I Stand with Ann Coulter, and Here's Why.

Let me be clear. Ann Coulter is a loathsome panderer to the lowest forms of hatred and bias of the Right Wing. Her acid and venomous words feed into a culture of discriminatory hate that maligns the very bedrock of American Liberty. However, I am regularly disgusted with the shameless way in which so-called "liberal, progressive" Democrats RACE to the bottom of the barrel when it comes to repudiating Coulter. Let me further clarify: ANN COULTER IS NOT A MAN. Even if she was born male, she would not be a man, she would be a transsexual woman.

The repugnant hypocrisy of the Left -- supposed champions of women's and minorities' rights -- in this rampant transphobia is mind boggling. If one brings these hypocrites to task on the issue, one will be met with vehement refusal to admit that they are bigots. I recently called out fellow leftists in a facebook group for the use of this despicable tactic, and was told -- in over two thousand replies, no less -- that it is in fact perfectly acceptable to use sexist and anti-trans slurs against Ann, because she is mean. This implies that all principles we claim can go right out the window, when we find our opponent distasteful. Here's a little bias check for you: If the things you say about Ann Coulter would offend you said about the First Lady, they probably aren't okay for you to say. Further bias check: If you replace the word "tranny" with "n*gger" in your rant, would it be okay? If one slur is wrong, the other is too.

Attacking Ann's physicality is intellectually LAZY. For starters, attacking Ann -- or anyone -- based on their appearance illustrates your inability or refusal to deconstruct the substance of what she has said. It's an egregious ad hominem heuristic that allows those on the Left to avoid real discussion. Her appearance has no bearing on the things she says. Furthermore, her schtick is to incite the kind of angst in the Left that makes them abandon their so-called egalitarian principles and turn into the same snapping, backbiting, hateful shits that the Left accuses Ann of being. No, wait. They don't. They accuse her of being a tranny. This plays directly into her hand and is the PERFECT illustration of the exact kind of bullshit hypocrisy Ann says Democrats engage in. So, in the end, the one who is right in such situations IS ANN. In a stroke of sheer mental sloth, Democrats shoot themselves in the foot by making themselves just as slimy and base as Coulter herself. The difference is Ann KNOWS what she is doing.

Let's be even MORE clear. If you call Ann Coulter a man, or a tranny, or a he-she, or a shemale, or point out her adam's apple, and call yourself "progressive" and "pro-lgbt" or "inclusive", you are the most foul and loathsome kind of hypocrite. You are selecting words that people -- who are arguably among the most severely oppressed in this country and around the world -- hear, right before rabid bigots bring the shovels down on their skulls. You are selecting words that transpeople hear as justification for discriminatory jailing. You are selecting words that teenagers hear ringing through their heads as their life blood pours from their wrists. You are selecting words that medical "professionals" use to deny equal access to care. The net effect on Coulter of all this transmisogyny is exactly one metric bupkis. Ann LIVES to see foaming-at-the-mouth Democrats eat their own and betray the people they claim to champion. This bigoted tit-for-tat only proves her point that Democrats, feminists, and the gay rights lobby are hypocrites just aching for a chance to attack and disparage a deeply at-risk minority community. Ann stands as the "manly" face of that hypocrisy. You are not only missing the mark of harming Ann, you are in fact doing nothing but causing collateral damage to gender minorities in that you contribute to institutional and cultural transmisogyny. Beyond that, you contribute to the larger problem of social sexism that makes it okay to criticize a woman's appearance in the first place, in lieu of confronting her thoughts or points. This begs the question: Why so anti-woman and anti-trans, Democrats and lefties? Aren't these the exact same things you have a problem being directed against Mrs. Obama?

So, although the words fairly curdle in my mouth, I will stand up and cry to the heavens that I stand with Ann when it comes to the bigotry of the Left. 

Lady Liberty sure is eating a lot of Cal-tein bars...

