Tag: politics

I can’t begin to tell you how happy I am that it’s election day. You know why? Because that means this will hopefully be the last day that Robert Ramirez, Grover Norquist, and some lady named Cynthia who claims to be from Arvada robocall me multiple times in the space of 24 hours and urge me to vote for Ramirez. This is even more aggravating because:

1) Robocalls leave voice mails, which I have to keep going into my mailbox and deleting.

2) I’ve already voted, and it sure as hell wasn’t for Robert Ramirez. I’m certain he’s a lovely human being, but I like my current state representative (Debbie Benefield).

3) And, let’s be honest. Having Grover Norquist pulling for you is really not something to be advertised if you want to impress me anyway.

It’s enough to make me want to ask for my mail-in ballot back, just so I can make sure the circle next to Debbie Benefield’s name is good and dark.

There’s no need to even go in to detail about the amount of spam (both digital and analog) I’ve gotten over the last week. Though I am a little disappointed that I didn’t get any crazy mail from Focus on the Family this year. That’s always good for a rage-filled cackle.

Anyway, if you’re American, go vote! And while I normally try to just emphasize the awesomeness of civic duty because I don’t want to sound like the Cynthia from Arvada robocall, I do have one request for this year – please remember that women are people too, and it would be nice if the government didn’t want to lodge itself in our collective vagina. Shocking, I know. (PSST. That means if you live in Colorado, for goodness’ sake VOTE NO ON 62! And non-high-heels wearing senate candidate Ken Buck doesn’t think much of women either, it should be noted.)

And tomorrow we can all celebrate the end of robocalls and political spam for another, oh, year and a half. Right up until the Presidential race really gets cooking.

Just in case yesterday was the one day of the summer where you unhooked your internet umbilical cord and were consequently far enough away from the general population that you couldn’t hear either the shrieks of outrage from the liberals or the squeals of schadenfreude-laden glee from the conservatives, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said some really dicky stuff:

“I hear these people saying he’s like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested,” Gibbs said. “I mean, it’s crazy.”

The press secretary dismissed the “professional left” in terms very similar to those used by their opponents on the ideological right, saying, “They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon. That’s not reality.”

I have no doubt that I am not part of the “professional left.” From what Gibbs said in his total non-apology today, the “professional left” is apparently people on cable TV. So… I guess Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann, and a couple of other wonks over at MSNBC, and… uh… Michael Moore? I have a hard time buying that Gibbs took time out of his busy day to direct some spittle-flecked invective at people who can probably be counted on one person’s fingers and toes.

Be that as it may, considering I’m not one of the “liberal elite” (ooh, scary), that statement still really pissed me off. Because you’re damn right I’m not going to be satisfied until we get a reasonable health care system. (Though, really, the Pentagon is just fine where it is.)

There are a lot of specific points in what he said that I could address, like the whole thing with comparing Obama to Bush – which is not something I would personally do, though every time Obama continues a Bush era policy that widdles all over privacy and freedom, I cry a little – but I’m not going to. Instead, I’d like to go to the root cause of why exactly I still want to knock Mr. Gibbs one, right in the kisser.

It’s simple. Mr. Gibbs, you don’t own me. And, come to that, neither does your boss. I may have donated money to the campaign (and I did), and I may have proudly voted for Obama (which I also did), but that in no way obligates me to keep my mouth shut when he does something I don’t like. Particularly not when he’s specifically said on several occasions that the left ought to hold him accountable – or does that only apply if the left has nice things to say?

Coincidentally, I am far more invested in my relationship with my husband than I am in my relationship with the President of the United States, and you know what? I’m not obligated to keep my mouth shut when he does something dumb either.

And neither of those simple facts would change, even if I were Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann or whoever Mr. Gibbs claims he was having his tantrum at. They aren’t owned by the guy they voted for either. And, coincidentally, I also think both of them spend a lot more time saying nice things about Obama (and his various accomplishments) than I ever have.

When Bush was President, I think there was this idea in everyone’s mind that he had monolithic, unquestioning support from the right. I don’t know how much of that was reality and how much of it was a news narrative, though it’s pretty easy to make arguments that the Republicans are more disciplined than the Democrats in general (but let’s be honest here… slime mold is more disciplined than the Democratic party in general), that they have Fox News, and that there was quite a bit of equating criticizing the President with being un-American. So perhaps President Obama – or at the very least his press secretary – thinks that he ought to be on the receiving end of a similar sort of support. That he deserves it, even. That’s certainly the vibe that I’m getting from this.

