Texas Republicans caught with pants down on military contract deal

Texas is losing a big military contract to Wisconsin and Republican politicians across the state are now left with egg on their face.

The Pentagon's decision to shift the production of Army trucks from Texas to Wisconsin after 17 years caught Texas' elected officials by surprise, raising questions about overconfidence, a loss of political clout and the impact of economic incentives provided to the winning company by Wisconsin's Democratic governor.

Overconfidence is putting it nicely. How about political cluelessness and incompetence. Those are the real factors that allowed this deal to slip through Texas' fingers.

Texas Republican Gov. Rick Perry and the 34-member Senate-House delegation are rallying to salvage a deal for BAE Systems that could be worth $2.6 billion and sustain 10,000 direct and indirect jobs around the sprawling truck manufacturing plant in Sealy.

Rallying. Yeah, right. A British-owned company that bid 10 percent higher than its competitor. That right there is enough to make this a no-brainer call by the Pentagon without even getting into the politics.
But when you throw in the politics it becomes so much clearer how badly Texas is now being represented by the clueless, government-despising, rightwing idealogues now in charge. In Wisconsin, the Democratic governor pulled every string he could to give his state's company every advantage. In Texas, Gov. Goodhair did squat. I guess he was too busy trashing the United States at some wild-eyed, radical Tea Party gathering and talking about seccession to notice that 10,000 state jobs were about to vanish.

The 92-year-old Oshkosh Corp. undercut BAE Systems' bid by roughly 10 percent. The Wisconsin company had support by a predominantly Democratic congressional delegation that helped Barack Obama carry the state last November. And the truck builder reaped the benefits of state assistance crafted by Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle.
Elected officials in Texas assumed the contract would remain in their state, relied on networks of support built up during Republican control of the White House and Congress and did not provide BAE Systems any state assistance.

They "assumed" the contract would remain in their state. And we all know what it means when you assume.... (You make an ASS out of U and ME).

This used to be a bipartisan state which allowed us to shift with the changing political tide in Washington in such a way that we were always able to protect Texas' interests. But no longer. Today we have a rightwing Republican governor who delights in sticking his finger in the president's eye at every opportunity, and two Republican Senators and a majority Republican House delegation that filibusters EVERY single thing the new administration tries to do regardless.
Even if moving the work to Wisconsin wasn't saving the government a huge chung of money (10 percent of $2.6 billion is a LOT of money), it would still be understandable just on the grounds of political payback. Why on Earth would the current administration want to do a special favor for a district in a Red state that voted overwhelmingly against them and just threw out a Democratic congressman in the last election?
But, even with all that said, it would still have been possible to salvage the deal and keep those jobs in Texas if our current political leadership were even halfway intelligent and even slightly competent. But that is clearly not the case.

