Truthy Slips

Romney was making a speech in Illinois and I think the truth finally came out when he was quoting Obama.

"We are inventors, we are builders, we are makers of things. We are Thomas Edison, we are the Wright Brothers, we're Bill Gates, we are steal jobs...wait, I missed that, we are Steve Jobs. That's who we are. That's who we need to be right now. That's true. But the problem is: he's still Barack Obama."

Steal jobs. This coming from a vulture capitalist.

No Money to Pay the Bills

So, I took a little break from my blog because...well...I'm lazy. But, at any rate, I came back on today.

Anyway, I won't have a great deal to say today, except to point out that we're so far in the shithole as far as money goes that at least one city in Michigan can't even pay its electric bill so they've resorted to ripping out street lights.

And the Republicans still won't allow a tax increase to get through.

Halloween

It's my favorite holiday ever again. That satanic night when all the little heathens get dressed up as spawns of Satan and go around trying to coerce good Christians away from the Lord and into occult wickedness!

Nah, it's the night when kids get dressed up and go around asking for candy and adults make their houses all scary. I love this night, it's fun. And when you take it in the historical context of the sabbat Samhain, it gets even better. It's a fun night of sweets and candy and scares and good times and it can also be a time of remembrance for those who aren't with us anymore. That can be almost as important as anything else on this night.

Happy Halloween, everyone. And a merry Samhain for those of that belief.

Valley Wall

I was reading an article on BBC.com about Occupy Wall Street and this caught my eye:

On the US East Coast, many of those taking part in Occupy protests are preparing for an unseasonally cold storm due to hit this weekend.

As much as 10in (25cm) of snow is expected in some areas on Saturday, with between two and four inches forecast for New York City.

Protesters are raising money and floating ideas for how to cope as the temperature drops.

Suggestions reportedly include stockpiling donated coats and blankets, trying to find more secure tents and turning to possible indoor locations.

"Everyone's been calling it our Valley Forge moment," Michael McCarthy, a former Navy medic in Providence, Rhode Island, told the Associated Press news agency, referring to a harsh winter during the American War of Independence.

I had to reflect on the validity of that statement for a little while. I've been out of school for a long time now and the History Channel is more interested in informing me about UFOs in the Mona Lisa and how Hitler really worshiped the occult to spend any real time on it. I haven't been to a public school since my mid-teens, so my knowledge of the events at Valley Forge are fuzzy at best.

But there are a few things I do remember. I remember hearing about how that winter was a badly wet one and how the constant freezing and thawing of ice and snow made it hard to stay dry. I remember hearing about how the soldiers had to hurry to construct log cabins to keep from freezing to death and how frost bite was a problem even with shelter. Food was scarce and came at irregular intervals for both soldiers and their horses. I remember hearing about how disease was rampant in the camp from the close quarters and found a nice breeding ground in the soldier's dirty uniforms. They shivered and starved all through the while continuing to fight the British. These were soldiers who had so much that was asked of them that a risk of mutiny was a very real possibility. In a letter to the President of Congress, George Washington wrote in part:

"Sir: Full as I was in my representation of matters in the Commys. departmt. yesterday, fresh, and more powerful reasons oblige me to add, that I am now convinced, beyond a doubt that unless some great and capital change suddenly takes place in that line, this Army must inevitably be reduced to one or other of these three things. Starve, dissolve, or disperse, in order to obtain subsistence in the best manner they can; rest assured Sir this is not an exaggerated picture,"

Washington managed to hold his army together and with better training from Major General Baron von Steuben and better food provided by Baker General Christopher Ludwick, he was able to not only keep his army together through the winter but was able to turn back the British and win a major victory.

The problems that face the Occupy Wall Street protestors are different, but no less real and these are problems of both civilization as well as the elements. It's going to be a cold winter for them, but that is not the worst thing they face. The enemy they face is the status quo, and the operatives of the status quo won't attack them with muskets and ambushes, they're more insidious. As reported by the LATimes;

It's also clear they don't want the demonstrators to get too comfortable.

City fire and police officials on Friday confiscated gas tanks and half a dozen generators being used for electricity in the makeshift kitchen and for media equipment. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg had declared them a safety hazard. Organizers were baffled; they said fire marshals had inspected the park the day before and hadn't mentioned any violations.

"It's strange that this happens on the first really cold morning," said Bill Dobbs, a volunteer with the press operation. But rather than prompt calls for further rebellion — plans already were underway Friday for an action targeting Midtown banks — organizers said they would ask for the generators back. Several protesters said cooperating with the city at this point in the season seemed important.

