The problem

In the contest between regressives and progressives, regressives have a significant advantage: They're willing to provide answers to complex problems that are simple, easy to understand, and utterly wrong because they have absolutely no connection to any reality that actually exists and thus no hope of actually working if implemented. Regressives have a consistent ideology, and virtually always provide answers that are consistent with that ideology, regardless of whether those answers are actually correct.

Communism had that advantage too, during its brief 70-year time in the sun before it finally collapsed of its inherent ideological contradictions. Communism provided answers to complex problems that were simple, easy to understand, and... well. Utter failures in practice.

Progressives, on the other hand... we are inherently pragmatists. We believe in using time-tested solutions where those are possible, we believe in looking at the actual reality and adopting solutions which will solve the problems that exist in that actual reality regardless of whether said solutions are consistent with any particular ideology or -ism, and we just don't have an ideological hook to hang our hat upon. People look at what we advocate and are, like, "why are you giving us all these complex solutions that have nothing in common, instead of simple solutions like the other guys give us?" The stereotypical left-wing rally where the "Save the Whales!" crowd and the "Gay Marriage Now!" crowd are feuding with the "End the patriarchy now!" crowd is almost a parody by now, but it is a parody that has a grain of truth in it -- the world has a lot of problems, and it's going to require a lot of different approaches, a lot of different tactics and viewpoints, to solve them, and the end result is that the progressive movement appears to be fragmented and inconsistent and a mess. You simply can't hang one single ideological hook on that whole mess and present a nice neat simple frame for Joe Sixpack to understand if he accidentally turns on MSNBC rather than Fox News one night.

The problem... ah yes, the problem. I've often noted that, as the American empire winds down, times are going to get hard. Way hard. Famine, starvation, food riots, and revolution hard, maybe. People are going to be open to new solutions when they have nothing left to lose, new solutions that maybe can salvage something out of the ruins of empire and come up with something at least somewhat sustainable. The problem is that the forces of regression are going to have their nice neat simple easily-understood solutions to all our problems and are going to be waiting and ready to sell these to people, and if the forces of regression win that intellectual battle, the end result will make the fall of the Roman Empire look like a day care center squabble. The eventual body count would end up making WW2 look like a border squabble between Nicaragua and Costa Rica. The problem is that the regressives have such pretty answers to the problems of the world -- simple, ideologically consistent, and easy to understand -- when the world is actually complex and the problems of the world similarly complex, requiring solutions that are neither simple nor always easy to understand. And 50% of Americans are below average (see below "dumbass" posts)...

WASF. Just sayin'.

- Badtux the Waddling Penguin

Retail politics

So I went into Koreatown yesterday to have kimchi, pork, and tofu stir-fry in a restaurant in a plaza full of Korean restaurants, shops, and a Korean grocery, and come out and there's a sheet of paper under my windshield wiper. I pick it up and read it, and it's a Korean-American politician inviting me to attend a fundraiser for his candidacy for the CIty Council, at a dinner at the largest Korean restaurant in the area. The amount of money requested is modest and it's clear that this restaurant is owned by one of his supporters who is donating a lot of the food and services.

So I'm reading this, and it occurs to me that this is old school retail politics. And it also occurs to me that this applies to immigrant communities in general -- they're fundamentally conservative. They believe in hard work, family, and traditional values. They believe in the American Dream. Which is why the Republican Party is shooting themselves in the foot so badly by becoming the party of the KKK, the latest outrage being of course not allowing brown people to use the emergency rooms in Arizona (they should just go die quietly on the streets, yo!).

The Republicans have gone nuts. That's all I can figure, they've gone nuts. They're pandering to an aging and declining population of white racists upset that brown people will soon be the majority, and not looking at the long term at all. They're like corporate CEO's who focus on the next quarter rather than on a strategic vision of the future, and end up destroying their company and their brand. This outbreak of outright racism from Republicans basically dooms them to minority status in the future, even if there are short-term gains in the present in states like Arizona that have a lot of old racist fucks who retired there from Indiana.

Democrats today are relying on the insanity of their opposition to win elections. It's pretty clear that Alaskan insane moron Caribou Barbie lost the election for John McCain -- Obama didn't win it, Caribou Barbie lost it. Thing is, relying on your opposition being insane is not a recipe for victory in the future. Just ask the Israelis, who relied on Hezbollah being incompetent when they invaded Lebanon in 2006... and ended up getting the shit beat out of'em by Arabs who proved to *not* be incompetent, they didn't even hit mainline Hezbollah forces, just the village militias, and got the stuffing whupped out of'em. Relying on your opponent's incompetence or insanity for victory is, in the end, a losing game, because sooner or later you *will* meet an opponent who is neither incompetent or insane...

