Democrat: You won’t have to change your health care if you don’t want to.
Republican: I don’t want the government to make decisions about my health care!
Democrat: But you won’t have to change your health care if you don’t want to.
Republican: Yes, but I don’t want the government to make decisions about my health care!
Democrat: Then everything will work out fine.
Republican: Death panels!
Teabagger: Socialist!

The end.

Just listened to this All Things Considered story ( via Amanda). A few immediate thoughts:

1. People this dense and bigoted should not be allowed to serve in Congress.

2. People this dense and bigoted should not be allowed to serve in the military.

3. Gay men and lesbians are already serving in the military. Officially labeling them as gay men and lesbians is not going to change anything.

4. The most common (and probably the most logical, actually, if there is any logic to this) argument against repealing DADT is that there will be sexual tension among soldiers and that this will prevent them from doing their jobs properly.

So, since Duncan Hunter and Melissa Block are both heterosexual, there must have been some sexual tension there, right? The interview seems to have gone just fine. What’s the problem? Another example: I work with people of the opposite sex all the time in my lab, and I have done plenty of experiments without being bombarded with sexual fantasies involving them. Maybe I am singular in having had this peace of mind, but I doubt it. The heterosexual people in the military who are making these claims shouldn’t be so quick to flatter themselves.

I would much—much—rather have a gay man or lesbian serve in Congress or in the military than someone who is honestly afraid of the looming transgender and hermaphrodite infiltration. If anyone is not doing his or her job properly, that is the reason.

It seems like we are gradually getting to the point in politics where new members of Congress will, upon running for subsequent terms or bigger and better positions, be judged not by their voting records, but simply by their party affiliation. With all this party-line voting, individuals’ voting records will quickly become obsolete.

A message to Congress: Have some courage, use your own brain, vote for what you believe in, and let the Constitution oversee the process as it was always intended. You are individuals in a system that was designed to limit the power of any single person, and yet you walk around making empty threats as though you’ve overestimated your place in the world.

I’m talking about Democrats and Republicans here. (Update: I’m also talking about the Supreme Court, too.) I’d love it if some Republicans voted for the Senate health care reform bill, for example—there must be one or two of them who want it to happen, right?—but I’d also love it if some Democrats voted against it—there must be one or two of them who would rather wait for something better, right? They all have brains, and let’s be honest—every single person in a party rarely agrees with every other person in that party, so why even pretend but for political reasons?

This is an MCAT prompt recently presented to a group of students I teach:

Politicians too often base their decisions on what will please the voters, not on what is best for the country.

How timely, yes? They’re asked to explain a situation in which this might not be true. These days, this assignment is getting tougher and tougher, as such situations seem fewer and farther between with each vote, each threat of filibuster, and each election.

An even better prompt might be:

Politicians too often base their decisions on what will please voters, lobbyists, themselves, party motives, individual benefactors, corporate benefactors—basically anything other than what is best for the country.

Were I taking the MCAT again, my response would be: “There exists no such situation to the contrary. I agree wholeheartedly.”

The way we should respond is by pushing for an alternative that gets us a system of funding elections that doesn’t leave people to wonder whether it’s money, rather than sense, that is producing a political result…an alternative that allows us to believe once again that our government is guided by reason or judgment or even just the politics of the people in their district and not by the need to raise money.

—Larry Lessig, in response to the Supreme Court’s decision on corporate election funding

People. Get behind citizen-funded elections.

Brilliant post from Matt Langer.

So here we are after months of debate, after months in which the White House and other Democratic party leadership stood idly by while the right wing not only dictated the terms of the national debate but dragged that debate into the fascist-Nazi-communist gutter, after months of bowing down before moderate Democrats and Republicans from Maine, after months of allowing the 60-vote cloture goalpost to slide farther and farther away from anything the Democratic party campaigned and won on in 2008—after all of this, we find ourselves tonight beholden to one senator from Connecticut who is demanding a compromise on the previous compromise of the initial compromise.

If anything, I’m just embarrassed I didn’t see this coming. I’m embarrassed I let Obama’s rhetoric of “hope” lead me to believe the American left had actually grown a pair. I’m embarrassed I failed to remember that whatever balls the American left can lay claim to remain firmly in the clutches of the healthcare industry—or any other industry, for that matter.

It was difficult not to quote the entire thing.

From Either/Or: Sports, Sex, and the Case of Caster Semenya:

Currently, the United States government recognizes the marriage of a woman to a female-to-male transsexual who has had a double mastectomy and takes testosterone tablets but still has a vagina, but not to a woman who hasn’t done those things.

Silly is the first word that comes to mind.

I cannot support a movement that sees climate change as a hoax and offers domestic oil exploration as the core plank of an energy policy.

Among others.

These are Illinois’ 7th (the one in which I reside) and 4th Congressional Districts. I’m pretty sure these are the images they showed us in high school government class to illustrate the concept of gerrymandering.

(via watchdog.net)