OWS is facing a different war with different rules; rules set up to put the advantage to those who hold power and the only people who can hold power are those who either are members of the 1% or people who are supported by the 1%. Unlike the officials in Oakland, a lot of cities have decided to leave the protestors alone because, as the SeattlePI points out;

But other cities have rejected aggressive tactics, at least so far, some of them because they want to avoid the violence seen in Oakland or, as some have speculated, because they are expecting the protests to wither anyway with the onset of cold weather.

They know that society today is very, very different than the society that bred the soldiers who suffered through the events at Valley Forge 234 - 233 years ago. We're a society that can find relative warmth during the bitter cold and we're not used to the hardships that were so common among the American colonies. The type of common work has shifted from very labor intensive to fairly automated and repetitive. The people who have the best chance at a long campaign are the soldiers and veterans who've been trained to have the discipline needed to see themselves through the extreme weather. And, to top it off, OWS doesn't have a George Washington, Friedrich von Steuben or Christopher Ludwick to help see them through and boost their morale.

Occupy Wall Street is, indeed, facing their own Valley Forge moment; and with the absence of an inspiring figurehead the only thing the protestors can rely on to see them through is how badly they want things to change and how badly they want the status quo to fall.

But what the protestors will need to keep in mind is that, while the Continental Army had George Washington to lead them; during Valley Forge they were poorly trained to the point of being little better than the militias that supplemented them. They were citizens with muskets, but they suffered, fought and stood their ground because they believed in what they were doing.

Occupy Wall Street can do the same thing just as well.

Brad and the Future of Occupy Wall Street

A very dear person to me linked me to a post by The Infamous Brad. In this post he examines the history of political protests and what that history may show for the future of Occupy Wall Street. A lot of good points were raised about the differences between the protests that worked in the past and what the focus is of the current Occupy Wall Street protests. And while I readily acknowledge the validity of the points raised, I have to disagree with the overall sentiment that the Occupiers are going about things the wrong way and that they're going to fail because of it.

This conclusion is drawn from the history of the Wobblies, better known as the Industrial Workers of the World. The IWW was most active around the Industrial Revolution though they are still an organized active union. The way that the Wobblies got the right to strike was by busing around to protest sites and giving so many numbers to the protests there that the cops couldn't jail them all. Without dedication and sacrifice like that, the article says, OWS is going to fail. Unless all the protestors support the main OWS body in New York by donating time, money or more protestors and not being so spread out over the USA that the numbers are easily dealt with, OWS will fail. That is the part I disagree with.

The protests over in Greece started around the 5th of May in 2010 for many of the same reasons that OWS has sprung up and, to my surprise, they're still going on, over a year later. When I first heard about the riots, I supported them in their cause but beyond that, it was just something going on far, far away. When I hear about protests going on in New York, be it OWS or the various antiwar protests from Bush's era, I'd support them too, but it was still this far removed thing so none of it was actually real to me. Even when OWS protests sprung up in Boston and Philly, I was surprised, but it was still this thing happening in distant lands.

What changed that was when I found out that OWS had finally reached the bastion of conservative ideology known as Oklahoma City. Suddenly, the protests weren't some far removed thing in distant lands; they had landed right into my backyard. I got to see people so disgruntled, so upset with the status quo that they were going to camp out in protest through bitter cold nights, rain, hail and a very near miss with a Tornado cell-cloud. They want change that badly.

Something that wasn't around back in the days of the Industrial Revolution was, obviously, the internet. The internet is a wonderful thing and something we largely take for granted, as evidenced by the article Infamous Brad wrote. The internet makes instant, wireless communication possible; not just text and voice communication, but also images and video. Ever see a movie set in the '40's or '50's, a big news story would break and you'd see reporters beating each other with severed limbs to be the first into the row of phone booths to call their editor?

It's funny, but transported to the 2000's and those same reporters won't be clawing their way to the phone booths; they'll be on their laptops, iPhones or Blackberries to let their editor know the scoop, the only determining factor in how fast the story gets out is by who has the quickest fingers. But with the advent of social networking, such as Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Skype and whatever else you can think up, you won't even need reporters anymore. Anyone with a camera phone can break a story happening anywhere in the world. We now have phones with 12-megapixel digital cameras built into them. It is now within the power of every John Q out there to be the first to report a revolutionary protest or post topless photos of himself on Craigslist so his can cheat on his wife.

One of the ideas behind the Wobblies' strategy was to gain public awareness for their cause to bring about change. But while they had to rely on the good graces of the Old Media to get their message out to the masses, we now have the internet.

