Tag: Politics

Unaccountable Council Behaves As Expected

Last year Minnesotans had the option to vote in favor of creating an entirely unaccountable council to decide when politicians should get a raise. A lot of people were suckered into voting for this because they thought it would take away the politicians’ ability to vote themselves raises willy nilly. Opponents of the ballot initiative pointed out that giving such power to an entirely unaccountable council would lead to politicians receiving more frequent wages. Not surprisingly, the opponents of the initiative were right:

ST. PAUL, Minn. — Minnesota lawmakers will get their first raise since 1999 after a newly created citizen council voted Friday to increase annual pay for members of the Legislature to $45,000 — a roughly 45 percent pay bump.

The Legislative Salary Council’s 13-1 vote increases lawmaker pay beginning in July, making Minnesota’s part-time Legislature among the highest paid in the country. Minnesota voters themselves set the increase in motion in November, overwhelmingly approving a constitutional amendment that removed lawmakers’ ability to set their own pay and instead handed the power to an independent council.

I wish somebody would vote a 45 percent wage increase for me!

Before the existence of the council, legislators who voted to give themselves wages might face some punishment from voters. Now there’s nobody to punish so legislator wages can go up and up! Isn’t democracy great?

I Want Healthcare Coverage Against Parasites

Now that the Republicans have seized both houses of Congress and the presidency they are busy going through with their promise to repeal and replace Obamacare. The second word, replace, is the keyword because the Republicans are doing nothing more than putting a bandage on a severed limb so they can take credit for helping.

However, the rhetoric surrounding this repeal and replace process is hilarious. Supporters of Obamacare are pissed and already claiming that this new bill will basically kill everybody in the country. Supporters of the Republicans are split. Some of them are not happy with the replace aspect. Others are supportive of it. So far my favorite piece of rhetoric goes to this dumbass:

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) on Tuesday said Americans may have to choose between purchasing a new iPhone or paying for health insurance.

“You know what, Americans have choices. And they’ve got to make a choice,” the House Oversight Committee chairman told CNN’s “New Day,” one day after the House GOP unveiled its plan to replace ObamaCare.

“And so maybe, rather than getting that new iPhone that they just love and they want to spend hundreds of dollars on, maybe they should invest in their own healthcare.”

You have to love the fact that a parasite who lives entirely off of money extorted from tax payers is telling the people he’s been extorting how to spend what little money he and his ilk are allowing them to keep. It also shows how out of touch some of these parasites are. The price of an iPhone won’t even buy a month of healthcare coverage for many people. It certainly won’t buy a year for most people.

Perhaps if he and his ilk allowed us lowly serfs to keep more of our money we could afford better healthcare coverage. Surprisingly, that option apparently hasn’t crossed his mind.

Redundancies in the System

The State has redundant layers of protection to defend itself from being meaningfully changed. We see this every time a police officer is fired for excessive use of force but is then later rehired because the union forced the department’s hand. But the redundancies don’t stop there. When a government goon goes rouge the system quickly moves to stop them from doing any damage.

Rand Paul, while mostly a run of the mill statist, has moments where he decides to go off of the rails. The Republicans have been crafting their Obamacare replacement bill in secret. Since he wasn’t invited to the party, Rand decided to grab a camera crew and attempt to bust into the secret meeting only to be stopped by armed guards:

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on Thursday blasted House Republicans for keeping their ObamaCare repeal and replace legislation under wraps.

“I have been told that the House Obamacare bill is under lock & key, in a secure location, & not available for me or the public to view,” Paul tweeted.

[…]

Reporters later tweeted photos of the senator attempting to access the room where the bill is being kept, and being denied entry.

It was a good publicity stunt and it shows why the electoral process is not an effective means of changing the system. Even when voters manage to elect somebody who is mostly unoffensive to the State, like Rand Paul, he’s unable to make even minor maneuvers against the status quo. His father, likewise, was almost entirely ineffective as a politician because of the system’s redundant layers of protection. No matter how hard you vote you’re still playing in a system designed by the people in power.

