Jay Lake: Writer

[politics] Why I focus on certain kinds of hypocrisy

As I’ve observed many times before, we are all hypocrites. I don’t think it’s psychologically possible to be completely consistent. The tension between mythos and logos in the human psyche pretty much puts paid to that. It’s certainly possible to be morally and intellectually rigorous, and intensely self-correcting, but most of us (definitely including me) are too busy leading our lives to keep that up on a full time basis, either. Insofar as I can tell, one of the whole points of pursuing religion, or some other form of ethical and philosophical system, is to provide a framework in which such consistency can be pursued without having to continually reason from first principles.

And for the most part, I don’t care, so long as you (and I) are not harming anyone. Have fun believing six impossible things before breakfast. I do it all the time. Revel in your self-contradictory nature. I do that all the time, too.

But when you move into the realm of politics, specifically legislation, and you bring your religion or your ethical framework with you and begin governing from that stance, you’d better damned well be consistent. My ethical framework tells me that other people’s private sexual, reproductive and social behavior is none of my damn business, except insofar as they might choose to include or inform me for their own reasons. If I were in politics or government, I’d stay the hell away from putting government in the bedroom. That’s one of the core reasons I’m a liberal-progressive: I firmly believe government doesn’t belong interfering in private life absent a compelling public interest (mandatory education, for example) or preventing harm (domestic violence, for example).

Contrast this with core conservative principles that attempt to control private sexual behavior, personal medical and reproductive choices, and ethical behavior. Legislating morality is a non-starter in any free society, but conservatives love nothing more than the idea of inserting government into the private lives of people they disapprove of. It’s in black-and-white in virtually every Republican party platform out there.

So when we see a story like the resignation of Indiana GOP Rep. Mark Souder in a sex scandal, I call it out. Like I (and so many others) called out Republican Senator Larry Craig, who promised to make the lives of gays a living hell while cruising for men in public restrooms. Or Republican Senator David “Diaper Baby” Vitter for his use of prostitutes while running and serving as a family values champion.

These are not the quiet, private hypocrisies of you, me and everyone else in America. These are the public hypocrisies of the people legislating sexual behavior and private lives of everyone else in America, and they’re doing it on a “punishment for thee but not for me” basis.

That’s why I don’t care when Democrats, or entertainers, or sports figures, are caught out in such scandals. Unlike conservative politicians, those people are not trying to use the force of law to constrain my freedoms and the freedoms of those I love.

It’s not the hypocrisy of doing one thing and saying another that incenses me. That’s just human nature. It’s the hypocrisy of doing one thing while criminalizing and persecuting others for doing the same damned thing that incenses me.

To my mind, that’s reflective of the ultimate flaw in conservatism. My worldview as a liberal-progressive encompasses most of the conservative worldview. Against abortion? Don’t have one. Creeped out by homosexuality? Don’t hang out in gay bars. Almost everything conservatives want, I’m happy for them to have. Even (grudgingly) guns, if people keep them safely. But conservatism, by its very nature, is incapable of granting me the same courtesy. Their worldview, as defined in their party platforms and public rhetoric, explicitly seeks to limit and criminalize mine.

I could never choose a narrowing of opportunity, freedom and the future for myself or anyone else. Souder, Craig, Vitter and the entire conservative movement base their entire political lives on exactly that narrowing. And they betray themselves with the hypocrisy of sex.

Tags: guns, Politics, sex

Posted: 5:52 am Wed May 19 2010 | Comments(3) |

[politics] Dear Arizona

Dear Arizona,

I am a proud immigrant to these American shores. My nth grandfather Lake arrived in North America in the mid-seventeenth century via Guilford, Connecticut from England. He did not have papers, he did not have a visa, and he certainly was looking for work. My family wandered across colonial and national borders, moved to the territories and to the Republic of Texas, and eventually back to the United States in the fullness of time. Always without papers, or a visa, always looking for work. Every single Arizonan who is not a tribal member is just as much an immigrant as I am. Even the tribes are, along their different path of history.

So the next time you ask someone for their papers, my dear Arizona, fall down on your knees and thank your petty little shriveled soul that no one was doing that to you when you were new, hungry and poor.