So far, instead of dwindling, we've seen OWS spread to Europe, the Tundra and Antarctica. There are stirs being felt in India and Putin has Russia scrambling to stave off protests there while China has put a gag order on it's media regarding OWS content.

I'm not sure how far OWS will go when all is said and done, but even if it does fade out, it will have made people and governments take notice that the status quo is on shaky ground. It has spread to levels the IWW of the Industrial Revolution could have only dreamed of and over a third of America supports them.

Housing for the Homeless

Something we all know about but take very little action to rectify is the problem of cheap or free housing for the nation's homeless. Most all of the shelters for the homeless are owned or operated by religious charities with few (if any) being run by a government agency. And some of our biggest questions are simply; where do we put them?

An idea I've had in my head for a while now is to put the United States' Reserve Fleets to this use. Instead of maintaining these inactive ships to be recalled to active duty (unlikely, considering the age of some of these ships), why not convert them to be used as cheap or free housing for the nation's homeless? Here, I'll give you examples as to why this would be a good idea:

In the James River Reserve Fleet there are about 60 ships laid up. In the Suisun Bay Reserve Fleet, there are around 80 ships just sitting around.

• Four Forrestal-class aircraft carriers were built, each one with a crew compliment of 4,378.

• Four Kitty Hawk-class aircraft carriers were built, each one with around 5,624 crew members.

• The USS Enterprise is nearing the end of her service life, and her compliment is around 5,828

Nine ships that the Navy doesn't want anymore could put a roof over the heads of 45,836 people who would otherwise be living on the street.

Now, if we still had all of the Midway-class aircraft carriers, that would have been three more ships that could carry a total of 12,312 people.

The battleship USS Iowa embarked with a crew of 2788 people.

There are 4 Ticonderoga-class cruisers laid up currently, each with a compliment of around 400 crew.

I have just listed 17 ships that are sitting and rusting when they could be used to keep 62,536 people off of the streets and alleyways, could give them a roof, warmth, shower and food facilities and, most importantly, mailing addresses for employment and getting themselves a chance for a better opportunity. The homeless problem is easy to solve.

I just listed what we could have done with 17 ships, had a number of them not been scrapped or sunk and with no modifications to them at all.

What could we do with the 140 ships laid up in those two reserve fleets I just mentioned? How many people could we get off the streets and give a chance to find employment if we used all of our reserve fleets?

How to Legitimatize a Movement

It seems that Occupy Wall Street is, far from my expectations, not dying out but actually growing. As it turns out, it's growing to the point that it's going international. There are protests cropping up in New Zealand, London, Frankfurt, as well as all over the USA. With this profound of a political movement cropping up it was only a matter of time before someone got the bright idea to call it the "Tea Party of the Left." Privately, I have to roll my eyes at pundits trying to associate the two , but it seems to have struck a nerve with the Teabaggers.

[Link]
The tea party isn’t about to make room for the new protesters on the block.

Big tea party groups have launched an attack against the Occupy Wall Street protests, challenging the line that the anti-corporate uprising is the “the tea party of the left.”

Tea partiers and their allies are looking to de-legitimize the protests circulating in the anti-Wall Street crowds, hunting for evidence of union ties, fringe rhetoric and bad behavior — ranging from news of arrests, to recordings of incendiary speeches, to tales of littering, drug use and debauchery.

They’re posting what they find online, like a photograph of a demonstrator apparently defecating on a cop car that has circulated widely, and are accusing the mainstream media of ignoring extremist elements.

This actually makes me chuckle a little. The idea of such an astroturfed movement getting a bug up their asses over another movement is hilarious in its own right, but what is just rib ticklingly funny is what one commenter pointed out;

Michael DiZazzo
"Nothing legitimizes a protest movement nearly as much as it's opposite number attacking it. True believers are terrified by the sight of their opposite pole."

Rarely do I find myself in agreement with a comment on Yahoo News. as I said before, the Yahoo News comments section seems to be a bastion of conservative knuckle draggers. However, this seems to be one of those rare comments that cuts right to the truth of the matter. What happened when the Arab Spring started sweeping the Middle East? They were largely written off until people started to actively attempt to discredit them or put down the movement through force. So guess what Mayor Bloomburg tried to do.

"If Bloomberg really cared about sanitation here he wouldn't have blocked portapotties and dumpsters."

