The Ballad of the One Percent

(Just make up your own tune until I write that!)

It seems there are some people
Who’ve been occupying parks –
Setting up their tents and signs
And hoping to strike sparks
With all the people who are unemployed
And looking for a job
In other words, they’re just a typ-
-ical disruptive mob.

Chorus:
We’re the one percent, you see,
We really do not care.
We love our lives of leisure;
We’re not going anywhere.
So beat your drums and chant your chants
And Occupy today.
Tomorrow we’ll still be in charge.
We own the U.S.A.!

It really doesn’t matter
What you think or what you say.
You’re just a bunch of hippies,
And, besides, you’re mostly gay.
And if you make a fuss, we’ll wait
Until it’s very dark.
And send a bunch of uniforms
To kick you out the park.

(Chorus)

Well, in spite of all the pepper spray,
The tear gas and the guns,
You morons keep on coming back,
And spoiling all our fun.
You’d better pay attention,
We’re not kidding, we’ll get tough!
If you don’t stop disrupting things,
We’re going to huff and puff (and hold our breath)!

(Chorus)

You don’t understand,
You can’t survive without our dough.
And if you raise our taxes,
We’ll just take our ball and go.
And if you make us leave our cash,
Our servants and our jewels,
We’ll start our scam up someplace new
And cheat some other fools!

(Chorus – repeat last line)

Shut Up and Shoot a Zombie

I have some friends who tell me that President Obama is no better than a moderate Republican, that he has failed to live up to his campaign promises and stand up to the bad guys, we should back somebody else in the Dem. primaries or start a third party or even begin thinking about revolution. Beyond the question of whether they are correct about Obama’s politics (and I don’t believe that), there is a broader response to that position:

You need to get some historical perspective. Let’s say you had a time machine and you could go back to the late 1700s and sit down with the smartest guys in America just after the Revolution, and tell them a little bit about the USA of the 21st century. You tell them that not only are black people not slaves, but that they can (usually) vote, and so can women, and so, in fact, can every citizen aged 18 and older who’s not in prison, and that in fact the President of the United States is a man whose father was from Africa and whose mother was Irish, of all things, and whose name is Barack Hussein Obama. Tell them that almost everybody has a car, and a refrigerator, and a TV set, people routinely live into their 80s and 90s, everybody can communicate with most people in the world over something called the Internet, using something called computers, and using something called telephones that they carry around with them everywhere they go… after they stopped laughing, some of them (maybe not Jefferson) would probably tie you to the back of a horse and ride you around a while. If you survived that, you could put them in the time machine and take them back to the Middle Ages, where they could sit down with some of the leaders of that unenlightened day and tell them that not only does everyone agree that the earth is round, not flat, and not the center of the universe, but that you come from a country on the other side of the ocean, where people (well, white men, anyway) vote for their leaders, there are no kings, the church and the state are separate… and probably before they got that far, Jefferson and company would have their eyes plucked out and be burned at the stake as witches.

Yes, we have bad guys. We have always had bad guys. Life is an eternal fight between rich and poor, good and evil, jocks and geeks. But it wasn’t that long ago that those bad guys could just come to your house, take your daughter away and rape her, steal your cattle, burn your house down and take your land, and nobody could say or do one thing about it. Today they can still do most of that, but it requires something called “due process,” and they don’t always get away with it, and sometimes your story appears in the news, and the bad guys are punished. And you don’t live in a dirt hovel with rags on your back. You have a car, and a color TV, and a cell phone, and a refrigerator. You might even have a good job, or at least a job, and health insurance. An average guy from the Middle Ages would kill you and suck your blood in an instant to have what you have. In 200 years more, things will be even better — that is, if a bunch of morons don’t start a revolution and blow it all up. Or if we fail to get enough progress on climate change to prevent everybody from just drowning eventually. Not that I personally have a stake in that, but my great-grandchildren might, if I ever have any.

So my answer is: Calm down, get some historical perspective, vote straight Democratic, and hope for the best. In the meantime, make sure your Visa is up to date, just in case. You may not think our current administration is all you’d hoped for, but if 2012 turns out to be 1980 all over again, you might be thinking about trading places with the guy in the dirt hovel. The left/moderate orgy of destruction in the face of a united right wing looks all too familiar. We need to get a grip. We should take a page from “The Walking Dead” (if you haven’t seen it, I recommend it): Stop arguing about who did what to whom, and go shoot a zombie in the head.

Rushopoly

I’ve seen Obamaopoly. Not that funny. Now, THIS is funny!

Click on the image for a version large enough to actually read.

Gee, that was fun to make…

The Last Word on the Birther Nonsense

Barack Obama is a citizen of the United States. The State of Hawaii says so, and that’s good enough for me.