So our two legacy parties here in the U.S. have lost their minds. But then, the nation as a whole has gone insane anyhow, so I guess that's no surprise...

-- Badtux the Old-school Penguin

The bottom line

By now all of you have read or heard about the shootings of a Federal judge and U.S. Congresswoman in Arizona. Federal judge John Roll, who made rulings of law that infuriated right-wing zealots to the point that he had four death threats against him in the past year, is dead, and U.S. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords is likely to survive but probably is disabled for life due to a bullet that went through her brain.

It appears that this is an act of right-wing terrorism against America. As with most terrorist attacks, from what details have been released about a middle-aged man picking up Jared Lee Loughner at home and driving him to the meeting, it appears that the usual template of the suicide bomber was used here -- find a loser, fill his head up with nonsense about how all his problems are caused by the targets, then set him loose to kill. Given what has been said about Mr. Loughner, it seems unlikely that he himself chose the targets, even the U.S. Army didn't want Loughner due to his lack of intelligence and emotional instability. Somebody loaded him up as a weapon, then set him loose to kill.

One thing this should make clear is the fundamental difference in values between liberals and conservatives. Liberals believe in democracy -- that the people have a right to decide who shall lead them, even when the people choose unwisely. Thus why liberal opposition to the election of George W. Bush focused upon irregularities in Florida and Ohio and the actions of the U.S. Supreme Court and Electoral College, and why there were few threats of violence, explicit or not, against Bush, unlike regular threats of assassination against Obama that have popped up on bumper stickers everywhere in conservitard country. Indeed, Bush's main fear was that he might encounter protesters who were exercising free speech and thus might bespoil his perfectly empty mind with ideas that he didn't want, not fear of people exercising "2nd amendment solutions".

Conservatives, on the other hand, distrust democracy. By and large they do not believe that the people should choose their leaders. They believe that only the *right* people should choose who leads America -- generally white property owners, if you look at conservative "Tea Party" rhetoric surrounding "voter fraud" and their desire to repeal the 17th Amendment (which allowed direct election of Senators). Conservatives fundamentally believe that the majority of Americans are idiots and unqualified to choose who leads our nation, they regularly rant about the "tyranny of the majority" that they claim will destroy the nation. Liberals, on the other hand believe in free and open elections that respect the will of the majority, no matter how delusional or stupid the majority may be. That is because the only way for a minority to impose their rule upon the majority (as vs. persuade the majority to go along with it) is at gunpoint, and tyranny imposed at gunpoint is not a liberal value.

The other fundamental difference this points out between conservative values and liberal values is one of respect for human life. Even radical left-wing groups that advocate violence, such as some of the radical Earth First types and Black Bloc anarchists, advocate violence only against property, not against people. They smash in the windows of Starbucks stores and blow up SUV's, they don't assassinate people. As far as I know the last American left-wing act of political violence against human life was the assassination of President McKinley by an anarchist in 1901, and the revulsion against that led to basically the destruction of the mainstream anarchist movement in America.

Conservatives, however, make no bones about "Second Amendment solutions" when the majority elects politicians that conservatives don't like. They believe democracy is a "tyranny of the majority", i.e., "will of the majority" is "tyranny", and that killing people -- i.e., using their guns to restore themselves to power- - is a proper response to this. Some go further and argue that we in fact live in a tyranny imposed by a minority, utterly ignoring the fact that every single one of the sorry sons of bitches in Congress plus the President were elected by the majority of voters in their respective district, state, or country as a whole rather than imposed by some outside dictatorship, but it's unknown how many conservatives believe in such a thing, and it's irrelevant anyhow to the basic point that violence against human beings is an accepted conservative value. Thus abortion doctors killed, the Oklahoma City federal building bombed, and so forth, all by right-wing terrorists. Once you dispense with the notion of respect for human life, crossing the line and actually killing someone is much easier.

So that's the difference, folks: One side believes in democracy and life, the other believes in dictatorship and death. And on that note, I leave you, because my purring cat deserves my attention more than the despicable bunch of people who committed this act of right-wing terrorism against America.

