Social Security (and Innocent Little 12 Year Old Girls!)

A couple o' toons from the Usual Source...

In regards to Mr. Kelley's cartoon... I have mixed emotions about means testing.  I'm generally in favor of the proposed practice on the one hand, especially when I heard Warren Buffett say he draws $30K a year in Social Security.  Mr. Buffett is entitled to recoup what he paid into the system but I feel he should draw a reduced rate while doing so.  On the other hand I know from personal experience that the Feds tax 80% of my Social Security, based on the fact that I make too much money (according to the IRS).  Who's to say my income won't be reduced if Social Security goes to a means-testing scheme?  I damned sure ain't Warren Buffett!  

As to Mr. Allie's toon... here's David Limbaugh, writing about Rick Perry, the other GOP candidates, and the Ponzi scheme angle:

It is very disheartening to see Republican presidential primary candidates racing to out-demagogue one another in denouncing Texas Gov. Rick Perry's accurate description of Social Security as a Ponzi scheme. It used to be that Republicans at least waited until the general election campaign to pander to liberals.

I admire Perry both for telling it like it is and for having the guts to stand by his statement when under fire. That shows character.

Honest people have been warning for years that our entitlement programs, as structured, are imminent train wrecks. Democrats were even saying it for a while, as Bill Clinton and Al Gore made a phony fuss about placing Social Security in a lockbox.

It's nothing short of outrageous that our politicians' instincts are to attack those who are talking realistically about entitlements instead of join them in talking realistically. I understand Democrats not doing so; I don't even expect them to anymore. But it's unacceptable for Republicans to pile on.

More here.  I watched a little of Monday night's debate, but I came in late because of confusion on my part about the start time and left early to take an extended phone call.  That said, I DID catch Romney trying to score points on Perry about Social Security and it turned my stomach.  D. Limbaugh is correct: a GOP candidate attacking another GOP candidate for telling the truth is nothing short of outrageous.

Speaking of outrageous... Michele Bachmann scored her points on Governor Perry Monday night about his executive order mandating Gardasil vaccinations for Texas schoolgirls.  Perry did a mea culpa on that point, admitting his decision was a mistake, and Bachmann really should have left it at that.  But she didn't (from Ace):

So now an anti-vax lunatic buttonholes Michelle Bachmann (or so she claims, at least) and tells her the story of how Gardasil caused her child's autism. At age 12. Late onset autism, I guess. And despite there being absolutely no connection between Gardasil and late onset autism (whatever that is), she broadcasts her new medical findings out to the public.

Well. She did used to style herself "Doctor Bachmann," I guess.

Michelle Bachmann is desperate. She's an ambitious, egotistical woman who started running for President just two short years after she first ran for Congress. In the past two months her support went from 13% and rising to 4% and falling.

So she needs something, doesn't she, and Rush Limbaugh warned her off her planned Social Security demagoguery. 

While we're on the subject, there's this, from Leon H. Wolf, writing at Red State:

I wasn’t informed until yesterday that believing vaccines are a bad idea and cause autism (or, if you’re Michele Bachmann, mental retardation. You know, basically the same thing.) was a prerequisite for supporting the TEA Party. Apparently, judging by the applause Bachmann received from a purportedly TEA Party audience for defending INNOCENT LITTLE TWELVE YEAR OLD GIRLS from the horror of being vaccinated against cancer, I missed a memo somewhere. Sarah Palin piled on the attack as well, and I am repeatedly assured by her followers that whatever Sarah Palin thinks is the Law in TEA Party land. It turns out, Sarah Palin is or at least was an anti-vaccination theorist herself. According to emails from 2008 (via Twitter), Sarah Palin wrote in response to the Department of Education’s announcement of a new vaccination policy (including vaccinations for diptheria, tetanus, polio, pertussis, measles, mumps, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, and rubella):

(Palin e-mail quote)

First of all, it deserves to be noted (as is clear from the context of the entire email exchange) that the Most Courageous Politician who Ever Lived™, when confronted with a policy under her Administration’s ambit, bravely passed the buck to her underlings while attempting to assauge anti-vaccine activists by letting them know that she was one of them. Second, the connection between autism and thimerosal was always pretty tenous and given the immensely salutary effect on the public health of mandatory vaccination against the highly contagious diseases listed above, only a reckless person would have based actual public policy on it.

