Wherein I am Skeptical, Yet Longing to Believe

At the meeting of the Republican Governor's Association last week, infamous pollster/soulless minion of Satan Frank Luntz went over the latest, newest, hippest ways to ensure that absolutely no truthful or 'reality-based' information is disseminated by anyone on Team (R).  Among intriguing pointers such as: 'Don't say 'capitalism' and 'Republicans should forget about winning the battle over the 'middle class,' Luntz also casually mentioned that he is 'so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort.  I'm frightened to death...they're having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism.'

I'd so much like to believe that he said that without a tone of mockery and ridicule--that he really is haunted by the spectre of OWS, waking up in a cold sweat from nightmares of being pursued by hippies with puppets.  And I've seen Luntz interviewed several times, and he seems 100% humor-free, so I can't imagine he was trying to make a little lighthearted joke as an icebreaker.  Because it is Luntz, though--the evil genius behind 'death taxes' and 100 other catchy ways to bludgeon Democrats in every debate since 1994--I can't help but wonder what his game is here.  I feel that I'm being played, somehow, but I'm not sure how.

In the meantime, Republicans can't talk about capitalism as if it's Everything You Ever Wanted for Christmas, Every Day!  That's happy news.  Keep up the good work, kiddos!  Oh, and keep some milk on hand to wash the pepper spray out of your eyes.    

Being 1 of the 1%: Nice Work if You Can Get It

I use 'work' in the loosest possible sense here.

Fun article in the Times today ('A Family's Billions, Artfully Sheltered') about the Lauder family and their hijinks.  Apparently the Lauders are not really into the whole taxpaying thing.  And who can blame them?  Asking people who are worth $3.1 billion to pay more than 17% in taxes is just so unjust.  If Ronald Lauder hadn't dodged $135 million in taxes, he just might not have been able to afford that Klimt painting--which he so generously donated to his own private art foundation.  And then deducted the 'gift' from his taxes, as one simply must, n'est ce pas?

Apparently the Lauders have so aggressively pursued every possible tax shelter, loophole, and ambiguously worded tax code that several loopholes have been closed just because of them.  Does that make for some awkward moments in St. Bart's, I wonder?*

A few minutes later I came across this little blurb from Progress Illinois.  Apparently a bill has been introduced in the Illinois state senate that would give tax breaks (amounting to $250 million a year) to a couple of companies, including one CME Industries.  That name rang a tinny little proletarian bell of rage in the back of my mind, so I went back to the Times article.  Sure enough, CME Industries is one of Lauder's 'companies,' which is organized as a Dutch holding company, conveniently headquartered in the Bahamas, and 'operated' in Central Europe.  Yet they forced the Illinois senate to give them tax breaks by threatening to leave the state.  Fascinating.

*'Don't be silly, darling, only the plebes go to St. Bart's now.  We all have our own islands. Ronald had his constructed out of a mixture of diamond dust and rabbit tears.  Isn't that fun?'

A Modern Revision

The Moving Finger texts, and, having texted,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit,
Shall lure it back to cancel half an :)
Nor all thy Tears wash out an LOL of it.

Going FDR

A few pithy words from FDR, a man well worth plagiarizing (hint, hint, Obamanos):
--'I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made.'
--'Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us. The ultimate rulers of our democracy are not a President and senators and congressmen and government officials, but the voters of this country.'
--Of the 'captains of industry': 'They hate me, and I welcome their hatred.'
Elizabeth Warren is running for Senate. I love her (we've been friends on facebook for two whole years now, and all) and I sincerely hope she beats Senator 'I Have a Truck!' Brown in the 2012 election. Here's an example of her general awesomeness: Look, a concise, powerful argument put forward with humor and energy in under 3 minutes. Learn from this, o ye Democrats.

'Their number is negligible and they are stupid.'

