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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Thursday, May 26, 2005

THE HIDDEN PRICE OF BUSH MONKEYS

...the various slights, affronts, insults, and rib-jabs that have been and will continue to be inflicted on reasonable, common-sense Americans by the band of fascist neo-religious bastards currently in charge of things come in flavors both bold and bland. There are the big outrages that stick out like a urinal in the ladies' restroom and the small ones that - although they deliver a sharp painful hammer blow to thousands of citizens - don't tickle the phosphor of the media radar screen because of the nature and circumstance of the people involved. I'm not talking about me, even though I have my own axe to grind after a day spent shoveling bags and bags and bags of asphalt pothole patching material into potholes on a road into a locally popular high-Cascade lakeside resort (just me and a shovel and all...those...bags) so that rich Republicans won't damage the tires of their multi-hundred-thousand-dollar motor homes driving into the resort on Memorial Day Weekend; it's a job needing doing, but - unfortunately - the road maintenance people of my employer who would normally do the work (at a higher salary per hour than I earn) are flat stone-broke out of money because of this sudden urge to balance the federal budget and therefore have no remaining funding to do routine road maintenance. Hey, it got me out of the office, it was a wonderfully warm day after two month of unremitting rain, the area is spectacularly beautiful, and any time I wanted to adopt the classic "leaning on the shovel" pose that road maintenance employees around the world are accused of adopting, I could look up into the towering forest and watch a couple of osprey pairs engaged in the industry of feeding their young in a couple of nests located along the lakeside route. No, I'm talking about things like the little noticed reduction in Section 8 housing subsidies for low-income families...

...today was a protest day in several cities across the country. People who didn't by nature benefit from Bush's tax cuts are ending up being one of the targets in this sudden wholey manufactured "crisis" of the overwhelming budget deficit that pretty much every human with a fully-occupied skull predicted would be the outcome of all those rich-guy tax reductions. Section 8 housing subsidies, administered through HUD, provide help (usually vouchers) for low-income families to afford housing, especially in metropolitan areas where housing costs are beginning to dramatically outstrip the ability of minimum-wage workers to afford. From the Louisville Courier-Journal in Kentucky:

A person in the Louisville area being paid the $5.15 hourly minimum wage would have to work 89 hours a week to afford a two-bedroom apartment at market rates, according to an annual National Low Income Housing Coalition report released last year.

...today, as mentioned, was a public action day in cities across the country, featuring real live people who are trying as best as their circumstances allow to stay off of welfare and hold actual real live jobs, just like the half-bright conservative class wants them to, but still live in real live housing rather than their cars or street-side cardboard appliance cartons. It appears that all this protest action received just slightly less coverage than would your average city council zoning variance hearing. This kind of stuff is a REALLY BIG DEAL, in that it touches on hosts of lives that don't belong to the classic image of "welfare queens" or dopers who can't hold a job or any of a host of society's down-and-outer's but instead belong to people who are trying to be responsible wage-earning members of society but, for any number of reasons too long to list, can't get outside of that low-wage category...

...for a whole lot of reasons that I don't feel like busting my much-appreciated readers' chops with right now, I have felt for a couple of decades that any country that wants to style itself as that shining beacon on the hill and the richest, most democratic and egalitarian nation on the planet must of necessity take care of it's less fortunated members. I can't trust myself to describe the degree of anger I have felt over the years to see those sad pitiful coin collection jars in stores in the small towns I've lived in trying to acquire enough money for the operation/treatment/procedure that would save the life of some invariably young citizen. Shining hill beacons don't treat their people that way, I thought in my youth at the sight of the first such jar (and thereby becoming something of a liberal without even thinking about it). People shouldn't live and die in this country, I thought, because of whether or not they can afford the life-saving treatment. As I have grown, I have had opportunities to know many people (50 years on the planet will do that) who are dealing with circumstance beyond their control that challenge their ability to put a roof over their head. Leave it to the Bush Monkeys, however, to smear lipstick on that pig and dress up a direct cut in housing subidies for low wage earners who are just trying to do what they were asked to do - go out/get a job/get off welfare/be productive - but can't afford on their own to provide for family housing in many metropolitan areas because of this wild housing bubble in which we are currently gripped. It's virtually another "What You Voted For" segment that gets lost in the Senate confirmation votes and Michael Jackson's trial and the travails of the "Runaway Bride" and all the other seemingly big issues of the day. The fact remains that perhaps hundreds of thousands of voiceless edge-clinging "little people" - a group that many of us could join at a moment's notice if the cards all fell wrong - are going to be denied the vital housing subsidies that would allow them the basic human dignity of having a sound roof over their heads. Gee Dub's people have their padded unnecessary riches courtesy of the cuts on taxes and dividend income while, at the other end of the economic spectrum, people who's only sense of dividends is whatever cheeseburger or soft drink they may win on a scratch-it ticket at some fast food outlet are staring down the barrel at the loss of the fundamental human need for housing. This is what the Grover Norquist version of 'compassionate conservativism' looks like, and we haven't even had the opportunity of seeing hide nor hair of ol' Grovner on this one. There's an easy statement to make, regardless of the architect for the eventual dissolution of the federal government as a protector of the the least amongst us: this is how today's version of the Republican Party works and this is the face that it wants to present to the nation. If you don't like it, don't vote for 'em....
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:40 PM 0 comments

Monday, May 23, 2005

HUGGING WITH NUCLEAR ARMS

...I would imagine by now the entire western world of lefties has weighed in on the newly announced compromise between 7 Democratic and 7 Republican Senators that would defuse the hankering that Bill "Cat Man" Frist has been displaying to employ his 'nuclear option' of eliminating the role of the filibuster in confirmation of judicial nominees. I haven't been able to survey the opinions that must be ricocheting around blogtopia (you, know, skippy and all that), what with having to make dinner for the family and engage in the traditional family dinner-time ritual of making it appear that I was more interested in how their days were than in rushing to the laptop, firing up my balky dial-up connection, and typing deathless prose about "what it all means". But it's my time now, Baby, so here we go...

