A question for my Republican friends - why?

I have a question for any of my Republican friends or family out there.  Why would you (assuming you are planning to) vote for Mitt Romney and the Republican candidates for the House and Senate wherever you live?  I mean this in all sincerity.  Based on what policy positions do you find them preferable to President Obama and the Democrats?

Is it because of the slow recovery from the worst financial meltdown since the Great Depression?  If so, let's talk honestly about a) what caused that meltdown and b) what has slowed down the recovery.  It's indisputable that the meltdown occurred under George W. Bush's watch, and largely if not entirely due to policies enacted or reinforced by him.  The measures put into place by President Obama, primarily the stimulus package and the bailout of the auto industry, also indisputably kept the economy from spiraling completely out of control and devolving into a potentially worse crisis even than the aforementioned Depression.  Even a number of Republicans have admitted as much. 

Is it because of the persisting unemployment problem?  Let's look at that as well.  In the last year of the Bush administration and the first 9 months of the Obama administration, before any of his policies could take effect, the economy was simply hemorrhaging jobs - some months as many as 800,000 jobs lost.  Since the Obama policies have been in effect, we have been gaining private sector jobs consistently, every month, for two and a half years.  The unemployment situation would be even better if not for the consistent loss in public sector jobs, through local and state-enforced budget cuts and austerity measures, mostly enacted by Republican-controlled governors and legislatures.  Without those job losses, we would now have unemployment at around 7%. 

Further, the Republicans have been harping for years now about the jobs situation, but have offered not a single constructive job plan of their own.  Rather, Obama has pressured them time and again to pass his jobs bill, which would put millions of people back to work - not through frivolous government spending, but through keeping teachers, firefighters, and police officers working, and through a number of desperately needed infrastructure projects.  These are not "liberal, socialist" ideas.  Please remember that one of the greatest public infrastructure projects in the history of the world was enacted by President Eisenhower - the interstate highway system, without which our modern economy would be unable to function.  The Republicans in Congress made it not only implicitly clear, but EXPLICITLY clear, that their primary goal for the four years following Obama's inauguration in 2009 was to make sure he was a one-term President.  It was not to fix the economy, it was not to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it was not to help the millions of people being forced into bankruptcy and foreclosure.  It was to wrest political power from their perceived enemy, at the expense of the country and the American people.

Is it because of the President's foreign policies?  If you object to these based on their aggressive nature (drone attacks, indefinite detention, extra-judicial assassinations of suspected terrorists, etc), then you would certainly have objected both to President Bush's foreign policies and to those of any of the Republicans who sought the Presidency this time around, with the single exception of Ron Paul, who was so disgusted by what he has seen so far from the Romney camp and the GOP convention, that he now describes himself as an "undecided voter" and left the convention entirely.  Or perhaps you object to the fact that the President made the courageous decision to attack and kill Osama Bin Laden, the man responsible for 3,000 American deaths.  Or perhaps you object to his policies regarding Israel, even though Shimon Peres has recently said that Israel has had no better friend or advocate in the U.S. Presidency in history than Obama.  Mitt Romney likes to portray Obama as an "apologist" for America, but the facts simply don't line up behind this attack.

Is it because you oppose same-sex marriage?  If so, I need to know this, as I find opposition to this wholly insupportable with any sort of sane logic, and personally deeply offensive.

Is it because you believe the government should be able to force a woman to bear her rapist's child, or one whose gestation would threaten her very life?  This seems to me the very opposite of the supposed conservative value of keeping government out of people's lives.  

