So Much for the Latino Vote

"I think we should catch 'em [illegal immigrants], we should document 'em, make sure we know where they are and where they are going. I actually support micro-chipping them. I can micro-chip my dog so I can find it. Why can't I micro-chip an illegal?"

Pat Bertroche, running for the GOP nomination for a House seat from Indiana

High Times at the GOP

Back in 2008, some people who were hired by the community group ACORN to sign up new voters figured out they could pad their earnings by submitting fake registrations for Mickey Mouse and other fictional characters. ACORN submitted the registrations to the county clerks because they had to - most states require canvassers to submit all received registration cards regardless of fraud or error. (The reason is simple: to prevent gatherers backed by one party from arbitrarily discarding registrations for other parties based on made-up allegations.) The group alerted the clerks' offices, the fakes were caught and invalidated, and the dishonest canvassers were charged with voter registration fraud.

In other words, the system worked. But it was a huge scandal at the time, with the Republican Party and its media divisions (Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, etc) all screaming about how the election would be tainted by a flood of fake ACORN votes. It was one of the reasons why the national group went under earlier this year.

Final tally of proven fraudulent votes based on ACORN registrations: zero.

So now we have another tale of fake voter registration, but it's somewhat different than the ACORN one. Earlier this month, the Orange County Register reported that the county Republican Party paid "bounties" of as much as $8 per head to canvassers who signed up new GOP voters. So the canvassers went around asking people to sign petitions in support of beach cleanups, cancer cures and even marijuana legalization - but didn't tell them that by doing so they were registering as Republican voters. (Does that mean you have to be high to vote Republican?) Hundreds of complaints have now arrived at California state elections offices from people claiming they were duped in this manner.

One canvasser, who submitted three registrations from people complaining they were lied to, dismissed them as morons: "I can tell you that half the people out there don't know the difference between a Republican and a Democrat." (And Tom Tancredo says we should bring back literacy tests since President Obama was supposedly elected by stupid voters. Perhaps he was looking at the wrong party.)

It's tempting to brush this off as an ACORN rerun, but it's not that simple. You see, back in 2006, the newspaper received the same sort of complaints, did some digging and found the same sort of GOP fraud that would be uncovered four years later. Back then, eleven canvassers were convicted of falsifying voter registrations, and eight of them went to jail. So they're trying the same thing again. Add in the fact that the "bounty" was paid directly by the Republican Party via the signature-gathering firm they hired and this is getting serious. The county Democrats are now demanding that the local US Attorney investigate the charges.

I don't care what your position or party is - if you have to con people to get them to register as a member of your organization, you have no business being in politics. The Orange County Republicans still have time to fix the mess, but only if they do some major housecleaning:

• Take all the crafty canvassers, and the party officials who gave them the green light, and throw them to the wolves.
• Contact all involved registrants and invalidate all registrations which were signed up fraudulently.
• Stop offering "bounties" to canvassers based on how many registrations they bring in and support state legislation to bar the practice.
• Promise never to pull such a scam again and submit to random checks to make sure they're being honest.
  

That should help clean things up. Because signing up marijuana proponents as Republicans makes the Harold and Kumar jokes just too easy.

Open Season

With Arizona's new anti-illegal-immigrant law SB 1070 making waves across the country and the world, state and local police now have blank-check power to stop and arrest anyone with a "reasonable suspicion" of being in the country illegally. Of course, this raises the question of just how to determine whether someone is an illegal immigrant, and it always comes back to racial profiling.

We all know the law will not be used against white people. It's aimed squarely at Hispanics, and it is Hispanics who will pay the price. It doesn't matter whether they were born in the US, have green cards or really are here illegally - if they have brown skin, they will be targeted. Leave your wallet at home and you run the risk of going to jail. It will be ugly.

(And is it just me, or do the same teabaggers who wave Gadsen flags and scream about "Obama fascism" think it's just peachy when that very same government stops people on the street at will and demands their identity papers? Gee, maybe all that stuff about freedom and tyranny is only for white people.)