-- Badtux the No-longer-conservative Penguin

Paradise!

As Republicans are fond of pointing out, lower taxes means more revenue for government, so this nation, which taxes less than 2% of its population, must have a bajillion dollar budget for everything from health care to its military. Since taxes are what keeps businesses from thriving, this nation must be a bustling paradise of commerce, so wealthy that its streets are paved with gold, and Americans must be clamoring to emigrate there looking for a better life, while employers beg the government to let more workers in because the economy is booming so fast that every citizen is employed. This nation is... uhm.... Pakistan.

Uhm, which, I might point out, is not a paradise. As in, the vast majority of the citizenry lives in abject poverty, misery, and ignorance, in a situation so bad that even the Taliban look good by comparison. As a result, the nation is wracked with violence. The money-starved government, starved of resources by low taxes, cannot afford to pay its employees, so corruption is a major problem as the only people who will go to work for the government are those willing to get their pay another way -- i.e., via corruption. Unemployment is over 14% and underemployment is probably double that. The educational system is so impoverished that the majority of classrooms lack textbooks and qualified teachers. And rather than educated people flocking to Pakistan to make their fortunes, the flow is actually going the other way -- educated Pakistanis fleeing the corruption and violence do everything in their power to emigrate to Britain, Australia, or Canada to get away from the horror of daily life in Pakistan.

But I forget, if we do to our government what the Pakistanis did to theirs, we won't have the same result. Even though every other country (Mexico, anybody) that has tried the cut-taxes-to-get-economic-growth thingy has gotten the same results as Pakistan, why, this time will be different, because... because... look! Unicorns! And cotton candy trees! Alrighty, then!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Medicare For All: The conservative choice

I am a fundamentally conservative person. I do not advocate change for the sake of change, and I am the bane of engineers who propose radical changes to our product or who have expansive plans for its functionality, demanding that they show me the benefit that will come from incurring those costs in terms of instability and lost opportunities for including more market-worthy features. While the fact that I prefer to work for small startups might make it seem like I undertake risk for the sake of risk, the reality is that I have decided notions of what good software looks like -- it is designed coherently, with provisions for future growth, it is simple but provides sufficient functionality to succeed in the marketplace, it is written in a manner that properly models the problem set with its components and objects, etc. -- and it is easier for me to achieve those objectives as a big fish in a small pond than as a smaller fish in a bigger pond. In short, my conservative desire for clean and functional solutions that don't take any big risks in terms of engineering outweigh the risks of working for less financially secure companies.

If you read the economics posts on my blog you will notice that none of them advocate a major change in the way that the U.S. economy fundamentally operates. Indeed, I strongly defend capitalism in a number of places as the best mechanism for creation of wealth and the best way (if properly regulated) to increase the overall welfare of the people as a whole. This should not be surprising, though. This is a fundamentally conservative way of looking at the economy. FDR instituted a mixed but fundamentally capitalist economy during the 1930's that functioned extremely well from 1945 to 1980 until it started being dismantled by Reagan and his successors. During those 35 years our nation became the greatest on the planet, going to the moon, building fleets of gigantic bombers, and otherwise doing grand and wonderful things. In 1945 most rural homes did not have running water and relied on outhouses for sanitation. By 1980, homes without running water or modern sanitation were almost unknown outside of small hidden pockets out of sight of public health officials. That wasn't done by socialism. That was done by capitalism -- by a properly regulated capitalist system raising the wealth of all Americans. A conservative does not dismantle something that actually works, he only fiddles around the margins. A radical dismantles something that actually works, but a radical is not a conservative, even if he calls himself one.

So anyhow, let's talk health care. I think it's no secret that the U.S. health care system is in a state of meltdown. 40 million people -- or over 13% of the US population -- now lack regular access to health care. Medicaid, a state-run program which serves another 17% of the population, is currently collapsing due to state budget collapses (only 50% of Medicaid costs are covered by the federal government). The reality is that 90 million people -- nearly THIRTY PERCENT of Americans -- will lack health insurance by the end of this year, meaning that if they get a serious illness like cancer or heart disease or are simply in a major automobile accident they will die or at the very least be utterly bankrupted, and if the swine flu really does take off, there will be bodies in the streets as has not been seen here since before World War II. This is unacceptable both from a standpoint of societal stability -- those people will *not* quietly go home to die -- and from a moral standpoint -- if every other industrialized nation can afford to provide health care to all their people, the same is certainly true of the US, killing people because of some ideological commitment to some ideal is immoral regardless of your religion, unless your religion is The Almighty Dollar in which case you're going to Hell anyhow so who cares (see: mammon, worship of). Yet costs of the U.S. health care system have gone completely out of control -- 16% of the U.S. GDP is now dedicated to health care, more than any other nation in the world. The cost of health care in the United States has become a drag on the economy that severely disadvantages us compared to international competitors who spend half as much on health care.

