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Not funny

Monday, July 14, 2008

My letter to the New Yorker:

I was shocked to see a reproduction of the cover to your July 21st issue on Americablog.

There is absolutely no excuse for publishing this canard. It is outrageous to suggest that Barack Obama and his wife are terrorists. I must assume, in charity, that your intent is to mock those who have spread rumors to that effect. If that is your intent, you have failed miserably, and have merely reinforced these racist lies. I realize that some of your covers have employed similar devices, but never regarding an issue as inflammatory as this, or one likely to have an impact beyond the people who are intelligent enough to “get” your intended meaning. Those of us who do not actually live in the upper reaches of New York society are painfully aware that there are a lot of stupid people in this country whose beliefs about Obama will be reinforced by your attempt at … humor?

My wife and I have subscribed to the New Yorker for years. It will be difficult, if not impossible, for us to see our way clear to continuing our subscription.

This appears to be the year of not funny under any circumstances political humor. Almost any joke by John McCain would do, but his “joke” about killing Iranians is the best case in point. There is no way you can joke about killing ordinary people who have done you no harm. It’s pretty hard with wife beating too.

On the other hand, if he told more jokes he might spend less time revealing his abysmal foreign policy ignorance (remember, that’s the stuff he claims he knows something about). Apparently, he just can’t let Czechoslovakia go.

Filed in Media, The Real McCain | | Comments (2)

A follow-up for Sean, if I might

Sunday, July 13, 2008

Paul Choiniere has a column in the Day this morning about Sean Sullivan’s long shot candidacy in the Second District Congressional race. He summarizes Sean’s political philosophy:

He feels government has grown well beyond the means of the average taxpayer to support it, that the ever-larger budget deficits are a major cause for concern. He sees the role of the federal government as providing for those things that individuals cannot provide for themselves – a national defense, a social safety net for the most vulnerable, a reliable highway system. Sullivan predicts a national health insurance plan would be a disaster, and feels tax incentives can encourage a private-sector solution. (Emphasis added)

I wish Choiniere had followed up and asked Sean why he feels that a national health insurance plan would be a disaster. After all, Sean is someone who lived most of his adult life under the closest thing we have in this country to socialized medicine: the armed services health care system. Was it a disaster for him? By all accounts it functions well, as does Medicare, as does the VA system, as do most of the national health care plans in the civilized portion of the world. Why does Sean feel that the United States would be the exception?

Republicans have a strange detachment from reality. For many, their political philosophy is like a religion, based not on facts but on faith. They believe government cannot work and do all they can to prove it when they can take the levers of power. No amount of proof to the contrary can shake their faith. If a program works, they will either ignore that fact, work to subvert it (e.g., Medicare Advantage) or appoint people who oppose its purposes to run it. On the other hand, they retain faith in their own prescriptions despite overwhelming proof that they do not work. Consider supply side (a/k/a voodoo) economics, the claim that lowering taxes mainly on the rich leads to increased government revenue. Reagan tried it. It didn’t work. Clinton did the opposite. It worked. George Bush tried it. It didn’t work. Now McCain wants to do it again. The fact that it has been disproved in real life means nothing to these people. They believe and that is sufficient. (And besides, they’re all rich and it benefits them enormously)

By the way, I’m aware that Medicare has financial problems. If the system were expanded to cover everyone, those problems would largely disappear, since the more healthy people we bring into the system the sounder it would get. And it remains true that the Medicare Advantage program, which subsidizes more expensive private insurance, has increased the program’s financial woes.

Filed in Joe Courtney, Politics | | Comments (1)

Talking about rights

Sunday, July 13, 2008

Does Khalid Shaikh Mohammed — the Guantánamo detainee who claims he personally beheaded the reporter Daniel Pearl — deserve the rights he denied Mr. Pearl? Which ones? A painless execution? Exemption from capital punishment? Decent prison conditions? Habeas corpus?

Such apparently unrelated questions arise in the aftermath of the vote of the environment committee of the Spanish Parliament last month to grant limited rights to our closest biological relatives, the great apes — chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans.

(New York Times, When Human Rights Extend to Nonhumans)

I’m not sure exactly why extending “rights” to apes raises all these questions, but I would submit that, at least in part, the quote above illustrates a problem with the way we Americans frame these issues, at least as they apply to humans.

It isn’t only whether Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (who, as Frank Rich points out today, may not be guilty of the crime to which he’s confessed) has a right to a painless death, but whether a civilized society should inflict any other kind, assuming in the first place that the death penalty should ever be used. That issue can’t be resolved solely by considering his rights.

The question is not, or not alone, whether individuals possess certain rights, but whether any society should demean and degrade itself by inflicting painful deaths, engaging in torture or setting up kangaroo courts, to name just a few of the crimes against humanity in which this country has engaged in the past seven years. Putting aside the practical objections to at least some of these activities (that they don’t work), we have proven in our own recent history that engaging in such practices destroys not only our claim to moral leadership, but our moral center itself. We became a compromised country when we chose to abandon the ideals we have espoused, and largely lived by, since George Washington opted to treat captive Hessian soldiers humanely, not as they deserved (they had been ordered to take no prisoners), but in accordance with our principles, not in accordance with theirs. Washington was not concerned with the Hessian’s rights, but with American principles and American honour.

As Hamlet told Polonius, “Use every man after his desert, and who shall scape whipping? Use them after your own honour and dignity-the less they deserve, the more merit is in your bounty.”

