Dr. Kenneth Katz recently published an article in the New England Journal of Medicine titled "Health Hazards of 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell." This week, he penned an op/ed for RH Reality Check about his experiences treating U.S. military at an STD clinic in San Diego. Dr. Katz sees the Pentagon's "Don't Ask Don't Tell" rule for LGB members of the military as a huge roadblock to good medical care. He's pretty confident that his military patients feel safe divulging their sexual histories to a civilian doctor like himself. But when those troops go overseas, they are cared for by military doctors. Technically, doctor-patient communication is exempt from DADT, but many patients don't realize that they can tell their military doctors about gay sex without fear of reprisals (at least in theory). Dr. Katz's patients have told him that they won't go for recommended follow-up STD screening after they ship out because they're afraid to be honest with their doctors. He worries about how many troops are suffering from treatable infections in war zones because they aren't allowed to serve openly.
Food stamp use skyrockets, swordfish sales unaccountably flat
Monica Potts of TAPPED points to the alarming statistic that in the last month alone an additional 500,000 Americans went on food stamps. She notes that the right wing website Daily Calleris alarmed not by the fact that fellow citizens can't afford food, but rather that there's no gruel-only foodstamp program available:
Meanwhile, the conservative news site The Daily Calleris shocked, shocked, to learn that you can use food stamps to buy all manner of food. The government, apparently, doesn't restrict you from purchasing an $18-per-pound swordfish steak from Whole Foods. But that kind of discovery, like almost everything else in the "debate" over food stamp use, is the sort of ridiculous one that comes from a person who's never been hungry.
The Hyde Amendment
In Campus Progress, Jessica Arons and Madina Agénor call for the repeal of the Hyde Amendment for being an assault on the reproductive rights of poor women and women of color. The Supreme Court declared abortion to be a constitutional right in 1973, yet nearly 40 years later, the Hyde Amendment still prohibits nearly all federal funding for abortions. In practice, the women most affected by the Hyde Amendment are those who depend on government health care programs like Medicaid and the Indian Health Service:
Former U.S. Rep. Henry Hyde (R-IL), the law's sponsor, admitted during debate of his proposal that he was targeting poor women because they were the only ones vulnerable enough for him to reach. "I certainly would like to prevent, if I could legally, anybody having an abortion, a rich woman, a middle-class woman, or a poor woman," he said. "Unfortunately, the only vehicle available is the ... Medicaid bill."
Meanwhile, ultra-conservative Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) is calling on Congress to de-fund the reproductive health provider Planned Parenthood, Andy Birkey reports in the Minnesota Independent. In an interview with a conservative news site, Bachmann doubled down on that idea, suggesting that all of health care reform be de-funded because it funds abortions. This is not true. The aforementioned Hyde Amendment guarantees as much. Furthermore, even though health reform never would have funded abortions, President Obama signed an eleventh-hour executive order guaranteeing that health care reform would not fund abortions.
Brooklyn bees gorge on maraschino cherry run-off
Home beekeeping is the hottest new trend for health-conscious locavores. New York City recently changed the law to accommodate beekeepers in the five boroughs. Just because you live in an industrial neighborhood in Brooklyn is no reason to miss out on this sweet action, right? Well, actually, there is a catch. That nice honey at the farmers' market tastes like lavender because that's what those rural bees ate. What do bees in Red Hook, Brooklyn eat? Run-off from a maraschino cherry factory. The overindulgent bees "look like vampires" according to one local keeper and their honey runs bright red. Maraschino honey sounds like a delicious mash-up of high and low culture. Unfortunately, Sarah Goodyear reports in Grist that the end product doesn't taste nearly as good as it looks. Arthur Mondella, the owner of Dell's Maraschino Cherries, wants to do right by the beekeepers. He initially suggested putting out vats of different colored syrup to "help" the bees make rainbow honey. His proposal was not well-received by the crunchy set. Instead, he has agreed to work with the beekeepers to keep the bees out of the vats next year.
What word would you use to describe a candidate for the U.S. Senate, who just happens to be a Tea Party favorite, that publically advocates repealing health care reform, opposes the regulation of health care insurers while at the same time benefits from health care provided by a federal government agency? If the word hypocrite comes to mind, you just hit the jackpot. Not necessarily intended to be a tongue in cheek quip, but our winner of the hypocrite of the day award goes to Nevada's Sharron Angle, who just happens to hail from the land of slot machines and crap tables.
