Current affairs

Political junkie that I am, I've been fascinated by the response to President Obama's statement in a speech that successful Americans owe much of their success to societal factors -- education system, roads and bridges, Internet, etc. -- they didn't build themselves. There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me -- because they want to give something back.  They know they didn’t -- look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own.  You didn’t get there on your own.  I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was…

This is a lie: "guns don't kill people; people do." No, that's wrong. Guns kill people. This is a fact. Believe it, unless you're so anti-American, you consider that citizens of the United States are hugely more violent and immoral than people in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, and other western industrialized nations. Have a look at two Wikipedia pages: First, List of countries by intentional homicide rate. In 2010, these were the intentional homicide rates per 100,000 population: United States 4.8Canada 1.6United Kingdom 1.2Austalia 1.2Germany .8 Are Americans really three times more murderous than Canadians? Or six times more murderous…

Check out a great article by David Pogue in Scientific American, "The TSA's Dumb Air-Security Rules Are Not Based on Science: Outdated screening rules aren't making for safer skies -- just longer lines." Having flown from Portland to Indiana and back recently, I agree with everything Pogue says. Getting through airport security is deeply irritating, but I wouldn't mind if the screening made scientific, logical, and reasonable sense.  But it doesn't. Here's some examples from Pogue's piece: Laptops have to come out of their bags and lie flat in a plastic tub—but not tablets, phones, Kindles, cameras or portable game…

Two things drove me crazy during today's drive from Salem to pick up my wife at the Portland International Airport: (1) Listening to right-wing talk show host Lars Larson, because his station, KXL, has good traffic alerts, and (2) getting stuck for a long time in a backup on I-205 whose seeming cause says a lot about the need for more mass transportation. This afternoon Larson didn't blather on about the blessedness of cars, and the hellishness of bicycles, light rail, high speed trains, and other alternatives to getting around in automobiles. But I've often heard him do this. Which…

Beware! Republicans want to raise taxes on the middle class. A lot. How? By repealing Obamacare, a.k.a., the Affordable Care Act, thereby making health care much less affordable for Americans. Obamacare will provide tax credits for those who want insurance, but can't afford to buy it on their own. $686 billion worth over 10 years. By contrast, well-to-do people who can afford health insurance, but refuse to buy it, would pay only $54 billion in shared responsbility penalties. If you want to call those penalties a tax, as the Supreme Court did recently, fine. The net result of repealing Obamacare…

Mitt Romney never met a flip that he didn't soon flop. The guy has no spine. He bends to whatever his right-wing Tea Party masters want him to say and do. Not a great leadership quality for a would-be president of the United States. Latest case in point: at first he and his campaign argued that the Affordable Health Care penalty for not having health insurance wasn't a tax, contrary to the Supreme Court majority opinion. Probably this was because the penalty in Massachusetts under "Romneycare," which "Obamacare" essentially copied, also was handled by the tax collection folks, so if…

When I said that "compassionate conservatism" is dead in today's GOP, a few commenters on my post disagreed with me. I stand by my assertion. Even more so, after watching in full an interview with Mitch McConnell on Fox News.  Even after being asked repeatedly how Republicans would handle the problem of 30 million uninsured Americans, how they would move toward universal coverage, McConnell kept dodging the question, saying "that's not the issue." What a jerk. What an uncaring, heartless, uncompassionate jerk. This is the modern GOP: out of ideas, out of caring. Here's the proof.  

This is how far modern-day conservatives have walked the Tea Party's right-wing plank: progressives like me now look back on Republicans like George W. Bush (and his father, George H.W.) a lot more fondly than we did when they were president. Like Ronald Reagan, both of the Bush's would be viewed as dangerously -- gasp!-- moderate by today's GOP faithful. Remember when "compassionate conservatism" was viewed positively by Republicans? No more. Just three years after George W. Bush left the White House, compassionate conservatives are an endangered species. In the new Tea Party era, they've all but disappeared from Congress, and…

Does Mitt Romney have no shame? For a supposedly religious guy, he sure has no problem lying. Today PolitiFact caught him in an obvious falsehood.  The Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, doesn't add trillions of dollars to the deficit. Actually, the Congressional Budget Office says that it will reduce the deficit. So Romney is just making crap up.  So says PolitiFact, in a more polite manner. How is it that a law can raise taxes and cut spending, but also add trillions to the deficit?That was Mitt Romney’s claim after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the core of the health…

There. I've gone out on a limb. I put a "will survive" in the title of this blog post. I've been thinking that the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, is going to fare better with the Supreme Court than most pundits are predicting. But until today I felt this was wishful thinking. My wife and I hate Blue Cross Blue Shield of Oregon, who we send a large amount of money to each month for an individual policy that steadily costs more and covers less. We're looking forward to becoming eligible for Medicare in a few years, having experienced the…

Do you want a puppet to represent you in Congress or be your President? Wouldn't you prefer to have someone who thinks for himself or herself and acts in the best interest of the country, rather than a robot who jumps whenever strings are pulled by a behind-the-scenes controller? Republicans are those puppets. Grover Norquist is the puppeteer. His rigid anti-tax pledge is the strings. Columnist Dana Milbank reports that it's been signed by all but four House Republicans, most Republican Senators, and Mitt Romney. Read his column, "Grover Norquist delivers the GOP's marching orders." Then make your own independent,…

I'm sure the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, Local 555, had other reasons to endorse a proposed 2012 ballot initiative here in Oregon -- the Oregon Cannabis Tax Act, which would legalize and tax marijuana consumed by adults. But when I saw the Portland Business Journal story, all I could think was: Smart move for a food group. Munchies! There's also some marijuana legalization news from Washington state today: The other ballot measure is Initiative 502, which would essentially legalize marijuana, regulate it, and tax it. Washingtonians seem to like pot even better than gay marriage, as the initiative is…

A few years ago Oregon raised taxes on businesses and high-income individuals. Tax-hating conservatives screamed warnings about how bad this would be for the state's economy, and how the "job creators" would be moving out. Not happening. Here's a couple of recent headlines from the Oregonian. Oregon economy growing at nation's second fastest rate"Oregon's economic growth outpaced all but one state in 2011, driven largely by double-digit manufacturing gains." Oregon payrolls continue to grow in May, but monthly figures cloud hiring picture"Oregon employers added 6,900 jobs last month, according to the state's monthly report. That's equal to 10 percent of all jobs…

After Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker survived his recall election last Tuesday, I was disappointed but not depressed. Democrats took back control of the state Senate and there were other reasons to not feel like the progressive sky was falling. Now I'm feeling even better. Joshua Holland helped boost my spirits with his "8 Ways Delusional Right-Wingers Are Blowing Wisconsin Out of Proportion." Thanks, Joshua. In the aftermath of the vote, conservatives, proving typically magnanimous in victory, spun the results like a top. They claimed the outcome spelled doom for Obama this fall, marked the death of the labor movement and…

What goes up, comes down. A loss today often presages a win tomorrow. The only certainty in politics is that nothing is certain. I'd hoped Governor Scott Walker would lose today's Wisconsin recall election, but polling showed that the prospects of this happening were low. His win is disappointing to me, not depressing.  I feel for the legions of hard-working progressives in Wisconsin who worked long and hard to recall Walker, collecting more than a million signatures. After subscribing to the Twitter feed of Wisconsin activist Kelly Steele, every day I enjoyed reading his passionate tweets about the ups and downs…