Thursday, April 30, 2009

These People Scare Me



Did you see the size of those bullets? In what world does it make sense to sell sniper rifles as hunting weapons? I also love how there's this pervasive fear among some right-wingers that President Obama is going to start putting Americans in "FEMA camps." Huh?

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Up is Down, Right is Left, and Losing is Winning

I was reading some of the political commentary about Sen. Specter switching parties when I came across conservative columnist Bill Kristol's thoughts on the subject. This poor delusional man thinks this is a good thing for the GOP. I thought I'd share one of the hilarious comments posted in response:

Fellow citizens of Hiroshima: I know that the bomb that fell on us this morning seems to have been a serious blow to your health and well-being, but let's not fixate on the glowing rubble, smoke, and devastation. Let's look at the bright side. There are now so many more places to park. You won't ever have to stand in line for a movie after this. And now we can all read by the glow of our own skins. Yes, millions of people are dead, and a cloud of deadly fallout now hangs over us, but come on. Cheer up. I mean, it's not like they'll bomb Nagasaki or something.

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

GOP Continues to Dwindle

Pretty shocking news from DC today:

Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania said on Tuesday he would switch to the Democratic party, presenting Democrats with a possible 60th vote and the power to break Senate filibusters as they try to advance the Obama administration’s new agenda.

Mr. Specter’s announcement shocked Senate Republicans.

In a statement issued about noon as the Capitol was digesting the stunning turn of events, Mr. Specter said he had concluded that his party had moved too far to the right, a fact demonstrated by the migration of 200,000 Pennsylvania Republicans to the Democratic Party.

“I now find my political philosophy more in line with Democrats than Republicans,” Mr. Specter said in his statement, acknowledging that his decision was certain to disappoint colleagues and supporters.


While the news is surprising, it's not entirely unexpected. The Republicans are less popular than the Ebola virus these days. In fact, a new Washington Post-ABC poll found that only 21% of those surveyed said they identify as Republicans, the fewest to do so in a Post-ABC poll in more than 25 years. Since losing in the November election, the GOP has run further to the right, and moderates in the party have been isolated. Former NJ governor Christine Todd Whitman has been talking about this for years.

Why is this important?

The greatest power that the minority has in the Senate is the power to grind things to a halt. By filibustering, the GOP not only blocks the piece of legislation it's opposing, but also any other action that is bottle-necked behind it. The threat to grind things to a halt is one that the majority takes seriously. It gives the minority veto power over small (but important) pieces of legislation that the majority wants but can't afford to lose several weeks pushing. With 60 votes, the majority can push through those smaller measures over the objections of the GOP.

Don't Panic

By now you have heard about swine flu. The World Health Organization raised its global alert level for the swine flu on Monday, as Mexican officials reported that the death toll from the outbreak had reached 149. Of course, news stories love to use scary terms like “outbreak,” “epidemic,” and “pandemic.” They are not interchangeable. Each describes an increasing degree of the number of infected and the geographical scope of the infection. We are not close to having a pandemic yet. And if we do it may not be anything like a catastrophe. The disease looks to respond to existing medication.

According to Dr David Ozonoff, a doctor and chronic-disease epidemiologist at the Boston University School of Public Health, we just don't know whether this will develop into a pandemic:

Flu pandemics are caused by variants of the influenza virus which are new and novel to our immune systems, and the current swine flu virus is just such an example. There is no natural immunity to it (that we know of at this moment), it causes human disease (most of the 144 different flu subtypes just infect other animals, like birds), and it appears to be fairly transmissible. If its transmission becomes sustained as more cases are reported (at least four countries have confirmed cases), we may well face a pandemic, the contemporaneous infection of many people in many parts of the world.


How is swine flu different from SARS and avian flu?

The new swine flu cases are caused by an influenza strain called H1N1, which appears to be easily passed from person to person.

But doctors have little information yet on the mortality rate, as there is no reliable data on the total number of people infected.
Reports from the United States suggest that some cases may be mild and therefore may go undetected — allowing the disease to spread further.

In contrast, the lethal avian flu that has kept world health authorities anxious for years is caused by H5N1 influenza virus. It has killed 257 of the 421 people who have contracted it, or 61 percent. But it has shown very little ability to pass from person to person, mainly infecting poultry, and some experts have suggested that there may be something about the H5N1 virus that makes it inherently less transmissible among people.

SARS — severe acute respiratory syndrome — is both easily spread and virulent. In the 2003 outbreak in Hong Kong, it killed 299 of the 1,755 people it infected there, or 17 percent.


