No, and let’s face it – neither do you.  You only care about a) the federal budget and the fate of Medicare, Social Security and other programs or b) the inevitability that a united, educated, empathetic middle class will rise up and raise taxes on the privileged few to pay for what makes America great…just as you finally get yours (aka you’re one of the delusional Americans who thinks that they’ll be millionaires are day even though they’re 35 and have never ground 30k in a year) So that’s you and me.  But someone must care about the actual deficit right? Nope. Anyone who says they do is lying to your face.

If you don’t believe me ask yourself why there are so many social riders attached to the budget bill? Why in the wake of record deficits do the same people who demand massive spending and also demand massive tax cuts? Nobody cares about the deficit.  If they did they could have become accountants or economists.

But enough about what I don’t care about.  Here is something I do care about: Healthcare and discouraging militarism.  Obama gave us sweeping Healthcare reform.  Boehner and company want to respond by killing Medicare, a landmark achievement unfortunately overshadowed by Civil Rights (good) and Vietnam (not so good).  The abomination of a budget that seeks to eliminate funding for this (protecting the Health of our own weakest citizens) ironically ramps up defense spending.  I used to think this was a contradiction until I reveal the Prince.  To paraphrase Machiavelli: a man forgets the killing of his brother before he forgets the taking of his property.  The budget or “cause” as it referred to is simply the voice of our lesser demons echoing the master politician codifying the death of our brother for the protection and expansion of our collective property.

Here at Debtor’s Prison we are familiar with deficits. It’s not about the number it is about the purpose.  Deficit for a world class education and a meaningful career = good.  Deficit for distracted, apathetic faculty and no job prospects = bad.

This topic deserves more than the brief illusion I gave to it in a previous post.  The American Civil War had just one cause: slavery.  States Rights is a myth.  Why does that matter 150 years after Fort Sumter? Because the Civil War made Americans who we are today, and in my opinion was simply the final military battle in what is called the American Revolution.  It created a vast country without borders – states because not a body of people but simply a necessary and subservient level of government.  Then of course we have the shame issue.

The shame associated with such a devasted defeat and a disproportionate share of the blame for the greatest atrocity man ever inflicted upon man.  The Civil War was less a war fought to free slaves as it was a war to pay for them.  Lincoln knew this as he said days before his own blood was placed on the alter of freedom with Brown’s and the 625,000 that died in between.  To understand this I offer an analogy.

Suppose eating meat and cheese (aka) animal slavery is wrong.  Who commits the greatest sin? He who keeps a single cow per year, sells the cheese and then slaughters the cow selling the meat, or the man who dines on steak and brie every night, but had never seen a cow in the flesh? Who refuses to even make the association? After the war each side had its own myth to create – The Lost Cause/States Rights folks of the South and the Freedman’s Army in the North.  Ironically, John Brown Free Soilers and Jayhawks are reviled by both sides …everywhere other than Kansas.

But it was the slaves stupid.  Everyone knew it at the time. The founding fathers knew it would come to this.  And somewhere, in their heart of hearts, every American for the last 150 years have known it.  If every mortal deed echoes through eternity, the cannons of the Civil War and still be heard loudly no matter how tightly we cover our ears and try and sing above the noise.

I am one of the largest critics of academia, along with Benito.  I think it’s a scam, I think it’s overpriced, yada yada yada.  I also am riding this link a little bit

http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/legal_skills/2011/04/new-scholarship-is-the-law-school-scam-blogging-movement-influencing-the-legal-profession.html

Surprisingly, I read it and learned a lot of things I didn’t know.  There is something to be said for scholarship, even if it does move at the speed of global warming (before 1970). 

But moreover academia is necessary because we are a google generation.  I am guilty of this.  I have no idea what the google algorithm is and I assume hits equates directly to truth.  And not only did I go to school when book reports still involved books, I’m an academic myself.  No wonder thousands of Virginian kids were almost taught that blacks fought in droves for the Confederacy.

Now my original rant was based on my gut reaction that the woman responsible for this egregious error was a racist daughter of the Confederacy who masturbated to Gone with the Wind.  Upon further (still extremely limited) review I think she was just stupid.  Based on that, how scary is it that something that is so factually absurd suddenly seems plausible when we type in some keywords and something like that appears?

Michele Bauchmann has stated several times that the Founding Fathers crusaded against slavery.  Now I know she’s racist.  But who knows what motivated this? It could be racism, ignorance and now there is the third option, perhaps she got bored and googled it or more likely one of her interns did. 

The internet makes it harder to completely bury the truth.  It also makes it easier to completely rewrite history.  A degree might not be worth the paper it’s printed on in terms of the market but it does serve a valuable function in society.  History, repeating itself, all that crap.

I’m one of those guys who constantly gets accused of making everything about race.  Everything from healthcare to the judiciary system, employment prospects to school admissions.  I’ve had a lot of discussions over a lot of beers and every now and then I get tired of being the only voice answering the meant-to-be rhetorical question underlying all these conversations “ok, you’ve got a black president, what more could you POSSIBLY want?” I begin to doubt myself, just a little, and then I read about Kyle Bristow’s “White Apocalypse,” a novel which the author insists isn’t a racist fantasy and it renews my resolve to at the very least not give the slight nod white people look for after a borderline statement to see if you’re one of those “reasonable” colored folk.  But here’s what’s interesting.  The racist fantasy is also a revenge fantasy.

