One Last Political Post of ’09 …

… may the coming year/decade bring with it more sanity. OK, so I doubt the coming year but possibly the coming decade. You know, hope and change I can believe in.

I want to sincerely thank Mary Matalin and Dana Perino for finally freeing me entirely from giving any credence to anything coming out of Republicans. These two people are not pundits, talking heads, or politi-tainers in any way. They are policy advisors and former members of presidential administrations. They are the people Republicans hire to help run government during Republican administrations. And they are the worst sort of liars in a sea of horrible liars:

Mary Matalin: "… we inherited a recession from President Clinton and we inherited the most tragic attack on our own soil in our nation's history." [emphasis mine]

Did I fucking hear that right? Inherited 9/11? James my ragin' Cajun, I realize you and your wife don't talk politics at home but please tell me you at least raised an eyebrow at her over that one.

But wait, there's more:

Dana Perino: "But we did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush's term."

Blink. Blink. I have no sane words for this. Terrorists flying planes into buildings aren't terrorist attacks on our country? Shoe bomber? Um, if we haven't had a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush's term, then why do I have to take my shoes off at the airport and have my underwire screened before I get on a plane?

Media Matters, Thing Progress, and Salon (sort of) all point out the obvious. These are bald-faced lies and distortions that don't have so much as a grain of sand grounded in reality.

But I'm grateful because it's the kind of bald-faced lie by actual Republican operatives and government policy advisors that shows how low these people are willing to go in an attempt to rewrite history and proves they have no interest in anything other than regaining power. And we have 8 years of evidence as to what happens when a Republican President is in power and 12 years of evidence as to what happens when Congress is in Republican hands. They'll do nothing about the issues they then bitch about when Democrats (who clearly campaigned on and were elected based those issues) try to address those issues. I don't care if you don't like what the Dems are doing, disagreements are fine, but in one of my favorite quotes right now, please stop telling us how to hold the mop when we're wiping up the mess you made. You had the mop, and you just made the mess bigger.

Anyway, I do sincerely hope that this is the last political post I make this year, because if it isn't, that means something so astronomically more stupid happens in the next ~35 hours.

Happy New Year!

Rudolph the Green-Eyed Reindeer

This is going to be another STFU post.

Note to everyone, get out of everyone else's holiday bidness. Believe it or not, this is meant to be a message of peace on earth/good will towards men (and women, thank you Batman). Can everyone please just back off and let the holidays flow? Are you really so insecure in your own holiday spirit you have to spit on someone else's? Or are you so jealous that you think someone is getting something out of the holidays that you aren't?

The following types of people need to STFU.

• Faux News kicking off the annual war against the so-called war on Christmas. Actually anyone saying "war on Christmas." There were actual wars on Christmas (where people died) as well as wars to force Christmas (where people died). We need a Christmas version of Godwin's Law.
  
• Ann Coulter screeching about how Kwanza's a fake holiday. Ok, Ann Coulter screeching about anything. Please, please, please STFU!
  
• Christians howling how it's Jesus's birthday (it's not, but whatever) and we're all going to hell if we don't embrace Christmas their way.
  
• The anti-consumerists' shrill smugness about the materialism and consumerism of the holiday.
  
• Anyone attacking anyone for wearing a Christmas sweater. They're ugly, I assume you know it, I assume you choose it anyway for your own reasons. In the spirit of the live-and-let-live holiday spirit I embrace, I take a leave of absence from the Fashion Police Brigade during the holidays.
  
• Anyone attacking anyone for wearing a Santa hat.
  
• Any Salvation Army collector who gives me a guilt trip for not donating when I've literally passed 10 Santa-wearing bell ringers in a five block radius (how the hell do you know I haven't donated yet!)
  
• Anyone who cringingly defends their Santa hat/Christmas sweater/candy-cane earrings. Wear it loud and proud folks if you're going to wear it at all!
  
• People insisting if you're not spending the day with family, you're screwing up the holiday somehow.
  

Here's what I think really goes on during this holiday season:

• There is no war on Christmas. There is a battle to celebrate any way we damn well please. This probably started with Catholic kids sick of going to midnight mass and then having to wait for their parents to drag their tired butts out of bed and have coffee before we could get to the presents. So mass slipped to 4 or 5 PM until that interfered with Christmas Eve dinner and was given up all together. Or something like that. Not that I have personal experience with that.
  
• Christmas morning can be absolutely magical for a kid, done right. And that means lots of presents arranged in a magically artful manner by parents who learn to love their bratty kids all over again when they see that light in their eyes when they really believe they've been good enough for Santa to shower such largess upon them. Which makes them actually be less bratty for a little bit. If consumerism can accomplish that, go team!
  