Religious Odyssey Part 2

Many people go through periods in their life where they begin to question the religious beliefs that they were exposed to as they grew up. When they suddenly find themselves confronted by a complex and diverse world that doesn’t seem to fit with their simplistic, childish faith they find themselves in a quandry. Some people lose their faith at that point, or become indifferent to it.
Others embrace their faith more fully and some become overly zealous and fanatical.
In college I was looking for some way to reconcile my notions of faith with the real world that was unfolding before me. During my lengthy diatribes with Eddie, I had made the argument that life without God was empty and meaningless, and I still believed that. What’s more is that it did not make sense and that was the real key for me.
It had to make sense and life without an afterlife did not make sense. To believe that our consciousness, our very existence, was nothing more than an illusion created by a complex series of chemical reactions and electrical synapses firing away in our brains seemed less reasonable than the belief that the world is flat and resting on the back of a giant turtle.
All of our knowledge, our understanding of science and nature, our philosophy, our appreciation of beauty, art and music, our capacity for love --- that all of these things were inconsequential accidents of nature and thus void of meaning was too much. And so it would seem, as someone once said, that if God were not real it would be necessary to invent him.
So atheism, I determined, was just an inverse form of religion, requiring just as much faith to believe God is not real as it does to believe that he is. At the same time, agnosticism - where someone claims to not know one way or the other if God is real or not or asserts that we cannot know for sure one way or the other - seemed to me to be philosophically lazy.
I kept going to A&M Methodist Church and eventually met my wife there. She was raised a Methodist in Houston attending St. Paul's United Methodist Church all of her life. We were married in that church by one of the preachers who had taught her Sunday school classes and both of our children have been baptized there.
Shortly after we were married, my wife and I moved to Connecticut and began looking for a new church to attend. We didn't like any of the Methodist churches we found for one reason or another and eventually settled on a Baptist Church on the green in Branford.
We learned that the American Baptist Church was much different from its Southern incarnation and we both fell in love with our new church. The thing we liked most about the church was how the congregation lived by Christ's message. It was the only church on the green (and there were several) that had a soup kitchen in the basement where they served meals for the homeless. The church was built in 1840 and stood out from all the rest because it was clearly missing the top of its steeple. According to church lore, the early congregants had a fund set aside which then intended to use to purchase a steeple, but ended up using the money instead to support veterans returning from the Civil War. And that scenario repeated itself again and again. The church would raise money for a steeple and then spend it on other needs - the Great Depression, WWII, and so on to the current day.
Susan and I volunteered to teach a youth Sunday school class and went on several out of town mission trips. Leaving that church was one of the hardest things about moving away from Connecticut and coming back to Texas.
In Kerrville, we once again had a hard time finding a church that we liked and ended up for a time in a Presbyterian church. When we moved to Lubbock we attended the same Methodist Church that Susan's aunt and uncle went to. Then when we moved to San Antonio we were very sporadic about going to church.
For several years we were probably going to St. Paul's in Houston more often than anyplace else. Then once the kids were born we had a new excuse for not going for at least the first couple of years. But as the kids started getting a bit older, Susan began pushing to go back to church. She found a Baptist Church with a day school program and both kids went there for most of their pre-school. But we never joined that church and instead ended up going to University Methodist.
At first, we were put off by that church because it was so big, but this past year we decided it was time for a full committment. Since Nathan was out of church pre-school and attending public school we wanted him in Sunday school at least once a week. And UUMC turned out to have a very good Sunday school program.