Well... a two-fer!  Mrs. Bachmann overplayed her hand and Mrs. Palin piled on, for unknown reasons.  I understand the need to score political points against your rivals in the primaries but I also understand bad politics and bad judgment when I see it.  Bachmann and Palin are guilty of the latter... in addition to being hypocritical about the issue (Palin as noted above and Bachmann here).  I don't wanna hear the phrase "innocent little 12 year old girls" ever again; I've heard it way too damned often in the last couple o' days.

The field narrows. 

On Perry and Conspiracies

This past Saturday Governor Perry did what everyone with three interconnected synapses knew he was gonna do: declared himself a candidate for president.  It didn't take long... a mere matter of hours... for the lefty secular-humanists to crawl out of the woodwork, shouting "Christer!" and other such blather.  Sunday's memeorandum page was chock-full of this sorta bullshit, including one particularly obnoxious hit piece in the Daily Beast (appropriate name, eh?) by one Michelle Goldberg that managed to slime both Perry AND Michele Bachmann at the same time.  A couple o' excerpts:

With Tim Pawlenty out of the presidential race, it is now fairly clear that the GOP candidate will either be Mitt Romney or someone who makes George W. Bush look like Tom Paine. Of the three most plausible candidates for the Republican nomination, two are deeply associated with a theocratic strain of Christian fundamentalism known as Dominionism. If you want to understand Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, understanding Dominionism isn’t optional.

Put simply, Dominionism means that Christians have a God-given right to rule all earthly institutions. Originating among some of America’s most radical theocrats, it’s long had an influence on religious-right education and political organizing. But because it seems so outré, getting ordinary people to take it seriously can be difficult. Most writers, myself included, who explore it have been called paranoid. In a contemptuous 2006 First Things review of several books, including Kevin Phillips’ American Theocracy, and my own Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, conservative columnist Ross Douthat wrote, “the fear of theocracy has become a defining panic of the Bush era.”

The article gets even worse than that... those are just the introductory grafs which dwell on a preemptive disclaimer for the idiocy that follows, i.e., "Take me seriously!  Please!"  Well, no.  I can't.  I thought we... us Americans... got over this sorta stuff after JFK was elected.  Apparently not, and there's no lack of people willing and able to stir the pot of intolerance.  This sort of thing just makes me scratch my head and go WTF?  I mean, really...

But there are rational agnostics in this country as well, Mr. Roger Simon being one such.  He posted a piece on Sunday too... titled "Agnostics for Perry."  An extensive quote:

Which leads me to why this agnostic — and I hope other agnostics of various stripes — could and should support Perry.

We live in a time when the economy trumps all other considerations by a staggering amount. The global financial system is on life support, teetering on the brink of depression, if not already over it. This has placed our country in a weaker state than any time since World War II, endangering world peace and encouraging a wave of despotism unseen since the rise of the Soviet Union and in many ways identical to it, except that it is motivated by jihadism rather than by communism.

Can a single human being solve this? Unlikely. He or she will need a lot of help. But we are in dire need of leadership, not of the policy wonk kind — God knows we’ve had a lot of that — but of the moral and inspirational kind. We need someone to call forth the best in America the way Ronald Reagan did in the 1980s. We need someone unafraid to speak for the democratic values of Western civilization and to fight for them economically and politically as well as militarily, if that is necessary.

The incumbent president has proven to be none of those things. He is at best ambivalent about our values and at worst an enemy of them. Rick Perry is the reverse. I had the pleasure of having dinner with him in Austin well over a year ago and could see it almost immediately. Call him a cowboy, call him a Christer, but this man is a passionate American and a passionate American is exactly what we need right now. And that kind of person, I am sad to admit, is unlikely to come from the ranks of the agnostic and the secular. It will come from the ranks of the religious, those who have faith. That’s just the way it is now.

