At this time of year, it's not always easy to be anything but tired, grumpy, and even a bit pessimistic. After a week of stupid political battles, some minor technical glitches, and struggles to keep healthy, staring down yet another weekend of bitterly cold winter weather isn't exactly a recipe for a positive Friday.
The vile threesome of intolerance, hate, and bigotry represented by the events in Arizona might have been enough to spoil this weekend weekend on its own, if Arizona's Gov. Brewer hadn't finally vetoed the gay hate bill this week.
Indeed, since much of our focus this week has been on the anti-gay legislation in Arizona and around the country, that some other very important stories have slipped through the cracks, as Alec Macgillis pointed out on Thursday.
From the Medicaid expansion fight that Macgillis wrote about, to the fight over voting rights Ana Marie Cox addressed beautifully, to the economic wedge between mainstream Republicans and right-wing extremists that Greg Sargent honed in on, there were plenty of other important political topics that didn't get the ink and pixels from us that they deserved this week and we were all set to tackle more than a few of those topics today.
Then one of our staff members came across the story of comedy writer Laurie Kilmartin and her father - and we pretty much gave the bird to covering any more intolerance, hate, and bigotry this week.
Kilmartin - who is a friend of a friend of one of our staff members - is a well-known stand- up comedian, and also a comedy writer for the Conan O'Brien show.
She's also been "live tweeting" her father's last days on her Twitter account, in a raw, real, funny, running stream of thoughts and images that shook us up just a little bit. As Carol Hartsell covered over at the Huffington Post, Gilmartin's account of her father's exploits right now are both gut-bustingly funny, and heart-breakingly sad.
Those 140-character messages from Gilmartin remind us of how funny being brutally honest and totally real can be.
We usually seek to remain a bit more removed from you, our audience, as you aren't coming here to see any of our staff members. You want to see our work, Paul's fantastic cartoons, our finely honed prose, and the trove of links in our expanded daily edition.
The personal struggles we face daily - sick kids, sick pets, being mind-numbingly sick ourselves, business trips, family trips, tripping over new technology. These are all things we usually choose not to share with you, our audience, in large part because doing so isn't professional.
Being a journalist or a member of the professional media most often means you don't make yourself the story, you don't draw yourself, and you don't insist that the part of the content you're creating that you identify with most is kept in - especially when it's the one part you need to edit out.
Every once in a while, though, you say "What the hell," you throw the rulebook out, and you do what Laurie Kilmartin is doing now. You be brutally, totally open to the world - and you laugh.
Sometimes, giving the world the bird and just being real is exactly what the doctor ordered.
Friday, February 28, 2014
Thursday, February 27, 2014
The Rising Tides Of Consequence
Actions have consequences. Poorly thought out actions often have drastic, unforeseen consequences.
The perfect example of these axioms were visible this past week in Arizona, as the state's proposed anti-gay "religious freedom" bill nearly passed into law. As we thoroughly discussed on Wednesday, and throughly displayed in Wednesday's extended edition, the bill would not have protected anyone's religious freedom. It also could have led to severely negative economic consequences for Arizona, from the potential loss of next year's Super Bowl, to the potential loss of jobs from major businesses like Apple & Intel.
In an action that only seemed to surprise the bigots on the extreme right, after being blasted by progressives, liberals, Democrats, and in a pleasant surprise, corporations and even some Republicans, the tide made a signifcant turn and Wednesday evening Arizona Governor Jan Brewer vetoed the anti-gay bill. What's more, the firestorm that exposed the heinous Arizona bill also seems to have scared politicians in Georgia and Ohio who've now dropped similar doomed legislation.
As we recently mentioned here, when Democrats and rational Americans stand together, America tends to win. That theory has been proven through growing numbers of wins on major policy issues, and those successes have continued to embolden progressives and liberals. Some Democrats have even begun to go on the offensive against major right-wing boogiemen like the Koch Brothers, as Greg Sargent pointed out yesterday.
Winning is something everyone likes, but like any action, winning has consequences, too. We think it's important Democrats take a look at some of the consequences of our energy policies, before a rising tide of small political victories, relatively cheap oil, and high efficiency technology blind us to the mess we're creating around us.
Even as one of our own staff members is now driving a car that gets over 100 mpg daily, and even as America's position as a world oil and energy leader continues to grow, that still doesn't mean we've solved the problems of our dirty energy economy.
A major oil spill in the Mississippi River just last weekend closed the mouth of the nation's largest interior shipping lane and the Port of New Orleans. Federal regulators are issuing emergency testing guidelines for shipping oil by rail, even as railroads scramble to institute new safety measures.
