Sit Down and Shut Up

With the end of the Bush administration, I had really hoped the days of just spouting outright lies and nonsensical streams of consciousness were over. I was wrong. The news about mobs for hire at health care Town Halls is everywhere now, but not surprisingly, Rachel Maddow has a really good run down of just what exactly is going on:

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The 2000 election was the first presidential election I was able eligible to vote in. I was in college, and by the time my classes were done for the day, the election had already been called, so I dejectedly cast my ballot that would never be counted.

Then, in the 2004 campaign, I worked 17 hour days, seven days a week, for six months hoping that this time we would have an election decided by an informed electorate who had their ballots counted. Again, we did not. And again, it seemed no one really did anything about it.

But, to the point: I thought I was an informed citizen, I worked in electoral politics and in the progressive media, and yet, I never once heard about the mobs for hire that had stopped the Florida recount.

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Make sure you watch the section where she identifies every single person in the "mob" as a Republican staffer. Strangely it makes me feel a little better to know that people didn't do that because they were idiots, but because they were paid to be idiotic.

It really is about time that we stop letting this crap slide. It is time that we started teaching people how to think rationally, and not allow for this kind of behavior. Not only is it ignorant, it is threatening to the people in attendance and members of Congress. It is time we take people like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh an Bill O'Reilly off the air once and for all.

The Military Industial Complex (Bye bye F22)

This week the first crack in the US military industrial complex was started. An overstatement? Maybe. Does it really mean we can start thinking smartly about how and why we have the largest armed forces in the world? Well, yeah lots of people are thinking smartly about it, just probably not Congress. Rachel Maddow gave a pretty awesome overview of what no longer building F22's means:

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As a part of the generation raised on Top Gun, the idea that the F22 is obsolete (both in tactics and technology) is news. It seems the F22 is just as pointless as the volleyball scene:



But, back to business...something else in the Maddow report struck me: when we talk about outsourcing military projects, we aren't just talking about Blackwater and mercenary contractors, we are also talking about companies doing nothing less than holding US tax payers hostage by their (albeit smart) business practices.

It wasn't until I was doing research for my master's thesis that I knew the origin of the term "Military Industrial Complex" and the fact that it was coined by Eisenhower was mind-boggling. As was the realization that American jobs were not always tied up in the creation of weapons and the goods of war. Of course, the world has changed, but it is interesting to think what the dollars and hours spent on something as useless as the F22 could have produced.

If you haven't read or read the speech, here is the text.

No Change

In undergrad I took "math for English majors," AKA: Logic. In that class we learned about fallacies and poor logical reasoning. Sadly, I have a feeling that this speech will be used as an example of very bad logic in classrooms for years to come:



In other words, the Obama Administration will let people who have been held in Guantanamo for years without trial go, so long as you can prove that they were innocent in the first place. For others that you can find guilty, they will be transferred to other facilities that (hopefully) are within US judicial and geographical borders. But, for those people that you cannot prove are guilty, they will remain in "prolonged detention."

The Obama Administration will "not avoid a legitimate legal framework," because they will create their own legal framework. And that framework will be in the context of a "legal regime."

This is scary. It simultaneously dismantles habeas corpus and the most basic tenet of the United States judicial system that we were all taught, "innocent until proven guilty," which means the burden of proof is not on the defendant - something particularly important when that defendant has no access to legal counsel.

But for me, this is especially scary because, as Rachel Maddow says, it is a beautiful speech full of platitudes about democracy and held in a venue that not only represents democracy, but holds the documents upon which American democracy is founded.

But, beautiful elocution means nothing if the content of the speech is despicable.