The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have provided the following common sense info to avoid becoming infected:


Avoid close contact.

Avoid close contact with people who are sick. When you are sick, keep your distance from others to protect them from getting sick too.

Stay home when you are sick.

If possible, stay home from work, school, and errands when you are sick. You will help prevent others from catching your illness.

Cover your mouth and nose.

Cover your mouth and nose with a tissue when coughing or sneezing. It may prevent those around you from getting sick.

Clean your hands.

Washing your hands often will help protect you from germs.

Avoid touching your eyes, nose or mouth.

Germs are often spread when a person touches something that is contaminated with germs and then touches his or her eyes, nose, or mouth.

Practice other good health habits.

Get plenty of sleep, be physically active, manage your stress, drink plenty of fluids, and eat nutritious food.


As usual, Jon Stewart puts it into perspective:

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c
Snoutbreak '09 - The Last 100 Days
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Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Go For It

We know the GOP will fight tooth and nail against healthcare for all Americans, so I'd support this move by the Dems to get it done:

With solid majorities in both houses of Congress, Democrats are tempted to use their political muscle to speed passage of health care legislation with minimal concessions to the Republican minority. That approach may be the only way they can fulfill President Obama’s campaign promises, but it carries high risks as well.

In the budget blueprint for the coming year, Democrats may resort to an obscure procedure known as reconciliation to clear the way for Senate passage of a comprehensive health bill with a 51-vote majority, rather than the 60 votes that would otherwise be needed.

“It may be a struggle to get to 60,” said Senator Jeff Bingaman, Democrat of New Mexico, who is working on the legislation.

Use of the expedited procedure, to prevent a Senate filibuster, could both help and hurt the Democrats. It would enable them to overcome Republican objections to a big increase in federal spending and a huge expansion in the role of government. On the other hand, it could fundamentally alter the political dynamic of the health care debate, detonating an explosive reaction among Republican senators who have been working with Democrats on the issue. 

If Democrats use the fast-track procedure, it would be tantamount to “a declaration of war,” said Senator Michael B. Enzi of Wyoming, the senior Republican on the health committee.

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Ready for Change in US-Cuba Relations

Over the past few weeks, there has been increasing optimism that for the first time in decades there might be significant change in US policy towards Cuba. In fact, all the key players (Cuba, Obama, Congress, the American people) are pushing for change.


Last week, Cuban president Raul Castro told the world:

We've told the North American government, in private and in public, that we are prepared, wherever they want, to discuss everything -- human rights, freedom of the press, political prisoners -- everything, everything, everything that they want to discuss.

Earlier this month President Obama lifted some of the travel and remittance restrictions imposed by the previous administration. During the Fifth Summit of the Americas last week, Obama responded to Cuban overtures, saying “the United States seeks a new beginning with Cuba,” and that he was willing to have his administration engage the Castro government on a wide array of issues.

As I mentioned in my previous blog entry on Cuba, a bipartisan group of senators recently predicted that Congress was ready to pass legislation to allow all Americans to travel to Cuba.

Cuban-American exiles, after decades of supporting the embargo and isolation from Cuba, are finally softening their stance (see graph above):

A poll released Monday by Bendixen & Associates has found that 67 percent of the [Cuban-American] community now supports the removal of all restrictions for travel to Cuba, an 18-point increase from three years ago, when the same question was asked.

Similarly, a recent CNN poll (of all Americans, not just Cuban-Americans) found:

Nearly two thirds think the United States should lift its ban on travel by U.S. citizens to Cuba. And seven in ten think it's time to re-establish diplomatic relations with that country.

"Republicans as well as Democrats favor re-establishing diplomatic relations with Cuba," says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. "On the issue of lifting travel restrictions, Republicans are evenly divided, while Independents and Democrats support the change."

Of course, there are those who claim that we would be “appeasing” dictators and/or communists by engaging Cuba. Really? In the years since the embargo was launched, we have done business with dictators like Saddam Hussein and have courted the friendship of Saudis, whose money and sovereign soil gave sanctuary to most of the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. We also trade with communist governments such as China and Vietnam.

As Pulitzer-prize winning Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson astutely noted:

Those who argue for keeping in place the trade embargo and what remains of the travel restrictions -- and even predict that these measures, imposed at a time when the Cold War was getting chillier, will bring the Castro government to its knees any day now -- have been drinking too many mojitos. Claims that the United States would somehow surrender valuable "leverage" by lifting the sanctions are purest fantasy.