The pipeline and fracking wars aren't over yet either. As Dave Domina, the attorney for the Nebraska landowners battling TransCanada, assured his clients and the public this week, the fight to stop that pipeline isn't yet a done deal. As Katie Valentine detailed in Think Progress, a second 600 mile pipeline known as the Flanagan South line has aready been rammed through with very little media attention.
Meanwhile, even as cities like L.A. are moving to ban fracking, major oil companies like Exxon continue to push for more fracking almost everywhere - except in the neighborhood of Exxon's CEO - even as more negative consequences of fracking continue to be discovered.
There are some wins, even on the issues of dirty energy. Colorado's Gov. John Hickenlooper successfully pushed through the Colorado legislature tighter pollution rules for oil and gas producers. The world's largest solar power plant opened in the Nevada desert earlier this month, and after seeing what the U.S. did with that power plant, Mexico is now set to build Latin America's largest solar farm to replace an aging, oil-driven power plant.
Every step forward, as a society, is a good thing. That said, if we're going to truly support progress, we must make sure that the political moves we make, as well as those we stop, don't have unintended negative consequences that rise up and drown out any good we might do.
The perfect example of these axioms were visible this past week in Arizona, as the state's proposed anti-gay "religious freedom" bill nearly passed into law. As we thoroughly discussed on Wednesday, and throughly displayed in Wednesday's extended edition, the bill would not have protected anyone's religious freedom. It also could have led to severely negative economic consequences for Arizona, from the potential loss of next year's Super Bowl, to the potential loss of jobs from major businesses like Apple & Intel.
In an action that only seemed to surprise the bigots on the extreme right, after being blasted by progressives, liberals, Democrats, and in a pleasant surprise, corporations and even some Republicans, the tide made a signifcant turn and Wednesday evening Arizona Governor Jan Brewer vetoed the anti-gay bill. What's more, the firestorm that exposed the heinous Arizona bill also seems to have scared politicians in Georgia and Ohio who've now dropped similar doomed legislation.
As we recently mentioned here, when Democrats and rational Americans stand together, America tends to win. That theory has been proven through growing numbers of wins on major policy issues, and those successes have continued to embolden progressives and liberals. Some Democrats have even begun to go on the offensive against major right-wing boogiemen like the Koch Brothers, as Greg Sargent pointed out yesterday.
Winning is something everyone likes, but like any action, winning has consequences, too. We think it's important Democrats take a look at some of the consequences of our energy policies, before a rising tide of small political victories, relatively cheap oil, and high efficiency technology blind us to the mess we're creating around us.
Even as one of our own staff members is now driving a car that gets over 100 mpg daily, and even as America's position as a world oil and energy leader continues to grow, that still doesn't mean we've solved the problems of our dirty energy economy.
A major oil spill in the Mississippi River just last weekend closed the mouth of the nation's largest interior shipping lane and the Port of New Orleans. Federal regulators are issuing emergency testing guidelines for shipping oil by rail, even as railroads scramble to institute new safety measures.
The pipeline and fracking wars aren't over yet either. As Dave Domina, the attorney for the Nebraska landowners battling TransCanada, assured his clients and the public this week, the fight to stop that pipeline isn't yet a done deal. As Katie Valentine detailed in Think Progress, a second 600 mile pipeline known as the Flanagan South line has aready been rammed through with very little media attention.
Meanwhile, even as cities like L.A. are moving to ban fracking, major oil companies like Exxon continue to push for more fracking almost everywhere - except in the neighborhood of Exxon's CEO - even as more negative consequences of fracking continue to be discovered.
There are some wins, even on the issues of dirty energy. Colorado's Gov. John Hickenlooper successfully pushed through the Colorado legislature tighter pollution rules for oil and gas producers. The world's largest solar power plant opened in the Nevada desert earlier this month, and after seeing what the U.S. did with that power plant, Mexico is now set to build Latin America's largest solar farm to replace an aging, oil-driven power plant.
Every step forward, as a society, is a good thing. That said, if we're going to truly support progress, we must make sure that the political moves we make, as well as those we stop, don't have unintended negative consequences that rise up and drown out any good we might do.
Wednesday, February 26, 2014
Even Children Can See It's Wrong
America today is not the freewheeling place millions of Americans remember it being when they were young and strolled the streets with their friends.
It's not that America is a more dangerous place. In fact, as the recently released FBI Preliminary Semiannual Crime Statistic report proves, America in general, is the safest it's been in many years.
If you listen to the right-wing media though, there seem to be victims everywhere you look in America. From the poor little billionaires being "attacked" for acting like selfish, arrogant jerks, to the fake Christians terrified they or their kids might have to sit next to a gay person in a diner, the right wing in America continues to see boogiemen everywhere.
