Author: Greg Saunders

Though I’m not as enthusiastic as Ezra, I’ve gotta say that Warren Beatty’s speech the other day was very impressive. Not only are his ideas right on, but it’s full of long-overdue jabs at Arnold Schwarzenegger :

I’ve never enjoyed being publicly negative about actors^[1] in public office like Ronald Reagan, who I really liked, or Sonny Bono or George Murphy because I’ve always had a real soft spot for actors even if they are right wing.

And although I’ve never known Arnold very well I’ve always liked him.
. . .
But now that he’s a politician, I say, why not rise to the higher levels of that calling, rather than denigrate your fellow politicians, calling them “stooges” and “girly men” and “losers.” They give years of their lives to public service in the legislature of what is intended to be a representative form of government, where public policy on decisions affecting 38 million people’s lives are adequately discussed — not a government by ballot initiatives financed by huge advertising monies that bypass a careful examination of a bill by the people’s elected representatives.

Can’t we accept that devotion to the building of the body politic is more complex and a little more sensitive than devotion to body-building?

Does that make me a “girly man”^[2] ?
. . .
Of course he can joke that I want to defend the nurses because I’m closer to needing one, and the elderly because I’m nearer to being one, and the blind because I can’t see past tax-and-spend liberalism. And then I can joke that he should defend the teachers because he has so much to learn, but finally it’s not funny.

Government is not a joke, and despite what he’s said, it’s not a movie.

That’s what ultimately drives me nuts about Arnold. His arrogance towards his fellow candidates for governor alongside his avoidance of every public forum in which he’d be pressed to articulate and defend his ideas^[3] pretty much confirmed the notion that most bullies are really cowards on the inside. He’s a political one-hit wonder who sailed into office on a string of cliches about “change” and “leadership” without saying a damn thing. He was a gimmicky candidate who’s now being forced to realize that you can’t quote movie lines to get yourself out of every problem.

Even if he was doing a good job as governor, I’d still resent the hell out of him. The way he ran his campaign was an insult to everyone who takes public service seriously. It was the ultimate example of style trumping substance and it makes me embarrassed for my adopted state. When he says “I’ll be back” during a stump speech, he might as well be saying “Where’s The Beef?”, yet the people of California were dumb enough to fall for it. Here’s hoping that Arnold’s latest troubles are the result of people finally seeing through his “charm” and not part of the natural ebb and flow of politics.

As far as Warren Beatty is concerned, I’m not a big fan of famous people graduating into government service, but then again it’s always the conservative celebrities who end up running for office^[4]. That said, I do see the appeal in trying to, as Ezra put it, “even up the star power and refocus the election on ideology”. Let’s take Arnie’s celebrity crap off the table and get back to business, shall we?

UPDATE : By the way, there’s no better metaphor for Schwarzenegger’s political career than this inane photo-op (via BoingBoing). In order to tout his ideas for funding transportation projects, he sent a crew to create a pothole so he could fill it up in front of the press. Hell, I thought Pete Wilson and Jeff Skilling were the only people who created fake problems that Arnold would pretend to fix.

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^{1 : Not that Arnold was ever a decent actor. At least his peers like Stallone and Bruce Willis branch out every once in a while and do serious work. The only real difference between Arnold and someone like Jean Claude Van Damme is that Arnie had a much better agent.}

2 : By the way, am I the only one who noticed that some of Arnold’s “best” lines were lifted from the Hans & Franz SNL sketches? How lame do you have to be to steal from people who were making fun of you?

3 : Except for the “Super Bowl of Debates”. Yawn.

4 : Schwarzenegger, Reagan, Sonny Bono, Fred Thompson, Clint Eastwood, Gopher from The Love Boat….the closest we have is Jerry Springer, but he was a politician before he got famous.