But there is a potentially even uglier consequence to this new law, one which I doubt its authors intended: namely, that it is now open season on anyone who is in the country illegally. Yes, once the law goes into effect this summer, any illegal immigrant basically has no legal protections against anything. You can do anything you like to them - robbery, rape, murder, whatever - and they won't go to the police. Why? Because they know that the instant they pick up the phone to call 911, out come the handcuffs and clang goes the jail-cell door.

Basically, the law creates "nonpersons" in Arizona. Sure, there is nothing in state law which specifically excludes illegal immigrants from police protection, but that's the effect of SB 1070.

With various people now calling for an economic boycott of Arizona, the same people who shot their state in the foot now have a chance to undo the fiscal damage. Since undocumented immigrants will now essentially be fair game, why not profit off it? Set up a facility somewhere off in the desert where the most beautiful and handsome illegal immigrants will be sent and housed. Then invite in wealthy sickos to do whatever they like to these people, secure in the knowledge that no one will go to the police. Think of it as a real-life version of the 2005 horror-porn film Hostel.

Terrible idea? Sure it is. But so is the whole idea of making people criminal suspects based solely on their ethnicity. My advice to the Arizona legislature is to find another way of solving the problem, preferably one not so blatantly un-American.

Papers, Please

It's a scene out of a seemingly infinite number of movies. Someone is walking down the street and minding his own business when a policeman (secret or otherwise) appears out of the blue, demanding to see his papers. Something is not in order and the helpless hero is dragged away, never to be seen again.

Okay, so it's not quite like that in Arizona, even after Governor Jan Brewer signed SB 1070 into law late last week. The new law, officially called the "Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act," allows Arizona police to arrest anyone suspected of being an illegal immigrant - but just how does one determine that? Skin color? Accent? Clothing? I mean, people don't walk around with helpful signs saying "I'm In This Country Illegally." Maybe they will just demand to see the person's birth certificate. Is there anyone out there who makes a habit of taking their birth certificate when they leave the house?

We all know what will happen with this law. Someone who looks like an illegal immigrant (translation: Hispanic) will be stopped and required to provide proof that he is in the country legally. If said person can't immediately produce the right paperwork, he will be arrested, thrown in jail and maybe even shipped across the border to Mexico. High-dollar lawsuits will ensue and the law will eventually be thrown out as unconstitutional.

Or perhaps he will simply be killed by vigilante "border patrollers" for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Oh, and when Tom Tancredo - the immigrant-hater extraordinaire who last distinguished himself by demanding that people pass a "literacy test" before they can vote - says it's a bad bill, you've got a big PR problem.

Is illegal immigration a problem? Of course it is. Illegal laborers drive down wages for lower-rung workers and can commit identity theft by using other people's Social Security numbers to get work for themselves. Not to mention that illegal immigrants are more at risk for being crime victims.

But is criminalizing a vast swath of the population the answer, especially when it can all too easily ensnare many thousands of completely legal people at the same time? No. There has to be a better way.

Authentic Frontier Gibberish

To quote Sam Cooke, Sarah Palin don't know much about history, not to mention energy, religion, economics, government, science and geography. She really is appallingly ignorant, not to mention incoherent (on a good day, she can make George W. Bush sound like an Oxford debating champion) and her popularity among the teabaggers says a whole lot more about them than it does about her. What she does know about, though, is how to cash in.

Last week, ABC estimated that ever since she got bored with being governor of Alaska and quit halfway through her term, Palin has raked in about $12 million (that's one hundred times her former gubernatorial salary) with most of it coming from her ghostwritten tale Going Rogue, her appearances on Fox News and especially her speaking gigs at a reported $100,000 a pop.

You'd think that at those prices, she can afford her own travel, but no. A contract unearthed by some enterprising California students requires anyone hiring Palin to provide either first-class plane tickets or a private jet which "MUST BE a Lear 60 or larger," not to mention deluxe hotel suites and bendy straws on her water bottles. It doesn't quite fit the folksy, "plain hockey mom" image she and her handlers try so hard to project.

