Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

The apathy strategy

by digby

Just this, via Daily Kos Comics

That expresses my feelings perfectly on this Monday …

Eternal Parasites

by David Atkins

The “Curiosity” rover/lab landed on Mars last night, pulling off a nerve wracking and difficult landing stunt. It was a project over a decade in the making that will yield invaluable scientific insights.

These are the amazing men and women that a Macau casino magnate will spend hundreds of millions of dollars to say are greedy parasites mooching off “producers” like the vulture capitalist wannabe President. How small and pathetic.

Two hundred years from now, the world will not care that men like Sheldon Adelson, Mitt Romney and George Will walked this earth. If they are remembered at all, it will be with only mildest sneer of contempt.

But the fine souls who made this technologically marvelous contribution to the welfare of all mankind possible will be revered and remembered for their contributions to humanity as long as records and historians exist to tell the tale. And even after their individual names are lost to history, their fledgling accomplishments will live on as the building blocks of future generations of human endeavor. That advancement can take many forms, from science and medicine to academics to social justice. But helping along that advancement is the true purpose of our being alive.

Sadly, most of us living today are at great pains simply to eke out survival for ourselves and our families. That means that those fortunate enough to have spare time and resources have an intrinsic moral obligation to do our part to further that purpose on behalf of all those who will never have the opportunity to do so.

All people die. All memory of our lives eventually fades into dust. But what we did to advance enlightenment, make the world a better place and elevate humanity beyond our current chrysalis: that is eternal so long as sentient life is able to bear us witness.

Men like Adelson and Romney are worse than parasites. Worthy of nothing but disdain, they hold the keys to the temple but enter not within. They are dismal blots on the human existence destined for oblivion, dragging our species toward the darkness in an attempt to buy a true happiness and fulfillment that no wealth, prestige or hollow belief can deliver.

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Ixnay on the ungay alktay

by digby

I realize that frequent mass shootings are just a fact of life in America, like historic drought brought on by man made climate change. Oh wait…

But even so, when we start averaging a couple of mass shootings a month you do have to wonder whether the constant admonition not to talk about gun violence is really quite … sane.Take this for instance:

Less than a month before Florida hosts the Republican National Convention, the state’s right-wing governor is pushing for an unusual law that privileges the Second Amendment over the First Amendment. Gov. Rick Scott announced Monday that his administration will pursue a court appeal to defend the state’s controversial “Docs vs. Glocks” law, which makes it a crime for doctors to ask patients if they own guns.

The 2011 “Firearm Owners’ Privacy Act”—one of a series of NRA-backed, aggressive pro-gun laws passed by Florida’s conservative Legislature in recent years—aims at keeping physicians from gathering information on patients’ weapons while discussing their health risk factors. (Decades of studies have shown that even law-abiding, responsible gun owners and their families have higher risks of death by gunshot when they keep a firearm in the home.)

“Patients don’t like being interrogated about whether or not they own guns when they take their child with a sore throat to a pediatrician, nor do they like being interrogated in an emergency room when their Little Leaguer broke his leg sliding into first base,” the NRA’s gun for hire in Florida, longtime firearms lobbyist Marion Hammer, told the Tampa Tribune last fall.*

Doctors have long been permitted to ask patients about other risk factors, like smoking and drinking (and patients, of course, have long had the freedom to lie about their bad habits). But asking about guns is different, say backers of the law, which could cost offending doctors their medical licenses and a $10,000 fine. Some even argue that federal power makes the law especially important. “Now we’ve got Obamacare, the government owns our health care,” a 58-year-old Floridian told Sunshine State News. “They can coerce the names and habits of gun owners out of doctors’ medical records, that’s what scares me most. Maybe it won’t happen today or tomorrow, but the ability to do it is there.”

Apparently, you sometimes have to destroy the Constitution in order to save it. A federal judge tossed the “Docs vs. Glocks” law out of her district court last September, ruling that it trampled doctors’ right to free speech. The law, Judge Marcia Cooke wrote, “aims to restrict a practitioner’s ability to provide truthful, non-misleading information to a patient”—information that she said “simply does not interfere with the right to keep and bear arms.”

The governor disagrees. “This law was carefully crafted to respect the First Amendment while ensuring a patient’s constitutional right to own or possess a firearm without discrimination,” Scott said in his statement. “I signed this legislation into law because I believe it is constitutional and I will continue to defend it.”

Guns are so sacred, that people cannot even be asked about it. Because apparently, if a doctor asks, they are required to answer and they must tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth due to the government takeover of medicine.

Either that or they are bunch of guilty people who know that they are perpetuating something evil and don’t want to admit it. Take your pick.