Conservative blogger Stephen Bainbridge^[1] has a good post about “the deal” that pretty much sums up why I hate the filibuster :

The filibuster is a profoundly conservative tool. It slows change by allowing a resolute minority to delay – to stand athwart history shouting stop. It ensures that change is driven not “merely by temporary advantage or popularity” but by a substantial majority. Is it any wonder that it has usually been liberals who want to change or abolish the filibuster rule?

The filibuster is an anti-democratic tool that’s been used to empower some of the most horrible elements of our society in blocking progressive reforms such as anti-lynching legislation, the civil rights act, and universal healthcare. It’s a depressing irony that Democrats have been forced into a position of defending this tactic due to the even greater hypocrisy of the Republican majority in the Senate^[2].

Then again, as far as I’m concerned, the filibuster isn’t the only problem here. I’ve always hated the fact that the Senate is an anti-democratic institution that disproportionately favors the south :

If each of every state’s two senators is taken to represent half that state’s population, then the Senate’s fifty-five Republicans represent 131 million people, while its forty-four Democrats represent 161 million. Looked at another way, the present Senate is the product of three elections, those of 2000, 2002, and 2004. In those elections, the total vote for Democratic senatorial candidates, winning and losing, was 99.7 million; for Republicans it was 97.3 million. The forty-four-person Senate Democratic minority, therefore, represents a two-million-plus popular majority — a circumstance that, unless acres trump people, is at variance with common-sense notions of democracy. So Democrats, as democrats, need not feel too terribly guilty about engaging in a spot of filibustering from time to time.

What’s even more frustrating is that this was all by design :

Writing to Thomas Jefferson, who had been out of the country during the Constitutional Convention, James Madison explained that the Constitution’s framers considered the Senate to be the great “anchor” of the government. To the framers themselves, Madison explained that the Senate would be a “necessary fence” against the “fickleness and passion” that tended to influence the attitudes of the general public and members of the House of Representatives^[3]. George Washington is said to have told Jefferson that the framers had created the Senate to “cool” House legislation just as a saucer was used to cool hot tea.

The notion that the Senate is the body in which cooler heads prevail strikes me as incredibly elitist. What is it about the makeup of the Senate that makes the body immune to the “fickleness and passion” of the House? The fact that states with small populations are given the power to overrule the will of the majority? This is just the sort of notion that I’d expect from a group of men who felt that the only people who could be trusted to pick their own representatives were wealthy, white males^[4].

Going back to the filibuster, before you all decide to send me angry emails, lemme make one point clear. I think the Democrats are completely justified in their use of the filibuster. It may be a tactic I disagree with, but my discomfort with its use is outweighed by the fact that the the GOP majority are trying to sneak wingnuts into the judiciary while crippling the rules that allow Democrats to give “advice and consent”. When the Republicans play this dirty, we’d be fools to not fight fire with fire.

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^{1 : Who gets my respect for being a real conservative and not just another partisan hack.}

2 : As Prof. Brainbridge put it :

[A]ny honest conservative must admit that the only reason we’re having this debate over filibusters is because of Orin Hatch’s changes to the Judiciary Committee rules and procedures on matters like blue slips, hearings, and so on, which deprived the Democrats of the tactics that the GOP used to bottle up a lot of Clinton nominees in committee.

3 : Which worked so well during the Terri Schiavo fiasco.

4 : No, I’m not bashing the founding fathers. I think their flaws should be kept in historical context, but I bring this up to make the point that our concept of how we define a democratic republic has evolved over the last 200 years or so.

I guess we can stop worrying about the filibuster battle now, which is fine by me. I’m not a big fan of the deal that the Dems made, but I’m not a big fan of relying on filibusters either. Kinda sad to think that this fight, in which both sides were making principled stands and unwilling to compromise, ended with a bipartisan display of political cowardice. In the end though, our side got the slightly better deal.

With or without the deal in place, it’s definitely not in the President’s best interest for the public to see how nutty his picks for the Federal bench are. Now that the public’s interest has been piqued, I wonder if the Dems will be able to get some additional floor time to publicly debate the three certain-to-be-confirmed judges. The GOP’s strongest hand during all of this was that the public really doesn’t give a damn about what happens in the Senate, but I’m sure there’s plenty of people who will tune in now just to see what all the fuss was about.