 Our current political and social system seems increasingly moody, to me. There are wild swings of SCOTUS between decisions like the recent Prop 8 and DOMA decisions to things like Citizens United. Congress is swinging from left to right control practically with every election cycle. The presidency is caught between class warfare and ideological warfare. There is a fast-growing disparity between the upper ends of our economy and the lower, and we seem to just be hopping from one bursting bubble to another with dotcoms, real estate, etc. It is as if there is no room for moderation in Washington, anymore. We don't seem to even know who we are from one administration to the next. It is as if America just hit political puberty.

The further we go into this realm of extremes, the more convoluted politics and political action becomes. With super PACs and corporations, and now even individuals allowed to feed unlimited amounts of capital into parties, one wonders how much equality the system still supports. More and more, our elections are won only in name by votes, when in reality the choices of candidates are made by a smaller and smaller pool of connected, wealthy interests and their various lobbies in Washington. Left or right, American federal politics is more and more a game of board room chairs, if not of thrones. In a country built on money talking and other things walking, is it any surprise that the rapidly impoverishing middle and lower classes also see a diminished capacity for their own voices to reach the ears of power? It's like the promises the POTUS makes are no more than the promises a class presidential candidate made at Anytown High. 

It is not, however, that Americans have no complicity in this system of extremes. Our memories have grown increasingly short, and our reactions to crises, political or otherwise, seem magnified, in all respects. Our political culture is riddle with affairs, and sexting scandals, and gossiping frenemies (I mean, why IS Nancy Pelosi's hair so big?). Our representatives seem to be cycling rapidly between political polarities, but do we not elect them? Do they not, by nature of our system, represent us?  Do we not choose our Queen Bees and Wannabes? Though the laws in congress lately seem to swing wildly from controversy to scandal and back, is it any wonder, considering the wild swings of public opinion in the last two decades? Twenty years ago, who could've imagined that a federal judge in Texas would be striking down the state ban on same-sex marriage? Poor sincere Cady--err--Barack, just a scrappy kid from Africa, with no idea how to play the game. Who could've imagined he'd become such hard, shiny, drone-bombing plastic?

America, it seems, has reached a strange political adolescence. Checks between the branches of government are used often and decisively like notes in home room. The Supreme Court regularly lays down bitterly divided decisions like a prom committee on too many stimulants. The first black president was elected as a liberal reformer after a primary campaign of Mean Girls level backbiting (Hillary Clinton: fugly slut? Pusher? Dyke?). Despite cheerleadery claims of hope and change, Obama has in many ways presided over a slide to the right in policies and decisions that nobody could've expected. Finally, for its part Congress sometimes becomes so overwhelmed at the enormity of everything that it, like, literally can't even right now, and has to shut down the government for a couple of months and go up to its room and cry. 

Hillary somehow did look like a rock star, though, at the dance (even after that Bengahzi bus Boehner allegedly shoved her in front of).

And Barney Frank? Yes. Almost too much to function.

Spencer on Equality

I agree strongly with Sydney Spencer's argument that the marriage debate is nothing but an argument over equal representation. Brown v. Board of Ed. taught us long ago that separate is inherently unequal, in the eyes of constitutional law. That we are having this debate now, nevermind 45 years from now, is embarrassing, in my view. The concept is not difficult. All citizens are afforded equal rights and equal access to state and federal resources. Denying marriage denies equal access to marriage benefits to homosexuals. Without even getting into religious and social definitions of what constitutes marriage, denial thereof is patently unconstitutional.

Furthermore, conservative arguments fall short in other respects. The idea that marriage equality redefines marriage any more than allowing women to choose partners or restricting marriage to two people (another thing I find silly) does is wholly fallacious. Marriage, for starters, is not defined by the Bible. Both human civilisation and marriage traditions existed long before Abrahamic religion. Even if marriage was created by God and unequivocally defined in the Bible, we hardly follow the letter of Biblical dogma, today. If we did, no blended fabrics would exist and I could be jailed for growing wheat and corn side by side.

