Divinest Sense

Things are pretty bad now, right? We’ve got a conservative administration out of control, a polarized electorate that finds its cherished good ol’ American myopia ain’t no good without a good set of lenses lying around… and, in our mass media, we find those dirty, misplaced and broken lenses.

If you think we’re floating in a sickening factless limbo now, just imagine where we’d be without bloggers. Say what you will about the ranting, craziness, and lack of journalistic standards on the wild frontier of the internet, but bloggers are the people staying up late at night doing the tireless research that our brightest and best newspaper and TV journalists are supposed to be doing.

So anyway, on with the item of the day: the Washington Post picks up this story from blogger Glenn Greenwald:

The Bush administration rejected a 2002 Senate proposal that would have made it easier for FBI agents to obtain surveillance warrants in terrorism cases, concluding that the system was working well and that it would likely be unconstitutional to lower the legal standard.

Yep. Looks like the ol’ administration whine that it just taaaaaakes tooooooo loooooong to obtain probable cause for a FISA-approved warrant is completely without merit. The Justice Depot spokeslawyer tries to defend the administration by boring everyone to death about how “reasonable basis” and “reasonable suspicion” are not the same thing, but of course they’re used interchangeably by ambulance-chasers and supreme court justices alike. Don’t try to out hair-split us, Bush folks. It cannot be done. Just go back to the usual flag-waving ad hominem defense strategies that have served you so well in the past. That’s better.

The party “strategists”, of course, are the most fascinating bloodless deep-sea creatures to watch in any time of political crisis. Apparently some unnamed democrats (yeah right) say the NSA wiretaps are a strategic “loser” of an issue for the dems, because the trope of republicans being stronger on national security trumps all, no matter what. But why are they scrambling to sound legally credible?

Exhibiting an obsession to detail not seen in the Social Security rollout a year ago, the White House is even waging a war on the semantics being used in the debate, lashing out at reporters who call the program “domestic” spying, because the monitored calls involve a person overseas. It is also putting out pages of highly detailed — and often hotly disputed — legal analyses of the program and drawing what Democratic critics and many independent analysts regard as questionable historical parallels to show Bush is following a long wartime tradition.

Oh boy, they really are cute when they try to actually refute our claims point-by-minuscule-point. They don’t look particularly strong on anything when they’re whining about whether your phone calls are “domestic” or not. Hillary Clinton pours some ice-cold water over their heads:

Speaking to reporters, Clinton took aim at what she called a lawless assertion of power: “My question is, why can’t we do what we want to do within the rule of law?”

Ah, Hillary, Hillary - you should be waving a flag and a bible when you say that. Pure, lucid reason is just not enough.

It is hard to describe the white-hot rage that consumed me, body and soul, this morning as I sat in heavy traffic, streets clogged with the cars of innocent commuters trying to navigate those last few blocks to the office amidst throngs of snotty young people with anti-choice signs and placards. All dressed alike in blue caps and lily-white skin, huddled like little flocks of sheep around the giant buses that decided to park in the middle of E street to drop them off.

Pretty much all DC protests arouse some ire in me when they decide to organize in the middle of my commute. But these ridiculous brainwashed morons bussed in from mega-churches all over the eastern U.S. were too contemptible for me to handle without busting a vein in my neck. I think what upsets me the most about this particular Jesus-freak love-in is the way that the churches brazenly explot their young people for the purpose of making a cheap political play. It’s easy to get a bunch of teenagers on a bus to go do something stupid. I mean, what could be more awesome than a bus trip out of town with all the other cool kids? This is how I got suckered into attending that morally blurry Steven Curtis Chapman concert at the age of 14. They even got me to wear a T-Shirt that said “get right, or get left….behind!” Listening to a couple hours of contemporary christian drivel seemed like a small price to pay to hang out with my friends at a concert downtown, plus we got to go out for mexican food afterward.

That what is so sad. Those pompous teenagers with their hats and signs are having lots of fun in DC today, but a few years down the road they are going to look back with morbid embarrassment - and sharp pangs of regret - once they realize that they contributed, in their own little way, to the curtailment of a human right and an essential public health service. They will hide their heads in shame when they realize that they have killed more people than they have saved, and caused more misery to BORN children than they ever imagined possible.

SusanG addresses part of my anger:

I’m just trying to tune in to the logic here of this fetishization of the fetus, this cult of the blastula. As far as I can tell, the “reasoning” must go something like this: Embryos are innocent and sinless, unlike the rest of humankind, therefore God commands that they are somehow deserving of treatment as a special class (although it’s hard to justify the God-induced early miscarriage rate under this argument … but never mind). But watch out, kiddo. Once you draw that first lungful of breath, sin must get sucked into your lungs like a couple gallons of evil in sick building syndrome, because … Baby, you are on your own. Yeah, you and your mama too, if she’s not of the right economic class. No child care, crappy and undersubsidized health care, no Head Start, no school lunches, no student aid to dig your sorry ass out of the mess you were born into, no federal job training if the conservatives continue their slash and burn budget cuts (but you can join the military, babe). Once you draw that first fateful breath, you’re just as worthless as the rest of us … and part of the growing legion of the discarded, shamed, blamed and forgotten, tossed into the dark corners of our “free” society. Crawl your own way out of the ditch the compassionate conservatives dug for you. Little infants who respirate, be on notice: You are the embarrassing debris left over from the American dream. Get used to it.