But let’s just grant, for the sake of argument, that the birthers are correct, and that President Obama can’t really prove without a shadow of a doubt that he was born in the United States. So what? Leave it to a bunch of right-wing corporate attornies to try and win their case by exploiting a legal technicality, a loophole, an irrelevancy.

After all, what does it mean to be a citizen? There are thousands of people in this country who could produce a long-form birth certificate with a baby footprint and a doctor’s signature on it who otherwise do not deserve to be citizens, who couldn’t pass a citizenship test if their lives depended on it, who have never taken advantage of their status as citizens other than to vote for a Republican Presidential candidate every four years, who couldn’t even tell you the names of their Senators. Barack Obama WAS a Senator, not to mention a Harvard Law School graduate, editor of the Harvard Law Review, and, of course, President of the United States. He’s more of a citizen than most people in this country. He earned his citizenship long ago. A citizen is as a citizen does.

But of course that exposes the core of the anti-immigration argument — the notion that citizenship is like a country club. You have to be voted in by the existing members, who can blackball you for any reason they like, including the color of your skin. Isn’t that what this is really all about, when you strip away the crap about certificates of live birth versus birth certificates, all the manufactured “evidence” and misquoted grandmothers? How could someone whose father was born in Africa possibly be President? Or a citizen? Or more than 3/5 of a human being? My God, what happened to the America we’ve always known, the one that was run by white male Christians? We’re losing it! Think of something, damn it!

Sorry, fellas, the jig is up. Nobody really believes you except a handful of unreconstructed racists and proto-Nazis. And if you don’t knock it off, the people are going to take away YOUR citizenship.

You Can’t Discriminate Against My Discrimination

(An Eastern Michigan University student counselor has sued the University, claiming her dismissal for refusing to counsel gay and lesbian patients was a violation of her religious beliefs.)

A counselor should not be allowed to claim a religious exemption from treating people whose sexual activities he or she objects to, any more than a counselor should be allowed to refuse to treat people because she objects to their politics, their gender, their race, or their physical appearance. It’s all discriminatory.

But what if your religion requires you to discriminate? That’s your choice, but religions which preach discrimination (regardless of what they call it or how they justify it) cannot be allowed to take advantage of laws which are designed to protect people from religious discrimination, or to claim that they are being discriminated against because of their discrimination against others. That makes no sense. And one cannot make comparisons to religious dietary laws, for example, since neither eating pork nor refusing to eat pork can be considered discriminatory in any way (except perhaps against pigs). The counselor in this example can be compared to a Jewish restaurant worker who refuses to serve non-kosher food to patrons because his or her religion prohibits it.

Just as a fitness instructor who is afraid of going outdoors will probably have to modify his or her activities because of that fear, a counselor who does not accept a certain class of people because of their race, religion, or sexual orientation could argue that her own fear of homosexuals hampers her from doing her job, rather than claiming a valid religious exemption. In that case, both the exercise instructor and the counselor should probably consider other careers, or may be forced to quit because of a lack of proper qualifications. The exercise instructor might want to get a job working at an indoor facility, and the counselor might want to get a job counseling ONLY people of her own faith, not just her own sexual orientation. (There are probably a lot of straight people who might object to receiving counseling from a homophobe!) But it must be clear that the problem is with the employee, not with the employer.

No thoughtful court is going to side with the plaintiff in this case, because making this kind of exemption to laws against discrimination sets a dangerous precedent and opens the door to a flood of other related and similarly invalid complaints. Can a police officer who is a religious pacifist refuse to carry a weapon? Can a Muslim model who wears a head scarf in public claim discrimination because she was passed over for a job working in a shampoo commercial? Can an Amish department store sales clerk sue for discrimination because he was fired for refusing to demonstrate to a customer how to use a cell phone? You can see where this sort of thing can lead.

Mubarak Must Go Now

I’m tired of this bullshit about gradually easing Mubarak out so that he isn’t “humiliated.” The guy is a dictator, and has been for 30 years, propped up by a foreign power and his huge secret police organization. He deserves not only to be humiliated, but to be executed. The idea is that he should get the hell out before the people give him what he deserves. Does he want to save face or save his ass?

The young people who are in the streets today have no patience with all this government protocol and face saving and dignity crap. Stability will come when the goons stop beating and killing people. They want freedom, they want truth, they want honesty, they want an end to corruption and brutality. No, they have no specific demands or well-thought-out program. They are not Muslim extremists. They are Sunni, not Shi’a, like Iran. They simply want the bad guys out of there, not just Mubarak, but his son and his security chief and the whole rotten bunch.

