Wahoo! Don’t forget to click on Politics for a more thorough reaction from Alpha Man.

I tried not to write about it.  I didn’t want to be just another liberal blogger uninentionally calling attention to the “birther” movement and thereby adding legitimacy to it in the subconscious minds of many Americans who vote.  When the White House went above and beyond any legal requirement of any American citizen to do anything (not to mention presidential candidate, not to mention sitting president) and released his long-form birth certificate I patted myself on the back for staying out at least one pointless debate.  And now they want his college records.  And of course the birthers are not satisfied with the long-form birth certificate.

So let’s go over what we know.  Birthers are racist, and not the pseudo-intellectual “there exist some gifted negroes but as a race they are intellectually inferior” but the “there are just some things nobody with mongrel blood should ever, ever do and being president is damn sure one of them.” All Republicans, racist or not, know that birthers are racist and deliberately pander to this group for political points by pretending that the birthers really care where Obama was born not as much what he looks like and who he was born to.  Polls indicate that over half of people who identify themselves as Republicans don’t believe Obama is American or aren’t sure.  Believe it or not, I can live with that.  Or rather, I have to – I’m black in America.

But here’s what makes me angry.  It’s the fact that so many people, with nothing to gain to from this slander and libel against the President, don’t get angry and don’t stand up to make any sort of change.  Case in point: If you haven’t struck up a conversation with an acquaintance or stranger about how absurd this birther thing is, then guess what? Black or white, you’ve failed the racism/self-hatred test. 

Ok, let’s back up.  Raise your hand if you’ve overheard a birther talking on the bus or in a bar sounding all authorative like he’s king shit of fuck mountain?  Yeah all right, all of you.  Now, raise your hand if you’ve EVER heard someone DENOUNCING birtherism loudly and in the same manner? Now put your hand down if you’re at a small liberal arts college North of the Mason Dixon line with no division 1 or division 2 athletics.  Yeah, not a single hand raised.

Look people.  It’s 2011.  We know that progress isn’t guaranteed with the passing of time.  We’ve seen slavery, holocaust, genocide and the like.  It’s not just that we know what our primal demons are like, we also know, as people how extremely cowardly we are.  I mean, you won’t come to the defense of the President of the United States? Your President? Supposedly the most powerful person in the world?  If not then guess what, you’re not coming to the defense of the gay kid who is being bullied.  You’re not coming to the defense of the Hispanic-American who is having his citizenship questioned by an angry mob.  Come on people, we need to start controlling how the masses think.

Oh, you’re one of those “you can’t control how people think” people are you?  Ever heard of advertising? Your deepest most sacred convictions are bought, sold, bundled, divided and sold again every day on Wall Street.  Your very concept of what it means to be American is 80% commercials you’ve watched during Major League Sports.

So read a book, figure out what your convictions are, and PLEASE don’t just STAND UP for them if they get attacked in front of you.  Convictions aren’t to be used for self-defense only.  ADVOCATE for them.  I mean, don’t get me wrong, I hate stupid people as much as the next guy.  But you know what I hate even more?  A coward.

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.

It’s hard to accurately summarize this piece of “work” and still capture the condescending arrogance that epitomizes the ruling class of every culture, country and time. Essentially it’s “the white man’s burden” but it’s employer v. Worker. To take this article literally a worker should be an omnipotent, mute slave. Essays could be written about each sentence and books about the handful of parables. I did not think it was possible to degrade a person in so many ways in such few words. I have always prided myself on keeping an emotional distance from employers even when I used to work for corporate America. But if a manager ever told me to read this I’d have spat in his face.

So enraged was I that I googled critiques of the article and guess what? It’s not a rallying cry to conservatism, it’s a commonly accepted piece of Americana adored by all! The idiot manager who assigned this may have just pulled a cliche out of the “Managing for Dummies” handbook!

How? How could the awful sentiment embodied in this hellspawn text be loved AND loved by most? At first I thought maybe I was wrong. Maybe I was messed up. Then I thought of Antonin Scalia.

