believe me; they have that entirely under control. In this time of momentary disappointment with the collective political environment, progressives/liberals need to re-focus on building more institutions that create widespread benefit, even if we are disheartened at the moment. The battle of healthcare reform 2009 isn’t over yet, and when it does reach a conclusion, the final product will serve as another marker on the path to social progress in America. Gather your swords and armor. We have a long march ahead of us.

To The Dogs

The Democrats have gone to the dogs on this latest bout for health care reform. More now than ever the mindset from the DNC has been "frantically do something." This reminds me of how my dogs act as I leave the house. In desperation they frantically run about and try to avoid what is coming. It never works. I have always come out on top, and the American people will come out on top of this so called health care reform.

The Beginning

This is the first of many blogs to come. I have intentions of raising awareness. I will try to maintain the absolute facts of the issues, while mixing in my own opinions and ideas. The purpose is not to repeat the droning of individuals that dominate the current market. I seek to enlighten and freshen the current state of political misguiding, and bring in both sides of any argument. I of course have my own spin on things, so cannot be completely impartial, but will be open minded.