Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

I really should read my own blog.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

Conservatism: there are some people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

Today’s GOP: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

“And when the Committee says to “report your income,” that could mean anything!

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

White supremacy is terrorism.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

Republicans can’t even be trusted with their own money.

We still have time to mess this up!

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

Despite his magical powers, I don’t think Trump is thinking this through, to be honest.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

“I never thought they’d lock HIM up,” sobbed a distraught member of the Lock Her Up Party.

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

The republican caucus is already covering themselves with something, and it’s not glory.

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Wilma Mankiller, RIP

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From the AP story, via the New York Times:

Former Cherokee Nation Chief Wilma Mankiller, one of the nation’s most visible American Indian leaders and one of the few women to lead a major tribe, died Tuesday after suffering from cancer and other health problems. She was 64.
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Mankiller, whose first taste of federal policy toward Indians came when her family ended up in a housing project after a government relocation project, took Indian issues to the White House and met with three presidents. She earned a reputation for facing conflict head-on. As the first female chief of the Cherokees, from 1985 to 1995, Mankiller led the tribe in tripling its enrollment, doubling employment and building new health centers and children’s programs.
[…] In 1969, she got what she called ”an enormous wake-up call” and took her first step into Indian activism by participating in the 19-month occupation of Alcatraz Island. Seventy-nine Native Americans took over the site of the former federal prison to protest a policy that terminated the federal government’s recognition of tribal sovereignty and the exclusion of Indians from state laws. The policy was based on the belief that Native Americans would be better off if they assimilated as individuals into mainstream American society.
[…] As chief of the Tahlequah-based tribe, Mankiller was less of an activist and more of a pragmatist. She was criticized for focusing almost exclusively on social programs, instead of pushing for smoke shops and high-stakes gaming.
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Mankiller decided not to seek re-election in 1995, and accepted a teaching position at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., where she held an honorary degree. Among her other honors was a Presidential Medal of Freedom — the nation’s highest civilian award — presented in 1998.

Seeing this reminded me that I need to replace my copy of her excellent autobiography, Mankiller: A Chief and Her People. And on her website, I found news of an upcoming documentary to which I look forward with great interest…
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“The question I am asked most frequently is why I remain such a positive person, after surviving breast cancer, lymphoma, dialysis, two kidney transplants, and systemic myasthenia gravis. The answer is simple: I am Cherokee, and I am a woman. No one knows better than I that every day is indeed a good day. How can I be anything but positive when I come from a tenacious, resilient people who keep moving forward with an eye toward the future even after enduring unspeakable hardship? How can I not be positive when I have lived longer than I ever dreamed possible and my life plays itself out in a supportive community of extended family and friends? There is much to be thankful for. Though I am an ordinary woman, I have been blessed with many extraordinary experiences. I have been privileged to travel extensively, meet world leaders like Nelson Mandela, represent tribal people in meetings with several United States presidents, and work with visionary tribal leaders and activists.
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I learned at a fairly early age that I cannot always control the things that are sent my way or the things that other people do, but I can most certainly control how I think about them and react to them. I don’t spend a lot of time dwelling on the negative. I believe that having a good, peaceful mind is the basic premise for a good life. — from “The Way Home”, Every Day is a Good Day by Wilma Mankiller, p. 148

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Always Have A Buddy At Your Back

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From today’s New York Times, “For the Battle-Scarred, Comfort at Leash’s End“:

[…] In August, Jacob Hyde got his service dog, Mya, from Puppies Behind Bars, a program based in New York State that uses prisoners to raise and train dogs for lives of service. The organization has placed 23 dogs with veterans with P.T.S.D. in the last two years, training them to obey 87 different commands.
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“If I didn’t have legs, I would have to crawl around,” said Mr. Hyde, 25. “If I didn’t have Mya, I wouldn’t be able to leave the house.”
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If Mr. Hyde says “block,” the dog will stand perpendicularly in front of him to keep other people at a distance. If he asks Mya to “get his back,” the dog will sit facing backward by his side.
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The dogs are trained to jolt a soldier from a flashback, dial 911 on a phone and even sense a panic attack before it starts. And, perhaps most important, the veterans’ sense of responsibility, optimism and self-awareness is renewed by caring for the dogs.
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The dogs help soldiers understand “what’s happening as it’s happening, what to do about it, and then doing it,” said Joan Esnayra, a geneticist whose research team has received $300,000 from the Defense Department to study the issue. “You can use your dog kind of like a mirror to reflect back your emotional tenor.”
[…] Under a bill written by Senator Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota, veterans with P.T.S.D. will get service dogs as part of a pilot program run by the Department of Veterans Affairs. Training a psychiatric service dog and pairing it with a client costs more than $20,000. The government already helps provide dogs to soldiers who lost their sight or were severely wounded in combat, but had never considered placing dogs for emotional damage…

While it’s not the focus of this article, these service dogs are helping rescue two sets of lost human souls. My dog guru in the Midwest helped start a different program to pair “throw-away” shelter dogs with… well, “throw-away” humans in the prison system, selected prisoners who earn a coveted slot for schooling as dog groomers and trainers. She thought that after twenty years of dog rescue, she’d be immune to horror stories, but it breaks her heart all over again to find out how many people have never known anything but coercion, force, and threats in their lives. Thank Goddess for dogs, who forgive.

