Joy to the World - or Else

One constant teabagger refrain is that government is too big, too intrusive and too all-encompassing. So one California teabagger naturally wants to require schools to play Christmas carols and students to listen.

Yes, the annual War on Christmas and the teabagger movement have come together in Redding, California. Merry Hyatt, president of the Redding Tea Party Patriots, is so incensed by her local public school not bombarding kids with holiday tunes that she's starting a ballot initiative signature campaign to fix this. If the initiative passes, schools would be forced to play carols - even overtly religious ones - and those who refuse would be dragged into court.

Hyatt, who as a substitute teacher really should know better, said she launched the initiative to push a specifically religious means of getting students to clean up their act: "He's the prince of peace; he's the only one who can get these kids to stop being so violent." She is unapologetic about her intentions, saying, "Bottom line is Christmas is about Christmas. That's why we have it. It's not about winter solstice or Kwanzaa. It's like, 'wow you guys, it's called Christmas for a reason.'"

She seems to be missing the point about a few things - such as that not everyone celebrates Christmas, and that not everyone who does celebrate it does it the way she does. Somehow, I doubt that Jews or other non-Christians would appreciate being forced to listen to Christmas music. And oh yes, there's a little thing called separation of church and state. Blaring such specifically Christian music as "Angels We Have Heard on High" or "Joy to the World" in a public school most definitely counts as advocating religion. Even if the initiative passes - and that's a big if - it would last about four seconds before being struck down as unconstitutional.

And for a supposedly get-government-off-our-backs teabagger, Hyatt apparently doesn't realize that her initiative would put government in charge of forcing religious beliefs on people. Anyone who has ever studied the history of governmental religious doctrine knows that it always ends badly. People who follow the "wrong" religions - or even the "wrong" form of the "right" religion - always end up being discriminated against or worse.

Of course, she seems to have no problem with forcing her own beliefs on people. She is saved and pure while everyone else is a godless heathen, you see.

Good Grief

When President Obama spoke Tuesday evening on his policy for cleaning up the mess in Afghanistan he inherited from President Bush, the various TV networks naturally bumped their original programming to make room for it. It was, after all, a major address on a major issue. It is therefore a depressingly common sign of the times to see how some people are turning it into something completely ridiculous.

Specifically, Russell Wiseman, the mayor of Arlington, Tennessee, thought he saw something sinister in the speech's timing - namely, to displace ABC's annual showing of A Charlie Brown Christmas.

Seriously.

On his private Facebook page, whose contents were promptly leaked, Wiseman griped:

Ok, so, this is total crap, we sit the kids down to watch 'The Charlie Brown Christmas Special' and our muslim president is there, what a load.....try to convince me that wasn't done on purpose. Ask the man if he believes that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and he will give you a 10 minute disertation [sic] about it....w...hen the answer should simply be 'yes'....

As Lucy van Pelt would say, what a blockhead. Out of all the bizarre stuff said about Obama, this ranks way up there - or down there, depending on your point of view.

I was going to say something along these lines, but DailyKos got there first:

Just imagine the scene in the Situation Room - the President, with his secret Muslim agenda, Pentagon officials and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, pouring over the holiday TV schedule to determine what would be the perfect day to announce they were sending 30,000 more soldiers into harm's way and to [f-word] over Russell Wiseman's kids.

Is there anything Obama's political opponents won't believe? Or will they happily continue to swallow anything which comes down the pike, no matter how crazy it is?

If Wiseman is any indicator, it's probably the latter one.

The God (Hit) Squad

As the conservative frothing-at-the-mouth over President Obama gets even crazier (The swine flu vaccine is actually a biological weapon! Obama will get New York attacked again!) we now have what may be the single worst combination of religion and politics since the Inquisition.

A company called CafePress which makes and sells customized knickknacks such as T-shirts and bumper stickers now offers a line of products with the phrase "Pray for Obama: Psalm 109:8." Now at first, this may seem like asking God to provide the president with the wisdom to do the right thing, but no. The verse reads, "Let his days be few; and let another take his office."

All right, so it's not asking for divinely inspired wisdom, it hopes Obama won't be re-elected in 2012. Right?

Wrong.

You see, the chapter goes on to deliver some decidedly ungodly sentiments:

Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.
Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg: let them seek their bread also out of their desolate places.
Let the extortioner catch all that he hath; and let the strangers spoil his labour.
Let there be none to extend mercy unto him: neither let there be any to favour his fatherless children.
Let his posterity be cut off; and in the generation following let their name be blotted out.
Let the iniquity of his fathers be remembered with the LORD; and let not the sin of his mother be blotted out.
Let them be before the LORD continually, that he may cut off the memory of them from the earth.

It should be pointed out that CafePress does not create the designs for their products; those are provided by their customers, and the company generally accepts everything which is not actively illegal. Close-up views of the designs show they were submitted by teabagger websites such as SatireWorks.com, as well as accounts with the user names "Hang Em All" and "RightWingStuff."

After the story broke, CafePress took down the items, but later put them back up, saying:

We initially pulled the Psalm 109:8 content from our products today because broader media dialog indicated that these designs potentially suggested violence towards the president. Based on current public discourse and further review of the actual content, we have determined that it is fair political commentary and we are in the process of reinstating this merchandise. As with all of our content, these designs will continue to be reviewed and if at any time their meaning is construed as advocating violence we will revisit our decision.

This is hardly the only time when Christian-right zealots have called for the president's murder, but it may be the sneakiest and yet at the same time the most blatant. The people buying these things know the Bible backwards and forwards, and it lets them advertise their desire to see the president dead without actually coming out and saying it.

Stuff like this gives religion a bad name.

UPDATE: After further hullabaloo, CafePress re-removed the items, saying:

We try to create an atmosphere of self-expression. Many of the things we encounter are not black and white, but grey. When the dialogue is civil, we want to let the larger community work things out rather than making an uninformed ruling. The dialogue has played out and common sentiment has reached agreement - this merchandise is not appropriate.

Glad to know someone over there realizes it.

Worse than Nothing

After months of compromise, backroom dealing and sellouts, the Senate Finance Committee, led by Senator Max Baucus, has unveiled its health-care reform plan. To put it mildly, the proposal is worse than nothing:

• No public option
• No requirement for employers to provide coverage
  
• Seniors and people living in supposed "high risk" areas would pay up to 7.5 times the premiums of other Americans regardless of income
  
• Premiums of up to 13% of adjusted gross income - before any deductibles, co-payments, co-insurance or any other out-of-pocket expenses
• Verification of citizenship before any treatment
• No public funds for abortion
  
• Very high annual out-of-pocket limits - up to $5,950 for individuals and $11,900 for families
  
• People denied or stripped of coverage due to pre-existing conditions must go without insurance for six months - and be responsible for all medical costs during that period - before being able to enroll in a "high-risk pool"
• Anyone who rejects the insurance plan provided by their employer (even if it costs too much and covers too little) and can't afford to buy insurance privately will be fined

And so on. This sorry excuse for a plan is what we get when bipartisanship is put above getting a good bill. It's been brutally obvious for months that the Republicans have no interest in working on any kind of health reform bill. And to no one's surprise, the GOP immediately rejected the Baucus plan out of hand.

Genuine bipartisanship works like this:

• Democrat: This is my bill.
• Republican: I don't like sections A, B and C.
• Democrat: All right, then let's work together to resolve the disputes.
• (Interlude, consisting of compromise)
  
• Democrat: I got rid of section A, made minor changes to section B and you're going to have to live with section C.
• Republican: I think that's reasonable. I'll vote for it.
  

