Republicanland

Long ago but not that far away, there was a kingdom with a country club known as Republicanland. The people there were prosperous. They sent their children to schools that taught things like evolution and separation of church and state and how the universe actually worked. The people there lived in rambling houses, drove Cadilacs and Lincolns, and complained about their tax brackets over three martini lunches paid for by their expense accounts. The people were mostly happy and even played golf and tennis with people voted Democratic.

Then, one day a dark shadow fell across Republicanland and that shadow was called Watergate. The people of Republicanland were mortified and saw their fortunes in danger. What if the shadow never receded? What if they had to live in its coldness and without the sun forever?

It was clear it would take a shining knight to rid the land of the shadow and that knight was going to need a lot of help, more help than the people of republican land could give. So the leaders of the land went to the Kingdom of Reactionaries, Racists and Zealots and struck a deal with the evil wizards there. In return for letting the RR&Zs into the gated communities of Republicanland, the RR&Zs had to use all of their power to support and defend the shining knight known as Ray Gun. The RR&Zs agreed and the leaders of Republicanland were overjoyed.

As the leaders went back to their sprawling ranchhouses, tennis courts, and heated pools, the wizards smiled and laughed for they knew once inside the gated communities of Republicanland, that kingdom would be theirs.

And that is just what happened.

Ten Reasons Chicago Educators and Parents Are Striking

1. Recognize That Class Size Matters: Drastically reduce class size. We currently have one of the largest class sizes in
the state. This greatly inhibits the ability of our students to learn and thrive.
2. Educate The Whole Child: Invest to ensure that all schools have recess and physical education equipment, healthy food offerings, and classes in art, theater, dance, and music in every school. Offer world languages and a variety of subject choices. Provide every school with a library and assign the commensurate number of librarians to staff them.
3. Create More Robust Wrap-around Services: The Chicago Public Schools system (CPS) is far behind recommended staffing levels suggested by national professional associations. The number of school counselors, nurses, social workers, and psychologists must increase dramatically to serve Chicago’s population of low-income students. Additionally, students who cannot afford transportation costs need free fares.
4. Address Inequities In Our System: Students and their families recognize the apartheid-like system managed by CPS. It denies resources to the neediest schools, uses discipline policies with a disproportionate harm on students of color, and enacts policies that increase the concentrations of students in high poverty and racially segregated schools.
5. Help Students Get Off To A Good Start: We need to provide age-appropriate (not test-driven) education in the early grades. All students should have access to pre-kindergarten and to full-day kindergarten.
6. Respect And Develop The Professionals: Teachers need salaries comparable to others with their education and experience. They need time to adequately plan their lessons and collaborate with colleagues, as well as the autonomy and shared decision-making to encourage professional judgment. CPS needs to hire more teaching assistants so that no students fall through the cracks.
7. Teach All Students: We need stronger commitments to address the disparities that exist due to our lack of robust programs for emergent bilingual students and services for students faced with a variety of special needs.
8. Provide Quality School Facilities: No more leaky roofs, asbestos-lined bathrooms, or windows that refuse to shut. Students need to be taught in facilities that are well-maintained and show respect for those who work and go to school there.
9. Partner With Parents: Parents are an integral part of a child’s education. They need to be encouraged and helped in that role.
10. Fully Fund Education: A country and city that can afford to take care of its affluent citizens can afford to take care of those on the other end of the income scale. There is no excuse for denying students the essential services they deserve.

The Birth of an Outside Agitator: Why I Fight.

This is where my politics begins

I start with the First Principle: Inherent worth and dignity of every human being.

Bill Schulz, the former President of the Unitarian Universalist Association, and recently Executive Director of Amnesty International, USA, said it this way:

Our First Principle, “does not claim that every person has worth and dignity. Rather, it is an affirmation that worth and dignity are values we attribute to human beings. It is also a strategy, asserting that every person has certain fundamental rights, and that we can make the world a better place when we treat people as having worth and dignity, even if they do not treat us that way.”

Human beings have the right and responsibility to give meaning and shape to their own lives. It stands for the building of a more humane society through an ethic based on human and other natural values in the spirit of reason and free inquiry through human capabilities.–from the Minimum Statement on Humanism

From the Five Smooth Stones of Liberal Religion

1. All relations between persons ought ideally to rest on mutual, free consent and not coercion.
2. Affirmation of the moral obligation to direct one’s effort toward the establishment of a just and loving community.
3. Denial of the immaculate conception of virtue and affirmation of the necessity of social incarnation. Good must be consciously given form and power within history.

That’s a start. do I always live up to them? No. But I try.