(Photo swiped, with permission, from commentor Yutsano‘s Flicker; hat tip to commentor Mai Naem for the article)

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Running the Gauntlet

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My last post on unemployment came from a News Hour piece on Florida’s unemployment system. The beast has been well and truly starved there: Florida pays about 50% of those eligible for unemployment, they use a computer system installed during the Nixon administration to do it, and if you do get benefits, the rate is the fifth lowest in the country.

Florida’s schools are “consistently ranked in the bottom 25 percent” nationwide. Adoption by gay couples is still banned, and they’re close to having a referendum on an abortion-banning “personhood” amendment. And you’re less likely to have employer-provided health insurance.

So, in this conservative paradise, losing your job or getting sick is a bigger risk. If you want to have children, you can’t be gay, and you need enough money to send them to private schools. And, speaking of kids, you’d better be good with the birth control, since it looks like abortion isn’t going to be an alternative.

In short, you need to be really fucking lucky to live there.

I’m not trying to single out Florida — I’m sure this is the general state of affairs for most states where tax cutting and bible banging have dominated politics for decades.

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Three Amigos

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Three Republican House members have opted-out of their leadership’s ban on earmarks: Don Young, Anh ‘Joseph’ Cao and Ron Paul.

It’s easy to understand why the most crooked and the most vulnerable Republicans would opt out. Paul’s a more interesting case.

The Paul formula for staying in office is simple: he brings home all the pork he can, and he does top-notch constituent service, making sure that everyone his district gets their Social Security checks on time.

There’s nothing wrong with what Paul is doing, but “I bring home pork and keep the government checks flowing” sure wasn’t the centerpiece of his Presidential campaign.

(via)

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More Support for HR-4872

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America’s most Jansenist blogger, James Howard Kunstler of Clusterfuck Nation, has surprisingly kind words for the Democrats’ attempts at reform:

The most striking elements of so-called health care in America these days is how cruel and unjust it is, and in taking a stand against reforming it the Republican party appeared to be firmly in support of cruelty and injustice. This would be well within the historical tradition of other religious crusades which turned political — such as the Spanish Inquisition and the seventeenth century war against witchcraft. Whatever else the Democratic party has stood for in recent history, it has tended to oppose institutional cruelty and injustice, and notice that it has also been the party for keeping religion out of government.
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Now a health care reform act has passed and there’s some reason to hope that insurance companies will be prevented from doing things like canceling the coverage of policy-holders who have the impertinence to actually get sick, which has been their main device for revenue enhancement, and we’ll see how they cope with the idea that being alive in a treacherous world is the fundamental pre-existing condition.
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[…] At least this once a workable majority in the government has stood up to the forces of cruelty and injustice, and whatever else happens to us in the course of this long emergency, it will be a good thing if the party of fairness and justice identifies its adversaries for what they are: not “partners in governing,” or any such academical-therapeutic bullshit, but enemies of every generous impulse in the national character.
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I hope that Mr. Obama’s party can carry this message clearly into the electoral battles ahead, painting the Republican opposition for what it is: a gang of hypocritical, pietistic sadists, seeking pleasure in the suffering of others while pretending to be Christians, devoid of sympathy, empathy, or any inclination to simple human kindness, constant breakers of the Golden Rule, enemies of the common good. In fact, the current edition of the Republican party has achieved something really memorable in the annals of collective bad intentions: they have managed to create a sense of the public interest whose main goal is the destruction of the public interest.

Go read all of “The Party of Cruelty“. With the usual caveat — the comment section is, shall we say, very much a mixed bag.

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Early Morning Open Thread: Thanks, Tim…

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As the BJ front-pager whose main contribution to the Great PTDB Push was staying the heck out of everyones’ way, I want to thank Tim F. (and commentors MCC and Moses2317) for so earnestly and effectively keeping us focused and on-target. Tim is the guy who’s been posting about the arcane Congressional travails of H.R. 4872, the Health Care & Education Affordability Reconciliation Act of 2010, keeping us up on the Congresspersons and the numbers involved as circumstances evolved, nagging us to get involved despite all our blogger-introvert instincts and preference for quirky snark over earnest activism. Tim, even if you never posted so much as a one-line Open Thread notice ever again, your work here over the last many weeks has made a place for you in the record books far beyond the borders of Balloon Juice. You have made the world a better place!

*****
In the same celebratory vein, the Boston Globe has a statement from Victoria Reggie Kennedy:

“As Ted Kennedy said, across the decades, in the best and the most discouraging hours, health care was the cause of his life. Tonight that cause becomes more than a dream, it becomes America’s commitment.
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“This landmark moment belongs to President Barack Obama, to Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the courageous members of the House, and to the colleagues he cherished in the Senate. Most of all, it belongs to America — and it is one of the rare legislative achievements that belongs to the ages.
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“When Ted stood with Barack Obama in 2008, he said he had new hope that we would break the old gridlock and guarantee that every American — north, south, east, west, young, old — would have decent, quality health care as a fundamental right and not a privilege. And now they do and from now on they will… “

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