Blog Free Earth

Parallels

Cecilia — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 19:53:02 +0000

Would any reasonable person vote for a candidate for school board that said “learning is the problem”?

Would any reasonable corporate board hire as CEO someone who said “business is the problem”?

No? Then what on earth are people doing voting for politicians who publicly state that “government is the problem”?

Sometimes I feel like I’ve broken through to a parallel universe.

DADT over and out!

Cecilia — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 19:22:35 +0000

One step closer to full equality before the law! Wooohoooo!!!!!!!!!!!
(And for you righties about to comment to tell me what a fat dyke I am, my male partner of 6 years would be surprised. Well, ok, not about the fat part.)

Long Time, No See

Cecilia — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 19:04:08 +0000

I’m sorry I’ve been away from this blog for a while. I was writing my Master’s Thesis, which I think might be an acceptable excuse. Maybe? I should be back more regularly for the time being. And oh, man, do I have some things to say.

Open Letter to Teabaggers/Tea Partiers

Cecilia — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 17:12:26 +0000

Sorry I haven’t posted in a while. Life’s been crazy. I’ve decided to add a new feature: Open Letters. Each feature, I will write an open letter to a public official or organization or even a segment of the population that I think needs one.

Dear Teabaggers/Tea Partiers,
I know you don’t like taxes. I’m here to tell you, nobody does. No one likes writing a check to the government when it’s failing to get things done. No one likes speeding tickets either, but most of us also don’t want that crazy guy driving 100 mph on the road by our house, right next to where out kids play. The reality is, sometimes we have to do things we don’t like to get things we do like. You know what the single biggest expense area in the US budget is? Defense. You know how much my Quaker boyfriend wants to pay taxes to fund war? Even less than you want to fund public assistance programs. But he likes living in a free country, so he pays them anyway. Go you like cops? Firefighters? Streetlights? Roads? Functioning stoplights? Food with lower levels of fecal bacteria? Guess who does all that stuff? Government. Why? Because some important stuff doesn’t fare too well in the market. Don’t believe me? Watch Colorado Springs for the next couple of months. They are a conservative area with taxes so low their government can’t afford to provide basic services. According to the Denver Post:

More than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark Monday. The police helicopters are for sale on the Internet. The city is dumping firefighting jobs, a vice team, burglary investigators, beat cops — dozens of police and fire positions will go unfilled.

According to CBS:

The city is… getting rid of burglary investigators and a vice team. It’s closing museums. It’s ending bus service on evenings and weekends. It’s cutting its street paving budget. It’s letting vegetation in its parks die out.

Is that the America you want? One without cops, street paving, museums, and firefighters? Because if you succeed, I can guarantee that’s what you’ll get. Please reconsider.

Love,
Me

Conservatives, Abortion, and Contraception

Cecilia — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 01:51:34 +0000

As I understand it, the big difference between conservatives and liberals/progressives is the relative importance they assign to the free-rider problem (and problems like it). Crudely, the right would rather be cruel than be conned, whereas the left is the opposite. This is true on almost any issue. The left is concerned with how many people get health insurance, and the right is concerned with whether the benefits extend to illegal immigrants. And there’s always the right’s “dependent class”/”welfare queen” bogeyman. The needs of poor single working mothers and people with disabilities are irrelevant; what is relevant is making sure no one can game the system. Today I was reminded that even abortion falls into this category. ‘Women shouldn’t be able to have sex for pleasure and get away with it,’ seems to be the twisted message.

But there is an even more twisted way in which many in the pro-life movement see the world, discussed in a recent article in Slate. The right attacked two congresspeople, a Democrat and a Republican, one on each side of the abortion debate, for promoting the “Preventing Unintended Pregnancies, Reducing the Need for Abortion, and Supporting Parents Act.” (Wow. Usually bills with names like that get decent acronyms, not PUPRNASPA.) Anyway, this bill “includes…sex-education funding, an abstinence-friendly curriculum, a bigger adoption tax credit, and financial support for women who continue their pregnancies.” Ok, lemme get this straight: no-sex sex-ed, supporting adoption, and helping women choose life? What doesn’t the right like? Turns out, it’s contraception. No, this one isn’t just from right-wing Catholics and Quiverfulls who oppose family planning. The head of the National Right to Life Committee, which is officially neutral on the issue of contraception, called the bill’s pro-life* sponsor “pro-abortion” and claimed that the bill is “a smokescreen” to hide “the public policy goals of the pro-abortion lobby, with a methodology that employs misleading rhetoric, labels, and props intended to disguise the substance of that agenda.” He also accused them of providing “camouflage for the pro-abortion politicians.” Yeah, that’s right. They directly oppose bipartisanship and common ground, because they are more afraid that their rivals will score political points than that, in their perspective, more babies will die. Yep, it’s more important to win than to not kill babies. I’ve got to say, that kind of makes their professed concern for life seem a tad bit disingenuous. If I could cut down on the number of murders being committed, but Republicans would score political points, of course I would do it. But apparently, despite their claims that “abortion is murder,” many in the pro-life movement aren’t willing to do the same.

*Pro-life and pro-choice are used in this blog to mean political, rather than spiritual, religious, or personal beliefs. I know devout Catholics who are politically pro-choice because they believe that when a government forces a woman to be an incubator, it is slavery, and that slavery is worse than death. I also know rabid pro-choice activists who would never themselves have an abortion.

From An Article On Health Care In Rolling Stone…

Cecilia — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 17:29:07 +0000

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell admitted that “private insurance will not be able to compete with a government option.” This is a little like complaining that Keanu Reeves was robbed of an Oscar just because he can’t act.

Dude…at least in his movies you get a choice of pills. The article is here.

