Chronically Pissed

I'm Pissed Again

Alas, my rage could no longer be contained. I had no choice but to resurrect Chronically Pissed as an outlet for my ire. The old domain - www.chronicallypissed.com - is in internet limbo, so for the time being, you will have to come here: http://www.chronicallypissed.com/cpii/ (I'm not at all sure why that works, but apparently it does). Anyway, here goes...

We've been using our primary babysitter for about two years now. Let's call her Anna. She's a senior in high school and lives directly across the street. We pay her $7 per hour. I don't really recall how we arrived at that rate, but it seemed (and still seems) fair enough. About a year ago, her little sister, whom we'll call Brandy, turned twelve and became available for babysitting as well. Brandy charges $5 per hour because she is younger and less experienced. Another neighbor, Chelsea, also recently turned twelve and also charges $5 per hour. 

The unspoken understanding that has developed naturally dictates that we always ask Anna first. If she is unable, Brandy is usually available and willing. If neither is able, we call Chelsea. As much as we adore Anna, having Brandy or Chelsea is a bit of a bonus for us, as it saves us $2 per hour, which adds up pretty quick when you're hiring sitters for upwards of 25 hours per week. (No we're not out drinking and carousing. We both work primarily at night.) 

We could, in theory, begin to ask Brandy and Chelsea first. Our finances have grown significantly tighter since we first started hiring Anna. Every penny counts these days. If our household was a corporation, we would most certainly have dropped Anna for the cheaper, less experienced labor. If we were capable of being coldly calculating, thinking only of the bottom line, we would do just that. It could potentially save us around $2,500 per year - no small amount of money in a household that grosses somewhere around $50k annually. 

So...why don't we make the shrewd financial decision?

Because we're not dicks. 

Maybe we're stupid and maybe we're destined for financial ruin, but we're not dickish fucking assholes. We value loyalty, consistency, seniority and experience. We care that Anna counts on the income she has come to expect from us. She cares that we value and rely upon her. We value knowing that Anna would never walk away from us for an offer of $9 per hour. It's a win-win, even if there's some loss involved on either side. 

Ah, but there's a crucial word: loss. In the situation I just described, there's not actually financial loss in real terms. Anna is generally babysitting for us so that we can work, which meanse that we're making money. Anna isn't really losing money by turning down a slightly better offer because she's still making money from us. The "loss" is a theoretical one, but the capitalistic obsession with that abstract conceptualization of the word is destroying the American Dream.

The modern corporation must grow, grow, grow. Failure to grow is considered a loss. Just today, Google's earning dropped and its shares plummeted. Google did not stop making money last quarter. In fact, they posted a profit of $2.2 billion in the third quarter alone. Apparently this was not enough - and they knew that. In August, Google laid off 4,000 from its Motorola Mobility unit. Google could surely have kept those workers on and still made a healthy profit, but that would have spelled doom to the analysts and traders who insist upon rapid, upward trajectory.

You and I are expected to save so that we can weather a rainy day, month or year without too much trouble. Corporations are not allowed to do this. They must squeeze every penny out of every rock in the pursiuit of endless growth. What's the softest place to squeeze? The minions who make the product. Reduce wages, halt wage growth, cut benefits, reduce hours, layoff thousands, ship jobs overseas - whatever it takes to make a profit for the shareholders that exceeds the profit from last quarter.  

Source: www.motherjones.com

Source: visualizingeconomics.com

All of this squeezing of the working class has led to levels of wealth disparity that rival the days of the robber barrons of the yesteryear crashed the economy and began the Great Depression. Money is being sucked upward like so much cocaine into a stock broker's nasal passage because, once again, the wealthiest, most powerful Americans have succeeded in perpetuating the myth that government need not help them maintain some level of parity through taxation. They'll make sure all that money eventually gets where it needs to get. Don't you worry your pretty little heads about it.

Except it hasn't. And it won't. Because they're just playing a big game of Monopoly. All they want is to see that number - that number that represents their net worth - get bigger and bigger and bigger. It is an unscratchable itch. It will never be big enough. There is no such thing as "too much." 

If you are a person who sees nothing but virtue in the unfettered acquisition of wealth, here's the question you have to ask yourself: Mustn't there be some level of wealth concentration that would be bad for society, essentially restoring an oligarchy and putting an end to whatever remains of our democratic system of government? How wide can that gap between, say, the top 10% and the bottom 90% grow before things fall apart? 

The free market is not working right now because people like MItt Romney have constructed a reality in which They set the rules. The rest of us are simply expected to play by those rules and take whatever scraps they see fit to throw us. If we don't, then we are obviously lazy, freeloading assholes leeching off the bloody teat of Lady Liberty.

