Category Archives: Random Blogging

Beyond Redemption

According to Political Animal , a few weeks ago, former senator and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Danforth (R) expressed some concern about the direction of his party. “If Dick Lugar,” Danforth said, “having served five terms in the U.S. Senate and being the most respected person in the Senate and the leading authority on foreign policy, is seriously challenged by anybody in the Republican Party, we have gone so far overboard that we are beyond redemption.”

I think we’ve crossed that threshhold.

Only in an alternative universe would Dick Lugar be considered liberal, or Richard Mourdock–the troglodyte running against him–be considered credible.

When Lugar was Mayor of Indianapolis, he governed from the middle, but since his first term in the Senate, he has moved steadily to the right. He has routinely voted against equal rights for gay people, including most recently against repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and he has been on the wrong side (in my view) on health care reform. He carried a lot of water for the  Bush Administration, despite the fact that he had to know how misguided its foreign policies were.   If he seems “liberal,” it is only by comparison to people who are certifiably insane–the people who want to build fences along the (southern) border, want to put women back in the kitchen (barefoot and pregnant), and want the U.S. to withdraw from all international treaties.

Mourdock is best known for an embarrassing lawsuit arising out of the Chrysler bankruptcy. After making an ill-advised investment in Chrysler stock, he was Indiana’s representative to the creditors committee–the group of creditors who negotiate in the bankruptcy proceedings on behalf of those owed money. Mourdock signed an agreement to abide by whatever agreement the committee reached; nevertheless, he made a lot of noise objecting to the agreement after the court approved it, and he brought a lawsuit to overturn it. The suit was thrown out, as any first-year law student would have anticipated, but the most ironic aspect of the whole mess was that Indiana would have received less had his lawsuit been successful than it received under the creditors’ agreement. Now this clown is playing to the Tea Party wing of the party–where he clearly belongs.

In a sane world, Lugar would have no problem winning a Republican primary, but this isn’t a sane world. There are a lot of frightened, angry voters out there, and most of them are members of the GOP. Plus, friends who are privy to the party’s powers-that-be tell me that the once-vaunted Lugar office staff no longer responds to constituent contacts or party requests the way they used to. (The words “insulated” and “arrogant” come up fairly routinely.)

I hope the Democrats field a strong candidate–something they haven’t done for quite a while–because we are witnessing the implosion of a once-powerful political party that may indeed be beyond redemption.

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What Part of “Everyone” Doesn’t Sarah Palin Understand?

According to the Huffington Post, Sarah Palin weighed in on the Wisconsin protests in a Friday night posting on her Facebook page. In the posting addressed to “union brothers and sisters” (cough, cough), Palin says Wisconsin taxpayers shouldn’t be asked to pay for benefits “that are not sustainable.” She says “real solidarity means everyone being willing to sacrifice.”

In Palin-speak, apparently, “everyone” means middle-class public servants. It clearly doesn’t mean those Americans in the richest 2%–the ones whose tax breaks Palin and her Tea Party buddies are so anxious to protect.

The Yiddish word for this is “chutzpah.” (Look it up.)

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Class Warfare

One of the reasons I left the GOP was impatience with party rhetoric equating taxes with theft.

It seems to have become a Republican article of faith that it is “immoral” to tax people for the services they receive, let alone for purposes of redistribution (i.e., using tax dollars to help poor folks). Those who work, we are told, should be allowed to retain the fruits of their labor. (I guess it is impertinent to ask what portion of those “fruits” are the result of living in a society that provides roads and bridges on which to ship goods, police protection of social order, courts to enforce contracts, and all the other infrastructure necessary to conduct a trade or business.)

So how do these principled critics of redistribution and “theft” justify the Wisconsin Governor’s attack on public workers—and his effort to take money from them in order to enrich the wealthy?

It should be emphasized that public workers in Wisconsin are not responsible for the state’s fiscal problems, and stripping them of their bargaining rights won’t solve those problems. According to reports in the New York Times and elsewhere, the Governor was the one who precipitated the state’s projected $137 million shortfall. Just last month, he and the Republican-controlled legislature gave away $117 million in tax breaks, mostly to businesses and for private health savings accounts.

If it weren’t for those tax breaks, according to the state’s Legislative Fiscal Bureau, the state would have had a surplus.

It’s interesting. Every time someone suggests reversing the Bush tax cuts for the richest 2%—tax cuts that left current rates at their lowest point in fifty years—the GOP screams about “class warfare.” I want to know why it is class warfare when we ask the rich to pay their fair share, but it isn’t class warfare to take money from hardworking public servants to pay for tax breaks for the rich.

I’d also like to know when the party of fiscal responsibility became the party that robs the poor to give to the rich.

I guess redistribution is okay when it’s upward.

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As My Grandma Would Say….

From Chris Rock’s mouth to God’s ears!

Scott Raab: Like many nice Caucasians, I cried the night Barack Obama was elected. It was one of the high points in American history. And all that’s happened since the election is just a shitstorm of hatred. You want to weigh in on that?Chris Rock: I actually like it, in the sense that — you got kids? Kids always act up the most before they go to sleep. And when I see the Tea Party and all this stuff, it actually feels like racism’s almost over. Because this is the last — this is the act up before the sleep. They’re going crazy. They’re insane. You want to get rid of them — and the next thing you know, they’re fucking knocked out. And that’s what’s going on in the country right now.

Downside of Democracy

Many years ago, during a discussion with a friend whose husband served in the Indiana House, she said something I’ve always remembered: “The problem with representative democracy is that it is representative.”

This session of the Indiana Legislature seems intent on proving the point.

If you’ve been following national news, you may be thinking that those we elected to the General Assembly couldn’t possibly be as crazy as, for example, the South Dakota lawmaker who sponsored a bill that would have made it legal to shoot abortion doctors (he withdrew it in the wake of the publicity), or the Arizona legislator who responded to the horrific shootings in Tucson by sponsoring a bill to allow concealed guns to be carried anywhere, or the Wisconsin Governor who is threatening to call out the National Guard if public workers protest his efforts to strip them of bargaining rights they’ve had since the 1950s.

But you’d be wrong.

Think an anti-bullying bill should be a slam-dunk? Think again. The Senate Committee killed it on a 3-5 vote. Opponents expressed an uncharacteristic concern for the First Amendment rights of schoolchildren…especially their right to express anti-gay sentiments.

Speaking of child safety, surely a bill to require all child care providers to meet health and safety requirements—staff criminal history checks, fire safety, drug testing and the like—should be a no-brainer? Wrong! Advance America’s Eric Miller brought in God’s folks to testify that the bill gave government “too much authority over Church ministries,” and the bill died without a committee vote.

Wisconsin isn’t the only state trying to strip public employees of bargaining rights—here in Indiana, a bill to abolish Indiana’s merit system has emerged from committee. And Mike Delph’s effort to have Indiana emulate Arizona by targeting people who “look like” they might be illegal immigrants is moving along nicely (never mind that Arizona’s convention bookings declined 36% in the wake of that state’s law, and never mind that immigration is an exclusively federal responsibility).

And of course, our “representative representatives” aren’t content with defeating the anti-bullying bill, and reviving the bill to amend the Indiana Constitution to ban same-sex marriage. Taking their war against gay Hoosiers up a notch, there’s an upcoming committee vote on a bill to prohibit state universities from providing domestic partner benefits.

The haters and the crazies are well represented in the Indiana General Assembly. The rest of us, not so much.

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