• Most people who are Christian, really Christian, don't give a shit about how others celebrate their holidays. They do their advent calendars, Christmas mass, nativity scenes, and are perfectly happy incorporating Jesus and the pagan tree into their holiday. As well as inviting the neighborhood Jews over for Christmas dinner (as long as they bring the ziti!) Stop giving them a bad name with your phony outrage.
  
• 2000 years ago Catholics made up a holiday. If someone wants to make up another one in the 60's, why does this bother anyone? For those it does bother, don't you believe you will never see them in the after life anyway? Can't your self-righteousness be enough or do you have to rain on everyone's parade? I don't know much about Kwanzaa, but I bet my Barbie dream house it's better than midnight mass.
  
• Don't let the fashion police ruin your holiday season. Yes, most Christmas sweaters are dorky. But also let the fat old guy have his one shining fashion moment where no one looks as good as he does in red and white. And stop cringing when you do embrace the fashion faux pas that is Christmas. If you love it, flaunt it! I have a fringed coat and I don't care how tacky it is. I love it. At least you fit in once a year. My fringed coat never does (except at the musical Hair).
  
• There are millions of us who love our families but don't necessarily want to be around them at all at the same time in a forced tradition that we abandoned long ago for very good reasons. Or we don't want to spend our few free days off of work traveling to everyone else's house. How someone defines family is up to them. Also, it's two free days off of work, let us figure out how we want to spend it.
  
• And I am not forgetting the smug anti-materialists here either. You piss me off just as much as anyone else. You're just as preachy about how people choose to spend their holidays. Spend it however you want, spend as much or as little as you want, just get out of everyone else's business about it. I have a lovely time picking out gifts for people based on things I've discovered that I really want to share with others. That's my thing, not yours. So what? Why cannot I do my thing and you do yours and we're all happy? You people are as pushy and condescending as the bad Christians in trying to define what a holiday should be for me or anyone else.
  

Seems like the only people who are live-and-let-live during the holidays are the Jews. Damn, if it weren't for bacon maybe I'd just join them for the peace during the holidays (and the incredibly awesome Xanadu/Hanukah song at last night's Seattle Women's Chorus).

Happy Holidays and if you don't like the way someone else celebrates it, STFU and figure out how you want to celebrate your own.

 

 

It’s Friday Night: Short Posts Filled with Cliches

I'm sitting at home this evening drinking a glass of wine, cat on lap, listening to music I cannot stand. That's because the fiancé is listening to music, it's not my choice. And normally he wouldn't make me listen to something I can't stand, but it's his (and my) good friend's music and the friend asked the fiancé to listen and let him know what he thought and he needed the feedback fairly quickly. So I sit here listening to music I cannot stand. It is by no means the quality of the music that makes me not like it. It's just not up my alley. There's nothing inherently bad about the music. And despite that it's not my cup of tea, I really want our friend to do well with his music.

So I listened to something I don't like for the greater good of my friend's success.

Today I listened to a radio talk show I cannot stand. Not Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity, but the show of a very good friend of mine. I cannot stand her show not because she is bad at her show. She is very very good at her show. I just cannot stand that type of show. But I heard about something that happened on it and then saw a comment about it that I thought was probably unfair and I was interested to know the context so I listened to it. Because regardless of what I feel about her type of show, I want my friend to succeed in her chosen career.

So I listened to something I don't like for the greater good of my friend's success.

These are very individual choices and I don't advocate that everyone has to make constant sacrifices for the good of someone else. If that were the case you'd all be playing Club Penguin these days. While I won't ask anyone to go through that if you're over 10, I do thank everyone for the decade of supporting a certain travel company; you still have to, the fiancé still works there. It's that everyone makes these types of choices all the time. They do something they'd rather not in order to support someone they care about and to support that person's hopeful success.

And that's my problem with the vitriol around health care. The ultra-right wingnuts and the ultra-left nuts swing so far to the extremes for the purposes of attention, ratings, or advancing their real agenda (which is attention and ratings) that they forget that there are some really core basics about even basic healthcare for all that will benefit everyone in increased productivity and longer term healthier population which is cheaper for everyone.

But the ultra right wingers would oppose a recommendation to brush your teeth twice a day if it came from the Obama White House. And these days the ultra left wing would freak out if Obama ripped a fart, claiming he was contributing to global warming.

The rest of us of course, try to sift through all the bullshit while actually trying to live our lives. And for many, trying to live their lives is in hoping and praying that nothing bad happens that taps out whatever meager health coverage they have.