On Thursday afternoon Occupy Wall Street called an emergency General Assembly down at Liberty Plaza to deal with the announcement that Friday will see a cleanup of the park by the City, starting at 7 am. Representatives of Brookfield, the company that owns the park, said in the clean-up notice that everything left behind will be thrown away. On Thursday it was also revealed that Brookfield had sent a letter to police commissioner Ray Kelly asking the NYPD help clear out the protestors. A group of New York civil liberties lawyers warned the CEO of Brookfield that forcing protestors from the park violates their first amendment rights, stating, "Under the guise of cleaning the Park you are threatening fundamental constitutional rights. There is no basis in the law for your request for police intervention, nor have you cited any. Such police action without a prior court order would be unconstitutional."

And guess what he failed to do?

A planned cleanup of the Lower Manhattan park that has been home to the Occupy Wall Street movement since September 17 was delayed just hours before it was due to begin by Brookfield Office Properties, which manages the publicly accessible park.

The move averted a possible showdown between police and protesters who viewed the cleanup as a ploy to evict them. Protesters loudly cheered the decision, and several hundred set off marching toward the city's financial district.

Police arrested 14 people, but there were no widespread disruptions.

"This development has emboldened the movement and sent a clear message that the power of the people has prevailed against Wall Street," Occupy Wall Street said in a statement, estimating more than 3,000 people had gathered in the park.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, in his weekly radio address on Friday, said his office was not involved in the decision to postpone the cleanup.

"My understanding is that Brookfield got lots of calls from many elected officials threatening them and saying, 'If you don't stop this, we'll make your life much more difficult,'" said Bloomberg, who added that he did not know which officials had called the company.

So thank you, Teabaggers, 1%ers, and righties of all stripes. You've done more to validate OWS than anything the left ever could have done.

Lower or Higher Standard of Living?

Shortly after I woke up I hopped onto YIM and checked my mail when I noticed one of the articles was entitled: "Unemployed seek protection against job bias". The article itself was talking about how many companies, when looking at applicants for a job opening, will automatically discard any one of them who is either unemployed or has been unemployed for longer than 6 months. This is not something that is unheard of for me, I've known for a while that this is fairly common practice and it seems to be so well known that President Obama has even included a provision in his jobs bill that would ban companies from excluding the unemployed when considering applications. But that is actually just background for the real thing I want to address in this post.

A while back I heard someone asking in confusion about the general attitudes of the common person during the Wisconsin protests; "Why" they asked, "is it that when they hear about union and government employees making X amount of money an hour and get Y days off and Z benefits that instead of demanding equal treatment by their own private sector employers they instead demand union and government employees to take cuts?"

It was a question that I couldn't answer. I puzzled over it for a long while and honestly, I could never find any answer that didn't sound like some variation of "Fuck the right wing." I didn't want another outlet for my contempt of most things conservative, I wanted a real damn answer. Eventually I gave up and put it out of my mind. Until today.

When reading the Associated Press article linked to above, I made the mistake of looking at the comments. I'd almost forgotten that YahooNews has become a bastion of right-wing knuckle draggers. As I was reading, quite a few of the comments were, surprisingly, agreeable. And then I found one from the user 1Spirit;

The point I am trying to make in my post is that we, the unemployed, are trying to hit a mercurial moving target in regards to jobs in our respective ares of expertise. Yes, we can
accept a jobs below our personal income requirements but, this only slows the ratcheting down of our standards of living. The probability of losing our homes, our marriages are only minimally diminished. Many, if not most of us, will still have thousands of dollars in student loans to pay for to which have no effective value. Collectively, this affects us all through the cascade effect.

This actually strikes me as quite a reasonable post. Why should we, the majority of America, have to sacrifice our standard of living so the richest fuckers out there can keep hoarding their cash? And why should we be excluded from employment because we can't find work in an economy where 65 year-old's are still working full time and unemployment is still hovering around 9%? And then I find some oh-so intelligent [/sarcasm] replies to this post.

Jim
Your standard of living? Are you kidding me. You are worried about the pride of losing your standard of living.Get out there and get a job and take care of your family. If they don't have a job in your area, move. You do what you have to to take care of your family you idiot. You lazy moron, get out there and go to work. Do anything you can. Businesses hire people that are willing to do what ever it takes. I delivered pizzas when I had to. My son told me the other day, Dad, you taught me a valuable lesson with that. The pride is in taking care of your family. You can't accept a job that is below your personal income requirements. You lazy sot. And your spouse buys that crap? I paid every dime of my son's tuition and housing because I worked second jobs. I had yard sales, I did what it took because that is who I am. You are part of what is wrong with this nation now, it does not meet your personal income requirements and ratchets down your standard of living. You moron. You voted for Obama didn't you.

Charles B
Took a job that pays less than 1/2 of what I was used to being paid.... it is a regular paycheck.

