The Whopper of the Year wasn't the President's lie about ACA coverage--it's the Republicans lie that their alternative is better

Every hour of every day, across the airwaves and the blogosphere, Republican partisans blast “Obamacare” with the usual heavy-handed sarcasm that passes for humor in conservative circles.
    Oddly, though, no Republican has even one word to say about Republicare–their alternative to the Affordable Care Act.
    Republicare is what we’ll get if the Republicans succeed in destroying the Affordable Care Act, through a combination of winning the Presidency and their lavishly funded national campaign of sabotaging the ACA. Then we’ll revert to the American healthcare system as of 2008, with no changes whatsoever. The proof of this is simple: the Republican-dominated House has passed 46 healthcare bills since 2010. And every one of them did nothing but repeal the ACA. Period. Individual Republican lawmakers suggest this or that reform, but the GOP's "Repeal and Replace" campaign, so far, is all repeal, no replace.
    So the real whopper of the year is the claim that the American healthcare system as of 2008, with no changes at all, beats the ACA, warts and all.
    The Republicans know better than to say this out loud. They’re just hoping Americans won’t realize it’s what they’re actually saying. They’re hoping we won’t remember what it was like to have insurance company clerks making life and death decisions about you–decisions that were nearly impossible to appeal; to have your insurance dropped as soon as you got really sick; to have insurance refused if you had a “pre-existing condition;” to get sold junk insurance policies in which “the large print giveth–the small print taketh away” (apologies to Tom Waits); a healthcare system that was the most expensive on earth per capita, with the worst results among rich countries.
    There are Americans who will spend more for healthcare under the ACA than before. However, what most of this small minority don't realize is that the healthcare insurance they'd had before was, for most, junk policies that would have done nothing for them if something bad actually happened to them. Investigative journalists have researched the angry "ACA losers" featured on FOX News daily and found that most of the cases were bogus--people who hadn't bothered to find out what their alternatives were under the ACA, or who didn't realize that their old policies were so bad they were really uninsured.
    For at least 90% of all Americans, they're better off with the ACA.
    Want proof? Look at what the Republicans say. They refuse to talk about what they have to offer in lieu of "Obamacare." What's the use of criticizing anything if you don't talk about the alternative?

     I dare any Republican to actually compare “Obamacare” to Republicare.

Who's playing with fire?

"Capitalism is like fire: a good servant but a bad master."

"Government is like fire: a good servant but a bad master."

Q. Which of these statements is true?
A. Wrong question–because both of these statements are true--




Something many Republicans and some Democrats don't understand.

Responding to the GOP's condemnation of Lberals/Democrats

I read this succinct diatribe in a major publication's comment thread recently:

 

The Liberal Democrats seek political power by the creation of strife.
_____
They attempt to turn black against white.
_____
They attempt to turn man against woman.
_____
They attempt to turn rich against poor.
_____
They attempt to turn labor against small business owners.
_____
They attempt to turn debtor against creditor.

Here's my response:

Yes, despotic movements always claim that all discontent is due to "outside agitators." Morsi in Egypt. The Mullahs in Iran, Southern whites back in the '60s, who were sure that "their" cullud folk were perfectly content until them Jewish college boys from the North came down to rile them up
.
Meanwhile the Republican Ministry of Propaganda seeks to distract us from:

1. Their war on blacks, spearheaded by their 22-state coordinated program to suppress the black vote, along with a 40 year campaign to "get tough on crime" that puts blacks in jail more often and for far longer than whites apprehended for comparable crimes, then disenfranchises all those black men for life

No wonder they've given up on the black vote.

2. Their war on women who are young &/or single &/or educated &/or not white Anglo &/or not fervent fundamentalist Protestant/Catholic &/or urban, via a national campaign to keep women ignorant about reproduction and fertility control options, keep them from getting HPV vaccinations in time for them to help, keep them from getting abortions even if they've been raped regardless of their age, keep them from getting birth control if they're underage.
No wonder a majority of women consider the GOP the party of old paternalistic white men--white men who adore "their" wimmen, just like they once adored "their" cullud folk.

3. The war on the poor and the middle class, seeing the former's real wages drop and the latter's stagnate for 30 years while the income of the .1% skyrockets in the same timeframe while corporate "welfare" also skyrockets while education and assistance for the neediest is continually cut back to the point where medical care for the poor approaches that of a third world country.

4. The war on small business by the GOP and it big business patrons. Walmart enters a town and dozens of small businesses die, with no net increase in employees there. Farm subsidies that favor a short list of huge agribusinesses hugely while doing nothing for other farmers. Helping big corporations outsource their pollution to all the small businesses and individuals around them. The special breaks and loopholes for big business written into so many bills in the dead of night. The GOP talks "small business" but it's smoke and mirrors.

5. The war on debtors. The GOP's machinations have turned the average college grad into a debtor who may not be able to repay his college loans until he’s middle aged, creating a generation of anxious, compliant workers–workers who can’t escape the burden even if they go bankrupt. Predatory home loan operations where buyers are lied to about the loans by the lenders, and then hundreds of thousands are foreclosed on illegally–going on to this day–while the loans are sold to pension funds and other investors as safe according to bought-and-paid-for ratings agencies, combining to implode the American economy in 2008–and not reformed to this day due to GOP rules manipulation in the Senate.