While the 30 percent of Americans lacking health insurance is unacceptable by any standard due to the problems of morality and social stability, the monetary cost problem might be acceptable if Americans really did get better health care. Yet they don't. The results of all this spending is no better than nations such as France that spend half as much on health care as the US -- people don't live longer, have less access to doctors, and hospitals and emergency rooms are closing all across the nation even as the population rises, meaning that if you have an emergency you may wait for twelve hours or more to see a doctor. In much of the United States a shortage of primary care physicians now means that you may wait as much as three weeks to see one of the few physicians who will accept whatever health insurance you do have. And even having health insurance is no guarantee that you will actually receive the care you need. Health insurance companies are canceling coverage for people ill with serious illnesses using the flimsiest of excuses even for prior illnesses that the patient didn't know he had because they had never been disclosed to him by the doctor, a process called "recission" that can kill or severely maim people yet that the insurance companies have no intention of limiting to only those who intentionally defraud them. So we are basically paying 16% of U.S. GDP for health care, but we are not getting the health care we are paying for by any measure. I know of nobody who has had a serious illness within the past ten years who believes that the current system for paying for our health care is efficient or effective. Well, except for those on Medicare, Tricare, or similar programs, where both my relatives on those programs and actual surveys all say that they're quite happy with their "government health care".

So what is the solution? President Obama proposes a system that has been tried in several states and failed in all of them -- a mixed public-private system with mandates to buy insurance and subsidies for lower-income people. It has not worked because it creates an expensive bureaucracy to administer the mandates and subsidies and public insurance pool, and the private insurers use the public insurance pool as a dumping ground for the more expensive people they don't want to insure. In addition, the subsidies for lower-income people have never been sufficient to insure all the uninsured, which does not solve the problem of the uninsured. In short, it causes higher costs and no real improvement in the overall healthcare system.

As a fundamentally conservative person, repeating an approach that has never worked anytime that it has been tried offends me. Meanwhile, Republicans and some conservative Democrats propose a risky and untried system that has never been tried anywhere in the world, and where there is no guarantee that it will actually work. The problem there is that they are proposing to experiment with the health of 300 million people with an approach to funding health care that has never been tried in real life as vs. their theoretical papers. I am fundamentally opposed to gambling with the lives of 300 million people. A real conservative doesn't gamble with the lives of 300 million people, he goes with what he knows works.

So if none of those work, what else is left? A fundamentally conservative person then goes out and sees what other people have tried. So let's head off to Britain. Britain has socialized medicine -- all hospitals are owned by the government, all doctors basically work for the government, and the British health care system, well, sucks. It is very cost-effective but that's the only thing you can say about it, outcomes and access to care both suck. So socialized medicine such as practiced in Britain isn't what we want.

So let's look north to Canada. Canada has what's known as a "provincial" system. Each province is required to have a public insurer that covers the care of its citizens. The structure of this insurer and how it is funded varies from province to province. The federal government provides matching funds. Hospitals may be public or private, doctors are generally private doctors who are paid via insurance. In short, it works a lot like the Medicaid system here in the US, except with a larger number of people in it -- and with the same problems as the current Medicaid system here in the US (i.e., uneven coverage, portability issues when moving to a different province, some provinces have poorer coverage than others due to a poorer economy or ideology which drives doctors out of those provinces to provinces that pay better and thus causes long waiting lists, and so forth). So anyhow, this is better than the British system -- at least the healthcare outcomes are acceptable, as is the cost, less than half that of the US as a percentage of GDP -- but a true conservative doesn't stop at two health care systems. There's lots more out there.