Yeah, you read me correctly, this morning's "Politico's Morning Score" blew the cover off of Ms. Angle's dirty little secret and possibly a hole in her campaign to be the next U.S. Senator from Nevada. Needless to say, this isn't exactly the kind of publicity that the Tea Party Movement is looking for either. Its one thing for the Tea Party Movement to be lampooned by the political highbrows on MSNBC and the Daily Show who can be dismissed as elitist by the party faithful. It's quite yet another for one of its premier candidates to so seriously stumble just weeks before an election that is supposed to be the movement's coming out party in the big leagues of electoral politics. Politico's Morning Score reports: "Angle's campaign acknowledged to Nevada journalist Jon Ralston Monday that both the candidate and her husband receive health care from the federal government. Spokeswoman Ciara Matthews said in a statement: "Mr. Ted Angle receives his pension through the (federal) Civil Service Retirement System. While it is not supplemented by the federal government, current civil servants pay into the program to pay the schedule of those already retired - much like how the Social Security Program works today." But there's more to it than just the machinations of the Angle family, another prominent mouthpiece of the Tea Party Movement, Michelle Bachmann, a regular critic of government health care is also a beneficiary of the very programs she rails against. According to MediaMatters.com:" Angle isn't the only right-wing Republican to bash government involvement in health care while benefiting from it. Back in May, the Minnesota Independent reported that Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), a frequent critic of "socialized medicine," was profiting from a government-run health program in Minnesota through her husband's Christian mental health clinic." A Christian clinic?, What became of the values of honesty and truthfulness, or are they to be convienently ignored when politics is what's on the menu?
So there you have it, some of the leading lights of the movement that is supposed to "take back our country" and bring us back to "the values and wisdom of our Founding Fathers", have found it in their best interest to talk you out of the need for health care reform and insurance company oversight while they and their families are more than happy to benefit from programs they publically oppose. These Tea Party elites, who regularly blast the established Washington elites, have seen fit to insulate themselves and their families from life's vicissitudes while admonishing the rest of us to" work hard, be frugal and trust in the markets and what made America great in the past." The hypocrisy in all of this is obvious and undeniable. What is not immediately obvious is to what extent these revelations just weeks before the mid-term elections will give the independent voter cause for concern as it regards supporting candidates like Sharron Angle or re-electing a Michelle Bachmann. I doubt it will do much to dissuade the rank and file Tea Party foot soldier, but it may. That said, what the rank and file intend to do really is of secondary import, it's the independent voter who holds the key to both this election and the next.
Some statements or arguments are irrefutable, because they are simply too stupid. In fact, it's not just them, it's the entire cognitive space in which they exist. Or should I say "entire cogntive subspace bubble", since that's pecise what it is: they exist in a black hole of stupid. Anything that gets close to enough to them to be used as an arguement, or even just evidence to refute them gets ripped from the fabric of ordinary cogntive space, and crushed by the forces of super-stupidity, suffering from an IQ depression shift, which has an effect analogous to turning your brains into applesauce. Like this, for example:
Taxes, more than any other issue is what drives the Tea Party movement. Thus those philosophical arguments related to taxation and the resulting size of government constitute the very essence of the rationale for the movement's existence. How then will the movement react and adapt to the latest findings of the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which reveal the movement's essential positions to be clearly at odds with empirical facts? As such, the Tea Party movement may soon find that the very rationale for its existence is being fundamentally challenged by a reality very much at variance with the movement's belief system. Likewise, the Republican rhetoric about taxes increasing may also start to ring hollow.
The Bureau's findings as reported by UPI are as follows: "Including state, federal and local taxes -- with sales tax and property tax thrown in -- the average tax bill came out to 9.2 percent of personal income in 2009.... That's down from an average of 12 percent over the past 50 years. The tax burden has not been this low since 1950...The U.S. tax burden has shrunk to its lowest level in 60 years...The tax rate has fallen 26 percent since 2007, a sharp drop that reflects progressive tax rates passed during the Clinton and Bush administrations and the 2009 federal stimulus bill that cut taxes by $800 for married couples earning up to $150,000." The Bureau's findings are just the latest in a growing body of evidence that refutes the basic premise which the Tea Party movement relies upon to energize its followers and fuel it's much hoped for transformation of American government. In a piece that followed this years Tax Day Protests, the Associated Press observed: "Lost in the rhetoric was that taxes have gone down under Obama. Congress has cut individuals' federal taxes for this year by about $173 billion, leaving Americans with a lighter load despite nearly $29 billion in increases by states."
