Category: Liberal Rants

Thoughtful posts on why the neopaleolithic viewpoint, while perhaps valid for its adherents, is yet not the way I want my country run.

A non-answer to an easy question

Posted on by Dale

One of the easy questions I recently asked of my senators was whether they agreed with the PPE’s tweet that people who burned the flag should be “stripped of their citizenship,” and whether they would vote for legislation that mandated that.  (Spoiler alert: there is no mechanism for “stripping” a U.S. citizen of his citizenship.)

Sen. David Perdue (R) responded via email:

 Thank you for contacting me to express concern over desecration of the American flag. I always appreciate the opportunity to hear from my fellow Georgians.

Like most Georgians, I find desecration of the American flag to be personally offensive, but unfortunately the Supreme Court ruled in the 1989 case of Texas v. Johnson that flag desecration is protected speech under the First Amendment. A year later, in the 1990 case of United States v. Eichman, the Supreme Court struck down the Flag Protection Act as an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment’s protections on free speech.

In light of the Supreme Court’s decisions in Johnson and Eichman, the only option available to Congress to prohibit desecration of the American flag is the passage of an anti-flag desecration amendment to the Constitution. This would require the support of a two-thirds majority of each house of Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the States. I will support the passage of such an amendment if it is proposed during my time in Senate.

Well.  Number one, as I replied to the senator, my concern was not over the “desecration” of the American flag; my concern was protecting free speech.  The idea that the U.S. flag is sacred is ridiculous.  That would imply it is part of some kind of state-sponsored religion, one that worships the state in fact, and we all know that is not the case.

Number two, he (once again) did not answer my question.  But I’m going to presume that yes, he does support passing legislation to “strip” a U.S. citizen of his citizenship if that citizen exercises his right to free speech.

note to Sen. Perdue and/or staff: I welcome any clarifications or corrections

 

An answer, kind of, to an Easy Question

Posted on by Dale

When I got home from the theatre yesterday, there was a message on the phone.  It was from a Drew Robinson, a pleasantly-voiced man, letting me know that Sen. David Perdue’s office had gotten my email about waterboarding (the PPE and several of his surrogates had suggested it was dandy).

This was just prior to my deciding to make this a blog series so I don’t have the exact wording of my email, but I essentially asked if my elected officials if they were down with the U.S. torturing prisoners in contravention of international law.

Mr. Robinson’s message, and I paraphrase, was to assure me they would be passing it along to the senator that I opposed the reintroduction of waterboarding in the Executive Branch.

You, being the astute reader that you are, will already have noticed that this is not really an answer to my question.  I appreciate that they’re not going to keep my opinion from the senator, but my question was whether David Perdue agreed with the PPE that we should be waterboarding.

And so back we go:

I had a voice mail on my machine yesterday from Drew Robinson from your office, assuring me that they would pass along to you my opposition to the U.S. waterboarding in contravention of international law (“in the Executive Branch,” as Mr. Robinson phrased it).  I appreciate the contact, but my question remains:

Do you agree with the presumptive president-elect’s position that the U.S. should waterboard its prisoners?

Astute readers will also have noticed that Mr. Robinson (presumably following office protocol) did not call the PPE by name.

Easy answers

Posted on by Dale

Oh my.  Our PPE certainly has some rather —what’s the word I’m looking for?— ignorant suppositions about U.S. citizenship and protest.

(There are those who are beginning to posit that whenever he does something dumb as shit like this, he’s just squid-inking to keep us from being even more outraged at his real problems.  I am not discounting the proposition.)

And so off we go to our elected officials:

The presumptive president-elect has tweeted: “Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag – if they do, there must be consequences – perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail!”

Do you agree with his statement?  Would you vote for legislation which stripped an American of citizenship for participating in an unpopular form of protest?

Bless their hearts

Posted on by Dale

Now that the election is over, the amygdala-based lifeforms are having to find other existential perils to fuel their daily crisis.

Here’s one mother who has gotten creative in her efforts:

Homeschool mom crushed by ‘moral dilemma’ after son sees male CoverGirl wearing makeup

Oy, as we say in my neck of the woods.

The problem with all this is not that she thinks it’s weird or icky that a boy is wearing makeup.  That’s fine.  Chacun à son goût, and all that.  There’s more than one hippie with whom I camp whose choices, impulses and/or pleasures cause me to raise my eyebrows and/or purse my lips.

The problem is that for her, this is a “moral dilemma.”  A moral dilemma?

