Recently in Politics Category

This has been going around Facebook today; I thought it warranted repeating here as well:

One of my favorite ways of disposing of my allowance when I was a kid was a comic book called The Micronauts. It was based on a line of imported Japanese toys -- Loyal Readers of a certain age may remember them -- and, like pretty much everything else around that time, it was heavily influenced by Star Wars, in particular by the Star Wars comics that were being published by the same company, Marvel. Despite its derivative elements, though, Micronauts quickly established its own rich identity. Its pages were filled with all sorts of wild ideas and concepts: another universe nestled within our own at a sub-microscopic level; a brave space explorer whose body spent 1,000 years in suspended animation while his conscious mind, merged with that of his robot co-pilot, traveled to the literal edge of their universe; and the decadent, violent society they returned to, where the rich and powerful prolonged their lives to near-infinity by replacing worn-out body parts with components harvested from the poor. It was all pretty heady stuff for a ten-year-old living in a sleepy little town in parochial old Utah, and it left a big impression.

Micronauts ran for five years, 1979 to 1984, resulting in 59 regular issues and two double-length "annuals." Remarkably, all of those issues save one were written by the same man, a guy named Bill Mantlo. Even more remarkably, Mantlo was simultaneously scripting all the issues for another toy-based comic, Rom Spaceknight, as well as contributing to other titles such as The Incredible Hulk, Spectacular Spider-Man, Thor, and Iron Man, a simply amazing level of productivity. By the late '80s, however, Mantlo was pretty well finished with comics; he left the industry, reinvented himself, and shortly became one of the great "where are they now?" mysteries from the pop culture of that era.

Earlier this week, I learned the fate of Bill Mantlo, and it isn't pretty. In 1992, he was struck by a car while rollerblading. It was a hit-and-run; the driver has never been found. Mantlo survived, but honestly it would've been better for him if he hadn't. He sustained massive brain injuries and was left severely impaired, both mentally and physically. But the accident was only the beginning of the real nightmare for Mantlo and his family. Although he made significant progress in his early rehabilitation, his insurance company soon started balking at the cost of the rehab, pressuring Mantlo's brother Mike -- who has been handling his affairs since the accident -- to find cheaper and cheaper facilities. Finally, the insurer decreed -- contrary to the opinions of doctors, mind you -- that further rehab was "unnecessary." Mantlo was cut off altogether. Mike was forced to liquidate everything Bill owned to qualify him for Medicare, and today Bill Mantlo, once such a prolific and creative force to be reckoned with, is warehoused in a geriatric nursing home in Queens, the only place his family could afford to send him. He is penniless and helpless. What progress he'd once made toward recovery has entirely dissipated without continuing therapy. His quality of life is essentially nonexistent. He is simply waiting to die.

That's the executive summary; you can read all the details here. It's a long article, but it's well worth your time, and I highly recommend that you read it and ponder it. Consider it a cautionary tale of how thoroughly a human life can be destroyed, short of death itself. And keep in mind that Bill Mantlo was one of the "lucky" ones. He had health insurance.

For me, this sad story constitutes just one more outrageous piece of evidence that the way we handle healthcare in this country is seriously broken. Conservative politicians scared a lot of people silly a couple years ago by claiming that a single-payer health system would lead to rationing of care and so-called "death panels," but what was Bill Mantlo subjected to if not rationing? And what were the faceless, implacable bureaucrats who decided his fate if not the equivalent of those dread death panels? Actually, they were worse than a "death" panel, because they condemned him not to death itself, but to a lingering, living hell until he finally gets around to dying. And they made that decision entirely on how much he was going to cost them, not whether he was responding to care or was still capable of improvement. If the United States truly is, as I've always been told, the richest country on earth, the best country on earth, how can we in good conscience abandon a human life in this way? The dirty truth behind our for-profit insurance industry is that insurers are more concerned with the dividends of their shareholders than the needs of their policy holders. People carry insurance as a hedge against anything really bad ever happening to us, but if anything really bad does happen, the insurance companies fight like hell to not actually help you, and that is just wrong. No... it's obscene. Our society's treatment of the long-term ill isn't quite as perverted as what Bill Mantlo imagined in the pages of The Mirconauts, i.e., Baron Karza's evil body banks, but in my book, it is just about as cruel and inhumane. I wish more people could see that and agree to change it.

I'll be honest, I haven't been following the deepening economic crisis in Europe very closely... I'm dimly aware that Greece is falling apart and threatening to drag the rest of EU down with it, but that's about all. I don't really understand the issues involved, and I have no idea what has to be done to fix things... or at least prevent catastrophe. Which means I have no clue if Andrew Sullivan's prediction today has any validity at all... but I thought it was some interesting food for thought, nonetheless:

My view is that at some point, Germany is going to rescue the euro, and provide the funds necessary for it. [German Chancellor Angela] Merkel will not let the European project die on her watch. Her country's entire postwar identity is rooted in it. And so a project designed to put a line against any new wars, after Germany's serial aggression, will end up making Europe a German-based, German-run and German-funded country. [Emphasis mine.]