So maybe the extreme right and left could just listen to what the majority is saying, even if they don't like it, for the greater good of getting something worthwhile passed?

Yeah, didn't think so. Back to your regularly scheduled programming. At least the fiancé is done listening to the music I can't stand.

Purity Tests Never Turn Out Well

Some time recently the GOP—or some faction of it—decided on a purity test for all candidates. Some Republicans have come out against that ten-point bulletin list and Mike Huckabee has recently come out somewhat in favor of it.

Now, I don't really care what a political party does. After all, I vote for the candidate not the party. Even though of late my votes have gone all Democrat that's because I'm so scared of the Republican party, not necessarily because of love for the actual candidates. But Huckabee's and the purists' attitude disturbs me because they are absolutely resisting anything resembling a big tent. Shit, they don't even want a small tent. They want a minimum of adherence of three out of ten points and any deviance from them will kill funding for the candidate.

But I'm not purist and I don't care about adherence to party principles. I care about nuance and pragmatism. So even though I share quite a few conservative viewpoints, the Republican party and conservative movement doesn't care about me because I don't meet their seven out of ten criteria? Seriously?

Let me give you a few examples of my non-purist but still conservative viewpoints that will still make me persona non grata in this particular movement (and will subsequently cause me to continue to vote Democrat):

Guns:

I love guns. I love shooting guns. I don't want anyone other than people I personally know and respect owning guns. I support gun rights for every qualifying American citizen because it's in the Constitution. I would love to change the second amendment. I will only support real gun control by changing the second amendment. I am a card carrying member of the NRA because of the second amendment. I don't love gun rights because I love gun rights. I love gun rights because it's in the Constitution and until that changes, I won't change my stance there. I love the Constitution more than I love gun rights. Squishy and weird to some, sure. Clear to me.

Fiscal Responsibility:

I'm all about fiscal responsibility. I'm also all about government stepping in where it makes sense, particularly when we have situations that affect all Americans whether they like it or not. For example, I'm a big supporter of private enterprise except when it's proven to fail. I'm a complete pragmatist in this area. I do believe in small government and limited spending, until such time that everything completely goes to shit (see healthcare). You are not going to get me on ideology. You are going to get me on specifics. Stop your ideological rhetoric when the private sector has so obviously failed.

Freedom of Religion:

I completely support religious institutions to run their institutions any way they see fit. I'm not so cool when they take tax dollars to do what counters federal law. I'm ridiculously pissed off at religions getting tax breaks. I'm ridiculously supportive of religion not being forced to perform gay marriage or gay couple adoptions. Until tax dollars are involved. Then I'm ridiculously opposed to religions avoiding civil liberties. But none of my positions should be considered ridiculous.

See, nothing that either really counters what a true conservative wants, but completely counters what fake wannabe conservatives say. But as long as you subscribe to purity tests, you will never get my vote. I'm a pragmatist/ideologue who while subscribing to some of your core beliefs, refuses to adhere to your ideological purity test.

You and I will continue to lose in coming elections as you continue to insist that there is no room for maneuvering. The only thing I have to say to you about that, in the immortal words of Grayson, STFU.

Correlate This

So I listen to Glenn Beck for about 10 minutes once a week. That's the one day a week I drive to work and the drive takes five minutes. So actually I listen to about three minutes because that's how much actual content there is between the commercials. And that three minutes is puh-lenty for me!

The three minutes I caught today had him citing Super Freakonomics. Of couse it was taken completely out of context to support some other point that had nothing to do with the point that Levitt and Dubner were making in the book, but that's Beck and I expect nothing less. And when I write I don't care much to focus on Glenn Beck. Beck can be handled with a simple Media Matters or Jon Stewart link on Facebook. What I'd rather talk about is Levitt and Dubner and what they're actually trying to accomplish with Freakonomics, Super Freakonomics, and their ongoing blog. Because that's actually intelligent.

If you haven't read them yet, run—do not walk—to your nearest bookstore or type—fast as you can with expedited shipping—on Amazon or other to order both of these books.

This is not about liberal vs. conservative, right vs. left, or politics at all. These books are about thinking. How to stretch your brain to think about every day topics such as crime, the environment, abortion, terrorism, names, and on and on and on in a way where the data is actually applied to prove causation, not just correlation. Religious and social conservatives might be outraged by the data showing legalized abortion reduced crime (Freakonomics). And liberal environmentalists go insane at the environmental proposals raised in Super Freakonomics. Which should prove that data is not, and can never be, political at its heart.

