Entries Tagged 'politics' ↓

When did the two become so hard to differentiate?

I thought this was simple enough. I learned in third grade what the difference was, afterall. Hell, got 10/10 on the test! The irony is the teacher got 9/10. I remember distinctly the point of contention.

“Fact or opinion: Spiders are smart.”

Opinion. Pretty simple, right? But the teacher said “Well, the guide says opinion, but if they weren’t smart they couldn’t make the webs they do, so I’ll take either answer.” This was a smart teacher too, this was an AP class! And yet, there it was.

Just a few days ago I watched J.D. Hayworth, noted moron/jackass but also former elected official, claim that he disagreed with someone on a fact.

A fact. Facts are, simply put, things that are real. There is no subjective choice, there’s a reality, and there’s a total lack thereof. J.D. Hayworth says Massachusetts defines marriage as the “establishment of intimacy.” It doesn’t. The words aren’t there, at all. You cannot marry your horse as he said you could by that clause.

Rachel Maddow correctly pointed this out, that those words do not agree in the document he’s referring to. And he says “Well we disagree on that.”

One person may love chartreuse, everyone else can hate it. That’s how opinion works. You may not, however, debate that the creature before you is a cat when it’s a border collie. You cannot disagree that you breathe air and be a sane person. You cannot disagree with a fact and be sane. If it’s a fact, there’s no option. Option, opinion, the words are fairly close even. That’s a hint.

Unless you’re a Fox News regular, anyway. Then the phrase “Well, we disagree, because I think dolphins are fish” is just as good as “I think the clause says ‘establishment of intimacy’ ” by all accounts. Reality doesn’t matter, and people don’t understand the difference between what they think, and WHAT IS REAL.

I mourn for the world. I also mourn for the nation, since this has become the standard tactic of the right, to claim reality is not real, to disagree with facts.

Fuck.

“Fuck the haters.”

I think he’d get the votes of damn near anyone under 30 who isn’t a Teabagger. That was, really, the basic intent of today’s speech he gave, and it was a good one.

But he’s the first president to really take advantage of new media. He’s the first one in touch with Gen X and under. He’s the first one who didn’t have some sort of involvement in Vietnam.

So I say take another step forward, be presidential, be confident, be bold, and say “Fuck the haters”, and walk off. Up to the podium, “Ladies and gentlemen, fuck the haters.” Better, do it on a real stage. Walk out under the arch, “fuck the haters”, walk off, close the grand.

Sure some older conservatives people will be offended, but how many of them were voting for him anyway? I say keep the youth vote enthusiastic!

A bill amendment in the senate was voted on to remove funding from Haliburton, Blackwater, and other companies contracting overseas if they require mandatory binding arbitration for absolutely  anything that goes wrong. No chance of litigation, trial, anything, just arbitration. Arbitration is already known to go very much in favor of the company, seeing as they pay the bills. It’s bad enough on civil suits, but this is applying it to criminal issues.

Like rape.

In fact that is, specifically, what brought this vote up.

Three years ago, because that”s how long getting past the arbitration clause has taken, Jamie Leigh Jones was, allegedly, I still have to say allegedly legally but it’s kinda “fucking duh”, gang-raped by her co-workers at KBR/Haliburton, in Baghdad. Her contract declared this to be “personal injury arising in the workplace.” That includes the part where she was stuffed into a shipping crate afterwards.

Now that alone is pretty outrageous, and the fact they tried to say it was contractually bound to arbitration moreso. Not like Haliburton is considered a company of good guys, right? But it goes on from there.

Senator Al Franken (I love saying that) put in a bill to withdraw funding from companies with those clauses. The vote passed 70-28-2. Two abstentions, 70 yay, 28 nay.

28 people voted that what happened should never go to trial, effectively. That companies with mandatory arbitration clauses deserve government contracts, regardless of the truly serious crimes happening.

They voted that hey, if you’re raped, that’s too bad, and a company representative will decide what happens to you and the assailants. If anything. They can just fire the victim for false claims against the company without seeing any evidence either way, and they’re completely free of accountability. Isn’t that wonderful?

So, 28 senators, all men, all Republican, have voted that rape is just fine with them, because the free market said so. Notorious assholes John Ensign, Mitch McConnel, Jon Kyl, and David Vitter all are included on the list of nays.

How crazy is that? Michele Bachmann supported the amendment in the house. So out of touch, this is a real quote of hers. “I am so proud to be from the state of Minnesota. We’re the workingest state in the country, and the reason why we are, we have more people that are working longer hours. We have people that are working two jobs.” Yet she realizes that mandatory arbitration is a bad idea.

But not these guys:

In the interest of fairness, ten Republican senators voted against rape:

All the rest of you, however, deserve a lifetime of being skullfucked by a kakapo.

