It's That Time Again

Release of the annual list of "best countries to be born in."

Here on planet We're Number One!, it's just one week after the latest mass shooting. One horrifying enough to still be in the news and public consciousness: a massacre of twenty 6-year olds, along with women school employees who must have reminded the guy of his mother.

But: a white loner guy, not terrorism, etc., etc., blah, blah to infinity.

Subtle marketing, this.

The usual crowd set out to prove how "Everything Except Guns Kills People." And to offer their solutions, like this.

Though the Right's newly discovered interest in mental health is quite touching.

An excellent business model; too bad about the sudden bad publicity.

And nice job, National Geographic: egging on deranged "preppers." One home stockpiler of an arsenal appears to have been the late Nancy Lanza.

To think: we geezers only needed to Duck and Cover against an abstract threat. Yes, it was assumed that at some time there would be a nuclear attack—and I think many of my contemporaries grew up assuming we wouldn't live long enough to become geezers. But no generation expects to become geezers, and this threat was deep in the background: something the authorities kept vague and "survivable," and certainly not something that was present daily in our lives.

Nope: civil defense drills were occasional, and nuclear holocaust was not a presence in our lives, as the terrifying images from Newton are for children now. And, if the noise machine gets its way, children will grow up with kindergarten teachers packing heat.

The NRA kept a low profile, until today's news dump no-questions event. Though Wayne Pierre with "bats flying out of both ears" could be a good thing, as far as attracting some public notice.

It remains to be seen if activism will overcome the longstanding absence of political will. And general public acceptance of a daily toll widely accepted as what "they" get for living in the wrong neighborhood.

The Newtown massacre followed last week's Michigan notch in ALEC's belt. Anti-union measures signed and sealed, Gov. Snyder dithered a few days over this. Evidently, Dick DeVos had no particular investment in this one.

One more state wrapped up and delivered for plutocrat Xmas. National austerity on the way, for deadbeat kids, disabled, and elderly. A bit hard to envision those armed guards being installed in every school, not when we don't fucking fund teachers or supplies.

"Best countries," indeed. Who would trade an ample safety net for our Freedom here, where any disturbed person is free to buy weapons of mass destruction, but health care, both physical and mental, is a privilege.

All In A Day's Work

OK: it took two or three days, that frenzy of legislative ramming that ended the week in Michigan.

Or, make that "Michissippi," as Charles Pierce now calls it—over stuff like this.

Commenter Rick Massimo added—

Gee, the Michigan legislature is working awfully hard all of a sudden. It's like they're up against a deadline of some kind. I cannot imagine what it could possibly be.

Whatever it is that poses as representative government has quickly gone beyond words I can find. Add to it this bit of timing; emptywheel, writing December 14—

There is absolutely horrifying news coming out of Newtown, CT, where 27 people–18 of them young children–are reported dead in a gun rampage.

The President's spokesperson, Jay Carney has already said today is not the day to talk about gun control laws.

Can we talk about this, then? A bill passed in the MI legislature's last day frenzy last night will expand concealed carry to include schools, day care centers, churches, and stadia.

Reporting on the bill's "sweeping changes" for formerly "gun-free zones" here.

Digby, on the Michigan bill, and on

...a gun worshiping culture that has morphed into an unimaginable level of barbarism. And apparently we are all just the idiot victims in the boiling water not able to recognize that America is killing itself one kid at a time.

Among their many accomplishments this week, the legislature undid the voters' rejection last month of power grab "emergency managers," appointed by the governor to oust elected local governments.

In his 2010 race for governor, former Gateway CEO Snyder's "One Tough Nerd" branding no doubt played on the "Bill Gates walks into a bar" psychology—elect him, and the average Michigan income will soar. Of course, the guy was also marketed as a "moderate" and "problem-solver."

The travesty in Michigan is the same old stuff, instigated by the likes of Dick DeVos and the Kochs (through their "Americans for Prosperity"), using "model legislation" provided by ALEC. More details on the players and the "right to work" law they paid for here.

Another state; another version of Scott Walker, "the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage their Midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin."

Way back here, Brother Snyder got a shout-out during Walker's chat with "David Koch"—

WALKER... I talked to Kasich every day, you know John's got to stand firm in Ohio. I think we can do the same thing with Rick Scott in Florida, I think Snyder if he got a little more support could probably do that in Michigan. We start going down the list, you know, there’s a lot of us new governors that got elected to do something, big.

KOCH: You're the first domino.

WALKER: Yep. This is our moment.

Next Order of Business

December 12, 2012: Workers' "rights" newly bestowed, the Michigan legislature turns to women's "health"—with "One Of The Nation's Most Extreme Abortion Bans."