I then cut out completely ANY AND ALL entertainment expense. I no longer have steak for Dinner (maybe 1 X /month). There is about 50X of ground beef in the feezer, and some chicken breast.
Before I lost my job and took the new one, I hadn't had a hamburger at home in ayear.... Now it is on the table 3 of 5 nights, disguised as manwich or salsbury steak..... or tacos or what have you.

SO I stepped down on all of my standards of living to be able to SUPPORT MY FAMILY!

I have "NO" sympathy for any of you that will not take something less to delay to lowering of the standard of living. GROW UP..... HAVE PRIDE.... ANS SUPPORT YOURSELF. We went from a 4 BR 3BA home that had 4.5 acres of land to a 3 BR 2 BA home that looks like a shack.... and well... it protects us from the elements. BUT WE DID IT!

BTW; I have TWO DEGREES.... and I am working in a field that only mildly corresponds to one of them..... BUT I AM WORKING!!!!! Adapt and overcome- stop being a poor pitiful pearl that expects others to supply your life's needs. YOU ARE AN AMERICAN.... You have the opportunity to succeed and fail.... now that you have had the failure, pull up your pants get on your shoes, and get back up on that first rung and begin moving back up...... IT CAN BE DONE BY EVERYONE BUT THE ENTITLED!
Stop hating those who have made it (RIch)- Stop demanding that they pay more so that you can continue to work less....... GET UP AND REACH FOR IT.... expect many steps, expect to have to give things up, expect to have to struggle.... expect to wonder what is happening next week...... but above all do not allow the government to take away that freedom!

Kevin E
I gotta cut my standard of living! Oh noes! Really? Well here's a dose of reality for you, sometimes when times get rough you have to cut out things that aren't necessary so you make ends meet until you can afford the luxuries. That's the problem with Americans today, they can't make cuts themselves and survive without nanny government to look out for them.

Ilona
The good jobs are long gone sorry that is the reality right now, get off your high horse and work a crappy job like most everyone else does before they all disappear too. maybe good jobs will return maybe not, whining won't help

I read these and went off to get dinner started. As I was heading to the kitchen I has a eureka moment. People don't want to admit that they are being taken advantage of. To see others who are fairly well off but not in the top 5% of income earners seems to gall them. Another person who is doing fairly well off but by no means rich seems to be an insult to those who're pissed off at their crappy job but can't seem to grow the stones needed to demand better conditions.

This is the sort of thing I find to be not only really sad, but is also an insight into why people will actively vote against their own interests by, among other things, supporting union busting legislation.

Yummies

So, I found myself in possession of a huge sack of boneless skinless chicken breasts and a whole head full of cooking ideas. Today, I shall lighten the over-all tone of this blog by sharing one such idea.

After thawing out two chicken breasts...well...one, but the fucker's large enough that it looks like it ate one of the others so I cut it in half, I decided to marinate it. So, I looked in my pantry and decided to pull a marinade out of thin air and ended up mixing in a small bowl;

• Dry Sherry
• White Vinegar
• Sweet basil leaves
• Rosemary
• Minced garlic
• Italian seasoning
• A pinch of salt

Mix well and marinade in a medium sized ziplock bag or a large bowl.

No, I don't have measurements because I didn't measure. I just eyeballed it, but it's a cheap enough marinade that you can season to taste. The most expensive part is the Sherry. I'll update this later tonight with a result of how it turns out.

*ADDENDUM*

It turns out that it is a good recipe. If you do it right you'll get a sharp taste of Sherry that's complimented by the herbs. I had the chicken with potatoes au gratin and fresh green beans boiled and seasoned with chopped onion, minced garlic and a pat of butter. Boil the water for the green beans and add the garlic, butter and onion to it and let it boil for a while to let the flavors mix before adding the green beans, if you care to try it.

We Are the 99%

Yesterday I posted an entry in which I included accounts of people who are suffering for the greed of the rich and powerful. That website, entitled We Are the 99%, has many stories of people suffering from no economic security. But what shocks me is the number of people who say they're grateful for their minimum wage no benefit we-can-replace-you-at-the-drop-of-a-hat jobs. They call themselves the lucky ones.

I understand that people are desperate and will take anything if it means having maybe enough money to feed their kids and themselves and keep a roof over their heads, I want it to be known that I understand it. But what I can't understand is why anyone would be grateful to be taken advantage of? Long hours, low pay, no medical, and not enough pay to keep yourself fed and still keep your debt from growing seems to be the order of the day for these grateful people. Consider yourself lucky, yes, but don't feel grateful to be exploited, underpaid and overworked.

