Today's True Blue Liberal Poll on Trumpcare

The House Republicans have finally announced their specifics for replacing The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) with The American Health Care Act (Trumpcare). Supporters of Obamacare are appalled at the number of people who will lose coverage and at the way it targets women and older Americans for special mistreatment. The Tea Party wing of the GOP is appalled that Trumpcare is leaving even a few tattered remnants of Obamacare's patient protections; they are calling for a straight repeal of the ACA and a return to the status quo ante a black man in the White House.

Which leads to today's Twitter poll:

Here's a simple poll to determine whether you are a liberal or a conservative.

I believe that replacing the #ACA with #TrumpCare will...

— True Blue Liberal (@TrueBlueLiberal) March 8, 2017

Today's "Real Fact" & Giving Conservatives Credit Where Credit Is Due

First of all, I "love" the fact that Snapple gives itself full deniability by placing "Real Fact" and "Real Facts" within quotation marks. Yes, they seem to be saying, these "Facts" may be exactly as "Real" as Donald Trump's "University" or "hair". But given that this "Fact" #786 might actually be bullshit, I found it interesting to imagine the human brain using the same amount of power as a 10-watt bulb.  I assume that's a rough average, but I think we can probably be pretty sure that the most conservative among us are conserving energy (or hoarding it in their beer bellies) by using only 5 watts or less in their crania.

So, I'm giving credit where credit is due. Thank you to all the teabaggers and dittoheads out there doing their best to conserve brain power (even as they follow Michele Bachmann's advice and cling bitterly to their wasteful incandescents to light their homes).

The Quotation of the Day About Liberals

Lawrence O'Donnell will be talking about this viral quotation on the Rewrite segment of his MSNBC show, "The Last Word" later tonight:

"What did liberals do that was so offensive to the Republican Party? I’ll tell you what they did. Liberals got women the right to vote. Liberals got African-Americans the right to vote. Liberals created Social Security and lifted millions of elderly people out of poverty. Liberals ended segregation. Liberals passed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act. Liberals created Medicare. Liberals passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act. 

"What did Conservatives do? They opposed them on every one of those things, every one. So when you try to hurl that label at my feet, ‘Liberal,’ as if it were something to be ashamed of, something dirty, something to run away from, it won’t work, because I will pick up that label and I will wear it as a badge of honor." 

-Lawrence O’Donnell Jr.

This could have been posted as my mission statement when I started this blog and John Kerry was pissing me off by running away from the liberal label, and handing the White House (and the meaning of the word) back to George Bush and the conservatives.

So I'll do my small part to spread this virus, as it is appearing around Facebook and blogs:

And as O'Donnell's words were delivered from the mouth of Jimmy Smits on The West Wing:

The Biggest Difference Between Liberals and Conservatives in 140 Characters

On this Thanksgiving weekend I was thinking about an uncle who's been gone for a while. He was the first person who gave me my archetype of how a conservative person's mind works. Over a Thanksgiving dinner table, his biggest complaint (before he had kids) was: "Why am I paying school taxes? I don't have any kids!"

Remembering that statement reminded me of a tweet I made a month or two ago. I think I remembered it word for word and just tweeted it again: "The biggest fear of liberals is that someone might starve.The biggest fear of conservatives is that someone might get something for nothing." It was a spur of the moment statement, and it still feels very true to me. When the first draft of a tweet turns out to be exactly 140 characters long, it also seems to me to have a special quality of 'truthiness.'

But we see the conservative's dislike of paying for other people's needs in more than Uncle X's hatred of paying for the education of other people's children. We see it in the predictable GOP opposition to paying for any health or welfare program, or extension of unemployment benefits, or infrastructure, or investments in mass transit, or green energy, or even giving disaster aid without taking that money out of some other social program.

But there is more than just greed at work. There is resentment of anyone who gets a government "handout" or "free lunch". The resentment is summed up in Ronald Reagan's fictional 1976 caricature of the "welfare queen" that made him a hero among the conservative uncles of this nation:

"She has eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards and is collecting veteran's benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands. And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She's got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income is over $150,000."

Of course their resentment of "getting something for nothing" does not extend to resentment of those who get a free ride by being born a Trump or a Rockefeller or a Kennedy or a Bush. That's the only way that money for nothing is acceptable in their world view, and they are doing everything they can to make the passing of wealth between generations easier and tax-free.