Now they'll tell us that the free market is the ultimate solution to every problem and that we must let it reign supreme over all the land, but think about it...that's a pretty convenient bit of ideology for the folks who run and benefit most from the market, isn't it? And, as we've seen, they're all for intervention when their asses are on the line, but when it's an out-of-work single mom (or, worse yet, a brown out-of-work single mom)...well, you know how they feel about that.

Look...I'm not a communist. I don't hate capitalism. I don't begrudge wealth, even if it is not high on my list of priorities. I grew up thinking that the social contract struck up over the years between the middle class and the American economy was a pretty great fucking bargain. It went something like this: We'll work hard making, selling, installing and fixing your widgets in exchange for the opportunity to raise and support a family, have a little liesure time and be able to afford some of the widgets we're breaking our back to make, sell, install and fix. (Plus, if we work hard enough or have a great idea, America will reward us with fame and fortune! Except that socioeconomic mobility has plummeted from it's heyday in the 40's and 50's.)

But something happened on the way to heaven. The fat cats got carried away. Technology made wealth all the more abstract to them, the workers all the more remote. They no longer had to look at our faces on the factory floors. Their wealth became just a collection of digital figures on a screen. Freed from the bondage of human interaction, they began to seek out ways to grow their resources beyond that which was rational, reasonable or required. 

In order to accomplish that, they essentially just began to overvalue themselves and undervalue the rest of us. In order to grow their wealth at the desired rate, they simply said "Oh, well...we just can't afford to raise your salaries at a rate that is commensurate with the growth of our wealth," and "Mmmm...I'm afraid the benefits you used to get are just not economically feasible for us anymore," and "You know...there are some poor folks in Indonesia who will do your job for pennies on the dollar. Sorry!"

Now that would have all made some kind of sense if, in fact, their wealth had been stagnating and corporate growth had been flagging. On the contrary, the opposite was happening. Our productivity was increasing and their wealth was increasing, while our wages were stagnating or declining.

They compounded the effects of this growing disparity by insisting that their taxes be slashed to historic lows, buying political power at bargain basement prices and convincing Red America that it was all intimately connected to god, guns and the big, bad guv'ment.

Further entrenching their wealth, they've created a system in which they get paid wether they succeed or fail. Whether it's Alex Rodriguez or Vikram Pandit, the wealthier you are, the more insulated your wealth is from the contigencies of life, including your own negligence, misconduct, or failure at your job. When the rest of us hit a rough patch, we get exactly shit, regardless of whether we brought it upon ourselves or were the victims of misfortune. They get golden parachute contracts, we get at-will employment. They walk away with millions, we get lectured about being unwilling to take responsibility for our lives. 

Mitt Romney thinks this is all pretty great. I would too if I were Mitt Romney - but 99% of us are not Mitt Romney. I'm not saying that Barack Obama is our savior. Far from it, given his tack to the center (as required by the most obstructionist congress in modern political history). I'm simply saying that Mitt Romney has only one core principle: the idea that he and his buddies should be free to acquire as much wealth and power as is humanly possible with as little intervention as politically possible. 

The tax code is our only tool for reigning in these fucktards. They are squeezing the lifeblood out of us and telling us that it's our own fault for not having more blood - and they will continue to squeeze until we say "enough already." If they will not fairly distribute the resources of the nation on their own through on-shore hiring, fair wages and decent benefits for the working people, we have no choice but to do it for them. 

To be sure, re-electing Barack Obama is not enough, but electing Mitt Romney is a move in the polar opposite direction. 

Bacon³

Dear Friends,

I'm afraid it's time to leave Chronically Pissed behind. I'm launching a new, more socially palatable soapbox from which to rant and rave. Thanks for your readership and support over the years. I hope you'll come join me over at Bacon³.

Wisconsin

I know it seems a little callous to write about anything other than Japan right now, but a) I think this remains a crucial issue for Americans, even amid the catastrophe overseas and b) I'm always about a week behind the curve, so just hold your horses for my thoughts on Japan.

Forget for a moment all of the particulars - wages, health insurance deductions, collective bargaining, etc. There's only one thing you need to know about Governor Walker's corporatist coup d'état (under the auspices of a budget repair bill): Not one person impacted by the legislation is getting rich by working for the state of Wisconsin. To hear people talk, you'd think teachers and other state workers were living high on the hog, making big bucks for no work, spending summers and holidays at lavish second homes in the French Riviera, throwing cocaine-fueled Christmas parties, and retiring in luxury at the ripe old age of 52. They are not.

This all comes back to something I talked about during the healthcare reform debate. For decades, Republicans have worked tirelessly to convince a certain segment of the population that the bulk of their tax dollars are being given away for free to a bunch of lazy, undeserving, freeloading minorities. It started obviously enough with the war on welfare. They found that it was remarkably easy to raise the ire of working class whites with the image of black welfare queens popping out babies and cashing government checks. It didn't matter what tiny fraction of national spending was directed toward aid to poor individuals and families, nor did anyone care to understand the circumstances that led people into difficult situations. All that mattered was that some black nogoodnick might be getting something for free. 

