Crazy Week

This has been a crazy week.  I feel like it would be a helpful public service to take a minute here and just sort of review everything. 

First, on Tuesday morning, the Supreme Court announced that they had decided to gut the 1965 Voting Rights Act.  Not a good start.  Now, to be fair, were we really going to let minorities keep voting in the south forever?  I mean, come on.  Plus, this Supreme Court is very into the founding fathers, and if you had asked Thomas Jefferson about this he would have said something like "What?  Why would I let my slaves vote? What's wrong with you?".  I assume those are the two basic arguments opponents of the Voting Rights Act made.  I can't think of anything better.

Seriously though, this was terrible.  It seems to me that the right of citizens to vote should be marginally more important than the right of states to not be minimally regulated based on their long histories of institutional racism, but then again, I'm not a big time fancy lawyer. You may not be a minority voter, and if you don't care about minority voters I can't make you, but just remember that the Supreme Court, the group of people who interpret the laws for your country, cares about the rights of states more than it cares about the rights of individuals, and that's pretty sad.

Also, there's no truth to the rumor that Alabama will now be granting an extra vote to anyone who shows up at the polls wearing a confederate flag somewhere on their clothes, and two extra votes to anyone who shows up wearing nothing but a confederate flag. 

But while that was happening, something awesome was also happening, in Texas (seriously).  The Texas State Senate was trying to pass a bill that would severely restrict abortion rights in Texas, because that's what Texans do I guess.  Tuesday was the last day of the legislative session and Texas State Senator Wendy Davis decided she was going to filibuster until midnight so they couldn't pass the bill.  She started a little after 11AM and kept going with no breaks for like 10 or 11 hours. 

I didn't really see any of the filibuster because I had work all day and also none of the cable news networks covered it and it took me a while to realize it was going on, but I tuned in on YouTube around 11PM Texas time and I feel like I caught the best part.  Apparently the Republicans in the Texas Senate were claiming that Senator Davis violated the rules of the filibuster three times, and in Texas three strikes means your filibuster is out.  The Democrats appealed this ruling and I tuned in while the Texas Republicans were googling "how to make a woman stop talking" (supposedly they were actually reviewing parliamentary rules and such, but based on what I saw my theory sounds more plausible).

They finally started Senating again after about 10 or 15 minutes, and that's when Senator Davis' colleagues started trying to help her out.  First, Senator Older Librarian Lady (I don't know any of the names except for Wendy Davis) stepped up, and she was a whirlwind of parliamentary inquiries.  I'd say she took up a good ten minutes just politely asking questions.  Unfortunately she eventually ran out of steam when she ran into some circular "because I said so" Senate logic from the guy running the Texas Senate (hereafter known as Captain Mustache, though I may be making up the fact that he had a mustache, but he looked pretty mustachy to me).

Then they moved on to debate on the appeal of the ruling that ended the filibuster.  Senator Beauregard T. Crockett went on for about ten minutes until Captain Mustache got tired of listening to him and just let some other guy call the vote on the appeal.  My favorite part of this section was that it took me and most of the people commenting on YouTube about five minutes to realize Beauregard was on Wendy Davis' side.  It was sort of jarring when it hit me.  He was just so southerny and Texasy.  Good for him though.

After the Republicans voted down the appeal, it was time for Senator Hispanic Lady in a Pants Suit, and she was awesome.  Senator Pants Suit peppered Captain Mustache for a good 7-8 minutes with her own hurricane of parliamentary inquiries.  When Captain Mustache finally got tired of her, she finished by asking what a female Senator has to do to get recognized over her male colleagues.  What happened next was, literally, the best thing I've ever seen in a Senate Chamber.  OK, that's pretty specific, but still.

The gallery, who had been super well-behaved up to that point, sensed that the Democrats were sort of out of ideas and the Republicans were getting ready to vote on the actual bill.  Captain Mustache finally stopped falling for the parliamentary inquires and may or may not have turned off some microphones so the Democrats couldn't bother him anymore.  You know what they say in Texas, fool me 114 times, shame on you, fool me 115 times, shame on me.  So, with the vote coming and the Democrats defeated, the gallery, in response to what Senator Pants Suit said, proceeded to cheer and chant for about 18 minutes until it was a few minutes after midnight.  At one point, Captain Mustache tried the old "if you stop cheering we'll stop voting" trick, but the gallery didn't fall for it.

This was fun to watch and really impressive/inspiring, but I went to bed thinking the bill had still passed, seeing as Captain Mustache said it did.  When I woke up, I found out that Captain Mustache is a liar and a cheater and the bill had, in fact, not passed.  The bill will almost certainly pass eventually, Texas isn't getting any smarter, but this was an awesome moment of democracy and I'm glad I had the chance to see it.