Or is it because you object to the Affordable Care Act?  Even though this legislation was modeled on the highly successful Massachusetts program put in place by Romney himself, he loves to blast this as governmental overreach and some sort of paean to socialism.  The fact is and always has been that this is a CONSERVATIVE idea, launched originally by the Heritage Foundation, on the principle that by putting in place a mandate, you keep the freeloaders (those who can afford insurance but choose not to have it, then use the emergency care system, ultimately resulting in increased costs for the insured) from wrecking the cost checks.  For those who truly can't afford insurance, other measures are in place to help them acquire it or to provide the truly poor with free coverage through Medicaid.  Republican talking points will call "Obamacare" socialized medicine, or a government takeover that strips you of your ability to make your own medical decisions.  The truth is just the opposite.  Obamacare relies primarily on private insurance, but puts into place protections for the insured that will keep costs down in the long run, prevent coverage from being denied because of pre-existing conditions, and eliminate lifetime caps that bankrupt people with devastating or chronic illnesses that require long-term, expensive care.  The number of people actually affected by the "penalties" associated with the mandate is extremely small, and there is scant enforcement mechanism.  The result, however, is the ability of the system to maintain itself, and that benefits everybody.

So which is it?  Because frankly, I don't see a single issue on which Romney and Ryan's policies are demonstrably better than Obama's, and in most cases they are disastrously, egregiously wrong.  In order to sell you on them, they've engaged in the most egregious lying and dissembling that has ever been wrought on the American people, at least in the modern era.  The best example of this is the current outrageous claim that Obama is "gutting" the work requirements from welfare.  In spite of the fact that every single fact-checking organization has decried this as an outright falsehood, the Romney camp has run FIVE separate ads (of their last 12) on this very issue, repeating this same lie.  This week a Romney spokesman asserted that their campaign would not be dictated to by "fact-checkers."  In other words - they would not be beholden to what the rest of us like to call "the truth."

So again, I ask you -- why? 

In defense of Lance Armstrong

The news today that Lance Armstrong will not continue to contest the doping charges filed against him by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency was certainly very disappointing and a bit perplexing. Lance has been the single most tested athlete in history, and has been cleared after every test - and yet the allegations persist.

If it's indeed true that Lance was using some sort of performance-enhancing drugs during his extraordinary run of Tour de France victories, it will definitely tarnish his reputation, and I will be quite disappointed in him - more for his dishonesty than for the doping itself.  

What this won't do is to invalidate completely my admiration for the man and what he has accomplished. After a start (pre-cancer) as an admittedly cocky and over-confident young man, he had not only his career but his very life threatened in the most serious and devastating way. On his initial diagnosis with testicular cancer that had metastasized to the lungs and brain, he was given approximately a 10% chance of surviving, let alone ever cycling competitively again.  

But survive he did, and came back not only a better cyclist, but a more thoughtful and dedicated man. In addition to the seven TDF wins, he founded the Lance Armstrong Foundation, which has raised, to date, over half a billion dollars for cancer research, and inspired millions of people to fight for their lives against seemingly impossible odds.  

I'm not going to justify his doping by saying that "everybody does it," but the fact of the matter is that in cycling, as in many sports, the preponderance of competitors are engaged in some manner of performance enhancement, and it becomes increasingly difficult to stay competitive without doing so. What I am going to do is to continue to give Lance the benefit of the doubt, until such time as it's proven there's no reason to, and I'm going to abide by my admiration for what the man has achieved.

When lying extends to branding

I've just read that the "theme" of the Republican Convention in Tampa next week will be "You DID build that." This cheap, dishonest swipe at the President's controversial "you didn't build that" statement elevates misrepresentation to a meta-level. They may as well just brand it the "Democrats are Commies" Convention. It's clear to anybody with more than an ounce of gray matter between the ears that the President never intended to suggest that business owners did not build their own businesses. His intent was plain and simple - to point out, correctly, that no business is built in a vacuum, wholly independent of the collective infrastructure that allows it to thrive. Without roads, bridges, telephone lines, the Internet, an electrical grid, and so on, there would be no business to build, no way to get goods, and no way to get customers, outside of perhaps a small farm in Amish country.

So make no mistake about it - the GOP is doing what it does best, which is to traffic in deliberate obfuscation and dishonesty. Next week is going to be interesting.