I hope BriVT is right about this - that this new Medicare debacle will affect so many millions of ordinary Americans that it will be impossible to ignore. This is truly a far-reaching crisis with staggering implications for our healthcare “system”. From a column in Newsday:

But Gottlich doubts this Congress or President George W. Bush will deal with the fundamental reason for these problems. As correspondent Margaret Warner said recently on PBS’ “NewsHour,” “There’s no standard government-designed plan” administered by Medicare. “Instead, enrollees have to choose from dozens of plans offered by private insurance, with different deductibles, co-pays and lists of authorized drugs.”
Some Democrats want to modify the privatization aspects of the law by having at least one standard plan run by Medicare. But that would mean competition for private companies from the more efficient Medicare system, which could use its purchasing power to drive prices down. The Republicans and the drug companies who bought them won’t hear of it.

Did anyone *really* think that Part D was going to improve anything? The congresscritters who voted for this piece of garbage must have just closed their eyes, gritted their teeth, put cotton in their ears, and mumbled to themselves, “well, it’s all for the sake of privatization and competition, which are theoretically good things…”

Despite whatever “big picture” rationale they made up to make themselves feel better, our legislators knew in their hearts that they were screwing the real, live, human individuals who depend on the government to get the medication they need. And they will hear about it. They won’t listen to young and healthy me, but they will be forced to listen to the millions of grandmas and grandpas whose lives are now in jeopardy, and the angry state officials who are emptying their coffers in order to keep the government’s pledge to the elderly poor.

Another hapless denizen of bizarro-world unmasked, tarred, and feathered by the relentless guardians of Wikipedia. Oh, why must we insist on the facts when the fiction is so much more entertaining? - Andy Carvin has the story.

A young man identifying himself as Caspian James Crichton-Stuart IV, 5th Duke of Cleveland, visited Stillwater Area High School in Minnesota three times trying to enroll as a transfer student. He had a “spot on” English accent and insisted on being called “your grace.” Students at the school had their doubts, so they began researching him on the Internet…student research exposed Gardner to be their so-called Duke of Cleveland; he also happened to be a 22-year-old registered sex offender.

All right, so it’s definitely for the best that the erstwhile 5th Duke of Cleveland was discovered in his lie, as he could have endangered the lives of high schoolers with his sexual predation. But think about it - with our pasts and personal histories becoming increasingly transparent, does anyone really have a chance to retire with dignity by becoming a harmless fringe-dwelling eccentric, without some plodding fact-checker pointing out to everyone that you are really just a former stock manager for Safeway, and not a terribly good one? I guess my life plan of moving to the backwoods of Kentucky, changing my name to Costanza, Duchess of Umbria, and collecting dried-out deer droppings in various-sized velvet-lined boxes and breathlessly showing them off to visitors as the “family jewels” will have to be modified a bit.

The question is exactly how. By what process, exactly, will our rights be taken away from us? In one fell swoop, where Roe is overturned and such matters are left to the states to decide? Or in a series of seemingly innocuous, but ultimately devastating, supreme court decisions? I can’t wait to find out! I can’t wait to see our brave democratic legislators fawning over Scalito and mumbling about how he’s one of the great minds of our time. I can’t wait to see the unbridled glee on the faces of those few but loud white “religious” men when they declare the War on Women over, mission accomplished. Because it will happen, and it will make them more powerful than we ever knew they could be.

California and New York have already had to pony up emergency state funds so that the elderly and poor can get the medications they need. Gee, we never saw THAT coming.

The problems appear to stem from the fact that 6 million elderly, low-income and disabled people – including 1 million Californians – were automatically switched into the new drug program Jan. 1. These people previously had been covered by the Medicaid state-federal health care program for the poor, called Medi-Cal in California.
The system was apparently not equipped to handle the influx.
“The result is a major health emergency in California, particularly for people with chronic and debilitating diseases who rely on multiple medications daily to keep them alive,” [Sen. Dianne] Feinstein wrote. (Feinstein voted FOR the medicare bill - ed.)
“In my view, the state of California is absorbing a federal cost caused by incompetence,” she wrote.

Ignore George Will’s little snarkity-snark about Howard Dean, and this is actually a very interesting column about a union leader for today’s world. Also an interesting tidbit about China:

Today Stern thinks globally. He has been to China five times and believes few Americans comprehend the scale of that nation’s potential challenge to America’s economic supremacy. Intel Corp., he says, sponsors science fairs around the world for students heading to college. Last year 66,000 young Americans participated in the local fairs that select finalists. In China, 6 million participated.

It’s true - countries like China and Russia haven’t been permitted to throw their resources into developing nuclear weapons and expanding their armies - but this allows them to invest all these savings into their economies, with which they will crush us. What are we supposed to do when China calls in our debts to them? Flatten them with A-bombs? George Will obliquely concedes that unions do benefit working people by giving them time to rest and fair compensation for their work, redistributing the wealth across the populace. Is it time to unionize China? That economy sure would slow down if people weren’t working 24 hours a day, and everybody sat around all weekend like I am doing right now. And if union organizers were to go in and start planting the seeds of revolution, would deomcracy follow? Or is a democratic state a pre-requisite for union activity?

And then, what about us? China’s got a heck of a lot more manufacturing than we do, and it’s easier to organize those types of laborers. Here in America, we’ve got a service economy that depends on cheap immigrant labor and is very difficult to organize. What can the SEIU accomplish?