Gutless Obstructionist Punks

When you were younger, did you ever know someone who, when presented with the itinerary for his/her selected group of friends, would stamp his/her feet, hold his/her breath, and adamantly refuse to do anything unless the plan was changed to meet his/her every specification? Someone who believed that compromise equaled “We’re doing it my way or we’re not doing anything?” Someone who always got his/her way just because it was easier than trying to reason with them? I would assume most of you did, and I would also assume that most of you found that person aggravating at best and downright loathsome at worst.

Who would have guessed that that child would grow up to become the entire modern Republican Party?

Yes, I did just compare an entire political party to a single spoiled, rancorous, unlikable child. Given the party’s platform and choice of action (read: inaction) for the last 22 months, I think it’s an apt comparison. Today’s GOP makes no pretence about their objective: their only interest is in regaining power, all others be damned. What’s the quickest way to regain power? Win elections. How do you win elections these days? Convince the electorate that the “other guy” is doing a lousy job. How best to do so? Ensure that nothing gets done, for if nothing gets done, then the people in charge must not be interested in working.

It’s a simple plan, and has been since Karl Rove laid it out following the GOP’s decimation in the 2008 election: make every bit of progress unbelievably difficult. The American public is, by and large, the laziest and dumbest electorate on the planet, and as such only knows as much about Congress as they saw on The West Wing or Schoolhouse Rock. When the public is clamoring for help and demanding action, they don’t know that one side is making even the tiniest issue an impossible mountain to climb; all they understand is that Congress is sitting on their rears not doing what the taxpayers pay them to do. It’s amazing how easily a lack of action can then be turned into a talking point: “The average American is in trouble, and what’s the Democratic Congress doing about it? Nothing!”

How did they accomplish this? How did they turn a public that overwhelmingly supported the Democrats following President Obama’s election into the most anti-incumbency electorate since the days of FDR? Simple: through arcane senatorial procedures and an unprecedented use of the filibuster. The filibuster has historically been used to prevent votes on controversial bills or to force further debate; while historically its use has been associated with preventing social progress, it can be a legitimate weapon for the minority to check the power of the majority and stop poor decisions from being made (as Senator Smith will attest). However, the Republicans now wield the filibuster like a fencer swinging a claymore. Anything and everything of any consequence in the Senate now requires a supermajority for passage, as the Republicans threaten requiring a cloture vote on every piece of legislation. This unprecedented use has slowed progress in the Senate to a crawl and even led to an unconscionable delay in unemployment benefits, the extension of which had never before been politicized in a time of recession. The only reason that benefit extension finally made it through the Senate is because Robert Byrd, whose illness had kept him from the Senate floor, died and his replacement was capable of providing the 60th vote. Maybe it’s just me, but when someone has to DIE for a bill to get passed, it would seem that there’s a fundamental flaw in the manner in which a governing body conducts itself.

The supermajority requirement is just the tip of the iceberg. Senate rules allow for senators to place holds on pretty much anything they want: presidential nominations, bills, steam trays in the Congressional cafeteria (joking about the last one, maybe). While an ordinary hold requires the senator to claim it and present a reason for the hold, secret holds allow any senator to do the same thing without claiming the hold or providing a reason for it for up to 6 days, at which point the senator must either claim it or release the hold. In a typical session of Congress, secret holds come up from time to time, again typically on more controversial matters (often times in the past they were used on controversial judicial nominees). In the current session of Congress, nearly every nomination has faced at least one secret hold, and some have faced multiple secret holds (in what some have dubbed “congressional roulette,” one senator can release their secret hold and have another secret hold be immediately placed on the same nomination by another senator). What’s worse is that nearly all of these holds are on nominees with completely noncontroversial backgrounds, nominees that came through committee with no dissent, nominees that ultimately are confirmed by sizable margins if not unanimously. Judicial vacancies are now at critical levels. Vital government departments are lacking the employees (and in some cases, the leaders) they need to function at full strength. The country becomes a little bit weaker every day that passes without these nominations making it through, and for what? The power to drive the country back off a cliff?

What bothers me the most, though, are the uses of bizarre, previously unused Senate conventions for the sole purpose of stopping anything from happening. For example, the Republicans have invoked on several occasions a never-before-used statute that requires the Senate, whenever there is not unanimous consent to continue, to halt all work and adjourn immediately. Think about that. The average daily session of the Senate starts somewhere between 9 and 10 AM. This rule forces the end of work in as little as 4 hours. Imagine trying that at your place of work, my readers, and then imagine the unemployment line you’d inevitably end up in. This has resulted in the delay and even cancellation of several important committee meetings, including at least one meeting of the Armed Services committee in which several major generals traveled half the length of the globe specifically to give testimony. Here we have an example of the party that allegedly are the only ones that can keep America safe from terrorists deliberately acting in a way to put America at risk. Why doesn't anyone call them on it?