This is the same group of medical experts who six months earlier had punished a legislator for saying "vagina.".

The Michigan of 1954 appears to have valued this sort of thing:

A good thing we're all getting over it; an educated public might be on to the meaning of "rights," "health," and other words.

Instead, it's time to do what Tengrain suggests, and heed the wisdom of Bobby Jindal—

"As a conservative Republican, I believe that we have been stupid to let the Democrats demagogue the contraceptives issue and pretend, during debates about health-care insurance, that Republicans are somehow against birth control. It's a disingenuous political argument they make."

After all, says Tengrain,

Yes, ladies, welcome the warm embrace of the party who brought you Tod Akin and Cardinal Frothy Santorum; they are at your cervix.

Ancient History

1954: a booster pamphlet published by a local Michigan newspaper could boast about this—

That publication credited organized labor, along with strong public services, as contributors to the state's prosperity.

More of those old-fashioned notions here.

Today, meanwhile: State House fait accompli.

Enacted by record stealth and speed, when January looms, and the lame [why insult ducks?] extremists would lack the votes.

Then:

Governor Snyder signed the bill in the secrecy of his office or a closet or wherever else he goes to deal with the shame of turning his state into Indiana or Mississippi or Bangladesh because he wasn't tough enough to stand up to Dick DeVos.

The latter being Michigan's version of Koch ownership.

Quel suprise; as in Koch-owned Wisconsin, "The bill passed today takes language verbatim from ALEC's model legislation."

In Wisconsin, police and firefighters understood that, even if Scott Walker promised to exempt their unions, their rights most certainly would be next on the chopping block.

Wisconsin firemen, February 2011 (photo here).

Today, Michigan state police were busy protecting the Republicans inside the Romney Building...

(AP Photo/Carlos Osorio)

... from evildoers.

(AP Photo/Paul Sancya)

The usual suspects staged a "union thugs" incident ready for handing to the noise machine, and from there into mainstream consciousness.

After previously pretending not to push anti-union legislation, this is the current footwork:

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) defended his state's right-to-work legislation on Wednesday, saying it will lead to more jobs and give workers "freedom of choice."
"I don't believe this is actually anti-union," he said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." "If you look at it, I believe this is pro-worker."
MSNBC's Richard Wolffe pressed the governor on the legislation, saying the it "undermines" the ability for unions to organize.
"This does not deal with organizing at all," Snyder responded. "This does not deal with collective bargaining at all. This has nothing to do with the relationship between an employer and a union. This is about the relationship between unions and workers. And this is about giving workers the power to choose."

Back in the world of facts and their liberal bias, there's this background—including some of that outmoded historical context.

Compassion

London collection box photo: Philip Watson

Why would Republicans be expected to show it?

Not when they can rev up The Base: by foiling the heinous UN plot for global wheelchair access—modeled on the Americans with Disabilities Act. And if rejection of the UN Convention on Persons with Disabilities was a slap in the face to one-time party powers like Bob Dole—and to treaty supporters like veterans' groups—so much the better.

It's all fodder for Rick Santorum's next presidential bid.

Digby's been coveried here digbysblog.blogspot.com/2012/12/black-helicopter-child-killers.html and here digbysblog.blogspot.com/.../these-zealots-can-find-controversy.html

Even if the UN Treaty was patterned after American law, the sitting, lame duck, and perennial candidate Republicans can take great pride that, in this country a state can keep an intellectually disabled man on death row over 30 years, without a valid conviction.

The Easy Part Over

It's not as if a Republican had won by a single vote; ergo, no "mandate."

It is, on the other hand, a narrow escape.

This makes no difference when the narrative is pre-determined: that The American People want deficit reduction and bi-partisanship. There's plenty of concern that the former aligns with the president's goals.

Of the latter, Obama's instinct to be "the adult" has seemed all about willingness to compromise with insatiable bullies. Charles Pierce writes at length here, about history as a river that "churns up the muck from the bottom and brings it to the surface," with "backwaters so obscure that they no longer appear on modern maps."

Given the noise machine's four-year rampage of bringing up "some of the deepest muck from the river basin," it's hard to disagree when Pierce wonders if Obama, in taking an overly flattering view of the citizenry, can realize "the bottomless thirst the country has for snake oil."

But there is also the matter of willingly selling snake oil, in the forms endorsed by the owners.