So now let's look at true national singlepayer systems -- Japan, Taiwan, and France. Japan and France have had their systems for decades and had excellent results with it. In both nations there are no waiting lists, patients have ready access to the latest technologies, and the health outcomes on all measures are superb. And they do this with much lower costs than the United States, while covering everybody. For example, France spends HALF as much as the US on health care in absolute dollar terms (or if looking at GDP, 11% vs. 16% on health care, still significantly less) -- yet still manages to provide health care that on virtually all measures is the best, or near the best, in the world. The French whine about how much it costs, but the fact remains that it still costs less than U.S. healthcare -- only 11% of their paychecks go to health care, as vs. 16% of our paychecks here in the US, and the fact that it's being taken out by government rather than private insurers doesn't really matter, I don't have it in my paycheck either way. Given that, less money out of my paycheck, better results... sounds good to me.

So the next question is: Can we really transition to this? I mean, we have 30% of the population either uninsured or on Medicaid. Surely it'll cost a lot of money to get them all insured and into the system, right? And surely it'll cause a lot of waiting lists as they all go get the health care they can't afford right now, right?

So now let's look at another single-payer system: Taiwan. First of all, Taiwan is hardly a socialist country. They are capitalist to a fault, taking it to extremes that the United States never did. Taiwan's thriving capitalist economy provides most of the motherboards in most computers sold world-wide, as well as significant numbers of microchips and other important pieces of the world economy. The modern computer industry basically does not exist without Taiwan's entrepreneurial spirit, their contribution to the industry is far out of proportion to the size of their population. But in 1995, Taiwan had FORTY PERCENT of the population with no health insurance -- i.e., even more, as a proportion of the population, than here. So Taiwan bit the bullet and instituted a single-payer system in 1995 and... There was no increase in overall health care spending! Instead, because health insurance overhead was reduced from over 35% to under 2% with the new national system, healthcare spending remained stable, and while it has increased since then it is still at well under U.S. spending. And none of the bad things predicted by conservatives -- waiting lists, government bureaucrats interfering with health care, etc. -- have come true.

Finally, there are the mixed systems for funding health care such as the Swiss and Dutch systems. These are similar to Obamacare on the surface but have one important different: For-profit health insurers are banned in both nations. All health insurers are heavily regulated non-profits that might as well be branches of the government, where any profit above reserve requirements is required to be turned over to the rate-payers as rate rebates and only a certain percentage is allowed to be retained as administrative expenses. Here in the United States we have no such health insurance companies and would have to build them from scratch -- the current for-profit insurers certainly would not consent to becoming heavily regulated non-profits. My conclusion is that while there are perhaps some advantages to those systems, trying to implement one of them here in the U.S. would be difficult. We have experience, with Taiwan, of what it takes to turn a US-style system into singlepayer. We have no experience with what it takes to turn a US-style system into a Swiss/Dutch style mixed system. Indeed, the Dutch system actually started out as singlepayer and transitioned to the mixed system, implying that the only way to get to the Dutch system is to start with single-payer and go from there with an entirely new insurance industry.

Conclusion: The conservative choice -- the choice that takes the fewest risks with the health of the U.S. population -- is a transition to a Taiwanese/French style single payer system. We have a model for how to do so with Taiwan, and we have a model for how to retain consumer choice on top of the core insurance program with France (via their Medigap-style policies available from private insurers). Furthermore, we have an already-existing singlepayer health care bureaucracy -- the Medicare bureaucracy -- that could be easily expanded to serve the entire population rather than just old people. Medicare already handles 22% of the health care spending in the US, scaling it up to cover the other 78% and bringing it to modern standards of coverage (as vs. 1968 standards) would be much easier than creating a new program entirely from scratch. All other approaches either do not work, we have no blueprint for how to transition to them, or are take unacceptable chances by applying unproven programs to the health of 300 million people and thus are "conservative" only in the minds of radicals who confuse "conservative" with "complies with a specific ideological filter". Single-payer Medicare For All: time-proven, cost effective, the choice of those who are really conservative as vs. radicals out to experiment with the health of 300 million people.

-- Badtux the Conservative Healthcare Penguin

Democracy and conservatives

Earlier today I had a Twiscussion with a "top conservative" about various topics. One of the things that came up was that he started talking about "starving the beast", i.e., making it impossible for government to do things in a timely and effective manner.

Puzzled, I said to him, "but in a Democracy governmen is We The People doing things for our common benefit. Why should We The People want to hamper what we can do with our government?" He then stated that he did not trust democracy because it panders to the least common denominator. I complimented him on at least being honest about his dislike for democracy, so many conservatives pretend to love democracy while doing their best to hamper its effective operation. But it does show the world view that many conservatives have -- We The People are not to be trusted, and government must be hobbled and hampered in order to keep We The People from effectively implementing democracy.