Boogeymen

Watching politics is a lot like watching a train wreck. Part of you wants to look away but the other part of you is too fascinated by the death and destruction.

For me, one of the most entertaining aspects of politics is the boogeymen. Every politician and political group has boogeymen that are supposedly responsible for the nation’s woes. These boogeymen change whenever it’s politically expedient and when they do we’re told that we were never at war with the previous boogeymen but we were always at war with the new boogeyman.

Right now the Republicans and Democrats seem to have settled on their current boogeymen. The Republicans are blaming the nation’s woes on immigrants while the Democrats are blaming the nation’s woes on Russia.

Why do politicians and political groups always point to boogeymen? Because they need to deflect attention away from the people who have been screwing things up, the people who are actually in power in this nation, themselves. And if you talk to most people they’ll acknowledge that the politicians have screwed things up. But then they’ll totally ignore that sentiment when one of the boogeymen is brought up. Mention Russia around Democrats and they’ll fly into a frenzy about how Putin manipulated our election like some kind of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agent. Mention immigrants around Republicans and they’ll foam and the mouth as they spew vitriol about the evil immigrants who built their deck and roofed their house being lazy and unwilling to work.

The reason politicians continue wrecking things but remain in power is because the average person is stupid enough to ignore their antics so long as they’re given something else to fear.

Government Databases

Every politician needs a boogeyman. The Democrats have decided that Russia is their boogeyman while Republicans have decided that immigrants are their boogeyman. While the Democrats pursue their boogeyman by claiming every Republican is a secret Russian agent, the Republicans have been working to ramp up harassment of immigrants. One method the Republicans have decided on is releasing private data on immigrants in the country:

Over the last month, the Trump administration has waged a war on the rights of immigrants and foreigners — including by issuing a policy that strips away basic privacy protections that have been provided by Democratic and Republican presidents for decades.

This policy shift was tucked into Trump’s immigration enforcement executive order released on January 25. It could let the Trump administration release the names and private information of non-U.S. citizens — including refugees, college students, tourists, and people here on work visas. The new policy could also make it easier for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to obtain information from other agencies that can be used to detain or deport people.

If the government didn’t have the data in the first place it wouldn’t be able to release it.

That’s the lesson people should be taking away from this. Government databases are always dangerous. Sure, they sound like a jolly good idea when your team is in power, especially if the databases are being used to store information about people you don’t like. But when the team you don’t like gets into power they’re granted access to every existing database, including those containing information about yourself and people you like.

If you’ve ever supported the government keeping data on people; whether it be on motorists, gun owners, or anybody who holds an ideology that you don’t agree with; then this recent development is the inevitable result of what you wanted.

Minnesotans Received a Slightly Longer Leash

Fellow Minnesotans, I’m proud to announced that after a great deal of political begging, kowtowing, and cock sucking we’re going to be granted the privilege of buying alcohol on Sundays:

The legislation allowing Sunday sales passed the state Senate on Monday, after sailing through the state House by a wide margin last week.

Senators and representatives must still iron out minor differences between the two versions of the bill — one version would allow sales to begin on Sundays at 10 a.m., while the other would allow sales to start at 11 a.m.

But once those disputes are ironed out in a conference committee, the bill is all but certain to become law. Gov. Mark Dayton (D) has said he will not veto the bill.

And it only took 159 years!

This year marked the first time since Minnesota became a state, in 1858, that a Sunday sales law even passed one of the two legislative chambers.

See? The political process works! After more than a century and a half of begging their political masters, Minnesotans have finally carved out a tiny bit more freedom for themselves! At this rate people will be able to buy a car on Sunday by 2176!

The Dumbest Thing You’ll Read All Day

I don’t think there’s anything I can add to this to make it more ridiculous:

Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) on Wednesday cautioned that a nuclear weapon could enter the U.S. under the cover of marijuana.