But this is the kind of "bipartisanship" we've been seeing from the Republicans:

• Democrat: This is my bill.
• Republican: I hate this bill and everything about it. I won't vote for it.
• Democrat: I don't need your vote to pass the bill, but I want it anyway.
  
• (Interlude, consisting of teabagging and wild shrieking)
• Democrat: OK, I ripped the guts out of the bill, turned it into a shadow of its former self, and made it so that it's worse than doing nothing. Now will you support it?
• Republican: No. And you're a Communist.

Too many Democrats still labor under the impression that the GOP wants to compromise. They don't. Everyone knew the Republicans would reject anything Baucus could have come up with, and indeed he has done nothing but waste everyone's time and effort.

Since the Republicans have shown bad faith at every stage of the process, the Democrats should just tell them to go jump in the lake. They should use their strong majorities in both houses of Congress to pass a real health-reform bill, one which actually makes people healthier instead of insurance companies richer. If the GOP doesn't like it, too bad. They don't have the votes to block it.

Will the Democrats get some cojones and actually do it? Or will they continue to sell their souls for Republican votes they don't need and can't get anyway?

Lighten Up

I was going to comment on Saturday's teabagger rallies, but thinking about them makes my brain hurt. So instead, here's something a little different.

Back in 2004, Republican Jack Ryan was the man to beat in the Illinois Senate race. He had the money, the coverage, the endorsements and the support of the Christian right. And then Jeri Ryan showed up.

Jeri, better known as Borg babe Seven of Nine on Star Trek: Voyager, was once married to Jack before the union dissolved in a messy divorce. One of the messiest parts revolved around Jeri's allegations of Jack's appetites being, well, nonstandard.

I [Jeri] made clear to Respondent [Jack] that our marriage was over for me in the spring of 1998. On three trips, one to New Orleans, one to New York, and one to Paris, Respondent insisted that I go to sex clubs with him. They were long weekends, supposed "romantic" getaways. ...

The clubs in New York and Paris were explicit sex clubs. Respondent had done research. Respondent took me to two clubs in New York during the day. One club I refused to go in. It had mattresses in cubicles. The other club he insisted I go to. ... It was a bizarre club with cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling. Respondent wanted me to have sex with him there, with another couple watching. I refused. Respondent asked me to perform a sexual activity upon him, and he specifically asked other people to watch. I was very upset. We left the club, and Respondent apologized, said that I was right and that he would never insist I go to a club again. He promised it was out of his system.

Then during a trip to Paris, he took me to a sex club in Paris, without telling me where we were going. I told him I thought it was out of his system. I told him he had promised me would never go. People were having sex everywhere. I cried, I was physically ill. Respondent became very upset with me, and said it was not a "turn on" for me to cry.

When the divorce files were unsealed and made public, Jack first called his ex-wife a liar and then dropped out of the race. With only a few months to go to the election, the national GOP had to scramble for a replacement candidate, especially after Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka turned them down. The party eventually went out of state to get Alan Keyes, the party's token black conservative, to stand in on the ballot. The far-right (he has since become a birther) Keyes never had a chance and was creamed in November by a state senator named Barack Obama.

Fast-forward five years. Republican uber-pundit Jonah Goldberg has spent most of the last year shrieking about Obama's election and America's subsequent transformation into a socialist (or fascist, he can't seem to make up his mind) tyranny. After all, look at how many teabaggers were arrested and/or beaten to a pulp on Saturday by Obama's private army of ACORN operatives and indoctrinated schoolchildren.

There weren't any? Really? I'm pretty sure I heard something about how America is now a dictatorship where dissent is punished harshly. Oh well, never mind.

Anyway, Goldberg has decided who is to blame for our current situation. It's Jeri Ryan.

Yesterday, Goldberg posted to his Twitter page:

Lightened up?

The lady's husband took her to places she did not want to go, which clearly upset her and left her feeling betrayed, and this guy's response is to tell her to lighten up? Did he not have enough tweet room to tell her she should have taken one for the team?

And the Republicans wonder why their party is so often seen as hostile to women.

Rise of the Tenthers

Evidently believing that birthers and deathers insufficiently cut the mustard, the latest arrivals in the world of political crackpottery are the tenthers. These people claim fealty to the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, which reads:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

For years, the amendment has been cited by libertarians and states-rights activists to oppose federal laws they don't like on the grounds they're not specifically mentioned in the Constitution. The amendment was used prior to the Civil War to defy federal anti-slavery laws, and again a century later to defy federal desegregation laws. Both instances ended badly for the contemporary tenthers.

According to the tenthers, the federal government cannot regulate food safety, assault rifles, highway standards or financial markets. Federal laws against such crimes as destroying aircraft, hunting endangered species, discrimination and mail fraud are all invalid. All government operations from Social Security and Medicare to the Veterans Administration and the GI Bill must be chucked into the garbage. All that would be left up to the states, and if they don't want to run such programs or punish such crimes - well, them's the breaks, even it results in a crazy-quilt patchwork of a national legal system.

This year, a number of state legislatures have introduced or even passed "sovereignty resolutions" invoking the amendment to declare themselves exempt from whatever laws the federal government might pass. Particularly in Texas, some have taken this movement to its logical extreme, promoting outright secession from the country.

Now we can add Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty to the tenthers' ranks. Last night in a Republican Governors Association conference call with conservative activists, he made plain his feelings about the cause of health care reform. "It's frightening," he said, "it's ludicrous, it's a bad idea and the country is against it." (Actually, the country is for it, but folks like Pawlenty have never let facts get in the way of their talking points.)

Asked if he would use the amendment to block health reform in his state, Pawlenty replied:

Depending on what the federal government comes out with here, asserting the Tenth Amendment might be [a] viable option, but we don’t know the details. As one of the other callers said, we can't really even get the president to outline what he does or doesn't support in any detail. So we'll have to see. I'd say that's a possibility. You're starting to see more governors, including me, and specifically Governor Perry from Texas, and most Republican governors express concern around these issues and get more aggressive about asserting and bringing up the Tenth Amendment. So I think we could see hopefully a resurgence of those claims and maybe even lawsuits if need be.

(Note that he mentions only Republican governors considering this move. You know, partisan politics just might be involved here.) Pawlenty and other tenthers conveniently forget another part of the Constitution. Article I lays out Congress' powers, and Section 8 in particular says:

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States. [emphasis added]

Isn't it reasonable to say that keeping the American population as a whole healthy makes us a stronger and more defensible nation? Doesn't making sure that people won't have to worry about losing everything if they get sick fall under the category of "general Welfare?" Seems to me that the Constitution clearly allows Congress to pass such laws.

Sorry guys, but you can't have it both ways. You can't claim ultimate supremacy of the Constitution while using one part of it to reject another part. Next!

Wrong, Wrong, Wrong

On the morning after President Obama's health-care speech to Congress, the Interwebs were buzzing about Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC). You see, at one point Obama explained that any reforms "would not apply to those who are here illegally," whereupon Wilson shouted, "You lie!" A breach of etiquette, to be sure.

Anyway, Wilson showed not only that he can't tell the difference between the House of Representatives and a teabagger rally, but also that he doesn't know what he's talking about. He wasn't just wrong, he was very obviously wrong. If you look at the bill and search for the words "undocumented" or "alien," you will very quickly find this on page 143:

SEC. 246. NO FEDERAL PAYMENT FOR UNDOCUMENTED ALIENS.

Nothing in this subtitle shall allow Federal payments for affordability credits on behalf of individuals who are not lawfully present in the United States.

Pretty self-explanatory, don't you think? If you're in the country illegally, you're not covered by the bill. Plain and simple.