No love,

Jay Lake, proud immigrant American

Tags:

Posted: 5:58 am Wed April 28 2010 | Comments(11) |

[politics|culture] Opinions and those inconvenient facts

Among other political and cultural hobby horses of mine, I rattle on a lot about evolution denial in education. Likewise the gross historical revisionism of the Texas Textbook Commission. There’s a reason for that, beyond my dedication to intellectual honesty and my aversion to hypocrisy.

Opinions, even those that come in the form of sincerely-held, passionate beliefs, do not substitute for facts. Especially inconvenient facts that contradict those opinions.

Yet when we teach kids in school that the objective evidence of the natural world can be disregarded for a subjective religious belief, we are teaching them exactly that. We are fundamentally undermining critical thinking and replacing it with magical thinking.

Magical thinking is something you see all time in adults. I don’t know a single writer who doesn’t indulge in it as part of preparing their writing mind. (Myself included.) Anyone who has a lucky hat, or cannot write without their tea in a special mug, or any other ritual, is doing this. But most of us understand that. I’m feeding the mythos part of my mind when I say I can only write on the Mac laptop, not the Dell. There’s no objective reason I can’t do it the other way around.

But I know I’m doing this. I don’t confuse my own rituals and magical thinking with the objective reality of the world around me.

One of my big quarrels with the contemporary conservative movement, both in its media form (FOX, etc.) and in its political form (GOP, Tea Party) is the pervasiveness of magical thinking they indulge in, and their overwhelming tendency to confuse opinions with facts. Yes, that’s human nature, and we all do it, but movement conservatism has institutionalized this as policy.

Note this item from a recent New York Times/CBS poll of the Tea Party:

Regardless of your overall opinion, do you think the views of the people in the tea party movement generally reflect the views of most Americans? 84% of the self-identified teabaggers said yes. Only 25% of the general public agreed.

These people honestly believe their view is a majority view. They’re not interested in facts. These people also honestly believe that Obama is a Muslim and was not born in the this country.

And outside of the fringe, you see the same magical thinking. Every time the Republican leadership gets into the media and talks about America being a center-right nation, they’re wrong on the face of both the polling and the electoral results. It’s a narrative they believe in, and need to be true to back their political stance, but it simply isn’t true. Any more than their narrative that a majority of Americans want to repeal HCR is true. Similarly, back in the 2000 election, when the Clinton economy was going strong, Bush advocated tax cuts to stimulate further growth. When the economy began to collapse in the face of an oncoming Republican victory, Bush advocated tax cuts to combat economic contraction. That’s like saying you use the gas pedal in your car both to speed up and slow down.

All this confusing opinions with facts? A lot of it comes down to how you’re educated and socialized in the first place. The conservative attack on education, which in its current form has been in play since at least the Reagan years, is about nothing more or less than raising citizens who don’t know how to question their own position, who will uncritically accept passionate statements as truth, and who, like evolution denialists, eagerly embrace their own opinions as facts, unswayed by the reality of the world around them.

Censoring reality is profoundly unAmerican and unpatriotic, and it’s a core conservative value, starting in the grade schools and going right on to the memory hole of FOX News, the GOP and the Tea Party. Reality is unforgiving, those opinions still aren’t facts; but politics is infinitely malleable, as the activists and leaders of this movement well know.

Tags: Culture, Politics, Process, Writing

Posted: 4:46 am Fri April 16 2010 | Comments(12) |

[politics] The myth of the Golden Age

So much of conservatism and libertarianism thought seems to rely on the myth of the Golden Age. This is the basis of William F. Buckley’s famous declaration to “stand athwart history, yelling Stop” — the idea that things were better than they are, and that change is dangerous. It’s a fundamentally emotional proposition, that strikes me as driven more by fear than any sense of opportunity or growth.

In this morning’s link salad I included a wonderfully idiotic bit of Golden Age myth making, courtesy of The Edge of the American West. Which reminds me of a woman I worked with years ago, back in the mid-1990s.