But Goebbel’s Rules of Propaganda state that you should always accuse the opposition of doing what you yourself are doing so they’ll be distracted into defending themselves instead of going after you. As the entry I'm replying to demonstrates.

The Democrats are no angels, as consulting FactCheck.org and PolitiFact.com will tell you. But those same sources will show that they’re pikers next to the GOP.

The GOP's "Hastert Rule" tells you everything you need to know about today's GOP

For years now the Republican Party leadership in the House has worked under a simple rule: if the House is majority Republican, no bill will be allowed to come to a vote unless the Speaker of the House is sure that a majority of Republican Congressmen will vote for it.

Speaker Boehner just reaffirmed this (there have been exceptions in the past), as a no-exceptions principle.

This matters. It means that what a majority of American voters want doesn't matter. And that what a majority of House Representatives want, working as representatives of their districts, doesn't matter either. All that matters is whether the bill being considered is considered good for the Republican Party.

This is baldly and unapologetically putting Party before Country. I'm sure that both parties want to help their parties. But usually, when there may be a conflict between Party and Country, at least the Democrats try to rationalize it. The GOP doesn't even bother. The Hastert Rule (named after the GOP Speaker of the House who formulated the rule) means the GOP's Prime Directive with ALL legislations is "What helps the GOP?" Period.

Fitting for the party whose rank and file members mostly believe that "compromise" is a dirty word.

Does "Republican" = racist?

Not all Republicans are racists, and not all racists are Republican--but the Republican Party got a huge infusion of such people when the Dixiecrats went Republican en masse after Congress under Lyndon Johnson got civil rights legislation passed that had some teeth in it.

A CBS poll taken before the 2008 election showed this:

"72% of those who live in the West say most people they know would vote for a black person for president. 66% in the Northeast and 64% in the Midwest agree. But the figure is lowest in the South, where just 54% say most people they know would vote for an African-American for president. 33% there say most people they know would not."

I'd guess that more people are racist than will admit it to a pollster, so these figure should be regarded as a low estimate.

And to such people--roughly a quarter of the nation, but a much higher percentage of Republicans--President Obama's election was their Nakba (Arabic for "catastrophe"--how they refer to Israel becoming a nation).

It is this group--perhaps very roughly half of Republicans--that regards a black man in the White House as a thumb in their eye.

It is this group that desperately needs the President to fail because he's black, no matter how much their efforts to make him fail harm the country.

This also means that the other half of Republicans are not racially biased against him, though of course they still wanted Romney to win and mostly voted for Romney.

However, it's hard for this group to accuse half of their own party of Racism, no matter how rabid the Republican racists act. So mostly they wring their hands and wish the Teanderthals would shut up--because they know the damage this is doing to their party in the long run. 

Dr. Gosnell the baby killer vs. the Pro Lifers

What we see in "Pro-life" comments about articles about Dr. Gosnell is the luxury of moral posturing without regard to real world consequence.

It's so inconvenient to see how often idealistic policy turns into horrors as it plays out.

Consider China vs. India. China implemented its One Child policy--including forced abortion for miscreants--in 1979. India tried something of the sort but, being a democracy, was forced to give in to the opposition of people like the anti-abortion crusaders you see on this thread.

Today the consequences--and contrasts--are stark. Individual Chinese hate having to obey the policy. Selective abortion of female fetuses has produced millions of excess males. But nobody's starving.

India now has hundreds of millions more people than China. In "pro-life" India, 7,000 Indians die of starvation every day, including more than 5,000 babies below the age of one--babies who never knew a moment of living without suffering. In a land where mothers saw their children's legs off to make them better beggars. Or simply abandon them, as the heartbreaking film "Salaam Bombay" shows.

In the real world Dr.Gosnell was a piker compared to India's "Pro-Lifers."

Abortion morality on Lifeboat Earth

re: should moral policy be based on science, not religion?

Every religion espouses a unique set of rules for living. There are Many hundreds of religions with active congregations. It would be impossible to find a subset of rules they all agree with.

Science can encode morality to a degree because of basic principles that are hardwired into the human brain (humans violate those rules every second, but they pay a heavy inner price for doing so). Of course science has its limits, and we're only starting to grasp the nature of consciousness.

The Bible ascribes consciousness to the fetus of John the Baptist, but doesn't say whether that was a special case--he being a prophet and all--and elsewhere gives babies no legal rights until they've survived 30 days out of the womb.

We can say, though, that "life" can't be said to begin at the moment of conception--monozygotic twins and chimeras along disprove that--along with the fact that so many fertilized eggs have zero chance of turning into a born, survivable baby. Even the inception of a heartbeat or brainwaves are arbitrary, with nothing linking these events to what we know as consciousness.

The only sure measure we have is survivability without modern medical care out of the womb. I'd be willing to sign on to that as a measure. Survivability with hi-tech care is morally appalling, since it excludes all those denied such an opportunity.

But for me the overpopulation crisis trumps all these considerations. That's why I say the morality of a land with infinite elbow room, infinite drinkable water, infinite arable land, is different from the morality of the lifeboat. The movie Life of Pi explores this BTW.

India has literally hundreds of millions of "food-insecure" people, many literally starving to death, and their land cannot sustain their current numbers. China does not, though it's close to a water crisis even so. China's morality vs. India's morality illustrates what I'm talking about.

www.blogzu.blogspot.com

What should determine a congressman's vote? The will of the people?