All summer, one of the teabaggers' favorite refrains was that senators and representatives supposedly didn't bother to read the bill text. If nothing else, Wilson just proved them right, at least as far as he's concerned. If he had actually taken the time to read the bill he so loudly opposes, he wouldn't have made such a jackass of himself on the House floor last night.

The Ick Factor Rides Again

It's happened so many times you'd think it would be obvious by now. If you talk loudly about the "sanctity of marriage" to prevent gays and lesbians from participating in that same sanctity, if you fly your "family values" on a very large and public flagpole, if you set yourself up as a yardstick by which everyone else should structure their moral lives - if you do all that, you'd darn well better walk the walk. Mark Sanford, John Ensign, David Vitter, Larry Craig, Ted Haggard, Mark Foley, Helen Chenoweth, Newt Gingrich, Bob Livingston - the list of hypocrites goes on and on.

And now we can add Michael Duvall, a California state representative from Orange County, to that roster of shame. He is a conservative Republican who opposes gay marriage while touting his own marriage and two children.

Indeed, he is so far to the right he received a 100% rating from the Capitol Resource Institute, an explicitly Christian lobbying group set up "to educate, advocate, protect, and defend family-friendly policies in the California state legislature." (Of course, their definition of "family" excludes same-sex families.) And just for good measure, he introduced a bill banning the creation and sale of T-shirts with the names of dead soldiers alongside such political statements as "Bush Lied," etc.

So what did he do? The OC Weekly reports that just before the start of a committee meeting, he was regaling a colleague with some rather gross details of his romps with not one but two women not his wife when his microphone went live, broadcasting his words on TV. (I will not get into the sordid intricacies of Duvall's bragging, mostly because thinking about them makes me want to saw off the top of my head and scrub out my brain with a Brillo pad. If you're a masochist who revels in the Ick Factor, have at it.)

As if to prove that yes, it can get worse, both women are lobbyists for companies regulated by his committee. For his part, Duvall never even tried being discreet:

Legislative sources say they have witnessed Duvall, who is vice chairman of the Assembly's powerful Committee on Utilities & Commerce, socializing after-hours with [Heidi] Barsuglia [one of his lobbyist mistresses]. Sources - who asked for anonymity because of Duvall's power in the capital - say Susan Duvall usually stays in Orange County during the week, when her husband flies to Sacramento. They also say they have seen Duvall with Barsuglia in restaurants, "arm-in-arm" at political fund-raising events and even shopping together for groceries just blocks from the capitol building.

"Their relationship is the worst-kept secret in Sacramento," a capitol staffer recently told me. "He's old and fat. She's hot, blonde and about 20 years younger. He could have never gotten a woman like that before he got this job.'"

So we have the specter - again - of a moral high-horse type who doesn't bother to live up to his own standards, and who is literally in bed with the lobbyists to boot.

After the scandal broke, Duvall tried explaining it away by issuing a statement saying "I deeply regret the comments I made in what I believed to be a private conversation." Didn't work; the howls kept coming. So late today, he finally gave up and resigned:

I am deeply saddened that my inappropriate comments have become a major distraction for my colleagues in the Assembly, who are working hard on the very serious problems facing our state. I have come to the conclusion that it would not be fair to my family, my constituents or to my friends on both sides of the aisle to remain in office. Therefore, I have decided to resign my office, effective immediately, so that the Assembly can get back to work.

Note that he doesn't regret the hypocrisy or the corruption, only that he was caught bragging about it.

You really think they would have figured it out by now: if you can't or won't keep it in your pants, don't lecture anyone else about it.

Be True to Your (Socialist) School

There is a scene in the 1984 movie Red Dawn in which our all-American heroes sneak into town only to find it dominated by the Communist invaders. Tanks are on the streets, the local movie house is showing Alexander Nevsky and propaganda posters blaring "A New Man Arises from the Ashes of Capitalism" decorate buildings. In other words, it's pretty much the sort of world wingnuts were expecting to find this morning after President Obama delivered his school speech yesterday.

You may recall that the White House announced last week that the president would give a back-to-school speech telling kids to work hard and stay in school. The right wing promptly panicked en masse, convinced he would tell them to embrace socialism, inform on their parents, hand their elders over to the death panels, worship at the Church of Barack, etc. With parents pulling their kids out of class and principals refusing to show the speech at all, Obama told kids to...work hard and stay in school.

This morning, the sun rose on an America pretty much exactly the same as the one it set on last night. Not surprisingly, this has made no impact on the paranoid right whatsoever.

Florida GOP chair Jim Greer, who started all this nonsense with his primal scream warning of "Obama's socialist ideology," now says that the White House rewrote the speech to take out all the red stuff. Pressed by CNN's Suzanne Malveaux, he reluctantly admitted to not having any actual information to back up his claim.

Not to be outdone, Rush Limbaugh said that Obama's call for students to take responsibility for their education actually meant the exact opposite:

The theme of his speech today was take personal responsibility, which none of his policies encourage. None of his policies even allow it. You want to take care of your own health care? No way! You're going to get a government-mandated health care plan regardless, and you can't do anything about it. You can't assume responsibility for your own health care. You can't assume responsibility for your own job. You can't assume responsibility for your own car. "No, no, no! You're too stupid to do any of that." So he goes out and tells these kids, "You've gotta take personal responsibility"? He never even does that in his own life.

So let me get this straight - after years of Limbaugh telling everyone to take responsibility for their own actions, a president says just that and his response is to go on the attack. It's a logical pretzel, but I gave up trying to make sense of Limbaugh's rants years ago.

The comments on Fox Nation were no more well-informed:

• "I don't care what he says. I do not want to hear it, because everytime his lips move, he is lying. He got what he wanted, all the parents read the dang thing anyway. I do not watch the propaganda on tv...and I wouldn't want my kids to see him on tv. He is on enough, anyway. ...I don't trust him, he is only after power and politics. If the left wants seperation from church and state, I want seperation from school and politics."
• "If we had not complained about his original plan and speech it would not have been rewritten. We would have had a lot of ammunition if he had delivered the original. Alas, it is better to protect our children from this communist. I have no doubt that Obama and his shadow government will most certainly supply plenty of vile and objectionable statements and actions in the near future."
• "Maybe our commie pres. should be taken care of business instead of B.S.ing our children? I don't trust this man ..........or his 'speeches'...or his 'czars'.......or ANYTHING about him! **=="
• "ENOUGH OF THIS LIBERALISM,my granddaughter is 5 years old in kindergarten.I just learned her teacher was doing polling last week on what president they would vote for.They are just starting out the new year and I don't know if this was the build up.They were using jellybeans for whatever reason.I see Obama building his civilian army from the ground up.This reminds me of the Hitler youth.PBS over the week-end showed Van Jones talking to students at another school venue earlier in the year.Parents better take charge and ask questions of their teachers.Don't let the village raise the child.Parents monitor your child's school work.This did not happen overnight,the times are changing,text books are changing,teaching humanism,evolution,and global warming religion in it self.Van Jones,self described communist in the White House.We have fired,sentence people for treason.What secrets has Obama given up? Obama just said this week-end he cannot remember promises he has made after he drinks his wine.Perhaps he should step away from the wine,America is too important to loose; Obama's comment was made at a event.It reminded me of the Kennedy wake to what politicians said about Ted getting too much alcohol in his system to remember what happened the night before. Obama is a radical and there is no other way to put it. If Obama were not the president he should not be exposed to any president because of his radical views,they searched Van Jones out and brought him in,a communist."
  

And so on and so forth, a continuing torrent of deranged paranoia.