Oh yes, and she is apparently so petrified of "real Americans" that she won't take any direct questions from them: "For Q&A, the questions are to be collected from the audience in advance, pre-screened and a designated representative...shall ask questions directly of the Speaker."

So what do you get for a hundred grand? Well, Palin spoke last week at a charity banquet for which 900 tickets were sold at $200 apiece. She isn't saying how much she made for this speech, but if it was her usual fee, she pocketed more than half of what the group collected. Charity begins at home, it seems.

Anyway, here's a sample of what she had to say:

I'm wanting to, though, kind of shift away from the political. I'm just getting off the trough from doing a lot of Tea Parties across the US, man those are a blast. [applause] They're rowdy and they're wild and it's just another melting pot, there's just diversity there and all walks of life and all forms of partisanship and non partisanship just wanting good things to happen in this part of the world. It's been a blast. The shift from the political, so now that I have that shift from the political but still have that desire to talk about the economy and talk about energy and resources and national security and all those things. I was telling Todd, okay, this is like [inaudible] on the vice presidential campaign trail, where you never really knew what you were getting into when you get into that line before you were interviewed. Obviously, sometimes I never knew what I was getting into in an interview. Obviously!

If anyone can extract any meaning at all from that mess, I salute you. I half-expected Olson Johnson from Blazing Saddles to stand up and say, "Now who can argue with that? Not only was it authentic frontier gibberish, it expressed the courage little seen in this day and age."

The rest of her speech was only slightly less jumbled. I suspect that as Palin rhetorically wandered all over the place, committing various crimes against the English language, the charity organizers realized just how much of their reputations they had flushed down the drain in pursuit of their "big name" speaker and were backstage drinking hemlock.

A hundred thousand dollars for that? I am definitely in the wrong business.

GOPman Sachs

Even with all the tales of greed and fraud coming out of Wall Street over the last two years, the allegations against investment bank Goldman Sachs are pretty appalling.

The story so far: a big Goldman client named John Paulson packaged a derivative based on subprime mortgages and pitched it to Goldman as an investment opportunity for their other clients. Goldman agreed and sold it as such - but never told the buyers that Paulson deliberately designed the investment, named ABACUS 2007-ACI, to lose value. Knowing that the subprime market would tank, Paulson sold short, made a killing and left other clients holding the bag.

So where does Goldman figure in all this? Well, it seems they did one of two things:

1. They were unaware that ABACUS was purposely meant to fail, in which case their lack of due diligence was criminally negligent, or
2. They knew all along that it was a scam and sold it anyway, in which case they coldly ripped off some of their clients to make another one richer.
   

Now that the Securities and Exchange Commission has sued Goldman Sachs in civil court for fraud, the popular anger is once again brewing. When we invest our money with Wall Street, whether it's in a 401(k), a stock or bond portfolio, or something else, we expect the company we're working with not to screw us over. This is why the White House is trying to rein in the Wall Street casino, to put back the regulations which have been repealed since the early 1980s and which would hopefully prevent future economic meltdowns.

But since the White House supports putting the crooks and connivers under control, the Republican Party must, by definition, be against it. Yes, the Party of No has once again emerged as the party of Wall Street, vowing to do everything it can - filibuster, offer endless amendments, hold its breath until it turns blue, etc - to derail the financial-reform bill. They evidently still don't realize that the American people are mad at Wall Street for very nearly sending the whole economy down the toilet, and are unlikely to reward its backers in November.

So now the GOP is weighing in on behalf of poor downtrodden Goldman Sachs, saying they're being picked on by that meanie in the big house on Pennsylvania Avenue. Yes, Senator Orrin Hatch went on the tube yesterday to complain that the SEC timed its lawsuit filing to fit the White House's legislative schedule and desire to pass the Wall Street reform bill. Fox News and other right-wing media outlets predictably ran with it, accusing the White House of "meddling" and darkly wondering whether they're "exploiting the charges to build the case for their financial regulatory overhaul."