Congressmen serve at least half a dozen masters: (1) the individuals who bankroll their campaigns; (2) the party they belong to, which can determine whether they get primaried or not, and which may demand that they sacrifice the interests of their constituents in some instances for overall Party demands; (3) the welfare of the voters in their district, (5) the wishes of the voters in their district, and (6) the congressman's personal principles. 
 
And what determines the wishes of voters in a congressman's district? What if they've been the target of a clever, lavishly funded propaganda campaign by special interests who exploit those voters' fears and prejudices? 
 
In Nazi Germany, I'm sure a majority of voters believed everything bad was all the fault of the Jews. Here, today, for example, a majority of Republican voters still believe that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11. They didn't just think that up. They were victimize by Republican demagoguery. 
 
And today a majority of American voters don't accept the fact that we're in the midst of dangerous global climate changes caused by human activity. They don't accept this because Exxon and the Koch brothers and other major petrochemical firms have spent a huge amount of money (from a non-billionaire viewpoint) in getting people to believe that. 
 
It isn't in their best interests to believe that. And their Congressman has a moral obligation to help convince them otherwise and to vote himself accordingly.  
 
With guns, here again a small group of immensely wealthy men involved in gun manufacturing and sales have spent a whole lotta money propagandizing people about guns, leading them to believe all sorts of patent falsehoods about guns and gun violence.  
 
A Congressman will feel immense pressure to cave in to the wishes of his patrons and his propagandized, badly misled voters. To think it's moral for him to cave in to this is, well, anything but moral.

The NRA disrespects the 2nd Amendment. That's right. Disrespects it.

It's a pity the gun maker's lobby--misleadingly calling itself the NRA--and the one third of its live members (as opposed to the million dead ones they keep on the rolls to make it look larger than it is)--have no respect for the 2nd Amendment, which was interpreted by the Supreme Court's current right wing majority as conferring a right to bear arms for individuals and a right to regulate those arms by governments. That second part is clearly stated in the first half of the 2nd Amendment.

Thus according to Heller the federal government can require the national registration of all firearms, require universal background checks, make straw man purchases a felony, ban unusual and dangerous firearms such as assault weapons, RPGs, flame throwers and machine guns, and more.

Rejecting half of the 2nd Amendment is worse than rejecting all of it, because it couples rights with responsibilities. Rights without responsibilities leads to chaos, just as responsibilities without rights leads to tyranny.

Thus the NRA and its shills are acting like spoiled five year old boys who want all the rights of grown-ups but none of the responsibilities of grown-ups.

They should show some respect for our Constitution. Their disrespect for it is downright unpatriotic. They call themselves conservatives when in fact they're anarchists.

Don't give up on gun control

Gun rights zealots believe they will always win--and that the rest of us will always lose. They have nothing but contempt and active dislike for anyone and everyone who advocates any form of gun ownership control, no matter how minor. If pressed, they claim their right to own any kind of gun they choose is based on the Constitution's 2nd Amendment having the purpose of enabling citizens to go into armed revolt against the government, using firearms comparable to those used by our military.Their message to gun control advocates is despair: "You are incompetent to talk about guns, your proposals are unconstitutional, and we OWN Congress (and every state legislature). Give up. We will always defeat you. And you deserve to be defeated, you contemptible worms."

They are that far out.

Equally far out is their defense of crazy people and criminals being able to get guns. Of course gun rights zealots say the exact opposite when they speak in generalities. But gun rights zealots are, as a group, self-centered and emotionally immature. So they see anything we could do to keep guns out of the hands of nuts and crooks only from the perspective of potential limitations to the zealots' rights to own guns--and to keep government agencies from knowing that the zealots have guns, and knowing which guns those are.

So they oppose changing the current federal privacy and mental health laws, which currently make it nearly impossible to institutionalize crazy people who don't think they're crazy--which is most of them. And they oppose universal gun registration, which would let us track straw buyers who are the source of most of the guns crooks possess.

Don't confuse gun rights zealots with gun owners in general, most of whom support at least some forms of gun control--especially universal background checks.

The only thing gun rights zealots support to deal with these all-too frequent massacres and gun homicides is more guns in more hands, which they say is the only way to more safety.

Of course every nation is an experiment in governance that other nations can study.America has more guns per capita with fewer controls than any other nation with comparable demographics. Comparisons prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that our path--more guns, less regs--leads to four to eight times as many homicides (not just gun homicides) as comparable countries, and the more gun controls, the fewer homicides. It's that simple and that plain. The rate of violence is comparable to that of comparable counties--the difference with America is that here that violence is vastly more likely to result in death.

The gun makers know this, but they have proven repeatedly is that all they care about is profit. Their shills, who lead the NRA, tread a well-worn path after every massacre:

1. Loudly denounce gun control advocates who dare to use the massacre to try to get gun control legislation enacted--denounce them as exploiting the suffering of the victims and their families for political gain. Demand a period of weeks to "respect the victims" before launching any discussion about the massacre, which gives the NRA time to marshall its forces and lobby legislators.

2. Try to slow-walk such discussions--the more time that elapses between the massacre and the discussion, the more time the NRA has to prevent--or gut--any legislation that does ensue.

3. Loudly insist that the ONLY solution to gun violence is more guns in more hands. Claim that the expired assault weapons ban didn't work (a baldfaced lie--it did to a a degree, hampered by the gun lobby gutting the bill). Claim that when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns (a baldfaced lie--other countries that restrict guns have their criminals using knives mostly). Claim that massacres happen everywhere (they do--but they do several times as often here, and more are killed in each massacre here on average).