History has its ironies, does it not? But Britain, alone of the major countries, stands apart. Plus ca change.

My colleague Jaquandor sums up my feelings very nicely:

I would like, just once, to see "compromise" in American politics mean something other than "Republicans get very nearly everything they want while Democrats get very nearly nothing of what they want."

I'd also like to see Democrats just stand up for what they supposedly believe in. The damned ship is going down, so why not go down fighting? Does the Democratic response to everything need to be to resignedly remove their pants while saying, "Well, now, let's just close our eyes and think of America"?!

As long as I've got the blood all angried up with politics anyhow, let me say something about this debt-ceiling nonsense that's been dragging on for weeks and weeks: enough of this bullshit! It's time to stop all the pointless grandstanding and just raise the damn thing already. It's a simple administrative procedure that's been done dozens of times in the past, and there's no reason why this occasion has to have everything riding on it. No reason, aside from the Republicans being their usual overbearing, obstructionist asshats, of course.

Don't talk to me about the debt or our out-of-control spending either. The fact is, Republicans don't give a shit about the debt unless there's a Democrat in the White House. They just don't. The debt ceiling was raised 18 times during Reagan's term as president, and nobody said a word about it. Dick Cheney said, and I quote, "deficits don't matter." Yes, I know it's grown much larger in the handful of years since the Dark Lord shot off his mouth, but I stand by my statement: nobody would be talking about this issue now if the president had a little R after his name when he appears on television.

It's painfully obvious to me what this debt-ceiling fight is about. It's about the same thing all the fights in Washington have been since at least the days of Newt Gingrich's Contract with America: scoring political points. Finding a way to dominate, to set the agenda, to frame the argument, and ultimately, to assume and retain power. It is about the Republicans thinking that finally, after decades of trying, they've found a weapon they can use to bludgeon the New Deal to death, and to (hopefully) deny a president they've never accepted as legitimate a second term. Maybe even finding a way to impeach him, depending on what action he's forced to take by their infuriating intransigence. In other words, Republicans are willing to destroy the country's credit rating and very likely its economic recovery (such as it is) in order to score some points in their never-ending political game. They're not frightened of imploding everything because they don't believe the federal government has any right to exist anyway.

And then there's the Democrats, proving yet again what a pack of craven pussies they are. They've basically handed the Republicans everything they wanted and haven't fought for anything progressives want. Way to go, you cowardly slime. Not that the Republicans have accepted any of it. That's largely why I think this whole conflict is nothing more than political: the Dems have rolled over for them and they still won't play ball. Which is pretty much how things have been for the last three years.

Finally, there's President Obama. Barack, my friend, I've stuck with you for three years even as you've wimped out on single-payer healthcare and stubbornly refused to put your foot down with the lunatics on the right, who would happily send you to Gitmo in the delusional belief that you're a Muslim sleeper agent raised from birth to become a president just so you can bring down the country from the inside. But it's finally reaching a point where you're embarrassing me, man. Stop with the "Mr. Reasonable" bullshit already. The Republicans are not going to deal with you. They are not going to accept you and they are not ever going to like you. Just stop banging your head against that wall of bipartisanship, rally your own troops, and try being more of the flaming liberal the right claims you are. Tell them no, they're not going to gut Medicare and Social Security, they're going to grow the hell up and do the responsible, logical, decent thing that will go a long ways toward fixing everything: let the Bush tax cuts expire instead. But of course, you won't do that, because you're really not a flaming liberal, are you? By any sane measure of your actions, you're actually a moderate Republican in the same mold as Dwight Eisenhower. Too bad you don't have the prosperous times and sane Congress Eisenhower was blessed with.

This is a dangerous moment in history, I think... we could finally be seeing the moment Grover Norquist prophesied, when federal government is shrunk down small enough to strangle. Some people rejoice at the thought. Let's hope they've been saving and investing wisely for their retirement. Because everybody does that, right? Right?

I don't suppose very many people outside of Utah have even heard the name Tim DeChristopher, so I'd better provide some back story before this evening's rant begins.