The Illustrated War on Women

by digby

BagNews Notes always does great work, but I particularly enjoy their salons with academics, visual analysts and photo journalists discussing how images shape the issues of the day.

Earlier today they did one about the War on Women that was just fascinating:

Host: Michael Shaw, Publisher, BagNewsNotes Moderator: Nate Stormer, Professor of Communications and Journalism/U. of Maine Discussants: Bonnie Dow, Associate Professor & Chair, Communication Studies and Associate Professor, Women’s and Gender Studies, Vanderbilt University; Janis Edwards, Associate Professor, Affilate in the Dept. of Gender and Race Studies, University of Alabama; Holly Hughes, Editor, Photo District News; Rita Leistner, photojournalist; Instructor, University of Toronto. Salons are produced by Ida Benedetto.

You can read the #BagSalon twitter feed for highlights. Great stuff.

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Two long reads for a Sunday afternoon

Infantile Randroidism hits the big time

by digby

Ryan Lizza has written a must-read profile of Paul Ryan for the New Yorker that will send chills up your spine:

Sitting in his office more than three years ago, Ryan could not have foreseen how successful his crusade to reinvent the Republican Party would be. Nearly every important conservative opinion-maker and think tank has rallied around his policies. Nearly every Republican in the House and the Senate has voted in favor of some version of his budget plan. Earlier this year, the G.O.P. Presidential candidates lavished praise on Ryan and his ideas. “I’m very supportive of the Ryan budget plan,” Mitt Romney said on March 20th, in Chicago. The following week, while campaigning in Wisconsin, he added, “I think it’d be marvellous if the Senate were to pick up Paul Ryan’s budget and adopt it and pass it along to the President.”

To envisage what Republicans would do if they win in November, the person to understand is not necessarily Romney, who has been a policy cipher all his public life. The person to understand is Paul Ryan.

Indeed. In fact, the Veepstakes panty sniffers are all over the fact that Ryan cancelled a big speech this week-end, intimating that he’s undergoing some sort of Romney vetting. A heartbeat away?

The whole article is interesting, but this is key:

His father’s death also provoked the kind of existential soul-searching that most kids don’t undertake until college. “I was, like, ‘What is the meaning?’ ” he said. “I just did lots of reading, lots of introspection. I read everything I could get my hands on.” Like many conservatives, he claims to have been profoundly affected by Ayn Rand. After reading “Atlas Shrugged,” he told me, “I said, ‘Wow, I’ve got to check out this economics thing.’ What I liked about her novels was their devastating indictment of the fatal conceit of socialism, of too much government.” He dived into Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman.

In a 2005 speech to a group of Rand devotees called the Atlas Society, Ryan said that Rand was required reading for his office staff and interns. “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand,” he told the group. “The fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism.” To me he was careful to point out that he rejects Rand’s atheism.

What that really says is that Ryan has not intellectually matured since he was a teenager. But we knew that. What follows shows just how powerful and influential this stunted boy-man has become:

[D]espite some desperate appeals by Republican pollsters, Ryan’s plan passed the House of Representatives, 235 to 193. Only four Republicans voted against it. Ryan told me that the class of Republicans elected in 2010 was transformational. “Usually, you get local career politicians who want to be national career politicians,” he said. “They’re more cautious. They’re more risk-averse. They’re more focussed on just reëlection.” He went on, “This crop of people who came up are doctors and dentists and small-business people and roofers and D.A.s. They’re not here for careers—they’re here for causes.”

Whatever benefit the White House had seen in raising Ryan’s profile, his increasing power, and his credibility as the leading authority on conservative fiscal policy, soon made his imprimatur essential for any Republican trying to reach a compromise with Democrats. Ryan helped scuttle three deals on the budget. He had served on the Simpson-Bowles deficit commission but refused to endorse its final proposal, in December, 2010. When deficit negotiations moved from the failed commission to Congress, Ryan stuck with the extreme faction of the G.O.P. caucus, which withheld support from any of the leading bipartisan plans. In the summer of 2011, when a group of Democratic and Republican senators, known as the Gang of Six, produced their own agreement, Ryan’s detailed criticism helped sink it. And, also that summer, during high-level talks between the White House and Republican leaders, Cantor and Ryan reportedly pressured Boehner to reject a potential deal with President Obama.