But why don't they feel the same resentment about the money that gets poured down the rathole of military waste? Why the cheering of wars and the death penalty and military tribunals and police brutality and almost any other form of state violence? I think they see this violence protecting their property rights, but it's still the part of American conservatism I have the hardest time understanding.

Tests confirm that True Blue Liberal continues to list toward port.

The visual representation of my results is to your left (where else?), but take the World's Smallest Political Quiz yourself to see if you can possibly be as liberal as me!

(h/t to @angryliberal for the link)

#3wordsconservativeshate, visually

The hashtag #3wordsconservativeshate took off on Twitter on Friday night, so I just wanted to preserve a few of them as a snapshot of the state of the hate in late January of twenty ten:
The triplets of words used in the Wordle up above : national public radio - john fitzgerald kennedy - public library funding - strong public schools - strong public option - Reagan rose taxes - #3wordsconservativeshate - true blue liberal - corporations aren't people - teabaggers teabaggers teabaggers - Franklin Delano Roosevelt - immigrants are people - gay marriage tolerance- gay feminist mother - hillary rodham clinton - Obama is president - Blackwater are mercenaries - Yes, Obama won - Yes We Can - Yes We Did - Dick Cheney's Daughter - Liberal policies Work - peace, equality, freedom -Universal Health Care - Rational Thought Process - Public Healthcare Option - Justice for All - Share the wealth - Basic Human Compassion - Proud American Liberal - Greed is Bad - Equal Rights Amendment - Liberté Egalité Fraternité - I'm Gay Mom! - and I left out hundreds and hundreds more, but these contributions seemed (to me) representative.
Unfortunately, #3wordsconservativeshate never came anywhere near the quantity of #3wordslibhate as shown here at Trendistic.com. So here are three more words: Quality Not Quantity.
Images of Wordles from Wordle.net are licensed by a Creative Commons License.

Breaking the Eleventh Commandment, or GOP Fratricide Anyone?

"Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican."

--repeated regularly by Ronald Reagan but created by
California GOP Chairman Gaylord "Moses" Parkinson

Republicans have had no trouble breaking the other ten commandments in recent years, so it probably shouldn't come as any surprise that they have decided to ignore the eleventh too. "The Eleventh Commandment" was created to silence liberal Republican (yes, Virginia, there once was such an animal) criticism of Ronald Reagan in his run for Governor of California to avoid a repeat of the liberal Republican criticism of Barry Goldwater that had exposed him as a dangerous joke in the 1964 presidential election. The liberals, of course, shut their mouths and a grade-B moviestar and host of "Borax Death Valley Days" began his improbable rise to the chief executive offices in Sacramento and Washington, D.C.

Patti & Ronald Reagan Only Two Years Before Moving from Boraxo Commercials to the Governor's Mansion.

Luckily for us though, the conservatives in the Republican Party in 2010 do not seem as anxious to shut their mouths for the sake of party unity (unless the party unifies behind their own very particular brand of wingnuttiness).
Here are a few promising signs of the coming GOP fratricide just in the last two days:

• Raw Story: "Palin’s snub of conservative conference raises many questions" tells the story of the tensions between the CPAC convention and the even nuttier Tea Party Convention (guess which one Sarah Palin has decided to appear at?)
• PoliticsUSA.com: "The Political Apocalypse is Coming As the GOP Guns for Palin" in which the coming attacks on Palin by McCain strategist Steve Schmidt are outlined.
• politicalwire.com: "Republicans Furious at Steele" in which Republican House and Senate aides are described as furious at their own party chairman Michael Steele.
• Phoenix New Times: "John McCain's Not Airing New Radio Ads on J.D. Hayworth's Radio Show -- Yet" in which McCain is being challenged from his right, so "the Maverick" is turning, predictably, righter.
• Tomorrow's New York Times Magazine: "The First Senator from the Tea Party" in which ultraconservative wunderkind Marco Rubio's challenge to the merely conservative Charlie Crist is described in great detail.
  

So, are there any Republicans still observing the Eleventh Commandment? Of course there are. You don't hear Republican moderates in Maine or elsewhere in the Northeast speaking ill of their fellow GOPpers, do you?

Taking the Joke Too Far.

