Freak Out

Divine Irony:

(Source: tastefullyoffensive)

↵ Originally from tastefullyoffensive
↵ Reblogged from savagemike

Silly People; Free Speech Rights Are For Corporations Only

Think Progress:

Several years ago, the American Medical Association advised doctors to ask their patients about firearms and “educate patients to the dangers of firearms to children” in the name of public health.

But doctors in Florida may be suppressed from giving this medical advice, now that a federal appeals court upheld a Florida law that became known as the “physician gag rule” because it punishes doctors for talking about guns.

But the only-corporations-have-free-speech aspect of this is not the most horrifying aspect: a federal appeals court has ruled that anti-science mumblings of slope-headed mouith-breathers trumps the medical necessity of doctors treating their patients.

I think this is proof that the NRA and the anti-woman freakazoids are working trigger-in-claw.

What's next? No blood tests because they make Jehovah's Witnesses queasy?  No health care for women because only men can be doctors and non-familial men can't view women un-burkahed?

Don't laugh:  First they came for the abortionists .... 

The Great Missed Opportunity

Like Digby, I was 15, and I remember it and the consequences the same way:

I didn't experience euphoria.  I was stunned though. Seeing the most powerful man in the world brought low by his own hubris (and psychic wounds) was an early lesson in human nature. A real life greek tragedy in front of my very eyes.

Perlstein said something very interesting yesterday on MSNBC. He pointed out that all of this was really a very fine moment for America.  The system worked.  The leaders of our nation were able to come to a consensus about something gone very wrong and rectify it.  It began a period of national self-reflection, a reckoning of sorts with the dark side of our power which had been sorely abused in the post war world. It was painful and difficult but as a nation we were facing up to ourselves and attempting to make adjustments in order to live up to our ideals. We were maturing as a country.

And then along came Reagan with his happy horseshit about American goodness and patriotism, giving excuses for everything, assuring the citizens that we could do no wrong. He infantalized us, making it impossible for America to become a truly mature nation able to face its own past and deal responsibly with its immense power around the globe. You know, actually be the "exceptional" country we like to pretend we are today.

This was a big moment, one that could have truly changed the trajectory of our nation in a positive way.  But apparently we just couldn't face up to what we were becoming. And so we turned to a man who made us feel like children again.

My very conservative republican grandmother never directly criticized Nixon, for whom she had voted three times. But in 1974, the very early days of Second Wave Feminism, my very un-feminist grandmother took me aside to say this:

"What this country needs is more women in politics, because they aren't corrupt." She was wrong about the second part - Geraldine Ferraro and Sarah Palin are proof of that - but dead right on the first part.

Play the Game

ummagumma.co

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Morality and the Trees

ummagumma.co:

(Source: atheistjack)

Ghosts

ummagumma.co:

(Source: johnnyfourhandles)

Questions and Answers

ummagumma.co:

           

Profit

ummagumma.co:

(Source: omnisvalidus)

QOTD

DR Tucker at Political Animal:

I’ll say this about Nixon: he was wrong, crooked, and vile in a great many ways—but on his worst day, he was better than George W. Bush.

Some Kentucky Laws Other States Want to Copy

Notice that the "Freakazoids Don't Have to Obey Any Laws They Don't Like But Fuck You Atheists" law did not make the list. 

From the Legislative Research Commission:

The Council of State Governments will consider adopting 12 bills from Kentucky as model legislation at its August annual meeting.

 

The bills, all of which became law, range from the well-publicized Juvenile Justice Reform Act to a lesser-known bill that provided civil liability protections to engineers and architects who volunteer their services after a natural disaster or emergency.

 

The council annually publishes suggested legislation about topics of current importance to states. The goal is to compile draft legislation so states can learn from the experience of others and not to influence the enactment of state legislation, according to the council.