Anyway, we now know just what the Republicans stand for - blowing off homework and dropping out of school. Perhaps they should just rename themselves the Grand Obtuse Party and get it over with. At least that way they don't have to learn new initials.

Stupid Is as Stupid Does

In my house, "stupid" is a bad word. But sometimes it's the only one that fits.

The White House announced last week that President Obama would make a back-to-school speech to America's students on the importance of education. No big deal - Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush made similar speeches. This time, however, the right wing exploded in blind paranoid rage, calling the speech "indoctrination" and comparing it to recruitment for the Hitler Youth.

Displaying a fine disregard for irony as well as facts, wingnuts galore told parents to pull their kids out of school to prevent them from hearing a speech urging them to stay in school.

With parents driven to hysteria by all the screaming, the media has finally realized that the people pushing this stuff really are nuts. John Harwood of that red network CNBC put it best:

Let's face it, in a country of three hundred million people there are a lot of stupid people too, because if you believe that's it's somehow unhealthy for kids for the president to say work hard and stay in school, you're stupid.

So after these last few days of idiotic tumult in the schools, we now have the prepared text of Obama's speech tomorrow. Just as everyone feared, it's chock-full of socialist exhortations to lock up all ObamaCare opponents in FEMA concentration camps and worship Chairman Obama for the god he is.

Nah, just kidding. As the sane parts of the country knew all along, it's your standard education speech. Obama will talk about students' responsibility for their own education, their need to put down the Xbox and pick up the textbook. To do any less would be a disservice not just to themselves but to the country as a whole:

Every single one of you has something you're good at. Every single one of you has something to offer. And you have a responsibility to yourself to discover what that is. That's the opportunity an education can provide.

Maybe you could be a good writer - maybe even good enough to write a book or articles in a newspaper - but you might not know it until you write a paper for your English class. Maybe you could be an innovator or an inventor - maybe even good enough to come up with the next iPhone or a new medicine or vaccine - but you might not know it until you do a project for your science class. Maybe you could be a mayor or a Senator or a Supreme Court Justice, but you might not know that until you join student government or the debate team.

And no matter what you want to do with your life - I guarantee that you'll need an education to do it. You want to be a doctor, or a teacher, or a police officer? You want to be a nurse or an architect, a lawyer or a member of our military? You’re going to need a good education for every single one of those careers. You can't drop out of school and just drop into a good job. You’ve got to work for it and train for it and learn for it.

And this isn't just important for your own life and your own future. What you make of your education will decide nothing less than the future of this country. What you're learning in school today will determine whether we as a nation can meet our greatest challenges in the future.

You'll need the knowledge and problem-solving skills you learn in science and math to cure diseases like cancer and AIDS, and to develop new energy technologies and protect our environment. You'll need the insights and critical thinking skills you gain in history and social studies to fight poverty and homelessness, crime and discrimination, and make our nation more fair and more free. You'll need the creativity and ingenuity you develop in all your classes to build new companies that will create new jobs and boost our economy.

We need every single one of you to develop your talents, skills and intellect so you can help solve our most difficult problems. If you don't do that - if you quit on school - you're not just quitting on yourself, you're quitting on your country.

So - that's that, right? You wish.

I absolutely guarantee that the usual crowd of teabaggers and blind Obama-haters, who have never let facts get in the way of anything, will not let this go. Rather, they will seize on Obama's comments to "prove" that he's pushing socialism, regardless of any facts or sanity. Or they will claim that the prepared text is merely a ruse, and that he will tell kids something very different tomorrow.

Or something else equally crazy and, yes, stupid.

Glenn Beck vs. Art

Glenn Beck, Fox News' very own demagogic combination of Howard Beale and Father Coughlin, has outdone himself. Yes, after ranting about President Obama's racism, Nazi health care and indoctrination in schools, he has taken on the world of art.

In a bit truly stunning for its tinfoil-hat craziness, Beck railed against the supposed Communist and Fascist art (what, they couldn't make up their minds?) installed at New York's Rockefeller Center more than seventy years ago.

Rockefeller Center is home to MSNBC - and also to Fox News, as Keith Olbermann gleefully pointed out on his own show. (You'd think Fox would catch something like that. But it's more likely that Beck has no one at all tasked with stopping him from making a jackass out of himself.)

And when Beck howls that people "need to see things that are hidden in plain sight," one should mention that other people see things no one else can see, and they have to take a lot of pills for it.

Many have wondered before just how connected Beck is to reality, but this one really takes the cake. People who actually know something about art history hooted in derision, and even some mainstream conservatives are starting to see him not as a voice of the populist masses but as a paranoid and increasingly unhinged conspiracy theorist.

Every time he starts shrieking about a (misspelled) oligarchy or how an elected president is about to "seize power," he sucks everyone connected with him, even tangentially, into the same nutty black-helicopter crowd. His advertisers are fleeing in droves, and one wonders just how much of a liability he'll have to become before Fox News realizes there's no upside in keeping him on the schedule.

Why the GOP Is Ignorant

Next Tuesday, President Obama will deliver an online speech to the nation's children just as the school year begins, in which he is scheduled to "challenge students to work hard, set educational goals, and take responsibility for their learning."

Now, one would think this is pretty standard for a president. After all, both Presidents Bush made the same sort of speech. But since the president involved is Barack Obama, the Republican Party is naturally having a hissy fit over it.

To be specific, Florida GOP chairman Jim Greer is having a hissy fit over it. In a press release sent out yesterday, Greer blasted Obama for daring to tell America's children to do their homework:

As the father of four children, I am absolutely appalled that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama's socialist ideology. The idea that school children across our nation will be forced to watch the President justify his plans for government-run health care, banks, and automobile companies, increasing taxes on those who create jobs, and racking up more debt than any other President, is not only infuriating, but goes against beliefs of the majority of Americans, while bypassing American parents through an invasive abuse of power.

And it goes downhill from there. The full thing must be seen to be believed.

From Greer's diatribe, one would think Obama plans to read to America's schoolchildren from The Communist Manifesto, lead them in a rousing chorus of "The Internationale," start the Pledge of Allegiance with "I pledge allegiance to Barack Obama" and end it with "Allahu Akbar!" It has no connection with reality whatsoever.

But since it is (a) critical of Obama and (b) completely nuts, the usual suspects - Glenn Beck, Michelle Malkin, etc - are predictably jumping all over it. Other pundits and bloggers told parents to keep their kids home from school on Tuesday, ensuring that they won't be exposed to the president with the side effect of missing any lessons which happen to be taught that day.

So not only do we have yet another example of the pettiness of right-wing rage, we also see just how much they value their kids' education. After all, if they're willing to pull them out of school to protect them from hearing someone talk about the importance of learning, one wonders from what else they're willing to protect them - the tyranny of 2+2=4, perhaps.

Let's face it - this latest in a (very) long line of supposed Obama outrages has nothing to do with what he will actually say. It's about the man himself. He could personally shoot Osama bin Laden in the head on the Fourth of July to the strains of "Onward Christian Soldiers" and he would still be attacked as a Socialist Muslim who wants to destroy America.

At least we now know why the Republicans so often appear to be deliberately ignorant. It's because they hate studying.

Supersocialist

Back in 1952, the Man of Steel appeared in an issue of the comic book The Adventures of Bob Hope, urging us to "hop on the welfare wagon" and support health care for all because it's good for everyone:

If that comic were published today, not only would Glenn Beck et al rant that Superman's "S" insignia stands for "Socialist," he would be accused of being an America-hating Marxist and hounded for his Smallville birth certificate to boot.

