Gotta love the South

Oh Dixie, how I adore thee:

Related bashing of my native region here and here.

Crazy conservatives redux

Glenn Beck calls Obama a racist who hates white people (@1m19s into video). Popular media conservatives really are getting more and more unhinged.

Feldstein tells us that Obama wants single payer. That's news to me.

On another note, Orally explains that Canada doesn't have better healthcare than us, we just have more people. Their higher life expectancy is just a figment of statistical manipulation, see...

Great minds think alike

Early this morning, I wrote a post complaining how the Gang of 6, as they've come to be known, is essentially holding healthcare reform hostage to their whims. I tallied up the combined population they represent in the Senate and found it to be under 3% of Americans.

At around 10:40, Matthew Yglesias published an almost identical piece.

Great minds think alike. (H/T: Krugman)

What is "representation" in the Senate?

The notion of a Senate body in which each state gets equal voice pisses me off to begin with. Wyoming has the same "weight" in the Senate as California, though it has 1.45% of the population of the state. That's right, CA outweighs WY by a factor of 69 in population but is equal in terms of Senate representation. The concept of democracy is majority rule with inalienable minority rights. But does that mean the minority's voice has to be equal to the majority's when the latter is 70:1 larger than the former? We all know that when it comes to getting things done in Washington, the Senate is the place that lobbyists target because it's easiest to gum up the works.

And that's part of the problem. I know that everyone thinks the Founders were infallible and their wisdom about this system of checks and balances is inerrant. But when you look at the fact that the GOP has turned filibustering (another "check" on the majority party) into standard procedure, and the relative difficulty of passing bills that have huge public support, it should make you wonder.

In reading today's NYT report about how the six members of the Senate Finance Committee all but hold the healthcare reform effort hostage to their own desire, I am angry at how these 6 Senators, 3 Dems and 3 GOP, are supposed to "represent" me and the rest of the country. Let's look at what states they hail from and how large those states are in terms of their population percentage of our nation of around 304,059,724 people**:

baucus - montana (0.318%)
conrad - ND (0.211%)
bingaman - NM (0.653%)

dem total: 1.18%

snowe - maine (0.433%)
grassley - iowa (0.987%)
enzi - wyoming (0.175%)

repub total: 1.60%

rep + dem = 2.78%

That's right. The six people who have all but decided a public option isn't necessary and a surtax on millionaires to pay for reform is just too much, despite the absurd inequality that the Bush tax cuts brought about that these "fiscally conservative" hypocrites helped vote for, come from states with a total of under 3% of the US population. That just sucks.

Remember David Brooks' remark,

"It’s not that interesting to watch the Democrats lose touch with America. That’s because the plotline is exactly the same. The party is led by insular liberals from big cities and the coasts, who neither understand nor sympathize with moderates."

Republicans can remark that the Democratic party is full of "insular liberals" from urban areas all they want, since those same areas hold the majority of the population of this great nation.*** We members of the Urban Archipelago make up the majority of the nation in population terms, and tend to be more progressive in politics. And so the majority of us aren't as "moderate" as all the talking heads want everyone to believe, it's just that the way the Senate skews power moderates are literally holding us all hostage to what they think is right. And those of us with voting power will remember that, despite how much our constitutional right of representation gets fuc*ed by the system.

(Gail Collins also made this point about Baucus' perverse amount of power, "Nothing is going to happen on health care without the approval of Baucus, whose vast authority stems from the fact that he speaks for both the Senate Finance Committee and a state that contains three-tenths of one percent of the country’s population.")

**All data from 2008 figures at census.gov

***World Bank data,Table A2 Urbanization, p337 for the US shows the 2005 population of our country is 80.8% urban and that by 2015 it is expected to be 83.7% urban. From the same table, in 2005 43.3% of our national population resided in cities with a population of over 1,000,000 people.

Brad Pitt and I are so alike...

HuffPo:

ON GOD:

BILD: Do you believe in God?
Brad Pitt (smiling): "No, no, no!"

BILD: Is your soul spiritual?
Brad Pitt: "No, no, no! I'm probably 20 per cent atheist and 80 per cent agnostic. I don't think anyone really knows. You'll either find out or not when you get there, until then there's no point thinking about it.

Except that last part. I don't think there's anywhere "there" to "find out"...but I get his point.