They took this a step further during the healthcare reform debates of the 90's and 00's by pretending that Hillary and Obama were attempting to give healthcare away to derelicts. They were so successful in making this case that millions of people were willing to turn down better, more affordable health care for themselves in order to ensure that no lazy, undeserving, freeloading un-white people would get something for free. They were more concerned about that horrible prospect in 2009 than they were about the trillion-plus dollars we had just handed out to a handful of rich, corporate bankers who had just forced the entire world into a recession. In fact, Republicans are still fighting tooth and claw to repeal the final, shitty, compromise bill while a motley crew of white collar criminals continue to enjoy their own personal fortunes (hundreds of millions each), which they may as well have taken directly out of our pockets as payment for hand-delivering us to our current state of financial calamity.

Now they're determined to rid the world of the scourge of unions. Those pesky public employees, with their mid-five-figure salaries, dragging the U.S. into a black hole of debt. Don't they understand that we're broke and that we simply can't afford to pay mediocre wages AND the deferred compensation they were promised in exchange for taking thankless jobs with mediocre wages? They should be grateful to have jobs at all and thank us all for stagnant, mediocre wages and decreasing benefits - at least until bankers are back to making record profits on Wall Street. Oh wait...they are.

The most surreal part of this Wisconsin fiasco has been the attempt to paint teachers as greedy bastards. Apparently, the existence of a few sub-par and downright poor teachers among the tens of thousands of excellent, hardworking ones is enough to taint the whole profession. Apparently if ONE bad teacher is making more than he or she deserves, they're ALL making more than they deserve. And the link to minorities no longer needs to be the least bit explicit. Republicans have so successfuly trained a certain type of American to have a Pavlovian response to these class war tactics that race can be totally irrelevant and it still works. When they talk about idle, unfireable teachers, their target audience will picture a sassy, insolent black person collecting three times the salary of a McDonald's employee. That same audience won't bat an eye at the ties between Scott Walker and the billionaire Koch brothers.

Forget the race aspect for the time being. Walker's actions are just as repellent without it. In an attempt to bust unions, avoid raising taxes on his wealthiest consituents, and further his own political and ideological ambitions, Walker is taking advantage of an unfortunate little misconception Americans have - namely, that our public schools suck. Here's what's interesting about that: A quarter century of polling consistently shows that while Americans generally rate the nation's school system poorly, parents rate their own kids' schools very favorably. We've bought into a myth that flies in the face of our own experience. Imagine that. Walker is cynically propagating and amplifying this unfortunate fallacy to the detriment of the hardworking people who are responsible for educating our children. He is essentially saying "Yes...teachers suck and we're overpaying them!"

Consider these fun facts: Millionaires now believe that $7.5 million dollars is the threshhold for being truly rich; 400 Americans have more wealth than half of all Americans combined (more on wealth disparity here); Compared to other nations, U.S. teachers teach more for less pay (and before you complain that they have summers off, please explain what you'd like them to do about that). What do all of those apparently unrelated bits of information add up to? The simple fact that it's outrageous to pretend that teachers are sucking America dry. It's even more outrageous to demand that they be the ones to sacrifice [more than they already do] at this moment. It's not only outrageous, it's dangerous. These are the people we entrust our children to on a daily basis. If we actually believe, as Whitney Houston does, that the children are the future, we need these people to be invested in that future. We cannot pile indignity upon insult upon pay cut and expect them to give a shit about our little shits.

In Michigan, Republicans refuse even to put a salary cap on the "emergency managers" that they hope to be allowed to install, by fiat, in place of elected municipal governments. But teachers...well, teachers are a different matter altogether. Yes, there are many more teachers than, say, "emergency managers." Yes, that means that it would be super easy to balance the budget by simply reducing the overall compensation of all teachers. That doesn't make it right. That makes it lazy. And wrongheaded.

Wisconsin has been the focus of the headlines, but the elections of 2010 put Republicans in a position to pull this shit all over America. It's happening. It looked like we might be on the verge of a revolution of sorts until the crisis in Japan. We must multitask. We must not allow our rage to subside. Do not think for a moment that Republicans will hesitate to take advantage of this distraction. However tragic it may be, they will seize it, they will capitalize on it, and they will reorder the country as they see fit...if we let them.

Abramoff Shrugged

After nearly a decade of trying unsuccessfuly to get past the first chapter of Atlas Shrugged, I am finally barelling through it and, to my great surprise, I am enjoying it immensely. Obviously, I have huge problems with Ms. Rand's worldview, but as a piece of fiction, it is highly readable. I intend to give it a full treatment here upon completion, but one of my fundamental complaints about the novel's ideology instersects serendipitously with my thoughts on Casino Jack and the United States of Money, a documentary about Jack Abramoff that I happened to watch last week - and I feel like talking about that now.