What about you?

Atheist’s Grace

For those of us less religious

For food in a world where many walk in hunger
For peace in a world where many walk in fear
For friends in a world where many walk alone
Let’s give thanks to all those, both past and present,
Who have turned our society into what it is today,
And let’s continue with their endeavor to make the world a better place.

Pasted from http://www.atheistmissionary.com/2010/04/atheist-grace.html

The Problem with “Just as Bad” (or How to visit the sins of one side on everybody)

“The democrats are just as bad.”

We’ve all heard it. We all hear it. Every now and then we hear it like this (“The republicans are just as bad”) but somehow not as much lately.

Maybe that’s because the Democrats are not just as bad, because no matter how bad a driver you are, you will never be as bad a driver from the passenger side as you will under the steering wheel.

Yeah, Yeah, Yeah

I know

The Democrats hold the White House and had big-assed majorities in the House and the Senate. Surely they were driving the car then?

Yeah, with the GOP’s foot on the brake and consulting a road map written by the GOP circa 1996.

Not since The DLC and it’s golden boy Bill Clinton started us down this road called interstate “the third way” has the base of the DP been driving a goddamn thing, except the DNC leadership crazy with its constant whining about silly shit like eroding worker rights, stagnant to falling wages, disappearing benefits, mounting personal debt and stupid stuff like that.

Whatever is a neo-liberal to do?

Anyway, back at the ranch…

the “Just as bad” trope has been around a long time and was usually reserved for 7 year olds who had just eaten a jar of cookies or 13 year olds caught wearing lipstick without permission.

It would show up among grown ups from time to time, but then that grown up would lose his grown up card and get sent to the guestroom to sit on gramma’s cedar chest and have a good long think about what he had done.

Then came our favorite school year (2007-2008) and the shit hit the fan. Apparently the the market wasn’t the best at doing a whole lot of shit and it was worst at actually handling other people’s money.

The priests of Market Fundamentalism had to field questions about what went wrong and that’s when you start hearing the “We didn’t see this coming, but neither did the other economists.” (actually there were plenty of other economists who did see this coming, but why let something like the truth stand between you and a good excuse.)

Pretty soon everybody, regardless of the topic, began their excuses with “the other guy is just bad.” Just as Bad became a bigger catch phrase than “Where’s the beef?”

What made it so catchy?

It does two things. two magical things.

It decreases blame on the offending party AND INCREASES blame on someone else.

EX.

Say you and your co-worker lose 100% of a client’s money. You lost 80% and your co-worker lost 20%. “Just as bad” makes the liability 50-50, making your liability decrease by 37.5% and makes you co-worker’s liability increase by 150%!

Who wouldn’t like that, huh?

This is why the GOP are more apt to use this excuse. Their ideas (if not their numbers) have held political power in this country since the Reagan Revolution. Those ideas hold the majority of blame for our current woes and if that ever got out…

Lord, ha’mercy! ‘Cuz the citizenry won’t.

A very ugly word.

The word nigger is a very ugly word.

This poem sums just how ugly

Incident
By Countee Cullen

(For Eric Walrond)

Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.

Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, “Nigger.”

I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That’s all that I remember.

Not saying not to use it. Not my place to say.

And I know I shouldn’t give power to the word. I have heard all the arguments from co-opting it to using it until it is rendered useless.

In the end, none of those arguments work because the need for those arguments betrays them. Why would I want to co-opt the word nigger? Why should I need to render it useless? What good has or does the word done or do? What are it’s redeeming qualities? What beauty does it hold that makes it too precious to let go? Perhaps there is a tragic truth that only it can express and to lose it would be to break from reality?

Not saying not to use it. Not my place to say.

But perhaps a more judicious use of it? It is a word with a history, a word that to this day holds the power to order murder. And the Queen’s English is a poor enough vehicle for communication, we can ill afford to lose more words, lose more meaning. Nor should we hide our precious egos from the ugliness of history, the wretchedness of truth, the nakedness of shadow.

Not saying not to use it. Not my place to say.

I will say this, it doesn’t make you cool, doesn’t make you down with the cause. Black folk who use it as a ball in a game of keep away, you do the world no favors. White folk who use it to show how you have embrace your inner “wigger,” you do the world no favors. It seems as had been the case for most of its history, the honesty in that word comes served with venom, bile, and malevolent revulsion. It always comes from a place of self hate, no matter the color of spewer. And its purpose is always cruel, even when said with a smile and hug and proceeded by “my.”

Not saying not to use it. Not my place to say.