Here you have an ugly small-minded creature who routinely accepts gifts from interested parties in the cases he hears, asks bullying and unsophisticated questions, writes at a fourth grade level and whose decisions are to the detriment of 94% of Americans. Yet ask a law student who their favorite Justice is? Scalia is by far the most popular. I hate people.

Part of it is somewhat understandable. Scalia’s misleading oversimplified questions and interruption are sometimes funny. The essay is kind of funny in a Mr. Burns sort of way. Also people don’t read. Case in point: Less than 1% of people who use the term “Uncle Tom” have read Uncle Tom’s cabin. The term and it’s meaning makes no sense to anyone who has actually read the book.

But the real reason most people find this abominable essay and the unsufferable Antonin Scalia is a perverted sort of hero worship and inflated sense of self worth.  It’s how Republicans win elections.  People don’t identify with their own situations, they identify with the situations they feel they will be in soon or someday.  The rich are given tax cuts by the wannabe rich.  Students worship asshole professors because they want to be perceived as part of the in crowd who managed to earn A’s.  Workers who are insulted by this essay love it because they are self-hating, because they want to be no not “Rowan” (the idiot who takes the damn message) but because they want to be the commander and chief who sends him.  All little kids want to be President.  The sidekick action figure never sells as well as the leader.  In this world a hero is just a martyr who survives or gets noticed dying.

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?

Alpha Man broke it down for me. According to the Alpha gospel sexism is actually closer related to homophobia than racism because barring interracial marriage sexism like homophobia comes into and divides family units. Husbands, sons, brothers and fathers practice it against wives, daughters, sisters and mothers.

Then there is the fact that for women it is much more common to be sucked into the “safety bubble” aka a comfortable life so long as you don’t rock the boat. Alpha Man says blacks who trade their integrity for this comfortable life are called “house [Negroes]” hmmmm… What other term begins with “house?” ah yes, house wives!

Yes, I’ll say it – it’s time we move away from house wives. If I ask a woman whose currently not working and has young children I automatically lose respect if I hear “house wife” in response to “what do you do?” Instead, how about “I’m a/in [blank].” Period. Then if they ask where you work you say “I am taking some time off but I last worked at/in.” If they ask if you’re looking for a job you say “While I always am open to a perfect opportunity and may have limited time to take on part time projects I am not currently in the job market.” THEN if they ask about your family gush about your kids. It’s fine to talk about them, but if we want gender equality we can’t talk about our kids when asked about our jobs or careers.

Alpha Man doesn’t pull his punches when he addresses the black community and I am not going to when I talk to women. If you’re not working and have kids keep up with your old profession. Be able to discuss it intelligently. Think about what you can do on the side. You owe it to the rest of us. And if you are one of those women who has never done anything but raise kids don’t tell me it’s your choice and that you’re happy and fulfilled. You are lying to me, you’re lying to yourself and you are embarassing both of us.

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.

Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama are very similar.  Beautiful, brilliant, ambitious – but when Hillary was first lady these traits were used against her.  She was attacked for it.  I can still remember in middle school seeing the bumper stickers that read “Impeach Clinton and her Husband.”  Michelle Obama learned from history and purposefully chose something seemingly innocuous and adopted the middle America friendly moniker “Mom in Chief.”  But is childhood obesity really that innocuous?

The fat kids I met were not the fat kids I remember from school.  They didn’t play video games 20 hrs a day, didn’t have chocolate constantly smeared on his faces, liked and were good at sports.  Well, not all of them.  There were some “traditional” candy-loving, video-game playing chess club attending geeks.  But the point remains, childhood obesity isn’t primarily due to what kids DO it’s about the FOOD children have access to, particularly in poor communities.  And that is a very worthy political issue.

Benito talks about how everything he learned in law school was either useless or a lie.  One of my greatest fears was discovering any similarities between medical school and law school.  The human body is the human body and science is science, I assured myself.  Law is just crap made up by old people to protect their property.  Sadly, I must admit that nutrition is one area where medical school takes on a sort of law school-esque motif.  First, doctors are not nutritionists and the entire industry is not based on prevention.  Second the food pyramid is bullshit.  People don’t need meat.  People don’t need dairy.

