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Let's repeat that:

Gay couples don't have equal rights. Gay people do.

As far as I know, couples are not mentioned in the US Constitution. However, people are. We the people (etc etc etc). So when the mainstream media, stuck in their tired old frames, too stuck in their ways and prideful of their privilege, go on and on about a "victory for gay couples," you need to step back and think about what's really happening.

The court ruled that gay people have equal rights.

And when you think about this, it's a no-brainer.

Example: If I want to marry Jane, and the government says, "No, you can't," what it's really saying is, "No, you can't marry Jane because you are a woman." Of course, if I were a man, sure, I could marry Jane.

That is plain and simple sex discrimination. It's not about gay-ness. It's not about couples. It's about the government requiring that I be of a certain sex in order to marry Jane.

This is why the right-wing hysteria over gay marriage is so misplaced and overblown — all the more so when it's a tea bagger. Tea baggers are big on saying how they're for shrinking government, but they sure want the government to protect them from their own homophobia.

For an eloquent post on this topic, see Derek Powazek's post:

In much of the news coverage today, I’ve seen the phrase “Pro-Gay Marriage” used to describe the people who are celebrating Judge Walker’s ruling. But this rubs me the wrong way.

I’m not Pro-Gay Marriage, I’m Pro-Equality. I’m not Pro-Gay Rights, I’m Pro-Common Sense. I’m Anti-Discrimination. I’m Anti-Enshrining Your Queasiness About Buttsex In My Constitution. I’m Pro-When The Constitution Says We’re All Equal, It Means We’re All Equal.

I’m married, and it matters. It changes the way I look at the world, and the way the world looks at me. It comes with state and federal benefits and rights. Withholding those things from same-sex couples is discrimination, pure and simple. If you support withholding rights from people because of who they are, you’re a bigot. Period.

My grandmother taught me two important lessons. The first was tolerance. Enjoy people who are different from you. It’s the variety that makes life wonderful. The second was to always look out for the rights of others. Because if you sit by and let discrimination happen, you’ll be next.

So if you're against gay marriage, here's the easy solution: Don't do it. Now wasn't that easy? (If not, maybe you should ponder a bit on the source of your opposition.)

[Photo: Happy face of hate, by Burns! (cc)]

They claim to be about "getting the government off of our backs." The problem here is that the Tea Party seems to be salivating at the opportunity to enact on the state level laws that prohibit equal rights for gays, women and even racial minorities. Listen past the opening salvos about big government and you realize that what the tea baggers really want is to replace federal government authority with state government authority. Their central assumption is that states have inherent rights but individuals do not.

Witness their reactions to last week's court ruling striking down the Defense of Marriage Act as applied to Massachusetts:

A spokeswoman for one of the biggest Tea Party umbrella organizations, Tea Party Patriots, said that social questions were not part of their mission.

“As far as an assertion of states’ rights goes, I believe it’s a good thing,” said Shelby Blakely, executive director of The New Patriot Journal, the group’s online publication. “The Constitution does not allow federal regulation of gay marriage just as it doesn’t allow for federal regulation of health care.”

“But I don’t want to come off saying I support gay marriage,” she added.

No of course not. In fact, the social gains of the past 50 years seem to be in the crosshairs of tea baggers from Rand Paul to Sarah Palin to Sharron Angle.

And then there's tea bagger heaven: Arizona, where "papers please" is not a line from a Nazi in a World War 2 movie but rather a populist mantra.

This is not libertarian. This is authoritarian.

Let's look at a definition of Libertarianism:

Libertarians believe that individuals should have complete freedom of action, provided their actions do not infringe on the freedom of others.

—Encyclopedia Brittanica

Libertarianism describes a range of political beliefs that advocate the maximization of an individual's ability to think and act with few constraints from large social structures, such as government,[1][2][3] and the minimization or even abolition of the state.

—Wikipedia

An advocate of the doctrine of free will

—Mirriam-Webster ("libertarian")

The Tea Party, with it's stated goal of establishing greater authority to state governments, is not libertarian. In fact, when you look at the code words, off-the-record remarks, and actions of Tea Party leaders and supporters, it becomes clear that the Tea Party is actually about authoritarianism. To the Tea Party, the federal government's oppression is that it prevents them from oppressing gays, oppressing women (especially with regard to healthcare), and oppressing racial minorities.

And yet the Beltway crowd seems to buy into the claim that the Tea Party is libertarian.