Nothing makes me more depressed than to see how some prescription drugs are practically given away… (via Eschaton)

Scores of convicted rapists and other high-risk sex offenders in New York have been getting Viagra paid by Medicaid for the last five years, the state’s comptroller said Sunday.

Audits by Comptroller Alan Hevesi’s office showed that between January 2000 and March 2005, 198 sex offenders in New York received Medicaid-reimbursed Viagra after their convictions. Those included crimes against children as young as 2 years old, he said.

Hevesi asked Michael Leavitt, secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, in a letter Sunday to “take immediate action to ensure that sex offenders do not receive erectile dysfunction medication paid for by taxpayers.”

…while others are nearly impossible to obtain.

Under assault in California and other states over the cost of prescription drugs, manufacturers are increasingly touting their donations of medicine to sick poor people. But some of the ill and their advocates say the free drugs are not as easy to obtain as the industry suggests.

They complain that manufacturers change application criteria without notice, require income documentation that many homeless and mentally ill patients cannot provide and establish other bureaucratic prerequisites that block many needy people from getting help.
. . .
Some companies require that a person be rejected for Medicaid programs — a process that can take months — before being eligible for free drugs. Dozens of firms require tax returns, paycheck stubs or other documentation that patients are too poor to afford the drugs. Many of the most desperate patients are homeless, mentally ill or work off the books and do not have financial records.

“I had a fellow who went around collecting cans, and at the end of the day, he cashed them in for a small sum,” said Lynn Bramwell, patient assistance program coordinator for Yolo County. “He was homeless, and that’s what he lived on. We tried to enroll him for some diabetic medicine. The company said, ‘We need some sort of documentation for his income.’ And I said, ‘He collects cans.'”

Bramwell said the company refused to provide the medication, and he never heard from the homeless man again.

If it weren’t for those Republican dickheads in 1994¹ and their cries of “socialized medicine” we might not be where we are now. Americans die of preventable causes every day because a bunch of selfish, elitist scumbags decided that they’d rather let poor people die than wait in a line. It’s sickening and we all know who has blood on their hands.

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^{1 : But as Tom mentioned last year, it’s not like Clinton’s approach was without its faults.}

I know criticizing a column at WorldNetDaily is like shooting fish in a barrel, but this guy’s asking for it. In “Welcome to my first column”¹, the author argues that Christianity is going to take over the entire world and in the process wipe out secular humanism and “liberal Christianity, whose basic tenets are the opposite of the Bible”². In order to prove his case, he resorts to hackish extrapolation like this :

In 1900, there were 2 million evangelical or charismatic Christians in Africa. By 2000, there were 200 million. In Latin America during that period, the born-again population zoomed from 1 million to 170 million. And in China, just since 1950, Christianity has exploded from fewer than a million to almost 120 million.
. . .
Now, straight-line projections are silly because nothing ever goes in a straight line. But just to give you a comically precise picture of our current momentum: At 8 percent growth a year, the world would have more Christians than people by the fall of 2032!

If you really think straight-line projections are “silly”, why build an entire article around them?? Maybe he believes that by 2032, Christianity will be so popular, it’ll start spreading to domesticated animals, inanimate objects, or reanimated corpses.

My research for my new book, “Megashift,” has found 52 countries where God has brought people back from the dead, mostly in the last 20 years. And these are not near-death experiences, where someone on an operating-room table passes out and sees himself going down a long tunnel. These are stone-dead corpses.

Also, for what it’s worth, I have zero interest in flying saucers, crop circles, the Bermuda Triangle, the anti-Christ, or the sexual preference of Spongebob Squarepants.

Whew! Glad we cleared that one up. For a minute there I thought he might be kinda crazy.

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^{1 : Yeah, that’s really the name of the column.}

2 : Personally, I blame all those liberal women who insist on wearing pants.