In an article, which appeared in Forbes in March; "The Misinformed Tea Party Movement", conservative writer Bruce Bartlett outlined just how little members of the Tea Party movement actually knew about the structure and level of taxation. Utilizing a survey of movement protestors at a recent rally Bartlett found: "Tuesday's Tea Party crowd, however, thought that federal taxes were almost three times as high as they actually are. The average response was 42% of GDP and the median 40%. The highest figure recorded in all of American history was half those figures: 20.9% at the peak of World War II in 1944... In short, no matter how one slices the data, the Tea Party crowd appears to believe that federal taxes are very considerably higher than they actually are, whether referring to total taxes as a share of GDP or in terms of the taxes paid by a typical family." In contrast in 2009 the corresponding number was 14.8%. When it comes to the structure and composition of taxes, the Bartlett article is chock full of repudiation for just about everything that the Tea Partiers believe in and that does not bode well for a movement that has as one of it's stated goals, the reconstitution of the size of American government based on its belief that taxes are too high and that they will crowd private borrowers out of the credit markets. Bartlett sums up his skeptisim of the Tea Party movement with an insightful statement that points out just how confused the Tea Partiers may be: "It's hard to explain this divergence between perception and reality. Perhaps these people haven't calculated their tax returns for 2009 yet and simply don't know what they owe. Or perhaps they just assume that because a Democrat is president that taxes must have gone up, because that's what Republicans say that Democrats always do. In fact, there hasn't been a federal tax increase of any significance in this country since 1993." And to think, such an observation would roll off the tonuge of an economic censervative who once promoted supply-side theories and who had also worked for Ron Paul!
Ironically, its not just on the issue of taxes that the Tea Party movement is in a bit of a pickle. For one thing, the movement's overall lack of a cohesive strategy for affecting political change works against its durability as a force on the American politcal scene. Atlantic's Michael Kinsley points out that unlike the anti-war movement of the 1960s which had a central theme and aim, the Tea Party movement is so fractionalized in terms of leadership and difuse in its overall ideological makeup so as to be more than a little precarious as a long term movement with staying power. Quoting Kinsley:" Not only do TPPs (Tea Party Patriots) not have one big issue like Vietnam-they disagree about many of their smaller issues. What unites them is a more abstract resentment, an intensity of feeling rather than any concrete complaint or goal." Kinsley points out that in their undefined frustrations the Tea Partiers have in affect discarded the much-cherished notion so dear to the conservative credo, self responsibility, in that everyone's problems can be directly traced back to Washington D.C. or their state capitol. Kinsley defines this inherent flaw in the movement as follows: "Personal responsibility" has been a great conservative theme in recent decades, in response to the growth of the welfare state. It is a common theme among TPPs-even in response to health-care reform, as if losing your job and then getting cancer is something you shouldn't have allowed to happen to yourself. But these days, conservatives far outdo liberals in excusing citizens from personal responsibility. To the TPPs, all of our problems are the fault of the government, and the government is a great "other," a hideous monster over which we have no control. It spends our money and runs up vast deficits for mysterious reasons all its own. At bottom, this is a suspicion not of government but of democracy. After all, who elected this monster?"
There is one other major time bomb ticking away inside the Tea Party movement, and that is the company it keeps. Who are the leading personalities associated with the movement, none other than some of the most controversial characters alive in American politics today: Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann and Glenn Beck. If Bachmann and Palin weren't the Thelma and Louise of the far right, who would it be? I mean if the G.O.P. ever were to find itself in the back seat of their car they will, like the movie characters find themselves on a joy ride off of a cliff and heading straight for political disaster. It goes without saying, that having Beck as the Tea Party movement's most vocal media personality leaves allot to be desired, unless your aim is to turn the movement into a laughingstock. After all, can you put together a more gruesome threesome than the aforementioned when it comes to alienating independents from the Republican Party? I doubt it.