E.J. Dione seems to think the Tea Party makes the common mistake:

The rise of the tea party movement is a throwback to an old form of libertarianism that sees most of the domestic policies that government has undertaken since the New Deal as unconstitutional. It typically perceives the most dangerous threats to freedom as the design of well-educated elitists out of touch with “American values.”

In a fascinating article analyzing the Tea Party — and the prevalence of women tea baggers — Ruth Rosen identifies some disturbing characteristics:

One important difference, however, is race. At Tea Party rallies you don’t see faces with dark complexions. Another important distinction is that men and women are drawn to this sprawling movement for a variety of overlapping but possibly different reasons. Both men and women seem to embrace an incoherent “ideology” which calls for freedom from government, no taxes, and an inchoate desire to “take back America,” which means restoring the nation to some moment when the country was white and “safe.”

She goes on to note how the conservative brand of "feminism" isn't quite the feminism that states that "Feminism is the radical idea that women are people." On the contrary:

Here is a great irony. Since 1980, when the backlash began attacking the women’s movement, young secular American women have resisted calling themselves feminists because the religious right-wing had so successfully created an unattractive image of a feminist as a hairy, man-hating, lesbian who spouted equality, but really wanted to kill babies. Now, Palin is forcing liberal feminists to debate whether these Christian feminists are diluting feminism or legitimizing it by making it possible to say that one is a feminist.

When I read what women write on Christian women’s web sites, I hear an echo from the late nineteenth century when female reformers sought to protect the family from “worldly dangers.” Frances Willard, leader of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, urged millions of women to enter the public sphere in order to protect their families, to address the decadent consequences and casualties of capitalism, to win suffrage, and to fight for prohibition, all in the name of protecting the purity of their homes and families.

For many contemporary evangelical Christian women, their motivations are similar. They want to enter the public sphere or even run for office to eliminate abortion, protect marriage, contain sexual relations, oppose gay marriage and clean up the mess made by the sexual revolution. [Emphasis added.]

This doesn't sound like liberty. It sounds like vesting greater freedom to state governments so they can oppress entire classes of people with impunity.

Am I wrong? If so, I'd love to see some proof.

In general, I'm politically right of center when it comes to fiscal issues. Obviously, after the catastrophic banking crisis of 2008, when we saw up close that the virtues of the invisible hand of the market come with a price: markets crash and revivals can be long in coming and very painful to wait for. The cost to our society has been very dear so far, and is looking to get worse before we see a meaningful upturn. Sometimes letting the market just do its thing can simply be too devastating to bear. Yet when things are going well, it's generally good to just stay out of the way of what the market does well. In other words, the cycles of markets are too turbulent to just let them run wild, but it's mainly the lows that we have to worry about.

I look at it like floating in a pool. Just let the buoyancy happen. But if you start to go under, do something about it.

Last night I caught Paul Krugman's appearance on Charlie Rose, where he talked about the price we're paying for fiscal austerity. His main point was that austerity now only shrinks the economy, and that the Fed is already as low as it can be on interest rates so there's really nothing more they can do to stimulate private sector growth to compensate for cuts in government economic activity. Krugman says we need another stimulus now to get the economy moving again. In the two previous major economic slowdowns, the emergence from the doldrums came, in the 1880s, from the railroad boom and, in the Great Depression, from World War 2. In the first case, technological innovation and a new industrial market led to economic expansion. In the latter case, the massive government spending on the war effort kicked the market into gear. Krugman asserts that now we're at a moment in time where we need one or the other to get us out of this mess, or we risk falling into deflation and rising unemployment.

In other words, we're sinking below the surface and we need either a boogie board or we better start activity swimming to get our heads above water.

To me it seems obvious that a national effort pushing development of alternative energies and energy-efficient technologies could prove to be the technological innovation that leads to new industrial markets. America could even become a manufacturing nation again, an exporter of goods.

In the meantime, though, we need some kind of spending to invest in our infrastructure — fix our crumbling bridges, our pothole-filled roads, our collapsing schools; build up our information infrastructure before we end up being on par with the third world — do things that put people to work improving our commons that is beyond the purview of any single corporation and bet on the future potential of this country.

The Republicans, however, and not a few conservative Democrats, are in a psychological brain-lock triggered, I believe, in no small part by their own buyer's remorse: After racking up trillions of dollars of national debt under the Bush Administration, and setting the stage for the bank meltdown that cost us trillions more in not just bailout funds but also lost economic growth and activity, the GOP has suddenly glommed onto the idea that they need to stop spending. Their anuses have puckered tightly shut and they'll be damned if they unclench.