Now, one of the points in Super Freakonomics is that we are not entirely rational beings. We all know this. But that doesn't mean we can't, particularly when we go crazy on emotion, ground ourselves in realizing that the data exists. The biggest issue in this context that we have to remember is that correlation does not equal causation. We may not like what causation actually means, but Know Thyself also means Know Thy Data and analyze it according to causation. Correlation can be meaningful in pointing the way, but it still does not equal CAUSATION.

Read the books. Learn to think in a new and mind-stretching way. It won't fit into easily digestible bits, but it really is interesting and a hell of a lot more interesting conversation at cocktail parties.

If you really support the Constitution clap your hands!

I think I don't write as much of late because while I like to write about politics, I don't like the way politics are talked about these days. And by these days I mean since about 1994. Yeah, that includes even when I do it.

But I'll continue to give it a go:

If you are fit to be tied over 9/11 terrorists being tried in our civil courts, imagine how fit to be tied we all would be if or when those military tribunals were proven to be unconstitutional. Listen, we have a complicated system. Sometimes it doesn't all fit within a 30-second sound bite, 5-minute segment of puerile punditry, or even an hour program. And we all know that anything longer than an hour is far too much a strain on the public's attention span, so all news/information/opinion/infotainment must be chopped into bite-sized pieces of meat and fed very carefully to people since no one knows the mental equivalent of the Heimlich maneuver.

From the above-linked op-ed:

The casual use of the word "war" has lead to a mentality among the public and even in the government that the rules of war could apply to those held at Guantanamo. But the rules of war apply only to those involved in a lawfully declared war, and not to something that the government merely calls a war. Only Congress can declare war — and thus trigger the panoply of the government's military powers that come with that declaration. Among those powers is the ability to use military tribunals to try those who have caused us harm by violating the rules of war.

Now, the question that I haven't seen answered by supporters, critics, commentators, or government officials, is why some in federal courts and not others? It appears that the ones to be tried in military tribunals are ones who attacked military targets (USS Cole) while the ones attacking civilian or non-military government targets get the federal trial. That seems like a fair divide to me, as long as it holds up under Constitutional scrutiny. The author of the op-ed disagrees, but I disagree. Point by point (my comments in brackets) from his paragraph detailing this:

That the target of the Cole attackers was military property manned by the Navy offers no constitutional reason for a military trial. [I don't know about this, is there precedent either way?] In the 1960s, when Army draft offices and college ROTC facilities were attacked and bombed, those charged were quite properly tried in federal courts. [Those charged were also American citizens, were they not? There is no legal precedent to deny an American citizen their rights under the Constitution regardless of their crime. And if you bring up Lincoln's repeal of habeas corpus during the Civil War, please go back to history class. That was eventually ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court] And when Timothy McVeigh blew up a federal courthouse in Oklahoma City [also an American citizen]; and Omar Abdel Rahman attempted in 1993 to blow up the World Trade Center, which housed many federal offices [not a military target]; and when Zacarias Moussaoui was accused in the 9/11 attacks, [also an American citizen] all were tried in federal courts. The "American Taliban," John Walker Lindh, [also an American citizen] and the notorious would-be shoe bomber, Richard Reid, [also an American citizen] were tried in federal courts. Even the "Ft. Dix Six," five of whom were convicted in a plot to invade a U.S. Army post in New Jersey, were tried in federal court [at least one of these men was an American citizen and the charges were conspiring and plotting. Might be difficult to retain the American citizen's rights while dealing with a military tribunal]. And the sun still rose on the mornings after their convictions. 

And the sun will still rise after the terrorist suspects are tried in federal courts.

So in short, it looks like it breaks down this way, for as long as we are not officially at Constitutionally defined war:

• Foreigners attacking non-military targets will get federal trials
  
• American citizens get American citizen trials no matter what
  
• Foreigners attacking military targets will get military trials
  

I think that's pretty fair way to break it down, get the bad guys, and make sure it all stands up to Constitutional scrutiny.

We cannot risk having a trial of these people be ruled unconstitutional. We have enough constitutional problems already with how they are going to be tried after being tortured. These trials will be kangaroo courts anyway, completely rigged to ensure convictions. We wouldn't be bringing them to trial if they weren't. But as long as they are rigged in a fashion that upholds the Constitution, I'm kind of fine with that.

We do not need military tribunals to be kangaroo courts. We might need them again if we have to officially declare war again. We don't need them tainted by the perception that they are nothing more than an end run around the Constitution when we don't feel like following our own laws and precedents. We can't shout from the roof tops that we are a nation of laws, rights, and freedoms, and then discard them when we don't like it.