More extreme arguments against marriage equality only get ridiculous from the religious right, truthfully. The slippery slope always comes up. If gays can marry, it goes. why not polygamists? Well, WHY NOT? Assuming polygamy wherein all parties are consenting adults freely entering the arrangement, exactly who is to dictate that most personal of household arrangement? And then, the argument continues, why not kids? Or Horses? Or brooms? Last I checked, children, horses, and brooms had no legal right to consent, or even thumbs in the latter two cases, with which to sign a contract. Because that is what marriage is. A contract. The idea of holy covenant is an add-on to soften the edges of what amounts to a document choosing how one’s body and estate is handled after death.

Ultimately, LEGALLY, whether gay or straight, all U.S. citizens must be afforded equality. In the absence of a theocracy, the proscription of rights based on theological morality is asinine. What church a person does or doesn’t celebrate a union in is has nothing to do with the fact that a marriage license is issued by the STATE as a contractual agreement between the STATE and INDIVIDUALS. This is a business arrangement, not a pastoral one. In order to meet the constitutional mandate of equality for all citizens, we must either allow homosexual unions, on par with heterosexual, or disallow ALL legal forms of marriage and leave such things to the churches. Either way, ALL citizens must have access to ALL government benefits and human rights

Paranoid Republiphrenia

"The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100 percent. If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both." -- Barry Goldwater, 1981

Barry Goldwater, figurehead of the American New Conservative movement of the 80's and 90's warned us of the perils inherent in capitulating to the fervent faithful of the religious right. Today, the GOP is rent by deep internal divisions fueled by extremism. From the chaos of the 2010 mid-term surge of tea party candidates, many of them very very green at politics, to the ridiculously reactionary anti-gay legislation recently shot down in Kansas and Arizona, to an outright government shutdown last year, the Republican Party seems unnervingly disjointed and at odds within its ranks.

And the consequences have been dear.

Even Gov. Jan Brewer, widely regarded as aggressively conservative, not only vetoed her state's reactionary anti-gay legislation, but felt compelled to castigate her fellow Republicans in the Arizona legislature for putting such a poorly conceived bill on her desk. And not just poorly conceived, but outright unnecessary, even if one moves past the obvious discriminatory spirit. The wholly imaginary "war on religion" that the evangelical wing of the GOP insists exists reveals such legislators as not just hateful, but downright paranoid.

The U.S. Congress, largely as a result of Republican (read: tea party) stonewalling on budgetary negotiations, is seeing across-the-board approval rates under 20%. With a Democratic President whose own approval rating stands at 45%, and who has presided over the sourest US economy since the Great Depression, the GOP should be preparing for a mid-term election season ripe for widespread victory. Instead, going into the these elections, the GOP is saddled with explaining why their leadership has no control over the least experienced and most reactionary crop of Congressional freshmen the party has seen in decades. They are saddled with an image of Jim Crow-style pedantry at state level. They are burdened with the very public and near-constant gaffes from deeply ignorant evangelical candidates. This is entirely because of timid handling of religious extremists in their own ranks.

It will be interesting, as the primaries and fall elections play out, to see America's reaction to the GOP's schizophrenia over the last two election cycles. If the GOP has any hope of returning to efficacy, the pandering to the evangelical base must be balanced, or the Democrats will very much take advantage of the vacuum created by the estrangement of moderate conservatives and centrists who do not believe everything in the world must be responded to from a perspective of fear and imagined persecution.

Political Histrionic Disorder: Godwin's Law in Beltway Psychology

In a recent blog, the Daily Kos' staff writer Hunter highlights a disturbing trend in partisan politics, the argumentum ad hitlerum, or rush to compare all things that a given talking head or politico disagrees with to Hitler, Nazi policy, or any of an assortment of colourful World War II throwback phrases. In this particular case, Dan Webster (R-FL) compares the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau with the Gestapo for having the audacity to attempt to carry out its mandate to amass cohesive data sets about mortgage loans. Hunter has a point that in an economy that warrants a Wikipaedia page about a crisis, it may be a good idea to compile accurate data about who has loaned money to whom, for what, when, and how that loan payment is going. Unfortunately, current political shorthand for "that makes too damn much sense" seems to be "this is some nazi-ass sh*t!"

