This is just... stupefying.
I cannot add anything to this discussion, nor voice my stunned outrage as eloquently as these two do here, but WOW. I just never believed anything like this could happen here. Jesus H. Christ: these people are MANDATING that the government basically rape women who exercise a legal right to control their own bodies. The people promoting this should be jailed for tyranny.
(Dahlia Lithwick covers the same topic in Slate.)
I mean, honestly: who would support such a measure? No sane woman, certainly. But what man would support it? And what woman would want anything to do with such a man? How does a party at war with 51% of the population (and a sizeable chunk of the other 49% who support the 51%) remain viable? How can we possibly be having this discussion in 2012 America?
I have never in my lifetime witnessed anything more outrageous than this.
(And why are men never the focus of these draconian tactics? Why, for example, are not the fathers of the--presumably--illegitimate children not imprisoned and forced to pay for the children they've fathered?)
I keep thinking it can't get worse, and I'm shocked and ashamed almost daily to see how wrong I am.
Showing posts with label politics / insanity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label politics / insanity. Show all posts
Friday, February 17, 2012
Thursday, May 19, 2011
About That Vampire Squid...
From Matt Taibbi's latest blog post:
As I will urge shortly in a review, everyone should get a copy of Taibbi's book Griftopia, which explains what's really going on with the financial meltdown. (It's probably not what you think.)
A lot of people aren't aware of the role Wall Street investment banks had in moving American jobs overseas. Most of the major bailout recipients, in fact, helped finance the wholesale export of the American manufacturing sector by lending money to the Chinese to build the sophisticated industrial infrastructure it needed to take full advantage of its inexhaustible supply of cheap pseudo-slave labor. This has been one of Bernie Sanders's pet peeves for years, that we not only provide financial assistance to companies who lay off American workers, we even spend taxpayer money to help finance the disappearance of American jobs.
As I will urge shortly in a review, everyone should get a copy of Taibbi's book Griftopia, which explains what's really going on with the financial meltdown. (It's probably not what you think.)
Saturday, April 9, 2011
I Wish I Believed in Reincarnation
Maybe I'd get to come back as Rolling Stone columnist Matt Taibbi.
Then I could write things like this.
Yes, yes, he begins with some petulant character assassination, but he soon enough gets down to business telling us how we are helping speed ourselves up to, and over, the precipice of financial ruin.
I am so tired and discouraged at seeing my country on its knees and those who have most benefited from our system unwilling to do their part to help. Our national debt is nearly universally cited as an impending national catastrophe, and yet to Republicans it's clearly not as great a catastrophe as failing to deliver more tax cuts to the country's well-off. Tax rates are at an historical low (for modern times) and yet Rupert Murdoch and his cabal have convinced a large part of middle America that they're being pillaged by taxes--and better yet, that the tax burden of rich folks is keeping the economy down!--even as the country is coming apart in front of us. How do you pull off such an illusion and get people to go to the polls eager to chop off their own hands?
We have not had such a dangerous wealth disparity since the days before the Great Depression, and yet I get lectured every day by Republicans about our tax system as a "redistribution of wealth," as though the world is full of deadbeats living fat off the hard-working rich white man. In what is becoming standard Republican strategy, the reality is the mirror-opposite of that narrative: a small group at the top is living super-fat off the poor and middle classes, and off the capital gains of the investments they were able to make by not having to pay a fair share of upkeep for the country that made them rich. No wonder guys want to get into business and become moguls and stock brokers and currency traders and CEOs.
The tax code in this country may be byzantine and as full of holes as swiss cheese, but the idea that the rich are being punished by taxation is a lie. And I'd like to stop hearing people try to make this argument to me.
Then I could write things like this.
Paul Ryan, the Republican Party’s latest entrant in the seemingly endless series of young, prickish, over-coiffed, anal-retentive deficit Robespierres they’ve sent to the political center stage in the last decade or so, has come out with his new budget plan. All of these smug little jerks look alike to me – from Ralph Reed to Eric Cantor to Jeb Hensarling to Rand Paul and now to Ryan, they all look like overgrown kids who got nipple-twisted in the halls in high school, worked as Applebee’s shift managers in college, and are now taking revenge on the world as grownups by defunding hospice care and student loans and Sesame Street. They all look like they sleep with their ties on, and keep their feet in dress socks when doing their bi-monthly duty with their wives... (continued)
Yes, yes, he begins with some petulant character assassination, but he soon enough gets down to business telling us how we are helping speed ourselves up to, and over, the precipice of financial ruin.
I am so tired and discouraged at seeing my country on its knees and those who have most benefited from our system unwilling to do their part to help. Our national debt is nearly universally cited as an impending national catastrophe, and yet to Republicans it's clearly not as great a catastrophe as failing to deliver more tax cuts to the country's well-off. Tax rates are at an historical low (for modern times) and yet Rupert Murdoch and his cabal have convinced a large part of middle America that they're being pillaged by taxes--and better yet, that the tax burden of rich folks is keeping the economy down!--even as the country is coming apart in front of us. How do you pull off such an illusion and get people to go to the polls eager to chop off their own hands?
We have not had such a dangerous wealth disparity since the days before the Great Depression, and yet I get lectured every day by Republicans about our tax system as a "redistribution of wealth," as though the world is full of deadbeats living fat off the hard-working rich white man. In what is becoming standard Republican strategy, the reality is the mirror-opposite of that narrative: a small group at the top is living super-fat off the poor and middle classes, and off the capital gains of the investments they were able to make by not having to pay a fair share of upkeep for the country that made them rich. No wonder guys want to get into business and become moguls and stock brokers and currency traders and CEOs.
The tax code in this country may be byzantine and as full of holes as swiss cheese, but the idea that the rich are being punished by taxation is a lie. And I'd like to stop hearing people try to make this argument to me.
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