But I will try to reassure my fellow agnostics with this. We are not nearly as far from religious people as we think. Though we may brood on the timing and veracity of the Big Bang, speculate on Einstein’s unified field theory (if we can understand it), debate St. Anselm in our heads or just throw up our hands and say the whole question is above our job description, when it comes to the way we actually live, our values, most of us do just as our religious brothers and sisters do. Like them we are products of the Judeo-Christian tradition and we live by the Ten Commandments — or try to.

That's the voice of reason speaking.  I'm prolly a lot like Mr. Simon when it comes to religion... which is to say I'm basically agnostic... even if I describe myself as a closet Buddhist.  Mr. Simon talks about his admiration, bordering on envy, for people with strong faith elsewhere in his essay and I identify with that, too.  His bottom line, as you can see from the above excerpts, is he has no problem with Perry's faith and neither do I.  The entire piece is worth a read.

That said... I don't identify with asshats and conspiracy theorists like Ms. Goldberg; I consider the woman and those of her ilk to be much more dangerous than the people she rails against.  Religious intolerance is close to the worst sort of bigotry there is and when you combine intolerance with conspiracy you get something truly dangerous and poisonous to the body politic.  I suspect we'll see much more of this stuff as the campaign goes on.

But... back to Governor Perry.  I'm pretty damned close to putting up a "Perry for President" link in my sidebar.  I think I've found my candidate.

Gettin' Some Serious Consideration

The Weekly Standard has a very interesting three-page article on Michele Bachmann here.  A couple o' few teasers:

“I think Bachmann’s chances of landing on Jupiter are higher than her chances of being nominated,” Republican strategist Mike Murphy told me in an April interview for Washingtonpost.com.

Well, get ready for an interplanetary expedition. Bachmann is a far more serious candidate for the Republican nomination than her reputation would suggest. She’s a talented fundraiser who raised $13.5 million for her 2010 reelection campaign. She’s a television star who appropriately tailors her message to her audience. Her combativeness will delight conservatives eager to fight Barack Obama. Her movement credentials—she founded the House Tea Party Caucus—put her at the cutting edge of right-wing politics. And in a primary campaign where authenticity counts, no other candidate has Bachmann’s unique history: an Iowa native who put herself through law school, raised her five children and took in 23 foster children, and has never lost an election for state or federal office.

Since 2009, millions of Americans have attended rallies, joined Tea Party groups, and become involved in politics. They’re scared for the future of the country, and they want to stop America’s decline. Many of these activists are parents or grandparents who simply weren’t political before government policies drove them into the arena. Michele Bachmann is uniquely positioned to speak to these voters—because she’s one of them.

[...]

The two women (ed: Mrs. Palin and Mrs. Bachmann) are compared constantly. Both have five children, both are Christians, both were drawn into politics through their children’s education, and both are Republicans whom Democrats love to hate.

But there are also some differences. Whereas Palin makes emotional and cultural appeals to her supporters, Bachmann formulates an argument. She talks like a litigating attorney, and her speeches, op-eds, and interviews are littered with references to books and articles. Not all of her references are conservative. During our recent interview, Bachmann cited Lawrence Wright’s history of al Qaeda, The Looming Tower (“I love that book!”), to illustrate a point about the rise of radical Islam.

I'd also submit that Mrs. Bachmann has a much more impressive background and record of accomplishment than Mrs. Palin.  But that's just me, of course, speakin' as a much derided and frowned upon "Palin hater" in some circles.  I'm labeled as such even as my writings consistently demonstrate I like the woman, I just don't want her to run for president.  But we digress.

Mrs. Bachmann piques my interest; I like both her style and as much of her substance as I've seen to date.  I've not yet decided who will get my vote in next year's presidential primary but Mrs. Bachmann is a contender.  The leading contender, as of this moment.