No one in this world deserves that sort of dogmatic support from me, or from anyone else. Not even my husband, my best friend, or my parents. And certainly not a politician. If someone does something I don’t like, or something that I think is a bad idea, I am well within my rights to say so. And in fact, I actually start getting worried if I feel like I’m agreeing with someone too close to 100% of the time, because that’s just not natural.

That’s why, even a day later, I’m still angry at Mr. Gibbs, because I think his real position is that we shouldn’t be allowed to criticize the President if we voted for him, that we owe him some kind of special allegiance, and that we should just shut up and like what we’re given. No, I don’t think so.

And if you just take his comments on their face and not read into them, they don’t make much sense either. There really aren’t that many people (I’m not going to say none, since it’s not like I know everyone in the world) saying the words that Gibbs stuffed into his lefty meaniehead straw man’s mouth. A lot of lefties (and not-so-lefties) are bitching about the President compromising, or starting negotiations too much toward the center, or who knows what else. But I don’t think too many of them are claiming that (a) the President has accomplished absolutely nothing, and if they are, shame on them, and (b) that they wish they’d never voted for him, because the alternative was so great.

Aside: Often when someone coming from the left bitches about the President, a smug conservative pops out of the woodwork and snidely asks something like, “How’s that hopey changey working out for ya?” Well, here’s the thing. If we’re sitting on our blogs and whinging about how Obama’s not being liberal enough, what sort of brain tumor does it take to think that somehow means we’ve got buyer’s remorse and wish we voted for McCain and the lipstick-wearing IQ black hole that he wanted as his Vice President? Yes, because if someone’s upset that Obama’s talking about offshore drilling, the people who were chanting, “Drill, baby, drill” at their convention are the option we wish we’d gone for. So even if I’m wasting hundreds of words bitching about Obama (or as the case may be, his press secretary), the hopey changey is still working out just fine, thanks.

Frankly, Mr. Gibbs should be happy that the lefties are spending so much time kvetching about the current politics. Because that means we’re still paying attention. The alternative would be an absence of commentary, and an electorate that would rather play Madden on the Xbox than volunteer, donate, and vote.

This very well could be an all-new, exciting evolution in the Democratic strategy of taking careful aim and shooting itself in the foot, right before an election.

“I don’t think they will [stay home], because I think what’s at stake in November is too important to do that,” he said.

Pinning your strategy on the Republicans being so chock full of the crazy that the progressives you shit all over won’t dare not vote just seems like a really bad move to me. But what do I know? I’m not supposed to be talking because I don’t have anything nice to say.

I’m incredibly lucky, and I know it. I’ve got a job, and a good one. I’m going back to school in August and will receive a more than reasonable stipend. I’m now married, and to someone that has a very stable job with a salary that we could both easily live on as long as we were a bit austere in our spending.

But you know, I see shit like this¹:

ANGLE: Well, I said that it had spoiled our citizenry. That’s a little different. They’re not spoiled. What has happened is this system of entitlement has caused us to have a spoilage with our ability to go out and get a job.

And it momentarily robs me of my ability to speak coherent English. After some jumping up and down and arm waving and gurgling shrieks of rage, I’m able to once again communicate like a semi-literate human being.

So here goes.

Dear Sharron Angle:

Fuck you. And I say this in all seriousness, knowing that I have made a conscious effort to tone down my normally salty language for this blog and I’ve now officially blown it in this post. Fuck you. Your original quote was insulting. Your pathetic attempt to wiggle out of it during this interview has crossed the line into the willful degradation of millions of Americans. So yes, fuck you.

Your response shows that you have never faced unemployment. It reeks of the lazy entitlement of someone who has never lived in fear of what will happen when the benefit checks stop coming in the mail. It stinks of privilege, of the sure, arrogant knowledge that, well, I’m okay, screw everyone else.

You know what’s sad? I actually used to buy into that disgusting lie. I used to cuddle with my privilege at night and tell myself that people who depended on the social safety net were just lazy, they obviously didn’t want to work as hard (HAHAHA) as me, so screw ’em. And this, despite the fact that my father was a union steward when I was little, and I can even remember a little bit about what it was like to be on strike.

You know what changed that? I got laid off. And then when I got another job, I got fired. And then suddenly there was nothing between me and losing my house except for my unemployment check and a rapidly draining savings account.

So let me tell you what it’s like. It’s been five years since that time, and it’s still all very vivid in my mind.

Being unemployed is carefully calculating the exact amount of money you’ll need to pay your mortgage and all your bills, then adding in the bare minimum of calories you’ll need to survive – in the form of ramen noodles, most likely – and then dividing that out into precisely how much of an hourly wage you need, so you know what jobs you can actually afford to apply for.