...a diversity of leftist views on the utility - or even the wisdom - of engaging in compromise have been floating around blogtopia (its all skippy) the last couple of days. One growing theme has been that it would be a bad thing for the Democrats to enter into a compromise. There will no doubt be those over the next day or so as the news settles in who will run with this particular viewpoint, mostly based on the fact that some of the most notorious of the seven nominees in question - Priscilla Owen, Janice Rogers Brown and William Pryor (who, by the bye and in all fairness, ignored the memo from the White House and Tom Delay and voted - in his capacity as a recess appointee to the 11th Circuit - to uphold lower court decisions in the Terry Schiavo case) - will be offered in an up or down vote, with the presumed outcome being confirmation. This can't be considered in any way any sort of unalloyed victory for the Democrats, but - on that other hand that is always available to be waved around in political debates - sticking to filibuster-or-bust guns with a promise to subsequently bring the Senate to its knees isn't all that big a win-win situation for the boys and girls in blue in any case. The outcome of this compromise holds, at least for the moment, the opportunity to use the filibuster to object to some wild-eyed conservative wingnut nominee for the Supremes, and what with Rehnquist teetering around the Capitol today in a wheelchair, the obvious message floating in the air is that this little item might not be a full tank of gas down the road. Beyond that, all other brave talk about monkey-wrenching Senate operations aside, that filibuster right in the face of a wave of far-right activist judicial nominees would be lost at least for the better part the next year and a half, and could likely last for three and a half years - and that's assuming that a Democrat captured the Presidency (all considerations of Democratics capturing the Senate aside)...

...another consideration to ponder, as long as we are in a pondering mood, is the actual set of ramifications that might arise from some sort of 'blue-flu' slow-down of Senate operations after the 'nuclear option' vote (boy, there are just days when a fella longs for the opportunity to speak in human English terms again, ya' know?). The logical, natural fear to have about Democrats staging a work-stopage after some vote eliminating the filibuster is how this whole thing is going to play in the media. Democrats all by themselves, and God knows by the busload in blogtopia (skippy, again!), have spared no insult in laying the emotional whip to the 'so-called mainstream media' and their callow willingness to spout the Republican public relations line without critical review. All of us have howled with indignation at one point or another about one apparent slight or another where bald-faced lies lay unexamined before the citizenry. Given that there is no reason to assume that the honorable members of the press will anytime soon be sitting bolt-upright in bed to slap themselves in the forehead and exclaim "What a Fool I've been", there is no reason to expect that Democratic monkey-wrenching of the operations of the Senate will necessarily be represented in any sort of balanced or fair light. There is a tremendous atavistic satisfaction at the thought of Cat Man standing hunched in the well of the Senate shouting raw obscenities at the empty Democratic seats while White House Scotty spins his hopeless dimwitted lies and Dick Cheney hovers sweaty and pale near his Senate president's seat surrounded by an anxious phalanx of medical specialists and paramedics, desperate to break some tie...ANY tie, goddammit, to smack down those Godless America-hating Democrats one more time. That won't cut this particular nut, however, in a situation where you don't have any expectation of a fair shake in the media to begin with...

...there are those, I am confident, who will characterize this as being a case of the Democrats blinking and therefore another in a long series of spineless losses for the Dem's. I see this a little differently; this is solely a loss - if winners and losers need to be assigned - for Cat Man Frist. He has lost control of his caucus; seven of his people have joined forces with the dark side to take away the long-desired opportunity by wingers to rip obstructionist opportunity away from the Democrats; it shouldn't be lost that this was one of the primary goals of the right-wing, and especially the religious right-wing, of the Republican dream machine. On the other hand, it does allow John McCain - amongst others with presidential ambitions - to make an important statement to the 70% of the population that doesn't have a dog in the religious conservatives' fight and would rather see these highly-paid adults behave in a manner more representative of the lives of give and take and compromise that they have to deal with every anonymous vexing day. This wasn't a win for the Democrats, by any means, but it also wasn't necessarily a loss, either. This was, in fact, an example of the way the dirty reality of politics works. This is how the Senate is supposed to work. Yeah, we have the prospects of three wacko's being elevated to the appeals court level, where a great deal of constitutional law is interpreted without subsequent Supreme Court review, but the right to filibuster still remains - AT LEAST FOR NOW - and preservation of that right as opposed to three years of unfettered court-packing of a whole new sort by the Bush Monkeys is far more important than whatever visceral satisfaction by staging a Senate slowdown. Tonight's compromise isn't any reason to break the really old Scotch out of the liquor cabinet for a little party, but it does represent a meaningful visit to the world of sanity...

...cross-posted at Ruminate This...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:17 PM 0 comments

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