I have to stop looking around the darker corners of the Twitter and the blogosphere.

When a blog has to run a sidebar disclaimer reading ...

• Legal Notice

  This blog does not promote, support, condone, encourage, advocate, nor in any way endorses [sic] any racist ideologies, nor any armed and/or violent revolutionary, seditionist,[sic] criminal, and/or terrorist activities!!! The author of this blog assumes no responsibility for the use or misuse of information contained in this blog!!! This blog is for information and entertainment purposes only!!![sick]
  

... and places that disclaimer to the right of incoherent obscenity-laced racist rants and immediately below links to white supremacist websites and a sidebar advertisement for a t-shirt bearing a parody of Shepard Fairey's iconic Barack Obama 'HOPE' poster with the President's head tilted to the side, his eyes closed, and a noose around his neck above the word 'ROPE', and takes the nom de blog et twitter of "Obama is a Monkey," has the joke gone further than a mere parody of right-wing imbecility?

Because it has to be a joke, doesn't it?

Just asking. And hoping.

The Quote of the the Day from Charles M. Blow

If you don't want to immediately read the rest of Charles M. Blow's column,"G.O.P. Grief and Grieving," in this morning's New York Times after reading this first paragraph, then you're probably reading the wrong blog here at TrueBlueLiberal dot org:

The attack on the Republican establishment by the tea party folks grabs the gaze like a really bad horror flick — some version of “Hee Haw” meets “28 Days Later.” It’s fascinating. But it also raises a serious question: Are these the desperate thrashings of a dying movement or the labor pains of a new one?

His thesis is that American conservatism is going through the clichéd stages of grief over the Democratic triumph in 2008 -- denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance -- and that the teabaggers are now in that angry stage where many of us found ourselves in the early years of the Dubya regime.
One less humorous take on the tea party movement is hinted at in a companion opinion piece in today's Times from Gail Collins prompted by the Washington Wizards' Gilbert Arenas and his recent problem with gun possession. She cites the fact that the vast majority of Americans, and even 82% of NRA members, want to be able to prevent terror suspects from buying guns at unregulated gun shows, and wonders about the minority opinion.

Let us pause for a moment to consider the 9 percent of respondents who said they thought this was a bad idea. Perhaps they live in the same compound with the 1 out of 10 dentists who did not think patients who chewed gum should go for the sugarless kind.

My guess is that all 9% of these gun nuts are also angry teabaggers. This angry minority on the right wing's fringe is much better armed than the hard-core opposition to George W. Bush was in 2002-2003.

Comedy Writers Take Note.

If you're looking to imitate a freelance conservative commentator on your own comedy website, you can't do better than the comedy writers behind the site that I just stumbled upon this afternoon: http://www.us4freespeech.com/. Here are a couple of randomly-selected run-on sentences from the center of their long Christmas Eve entry.

"[...] REMEMBER: MAN MADE GLOBAL WARMING = CO2 REGULATION = CARBON EMISSION REDUCTION = OBAMA, AL GORE, CHAVEZ, MUGABI, BARBRA BOXER, THE EPA AND ANY OTHER LIAR, BECOMING THE LAUGHING STOCK OF THE WORLD! GLOBAL WARMING PREVENTION, CARBON DIOXIDE REDUCTION, CO2 EMISSION CONTROL REGULATION ALL HARMLESS TITLES REQUIRING THE EPA, FORCED BY THE UNDOCUMENTED CONSTITUTIONAL THREAT TO AMERICA OBAMA, TO KILL AMERICAN TAX PAYERS BY MEANS OF ANNUALLY GENERATING FALSE REPORTS OF ELEVATED NATIONAL CO2 LEVELS REQUIRING A REDUCTION PERIOD EVENTUALLY BECOMMING A LAW. EXCITING! DURING THESE REDUCTION OR CLEAN PERIODS, AMERICANS WILL BEGIN TO DISAPPEAR WHILE THE FAKE NEWS STATE CONTROLLED MEDIA REPORTS IRONICALY HOW KIDNAPPING IS ON THE RISE, WHEN ACTUALLY IT WILL BE OBAMAS FUTURISTIC RED/GREEN "NEW NATIONAL ARMY" COMMITTING MURDER. THE DEMOCRATS WILL NOT ALLOW ANY INVESTIGATION OF THE FALSE ELEVATED NATIONAL CO2 DATA FOR FEAR OF THE TRUTH BEING TOLD ONCE AGAIN LEADING TO THE DEMOCRATS BEING EXPOSED AS THE RACIST ROBERT BYRD KKK PARTY SEEKING TO DOMINATE THE POLITICAL LANDSCAPE. EXTRAVOGANT WORDS TWISTED AROUND MEANINGLESS LANDSCAPES OF HARMONY AL GORES POEM REFERS TO PREACHERS BEING MURDERED AND HORSEMAN RIDING.[...]"