Lets face it, if it were not for the fact that the Tea Party movement has become the primary pawn in the ideological proxy war between MSNBC and Fox News, its presence on the American political landscape would be far less visible. A recent Quinnipiac Poll found that only 13 percent of American voters say they are part of the Tea Party movement and that this group is largely white, had supported McCain and presently backs Sarah Palin. But in what could be the most telling piece of evidence derived from the Quinnipiac Poll is that: "Overall, this survey paints a picture of the Tea Party movement that encompasses a broad swath of the American middle class, but clearly at this stage one that is a minority group. In essence their numbers equate to about the size of the African-American electorate overall," That said and with that empirical evidence in hand, does anyone really think for a second that the future of American Conservatism or its fellow traveler the G.O.P. is best served by hitching its wagon to the Tea Party movement, especially when that movement has been exposed as containing a fundamental philosophical credo that is so starkly at variance with established political facts and trends.
3) Tea Party Rally Upbraids 'Gangster Government' by The Associated Presshttp://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125251286≻=emaf.
4) My Country, Tis of Me, There's nothing patriotic about the Tea Party Patriots. by Michael Kinsleyhttp://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/04/my-country-tis-of-me/8088/
5) QUINNIPIAC UNIVERSITY NATIONAL POLL: TEA PARTY COULD HURT GOPhttp://thepage.time.com/quinnipiac-university-national-poll-tea-party-could-hurt-gop/
Michelle Bachmann epitomizes the dishonesty and / or ignorance behind the "big government" debate:
"And what we saw this Tuesday, once the president signed the health care bill at the 11th hour in the morning on Tuesday, that effected 51% government takeover of the private economy," Bachmann said on Wednesday, during an interview with North Dakota talk radio host Scott Hennen. "It is really quite sobering what has happened. From 100% of our economy was private prior to September of 2008, but as of Tuesday, the federal government has now taken ownership or control of 51% of the private economy."
This is just blatantly false. From 2004-2007, public spending in the United States averaged 36.7% of GDP (PDF, page 5). The OECD (wealthy, developed democracies) average for that timeframe was 43.6% (same source). The reforms that have been put into place over the past year are projected by usgovernmentspending.com to increase public spending as a percentage of GDP in the USA to an average of 44.4% from 2013-2015, a time period which will be post-stimulus, post-TARP and, hopefully, post-mass unemployment. This will effectively bring the USA in line with the OECD average (although that average has likely increased since 2007, both as a result of growth in public spending in the USA, and because other OECD countries likely experienced an increase as a result of the recession).
Breathless exaggeration from the likes of Michelle Bachmann and other conservatives make it sound as though the public sector was invented whole cloth over the past two years. The argument of "big government" versus "small government" is portrayed in grandiose terms, rather than the actual frame of the debate over a 35% public sector on the right and a 50% public sector on the left. Or, to put it a different way, over the right-wing arguing for a 35% socialism that leans a bit more toward the military industrial complex, and the left-wing arguing for a 50% socialism that leans on single-payer health insurance.
Here is a graph of post-WWII public spending in the United States:
Even American conservatives are plenty socialist (if lemon socialist). Public spending as a percentage of GDP under conservative governance from fiscal years 2004-2007 averaged 34.9% according to usgovernmentspending.com, and 36.7% according to the OECD. Their collective conniption over moving the needle by about 7-9%, and bringing us in line with other wealthy democracies, is one of the most dishonest and / or utterly ignorant aspects of our national political discourse.
We are all frakking socialists. The question is just to what degree, and what kind.
Also, last week, when bankers swarmed Capitol Hill to influence backing legislation, John Boehner told them: "don't let those little punk staffers take advantage of you." Since then, some staffers are taking the term "little punk staffer" back. Barney Frank made buttons!