Winston Churchill once said, "Democracy is the worst of all systems of government, except all others that have been tried." He also said, "Americans will always do the right thing, but only after trying all else." I guess the difference between me and this "top conservative" is that I think Churchill was right, and he thinks Churchill was wrong. I chaffed when the American people voted the Busheviks into office, but I did not deny that it was the will of We The People and that We The People got what we deserved, good and hard (H.L. Mencken :-). That said, I stuck around rather than heading to Canada because I believe Winnie and trusted We The People to eventually get it right. That trust is what this "top conservative" lacks -- and is why he distrusts democracy and will do whatever he can do in order to undermine its effectiveness.

-- Badtux the Democracy Penguin

Man bites dog

Now, I admit it -- I don't have a whole lotta respect for most conservatives. They talk a good game about "small government" and keepin' the government out of the lives of the American people and shit like that, but you give'em the reins of power and what you find is that they just love, love, LOVES them some big government. They go on a spending binge for every sort of faith-based initiative, weapons system, and prison building spree that they can put together, they send their goons out into the field to throw sick people who ain't hurtin' nobody into jail for smoking medical marijuana and pass laws telling people who they can marry or not marry (so much for that "keep the government out of the lives of the American people" bullshit), and otherwise carry on like a buncha big government thugs and goons. So much for the notion of "keep the government out of the lives of the American people." What they really mean is, have the government enforce their own hatreds and bigotries and expand how much government interferes with the lives of the American people -- but only *those* American people. You know, "those* people. Different color, maybe different religious beliefs, could be gay, feminist, whatever? You know, those *weird* people, not good upstanding white Christian Republicans!

So anyhow, when a conservative actually stands up and actually lives those values that other conservatives only blather about, when he defends the right of people to be free of government interference in their personal lives when it's people that most conservatives hate (i.e., people that most conservatives want government to persecute), well. This penguin has to sit up and look around in startled expectation of other improbable events. What next, cats being friends with mice? Rains of frogs and dogs? Dick Cheney converting to Islam, donating his entire worldly wealth to Palestinian causes, and condemning the War on Terror? That's my reaction when Ted Olson joins a federal lawsuit to overturn California's Proposition 8 as illegal under the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

WTF? A conservative -- not just any conservative, but George W. Bush's very own Solicitor General, a founding member of the right-wing Federalist Society -- arguing that government has no right to interfere with the marriage of loving gay couples? Arguing that big government is wrong, and that government should just butt out of people's marriages? Wow, talk about different! Doesn't he know that conservatives are supposed to be hypocrites?!

Anyhow, a number of gay rights groups whine that this is not the time for this lawsuit, that it could be Plessy v. Ferguson for gays rather than Brown v. Board of Education. But I'm not sure of that. The court that decided Brown v. Board of Education did so because government-enforced racial segregation had become morally offensive to a large set of Americans and was clearly unlawful. Government-enforced inequality for gays has similarly become morally offensive to a large set of Americans -- thus why gay marriage has been legalized in several states now -- and is also clearly unlawful under the U.S. Constitution. I think it has a chance. Not a tremendous chance, but really, if it fails, what's the harm? It's not as if gays could have less marriage rights in California than they already have, after all.

And besides, the gay rights groups like the Human Rights Campaign have a really suck-ass record of failure. They spend jillions of dollars of money to lose to a buncha goddamned MORMONS, for cryin' out loud, folks whose special underwear is so tight that even the fundies get nervous dealin' with them. So HRC says that this lawsuit is a bad idea? Well, who am I supposed to believe -- the lawyer who won Bush v. Gore, or the morons who have a perfect record of failure? Huh!

So anyhow, we'll find out soon enough whether this is gay people's Plessy v. Ferguson or their Brown v. Board of Education. But regardless of which one it is, the very sight of a conservative living up to the principles that he espouses makes this a historic day for me.

-- Badtux the Astounded Penguin

Outrage junkies

Outrage is the only emotion the tighty righties have. There must be a constant supply of outrages for them to get red-faced and angry about, or otherwise they're not satisfied. So what is the latest thing that the tighty righties are getting outraged about? Well, a brief glance at Google News and World Nut Daily shows that they're getting outraged about... torture.