As Jonathan Chait pointed out Tuesday, when they're caught lying about an issue like the Affordable Care Act, conservatives and Republicans today immediately crumple into a metaphorical fetal position and cry that they're the victims. They even claim to be victims in their inability to pass major legislation like immigration reform, even though - as Greg Sargent has consistently proven - the only people who are victims are the Americans still waiting for Republicans in Congress to do any kind of worthwhile legislating.
Nowhere has this false meme of victimhood been more obvious lately than in the attempt to legalize bigotry and 'Jim Crow'-style treatment of LGBT Americans through a series of laws in states all over the country, generally referred to as "religious freedom" laws.
In truth, these proposed laws do absolutely nothing to protect the rights of any American of any religion to worship as he or she sees fit.
In fact, as Cecile Richards pointed out in the Daily Beast on Monday, these "religious freedom" laws - along with the Hobby Lobby and Conestoga cases that the Supreme Court will hear next month - are simply legal fictions, designed to allow both for profit corporations and not-for-profit organizations like religious groups to pick and choose which laws the people running them would like to follow.
Want to have slaves in America today? Under these "religious freedom" laws, you may be able to simply claim you're a Christian, and quote Leviticus 25:44-46. Want to beat your wife and get away with it? Christians also have that covered multiple times in the Bible. Most other religions have similar justifications for heinous acts from murder to vandalism that are authorized under their tenets, even if the civil laws of the land don't allow it.
Of course, we realize that those examples sound ridiculous. Then again, so does the idea of attempting to make a class of Americans into second-class citizens, using legal attempts at nullification, which is what these bills would do to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered Americans.
The fact that so-called Christians are pushing so hard to have bigotry enacted into law, in America, at a time when Americans are more rapidly than ever accepting gay and lesbian Americans as their equals, is both sick and sad.
The sheer terror that many of those on the right seem to have right now, that the view of America they have may be under siege from an evil force is something we can totally empathize with.
The problem is, the force that is committing those acts of exclusion and evil is the one in their own mirrors - a fact that even children can see.
Too bad right wing Americans can't seem to.
It's not that America is a more dangerous place. In fact, as the recently released FBI Preliminary Semiannual Crime Statistic report proves, America in general, is the safest it's been in many years.
If you listen to the right-wing media though, there seem to be victims everywhere you look in America. From the poor little billionaires being "attacked" for acting like selfish, arrogant jerks, to the fake Christians terrified they or their kids might have to sit next to a gay person in a diner, the right wing in America continues to see boogiemen everywhere.
As Jonathan Chait pointed out Tuesday, when they're caught lying about an issue like the Affordable Care Act, conservatives and Republicans today immediately crumple into a metaphorical fetal position and cry that they're the victims. They even claim to be victims in their inability to pass major legislation like immigration reform, even though - as Greg Sargent has consistently proven - the only people who are victims are the Americans still waiting for Republicans in Congress to do any kind of worthwhile legislating.
Nowhere has this false meme of victimhood been more obvious lately than in the attempt to legalize bigotry and 'Jim Crow'-style treatment of LGBT Americans through a series of laws in states all over the country, generally referred to as "religious freedom" laws.
In truth, these proposed laws do absolutely nothing to protect the rights of any American of any religion to worship as he or she sees fit.
In fact, as Cecile Richards pointed out in the Daily Beast on Monday, these "religious freedom" laws - along with the Hobby Lobby and Conestoga cases that the Supreme Court will hear next month - are simply legal fictions, designed to allow both for profit corporations and not-for-profit organizations like religious groups to pick and choose which laws the people running them would like to follow.
Want to have slaves in America today? Under these "religious freedom" laws, you may be able to simply claim you're a Christian, and quote Leviticus 25:44-46. Want to beat your wife and get away with it? Christians also have that covered multiple times in the Bible. Most other religions have similar justifications for heinous acts from murder to vandalism that are authorized under their tenets, even if the civil laws of the land don't allow it.
Of course, we realize that those examples sound ridiculous. Then again, so does the idea of attempting to make a class of Americans into second-class citizens, using legal attempts at nullification, which is what these bills would do to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered Americans.
The fact that so-called Christians are pushing so hard to have bigotry enacted into law, in America, at a time when Americans are more rapidly than ever accepting gay and lesbian Americans as their equals, is both sick and sad.
The sheer terror that many of those on the right seem to have right now, that the view of America they have may be under siege from an evil force is something we can totally empathize with.
The problem is, the force that is committing those acts of exclusion and evil is the one in their own mirrors - a fact that even children can see.
Too bad right wing Americans can't seem to.
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