The Empire Strikes Out

So the world didn't come to an end today.  This is kind of depressing for those of us who haven't bothered to do any Christmas shopping since it didn't really matter this year.  I also have no idea what I'm gonna' do with all these "The Mayans were right" T-Shirts I planned to share with my ancestors after the apocalypse (having cleverly bought them on a payment plan, it turns out I'm actually gonna' have to pay full-price for all this crap now).

At a mournful moment like this, where for once it looks like tomorrow actually IS promised, the only thing that cheers me up is reminiscing about the year gone by, and the magic and wonderment that the Republican party has brought to the unwashed masses of our nation in these difficult times.  

It all began with the presidential election season, which featured the surreal spectacle of the GOP primary debates in which grown men and woman showed the entire world why Saturday Night Live will never go off the air.  By the time the "inevitable-nominee" Mitt Romney emerged victorious, it was clear that the shining lights of the Republican Party would not be willing to accept a 10-to-1 package of spending reductions to tax increases, had little to no respect for the troops (if they happened to be gay), and were willing to consider "self-deportation" as a serious approach to solving our immigration problem.

Despite my own dashed hopes that a few of these candidates would engage in the age old practice of "self-shut-up-already," the general election revealed a GOP just as beholden to magical thinking as it was to invisible billionaires with bottomless checkbooks.  From fabricating imaginary attacks on welfare reform, to leveling incessant broadsides against an imaginary President Obama (and I'm not just talking about Eastwood), to the oft-repeated-never-proven assertion that lowering taxes for the wealthy increases revenues - embracing the GOP platform this year required a certain belief in elves and faeries, worthy of anyone embarking on a quest for the Ring of Sauron, or bipartisan compromise in Congress. 

And when that magical thinking failed to transform the president's persistent lead in the polls into a landslide victory for Mitt Romney, the world witnessed the meltdown of the modern-day Republican party personified in the antics of Karl Rove during FOX News' election night coverage.  Apparently the 47% of Americans comprised of women, youth, people of color, and all manner of other freeloaders - turned out to be a majority of the electorate.  It's the kind of math that only the GOP of 2012 could imagine.

And today, when the world should have been busy ending, we instead witnessed two more memorable moments.  First, House Speaker John Boehner's failure to win enough support from his own caucus to bring a vote on his proposed "Plan B" fiscal cliff solution to the floor of the House of Representatives.  While this was a surprise for most who've been observing the back & forth from a safe distance, in the end is it really so surprising that Congressional Republicans weren't willing to pass a bill that would put them on record as supporting a tax increase - a bill that could never become law even in the imaginings of its sponsor?

Yet the good times were only beginning to roll.  To cap it all off, this morning NRA chief sharpshooter Wayne Lapierre held a half-hour news conference in which he single-handedly managed to convince the entire nation of the absolute necessity of keeping firearms out of the hands of people as mentally disturbed as Wayne Lapierre.  After what many would argue to be the single most tragic mass shooting in our nation's history - it's horror marked not only by the number of people killed, but by the incomprehensible fact that most of them were children - the NRA declared it's position that in order to solve the problem of mass shootings at schools...we need to have more guns at schools.

I look at all of this and can't help but think that the imaginary world the GOP has created - one where brown people, women, gays and youth either don't exist or don't matter enough to speak to - is drifting apart before our eyes.  While most of the country is still pondering how we can sensibly preserve the rights guaranteed by the 2nd Amendment while keeping assault weapons off our streets, and out of our malls and schools, the Republican stalwarts at the NRA have determined that video games, movies, music and other fictional works are the sources of the real-life violence we've grown so accustomed to - which is clearly why video-game loving nations like Japan, the UK and the maple-syrup-snorting madmen to our North have a fraction of the gun-violence we do.

In the end it's been a big year for the American imagination.  And who would have thought that ultimately the Mayan calendar predicted not the end of the world...but the end of any connection the Republican Party once had with reality.

D.N.A

American Taliban

This Saturday I had the opportunity and honor to participate in the Unite Against The War on Women rally in Washington DC. The issue of the degradation of women's rights in this country is something I've been thinking about for a while now, but the impetus to attend the rally actually came from Facebook. One of the organizers of the campaign had reached out to us about using "Fight On" as the soundtrack for one of their videos and we agreed:

The interesting thing about the request is that while "Fight On" was written with oppressed people in mind, a big part of the theme of those who "fight on in a world that doesn't see them" is specifically inspired by the bravery and challenges faced by women around the world - those who don't get medals when the soldiers come home, but who nonetheless keep the world moving and make our lives worth living.