Let's begin with Atlas Shrugged. To put it simply, I find Rand's protagonists to be incredibly admirable. I did not expect this. I expected to be appalled by the merciless greed of self-interested, capitalist swine. Instead, I found brilliant and deeply principled achievers, creating, building, making, and doing great things. Hank and Dagny are the sort of people that I would have nothing to say against. In fact, I would have profound admiration for anyone like them.

I think that Ayn Rand would have been very surprised to hear that assessment from someone like me because nearly everyone else in the story is a grotesque, horror-show caricature of the most reprehensible, freeloading, pinko commie fag that Ayn Rand could dream up in her worst nightmare. There are literally dozens of secondary characters swirling around the saintly Rearden and Taggart, illustrating with every word, thought, movement, and breath the repugnant ideas, motives, and weaknesses of those whom she perceives as enemies of Objectivism. She thus defines her philosophy not so much by its virtues, but by her unmitigated hostility toward everything else. I'll delve more into that at a later date, but for the moment, let's move on...

Casino Jack and the United States of Money - not to be confused with the Kevin Spacey dramatization - details the rise of Jack Abramoff - along with Karl Rove, Ralph Reed, Tom Delay, Dana Rohrabacher, Grover Norquist, et al - through the 1980's college Republican movement. Their political personalities were formed by the Cold War's paranoid anti-communism, particularly through their activism with Nicaraguan rebels, to the extent that they ended up thinking and speaking about domestic political opponents in the same terms as Regan spoke about the Soviets. According to the film, George C. Scott's famous speech from Patton was a favorite at College Republican headquarters, where they would replace "Nazis" with "Democrats," like so: "Democrats are the enemy. Wade into them. Spill their blood. Shoot them in the belly." Ralph Reed spoke of his political tactics thus: "I do guerrilla warfare. I paint my face and travel at night. You don't know it's over until you're in a body bag." Grover Norquist wants government reduced "to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." This sort of language obviously continues through the present day, as recent events in Arizona remind us.

So thinking about these two significant pieces of the conservative movement, it strikes me that while liberals may think of conservatives as ignorant, conservatives think of liberals as evil. Not misguided, not cut from a different cloth - but motivated by powerful, metaphysical forces of darkness that seek to sew destruction and misery among God's children. They would draw a straight line through history from the devil's temptation of Jesus Christ, to Atilla the Hun, to Vlad the Impaler, to Hitler, to Stalin, to Pol Pot, to bin Laden, to Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama. (I'm pretty sure Glenn Beck has drawn that exact diagram on his blackboard.)

I, for one, don't happen to believe in evil - at least not in the ecclesiastical sense. No...not even in the case of Hitler. I have chosen not to ignore all of the information science has bestowed upon us regarding the workings of the human brain. We now understand mental illness in a vastly different light than did, for example, the people of Salem in the 17th century. Schizophrenia (or Tourettes Syndrome) was surely the leading cause of demonic possession in the past. We now know that most sex offenders were sexually violated as children, that most violent criminals were abused as children, and so on down the line. We no longer need to ascribe bad events to some occult force. In fact, the longer we insist upon doing so, the less we take responsibility for our ability to intervene, and the more often we will fail to prevent future tragedies.

Now...I am quite sure that I have used language on this very site that would appear to contradict everything I've just said. If I've called Sarah Palin an evil fucking cunt once, I've called her an evil fucking cunt a hundred times. It goes without saying that I don't actually believe her to be the literal spawn of satan any more than I believe her to be a large, walking vagina. I use the term "evil" in two different ways, both secular. The first is for hyperbolic effect. It just sounds (and feels better) to say that Sarah Palin is an evil fucking cunt than to say that Sarah Palin is sadly misguided by her own oversized ego and demonstrable lack of intelligence. The second is to describe what I believe to be bad motives on the part of some entity. If I say that Fox "News" is downright fucking evil, I simply mean to say that they are motivated by greed, xenophobia, racism, chauvinism, and other forms of ignorant ass-backwardness.

So while it may appear that both sides of the divide despise each other with equal vehemence, the nature of the underlying animosities of each are very different. Ayn Rand apparently could not conceive of a person who might disagree with parts of her premise without being a repugnantly pathetic cancer on the ass of humanity, clawing and scratching the great capitalist dream to its death by a thousand cuts. Modern conservatives are convinced that liberals are attempting to drag the United States into some sort of socialistic new world order that will collaborate with the illegitimate (by virtue of his Kenyan upbringing and Mau Mau sympathies) President to establish a worldwide Islamic caliphate.

This explains why conservatives cannot coherently or rationally contextualize the presence of Muslims in the United States or the tendency of liberals to accept them. Radicalized or not, Muslims are, quite literally, enemies of God in the eyes of Christian Conservatives. 9/11 was not a confluence of complicated historical and geo-political forces with the brilliant exploitation of weaknesses in American security. 9/11 was pure evil, perpetrated by enemies of the Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. (Their worldview also miraculously shields them from the ravages of...well, of their worldview. The shooting rampage in Arizona had nothing to do with lax gun laws and the proliferation of violent, inflammatory language and imagery in the political realm. It was simply an act of evil.)

