Thanks, Republicans!

Our broken party of ignorant zealots, the Republicans, have shut down the government in a tantrum over our very limited healthcare proposal. Here’s what we can expect to see happen:

  • State department will be able to operate for limited time

  • Department of defence will continue military operations

  • Department of education will still distribute $22bn to public schools, but staffing is expected to be severely hit

  • Department of energy – 12,700 staff expected to be sent home, with 1,113 remaining to oversee nuclear arsenal

  • Department of health and human services expected to send home more than half of staff

  • The Federal Reserve, dept of homeland security, and justice dept will see little or no disruption

  • US Postal Services continue as normal

  • Smithsonian institutions, museums, zoos and many national parks will close

I might have seen a bright side to this if the military and homeland security had felt the bite, but no — health and human services, the department of energy, education, and our parks and museums are being hit. It’s always the stuff that makes us better people that suffers the first cut when the Republicans have their way.

There is no further excuse for them. The Republican Party must wither and die. It is no longer the loyal opposition, the party of conservatives, or the cautious, fiscally responsible party: it is the fringe party of lunatics, demagogues, and irresponsible lackwits.

By they way, if you go to Google right now, their doodle is celebrating the 123rd anniversary of Yosemite National Park.

Why do the Republicans hate Yosemite?

Wincing…and applauding

Oh, man, I can’t endorse this action by Lakota and Dakota women. I think people have a right to do as they please (as long as it doesn’t harm others) on their private property — that goes for worshipping Jesus or Thor, desecrating Bibles, or even flying Nazi flags. (All bets are off if the Nazi sympathizers in Leith, ND, who were trying to stage a takeover of the local government, were flying that flag as representative of the city.)

So I can’t support seizing the Nazi flag and burning it, if it were someone else’s private property. But I still look at this picture and think…whoa, but they are badass.

Lakota and Dakota grandmothers captured the Nazi flag hanging in Leith, ND and burned it. Warriors!

Lakota and Dakota grandmothers captured the Nazi flag hanging in Leith, ND and burned it. Warriors!

The real creeps are the Republicans

I watched this ghastly video supported by the Koch brothers, and my jaw dropped and I said “Holy shit.” Literally. Not a metaphor.

They are trying to scare women away from getting a Pap smear and turning gynecological exams into a creepy episode, all in the name of squashing government-insured health care.

We’re just going to have to face it. Republicans are simply awful human beings.

I’m so sorry, Colorado

My daughter moves to Boulder, and what happens? The worst storm in a century. I’m not saying there’s a causal relationship, but you know we sent her far far away for a reason, right?

Actually, I’m pretty sure she had nothing to do with it. But there are things we could have done and should be doing right now.

As I wrote late last week, thanks in part to climate change, the odds are shifting toward more frequent extreme weather events like this. We all watched as the Hurricane Sandy relief bill languished in Congress for months. An economy on the doorstep of recovery doesn’t need yet another surprise $20 billion tab to pick up. Action on climate change would also help to prevent future disasters.

However, perhaps a more ominous takeaway is that the torrential rain in Colorado wasn’t well-forecast. The first flash flood watch was only issued by the National Weather Service on Thursday morning, less than 24 hours before the peak flooding. At the time, the forecaster on duty remarked “rainfall amounts today not expected to be as great as those observed during the past 18 hours.”

At the very least, Republicans should stop trying to dismantle the national weather service. Optimistically, they should stop dragging their heels on environmental issues. Once upon a time, Republicans could be relied on to snap to attention when a problem threatened to cost big money if not addressed; no more. Ideology is all.

And there was much rejoicing

Good news: Larry Summers has withdrawn his candidacy for chairman of the Federal Reserve. Just the fact that Obama keeps propping up this banker mentality for his economic advisors calls his judgment into question, but at least this is one rich gomer who won’t be calling the shots. Let’s have no illusions: the rich have gotten richer under Obama, and the poor have only gotten poorer at a slightly slower rate than under the Republicans.

