No Merit Badge for You!

Remember a few months ago when the Boy Scouts announced that No Gays Allowed was now their official policy.  No gay kids, no gay scout leaders or employees.  No gay need apply.  And they declared they were doing this to "protect the children."  So some fabulous young scouts were out on their keisters, along with some fabulous scouting leaders.

Then the L.A. Times comes out with an exhaustive report after "examining 1,600 confidential files dating from 1970 to 1991 [and] found that Scouting officials frequently urged admitted offenders to quietly resign -- and helped many cover their tracks."  [that] "Volunteers and employees suspected of abuse were allowed to leave citing bogus reasons such as business demands, 'chronic brain dysfunction' [???] and duties at a Shakespeare festival."  And that "The details are contained in the organization's confidential 'perversion files,' a blacklist of alleged molesters, that the Scouts have used internally since 1919.  Scouts' lawyers around the country have been fighting in court to keep the files from public view."  And, "In about 400 of [500] of those cases -- 80 percent -- there is no record of Scouting officials reporting the allegations to police.  In more than 100 of the cases, officials actively sought to conceal the alleged abuse or allowed the suspects to hide it, The Times found."

Well, sure.  I can see the problem.  When you're getting a merit badge in wilderness tracking, for example, the first thing you learn is you must correctly identify the right footprint.  No good rushing off on a deer track if you're hunting a panther.  So, listen carefully, Scout leaders:

1.  There's gay people.  2.  There's straight people.  3.  There's pedophiles.
You can be a gay pedophile.  You can be a straight pedophile.  But the key word there is:  pedophile.  That's who you're supposed to be looking for, not gay people. HUGE difference.. 

So, no merit badges for you.  You've been tracking the wrong people. 

Oh, America, Get Over Yourself!

Thanks to the media and America's generalized narcissism, a whole lot of us are getting all riled up over those crazy Muslims, wringing our hands and saying, O, O, why do they hate us?

Well, first of all, many of them actually have a long, long list of perfectly valid reasons and if Americans bothered to read much history, they'd understand the list very well.  But, secondly, a whole lot of the DeathToAmerica! foofarrah in the streets, the "Arab Street," isn't about America at all; it's about local politics -- who's going to prevail in a newly liberated country.  Will it be the conservative Salafists?  A more moderate group? Secularists?  Another dictator?

And, as any political organizer knows, having a great hot-button trigger that's easily understood is a great way to get a good turnout. Remember in New York when a group of Muslims wanted to build a mosque near Ground Zero?  That was a perfectly legal, proper thing to do in the Land of  Freedom of Religion, right?  Remember how perfectly decent people suddenly lost their marbles and turned into raging, ugly, racist bigots, snarling and hissing about "muslim murderers", and etc.  Shameful.  Disgraceful.  But there it was: Americans coming unglued, having an irrational, emotional, ugly, bigoted flare up over . . . what?  Another group of Americans who just wanted to build a house of worship.

And Americans are now having a fit over another group of people having an irrational, emotional, ugly flare up over . . . what?  A crappy, ridiculous film.

This is what a certain percentage of people always do. Including Americans. So, get over yourself.  You're also no better than you ought to be either.

Awwww, Mitt.  You don't love us freeloading bums anymore, do you? 

So Mitt finally spilled the beans of his heart:  He thinks 47% of us lazy, good for nothing citizens, are a bunch of tax-shirking freeloaders who want to loaf around all day eating bon-bons and waiting for our government checks.  That we "pay no income taxes," are "dependent upon government." and we're all food-stamp black welfare queens who are going to vote for Barack Obama no matter what Romney has to say.

Well, first of all, Mitt clearly didn't see last week's Time Magazine's cover story on "Subsidy Nation," a brilliant exploration of how everyone in the country is on the mooch -- farm subsidies, energy subsidies, infrastructure subsidies, tax breaks -- subsidized everything that touches our lives. (That electric bill you just paid doesn't begin to cover the real cost of getting that power to you.  Ditto your water bill. Fill your gas tank?  Take off the gas/oil subsidies/tax-breaks and you'd have heart seizure watching the pump ratchet up the real (unsubsidized) price per gallon. Hospitals, public health, streets, airline safety, schools, public safety, you name it, every bit of it is communally subsidized by all of us.  Which will come as a shock, no doubt, to privitizing Ayn Randers of all stripes, including Paul Ryan, bless his heart.)