The Obamas learned something, alot of things from the Clintons.  I understand it would be political suicide now, but perhaps if the Obamas are as active as the Clintons are in their post-whitehouse days perhaps they’ll take a play from the Clinton playbook and go vegan.

So Alpha Man asked me to write about this after the last (2010) State of the Union address and I don’t believe I did. After the most recent (2011) SOTU and the surrounding commentary both of us were reminded…and I dropped the ball again despite the greater urgency given the fact that proponents of the decision are pointing to a lack of an apocalypse as proof it was ok. But then Alpha Man and I went to a poorly attended free showing of “Who Killed the Electric Car” at our local community center. That’s when we discovered the the terrible truth.

Alpha Man here. First, we didn’t drop the ball, Benito did. Normally I don’t mind talking out of my ass about something I know little about, but with 2 JDs and a combined 8 years of law school between the writers of this blog I figured someone other than myself should have taken the lead. Wrong!

Ok, in non-legal terms Citizens United basically means corporations can contribute an unlimited amount of money directly to political campaigns, essentially buying elections. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the conservative wing of our learned Supreme Court virtually ended democracy 10 years after getting a taste for it by giving us Bush v. Gore. And you know what? I don’t care. And here’s why: Corporations already own this Bitch – I mean how else would a monstrosity like a corporation be granted “personhood” under our law?

First, I’ll admit I didn’t want to go watch “Who Killed the Electric Car” on a Saturday Night. I wanted to go into the city and nurse PBRs in a dive bar hoping that the attractive waitress who had no way of knowing she would be receiving no tip at the end of the night didn’t catch a whiff of our collective failure. But the movie did a pretty good job of showing how the oil industry bought the government of California and put an illiterate drunk in the White House in order to make sure electric cars never caught on.  On a side note, ten years after GM abandoned electric cars for Hummers the company required a multi-billion dollar bailout. And got it.

Citizens United is like a couple getting married after their 10th grandchild is born, or after menopause has set-in for the woman and the couple just wants an easier time getting a loan to buy that condo in Palm Beach.  Now keep in mind it is still disgraceful for the Supreme Court to have ruled this way. But if we look at this from a historical perspective, the law is always playing catch-up to society with the singular exception of Brown v. Board.

And if that wasn’t a sour enough note to end on let me add that this is by no means a guarantee that something unanticipated won’t flow from this decision to fuck up the country and by extension it’s most vulnerable citizens (disproportionately as always) in some worse way (though it’s hard to imagine a process that could produce a worse President than W.) because let’s face facts- Dredd Scott was the court’s worst decision – but it took more than a year before the country was mired in Civil War.

As inmates in debtors prison we are an ignored constituency due to several factors that make us unlikely to vote, particularly in non-national elections. Still, it is useful to look at certain political deals in the making and ask “how does this further screw me?” Case in point: tax cuts for the rich in exchange for unemployment benefit extensions.

It’s a brilliant win-win for the Republicans politically. If the President agrees he looks weak and further exacerbates the deficit. It will also piss off Federal employees who just got their pay frozen for two years. If he doesn’t agree then taxes go up for everyone and the Republicans will bitch about that.

Sadly, unemployment doesn’t affect us much. To receive unemployment you need to have worked for a certain period of time and have made a certain amount of money. Obviously, we’re in the same boat as far as taxes are concerned. You can’t be taxed on jack shit. So, does this mean we shouldn’t care?

If you’re like me you have some crab tendencies. I’m in this barrel, why the hell should you crawl out? The crab philosophy says it’d be better for ALL taxes to go up rather than none…but the crab philosophy also says if the American dream is out of reach for ME it may as well be out of reach for as many people as possible, so let’s cut taxes, sell the rest of the country to the Chinese, and be done with it. The point is crab tendencies could lead to two different conclusions depending on how much patience one has.

But what if we are motivated by something other than spite?Well there is the deflected glory theory – that your life’s meaning comes from the accomplishment of your generation, ours being the election of President Obama. But as I just explained unless the lameduck Congress forces through a bill that extends middle class tax cuts while letting the others expire the President is likely to take some shit for whatever happens.