The problem with the "Both Sides Suck" argument

Last night and then more so this morning I got into a bit of a stew with a good friend, whose intelligence I admire but with whom I disagree on many, MANY issues of substance, over a bit of rhetorical silliness posted on the libertarian-leaning website reason.com. Clearly meant to be a satire of hysterical political punditry, it unfortunately feeds into the dangerous narrative on which far too many in the media rely, that of the "both sides are awful and an argument can be made equally on either side" school.

The particular irony of this piece coming from reason.com is that this might actually be true or even helpful if we were in normal times, where both sides relied on ... well, reason in making their political and policy arguments.  Unfortunately we are not in normal times, and one side, whether you want to call it the Republican Party, or the "right wing," or even what is today considered the conservative movement, has utterly eschewed reason on virtually every level.  From science to economics to basic principles of human decency and respect, they currently choose ideology and rigidity over common sense and critical thinking. They harp constantly about "liberty" but are actively engaged in the pursuit of massive voter suppression on a scale last seen in this country decades ago, and are trying to control women's personal choices in ways that make the distant 1950's look positively modern. You can't claim to be in favor of liberty and "small government" and then pass legislation in which the government forces women to have invasive, medically unnecessary procedures performed on them against their will and the advice of their doctors.

You also can't claim to be in favor of deficit reduction when your own economic plans do the exact opposite. Nor can you claim any credibility in the world of science when you deny both evolution and climate change in spite of massive scientific evidence verifying both.

So while I was ridiculed and called "humorless" for taking umbrage at this rhetorical nonsense, I stick by my original assertion that it is not only silly but dangerous. Both sides are NOT equally troubling, and whether you agree with everything the so-called "left" (though the current Democratic Party, including the President, would best be described in terms of a normal political spectrum as ranging from center-left on social issues to center-right on military ones), it has never been more important to stop the "other side," to wit the GOP and the right-wing, as it is now, if only to save it from the weight of its own intellectual, moral, and spiritual bankruptcy.

Your Royal Heiny... I mean Highness

I know the world was shocked... SHOCKED... to learn that the always roguish Prince Harry of Britain was romping naked with a young woman in the privacy of his VIP suite in a Las Vegas hotel.  Other than the mere titillation of it, why the hell do we care?  Oh yeah -- it's entirely BECAUSE of the mere titillation.

Here's the deal, folks.  He's a normal, randy 27 year old with a marked tendency to be outgoing, fun-loving, and a bit of a scamp.  He also happens to be hot, and a fucking PRINCE for crying out loud.  So everybody should just chill out, enjoy the pics, be grateful that it's Harry whose pics made it to TMZ and not his father or (shudder) Camilla, and send e-mails, cards, letters, and tweets to Prince Carl Philip of Sweden to follow suit.

From Bogeymen to Birthers - how the GOP is making America crazy and stupid.

Ever since this Sunday, when Missouri Congressman and Senatorial candidate Todd Akin made his lunatic statements about women's magical abilities to "shut down" the fertilization process in cases of "legitimate rape," the vast majority of the GOP, from establishment figures to Tea Party favorites, to the Presidential ticket, have been working themselves into a frenzy trying to distance themselves from that comment, and by extension, the sentiment behind it.  They've been calling on Akin to withdraw from the race, clearly terrified that he will poison not only the Senatorial race and any chance they have of regaining the majority, but the chances that Romney would win Missouri as well.

The fact of the matter, however, is that there is virtually no daylight between what Akin said, however inartfully, and GOP policy positions.  The official GOP Platform for 2012 advocates for a total national ban on abortion, even in the case of rape or incest.  They are putting forth the idea of a Constitutional Amendment as a means of achieving that objective, if they can't get Roe v. Wade overturned by SCOTUS.  This would, of course, join the ranks of that other Constitutional Amendment they would like to see, banning same-sex marriage across the land.  In the last century we can point to one time where the U.S. Constitution was used to LIMIT, rather than to expand rights, and we all remember how well that turned out.