No, no, not about the fact that torture violates the Geneva Conventions and all human decency. Not about the fact that the Bush Administration tortured Khalid Shaikh Mohammed by waterboarding him 183 times (and if waterboarding is so goddamned effective at getting good information out of a suspect, why the fuck did we have to waterboard this asshole 183 times before deciding we'd gotten everything he knew?). But, rather, because the Obama administration released the torture memos allowing this torture, and therefore clued in the terrorists as to what tactics were allowed (past tense since Obama banned torture), thereby harming national security.

Which is another "WTF?!". We've released poor sods who were tortured this way after determining that they were just harmless cab drivers or whatever who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. They know what was done to them. They've told everybody at home what was done to them. The only thing not known is whether the torturers had legal cover from administration officials, or were doing it all on their own (the "few bad apples" defense). So now we know: the Bush Administration officially had torture as an official policy. How the fuck can that jeopardize national security, when the terrorists already know what's being done?

But wait, I forgot. It's all about tighty righties covering their ass and trying to hide what they did from the American people. It's like Richard Nixon's "secret" bombing of Cambodia. The Cambodians sure the fuck knew they were getting bombed. But it's all about hiding that information from the American public, disappearing it down the memory hole for the next election. And now Obama is shitting on their plan to hide what they did. Well fuck these vicious criminal assholes and the goddamned horses they rode in on. If there was a God, if there was any justice in this world, they'd all be swinging from the ends of ropes like the war criminals that they are, just like the German and Japanese war criminals who tortured our GI's during WWII. Sad to say, they will die rich and happy in their sleep just like that fucking ratbastard Richard Nixon, because there is no justice, and there is no God. But at least we can shit on their graves by releasing these torture memos so that everybody knows just what kind of craven, criminal, inhumane bastards these scum really are. There is no justice, and there is no God, but at least there is some small satisfaction in seeing just how low, just how evil these "people" are. We must take our satisfaction where we can get it, I suppose... no matter how much these war criminals squawk about it.

-- Badtux the Rude Penguin

Tea bagging

Tomorrow, a lot of the tighty righties are going to get together to tea-bag Obama to celebrate the fact that the top 5% saw its share of national income grow from 15 to 21 percent between 1970-2006 as their effective income tax rate declined from 17.4% to 16.0%. So they're going to have a teabagging party. Talk about kinky. Ugh. These dudes are sick! And I thought the allegations in the Jeri Ryan divorce were kinky...

Hopefully the Secret Service is on top of this. I doubt President Obama is going to lower his pants and undies for them anyhow. He seems far too dignified for that sort of thing. A straight missionary position guy, if ya know what I mean.

Badtux the Buggery Penguin

Historical revision

Did you know that Hitler was a socialist? Really! And Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a Republican when he was assassinated. And Stalin was a fascist, not a Communist. Except Communists are the same thing as fascists, even though Hitler killed every Communist he could find. And Russia attacked Georgia rather than Georgia invading South Ossetia. And war is peace. Freedom is tyranny. Obama is a Socialist. GAH!

Y'know, I would have more respect for these people if they were not so obviously using George Orwell's novel 1984 as their template. In 1984, the English language is being re-written into NewSpeak. Words that once had meaning now mean the exact opposite of what they once meant, or have changed in meaning to be exactly what Big Brother wants them to be. There are entire areas of thought that are no longer capable of being discussed because the words to use to discuss them no longer have the meaning they once have.

Now me, I read 1984 and I see a precautionary tale. But when it comes to the tighty righties and their assault upon the English language, it's clear that the tighty righties don't see 1984 as a precautionary tale. They see it as an instruction manual. And the end product of that instruction manual? Why, we all know that one. If you want a picture of their perfect future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.

-- Badtux the Literary Penguin

Government is the problem?

Third day in a row of record heat here in Santa Clara. My air conditioning has been making my electric meter spin madly. I pity those of you who don't have cheap reliable government-provided electricity but instead must purchase that expensive unreliable private enterprise provided electricity for twice the price (or for those who can't purchase private enterprise provided electricity for any price and must rely on expensive diesel generated electricity). I might go walking down the street and take a few photos of that shiny glistening Santa Clara Muncipal Utilities power substation just so I can play them back as a slideshow on the background of my Macbook while smiling at the people who say "government is the problem, not the solution!" while I pay half as much for my power as they do thanks to the people of the City of Santa Clara gathering together and building their own power plants and power substations for themselves (that whole WE THE PEOPLE thingy).