4. Trot out anecdote after anecdote showing how having a gun protected someone. This works because most people are innumerate and thus don't understand statistics (along with most abstractions).

5. Send forth the gun control zealots to overwhelm every newspaper and blog forum that mentions gun control, after stirriing them up with wild accusations.

6. Constantly try to change the subject from gun regulation to gun confiscation, despite the fact that no politician in America talking about gun confiscation.

7. Constantly try to change the subject of gun control to the subject of violent mental illness. It's a valid subject but not instead of gun control--it should be as well as gun control

8. Deny that there's any such thing as an assault weapon--important since the bulk of gun maker profits come from selling assault weapons, despite the fact that they're marketed to gun buyers as assault weapons, using military commando mission atmospherics.

9. Depend on the fact that the million-odd gun rights zealots wake up each morning thinking about guns, and typically associate gun possession with virility, so this group will ceaseless promote their position, while most people only think about guns for a few days or weeks after each massacre.

10. Continue to lobby to suppress any attempt to study gun violence by government agencies (a sucessful effort for decades).

11, Continually talk about video games and violent movies as the cause of massacres, ignoring the literally millions of young men who play such games and see such movies all the time and never commit acts of physical violence, also ignoring the difference between "shooting" cartoon people with a computer mouse vs. shooting human-shaped targets with real bullets fired from a real gun on a real target range.

12. Continually frame the debate as one between patriotic Americans and people advocating foreign ideas that violate the Constitution (talk about Constitution constatnly), bordering on treason. Use inflamed and inflammatory rhetoric, including denouncing the President for having Secret Service protection for his children when he doesn't want that for yours.

13. Try to wear down the other side on every front. Constantly belittle  gun control advocates for being ignorant about firearms and gun violence research (ironic since the NRA has prevented the government from studying gun violence).

Gun rights zealots typically know a lot more about firearms than gun control advocates. I'm not as ignorant about firearms as most gun control advocates, but even so I've found myself having to do hours of research to get up to speed enough to really debate with these guys.

And once I was up to speed I found that gun rights zealots--and the NRA--habitually and knowingly lie to the rest of us in order to advance their desire to own firearms of any type they like without impediments. I only discovered this after I'd done my homework. It was not obvious at first. This was especially interestting because gun rights zealots represent themselves as the most moral, patriotic, upstanding citizens. But in my experience they routinely practice taqiyya (an Arab term "honorable lying to Infidels") with those outside the gun community. If the NRA asserts something, you can safely assume it's a baldfaced lie unless proven otherwise.

For example, NRA membership claims include tens of thousands of members who are no longer alive, along with members whose membership was a freebie including with a gun purchase or gun show admission. It includes a million or so gun rights zealots along with three million or so gun owners whose views differ strikingly from those advocated by the zealots and the NRA leadership.

So when you debate with gun rights zealots, take note of the claims they make, and when you find out they're lying, and exactly how, consider the likelihood that they knew they were lying when they said that to you--and let them know, calmly but inexorably.

That is, use the techniques my spouse used to use when she worked as a collecor for a computer peripherals manufacturer. She never got mad but she never let people off the hook--and she took note of every promise they made, and used that in subsequent conversations, so as to draw the noose progressively tighter and tighter. And of course she never called them liars. She just pointed out what they said, what was factual, and asked them to account for the disparity.

That's the twofer. Never get mad--never relent.

It looks as though the gun makers and their eager shills will mostly win the current fight going on in Congress. But remember how many fights homosexual rights advocates lost before they started winning. Most political victories stand on the shoulders of innumerable losses.

And this is important.

Hope clouds observation--for the Right and Left alike

Man-caused global warming, if acknowledged fully, would severely crimp the short-term profits of many very large corporations--along with the lifestyle of the average American.

So it doesn't exist. Not for those corporations and right-wing Americans at least.

Evolution, if acknowledged fully, would mean that important scriptural works like the Bible and the Q'uran must be taken figuratively, not literally.

So it doesn't exist--not for fundamentalists at least. And that's a majority of Americans.

The overpopulation crisis, if acknowledged fully, would lead to all nations adopting China's One Child policy, providing every form of birth control to everyone with no questions asked--including abortion--as well as leading to a poorer lifestyle for everyone in graying rich country populations, as well as leading to a disproportionate need to reduce nonwhite populations on the whole, for exigent reasons. 

So it doesn't exist--not for doctrinaire right wingers, due to the abortion aspect and the lifestyle crimp aspect--and not for doctrinaire left wingers, due to the nonwhite aspect leaving one open to accusations of racism.

President Obama's intelligence and discipline have been obvious and repeatedly demonstrated for decades. But he's a black man. And black men are not intelligent--not if you're an angry old white man of the Southern persuasion.

So the President's intelligence doesn't exist. Remember all the right wing japes about him only being clever when he had a teleprompter? Not to mention all the other nonsense they've said about his smarts. 

Race makes racism possible. But racism is wrong. So race doesn't exist. At least not if you're a doctrinaire leftist. 

I was thinking about that last one yesterday when the NY Times published a longish essay by a philosophy professor about how race is a "social construct" yada yada.

Hundreds comments mostly agreed with the good professor, blathering endlessly about how there's no such thing as race.