These are not conditions under which serious discussion can take place. Earthly problems - admittedly, the only kind I know of - can only be dealt with on earthly terms. Liberals may make things difficult by believing that conservatives are greedy, xenophobic, racist, chauvinistic, and ignorant, but those are earthly charges based on quantifiable data. There is, believe it or not, room for debate with someone in possession of some combination of those characteristics - unless, of course, they come to the table believing that our side is colluding with Beelzebub to lure as many souls as possible into the fiery pits of hell on judgement day.

I was about to scour the internet for evidence of just that attitude, but why waste my time? Just watch Fox "News," follow Sarah Palin on Twitter, watch Glenn Beck, listen to Rush Limbaugh, read World Net Daily. Instead, I'll continuously update this post with examples as they occur in the coming days and weeks. Please feel free to suggest your own on the Chronically Pissed Facebook page and I'll add them to the list.

Fauxpinions

PLEASE TAKE A MOMENT TO VOTE FOR MY NEW RULE IN BILL MAHER'S NEW RULES CONTEST ON FACEBOOK. I EXTRACTED IT FROM THIS POST AND WOULD APPRECIATE YOUR VOTE! THANKS, CP.

In a recent edition of This American Life, Ira Glass interviews a 14-year old named Erin Gustafson at a Glenn Beck rally. Erin thinks that "global warming is propaganda. That's what I believe." 

In this clip from the most recent Real Time with Bill Maher, Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA) holds fast to his opinion that the jury is still out on climate change. He is also, incidentally, of the opinion that evolution is a lie, because he does not "believe a creature crawled out of the sea and became a human being one day."

This morning, I watched the Frontline report The Vaccine War. The program labors mightily to take an even-handed approach to the so-called debate over whether or not vaccines cause autism, but there was an insurmountable obstacle standing in the way of that objective, namely: the sum total of all medical and scientific data that exists on the subject.

In essence, the Frontline report was about a loud, public battle being waged against science and the public good by non-experts who believe that their opinions and beliefs carry more weight than those of people who have, for example, been to medical school. Former Playboy Playmate Jenny McCarthy speaks with absolute authority about her [thoroughly debunked] opinion that vaccines cause autism, as though it would be absurd to question the depth of her expertise in the face of her dearly-held belief; Representative Kingston does not need scientists to tell him what God has already told him; and Erin Gustafson is not impressed by her school's curriculum because it flies in the face of what she believes.

Dr. Roberta Johnson, the Executive Director of the National Earth Science Teachers Association, is given a chance to sway Erin on the radio. She presents a brief but detailed explanation of the science that has been used to reach the consensus that the climate is warming and changing. Erin is unmoved. Ira Glass asks "Is there anything that any science teacher could say that could convince you of this?" Erin groans a bit and, with greater reluctance than it is possible to convey in print, says "Quite possibly. If I saw both sides of the argument arguing for...both for and against global warming...see those two arguments completely side by side...laid out...then...maybe...I could see how it...would be true...or even more definitely how it isn't true."

And therein lies the problem. There are not two sides to these issues. Unsubstantiated belief is not the other side of a debate with a peer-reviewed expert community. (Surely there are many legitimate, important debates occurring within those expert communities about obscure medical, scientific, historical, epidemiological, and anthropological particulars - but those are based on statistical variations, methodological differences, and the need to hypothesize about the unknown as a scientific method toward filling in the gaps - a method that unequivocally throws out any hypothesis that does not stand up to empirical research.) If you saw "those two arguments completely side by side," you would see one side stacked with 99% of the scientific community and the other with pundits, politicians, radio-hosts, preachers, and perhaps a handful of "experts" who happen to be on the payroll of a major oil company. They have opinions - or, as I would like to propose calling them, fauxpinions.

A fauxpinion is an opinion about a matter on which you have absolutely zero standing to have an opinion in the first place. You can lack standing by virtue of youthful ignorance, ulterior motives, lack of expertise, political allegiance, or brain damage. It doesn't matter. If you lack the education and experience to know jack shit about the subject, you don't get an opinion. You have a fauxpinion. You might, for example, have the fauxpinion that the two bottles of beer in front of me are full of beer, but I'm here to tell you that you're wrong because I have the standing to know that I fucking drank them both already!