She was about 30 at the time, divorced, living with her boyfriend who worked shifts in emergency services. She was an art director at the ad agency where I ran IT and production. She lived in a conservative exurb of Austin, attended an Evangelical megachurch on Sundays, and came in every Monday grumbling about how liberals were ruining America, about the Clintons and their crimes, and whatever else her preacher had railed about the day before from the pulpit. Her constant theme was how much better things were in the 1950s when the streets were safe, everybody had jobs, and America was powerful and secure.

I finally got fed up with this and asked her how much she knew about the 1950s. Did she know anything about the African-American experience in those days? What about other non-whites? The unemployed? When I pointed out that in the 1950s she wouldn’t have had the job she did because it would have been given to a man who needed to feed his family, and that she wouldn’t have been allowed in the door of her church as a divorced woman living in sin with another man, she got upset with me and said that wasn’t what she meant.

She wanted the good parts of the myth of the Golden Age without having to acknowledge or accept the prices people paid for them. I’ll bet good money this woman today is a Sarah Palin fan and a Tea Party member, because that’s the depth of thinking I see from conservative America even now. Not all conservatives everywhere, but from those in political power and those with media voices.

I atill think about her sometimes, because how the heck do I, as a liberal-progressive, even get her to see where her own thinking goes awry? She’s like those Christians who demand literal subservience to Biblical truth, except for the inconvenient parts. There’s no logic or coherent philosophy, only wishful thinking wrapped in justification.

Some of it is education and worldliness. One reason academia and journalism are so stereotypically liberal is people in those disciplines generally have to look at the world critically and think about the facts on the ground; at least if they’re going about it properly. It’s difficult to maintain my friend’s level of denial and wishful thinking while engaging in intellectual honesty. Contemporary conservatism is a lot more about denial and wishful thinking than it is about intellectual honesty — look at the issues that drive votes: evolution denial; gun fantasies; fears of gays; climate change denial; magical thinking on taxes.

The myth of the Golden Age is as old as history. Children were always more respectful, the language always more well spoken, and times always better in the previous generation. But confusing the myth of the Golden Age with the reality of life is misplaced at best.

How to address that? Surely not through my rantings. But I’m not sure how to be more thoughtful in the right ways.

Tags: Personal, Politics

Posted: 5:52 am Wed April 14 2010 | Comments(3) |

[politics] The fine art of denial in political discourse, part 1

This will come as no surprise to anyone who’s been following me for more than, oh, about eight or ten hours, but a lot of politics gets talked on my blog. And my Twitter feed. And my Facebook. I’m a strong liberal-progressive, Leftist by American standards, barely past the Center by European standards. In other words, I’m not a Socialist, or anything much like one, except in the highly inaccurate, perjorative sense that Republicans use “Socialist” as a scare word indicating anyone to the left of Richard Nixon. I like my nice capitalist paycheck and my nice capitalist house and so forth. My net worth would suggest I’m not a very successful capitalist, but by and large the system works for me.

I’m also not a Democrat, except technically. I registered Democrat in the 2008 election cycle because Oregon doesn’t have open primaries, and I wanted to vote for Obama. This was before his vote (as Senator) for the Telecommunications Immunity Act, after which I ceased donating money or offering my political support to him. I probably would have gone with Hillary Clinton otherwise, or just sat out the primaries completely. So yes, I’m still registered, but for most purposes, I don’t see a lot of distinction between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.

For most purposes. A few differences, however, count for a great deal. In the most basic sense, the Republican Party has become single-threaded, while the Democratic Party still moves in a number of directions simultaneously.

Prior to Ronald Reagan, both parties had conservative and liberal wings, with a variety of viewpoints and perspectives. I’m (barely) old enough to remember Richard Nixon in a political sense, and Rockefeller Republicans. Nixon proposed the Environmental Protection Agency and signed it into law. Can you imagine any modern Republican doing such a thing? As a purely practical matter, the Republicans today have become a very narrow party, dedicated to eliminating abortion, promoting Evangelical Christianity, protecting gun ownership, and lowering taxes. This is is the distilled essence of Sarah Palin, who is the closest thing the GOP has to standard-bearer of late.

