when the status quo frustrates.

Congress proclaims, “We’re going to do things the right way,” but has yet to decide if those things will continue to matter

Sunday, January 21st, 2007

As I’m sure many of you know, on January 18th, the Senate passed by an overwhelming majority the lobbying and ethics reform bill promised by both parties:

Under the bill, passed 96-2, senators will give up gifts and free travel from lobbyists, pay more for travel on corporate jets and make themselves more accountable for the pet projects they insert into bills.

Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., who made the bill his first initiative as head of the Senate, called it the “most significant legislation in ethics and lobbying reform we’ve had in the history of this country.”

PAB reader Phoenix alerted me to a potential problem in the bill for those of us in the blogosphere, including punkassblog. This statement came from the organization GrassrootsFreedom.com:

“Section 220 of S. 1, the lobbying reform bill currently before the
Senate, would require grassroots causes, even bloggers, who communicate to
500 or more members of the public on policy matters, to register and report
quarterly to Congress the same as the big K Street lobbyists. Section 220
would amend existing lobbying reporting law by creating the most expansive
intrusion on First Amendment rights ever. For the first time in history,
critics of Congress will need to register and report with Congress itself.
“The bill would require reporting of ‘paid efforts to stimulate
grassroots lobbying,’ but defines ‘paid’ merely as communications to 500 or
more members of the public, with no other qualifiers.
“On January 9, the Senate passed Amendment 7 to S. 1, to create
criminal penalties, including up to one year in jail, if someone ‘knowingly
and willingly fails to file or report.’

Fortunately, the way I read the bill, it doesn’t work that way. As the release above notes, it only requires reporting on paid efforts to stimulate lobbying; it expressly excludes actual grassroots lobbying from reporting requirements:

(1) in paragraph (7), by adding at the end of the following: `Lobbying activities include paid efforts to stimulate grassroots lobbying, but do not include grassroots lobbying.’; and

The “500 person” qualifier also isn’t quite as vague as they feared. Only people who are being paid by clients to stimulate grassroots efforts that are expected to target more than 500 people have to turn over their paperwork:

`(B) PAID ATTEMPT TO INFLUENCE THE GENERAL PUBLIC OR SEGMENTS THEREOF- The term `paid attempt to influence the general public or segments thereof’ does not include an attempt to influence directed at less than 500 members of the general public.

Maybe I’m reading the legislation incorrectly, but I think we’re all fine. I have no problem saying that, if you pay a third party to actively lobby more than 500 people, you should have to make your activities known. My only question is whether all the people “influencing” ministers of the huge power churches will be forced to step out from behind the curtain. If there’s any secret lobbying effort whose coordination needs to be made public, it’s that one.

Unsurprisingly, this bill almost didn’t make it to a vote. Republicans became anxious about the lack of overt fascism in their new legislation, and attempted to balance it out by upping the dictatorial authority of herr president. The Dems said nein:

Republicans were angry they could not get a vote on a proposal giving the president, with congressional approval, more power to kill single spending items in larger bills. So GOP senators voted against a resolution needed to move the bill to final passage.

But they didn’t necessarily say nein hard enough:

Under the agreement reached today, the sponsor of the line-item veto amendment, Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., will be allowed to offer his proposal as part of the next bill to reach the Senate floor, a proposal to raise the minimum wage while giving small businesses several tax breaks. That will take place on Monday.

I’m fine with the passage of this bill, but if I’m following the exhilerating play-by-play correctly, we could be looking at a LINE ITEM VETO being attached to the raising of the minimum wage on Monday. This version would turn every expediture deemed worthy by Congress into nothing more a request for more allowance money from Big Daddy Prez.

The Dems won the day on Friday, but tune in tomorrow to see if the last tatters of the Constitution find their way onto the shoeheels of our law-makers.

Er, law-suggesters.

21.01.2007 Politics 2 Comments

Are you being blocked from commenting?

Friday, January 19th, 2007

If so, please email me at the address here. We installed tougher spam filters, but folks like JackGoff have been denied since then. I’ll be looking into ways to keep up the protection but also avoid getting friendly folk blocked.

19.01.2007 Asides 4 Comments

They’ll get you, and your little dog, too

Friday, January 19th, 2007

This particular weirdo troll, who claims to be a feminist and an atheist but hates feminists and really ought to give the God-thumping thing a try, is worried that librul hedonist peer pressure is forcing young girls and boys to pick their flowers before they’re ready.

95% of girls and 89% of boys agreed that “being a virgin in high school is a good thing.”

77% of sexually active teen girls, and 60% of boys, wished they had waited longer before having sex.

****
24% of sexually active girls between 15 and 19 said that their first sexual experience was voluntary but unwanted.
(Moore et al, “A Statistical Report of Adolscent Sex, Contraception, and Childrearing,” National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, March 1998, pg. 11)

****

But, omigod, let’s not encourage abstinence, because that’s what conservatives do.

I suspect that when this troll’s preschool children bury their teary faces in his/her stomach, crying that they’re afraid of the dark because there are monsters under the bed, s/he lovingly strokes their hair and tells them they’re right, there are monsters under the bed, and in the closet too, just waiting to gobble up naughty little children who go into the dark alone.

Clearly, there’s nothing wrong with being afraid of the dark when you’re a small child, and forcing a terrified little creature into a dark room by himself and locking him in is abusive by any measure. But to a sex-hating conservative, children aren’t to be encouraged to face their fears, taught how to keep themselves safe while living as freely and fully as they can, and offered respectful guidance and support as they learn to trust the world and themselves. Frightened children are easier to control, after all, so why give up such a useful teaching tool as fear?

Where are the surveys telling us how many adults wish they hadn’t waited as long as they did before having sex? How many would have preferred not having their adolescent fears of growing up and learning to relate to other people as friends, lovers, and makeout partners validated by their parents and teachers? How much easier would it have been to grow up if they hadn’t been surrounded by people happy to keep them young?

19.01.2007 Advice, Sex, We caught a troll and he was THIS DUMB 11 Comments

This is Just to Say

Thursday, January 18th, 2007

I have damaged
the cat
who was trampling
my keyboard

and who
probably held
sentimental value
for you

Forgive me
but I get jumpy
when I can’t see
the screfdgdtsen

18.01.2007 Aww Kittens 4 Comments

State of the village report

Thursday, January 18th, 2007

Some of you have probably already seen this exercise, but I thought it’d be worth a link for those of you who haven’t. A friend of mine just finished a school report on it and shared it with me.

The State of the Village

18.01.2007 Punkass! No Comments

But, wait! There’s more! Stop the war now and we’ll include a lovely set of Ginsu knives for every household in America!

Thursday, January 18th, 2007

In war, like in home redecorating or computer upgrading, your initial guess about how much money and time you’ll be spending is always a bit low. Part of the reason it’s important to set a strict budget for yourself is so that you have a baseline against which to judge how insane you are going when you, inevitably, run over.

With that in mind, could you imagine how fucked we’d be if Bush & Co. hadn’t planned for a modest $50 billion war? Because we’re now up to $700 billion in what the Times calls “direct spending,” and it estimates a total eventual expenditure of 1.2 trillion dollars.

And that’s the conservative estimate.

In the days before the war almost five years ago, the Pentagon estimated that it would cost about $50 billion. Democratic staff members in Congress largely agreed. Lawrence Lindsey, a White House economic adviser, was a bit more realistic, predicting that the cost could go as high as $200 billion, but President Bush fired him in part for saying so…

…over the full course of the war, an eventual total of $700 billion in direct spending.

Let’s pause and reflect on the term trillion. A trillion is a 1 with 12 zeros at the end of it:

1, 000, 000, 000, 000. I can’t even deal with that many zeros. I think of it as 10^12.

It’s a million (1,000,000) piles of a million.

If the objects in your pile are dollar bills, great! We’ll need between one and two of these sets of piles to:

-pay for the direct costs of the war
-take care of the vetrans
-replenish our military hardware and readiness (I guess we’re seeing some savings here by not giving the soldiers the proper gear in the first place)
-and other sundry expenses

If that doesn’t piss you off enough, the business section of the New York Times engaged in a little thought experiment: what else could we have done with that kind of cash?

For starters, $1.2 trillion would pay for an unprecedented public health campaign — a doubling of cancer research funding, treatment for every American whose diabetes or heart disease is now going unmanaged and a global immunization campaign to save millions of children’s lives.

Combined, the cost of running those programs for a decade wouldn’t use up even half our money pot. So we could then turn to poverty and education, starting with universal preschool for every 3- and 4-year-old child across the country. The city of New Orleans could also receive a huge increase in reconstruction funds.

But we’re not done yet! Why, we could even buy security, real security, the kind that doesn’t eat our children’s economic futures while growing newer and angrier terrorists!

The final big chunk of the money could go to national security. The recommendations of the 9/11 Commission that have not been put in place — better baggage and cargo screening, stronger measures against nuclear proliferation — could be enacted. Financing for the war in Afghanistan could be increased to beat back the Taliban’s recent gains, and a peacekeeping force could put a stop to the genocide in Darfur.

So for the cost of the Iraq war, we could immunize the world’s children, educate our own, fix New Orleans, make ourselves safer, actually help out Darfur and complete the job that we initially set out to do three years ago in Afghanistan! Remember Afghanistan? That tiny detail? The slightly more justified part of our use of military force in the Middle East? The part of the war people actually signed up to fight? Because that’s where the terrorists were? Back before we made sure they were everywhere?

If that bit doesn’t make your head explode, nothing ever will.

If you’re not depressed enough, then take a break from these cold, hard numbers and look for a more human facet of the story:

In economic terms, you can think of these medical costs as the difference between how productive the soldiers would have been as, say, computer programmers or firefighters and how productive they will be as wounded veterans. In human terms, you can think of soldiers like Jason Poole, a young corporal profiled in The New York Times last year. Before the war, he had planned to be a teacher. After being hit by a roadside bomb in 2004, he spent hundreds of hours learning to walk and talk again, and he now splits his time between a community college and a hospital in Northern California.

Dammit, Appletree, I was having an OK day until I found that link on your blog.

18.01.2007 Bush is a cock, Governmental Failures, Moola, War, War HUH! What is it good for? 6 Comments

Violating the conservative mythos on rape

Thursday, January 18th, 2007

After reading a Courtney Martin article on sex education that’s been covered quite well across the blogosphere, my mind was immediately flooded with the kneejerk reactions I would expect to hear from your standard-issue rape-apologist wingnut.

Courtney opens her article by recounting the story of her friend, Jen, whose sociology professor described the power dynamics of rape in class, leading Jen to realize one of her recent experiences after a night of drinking precisely fit the mold.

The Right would be incensed by this tale, but not because of the rape. No, they’d be pissed she had the gall to get raped and then realize she got raped, advancing arguments like:

“It’s her own fault for putting herself in a bad situation!”

Yep. Drinking is dangerous. Problem is, the conservatives never ask themselves what’s worse: drinking which puts you in danger of being raped, or drinking so that you release your inner rapist and actually rape someone. If anyone should be chastised for imbibing so much alcohol that you can’t control yourself, it should probably be the violent offender. Wacky pinko liberal theory, I know. But hey, when a drunk driver hurts someone, we usually blame the person who got hit for being out in the road, don’t we?

What’s that? We don’t? Oh.

Getting in a car is dangerous. Jaywalking is dangerous. Challenging Jeff Goldstein to a fight is dange- okay, well, not that one so much, but you get the idea. Every day, each of us do plenty of things that increase our risk of being hurt, but that doesn’t give a single soul the license to hurt us.

“If she really didn’t want to have sex, she’d have fought back harder!”

A famous conservative once made waves with a powerful and popular slogan: “Just Say No.” For las drogas, that was supposed to be good enough. For rape? Apparently, in a paradox to the previous wingnut axiom, you’re expected to increase your risk of being harmed even further by instigating violence against your attacker. That’s the only way to “prove” you didn’t want it. If you didn’t bleed, says the ‘nut, then voluntary sex was decreed.

I’d wager that if any of the asshats promoting that position ever switched places with Ned Beatty in Deliverance, they’d have a whole different outlook on how one would react in a rape situation, or any situation where you are in real danger of being hurt even more by escalating violence. Of course, these same nitwits think waving a gun at an intruder in your home will somehow “protect” you, so maybe they shouldn’t be considered too trustworthy when it comes to risk factors. [Insurance agents, take note!]

“Liberal academics are filling our kids’ heads with lies!”

I guess if evolution is a lie, so, too, is the idea that being forced to have sex after saying “no” equates to rape. Either that, or those kooky academic ideas just happen to threaten two of the conservative’s most endearing positions, namely “I will NOT die and rot in the ground because I AM A BEAUTIFUL AND UNIQUE SNOWFLAKE GODDAMIT” and “Boy will be boys!”

When handled by a reasonable teacher, almost all meaningful education points to a belief in equality. The traditional differences we’ve been taught to fear are better explained, and in some cases torn down, by biology, philosophy, and, yes, sociology. But hey, if you go that route, then the special treatment and double standards afforded men don’t make as much sense any more, and *poof!* you lose your ability to get away with stealing a bit of the ol’ in-and-out.

That simple fact is part of why we have so much trouble fulfilling Ms. Martin’s desire to see reasonable sex ed taught in American schools. She’s right that, if done correctly, sex ed could dramatically reduce rape and sexual confusion, but I fear there are far too many people who like the system just the way it is. It’ll be some time before we can even hope to have a reasonably-sized pool of teachers in our school system who wouldn’t mangle sex ed with their own broken beliefs or religious righteousness.

Fortunately, painful as it has been at times, feminism continues to make real progress in America. Maybe in 100 years it won’t be so easy for so many people to dismiss stories like Jen’s with the loathsome lies above, or so hard to teach our kids about the basics of their bodies and how to interact with them responsibly.

18.01.2007 Edumakashun, Feminism, Rape, Shame on you for being a woman 7 Comments

The art of compounding your crimes

Wednesday, January 17th, 2007

The new conservative party line on Iraq is simple: now that we’ve gang-raped the bitch, now that she’s all choking and sobbing and looking a mess, we have to kill her, or else we’ll really be in big trouble. Sure, maybe we feel bad about raping her now — we didn’t know she’d put up such a fight and get this upset, but now that she has, well, we can’t just leave her like this. If we do, she could seek vengeance, or go to the police and get us thrown in jail — basically, if we quit now, our first mistake will really come back to bite us in the ass. So, regardless of how we feel about rape, and even about murder, we have to kill her if we don’t want our lives totally ruined.

Really, what’s different between that line of reasoning and arguing that, even if it turns out we were wrong to go into Iraq in the first place, we have to finish the job, whatever that means, or else it could be even worse for us than life was before we screwed up in the first place?

Isn’t that precisely the implication here?

If we walk away from Iraq, we face the prospect of a strengthened Iran with a half-crazed madman threatening nuclear annihilation, the entire Middle East in flames, as our economy here in the U.S. takes a nightmare nosedive beyond anything even imagined in the Great Depression. America’s enemies would have us by the throat. As we’ve outlined before in this column, the Islamofascists and Marxist regimes the world over are just waiting for the time when this nation is as helpless as Gulliver was when tied down by the Lilliputians. That’s when they will move in for the kill.

The only justification offered by this nutcase at Renew America* is that we’ll be in deep doo-doo if we don’t keep fighting. Correct me if I’m wrong, but that is classic Machiavelli. Apparently, we have to keep fighting an unjust war because the goal of a stable puppet regime in Iraq would still be tremendously beneficial to us. The ends justify the means.

McCain’s quote on the troop increase strikes the same chord:

McCain said those advocating the start of a troop withdrawal, which includes many Democrats, ”have a responsibility to tell us what they believe are the consequences of withdrawal in Iraq. If we walk away from Iraq, we’ll be back, possibly in the context of a wider war in the world’s most volatile region.”

I hate to burst Johnny “The Reb” McCain’s bubble, but we don’t have to explain the consequences of a dadgum thing. All we have to do is demonstrate the morality or immorality of our actions. The results are irrelevent.

America was built on precisely these principles. Founders insisted the process must be just above all, regardless of the outcome. Our judicial system, flawed as it might be, is the shining example of this ideology. So why are we presented with this conservative line of questioning as though it’s anything but deeply un-American?

