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« Older Entries | Newer Entries »Health Care For Us, Or Wealth Care For Them?
[ Comments Off ]Posted on February 26, 2010 by admin in Politics
Friday, February 26th, 2010I’d feel a lot better about buying insurance if I didn’t feel like I was supporting Wall Street’s gambling addiction.
I must confess to being a bit of a simpleton in some ways, so could someone please explain to me what the health care summit and the health care reform act have to do with reforming health care? And since when does someone “win” a summit meeting? I had to check the definition of the phrase to make sure I’m not crazy for asking that question. Personally, I’m a little stuck on a few ideas, one being that “fixing the health care problem” means that, well, someone will be fixing the health care problem, not just making sure that we all have an equal opportunity to take part in it. And by “it” I mean “the problem”. I feel odd finding myself aligning with a lot of Republicans (although I have pretty liberal social attitudes, I think I’ve formed my own little political party in my head) on an issue like the individual mandate. If I’ve already opted to not give my money to an industry that generates 20% of its revenue from my boss wanting me dead, why would I start now? Oh yeah. Because I’d get a tax penalty if I didn’t. This is starting to feel a little creepy. After being told that my tax dollars would be used to bail out the gambling-addicted banking and insurance industries, now I’m being told that if I don’t give them business, I’ll pay more taxes? Why do I feel like I’m trapped in some weird revolving door? Oh. It just might be the combination of the Goldman Sachs Government (they were negotiating a deal to acquire the treasury department last year, you know) and the influence peddling of the the Media Lobbying Complex. I’m glad I read a lot. It keeps me alertly apolitical. Everyone seems to have an informed opinion on health care, but if you really want to know what’s wrong with health care, ask a nurse.
Terrorists & Teabaggers
[ Comments Off ]Posted on February 21, 2010 by admin in Politics
Sunday, February 21st, 2010The greatest threat to American security right now is probably a white fella from the heartland.
 Is this what you picture when you hear the word “terrorist”? |
Just when I was starting to find this whole teabagging thing entertaining, some mentally unstable individual in Texas has to go and wreck everything for me. You’ve almost certainly heard about Joe Stack burning his house down and crashing his plane into the IRS office in Austin, TX. But did you read his final note at embeddedart.com? If not, I’ve saved an original copy here. I saw it the morning before his hosting company decided to take it down for bandwidth reasons, so unlike the nutjobs posting in the forum the hosting company courteously provided visitors, I’m confident that there’s no FBI coverup conspiracy behind the takedown. I’m not surprised that both liberal and conservative sources are trying to link or unlink his action with the teabagger movement though; that’s just par for the course in politics these days. But to me it’s clear that he was just a fairly intelligent person who became consumed by his own pathological thinking. Reading Stack’s last words made me especially uncomfortable, partly because – like many of us – I can find myself agreeing with a lot of what he said. It revived unpleasant memories of reading Unabomber Ted Kaczynski’s ramblings; there were portions of his lumbering manifesto that any modern person might agree with, but the overall tone and the author’s real-world actions rendered any points one might agree with irrelevant. For me, this was especially true in Kaczynski’s case; a personal friend of mine was one of the victims of his deranged actions. But back to the teabagger link. Is there a connection? How can a reasonably informed person deny that regardless of whether Stack considered himself a teabagger, he ABSOLUTELY had common ground with them? It’s ironic that a recent Fox News piece expressed concern with the headline Radical Anti-tax Groups Growing Threat, when it’s the opportunistic sentiment-baiting that Fox News and Bitchzilla from Wasilla (yeah, I can say that, there’s no editor around here) engage in that fuels the kind of rage that sparks violent protests and makes crazy men fly planes into buildings or bulldoze their houses. I imagine we’ll see a few more tragic events over the next few years as a result of people’s frustration with money & taxes. This Newsweek blog post points out that there have been 75 domestic incidents since the Oklahoma bombings, with 6 of them specifically targeting the IRS. I find it more than a little ironic that a government that was born of tax rebellion and presently sees terrorism as a threat from Islam is going through a two-decade struggle with domestic terrorists. If you’re not familiar with the recent history of violence and the American radical right, the Read the rest of this entry »
Let’s Play Dunk The Dick
[ Comments Off ]Posted on February 16, 2010 by admin in Politics
Tuesday, February 16th, 2010If Dick Cheney loves waterboarding so much, I think he should subject himself to it on Sunday TV.
 Dick Cheney LOVES him some waterboardin’ |
I don’t think I’m alone in saying that I wish Dick Cheney would just shut up. It’s not because I have some airy-fairy liberal stance that as a former vice president, protocol dictates that he shouldn’t speak in ways that undermine a sitting president’s actions; this Slate piece does a nice roundup of other former executive branch members who couldn’t keep their mouths shut either, and frankly, one of the worst in this regard was former democratic president Jimmy Carter. No, for me it’s a few other things. One is that I just get sick of seeing that hideous little face of his. Another is that I get sick of hearing about him when he makes some childish and angry remark on Sunday TV, and that’s all my liberal friends talk about for a week. But perhaps most importantly, it’s because I’m sick of a self-serving, sociopathic, sadistic prick trying to take on the mantle of dignified statesman, and getting airtime to do it. It would be a lot easier to tolerate statements like “I was a big supporter of waterboarding” if I knew he had at least tried it once. A different self-serving prick who gets on my nerves tried it, and although I’ll continue to disagree with lots of other things he says, I won’t take issue with his stance on that topic. So please Dick, do us a favor. You’ve already carved out your legacy with a Dickipedia entry and a place on Time’s Worst Vice Presidents list. Please, just shut up and get back to your other hobbies like running corporations that support rape and shooting your friends in the face.
