Telltale Signs And The Truth

A friend of a friend has been saying for years - long before the great Maya Angelou is credited with saying it - that, "When they show you who they are, believe them."

With all of the insanity going on in the world right now, that phrase has never seemed more appropriate.

Lately, on almost any topic, both the narrative thread usually spun by those in power, and the truth behind the lies seems to be leaking out everywhere, even more than usual. Sadly, that hasn't stopped some of those in power from desperately claiming there's nothing really to see.

One obvious place to see this Orwellian duality is in the ongoing Exxon Mobil oil disaster in Arkansas. Exxon has promised to the media and the residents of Mayflower, Arkansas that they will cover the oil disaster cleanup costs. However, their past history, and a 1980 law - reasserted as still valid in a 2011 IRS memo - say that Exxon Mobil doesn't have to pay into the Federal fund to clean up disasters like this one, and Exxon Mobil's history has all the property owners in Mayflower scared to death about the future. Further, Exxon Mobil appears to have convinced the FAA to put up a "no fly zone" over Mayflower, Arkansas, overseen by the corporation, until further notice.

That could be a long time, as Rachel Maddow noted last night, when she cited the only other tar sands oil spill in America, back in July of 2010 in Michigan. Nearly two years and $765 million dollars later, cleanup continues from that Enbridge disaster in Michigan - a disaster that the company said would only take a few short months to clean up.

On a completely different topic, in the last month, the leaders of North Korea appear to have decided they'd like to threaten to go to war - nuclear war - with pretty much everyone else on the planet. Their threats late Wednesday, that they've authorized a nuclear attack on the United States, appears to have both the U.S. and China - North Korea's neighbor - a bit worried. North Korea's belligerent rhetoric, though stronger than ever, still follows the same behavioral role they've been playing against the U.S. since the end of active hostilities in the Korean War nearly fifty years ago. They push, the U.S. and other nations agree to some form of a deal, then North Korea gets the goodies from those concessions - and then North Korea begins the cycle again.

Whether it's extremist Republicans in North Carolina threatening to pass an unconstitutional law declaring an official state religion, or the legislature in Connecticut passing strong new gun safety laws, or people like President Obama and Sec. of Defense Chuck Hagel taking a cut in pay in solidarity with all those Americans who will be affected by sequester furloughs, people all over America and the rest of the world are letting their true colors leak out all over the place.

Even simple, methodically tested numbers are giving up the truth more easily than they seem to have in the past. For example, in a Quinnipiac poll released Wednesday, it's obvious that 43 percent of Americans would support a Democratic U.S. House candidate in 2014, but only 35 percent would support a Republican candidate for the same office. However, the numbers also show that gerrymandering - effectively, cheating by changing the boundaries of congressional districts -  will make it nearly impossible for the will of the American people to be accurately reflected in the makeup of the U.S. House.

If you're looking for the truth, as we've always said, you simply have to open your eyes. Now that it seems to be leaking out everywhere, seeing the truth should be easier than ever. Seeing isn't really the problem, though.

The problem is that far too many people keep seeing the truth, yet refuse to believe.

At least we know who they really are. They keep showing us every day.

It's All About Timing

With a full staff back from vacation (though still under the weather), and everything on the table today from media ethics to the growing damage caused by the sequester, we thought the best use of our time and yours was to focus on timing - specifically, the timing on issues of gun safety legislation.

The NRA lobby, notorious for slow-walking gun safety legislation to its death, once again belatedly trotted out its own plan on Tuesday, a 225-page "school safety" report that may as well have been titled, "Let's Arm Everyone In School Except The Kids" or, even more simply, "Guns For Teachers." The only thing that might be worse than arming all the teachers and school staff everywhere is listening to the NRA in the first place.

It's obvious the NRA's latest document is nothing more than a carefully worded exercise in evading one of the five key components about gun safety we addressed initially last December - that while the media, mental health, economics, and politics are all factors in our national gun violence problem, it's the guns themselves that are the key part of the problem.

One of the other five components of America's continued gun violence problem is our corrupt political system - a system which wasn't always as corrupt as it is now.

Greg Sargent of the Washington Post exposed that reality clearly early Tuesday afternoon when he dug up an old New York Times interview with Senator John McCain from October 2000, along with a television ad of McCain denouncing the private gun seller loophole. Senator McCain, a longtime ally of the NRA, clearly laid out in the 2000 television ad the same problems with the loophole - often called the 'gun show loophole' - which most sensible gun rights supporters agree even today are problems.