The Democrats, by contrast, span the gamut of views on reproductive rights, religion, firearms, fiscal policy and host of other issues. It’s a bigger tent. Which is why you see Democrats so often forming a circular firing squad at crucial moments, with their justly famed prowess at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. They can’t agree on anything most days, while the GOP has religiously observed Reagan’s Eleventh Commandment by marginalizing almost everyone within their own party who doesn’t toe the line.

As it happens, I disagree with all the Republican signature issues, as well as their stance on immigration, national security, foreign wars, unrestrained spending, regulation, the role of government in society, and a number of other things. Mind you, GOP rhetoric, on spending, for example, can be quite reasonable. But from 2000-2006 the Republican Party controlled all three branches of government, and the United States ran up the largest deficits in history. Reagan’s record was quite similar. Conservative actions do not even begin to match rhetoric.

I disagree with the Democrats on a number of their positions as well, viewing them as largely the lesser of the evils, especially in their corporatist tendencies and their comatose quiescence on national security abuses. But our system is so heavily weighted against third parties I don’t see much point in going Green, for example, even if I wanted to. Besides, I’m not aware of a third party that matches my desires for strong progressive social policy, limited defense spending, an internationalist foreign policy, very strong gun control, strong environmental protections, and so forth. So my votes are generally Democratic, and by default my views wind up aligning with them more than anyone else.

All of which is to say, those are my views of the political parties. As individuals, the people I know in my life range from radical anarchists to neo-Hooverite paleoconservatives. To a woman and man, they are decent, thoughtful people, even though I disagree with many of them. I don’t talk politics with most, have blazing rows with a few, and friendly tussles with quite a few more. That’s how I learn, and adapt my views — by advancing them, defending them, and listening to people’s responses.

Am I guilty of confirmation bias in the evidence I seek? Doubtless, though rarely deliberately so. Do I ignore what I don’t agree with? More often than I’d like. Do I change my views on political topics? Yes, from time to time, though generally it’s a case of moderation rather than reversal. (For example, specifically due to an extended series of discussions on my blog a few years ago, I’ve backed off from my historical hardline opposition to home schooling. Likewise, I am more moderate on my views of gun control than I used to be.)

But there’s a pair of tendencies I run into from time to time in political discussions that frustrate me immensely. And they seem to have grown much stronger of late as political and social passions have been inflamed nationally by the poor economy and healthcare reform. One is False Equivalency, which I see both from angry people who identify as centrists, and conservatives squirming away from the excesses of their party and their fellow travelers. The other is a more specifically conservative trope, which is a version the No True Scotsman argument.

And frankly, they’re both pissing me off. More to come in a day or two…

Tags: Politics

Posted: 4:22 am Mon March 29 2010 | Comments(1) |

[politics] What I believe

I believe in freedom of religion. That means you cannot be discriminated against for your religious beliefs. That also means no one else can be discriminated against for your religious beliefs. Freedom from religion is an essential component of freedom of religion, otherwise every minor or unpopular congregation in this country would be at deep risk from the passions of the majority.

I believe in freedom of speech. You and I have every right to be wrong, but freedom of speech doesn’t mean we get to make up our own facts, and it doesn’t protect us from being called on hypocrisy, bullshit and lies.

I believe in freedom of the press. But with freedom comes responsibility, and the press has lost its way in terms of balancing coverage of issues, recalling or reporting any political history past last week, and serving the public interest. The shift from news to infotainment has taken us back to the nineteenth century yellow press, and done much to poison the public discourse.

I believe in the right of peaceable assembly. This does not include bringing firearms to peaceful demonstrations, spitting on Congressmen, or blockading city streets.

I believe in the right of redress to the government for grievances. Being arrested for questioning your beating by a law enforcement officer is not part of this process.

I believe that a well regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state. That’s why we have a National Guard and Reserve forces.

I believe in the right of the people to keep and bear Arms. On firing ranges and in gun safes, not on public streets. Because I believe my right not to be shot trumps your right to open carry, for example. And the statistics on gun deaths are never on the side of freely available weapons.

I believe in my protection from the quartering of troops. I do not believe that NATO or the UN or the Federal Government is planning to station troops in my home, no matter what the Republican party claims. Regardless of one’s psychological disturbances, this fails the common sense test. There are over 100 million households in the United States, and no one has that many troops.

