Politics

Rush Limbaugh is profoundly ignorant

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Rush LimbaughEvery now and then, I listen to Rush just to see what he’s up to. Usually, I find him ranting, sometimes incoherently, about the evils of the Democratic party or giving some sort of out-there, right-wing dissertation on how to interpret the latest actions of the liberal elite. It’s entertaining, in a “pandering to intellectual vapidity” kind of way, but I end up shaking my head in dismay within 5 or 10 minutes, after which I change the station, lest my eyes glaze over and I veer uncontrollably off the freeway.

At times, however, Rush just gets his facts wrong… or contradicts himself… or misses the point. Today, he did all of the above in grand style. Not only that, but he displayed a huge amount of sheer ignorance about the subject on which he was speaking. Sadly, I don’t have a transcript, because it’s not on his site yet, since it was less than an hour ago that I heard this part of his show. However, I got the main gist of it.

There’s an addition to what he was calling the “cap and trade” bill. I didn’t hear the beginning, so I’m not sure of the exact bill, but the addition was a list of items related to gaining energy independence. The government would offer an award to anyone who could invent technology to accomplish any of the tasks in the list during the next 10 or 20 years. The list included solar energy, better gas mileage, bio-fuels efficiency, and a number of other items that we don’t currently know how to do in any practical sense.

Rush lambasted the entire list, calling the items absurd or pointless or senseless… or some other combination of words that escapes me. He decried the list with exclamations such as “We don’t have the technology to even do that!” or “We’re nowhere near being able to do that!” or “If there was profit in it, we’d already have it now!” Evidently, in Rush’s little world, since it’s currently profitable to build Toyota Sequoias, we should have had them since the dawn of time. Or since nuclear energy is profitable, we should have had nuclear power plants way before the civil war.

But then he says the following about alternative energy as opposed to coal and oil (paraphrased until a transcript is available):

The coal already has the energy in it. All we have to do is dig it up. The oil already has energy in it. We just have to get it and refine it.

Magic coal and magic oil. The energy is already in it and magically appears in our homes just by digging it up! That’s all we have to do!

He then stated that our energy problems would be solved if we just drilled here at home… and that the world was nowhere near the point of running out of oil or natural gas… as if that would be a perfectly valid reason to never do any research into any alternative sources. Never mind pollution. Never mind cost. Don’t plan ahead. That would be bad… and silly.

Rush seems to have no concept of what research is or how it works. He misses the fundamental point that technology advances with research. It doesn’t just appear in a magic poof of spontaneous Republican ingenuity. The research takes work and it takes time and it takes money… and if it gets started now instead of next year, it puts us one year closer to a beneficial result. Rush seems to prefer doing nothing but burning coal and oil. Don’t bother with the research because “we don’t have that technology now.” Don’t bother rewarding those who can come up with more energy efficient solutions. Don’t bother improving technology so we don’t have to pollute the Earth. Don’t bother because we have plenty of oil and natural gas.

…and it seems Rush is producing most of the gas.

Seriously? The best health care system?

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Senator Richard Shelby

Republican Senator Richard Shelby said on Sunday that President Obama’s proposed health care reform plan is “first step in destroying the best health care system the world has ever known.”

Are we talking about the least expensive health care system? No. Are we talking about the most effective health care system? It seems not. Are we talking about the health care system that covers the most people in the country? It’s not that, either.

I wonder, then, what criteria Senator Shelby is using when he makes his statement because using the criteria that I think most people would use to judge the quality of the health care system, his statement can be considered nothing more than political grandstanding.

While I don’t necessarily know what the best way is to improve our health care system, I certainly don’t think that the solution is to spew partisan hyperbole or to repeatedly parrot the party-line talking points.

…especially when those talking points have no basis in reality.

What a Load of Crap!

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Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA) has announced that he will oppose the misnamed “Employee Free Choice Act” which he previously supported. That’s good news as far as I’m concerned because at least he’ll be nullifying the support given by  Senator Casey (D-PA) for the legislation.

What’s absurd is Change to Win chairperson Anna Burger’s statement about the Employee Free Choice Act.

The Employee Free Choice Act is a vital component to restoring our economy, rebuilding the middle class and renewing the American Dream for America’s workers. Allowing workers the choice to join together, free from intimidation and harassment, to bargain for job security, better wages and health care will stimulate our economy and put working families back on the path of prosperity. We will continue to work with Democrats and Republicans, including Sen. Specter, to pass this critical legislation and make our economy work for everyone.