The 2000 television ad was designed to help voters in Colorado and Oregon push to pass state laws for background checks on private gun sales, something the Colorado legislature and governor just put into law in their state last month. McCain's October 2000 interview with the New York Times made it obvious that the Senator wasn't just pushing for changes to the laws in Colorado and Oregon though. Indeed, in the Times' piece, McCain claimed that he would push to pass the gun-show bill in Congress in 2001, though history clearly shows McCain did no such thing.

In fact, these days, Senator McCain seems to be trying to time his media appearances so that he doesn't have to face the 2000 version of himself on gun safety.

Not surprisingly, McCain isn't the only one with bad timing.

Asa Hutchinson, the former GOP congressman from Arkansas who presented the NRA's school "plan" midday Tuesday agreed later in the day in a CNN interview with Wolf Blitzer that universal background checks would in fact be a sensible idea. Of course, the NRA, in a move as well timed as snowshoes in June, immediately followed up Hutchinson's CNN appearance by saying the former congressman didn't currently speak for them on background checks.

Maybe Hutchison was thinking about a different time. In 1999, the NRA's Wayne LaPierre testified in front of Congress that the NRA supported background checks as "reasonable…  for every sale at every gun show. No loopholes anywhere for anyone." The NRA even did a massive ad campaign in 1999 in favor of background checks.

The fact is, whatever ridiculous plan the NRA is pushing for today, any American with sense would need another hole in their head if they were to honestly believe that what the NRA - the gun manufacturers' lobby - has to say on guns is going to be anything other than a message to "Buy more guns."

In life, timing is everything.

The gun makers' time to control the message of gun safety has passed. It's long past time Americans enacted sensible gun safety reform.

Time To Put Your Shoulder Into It

The wait for spring to truly arrive has seemed especially long this year in many corners of the nation, so to many Americans, the crushingly slow move towards seasonably warm Spring weather feels like the whole nation is taking on a Sisyphean task, pushing a massive boulder uphill.

For those of us focused on moving our nation forward politically, this painfully slow feeling is one we've been used to for at least a dozen years now. That frustration is often quite obvious in the way President Obama continues to push for progress against the obstructionists in the GOP.

For some time now, though - especially since the successful 2012 election - we've been hearing more complaining and grousing coming from the liberal left towards President Obama and towards certain Democratic politicians. We're more than willing to admit - we've got our own issues with President Obama's Adminstration, and with certain other Democratic politicians, chief among them the ineffectual Harry Reid.

That said, we've got news for progressive-minded Americans, and indeed any sensible American, regardless of their political leanings who wants to sit on their backsides and blame all our nation's problems on either President Obama or Republicans in Congress: Get off your behind, step up, and get to pushing. It's time to put your shoulder into it - "it" being the things we need to do to move America into the future.

A perfect example of this is in the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, aka "Obamacare."

As Ed Kilgore of Washington Monthly notes, this week marks the third anniversary of the final House vote that gave us the ACA. The ignorant idiots of the far right, like right-winger Ben Domenech, continue to trash the ACA, insisting that someday they'll repeal and replace Obamacare.

Anyone with half a brain has to laugh at that attitude, as Republicans in Congress have been promising "repeal and replace" for nearly three years now, and have NEVER presented so much as a whisper of a hint of a notion of a realistic replacement plan for the ACA. In a similar way, Republicans have been promising to strike down Roe vs. Wade for forty years, and while they have pushed through some draconian attacks on the rights of American women, they still haven't been successful completely curtailing the rights of women and individuals after forty years of failed attempts. That doesn't mean defeating the habitual right-wing liars will be easy, as Julie Burkhart and the Trust Women Foundation are finding out in Kansas right now.

The fact is, securing further progress in America is going to be hard.

Whether it's on the issue of gun safety, where most Americans - 91% - agree, or it's on the issue of immigration reform, on the availability of honest, ethical, and diverse media, or fighting for sensible, effective, progressive economic policies that work, there are no more battles against the small-minded that will be easy to win any more.

Extremist conservatives understand: their very existence is threatened by things like hard work, performed by good people of all sides working towards common goals on issues like the budget, immigration, gun safety, health care, the environment, and more. Listening to one another, and remembering that most Americans really do want the best for other Americans - even many of those they disagree with - isn't easy. Passing what appears to be sane sensible political solutions over the billions of dollars at the disposal of corporate politics is even more difficult.

The only way to lose, however, is to give up, to stop pushing to make things better for all, to stop pushing forward.

When President Obama campaigned, he never said, "Elect me, and I'll do it all for you." He said, "Yes WE Can."

If WE want anything done, WE - all of us - must put our proverbial shoulders into it, together.