And this anal retentive fear of spending is exacerbated by the right-wing's culture of bedwetting fear, which is showing itself in conservative attacks on immigrants, on equal rights for gays, on equal rights for blacks (because of course the Civil Rights legislations of the 1960s are problematic, says tea bagger candidate Rand Paul and others), and so on.

So the panic-stricken conservatives are blocking even aid to the unemployed — as if unemployed works who are looking for work but cannot find it were the real problem of our economy. Like nervous children who never learned how to swim, the right wing leaders are locking onto us all, frozen in fear, dragging us all down under water.

Yet the Republicans declare that such panic is virtuous.

Changing metaphors for a moment, let's look at our economy as a house. In general, you want to run your house in sound fiscal order. But sometimes you just have to spend. You have to spend if the roof is leaking. You have to spend if the water main breaks. You have to spend if the electrical wiring shorts out. You can't just say, "Well we spent too much on the credit cards throwing parties, so now we refuse to fix the broken water heater." (Maybe you shouldn't have spent so much on your war parties in the first place, Senator Mitch McConnell!)

Now is not the time to give in to conservatives' panic. We are not a country that displays its best out of fear. When we face the challenges head-on and mobilize our resources, we tend to triumph. When we react in fear and trepidation, we tend to make mistakes that cost us for years, even decades.

Yes, we need to get a handle on our long-term national debt. It's fucking frightening how big it has gotten in the last 10 years. But now's not the time. First we have to prime the economic engine again, and kick things into gear, get people working. Working people spend. Working people feel better about themselves. A working nation is empowered.

Then, when the economy is humming along again (which, by the by, also means government revenues are rising again), that's when we cut spending. Let's fix the house first, then worry about the monthly budget. Let's swim now, while we can, before we drown.

Consider the remarks of John McCain:

"We feel very strongly that it needs to be condition- based, because if you tell the enemy when you are leaving, then obviously it has an adverse effect on your ability to succeed. So that is a major concern. And there's still a great deal of ambiguity about that issue."

...During yesterday's press conference, Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) backed up McCain's assertions.

But let's consider this: Since 1945, Congress has failed to declare war on anyone or anything. Instead, they have left all war-making authority to the President. Why? You tell me. Mostly political cowardice, I'd wager.

So it's easy for these old wise men to kibbitz and criticize, but if they want to set conditions on the war — and especially since they aren't trying to stop an undeclared war — maybe they should get Congress to declare the fucking thing and then they can review to their hearts' content.

Until then, it's all posturing. Right or wrong, it's posturing.

The New Yorker quotes right-wing rabble rouser Andrew Brietbart:

“This is the revolution,” he told his audience, before explaining that the war against the mainstream media was not only political but also economic. Newspaper subscriptions are lapsing, he argued, because readers have tired of liberal bias.

Read more

Sorry, Andrew. People haven't stopped reading newspapers because they're offended, they're not reading because they're getting their information other ways that are faster, more relevant, more in depth (and quite often from those same newspapers' websites). It was true when Obama and the Democrats were insurgent, and it's true now.

Of course, the cock can claim he brings the sunrise, but who will believe him?

There's no doubting the energy in the tea bagger movement. The spittle practically flies at you right out of the TV screen.

There have been some interesting articles on the tea baggers lately. One of the most interesting is Mark Lilla's in The New York Review of Books: "The Tea Party Jacobins":

A new strain of populism is metastasizing before our eyes, nourished by the same libertarian impulses that have unsettled American society for half a century now. Anarchistic like the Sixties, selfish like the Eighties, contradicting neither, it is estranged, aimless, and as juvenile as our new century. It appeals to petulant individuals convinced that they can do everything themselves if they are only left alone, and that others are conspiring to keep them from doing just that. This is the one threat that will bring Americans into the streets.

Welcome to the politics of the libertarian mob.

I can't so easily dismiss everything that these "Jacobins" have to say, though. Among my concerns are indeed:

• The increasing power of the government.
• The increasing budget of the government.
• The increasing deficit of the government.
• The apparent erosion of civil rights.

No doubt your average tea bagger would define these concerns a bit differently than I do. But there's a bit of common ground there. And I'd say most progressives share these concerns. It's been a regular refrain in the progressive blogosphere for years.

But the tea baggers come with baggage — offensive, hateful baggage that I simply can't endorse, or even stomach:

• The anti-immigrant cant that smacks of racism and xenophobia and fear.
• The anti-gay rage that burns with homophobia and fear.
• The anti-women's health attitudes that crackle with misogyny and chauvinism and fear.
• The hysterical, amped up propagandizing, with liberal use of "fascist" and "socialist," often in the same sentence that drips with fear.
• And the utter stupidity that wails about fantasy nightmares like "the government taking over Medicare" (which, for you who were left behind, is a government program).