I believe in protection from unreasonable search and seizure. This means I oppose USA-PATRIOT and all its dependent laws and regulations, including the Telecom Immunity Act that Obama supported. Our system of warrants and judicial oversight worked quite well before we tore it apart in the name of the War on Terror.

I believe in the right of due process, and protection from double jeopardy. Again, this means I oppose USA-PATRIOT and all its dependent laws and regulations. The prisons at Guantanamo Bay and Baghram Air Force Base are stain on American honor as deep as the Japanese internments.

I believe in protection from self-incrimination, but I also believe in taking full responsibility for one’s deeds.

I believe that private property shall not be taken for public use without just compensation. I do not believe that public use includes turning the private property over to a developer in the interests of expanding the tax base.

I believe in criminal trial by jury and the rights of the accused. Just because someone is suspect of a crime, or arrested for it, does not mean they are guilty. Again, the prisons at Guantanamo Bay and Baghram Air Force Base are stain on American honor as deep as the Japanese internments, and a blot on our judicial system. I also believe in fully-informed juries, not subject to manipulation by either prosecution or defense.

I believe in the right to civil trial by jury, again, without manipulation by either party to the suit. I also believe that the right of civil redress should not be dependent on the deepness of the parties’ pockets, as this means the rich and powerful can never be fully called to account

I believe that we should be protected from cruel and unusual punishment. Again, this means I oppose USA-PATRIOT and all its dependent laws and regulations. The prisons at Guantanamo Bay and Baghram Air Force Base are abuses upon our perceived enemies that will come back to haunt captured Americans, possibly for generations.

I believe that rights not enumerated in the Constitution still apply to us, regardless of the currents of popular culture, or our national fears and our private prejudices. This includes a right to privacy, a right to healthcare, a right to freedom of sexual expression, and right to freedom from bullying at all levels of society, a right to be free from violence. It also includes a right to be wrong, dead wrong; but also a right not to suffer from the errors of others.

What do you believe?

Tags: guns, heathcare, Politics, sex

Posted: 9:06 am Sat March 27 2010 | Comments(8) |

[politics] Being crazy isn’t looking stupid, it’s the native condition of the GOP

There’s a new poll coming out today which appears to back up what the Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll said a few weeks ago. As you may recall, at the time GOP leaders and pundits reacted angrily, saying the poll was meant to make them look stupid.

The lede on the Harris poll is “Majority of Republicans: Obama is a Muslim”.

Confidential to GOP in America: When you tell your followers that the president is a Muslim, a Socialist, and that he pals around with terrorists, you look stupid. When they believe you, your followers look stupid. When the real world notices this stupidity, you look stupid.

No one made you look stupid but yourselves.

Brighten up, Republicans. Your media strategy has been a success. People believe all those lies you’ve been feeding them for years. A significant portion of this country is convinced we have a Muslim Socialist Nazi fascist terrorist traitor in the White House. And many of them carry guns, for bonus fun! Never mind what any of those words actually mean, or how internally contradictory they are. Never mind what the actual facts on the ground are. Your message has succeeded wildly.

It’s not looking stupid. It’s sowing what you reap. Unfortunately, the rest of us have to live in this country.

Crazy isn’t looking like such a great electoral strategy these days, is it?

Maybe you should try, you know, facts. Ideas. Governance instead of politics. Reality instead of rhetoric. But that passion that Beck and Limbaugh inspire is a powerful drug, isn’t it? Hard to kick the buzz, hard to lose that “king of the world” feeling when the mob is shouting your name as their savior.

This is what Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes set out to do almost forty years ago. Demonize the opposition, activate the base, and turn the media. Hope you like our country now, conservative America.

You broke it, but we all have to buy it.

Tags: Politics

Posted: 4:56 am Wed March 24 2010 | Comments(4) |

[politics] Healthcare reform and the liberation of labor

An observation I’ve made before, and haven’t seen covered much in the press or the commentariat (though maybe I’m not looking in the right direction) is that healthcare reform will quite possibly significantly remake the employer-employee relationship.