I'm sure by this point some of you are wondering why, if the Republicans are so eager to regain power, they don't just present their own ideas to an increasingly skeptical and short-sighted public. To make a long story short, the answer is that they don't have any ideas. Just have a look at some of the amendments they proposed for the health insurance reform bill. Only two of those amendments weren't already covered in the bill, and neither had anything to do with the debate at all. How about having a look at their objections to Wall Street reforms? Each objection specifically targets an area that can be directly linked to aspects of the financial collapse and economic degradation of the last three years, and each objection could only benefit the fraudulent, irresponsible white collar criminal bankers whose high-risk, greed-soaked actions caused this whole mess in the first place. Or how about we look at the current House Minority Leader's economic plan? Immediate cutoffs of all stimulus spending, dramatic slashing of funding for federal programs across the board...sounds like a great way to kill any growth, no matter how small, that's come out of the last 12 months. But hey, at least we don't have to worry about taxes going up for the rich. That makes me feel so much better, because keeping taxes low on the rich has worked so well every time it's been tried for the last, oh, FOREVER (end sarcasm). No matter what the issue, the Republicans just don't have any viable answers to solve it. So what do you do when you don't have any ideas and want to win? You set up roadblocks to prevent your opponent from having any success. You drag everything out and fight tooth and nail to cripple or bury necessary legislation. You abandon any pretext of caring about your constituents for the sole purpose of scoring points with the corporate bigwigs that run your party and hope that the voters are too stupid to notice.

The most disgusting aspect of this? It's working. Polls suggest that the Republicans will most likely gain control of the House and cut into the Democratic majority in the Senate substantially. This would appear to be irrefutable proof that the American public is, as I said before, the laziest and dumbest electorate on the planet. At the very least, it stands as a testament to what Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone calls "the American voter's unmatched ability to forget what happened to him 10 seconds ago." If there has ever been a greater indictment of how pathetic, how slothful, how unwilling to seek the truth we have become, I can't think of it. We are no longer a nation of free-thinkers, of knowledgeable human beings determined to do what's right for the good of the country. Now we are a nation that needs to be spoon-fed its opinion on everything, because learning the truth is hard work, and we stopped doing hard work a long time ago. Why waste time searching for the right answer when the ranting crying Mormon on the TV can tell me what the right answer is?

No more. We cannot continue like this. People constantly invoke the Founding Fathers to justify any crazy philosophy they have, be it on gun control or policing internet pornography. Well, there is one thing that the founders were undeniably, adamantly in favor of: a well-informed, rational, reasoning electorate. That's why I call on all of you to stop believing what you hear and find out for yourselves. Do the legwork and find out just how little these bullies have done to help us out of this quagmire. Dig a little deeper and see the roadblocks they've put in the way of national healing. Switch over to C-SPAN for a few minutes and watch these empty-headed goons go through the same talking points they've been harping on since last February. And for the country's sake, don't reward these spoiled brats on November 2nd for their constant threats to take their ball and go home.

These children need to be grounded. I implore you, America. Be smarter than this. Work harder than this. It's time to lay down some discipline.

Black Death, Reloaded

Consider the following, my readers. Suppose you're driving while texting, a seemingly innocuous action. In the course of your distraction, you drive over a curb into a crowd of people downtown, killing 11 of them and causing substantial damage to the downtown area. The odds are fantastic, if not 100%, that you will be spending the rest of your life (or at least a very large part of it) in prison and paying restitution to the families of those whose relatives you killed.

Now, consider the following: An enormous oil rig, mostly out of commission, lacks the modern safety equipment necessary to prevent a catastrophic leak. The company chooses not to outfit it with said equipment because it would cost an extra $500,000 (note: said company made over $4 billion in profits in the fourth quarter of 2009 alone) and the government, loaded at the time (and even now) with corporate cronies and former members of said company, makes compliance with international standards voluntary. These failures all come back to bite everyone related in the ass when a trapped methane bubble causes a massive explosion, rupturing the oil main and opening a geyser into the Gulf of Mexico.

The costs: 11 dead oil workers. Millions upon millions of dollars lost to federal cleanup efforts, which to this point have been largely unsuccessful. A devastated ecosystem the likes of which we've never seen. Entire local industries decimated. Tens of thousands of Americans facing unemployment through no fault of their own. Sounds a little bit worse than the first situation, right?