So where's the party for those of us who are fiscally on the conservative side and socially on the live-and-let-live side? Obviously the Republicans have been on a government-regulating-private-lives bent for decades now, so they're out. And the Democrats … well … when they aren't selling out to right-wing interests, they're coming up with big projects like this was 1965.

I feel like I've had no party my entire voting life. The Republicans have been hyenas barking at everyone to get in line, and the Democrats have been gazelles, running away, always striving for style points.

In the olden days, there was a real debate between Democrats and Republicans. It seems like it was more principled, more about ideas than about strutting around, claiming to be "the real Americans." And there certainly was less brazen selling out to lobbyists.

There was a time when Republicans were led by people like Barry Goldwater, who had what today would be considered "radical" ideas about small government: that "the government should stay out of people's private lives," and that included homosexuality and abortion. He even supported gays in the military.

It's a wonder the tea baggers aren't burning him in effigy.

Imagine a Goldwater kind of Republican Party opposing the Democrats. I wouldn't agree with them on a lot of things, but at least it's philosophically consistent, and would be a good counterbalance to the Democrats. As it is, I find myself rooting for the Dems not so much because I support what they're doing up and down the line — far from it — but rather because I find the Republican opposition so unprincipled, so spiteful, so unpatriotic and so incredibly stupid that it doesn't just turn me off, it frightens me.

It's almost like George W. Bush was a restraining influence, and now the wingnuts are really cutting loose.

No, if you're a fiscal moderate with leave-people-alone views on private life, like I am, you know that, when it comes down to it, we have no party to represent us. We just support the party that works against us the least. Resigned. Disgusted. Seeing the appeal of embracing cynical distance from it all, because actually doing something sensible seems so out of reach of our government these days.

And meanwhile the tea baggers mock us with their lurid, tragi-comic mockery of what this country really needs.

So now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to wrap up this little rant, pour myself a drink, and watch some TV like a good citizen.

To summarize:

The Pope had nothing to do with those cases.

And even if he was involved, you can't pin anything on him.

And even if you can, he has immunity.

And you're like an anti-Semite for even raising the issue!

No questions, please. We are infallible.

Bob Herbert has a powerful column today about the lack of civility in public discourse, especially as practiced and encouraged by Republican activists. He opens with this disturbing encounter:

A group of lowlifes at a Tea Party rally in Columbus, Ohio, last week taunted and humiliated a man who was sitting on the ground with a sign that said he had Parkinson’s disease. The disgusting behavior was captured on a widely circulated videotape. One of the Tea Party protesters leaned over the man and sneered: "If you’re looking for a handout, you’re in the wrong end of town."

Another threw money at the man, first one bill and then another, and said contemptuously, "I'll pay for this guy. Here you go. Start a pot."

Don't believe it? Here's some video, in case you missed it.

To them, life is nasty, brutish and short, and they want to make sure it stays that way.

Here's also video interview of the man they were taunting.

Yes, people are mad and frustrated. I've been frustrated with Washington pretty much all of my adult life. But this kind of nastiness — along with other things like shouting racist epithets at a black congressman, spitting on people, screaming "faggot" at Barney Frank, all the way back to John McCain's concession speech in 2008, where we heard shouts of "kill him" referring to Obama — is just awful. Maybe people like these goons have always been around, and we just haven't had to see or hear them before this age of citizen-generated media (blogs, YouTube, Twitter, etc.). I don't know.

But as someone who considers herself a moderate independent politically — which apparently makes me a communist or fascist, I can't tell which, according to the wingnuts — I can't find myself sympathizing at all with people like this.

The Republicans have a problem. Several problems, actually.

1. They're responsible for most of the national debt.
2. Republicans in Congress, whatever positions they may run on, vote as a block against:
   • Protecting people from air pollution.
   • Protecting people from water pollution.
   • Protecting people from having their health insurance cancelled when they get sick.
   • Allowing women to make decisions about their own bodies.
   • Allowing people who happen to be gay to have equal rights.
   • Religious freedom. (Only certain Christians are deemed acceptable.)
3. They're beholden to the evangelical right-wing.
4. They vote party first, country second.

And it's the last point that has me disgusted. Yes, Democrats can do this, too, but the GOP has the corner on me-right-you-wrong politics. Anything that's Republican is good, anything that's Democrat is bad, and that's that according to them. (And that's why you see things like cap-and-trade, a Republican policy under Ronald Reagan, is now evil as soon as Barack Obama endorses it.)