Here's my comment, which you can see in the thread near the end:

The Republican Party's hostility to both science and scientific thought is so blatant and widespread that's it's easy to overlook the ways in which doctrinaire Leftists show the same character defect.

What I glean from this article and most of the comments is how easy it is to get a Liberal Arts college degree without learning even the rudiments of science. Instead we see smug academic parochialism.

Race is a feature of every kind of living organism, not just people. It's the first step towards speciation--the way in which evolution leads to a different species, genus, family, order, class, and even phylum. The human species started out as a race of proto-hominid that evolved into a separate species--ours--which then spread out and started to subdivide, in the same way that other species of organisms do--through geographical and/or ecological isolation, with differing evolutionary pressures on each isolated gene pool. 

Only two kinds of people deny that human beings are living creatures that evolved like other living creatures: religious fundamentalists and liberals--strange bedfellows indeed.

You can't deny that there are human races unless you also deny that there are different races of, say, corn, or cats, or malaria. Yet no one in this thread has talked about our species in the context of the rest of Earth's biosphere.

A Liberal Arts BA needs to include far better grounding in science and critical thinking in general.

--------------------

I added some details about just what "race" means scientifically as a response to another comment in the thread:

 The evolution of one species of living organism into two or more starts with gene pools of that species becoming geographically and/or ecologically isolated (eating different kinds of foods, for example), leading to that species developing into different races, as any introductory biology course would teach.

Thus Orientals and Caucasians differentiated from common stock in western Asia roughly 50,000 years ago, when the former moved east and the latter, west. Orientals had to evolve adaptations to the harsh winters of the central Asian steppes, including the epicanthic fold, while Caucasians had to evolve lighter skin so they could still synthesize Vitamin D under the cloudy skies of western Europe.

Racial differentiation usually continues to the point where individuals from the isolated groups can no longer produce fertile offspring when they try to interbreed. This process is called speciation.

For example, horses and donkeys--different species of the same genus--can reproduce but the offspring (mules/hinnies) are not fertile. In time, in the natural environment, their descendants would no longer be able to produce any offspring at all--as is now the case with their more distant cousins the tapirs and rhinoceroses.

How anyone with a college education might imagine that homo sapiens is exempt from these evolutionary processes, to which all other living organisms are subject, is beyond me.

Let's give up on the Constitution?

That's the title (sans question mark) of an op-ed piece in the December 30 New York Times. Written by a constitutional law professor, its main point is that Constitution is frequently violated and we just pretend we didn't do so; every non-unanimous Supreme Court decision means one or more veteran Supreme Court justices believe that ruling was unconstitutional.

Moreover, several other rich nations have no constitution at all, and none have collapsed into chaos or dictatorship (while many tyrannies do have constitutions).

And our Constitution is un-Confederational. That is, it was written in defiance of the orders of the American government of that day, which had tasked the Framers with offering some amendments to the Articles of Confederation--not to supplant it with something else.

But above all, our Constitution was written for an almost completely different country. The USA of 1789 was a rural country where nearly everyone lived by farming; where there were no means of communications other than riders on horseback and newspapers; where we had almost no foreign trade in either direction; where we kept slaves, denied blacks, women, and men without land the vote; where "arms" to be borne meant flintlock muskets...need I go on?

The op-ed writer says we should be deciding on the validity of laws based on today's America rather than trying to divine what a handful of men who lived 200 years ago wanted for their infant country.

Naturally the RWM (Right Wing Media) are in their usual apoplexy about this--but instead of speaking to the argument's merits or weaknesses, they claim that the author is a Leftist and may therefore be ignored.

Yet another proof of the profound lack of critical thinking skills on the part of so many self-style conservatives.

How the Gun Makers Arm Psychos & Crooks

Look at it from the gun maker's point of view. A sale of a gun to someone who's criminally insane or a criminal nets the gun maker just as much as a sale to a responsible NRA member who only uses his firearms legally.

Actually, in some ways it's better (assuming your sense of obligation as a gun maker is, as Milton Friedman said, only to profit), since it lets you argue for people buying guns to defend themselves from the people you've sold guns to.

Every time there's a massacre, the gun makers' lobby (AKA the NRA) and its political servants (AKA the GOP) first say it's political opportunism and an insult to the dead to take up gun control "at this time." Then, a week or so later, after they've lined up their ducks in those good old smoke-filled back rooms, they make a public statement that the problem of gun massacres is everything but guns, and the solution is always "more guns" along with measures that will supposedly keep the gun out of the hands of criminals and psychos, because "guns don't kill. People kill."

Well, people kill with the connivance of the NRA. Because the gun makers and their shills have successfully ensured virtually free access to guns by crooks and nuts. And by "guns" I mean assault weapons above all, because they are the most profitable segment of the gun market by far. 

Here's how the gun makers make getting guns a snap without discriminating on the basis of race, creed, criminal record, or psychiatric record:

1. "Felons Finding It Easy to Regain Gun Rights: Decades of lobbying have loosened laws, allowing felons to regain gun rights often with little or no review."

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/14/us/felons-finding-it-easy-to-regain-gun-rights.html

2. "Some With Histories of Mental Illness Petition to Get Their Gun Rights Back: States are increasingly allowing people who lost their firearm rights because of mental health issues to appeal to have them restored."

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/03/us/03guns.html

3. "States Struggle to Disarm People Who’ve Lost Right to Own Guns: There is serious vulnerability when it comes to keeping guns out of the hands of the mentally unstable and others."