And if the people aren’t as “friendly” to Israel because they haven’t been paid billions to be friendly, like the Mubarak government has been, then we’ll just have to win them over. They’re clearly not stupid. They love the idea of America, if not our past foreign policy. But whatever may happen, one thing I know to be true is that no nation’s security is worth keeping eighty million people suffering under a military dictatorship. Israel can take care of itself. The people of Egypt need our help, and it would be better to be their friend now rather than their enemy later.

I just heard a commentator on MSNBC talking about how difficult it will be to “legally” do anything about getting rid of Mubarak because there are laws in place in Egypt, and the Constitution requires this and that, and the U.S. can’t stop giving them aid because it’s all in the “pipeline” for the next two years, blah, blah, blah. He says he’s a lawyer, and that’s for sure.

Hey, this is a revolution! The Egyptian Constitution needs to be thrown out the window, along with Mubarak and his entire administration. What good is a revolution if you don’t actually overthrow anything or anybody? It’s not a revolution if it has to take place within the framework of the phony baloney structure that was put in place by the dictator. You want the demonstrators to start writing a constitution and arguing over laws? That’s a great way to stop their momentum! The first step is to throw the rascals out. They want democracy, that’s the beginning and end of it, and how that democracy works itself out is just details. First you have to get rid of the tyrant! As long as he’s there, you can’t do anything.

So what if another opportunist takes his place? If he doesn’t mind his manners, the people will go back into the streets and kick him out, too. Eventually, with practice, they’ll get it right. A leader will emerge. But let’s not put the cart before the horse.

The Egyptian people are saying they want a democracy just like we have. Of course, they don’t realize it, but we don’t really have a democracy. We have a fake democracy. Every two years the people get to vote, and they have a choice between three guys: A crook, a bigger crook, and a guy who can’t win because the pundits tell us he can’t. But at least we don’t have an outright dictatorship, and we have freedom of speech, for the time being. All the Egyptians want is their own fake democracy, and ability to say what they want without the secret police showing up in the middle of the night.

But what about the “Muslim Brotherhood”? Oooo, scary! Okay, so they’ll have to fight their own fight against their religious extremists, just like we do in America. They have people who want to exercise power based on the Koran, and we have people who want to exercise power based on the Bible. You can’t prove to me that either group is more frightening than the other. What’s more frightening than the Islamic fundamentalists is the fact that Mubarak was put in power by the West, and has been kept in power by us all these years. Should we be surprised if they’re a little cheesed off at us when this is all over? Now would be a good time to start changing the way we do things, because this isn’t going to be the last democratic revolution in that part of the world. We’d better get used to it.

The Second Amendment Extremists

According to right-wing Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), in 2006, the Second Amendment is about the right to own guns in order to muster enough firepower to overthrow tyranny in battle. And logically this means we need anti-tank guns and cannons and even nuclear weapons.

As Rachel Maddow put it, “If the United States military is armed with depleted uranium munitions, if they’re armed with nuclear weapons, in order to be able to compete with that — in order for you and me to go up against the tyrannical commander-in-chief of the U.S. military and defeat him in battle — you and I should quite literally be able to obtain private nuclear weapons,”

That means that we can pass no laws regulating any type of weapons, because we have to be equal to the government we’re fighting against!

Maddow goes on to say, “Forget the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union back in the 1980s. Under this view of gun rights, every day should be an arms race between you and me and the 82nd Airborne, if that’s the way we’re going to approach gun politics.”

There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that our founders intended the Second Amendment to mean that people had to be armed in order to overthrow their own government. They were talking about state militias, whose purpose was to protect their communities against invading forces from another country (Great Britain, specifically) or from (unfortunately) native Americans. There was no serious standing army after the Revolution; the citizens at the time WERE the military. That’s why they needed to be armed. If you were to show Thomas Jefferson a Glock 19 and ask him if every citizen should have one just in case the U.S. government needed to be overthrown, he would have laughed in your face (if he didn’t get sick to his stomach). As I laugh in the faces of all those who make this incredibly dangerous and stupid argument. A well-armed citizenry is a disaster waiting to happen; in fact, it’s already happening. Here’s another way to look at this: If you live in a society which actually permits people to own this many guns and to talk about it openly, you live in a society in which revolution is unnecessary. Unfortunately, a free society is easily taken advantage of by scoundrels, and there are no greater scoundrels in our society than the gun manufacturers and their stooges at the NRA (though there are plenty of soundrels equal to them, as some have pointed out to me).

Masters of War

The most powerful song Bob Dylan ever wrote — lyrics reproduced here and dedicated to Glock, Sportsman’s World and the NRA:

Come you masters of war
You that build the big guns
You that build the death planes
You that build all the bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks.

You that never done nothin’
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it’s your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly.

Like Judas of old
You lie and deceive
A world war can be won
You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain.

You fasten all the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansions
As young people’s blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud.