If anybody thinks that Akin is an outlier here, I refer you to the fact Akin has had a very close ally in the House of Representatives on just these issues, in the person of none other than Paul Ryan, the presumptive nominee for Vice President.  Not only were the two of them (along with a large number of GOP members of the House) co-sponsors of a bill that would re-define rape, making a distinction between "forcible" rape and, I gather, "non-forcible rape," an oxymoron if ever I've heard one, but they worked hand in hand on the infamous "personhood" bill, which would grant to a fertilized ovum the status of a human being, potentially criminalizing everything from abortion to using an IUD.  This is a federal version of a bill that was so extreme not even the uber-right state of Mississippi was willing to pass it.  Never mind that it is scientifically ludicrous.

These ideas are, simply put, well outside the mainstream of rational thought, and frankly crazy.  The assertions about how a woman's body works are wholly unscientific and more than a little ridiculous.  But why should we expect any sort of rational thought from a party that has consistently denied climate science and even seeks to roll back the clock on our understanding of evolution?  This is a party that revels in, and extols the virtues of, ignorance.  To choose science over "faith," in their minds, is immoral and practically treasonous.

Science, unfortunately, is not the only intellectual discipline that the GOP seems to despise.  They also are failing miserably at math.  Somehow or other, with the assistance of a lazy media that allows itself to be duped into repeating useless and meaningless tropes, Paul Ryan and his magical budget have been put forward as "serious" and a genuine attempt to balance the budget and reduce both the national deficit and the national debt.  The problem is that, even if one takes the most optimistic assumptions on which the Ryan plan relies, and which most economists and political scientists, even those on the right, assert are improbable at best and likely impossible, and even by Ryan's own projections, the budget wouldn't be balanced for "30 or 40 years."  When pressed for details on how all of this magic (massive tax cuts for the wealthy, increased defense spending, massive cuts not only to services for the poor, elderly, and sick, but to virtually every other part of the federal government) would work, the answer from both Ryan and Romney is "we'll work that out in time -- trust us."  The fact is, it CAN'T work.  It's mathematically impossible.

So given its total rejection of science, miserable failures with math and economic theory (supply side economics, pushed since Reagan, have been shown simply not to work in practice), how has the GOP managed to fare so well electorally?  I believe this can be traced back to 1968, and Richard Nixon's infamous "Southern Strategy."  Prior to that time, the South was dominated by the Democratic Party.  To be sure, many of these Southern Democrats were socially conservative bible-belters, but they had seen how Democratic fiscal policies had worked for them, and stuck with that Party.  Nixon and his Machiavellian team came in and used the politics of racial division to convince Southern voters to vote against their own financial interests, and the GOP never looked back.

Ronald Reagan doubled down on this strategy with his foul, racist "welfare queen" language, and forever allied GOP politics with the use of the bogeyman - an evil "other" that is trying to steal your way of life, cheat you, betray the Republic, and laugh in the face of God.Virtually every other major campaign has used this strategy to some extent or another.  If it wasn't African Americans (welfare queens, Willie Horton) it was the gays, the baby-killers, the Muslims, the Latinos, the socialists - whatever they thought would stick.  It seems the lessons we as a country should have learned from the disaster of McCarthyism just didn't resonate long or hard enough, and we're still mired in this nonsense 60 years later.

All of this might have been a lot more difficult to pull off, in the age of the Internet, when we have ready access to virtually unlimited information, which should by all rights help to dispel the ignorance and fear on which the GOP hopes to capitalize.  The problem is that for as much fact as can be found on the Internet, even more fiction can be.  At the same time, journalism and factual reporting took a major hit when Fox News entered the picture and cast itself as an actual "news" organization, when it was, from the outset, purely a propaganda arm of the GOP, having absolutely no qualms about "reporting" absolute drivel, lies, and nonsense and passing it along as "fact."  They have deftly played upon the very fears and ignorance that the GOP peddles, and the results are clear.  Study after study has shown that people who get their news primarily from Fox actually know LESS, factually, than people who don't follow the news at all.  In order to achieve that you have to go beyond simply failing to inform, and deliberately MISinform.