Of course it is.  The amygdala-based lifeform requires that life be a certain, specific, and unalterable way.  This guarantees an eternally renewable source of energy: newness is to be feared.  Change is to be feared.  Ambiguity is to be feared.

They cannot allow themselves to recognize that life might have been different before this and will be different after this—and the idea that life is changing even as we live it is enough for them to get their daily dose of panic.

So this lady is having a great day.  She is so fearful of a boy wearing makeup (and all that this might mean) that she cannot take her eyes off her son “for a second.”  She cannot bear the thought now of even allowing him to “go over to a friend’s house,” where he might encounter something different than the walls she and her husband have built for him.  She feeds off this fear.  If she were a vampire, she wouldn’t have to dine for a month.

Finally, every parent’s rueful truth—that their six-year-old is growing up so fast—becomes in her world another source of tasty, delicious fear.  I’m sure she’s looking forward to the teen years with slavering anticipation.

Ethics—how do they even work?

Posted on by Dale

This is another in our Easy Answer series, in which I ask my congressional representatives a pretty easy question to answer and await their response.

This time my concerns spring from the probable hypocritical stance taken by our Republicker friends in regards to the presumptive president-elect (PPE) and his business dealings with foreign sources.  My trigger was this article from the WaPo.  It’s worth a read.

For real, the howler monkeys have been shrieking and flinging poo about Hillary Clinton’s “corruption” in taking money from foreign governments, etc., to fund the Clinton Foundation, the non-profit her family runs to “convene businesses, governments, NGOs, and individuals to improve global health and wellness, increase opportunity for women and girls, reduce childhood obesity, create economic opportunity and growth, and help communities address the effects of climate change.”  Much was made of its diabolical nature during the campaign, despite its consistent high ratings from independent organizations like Charity Navigator.

Likewise, the Republickers cranked up that smoke machine and did their best to make the Foundation look as if it were some kind of money funnel to the Clintons themselves, which of course it isn’t.  One claim I read was that you could tell it was corrupt because only 3% of its funding was dispersed in donations.  This was of course a deliberate lie and not an easy one for the regular voter to see through: since the Foundation runs its own programs, little of its funding goes to other organizations.  Let me repeat that for the hard-of-thinking: because the Clinton Foundation runs its own programs, it uses its funding to do that rather than pay someone else to do that.

So with such high dudgeon and general fantods on the part of the Republickers, you might very well think it was because of their high moral and ethical standards.  You might think that now that the PPE is heading their way, they’d be clutching their pearls and staffing their investigative committees to root out all potential corruption from the PPE and his foreign business issues.  You might think that, but then again you might be A Idiot.

Today’s email:

Many of your colleagues have been quite vocal in their calls to investigate Hillary Clinton on the basis of “foreign donations” or “entanglements,” implying that the U.S. President should be above suspicion when it comes to money matters and foreign entities.
Do you share their view, and do you intend to apply the same ethical standard to the presumptive president-elect’s business affairs?

As usual, I concluded with, “As a matter of course I will publish my question to you and your response both on my blog and on social media.”

Betsy DeVos

Posted on by Dale

Already, we have a second post in our new Easy Answers series.

The presumptive president-elect [PPE] has selected Betsy DeVos to be his nominee for Secretary of Education.  The short version is that this woman has spent most of her adult life attempting to dismantle public education wherever she can: vouchers (of course); for-profit charter schools; no regulation for charter schools; characterization of “government schools” as “failing”; characterization of teachers as “the problem”; etc.

Here’s the first round of news articles on this piece of work:

And that’s just the legitimate news outlets.  You should hear what education organizations are saying.

edited to add: RawStory gives us the gory historical details in a story they’ve republished from five years ago.  This article is a must-read.

So here’s today’s email:

The presumptive president-elect has chosen Betsy DeVos as his nominee for Secretary of Education.  She refers to the public school system as “government schools,” usually categorizing them as “failing,” and has spent millions of her family’s fortune on promoting the diversion of tax dollars into private entrepreneurial schools while discouraging any kind of oversight of these institutions.

Do you share her values, and do you plan to vote to confirm her?

I’ll keep you posted.

A new series

Posted on by Dale

Based on my post from yesterday, I am starting a new series, called Easy Answers.  Hope springs eternal, after all.  I will publish the question I sent to my congressional representatives along with some context for my concerns; if and when they reply, I will put up a new post with their answer.  If they reply with some boilerplate bullshit, then I will select the passage that seems to be the answer, then call his office and ask the poor twenty-something on the other end to verify that this is what his/her boss is comfortable with being published.