And the apparent decisions that, bully pulpit be damned, truth-telling and rule of law are just too impolitic. As Pierce suggests, the president

... has granted immunity to the country by granting immunity to many of the people who did that country the most damage, whether they were the criminals within the previous administration, who tortured without conscience or spied without warrants, or whether they were the criminals within the financial sector, who rigged the game, cheated millions of ordinary people out of their money, and then escaped back into the institutions that had been Too Big to Fail and that, remarkably, came out of the scandal even bigger than they were before.

With a House gerrymandered to stay in the grasp of lunatics, impeachment will begin in January (if not sooner). The noise machine may have been caught a bit off-guard last night, but soon enough it will function as if the election had never happened.

On the very positive side: Elizabeth Warren and Tammy Baldwin, among other wins.

And passage of marriage equality measures in four states. A truly heartening sign that demographics are changing, and that this particular wedge will lose its power for more of the electorate.

November 6, 2012

And I didn't get a sticker.

Maybe the polling place was out of them, or maybe the workers were just too overloaded to bother. The wait that has never been longer than five or ten minutes was two hours. I got there before 4:30; a few minutes later, the crowd stretched down the block. It got cold during the half hour it took just to reach the building door; ahead of me was an elderly man with walker, who refused an offer to ask poll workers about letting him ahead. After finally getting to the entrance, we had to squeeze into a triple line snaking through a very narrow corridor, in a space inadequate to the turnout.

Poll workers included the usual faces, and they were efficient enough. It's the extra ID and forms, courtesy of our Republican-controlled legislature, that were different this year. Large turnout in a precinct heavily populated by students and this year's long ballot of state and local offices also contributed to the wait, during what was not quite peak time. And this was in a Democratic stronghold where there's no apparent history of voter discouragement efforts.

He so gets to the essentials that it's hard to resist quoting great swaths of Charles Pierce's Election Day summation—

...were it not for the new political universe created by the Big Bang of the Citizens United decision, and were it not for the swiftly established metric that he who has the most money wins, the candidacy of Willard Romney would be an almost impossible burlesque. Four years after the titans of the financial-services industry nearly ate the entire world, the Republicans nominate a plutocratic maladroit who can barely wrestle a coherent sentence to a draw — "We start a new tomorrow tomorrow," was yesterday's gem — and who is entirely a creature of the very industry that had caused the misery in the first place. It is exactly the same as if the Republicans in 1932 had replaced Herbert Hoover at the top of their ticket with Andrew Mellon.

But the election is still within an eyelash, one way or the other, because Romney's money, and all the other money that lined up behind it, made him credible. Exactly forty years after anonymous corporate cash became the first loose thread that would lead to the unravelling of Richard Nixon's presidency, anonymous corporate cash is the coin of the realm....

But, recently, watching things on the ground here in Florida, I've come to think that there is an even bigger story than the money, that the money is merely the only story within the only story. I have watched at close range how very far politicians will go to use their institutional power as elected officials to deaden the instincts of self-government. It is the money that got them into place to do it, but what they're doing is something far more insidious and dangerous. Actively keeping people from exercising the franchise is bad enough. But to continue, over and over and over again, to make the process harder and harder until a critical mass of people decides that self-government is not worth the bother, I think, is far, far worse.

And yet it has to be said, that

...while the process may have been grubby, and the tone of the debate wretched, there was a genuine debate to be had here, and it was worthy of all the best instincts of self-government that had been enervated, day by grinding day, by what our politics had become. It was a debate about the very nature of self-government itself, and about the value of the political commonwealth that is its only worthwhile creative endeavor. There is one side in this election that is far too timid, and far too closely allied with far too many people it ought not to be allied with at all, but which at least does admit the existence of a political commonwealth, and at least does recognize that self-government is an ongoing creative endeavor. And there is one side that simply does neither, and that has been quite clear about why it does not, and that has worked within the institutional structures of self-government to undermine the creative soul of the democratic project. And that has been a debate worth having, and that is the debate that will conclude today.

Given that the average person tunes out politics unless bothering to vote in presidential elections, today does conclude what's dubbed public "debate."

Ending some measure of self-government, on the other hand, is not yet an entirely done deal. If Obama is re-elected, the money will go on subverting democracy by stealth. And Obama will presumably go on being "far too closely allied with far too many people ... [he] ought not to be allied with at all."

If the unthinkable happens, those who will "undermine the creative soul of the democratic project" won't tarry at their work of devastating what's left of the economy. At least they should no longer need to pander to The Base, or pretend to any concern for the non-One Percent.

A mere four years (and one black man) ago, even Republicans were frightened by the thought of Sarah Palin, a heartbeat away. Those voters have no such fear this time. If their Monopoly man and Ayn Rand fan grasp this enormous power, it will be theirs along with the Mandate due only to Republicans.