The Government As Household

Cecilia — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 15:34:02 +0000

I used to think that when Republicans cried for government to be run like a household, it was idiocy. Households don’t have things like big armies and their own money. Wage-earners can often get raises without losing their jobs. However, upon reading the same kinds of statements today in the comments on the NYTimes editorial “Once and Future Taxes,” I finally understand that this way of thinking isn’t totally wrong, it’s just usually incomplete. The argument is that just like households need their spending to be within their means, the government needs to keep its budget below its tax revenue. But here’s the rub: there are responsible reasons to temporarily spend more than you earn. If you are going to college, accumulating some debt makes sense, because you are spending now to increase your future earnings potential. It would also make sense to go into debt for the purchase of things that would increase your productivity and/or future spending. If you buy a house, you will have an asset at the end of the mortgage and you won’t be putting that money into rent, since you can live in your asset. If you have a serious illness and your insurance won’t cover treatment, it makes sense to go into debt, because money won’t help you when you’re dead. The government equivalents are borrowing to increase future productivity and international competitiveness. These programs include things like education, expanded health care coverage, stimulus, etc. But there are also bad reasons to go into debt. For instance, if you’re going into debt to show off, that’s stupid. In the household this kind of spending can involve a Chanel bag or a sports car. The Iraq War is an almost perfect analogy. Bush took our country into debt because he wanted to “go after the guy who tried to kill my dad,” and so he could have an easy military victory and wear the ‘Mission Accomplished” ~~codpiece~~ flightsuit. So, in sum, going into debt to spend money on whims and impulse buys: bad. Going into debt for the essentials of productivity: not so bad. Will you right-wingers please stop running that stupid ad with the little kids pledging allegiance to debt now? Please, it makes me want to hit children with the enlightenment stick.

Teddy Kennedy

Cecilia — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 15:28:22 +0000

Thank you, Teddy, for all you did for our country. May you rest in peace, and may the ’cause of your life’ become an eternal memorial to your goodness and decency.

Being a Hero

Cecilia — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 17:36:08 +0000

I just found the most fantastic site. Wishuponahero.com allows you to do something magical for another person by granting a wish. Some wishes involve get-well cards to the lonely, wedding rings for vets who can’t afford them, and school supplies for children. No matter whether you have money or not, you can fulfill someone’s wish. It makes you feel good, it grants their wish, and it restores in both of you the faith that there are good people in the world. If you have a need, you can also post wishes. I know I sound like an ad, but it’s amazing. It’s like being the Easter Bunny for someone you don’t know.

Response To Cries Of: “Rich People Can’t Pay Higher Taxes! They’ll Leave!”

Cecilia — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 14:03:21 +0000

Rich people are a pretty diversely motivated crowd. While some rich people might leave a state based on income taxes, they are much less likely to leave the country. Where would they go? Pretty much every industrialized country has higher ‘real taxes’ (i.e. tax rates including loopholes and workarounds) than we do. They’d have to move to the developing world. But guess what? We have taxes for a reason: public services, just like private ones, cost money. It’s kind of like having insurance, except the public sector isn’t legally bound to be more concerned with their bottom line than with their customers. I pay taxes because some day I might need the fire department, or the police, or the public education system, or a road, or an airport, etc. And the government is obliged to provide those things as long as citizens keep paying for them. Wealthy people move to places with higher taxes, like San Francisco and New York, when the services provided suit their lifestyles. It might be cheaper to live in Wyoming than New York, but you don’t have near-constant access to nightlife, cafe culture, emerging young playwrights’ new experimental work, large tech corporations, Wall Street, some of the best private schools in the country, networks of interesting and important people, etc. You aren’t in close proximity to the world’s power centers in Wyoming or Alaska (unless you consider God to be a power center, in which case the West has some of her most beautiful work.) Ask any suburban teenager where they would go if they were millionaires. It”s the city, because they’re bored where they are. Then tell them about the tax rates, and see how many pick Alaska. Yeah, I thought not, especially if you also tell them how long a fire truck will take to get there when their ranchion burns down. I grew up in a place with pretty low taxes. It also took 40 minutes to get to the hospital. My mom used to tell my siblings and me: “Don’t any of you do something dangerous and get hurt because we might not make it to the hospital in time.” The fire department was closer (20 minutes). And in developing nations, you might not know who to bribe to get any response at all, so it may take several times as long as anywhere in the states. The services paid for by taxes tend to make your private cost-of-living lower than it would otherwise be, too. Where I grew up, you basically had to have a car for every driving-age member of the family in order to avoid the trap of ‘That little piece of crap took my car again! And he’s not coming back until midnight! Now how am I going to get groceries?’ While cellphones would theoretically improve this, there are also huge areas that get no reception, something else that is much rarer in the city. Truly rich people see real benefits to the results of those taxes, or so many of them wouldn’t live in such high-tax locations. There’s one other major element that makes a difference at the national level: security. Do you really think Al Qaeda rammed those planes into New York because they were upset about my shared two-bedroom apartment, my dog, and my most expensive posessions (my laptop and my sewing machine)? NO. They didn’t do it because I wear a swimsuit in public occasionally either; that’s just how they get low-level recruits. People have sewing machines and corgis in Stockholm, Oslo, and Dublin. They also wear swimsuits there. (But only in the summer! Brr!) Why us and not them? Because we have more people who are richer than the average person on the planet can imagine. It’s easy to turn self-righteous envy into belief that the envied party’s gains are ill-gotten. And there just isn’t any real European equivalent of the LA lifestyle they see on their TVs. So who is our national security spending benefiting most? You guessed it! Rich people! The rich should pay higher tax rates, because they can’t afford to have their amenities fall down around them. They use more services and they can afford it. Sounds pretty simple to me.