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/us/06guns.html

4. "N.R.A. Stymies Firearms Research, Scientists Say: Researchers who study guns and violence say the influence of the group has all but choked off funds."

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/26/us/26guns.html

5: "Guns in Public, and Out of Sight: As states ease concealed weapon laws, some of the permits are ending up in the wrong hands."

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/27/us/more-concealed-guns-and-some-are-in-the-wrong-hands.html

6. The NRA sponsors/endorses bogus "research" supporting more guns/fewer controls.

http://propagandaprofessor.net/tag/dr-kleck/

7. "Over 62,000 guns unaccounted for in U.S. since 2008...weak federal gun laws and irresponsible gun dealers allow tens of thousands of firearms to leave gun shops without background checks or a record of sale"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/25/AR2011012500867.html

8. "NRA-led gun lobby's powerful influence: The NRA-led gun lobby has consistently outmaneuvered and hemmed in the ATF, using political muscle to erect barriers to tougher gun laws."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/14/AR2010121406045.html

9. Book: "Ricochet--Confessions of a Gun Lobbyist"
--shows how the NRA, among other things, works behind the scenes to weaken gun laws that would otherwise protect civilians from guns being wielded by psychos and crooks. The book is aimed at NRA members; its central thesis is that the NRA exploits its members with phony 2nd Amendment scares but really just works for its top management (the best-paid of any nonprofit organization in America) and the gun makers.

http://www.amazon.com/Ricochet-Confessions-Lobbyist-Richard-Feldman/dp/0471679283/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1356645217&sr=1-5&keywords=NRA

Are we a "center-right country" as the GOP constantly says?

Well, for one thing, Americans don't say they are. Only a third of Americans say they are conservatives, while about a fifth say they are liberals. The rest say they are moderates. So while more Americans say they are conservative than say they are liberal, a plurality of Americans reject both labels.

But wait, there's more. A solid majority of Americans are against raising taxes for pay for federal government spending. But that same majority have a picture of what the federal government spends money on that's radically different from reality--they grossly underestimate what the government spends on them, and overestimate what it spends on others--particularly foreign others via foreign aid, which is a tiny part of the budget. Many don't even realize that MediCare is a federal program.

What our "center-right" tilt boils down to is "Justice for thee--mercy for me." Americans want a level of government services that our current level of taxation won't pay for. They don't want fewer services. They don't want higher taxes. And our politicians of both parties don't want to tell this to the public. Instead the Democrats tell sob stories while the Republicans tell horror stories and talk about "waste and fraud" when the biggest amount of fraud--by far--goes to corporate welfare, not personal welfare.

Fact checkers do--or don't--tend to their knitting?

The Republican war on fact checkers was predictable, because given what the fact checkers have been saying after the Republican convention, either Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan and their cronies are lying--and lying large--or the fact checkers are lying.

That's the choice.

The least interesting part of the Republican attack is their attempt at cult programming: saying that all the mainstream media is left wing and in the tank for Obama, and then weaving conspiracy theorizing about various associations they say the fact-checking institutions have.

Next comes their habit of simply ignoring fact-checkers' challenges. Romney's been doing this for over a year.

But the most interesting is the Republican Ministry of Propaganda trying to define the fact-checkers' job as only legitimate it they confine themselves to quantifiable assertions and open statements.

For example, last year Romney ran an ad stating that President Obama had said in 2008 that "If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.”

The ad neglects to mention that Obama was quoting someone in Senator John McCain's campaign. 

But by the GOP's Goodspeak Rules, Romney's ad wasn't lying because Obama did say those words. It's just "interpretation" that journalists have no business doing to call Romney a liar because the words were a quote. 

Thus Lyin' Ryan's lie about the GM plant's closing in his hometown meaning Obama had broken a promise to keep it open was defended as true because even though the plant closed during the Bush administration, laying off its 1200 employees, a few dozen stayed on until April 2009 to finish an order for vehicles being produced on contract for a Japanese carmaker. So it wasn't formally padlocked until Obama was President. But this is lawyers' parsing, like Clinton's notorious "What is the meaning of 'is'?" malarkey. The plant was effectively closed during Bush's reign. And Obama hadn't promised to keep it open--he was making a more general statement, and made good on that general statement when he engineering the GM bailout which did keep many plants open.

If you read what Ryan said carefully, you can see how he was able to get 90% of listeners to believe he said the equivalent of "Obama lied, workers cried," while leaving himself room for his numberless paid defenders to attack the fact-checkers by saying Ryan didn't say precisely what he got his listeners to hear.

So now if you mention Lyin' Ryan to Republicans they can dismiss that sobriquet as fact-checkers' not only being Liberals but also going beyond their mandate.

Ironic how Republicans derided Clinton for such parsing when he was talking about the Lewinsky affair, yet happily do exactly the same thing now. 

Propaganda is often very subtle in its methods. That's how it can communicate racist sentiments to racists that pass right over the heads of nonracist Republicans. Welfare-gangs--street crime memes all signify "Negroes" to racists, while Republican spinmeisters hotly defend harping on such themes as being only what they say they're about. 

These are also shaped charges. Romney gives his acceptance speech without using the word "Welfare" once, yet his advertising in Southern-flavored battleground states depends on the Big Lie that Obama decided to remove work requirements from welfare. He never says "Vote for Romney to stop the Negro illegitimately in the White House from taking white people's money and sending it to Negroes." But that's exactly what his supporters who are racist hear when his ads harp on this theme. Meanwhile his supporters who aren't racist nod their heads approvingly, and those who are in between are delighted because it gives them plausible deniability for their real reason for hating Obama so much. 

