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SHORTHOPEUNFILTERED

 
Wednesday, March 30, 2005  
Nader press release begs: "Let Terri Live!" Via Digby, consider this joint press release from Ralph Nader and the creationist Discovery Institute:

Consumer Advocate Ralph Nader and Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Wesley J. Smith call upon the Florida Courts and Governor Jeb Bush to take any legal action available to let Terri Schiavo live.

[ . . . ]

The federal and state governments are spending billions on what we are told will become miracle medical cures for people with all sorts of degenerative conditions, including brain damage. If this is so, why not permit Terri’s parents to care for her in the hope that such cures are derived.

Benefits of doubts should be given to life, not hastened death. This case is rife with doubt. Justice demands that Terri be permitted to live.


I won't rehash all of the reasons this link between Nader, the conservative Christian Discovery Institute, and the Schiavo distortion machine in the service of this cruel circus is repellant and unsurprising. Is there anyone left who will stand up and speak for this disgusting fossil? Anyone?

3/30/2005

 
Nader press release begs: "Let Terri Live!" Via Digby, we find this joint press release from Ralph Nader and the creationist Discovery Institute:

Consumer Advocate Ralph Nader and Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Wesley J. Smith call upon the Florida Courts and Governor Jeb Bush to take any legal action available to let Terri Schiavo live.

[ . . . ]

The federal and state governments are spending billions on what we are told will become miracle medical cures for people with all sorts of degenerative conditions, including brain damage. If this is so, why not permit Terri’s parents to care for her in the hope that such cures are derived.

Benefits of doubts should be given to life, not hastened death. This case is rife with doubt. Justice demands that Terri be permitted to live.


I won't rehash all of the reasons this link between Nader and the right wing distortion machine in the service of this cruel circus is repellant and unsurprising. Is there anyone left who will stand up and speak for this disgusting fossil? Anyone?

3/30/2005

Thursday, March 24, 2005  
Kung Fu Monkey misses real Republicans:

[ . . . ] I love how in these articles, the [hugely expensive, constantly malfunctioning missile defense] system is always quoted as designed to protect us " ... from rogue states such as North Korea ...". No. No, there are no rogue states "such as" North Korea. It's North Korea, guys. That's it. The only fighter in this weight class. China? They're our biggest foreign asset holder, please. Iran? Jerusalem should worry. The US, not so much . Russian loose nukes? More likely to be broken down for parts for a Van-Based Delivery System (TM) than not -- and year's worth of what we spend on missile defense would be a %2000 increase on what we spend on locking down loose nuclear materials now.

What, are the Phillipines suddenly gonna get all cranked up on non-drowsy cough medicine and decide to go postal on us with their shoddily-made fusion-bomb dancing dashboard figurines? No, when we say " ... rogue states such as North Korea", we mean North Korea. And that means Kim Jong-il. One guy. Simple, fifth-grade logic inexorably draws us to the conclusion that we are spending $200 billion dollars to protect ourselves from one guy.

I'll even SPOT you the argument that we should spend $200 billion on protecting ourselves from one guy. He is, after all, nuts. Probably not so nuts that he'd tip off his super-secret invasion of the southern half of his peninsula by nuking and therefore SUPREMELY pissing off the world's only remaining superpower before he got the tanks rolling, but fine. Nuts. Are you telling me there's no better way to spend $200 billion to stop one guy? What'd it cost the mob to whack Kennedy? $50,000 plus hotel? Even with cost-of-living increase, we can get a better deal here.

If there were a rash of break-ins ... no scratch that. Say there's a violent murder in your neighborhood. A really brutal slayfest. Blood on the walls, body parts on the lawn.

Your neigbor decides to take precautions. He leaves his doors and windows unlocked. He sits on the roof, armed with a SpongeBob SquarePants air-rifle, just in case the killers return and attack the house by hang-glider this time. And the air rifle doesn't work. And he spent EVERY DIME HE HAD on the air rifle.

You would of course, say your neighbor was insane. Or supremely stupid.

You do the rest.

My original point was -- Republicans used to be the guys who put the brakes on this shit. A sad chuckle, a little head shake. "Who's going to pay for this?" they'd say, frowning over national budgets. "Where are the facts? The research?" They'd take out their little red pens and buzzkill our little dreams of nationalized health care or solar-powered windmills or maglev trains, and then go back to banning pornography while secretly screwing around on their wives. But you know what? A lot of times, they were right.

We needed those guys. They were a dull but crucial part of the national dialogue. (And they knew their scotches. ) Now ... a void. Simply put, if you are voting for these guys who call themselves Republicans, then you are voting for crazy air-rifle guy. You just walked up, nodded, and said: "Wow, I gotta get me a ladder."