We're all in this together. Making sure we as a nation are as healthy as possible makes us more productive, meaning we get a better economy and a better quality of life for everyone. We knew it even at the height of McCarthyism and the Red Scare, so why is it so hard to realize now?

Into the Lion's Den

The other night, I attended a town hall meeting by my Congressional representative to discuss the health reform bill currently in Congress. Actually, I tried to attend the meeting, but it was full up long before I got there. Instead, I found myself on the lawn outside the meeting place, where the man hoping to defeat my rep in 2010 set up a campaign rally. The usual crowd of teabaggers (holding signs like "GOVT. HEALTHCARE HOTLINE / 1-800-YOU'RE-DEAD!"), pro-lifers (with their requisite gory photos of aborted fetuses) and Lyndon LaRouche disciples (sporting posters of Obama with a Hitler mustache) was very much in attendance.

The general atmosphere was like something out of another dimension, where up is down, black is white, and an effort to make sure everyone can get the health care they need is actually a plot to destroy America.

Person after person railed to me against "socialism," "death books," "Marxism" and other canards, citing the paranoid ravings of Glenn Beck as if they were holy gospel.

"Have you read the bill?" I was asked over and over, and my response of "yes, have you?" flummoxed them. Such people apparently believe that their refusal to read the bill for themselves means that no one else will read it either, and so they're caught unprepared when talking with someone who actually took the time and effort to debunk the scare stories.

People carried signs denouncing the bill as "unconstitutional" and demanding its supporters be tried for treason. They have evidently never read Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, which clearly gives Congress the power to "provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States." One would think that health care definitely belongs in the category of "general Welfare."

And then there were the arguments over the "death panels." I argued myself blue in the face that there are no death panels and that it's all a monstrous lie. I explained the actual purpose of the attacked section - namely, if you choose to discuss a living will and/or other advance care planning with your doctor, Medicare will cover the cost of the consultation - and it made no difference whatsoever.

Same thing with the Veterans Administration's supposed "death book," Your Life, Your Choices, whose actual purpose is to educate veterans about advance care planning. People had already made up their minds, and no amount of facts was going to change them.

When people over 65 denounced "government run health care" and I mentioned a little something called Medicare, they didn't even slow down. When they fulminated against "socialism" and I asked if they receive Social Security, they accused me of twisting their words against them.

But the absolute low point was a woman in a wheelchair shakily taking the microphone to say that as a "cripple" she was on the list of "disposable" people who would not receive care. The crowd replied with a mixture of cheers (for her) and boos (for Obama and anyone else who supports the bill).

"That's not true!" I blurted out, only to be shouted down.

The thought of someone deliberately twisting that woman's mind with fear and terror into believing something no sane person would ever suggest is simply obscene. And the realization that far too many Americans wholeheartedly believe it as well makes me despair for our nation.

Death Panels 2.0

With the "death panels" smear having gone down in flames, exposed for the monstrous lie it is, the right wing is taking another tack in attacking the Obama Administration - saying it wants elderly veterans to die.

Call it Death Panels 2.0.

All during the Bush Administration, the Veterans Administration distributed a booklet titled Your Life, Your Choices, educating veterans about advance care planning and encouraging them to discuss the issue with their families, doctors and spiritual advisers. Advance care planning, which became widely known after the Terri Schiavo fiasco, lets people dictate the terms of their health care in advance should they become incapacitated. For example, via a living will you can tell your doctors to keep you alive by any means needed, or you can direct that treatment be withheld. With a health care proxy, you can specify that someone else has the right to make health-care decisions on your behalf.

The point of such planning is that you control your treatment and thus spare your family from having to make painful decisions on your behalf. So it is thus not surprising that the booklet, first issued by the Clinton Administration and retained for twelve years, is being distorted beyond all recognition.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed and again on Fox News, Jim Towey called Your Life, Your Choices a "death book," saying that it "presents end-of-life choices in a way aimed at steering users toward predetermined conclusions, much like a political 'push poll.' For example, a worksheet on page 21 lists various scenarios and asks users to then decide whether their own life would be 'not worth living.'"

If he genuinely believes veterans (or anyone else, for that matter) would tell their doctor to pull the plug based solely on a worksheet, he must really think they're morons.

Of course, since the booklet is freely available online, Towey exhibits the same haughty arrogance shown by other death-panel scaremongers - he apparently believes his readers are either too stupid or too lazy to look it up for themselves. Anyone who actually looks at the booklet quickly sees that the worksheet helps veterans consider their feelings about the subject and thus decide for themselves what treatment they may want done (or not done, as the case may be) if the worst happens. It does not favor one outcome or another. Indeed, it explicitly says, "You can help assure that your wishes will direct future health care decisions through the process of advance care planning."

So Towey is lying. But we already knew that.

What we didn't know is that for years, Towey repeatedly lobbied the VA to buy millions of copies of Five Wishes (his own for-sale "living will with a heart" booklet) but was turned down. So by smearing the free VA booklet, he's not only lying and fear-mongering, he's also trying to drum up business.

This is really terrible. Base political opportunism combined with scaremongering and crass exploitation makes for a very bad combination. Preying on elderly people is always bad, but preying on elderly veterans who have given their all for their country is particularly awful.

Now He Tells Us

Several years ago, quite a few people noticed a distinct pattern to how the Administration blared scary terrorist warnings - namely, that a disproportionate number of them were announced in such a way as to offset bad publicity or to ratchet up the fear level in advance of the 2004 election. MSNBC pundit Keith Olbermann called it "the nexus of politics and terror" and often commented on how terror plots were foiled with such perfect timing.

Now we know that was no coincidence. Tom Ridge, President Bush's first Secretary of Homeland Security who resigned less than a month after the 2004 election, has come forward to confirm what so many of us already suspected - that the terror alert system was blatantly politicized to bolster Bush's poll numbers and to ensure his re-election.

In his upcoming book The Test of Our Times, Ridge writes that when a new Osama bin Laden videotape surfaced only a few days before the election, he was pressured to raise the alert level despite the lack of any actual need for it: "There was absolutely no support for that position within our department. None. I wondered, 'Is this about security or politics?' Post-election analysis demonstrated a significant increase in the president's approval rating in the days after the raising of the threat level."

Not surprisingly, other former Administration insiders have disputed his claim, but it all comes together. Prior to the election, it was obvious that the system was being misused. Terror alerts were issued in such a way as to wipe out Democratic poll advantages, divert from whistle-blower testimony about the FBI's pre-9/11 activities (or lack thereof) and distract from the Abu Ghraib revelations. And the number of alerts dropped off sharply right after the election, when they were no longer needed so urgently.

But really, we should not be surprised. After all, the Bush team politicized everything, from the criminal justice system to science to 9/11 itself. Every function of government was twisted to serve not the nation, but George W. Bush and the Republican Party.

Disgusted, yes, but not surprised.

A Different Kind of Marxist

When it comes to health-insurance reform, the Republican Party has officially moved from opposition to obstructionism. First they screamed that the "public option" was socialist (despite the similarly "un-American" existence of Medicare), then they screamed that "co-ops" are the same thing and thus still socialist. It seems that the only non-socialist reform is none at all, leaving us stuck with what we have now. This works just fine for a few of us, works less well or barely at all for many more of us, and leaves almost fifty million of us out in the cold altogether.

So with their determination to oppose anything supported by the White House, it seems the GOP has become a bunch of Marxists. No, not Karl - Groucho:

Yes, it's true. The movie Horse Feathers predicted the Republican reaction to the Obama Administration a full seventy-seven years before it took office. After all, as Oscar Wilde said, "Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life."

