doit, doit now!

There’s a fabulous book called What’s the Matter with Kansas? that offers an excellent explanation of how neoconservatives managed to lie their way into the hearts of Middle Americans and convince them that the neoconservative viewpoints are actually beneficial to them, when the reality is precisely the opposite. I stress “neoconservative” here because I have grown to consider myself a conservative in the classical sense of the word: one who believes in a small federal government that has low taxes, defers to state and local governments for as many functions as possible, and otherwise stays out of people’s lives.

The current crop of Republicans are thus anything but conservatives, which is why the term “neoconservative” was coined. They are economically liberal, in that they have reduced taxes for the top 5% of American incomes, while on the other hand they have presided over the largest increase in Federal spending since the Great Depression. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that if you reduce your income and increase your expenses, you have to either borrow money or go bankrupt. Since we’re not bankrupt, our government has been borrowing money to pay for the tax cuts and budget increases. It also doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that when you take out a loan, you have to pay it back, with interest. So it follows that tax cuts without spending cuts equals a much larger overall financial burden due to interest. Thus the taxes are not being cut at all — they are simply being deferred. Which means that we will all end up paying more than we would have if they would have just left the taxes alone. And if you happen to die before the interest comes due, guess who will have to pay for it? Your kids.

Don’t believe me? One of the nation’s most conservative newspapers, The Washington Times, had an article today about how Tom DeLay says that our government is now operating at peak efficiency. Some of America’s most conservative think tanks rebuff Tom’s absurd opinion with actual facts while some other Republican Congressmen actually go so far as to ask whether or not they are all serving in the same government.

This is a perfect case of where the neocons have somehow convinced Kansans (and Ohioans and Oklahomans and other normally sensible people) that tax cuts are always good for them, even when the tax cuts actually only affect the rich and often result in a tax increase for the Kansans, et al. (Tell that to New Orleans’s levees and the 500,000 displaced people there).

My stepfather is a case in point: before the election last year, he got into a shouting match with both me and Kevin on two separate occasions. Now this is a guy who is normally cool, calm, collected, and rarely bothered by anything, and yet he was really, truly angry. He was yelling things like “Kerry would increase taxes on couples who make more than $200,000 a year!” Nevermind that he and my mother do not make $200,000 a year. Nor does 99.8% of the rest of America, according to the US Census Bureau. Somehow, through the flashy graphics and vitriol and lies that Faux (Fox) News and its ilk spews on a daily basis, the neocons have convinced the average American that they are best served by this neocon ideology.

In fact, because of the creep of the Alternative Minimum Tax, people like my mom and stepdad have actually seen their tax burden increase under Bush, and again this says nothing of the spending increases and resultant interest penalties we all are going to see as a result of it. It also says nothing about how the tax cuts axed money from programs like the ones that would have shored up the levees in New Orleans, and now the government is borrowing nearly $70 billion to pay for it, when the original spending amount was in the single-digit billions. So let’s see: spend a few billion to shore up the levees and don’t cut taxes, or cut taxes, don’t fix the levees, watch people suffer and die, then borrow tens of billions (with interest) to pay for the resultant disaster and tuck your tail between your legs and say you’re sorry?

We all know what the neocons picked.

But on the other hand, the neocons are socially conservative, in that they want to impose a fundamentalist Christian theology down the throats of everyone in the country and essentially legislate morality on issues such as abortion, sex, women’s health, science, and the definition of “family.” So if you voted for anyone in this administration and yet are opposed to religious fundamentalism, you are again fooled by the neocon machine.

I have members of my family who voted for Bush and simply do not care that he lied to them over and over and over again. They say they feel “safer” with Bush and his cronies in office and blithely ignore that we are inciting Islamic fundamentalists to attack us while simultaneously saying we are at war with them while simultaneously encouraging Christian fundamentalists to enforce their viewpoints on everyone in our country.

None of this makes any sense. These are sensible people who have been driven to senseless acts by lies and fear for their own safety.

At some point a culture of sensibility will return to our country. Until then we are stuck with this idiot:

For those who say that local and state Gulf Coast officials deserve blame for the Katrina mess, I offer you this Katrina timeline that details, with specific backup, exactly what went on from the beginning of the crisis up until now. It shows that there was a ridiculous failure of leadership from the top down. Bush was literally eating cake and playing guitar while people were drowning.

Bush appointed Michael Brown (a man who could not possibly be more unqualified for the position) to head FEMA because he was college buddies with Bush’s reelection campaign manager. If appointing someone who has absolutely zero experience managing emergencies to the Federal Emergency Management Agency does not show a complete abdication of responsibility for the power Bush was given as President I don’t know what does.

How many other people has Bush appointed to positions where their failure will result in the deaths of potentially thousands of people? Or even result in mild hardship for people? Bush has shown he’s a big fan of nepotism. I don’t know how he keeps his hands as manicured as they are with the amount of innocent blood that soaks them daily.

The Catholic Church had it right in the 1960’s. It’s time for the First American Reformation Council. We need to take a long, hard look at our federal government and at what’s missing from the Constitution, including an explicit right to privacy, methods for handling campaign finance and political parties, and a civil rights amendment. We need to stop spending tax dollars on corporate subsidies, reform welfare, refocus our country’s laws to support individuals rather than corporations, massively increase education funding (including perhaps giving it a budget where increases in military spending directly increase educational spending, but not the other way around), put a stop to the Religious Right’s attempt to impose its theocracy on all Americans, stop the hysteria over terrorism and likewise stop causing it, quit the Drug War, reinstate the Fariness Doctrine after the Reagan administration axed it, increase taxes for the top 1% of the country and drop them for the bottom 80%, earmark billions of dollars for a Manhattan Project-esque race to build an energy infrastructure that’s not dependent on oil… The list goes on and on.