It all started in the waning days of the George W. Bush administration, December 2008, when Dubya authorized the BLM to auction off millions of acres of public land leases here in Utah -- some of which were uncomfortably close to the scenic landscapes of Arches and Canyonlands National Parks -- for oil and gas exploration. Many people, myself included, feel like the Bushies were trying to pull a fast one, handing their friends in the energy industry some prime real estate at dirt-cheap (so to speak) prices in a hastily organized deal while the rest of the country was distracted by the approaching spectacle of Barack Obama's inauguration. But some people noticed. And on the day of the auction, one of these people -- a 27-year-old economics student from the University of Utah named Tim DeChristopher -- decided to do something about it. He somehow got inside the auction and started bidding on parcels of redrock country himself. He later said his goal was simply to drive up the prices and make life a little uncomfortable for the energy-industry representatives in the room, but in a quirk of fate, he actually started winning auctions that he had no intention of paying for. He instantly became a hero to the environmental movement for successfully "monkey-wrenching" the corporations, and he later saw some vindication when the auction was ruled illegal because the proper protocols had not been followed, and most of the leases that had been sold were rescinded. But of course there was a price to pay for daring to cross the powerful people: he was charged with two felony crimes related to his disrupting the auction.

Because of the nature of this state -- vast tracts of undeveloped land that are breathtakingly beautiful, surprisingly fragile, and geologically rich, all at the same time -- Utah is often ground-zero for big environmental battles. Huge swaths of Utah's territory are owned by the federal government, which generates much resentment in a largely conservative state that, frankly, doesn't have a lot going for it aside from lots of open space. People in the outlying and very desolate parts of the state crave the jobs that oil and gas fields, as well as various types of mining operations, would bring. But naturally those very same regions are the unspoiled wild places that environmentalists want to ensure remain unspoiled, essentially locked away from the locals who would tear them up in search of something of more tangible value.

With those kinds of tensions percolating through the atmosphere, it probably goes without saying that DeChristopher's trial generated a lot of emotion, and a lot of theater. And as it happens, I've been a witness to much of it, due to the fact that I work right across the street from the federal courthouse. The plaza just west of my building has hosted a number of big -- well, big for Utah -- rallies in support of DeChristopher, attracting heavyweights lefties like Peter Yarrow of the folk group Peter, Paul and Mary; the actress Daryl Hannah; and Utah's own Terry Tempest Williams, an acclaimed naturalist and writer. It was all rather entertaining during the trial itself. But the fun ended this week, following DeChristopher's sentencing. (There was never any question he would be convicted, of course, not in this state. He may have been on trial in a federal court, but it was a federal court in downtown Salt Lake City, under the auspices of a judge who was born and raised here. And in this state, you do not cross Big Business or interfere with the free market and win your case. A casual glance at the comments in the Salt Lake Tribune suggest a not-insignificant percentage of Utahns would like to see him tarred and feathered. Of course, an also not-insignificant number of people would like to nominate him for sainthood. Utah also happens to share a lot of history with Edward Abbey, whose novel The Monkey Wrench Gang is said to have inspired radical environmentalism in the first place... yet another of those diametrical contrasts that make life here so interesting.)

DeChristopher was sentenced Tuesday to two years in a federal minimum-security prison as well as a fine of $10,000, which is surprisingly light in my opinion. Not because I think he deserved more, but because I expected the judge to throw the book at him. (The maximum sentence could have been a full ten years in prison.) His supporters on the plaza disagreed, however. They apparently thought he should've gotten simple probation. I've also heard they were angry because the judge hadn't allowed him to explain the necessity of his actions in order to do something to limit climate change. Whatever was motivating them, they were getting ugly by the time I got off work. And this is where my rant begins.

Woke up this morning to the news that gay marriage is now legal in New York state. Good for New York. Social progress comes slowly. Sometimes it seems it's never going to arrive. But if you wait long enough, work hard enough, hold on to your principles no matter what, it eventually does come around. The long trajectory of this country has forever been toward greater equality under the law for all its citizens, no matter who they are or what they stand for. New York just affirmed that fundamental idea in a major way.

Now, anyone care to wager over whether my home state of Utah will be the last in the union to the affirm that idea? No, I suppose not... the odds are too bad...

Kevin Drum says what I've been thinking lately:

Republicans didn't care about the deficit when Reagan was president, they didn't care when Bush Sr. was president, and they didn't care when Bush Jr. was president. They only get religion when a Democrat is president and they need an all-purpose reason to oppose everything Democrats want to do. Is this really too complicated to understand? It's a political tactic -- and a good one! -- not a genuine reaction to anything in the real world. In the real world, stimulus spending is winding down, Medicare was reformed a mere 14 months ago and is solvent for at least another decade, Social Security is solvent for two or three decades, and the deficit is very plainly not a domestic spending problem. It wasn't a problem at all until 2001, and after that it was caused by two gigantic tax cuts, two unfunded wars, and a finance-industry driven recession. If we just let the tax cuts expire, get out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and get the economy moving, the medium-term deficit will disappear.

No comments please. I'm not in the mood to argue about things that ought to be self-evident.

It would've been nice, I think, if the previous administration had given more weight to the "intelligence, patience, and commandos" approach that was used yesterday to such great success, rather than going directly to "Hulk SMASH!!!!" mode and bankrupting us with full-scale wars in two separate countries. I'm just sayin'.