“We sometimes used to make the point that if someone wanted to smuggle a dangerous weapon into America, even a nuclear weapon, how would they do it?” he said on CNN. “The suggestion is, maybe we’ll hide it in a bale of marijuana. There are national security implications here for a porous border.

I guess smuggling nuclear warheads into the country on rockets was a bit expensive.

The Only Solution is Prisons in Space

What is a greater accomplishment, putting a man on the moon or building a prison? I would imagine that most of the people reading this would choose the former. In fact, I hope that most of the people reading this would consider the comparison absurd. But when you’re talking to a politician the two accomplishments are of equal importance:

Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley (R) pointed to one of man’s greatest scientific achievements as evidence that his state could build more prisons.

Noting that 2019 would mark the 50th anniversary of his state putting a man on the moon, Bentley argued that Alabama should be able to build more facilities.

“If Alabamians can put man on the moon, we can build new prisons,” Bentley said during his State of the State address on Tuesday. The Saturn V rocket, which propelled Apollo 11 to the moon in 1969, was built at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

When the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) put a man on the moon they first asked themselves what would be accomplished by doing so. Then they asked themselves whether a cheaper solution existed. Because NASA is a government agency the motivation was statist in nature, to show the world that American had a bigger dick than the Soviet Union. There wasn’t a cheaper option because putting a man on the moon was the only way to overcome the fact that the Soviet Union put the first satellite and man into space. No lesser endeavor would have done.

But Governor Bentley isn’t even smart enough to ask why more prisons are necessary or whether a cheaper solution exists. The reason more prisons are necessary is because politicians continue creating new laws that turn formerly law-abiding citizens into criminals. There are a lot of cheaper options for dealing with that problem. For example, the politicians could simply stop creating new crimes. Better yet, they could save the state some money by decriminalizing a bunch of currently criminal actions. Then they could commute the sentence of anybody currently rotting in a cage for committing one of those crimes. Instead the politicians continue creating new crimes so, of course, see the need to also create new prisons.

I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before Governor Bentley decides to combine the two ideas and demand that Alabama build prisons in space.

We’re All Victims Now

For the longest time self-identified rightists have been referring to anybody they identified as leftists as special snowflakes who are constantly seeking opportunities to be victims. The irony in this is that those rightists are constantly seeking opportunities to be victims:

That said, Hanlon is right to bemoan the rise of a “cottage industry of outrage” related to conservatives on college campuses. Whether or not their frustration stemmed from legitimate grievance, the conservative student movement is increasingly, and loudly, playing the victim—with an energy as palpable as the left’s. Too many right-leaning student groups have lost interest in inviting speakers who are knowledgeable about philosophy and policy: they would rather score easy outrage points with provocateurs.

I suspect that some of this is not just a reaction to the left’s hysterics, but rather, a convergence. Many of the forces that incentivize leftists to seek victim status—Title IX guidance, administrative bloat, changing ideas about safety in the K-12 system, helicopter parenting, concept creep—apply equally to rightist students.

As is often the case, in their constant struggle against leftists the rightist have become the very thing they hate. At one point identifying as politically right in the United States meant you were an opponent of socialism, advocate of self-reliance, and absolutist on free speech. Now rightists are just as much of socialists as leftists (but are dishonest about it, unlike most leftists), supporters of the nanny state, and flip their shit whenever somebody exercises free speech in an unapproved manner.

The rightists and leftists in this country deserve each other.

Where Does Trump Buy His Drugs

Where does Trump buy his drugs? Asking for a friend.

President Trump thinks drugs cost as much as a Snickers or Butterfinger.

“Drugs are becoming cheaper than candy bars,” Trump said at a news conference Thursday.

Could drugs cost less than a candy bar? Perhaps, if the government wasn’t investing so many resources into wielding violence against peaceful drug manufacturers, sellers, and users. But risk increases prices and the war on unapproved drugs adds a lot of risk for participants in the drug market.