I guess I'm still just reeling over how bad things have gotten for people these days...though I shouldn't really be surprised. Things have been horrible for years now, but out of control poverty isn't dramatic enough to warrant media attention until it gets bad enough that people start marching in the streets, and even then it gets very little coverage.

I think my surprise rests mostly with how ignorant I've been of these things until now.

Burn Bright and Flicker Out

According to The Daily Beast by way of Yahoor News, it seems that the rage that has driven the Teabaggers so far is fizzling out. This alone is enough to make me laugh, and when all is said and done, I'm not surprised. On another forum I frequent, a member there by the name of Sandman made a very concise and, to my opinion, insightful post explaining why the Tea Party as it stands now will not last. Well written as it is, I want to call attention to the third reason he gives:

Reason 3: It is a political movement based on anger.

You can get a lot of stuff done in politics when you get people pissed off at something. What you can't do is maintain that long term. Political motivation by anger is a lot like shock comedy, you have to keep topping yourself in order to keep the momentum going. What all shock comedians eventually discover, and what the Tea Party will eventually discover, is that you can't keep escalating things forever. Eventually you will get to the point where you simply can't go any further without appearing genuinely insane even to the most hardened of your followers, and the momentum falls apart.

In order to keep the anger-momentum going, the Tea Party has been reduced to incitement, exaggeration, and bald-faced lies to keep people pissed. Everything from "death-panels" to Obama "not being born in the USA" to Obama is a "socialist" to the blatant lie that Americans are being taxed to death. None of it is true, but that doesn't matter. The Tea Party "leaders" don't even care if these things are true, that's not the point. The point is that these lies can be used to keep the rank-and-file Tea Party member frothing at the mouth with righteous fury.

The Tea Party is based on anger, and while this is effective in the short-term, is impossible to maintain in the long run.

Shortly after that, another member, gyeonghwa, was kind enough to share an article he found on the New York Times.

But in fact the Tea Party is increasingly swimming against the tide of public opinion: among most Americans, even before the furor over the debt limit, its brand was becoming toxic. To embrace the Tea Party carries great political risk for Republicans, but perhaps not for the reason you might think.

Polls show that disapproval of the Tea Party is climbing. In April 2010, a New York Times/CBS News survey found that 18 percent of Americans had an unfavorable opinion of it, 21 percent had a favorable opinion and 46 percent had not heard enough. Now, 14 months later, Tea Party supporters have slipped to 20 percent, while their opponents have more than doubled, to 40 percent. Of course, politicians of all stripes are not faring well among the public these days. But in data we have recently collected, the Tea Party ranks lower than any of the 23 other groups we asked about — lower than both Republicans and Democrats. It is even less popular than much maligned groups like “atheists” and “Muslims.” Interestingly, one group that approaches it in unpopularity is the Christian Right.

More and more I am seeing signs that the Teabaggers are ringing their own death knell. They're trying to go in a direction that the majority of Americans don't want, and a lot of the people who voted for them didn't realize. But what I fear right now is the damage they'll inflict before they finally flicker and die. Do I think they're malicious? Not intentionally. Do I think they're mentally unhinged? The evidence is getting more difficult to ignore.

Consider for a moment this article from the Southern Poverty Law Center:

A new Tea Party group in Florida is boldly going where no Tea Parties have gone before – space.

Tea Party in Space, an offshoot of the South Florida Tea Party, is, of all things, pushing to end the government’s supposed monopoly on space exploration.

“Our goal is nothing less than the expansion of American civilization into the solar system,” says the group’s platform. “We must return to traditional American free-market principles to expand permanently into space.”

Tea Party in Space is complaining that, as its founder Andrew Gasser said, “NASA is being forced to fund programs that are behind schedule and ridiculously over budget.” But that’s not all. Gasser sees a great ideological principle here: “It is socialism when you have the government coming down and saying, ‘this is what we want to build, and this is how we want you to build it.’”

According to Tea Party in Space logic, the Erie Canal, Hoover Dam, our national highway system, and Mount Rushmore are all just examples of unnecessary government socialism.

Of course, Tea Party in Space has a rock-solid standard bearer, proudly noted in its “Core Values”: “I am a child of Ronald Regan [sic], Ronaldus Magnus. ”

Houston, we have a problem.

As NASA recounted in its statement in honor of Reagan’s death in 2004, “President Reagan spoke … about how the shuttles were the modern day equivalent of the Yankee Clipper ships that opened new horizons for our young nation.” In his 1984 State of the Union Address, the statement continues, Reagan “announced plans for a permanent human presence in space with the construction of a space station, and he tasked NASA to including the international community to be part of a project designed for the benefit of everyone on Earth.”

