ARTS & FARCES internet

So, the US Republicans in both houses of Congress want to reduce the duration of unemployment benefits while imposing strict new qualifying requirements. Just as they adjourn without getting anything done this session.

US Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah)—the senior Republican on the Finance Committee—tells Robert Pear, writing for the New York Times, “I don’t see why you have to go more than 59 weeks. In fact, we need some incentives for people to get back to work. A lot of these people don’t want to work unless they get really high-paying jobs, and they’re not going to get them ever. So they just stay home and watch television. I don’t mean to malign people, but far too many are doing that.”

Well yes, Senator, you clearly did mean to malign people.

We need a national referendum to reduce congressional salaries to 10 percent less than the nation’s median income. That would be about US$26,000, Senator Hatch. Think of the 10 percent as an incentive. Then we’ll see who’s sitting around watching television. Fact is, there are no jobs—high-paying or otherwise.

The problem, Senator, is that you can no longer get any work done or even budge because so many of the one percenters have crawled up your ass and nested. Right out of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights.

The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch.

As if anyone cares, here’s my top albums list for 2011, without comment. I’m not sure the first five are in the right order; they’re all pretty much tied. Similarly, I’m not sure the last five are in the right order either. I do this mostly for me, so I can see how these selections stand up over the years. And yeah, there’s 18 because, well, there’s 18; so sue me.

1. Tom Waits: Bad As Me
2. Lucinda Williams: Blessed
3. Tedeschi Trucks Band: Revelator
4. Bela Fleck & The Flecktones: Rocket Science
5. Pieta Brown: Mercury
6. Ry Cooder: Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down
7. Gregg Allman: Low Country Blues
8. Gillian Welch: The Harrow & The Harvest
9. Wilco: The Whole Love
10. The Civil Wars: Barton Hollow
11. Jason Isbell & The 400 Unit: Here We Rest
12. Pert Near Sandstone: Paradise Hop
13. The Deep Dark Woods: Place I Left Behind
14. Charlie Parr: Cheap Wine
15. Hayes Carll: KMAG YOYO (& Other American Stories)
16. Fleet Foxes: Helplessness Blues
17. Dawes: Nothing Is Wrong
18. Middle Brother: Middle Brother

In a surprisingly bush-league attempt at appearing to be relevant, credible, and most of all “balanced,” Politifact—a fact-checking website—has pronounced US Democrats (and all others) guilty of the “Lie of the Year” for saying that US Republicans have voted to end Medicare.

Nonsense.

First of all, the claim is more than likely true. Republicans have voted to end Medicare (US House of Representatives 15 April 2011; the vote was 253-193 with only four Republican Representatives—Walter Jones (R-North Carolina), David McKinley (R-West Virginia), Ron Paul (R-Texas), and Denny Rehberg (R-Montana)—voting against the measure). It’s indisputable that Republicans voted to replace Medicare—a single-payer system with guaranteed benefits—with a privatized system with vouchers, whereby those eligible for Medicare would be given “premium support payments” to help purchase private healthcare insurance. Those vouchers would be intentionally designed to not fully cover the cost of the private insurance. Each year, presumably, costs of healthcare insurance would continue to rise while the relative value of the vouchers would decline.

Is that ending Medicare?

As Steve Benen, writing for Washington Monthly points out, “It seems foolish to have to parse the meaning of the word ‘end,’ but if there’s a program, and it’s replaced with a different program, proponents brought an end to the original program. That’s what the verb means.”

As someone who qualifies for Medicare but chooses to remain privately insured, I follow Medicare-related issues with some interest. In my opinion, the Republicans’ vote would absolutely end Medicare. Just maybe not immediately (under US House of Representatives Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan‘s (R-Wisconsin) plan, citizens older than 55—including me and my wife—would still be eligible for traditional Medicare). But that’s just my opinion, and as Jonathan Chait, writing for New York magazine points out, that’s precisely the problem. No one knows for sure because no one can know for sure. “But it’s obviously a question of interpretation, not fact. And the whole problem with Politifact‘s ‘Lie of the Year’ is that it doesn’t grasp this distinction,” writes Chait. “Politifact doesn’t even seem to understand the criteria for judging whether a claim is a question of opinion or a question of fact, let alone whether it is true.”

Jalue Dorjee is believed to be the reincarnation—a tuklu—of a Tibetan Buddhist lama who died in Switzerland six years ago, and the eighth incarnation of the original lama who was born in 1655. Born in 2006 and discovered, through divination by high lamas, as a tuklu in 2009, Dorjee will likely leave his Columbia Heights home in five years or so to study and live in an Indian monastery.

Dechen Wangmo, the child’s mother, tells Allie Shah, writing for the Star Tribune of dreams she had while carrying him:

“One night, an elephant appeared with several little ones around it, she said. They merged into the small prayer room in the family home. Once inside, they vanished.”

Shah also reports the boy’s father, Dorje Tsegyal, having “vivid, symbolic dreams” including that of “many lamas surrounded by tall sunflowers.” When a high lama visited the Tibetan community in the Twin Cities, Tsegyal told him of his dreams. The high lama had “magical dreams” that night including one of seeing “huge tigers, one in each room of the family home.” Tibetan Buddhists consider tigers to be a good omen and a sign of protection and strength. After a series of divinations by different high lamas, the Dalai Lama officially recognized Dorjee as the reincarnation of Taksham Nueden Dorjee and gave him the formal lama name of Tenzin Gyurme Trinley Dorjee on 6 January 2009.

President Obama was never opposed to the provisions of this year’s version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that allow for US citizens to be detained indefinitely without due process. If passed and signed into law, anyone anywhere—including US citizens—can be imprisoned for any length of time without ever being charged with, tried, or convicted of a crime. Contrary to what his administration has said, Obama was concerned solely with imagined limitations on the executive branch with regard to the indefinite detention provisions. So, the corporate media is wrong when it reports that President Obama “backed down” yesterday under “political pressure” when he announced he would not veto the bill. He did it all his own self.

The NDAA was born of President George W. Bush’s administration’s manipulation of the nation’s fear, insecurity, and bias after the 11 September 2001 attack and provided the seed corn from which a whole collection of terrible legislation, most notably the USA PATRIOT Act, grew. It marks the slow descent of American civil liberties into a steep nosedive and is the worst case of fear-mongering politics since Joseph McCarthy. Where McCarthy saw communists and subversives; these people see terrorists. The parallels with McCarthy aren’t just vague generalizations. As Ateqah Khaki, writing for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) points out, “The last time Congress passed indefinite detention legislation was during the McCarthy era and President Truman had the courage to veto that bill.” Khaki is referring to the McCarran Act—the Internal Security Act of 1950. Truman vetoed the bill, but Congress overrode his veto.

As Glenn Greenwald, writing for Salon notes, “President Obama, needless to say, is not Harry Truman. He’s not even the Candidate Obama of 2008 who repeatedly insisted that due process and security were not mutually exclusive and who condemned indefinite detention as ‘black hole’ injustice.”