Ryan had aligned himself with Cantor and the self-proclaimed Young Guns, who made life miserable for Boehner, their nominal leader. They were the most enthusiastic supporters of the Ryan plan, while Boehner had publicly criticized it. Cantor’s aides quietly promoted stories about Boehner’s alleged squishiness on issues dear to conservatives, and encouraged Capitol Hill newspapers to consider the idea that Cantor would one day replace Boehner. As the Republican negotiations with the White House fizzled in the summer of 2011, Barry Jackson, Boehner’s chief of staff and a veteran of the Bush White House and Republican politics, blamed not just Cantor, who in media accounts of the failed deal often plays the role of villain, but Ryan as well.

“That’s what Cantor and Ryan want,” Jackson told a group of Republican congressmen, according to Robert Draper’s recent book, “Do Not Ask What Good We Do.” “They see a world where it’s Mitch McConnell”—as Senate Majority Leader—“Speaker Cantor, a Republican President, and then Paul Ryan can do whatever he wants to do. It’s not about this year. It’s about getting us to 2012, defeating the President, and Boehner being disgraced.”

2016’s right around the corner.

Lizza goes on at great length to describe how much money the stimulus and other government programs has helped Ryan’s own district and asks Ryan about it. And Ryan shows once again what a whining little adolescent he is whenever he’s confronted with the reality of his hideous misanthropic philosophy:

When I pointed out to Ryan that government spending programs were at the heart of his home town’s recovery, he didn’t disagree. But he insisted that he has been misunderstood. “Obama is trying to paint us as a caricature,” he said. “As if we’re some bizarre individualists who are hardcore libertarians. It’s a false dichotomy and intellectually lazy.” He added, “Of course we believe in government. We think government should do what it does really well, but that it has limits, and obviously within those limits are things like infrastructure, interstate highways, and airports.”

As Lizza points out:

[I]ndependent assessments make clear that Ryan’s budget plan, in order to achieve its goals, would drastically reduce the parts of the budget that fund exactly the kinds of projects and research now helping Janesville.

Of course it does. He just refuses to admit that he doesn’t give a damn about the parasites, moochers and looters.

The article implies that Ryan is playing with fire and that the Republicans are doing their usual hubristic self-immolation by following his lead. We’d better hope that’s right because if this infantile extremist ever gets into high office we’re all going to need to go Galt in a hurry.

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Mitt’s character in pictures

by digby

I think it’s fairly telling that these are the two most iconic photographs of Mitt Romney, don’t you?

I’d say the first represents his business career and the second represents his political career.

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Sandra Day O’Connor haz a sad

by digby

Sandy can’t you see I’m in misery
We made a start now were apart
There’s nothing left for me
Love has flown all alone
I sit and wonder why-yi-yi-yi
Why, you left me oh Sandy

Ya think?

Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor suggests that declining public approval of the court dates back to the controversial Bush v. Gore decision, which decided the 2000 presidential race.

“That was one that was widely talked about at the time, as you know, and involved the public in a presidential election,” O’Connor said in an interview aired Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “And that could be something that triggered public reexamination.”

She said she wasn’t sure if people thought the court had become too political.

“But I suppose that’s part of it, yes,” she said. “And of course, anytime you’re deciding a case involving a presidential election, it’s awfully close to politics.”

She cast the deciding vote in the case, but she demurred on taking responsibility.

“I don’t see how you can say anybody was the deciding vote,” she said. “They all counted.”

O’Connor said she has no regrets about her vote.

“No, I mean it was a tough deal; i[t] was a closely fought election; and it’s no fun to be part of a group of decision makers that has to decide which side the ball is going to fall on,” she said.

She had to “decide” which side the ball fell on, to be sure. But it’s not as if she carefully weighed the evidence and the arguments:

After 7:50 p.m. November 7, 2000: Supreme Court Justice on Projected Gore Victory: ‘This Is Terrible’

Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, attending a Washington, DC, party and watching the news networks predict Florida, and thusly the presidency, for Democrat Al Gore, says aloud, “This is terrible.” Her husband explains that she is considering retiring from the Court, but will only do so if George W. Bush, a fellow Republican, is in office to appoint her successor.

And then there was this:

(November 29, 2000): Justice O’Connor Intends to Overturn Florida Supreme Court Decision, Grant Bush Election, Says Her Clerk

The clerks for the four liberal justices at the Supreme Court—John Paul Stevens, Stephen Breyer, David Souter, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg—continue their speculation as to whether the Court will actually attempt to decide the presidential election ((see November 20-21, 2000 and November 22-24, 2000), especially in light of Florida’s recent attempt to certify George W. Bush as the winner (see 7:30 p.m. November 26, 2000). At a November 29 dinner attended by clerks from several justices, a clerk for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor tells the group that O’Connor is determined to overturn the Florida Supreme Court’s decision to go ahead with manual recounts of election ballots (see 3:00 p.m., November 16, 2000). One clerk recalls the O’Connor clerk saying, “she thought the Florida court was trying to steal the election and that they had to stop it.” O’Connor has the reputation of deciding an issue on her “gut,” then finding legal justifications for supporting her decision. Unbeknownst to anyone outside the Court, O’Connor has already made up her mind.

