More flawed GOP “thinking”

In its ongoing campaign to make no sense, GOP spokesmen continue to peddle the notion that government should operate like households and businesses, which they say must balance their budgets. Here is reality as I see it:

People who work usually seek and receive raises and promotions that result in more income, and in times of financial stress this can become urgent to the point where they seek a second job.

In business, the goal is always to increase income, and this can be accomplished by cutting costs and by generating more business.

My question for the GOP then: who in their right mind says no to increased income when trying to balance a budget?

Don’t blame the movies

When I was growing up, plenty of people died in films — in westerns, crime dramas, war movies, tales of knights in shining armor, horror flicks. And as kids were inclined to do, we made up a lot of games based on Hollywood entertainment. We routinely killed our best friends in mock army battles, gunfights, shootouts, and duels. Of course it was all make-believe, just as the depictions of killing in the movies we saw were make believe. We knew it was all make-believe. We were never inspired to really kill anyone by the movies we saw at Saturday matinees. My Quaker grandmother may have hated the fact that I wore a holster with a toy six-gun, but she’d be pleased to know that in my entire life I’ve never been even tempted to shoot someone with a real one.

So why should kids today be any different? Well odds are they aren’t. Odds are they’re no more influenced to commit heinous crimes by the movies they see than we were. But movies are a handy scapegoat for the NRA, which will blame the high American murder-by-gun rate on everything except where blame belongs — on the availability of guns that makes bloody acts of violence so easy for the occasional person who loses it.

Increasing CO2: undeniable.

Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels for December, 2012, were 394.39 ppm, according to http://co2now.org/. What does this mean? Well, it means CO2 levels are still rising, which should come as no surprise since we’re not doing anything to reverse the trend. What else does it mean? Well, it also means that the violent weather events we’ve been experiencing with increased frequency will continue and probably more often and with greater intensity. Despite the deniers, there is no doubt that human activity since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution is artificially affecting any natural climate cycle that might be occurring.

The logic is indisputable: since the latter part of the 18th century, we’ve released carbon into the atmosphere through combustion that took millions of years to be stored beneath the surface of the earth. We are essentially restoring the levels of CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere to levels that were present when the planet was so warm that there was no polar ice.

How bad can it get? Here’s a chilling factoid: While Venus might be almost twice as far from the sun as Mercury, its average surface temperature is much higher — somewhere around 872º F. Why? Because unlike Mercury, Venus has an atmosphere, and it’s almost 100 percent CO2. Temperatures on airless Mercury, on the other hand, range from about 800º F on the side facing the sun to -300º on its dark side. There is no atmosphere to trap the heat.

Is this the America we want?

For most of America’s history, we’ve progressed through stages of civilization. While it is true that in our early days the majority of people were not armed, it is also true that in the early days people did sometimes have to defend themselves and their homes. But law and order was something settlers yearned for as they marched westward, and when it arrived they were relieved of the need to fend for themselves. By the mid-20th century, the only people who cared about owning guns were honest hunters who lived in our neighborhoods. On my block in the 1950s, out of about 40 homes, one man owned a gun — a Savage bolt-action rifle for hunting deer. Law and order was one of the principal blessings of a civilized society, for people could roam in public freely, without fearing for their safety, without thinking they needed to carry a gun.

But no more. Today we have regressed to a condition that matches no period in our history, with almost as many guns in circulation as there are Americans—about 300 million. This is not to say that everyone owns a gun; the truth is that most gun owners own several, just because they can.

Today America is the most violent democracy on earth. There are about 45 murders per day on average, most by gun, with suicides and accidental shootings adding to the numbers. And today mass shootings have become commonplace, the recent massacre at Sandy Hook school in Newtown, Connecticut, among the most horrible. Today, Jan. 20, 2013, news of yet another mass shooting broke, this time in a home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, when a 15-year-old boy took the lives of two adults and three other children. At this writing his relationship to the deceased is unclear.

There are no statistics to show that the percentage of violent people in the US is higher than anywhere else in the world, nor can it be shown that Americans react differently to the same violent movies and video games available to everyone else in the world. The only thing that can be said with certainty is that there are more guns in America, and that guns are ridiculously easy to acquire. Americans are no more prone to anger and rage than anyone else on earth, but they have the means to act on that anger and rage in horrific ways unavailable to others.