I think the reason I care so much about politics is that even though it exists in an alternate inside the beltway universe of fancy dinners and trust funds it still resembles my and all other student debtors lives…in that the common sense answer is the only one certain not to happen. Why is it that my leaders must choose between letting the unemployed twist in the wind while the country builds itself back up or giving them a mere subsistence while giving millions in tax breaks to the rich and thereby preventing a return to federal fiscal responsibility?

Probably the same reason I could never find a conventional job.

One of the worst sensations associated with being in Debtor’s Prison is the sensation of having been lied to. You relied on an implied social contract and gave up not just money and time, but countless experiences (concerts, sporting events, family functions, even and probably most foolishly opportunities for romance). Now our best case scenario is to work for people who made none of those sacrifices, living proof that many of us do get to have our cake and eat it too. You were lied to and everyone thinks you a fool because of it.

Speaking of lies, while it is not in me to talk about a public figure directly but the random influx of Sarah Palin themed quotes caused me to remember the whole “death panel” debate, I can’t help but sort of go there.  This debate was raging about the time I realized that the economy passed me by and my degrees were useless.

What happened to me, to us, is pretty horrible but I gained a valuable perspective today when I learned about a patient in Arizona who was denied a liver after being promised one. He’d already been prepped for surgery when Arizona state budget cuts caused the state to no longer cover such procedures. Because he didn’t have 200,000 the liver went to another patient. Heh, if only they’d given my degree to someone else instead of saddling me with these loans.  The story gets worse however.

So the governor of AZ, the same one who erroneously claimed illegal immigrants were decapitating people said that the cuts were necessary somehow because of Obamacare. See what she did just there?

Similarly law schools are adding an interesting phrase to their employment surveys that go something like this “after gaining   [x-type of] employment please fill out…” See? There it is again.

So recap: two lies. Death panels and higher education is the way to go. Then two late-game deceptive practices to perpetuate the lies that have already accomplished the horror they’ve been designed to accomplish. You already destroyed the public option. You already robbed me of my money, opportunity to gain marketable skills, honor and dignity.  Why keep lying? Why?

Why is Ashton Krutcher still relevant? He snagged himself a cougar named Demi Moore. He took Demi Moore from Bruce Willis. Bruce FUCKING Willis. I think I can take Todd Palin. His name is Todd for heavens sake.

Alpha Man’s rant got me thinking. Why not work for her campaign, start sleeping with her, be her shoulder to cry on when she divorces Todd in 2014 to take the country’s attention off the horrible job she’s doing as Prez. And then marry her a month before she’s up for re-election?

Now I know, I know she’s already haggard-looking and by 2014 she’s 50. And by the time we’re married she’ll have great grand children if the next Palin generation is anything like the preceding ones. Yeah there are her slutty daughters but Bristol is no looker and it’s too early to tell about the others. But hear me out. I rarely talk about my cougar conquests but there have been some doozies. Plus once I am in front of that camera and get the type of exposure the Palins get it’s over folks. It really is. I look that good and the sound of my voice is addictive. I am like Dickie V. To a college basketball fan.

Obviously if I do this the Presidency is mine. A Palin administration will mean the end of all standards and the United States will officially be a circus/place for the worlds best and brightest to get drunk and screw for four years before taking tomorrow’s ideas back to their home country. But I’ve always wanted to be a Ring Master. I wouldn’t even have to run Republican, I could pull an Arnold. That way when I divorce her it will seem like a principled thing and not her having gotten old. So so old.

I guess the larger point here is relationships. It was like this back in the days of monarchy and it’s like this now. Marriage, dating, all of it is about what you can do for someone else and what they can do for you. Right now you need something, someone to pay your debt. Right now there is a wealthy benefactor who needs a relatively young person with an interesting story. Even better if the wealthy benefactor is dumber than runny eggs. But you need to move quickly. Smart money hangs around, but youth is fleeting.