The emperor has no clothes. Thank god Americans can see it for what it is now. We’re in a quagmire, and this Administration is whistling all the way to the bank while everyone else suffers.

The federal government’s response to Katrina was atrocious. Michael Brown of FEMA and Michael Chertoff of DHS both said that they thought that New Orleans was fine after the hurricane because they had read so in the newspaper, and meanwhile the New York Times, Washington Post, Washington Times, and New Orleans Times-Picayune all had “New Orleans catastrophy” stories on Tuesday, August 30th. What the hell newspaper was he reading? The rest of America knew, how did the head of FEMA not know?

Then Bush was playing guitar at a fundraiser in San Diego while people drowned in New Orleans. I just don’t get this guy: if there is a crisis in this country you get off your Presidential ass and go and deal with it. You don’t keep reading My Pet Goat, you don’t go on vacation, you don’t go to a fundraiser — you go and bring the full resources of the federal government to bear on the problem, and you do it immediately. The entire goddamned country was glued to the television and the Net, and everyone was wondering where the hell the government was.

The notion that this was in any way the fault of the local officials is absurd. When an emergency of this magnitude happens across state lines it is then by definition a federal emergency. It is the responsibility of the federal government — specifically the Federal Emergency Management Agency — to step in and manage the frigging federal emergency.

If FEMA isn’t there to swiftly and effectively manage Federal Emergencies then what they hell are they there for? This wasn’t 9/11 where two (large) buildings were struck and the entire local social infrastructure was still left intact, allowing local officials to do their jobs. This was the destruction of an area the size of the continent of Europe. The local law enforcement, just like the people who lived in New Orleans, were destroyed, and we all watched it. They had no resources to bring to bear on the subject because they were underwater.

San Francisco is going to have a disaster of this magnitude. Many people who live here happily ignore this fact. But now that we’ve seen how FEMA responds to emergencies such as this I don’t know how anyone in their right mind could say that a.) this was handled well or b.) that we should have faith that the next time something like this happens that we’ll be prepared.

At the moment it appears we will not be. God help us.

The federal government sucks. The Bush Administrations’s attempts to rewrite history (lying about WMD’s and then saying they didn’t lie about them, acting as if Iraq had anything at all to do with 9/11, the list goes on…) has reached a ricidulous crescendo this week. This administration loves to eschew facts for talking points and soundbites, and the idiotic people who watch Fox News and listen to Rush and Dr. Laura and all of the rest of the we’re-going-to-hell-so-let’s-just-make-it-hellish-for-everyone-else crew just start agreeing with them after a while because it’s all they hear. These people do no critical thinking, they don’t get multiple viewpoints — they get one side of the story and they hear it so often that it changes them from thinking, rational people into idiotic automatons who simply repeat what they are fed.

Enough with Fox News already. If Fox News is your primary source of knowledge about what’s going on in the world you really deserve the massive shit sandwich you’re fed every day by our government. Fox News lies over and over every day (see Media Matters for America for near-real-time coverage of the lies they spew, complete with factual backup), and when you hear enough of those lies you start to believe them. There’s a reason Rush Limbaugh calls his followers dittoheads, and it’s because they parrot what he says without ever doing any research themselves or really thinking about what they are hearing. The world is bigger than Fox News, Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter and their ilk. If that’s where you get your news on a daily basis consider yourself part of the problem with the world.

Fox News is really spelled “Faux News.”

Jefferson Parish president Aaron Broussard was even more blunt.

“Bureaucracy has murdered people in the greater New Orleans area,” he said on CBS’ “Early Show.” “Take whatever idiot they have at the top of whatever agency and give me a better idiot. Give me a caring idiot. Give me a sensitive idiot. Just don’t give me the same idiot.”

From WWLTV, a local New Orleans television channel.

The Mayor of New Orleans outraged at the response of the federal government to the crisis.

It’s been four days since the levee broke and New Orleans was destroyed. That’s four days of 90-degree weather, no food, no water, murder, looting, disease and death, and meanwhile Congress has been talking about ending their recess a few days early (hey, the life of a Congressman is rough, they need vacations, too). Four Senators, two Democrats and two Republicans, managed to pass a bill for $10 billion aid for FEMA and finally, an hour or two ago, some House membbers finally sauntered in to the Capitol and passed their version. Bush will finally get around to signing it tonight.

So much for a “Culture of Life.” It’s convenient to say that to get the support of the Religious Rong, but when it comes time to save the living it’s apparently only for clusters of cells in a womb. If there is one good thing that could come out of this it might be that the pendulum will swing away from lies, fear, deceit, and death, and back towards human rights, progress, truth, and life.

Meanwhile National Guard troops have finally started bringing in supplies to the people of New Orleans. There are estimates that 50,000 people are stranded on rooftops alone, which is to say nothing of those at the Convention Center and elsewhere.

The conditions there are just heartwrenching.

This account of what the conditions are like on the ground in New Orleans is simply staggering. Armed soldiers herding people like cattle, pointing guns at them when they try to approach, others dropping supplies from such a height that they break when they land… What is going on down there? This is unbelievable.

May God have mercy on the people of the South. And may she have mercy on the souls of our “leaders.”