Since about WWII, the most ordinary model for Americans to receive healthcare coverage (ie, insurance) has been through the workplace. It’s my understanding that this was deliberate industrial policy at the time, presumably to stabilize the workforce and countervail the pressures of unionization. Everyone in the workforce today entered the workforce under that assumption. You get a (decent enough) job, you get health insurance.

That bargain started to fall apart in the 1980s with the increasing use of part-timers in blue collar jobs and contractors in white collar jobs. That, of course, was all about reducing the cost of benefits for the employer. Companies like Wal-Mart and McDonald’s build their entire cost-of-labor around such measures, as do many high tech companies. Part of the reason for so many millions of uninsured and underinsured today is the erosion of benefits in the non-unionized workforce.

(I am neither a healthcare historian or a labor historian, so take all of the above with a grain of salt.)

The profit-driven nature of market-based insurance has introduced so many restrictions that for a lot of workers, myself included, the only access to health insurance is through non-qualifying employer-sponsored groups. In my case, one of my dependent insureds has a chronic illness that barred me from the private market for years before my own cancer made me uninsurable, so this has long been an issue in my professional life.

The full terror of unemployment for someone like me isn’t loss of income, it’s loss of healthcare coverage. The last time I was unemployed, 2002-2003, my COBRA costs were $1,400 per month. Which was more than my unemployment compensation.

How many millions of Americans with insurance are tied to their jobs by similar issues?

If HCR delivers what it’s said to deliver (assuming the Republican ideologues in the Senate don’t find some last-minute way to halt the reconciliation bill), those millions of Americans will no longer be tied to their benefits package. Yes, most of us need an income. (And fortunate are you who do not.) But incomes don’t have to be paychecks from statutory employment.

I predict a sharp increase in labor mobility in this country, along with a parallel sharp increase in new small businesses as well as independent innovation. Because what we’ve just done is unchain people from their workplaces. There’s a lot more ways to make money than there are to find health insurance. Obama, Pelosi and Reid have just freed us to explore those ways. Which would seem to me to be a conservative ideal, would it not?

What will the social consequences of this be? I don’t know, but I’m guessing some pretty fundamental changes are in store for American society over the next years, if the GOP doesn’t freeze all of us out. Increased economic prosperity and personal opportunity, reduced unemployment, and better treatment of employees by employers as competitive options open up for the workforce.

Optimism? Sure. But think about it. Take this idea right down to the personal. How many people do you know who are trapped in jobs for the healthcare?

Tags: healthcare, Politics

Posted: 4:51 am Tue March 23 2010 | Comments(7) |

[politics] My initial thoughts on HCR, and some related links

I thought I’d put the healthcare reform links in their own post, rather than link salad. A special link salad, as it were. Basically, as flawed and difficult as this bill is, I’m glad it passed. I’m even more glad Representative Stupak and his merry band of forced pregnancy enthusiasts weren’t able to derail it. How can you call yourself “pro-life” and oppose something that will reverse mortality outcomes for tens of thousands of Americans every year simply by ensuring they have access to healthcare? Not to mention if abortion reduction is your goal, why ignore the documented link between increased access to healthcare and decreased abortion rates?

Everyone benefited last night. Even all the screaming, spitting Tea Partiers. Because now their coverage won’t be cancelled if they fall seriously ill, or run against a lifetime coverage limitation if that illness becomes extended. My lifelong experience of observing politics is that liberal-progressives want to help even people who don’t want their help, even at a cost to themselves, while conservatives want to put limits on both rights and opportunity for everyone they disagree with in the name of preserving their own rights and opportunities. Healthcare reform has been an amazing illustration of this principle in point.

As conservative commentator David Frum notes in one the articles linked below, this HCR initiative is rather similar to Republican plans from decades past. Yet to hear our Republican friends tell it, this is a Socialist millstone that will sink the Republic. The politics of this have been beastly, funded and driven by an effort to unseat Obama, as much as any actuality of healthcare. The people protesting this will benefit as much as the rest of us, for all the bill’s flaws.

The left, such as it is, tries to talk policy, the right talks politics. And politics makes for better soundbites, angrier voters, and ultimately stronger electoral returns.

