To your health...

The weather's been especially windy this month, and so have I. What the hell — here comes post #11 for March.

As we have seen in the past week (if we hadn't noticed it earlier), the Supreme Court is thoroughly politicized. Now there is no branch of government in which the American people can place its faith.

The first mistake of the Obama administration was deciding to go with a health care plan designed by the Heritage Foundation. Did Our President think a plan designed by a right wing think tank would lead to bipartisan support for universal coverage? Probably not. For a smart man, he's more than a little naive, but he couldn't have been that innocent. Even though he never actually joined the DLC, he's been a fellow traveler — and he certainly didn't want to offend the deep-pocketed insurance industry.

I don't know whether the individual mandate is or isn't constitutional, and I don't suppose it especially matters — unless Chief Justice Roberts, perhaps, figures out he no longer is beholden to the plutocrats, or Kennedy hits the Jameson's a little harder than usual. (Our affirmative action Justice, as usual, said nothing — but we all know how he'll vote.)

What I do know is that if the Democrats had some organization, some discipline, and some guts, we might even have single payer on the horizon instead of a jumbled mishmash of questionable legislation which will do nothing to lower health care costs. (Okay, that was just wishful thinking — too many goddamned DINOs were standing in the way. There may have been sixty Democrats in the Senate, but there were a hell of a lot fewer liberals.)

I can't fault Sandra Day O'Conner for leaving the court — I am not one to begrudge anybody's retirement — but I still wish she had stayed. I don't know how she would have voted, but I'm sure her vote would have been based on her understanding of the law rather than on ideology.

Okay. That should do it for March.

Scary People

Hmmm... this guy looks like bad news. Maybe you ought to shoot him.

Okay, he seems to be a bit older than the people you ordinarily shoot, and a bit whiter. Just the same, that's a threatening look on his face. Are you feeling threatened?

In Florida, you can feel free to shoot him, with the blessing of the NRA inspired and ALEC drafted "Stand Your Ground" law. Very similar laws exist in 23 other states, and the movement seems to be spreading, despite the outcry over the murder of Trayvon Martin.

As of this writing, George Zimmerman, the man who shot Trayvon Martin, has been neither arrested nor charged with any offense. As far as I can tell, the Sanford police didn't even confiscate his gun. He tells a fairly incredible story about being attacked by the 140 pound teenager — about 100 pounds less than Zimmerman weighs — and acting in self-defense.

To me, George Zimmerman sounds like a very scary man. Even though I'm an old white man and I had to Photoshop myself into that hoodie because I don't own any, I'm pretty sure I'd feel threatened if I ran into him on the street. Florida law, I believe, permits me and anybody else who shares my apprehension the legal right to blow him away. No wonder he's in hiding.

Keystone XL

Just in case you were not aware — and hardly anybody is — there already is a Keystone pipeline, extending from the oil sands of Alberta to Cushing, Oklahoma, and St. Louis, Missouri. Our President just announced that he wishes to expedite a southern extension of the pipeline from Cushing to the refineries of Port Arthur, Texas.

Why Port Arthur? Because it's a port, of course! That makes the refined products much simpler to export. The United States is a net exporter of petroleum products, and the southern leg of Keystone will help to expand those exports. It will not increase the supply (much less lower the cost) of gasoline in the United States.

Granted, that would help to reduce, to a small extent, our trade deficit — but selling jet fuel to European airlines does nothing to relieve the current stress on American drivers. If the idea were to increase American gasoline supply, it would make a lot more sense (environmentally as well as economically) to approve a fairly short new pipeline from Alberta to Montana, where there are refineries that serve the United States.

The devil, as always, is in the details. The American public, typically, has no clue.

How dum r we?

It is no secret that Americans read little and none too well. American computational skills have necessitated the development of the modern cash register, which requires only that the human being be sufficiently competent to scan in a price, punch in the amount of cash presented, and count out the correct amount of change. (The operators of such machines generally earn more than minimum wage because of their superior skill sets.)

Hence, it comes as no surprise that there is a lot of support, out there, for assorted Republican candidates for the House, the Senate, and the Presidency. If you've had a look at Paul Ryan's latest budget proposal, you will understand that Ryan — like me — does not hold American intelligence in high regard.

Just two tax brackets?!!! Are you kidding?!!! (No.) Letting American corporations repatriate their foreign profits for free, forever?!!! (I know! Let's ship even more jobs overseas!) Let's not even bother to consider the extreme reductions to high income and corporate tax rates.

(Well, maybe we ought to at least think about them, because we Americans are not too bright. The justification for tax breaks to the rich is that they will invest more in our economy and, therefore, create jobs. Sounds good, except that when they got tax breaks under Bush, they invested their extra money in derivatives — not new business — and brought down the Western World. Derivatives represent fast money. Investments that create jobs represent slow money. Don't bet on the tortoise against the hare. You'll lose.)