Of course, the people doing all the shrieking and conspiracy-theorizing ignore two things: as an independent agency the SEC doesn't coordinate any enforcement action with the White House, and Goldman Sachs actually donated more money to Democrats than to Republicans. If the White House really was making an example of a Wall Street powerhouse, wouldn't they have picked one which supported the other side? Just sayin'.

Will the GOP realize that they're playing a losing game? Will they continue to sell their souls for Wall Street's tainted campaign cash? Of course they will. Expect the fall campaign to be especially nasty as the Republicans try and divert voters' attention from this simple fact.

Bring a Chicken to the Doctor

Having failed to stop the nation's badly broken health-insurance system from being reformed, the Republicans now say they want to repeal the entire law (including the parts which prevent insurance companies from yanking your coverage when you get sick) and start over - meaning, of course, to do nothing at all. Part of this latest GOP push comes from Nevada, where Sue Lowden, running against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, says that patients should barter with their doctors over the price of care.

I am not making this up:

Yes, your intestines may be falling out or your skull may be cracked, but you can still paint your doctor's house to make sure you get treatment.

With Lowden quickly becoming a laughingstock, her campaign tried to insist that she actually said "bargain" rather than "barter," but the video clearly shows her saying the latter. Bargaining isn't such an attractive prospect either; can you really imagine someone with a broken leg saying he'll hobble out the door and try getting a better price from the doctor down the street?

Apparently believing that she hasn't gotten enough flak ever since her comment came to light, Lowden yesterday doubled down on it. Appearing on the talk show Nevada Newsmakers, she fondly remembered the time before people had access to health care and said it's a great idea to just bring a chicken to the doctor's office when you get sick:

So in Lowden's world, instead of asking which insurance you have, do doctors ask whether you're bringing Original Recipe or Extra Crispy? I have this image of a doctor saying, "Sure, I'll take out that appendix, but I need my car's oil changed first."

You know, I suspect that she really doesn't want this job and is trying to find a way to sabotage her own campaign. She cannot possibly be this callous or this dumb. Every time she tries to get herself out of this hole she blasted and then jumped into, she just keeps on digging deeper.

Reid, who's facing a tough re-election fight, must be on his knees right about now, thanking God, Jesus and Brigham Young for this manna from heaven. If he has any political savvy at all, he will run ads mocking Lowden's health care "plan" until she drops out in disgrace.

It's going to be a fun campaign. Tastes just like chicken.

A Modest Proposal on Gay Marriage

For years now, the self-righteous wing of the Republican Party has insisted that allowing gays and lesbians to get married will cause all sorts of chaos, from earthquakes and volcanoes to, in the words of Bill Murray from Ghostbusters, "dogs and cats living together."

Well, same-sex marriage is now legal in five states (Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Iowa and Connecticut) and the District of Columbia, and the world is still here. But the usual suspects keep shouting that allowing such weddings will doom us all, insisting that only men and women can get married because only men and women can reproduce.

Fine by me. Allow me to present a modest proposal to deal with this issue once and for all. If we're going to protect marriage, let's really protect it without all that mushy love business getting in the way. Since the right wing says marriage is only for making babies, let's treat it as such.

1. All couples who wish to get married must undergo fertility testing (at their own expense, of course) to see if they are mutually capable of making babies. If the test comes back negative, the marriage will be denied.
2. No one who tests as infertile will be allowed to get married.
3. No woman past the age of menopause will be allowed to get married.
4. All couples who test as fertile and still wish to get married must sign a sworn statement promising to produce a child within three years of the wedding date. All marriages of couples who do not produce a baby within three years will be annulled.
5. No divorce or annulment will be allowed for any reason other than the failure to produce a child.
   
6. All babies born in the third year must undergo DNA testing to make sure they really are the biological offspring of their parents and not merely "borrowed" to beat the deadline.
   
7. No one will be allowed to adopt who has not already made a baby the old-fashioned way.

I await the response of all those who insist that letting gays and lesbians marry will destroy civilization.

Bad Medicine

Dr. Jack Cassell, a urologist in Mt. Dora, Florida, doesn't like the new health care law. That's fine. He is quite vocal about it. That's fine too. This is, after all, America, where everyone is free to speak their minds, and I wouldn't have it any other way. But he went too far when he put up a sign on his office door earlier this month saying, "If you voted for Obama, seek urologic care elsewhere."