But it seems the intellectual disconnect doesn't end at the Final Frontier. Teabagger and GOP favorite (and sane person's favorite chimp) Michelle Bachmann has shown us that there is an aspect of ignorant and malicious thinking when she made it a point to block anti-gay bullying legislation for public schools in her district. The result of that? Let Mother Jones tell you:

The first was TJ. Then came Samantha, Aaron, Nick, and Kevin. Over the past two years, a total of nine teenagers have committed suicide in a Minnesota school district represented by Rep. Michele Bachmann—the latest in May—and many more students have attempted to take their lives. State public health officials have labeled the area a "suicide contagion area" because of the unusually high death rate.

Some of the victims were gay, or perceived to be by their classmates, and many were reportedly bullied. And the anti-gay activists who are some of the congresswoman's closest allies stand accused of blocking an effective response to the crisis and fostering a climate of intolerance that allowed bullying to flourish. Bachmann, meanwhile, has been uncharacteristically silent on the tragic deaths that have roiled her district—including the high school that she attended.

Bachmann, who began her political career as an education activist, has described gay rights as an "earthquake issue," and she and her allies have made public schools the front lines of their fight against the "homosexual agenda." They have opposed efforts in the state to promote tolerance for gays and lesbians in the classroom, seeing such initiatives as a way of allowing gays to recruit impressionable youths into an unhealthy and un-Christian lifestyle.

Later on, we get this:

As civil rights groups have pushed the Minnesota school district to do more to increase tolerance of LGBT students, conservative religious groups fought to keep them away from public schools. After Samantha's suicide and several others, students in Anoka-Hennepin schools participated in the Day of Silence. The event, organized by the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network, encourages kids to remain silent for the day in recognition of the effect of anti-gay bullying and harassment. In response, religious activists took up the "Day of Truth" an event championed by the "ex-gay ministry" Exodus International that's usually held the day before the Day of Silence. Students who participated were encouraged to engage their classmates in discussions of homosexuality from a Christian perspective.

Fifteen-year-old Justin Aaberg appears to have been one of the targets of this initiative. One day last year Justin came home and told his mom, Tammy, that another student had told him he would to go to hell because he was gay. "That did something to his brain," she says. He hanged himself in his bedroom last summer. Only after his suicide did Tammy learn that the Parents Action League had reportedly worked with area churches to hand out T-shirts promoting the "Day of Truth" to students at his high school (which is also Bachmann's alma mater). The students were also instructed to "preach to the gay kids," Aaberg says. (No one from the Parents Action League responded to a request for comment.)

A favorite cry of these people has been "What about the children?!" Well, the children are killing themselves because they're not accepted for who they are and you're not just doing nothing to change that, you're obstructing efforts to reach out to these kids.

These are the sorts of things I am talking about. I have no doubt that the Teabaggers will die out, likely they'll fade into a distant memory as the Baby Boomers start dying off. But I am scared, very scared, of what they will do before then.

Fight for the Future or Watch NASCAR?

The following is a repost from an entry I made on the IrregularTimes guestbook.

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I'm quirky. I'm one of those rare and elusive creatures known to anthropologists as a Gun Toting Liberal (guntotus liberus).

Something I have wanted for years is to own an AR-15 rifle but I have never been in a financial position to acquire one of my own. Hopefully, I would be able to build one from one of the many kits available online. My financial position recently changed and I ordered a stripped AR-15 lower receiver online and then waited for the company to ship it to my local FFL dealer so I could fill out the forums and have my background checked and be all legal.

This was happening during the debt ceiling debate, during which I saw the Teabaggers on capitol hill basically taking America hostage and threatening to kill said hostage. As the days turned into weeks of this, I occasionally found myself thinking: "I better hurry up and build that AR-15 before these idiots destroy the economy and I have to end up shooting things for food."

Well, they didn't blow Uncle Sam's head off, thanks to Obama snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Not long ago, I put in an order for a full length AR-15 kit and am waiting for it to be shipped. Now, I've taken the time to look at these people, their actions, their mentality, their goals and I find myself thinking; "I better hurry up and build that AR-15 before these fuckers trigger the civil war they want so badly."

And then I remember Americans are too apathetic to actually take up arms, so I go look at what else is on TV.

Question for the Libertarians

Now, I admit, my views on libertarianism are no secret. *cough, cough*




But whatever I may feel on the subject (mocking laughter, for instance), I want to ask one serious question. Knowing the basic views of the ideal, I can't help but wonder if the typical libertarian would support the Clean Diamond Trade Act. The CDTA was written to help curb the importation and sale of rough diamonds from Sierra Leone and Liberia, better known to the world as Conflict Diamonds.