Being unemployed is realizing that the jobs for those wages are too infrequent, and trying to figure out where you can shave off more money. Well, it’s almost summer so I can just not turn on the air conditioning. I’ll survive. I won’t turn on lights to save on my electricity bill. I’ll stop driving my car so I can probably get away without insurance.

Being unemployed is applying for job after job after job and being confronted with a deafening silence on the other end. No one bothers to tell you any more if you didn’t get the job. They just bin your resume and you have to assume you’ve been rejected, without even the closure of a recorded phone call or a form letter. It’s being rejected, every day, constantly, and never even being told why.

Being unemployed is calculating the cost difference between birth control pills and just having to buy more feminine hygiene products, because it’s a way to save a few bucks a month.

Being unemployed is lying on your resume to make yourself look less experienced, so maybe you’ll have a better chance of landing an entry level job.

Being unemployed is assuring your mom that no, it’s okay, I’ve still got plenty of money left in my savings account, don’t worry about it. Because your parents have already supported your far too much since you moved out, and you feel horrible even thinking about asking them for money and hope that it won’t come to that – or that it won’t get worse and come to you having to move back in with them. It’s feeling so grateful that you want to cry when your mom insists on paying for your health insurance, because you were just planning to let it lapse and keep your fingers crossed about not getting sick.

Being unemployed is walking everywhere or begging for rides from your friends, because you want to save your gas budget for the week just in case you actually get an interview and you can’t afford bus fare either.

Being unemployed is spending hours on hold with the unemployment office, because their website is down and you have still have to go through the humiliating process of proving that you’ve been looking for a job if you want your next check.

Being unemployed is feeling guilty when a friend buys you dinner because you can’t afford it, even after you’ve bought that friend dinner dozens of other times when you were making good money. Because you feel like no one should be spending money on you.

Being unemployed means that when you do spend money on yourself, because you’re so fucking depressed about the constant rejection that you just can’t handle it any more, and a flavored tea from Starbucks is so cheap and so nice on a hot day, that when you’re done drinking your treat you realize what you’ve done, and you shouldn’t have spent that money, and then you throw your treat up because you’re so upset with yourself.

Being unemployed is being asked by some entitled asshole why you aren’t working for McDonald’s, they’re always hiring², because it apparently just doesn’t matter if you want to be able to pay your mortgage. And it’s also wondering if maybe they’re right, if maybe it’s somehow your fault or your bad planning for buying a house and then (five years later) getting laid off.

Being unemployed is slowly losing your respect for yourself, one day at a time, because you’ve known all your life that you should be working to earn your keep, and no one will give you a job.

And you know what? I was lucky. I had an understanding roommate who was helping me pay my mortgage at the time. I had an amazing, supportive family and a lot of amazing, supportive friends. I had a lot of warning that I was going to get laid off, almost six months when my department at AT&T barely made its quota of people taking voluntary retirement, so I saved a lot of money. And maybe some of that stress and fear I felt was my own damn fault, because right at the start of my unemployment I sucked most of the life out of my savings account flying to England twice to see Mike – which I can’t honestly say I regret, since that probably directly lead to us getting married this last year.

But none of that changes certain things. None of that changes the constant, crushing depression of getting rejected for jobs, day after day. It doesn’t change the fact that people treat you as if you’re unemployed because you just don’t want it enough or because you’re lazy – because after a while you start believing those things and your self-worth goes even more down the shitter. It doesn’t change the utter guilt you feel every time you cash one of those unemployment checks, guilt that makes it impossible to feel relief that you’ll be able to keep your house for another month, because everyone’s told you that you didn’t earn that money, despite the fact that you’ve been paying in to unemployment insurance every working day of your life.

So fuck you, Sharron Angle. I invite you to find out what it’s like to be unemployed with a mortgage, or unemployed with debt, or unemployed with a family to support – or just plain unemployed with no one to care for but yourself. It’s not fun. It’s not easy. It’s hard enough without people like you looking down your noses. It must be nice to pander to the privileged, who have convinced themselves that they’ll never be unemployed, that they’ll never need the safety net. It’s all a lie. It could happen to anyone.

Maybe it should happen to some people.

1 – Actually I watched the entire interview because I was curious. I link to the Huffington Post piece because they have a convenient transcript, not because I’m taking their word for it.

2 – Particularly today, this ignores the fact that there are more people that need jobs than there are jobs. But I guess you just must not want it hard enough if you’re not willing to hunt down the other applicants and, I don’t know, kill them.

Lt. Dan Choi and Capt. Jim Pietrangelo (discharged under DADT) handcuffed themselves to the White House fence to protet DADT. They have both now been arrested and removed.