And this is how we find ourselves here.  While the Democratic Party and President Obama have many failings, the GOP is now so completely off the rails that they should be laughed off any national stage, and yet they're in control of the U.S. House of Representatives as well as the majority of state legislatures, and are running scarily close to having a reasonable shot at both gaining control of the Senate and winning the Presidency.  They're putting forward a wholly reckless economic plan, and casting Obama and his plan as a "failure," when any shortcomings in the results of that plan are directly attributable to their own obstructionism.  It's the classic tactic of a schoolyard bully - make a mess, force the other guy to clean it up, then keep slapping the broom out of his hands while calling him an incompetent for not being able to get it done.

There are only two ways that we're going to get out of this insanity.  One is for the GOP to get SO extreme and crazy that nobody can possibly support it anymore.  They're perilously close to this point already.  They've painted themselves into such an extreme corner that there's nowhere further to go.  The other way is for the media to grow a collective set of cojones and drop the charade that there are two "sides" to this argument.  There no longer are.  There's the imperfect side and the lunatic side.  One side has some facts to back it, the other has fictions, lies, and demagoguery.  One can only hope that both things happen, and soon.

Mystery Science Project Theatre 2012

Somewhere along the line cosmetic surgery took a very dark and crazy turn.  Once used to tighten, tone, and "refresh" one's looks, or to correct perceived imperfections such as a crooked nose or a weak chin, it's now become a virtual science project and the results are both frightening and appalling.  Here's celebrimom Jackie Stallone, 90, at the premiere last night of The Expendables 2, looking like somebody put a Delta Burke wig and wax lips on the Gollum.  You can almost hear her in this picture rasping "The precious!! The precious!"

What happened to a 90 year old woman looking like a nice old lady?  It's one thing to stay youthful and attractive, but if this is an attempt at that, I'd rather see the Estelle Getty from The Golden Girls look, oversized vinyl purse and all.

On the plus side.... she could have a whole new career reviving the "Creature From the Black Lagoon" franchise.

Unrepentant lying, facts be damned.

Paul Ryan went on Sean Hannity's radio program and told as flat-out a lie as could be. He said in no uncertain terms that the President's cuts to Medicare would reduce services to current seniors. This is categorically false, and provable to anybody who bothers to check the facts. I've said already in this blog, and it's absolutely the case, that NOT ONE CENT is taken from services under the Obama prescription. The Republicans are always trying to claim the high ground when it comes to fiscal responsibility and cost-cutting, and here the President has done just that -- ensured more accountability and more efficiency without reducing services at all, and they're trying to claim the exact opposite.  

This is the biggest and boldest bunch of liars in American political history. Full stop.

Republican Strategy 101

In one of the most sickening and disgraceful episodes in American political history, the 2004 George W. Bush campaign, aided by the abhorrent "Swift Veterans For Truth," successfully used one of John Kerry's greatest strengths, his sterling military service, and turned it into one of his greatest weaknesses. Of course, in order to do this, they had to lie. As usual, in spite of pushback from the Kerry campaign and what we like to call the "facts," the nature of this kind of propaganda is such that a lie, repeated often enough, starts to be understood by enough people as the truth to make a difference.

Nobody should then be surprised that the Romney campaign now has the sheer audacity to try to campaign on their supposed strength, and Obama's supposed weakness, on Medicare, of all things. As with the Swift Boat campaign, it's complete nonsense. The Romney/Ryan claim is that the President "stole" $700 billion dollars from Medicare, to pay for the Affordable Care Act which, as we all know, they abhor (even though it's modeled on Romney's own plan in Massachusetts and stems from an idea hatched at the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation).  I'll give them credit -- this time it's not an OUTRIGHT lie, just a massive distortion.  The fact is, the President did not "cut" Medicare at all, but rather limited growth, entirely on the supplier side, by eliminating waste, fraud, and overcharging, primarily through the Medicare Advantage program.   NOT ONE CENT of these limitations, or "cuts," if you insist, comes in the form of reduced benefits.  NOT. ONE. CENT.  