Since the GOP has made it very plain that they will oppose health reform no matter what, it's way past time for the Democrats to tell them to take a hike. The Dems have a strong majority in Congress, and it's about time they used it.

Fearing Fear Itself

After the Terri Schiavo spectacle a few years ago, many people started thinking about living wills, health care proxies and other methods of avoiding the same nightmarish limbo. So when the health-care reform bill was introduced in Congress last month, it included a provision (section 1233, pages 424-434) extending Medicare to cover "advance care planning consultations" should you choose to discuss such options with your doctor.

Eminently sensible. After all, making it easier for you to plan ahead for such a tragedy is a good thing.

But that was before Sarah Palin, former governor and present full-time provocateur, seized hold of the section and mangled it into something out of the Holocaust. Screaming about nonexistent "death panels" and raising the equally imaginary specter of killing off the elderly and disabled, she lied and lied and lied, scaring the pants off people solely to advance her political ambitions and gain street cred with the GOP.

(Of course, Palin would not be Palin without some rank it's-OK-for-me-but-not-for-you hypocrisy. You see, last year she proclaimed "Healthcare Decisions Day in Alaska," praising the exact same things she now denounces. Why am I not surprised?)

As if on cue, the airwaves were promptly filled with equally dishonest shrieking. Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Newt Gingrich and others all fear-mongered about how the bill supposedly decides which Americans would get the axe. The fact that it wasn't in the bill, would never be in the bill and indeed would never be considered by anyone in their right mind was irrelevant. There were people to terrorize and cheap points to score.

In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt told Americans that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." In 2009, fear has won. In an unconditional surrender to mindless demagoguery and lies, the Senate Finance Committee yesterday stripped the provision from the bill. Senator Charles Grassley claimed it was dropped because it could be "misinterpreted or implemented incorrectly."

By him, perhaps? Grassley had lied to his constituents only the previous day, depicting the section as "a government program that determines if you're going to pull the plug on grandma."

It was so incredibly false the thesaurus does not have enough words to convey just how false it was.

And yet it worked.

Yes, you have been protected from the horror of being able to decide your own fate without having to worry about paying the cost of the decision. If you want to plan ahead for a possible future, you're on your own.

And to everyone who terrorized their fellow Americans with blatant untruths - let's just wait and see what happens. God forbid you or your loved ones wind up condemned to exist in mute suffering, unable to express anything, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it. All because in the name of partisan politics you made it harder for everyone to plan ahead.

Way to go, guys.

It's All Happening at the Zoo

When the late great Molly Ivins wrote, "You pick up the paper in the morning and it's kind of like finding Fidel Castro in the refrigerator," she was describing Texas politics. But it works for pretty much anything, such as this item from the Tulsa World:

Republican mayoral candidate Anna Falling said Tuesday that putting a Christian creationism display in the Tulsa Zoo is No. 1 in importance among city issues that also include violent crime, budget woes and bumpy streets. "It's first," she said to calls of "hallelujah" at a rally outside the zoo. "If we can't come to the foundation of faith in this community, those other answers will never come. We need to first of all recognize the fact that God needs to be honored in this city."

The notion of an explicitly Christian creationism exhibit at a zoo (much less a publicly-owned zoo) is sort of like the Pope becoming a Bar Mitzvah - the two just don't go together. It seems Falling has never considered the possibility that people who go to the zoo want to learn about animals and science. People who want to learn about creationism would go to - oh, I don't know - church, maybe.

And Falling apparently doesn't care about what just might take precedence on a mayoral agenda - you know, all that boring secular stuff like budgeting and education and police departments.

But just for the heck of it, what would a creationist zoo exhibit look like? Would we see a mock-up of the Garden of Eden, showing the snake tempting an Eve whose naughty bits are tastefully shielded? Would we have a display showing all the animals which went extinct because they never made it onto the Ark? Perhaps something showing which animals were created on which day. The possibilities are endless.

Falling herself, at least according to her campaign website, appears to be just another generic fundamentalist wacko, charged by God with pushing her personal religious beliefs on everyone else whether we want them or not. Indeed, in her zoo speech she promised to turn city government into a Gilead-ish system of clerical control: "Unless the churches of Tulsa are brought into City Hall to begin to address our community's greatest ills - the City of Tulsa will go bankrupt, spiritually, morally and financially."

The article on the Tulsa World's website has already garnered hundreds of comments, from the aghast ("she's kidding,right? right? please someone tell me she's kidding,right?") to the supportive ("Maybe some need to ask themselves 'why be offended by this honest effort to work on root cause of rot in this city?'") to the puckish ("You can see animals at the Tulsa Zoo performing the acts of creationism most any day of the week!").

Somehow, I think Falling's mayoral campaign is not long for this world. After all, the people of Tulsa see all too well how she's turning their city into a laughingstock. Even if she doesn't.

It Must Be True in a Parallel Universe!

Some arguments by opponents of health care are distorted, some are bizarrely so, and some are just...well, read on.

"How House Bill Runs Over Grandma" is a tastefully titled editorial from the July 31 Investors Business Daily. In the middle of pushing the Obama-wants-to-kill-everyone-over-the-age-of-65 lie, they present this tidbit:

People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.

Hawking is a theoretical physicist who is almost completely paralyzed from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (better known as Lou Gehrig's disease) but hasn't let that stop him. In addition to being a college professor, he has written a series of books in which he explains such mind-bruising topics as cosmology and quantum gravity in language accessible to everyone, not just those with multiple PhD's.

Oh yes, and he lives in the UK. In fact, he's lived there all his life. Not only is he not ineligible for health care, he was hospitalized earlier this year.

You may think IBD's editors just might be slightly abashed that their central "gotcha" point is in fact wildly wrong, but I doubt they noticed. After all, they're too busy pushing health-care lies to be bothered with something as trivial as accuracy.

On the other hand, since Hawking theorizes the existence of "baby universes" via black holes, perhaps the editorial is true in one of those other universes. Makes more sense than the rubbish they usually churn out.

Paranoia on Parade

"A lie can make it half way around the world before the truth has time to put its boots on. "

Mark Twain (also attributed to Winston Churchill)

The White House's plan to reform America's health system has been attacked by wild distortions and lies designed not to inform but to terrify. Sarah Palin reached the nadir (so far) of this fear campaign yesterday, shrieking,

The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's "death panel" so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their "level of productivity in society," whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

It's all complete garbage, a dark and twisted fantasy spun out of thin air by people desperate to stop reform in its tracks but who are utterly unable to argue their case on the merits. (And by the way, Sarah, for someone who whines all the time about how your family is supposedly hounded by the media, you sure do love using them as props whenever it suits your purposes.)

In doing so, they are simply falling into line with the standard right-wing playbook: if the facts do not support your position, screw the facts and lie like hell, scaring the crap out of your audience wherever possible.

Horrifyingly, this terror campaign is working. Congressional town hall meetings have been inundated by mobs whipped into a frenzy by false talking points, and have been the location of numerous fights and physical attacks. At least one representative has received death threats and one other has decided to cancel town halls entirely rather than have them become occasions for more mob intimidation.

Thuggish paranoia is on the march in America, and the home of the brave has become the home of the frightened. People's minds are pumped full of terror on a daily basis, and some will believe anything, no matter how ridiculous, as long as it caters to their fears.

For example, a few days ago the White House announced an E-mail address to which people can send the more pernicious lies encountered in this whole miserable situation so they can be quickly debunked. The right wing issued a bloodcurdling scream en masse, and a new phony talking point was born. "The White House wants you to turn in your neighbors!" this one goes. "Report anyone who does not agree with the president!"

And people are believing it.