The following statement was read by Lt. Choi outside Freedom Plaza before he set off to the White House:

“Hello. My name is Lt. Dan Choi. I am being discharged from the US Army because I am gay and dared to say it out loud.

Today, I am here on a mission with Capt. Jim Pietrangelo, and we are asking you all to join us. We’re calling you to action because we are at a turning point — a moment in time where talk is no longer enough, and action is required.

Equality is not going to happen by itself…”

(Rest of the statement at the bottom of this post.)

In case anyone needed a reminder of what heroes look like.

I’m guessing that this bill (S 3081) is the follow up to all of the complaints about the underwear bomber getting read his Miranda rights. Which was something I heard far too much about in the two weeks following the unsuccessful bombing attempt, and involved a lot of back and forth with one side pointing out that they supposedly got “actionable intelligence” out of the guy without treating him an way that makes me ashamed to be an American, and the other side (as far as I can tell) maintaining that so what, it doesn’t count if you didn’t get that information 24-style. It also goes with the absolute paroxysms that some people are having about trials for terrorists in civilian court, which is another thing I support. If it was good enough for Timothy McVeigh or shoe bomber Richard Reid (a foreign national), I tend to think it’s good enough for other evil pieces of human-shaped refuse that think they have a right to express themselves by killing a lot of innocent people.

So as you can imagine, I am less than impressed by this bill. Eric from Standing on the Shoulders of Giant Midgets has a lovely analysis of the awfulness of the bill, which is better than anything I could come up with.

Taking a look at the bill on THOMAS¹ (if you haven’t used THOMAS before, I really recommend having it bookmarked) shows that it was introduced by Senator McCain², who once upon a time I respected as a human being, and 9 consponsors, eight of whom are Republican, with the last being McCain’s BFF Lieberman. I find this sadly unsurprising. The bill’s currently in the Judiciary committee, where one might hope that it will be set on fire, or possibly used to line a bird cage. Considering that the US Senate has recently become the Great Engine Of Getting Absolutely Nothing Done, I’m not actually that worried, though goodness knows that the Senate as a whole has made it a career goal to be galactically disappointing. I’m mostly just distressed that close to 10% of the Senate seems to distrust our legal system so profoundly.

1 – The Colorado equivalent of THOMAS can be found via the General Assembly website. I find it invaluable for every time I get a new “action alert” from some random political group (this is what I get for having donated $25 to someone’s campaign, apparently) and want to see if the bill in question really is what they’re claiming. If you’re not a Colorado resident, I’m sure your state has something equivalent. It’s a good thing to have in the bookmarks, I think.

2 – So this also may very well also have to do with Senator McCain desperately trying to hold on to his senate seat by outcrazying JD Hayworth without sinking to the level of man and horse marriage. The Rachel Maddow clip is very worth watching for the hysterical laughter-inducing revelation of Hayworth’s problems with empirical reality.

Murray Hill, Inc. is going to run for Congress. The press release reads like something out of the Onion, which means that these people are A-okay in my book.

I’m still pretty steamed about the the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission SCOTUS ruling. Not because I think it’s going to destroy the electoral process as we know it – I tend to agree with someone¹ who was on Rachel Maddow’s show. Basically, he said that it just means instead of corporations paying for adds that say “Ask Senator Bob why he keeps killing puppies,” they can now run scarier attack adds that say, “Vote no for Senator Bob because he keeps killing puppies.” Functionally, I don’t see that much of a difference. The shadowy corporate paymasters can now just be a bit more open about throwing money around, I guess.

Of course, I’m sure there’s a lot of nuance I’m missing here, since I’m most definitely not a lawyer.

Anyway, the reason I’m ticked off about the SCOTUS decision is that I deeply resent the implication that corporations are in any way equated to, you know, actual people. Agreeing with Justice Stevens, here:

A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law. Being the mere creature of law, it possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it.

If nothing else, corporations have a lot more money to throw around than those of us who are supposed to be having an active voice in our own government. I know our congresscritters rarely listen to us to begin with, but this is just rubbing our noses in it.

I suppose this is an even more powerful argument for trying to aim your spending at corporations that espouse values that you support. Considering the concerns regarding the disclosure of donations to political campaigns that we’ve seen pop up during the Prop 8 dust-up, I admit I’m pretty worried that even that method of exercising individual power could be in jeopardy.

…and all this from a post that was just supposed to point at a cute an amusing link.

Here: an adorable picture of a cat. That should make it all better.

ETA: Also, Corporate People in the News, from Lockwood. It made me giggle.

1 – Whose name I have forgotten, so you’ll just have to trust me on this one.