We were discussing homosexuality because of an allusion to it in the book we were reading, and several boys made comments such as, “That’s disgusting.” We got into the debate and eventually a boy admitted that he was terrified/disgusted when he was once sharing a taxi and the…
The real crisis of public morality in the United States doesn’t lie in the private decisions Americans make in their lives or their bedrooms; it lies at the heart of an ideology — and a set of policies — that the right-wing has used to batter and browbeat their fellow Americans.
They dress these policies up sometimes, give them catchy titles like Rep. Paul Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity.” But they never cease to imbue them with the kind of moral decisions that ought to make anyone furious. Ryan’s latest budget really is case in point. It’s a plan that says that increases in defense spending are so essential, that massive tax cuts for the wealthy are so necessary, that we must pay for them by ripping a hole in the social safety net. The poor need Medicaid to pay for medicine and treatment for their families? We care, we really do, but the wealthy need tax cuts more. Food stamps the only thing standing between your children and starvation? Listen, we feel your pain. We get it. But we’ve got more important things to spend money on. Like a new yacht for that guy who only has one yacht.
TechDirt:
He didn’t get sick or have something better to do. Hell, he didn’t even miss a flight. Instead, according to Schneier, the TSA itself had him removed from the panel:
On Friday, at the request of the TSA, I was removed from the witness list. The excuse was that I am involved in a lawsuit against the TSA, trying to get them to suspend their full-body scanner program. But it’s pretty clear that the TSA is afraid of public testimony on the topic, and especially of being challenged in front of Congress. They want to control the story, and it’s easier for them to do that if I’m not sitting next to them pointing out all the holes in their position. Unfortunately, the committee went along with them.As Tim Lee notes in reporting on this story, the TSA has done similar things in the past, and even been rebuked by Rep. Jason Chaffetz — and yet it had no problem doing it again. The fact that Schneier is a part of that lawsuit is meaningless and shouldn’t stop him from testifying at all. Schneier is a clear thorn in the side of the TSA, and if it’s so afraid of having him speak to Congress, that really says a lot about the (lack of) confidence it has in its own arguments. If you can’t stand to let a critic speak, it suggests that perhaps your own argument isn’t very strong.
But to grant private citizens — untrained, unsupervised, beholden only to their individual thoughts, biases and capabilities — the very same standards as we give sworn, trained law officers? To allow them to walk the streets and apply deadly force as they see fit, with only their own sense of their own reasonableness to guide them? Really?
The state of Florida and others like it have lost all sense.
That these laws sailed through legislatures and were signed by governors is indicative of a craven national culture, a panicked bunker mentality that now approaches the pathological. Despite becoming the most incarcerative society in the history of the planet, despite spending more and more of our national treasure on prisons and probation officers, drug courts and sentencing judges, despite the elimination of parole and the proliferation of mandatory sentencing, we are still ever more angry, ever more lethal, ever more afraid. Based on the scope and reach of our criminal justice system, Americans are now either the most evil people in modern history, or our view of ourselves, our neighbors and our national collective has been utterly corrupted by our own cowardice and rage.
My country lost its mind in 2001, and I don’t know if it will ever find it again.
Obamacare turns 2. Here are the facts about what Americans have already gained.
“WE DON’T CARE ABOUT YOU OR YOUR FACTS!!!”
— Republicans
OH BABY JESUS WHO WILL SAVE US FROM THE AWFUL TYRANNY OF AFFORDABLE HEALTHCARE?!