And they don't want fact-checkers to check on propaganda.

I wouldn't want them to either if I were them.

For the GOP, facts don't matter.

The fact-checking organizations had a field day during & after the Republican convention, since so much lying and deceit characterized nearly every talk. Even Mrs. Mitt Romney, known by one and all as a pillar of rectitude, repeated the totally false canard about President Obama telling small business "you didn't build it." Just about the only ones who didn't lie to some degree or other were the families from Bishop Romney's ward and, just about, his former associate in his bishopric.

The rest lied, and lied, and then lied some more.

And Clint Eastwood made it clear that his imaginary guest on the stage, Barack Obama, was saying "Go f....ck yourself" repeatedly. This in front of the Romney clan's small children--not to mention any children in front of the TV when it aired during prime time.

Yet the next day Mrs. Mitt defended the skit, completely unfazed by 10 minutes of comic obscenity in front of her grandchildren.

If Clint had said the words out loud instead of implying them, the Republican National Committee would have been fined massively by the FCC.

More importantly, every single person connected to the Republican campaign has come out and dismissed all the fact-checking organizations as all being partisan lib-er-uls trying to get President Obama re-elected.

The very same organizations that call out the Obama campaign for its own lies and distortions daily.

And it sure works for partisan Republicans, whose knee-jerk rejection of all media outside the Fox/Rush orbit was abundantly clear in the comment threads of the major newspaper articles.

These guys show all the signs of being brainwashed cult devotees through their circle-the-wagons paranoia about the world outside the Republiverse.

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Footnote: the RNC convention talked repeatedly about our founding fathers and how we should get back to their beliefs and ideas.

The irony is that they're the liberals' founding fathers. The conservatives of that era were Tories who stood with the Crown. It's pretty funny that they talk so reverently about the people they were taking up arms against at the time...

GOP Convention Second Night: the speakers told the truth...about their names

Yes, folks, not every single thing a Republican politician said on the second night of the convention was a lie. Every speaker got his own name right.

But it went downhill from there.

Congressman Rand Paul, first at bat, built his entire speech around the Big Lie that President Obama said "You didn't build that" to American small business owners--already debunked as a "Pants on Fire" lie by every fact-checking organization that looked at what the President actually said.

But just in case someone had read what the Prez actually said, RP doubled down by flatly stating that "Roads don't build businesses--businesses build roads."

Seriously. In Rand Paul's universe, government is almost completely superfluous. Past guarding our borders--perhaps with a womped-up Coast Guard--that's about it.

Well, he can get that. He can move his business to Mogadishu.

And this delusional guy got a standing ovation.

Also, I think, for another Big Lie: that the GOP is the party of small business. Hardly. It's the party of Big Business.

Paul backed up his small business shtick with stories about self-made American business owners. His great-grandfather. The donut shop guy he patronizes. But not himself, because he was born to wealth and privilege.

Maybe that's why he referred to taxing corporations as "punishing the rich." Specifically Exxon-Mobil, so punished it has become the most profitable business in world history, propped up by lavish government favors. I'd sure love to be punished like that.

Next up was that Hawk's Hawk Senator John McCain. If you think America should declare war on Iran and Syria unilaterally, he's your guy. He was saying this to a political party that lambasted the President for joining a coalition to help Libyans oust their dictator without committing ground troops, and Clinton for the bombing campaign in the former Yugoslavia that ended Serbia's ethnic/religious war on every Muslim living in the former Yugoslavia.

If Mitt Romney endorses unilateral military intervention in the countries Senator McCain named in this speech I'd be amazed. One reason I couldn't vote for McCain when he was the nominee was that I perceived him to be a hothead. This evening's speech was consistent with that.

McCain continued the GOP tradition of telling hugely dishonorable lies about their opposition by claiming that President Obama leaked crucial secret information about the Bin Laden raid for political gain. This is a baldfaced lie by a sitting United States Senator--and one that has already been thoroughly debunked. You can read about it here.

What this signals is the fact that the GOP has spent decades building up the myth that they're guys who know war and the Democrats are the pantywaist pacifists who don't. They do this totally in the face of history (Wilson, FDR, Truman, Kennedy, Obama). Of course the other covert message is that a Negro cannot be a competent Commander in Chief. This will never be so much as whispered. It's just in the air, seeping out between the lines.

And when McCain Swift-boated President Obama, he also stooped to the level Bush II stooped in 2000 when he destroyed McCain's presidential run with the rumor that McCain had fathered a black baby out of wedlock (he and his wife had in fact adopted a Bangladeshi baby), just before a critical primary in a bigoted Southern state.

Seems like a willingness to lie, and in particular to try to destroy the good name of the opponent, is the   price of participation in today's Republican politics.

I add with great sorrow that the Democratic Party and its pols also lie all the time, as attested by FactCheck.org. The lies are mostly less egregious and less downright vicious--but not always ("Romney killed my wife" comes to mind).

So the point here isn't that you shouldn't vote for a liar but that you shouldn't use truthiness as a reason for voting one way or another.

Voter fraud

From a comment on an Economist article about Republican vote suppression activities:


"Millions of US residents do not possess the franchise to vote and experience shows that, their inelligibility [sic] notwithstanding, many spurious votes will be cast either by them or in their names."