Let me take it one step further: On the broad question of evolution, for instance, there is no such thing as opinion or belief. Bill Maher was mistaken to ask Jack Kingston "Do you believe in evolution?" Evolution is not something to be believed in or not believed in. Evolution IS. Some people don't "believe" in the holocaust. Do we give a flying fuck what they believe? No...because they're fucking nuts. Just like Jack Kingston is fucking stupid if he doesn't "believe" in evolution. There is no opinion to be had by a backwater hillbilly from Georgia on the subject. Just like Jenny McCarthy doesn't get to put her tits away and suddenly declare herself knowledgable about the phyisological and neurological effects of vaccines on children - especially when doing so is endangering the rest of the population. 

"So," you may be asking, "why are you allowed to 'believe' in climate change, evolution, and the safety of vaccines?" I'll tell you why. Because it's not a belief. It is acceptance of the work of experts in those fields. When you step onto an airplane you don't believe that airplanes have been well engineered or that the aerodynamic princples of flight are true. You accept those facts based on secondhand knowledge. (Patrick Wilson's theory of Cognitive Authority describes the various ways in which we construct knowledge.) Most of us have precious little knowledge in the broad scheme of things and rely almost exclusively on secondhand information. The politicization of certain issues by zealots makes them appear different in nature and as a result people tend to pussyfoot around the naysayers rather than calling them what they are. They are WRONG. They have accepted and are propagating factually incorrect information. Period. They are the equivalent of holocaust deniers. They have decided to reject a specific piece of secondhand knowledge while continuing to rely upon it in nearly every other aspect of their lives.

This epidemic of faux expertise is hugely dangerous. Science matters. Education matters. Is everyone entitled to their opinion? Sure...everyone is entitled to their opinion about whether Ingmar Bergman films are tedious and depressing, or whether Elton John and Rod Stewart should have died sometime around 1985 for the good of their respective legacies. But facts are facts. I could hold the opinion that Sarah Palin has the head of a rabid, snaggle-toothed badger where her vagina should be, but I don't currently have access to the facts and, more importantly, it's either true or it isn't. Opinion doesn't enter into it at all. So I'm not about to go around saying that Sarah Palin has the head of a rabid, snaggle-toothed badger where her vagina should be. That would be a fauxpinion.

The Day After

Here's a web of irony so dense I won't even try to untangle it: Representative Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot at point-blank range by a seemingly anti-government madman who was able to legally purchase and carry a concealed semi-automatic weapon despite being rejected from the United States Army, is still alive today because a superb municipal infrastructure got her into surgery 38 minutes after the bullet traveled through her brain. It will be a long time before we know exactly what her prospects for recovery are, but it is very possible, if not likely, that she and/or her family will wish that she had not survived, as they live in a state that despite having some of the most permissive gun laws in the nation, criminalizes assisted suicide.

 

@MMFLINT (Michael Moore): If a Detroit Muslim put a map on the web w/crosshairs on 20 pols, then 1 of them got shot, where would he be sitting right now? Just asking.

That's a good goddamned question and gets to the heart of the current debate about political rhetoric and imagery. Is anyone really saying that Sarah Palin is responsible for this act? Of course not. Political rhetoric doesn't kill people. Mentally unstable persons who've listened to violent political rhetoric kill people.

Whether or not Jared Lee Loughner (yup...three names) turns out to have been explicitly provoked by the Tea Party crowd is not really important. Palin, Beck, & Co. have, at the very least, turned a deaf ear to the darkest aspects of their movement. They have constructed a presentable facade for the deep-seated fear and bigotry that motivates many of their followers, allowing them to feel enlightned and self-righteous about primitive feelings. They have encouraged revolution ("Take back our country") among a restless, simple-minded, fringe minority - a minority that happens to like its guns. For this, they cannot be exonerated. For this, the perception is proof enough that they have gone too far.

-

Once we get past the initial trauma of this situation, one can hope that we'll have a serious national discussion about two important underlying issues: Mental health and guns. We'll find that Jared Lee Loughner is less responsible for this crime than the people who negelected to institutionalize him.

Mission Accomplished, Sarah (UPDATED)

This is a screenshot taken down today by Sarah Palin's campaign to Take Back the 20. Congresswoman Gabrielle Gifford and about a dozen others have been shot at a public event in Arizona. Gifford's district is one of the "problems" pictured under a bullseye below. Congratulations, Sarah, on your first hit job. Maybe it's time to rethink the use of violent rhetoric and hunting imagery in the political realm?

UPDATE (12:50pm PST):

Federal Judge John M. Roll has died as a result of the attack in Arizona, MSNBC reports. Judge Roll received "hundreds of threats" when he angered anti-immigrant forces by refusing to dismiss a case brought by migrant workers against a rancher.

UPDATE (1:11pm PST)

Surgeon "very optimistic" for Gifford's survival after surgery.

Also, here's another another graphic from SarahPAC.com:

NPR suggesting, with some degree of validity, that all of this speculation about political motivations is perhaps a bit premature. Whether or not the shooter had political motives, it is impossible to dismiss the danger of using the kind of rhetoric and imagery employed by the extreme right. There is nothing that could come to light in coming hours and days that will exonerate Sarah Palin and her Tea Party pals from some degree of culpability for this incident.