NYT Healthcare Editorial

Here's Krugman on why the free market can't fix healthcare: 1) the unpredictability of the need for healthcare and the potentially devastating costs make insurance necessary, and so "consumer choice" doesn't exist between doctor and patient, and 2) experience, price comparison and other market dynamics don't work in healthcare.

Here's a good editorial of the reform effort as a whole, pros and cons, consequences and risks:

Thune Amendment

It's funny that Republicans talk about supporting "local control" and "states' rights"...until they disagree. They want to prevent states and localities from deciding their own criteria for concealed weapons permits. This goes back to an issue I've discussed before: why do citizens need to walk around with handguns when it's 3 times likelier a child will kill themselves with it and 120 times likelier their gun will be used for murder than defending themselves?

So basically the GOP is for "states' rights" and "local control" only when it comes to...

• keeping people from voting (trying to push federal ID laws)
  
• keeping people from receiving welfare and social assistance ("welfare reform")
  
• keeping people from smoking pot (medical marijuana laws)
  
• keeping people from choosing to die with dignity (assisted suicide in Oregon, Terri Schiavo)
• keeping people from choosing to lower pollution (California emissions standards)
  
• keeping people in prison longer and on death row (Bush DOJ demanding longer sentences and death penalty in specific cases)

Good to know.

The Obama effect

I would never use anecdotal evidence to argue a serious trend. But I do like to use my experiences as a pretext to make horrible generalizations. So let me do that...

The other day at B&N, I noticed a few black families in the children's section with their kids picking out books and reading. This was two days after the president's NAACP speech, which emphasized active parenting, among other things, to solve serious problems in the black community:

To parents -- to parents, we can't tell our kids to do well in school and then fail to support them when they get home. (Applause.) You can't just contract out parenting. For our kids to excel, we have to accept our responsibility to help them learn. That means putting away the Xbox -- (applause) -- putting our kids to bed at a reasonable hour. (Applause.) It means attending those parent-teacher conferences and reading to our children and helping them with their homework. (Applause.)

And by the way, it means we need to be there for our neighbor's sons and daughters. (Applause.) We need to go back to the time, back to the day when we parents saw somebody, saw some kid fooling around and -- it wasn't your child, but they'll whup you anyway. (Laughter and applause.) Or at least they'll tell your parents -- the parents will. You know. (Laughter.) That's the meaning of community. That's how we can reclaim the strength and the determination and the hopefulness that helped us come so far; helped us make a way out of no way.

It also means pushing our children to set their sights a little bit higher. They might think they've got a pretty good jump shot or a pretty good flow, but our kids can't all aspire to be LeBron or Lil Wayne. (Applause.) I want them aspiring to be scientists and engineers -- (applause) -- doctors and teachers -- (applause) -- not just ballers and rappers. I want them aspiring to be a Supreme Court Justice. (Applause.) I want them aspiring to be the President of the United States of America. (Applause.)

Perhaps it's just racist of me to assume that there aren't already a lot of black families going to B&N on a Sunday afternoon, but I've been in a lot of bookstores and it definitely made an impression on me as something I don't see often (anecdotal, I know). I guess I'm prone to overestimating the effect that Obama will have on black culture. The fact that so many children are born out-of-wedlock to black women is tied directly to perpetuating the cycle of poverty and crime.

While 28 percent of white women gave birth out of wedlock in 2007, nearly 72 percent of black women and more than 51 percent of Latinas did.

That is just unbelievable. Part of it may be that white women are more likely to be on birth control, part of it may be that white women are more likely to have the financial resources to get an abortion. Adding to this problem comes the higher religiosity of black women, which will guilt them into thinking they shouldn't have an abortion and instead drop out of college.

Some part of me just thinks that having a black president really has and really will continue to make a serious difference in the cultural attitude of black America. Maybe I'm overly naive.

I also wonder if there's any evidence of this in the serious drop in violent crime rates:

The District, New York and Los Angeles are on track for fewer killings this year than in any other year in at least four decades. Boston, San Francisco, Minneapolis and other cities are also seeing notable reductions in homicides.

"Experts did not see this coming at all," said Andrew Karmen, a criminologist and professor of sociology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

Time will tell, I guess...

Are conservatives crazier than they used to be?

I really don't think conservatism is "dying" as an ideology. But I am afraid it's getting dumber and crazier.