Please. Please. Bring back the real Republicans. Bring back the science guys. I miss you.


Me, too.

Read it all, it's effing hilarious. Via Crooked Timber.

3/24/2005

Monday, March 21, 2005  
I am trying to get my head around the raw, evil political opportunism that is underlying the Republican production number over Terry Schiavo, and write something that expresses my disgust and anger, but it's just too much, like trying to force a medicine ball down an exhaust pipe, and besides, everybody else has done it better. Via Pandagon, this Scott Bateman cartoon does a pretty good job. Jesse goes on to summarize the hypocrisy in one brief paragraph:
In a Republican world, Schiavo, whose medical care is being paid for by a medical malpractice case, would have likely run out of money long ago. In a Republican world, after that money ran out, Schiavo's medical care would likely have gone unpaid-for, as there would have been no allowable declaration of bankruptcy. Schiavo's case wouldn't have been picked up by the Christian right, as the operative line would have been concerned with her trying to get malpractice awards for a self-inflicted state, she and her husband would have been shoved together as unscrupulous exploiters of the med mal state, and she would have been dead before the Republican Revolution ever began. This isn't even discussing the fact that Medicare would have been slashed to the point that any award Schiavo got would have been likely the sole fund for her medical support.


The antiabortion right is wringing political capital out of the suffering of a family, trashing the reputation of the husband and preying on the denial of the parents, to create this monstrous, monstrous spectacle as a sop to the religious zealotry of their base. As a political decision, this may be disastrous. The public is apparently repulsed by this grisly, heavyhanded maneuver. But seriously, I don't care about the fallout. I hope the GOP does figure out that this is a loser, and drops it with no more damage to themselves or anyone else. Whatever. Ach, jesus, please, just stop it. The CAT scan doesn't lie. Her cerebral cortex is gone. She's not coming back. She didn't murmur "I want to live." What movements she has are simply automatic artifacts of muscle memory, impulse loops, ghosts of consciousness haunting her empty cranium. Breaking the barricades to give her bread and water will only choke her to death, because she has no swallow reflex. She's gone. Stop it stop it stop it stop it stop it stop it. Stop it.


But how? How do you let go of a child when you are inside a political bubble, being told by Senator Frist and the nice man from the Southern Baptist "Save Terri Coalition" that the CAT scan is inconclusive, that MRI testing muight show something different, that "miracles can happen!" How do you let a child go when it seems that powerful, important people are on your side, and they tell you they only want what's best for your daughter? Finally someone is listening! How can you let go now, when finally someone is listening? To the parents, this must seem like the transition from the hands of the liars and would-be-killers into the bosom of good Christian understanding. What it actually is is the transition from a forum where the result is guided by the facts (the courts) to a forum where the only "truth" is what perpetuates the spectacle. But how can the parents see that? They can't. They are being fed false hope for political advantage. This is why this episode is so fucking evil. Because if the fundies win, and the feeding tube is put back in, the parents will eventually get the new testing done and all that new false hope will disappear, and they will be losing their daughter all over again. If the fundies lose, and she does die without feeding, the parents will believe, for the rest of their lives, that their daughter was, quite simply, murdered.

3/21/2005

Monday, March 07, 2005  
Well, this is why Josh Marshall is the boss. TPM has been pretty much all-social security, all the time in the last several weeks, and the coverage has been by turns wonkish and fire-eating, profound and trivial, attacking the issue from all sides; one moment digging into the numbers, and the next chuckling while flinging one Congressman or another into the "Fainthearted Faction" or "Conscience Caucus" based on their public statements with the old-school zeal of a carnival barker. I don't think that it is unfair to suggest that his campaign to drum up phone calls and letters, and his constant challenges to reporters, have forced a number of wavering House democrats to get off the fence.

Yesterday, he hit upon something fundamental, and his description of it is accurate and elegaic; no easy feat. On Meet The Press on Sunday, Joe Klein casually asserted that private retirement accounts are somehow better suited to the information age, and that clunky, unlovely Social Security is an "industrial age" relic, structurally akin to the rusting factories outside of Detroit and Ithaca, NY.

Marshall takes off from Klein's foolish sentiment to drive right at the heart of the entire Social Security debate:
I would like to ask Klein what it is exactly about Social Security that makes it appropriate to the industrial age but not the information age. If it is phased out in the next few years that would be one objective sign that it couldn't withstand the politics of this new economic era. But that would be a circular argument.