No, I am not a Democrat. But there's no way in hell I will trust a Republican Senator or Congressman to do the right thing, no matter what he or she says.

...unless, of course, you mean the Constitution of ancient Rome.

Many seem to have made the false assumption that we're stuck with the filibuster and the supermajority requirement in the Senate to stop a filibuster. So here's some news:

The filibuster is not in the United States Constitution. Nope. Go ahead. Go look. I dare you.

What the heck is this filibuster stuff then?

In the United States Senate, rules permit a senator, or a series of senators, to speak for as long as they wish and on any topic they choose, unless "three-fifths of the Senators duly chosen and sworn" (usually 60 out of 100 senators) brings debate to a close by invoking cloture under Senate Rule XXII. According to the Supreme Court ruling in U.S. v. Ballin (1892), changes to Senate rules could however be achieved by a simple majority. Nevertheless, under current Senate rules, a rule change itself could be filibustered, and in this case votes from two-thirds of the Senators present and voting would be required to break the filibuster. Despite this written requirement, the possibility exists that the filibuster could be changed by majority vote, using the so-called nuclear option. In current practice, actual continuous floor speeches are not required, although the Senate Majority Leader may require an actual traditional filibuster if he or she so chooses.

Got it? It's a Senate rule, and now you don't even have to filibuster to get the effect of filibustering. Isn't that nice and tidy. Wouldn't want to actually make a Senator work, now, would you?

And what about the House of Representatives?

In the House of Representatives, the filibuster (the right to unlimited debate) was used until 1842, when a permanent rule limited the duration of debate. The disappearing quorum was a tactic used by the minority until an 1890 rule eliminated it. As the membership of the House grew much larger than the Senate, the House has acted earlier to control floor debate and the delay and blocking of floor votes.

Imagine the braying filibustering we would have seen yesterday.

The healthcare debate happening now, let's face it, is the result of the decisions the Democratic and Republican parties have "evolved" (and I use that word advisedly) over the years.

RINO Whinos

The bad behavior of the GOP is just the tip of the iceberg of the Republican sell-out back in the 1960s. That's when the religious conservatives, empowered by Barry Goldwater's loss in the presidential campaign of 1964, surged into power and moved the GOP from being about fiscal conservatism and civil liberties and leaving people alone to live their own lives into the party of Big Brother, demanding governmental control over people's private lives while pushing major forms of corporate welfare.

The 2-year-old types of behavior the Republican leaders and prominent activists are indulging in arises out of this kind of self-righteous outlook on life. They consider themselves the good people, the "real" Americans. (And let's just not pay attention to their embracing of secession from the United States as an expression of their patriotism.) No, they aren't getting their way so they pout and whine and cry "no."

They also preach fear. It's a big thing to them, their fear. They are afraid of everyone ... especially Americans. Be afraid.

Well I am afraid. I'm afraid of them. They are creepy.

They'll Let Anyone in this Big Tent

But let's look at the Democrats. They're no great shakes either. Here they are in control of Congress and the White House and they can't get anything done.

Why the hell was this healthcare reform vote last night such a squeaker?

I'll tell you: It's that Big Tent strategy that the Democrats embraced years ago, starting around 2004. Remember that? When women were told to shut up and stop distracting people from the "important shit"? This is when the Democrats started actively recruiting anti-choice candidates, anti-gay candidates.

They Democrats in Congress are comprised of a high percentage of the opposite of RINOs (Republicans in name only): REBAONs (Republicans by any other name).

And so we get nitwits like Stupak.

The Senate is full of it, buster

Of course, all of this is aggravated by "Senate tradition" which really just the latest tactics employed on a rule that the Senate made up so long ago nobody in office really knows what it's even about:

The filibuster.

What a load of crap this is. This whole idea that a supermajority now must be in place for anything to happen is in large part why nothing much is ever accomplished in the Senate.

So with the Republicans opposing anything that the Democrats support, and the Democrats too timid to call the Republicans' bluff and actually force them to filibuster — I'd love to see that! — we have a case where the Republicans are actually running the Senate.

Any wonder why we're where we are now?

Could you imagine a Lyndon B. Johnson or a Barry Goldwater in today's political climate? Johnson would be a Brobdingnagian in today's Senate.

On the other hand, Barry Goldwater would be attacked by Republicans as being a "socialist" because he supported the separation of church and state and opposed governmental intrusions into private lives.

Yeah, that's a socialist. Uh huh.