Should be fun.

So yesterday, the New York Times published the transcript of the presumptive president-elect’s interview with them.  The situation was already weird, with the PPE at first declining to be interviewed because the Times didn’t “agree to the terms and conditions.”

Of course he reversed himself.  I imagine someone must have explained to him that the press doesn’t have to agree to “terms and conditions” to interview an elected official, especially the President.  First Amendment and all that, eh wot?

It’s pretty rough reading.  The man is who he is, and those who thought he might rise to the challenge once he had greatness thrust upon ‘im are being disillusioned at a ferocious pace.

Here’s the quote I worked from yesterday:

In other words, in theory, I can be president of the United States and run my business 100 percent, sign checks on my business, which I am phasing out of very rapidly, you know, I sign checks, I’m the old-fashioned type.  (NYT, 11/23/16)

And in case you thought he was just riffing1, he repeats himself:

 But in theory I could run my business perfectly, and then run the country perfectly. And there’s never been a case like this where somebody’s had, like, if you look at other people of wealth, they didn’t have this kind of asset and this kind of wealth, frankly. It’s just a different thing. (NYT, 11/23/16)

Well.

You might very well think that the man could not be telling us more clearly that the plutocracy has dropped all pretense of democratic faith, but let’s check in with Sen. Isakson (R-GA) and Sen. Perdue (R-GA):

The president-elect has stated that he could “theoretically” run his business empire while handling the duties of the office.

Do you agree with his statement?

Now we wait.

—————

1 Just kidding.  He’s always just riffing.

Email those fuppers.

Posted on by Dale

I was out of commission for a while, but damn it all to Cthulhu, people, none of us can sit back and swath ourselves in our privilege and wait it out.  And by “it” I mean the apocalyptic reversal of every liberal gain of the last 80 years.

No, I’m not really a prepper in this regard (nor in any regard).  The apocalypse is not upon us.  But we are facing some serious challenges in many areas.

To that end—and I know I’ve made this vow before—I’m going to pester the hell out of my elected representatives.  Yesterday I made it a whole lot easier to do that on impulse.

You know how it is: you’re just reading along and suddenly there’s an article about the neo-Nazis supporting the president-elect; or Ken Blackwell being in charge of “mental health issues” for the transition team; etc.  There’s not a damned thing you can do about it, of course, and it’s not as if your elected representatives are going to do anything about it, but BY CTHULHU THEY’RE GOING TO KNOW THEY’RE PISSING ME OFF, KENNETH.

But first you have to go to their congressional website, click through to the “Email Me” page, and then input all your information in the online form.  (Congresscritters don’t have published email addresses that you can just yell at directly.)  It’s tedious and would certainly deter you from responding when the mood strikes you.  I’m not so conspiracy minded that I would suggest that this is deliberate.  But it’s deliberate.

So here’s how you regain the upper edge.

Step 1: Open your macro program

I use a program called Keyboard Maestro, and it’s magnificent.  I can automate almost anything I do on my MacBook Pro.  It’s magic.  Macs also have a built-in macro program called Automator, but I’ve never used it, and it appears to be not as flexible or powerful as Keyboard Maestro.  There are other macro programs, like QuicKeys (which I used to use).  Find one you like. Trust me, if you do a lot of work on your computer, especially work that you have to repeat on a regular basis, you’ll be glad you learned to use it.1

Step 2: Open the congresscritter’s email page

Every one is different,2 so you will have to construct your two macros for each critter separately.

Step 2A: Create a macro to open this page.

This is an easy one.  You just have to create a macro that opens the page.  In Keyboard Maestro, it looks like this:

  1. Create a new macro.  (In KM, you can create groups of macros that are available only in specific programs, in this case my browser.  This will keep it from triggering if you accidentally pull the trigger in your word processor, for example.)
  2. Name it: goIsakson, for example.
  3. Add an “action”: Open URL, in this case.  Copy and paste the congresscritter’s page URL in there.
  4. Save.

You can, in KM, add a trigger of your choice.  My Lichtenbergian trigger is simply typing four L’s in a row; KM then backspaces over those four L’s and types Lichtenbergian for me.  I have other macros that are triggered when I type a key combination, like my macro (ctrl-opt-cmd-R) to resize and save an image in Pixelmator to my website.  In this case, I’m going to trigger goIsakson by first triggering KM’s “Trigger Macro By Name” option (ctrl-opt-cmd-T) and typing in g-o-i, which is enough to bring up goIsakson.  Hit return, and presto! the webpage opens.