We lost a lot here. Single payer would have solved so much of the healthcare spending issues. (Quick quiz, what percentage of private healthcare spending goes to processing costs and profit margin? What percentage of Medicare healthcare spending goes to processing costs and profit margin?) The public option would have been a decent compromise, if nothing else through a Medicare buy-in. But those things can come into play over time, once people see this bill isn’t a ‘poison pill’, but something that benefits them and their families personally, regardless of their political views.

We may still lose ground here. I imagine there will be hundreds of court challenges, some from politically ambitious Red State attorneys general, others from the Orly Taitz wing of the conservative nuthouse. Some challenges might even have substance on the merits, though I’ll be surprised. And much of the long-term success of HCR depends on not having a massive string of bills overturning it pieces in the next few years.

Still, today, I woke up in a world where my healthcare funding won’t be terminated because of lifetime coverage limitations, or because I am too sick. I woke up in a world where I can change jobs without sentencing myself to death from the disqualifying pre-existing condition of metastatic colon cancer. I woke up in a world where a major liberal-progressive idea has gained a significant foothold.

And that idea will benefit every American, even those who willfully misunderstand it, and hate it with a screaming passion. That’s what good political ideas are all about. Benefiting everyone.

Meanwhile, some linkage:

Health Vote Caps a Journey Back From the Brink — How Speaker Pelosi brought HCR back from the dead.

Tea Party Protesters Shout The N-Word At, Spit On Passing Legislators — More on this. The Sarah Palin cite in this piece is especially trenchant. Ah, the classness of conservatives.

Waterloo — Conservative David Frum on HCR. The Obama plan has a broad family resemblance to Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts plan. It builds on ideas developed at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s that formed the basis for Republican counter-proposals to Clintoncare in 1993-1994. Definitely sounds like screaming socialism, doesn’t it? In other news, Republican lawmaker says of this same plan, “We believe that this is the beginning of the end of America.” Hyperbole much?

In Case You Missed Obama’s Health Speech Saturday Afternoon — Political capital, and the expending thereof. I do significantly disagree with one of Fallows’ closing statements, “I support it, because it is a step toward the principle that for society’s benefit and for individual protection, everyone should be insured.” Actually, everyone should have access to healthcare. Insurance is just a mechanism. Healthcare is the issue. There are other ways to deliver and fund it.

A look at the healthcare overhaul bill — Might have been nice if the media had spent more time on this and less on people screaming about death panels and socialism. For my part, I note “Starting this year, insurers would be forbidden from placing lifetime dollar limits on policies, from denying coverage to children because of pre-existing conditions, and from canceling policies because someone gets sick.” That removes two of the several death sentences I’ve been living under. The market-based solution thought it was fine to cut me off to die once I’d received too much healthcare. Any wonder I favor government intervention? I wasn’t willing to die for conservative beliefs about the free market, thank you.

Tags: Cancer, health, healthcare, Politics

Posted: 4:44 am Mon March 22 2010 | Comments(3) |

[politics] Your simplified political dictionary

This is your simplified political dictionary for today.

• If you’re pro-life and you support the death penalty, you’re not pro-life.
• If you’re pro-life and you support the Iraq War, you’re not pro-life.
• If you’re pro-life and you own a handgun, you’re not pro-life.
• If you’re fiscally conservative and you vote Republican, you’re not fiscally conservative.
• If you’re for family values and you vote Republican, you’re not for family values.
• If you’re for limited government and you vote Republican, you’re not for limited government.
• If you’re pro-America and you support teach alternatives to evolution, you’re not pro-America.
• If you’re anti-tax but you want to be able to call 911 in an emergency, you’re not anti-tax.
• If you’re anti-government but you want the potholes filled in the road, you’re not anti-government.
• If you’re against government healthcare but are on Medicare, you’re not against government healthcare.
• If you’re against single-provider healthcare but are in the VA system, you’re not against single-provider healthcare.
• If you’re Christian but you pray for the death of political opponents, you’re not Christian.

Intellectual consistency is fun. Try your own examples!

Tags: guns, healthcare, Iraq, Politics

Posted: 4:24 am Mon March 15 2010 | Comments(2) |