After a furor erupted, Cassell backtracked slightly, saying he hasn't actually told any Democratic-voting patients to go away, "but if they read the sign and turn the other way, so be it." Since he evidently relies on his patients' identifying themselves as either real Americans or traitors, I wonder just how he plans to weed out one from the other. Will he put up a big poster of Sarah Palin to scare away pinkos as a crucifix scares away vampires? Or maybe he'll use such phrases as "socialist dictator" with patients and gauge their reactions.

Rep. Alan Grayson, the firebrand Florida Democrat whose district is home to Cassell's office, said he would file an ethics complaint with the state medical board on the grounds that refusing to treat Democratic patients is the same as refusing to treat black patients. He's wrong; the two are very different, and Grayson comes off as just trying to cash in on the fuss politically.

That is not to say that Cassell is acting professionally - quite the opposite. Even more so than in other fields, a doctor is expected to put his patients' needs above his own prejudices, and this goes double for something as (comparatively) unimportant as partisan politics. Telling sick patients who voted for the "wrong" candidate to get lost is, to put it mildly, extremely unprofessional, not to mention childish. And I would say the same thing had he put up a sign telling McCain voters to "seek urologic care elsewhere."

Cassell should rethink his choice of office decor. Either that or get a job which doesn't directly affect people's lives and health.

The Terror Begins

It's been three days since the House of Representatives passed the health-care reform bill and two days since President Obama signed it into law. If you believe the tea partiers, that's two (and possibly three) days since tyranny came to our shores and killed off the America we all know and love.

It is, of course, nonsense. But the scary part is not that the tea partiers believe it. The scary part is that some of them, goaded on by their leaders, are descending into violence.

The offices of Democratic representatives around the country have been attacked and vandalized, often with rocks or bricks thrown through the windows.

A number of Democrats have received explicit death threats, both at their Washington offices and at their homes. Many have had to request Secret Service protection, not just for themselves but for their spouses and children as well, who in many cases were also directly threatened.

Virginia teabagger leader Nigel Coleman posted what he believed to be Rep. Tom Periello's home address on his Facebook page, telling his equally rabid followers to "drop by" and harass the man at home. But Coleman didn't even bother to get it right - he posted Periello's brother's home address. Shortly afterward, the brother found a threatening letter in his mailbox as well as a slashed and leaking propane gas line on his barbecue grill.

Coleman's response to the vandalism was, if possible, even more reprehensible than his original actions. "Do you mean I posted his brother's address on my Facebook?" he wrote on his blog. "Oh well, collateral damage."

Collateral damage.

This is not political discourse. This is terrorism. It might be conducted by Americans instead of Arabs, but it's terrorism nonetheless.

When Democratic representatives were spat on and taunted with racial and sexual epithets, the Republican leadership grudgingly told their followers to cool it. A bit late in the game, especially since that same leadership had spent months twisting people's minds with lies about "death panels" and "Marxism," endlessly using the language of war and killing, recklessly stoking the fires of hate ever higher until the day when something truly ugly becomes inevitable.

That day has arrived.

The teabagger movement has long turned a blind eye to the racists and crackpots and haters in their midst, but they can hide no longer. The Republicans, from Sarah Palin and John Boehner on down, can't hide anymore either. Like Dr. Morbius' "monsters from the id" in Forbidden Planet, the demon of fear and hatred they created has started to run amok.

So what happens now? Will the Republican and teabagger leaders tell their followers in no uncertain terms that violence is un-American and will not be tolerated? Or will they continue to remain silent, unwilling to surrender their weapon of an angry mob even if someone gets killed?

Even if they speak out from pure self-preservation, they'd better do it, and damn fast too. The first murder will doom the Republican Party for a generation and destroy the tea party movement forever.