(Deep and disgusted sigh)

What kind of a country are we, where our people fall so easily for the most outrageous lies? Have we really forgotten how to determine if something is true or not? How many ways can we say, "It is a lie?" How many times must we say, "It is not true?"

A few years ago, it was revealed that the Bush Administration ran a massive (and massively illegal) spying program, snooping on Americans' phone calls, E-mails, web browsing, and anything else they wanted. It was also revealed that the Administration attempted to set up a civilian corps of informants who would spy on people in their own homes and report anything "suspicious." (That one was never put into operation not because it was illegal or immoral, but because the American people would never have accepted it.)

Those violations of our privacy were real. This one is imaginary. And it is a particularly bitter irony that the very same people who a few years ago lambasted the Bush Administration's critics are now leading the shrieking chorus of paranoia. When the Bush spying operation was revealed, Senator John Cornyn, who started this latest freak-out, notably snapped, "None of your civil liberties matter much after you're dead."

Ah, what a difference a change in presidents makes.

The fear level is stoked ever higher by the talking heads who revel in terrorizing their listeners and viewers and who live for turning them into quivering lumps of paranoid jelly. Rush Limbaugh growls with dreary regularity that President Obama is like Hitler. Glenn Beck's broadcasts have become so drenched in paranoia that he actually had to plead with his viewers not to be violent. (They do not appear to be listening.)

Is it any wonder Obama receives 400% more death threats than President Bush did? How long will it be before someone with more guns than brains takes Limbaugh or Beck or Palin or whoever seriously, and decides to murder the president for the supposed good of the country? Or perhaps it will be "just" a senator or representative, perhaps at a town hall meeting. Have the people who get their kicks from terrorizing people with sickening lies considered that possibility? Or will they get it only when someone gets killed? (Then again, they didn't get it when Kansas doctor George Tiller was killed in church after years of vilification on Fox News.)

In the meantime, I'm making a direct appeal to anyone who reads what I write today. Don't believe the scare stories. Do the research. Think for yourself. Verify what you are told and decide for yourself whether it is true or not. And if it's crap, call them on it. That would be a very American thing to do.

If You Can't Win the Argument, Scream Louder

Earlier this year, lobbyists and Republicans joined together to manufacture astroturf "tea parties" at which President Obama was attacked for economic policies which actually began under the previous administration. Fox News did their part as well, abandoning any pretense of journalistic integrity as they aggressively promoted the protests. One Fox reporter even went so far as to rail on air against "the Democrat fascist stimulus package."

The "tea parties" were something of a bust, attracting far fewer (and far crazier) attendees than their organizers were hoping for, but you know what they say - if at first you don't succeed, try, try again.

And so they are indeed trying again, this time under the guise of derailing the current push for health-insurance reform. With Congress away for the August recess, many senators and representatives are holding "town hall" meetings with their constituents. This is, of course, a good thing - our representatives in Congress need to hear from us, loudly and regularly.

But right-wing lobbyists and political groups are packing such meetings with their own supporters, whose only purpose is to yell, scream, disrupt and intimidate by any means necessary. And not surprisingly, GOP TV - er, Fox News - is once again backing this to the hilt.

In fact, a memo leaked last week outlines the exact strategy in almost gleeful terms:

Spread out in the hall and try to be in the front half. The objective is to put the Rep on the defensive with your questions and follow-up. The Rep should be made to feel that a majority, and if not, a significant portion of at least the audience, opposes the socialist agenda of Washington...

You need to rock-the-boat early in the Rep's presentation. Watch for an opportunity to yell out and challenge the Rep's statements early... The purpose is to make him uneasy early on and set the tone for the hall as clearly informal, and free-wheeling. The goal is to rattle him, get him off his prepared script and agenda. If he says something outrageous, stand up and shout out and sit right back down. Look for these opportunities before he even takes questions.

Since opponents know they have no case (after all, does anyone really like fighting insurance companies which refuse to pay for needed treatment?) and aren't even trying to argue on the merits, they have resorted to plan B - outright thuggery. This is not dialogue or conversation, this is designed to shut down dialogue and prevent conversation.

Furthermore, where does it go from here? Let's face it - when people are sent solely to disrupt meetings, any difference between screaming at participants and beating them up is only one of degree.

Tactics like this are profoundly anti-democratic (with a small "d"). Of course we have the right, indeed the duty, to challenge our elected representatives when we don't agree with them. This is America, and I wouldn't have it any other way. But when it crosses the line from discourse to stage-managed harassment, it becomes unacceptable.

And is it just me, or are there a lot of older people screaming about "government control of health care" at these things? Do they not know they even have health care thanks to a little something called Medicare?

The mind boggles.

Her Own Worst Enemy

"We have met the enemy and he is us," the comic-strip character Pogo famously said. So it is with Orly Taitz, the Soviet-born dentist-turned-correspondent-school-lawyer who has put herself at the forefront of the birther movement. In her relentless quest to prove that Barack Obama is not a natural-born citizen and so cannot be president, she has done more damage to her cause than a whole squad of debunkers could possibly accomplish.

For example, take this little tête-à-tête yesterday with MSNBC's David Shuster and Tamron Hall:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

She seems to believe that rambling incoherently and yelling at the interviewers will somehow make everyone flock magically to her side.

And if that wasn't enough, she also shrieked on her website (sorry, no link - a virus tried to infect my computer the instant the page came up):

I also did MSNBC TV show with David Schuster [sic] and Tamaryl [sic] Hall- two of them are just Nazi brown shirts, they and their network should be prosecuted under RICO act, a number of people will have to serve lengthy prison terms for aiding and abetting treason

Way to go, Orly. Hope your dentistry skills are up to snuff, because I don't think this lawyering thing is working out.

One Year of Birther Madness

As amazing (appalling?) as it sounds, it really has been an entire year since this Barack-Obama-is-not-a-natural-born-citizen-and-so-can't-be-president nonsense began. (For the record, Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii on August 4, 1961.) The birthers have not only managed to push themselves onto the national stage, but actually pose a real threat of taking over the Republican Party.

A poll released July 31 on the DailyKos website revealed that an astounding 58% of Republicans either believe that President Obama was not born in the United States or don't know for sure. Some GOP politicians visiting their districts face crowds of constituents jeering their assurances that Obama is a natural-born citizen, while others prefer not to confront a growing segment of their party rather than admit the simple truth. As the rest of the country watches in a sort of horrified train-wreck fascination, the GOP is fast spiraling down the hole of birtherism, and may not be able to climb out.

So in (dubious) honor of the one-year anniversary of Birther Madness, here is a list of the birthers' arguments (so far) and why they don't hold water. In no particular order:

1. The image of Obama's birth certificate is a fake.

No, it's real. It was verified as both genuine and accurate by the Hawaii Department of Health.

2. The "Certification of Live Birth" presented by the Obama campaign is not the same as a birth certificate and is not accepted when applying for a passport.

Sure it is. It's the exact same document anyone receives from the state when requesting a copy of their birth certificate, and is the standard form issued by Hawaii (and, indeed, many other states) for all births. It is perfectly acceptable at all levels of government as proof of citizenship, including for passport applications. The "certification" vs. "certificate" business is a matter of semantics and nothing more.

3. Why doesn't Obama release his original "long form" certificate?

Why should he? He already proved his citizenship status by releasing his birth certificate, and the Hawaii state government has confirmed its authenticity multiple times. It's not his job to cater to the birthers' paranoia - or anyone else's paranoia, for that matter - and surrendering will only keep this farce going ad infinitum.