That was just Tuesday.  Wednesday featured two almost simultaneous happenings.  Two things which received news coverage almost inversely proportionate to how important they were.  First of all, we found out that while the New England Patriots may not have won a superbowl in a while, they've been secretly leading the league in murders (allegedly).   And that's really all I have to say about that because the TV won't shut up about it and I just don't care.

More importantly, the Supreme Court (remember them from yesterday?) announced that they had struck down a section of the Defense of Marriage Act and had also declined to rule on Proposition 8 in California, effectively restoring marriage rights to same-sex couples in California.  Both of these rulings were, while not perfect, full of all kinds of good stuff for marriage equality.

Here's how you know this was a big day for marriage equality.  Fox News almost completely ignored this story all day.  If you've never watched The Five on Fox, they basically get five of the stupidest people you could ever find (OK, four of the stupidest people you could ever find and Dana Perino, who is adorable), put them at a table and have them talk about politics and stuff.  I watched them for pretty much the whole hour yesterday, they didn't go anywhere near this.  I'm not sure Republicans have any idea what to do with this now.  Even the Roberts court won't back them on homophobia.  It's a bad week for bigots and religious nuts.

Fox spent the rest of the night talking more about Paula Deen than they did about two historic Supreme Court decisions.  Ya know, I was originally on the fence about Paula until she went on TV this week like a blubbering idiot and cried about how you can go ahead and cast the first stone if you've never said something you regret.  You know what Paula.  How about she who has never said the n-word can keep getting paid ridiculous amounts of money to melt butter on TV.  Go away.

And then, as if all of that wasn't enough, today the Senate passed an immigration reform bill.  Sure, it's probably dead on arrival in the House, but still, the Senate did a thing!  I had to check with all three cable news networks to make sure MSNBC wasn't hallucinating.  So it was a crazy week, and here's what I learned:

1) Seriously, cable news is awful.  They spent more time this week on Paula Deen, Aaron Hernandez and George Zimmerman than they did on the awesome Texas filibuster and three really important Supreme Court decisions.  A friend from college pointed out to me the next day that while the filibuster was going on CNN was airing an important discussion between Piers Morgan and Dr. Drew regarding blueberry muffins.

I guess CNN gets a pass, I have a lot of questions about blueberry muffins.  Why not chocolate chips? Can I trade you one blueberry muffin for four mini-muffins? Can you tell me what blueberries taste like because I don't really know?  I guess if I had watched Piers Morgan and Dr. Drew instead of the filibuster, I'd know the answer to these and many other muffin related questions by now.

2) No matter how obviously you murder someone, you can always find people on TV to take your side. I watched like five minutes of George Zimmerman coverage, because MSNBC literally stopped in the middle of a great discussion of the DOMA ruling so they could show us silent pictures of the Zimmerman trial, and you know what I'm already 100% sure of?  George Zimmerman is definitely a murderer (allegedly).  Even if you believe every word of his story, his basic story is "that guy was punching me, so I shot him in the chest".  That's not a proportional response!  I'm not a Florida law expert, but it can't possibly be legal to shoot somebody in the chest for punching you.

3) I will stay up way later than I planned to in order to watch anything that even remotely reminds me of an episode of The West Wing.

4) I think...oh wait, forget about what I learned, because also, I almost forgot about this, the President made a big speech about climate change and said he's going to start doing a bunch of executive orders to get on top of that whole thing.  I don't know if he'll actually do anything, or if it'll actually work, but that was like the 8th biggest story this week.  Crazy week.

Corpocracy

Did I watch Conan O'Brien's last Tonight Show? Hell yeah I did! It was fantastic. Neil Young was awesome (Neil was awesome on the Haiti concert too. Is that the first time him and Dave Matthews played together? Did Neil travel back in time at some point so he could have a second career as Dave Matthews?). Plus, and I swear this is true, I had never heard Free Bird before, at least not that I can remember. I'd heard of it, but I'd never actually heard the song. Will Ferrell, by the way, has gotten to the point where I can't tell if he's kidding anymore, but he gets an A+ for breaking out the cowbell (I feel like we needed a little more of it). If I was Fox, I'd give Conan a blank check to go on my network at 11:30 starting in September and do whatever the hell he wants. If they do it right, he'll crush Leno and Letterman. I almost wrote a whole thing about it, but then I thought, who would I be convincing? Is there anyone who would say "no Sean, I don't think Conan has a big future in TV, Fox should just stick with Seinfeld reruns at night"? Of course not, that would be ridiculous.