 

A special committee of the council meets at least twice a year and typically reviews approximately 80 pieces of legislation per meeting, voting to include an average of 30 to 40 bills in its yearly volume of suggested legislation. It prefers to consider legislation that has been enacted into law by at least one state.

 

State officials and their staff, council and council staff can submit legislation to be considered. The committee also considers legislation from other sources, but only when that legislation is submitted through a state official.

 

The other Kentucky bills being considered including measures to:

 

·         set emission standards for power plants ahead of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulations.

 

·         require businesses to report data breaches of individuals’ personal information.

 

·         allow victims forced into prostitution by human traffickers to take steps to clear their criminal records.

 

·         make “upskirting,” the practice of taking photos up women’s skirts without their knowledge, illegal.

 

·         make the possession of cash registers altered to avoid recording all sales illegal. Known as “tax zappers,” the devices are used by merchants to avoid reporting sales taxes.

 

·         automatically terminate parental and custody rights of anyone convicted of felony rape when the mother chooses to keep the child.

 

·         create an adult abuse registry to allow employers to find out whether potential adult-care workers have been the subject of a substantiated finding of adult abuse, neglect, or exploitation.

 

·         allow Kentucky to share prescription drug monitoring information with other states. It is designed to stop “doctor shopping” among prescription pain pill addicts.

 

·         create exemptions that permit some mini-trucks to operate on public highways. Mini-trucks are sold as off-road vehicles, such as the John Deere brand of Gator utility vehicles.

 

·         allow victims of domestic violence and sexual assault to remove their addresses from public voter registration rolls.

 

The Lexington-based council describes itself as a region-based forum that fosters the exchange of insights and ideas to help state officials shape public policy.

 

So, Basically

ummagumma.co:

(Source: deannajackson

"The United States cannot and should not intervene every time there’s a crisis in the world"

Nor can nor should the United States send American service men and women to die in some hellhole to protect the profits of multination corporations that don't even pay American taxes. Gather up the warmongers giving you bad advice and treat them to a showing of "Good Morning America."  Where Indochina was 50 years ago is we are right now in the Middle East, and it's not fucking funny.




Full transcript here.

Leave the Corn-Pone to the Repugs

Steve M. surveyed the smashed and burning remains of Brian Schweitzer's one-bright political future and diagnosed a terminal case of redneck-itis.

Please, Dems, just don't do this. The pork-rind-and-country-music party has lost the popular vote in four five of the last five six presidential elections. A guy nobody thinks ever owned a hunting dog won two straight elections. It's a new day. And if you're going to try to appeal to the white working class, do it by promising to improve their economic lot -- and then make good on the promise. They'll let you eat all the quiche you want.

Are you listening, Alison? Put down the long gun and start talking to Kentucky Democratic voters like the liberal adults we are.

How to Use Reagan Against the Repugs

Too many dems make the mistake of thinking Reagan is the repug's biggest strength. In fact, he's their greatest weakness, both because he wasn't who they thought he was, and because their blindness about him makes them vulnerable to being sucker-punched with the truth.

Digby:

Rick Perlstein pointed out the error in that formulation a long time ago citing the Great Communicator as the example of how this sort of appeal can be done to advance your agenda while appealing to people across the aisle. (By the way, it includes making some of your enemies furious ...)

Reagan didn't praise FDR. He stole from him. As in, "This generation has a rendez vous with destiny." We should steal from Reagan too. As in: "There is no left and right. Only up or down." He would then use that intro to frame some outrageously right-wing notion as "common sense." We should do the same for left-wing ideas.

Also, use Reagan to mess with righties' heads. As in: I agree we need a Reaganite foreign policy. When Reagan realized we were caught in the crossfire of a religious civil war in Lebanon, he got the hell out. He would have done the same thing in Iraq. The rule isn't "never say anything nice about Reagan." It's "use Reagan for progressive ends."

SNIP

Reality does bite and Reagan wouldn't have been able to sustain that position if the economy hadn't been improving, but he understood that the only way forward politically was to assert the rightness of his policies and philosophy. It was a gamble, but then it was a gamble either way.