Religious Odyssey Part 1

I've always considered myself to be a Christian. My mother's family was Southern Baptist and my father's family was Methodist. Early on we attended Baptist churches and my first memories of Sunday School are from a Baptist Church in Indiana. Later on when I was about junior high age we switched to attending Methodist churches. I never knew why. I always assumed that it was simply Dad's turn to pick the church after that move.
I went through the confirmation program at a Methodist Church in Victoria as a pre-teen and was baptized. I'm pretty sure I was baptized as an infant as well. I also served as an alcolyte during that period and lit and extinguished the candles before and after the service.
When we moved to Premont just as I was starting high school we joined another Methodist Church and my mom became the leader of the Methodist Youth Fellowship group. I served as president of MYF on and off for most of the time we were there. I also attended church camps several times during those years. One camp, I believe was at Wimberly. I remember at one church camp some of the kids were distributing these evangelistic comic books with graphic depictions of the author's interpretation of Revelations depicting the rapture and the tribulations to follow. I remember thinking they were just awful. I couldn't believe God could ever be so cruel and so arbitrary about casting people into a pit of fire. More significantly at that camp, one of the counselors gave me a copy of an essay entitled "Developing Your Own Personal Theology." I was intrigued and comforted by this reassurance that I was not locked into any particular church's dogma and could essentially chart my own course. This would prove to be key for me later on.
When I went off to college at Texas A&M, I joined the A&M Methodist Church and found it to be a nice refuge from life in the Corps of Cadets every Sunday morning. I was majoring in Speech Communication at the time (I would later switch to journalism) and took a course in Persuasion. For one assignment I had to write a persuasive essay and I chose to write a defense of belief in God. I was quite proud of the results and that summer I mailed a copy of it to my best friend Eddie Shearer who had been my debate partner in school and was studying engineering at Texas A&I. I was taken aback when he resonded with an essay of his own, every bit as long as mine, critiquing my essay and making his own case in favor of agnosticism. I responded with a lengthy critique of his critique and we went back and forth like that for the better part of the summer. I still have copies of our little exchange in my file cabinet.
While I was not dissuaded one bit in my belief in God, I was deeply disturbed at first with the thought that my best friend would go to hell according to the church. That just couldn't be right, I thought. My friend may have been saying that he was not a Christian, but he certainly lived his life as though he was. He was one of the most decent, caring, thoughtful people I knew and the notion that he would be punished for all eternity because he wasn't jumping through certain theological hoops according to the church didn't seem right to me. And it wasn't just my friend, either. There were billions and billions of people throughout time who were never Christians and yet did not deserve damnation in my opinion. How is it that I could be more merciful than God? Something wasn't right.
So I had a conundrum in that there was this major tenant of the church that I suddenly found myself at odds with. The seeds of doubt had been sown and now I was looking for some answers. I had the essay about a personal theology in mind, but I needed some guidance and I found it in the works of Hans Kung and C.S. Lewis. Both were major influences on me in college. Kung, in particular, noted that Heaven would likely need to be walled off to keep some groups of people from knowing that other groups of people were in Heaven too.

Republicans' history of getting it wrong

Why would anyone believe Republicans when they predict doom and gloom resulting from the new health care reform bill?
If history is any lesson, it should be clear based on their past track record that Republican predictions in these debates should be viewed with a high degree of skepticism.

Texas executes a man for robbery as Perry thumbs his nose at parole board

The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles is so stacked with rightwing death penalty supporters that it almost never recommends commuting a sentence. But it did so the other day for Robert Lee Thompson on account of the fact that he didn't kill anybody. He was party to a robbery in which someone else shot and killed a store clerk, but Thompson was not the gunman. However, under a bizarre rule called the "Law of Parties" he was convicted of murder anyway and sent to death row. His last chance came when the parole board reviewed his case and recommended his sentence be commuted to life in prison.
Unfortunately for Thompson Gov. Rick Perry is running for re-election in a Republican primary where he has established himself as the ultimate wingnut, Tea Party, seccessionist in order to place himself to the right of rightwing Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison. So he obviously felt that he could not do anything that would wreak of liberalism like commuting a death sentence, even if the guy wasn't a killer. So now Thompson is dead. He was lethally injected tonight. End of story.
Except to say that Rick Perry is a lowlife scumbag.

Express-News promotes lone conservative dissenter; ignores liberal majority

I'm still shaking my head over this article from the San Antonio Express-News on Wednesday.

Texas students will feel ashamed of this country instead of proud and likely get a liberally biased view of U.S. history if new social studies curriculum standards are not changed, says a dissenting member of a team responsible for the proposed guidelines.
...
Proposed curriculum standards covering U.S. history would “indoctrinate impressionable students that America is a terrible place,” says Bill Ames, a Dallas-area retired IBM executive who lost several 7-1 votes this year on one of the review committees developing the new standards.

The article goes on and on quoting this Ames fellow in depth. Later on, they quote another member of the panel defending its decisions but does not spend any time delving into their thoughts on social studies curriculum guidelines.

So ONE GUY gets all this attention. The lone dissenter on a panel of 7 experts. Why? Why should we care?? Probably for the same reason that the E-N ran several front page articles promoting Sarah Palin's new book. They must think that catering to rightwingers will somehow shield them from charges of "liberal bias" and that will somehow convince people to start buying the paper again.