If anything I would think there's a much stronger argument that Social Security with its guaranteed benefits is more suited to this age than the last one, given how the increasingly transitory nature of work and the pressures of globalization are undermining the basis of defined benefit private sector pensions.

The real point, though, is that when you set aside all the practical matters of debt and transition costs, this is an ideological debate -- or to put it less antiseptically, a debate over different sets of values. The idea behind private accounts is that people should rely on themselves alone and bear the consequences of their successes and their failures and random chance on their own shoulders. If things don't pan out for you in retirement, that's something to take up with your children.

The concept behind Social Security is fundamentally different. The first premise is that if you put in a lifetime's work there is simply a level of destitution below which society will not let you fall. Maybe you made so little during your working years that there wasn't enough to save. Or maybe you just didn't plan ahead well enough. Or maybe you suffered some misfortune. Whatever. If you worked you won't be destitute when you retire. People who made big bucks through their lives don't get a particularly good 'deal' from Social Security, if you insist on seeing it in investment terms. But that's a distorting prism, sort of like thinking you got a rotten deal on your medical insurance if you never have a catastrophic illness.

I like to think of this as the moral equality of work. In our society, we allow the market to assign all manner of different cash values to different sorts of work or even the same sorts of work under different circumstances. And by and large, within some very small limitations like the minimum wage or certain non-discrimination laws, most of us think this is how it should be. I certainly do. (In this sense, I think collective bargaining amounts to another competitive arrangement within a market economy -- though doctrinaire free market folks have always seen it in contrary terms.)

But the cash value of work isn't the same as its moral value. And if you look at the values imbedded in all those Social Security actuarial tables, you see this principle: whether you were a janitor or a fast-food worker or a doctor or a tycoon, if you worked during your working years you shouldn't be left destitute when your working years are over (retirement) or when, through no fault of your own, you can't work anymore (disability). No matter what. The common denominator is a life of work -- skilled or unskilled, impressive or unimpressive, remembered or forgotten. It doesn't matter.

In any case, that's only one way to look at it. More prosaically, you might just say that there are certain risks we choose to share across society. And this is one of them.


Yes, it's true that if you only have Social Security, your old age will be hard. You will be poor. You will not have luxurious housing or money to spend on travel or amenities. That is undeniable. But you won't starve. And before Social Security, you would. And if you spent your whole life working, that shouldn't happen. And that's what the program is for. Social Security is not socialism; it's not monolithic, outdated social engineering. In fact, it exists as a program because it acknowledges that (a) capitalism, operating properly, will produce have-nots, and (b) work should be rewarded. These are profoundly conservative notions. Even the architects of the hated regulatory state acknowledged that our system is going to leave some people without any money, even after a lifetime of employment within it. Social Security, at its heart, is a makepeace with the ineluctable fact of winners and losers in a capitalist economy. Social Security does not seek to bring down capitalism, or level the social classes; hell, there is no means testing for Social Security! And as your income goes up, your SS payment goes up!

Therefore, the dislike for the system comes not from some critique of Socialism (though critics often falsely clothe themselves in such robes), but rather from the feeling that the poor are morally culpable for their poverty, and that their squalor is a punishment, a meet and just punishment, and evidence of their essential inferiority and unworthiness. This is, of course, completely evil.

Another thing that bugs the shit out of me: only this generation of republicans (rootless, powermad hypocrites that they are) could take one of the fundamental innovations of the capitalist revolution - risk pooling - and attack it as "socialism." Listen up, motherfuckers! Everybody pays, because, (a) theoretically, everybody could lose, so it is in everybody's interest to make losing less fatal and horrible; and (b) when everybody pays, you have a fuckload of money, and can deal with almost any eventuality.* This is elementary - if we hadn't figured this one out like seven hundred years ago, I would likely be squatting today somewhere in the environs of a feudal castle in Scotland scraping at the rocky, unforgiving dirt with an iron fork, and we would know what the world's indigenous societies would have become had not the Europeans come boiling out of the North, riding on a huge wave of shipping that was built, bonded, crewed and victualled by the near-magical power of risk-pooling.

The only way that the risk-pooling for SS does not make sense is if the opponents of SS feel that their own risk of failure in life is lessened; that they do not need to be concerned, as their own risk of falling through the capitalist cracks has somehow been lessened. For further detail on that point, please refer to the entirety of the rest of the Republican economic platform. You might see a bit of a pattern there.



*Yes, yes, I know, the solvency problem. Blah, blah, blah, easily fixed with minor adjustments; some light means-testing, raise the exemption rate, etc., we're good to go for pretty much forever.

3/07/2005

 
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