Both Obama and Reagan won their re-elections, likely due to the improving economy as much as anything else. But Reagan had instilled a bedrock belief in a very large number of people that the conservative philosophy was the key to success. I don't think President Obama can say the same thing.

Whatever Happened to the Liberal Hellhole that Higher Taxes Were Supposed to Create? Well, Funny Story ....

How many years is it now that conservatives have an unbroken streak of being dead-fucking-wrong about abso-fucking-lutely everything?  30? 100? 5,000?

 

Paul Krugman:

Needless to say, conservatives predicted doom. A representative reaction: Daniel J. Mitchell of the Cato Institute declared that by voting for Proposition 30, which authorized those tax increases, “the looters and moochers of the Golden State” (yes, they really do think they’re living in an Ayn Rand novel) were committing “economic suicide.” Meanwhile, Avik Roy of the Manhattan Institute and Forbes claimed that California residents were about to face a “rate shock” that would more than double health insurance premiums.

What has actually happened? There is, I’m sorry to say, no sign of the promised catastrophe.

If tax increases are causing a major flight of jobs from California, you can’t see it in the job numbers. Employment is up 3.6 percent in the past 18 months, compared with a national average of 2.8 percent; at this point, California’s share of national employment, which was hit hard by the bursting of the state’s enormous housing bubble, is back to pre-recession levels.

On health care, some people — basically healthy young men who were getting inexpensive insurance on the individual market and were too affluent to receive subsidies — did face premium increases, which we always knew would happen. Over all, however, the costs of health reform came in below expectations, while enrollment came in well above — more than triple initial predictions in the San Francisco area. A recent survey by the Commonwealth Fund suggests that California has already cut the percentage of its residents without health insurance in half. What’s more, all indications are that further progress is in the pipeline, with more insurance companies entering the marketplace for next year.

And, yes, the budget is back in surplus.

The Cure for Terrorism

ummagumma.co:

"Heroes" Is Not A Compliment

If you've ever met a recipient of the Medal of Honor (don't you dare call them "winners"; it's not the fucking lottery), you know that they forcefully reject the label "hero."

When they say, "I'm not a hero, anybody in the same situation would have done the same thing," they're not being disingenuous.  They mean it.

So stop saying it.

From Firedoglake:

- Calling soldiers as “heroes” dehumanizes them. It ignores what they faced and will continue to face.

The Politician of Joy

Wonkette favorite Old Handsome Joe Biden was his usual irresistible self at Netroots Nation last month, as Charlie Pierce writes:

He's one of the last politicians I know who really enjoys getting up and doing this, who really enjoys jumping through the preposterous hoops that are set up for every national candidate. The general feeling here is that Biden will not run for president if Hillary Clinton does. This is unfortunate. If there was ever a contrast to be made with the dour, mechanized, winning-through-effort style of the former Secretary of State, it is Biden's Humphrey-esque joie de pancake breakfast. As much as he deplored the politics of division in this country, which he did throughout the last third of his speech, Biden finds in politics the kind of joy and the kind of outlet for the goofier angels of our nature that have been bred out of our politicians by four generations of political consultants. Biden is Lyndon with his beagles, and FDR with a cocktail shaker. He is the last real eccentric, and he knows it, and he plays it to the hilt because it is so much of what he is. Tattered and worn and old as it is. Joe Biden's freak flag still flies high and proud.

 

Also, he swims in the nude. If he runs against Hillary, I will quit my job to work on his campaign.

No-Shit Story of the Summer

Yes, of course stand-your-ground laws increase homicides.  They are really shoot-all-the-ni**ers-you-can-find laws and everybody knows it.

 

Dylan Scott at TPM last month:

Homicides increase under the "castle doctrine" or Stand Your Ground laws, according to two studies published since 2012, while the laws do not appear to deter crime in any significant way.