The novel supposedly begins with the discovery of a mass grave…filled with white people.  Ancient white people who somehow got to the North American continent before Native Americans presumably by crossing a frozen Atlantic Ocean. Then the Native Americans slaughtered them, millenia pass, and suddenly directors of the Southern Poverty Law Center are being assassinated and self-hating white people are exercising their liberal guilt by dating non-whites.  Ok, so obviously Bristow (who sure as hell is no looker) lost a girlfriend (or more likely crush) to a black guy.  Sexual insecurity has long been a hallmark of racism, particularly American racism.

Read on to find out what makes this book extra special

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So Benito has been trying to recruit an underemployed blogger to join our motley crew, but is failing because obviously none of the candidates want to lose their job. But one of them did pass on a mandatory assignment a senior manager gave to his underlyings before the monthly meeting when they were to pay homage to his greatness. Read “A Letter to Garcia.” Here is the damn link

http://www.birdsnest.com/garcia.htm

I talked to the guy and he said he was hurt that his manager thought so little of them collectively that he would make them read what amounted a treatise on how they were so worthless as to be morally bankrupt human beings. Or at least that’s what he got out of it. You are probably wondering what this has to with Scalia. Getting to that.

My first reaction was this kid is a major loser if his managers have any ability to affect him emotionally. So I read the article…turns out it’s a turn of the (previous) century essay, penned on a lark, a 100 yr-old blog entry that could have been written by Rush Limbaugh. Then I got angry.
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I was furious when I read the headline about the woman who was dismissed from her job at a law firm days after suffering a miscarriage.

http://abovethelaw.com/2008/05/breaking-a-dramatic-farewell-emailand-proof-of-paul-hastings-layoffs-/

Needing to vent I turned to the first woman I saw in the office despite somewhere in the back of my mind knowing she was one of those bible thumping conservatives. No joke, the conversation went something like:

“Can you BELIEVE what happened to this poor woman?!”

“She should have stayed in the damn kitchen.”

“Pardon?”

“She should have been at home. If there weren’t so many women in the workplace, particularly lawyers, then perhaps my nephew could find a job or get into law school.”

“What if she had just decided to get an abortion huh? I bet you’d support more work life balance then.”

“Then she would have burned in hell. She probably will anyway. Her act of working was an abortive act in the eyes of the Lord. Better the child suffer in purgatory than be raised in a damned household.”

The woman crossed herself and went into the ladies room. I considered following her, grabbing her by the hair, and slamming her head into the latrine until I felt better. Instead I called Alpha Man and asked him why there were so many more turncoat women than turncoat blacks. Do we have to be constantly arrested and fucked up by the cops to remind us where we still stand in society?
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I am not the biggest fan of kids.  I did my rotation through pediatrics and was told I’d be a good pediatrician because I didn’t let emotions get in the way of medicine, and because children are more comfortable with a female doctor.  Pass.  One of the things I did notice though was that there were alot of fat kids.  Half of the kids were in my humble opinion fat enough to be the “fat” kid in their respective class, the one with no friends that everyone poked fun at.  My thought is that an anti-obesity campaign is so benign as to be almost useless.  Michelle Obama is a beautiful, empowered, intelligent woman who could raise awareness about any number of issues.  Then I heard about Rush Limbaugh, a morbidly obese, fat drug addict, attacking the first lady over her anti-obesity campaign.  This indicates the type of bald-faced hatred that still permeates a great deal of the 48% of the country that did not vote for Obama.

I do not know exactly why I found Limbaugh’s commentary to be so much more offensive than Sarah Palin’s similar comments.  Palin constantly goes out of her way to take shots at the first lady, going as far as to dedicate a plate of smores to her in the defiant act of eating dessert.  Sadly, I suspect the reason for this is that Sarah Palin, who is losing her battle with age, is still in far better shape than Rush Limbaugh.  The hypocrisy of a man who can lose well over 50 lbs and not look any different criticizing someone for combating childhood obesity cuts through my political apathy and strikes me as absurd.  It also demonstrates that I was wrong about two things.  First, that the first lady should have taken on something more concrete, and two, that childhood obesity isn’t such a big deal.

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Clarence Thomas is only the second African-American ever to sit on the Supreme Court.  He was nominated by the first President Bush when Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American ever to sit on the Supreme Court, retired.  I do not care for Clarence Thomas.  Neither do 98% of African-Americans – ever since he first caught Reagan’s eye for being willing to perpetuate lies about African-Americans and his systematic destruction of the EEOC.  Twenty years later, he sits alienated and alone on the court, under a self-imposed vow of silence.  After his wife accepted over $700,000 to lobby against President Obama’s groundbreaking Healthcare reform, Thomas stands poised to cast the deciding vote rendering a law unconstitutional, purely on political grounds, that will directly cause the death of hundreds of thousands of the poorest Americans.  Ladies and gentleman I give you Clarence Thomas, the first Student Debtor.

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