How I Became A Teabagging Dick Tuck
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on February 9, 2010 by admin in Politics
Tuesday, February 9th, 2010If you can’t beat ‘em, infiltrate ‘em.
 I don’t care WHERE you bring Glenn Beck, as long as it takes him further from ME. |
To me, voting these days seems more like a choice of execution method than a treasured civil right. Would I rather be shot with the antiquated but lethal and remarkably reliable Kalishnakov (The Republican Party) or with the the Humanitarian Magic Fairy Love Rifle that turns the target into a pretty and confused unicorn and brings peace, love, high speed trains, and broadband to all (The Democratic Party)? Which is why I always delight when an alternative pops up, if only for the variety. Of course, in the case of guys like Ross Perot or Ralph Nader, that “variety” can work against the voter’s intention by helping the worse of their two perceived evils to win, as happened in 1992 and 2000, and that’s one of the reasons I’m fascinated with the teabaggers. The first reason is of course their choice of name. Although polls have shown that a lot of Americans aren’t (or won’t admit that they are) familiar with the well-established slang term teabagging, there had to have been quite a few former frat boys amongst the party’s ranks who were well aware of the term. Another reason I’m fascinated with them is their utter ignorance of the fact that they’re really just Libertarians. Somewhere between deciding on their values and choosing someone to represent them, things got really confused though. Which is why it’s fun to mess with them. The other day I visited the web site of the Tennessee Tea Party Coalition to see if there was any sanity embedded in their angst-driven herding behavior. I didn’t find much; they make their confusion clear in the second sentence of their little manifesto by saying “We are non partisan, unabashedly conservative, and drama free“. On the other hand, they show a little cleverness by putting social networking and sharing tools to use with a Ning site, user polls, and and an Eventful.com badge for a Glenn Beck appearance. Which is where I had a little fun, and where I think I finally discovered my place in modern politics. First, the trivial fun, then I’ll explain my new role in politics. I noticed they had a poll that said “Do you think Tea Party Coalition will be a usefull tool?“, so, after leaving a comment that said “Do I think [the] Tea Party Coalition will be a usefull tool? No. But I think you all ARE a bunch of tools. And I think you should learn how to SPELL before you try to EDIT the existing tax code. That would be ‘usefull’!“, I noticed the poll had no block on voting twice, so in the time-honoured tradition of “vote early, vote often”, I shifted the numbers a bit by voting “No” 270 times to amuse myself while I was busy on a phone call. Then I noticed they were also trying to get Homosexual Nazi Blood Elf Glenn Beck to come to Tennessee. I’m all for getting Glenn Beck as far away from ME as possible, so I voted a few times for that as well. And this is when it dawned on me. I don’t support either major party across the board, and this has frustrated me for quite a while. So in the interest of sticking to some of my core values but still doing something that has impact, I’m going to become a Bipartisan Dick Tuck, and offer my campaign pranking services to both parties, but based entirely on whether the prank aligns with my values. See you at the reader poll! Read the rest of this entry »
Thanks A Trillion, Frank
[ Comments Off ]Posted on February 2, 2010 by admin in Politics
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010How the GOP will stick you with the biggest economic debacle in history and make you think Obama did it.
 This example uses $100 bills |
It’s time once again for people like you and me to have their heads spun by the incomprehensible numbers that are the US Budget. Personally, ever since I learned about fictitious capital, I’ve had a hard time understanding why the government expects us to pay OUR bills, when THEY operate at a deficit almost all the time. Short of a revolution though, not much can be done about that, so let’s just try to understand the numbers. There are two ways to look at numbers like this. One is to just look at them, and say “Wow. Those are some really big numbers.” The New York Times has a great interactive for doing just that. You can also try to visualize the numbers, as in the graphic at left, which was assembled from the larger images here. We explored this in more detail last year. You can also do what politicians do, and talk about the numbers in ways that sound good but make no sense in reality. That’s what the GOP has been doing for a while, largely with the help of Frank Luntz. Frank Luntz is the guy that was largely instrumental in the success of the GOP over the past decade, through their implementation of his GOP Playbook. If you’ve never given it a look, you should, because it was his language – refined through dial groups and other marketing-style research – that allowed the previous administration to rack up the hugest deficits in history, while making you think they were frugal conservatives. Now that the previous administration has trashed the economy, saying goodbye on the way out with Bush nationalizing the banks and essentially destroying American capitalism as we knew it, it’s time to make it look like it’s all Obama’s fault. And Frank is back, with the words to do it. He’s penned the new talking points in a memo called Language of Financial Reform. That’s a link to the full document, which is also embedded and excerpted below. Read the rest of this entry »