I realize that as a left-of-center type of person I'm inclined to exaggerate the stupidity of conservatives in some ways. However, watching/listening to Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, Hannity, and others just makes people go fuc#ing bananas. I mean they aren't just complaining about what Obama's doing, which is their profound right and responsibility. They are literally selling people on the idea that our country is turning into either a Nazi state or a Commie one. Some of them (and their followers) are so dumb that they don't know the vast difference between a free democratic capitalist country with some government intervention and Nazi Germany or Communist Russia.

I know that not all conservatives think this way, but the ones who represent the greatest danger to democracy do: the ones who don't think critically, or for themselves, and are constantly misinformed by idiots. And what's scary is just how influential and popular these idiots are. I mean Beck has one of the most popular shows on television. Faux News has almost quit trying to appear nonpartisan (or sane).

I also know that other liberals have commented on this trend lately and pointed to examples like this that go way back in time. So perhaps it's just that I wasn't informed/interested enough during the Clinton years to appreciate it, because this seems new. And one has to wonder, with the recent shootings by all these bigoted gun nut conservatives, if the combination of Antichrist rhetoric and Glenn Beck's rodeo clown antics aren't pushing more over the edge than before.

Last night at B&N I saw a lady ask where DeMint's new screed about the Nazi USA could be found.

Today I read things like the founder of Freeperland calling for a revolution that begins by removing every elected official in government. I have to agree with this guy's analysis:

There will always be a certain portion of both the right and left who are basically nuts. The hysterically exaggerated dangers of a Bush putsch were written about endlessly by the left for 8 years. Now it’s time for righty crazies to crawl out from under the rocks and dark places where they’ve been hiding to make conservatism look like an ideal home for kooks, paranoids, and other unbalanced denizens who inhabit a creepy reality of their own making that bears little resemblance to the real world.

Conservatives will laugh this kind of thing off as an aberration. But I am telling my fellow righties that we ignore this crap to the detriment of the rest of us who oppose the administration’s actions. With pop-cons like Hannity, Beck, Coulter, and other conservative celebrities mouthing some of this nonsense (while implying even worse) on a daily basis, more and more of the base are turning into unhinged, screaming maniacs who believe America is being “destroyed” by Obama and the liberals.

This screed is symptomatic of the sickness of thought and reason that afflicts many conservatives today - more than we are prepared to acknowledge and far more than one would normally expect from a philosophy that supposedly prides itself on prudence, rationality, and probity.

You can dismiss Robinson and his unhinged followers. But they aren’t going away and their influence can only grow if we ignore them.

Basically: is it just me, or are some conservatives just going fuc*ing nuts?

Tramp Stamps

Some lower back tattoos are nice, I guess, but this one makes me just feel sorry for her.


Notice the sentence, "There is no limit to it's [sic] faith." The possessive "its" of love is misspelled "it's"...(unless she has an ironic freckle)

A point about pot

In this article a doctor indicates he'd feel better prescribing marijuana for anxiety and sleep disorders than the current meds because of their far-higher addictive natures.

What a surprise!

Steorn failed. The 1st Law remains intact. What a surprise. I could have never predicted that...

Now we'll just wait and see how those "over unity devices" work out.

Brüno and atheism project

I haven't been able yet to see Brüno, but plan to soon. And Public Enemies.

A Project: I'm going to do a video collage of horrific images of suffering and disease, especially in children, and overlay audio of my own rendition of a classic hymn, "The Love of God" (here's Mercy Me's version from their "Spoken For" album in 2002). I'll post my video to YouTube with the title, "Why I'm an Atheist," or something like that. I think it may go viral. I hope so. It may take some time, but I'd like to finish it before September. And from now own whenever a Christian asks me a question about atheism I'll just give them a link to it.

*UPDATE (7/16): I think this video is a great idea but it doesn't hit you emotionally the way I want mine to.

Legalization is probably not going to happen

After reading this article I felt depressed.  Despite earlier hopes, when the question of moving towards legalizing pot came up recently, Obama said, "No."  The case is made for legalizing and taxing marijuana to save the US billions by both bringing in more revenues (taxes) and reducing costs (law enforcement and the "war on drugs").

In the first part of this video, Calif. Assemblyman Tom Ammianomakes the case for doing it at the statewide level, as he has already sponsored a bill to do so: