6/4/2010
I don't disagree with the supreme court that corporations have free speech rights. Corporations are just groups of people acting together. I place the fault with the voters. Money should not be so useful in manipulating public opinion. People should not pay any attention to political ads. The only reason to watch political ads on TV is if you're curious what the rich would have you believe. We can't get the money out of politics. But we could make that money far less useful by educating voters. Voters need to learn to consider the source of everything they hear, and what motives that source might have. Voters need to understand that there is no fact checker preventing lies and half-truths from appearing on their TV screens. Voters need to learn about propaganda techniques. Campaign finance reform won't work. Voter education is the better and more lasting solution.

6/3/2010
People used to believe that God made it rain. Scientific knowledge has pushed God's role back now about 12 billion years. Isn't that far enough now to guess that material reasons just keep going back forever in time and there is no God?

5/6/2010
Why isn't there a political party combining the Republican position against forced charity through taxation, with the Democratic position that we should have effective regulation of corporations on pollution, consumer fraud, false advertising, anti-competitive practices, etc...? The left/right political spectrum is a ridiculously simplistic way to conceptualize all possible political parties and movements.

5/9/2010
The 70's sit-com Barney Miller is a very underrated show. It deserves to be listed along with All in the Family and Cheers. It was politically relevant and daring, and regularly laugh-out-loud funny. If you've never seen it, I recommend buying it on DVD (or downloading it) and watching it instead of some of the crappy sitcoms on TV today.

4/29/2010
Why haven't all the members of the New York Islamic group that threatened the lives of the creators of South Park been arrested? Are people now allowed to make death threats in America as long as their motivation is religious?

Censorship on TV isn't just of "dirty" words. There are many censorship rules with political or religious goals. For example, most TV networks and cable channels have rules against any reference to illegal drugs unless the drugs are portrayed in a negative way. Censorship like that is nothing short of propaganda and cultural manipulation. The worst thing about this censorship is that most TV viewers are unaware that they are watching a censored view of reality that is skewed to encourage inaccurate beliefs that are beneficial to rich people and the profits of their corporations.

4/25/2010
I think ruling class people (rich people, business managers, aristocrats) see working class people like the rest of us see tools. You recognize that your tools are useful, they give you power, but they can be replaced. You don't want to waste or throw away your tools. You make some effort to take care of them so they'll last, but you don't worry overmuch about breaking them or wearing them out, especially if what you're working on is very important.

3/22/2010
A good portion of conservative ideology serves the purpose of making the rich feel okay about being callous, vicious, selfish pricks. For example: It's okay to oppose assistance for the poor because they're all lazy beggars.

It's truly shameless for the right-wing media to trumpet the polling that shows people don't like the Obama health care reform bill. The right-wingers successfully deceive the American people about the bill, poll them to get their own lies repeated back to them, and then act like this proves the bill is bad.

3/9/2010
I would make the case that the nature of health care prevents it from being well regulated by consumer choice, which is the conservatives' preferred method of controlling the behavior of corporations. There are three differences between health care and other services: (1) When you need health care, you often need it immediately. You don't have time to shop around or do research to find deals or pick the best doctors, etc.... (2) Modern health care is highly technical. Few people can be expected to, for example, detect unnecessary treatments or be aware of less expensive alternative medications. (3) Health care is a life-and-death matter. It's one thing if you make a poor choice buying a portable music player, quite another if you make a mistake in selecting your doctor, hospital, or medication. For some things, a market-based, laissez faire approach is simply not appropriate.

It's yet another Republican deception to say that we can't afford health care reform now because of the weak economy. Health care reform isn't some expensive luxury. If done properly, it would help people deal with economic hardship. Regulating health insurers to reduce their profits and increase their services, setting up a public option to provide competition, and preventing people from loosing their insurance when they change jobs would all help working people.

Some people are inclined to explain the replacement of news with infotainment as nothing more than a profit-driven media simply giving the people what they want. But I fear that it may be more sinister. What if the people chosen to run our mainstream news media understand that their job is to distract people with dramatic, salacious, but unimportant news, and also to make them feel that they know what's going on so they won't look elsewhere for real news?

2/24/2010
In order to accelerate the construction of clean energy sources, Congress should pass legislation requiring all electricity utilities to give their customers an option on their bills to pay a fixed dollar amount extra per month for solar- and wind-generated electricity. The extra money collected would be added to the fees paid by the utility for the clean energy, thereby raising the price clean energy would command. The defenders of the status quo would find this difficult to attack because it's completely voluntary.

CBS has refused to broadcast more than one progressive ad, but recently they showed an anti-abortion ad from Focus on the Family. NBC has also been accused of this sort of ad discrimination. TV networks don't have the right to act as gate-keepers for political speech. An argument can be made that they should be able to do whatever they want since they're private businesses. However, the goal of maintaining a free and open exchange of political ideas is far more important to our nation than the relatively minor right to choose with whom you do business. The networks' behavior is an abuse of power. They gain nothing by their action other than censoring ideas they dislike. Actually, they loose money by refusing certain ads. If the primary motive is to censor constitutionally-protected political speech, then it should be illegal. It's like a cab driver refusing to drive someone to a political protest he disagrees with, or a printer refusing to make posters for a cause he dislikes. Congress should require TV networks to accept all political ads or none. If the networks are only concerned about offending their viewers, then they should welcome such a law because it would shift any blame for the ad onto the law.

Some right-wingers, including Sarah Palin, have tried to twist this issue. Their statements seem to be intended to mislead people into thinking that Progressives want the anti-abortion ad censored. Progressives are not calling for that. We want equal treatment for all political ads. This is a deceptive tactic oft-used by Conservatives: The Straw Man Logical Fallacy.

2/22/2010
There's been some recent controversy about the use of the word retard as an insult. Insulting a normal person who's done something stupid by calling them a retard is not an insult against retarded people. Imagine that someone had spent all day in their recliner watching TV, and you said to them, "Why don't you get off your ass and do something? What are you, a paraplegic?" That wouldn't be an insult to paraplegics. There's no shame in having a disability. However, there is shame in acting as if you have one when you don't.

2/18/2010
The whole "death panel" thing is excellent evidence that the Republicans are systematically deceiving people. The whole thing was based on two things: (1) the health care reform bill paying for end-of-life counselling, and (2) an implausible misreading of one version of the bill. Obviously, you'd have to be insane to think that the government paying for a doctor to council a patient could be some plot to trick patients into agreeing to sign away their lives. The bill said nothing about what choice the patient had to make about their end-of-life care. A living will can say "Keep me alive no matter what!" you know. Patients would obviously benefit from having end-of-life medical facts explained by a doctor, especially the fact that pain can usually be controlled, and the fact that palliative sedation is an option (keeping the patient unconscious if the pain can't be controlled). The misreading was even less believable. The bill said that doctors' pay would be partly based on how many of their patients established living wills, and how well the wills were adhered to. The lying Republicans pretended to misunderstand this as saying that doctors would be paid by the government to force their patients to obey their living wills even if they had changed their minds. This is absurdly ignorant. Living wills only come into effect after the patient is incapacitated and can no longer communicate their wishes. It's literally impossible for a patient to be forced to obey their living will. Obviously, it's the doctors who will be encouraged to follow their patients' living wills by basing their pay partly on whether they do so. The Republican leaders can't possibly have made this mistake honestly. Most of them are lawyers. They know what living wills are. The only explanation is that they seized on this slightly unclear bit of the bill as an excuse to terrify the American people with images of elderly people sick in bed being told they had to die now because that's what it says on this piece of paper.

The Republicans' have systematically and repeatedly used fear and scare tactics against the people of America. Perhaps the Democrats should start calling them terrorists. Or at least start talking about the "terrorist-like scare tactics of the Republican Party." It wouldn't be just name-calling. The definition of terrorism is the creation of fear in a population to achieve a political goal. It's true that Muslim terrorists use bombs and bullets to produce the fear, but producing fear by deception to achieve a political goal still fits the definition of terrorism. The Republicans don't murder people to produce fear, but their policies do kill people. It's estimated than 45,000 Americans die every year due to a lack of medical coverage. By attacking health care reform, the Republicans are trying to kill far more Americans every year than Al-Qaeda has ever killed. They're doing this to protect the profits of the health insurance, pharmaceutical, and hospital corporations so they'll keep giving them campaign money. At least the evil, religious fanatic terrorists are doing it for something they believe in.

2/16/2010
Republican leaders and spokespeople keep hysterically screaming that President Obama wants to turn the US into a socialist state. This is ridiculous on its face. In a socialist system, all the elements of the economy are owned collectively by the people. Obama and the Democrats haven't proposed anything even approaching this. Regulating health insurance companies or setting up a government-run, non-profit health insurance provider that people can use or not use (the "public option") isn't even slightly socialist. Even the takeover of some US auto manufacturers by the government isn't socialist... because they were bankrupt! They weren't worth anything. Their debts were greater than their assets. The government took them over, bailed them out actually, to prevent them from going through formal bankruptcy proceedings and turning all their employees out onto the streets. The Republicans are shamelessly taking advantage of fear based on ignorance.