Poets and prosists have used the word to great effect exploring its violence and exposing its parasitic nature. Its tragic truth, its seductive misery, its damning invective against speaker and listener. And yet…

And yet we cannot let it go. It is the bastardization of our exceptionalism, it is the hate that gives us meaning, our cross to bear and on whose timbers we sacrifice whatever gods we see, whatever souls we be and loathe in the truth of our imperfection.

Not saying not to use it. Not my place to say.

Things to look forward to during a second Obama administration

Joe Biden will keep talking (hey, not like comedians can write that kind of material themselves)

Malia’s first date: I think we may finally see Obama lose his famous cool. I just pity the poor boy who comes a calling.

Boehner goes from orange to purple, oompa loompa to blueberry girl. Gene Wilder eat your heart out.

Paul “Eddie Munster” Ryan goes back to haunting the nightmares of small children and Medicare recipients.

Mittens “I wanna be president and if I don’t get to be president I will hold my breath until I die” Romney, does. In lieu of flowers, send donations to Miss Ann’s School for Horsie Ballet

Why I Love Melissa Harris Perry

 

“What in the world is riskier than being a poor person in America? I live in a neighborhood where people are shot on my street corner. I live in a neighborhood where people have to figure out how to get their kid into school because maybe it will be a good school and maybe it won’t. I’m sick of the idea that being wealthy is risky. No, there’s a huge safety net, that whenever you fail, we’ll catch you, and catch you, and catch you. Being poor is what is risky. We have to create a safety net for poor people and when we won’t because they happen to look different from us, it is the pervasive ugliness. We cannot do that.”

Feeding the Poor, Starving the Beasts: American Nutritinal Policy and the Morality of Knowing What’s Best

Forgive me if this seem disjointed. Some of this piece comes from a conversation I had on a message board. But I think there is more than enough here to stimulate thought and discussion.

Let’s talk about poor people, poor diet, and a poor decision-making.

What do you guys know about food desserts?

It is not just that healthier food is more expensive at the point of purchase, but it is more expensive to get to. Poorer neighborhoods don’t have grocery stores or at least not nearly enough considering the size of surrounding populations. Poor neighborhoods have liquor stores, convenience stores, and/or package stores. None of these places are going to have asparagus on sale this week, buy one bundle, get one free.

Gallon of milk — $4
2 liter cola — 99 cents

For what is spent on a bag of oranges, you can get corn chips, cookies, and Vienna sausage for three kids (and you don’t have fight the kids to eat it thus winding up late for your second or is it third part-time workfare job.)

And we haven’t even begun talking about urban design, public safety, and cuts to public health and education programs targeting families and children.

So point one: We have limited the choice of poor people AND the availability of healthy food through the physical placement of that food. But that is only part of the story. Let’s take a look at SNAP (aka the Food Stamp Program) and how we have tried to make a situation better by making a situation worse.

Food stamps are set up to buy legal food. Junk food is legal food. And as food stamps actually can’t be used to theater tickets, we have already limited the use of funds. The problem with the junk food is that we have left provision of funds for food to micro managing what type of food based not on the law, or the poor quality of the food (otherwise the logic would be to ban the bad food), but to limit freedom of choice of purchase among legal items simply because a citizen is making use of public money, money which I may add, they themselves have also probably paid into.

Junk food is legal food. Make junk food illegal and you have no problem. Or you could make it its own designation of controlled or harmful substance, like alcohol or tobacco, and ban it from government programs. That should make everyone from farmers to Frito Lay to the plastics industry to your local convenience store quite pleased.

You are asking poor people to limit purchases of a legal food stuff because they are not financially able to feed themselves and their families without public assistance. Doritos become a food of privilege. You are in effect saying to poor folk “Either go out and find special money with which to buy junk food or do without it because on MY dime (which really isn’t mine but the public’s which means the poor have as much say in how it is spent as the rest of us and have contributed to the pool as well) I get to decide what YOU can and cannot have.”

So we take the program that is designed to help the poor and make it inot a bludgeon with which to beat the poor, infantilize the poor and make the rest of us into precious moral overlords of the poor.

And on a personal note

I want everyone to eat healthy. So I want to outlaw or restrict access to bad food.

But the food stamp debate is more about just restricting or banning bad food for poor folk. Somehow poor folk aren’t allow the luxury of poor decision making. That’s a right they shouldn’t have but others should. Because we who buy food with money are more enlightened and our bad decisions are better than their bad decisions.

And Finally

The problem isn’t food stamps or checks or subsidized housing or Medicaid.  The problem is poverty and the beasts it makes of the poor and the brutes it makes of the rest of us.