The bottom line is that we don’t know what’s going to happen in Iraq, whether or not we stick around. Even if Republicans think they’re pursuing just ends, they can’t guarantee those result will come to be. That’s why we can only worry about the morality of our actions, not their odds of bringing prosperity.

Nobody thinks of themselves as a bad person. That’s why doing whatever you have to do to protect yourself always seems like such a justifiable motive. I guess that’s why wingnuts feel just fine about all the blood on their hands.

*Something I’ve never understood about Renew America: what the hell does that name mean? Is America an overdue library book? Is it a prescription? A subscription? Maybe a driver’s license? If we don’t renew it, will the President get pulled over by the UN for expired tags? This is all very confusing.

17.01.2007 Imperialism for Dummies, McCainery, Wingnuts 15 Comments

I have to admit, I like what I see.

Tuesday, January 16th, 2007

Ok, get rid of the ridiculous name and make another version with short sleeves and no headpiece, and I will totally take one as well.

I want a swimsuit that covers my back and shoulders without looking like a wetsuit. And one that will restrain my unruly girls.

16.01.2007 Punkass!, For the ladies 11 Comments

Does this make you stare at my tits? No? How about this?

Tuesday, January 16th, 2007

The Rebelution, a pair of almost preternaturally attractive and well-spoken brothers who happen to be blessed with a helpful sister and a father who will be one-upping James Dobson on the family ministry tour circuit, have finally provided hundreds of teenage Christian girls with the forum to find out what they’ve always wanted to know: are you looking at my boobs?

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, which is unfortunate because these guys are just overflowing with good intentions. Their survey, in which 200 something girls submitted over 300 “is it skanky when I _____” questions, which were then boiled down to something like 150 meticulous statements covering topics like bikinis, body glitter, and appropriate fabrics, complete with pictures for those guys who don’t know what a camisole is because in their minds they call it “she’s wearing that shirt that gets me all hard again.” Boys have to indicate to what degree they agree or disagree with the statements. The results will help girls help guys by finally having a clear set of instructions that will help them avoid being siren songs to sin. Unless you want to be a siren song, in which case the results will give you detailed instructions of exactly where the fine line is for getting your Christian brothers all hot and bothered against their will without overdoing the slut bit.
(more…)

16.01.2007 For the ladies, Godbaggery, Shame on you for being a woman 39 Comments

Spamalot

Tuesday, January 16th, 2007

Update 2: Done upgrading. Still tons of spam, but I am trying some new plugins, too, so we will see.

Update: hold everything, we’re updating several bits of software. Any comments posted after 5:53pm CT may be lost…

Right now, our server is being absolutely crushed under the weight of a non-stop spam attack on comments. We’re seeing dozens every minute flooding punkassblog alone, and we had to close Pandagon temporarily because opening it up to the spammers crashes the server within minutes.

Has anyone experienced anything like this before? If so, did it ever fucking stop? This one’s been going all day.

16.01.2007 Punkass! No Comments

They could have sworn they found a wad of gum stuck under a seat in the auditorium

Tuesday, January 16th, 2007

So I’m a punkass now. Believe me, I’m as surprised as you are.

To celebrate, I thought I’d pop some champagne and share with you what I learned from PZ Myers today: Christian fundamentalists in America are being persecuted.

Ken Ham’s creation museum hasn’t even opened its doors yet, and things are already getting ugly on the bloodthirsty Darwinist heathen front. Now, don’t get them wrong; the Docents for Jesus can handle being laughed at.

While foreign media and science critics have mostly come to snigger at exhibits explaining how baby dinosaurs fit on Noah’s Ark and Cain married his sister to people the earth, museum spokesman and vice-president Mark Looy said the coverage has done nothing but drum up more interest.

“Mocking publicity is free publicity,” Looy said.

But they aren’t quite as lighthearted about being torched to the ground by the inevitable hordes of pitchfork-wielding evilutionists.

The museum has hired extra security and explosives-sniffing dogs to counter anonymous threats of damage to the building.

Of course it has. It makes me want to fly to Kentucky and blow up an aerosol can in the parking lot to make them feel better.

16.01.2007 Punkass!, "Science", Brilliant Ideas, Edumakashun, Godbaggery 10 Comments

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