So what does the company responsible for this catastrophe stand to lose? $75 million, plus the cost of cleanup. That's it. For comparison's sake, based on their profits from the last year, BP could pay the entire cost of the cleanup, plus their meager oil pollution fine, with the money made in roughly a week. How is this possible? Are we really OK with letting this happen? Think about what's happened here: through sheer negligence, BP has wounded the Earth. It has killed, murdered if you will, eleven innocent people. It has contaminated a vibrant ecosystem beyond anything we've known (this makes the Exxon Valdez look like someone tipped over a teacup). It has compounded the problem by using chemical dispersants to ensure that the oil slick looks less serious when photographed from above, ocean life be damned. For the record, while these dispersants allow the oil to be broken down over thousands of years by microscopic bacteria, they're toxic to phytoplankton, which are the bottom rung on nearly every marine food chain. With the base of the food chain gone, there's nothing left for the next highest group to survive on. Slowly, tortuously, everything dies. No life means no fishing industry, so in turn it has obliterated a major local industry, costing the cash-strapped South billions and putting thousands out of work. It has wrecked the local tourism industries as well, with some businesses reporting enormous losses as travelers stay away from the ever-growing toxin lake. It has downplayed the ultimate impact of the disaster, even as scientists begin to warn that the oil threatens to move into strong ocean currents and pose a threat to the coasts of Florida and Texas, with some possibility it could even begin to reach the East Coast.

We cannot stand by and let them get away with this. This is no oil spill; this is a cataclysm. This is devastation on an unimagined scale. This is the end of the Gulf of Mexico; for decades, barring any sort of immediate intervention and drastic change of course, the Gulf will be a dead zone. This is an economic massacre; BP ultimately loses nothing, save maybe some public stature, while whole states face untold ruin. To watch BP, Halliburton (that's right, our good friends are also responsible for upkeep on this rig) and Transocean Limited ignore the scale of this problem while pointing fingers at one another makes me physically ill.

As you might have guessed from my anger, I've got something of a personal stake in this. I've only seen the ocean once. It was on a spring break while I was in high school, and it was the Gulf of Mexico, from the Port of New Orleans. Much as watching a city I came to love drown hurt me personally, watching these waters, teeming with unique and magnificent life, wither and die as the blackness spreads makes me ache. I'm tired of watching my country let parts of itself die. No more. The time has come to speak out. Tell your congressman that this mockery of justice cannot and must not stand. Tell your attorney general that these companies must be held accountable for their failures in criminal court, that someone must pay for these tragic, inconceivable crimes. Tell your president that the time for cowering in the face of corporate power is over. Tell your country that, in the words of Peter Finch in Network, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!"

My planet bleeds. I do not accept this wave of death. I do not accept this crime. Until next time, do not accept anything less than justice.

Children, Children, Future, Future

It's a pretty rare occasion when the far left and the far right agree on something. Typically, the two sides only agree completely when the situation is so black-and-white that literally nothing could lead to disagreement (the obvious example being things like Pearl Harbor). Hence my surprise at the growing accord between the two sides regarding a number of issues, including one which recently reached the Supreme Court. For completion's sake, I'll run down the four I'm thinking of; see if you can guess the common link between the four.

1. Santa Clara County in California has banned the sale of fast food meals that "pander to children."

2. Corporate Accountability International is demanding that McDonald's eliminate their use of terrifying demonspawn (or, to use a term many of you may find more fitting, clown) Ronald McDonald as a mascot, calling him "a deep-fried 21st century Joe Camel."

3. Increasingly, parents are refusing to have their children vaccinated, claiming that the injections are dangerous. Still others refuse because they believe, despite numerous studies to the contrary, that the preservatives in vaccines lead to autism (I've got major issues with the attention given autism these days, but that's another story for another time).

4. The Supreme Court agreed to hear a case regarding overturning a lower court's own overturning of a California law banning the sale and rental of violent video games to minors.

The answer, for those of you who saw all the links, remembered my column on "our hyperradical president" and immediately said "tl;dr," is that all of these are examples of legislators pursuing agendas that propose removing responsibility for children from their parents. In essence, legislators are trying to force the state to play nanny, and many parents are all too willing to hop on board for the supposedly altruistic reason of "protecting our children." The far left views this as eliminating unseemly aspects of modern society (particularly childhood obesity and violence anywhere), while the far right can get past the "big government" issues because these issues fall in line with their (mostly) fundamentalist Christian dogma.

Man, it just figures that when you finally get them to agree on something, they're wrong, doesn't it?