Now that is a load of repulsively odiferous crap.

The statement about allowing workers to join together, free from intimidation and harassment is complete nonsense. They can already do that now, with less potential intimidation and harassment than they would be subjected to if this legislation would pass! Allowing the EFCA to pass would be like opening the virtual floodgates of uninhibited union harassment onto employees… with no repercussions… which is why unions desperately want this to pass. By taking away any practical chance of a secret ballot election, the EFCA would completely remove the current protection granted by anonymity, letting the union know exactly who it needs to target and where to apply the pressure, making harassment and intimidation its key tools. Getting employees to submit to union representation, willing or not, would never be easier.

The EFCA would remove employee choice, negate employee rights, and open a Pandora’s Box of harassment and intimidation abuses that haven’t been seen for decades.

And that is not good for the economy.

Employee Free Choice Act Opposition

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Ballot BoxI wrote a letter today to Senator Casey of Pennsylvania urging him to oppose the grossly misnamed “Employee Free Choice Act” which unions desperately want to pass in order to make unionization much, much easier. I say that the proposed legislation is grossly misnamed because it essentially removes an employee’s free choice in the matter by removing any anonymity from the unionization process.

Currently, when a union wants to get into a company, they need to get at least 30% of the employees to sign cards stating that they’d like union representation. After that, the company can decide to hold a secret ballot election to determine if a majority of employees want union representation. The company doesn’t have to hold the elections. They can just agree to union representation if they want, but that’s a rare (if not nonexistent) happening. Typically, unions try to get 50-60% of the employees to sign cards before moving on to the election in order to bolster their chances for success.

The EFCA effectively removes the secret ballot election, thereby removing any and all employee anonymity in the unionization process. Supporters claim that it does not remove the secret ballot elections and technically, they are correct. They say that it moves the choice of whether to have one from the company to the employees, giving the employees even more say in how the process works. The reality, however, is that they are gone.

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I love this quote…

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I saw this posted by Megavirus over at Library Grape and thought his comment on the quote was terrific!

Obama said:

I’m not going to make any excuses. If stuff hasn’t worked and people don’t feel like I’ve led the country in the right direction, then you’ll have a new president.

Metavirus’s comment about the quote is:

This must be what it feels like to have an adult running the country.

I LOL’d, but it’s so true.

A Better Approach

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At the beginning of last month, I wrote about the Freedom From Religion Foundation‘s sign at the Olympia, Washington capitol building, stating that I wasn’t all that pleased with the approach they took with the wording of the sign. Since then, I’ve read a lot (and I mean a lot) of commentary about that situation and have decided two things.

First, I think the point of displaying the sign wasn’t to further atheism, per se, but was more to demonstrate the point that government buildings shouldn’t be hosting religious displays of any kind. Not only was the FFRF’s sign displayed, but because of the “open door” policy required due to the Alliance Defense Fund’s lawsuit, there were displays requested  for other “religions” as well (Pastafarianism, Festivus) including an application by the Westboro Baptist Church to put up a sign declaring that “Santa Claus Will Take You To Hell.” It turned into quite a fiasco which, to anyone who wasn’t too incensed to miss the point, demonstrates in grand fashion just why religious displays have no place in government buildings.

Second, I still don’t think it was the best approach. FFRF’s stated goals are (from their bylaws) “to promote the constitutional principle of separation of state and church, and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.” I think both of those goals are admirable and could have been accomplished in a way that would have brought far less scorn to atheists.

I read this article today by David Gleeson (who has a similar view about the situation) and was impressed with his suggested alternate message.

At this season, may reason triumph over fear and superstition, and may we renew our commitment to life, love, and the bonds of our shared humanity.

That’s good stuff.

David makes a number of other good points in his article as well and I especially agree with him about the absolute statements in the FFRF’s sign. Dan Barker of the FFRF should know better. Lack of evidence does not necessarily mean lack of existence. It might. It might not. We don’t know and we cannot possibly know… for certain. Claiming to know with certainty cripples us in the same faith-based trap as religion. Based on the evidence (or lack thereof in this case), I can believe there is no god, but I cannot know there is no god.

So David’s softer, more positive message is a winner in my book. I think it would have been a much better approach. It  probably still would have stirred up enough controversy to make the “separation of church and state” point, but it would have done it without putting another black mark on atheists.