Addendum: I have received an extended comment to this post. I haven’t read all of it yet, but it is essentially a defense of the death penalty, grounded in Catholic theology. You can, of course, prove anything by a resort to theology, a philosophical system grounded in fantasy. Though I should add, to give it its due, that the Catholic Church is now against the death penalty, except, apparently, in extreme cases.

Filed in Issues | | Comments (1)

Little Zippy speaks words of wisdom

Sunday, July 13, 2008

(Click the graphic to make it readable)

Filed in Uncategorized | | Comments (1)

Friday Night Music-Blood, Sweat and Tears

Friday, July 11, 2008

Every week it gets harder to dig into the old memory hole to come up with a different group. Luckily, I grew up in the 60’s and the supply of great music seems endless. Nonetheless, any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rjMB0JotHM[/youtube]

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Dodd for VP? Sadly, I’m against it

Friday, July 11, 2008

Jason Rosenbaum at the Seminal reports that our own Chris Dodd is under consideration for the VP slot. I don’t know if the interest is real, or if Obama is just engaging in feel good politics. Sadly, I must protest against this choice. Nothing would make me happier than to see Chris Dodd a hearbeat away from the presidency, but we’ve worked too hard to take back the Congress. We can’t hand the Republicans a Senate seat, which is precisely what a Dodd vice presidency would do. We are going to need every Democratic vote we can get, if we’re going to get Harry Reid to shut down the Republican filibuster machine.

My wife suspects the undeserving future Senator would be Rob Simmons, which would make us Eastern Connecticut Democrats feel doubly burned. We worked our butts off to get rid of him, an dwe don’t want him coming back through the back door, particularly to the Senate. Simmons is just the sort of pseudo moderate that the Republican leadership loves. He talks a good game at home, but is totally tractable, like Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe and Rob in his congressional days, one of the catch and release crowd.

Dodd is a true hero in my book. Back in January his stand against FISA might have been dismissed as campaign posturing, but he had nothing to gain by continuing the fight. Unfortunately, we can’t afford to lose him.

Let’s not forget that we are in this position because the Democrats in the State House, while they had their veto proof majority, lacked the presence of mind to change Connecticut law to allow the people to fill a Senate vacancy, rather than the keep the present system, which allows the lady with the vacant head to do so.

Filed in Local issues, Politics, Presidential Politics | | Comments (0)

Straight talker bobs and weaves

Thursday, July 10, 2008

This is an issue about which my wife has always been justifiably steamed. Many health plans cover Viagra, but will not cover birth control. Watch John McCain squirm as he ducks the issue, which was raised by his own advisor:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6IlGXhCUHo[/youtube]

Only John McCain could get away with refusing to talk about an issue because he has to go back and see how he voted. Note that he says he doesn’t usually duck an issue. Maybe he doesn’t, if you don’t count lying about your record in order to avoid answering a question:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGvxK660oFo[/youtube]

This guy can’t be worse than Bush, can he? Can he? I didn’t think it was possible, and I always figured Bush would hold the worst president in history record for a long time. But then, I once thought no one could be worse then Nixon, who now seems like a man of the Enlightenment.

Filed in The Real McCain | | Comments (0)

A moment’s silence for the Constitution

Wednesday, July 9, 2008

September 17, 1787 to July 9, 2008.

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McCain more like Bush than we thought

Wednesday, July 9, 2008

McCain has been in Congress for about three decades. You would think in all that time he would have learned a little something about Social Security. Apparently not.

According to McCain it’s a disgrace that Social Security is a pay as you go system. Here he is talking about it:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugN8Rn5baqM[/youtube]

Now, you would think from listening to him that somehow the fact that current beneficiaries are paid from current receipts is a development of recent vintage. In fact, it’s a basic principle of the system. It was designed to function that way. So McCain is saying one of two things. The first is that he wants to put an end to Social Security. The alternative is that he is so uninformed that he doesn’t even have a basic understanding of how the system works. Personally, I vote for the latter. His reference to the Reagan era overhaul tends to prove that, since that legislation, of which he apparently improves, did nothing to change the basic system, and it remains the basic legislation by which the system is funded.

The reality is that McCain’s ignorance about this issue is of a piece with his basic ignorance about just about everything else. This is the guy who can’t tell a Sunni from a Shiite, though he is supposed to be an expert on security issues.

McCain’s fact free approach to his “straight talk” will, of course, be ignored by the media.

It is worth remembering, however, that McCain’s statement is not entirely correct. Today’s workers are not only paying the benefits for today’s retirees. They are also buying government bonds to pay a portion of their own benefits when demographic realities will make it too difficult for working people to carry the full load (this is the Reagan compromise that McCain lauds). Bush and Congress have taken that borrowed money and squandered it, and the Republicans, apparently including McCain, don’t want to pay it back. One way to achieve that purpose is to get young people to ask planted questions like that posed by the lady in the video. The idea is to drive a wedge between the generations.

Filed in The Real McCain | | Comments (0)

A Man of Principle

Wednesday, July 9, 2008

There aren’t many in the U.S. Senate, but there’s at least one in North Carolina:

L.F. Eason III gave up the only job he’d ever had rather than lower a flag to honor former U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms.

Eason, a 29-year veteran of the state Department of Agriculture, instructed his staff at a small Raleigh lab not to fly the U.S. or North Carolina flags at half-staff Monday, as called for in a directive to all state agencies by Gov. Mike Easley.

When a superior ordered the lab to follow the directive, Eason decided to retire rather than pay tribute to Helms

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