I won't get into Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, Pell grants, and the rest of the proposed Ryan cuts right now — suffice to say that the plutocrats grow fatter and grosser at the expense of the far more ordinary. Romney implies that the ordinary deserve to struggle all their lives, because they're dumb — and he deserves to be President because he embodies the "meritocracy."

Well, the ordinary are pretty dumb, but that doesn't mean they don't deserve decent lives — with decent incomes, decent health care, and what used to be very ordinary hopes for the future of their children. If we really had a meritocracy, Paris Hilton would be whoring out on the Tenderloin, and Romney's vast brood would have no greater opportunities than some very nice, bright kids who are growing up in East Harlem.

Watch Obama move even further to the right. Here, in the 21st century, money moves all mountains — and it makes me sick.

The "JOBS" Bill

When I first heard about the bipartisan JOBS (Jump-start Our Business Start-ups) bill, I didn't pay a lot of attention, figuring it was just some innocuous bit of legislation with a politically attractive acronym. Well, I was wrong. I should have remembered one of my first laws of American politics:

Bipartisan means everybody gets screwed.

What the bill does is gut financial regulations put in place after the Enron debacle, and then some. When this bill is signed into law by Our President (yes, he's in on it too), companies going public can ignore many important auditing requirements, keep executive compensation a secret, and market shares directly to consumers over the internet. Five'll get you ten the JOBS Act's most outstanding accomplishment will be a massive explosion of fraud.

Here's how to do it, amateur grifters. Incorporate; announce your IPO; create some buzz with posts to consumer finance blogs; sell blocks of stock for relatively small sums, say fifty or one hundred dollars; take all the money from sales and pay it to yourself as an undisclosed executive salary; declare bankruptcy.

It's so easy, even a Congressman could do it.

Sexual Politics

CNN informs me that Rick Santorum just won Alabama and Mississippi — albeit the count shows Romney and Gingrich not very far behind. Whatever. It's time to look at the politics of abortion, contraception, and (not yet mentioned in this campaign) masturbation.

For all human groups, throughout history, survival has depended on numbers. When two tribes had to work out who got the river valley and who got the desert, the big tribe got the prime real estate and the small tribe got to wander in the wilderness. It's no different with religions. The more adherents to a faith, the more likely it is to survive. "Be fruitful and multiply," sayeth the Lord. If you don't, those damnable Egyptians or Hittites or whatever will wipe you out.

Increasing your group's numbers depends on keeping your women pregnant. Naturally, it follows that religions competing with other religions for population will have "moral" prohibitions against birth control, abortion, and that "sin of Onan," which "wastes" what could be used to keep the group's women perpetually pregnant (and don't forget to kill the queers.)

In the United States, "mainstream" Protestants, secularized Jews and Catholics, and those with no particular interest in any religion are failing to be fruitful and multiply, perhaps under the impression that they can do more for one or two children than for seven or eight — while traditional Catholics and Muslims, Mormons, and many Evangelicals are breeding like bunnies.

In a democracy, the breeders, eventually, will win.

The Kandahar Massacre

A 38-year-old Army sergeant and a father of two (according to sources for the New York Times) left his base in Kandahar, kicked down the doors of a bunch of people who lived about a mile from the base, and killed sixteen of them. Most were children.

Afghanistan's vox populi doubts the "lone gunman" theory, but most likely it was one guy driven batshit crazy by his service — three tours in Iraq, and a final tour in Afghanistan. Needless to say, he had to be batshit crazy, but that little factoid should not be allowed to invoke any no-fault insurance policies. The blame should fall exactly where it belongs — on the United States military. Only the military had the opportunity to drive him batshit crazy, and only the military had the responsibility to notice he was nuts.

Except for a few psychopaths, who rise rapidly either to the middle ranks of the military or the upper echelons of government, even young men have inhibitions about killing. One of the inevitable objectives of military training must be dehumanizing "the enemy." It's a damned shame that the only options available to basic training personnel consist of either teaching the gung-ho youth sophisticated and nuanced ways to discriminate between "the enemy" and potential friends, or just teaching them to hate all "towelheads"

We all know which approach they take — the easy one.

The video of American soldiers pissing on the corpses of dead Afghans (who may or may not have been Taliban — it doesn't matter), and the "accidental" burning of a stack of Korans at Bagram should have provided ample proof that whatever the US military is doing to train its troops is inadequate at best, more likely counterproductive or, at worst, suicidal. The Kandahar murders just put the cherry on top.

Considering that the main thing we've been doing in Afghanistan for too, too many years has been propping up the corrupt Karzai government, I suggest it's time to tell America's ignorant masses we won, and just get the fuck out. (As a matter of fact, I think that's exactly what Obama plans to do. I wish him luck.)