Know what I hate? Well, I’m going to tell you. It’s when people intrude upon your deepest personal life, and then when you object, they accuse you of denying their right to – I don’t know – have everything exactly their way, I guess. That’s how I see the hyper-religious crowd who have been complaining about the mandate in the Affordable Care Act requiring employer-provided health insurance to cover contraception. Obama carved out an exception that should satisfy anyone – one that goes way beyond any necessary relief from what’s required, in my view. And still they are crowing about it, comparing it to religious persecution, even Nazi-ism in the more extreme cases.
The latest round has been in state legislatures from Georgia to New Hampshire, where the crackpot tea-party majority has proposed a “conscience” exception so broad it practically guarantees legal challenge. (These are the freaks who insisted, bizarrely, that all legislation be rooted in the Magna Carta, even though few of them have ever read the document in its entirety. Next, they’ll demand all proposed laws draw on neolithic cave paintings.) Then there are the fetal “personhood” statute and vaginal ultrasound bill in Virginia, scaled back in the face of massive protests by women in that divided state. This … from the party that was all about jobs, jobs, jobs during the 2010 election. See what happens when you trust them?
It should surprise no one that Republicans used the economy as a trojan horse to conceal their deeply unpopular, highly regressive right-wing social agenda. It was, after all, GOP-driven policies (aided, of course, by watery Democrats) that blew a massive hole in the federal budget back in 2001, expanding it in subsequent years with undeclared wars and unwarranted tax cuts for the wealthiest people in the country. Those tax cuts were supposed to have expired by now, but as every politician knows, that ain’t gonna’ happen … because no one has the spine to allow it. Meanwhile, we all pay the price. My city in upstate New York is starved for funds largely because the Feds are starving the States, and the States are passing the cuts along to municipalities. That and inaction on health and retirement reform (not privatization, but the kind that would work) is resulting in massive tax hikes at the local level – close to 20% for the coming fiscal year. This just to spare the Romneys of the world a return to the favorable income tax rates of the 1990s, when they gained plenty enough wealth, thank you very much.
The Republicans have nothing to offer on the economy. And unless we push them, neither will the Democrats.
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Then there’s the billionaire problem. It seems that every major candidate has his sugar daddy. For Gingrich it was Adelson, the reactionary casino magnate. For Romney, it’s himself (of course). And for Santorum, it’s Foster Friess, last name pronounced “freeze”. That’s right: the person behind Rick Santorum, presidential candidate, is Mr. “Freeze”. Time to pick up the bat phone, commissioner. This time, Mr. “Freeze” has a plan that just might work. After all, Santorum was nobody, absolutely nobody before the right-wing, hyper Christian billionaire started sluicing money in Super-PAC support of his flagging campaign. Then, hey-presto! Front runner status, with no campaign headquarters, bare-bones staff, and little organization. Just like many of the previous front-runners. Sense a pattern?
Of course, we all know how this story ends. What became of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons ambitions about which “there can be no doubt”? It was just as defector Hussein Kemal described it in the mid 1990s, in interviews that were well circulated before the Iraq war: Iraq had never gotten beyond the theoretical stage in weapons development, and what technology they had relating to uranium enrichment was broken up and buried after the Gulf War. And their missile technologies? We all know about the aluminum tube hoax. Then there were the deadly drones – basically model planes bound together with duct tape. This is why the current claims about Iran shouldn’t be taken too seriously.