Furthermore, the vaunted Ryan budget KEEPS these reforms, and then goes considerably further, to turn Medicare into a voucher program, shifting dollars to private insurance firms, and limiting the benefits so that most seniors will wind up having to pay more for their coverage. True to form, they are just not telling anything remotely resembling the truth, and trying to shift attention away from what really is one of their greatest weaknesses. The fact is, Americans LIKE Medicare, just like they LIKE Social Security. And these are not "entitlements," they are insurance programs into which people pay and contribute their entire working lives. They have kept millions of seniors, disabled, and ill people out of poverty, and been huge successes. 

But Republicans have hated these programs from the beginning, and will not be satisfied until we go back to the "good old days" before the New Deal. I think they've finally crossed the Rubicon, and that the American people are finally figuring out that the GOP does not have their best interests at heart - just their own twisted vision, which is something closer to fascism than democracy. And before anybody gets all riled up about my calling them fascists, I'll just close by suggesting you read what fascism is really about. Not Nazism, with which it is often confused, but real fascism. The GOP isn't quite there yet, but it's getting too close for comfort.

Romney, Ryan, Republicans, and the art of the false premise.

Politics has always been a dirty business, and dissembling is standard practice on both sides of any given aisle.  What's happened over the past few years, however, and has now gone turbo-charged under the rabid right-wing GOP, aided by lazy and incompetent media, is that the very premises on which arguments are made are utterly false, and nobody is quite calling them out on it.  The conventional narratives are just assumed to be true, regardless of evidence to the contrary.  What Romney has been doing, pretty much since he started campaigning (this time around) for the Presidency last year, is to make a patently untrue assertion about the motivations, goals, world views, and intentions of his opponents, and then run AGAINST those untrue assertions, as if they were real.

One clear example came early on, when Romney claimed that the President was "apologizing for America," and somehow belittling the notion of American exceptionalism.  He also tried to portray the President as an appeaser in his approach to foreign policy.   The facts speak for themselves, and completely belie the assertion.  One might well take exception to some of the President's policies in this area (and I do - particularly his assertion of executive power to make targeted killings of certain suspected terrorists, even if they are U.S. citizens), but one can hardly call the man who defied the Pakistani government to find and kill Osama Bin Laden, enact the harshest sanctions to date on Iran, and by virtually every measure be anything BUT soft or overly cautious about foreign policy issues.

In just the last month Romney has taken on at least two new false premises, and run with them.  In at least one of these cases, the media has taken some notice and called him out, but on the other he has gone largely unchecked and unchallenged.  First he asserted that the President was attempting to strip veterans and active military personnel of their early voting rights in Ohio.  The truth was diametrically the opposite.  What the President was calling for was to restore the early voting rights of ALL Ohioans, including veterans and military personnel.  Next came the infamous charge that the President was stripping the welfare program of its work requirements, and then running against him on that basis.  Again -- completely false.  This time Romney was called out by SOME in the media, but not strongly enough that he didn't run a new ad making the same entirely bogus assertion as recently as yesterday.

Perhaps the biggest false premise on which the GOP is resting the bulk of its case for political victory in November, and on which they have been coasting for a number of years now, is that they are the party looking to restore fiscal sanity and responsibility, to reduce the deficit and begin to pay off the crushing national debt.  This is where the media has been the absolute laziest, as they've largely bought into this narrative, as well as into the narrative that Paul Ryan and his draconian budget plan are "serious" and "bold."  Any rational, objective analysis of the Ryan budget shows that it not only fails to accomplish any sort of deficit reduction, but would actually INCREASE the deficit and the debt.  To begin with, the plan, in its own language, relies on best case scenarios for even its base assumptions - scenarios that are highly unlikely, and without which the economics of the plan fall completely apart.  Moreover, even if those best case scenarios were to be realized, the numbers don't add up.  In order to give the outsized tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans and increase the defense budget as called for in the plan, the federal government would have to eliminate virtually EVERY other service (outside the eviscerated shells of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security) that the government provides. 