Economic conservatives argue that corporations are best regulated by the purchasing decisions of consumers rather than the government. This might have worked in the days of small villages. If the town blacksmith were burning sulphurous coal and stinking up the town, his customers could certainly force him to stop. But the idea that such a system could work in our modern, highly technical, global economy is simply ridiculous. It's unreasonable to expect every consumer to understand all the consequences of the manufacture of every product they buy. The only explanation for this ridiculous consumer regulation argument being made is that it's a cover for letting corporations do whatever they want at the expense of the vast majority of the people. This view is backed up by the fact that during the Dubya administration, when Republicans had a majority in Congress, they tried to repeal the law mandating the standardized nutrition labels on food products that we're all familiar with. If the Republicans truly believed in regulation by consumers, they certainly wouldn't try to reduce the information available to consumers.

The Tea Baggers style themselves as freedom lovers who fear having their freedom taken away by the government. But our government is a democracy answerable to the voters. Why aren't the Tea Baggers more fearful of loosing their freedom to profit-driven corporations that are answerable only to the rich elites who own and run them? The government doesn't poison our children's brains with mercury from coal-fired power plants, test us for illegal drugs without probable cause, search for excuses to deny us medical coverage, nor dictate how we spend our working lives. Corporations do.

Why do people respect the law? Everyone hates politicians. Everyone things they're a bunch of corrupt, self-serving bastards. Well, who do you think writes the law? Politicians! Once you get beyond murder, rape, and stealing, the fairness of the law becomes suspect.

2/13/2010
Here's a suggestion for dealing with the recent Supreme Court decision allowing corporations to spend without restriction on political advertising: Rather than beginning the long and likely to be unsuccessful process of passing a constitutional amendment, Congress could immediately pass a law requiring corporate-sponsored ads to carry a clear statement of who ultimately paid for them. Rules would prevent deceptive names of shell companies from being used. The corporate names most recognizable to the viewer would be required. Or the government could write the disclosure and specify the industries who provided the money. For example, an ad attacking climate change would have to say that it was paid for by the petroleum and coal industries. Bush's Supreme Court has opened the flood gates of corporate money, but Congress can at least make sure the American people aren't kept in the dark about where the money's coming from.

The right-wingers always say they believe in freedom. But they define the word freedom to mean their own freedom and the freedom of people just like them. That isn't believing in freedom. Everybody selfishly wants freedom for themselves and their group. Therefore, truly believing in freedom must mean something more, otherwise it would be a useless term. It must include tolerance for people different from you to also be free to live their lives as they see fit, so long as they do no tangible harm to others.

2/2/2010
What if the left wing of the Supreme Court decided to allow foreign corporations to spend as much money as they want to influence American voters? What do you think Fox News and Rush Limbaugh would say? I'm pretty sure the word treason would involuntarily explode out of that corridor to Hell Ann Coulter calls a mouth. -- But the right-wingers on the court do it, the guys appointed by Dubya, and what does Fox News say? What does Limbaugh say? It's a victory for free speech! What's happening here? Are we not racing toward some sort of global plutocracy? Are rich people forming a global government that ignores national boundaries? Does it already exist, and this is just its latest move?

Working class people need to wake up and realize that expensive TV ads are not telling them the truth. Instead, TV ads are telling them what rich people and their corporations would have them believe. If American voters don't learn the difference between journalism and propaganda -- and learn it in a hurry -- we're going to find ourselves trapped in a global, fascist plutocracy. It sounds like alarmist paranoia, especially to those who get all their news from television, but it's happening.

3/31/2008
Those who preach intolerance have no right to expect to be tolerated. It's a dangerous mistake for those who value freedom and tolerance to extend that tolerance to those who are vigorously attacking those very values. It's not a contradiction to be intolerant of the enemies of freedom.

2/27/2008
Christian charity is tainted by the underlying motive of winning converts. To see it from my perspective, imagine an atheist charity running, say, a soup kitchen. They bring homeless people in with a promise of free food, lock the doors, subject them to a sixty minute lecture on evolution and all the reasons God doesn't exist. Only then do they hand out the soup. Would you as a Christian say, "Look at those fine, charitable atheists helping the poor."?

12/27/2007
People believe religion because of the way it makes them feel emotionally, not because they have any valid reason to think it's true. Until you understand this, you have no hope of talking anyone out of religious fanaticism.

12/16/2007
What percentage of people understand the difference between the subjective and the objective, between facts about the real world on the one hand and values, motivations, and morality on the other? I didn't for a long time. I don't think most people get it, or if they do, they don't properly identify all their own subjective beliefs as such.

7/25/2007
It seems to me that refusing to accept the truth of his own origins diminishes a human being far more than having evolved from simpler creatures.

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