TPM shares another charming piece of campaign literature captured from Gifford's Republican opponent, Jesse Kelly, during the 2010 campaign:

Apparently this is the alleged shooter's YouTube channel, featuring the irrational rantings of a gold standard (Glen Beck?) tea-bagging lunatic. Meet Jared Lee Loughner:

 

Im April, Arizona passed and Governor Jan Brewer signed a law allowing the carrying of concealed weapons without a permit. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/17/arizona-gun-law-concealed_n_541445.html

The Golden Voice in the Gutter

The story of Ted Williams, the "golden-voiced" homeless guy who became an internet and television sensation this week explains damn near everything you need to know about why I am a liberal.

If you've watched the interviews or the original viral video - and especially if you've gotten a little tingle or shed a single tear - I'm going to ask you to pay a very small fee for the entertainment. I'm going to ask you to donate a moment of your time to think beyond the cheap thrill, beyond the circus-attraction novelty of the whole situation, and ask yourself what this story can teach us. (I'll give you a hint: It's not "Never, ever give up...because anyone can become the voice of Kraft Homestyle Macaroni & Cheese!®")

Ted Williams was remarkably appealing from the moment he first opened his mouth in the now-famous video. He does indeed have a golden voice. He speaks articulately, in non-dialectal English. He seems to be sober and intelligent. He does not, in short, fit our archetype of a homeless person. He is, however, standing on a street corner, in a camoflauged jacket, with unkempt hair and teeth. So - how many people do you suppose ever gave him a chance to reveal that profusion of charm and potential? What were the odds that someone would record their exchange with him and post it to the internet? What were the chances that it would become a national phenomenon? And isn't it true that Ted Williams would very likely have remained among the ranks of the anonymous poor if not for a stupendously improbable stroke of good fortune?

What we all see in Ted is not just some utilitarian commodity that the world has been missing out on and which must immediately be put to good use. (Surely there are plenty of talented, experienced voiceover artists out of work at the present moment.) What we see in Ted is a bright and vital life force where we least expected it - a person of value where we would have presumed, by dint of our own prejudices, worthlessness.

Surely Ted Williams cannot be the only person of value living a life of desperation. It stands to reason that among the hundreds of thousands of homeless and the millions of desperately poor in this country alone, there must be many, many people with bright and vital life forces to share if only they could get out from behind the cardboard sign they're holding. They could be be persons of value too. (A radical humanist might even argue that all of them have inherent value!) Sure, many of these individuals are still dealing with addictions. Most have not had the benefit of much education. Mental illness of varying degrees affects many in their cohort. So how many of them will ever get a chance to shine? How many of them will even get a chance to participate in society in any meaningful way?

Most of us do not have the time, the energy, the wherewithal, or the power to help those who need it most, let alone to sweep them off the street and onto the set of the Today Show with Matt Lauer and Meredith Viera®. Ultimately, even the reporter who took the video of Ted wasn't really responsible for helping him so much as the infotainment industry saw an opportunity to capitalize on the situation during a slow news cycle. (If you'd like some repugnant evidence of that, READ THIS.) Most of us, for reasons ranging from apathy to justifiable concern for our own safety, leave our windows rolled up and look away when approached by someone like Ted Williams. We know that the best we are likely to accomplish is getting that person through another day, which is not a particularly inspiring cost-benefit analysis. Even if we could manage just one Eliza Doolittle, rags-to-riches transformation, there would still be millions left to starve and rot.

Charities and churches are multitudinous, but each has its own overhead costs, its own niche, its own prejudices, its own limitations, and its own inefficiencies. I'm not a churchgoer and I don't particularly want to throw what little money I have at various and sundry charities in the hopes that it will be wisely spent and that a majority of it will go toward actual good works. I don't enjoy having to choose what few causes or individuals I can help. I would rather pay tax dollars into a unified, comprehensive vision for our country than drop loose change into a tin can. I would rather donate a portion of my paycheck toward a collective uplifting of everyone than allow Corporate America to decide what downtrodden individual will be the next beneficiary of the Great American Five-Minute-Celebrity Lotto.

Also, I would rather bail out the Ted Williamses of the world than the Merril Lynches.

And that's really the point. We already do this...just not for the right people. There are no charities or church groups set up to assist failing financial institutions because the federal government does it already. What in the hell is so offensive about the notion of doing it for the least among us? Do we really prefer a world in which Ted Williams has to be discovered on the side of the road? Is the thrill of this single personal resurrection so gratifying that it was worth his years of destitution - along with the continuing destitution of so many others? We must not delude ourselves that this story is somehow a manifestation of the American Dream. In fact, it reveals just how far that dream has fallen.