Perhaps Justice O’Connor has finally realized what she has wrought. Or not.

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QOTD: David Siegel

by digby

David and Jackie have been surprised by the criticism of their lifestyle. “So much negativity. You would think they would be happy for someone living the American dream,” Jackie says. … As for the notion that the divide between the wealthy and everyone else is grotesquely wide, David says: “There’s always been rich and poor, the 1 percent and the 99 percent.” And then he adds, “It’s like a prison. If you only have prisoners and no guards, you’d have chaos.”

Right. Well, at least we know we’re free.

That comes from the ertswhile “King of Versailles” via Jonathan Schwartz, who also notes this charming tid-bit from Bloomberg:

A lot of people are wondering how much influence a few rich businessmen will have on the presidential election. The rich businessmen might be wondering, too. But mostly they’re not talking about it. There’s one exception: David Siegel…In [The Queen of Versailles], Siegel says that he was personally responsible for the election of George W. Bush in 2000…

Here’s Siegel’s account of how he swung the election in Bush’s favor: “Whenever I saw a negative article about [Al] Gore, I put it in with the paychecks of my 8,000 employees. I had my managers do a survey on every employee. If they liked Bush, we made them register to vote. But not if they liked Gore. The week before [the election] we made 80,000 phone calls through my call center – they were robo-calls. On Election Day, we made sure everyone who was voting for Bush got to the polls. I didn’t know he would win by 527 votes. Afterward, we did a survey among the employees to find out who voted who wouldn’t have otherwise. One thousand of them said so.”

Click over to A Tiny Revolution for the whole story and a truly amazing Youtube about the movie.

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Cruel and unusual punishment just for dying

by David Atkins

Reading stories like this makes me want to destroy random inanimate objects:

“My husband has repeatedly asked me to give him a gun, he has asked me to shoot him, and he repeatedly begs to die.”

This came to me Wednesday afternoon in an email from a Northern California woman.

“All I can do is give him the prescribed doses of morphine provided and hope it’s enough to enable him to let go,” said Sandy Wester, whose 71-year-old husband, Donald — Donnie she called him — was in hospice care, with cancer spreading through his body. His dignity was gone, he had many of the same needs as an infant, and the long days brought nothing but anguish.

Wester wrote to say she had followed my accounts of my father’s death and was incensed by my July 22 column about the arrest of an 87-year-old Palm Springs man. Bill Bentinck was locked up for three days on suspicion of murder after his terminally ill wife removed her nasal oxygen catheter to speed death along. Bentinck, who quietly allowed her to pass, was held on $1-million bail but was later released without charges.

I called Wester as soon as I got the email, and she described the scene playing out in her cabin in the Sierra foothills. Donnie, who hadn’t eaten in days, was trying to lift himself off the bed, angry that death was making him wait so long.

“He’s flipping a chair,” Sandy said, describing a light, plastic lawn chair next to the bed. “He’s saying, ‘Why can’t I just die?'”

Why not, indeed? Where is the concern for “liberty” we so often hear from the right wing in cases like these?

Donnie’s line, according to Sandy, was that he wanted to wake up dead, meaning that if physician-assisted death wasn’t possible, he wanted to die in his sleep. Weeks of misery at the end of a good life “was not the way he wanted to go, and I think we need to have more control over the dying process,” Sandy said.

“My God,” said Sandy’s friend Sue, “we put our dogs down because they’ve got a terminal illness or can’t breathe or walk or whatever. But we make a human being … suffer.”

Sandy said Donnie had recently backed off his requests that she go fetch a pistol, but only because he didn’t want her to have to “clean him up.”

On Wednesday night, he fell out of bed and the fire department came to help Sandy lift him. On Thursday morning, he was barely hanging on.

“At 5:30, he laid there and that’s when the horrible breathing started,” she said of the death rattle that often signals the end is near. “And then it got worse. Oh my God, it was horrible.”

She used the word “barbaric” to describe the way Donnie died, and it’s not the first time I’ve heard that very description from a Californian wondering why we don’t have the same end-of-life options that residents of Oregon, Washington and Montana do. The answer is that religious organizations — chief among them the Catholic Church — and some medical associations have derailed such efforts in the past.

Revolting. Conservatism in all its forms, but especially in its most backward social forms, is responsible for untold misery and suffering. If only the eternity of suffering truly awaited them in equal exchange for the pain they cause others.

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