Speaking of ridiculous, Glenn Beck, my favorite TV crazy person, is at it again. Last week Glenn did a whole special about how communism is bad. Thanks Glenn, that's super helpful. I hadn't noticed all the communist countries failing miserably and disappearing, except Cuba and North Korea, who can't feed themselves. At one point, Glenn teased the next segment as the story of the holocaust that history forgot. That sounded unlikely right off the bat, but I stuck around to find out. Turned out he was talking about Stalin. Ummm, what? Can I get a show of hands from anyone who didn't know Stalin killed millions of people? Seriously, wow, kudos to Glenn for pointing out that Stalin, Hitler, Mao and Che Guevara were all bad guys (I know, people wear Che t-shirts, it's not because they support all the things he did, it's because they're stupid. Glenn, of all people, should understand what that's like).

With whom did Glenn think he was arguing? Does he think people were watching and thinking "sorry dude, I totally disagree with you about that Stalin guy, he seems super cool"? I know we have some communists in America (and that's the good part about America, you get to believe whatever you want, and tell people about it too, and I'm not allowed to send you to jail, or even punch you), but they're not the crazy killing people communists, they're more the sharing the wealth types. I have yet to meet anyone who thinks all America needs is Stalin. And I know Glenn would say that the wealth sharing communists always eventually turn into the killing communists. And if there was a huge wealth sharing communist movement in America and Glenn was talking about them and warning them that it's easy to get carried away, I wouldn't make fun of him.

Unfortunately, Glenn was talking about this because he continues to insist that President Obama and the majority of Congress are, in reality, communists/marxists/socialists/facists; maybe polygamists. OK, I made up that last one. But Goldmember Beck isn't the only one saying this, lots of "conservatives" are. I'm not sure why.

The bank bailout? As far as I can tell, here are the terms we gave the banks in return for giving them an oil tanker full of unmarked bills:
1) You have to pay us back, well most of it, or some, unless you really don't want to. We might suggest a new tax/fee to get the money back, but it'll never pass Congress because, um, you own Congress.
2) You have to come to Washington every once in a while and re-apologize for lighting the economy on fire and using the flames to light your cigars. You have to try and sound really sorry.
3) We're going to use you as a political pinata for a while.
4) There are some things we're requiring you to do with the money to help re-build the economy you broke, and no more huge bonuses (or, if you prefer, boni)...just kidding. Do whatever the hell you want.

Now, you could argue, since we don't produce actual things in this country anymore, that the banks are as much a means of production as anything. I'll buy that, especially because, the way our economy is set up, it's basically impossible to start any kind of business without a loan. But if you'd say that the government controls the banks now, you have a very odd definition of control. It reminds me of that joke about who aliens would think was in charge if they came down and saw us following dogs around and picking up their poop. The banks destroy the economy, the government gives them billions of dollars and they get super rich again while the rest of our economy still sucks. It's hard to argue a lot of government control in that equation.

Health Care?
I don't know what a final health care bill is going to look like, or if we'll get one at all. I do know that Republicans have been crying about a "government take over of health care". What? What part of forcing citizens to by insurance from private insurance companies at basically the same rates we're paying now constitutes a takeover? Believe me, I've argued that a government takeover of health care might be necessary, the way the government controls the military or police, because the private sector isn't doing the job on health care. If the government was taking over health care, I'd be among the first people to say so.

What about the auto industry bailouts?
Well, we're getting warmer at least. I'm not wild about taxpayers owning the majority of GM, especially since by taxpayers I mean the federal government. Because if I owned any piece of GM, we wouldn't be getting rid of the Saturn brand. Soon I'll have to find somewhere else to take my car for service, I don't like change. On the other hand, there are a couple of realities here worth noting. First, if we're going to bailout huge banks, why not also save some jobs for blue collar auto workers. If you'd rather have done neither, that's an excellent point and I couldn't agree more, but that ship had already sailed on the President when he took office. Second, if it takes a little government input to get GM to stop making cars that get 3 miles per gallon and explode whenever they turn left, then so be it.

On a somewhat related topic, last week, the Supreme Court ruled that any limit on corporate contributions for buying campaign ads in unconstitutional. They can't just give a candidate a sack of money, but they can buy all the ads they want (which is what campaigns use money for anyway). Great job Supreme Court, well done. For years, Congress has tried to find sneaky little ways to be corporate whores, now they can do it right out in the open, I'm so thrilled (by the way, Republicans seem to be supporting this decision, I'm not sure why they think it'll be better for them, Democrats can be whores too).

This doesn't really look like socialism or communism to me. It's actually sort of the opposite of socialism, the corporations are running the government. What do you call that? Congressman Clyburn, specifically in reference to the Supreme Court ruling, called it a corpocracy. I knew there was a reason I always liked him. I especially like corpocracy because, if you look at it really quickly, it kind of looks like crapocracy. Is this better than communism or socialism? Probably not. But it isn't socialism.