The Tyranny of Health Care

The loudest voices opposing health care reform howl about how passing the bill currently in Congress (or any bill, really) will usher in a new era of despotic socialism. They warn of the approaching thud of jackbooted feet trampling all over us, poking into every nook and cranny of our lives, requiring us to exchange iceberg lettuce for arugula and buy a $59.95 Michelle Obama Triceps Cruncher.

I got into a scrape on Facebook yesterday with a friend (at least, I hope she's still a friend) who calls the bill "tyranny." She hates everything about it, from the requirement that we carry some form of health insurance to the (minimal) regulation of some of the insurance industry's worst abuses to the fact that the bill even exists, as she claims it to be unconstitutional. Every change to the bill, including the removal of a public option, has been met with the same response: it's tyranny. As she is very politically involved, I asked what I thought to be a reasonable question: since she rejects all proposed reforms, how would she fix the system? After all, having many millions of Americans with no reliable health care combined with medical and insurance costs rising far faster than inflation is a serious problem.

It's a fair question; one cannot say "no" to everything. Simply raging against fictional socialist death panels and demanding that Congress "kill the bill" doesn't fix anything. Proposing an alternative would be nice, especially since the status quo is so unsustainable.

She did not take it well. As we went back and forth, she mostly dodged the question and then eventually blew up, accusing me of presenting my case in "partisan terms." She even posted on her own blog a long screed saying I was a "distraction" using "talking points straight off of Moveon.org's playlist." Neat trick, since I don't follow MoveOn.

Silly me, I thought I was talking about the basic facts of the health care brouhaha: the yanking of insurance on the flimsiest of excuses, the high-deductible coverage which doesn't cover much at all, the penny-pinching, the denial of care, the use of pre-existing conditions, the fact that money spent on health care pays off (and then some) in the form of higher productivity and thus higher tax revenues, the fact that 62% of bankruptcies involve medical debt and that 78% of such bankrupts had insurance which didn't protect them.

It appears not. Despite Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, which specifically allows Congress to levy taxes in furtherance of the nation's "general welfare," any insurance mandate is apparently unconstitutional and tyrannical control of our lives, and any requirement to treat people who can't afford care is socialist slavery.

This shows an ugly trend in this whole debate: the attitude of "I've got mine, so screw you" on display everywhere. Stories of how people lose their insurance based on made-up excuses are greeted with shrugs. If someone loses their life savings or their home, well, them's the breaks. It's your own fault for getting sick in the first place. Or you should have shopped around to pick the right hospital after your stroke. Being comatose is no excuse.

One particularly sickening video posted yesterday showed a man with Parkinson's disease being harassed by protesters who call him a Communist. One man sneers in his face that "if you're looking for a handout, you're in the wrong end of town." Another scornfully throws a couple of dollar bills at him, shouting, "I'll decide when to give you money!"

Their message is simple: Go ahead and suffer. Go ahead and die. I don't care.

And this illustrates the deep divide between our two philosophies of life. Progressives believe that we are all in this together and that what strengthens the nation as a whole strengthens each of us individually. The teabaggers reject the idea that we, via government, are our brother's keeper and claim that anyone who believes otherwise is an apologist for slavery.

But even if requiring us to carry health insurance is tyranny (and that's a Brobdingnagian if) is it not more tyrannical to live in constant fear of getting sick or injured, not knowing whether your insurance will really protect you? Is it not a form of slavery to be all too aware that should you lose your job, you would be unable to buy coverage on the private market because of a "pre-existing condition" in a loved one? Since the United States is the only developed nation in the world without some form of universal health coverage and where the obscenity of medical bankruptcy is allowed, does that mean we are the only free nation on Earth?

Back during the bad old days of the Cold War, we were told that we had to possess thousands of nuclear weapons because the Soviets had them as well and that our freedom depended upon remaining under the threat of mutual annihilation. Do we now have a 21st-century version of that atomic Sword of Damocles? Can we be free only if we live in perpetual danger of financial ruin for the crime of getting sick?

Not in my America. My America is a nation where we look after each other and where no one is condemned to exist in pain and suffering, or be forced out of their homes, because they can't afford to see a doctor. If others believe that represents tyranny, then so be it. We have to agree to disagree.

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.