It's important to understand that Paul Ryan is not stupid.  He can do the math as well as anybody else.  He's just misrepresenting himself and his goals.  This is entirely in line with Grover Norquist's infamous line about shrinking government to the size that it can be drowned in a bathtub.  THAT is the goal of the GOP, Mitt Romney, and Paul Ryan.  And until the media calls them out on this, as well as their denial of science, their embrace of the most radical elements of social conservatism, and their utter contempt for anybody but themselves, they will continue to survive as a party and as a movement.  They will lose in November, to be sure, but they will just double down, and come roaring back with ever more extreme views, ever more false assertions, and ever smaller connection to reality.

Plus ça change....

Romney's pick of Paul Ryan as his running mate was supposed to be a game changer, providing his campaign with some serious talking points and a clear "vision" beyond just slamming Obama.  Today they're out with their first new ad since the VP announcement, and instead of touting any of Ryan's "bold" new ideas, they've reverted to another ad spreading an outright fabrication - a demonstrable lie.  The ad once again claims that Obama has quietly removed the work requirements from the welfare program.

This isn't about spin, this isn't about opinion, this isn't about perspective.  This is a flat-out, demonstrable lie.  It's factually incorrect on every level.  There is absolutely no justification for it, no way to look at the situation from a different angle and arrive at this conclusion.  It's just lying.  The Romney campaign was roundly savaged for spreading this lie the first time, so now, rather than recanting or saying they chose the wrong words, they're just repeating the same completely disproven lie.  

How on earth do they expect to get away with this?  I'll tell you how.  We have a lazy, incompetent, complicit media that will not do the right thing here, which would be to scream it from the headlines and shout it on the airwaves.  "LIARS!!"  Let's see what happens.

The Ryan Pick

I picked a great weekend to start blogging.  On Friday Mitt Romney decided to go full-bore right-wing pander machine by choosing Paul Ryan, the current standard-bearer for the faux-libertarian supply-side social Darwinist fantasy camp as his running mate.  Clearly he felt the need to invigorate his flagging campaign, but rather than making an attempt to reach out to the small percentage of voters who are undecided and therefore rather likely moderate or at  least ideologically flexible, he went to the far-right of the ideological spectrum and embraced everything that the middle should, and probably does, deplore.  I hope it backfires on him in epic fashion.

Consider that Ryan is not really a fiscal conservative in the classical sense, in that his prescription virtually by definition will lead to greater deficits and greater debt.  Rather, he advocates a budget that cuts services to the poor, working class, disabled, elderly, and students that are so draconian that even very right-wing members of his own party (hello Newt Gingrich, whose characterization of Ryan's budget plan as "right-wing social engineering" got him in huge trouble with the party, until he had to back down) were appalled, while giving enormous gifts in the way of tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans who hardly need them, and not specifying how exactly all of this is supposed to be paid for. 

Socially, he's just as right-wing as he is fiscally.  He believes we should reinstate Don't Ask Don't Tell, endorses a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, and was co-sponsor of a fetal personhood bill that would open the door to banning virtually all abortions and even some forms of birth control.

But make no mistake -- Paul Ryan is no Sarah Palin.  Whereas Palin was crazy and stupid, Ryan is just crazy.  He's bright, well-spoken, and borderline attractive, if you don't mind the skinny lips and bug eyes.  It will be interesting to see just how long it takes America to figure out what a total fraud and prick he is.

Get the blog outta here...

It's said that opinions are like assholes - everybody has one.  Well, I've got a lot more than one, so I've decided to join the army of cranks and blowhards who use the fine art of blogging to air them.  In these pages I will air my thoughts on politics, pop culture, fine culture, health, food, and anything else that pops into my head.  Feel free to read what you like, and skip over what doesn't interest you.  Here goes something.