4. Hawaii allows children born in other locations to receive Hawaii birth certificates.

Hold on to your hats, people - all states allow this. Children who were adopted from out of state or who were born while their parents were traveling receive birth certificates from the state of their parents' residence. It happens all the time. The birthers' argument fails because (a) Hawaii did not allow this until Obama was in his twenties and (b) all birth certificates include the place of birth regardless of where the child was born. If the child was born in New York City, it gives the place of birth as New York City. If the child was born in China, it gives the place of birth as China. No exceptions.

5. Anyone can contact the Hawaii state government, say his or her child was born in-state, and get a Hawaii birth certificate and thus American citizenship.

No evidence for this claim has been presented. This one apparently represents the next round of birther (il)logic. As long as the long-form certificate is unavailable, the birthers can claim Obama's hiding something. But if he gives in and releases it, they can then claim the document is meaningless because it could possibly be fake. Such is birther doublethink: the long-form document is both crucial and useless, relevant and irrelevant.

6. Sun Yat-Sen, who was born in China, fraudulently obtained a birth certificate saying he was born in Hawaii.

He did indeed - in 1904. Hawaii was an American territory at the time and so he did not become an American citizen. Both Hawaii and the United States had very different citizenship laws than they had after statehood in 1959.

7. Obama has dual citizenship because his father was a Kenyan citizen.

Not any more. Kenyan law allows dual citizenship in children, but terminates it on the child's 21st birthday unless he renounces his other citizenship and swears an oath of allegiance to Kenya. Since Obama did neither, his Kenyan citizenship automatically expired on August 4, 1982.

Besides, if dual citizens cannot be president, then any country in the world - Iran, for example - has the power to remove an elected American president simply by declaring him to be a citizen of their own country as well as the US. Is that really what the birthers want? I didn't think so.

8. Both parents must be American citizens in order to be a natural-born citizen.

Wrong again. American law recognizes only two types of citizen: natural-born and naturalized. All that is required for natural-born status is for a person to be born either (a) in the United States or (b) outside the United States to at least one citizen parent. The first requirement covers Obama, who was born in Hawaii, while the second covers John McCain, who was born in Panama when his father was stationed there as a naval officer. (Somehow, I doubt all this would now be happening had a white man with an Anglo-Saxon name been elected.)

Not only that, three other presidents have been born in the U.S. to one non-citizen parent: Chester Arthur's father was Irish, Woodrow Wilson's mother was Scottish, and Herbert Hoover's father was Canadian. Were they illegitimate presidents as well?

9. Obama's stepfather listed him as an Indonesian citizen on his school registration form.

Since no evidence of Obama's alleged Indonesian citizenship has ever been presented, it seems Lolo Soetoro simply lied so his six-year-old stepson could go to school. Oh yes, and the very same form clearly gives Obama's place of birth as Honolulu.

10. American citizens were not allowed to enter Pakistan when Obama went there in 1981.

Not true. The State Department's 1981 travel advisory does not bar Americans from visiting Pakistan and even gives instructions on how to obtain a visa.

11. Obama's grandmother said she was there when he was born in Kenya.

The cropped recording of Ron McRae's interview with Sarah Obama (conducted via translator over a bad phone connection) ends abruptly after her statement, even cutting off McRae mid-word. In the complete recording, Sarah Obama and her translator immediately realize the error and tell McRae over and over that Barack Obama was in fact born in America.

12. The certificate provided by the Obama campaign was printed on a laser printer, which had not yet been invented in 1961.

No one said the released certificate is from 1961. It was issued by the Hawaii Department of Health in 2007.

13. The short-form certificate Obama released is not recognized as valid by the Hawaii state government.

Barely true once upon a time and for the wrong reasons. The state Home Lands program leases state land to people with at least 50% indigenous Hawaiian ancestry. Because eligibility for this one program concerns ethnicity rather than place of birth, it used to require long-form certificates when applying but now accepts short-form certificates as well. Since Obama never claimed to be of indigenous Hawaiian descent nor applied for the program, it has nothing to do with him anyway.

14. Obama's birth announcements, sent to Honolulu newspapers by the state Department of Health, could have been falsely placed there by Obama's parents or anyone else.

No evidence for this claim has been presented.

15. A Kenyan birth certificate for Obama has been discovered.

A photo of the supposed document was announced by Orly Taitz and trumpeted by WorldNetDaily, but was exposed as a hoax within hours.

There will be other arguments, I'm sure. As long as the sky remains blue and Barack Obama remains president, Lord knows there will be others.

The Seductive Power of the Dark Side

A friend of mine posted an item on Facebook today touting the 2009 Citizen's Continental Congress, a political gathering taking place later this year. Its manifesto is a hodgepodge of causes ranging from the paranoid to the legally dangerous to the just plain loony. And it does it all not just while wrapping itself in the flag, but while grafting it to its skin as much as possible.

This thing veers all over the political map, embracing ideologies from the birthers to the conspiracy theorists. It claims that the United States is a Communist nation (it isn't), Barack Obama never released his birth certificate (he did) and we're living under tyranny (we're not).

Since my friend apparently accepts this silliness as is, it got me thinking: why do so many otherwise sensible people fall for this sort of stuff?

In The Empire Strikes Back, Luke Skywalker asks Yoda if the dark side of the Force is stronger than the light side. "No," the Jedi Master replies. "Quicker, easier, more seductive." And so it seems to be with so many of these wild claims.

Take the current debate over health care. Few would argue that our present system of health coverage is the best there is. Fifteen percent of Americans have no health insurance at all; when they get sick or injured, they must either pay huge sums out of pocket or go to the hospital emergency room for free care, in which case the taxpayers pick up the tab.

The rest of us have insurance, either through one's employer, through the government (military, VA, Medicare or Medicaid) or bought privately. But in far too many cases, people still find themselves in desperate straits, losing their coverage through "rescission." This euphemism masks the noxious practice of yanking coverage just when it's needed the most, usually for the flimsiest of reasons.

I can hear people out there saying, "But that could never happen to me." Don't be so sure. Last month, the American Journal of Medicine released a study with some frightening conclusions:

• 62% of all bankruptcies in 2007 were at least partially caused by medical debt (up from just 8% in 1981)
• 78% of people who went bankrupt due to medical costs had health insurance when they became sick or injured

Think about that. Even if you have health insurance, it may well not protect you from financial ruin.

That is more than appalling. That is obscene.

But the current Democratic proposal for reforming the system (the Republicans didn't bother to offer any proposals of their own) is being attacked by people who don't want the system reformed. They call it "socialized medicine" or "medical fascism" and spread scare stories to frighten people into knee-jerk opposition. You will be forced to accept government health coverage! Government inspectors will enter your home to monitor your parenting! The government will mandate euthanasia for seniors!

Of course, all of these are nonsense, as can be quickly learned from actually reading the legislation text. (Secure that their rhetorical targets either cannot or will not look for themselves, writers of the aforementioned scare stories helpfully provide the exact page numbers, making debunking a snap.)

But my point is this: Even when something is clearly in their best interest, people can still be suckered into opposing it. People can and will believe the most ridiculous things possible. After all, look at how many still think the moon landings were faked, or that Jews control the world, or that 9/11 was an inside job.

But why? Perhaps it's because, as Yoda said, it's simply easier. Sometimes people are all too willing to let someone else do the thinking for them. Sometimes people are so scared of change they will grasp at anything, no matter how insane, which promises normalcy, even if that normalcy will hurt them. It's always a distressing development when people embrace this lunacy, and it's even more distressing when a friend does so.

When Luke asks how he can distinguish the good side of the Force from the bad side, Yoda answers, "You will know. When you are calm, at peace."

Maybe all that's required is to slow down and think with a clear head.