These examples are really a continuation of a trend we've seen since the early 90's: reducing the responsibility of parents for the behavior of their children. Heck, if you want to toss the mass overdiagnosis of attention deficit disorder in with the others, feel free, it'd be fitting. More and more, parents are deciding that raising their children properly is just too hard, so rather than amp up their level of commitment, they seek other ways to absolve them of their own failures. Consider the vaccination issue. In spite of overwhelming physical evidence that proves beyond any doubt that the use of vaccines has drastically reduced childhood mortality and even eradicated certain diseases (smallpox is completely gone, polio no longer present in North America, tuberculosis fairly rare), parents would rather take a chance with their child's health. They claim they're "looking out for their babies," but who they're really looking out for is Number 1. If the kid gets something, then they can make the argument that someone else gave it to the child, thus making it this other ill person's fault. Some will counter with the claim that this is the perfect example of taking total responsibility for their children because they're taking responsibility for any future vulnerability to diseases. To that, I counter that in doing so they are abandoning their responsibility to society to prevent the possible spread of potentially fatal diseases. There are studies currently ongoing that show the lack of vaccination, in conjunction with the increasing number of drug-resistant strains, is beginning to allow certain major childhood diseases to return (the measles, in particular, has returned with disturbing force). In this instance, abdicating your responsibility to cover your ass is only putting the rest of ours at risk.

The irresponsibility doesn't stop there. The two McDonald's-targeted challenges are ostensibly meant to curb the spread of childhood obesity, which is a decent goal. The issue, though, is that last I checked, kids don't buy their own food (most of the time). If I wanted a Happy Meal toy back in the day and my parents weren't interested in going to McDonald's, you know what they did? THEY SAID NO. I know that's a foreign concept to many parents today, but it's what needs to be done. In general, children who don't eat fast food on a daily basis don't typically become obese from fast food. Again, odd concept, I know. At no time should anyone pretend they don't know what they're getting into with fast food. I understand with kids, because at that age many don't read particularly well (another issue for another time) and even fewer would understand a nutrition chart if it smacked them in the face. I don't expect them to know the health risks they face from eating that stuff all the time, but for their parents to pretend that it isn't their responsibility to know what's in their kids' food smacks of laziness, apathy, and an unwillingness to take responsibility for their own decisions. The same is true of the push to eliminate Ronald McDonald. The comparison to Joe Camel is erroneous because Joe Camel pandered to minors a substance they could not legally use, a substance with known addictive chemicals present to ensure their continued use. If a child decides "Screw you, I'm gonna have a burger," there's no real concern that the child will become physically dependent on hamburgers for the rest of his or her life. Above all else, though, it's a matter of having a spine. The child is not the one making the decisions. As such, the child's predilection to follow the wishes of a mephitic burger jester shouldn't come into play. If you're pathetic enough that a charlatan in a yellow jumper has more influence over what your child eats than you do, then you might as well just give your kids to Angelina.

The last one, regarding violent video games, really bothers me for a number of reasons. I know a fellow who started playing violent things like Mortal Kombat back in grade school and has continued with it up to this day. He's never had any issues with violence or anger. He graduated at the top of his class in high school, graduated with honors from a respected university, and today is a respected professional with a steady job and fiscal independence. I know this fellow pretty well, because this fellow is me. I've never had an issue with it because from an early age, I could tell the difference between a game and reality. Moreover, my parents understood that I understood the difference, so they permitted me that leeway. To put this simply, if a parent doesn't believe their child can play these sorts of things without reenacting them (in other words, that the child can't tell what's acceptable in real life and what's not), there should be absolutely no way the parent permits the child to play them. There's not even a good excuse for not knowing what games could pose a problem, because THERE'S A RATING SYSTEM. THE ANSWERS ARE ALREADY ON THE DAMN BOX. If parents would just do some research and look at the box, they could be well-informed on what their child could be witnessing and make their decisions based on that. It reminds me of the parents who go to Blockbuster, see the cartoon pictures on the box, rent Urotsukidoji for their kids, and come back furious over what was in it (if you're curious, Google it...there's no way in hell I'm linking anything on that). There's a certain level of responsibility that goes into these sorts of things, and if you're going to duck that responsibility, you deserve the consequences.

You might have noticed I keep using the word "responsibility." That's because that's what all this comes back to: responsibility, and an unwillingness to accept it. There are certain things that a parent needs to know to make informed decisions. For some reason, there's a distinct lack of interest in learning those necessary things; I'm tempted to call it "willful ignorance." Instead, the prevailing thought has become "Let's force everyone to play by a set of rules because we don't have the stones to make our own." That disturbs me, as it should disturb anyone who respects the notion of a free, well-educated society. When did we stop forcing people to own up to their mistakes? When did we decide parenting was the government's job? When did we decide that individual responsibility is irrelevant when it comes to progeny? Why haven't we fixed that? It's time to face facts: if there's something wrong with your child, the first person you should even consider blaming is the person in the mirror. Until next time, whenever someone says "Won't someone pleeeeeease think of the children?", respond with these two little words:

You first.