This is precisely the lying, legalistic, pseudo-rational verbosity Republican officials use to cloak their caveman "morality," i.e. "Heads I win tails you lose."

In fact, "experience" shows the exact opposite. In every state controlled by the Republican tribe, and federally when the Republican tribe has controlled the White House, many millions of dollars have been spent in an effort to find any examples of voting fraud.

They have failed--failed spectacularly. However, having learned well from Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, the fountainhead of their communications strategy, they simply claim there is widespread voter fraud through their various sock puppets--AM radio talk show hosts and the fake pundits on their fake TV "news" channels.

Instead of evidence they simply repeat it as if it were a fact, over and over, every day of every week, and the weak-minded in the millions then accept it as fact, as shown by national polls. And roughly half the nation is weak-minded enough for this to work on. It helps that a significant portion of these weak-minded people are also racists. Kind of goes with being weak-minded, after all. Since those being denied the vote by the Republican Tribe's vote-suppression campaign are first and foremost blacks and Latinos, it gives racists a chance to express their racism that gives them--in their own minds at least--plausible deniability.

The only thing their hunt for the phantom voter fraud turned up was the ACORN scandal in which paid voter registrars registered nonexistent voters so they'd get paid more. However, this was not voting fraud--nonexistent voters don't vote, in contravention of the Republican Laws of Physics. But to this day weak-minded Republicans invoke "ACORN ACORN ACORN" like primitive tribesmen chant the names of their enemies as they dance in the firelight before going off to war.

The Republican Party used to be a political party, but its gradual takeover by the closest thing America has to the Taliban has turned it into a tribe, complete with tribal beliefs like this one.

Makes them quite easy to dupe by the corporatists pulling their strings, and as no cost to the corporatists, since all their God Gays and Guns blather (plus their nudge nudge wink wink racist agenda) costs the corporatists nothing. Meanwhile the tribe's anti-illegal immigration wishes get nowhere nationally because that would cost the corporatists something.

The Man with the Plan--Chairman Ryan

Chairman Ryan's supporters call his plan for tax "reform" "brave." How is it brave for a politician to promise huge tax cuts for everyone (everyone wealthy at least) without saying just which loopholes he'd eliminate to offset those tax cuts?

He says "Trust me" instead of saying what he'd do.

Really? Given his voting record during the Bush II administration, absent specifics what I can trust is that he'll do the same now as he did then: vote for huge tax cuts paid for by borrowing. That's what Republicans do: borrow and spend. The Democrats may be profligate but at least they're honest about their policies.

Because Ryan's record shows that he's no deficit hawk. Not when a Republican's in the White House he isn't. Has he experienced some kind of conversion on the road to Damascus? Or is it more of the same-old, same-old: crying for reform while out of office, then it's "let the good times roll" for the party's patrons as soon as the foxes are back in the henhouse.

He's the "man with the plan" all right. The main part of which is the one he won't share with us.

Lastly, readers should realize this isn't an election about President Obama's policies vs. Governor Romney's rubber stamp of Ryan's policies.

It's about whether the nation will have a Republican-dominated Congress, Executive and Judiciary branch, or a Republican-dominate Congress and Judiciary branch with the check of a Democratic executive branch.

Meaning if President Obama wins re-election, virtually none of his domestic policies will be enacted, because Congress writes and passes legislation--not the President. This isn't a parliamentary system where the winning party holds all the cards. It's a system with sand in the gears designed into the system.

Now you may want a Republican trifecta if you believe that the last time we had this--from 2000 to 2010--that our government paid as it went, instituted sound fiscal reforms, paid for its wars instead of sending the bill to the next generation, and by the end of that period had the average American in a better economic position than at the beginning.

If that's so, vote for another Republican trifecta. If that's not so, vote for one branch of government being of the other party, so as to reign in the other party's total inability to govern itself by its own stated principles.

This has nothing to do with Governor Romney's qualification--though by choosing Ryan he's made it clear that he doesn't believe a business background is a relevant qualification. It has to do with whether you believe either party, when it controls all three branches, can resist the urge for self-dealing and prioritizing consolidating power over what we sent them all there to do.

Governor Romney says his business background irrelevant

That's right. According to Governor Romney, his business background is not an important qualification for being President of the United States. Of course this isn't his words. It's his actions. And don't actions speak louder than words?

The action is his choice of Vice President: a 42 year old man with exactly zero business experience--none whatsoever.

So unless you believe that Mitt Romney is immortal and invincible, and if you believe that the Vice President's constitutional job description is "Takes over if the President is killed or incapacitated," then you must agree that the traits and background needed for the job of Vice President are exactly the same as for President.

Which means you must base a vote for President Obama or Governor Romney on their experience in government--Romney as, in his words, the "severely conservative" governor of Massachusetts for one term vs. President Obama's experience in a state legislature, in the national legislature, and as President of the United States, plus Chairman Ryan for his long service in the House of Representatives, plus Vice President Biden for his long service in Congress plus his experience as Vice President of the United States/

Of course there are other relevant things--policy positions, strategic vision, personal character, life story, spouse, education, demonstrated understanding of the needs and concerns of most Americans, mastery of foreign policy issues and tactics, international experience.

Just not business experience. I'd thought it had some relevance myself, but Governor Romney overruled me this weekend with his choice of Chairman Ryan.