We’re also spared the spectacle of seeing the lady bankers shooed away to play with little pink dolls.

Talking smack at libertarians

Ahh, that’s what I need. In a long day full of classes and meetings, it’s a breath of fresh air to see libertarians called on their baloney.

Libertarians have a problem. Their political philosophy all but died out in the mid- to late-20th century, but was revived by billionaires and corporations that found them politically useful. And yet libertarianism retains the qualities that led to its disappearance from the public stage, before its reanimation by people like the Koch brothers: It doesn’t make any sense.

They call themselves “realists” but rely on fanciful theories that have never predicted real-world behavior. They claim that selfishness makes things better for everybody, when history shows exactly the opposite is true. They claim that a mythical “free market” is better at everything than the government is, yet when they really need government protection, they’re the first to clamor for it.

It’s quite clear that libertarians are just “useful idiots,” pawns of the far right wing deployed whenever they want some stooge to claim that inequities are rational.

Give Kentucky a hand

They need all the help they can get — having a festering boil like the Creation “Museum” in their midst is not conducive to a healthy educational system. They’re trying, though, and the Kentucky Senate education committee is poised to approve some Next Generation Science Standards.

But of course, some nitwit has to raise absurd objections to the fact that the standards include material on evolution and climate change, the two big hot button issues for ignorant conservatives. The nitwit also happens to be the chair of the Senate education committee, Mike Wilson.

Yeah, there’s a fundamental problem right there, that the Kentucky senate puts an idiot climate change and evolution denier in charge of education.

How about if you all flood this petition and get the message across that science must be supported in education…in Kentucky and in every state.

Read Krugman this morning

The Republican party is appallingly misinformed: there is a Wonk Gap .

But that was then. Modern conservatism has become a sort of cult, very much given to conspiracy theorizing when confronted with inconvenient facts. Liberal policies were supposed to cause hyperinflation, so low measured inflation must reflect statistical fraud; the threat of climate change implies the need for public action, so global warming must be a gigantic scientific hoax. Oh, and Mitt Romney would have won if only he had been a real conservative.

It’s all kind of funny, in a way. Unfortunately, however, this runaway cult controls the House, which gives it immense destructive power — the power, for example, to wreak havoc on the economy by refusing to raise the debt ceiling. And it’s disturbing to realize that this power rests in the hands of men who, thanks to the wonk gap, quite literally have no idea what they’re doing.

There’s another place with a major wonk gap: the media. Television news is unwatchable, and even the major newspapers, like the one that publishes Krugman, are loaded with delusional timewasters and glib liars for conservative policies. How do those clowns get in control of government? Well, one way is that the media are indiscriminate and set up superficial apparatchiks like Friedman and Brooks and Will and whoever as arbiters of rational policy.

I guess I’ll know who to vote for in the Australian elections, then

Oh, wait, I’m not a citizen, I don’t get to vote. But if I were a citizen, I know I could never vote for the Liberal party, because they put up billboards flyers like this:

billboardbaby

We just had a long fight over same-sex marriage in Minnesota (we won!), and the conservative thugs and liars who opposed it here never sunk quite that low. And really, now that gay couples are getting married all over the place, the landscape is not littered with tearful abandoned children.

And then there’s this guy Rudd from the Labor party who said this in a debate the other day:

Labor it is, then.

Although Rudd doesn’t seem to think things through. He does consult his “Christian conscience”, but doesn’t he realize that his riposte — that he’s no more compelled to oppose gay marriage because of a Biblical injunction than he is to support slavery because “the Bible also says slavery is a natural condition” — is a knife to the heart of the whole notion of the Bible as any kind of moral authority at all? I’d be happier with him if he’d consider the logical consequences and simply abandoned Christianity altogether.

He might as well. I bet that pastor who asked the question, and his congregation, all think the billboard above is lovely and are going to vote Liberal anyway.