People, we have no leverage in Cuba. If we had any, we'd have managed to move the Cuban government an inch or two toward democratic reform in the past five decades.

What we should do is lift the embargo, which Obama hasn't meaningfully disturbed, and end the travel ban for everyone. That would put the onus on the Cubans to somehow keep hordes of American capitalists and tourists from infecting the island with dangerous, counterrevolutionary ideas. But we should take these steps with our eyes open, seeing Cuba as it is, not as we might want it to be.

Cuba is ready. The president and Congress are ready. Americans are ready. Let’s get moving! I can already taste that first mojito in Havana.

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Another Example of Why We Need Better Science Education

Taibbi Rocks

Have I mentioned how much I love Matt Taibbi? Pure awesome:

It’s been strange and kind of depressing to watch the conservative drift in this direction. In a way, actually, the Glenn Beck show has been drearily fascinating of late. It’s not often that we get to watch someone go insane on national television; trapped in an echo chamber of his own spiraling egomania, with apparently no one at his network willing to pull the plug and put him out of his misery, Beck has lately gone from being a mildly annoying media dingbat to a self-imagined messiah who looks like he’s shouldering more and more of the burdens of Christ with each passing day. And because he’s stepping into a vacuum of conservative leadership — there’s no one else out there who is offering real red meat to the winger crowd — he’s begun to attract not professional help but apostles, in the form of Chuck Norris (who believes we have to prepare for armed revolution and may prepare a run for “president of Texas”) and pinhead Midwestern congresswoman Michelle Bachmann, a woman who is looking more and more like George Foreman to Sarah Palin’s Joe Frazier in the Heavyweight Championship of Stupid.

Texas governor claims sovereignty from “oppressive” U.S. government

I'd like to know why these jackasses were silent when our government started an unprovoked war in Iraq, tortured people, illegally wiretapped citizens, suspended habeus corpus, etc. Please enlighten me, Gov. Perry. What, exactly, is the government doing that is oppressive?



Not surprisingly, Glenn Beck agrees:

You can’t convince me that the Founding Fathers wouldn’t allow you to secede.

The Constitution is not a suicide pact, and if a state says: ‘I don’t want to go there, because that’s suicide, they have a right to back out. They have a right — people have a right to not commit economic suicide...

...Texas says go to hell, Washington, which by the way has been said before. I believe it was Davey Crocket...it’s about time that somebody says that again."


Wednesday, April 8, 2009

The Big Takeover

Journalist Matt Taibbi has a must-read article about the financial crisis in this month’s Rolling Stone. If you were looking to be enraged by a detailed explanation of how this whole crisis is a result of a political structure that in the past 10-15 years has constructed a system to create wealth for massive companies and the financial class, this is it. Here’s a snip:

So that's the first step in wall street's power grab: making up things like credit-default swaps and collateralized-debt obligations, financial products so complex and inscrutable that ordinary American dumb people — to say nothing of federal regulators and even the CEOs of major corporations like AIG — are too intimidated to even try to understand them. That, combined with wise political investments, enabled the nation's top bankers to effectively scrap any meaningful oversight of the financial industry.

By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system — transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.


Rachel Maddow’s interview of Matt Taibbi is also worth watching:

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it

I think most people understand that there are multiple factors which contributed to the financial crisis. One of these was the passage of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) in 1999, which basically repealed the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act and allowed banks, securities companies, and insurance companies to directly compete with one another (and leading to the creation of financial conglomerates like Citigroup).

Although the Democrats are far from blameless (several Congressional Dems voted for the bill and Clinton signed it into law), it was the Republicans (who were the majority in Congress at the time) and their crusade to deregulate the markets that were pushing for it. Phil Gramm, a Republican senator from Texas who co-authored the GLBA, said at the time, ''The world changes, and we have to change with it…We have a new century coming, and we have an opportunity to dominate that century the same way we dominated this century. Glass-Steagall, in the midst of the Great Depression, came at a time when the thinking was that the government was the answer. In this era of economic prosperity, we have decided that freedom is the answer.''

You know, the typical GOP talking points: government, bad; free market, good. As the New York Times noted at the time, “the original idea behind Glass-Steagall was that separation between bankers and brokers would reduce the potential conflicts of interest that were thought to have contributed to the speculative stock frenzy before the Depression.” I guess the opponents of the GLBA are looking pretty prophetic right about now, huh? Here’s the money quote from 1999:

''I think we will look back in 10 years' time and say we should not have done this but we did because we forgot the lessons of the past, and that that which is true in the 1930's is true in 2010,'' said Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota. ''I wasn't around during the 1930's or the debate over Glass-Steagall. But I was here in the early 1980's when it was decided to allow the expansion of savings and loans. We have now decided in the name of modernization to forget the lessons of the past, of safety and of soundness.''