Increasingly Americans are in fear of those around them — and the best the National Rifle Association can do is to urge even more people to arm themselves for self-defense. The NRA, which started out as an organization to teach marksmanship and gun safety in the late 19th century, has become nothing more than a lobby for the gun industry, under the guise of protecting second-amendment rights since the 1970s, when marksmanship, safety, and hunting became almost irrelevant.

America has become a scary place. There are shootings in movie theaters, schools, shopping malls, churches, offices, and homes. There are shootings in the streets and on corners and trains. No place seems safe — and contrary to what the NRA says, the more guns there are, the worse it becomes. Today if people think they might need a gun for self-defense, it would be to defend against what? Why people with guns, of course.

It’s not the America I grew up in. In the land of my youth, good people weren’t murdered very often — and children almost never. Grisly killings usually involved organized crime hoodlums, and even Mafia thugs knew better than to shoot children. But things have changed — and people who defend how things are now just don’t get it. How things are now isn’t how America was supposed to turn out.

For some, adulthood is out of reach

Anyone who doubts that conservatives are often hopelessly unformed, arrested adults need only have seen a few of the comments I’ve received recently from someone who can’t seem to settle on a name. I deleted them and marked them as spam because they contributed nothing to the discussion, but I couldn’t help thinking how Right-Wing Nut Jobs often quite voluntarily confirm that they are indeed brain dead.

Let’s be grownups about guns

The vicious murder of 20 children in the Newtown, CT., school is so despicable that it’s almost impossible to believe that it happened. Yet it did, and in the wake we’ve renewed the conversation about what guns in America.

Gun defenders argue that we can’t objectively talk about guns so soon after such a shooting, yet they seem to be happening so frequently that not enough time elapses for emotions to calm before another occurs. But what’s obvious is, the time to talk about guns was in the past. Failure to act responsibly just allows the body count to mount.

A concomitant issue is America’s mental state, its love affair with guns. Is it a holdover from our frontier days? Our fascination with the Wild West? Or have we been so conditioned by what I believe to be a misinterpretation of the Second Amendment that we would defend it even at terrible cost?

But that’s a discussion for another day—and it’s a discussion more people seem to be open to. For now I want to put forward an idea with several parts that I’m sure will be lost amidst the noise surrounding the tragedy.

 

1. There is no earthly reason for private ownership of weapons designed for the military and law enforcement. Prohibiting the sale of such weapons to the public is something all policy makers should be able to agree on. There was a time when a revolver was an adequate sidearm for the average cop, but that time is past as Glocks and Sig Sauers have flooded the streets.

The term “well regulated militia” is a key part of the Second Amendment, but few seem willing to discuss that in the overall context of the amendment. In my mind, regulating the sale of arms to the public is well within the scope of the Second Amendment, and those wishing to bear super-lethal weapons are welcome to join their state’s national guard, today’s version of a well-regulated militia.

2. Following that, it should be made illegal to own a prohibited weapon, and while I wouldn’t propose a house-by-house search, I could see either a buy-back program or a swap, where an owner would be offered a revolver in exchange for a gun with a magazine or a bolt- , pump- or lever-action long gun for a military-style rifle. I doubt if most people who would voluntarily turn in their semi-automatics would ever be inclined to shoot up a school, but as we’ve learned, such guns can fall into the wrong hands. Sounds impractical, but clip-fed semi-automatic weapons make mass murder easy, and I see no other way to reduce their numbers.

Let’s remember that there may be over 300 million privately owned guns in the US, and no one knows how many would qualify as prohibited weapons. Preventing their sale lone isn’t going to get rid of them.

3. Responsible gun owners, meanwhile, should quit their NRA memberships and if necessary join another organization for hunters and target shooters, one embracing the original mission of the NRA—teaching marksmanship and gun safety, and perhaps protecting wild habitats.

 

I’m sure if a hundred people read this, a hundred people will tell me why it won’t work. Maybe it wouldn’t, but nothing else I hear discussed is going to save lives.

In the wake of such a tragedy, it’s hard to imagine that there wouldn’t be widespread bipartisan support for some kind of meaningful action. I’m sure at least a few of the victims came from Republican households, so it’s not like it’s possible to find comfort in being a Republican. The sad truth is, of course, that political figures of both parties are cowed by the reach of the NRA.

We can ask how many innocent children need to die before America grows up enough to regard semi-automatic weapons for what they are—weapons designed only to kill people. But it’s a question we don’t want to know the answer to. Certainly every mother and father in this country should by now want to get such guns out of people’s hands—and maybe what we need is a parents’ march on Washington.

