A jaundiced look at the world we live in.
And no, not THAT kind of quickie. A very short post.
Daily Kos today: “Michelle Bachmann is announcing her run for president. God help us.” To which I would only add, a country in which anyone takes crazy Michelle Bachmann seriously as a candidate for any office, let alone the Presidency, may be beyond redemption.
Happy Memorial Day.
CommentsThis Minnesota Republican veteran represents the party I used to call mine. His heartfelt, gutsy speech to the Minnesota legislature right before the vote to place a ban on same-sex marriage on the state’s 2012 ballot says it all.
I see where the Superintendent of Schools of a small district in Michigan reacted to draconian cuts to education in that state with a nice piece of snark: He wrote a letter to the editor proposing to turn his schools into prisons, since spending on prisons was protected from the deep cuts imposed on other state functions.
He had a point.
The Governor of Michigan–one of the current crop of crazed right-wing “true believers”–insists that the state needs to cut spending, which it undoubtedly does. But where does he propose to make those cuts? He proposes to reduce K-12 spending by nearly a billion dollars (yes, that’s not a typo–a billion dollars), to significantly reduce spending for universities and community colleges, and to make further cuts in Michigan’s already meager welfare payments. Along with his obedient legislature, he also raised taxes on pensions for seniors.
At the same time, he got the legislature to lower business taxes by $1.8 billion. This isn’t even “class war”–it’s insanity.
I understand there is a recall movement underway. For the sake of the people living in Michigan, I hope it succeeds.
Steve Benen has an important post up today at Political Animal, discussing the GOP’s recently-unveiled and badly misnamed “Jobs bill.”
As Benen points out, “the jobs agenda, such as it is, is practically a conservative cliche: the GOP wants massive tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation, more coastal oil drilling, and huge cuts to public investment. Republicans are confident this will work wonders, just as they were equally confident about the identical agenda in the last decade, and the decade before that, and the decade before that.
Indeed, the most glaring problem with the GOP jobs agenda is that it won’t work, but nearly as painful is the realization that it’s already been tried, over and over again, to no avail. They either haven’t heard the famous axiom about trying failure repeatedly and expecting a different result, or they don’t care.
The agenda is the agenda: tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation, cut public investments. Good times and bad, deficit or surplus, war or peace, it just doesn’t matter.”
The entire post is well worth reading.
Way back when I became politically active, I bought into the theory that tax cuts for the wealthy would spur investment, and that investment would create jobs. It made a lot of sense; unfortunately, the evidence is pretty overwhelming that it doesn’t work that way.
The ability to change ones opinion when faced with new evidence is how humans learn and thrive. When people “double down” on beliefs even when faced with facts debunking those beliefs, we call that a delusion.
CommentsThis morning, the American Constitution Society blog referenced a recent report from the Associated Press:
“The Associated Press has provided new details about a push by the nation’s largest Tea Party umbrella group to teach the Constitution in public schools using materials from an organization that promotes the Constitution as a divinely inspired document.
As originally reported by Mother Jones, the Tea Party Patriots are encouraging public schools to participate in “Constitution Week” in September by utilizing teaching materials from the National Center for Constitutional Studies, a group that ACS Executive Director Caroline Fredrickson called so outside the mainstream that even the conservative Federalist Society would object to its materials.
Mother Jones’ Stephanie Mencimer participated in a daylong seminar with NCCS last year, and reported:
If its public school curriculum resembles anything like what I witnessed, it has no place in the nation’s classrooms. Among other things, NCCS uses materials written by Skousen suggesting that Anglo-Saxons are descended from a lost tribe of Israel; Skousen claimed this meant the Constitution may have been inspired by God, who intended for America to be a Christian nation. The very same bogus history has been perpetuated by the white supremacist movement.”
When the public schools fail to teach real history–when most “social studies” classes are taught by people hired for their ability to be athletic coaches rather than their ability to teach American history or the constitutional architecture–students are defenseless against this sort of propaganda.
Here’s a proposal for those of you reading this. Ask the next three teenagers you encounter to answer a couple of these questions: what was the Enlightenment? What are checks and balances? What does the Establishment Clause do? How did the 14th Amendment change the Constitution?
My guess is the results of such an experiment wouldn’t be very pretty.