Don't hurt your brain trying to make logical sense of it. Simply admire the flow, the unrelenting unreadable BOLD ARIAL CAPS, the exclamation points, the creative spelling. Priceless. It's right up there with the comedy writers behind @SarahPalinUSA who celebrated Christmas Eve with the following joke posting. Note how brevity and random capitalization and punctuation can be used just as efficiently as screaming run-on caps when imitating the comic reactionary voice. A freedom from standard orthographical rules is mandatory though.


~~~~~~~~~~~~
(And for those of you who may be reading this on a device that doesn't show images, the text of "Sarah Palin's" Tweet reads: "c tomrrw's Healthcare Takeover vote=the sleeping giant will awaken&action will b takn by"average"Americans as lite shines on big govt growth")

The Quote of the Day about the "defectively imagined future" (and a primary difference between conservatives and liberals?)

"... Sooner or later Holytail [marijuana-growing area in Vineland County] was due for the full treatment [from the federal marijuana eradicators of CAMP], from which it would emerge, like most of the old Emerald Triangle, pacified territory -- reclaimed by the enemy for a timeless, defectively imagined future of zero-tolerance drug-free Americans all pulling their weight and all locked in to the official economy, inoffensive music, endless family specials on the Tube, church all week long, and, on special days, for extra-good behavior, maybe a cookie."

--Thomas Pynchon, Vineland, pp.221-222

The passage published in 1990 up above was one of the last I read on the train from work this evening. And while I wasn't going to write at all about Sarah Palin's July 3rd resignation (feeling that commenting on Palin, Sanford, Ensign, Boehner, Cheney, and all the other Republicans right now is like piling insults on the mentally challenged), I couldn't help thinking that this paragraph pointed out a key difference between liberals and conservatives. That picture of church-going Tube-watching Stepford families is a dystopic nightmare in Pynchon's universe, and in mine, but I can't help thinking that it's Sarah Palin's and Dick Cheney's dream, and even the dream of those like Sanford and Ensign who have recently slipped from their ideal straight and narrow and are now praying to regain their footing on that correct path with the promise, after confessing their "sins" to the world, of "maybe a cookie."

These are not views of the world that are ever going to be fundamentally reconciled by political compromises (or by any political means). Like it or not, there will always be people who feel they know the one correct way for all of us to behave (even when they don't behave that way themselves).

SpongeBob, Yellow Gay Heathen (via Mark Morford)

Click here for Mark Morford's latest: SpongeBob, Evil Gay Heathen / How sad to be a right-wing Christian in a world full of homo cartoons and scary nipples.

I really didn't want to add anything to the whole easy target of joyless fundamentalists attacking the happiest, most porous yellow fictional being on the planet, but Mark Morford, as always, does a great job of connecting the threads here to show (in his humorous & outraged way) that the connections among all these elements on the Right are far from humorous. And there was also the added appeal of his comment on the primary color tangent I went off on at one point last week. In the end of his discussion of the yellow sponge, the red and the blue make a prominent symbolic appearance, playing their customary roles as fear and hope.

"Note the connection. Note the blood-red thread of fear and dread and homophobia, the brutal irony throughout all these stories. Shrill extremist sects and small-minded leaders with too much control, saddled with self-righteous and outdated doctrines that refuse to allow the culture to progress, to laugh, to moan in joy and sticky happiness.
Note the people who look at hilarious children's cartoons and see only sinister mind control, who look at their fellow human souls and see only an army of debauched heathens, who look (reluctantly) at their own genitals and see only a gnarled clump of pain and confusion, who look up at the beautiful blue sky and see only a massive canopy of daggers."

Once again, proud to be, True BLUE Liberal (a.k.a. one of the Right's daggers)