Fiscal priorities

Deficit! Deficit! Deficit!

(whisper, whisper)

We can't raise taxes on the wealthy!

When it comes to cutting benefits for poor and middle-class seniors, or cutting the pay of our military personnel while forcing our veterans to pay more of their own health care costs — much of which likely resulted from illness due to their service in two long wars — what we hear from Washington elites is the great need for “shared sacrifice” to bring down the deficit. Yet, when debating the idea of allowing taxes on millionaires (and here it might be good to remember that two-thirds of the members of Congress are themselves millionaires) to return to what they were under Bill Clinton, it is all “damn the deficit we can’t let the wealthy suffer during this economic downturn!”

The insincere so-called deficit hawks won't actually speak the pseudo-quote at the end of the block quote, but their actions speak very loudly. They are not willing to raise taxes, even on the wealthy, the very same people who have gained every significant advantage written into tax law over the past thirty years, the very same people who gained virtually all of the financial bailouts, the very same people whose incomes have skyrocketed while everyone else's have stagnated.

Conservative Democrats are not on your side any more than the whole lot of Republicans are.

Blind faith is practice for conservatism

There's no possible doubt that many people choose the beliefs they take to be true. Reason, as I'm learning the more I read about neuropsychology (currently, How We Decide, by Jonah Lehrer), is only part of the decision to believe.

Often, a very small part. Some believers intentionally push reason aside for a heady brew of reflex, prejudice, and blind faith in received wisdom. Even if that wisdom was only slightly wiser than the violent and tribal surrounding society of 2000 years ago...

Bushists believe that Duhbya went to church a lot, not because it's true but because they know it. Facts - he didn't - and memory - his absence was reported in real time - don't bleedin' enter into it. Duhbya talked about Gawd all the goddamned time - and talked about prayin' and blessings and reading Scripture (capital S, by gum). Flaying his faith like Elmer Gantry, they're sure that he surely must've been sitting in a pew nearly every Sunday, not just Christmas, Easter, and National Prayer Day. Even if their senses should tell them that he wasn't.

Who you gonna believe - faith or your lyin' eyes?

When Duhbya recently met some soldiers at the Dallas-Ft. Worth airport on their return home on a two-week break from Iraq, Afghanistan, and other, unspecified billets, one of my Facebook friends, an evangelical Christian, commented about how much the Bushes love our troops. I bit my tongue and didn't ask her for evidence. You can find more of her faithful compatriots among the commenters on the Dallas Morning News site.

There was one previous time that Duhbya greeted returning sailors. Mission accomplished!

But Bush was in office for more than seven years while our troops were in combat in Afghanistan and for nearly six while they were in combat in Iraq, and I don't recall any other time that he greeted them. He never went to greet the fallen in their caskets at Dover AFB (something President Obama had done already ten months ago), and he only went to Walter Reed to see the wounded after the scandal of the grim conditions there broke.

But Duhbya loves him some fighting men (and women).

If you are practiced well at believing in your own personal Jesus and you thank him every time another Vicodin relieves the pain of your kidney stone (Facebook again), you're well prepared to believe that a man who got 4000 Americans killed and many more maimed in a war of choice loves the troops.

Hippie kids and god bless 'em

First, an apology: Earlier I called the victims of the St. Paul police intimidation 'loonies'. They believe things that I don't, that I sometimes find absurd, but there are things they are right about, too. And the truth is that there is something very wrong with this kind of policing.

The biggest point of agreement I have with these anarchists is that we use our rights or we lose them. The authoritarian instinct runs deep in government, especially in institutions run by Bushists and their sympathizers. They're happy to turn any conversation between people whose views they despise into some dark and violent conspiracy.

Not ignoring the past

Of course, we have seen before that some of these hippie kids are likely not to remain non-violent, and there are hints of it in some of the videos Glenn Greenwald is in or links to. However, there is a suitable and legal police response to this. That response does not include further trashing of the Constitution, and the SWAT-level raids are clearly about politics, not about law enforcement. We should all be very fearful of the continuing escalation of Big Brotherism.

In further defense of these young radicals, they do have a better record than police riot squads in confining their violence to property.

Official accountability?

Last (for now), there's missing accountability in our system for official violations of the Constitution. Ramsey Co. Sheriff Bob Fletcher, who is behind these raids, is not going to suffer any consequences for their illegality. I know that's a prediction, and I hate when other people make those; I'll happily retract it and apologize if someone can show me any single time in the past twenty years when a police official did time or paid a fine related to a rights violation (not including official violence). It just doesn't happen.

Further, the judiciary is supposed to restrain this sort of police misbehavior. Who is the judge or judges who signed these dubious warrants?