Conservative philosophy has been on full-throated display in recent days. Between the Republican talking points at the Health Care Summit (which essentially boiled down to "we don't care about the uninsured or less healthy people, especially if it might cost any rich people a penny in taxes"), the Senate floor where Republicans held hostage a bill to help unemployed people because they wanted a chance to let mega-millionaires off the hook on inheritance taxes, and the speeches at the CPAC conference, the last few days have allowed us all to see the modern conservative philosophy in all its undisguised glory. My reaction to all this is that I owe Ayn Rand an apology. Given that she's been dead for a while, she's not likely to care, but even so Ayn: I'm sorry. I underestimated your influence. Where I wrote my book about the history of the American political debate, The Progressive Revolution: How The Best In America Came To Be, I neglected to mention Rand. I did this for a couple reasons. One was because her extreme form of libertarianism seemed to me only one modest strand compared to the intellectual and/or political giants of historical American conservatism such as John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, John C. Calhoun, the Social Darwinists, or even the modern day conservative movement builders like Buckley, Helms, Goldwater, or Reagan.
The other reason that I discounted her was, well - how do I put this diplomatically? She was such a freak. Her twisted novels extolling selfishness and cruelty - apparently based in part on her admiration of a kidnapper and murderer who dismembered his twelve year old victim and threw her head and torso at the girl's father as he sped away in a car - are so twisted and nasty that I had trouble believing she really merited note in a discussion of influential conservatives. But the victory of libertarian Ayn Rand disciple Ron Paul at the CPAC straw poll, the strong influences of her thinking on such CPAC heroes as Michelle Bachman and Glenn Beck, and the increasingly strident me-first-and-only-me rhetoric of a Republican party utterly captured by Tea Partiers have made me realize just how big Rand's influence is. Rand's philosophical magnum opus was a book she entitled "The Virtue of Selfishness." In it she argues not only that selfishness is moral and good, but that altruism, charity, and even kindness are evils - a "moral cannibalism" is what she called it. Like Glenn Beck, who glorified (to the laughter and cheers of the CPAC audience) the "lion eating the weak," people who are poor or weakened or in trouble for any reason are just parasites, nothing more.
Rand went even further, writing that people who place even their families and friends above their own work and desires are immoral. Rand and Beck's philosophy that selfishness is the ultimate virtue, and that any kindness or generosity or compassion toward others - even your own family and friends - is so the opposite of what all the world's great religions and moral traditions teach us that you would think Bible toting conservatives would run from these beliefs. You'd think that the contradictions would be too great, and there are certainly rifts at times between the true libertarians and the Christian conservatives. But for political reasons conservatives try hard to keep a combination of these two philosophical strains in place at the same time, a sort of hybrid conservative that scours the Bible for quotes that can be somehow interpreted as pro-free market and against taxing the rich. My personal favorites in this genre include a Christian Coalition issues guide which argues against labor unions by quoting a verse about how slaves should obey their masters, and a guy named David Barton who argues that the Parable of the Talents (which some Bible readers might have thought was an analogy about spiritual matters) means that there should be no Capital Gains tax.
BACHMANN: But people talk about cap and tax and they aren't sure exactly what we're talking about. Let's get back to step one. What is the problem? Why do we have to have this tax in the first place?
It's about watercarbon dioxide.
Well, what is watercarbon dioxide? Let's just go to a fundamental question.
WaterCarbon dioxide, Mister Speaker, is a natural byproduct of nature. WaterCarbon dioxide is natural. It occurs in Earth. It is a part of the regular lifecycle of Earth. In fact, life on planet Earth can't even exist without watercarbon dioxide. So necessary is it to human life, to animal life, to plant life, to the oceans, to the vegetation that's on the Earth, to the, to the fowl that - that flies in the air, we need to have watercarbon dioxide as part of the fundamental lifecycle of Earth.
As a matter of fact, watercarbon dioxide is portrayed as harmful! People say you can drown in it! They even say that thousands of people drown in it every year!
But there isn't even one study that can be produced that shows watercarbon dioxide is a harmful liquidgas. There isn't one such study because watercarbon dioxide is not a harmfulliquidgas, it is a harmlessliquidgas. Watercarbon dioxide is natural. It is not harmful. It is part of Earth's life cycle.
Michelle Bachmann has turned into quite a hot topic here in the netroots after her disgraceful performance on Hardball that that you can watch for yourself here.
It's hard to even begin on how horrifying that McCarthyesque, hateful interview was. But a lot of us Minnesotans have known about Michelle Bachmann and her hateful, extreme ways for years. Thankfully we've got a real shot at beating her this year, and you can help send her and her hateful brand of politics packing. Keep reading to find out how!
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