Researchers at Georgia State and Texas A&M universities used different methodologies and data sources to reach their conclusions, but they ended up in the same place: More people are killed after these laws are passed.

Researchers at Texas A&M University, for a study published in the Journal of Human Resources, concluded that homicides had increased by 8 percent in the more than 20 states that had passed "castle doctrine" laws, many of which include Stand Your Ground provisions. That equals 600 additional homicides every year in those states, they wrote.

At the same time, however, the researchers found no detectable decrease in burglary, robbery or aggravated assault.

"Collectively, these findings suggest that incentives do matter in one important sense: lowering the threshold for the justified use of lethal force results in more of it," the authors concluded in the report.  

"On the other hand, there is also a limit to the power of incentives, as criminals are apparently not deterred when victims are empowered to use lethal force to protect themselves."

Advice for Democratic Candidates

Inspiring discouraged Democrats to get out and vote in the numbers that will prevent a repug tsunami is not going to be easy, but neither is it rocket science, if dems just concentrate on what's really happening.

Steve M:

So what can Democrats do? I think they have to start talking about why popular Democratic policies don't get enacted. The reason is that there are too damn many Republicans in Congress.

I think they have to say, "When you elect Republicans, they block any increase in the minimum wage. When you elect Republicans, they block every bill that would put people to work. When you elect Republicans, they block immigration reform. When you elect Republicans, they insist on trying to get the budget under control by cutting programs that people really need because they refuse to allow the taxes of the wealthiest Americans to go up by even one dime." And so on and so on.

Maybe you even need to explain the filibuster -- yes, on the campaign trail. Don't you think Bill Clinton could pull that off in a speech and still keep an audience's attention? Well, why should that be a unique skill? The president is a pretty good speaker, too, isn't he?

According to a recent New York Times/CBS poll, 59% of voters are at least somewhat "disappointed" in the Obama presidency, including 24% of Democrats. Why is that? Partly it's because people thought he could do more. Well, most voters don't have a clear picture of why he can't do more. They need some Civics 101 so they'll understand. And they need someone to explain what the solution would be, even if it's highly unlikely to be attainable.

Why is it so difficult for Democrats to say that Republicans are the problem? Republicans have no problem blaming Democrats, and they're not punished at the polls for "divisiveness," at least in non-presidential elections.

Assess the blame where it belongs. Otherwise, voters just think that ineffectual Democrats are the real problem.

As Kevin Drum put it:

 Democrats simply don't consistently support concrete policies that help the broad working and middle classes. Half of them voted for the bankruptcy bill of 2005. They've done virtually nothing to stem the growth of monopolies and next to nothing to improve consumer protection in visible ways. They don't do anything for labor. They're soft on protecting Social Security. They bailed out the banks but refused to bail out underwater homeowners. Hell, they can't even agree to kill the carried interest loophole, a populist favorite if ever there was one.

Sure, Democrats do plenty for the poor. They support increases in the EITC and the minimum wage. They support Medicaid expansion. They passed Obamacare. They support pre-K for vulnerable populations. They expanded CHIP. But virtually none of this really benefits the working or middle classes except at the margins.

Now McElwee wants to use environmentalism to appeal to the working class. I'm all for that. But you don't have to play 11-dimensional chess to figure out how Republicans will respond. They'll say that Democrats want to raise your taxes. They'll say Democrats want to take away your plastic bags. They'll say Democrats want to make us all drive tiny cars or take the train everywhere. In coal country they'll say Democrats want to take away your jobs.

And then Democrats will wonder yet again why a big chunk of the working class votes for Republicans. It's a stumper all right.

Apologies for being peevish. But honestly, Democrats have done virtually nothing for the middle class for three decades now. They're nearly as reliant on the business community for campaign funding as Republicans. Can we all stop pretending that there's some deep mystery about why lots of working and middle class voters figure there are no real economic differences between the parties, so they might as well vote on social issues instead?