Conflict Diamonds are mined in areas where heavy fighting is going on to sell or barter in order to continue to finance a war effort or insurgency or just to help support the local warlord. Knowing that could you, in good conscience, not support the CDTA?

If You've Done Nothing Wrong, You've Got Nothing to Hide

If you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to hide.

If you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to hide.

This is a phrase that has irritated the holy shit out of me for a very, very long time. Any time privacy is brought up, there's some idiot out there who'll whip this little saying out like a cock at a streaker's convention. I don't know if they really believe this or if they're just mind-bogglingly naive.

My knee-jerk reaction to this is to ask: "Then would you want to take a shit in a glass box on the sidewalk?"

The baseline of this, as pointed out in another article I read, is that the If You've Done Nothing Wrong argument is faulty on it's face because it mixes up the concept of privacy with the concept of secrecy. We do things that are private; like taking a shit, making love, lounging in our underwear, keeping medical records sealed, not sharing our credit card bills, not blabbing our social security numbers to people. We do these for a number of reasons; modesty, security, the desire not to put ourselves on display. When we go home, we have doors to close, windows to shut. We do this because, among other things, we like our privacy.

Now, I have done no wrong, but I have things I want to keep private. My online browsing habits, for example. I don't go to pedo websites, I don't hit up white supremacist sites or look up nuclear weapon designs. I go to message boards, art websites, webcomic sites, but the bottom line is, they are my business and no one else's. I don't want to have my internet movements tracked without my consent, just like I don't want my reading habits monitored or my phone calls listened in on. It's not because I am up to anything nefarious, I am just a private person.

People also seem to underestimate simple things like intimidation. If a person believes that participating in this protest is going to get them on a government watch-list which will then have agents snooping through their lives and records, then they are more likely to stay home when they otherwise would have exercised their First Amendment rights. Of course, the government did nothing overtly to curb their rights to freedom of speech, but they did through the use of perceived retaliation. These people have nothing to hide, but they don't want to have government agents poking their noses into their business.

The people who are saying this are largely doing so in response to the government violating the Fourth Amendment. After all, only Evil Doers™ need to be afraid and unlike the Evil Don'ters©, who Have Nothing to Hide, they do so why are you worried about enforcing the Fourth Amendment?

The only way this argument would work in the case of security or the pursuit of justice, however, is if the government could be shown definitively to have never, ever made a wrongful conviction in the entire history of that government's existence. Just one wrongful conviction, one, would be enough to render the If You've Done Nothing Wrong argument invalid. Well, here you go, everyone. One article about two such wrongful convictions. Not only have two innocent men been convicted, one was on Death Row for it. And, the icing on the cake of this is that the Supreme Court has basically said "Tough shit."

One innocent man, from Arizona, was sent back to prison for raping a child when the Supreme Court ruled he had no right to evidence that would later set him free.

Another innocent man, from Louisiana, was convicted of murder and came within weeks of being executed because prosecutors had hidden a blood test that later freed him.

The two men were linked at the Supreme Court last week by Justice Antonin Scalia, who argued that criminal defendants have no right to "potentially useful evidence" that "might" show they were innocent.

Since the 1990s, the advent of DNA evidence has swept across the American criminal justice system and revealed that hundreds of convicted prisoners were innocent. Yet, throughout that time, the Supreme Court has shielded prosecutors from claims that they hid evidence that could have revealed the truth and has been reluctant to give prisoners a right to reopen old cases.

By a 5-4 vote Tuesday, the high court threw out a jury verdict won by John Thompson, the Louisiana man who had sued the New Orleans district attorney after he spent 14 years on death row for crimes he did not commit. In the past, the court has shielded individual prosecutors from being sued, even if they deliberately framed an innocent person. Last week's decision protects a district attorney's office from being sued for a series of errors that sent an innocent man to prison.

Advocates for the wrongly convicted denounced the decision. Prosecutors have "enormous power over all of our lives," said Keith Findley, president of the Innocence Network, yet "no other profession is shielded from this complete lack of accountability."

In Thompson's case, at least four prosecutors knew of the blood test, eyewitness reports and other evidence that, once revealed, showed they had charged the wrong man.

"When this kind of conduct happens and it goes unpunished, it sends a devastating message throughout the system," said Sherrilyn Ifill, a University of Maryland law professor. "It means more of these incidents will happen."

So, no, I don't have anything to hide, but I've done nothing wrong so I'm not gonna show it to you anyway. Come back with a warrant.