True, Mitt forgot to note that all us 47% moochers were paying payroll and sales tax, something The Mitt might have overlooked since he may not be familiar with getting an actual "payroll check" as opposed to a "dividend check."  And I'm sure he forgot the fact that those moochers who did pay income tax were taxed at a higher rate for their income than he was.  And, yes, he likely overlooked that, according to the Tax Policy Center, over half of those moochers who paid no taxes, "more than half were elderly and more than a third were not elderly but had income under $20,000.  Which means that "about half of those were off the rolls because they had low incomes."

So, in MittWorld, people who are so poor they don't hit the income tax threshold are moochers.  Noted one wag on the New York Times comment page, "He's talking about the 47% who clean his toilets, do his laundry, drive him around, clean the hotels, pick the fruit and vegetables.  Maybe if Mitt and his snobby pals paid a living wage, the working poor wouldn't need food stamps.  He really does look down his nose at the rest of us."

Ya think?      

Where's the Pony?

Calhoun’s Can(n)ons for April 8, 2011

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.
Thomas Pynchon

The laughter started in the middle of Los Osos Valley Road, halfway home. I had been driving along while listening to another radio news broadcast so full of crap it took my breath away. Then it hit me: They’re not even trying anymore. The bullsh*t has now gotten so high it’s simply no longer worthwhile to try to spin it, to cover it up or ignore it or pretend it isn’t there. There’s simply too much of it. Piles of it. Mountain ranges of it, filling all the spaces of our daily lives. A person can’t breathe any more without inhaling bullsh*t.

In the bad old days, there was a sense that arrant nonsense should be hedged in with at least some kind of plausibility, that blatant, palpable lies needed to be finessed, that hypocrisy and theft and greed and wrongdoing and bad behavior needed to be justified or hidden because there once was some kind of sense of accountability or shame left in the country. A sense that people were too smart to fall for the feeble con, the misdirect, the political carny tricks that only worked on low-information rubes.

No longer.

We aren’t bombing Lybia, France is. President Obama is a Muslim who was born in Kenya. Tax breaks for the rich and for multinational corporations create jobs. Trickledown economics raises all boats. The budget deficit can be fixed by cuts alone. Taxes are job killers. What’s good for Wall Street is good for America. (Which is why I paid more taxes last year than G.E. did?) Medical reform hurts businesses. A fairer, reformed tax code is socialism. Illegal immigrants are destroying America. Global warming is a myth. Tighter (and enforced) Wall Street rules and regs will kill the economy. Outsourced jobs didn’t kill the American Dream. Skewed tax breaks for the wealthy didn’t kill the American Dream. A de-regulated Wall Street didn’t kill the American Dream. Collective bargaining by Wisconsin’s teachers did!

Bullsh*t.

Here in California, which is sinking under a mountain of debt, the legislature has been held hostage by a minority of Republicans who refused to even let the people vote on extending a modest handful of about-to-expire taxes and instead proposed a cuts-only budget which will result in continued tax breaks for big corporations while it slashes K-12 funding and cuts services for the most vulnerable of our citizens. In short, Grover Norquistian Bullsh*t.

In real life, when your family finds itself in debt, you tighten your belts, cut expenses to the bone and every able bodied family member, including the kids, goes out and gets part-time jobs to raise income. But not in Republican Norquististan. In that country, Daddy first goes out and buys a few Rolls Royces for himself and his buddies, thereby busting the budget. Then he absolutely forbids Mom and the kids from getting jobs to raise more money, and instead takes money out of the house-repair account to buy more cars for himself, and if the leaking roof can’t be repaired and falls down as a consequence, well, too bad. Then he eliminates family medical coverage to ensure his rich friends have extra money for luxuries, and if the kids get sick and die as a result, also too bad. As for taking care of Granny? Sorry, Daddy needs that money to avoid paying taxes on a new yacht, so out into the street she goes while the rest of the family is put on bread and water rations for the duration.

In the good old days, anyone proposing that line of Bullsh*t would be laughed out of office. But not now. Now, they get elected by the very people who are going to get kicked to the curb – folks who understood too late that the funny piece of paper pinned to their backs was a bull’s eye. And now they’re afraid because they no longer even know how to ask the right questions.

Which is why the corporate pols no longer even bother to lie to them anymore. And why the bullsh*t is so high it’s blotting out the sun. And why I started laughing out loud while driving down Los Osos Valley Road, half-way home.

Donald Trump for President! Too perfect. America? You’re fired!