Today the rights of  women are under assault in the United States by leaders who preach "small government" while practicing the politics of invasive ultrasounds. It strikes me that this actually follows a pattern we've seen in many parts of the world, where predominantly male leaders in societies facing significant challenges, latch onto the issue of a woman's "virtue" as a panacea for society's ills. Such efforts are couched in terms of honoring women, yet they result in such heinous practices as the prevention of girls from attending school in Afghanistan, women being forced to marry their rapists in parts of the Middle East, and the practice of Female Genital Mutilation in parts of Africa.

For Westerners these perspectives are seen as barbaric and a world away from anything we can understand. But how far are we from "barbarism" when an opinion leader like Rush Limbaugh can call Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke a "slut" for testifying in Congress about women's contraception, and the putative leader of the GOP, Mitt Romney, doesn't have the balls to take him to task on it? The whole right-wing peanut gallery was likewise silent about the original all-male panel on the subject. If silence is consent, we have a political movement in this country today that is pretty Medieval in it's view of women's rights.

Now wait, some will argue - this is not about women but the rights of the unborn. Is all this controversy, truly based on the American right's love of children? If so, then certainly the policies advanced by the conservative leadership would clearly be pro-mother-&-child right? House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan's budget reflects added money for pre-natal care and early childhood education right?

That's a bigger joke than anything we heard at the White House Corrrespondent's Dinner. We all know that these people's money has never been put where there mouths are (with the exception of Mitt Romney who apparently has money pouring out of every Swiss orifice). This is not about serving the interests of women nor children, it's about the exercise of power by men who feel powerless to address the real economic, social & political challenges facing the nation.

Looking at all this through that lens, I'd argue you don't need to be a feminist to realize that the so-called "War on Women" is really an abdication of responsibility by our leaders and as such it's assault on all of us. Whether you consider yourself liberal, conservative or indy like me, we all deserve better from our leadership. And until our leaders start pursuing policies that will provide good jobs for people other than ultrasound technicians, we need to stand firm with our mothers, daughters, sisters and lovers to hold those leaders to account. This ain't Afghanistan. The buck stops at our feet.

Peace,

D.N.A

Healthcare 101: Part I

 

For the past week the media has been abuzz with talk of the Affordable Care Act, affectionately known to most of us as "ObamaCare".  The source of this buzz, is the fact that the legal challenge to the individual mandate provision of the sweeping healthcare law, has reached the Supreme Court.  Today in fact that very provision goes to oral argument before the justices, and the media-fueled rhetoric around it has been heated.  I'd like to take a moment to point out the obvious just for the sake of my own conscience.

 

First of all, I do understand the reticence many people have about the individual mandate. "The Govt is gonna' tell me what to do & what to buy?? Oh hell naw. Next thing you know, we'll all be wearing jumpsuits & eating broccoli!" This was my own basic & flawed thinking on the topic prior to the 2009 healthcare debate, which is why I supported candidate Obama's approach over candidate Clinton's. But in the end that healthcare debate did indeed change my mind & here's why in plainish English:

 

If we're going to have a system of privately issued insurance (which we do have, and which the govt has made no moves to get rid of), we run into a basic problem: healthy people don't wanna' buy it. To be specific, young & healthy people in particular  don't see the point. It's a bad investment - I feel good, I take care of myself, the odds of being hit by a car are low so, I'd rather spend my money on beer. This is actually pretty sound logic if you're young & have no medical problems.

 

If you're old and/or sick, however, you desperately need medical insurance. Why? Because the out-of-pocket costs are prohibitively expensive for the average humanoid to afford. What naturally tends to happen to insurance markets then, is they become dominated by sick people who use up lots of insurance services, with relatively few healthy people to offset the cost. This automatically breaks the system. The only way insurance works, is if 100 of us buy fire insurance and when 1 of us loses a house to a fire, the insurance company can use the money collected over years from all 100 of us to pay the damages. If 50 or 60 of us have house fires, the system can't work.

 

Private health insurance can only operate if the preponderance of participants are in fact HEALTHY. This is why Insurance companies don't want to insure the sick - the infamous "pre-existing" condition clause. And if you were an insurance company, frankly you wouldn't either. The math doesn't work out. But you're not an insurance company are you? You're probably a soft, carbon-based lifeform that's thinking about eating a chocolate bar right now. In which case, if you determine you need health insurance you don't want to hear from every company you call that no we won't cover you because you have, say diabetes. And if you do have diabetes that is EXACTLY what you're likely to hear if you try to buy insurance. In the midst of the Great Recession if, like many Americans, you lost a job that used to cover you and now you're in the healthcare market on your own, you're pretty much screwed. Pre-existing condition = no soup for you!!