So wrote President Eisenhower in 1954, about a 'tiny splinter group' who believed it was possible to eliminate the social safety net provided by Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment insurance. It was quoted by Mike Lofgren in his recent piece for TruthOut, which is well worth reading in its entirety. I particularly liked Lofgren's characterization of Democrats' political action as "feckless, craven incompetence." Democrats might as well take that as a motto--nicely alliterative, pretty catchy, and even has the added appeal of truthiness. Lofgren points out, as have ever so many other people, that Democrats just cannot seem to get their little kitty minds around the necessity for consistent, clear, and emotionally resonant messages, phrases, captions on LOLcats, anything at all that actually means something to anyone ever. The Democrats have a particular genius--if that is the right word--for being generic. They can take "You are being completely fucked by health insurance companies, and it's bullshit, and it is also bad for business" into the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act." Not only is that unforgivably boring, but it is also, actually, a goddamn lie. The tragically deformed, stillborn creature that was the healthcare reform bill actually didn't protect patients OR make care any more affordable at all--no price caps, no collective bargaining on prescription drugs, not even guaranteed universal coverage for seriously ill children. So everyone knows on some level or another that the Democrats are both lying to them and boring them at the same time. And if we're going to be lied to, we want it to be entertaining, at least. Throw in some monkeys and fireworks and "death taxes" and whatnot. Democrats: neither bread nor circuses, that's the problem.

A Modest Proposal: The Undeserving Olds

As many pundits have repeatedly punditized, cutting Medicare or Social Security is the third rail of American politics. No politician can even hint that the thought once crossed his mind, during an interminable bus ride in Iowa 45 years ago. There are a couple of reasons for this: 1) a fiercely organized lobby with hundreds of thousands of members, all of whom have a great deal of time on their hands and 2) everyone is sentimental about grandparents, who hand out bits of folksy wisdom and Toblerones. This is in notable contrast to The Poor, who only hand out methamphetamines and crack babies.

In our rapidly hobo-izing society, however, some hard truths must be acknowledged. Belts must be tightened, bootstraps must be pulled, cat food must be eaten. Just as there are deserving and undeserving Poor, there are clearly undeserving Olds. Many, many old people are quite cranky and mean-spirited. They don't have jobs, and most of them aren't even trying to get a job! Worse, a staggering percentage of them are on drugs--drugs paid for by YOUR TAX DOLLARS. What kind of example is this for the youth of America? What message does it send to them: that if you simply manage to live long enough, the taxpayers will keep you in a life of leisure? Most of these people don't even have the common decency to be grateful for the hard working Americans who keep them in golf carts and Early Bird Specials at the Golden Corral: 44% of Social Security recipients and 40% of Medicare recipients don't believe that they are the beneficiaries of government programs.

Nuts to all that. Time to means-test the Olds--not by income, but by actual meanness. Did you beat the family dog? Cheat on your taxes? Threaten your neighbor? Did you never, ever volunteer at a soup kitchen? Then I'm sorry, but we simply can't reward that kind of behavior.

Why Every Guy in America Should Be Sending Lots of Money to Planned Parenthood, Right This Minute

Because here's the thing: somehow, in all of the wankery and douchebaggery and windbaggering about abortion, an essential point is completely overlooked--and the constitutional right to the ownership of one's own body becomes merely a 'woman's issue' (read: 'irrelevant' 'frivolous' and 'hysterical'). So let me go ahead and make a point of it: abortion is the reason dudes/guys get to have casual sex at all.* We might plausibly say that dudes/guys are in many ways the primary beneficiaries of legal abortion in this country.

Why so? Because women know that dudes/guys are not to be relied upon for the long haul, not for anything that really matters. Women know that a dude/guy is going to flake out when you need them most. Confronted with an overflowing toilet, a broken-down car, or Jesus, even just curtains that need to be hung, a dude/guy will suddenly have Very Important Things To Do Elsewhere. When faced with something even more pressing and non-negotiable, something like, say, a screaming infant, a dude/guy will suddenly have Very Important Things to do...in Peru. Or Tibet. Costa Rica, possibly. Places where, mysteriously, there aren't reliable phones or internet connections or telegraph wires or carrier pigeons. 95% of women see these guys for what they are, but are willing to play along for reasonably decent sex for a short period of time. In general, though, women are relentlessly practical and rarely sentimental (though occasionally delusional). No woman wants to have an unplanned pregnancy, and there is not one woman in the world who would think of an abortion as a real good time. Every woman hopes to never have to make that choice. But the fact that there is the chance of a choice means that women make different decisions than they would otherwise. It means that at 2 a.m. in a bar they're not looking at someone who could be the father of their child, but at someone who is cute enough for now. On the one hand, there's simple addition and subtraction; on the other, calculus and non-Euclidean geometry. It's an entirely different category of calculation.