I'm glad for Ted Williams, though I obviously worry what will happen when the media is through with him. This week he was valuable to anyone who could look good by interviewing him or by saying they'd hired him for a gig - but what about next week? I wish we'd been there, as a society, when he was losing control and slipping into addiction. I wish we'd  been there, as a society, when he cleaned up his act two years ago but couldn't break through the barriers at the margins of society.

I'm Not Dead

Yet.

I think it's about time to get back to the business of purging my soul of the countless angry, brilliant, vulgar, insightful, cynical, and/or completely useless thoughts I have on a daily basis. I shall attempt to bestow these gems upon you in a more consistent manner than has been the case for some time. Please don't go to any trouble planning a "Welcome Back, CP!" party or parade. I should prefer that you simply send money, food, and or ticker tape directly to my residence, whereupon I will spend it, eat it, or incorporate it into a bizarre and possibly violent (but always consensual) sexual ritual - not necessarily respectively.

So...where to start? Let's start with a chart:

The above chart, from The Nation, gives a nice historical view of income inequality in the U.S. over the last hundred years. Now let's cross-reference it with another chart, showing the top marginal tax rates over roughly the same period of time:

Okay...so what are a few cheap and easy conclusions that can be reached with those charts and a third grade education? Well, I suppose we could conclude that allowing the gap between the rich and poor to get too wide doesn't seem to be sound economic policy. The argument invariably centers on whether government should "redistribute" that wealth by way of tax policy, but let's throw it back into the hands of the free-market capitalists for a moment. It needn't come to governement intervention in your precious markets. If the über-rich would simply use the skyrocketing wealth created by lower tax rates and rising profits to create more jobs and pay better wages and benefits, that gap wouldn't get so out of control so quickly and to such devastating ends. I, for one, am happy to keep your tax rates much lower than, say 90%, where they stood through much of the 1950's, if only you'll "mind the gap."

See, what happens when you sit your fat fucking asses on all of that cash is that cash gets scarce out here in the the world outside your fat fucking asses. If we don't have cash to buy the shit you're selling, things start to get kind of ugly for everyone. You start laying people off, closing factories, and foreclosing on homes so that you won't have to pull any of that cash out of your fat fucking asses. You then proceed to bitch about how the American consumer isn't spending any money on the shit you're selling which is why you can't hire people. In reality, it's not that you don't have the money to hire people. You don't have the money to hire people while continuing to grow your bottom line, by which I mean "continuing to stick cash up your ass." So while you're worried about the slowing rate of cash being shoved up your ass, most of us are worried about having any cash at all.

So you've really left us with no choice. You've simply got too much cash up your fat fucking ass. It's not that anyone really wants to reach in there and take it from you, it's just that you're not minding the gap. You've either got to start hiring, paying better wages, and providing better benfits or we will put on our rubber gloves and come get some of that cash. It won't be pleasant, but we'll do what we have to do.

Hopeless

The people of Massachusetts have apparently had it with Change. Change didn't work fast enough for them, so it's time to go back to the pre-Change days. You know...those glory days of 2007? Things were so much simpler then. Everything was going to shit, but no one was bothering to try to fix anything, so there was nothing to complain about. Then the new guy shows up and ruins everything by trying to clean up the shitstorm with his hoity-toity ideas and reforms and regulations and whatnot. Couldn't he have just left well enough alone? And by "well enough," I mean "pretty fucking crappy."

One year ago today, Barack Obama was inaugurated President of the United States. It was, to any remotely honest observer, a moment of hope. Not Hope: The Campaign Slogan, but the simple, optimistic yearning for better days that has long gone by that name. Things had, quite simply, gotten very bad. There was no debate about that. Remember? None whatsoever. Something - many things - had gone horribly, horribly wrong. We were exhausted. We desperately needed to move on.

And so we did. We set our eyes upon something new, something different, something that made us feel, deep down in the cockles, that maybe all was not lost. 

One year ago today, the Tea Party movement began. A small group of disenfranchised cranks suddenly awoke from their eight year slumber to realize that...hark, something was not right in America. Something had to be done now, goddamnit! Politics be damned. This was bigger than politics. This was about restoring America to some vague notion of what the founding fathers may or may not have originally intended, so long as that vision meant no taxes! And DEFINITELY no health care reform!

And thus began the great uprising against the Change that had only just begun. The Republican party set out, in collaboration with the teabaggers, to extinguish the tender, young flames of hope before they could spread. Never mind that this president was actually incredibly moderate and pragmatic, making absurdly reasonable proposals with built-in capitulations. Victory at the polls was the more important, long-term goal than the peace and prosperity of their country.

If the people of Massachusetts can be talked into sacrificing the seat held by Ted and John F. Kennedy to a teabagger who represents the Republicans' opportunity to obstruct health care reform, the lifelong passion of the man they elected nine times, there is very little to hope for. If the people of Massachusetts are growing impatient, after only one year, with the man they elected 62-36%, there is very little to hope for. If this is an indicator of things to come...you can call me hopeless.