The Right’s real answer to Universal Coverage: No Coverage

Paul Krugman points out:

the cost-saving measures under consideration now — which are the first real effort to tackle Medicare costs, ever — are pooh-poohed, because they’re part of a plan that would expand coverage, not contract it.

This is keeping with almost all of the objections from the right wing and sympathizing establishment pundits and politicians. They talk about providing this or that benefit, but really all they want to do is eliminate benefits, or fair wages, or greater progressivity in taxation or regulation so that they can maintain the status quo where they (the top 1 or 2 percent) own and control the wealth of the planet and determine the futures of everyone else.

And they really don’t care about anyone else since they’re all right, Jack.

A guy walks into a bar…

And gets shot.

How’s this for crazy?

Two States Legalize Guns in Bars - The Lede Blog - NYTimes.com: "Two States Legalize Guns in Bars
By Robert Mackey
Even though gun-rights advocates in the Senate narrowly failed on Wednesday in a vote to greatly broaden the freedom to carry concealed weapons, two states acted last week to make it easier for armed gun owners to hang out with drunk people."

I’m not your typical liberal. I’m mostly in favor of private gun ownership. My sane position is that people do have the right in the USA to own and probably carry fire arms. But that right should come with responsibilities such as mandatory registration of the weapon and of fired shells for ballistic checking (see TV shows if you don’t understand). In addition gun owners should be licensed and the licensing should require safety and proficiency training and testing. If you own a gun for hunting you should know how to hunt and if you own if for protection you should know how to kill a fellow human.

This is basic stuff here: If you don’t know what you’re doing with a gun you’re more likely to shoot yourself or a loved one than a deer or a burglar.

My less sane position is more extreme than the NRA. I think gun possession should be mandatory. Every citizen should be trained in fire arm use with militia level training. Every one should have at least one weapon.

(This is the more reasonable part, now I get to the weirder part – the one that really makes my friends uncomfortable. I’m not sure, myself, how far in my cheek my tongue resides on this, especially given the theme of this post.)

Not only should everyone have a gun, they should be required to carry one at all times. Never know when it will be needed.

And the weaponry should not be limited to hunting rifles and target pistols. Every personal weapon in our arsenal should be legally available. This includes automatic weapons, anti-tank and other artillery piercing weapons including RPGs and anything else a person can carry or mount on his or her car.

This isn’t so much to protect us from criminals. I’m one of those folks who are more fearful that if we take away our citizens’ guns then only the police and military will be armed and we’ll be defenseless against a military coup or police state.

This may just be vestigial ‘60’s paranoia. Back then we thought the government was building camps for the anti-war radicals (or more accurately – those terrifying “YOUNG PEOPLE”) and that a round-up was imminent. After a while that seemed ridiculous, but then Dick Cheney became Vice President and actually set up camps and made de facto law that the President could lock up whomever he wanted to and throw away the key. Cheney, being one of the remaining unindicted co-conspirators from Watergate (actually he was a conspirator wannabe) just proves that just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you.

We’re so screwed!

My last entry was on how lucky we are that Obama’s not Bush. I still mean it, but Obama’s not the answer to the country’s and world’s problems that Progressives or Liberals were looking for in 2008. He’s not even that much left of the Republican redefined center.

When he was running in the primaries against Hillary, I felt that he was too soft on the issues that mattered. That his starting point was a good end point to negotiations, not the place to begin. I still feel, as I wrote then that he his approach might make for a healthier discussion, but I must have been in a good mood that day. I’d forgotten that the Republicans and the right in general are too nuts to meet anyone half way. Their whole philosophy is based upon exclusion, derogation and negativity. Not to mention bigotry, hatred and violent rejection of the “other”.

I won’t be the last to point out that Obama’s programs on the economy, environment, gays, Iraq, the military, religion, trade and almost everything else are either too weak to accomplish their stated goals, to compromised with the corruption of what I’ll euphemistically call “Wall Street” and perhaps too willing to continue the global security status quo to be satisfying.

I will admit, though, that with Andrew Sullivan, I think these tactics can accomplish more than my desire to crush the right wing, smashing their institutions and belief systems into the dust, discrediting and imprisoning their war criminal leaders, and generally ending them. After all, the American Right Wing is not that different from the Ayatollahs, the Taliban, the Israeli settler movement and fundamentalists everywhere.

The global economy is collapsing because, to the governments and regulators, the economy is synonymous with finance. The real economy is the interaction between people which may be expressed by markets and enabled through the tautological flow of currency. Mistaking the currency for the thing itself is the error.

Obama, the rest of the US government, and most of the world are making these mistakes again and again and claiming the opposite.

We’re so screwed.