To cut to the chase, your average dude/guy's chances of getting laid in a bar on a Saturday night decrease by approximately 90% once abortion is outlawed. Women's knees would slam together in such force that a mighty and terrifying thunderclap would be heard across the nation. Any guy who likes getting laid, but is not yet ready to be a father and a husband--that is, any guy who is not yet ready to be a man--should be holding up pro-choice signs on the steps of every Capitol building in every state.

*Distinguishing dudes/guys from men; these days men are vastly outnumbered, I'm sorry to say, by dudes/guys.

Wherein I Am Once Again Inspired by the Republicans

Every couple of years, some Republican dickhead suddenly leapfrogs to the head of the Stupid Parade and begins wildly gesturing, like a sociopathic drum majorette. And the media marches right along behind, providing the horn section. This year, it's Congressman Paul Ryan (Wisconsin, and what a great year that state has been having). His budget has been treated by the media as if it were an Actually Reasonable plan put together by someone who passed macroeconomics in college. In fact, of course, it is a Willfully Insane plan put together by someone who blames liberal professors for his mediocre grades in college.

The media should--but rarely does--show what proportion of government spending these proposed cuts are. $38 billion is simply not very much money relative to the overall size of the federal budget--and Republicans know that. They also know that $38 billion dollars is an almost unthinkable amount of money to people who are making $28,000 a year (the median income in the United States).

The Obamanos are up to their usual tricks, if by 'tricks' you mean 'Frantic bullshitting.' As David Stockman points out in his editorial in the Times, both parties are playing a game of kick-the-can (wouldn't 'kick-the-hobos' be a much more fun phrase?). The money quote from the editorial is this one: 'A quasi-bankrupt nation saddled with rampant casino capitalism on Wall Street and a disemboweled, offshored economy on Main Street requires practical and equitable ways to pay its bills.'

So true...Wait, bills actually have to be paid? Can't we just run our little Ponzi scheme indefinitely? We should ask the expert. You know Madoff's not doing anything right now--let's get him on this, chop chop.

Here's the thing. People don't like taxes because most people don't think they get anything for the taxes they do pay. Part of this is our rampant sense of entitlement, since roads, firefighters, schools, the police seem to be regarded as Gifts from God--and God doesn't need to be paid back, obviously. But part of it is that Americans are on the hook for some big ticket items--little details like college tuition, the annual 20% hike in health insurance costs, maybe even keeping all your teeth--that in other, mythical lands are paid for by taxes. When everyone gets something from a system, it's hard(er) to bitch about it. Which is what I said about the Obama health care plan a hundred years ago: it provided no tangible, immediate benefits to anyone, and would therefore cost the Democrats the midterm election.

What's phenomenal to me is that even that bullshit, half-assed plan is likely to be stripped down by the Republicans. But the Democrats made that a political possibility by writing and passing such a bullshit, half-assed bill that no one really supports it or even really gives a shit about it. So we continue down our fantastical Road to Imbecility.

Something for Nothing

One of my friends once told me a story about going to a party, getting quite un-sober, and (as one tends to do at social gatherings) picking up a copy of Sartre's Being and Nothingness . "Suddenly," she said, "I thought, wait, why IS there something rather than nothing? My mind was blown for at least the next ten minutes."

Over the last several months, I have come to realize that there is something so that there can be nothing. And I came to this realization without going to India, or even to a weekend yoga retreat. I simply asked myself why I no longer felt like writing out the witterings of my mind on the wall of the Internet. It was clearly because I no longer had something I wanted to avoid doing, something pressing that I could ignore in order to do nothing. It turns out that in order to want to do nothing--in order to enjoy, however furtively, wasting time writing blog posts--there needs to be something you should be doing, but are not. Once I no longer had something to do, I didn't want to do nothing, either.

Finally, some Serious Somethings have caught up with me at last, so I am sure that I will now feel a deep need to respond to a Salon article about wingnuts, or a NYT article about Williamsburg.

(In truth, I can never read past the second paragraph of any article in the NYT about Brooklyn, because I inevitably break out in Hipster Hives--a symptom of my tragic allergy to hipster-hood. Also, 85% of the articles are about Hipsters Having Children ("My, What Big Strollers You Have!") and the thought of all the chunky-glassed, tattooed, Pendleton-wearing locavores wheeling their Concept Children around makes me wish I still enjoyed drinking, because chewing on my desk is so hard on the teeth.)