Senator Paul Wellstone, Democrat of Minnesota, said that Congress had ''seemed determined to unlearn the lessons from our past mistakes.''

''Scores of banks failed in the Great Depression as a result of unsound banking practices, and their failure only deepened the crisis,'' Mr. Wellstone said. ''Glass-Steagall was intended to protect our financial system by insulating commercial banking from other forms of risk. It was one of several stabilizers designed to keep a similar tragedy from recurring. Now Congress is about to repeal that economic stabilizer without putting any comparable safeguard in its place.''

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Unstable

Not only is this idiot actually defending some of the very CEOs that got us into this economic crisis, but he's essentially calling for the assassination of government leaders, including the president. I'm all for freedom of speech, but considering the outbreak in gun violence the past few weeks and the fact that gun and ammo sales have skyrocketed since the election, this kind of talk is incredibly inflammatory and could provoke violence against our leaders.



Of course, no Glenn Beck post would be complete without a link to that hilarious video of him crying during his show. Even better is the video of Stephen Colbert mocking the hell out of him. 

UPDATE: I can always count on Jon Stewart to put it all in perspective:
I'll give Hunter at Daily Kos the last word:

Fearmongering -- being eager transmitters for whole hosts of the worst of right-wing conspiracy theories, so long as it brings in readers, viewers, or voters -- is a prime function of the conservative movement, from Glenn Beck's show to Sarah Palin rallies, from blogs to talk radio to the entire Fox News network. The language is deliberately panicked, exclusionary, and eliminationist, premised on constant, day-in-day-out assertions that liberals, Democrats, or others are not merely people of differing political opinions, but that they are less than American, are traitors to the country, or an imminent threat to the rights and freedoms of "true" patriots.

It seems hardly an outrageous presumption that some among their listeners will internalize the message of President Obama as traitor, and non-conservatives as enemies... and then act upon those beliefs with violence, either planned or spontaneous. Given the expanding list of examples of just that, in fact, it seems a proven connection.

Iowa (yes, Iowa) Legalizes Gay Marriage; Vermont Follows

Good news:

Iowa became the first state in the Midwest to approve same-sex marriage on Friday, after the Iowa Supreme Court unanimously decided that a 1998 law limiting marriage to a man and a woman was unconstitutional.

The decision was the culmination of a four-year legal battle that began with a suit filed on behalf of six same-sex couples in the lower courts. The Supreme Court said same-sex marriages could begin in Iowa in as soon as 21 days, making Iowa only the third state in the nation, along with Massachusetts and Connecticut, to legalize gay marriage.


UPDATE: And more good news:

The Vermont Legislature on Tuesday overrode Gov. Jim Douglas’s veto of a bill allowing gay couples to marry, mustering one more vote than needed to preserve the measure.

The step makes Vermont the first state to allow same-sex marriage through legislative action instead of a court ruling. The law goes into effect Sept. 1.

Friday, April 3, 2009

Just Say Yes

Last week, President Obama held a "virtual" town hall meeting in which people were asked to submit questions online or vote on questions asked by others in a number of categories, such as "green jobs," "financial stability," "jobs," and "budget." Do you know which topic got the most votes by far in just about every category? The legalization of marijuana (specifically, whether legalizing marijuana could spawn job creation by allowing the government to regulate and tax the drug). 

Although Obama (a former pot smoker and the third president in a row who has admitted smoking it) dismissed the question and does not support legalization (in 2004 he did come out in favor of decriminalization, however), there are signs that the government's attitude towards marijuana may be changing. For example, Attorney General Eric Holder signaled that federal agents will only target medical marijuana dispensaries (medical marijuana is legal in California and a dozen other states) that violate both federal and state law, a departure from the Bush administration which targeted dispensaries, even if they complied with that state's law. 

Additionally, Senators Jim Webb (D-VA) and Arlen Specter (R-PA) have proposed a major prison-reform package, which would directly address drug-sentencing policy (although the United States has only 5% of the world's population, it has 25% of its prison population, a higher percentage than any other nation), and possibly, legalization, as part of the criminal justice overhaul. Considering that these guys rarely agree on anything, it's refreshing that this measure has support from both Democrats and Republicans.