You’ve thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You ain’t worth the blood
That runs in your veins.

How much do I know
To talk out of turn?
You might say that I’m young
You might say I’m unlearned
But there’s one thing I know
Though I’m younger than you
That even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do.

Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good?
Will it buy you forgiveness?
Do you think that it could?
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul.

And I hope that you die
And your death’ll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I’ll watch while you’re lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I’ll stand over your grave
‘Til I’m sure that you’re dead.

Will We Stop the Killings?

Let’s get this out of the way off the top: The kid who shot 18 people in Tucson is just oddball enough that both sides on various online forums and on cable news are claiming he was working for the other guys. His list of favorite books and his comments about flag-burning are a lightning rod for the righties. Clearly, unless you have a blind spot based on your politics, you can see that with all his talk about the currency, about gold, about the government and other subjects, his sweet spot was right wing conspiracy theories. He’s no liberal, that’s for sure.

But the issue shouldn’t be what he believed, which was clearly not rational no matter how you look at it, but what he used in his attack: A handgun. We need gun control in this country, and we need it twenty years ago. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that some of the victims were shot by other people who decided to pull out their guns and “protect” themselves. An armed populace means more dead people, period. But nothing will be done, as nothing was done after the last ten shootings. We will just continue this way until we live in an armed camp, if we don’t already.

Do we pay attention to warning signs? All the evidence says no. I recently watched a newsreel made in 1937, from the March of Time series shown in all the movie theaters, that revealed all the information anybody would need about the frightening things going on in pre-war Germany under Hitler. Nothing was done about it. Germany re-armed, attacked its neighbors, and allied with Italy and Japan to start a full-scale world war, and when the smoke cleared, we had 6 million dead Jews, countless millions of killed and maimed soldiers and civilians, worldwide devastation, two nuclear bombs dropped on Japan, and an entire generation militarized and traumatized. We could have stopped it. We could stop this. But we won’t, because we don’t have the political will, and we’re too busy trying to figure out how to pay our bills.

Most of us are also too frightened to speak up, and with mostly good reason. Posting this is as far as I want to go, and who knows whether or not my words will attract the attention of another Jared Lee Loughner, sitting out there somewhere with a gun in his hands, stewing in his own psychotic juices, listening to Fox News and reading conspiracy theories online? If you’re reading these words and you agree, at least try not to cast a vote for anybody with more than a 0% rating from the NRA, because the gun lobby’s control of Congress is public enemy number one. How much damage could Jared Loughner have done with a handful of rocks, or even a knife? He might even have decided not to do it in the first place.

How Conservatives Think About Health Care

In the debate over health care, you have to understand how right-wingers think. I know, because I used to be one. When you ask Republican congresspeople to give up their health care if they’re going to repeal the health care bill, it’s as if you said to them:

LIBERAL: We want to buy everybody a car. You need a car to get to work or to get to school or to take your children to day care or to go out and buy food and clothing. Without a car, you’re stuck, and mobility is essential for our economy.

CONSERVATIVE: We can’t afford to buy everybody a car. I’m voting against it.

LIBERAL: Okay, then give up your own car.

CONSERVATIVE: Why? I can afford MY car.

LIBERAL: But that’s not fair. Many people can’t. Certainly not one as nice as yours.

CONSERVATIVE: That’s not MY fault. They should go get a job and earn enough money to buy a car.

LIBERAL: But how can they get to a job without a car?

CONSERVATIVE: Not my problem. Maybe they don’t deserve a job. Anyway, the government shouldn’t be forcing people to buy cars.

And so on and so on. When applied to health care, the argument goes like this:

CONSERVATIVE: We want to repeal the health care bill. It’s too expensive, and the government shouldn’t be making people buy health insurance.

LIBERAL: Okay, then give up your own insurance.

CONSERVATIVE: Why? I have insurance that comes with my job.

LIBERAL: But that’s not fair. Many people can’t get insurance. Certainly not one as good as yours, that’s provided by the government.

CONSERVATIVE: That’s not MY fault. They should go get a job that provides insurance. The fact that I work for the government is just a coincidence. If they worked for the government, they could get government insurance, too.

LIBERAL: But how can they survive without health insurance?

CONSERVATIVE: Not my problem. Maybe they don’t deserve to live. Anyway, the government shouldn’t be forcing people to buy insurance.

See the logic of it? To the right-winger, it’s all the same: Cars, health insurance, jobs, food — you either have them or you don’t, and if you don’t, maybe you don’t deserve them. Nature has to have some way to thin the herd. If you want something I have, and you take it from me, that’s stealing. If I give it to you, that’s charity, and it’s my choice. If I choose to keep what’s mine, that’s called freedom. It’s a free country, and you’re free to drop dead. Do it quickly, so my taxes don’t go up.