Well, it ain't going to work because we are not talking about rational people here. We are talking about ideologues who will just find some other reason to continue believing their "liberal media is bad" doctrine. It doesn't matter how many times the E-N endorses Bush (twice) or Palin (once so far) for president. The "movement conservatives" will not change their opinion because it would require them to acknowledge that they are not always the victims and the underdogs fighting against a powerful, corrupt enemy.

Peep

I've become hooked on a new kids show that I've been watching with my kids. PEEP and the Big Wide World features three main characters: Peep, a little yellow chick; Chirp, a little red bird; and Quack, a kind of blobby purple duck. The animation is very simplistic, but the stories and characterizations are rich and wonderfully funny.
The show is narrated by Joan Cusack and has a very catchy theme song sung by Taj Majal.
I highly recommend checking it out.

RNC Hypocrites

Hypocricy exposed at the RNC

The Republican National Committee’s health insurance plan covers elective abortion – a procedure the party’s own platform calls “a fundamental assault on innocent human life.”
Federal Election Commission Records show the RNC purchases its insurance from Cigna. Two sales agents for the company said that the RNC’s policy covers elective abortion.

Obama at Fort Hood memorial

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Election results: Teabaggers lose

I can’t really blame the Republicans for getting excited about last night’s election results. Lord knows they are desperate for some good news after getting their clocks cleaned in the last several elections.
But one thing should be made clear about this election. While Republicans may have won two big gubernatorial contests in Virginia and New Jersey, the clear losers in this election were the Teabaggers. No matter how they want to spin this on rightwing radio, Nancy Pelosi now has an even bigger majority in Congress than she did the day before. Democrats won a congressional district in upstate New York (23rd) that they had not won since the Civil War. They also held onto a Democratic district in California, replacing a moderate-conservative Democrat with a decidely more progressive Democrat.
The California contest got hardly any attention at all because all eyes were focused on the NY23 race after Sarah Palin swooped in an annointed independent Conservative Party nominee Doug Hoffman as the Teabagger favorite over the mainstream Republican nominee Dede Scozzafava. The Teabaggers then went to work villifying Scozzafava because of her pro-choice views and her position on gay unions. Things got so bad that Scozzafava ended up dropping out of the race three days before the election and endorsed her Democratic opponent Bill Owens.
But all the fawning media attention, the gobs of money (95 percent from out of the district) and the backing of nearly every prominent rightwinger in the country was not enough to lift Hoffman to victory on election day. For some reason, the voters in the 23rd District did not support a candidate who lived outside the district, knew nothing about the issues impacting the district and got most of his financial support from outside the district. Imagine that!!!
But Republicans can still celebrate their victory in Virginia where conservative Republican Robert McDonnell trounced his hapless Democratic opponent. And there was no question that McDonnell was a conservative, however, he did not invite Palin or any of the other Teabagger crowd to come out and campaign for him and he made every effort to downplay his far right views and hew to a more mainstream position.
In New Jersey, where Republican Chris Christie ousted the unpopular Democratic incumbent John Corzine, it would seem to be another big victory for the GOP. But before the Teabaggers start celebrating, they ought to check out Christie’s positions on some of their key issues. On abortion, Christie says he is “pro-life,” but then goes on to stress that he will not force his views onto anyone else as governor. Not exactly the kind of message Teabaggers like to hear. Then, on gun rights, Christie says he fully supports and backs New Jersey’s gun laws. I will let everyone guess how those might compare to laws in Texas and Oklahoma. Finally, on illegal immigration, Christie says he does not think it should be a criminal issue, only a civil one. Oh, and he supports civil unions for gay couples too. Sure sounds like the Teabaggers could have condemned Christie just as harshly as they did Scozzafava. The fact that they did not is probably due to either ignorance or hypocricy or both.