We ignore warnings at our own peril

As sea levels rise and weather patterns become more bizarre, storms like Sandy are bound to become commonplace. What we have seen already this year is that it won’t be years before we feel the effects of climate change — we’re feeling them now.

While it’s pretty clear that one of the things we’ll have to do is relocate coastal communities inland, it’s also pretty clear that a city like New York can’t be moved. So it will have to adapt.

It’s possible that some are now ruing the decision so many decades ago to take down the elevated lines and put the trains underground, but what’s done is done — and now flooding in the subways has shut down perhaps the world’s greatest urban transportation system.

Protecting the subways might not be an insurmountable problem. We have a fair idea of how far inland a storm surge would occur, so in vulnerable areas it might be possible to stave off flooding by elevating some subway entrances and installing covers over the stairways to others. People in NY are accustomed to the occasional steel plate on sidewalks in front of shops. These are exterior entrances to basements, and they keep out rain. Gaskets would make them fairly watertight, and this could work for not only subway entrances but the ventilation grates that also dot the sidewalks.

But no one should be surprised by the devastation wrought by Sandy — or Irene of the previous year. We have certainly been warned. And no one should be surprised by the other bizarre changes in our climate that we’re seeing, because scientists have been warning us about the effects of global warming since at least the 1980s.

The end game

Corporations have been sitting on tons of cash for some time now even as unemployment remains high. “Uncertainty” is given as the reason. But probably not. Corporations would prefer a Republican president, so why would they want to do President Obama a favor by putting people to work? Couple this with the House Republicans’ refusal to act on Obama’s sound jobs bills, and the cards are stacked against the president come election day. If Romney wins the White House, Republicans are sure to retain control of the House and retake the Senate. If that happens, don’t be surprised if corporations free up some of that cash to hire, and if the House passes some form of the bills it’s been stalling, just to make the GOP look heroic and give Romney something to run on in 2016.

And now it begins

The Isaac-delayed RNC Convention takes place this week, and Mitt Romney is expected to be officially nominated as the Republican candidate for president. Few observers expect any surprises. The various speakers will use the opportunity to attack President Obama and promote various aspects of the most corrupt party platform in history, and then they will go home to campaign for the destruction of democracy as we know it.

If Romney wins and Republicans gain full control of Congress, we can kiss America goodbye, for what the Founders struggled to create will be gone, probably for good. Conservatives own the Supreme Court, and this would likely be permanent. Meanwhile, restrictive state voting laws would cement control of government for Republicans at every level — and who’s to say that they would even honor the outcome of an election that didn’t go their way in the future?

I expect I’ll be repulsed by what I hear in the snippets of the RNC convention I watch. Republicans will probably get a post-convention bump, although I hope the opposite is true. I hope that as more Americans tune in to the GOP message, they will be as repulsed as I am. I hope when they finally get to meet the real Mitt Romney, they will run away as fast as they can. Conventional wisdom says the campaign season actually begins in earnest with the conventions, so I hope people finally tune in and start paying attention.

Getting it right

I’m sure there are Twitter zones that I’m unaware of, but where I hang out, people don’t tweet about boyfriends or zits or clothes or what they’re doing at the moment — they mostly tweet about current events. It’s generally a congenial place, made so because we tend to follow and be followed by like-minded people as we pass around our take on the politics that affect all our lives.

Which is why I’m disturbed by a disagreement I had tonight with a Twitter friend about accuracy. Passions often run high in Twitter, but that’s no reason to pass along something you can’t confirm as the truth. In my mind that’s a contemporary GOP tactic, and we don’t want to stoop to that level. But I didn’t get a chance to mention that in the several tweets we exchanged because she hung up on me — or the Twitter equivalent.

Journalists have a basic rule: if you can’t confirm something from at least one other credible source, you sit on it. I haven’t been a working journalist in a long time, but I follow this rule no matter where or what I’m writing — whether it’s here, or in Twitter, or occasionally for the local paper.

I do my best to make sure that if I pass something along that’s not an opinion, it’s factual, whether here or in Twitter. Often before I tweet, I’ll look something up, to make sure I’m on solid ground. It’s not hard, thanks to Google, and it doesn’t take long to figure out how to tell the credible sources apart from the crackpots. There’s a community effort going on, and a lot of people have done some serious research to support their reporting. We’re foolish if we don’t take advantage of that before we blog or tweet.