I don’t get too political here for the most part (though it’s not hard to guess I lean way left, by any means). I can usually just laugh at death panels and the other lies going around.

Today, thanks to a sign I just saw at the “tea party march” down DC way, I have to make a political post. And it’s going to have some seriously offensive content. Fortunately, some of these people are just stupid, like the one holding a sign covered in stars that said

“I am not a Terroist [sic], Socialist or Extreemist [sic]. I am a PATRIOT.”

Really, they did put in a lot of effort. A circle of stars, nice color work, just uh…well, not so much with the spelling. And right now I’m looking at someone walking with a “Fair Tax” flag (now that I could write plenty about later). He’s holding it backwards. And there’s signs saying “Who is John Galt?” from the objectivists who forget someone has to scrub the toilets, to quote Frank Fontaine. The standard implication Obama is a Nazi, via a sign saying “Got Swastika?” Most of the time, we can just be amused by these signs. And an interview with a woman who said “We have some people in talk radio that are tellin’ us the truth!”

This time, one sign really concerned me.

“Obama,

We have waken[sic] up to your evil plans to destroy our country. Take your racist, un-American *ACORN* group and arrogent[sic] wife back to your own country and strip their rights away.”

Now granted, there were plenty of insane signs as always, but something about this one just really gets my attention, probably the racist undercurrent combined with general Beckian (Comma Glennian) batshittery.

“We have waken[sic] up to your evil plans to destroy our country.”

Now honestly, I’ve never been a fan of say, GW. But I don’t remember people in such large, visible numbers declaring he had evil plans to destroy the country. Was he fucking up? Sure. Were members of his administration war profiteers? You bet. But did he have an “evil plan to destroy the country”? No, he really didn’t. He just was shitty at the job.

Now how in the world have people come to the conclusion Obama’s got active, malevolent intent? What would be the point, even, of actively destroying the US if he even had that ability?

I hear a lot of “take the country back.” From what? Who? I heard a claim of Obama’s secret government, and cries of socialism (and frankly, as someone who’s just fine with some socialism, we’re nowhere close to it anyway, seeing as the government doesn’t control any means of production).

Let’s just visit the next piece of the quote.

“Take your racist, un-American *ACORN* group and arrogent[sic] wife back to your own country and strip their rights away.”

Oh.

I guess that fits with the self-contradictory “Muslim Marxist” claim. Not that Marxism and religion match, or that Obama is Muslim. Or that ACORN is un-American, even. I’d dare say any group which gets more voters to the polls is pretty damn American on either side. But, since ACORN has a tendency to push minorities to the polls, they helped change the balance of power. And as for his arrogant wife and own country…well, if the scary black man really is from Kenya (despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary), we can send him away! It’ll be okay, and take his wife too, she’s another negro. Obviously that means she’s not American, because if she was, she wouldn’t be getting uppity, because let’s face it, that’s the word they’re wanting to use.

Oh, and the whole of ACORN. We don’t need those darkies in the US either. I used to wonder why the hatred for an organization that encourages voting. I don’t now.

Just what rights have been stripped away, anyway? Over the last eight years old white conservative men have given us DHS, the PATRIOT act, warrant-less wire tapping, torture, and a suspension of habeus corpus. That was all under the watch of George W. Bush. Some of those programs have ended already, thus restoring our rights since President Obama’s election.

The nasty underbelly has shown itself, and it’s racism, plain and simple. From claims the president isn’t born in the US (A claim that people had the decency to leave alone when it came to John McCain, despite having been born to US parents in Panama because they understood a US parent makes him a natural born citizen), to that he’s a Muslim (fine if he is, we don’t have a religious test to hold office, but he’s not), to overtly racist propaganda.

This one came from Doctor David McKalip. A Tea Party activist, Beckian extraordinaire, and member of American Medical Association’s house of delegates. I’m sticking this one under a thumbnail because holy shit, it’s vitriolic, racist, and pretty damn shocking.

This is where we are as a nation. A group that’s had power for 30 years, effectively, has finally been totally put out of power and has shown its true colors. Ad hominem attack, overt racism, panic and lies.

When Barack got elected, I thought “wow, we really HAVE made it somewhere. Racism is still there, but I think it really might not be the problem it used to be.”

I was wrong.

Am I saying everyone against health care reform is racist? Absolutely not. Am I saying everyone who was against the stimulus package, or other policies from the administration is racist? Certainly not.

But it’s become very, very clear a large amount of the people fighting are, even in congress, where you can’t get most of the Republicans to say “Barack Obama is constitutionally eligible to be president” even. At best, they’re playing to an extremist base. At worst, they are that base, and this shit has to end. Now.