Some think the economic crisis will help the legalization cause. California state legislator Tom Ammiano argues that marijuana, by far the most lucrative crop with an estimated $14 billion in sales, could provide over a billion dollars of tax revenue in California alone. And this doesn't include the hundreds of billions of tax dollars we spend on policing and incarceration. 

As everyone knows, pot is legal in Holland. But did you know that Portugal decriminalized all drugs in 2001? Neither country has become a drug-infested wasteland. 

But wait, isn't marijuana a "gateway" drug? Nope. Several scientific studies have discredited this idea. Most recently, a 12-year study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry reported that marijuana is not a gateway drug that predicts or eventually leads to substance abuse. Also, the study noted that if it’s easier for a teen to get his hands on marijuana than beer (which makes sense since you need an ID to get beer), he’ll be more likely to smoke pot. Thus, if marijuana were legalized and regulated similar to alcohol, it would be much more difficult for kids to get their hands on it.

In his Time column entitled "Why Legalization Makes Sense" yesterday, Joe Klein broke it down:

We spend about $150 billion on policing and courts, and 47.5% of all arrests are marijuana-related. That is an awful lot of money, most of it nonfederal, that could be spent on better schools or infrastructure — or simply returned to the public.

So why not do it? There are serious moral arguments, both secular and religious. There are those who believe — with some good reason — that the accretion of legalized vices is debilitating, that we are a less virtuous society since gambling spilled out from Las Vegas to "riverboats" and state lotteries across the country. There is a medical argument, though not a very convincing one: alcohol is more dangerous in a variety of ways, including the tendency of some drunks to get violent. One could argue that the abuse of McDonald's has a greater potential health-care cost than the abuse of marijuana. Obviously, marijuana can be abused. But the costs of criminalization have proved to be enormous, perhaps unsustainable. Would legalization be any worse?

I don't see any good reason why we shouldn't legalize or at least decriminalize marijuana in America. By the way, we already have the perfect poster boy for the campaign: 14-time Olympic gold medal winner, Michael Phelps. And Carlos Santana can write the jingle.

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Americans to be Allowed to Travel to Cuba?


As the son of Cuban immigrants, I really hope this is not an April Fool's joke:

A bipartisan group of senators predicted Tuesday that Congress was ready to pass legislation to allow all Americans to travel to Cuba. Removing the travel ban would produce a burst of tourism, create thousands of jobs and generate as much as $1.6 billion in business a year, an independent research group said.

A Senate news conference Tuesday and one in the House set for Thursday reflect new attempts to lift the travel ban, a key part of the U.S. trade embargo imposed after Fidel Castro took power in Havana in 1959.
 
It's about damn time. While the embargo may have made sense during the Cold War, it's been nearly 50 years and it has not shown any signs of successfully promoting democracy or human rights in Cuba. As Albert Einstein once pointed out, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Besides, the only ones suffering from this policy are the Cuban people. Not to mention, most countries are doing business in Cuba and allow their citizens to travel there. So what exactly do we think we are accomplishing by continuing this failed policy? Why not open up travel for all Americans and see if we can promote change from the inside? Oh right. Cuba is a communist country with a terrible human rights record. Umm..can't we say the same thing about China, our biggest trading partner? Seems like a very hypocritical policy to me.

Thankfully, Obama seems to be moving towards a fresh approach. During the presidential campaign he said that he would be willing to meet with Cuban President Raul Castro without preconditions and supported loosening restrictions on U.S. family travel and remittances to the island. Earlier this month, Obama signed an omnibus spending bill which did just that. Provisions in the bill allow Cuban-American relatives to go to Cuba once a year and stay for an unlimited time. In addition, the definition of relatives has been broadened to include uncles, aunts, nephews and nieces. The new measures also increase the amount of money visitors can spend. Previously, the Bush administration limited travel to Cuba to just two weeks every three years, and confined visits to immediate family members. 

However, Obama does not favor lifting the embargo entirely, a position I vehemently disagree with. I'm holding out hope that he's waiting to meet with Castro before announcing that he's open to lifting the embargo. I guess this makes some sense. If he makes these concessions too early, he'll have a weak hand to play. Regardless, my patience is wearing thin on this issue.


UPDATE: Congress isn't kidding around!


Raul Castro has held talks with members of Congress in his first face-to-face meeting with US politicians since he became president last year. State television showed Mr Castro talking to members of the delegation, which is in Havana to explore ways of improving US-Cuban relations.

No details of what was said in their discussions were released. Barbara Lee, the leader of the seven-strong group of Democrats, said the group did not carry a message from President Barack Obama but had come only to "listen and talk" with the Cubans.