Ayn Rand and the contradictions of the GOP

New biographies are out about Ayn Rand just as her objectivist philosophy is becoming resurgent within the rapidly shrinking Republican Party.
I first heard of Rand when I was in college working with a group of liberal, idealistic students in the Students Against Apartheid group at Texas A&M. One of the girls in the group had recently become intrigued by Rand after picking up one of her novels and showed it to the rest of us. Someone else in the group immediately dismissed Rand as the “Goddess of Greed.”
It is not hard to understand why Rand’s philosophy - expressed in her novels “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead” - would be popular among rightwingers today. Just like rightwing talk radio, it tells them exactly what they want to hear - that they (the readers) are privileged and special and that they should spend all their time and energy advancing their own interests and not worry about or bother with anyone else. It is the ultimate paen to greed and selfishness and that is pretty much what much of Republican political philosophy boils down to today.
But there is one big problem with this Republican infatuation with Rand and her objectivism philosophy. It is not in any way compatible with their supposed Christian beliefs. Ayn Rand was an atheist who was basically disdainful of Christian philosophy. Here is what she had to say on the matter in a letter from July 9, 1946:

There is a great, basic contradiction in the teachings of Jesus. Jesus was one of the first great teachers to proclaim the basic principle of individualism -- the inviolate sanctity of man’s soul, and the salvation of one’s soul as one’s first concern and highest goal; this means -- one’s ego and the integrity of one’s ego. But when it came to the next question, a code of ethics to observe for the salvation of one’s soul -- (this means: what must one do in actual practice in order to save one’s soul?) -- Jesus (or perhaps His interpreters) gave men a code of altruism, that is, a code which told them that in order to save one’s soul, one must love or help or live for others. This means, the subordination of one’s soul (or ego) to the wishes, desires or needs of others, which means the subordination of one’s soul to the souls of others.
This is a contradiction that cannot be resolved. This is why men have never succeeded in applying Christianity in practice, while they have preached it in theory for two thousand years. The reason of their failure was not men’s natural depravity or hypocrisy, which is the superficial (and vicious) explanation usually given. The reason is that a contradiction cannot be made to work. That is why the history of Christianity has been a continuous civil war -- both literally (between sects and nations), and spiritually (within each man’s soul).

So Rand rejected the core teachings of Jesus without any equivocation. At least she was honest. Most “Christian conservatives” reject his core teachings as well, but they are either too ignorant to realize it or pretend that they do not. Many simply ignore all the parts of the Bible that have to do with helping the poor and loving your neighbor - which takes up a sizable chunk of the New Testament - and instead focus on things like abortion and gay bashing which are hardly even mentioned in the Bible if at all.
There are also a lot of people who rush out and embrace Rand without any real understanding of what it means. It is not as if you can be a Randian and a Christian at the same time, kind of like being a fan of both Star Wars and Star Trek. These are two completely divergent philosophies that are opposed to one another. One says love your neighbor as yourself, the other says love yourself and screw your neighbor.
The way that many Republicans and conservatives today embrace Christ’s image while ignoring his teachings is similar to the way that they embrace the images and symbolism of America, but ignore or reject the actual workings of the government - the hard-fought, messy compromises, the diversity of races and cultures, and even the bloated bureacracy, without which there would be no country of which to speak.

Republican implosion in NY 23rd

Frank Rich's column in Sunday's NY Times is a must read this week.
One can't help but wonder if we are witnessing the disintegration of the Republican Party.
The wingnuts and the teabaggers who are taking over the Republican Party forced the Republican nominee in the race for the 23rd Congressional District of New York to drop out because they deemed her to be insufficiently conservative. Instead, they are backing the Conservative Party nominee - someone who doesn't even live in the district and has no clue or interest in the issues impacting the district.
Now the Republican nominee, after having been forced out, is endorsing the Democrat in the race.
Whether or not the Democrat wins - and no Democrat has won this district since the Civil War - this is a win-win for the Democrats as the Republicans continue to run off moderate (and sane) voters and continue to shrink into electoral insignificance.