Let's be clear. Regulation of sub-prime lending by banks who recently got away with a slap on the wrist for very nearly collapsing the entire economy is not in the least akin to rounding up people and putting them in death camps. Not only is the insinuation belittling of actual human suffering at the hands of pure ideological evil, it is the most trivial and predictable logical fallacy of modern American political discourse. This knee-jerk political response even has an internet "law": Godwin's Law. Hunter is right to respond to this sort of thinking with a resounding "what?"

American politics these days are murky. We have no clear evil, anymore. In the past, American office seekers could draw a clear, concise picture of the decidedly evil other to whom to contrast themselves. Stalin. Marx. King George III, and the grandaddy of all that is wrong with government run amok: Adolf Hitler. In answer to Hunter's question of how politicians in modern US discourse get to the point of shouting "Hitler" and "Nazi" at everything they don't like, I say: laziness. Argumentum ad hitlerum, sadly, WORKS. Nothing sticks in the mind; nothing seems quite so comforting to the American political psyche as to draw allusion between the other guy and Hitler, history's consummate OTHER GUY. So, firing up the base by conjuring images of shiny black boots and ghetto raids is often far more useful in politics that one might hope. It certainly works better that trying to actually break down complex issues like sub-prime lending and assess--never mind accept--actual political responsibility.

Where I disagree with Hunter is in that he asks how politicians get to the point of aggrandizing simple, logical regulation to pogroms. What he should be wondering is how we continue to allow ourselves to elect those sorts of people. How are we, the voting public, allowing ourselves to get caught up in the laziest, most illogical forms of political propaganda? THEY WANT TO REGULATE HOW WE TRACK MONEY IN A SYSTEM THAT NEARLY DESTROYED THE VERY FABRIC OF THE NATIONAL AND GLOBAL ECONOMY?!?!!!!  THOSE NAZI BASTARDS!!!!  Hunter doesn't really take the chickens of outrage quite all the way back to roost. If we stopped giving the Chicken Littles of US politics a forum to holler about falling skies, we might be able to do something about things that actually matter, like unemployment and effective regulation of banks.

Have Degree, Will Work for Peanuts

In an editorial in USA Today, Theda Skocpol and Katherine Swartz analyze the potential effects of the Affordable Care Act upon the phenomenon of employees remaining with companies that provide healthcare coverage--simply for continuation of coverage--which they call "job lock." Projections by the Congressional Budget Office indicate a loss of two and a half million full time equivalent jobs as people move into retirement, out of the work force, or into reduced work hours as the ACA becomes fully implemented and frees people from work-tied insurers. The authors cite existing medical conditions, personally or of a family member, as a major reason people maintain employment in such jobs. This of course leads to people working in fields that are not ideal, working rather than taking time to care for children and loved ones, or avoiding retirement simply to maintain insurance coverage. Under the ACA, Americans now have the option of pursuing reduced time at work without fear of being unable to maintain their healthcare. As a person who has personally sought out jobs based at least in part on healthcare packages, it is easy to see the benefit in freeing up people to seek fulfilling employment or a more amicable balance between family and work obligations, but still being able to see a doctor.