I came across the following comment reading an online article today:

Plot Synopsis: Sarah Palin’s Alaska: Episode 2 – Todd Strikes Back

When we last left our boy Toddy, the evil liberal writer next door had poked his head over the Great Freedom & Liberty Fence and caught old Toddy porking his favorite old pet goat (again) like a piston engine out back behind the snow machine shed. The old Granny Griz was none too happy about that you betcha. Toddy rallied the Greater Alaskan Frozen Tea Bag Patrol to help him build an Even Greater Freedom & Liberty & Patriot Fence so he could really git’er done Toddy style. Toddy told the Patriotic Patrollers that if they built our boy a bigger Even Greater Freedom & Liberty & Patriot Fence that he’d let them have a turn with his old goat… and after that they could have a shot at the four-legged one too….

I posted this mostly because it’s funny as hell, but there is a deeper point too that must be discussed.

Sarah Palin is an American Disgrace.  This is so obvious I probably haven’t even written about Sarah Palin before.  Sarah Palin’s one and only virtue is that she can make just about anyone feel better about themselves – be it their own level of intelligence, lack of a hokey accent, the fact their name isn’t synonymous with moron, the fact their daughter isn’t a giant slut, etc.  Many middle-aged women compare themselves to Sarah Palin physically and feel even more attractive, even if you factor in her 19 kids.  The fact that she no longer has to work more than makes up for it.   But other than making one thankful that even with 150k worth of student debt one won’t go down in history as the subject of the longest running most famous SNL sketch ever she’s not much use.  Of course not being of much use is a far cry from disgrace.

Sarah Palin is an American Disgrace because she’s a self-made moron whose patron saint is luck – much like the idiot who graces our twenty-dollar bills – the bastard child of two despicable practices: a sort of legacy nepotism with respect to the Oval Office and a desire by certain elements to put self-hating members of certain groups in positions of power to get the statistical check mark and have all of their oppressive legislation rubber-stamped by one of the oppressed own.  This is bad for the student debtor because the undeniable message is 1) being degree-less and stupid can be an asset and 2) if you’re a woman or minority and therefore more likely had to struggle harder for your education, sell-out as fast as you can.  After all, what’s a little more gas on a fire that’s already going to burn the house down?

The two idiots most directly responsible for Palin are Bush and McCain, neither of whom were qualified to work as janitors at the schools they attended, Yale and the United States Naval Academy.  Without their last names they not only wouldn’t have gotten in, they would have failed out, early and repeatedly.  In order for George Bush Jr. to be President for eight years there had to be a certain “cool” factor to being stupid.  Stupid is good.  Then in comes John McCain.  McCain, a man of average intelligence, see the propriety of choosing a female as his running mate given that Hillary Clinton had just lost the democratic primary and he hoped to pick up disgruntled women, particularly disgruntled blind white women scared of black men and unable to tell how attractive Obama was.  But where to find a female politician with a track record of working against women’s interests?  Inspired by the story of Clarence Thomas, the McCain campaign didn’t give up until they found Sarah Palin. 

Megan McCain says she always knew Palin was a snake in the grass, and that was confirmed at her father’s concession speech.  Palin treated it like a coming out party.  It was like the King died and she was next in line.  She immediately began capitalizing on her newfound national fame in much the same way as a slutty teenager capitalizes on her amateur sex tape going viral.  Whereas the slut typically drops out of highschool or college to pursue profits in prurient interests, Palin quit the governorship.  For the people of Alaska, not the multi-million windfall she received.  For us here in debtor’s prison that struck a particularly painfull chord.  We all had the ability to quit something hard and save money in the process.  Palin had sense enough to do that and she still has to sound out the words of her children’s bed time stories.

Sarah Palin doesn’t care that she’s a disgrace to her country, women the world over, her family (particularly the youngest son), but she will eventually care that she’s a disgrace to herself.  She’s half token, half bad joke. When Bristol Palin starts posing nude for adult magazines, she has a few more grandchildren out of wedlock, her own marriage falls apart when Todd gets tired of hiding his mistresses and the same bubble-headed housewives who support her abandon ship when someone asks how a woman who claims to put family first can use her infant son with down-syndrome as a political prop and rarely if ever spend time with  him, then she’ll care.  But we won’t.  She’ll just be the butt of a joke involving a nephew and uncle who are the same age arguing who is the bigger slut, the nephew’s grandmother or the uncle’s mom.