When folks elsewhere are having blackouts, we have reliable electricity flowing to our wall outlets. When folks elsewhere are being reamed by private utilities, we pay half the price. AND THAT IS TRUE EVERYWHERE THAT MUNCIPAL UTILITIES PROVIDE ELECTRICITY! And it's not because Santa Clara Municipal Utilities is subsidized by taxes. Indeed, the City of Santa Clara has lower taxes than all the surrounding cities because of "in lieu of taxes" revenues from the electrical utility. It's simply that for necessities that we cannot easily live without such as electrical utilities, government is more responsive to the people than private enterprises are. Once a private enterprise has obtained monopoly status, it has no incentive to economize, reduce headcount, and increase its reliability. But for the City of Santa Clara, if the electrical utility becomes unreliable, we would start clogging our city councilors' phone lines with complaints -- and WE KNOW WHERE THEY LIVE. They aren't anonymous unelected people in some giant corporate tower thousands of miles away. They live HERE, and we voted them into office, and if they don't serve us, we can kick them out and elect city councilors who will, and if worse came to worse and dozens of people were dying from the heat because of their incompetence, we could get together with our baseball bats and pitchforks and run them out of town with their homes burning behind them.

Now, folks say that private enterprise always works better than government, and that's why we should not allow government to provide health insurance. To them all I have to say is this: Muncipal power companies, bitches. When you idiot ideologues were sweltering in the dark during the rolling blackouts in 2000, we few cities in California who own our own power companies were nice and cool. If Medicare For All operates with even HALF of the efficiency of Santa Clara Muncipal Utilities, it would still be TWICE as efficient as private insurance companies are at providing health care funding. And there's no reason to believe that Medicare For All would be any less efficient than Santa Clara Municipal Utilities.

So you guys who say private enterprise is always better than government can just go take out a third mortgage on your homes to pay for your electrical bills during this heat wave. I, on the other hand, shall pay for it with the contents of my change jar. Hasta la vista, baybee! And may someday we get government-provided health insurance as reliable as government-provided power. Government of the people, by the people, for the people. We The People, fuck yeah!

-- Badtux the Cool Penguin.

George W. Bush's enabler dies

I come not to praise William F. Buckley, who died today at age 82, but to lambast him. They say "speak no evil of the dead", but I wonder if that really applies to a man who has the blood of millions on his hands. Because the blood of millions it is, from the blood of millions killed in Vietnam courtesy of a crusade that William F. Buckley spearheaded, to the blood of millions killed in wars all over the world culminating in the Iraq fiasco that relied implicitly on the methods and mechanisms created by William F. Buckley.

But first, some history. After Harry S. Truman won the 1948 election in an unlikely triumph caused by his ability to communicate to ordinary people, the Republican Party was in a mess. The only way they could win the Presidency was with Dwight D. Eisenhower, a man who wasn't even registered as a Republican on the day he announced his candidacy, and that only because of the Korean War and the desire of the public to have a military man in charge of ending the war. Conservative ideas had been thoroughly repudiated by the Great Depression caused by conservative economic notions and by the post-war economic boom caused by progressive economic notions, all of which directly contradicted the notion that conservatism was the only road to economic prosperity.

It was William F. Buckley who founded the National Review and came up with the idea of the right-wing echo chamber in order to counter the draw of reality-based politics, and William F. Buckley who became its erudite and witty face. To oppose William F. Buckley was to appear to oppose intelligence. I say "appear" because in reality Buckley was pushing the vilest of vile politics. It was a generation-long propaganda effort, he knew, to discredit progressive ideas and bring back the sort of conservatism that predominated in America prior to the Presidency of FDR, the sort of conservatism that culminated in the glorious Presidency of Herbert Hoover at which point it collapsed under the weight of its own evil, but he was up to it. And so, over the course of the next forty years, William F. Buckley managed to convince the majority of Americans, through massive applications of every vile and venal propaganda technique under the sun, that elephants were pink and that conservatism was something other than a scam to loot the wealth of nations for the benefit of an unelected elite.

So go in peace, William F. Buckley. May the Great Penguin flog you forever in Hell, Arizona, where all bad penguins go upon their ultimate demise. Too bad that, as a good Tuxologist, I do not believe in the Christian conception of "Hell". But perhaps that is all for the better. Hell would be too good for a man with so much blood on his hands.

-- Badtux the Rude Penguin