Step 2B: Create a macro to fill in all those fields

This one isn’t hard, but you have to pay attention.

I recommend starting with your cursor in the first field.  Because reasons.

Then it’s a simple matter—no, really—to add actions that a) type in the requested info; and then b) tab to the next field.

So on Isakson’s page (http://www.isakson.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/email-me), I would build this:

  1. Create a new macro.  Name it Isakson.
  2. Insert text by typing: Mr.
  3. Type a keystroke: TAB
  4. Insert text by typing: Dale
  5. Type a keystroke: TAB
  6. repeat till done

You may find that you have to insert a Pause for x seconds after the Insert text action.  Otherwise, your macro may trip over itself because the website is slow to respond.  Better to wait those few extra seconds than have it get all tangled up.

Step 3: Get to work

Now, when some news item makes you want to hurl Molotov cocktails, you can pull up the congresscritter’s page and zap its form with your person info in no time at all.  Then you can select a topic (there doesn’t seem to be one for fuppery) and type in your demands message.

So far my emails to my two senators3 have been to demand they repudiate the crap that’s surged up from the sewers since the election.  I end each brief message with a direct question: “Will you repudiate this?”  or “Do you agree with this mindset?”  My sign-off is my new mantra: Not in my name.  Not in my country.  SPEAK UP. Last night in discussing my project with my Lovely First Wife, I decided I would add to every email the cheery message that I would be publishing my question and the critter’s response on my blog and on social media.

Which means I’m off to create a macro to type all that for me.

—————

1 For example, I never type Lichtenbergian or Lichtenbergianism or Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy any more.  I just type l-l-l-l or l-l-l-m or l-l-l-t and Keyboard Maestro does it for me.  Or more extremely, I can create an Alchemy art fundraiser project page in seconds just by triggering a macro that fills in all sections of the backend page, including all the HTML, pasting all the individual artist info which another macro has copied from the spreadsheet into named clipboards, Kenneth.  NAMED CLIPBOARDS!

2 Which means that every congresscritter hires its own IT staff, surely a reduplicative effort if ever there was one.  And how many security clearance nodes does that create, eh?  Party of small government, my ass.

3 At the moment I don’t have a representative.  The old one has quit, and the new one hasn’t emerged from his pod yet.

So.

Posted on by Dale

America, you are A Idiot.

This is all I am going to say about it: you elected George W. Bush because he was a manly chest-thumping cretin, and it got you the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a budget surplus turned into a record deficit, ruinous tax cuts, and the Great Recession.

Now you’ve done worse.

I don’t get it.

Posted on by Dale

I truly don’t understand why Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan aren’t actively campaigning for Hillary Clinton right now.

Let’s face it, I think they have long since realized they personally would be better off if she won the election.  After all, what are the possibilities?

  1. Trump is an enormous drag on the downballot races.  At the moment, there’s a real chance the Republicker Party could lose the Senate and a non-zero chance of the House as well.  Republicker candidates all across the nation are distancing themselves from their candidate for President, even to the extent of running ads that they would “stand up to” Trump if necessary.  A few have gone so far as to actively endorse Hillary Clinton.
  2. And if Trump wins the White House?  What’s it going to look like for McConnell and Ryan when they either have to vote against their President’s legislation or (more likely) are unable to control the crazies in their own party who will surge forward with truly appalling ideas which Trump would sign?  And in the next election?  Do they think they will survive primary challenges from their crazies?
  3. Then we have the problem that the Republickers don’t currently govern or legislate anyway.  They seem to have lost the knack for doing their jobs: the current Congress is the least productive ever.  They can name a post office or two, but they can’t even pass funding to control the Zika virus, much less anything more broadly useful.
  4. They are far more comfortable — certainly more experienced in — opposing the person in the White House.  If they got their candidate in there, they would have to work with him and even, maybe, govern — if they weren’t consumed by mopping up his messes.  [See 1 & 2.]  If Clinton were elected, they could just sit back and continue being whiny-ass titty-baby obstructionists like they are now.

So clearly it would be in their best interests to endorse Hillary Clinton so as not to rock their little boat.

Except for how all the amygdalas they’ve stampeded about Clinton being Satan incarnate would run right over them.

Hm.  Sounds like they’re screwed.

What a pity.