However, there are of course downsides to the relationship between the ACA and corporate America. Skocpol and Swartz make a good point about the restraints upon established workers, particularly those in the demographics most likely to have both aging parents and young children, as well as older workers who are approaching retirement. They ignore, however, the workers freshly entering the workforce, who are facing the other edge of the sword that is the ACA. Young people coming into the workforce are seeing fewer and fewer full-time opportunities as profit-driven corporate America seeks to reduce insurance overhead at the lowest ranks of employment. In 2012 John Schnatter, CEO of Papa John's Pizza caught a lot of heat for his vow to reduce hours for his workers as a way of absorbing the cost of the ACA's mandate to insure those working over 33 hours a week. Fox News criticizes the ACA for pushing people into part-time work as companies work to keep costs down. While the freedom to work fewer hours may indeed be a major benefit to a stable, salaried family with children or elderly relatives to care for, the push to keep hourly employees below the threshold of full-time to mitigate insurance hassles at the corporate level leaves the young struggling to make ends meet at jobs where there is incredible pressure to avoid not just overtime but even achievement of regular hours in the 30+/week range. People working in the service industry are particularly vulnerable, being forced to work two or three part time jobs in order to maintain the same standard of living that they could previously have had with one 40hr/week job, even if it did not provide full coverage for healthcare. This is particularly galling when you consider the statistics of how much use younger people even get out of insurance. The fact is healthy, younger workers are far more often in need of income to pay rent than they are of insurance to cover treatment of illness. But with more and more jobs being made part-time or on-call, simply living month-to-month becomes more pressing than the idea that one might miss a physical.

While Skopcol and Swartz and USA Today paint a rosy picture of the suburban mom able to make more PTA meetings and soccer games, and the 60 year old with chronic illness no longer shackled to a desk for five more years to maintain healthcare, it ignores the shaft being given to new workers trying to establish themselves. In an economy where underemployed college graduates are moving back in with mom and dad  as it is, can we afford to give corporate America carte blanche to force a generation of workers to depend on income from the new proliferation of part-time, on-call jobs? What stability is to be built in a job market that has people not only juggling job and family, and possibly school, but job, and job, and job, and family and school? And that 63-year-old entrepreneur no longer forced to forgo his small business dream so he can have insurance coverage? He's gonna have a lot less capital to invest in his new small business, with two part-time employed, degree holding, 30-somethings to feed, at home.

Fording the Wage Gap

In an America where the average cost of living for an average family is near to $60,000 a year (http://cost-of-living.findthedata.org/l/615/National-Average), we are staggeringly still paying $7.25 an hour minimum, which results in $15,080 a year individual income ASSUMING one can find full-time employ in this turbulent job market (http://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/what-are-annual-earnings-full-time-minimum-wage-worker). That is to say, a dual-income family, with both wage earners employed full time, will pull just over $30,000 a year. That is HALF WAY to the poverty threshold. And that is in the rosiest of possible minimum wage earning situations, which is for many absolutely not the case. Meanwhile, corporate America is fighting the idea of raising the minimum to a living wage tooth and nail. Personally, I find this refusal astonishingly myopic. After all, until we decide we are okay with rampant starvation and homelessness in America, the under employed, unemployed, and underpaid must seek out taxpayer assistance simply to live. And yet, as Michael Moore points out, a hundred years ago, one of the most venerable architects of American industry,  Henry Ford, paid the adjusted-for-inflation equivalent of $15 and hour. This was based on the simple idea that not only should a worker be able to LIVE on his or her wages, but should be able to afford the product they are in fact working to build. It is a head-hanging shame that "in a country about eight times as rich per person" as Ford's day, we see full-time employed people in a welfare line. Henry Ford understood that reinvestment into the working class fuels the furnace of capitalism, by diversifying one's customer base. When one considers the lamentations from the right at the deplorable welfare state, one wonders how those same voices decry making it possible for vast swaths of Americans to WORK for a LIVING wage rather than work for half a living and ask for taxpayer dividends to close the income gap. As a student, working part time and in school full time, this issue hits home particularly. Part-time supplemental jobs rarely come at much above the minimum wage, and without the cushion of family help and financial aid, I personally would not be in a position to live with anything resembling comfort. In looking to our future, maybe it's time America started thinking like Henry did, a hundred years in the past.