 

Well since we all hate the pre-existing condition clause, why don't we just get rid of it! Great idea! With a small caveat...if you get rid of it, how do insurance companies stay solvent & capable of providing the insurance promised (instead of weaseling out of covering bills as some have been wont to do)? Remember, only sick people and old people (who by virtue of being old, are more likely to eventually become sick) are interested in buying health insurance. The answer: you mandate that "everyone" buy insurance, thus giving insurance companies the mathematical liberty to actually get rid of practices like the "pre-existing condition" & denial of coverage.

 

The "conservative" argument against this of course, is that it's an infringement upon freedom - why should the government be able to force me into a market I don't want to be a part of, just because I'm "alive"? Aside from the fact that the individual mandate is in fact a 20 year-old Republican policy proposal, this argument is fundamentally flawed because like it or not, you ARE a part of the healthcare market, and sad as it may be...it's just because you're alive! This is the argument that the government is going to make in support of the healthcare law and it is the correct argument. In part two of this post I will explain why. First I need to go grab a chocolate bar.

 

 

D.N.A

Big Gubment - The Bain of Our Existence

 

Today voters in Florida hit the polls and all indicators show that Mitt "Don't-hate-the-playa-Hate-the-Tax-Code" Romney will win a decisive victory after being trounced by Newt Gingrich in South Carolina just a week-and-a-half ago.  The see-saw of Republican primary politics this year hasn't yet removed the patina of inevitability from Mr 15%'s visage - a face rough-hewn from years of living in the "real economy" - but it has certainly dispatched the idea that anyone would get to enjoy the wonders of bean bag this time around.

In addition to summarily destroying the heretofore stellar reputation of a favorite childhood game, the GOP field has managed to maintain a unified position in one other key issue: Big Government.  It's big, it's bad and it's coming to get you.  And yet there's very little substantive argument  on what exactly "Big Government" is, and how exactly it's going to hurt you.  We hear the recycled mantra of "Repeal Obamacare" on a daily basis, and yet the arguments that the Affordable Care Act's mandate for citizens to buy private health insurance, is some sort of red-scare government-take-over of health care is...well, dumb.   

I heard a dumb person being interviewed on TV earlier today saying that Romney would defend Medicare, unlike Obama who wants us to have "government-run-healthcare."  The reporter didn't bother to inform the individual in question that he was dumb, since as most of us who can read have already noticed, Medicare "is" government run healthcare.  He also didn't bother to point out that Mitt Romney early endorsed the Paul Ryan budget, which would effectively turn Medicare into a privatized voucher system - something that most Medicare advocates would argue is by definition no longer "Medicare."  And finally neither did the reporter have the heart to inform this particular voter that Obamacare is the bouncing brawny baby of Romneycare - how proud is papa Mittens of that?

In the end there's a lot of rhetoric thrown around, designed to get people's waders in a winch about the dangers of "Big Government" in our lives, and frankly I don't know that I want "Big" anyone peering over my shoulder when I'm eating my evening Cheerios. But there's another important point that is oft overlooked.  Lately the media has begun to take note that all of the Presidential candidates who rail incessantly against Big Government, are in fact rich people (one of them being much richer than the rest combined...and their ancestors...and their kids).  The thing no one is bothering to point out is simple:

In the absence of Government, Rich people ARE the government.

I know it sounds simplistic but think about it historically: who ever heard of the King of France, the Queen of England or the Sultan of Brunei struggling to make their horse & carriage payments? No one.  Why?  Because they got PAPER son (or as Ron Paul prefers it, they got Gold for every rainy day in the almanac).  If they were broke their kingdom would eventually be taken over by the army of some other rich person, and they would either be sent to meet their maker (as Mittens would love to do to Castro), or they'd be turned into some sort of sub-king or duchess in the interests of saving face.  But the bottom line remains, historically, rich people have run things.  Over time they became clever enough to say, "I run ish because God said so," rather than the proverbial "I run ish because I got guns n scimitars" which always frightened the children.

I can't even pretend to be a proponent of government largesse, as I think there are a world of sensible reasons to curtail the power of the State.  That said, the next time some multi-millionaire candidate tells you he or she is here to protect you against the ravages of Big Government, take a moment and ask yourself: after Richie Rich has finished drowning "government" in his golden bidet, who will protect you from him? 

D.N.A

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Streaming Saturdays - 01/08/2011

It is the first show of 2011 and we are coming to you LIVE with some great interviews and DNA's take on the week's news and events. On deck this week: the GOP seeks repeal of Healthcare Reform even though they will be increasing the deficit, plus some great convos about giving felons second chances including a discussion of "Golden Voice" Ted Williams, discovered on a street corner in Columbus. All in all we've a great LIVE show lined up for today.  We're live at noon ET (9am PT)! C ya online!