Republican senator in not quite evil enough to disown gay son shock!

Civil liberties, GLBT rights, Grand Old Paedophilia Party, US politics
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Dave Lartigue is unimpressed by a Republican senator suddenly realising gay people aren’t that bad after all just because his own son has come out:

Some are praising this guy’s sudden awareness that maybe gay people can be human beings too as a triumph of family love or, at the very, most minimal, least, a “baby step”. But is it? Will Senator Portman be able to examine this feeling and logically extend it? “What if my son were poor? What if he were in need of basic healthcare? What if he were a woman?” We can all hope, but it seems unlikely. No less a monster than Dick Cheney is all for gay marriage, and for the same Gay Kid reason. Doesn’t change anything else about him.

Being able to accept your son is gay is about the minimum required to be a decent human being; you shouldn’t get a cookie for that. Nor should you be proud of the fact that the only reason you suddenly realise that gay people deserve human rights is because somebody you know is gay, as most people can reach that conclusion without necessarily knowing an out gay person.

Serious People are bipartisan

US politics, War on Terror
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Why you shouldn’t take Rand Paul’s anti-drone filibuster seriously:

In short, a lot of commentators appear to have fallen for the old “Serious People are bipartisan” appeal again. Paul’s schtick was about bunker-dwellers’ fears that the government plans to hunt them down, kill them, and steal their stash of freeze-dried shelter foods / impressive collection of Anime porn. If a president wanted to do that – and again, god only knows why they would – the ability to use a drone would be irrelevant.

So Rand Paul is basically just being the typical Paultard, inveighing against the government’s plans to kill us all and round us up into camps and whatever else Alex Jones sees when he closes his eyes at night. No, we should not cheer him on for that.

If you want to be taken seriously, hurt poor people

Poverty, US politics
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Dean Baker on Obama’s quest to sound serious and how it harms ordinary people:

In societies across the globe, men demonstrate their manhood in different ways. There are many wonderful tracts on the topic. However, in the culture of Washington DC, the best way to demonstrate your manhood is to express your willingness to cut Medicare and Social Security. There is no better way to be admitted into the club of the Very Serious People.

This is the reason that we saw White House spokesman Jay Carney tell a press conference. He told the reporters that President Obama is still willing to cut Social Security benefits by using the chained CPI as the basis for the annual cost of living adjustment (COLA). This willingness to cut the benefits of retirees establishes President Obama as a serious person in elite Washington circles.

Why war on Iran is inevitable

Anti-war, US Foreign Policy, US politics, War on Afghanistan, War on Iran, War on Iraq
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Eleven years of non-stop war later and the US political establishment is as moronic as ever:

Instead of doing penance every single day for the rest of their natural lives for the deaths of 4,422 Americans and, according to a survey from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, the deaths of at least 650,000 Iraqis, the architects and principal advocates of the Iraq war angrily brayed for more: more aggression, bigger military, more wars. And the non-neo conservatives, the ones who’ve been proven definitively right by history, seemed to just meekly nod along. The DNC didn’t even issue a press release all day. And so all the lessons that could have been learned are unlearned.