I thought it would be worthwhile to try to get a discussion going on this topic.    We've already had a diary on this topic, and I don't want to undercut it.

A conversation with a group of friends last night, though, made me think that there is a side of the issue that most people aren't seeing, and wouldn't necessarily even think about without prompting.    

Part of the disagreement comes from the very names used for the legislation. Supporters tend to call it "death with dignity" while opponents prefer "physician assisted suicide". Obviously, each preferred name is a product of spin, but the spin reveals a central disjunction between two world views.  

Before we get to that, though, a little bit about who the sides are. It's easy to picture the "pro" side: liberal people like us, people who value civil liberties and think that choosing to end one's life is a natural right for all people; people who believe they should have the right to direct the course of their medical treatment; people who have seen loved ones go through horrible, painful deaths and don't want that for themselves. I'm someone like that.  

The "cons," though, are not primarily people who think the Bible's injunction "Thou shalt not kill" applies in this situation, and that humans shouldn't go messing with god's right to determine the beginning and ending of life. No, the cons are disability rights people, and unless you spend time engaging with them you might not understand just how radically different from the standard liberal perspective the disability rights perspective is.  

Let's take the title of the bill. Who could object to "death with dignity"? Isn't that something we can all relate to?  

Here's how. If the policy of the state of Vermont is that once you have a certain medical condition or severity of disability your only chance to have dignity is by dying, what does that say to the people all over the state living with disabilities who need assistance to get through the activities of daily living that the rest of us take for granted?  

If dignity comes through dying, does that mean living with assistance is without dignity?  

If we adopt this bill, will our state policy be to send a message to everyone living with a disability that it is impossible for them to live with dignity? Or a message to everyone, with or without a disability, that if you need a certain level of assistance you can no longer have, and can't expect to have, the human dignity that we are all entitled to?  

Or, to put it in the stark terms that a friend uses, are we adopting the policy that tells people you can't live with dignity if you need someone to wipe your ass?  Do we want to rush into that world view?  

What about the alternate title of the bill, physician assisted suicide. Opponents of the bill argue that the idea that a physician would assist one to commit suicide is the very antithesis of the proper role of doctors, to help preserve life. Supporters, while rejecting this designation, argue that it is entirely proper to allow physicians to assist people in the extremities of medical conditions that people face. Again, different world views.

Finally, will death with dignity/physician assisted suicide put pressure on people to go along with it to save the physical, financial, and emotional burden on family members? I think the evidence is unclear on this, but it's a valid question to ask.  

VPR has devoted an entire Vermont Edition to this debate, and the advocates make the arguments better than I could. I urge you to listen to it.

I also encourage you, though, to consider how the world would look if you were on the other side of this divide, because it's no more than a moment's inattention behind the wheel or a cerebro-vascular accident that could be waiting for you tomorrow morning that separates you from a very different existence.

We already know the high regard in which Wisconsin Republicans hold the sacred forms and traditions of democracy, right?  If you recall that they railroaded Walker's union-busting bill through the Assembly and Senate, likely nothing will surprise you.  

But here are some new rules from the Republicans:  

1. If you're a Democrat, you don't get a vote in committee.  

2. If you're a Republican, you don't have to live in the district you are elected to represent.  

Let's go over that once more.  

The majority leader of the Wisconsin Senate has ruled that the Democrats who boycotted the proceedings to avoid giving the R's a quorum are in contempt of the Senate, and that consequently their votes in committee don't count.  

.  Nice, huh?  

Now, Number 2: Like every other state, Wisconsin's legislature has a system of districts. The voters in those districts turn out and vote for their representatives, who live in and represent those districts.  Except that that's not how it works for one of the Republicans in the Senate. Last year Randy Hopper, R, Fond du Lac, left his wife and took to living with a 25-year old aide.

As you can see from the picture, Randy is not 25 years old. If it matters to you that his new paramour is twenty years younger than he is, that is.  

And if it matters to you that she now works for the lobbying firm that represents some very nasty right-wing groups.  It's certainly not unheard of for an elected official to set up housekeeping outside of his district, or even to have an extramarital affair.  

What seems to cross the line for me is that not only did he move out on his wife and out of his district, but he ran for re-election. That means he undoubtedly had to sign papers with the Wisconsin Secretary of State, probably under oath, verifying his place of residence. (He conveniently includes a map of his district–I mean the one he used to live in–on his legislative web page.)  And whatever he swore to on those papers was a lie.  

So it's not the sex, and it's not just the hypocrisy (nothing like those bible-believing, family values Republicans, huh?), it's the whole package of sleeping with a scummy lobbyist, leaving your wife for her, and lying about where you live when you run for reelection.  

In case you're wondering, his wife says she'll sign the recall petition. His maid already has.

Shouldn’t people know better by now?

The scandal of the week was that James O’Keefe, the guy whose lies and distortions brought down ACORN and Shirley Sherrod (temporarily), had struck again. This time his target was another of the favorite punching bags of the extreme Right: National Public Radio.

I’ll give you NPR’s initial story on this, since this became the canonical version of the tale:

The top fundraiser for NPR has resigned after a videotape became public showing him openly disparaging conservative groups during what he thought was a fundraising meeting. The video was recorded secretly during a lunch Ron Schiller had with two people who claimed to be eager to contribute to public radio.

The top fundraiser for NPR, who had already announced that he was leaving NPR for another job, officially resigned last night. A videotape became public showing him disparaging conservative groups during what he thought was a fundraising meeting. The video was secretly recorded during a lunch with two people who claimed to be eager to contribute to public radio.

Eventually the fundraiser and the president of NPR were fired because of this, providing two more trophies for O’Keefe’s wall.

The rest of the story came out Sunday, and it comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with O’Keefe’s modus operandi.

Wait for it . . .

That’s right: O’Keefe lied.

And he did it the exact same way he has lied to create these other stories: by creative editing to create a fictional account of what happened.

Keep in mind what Schiller said, as reported by NPR:

ABRAMSON: Schiller says the Tea Party, in particular, is, quote, “not just Islamaphobic, but I mean xenophobic. I mean, basically they believe in sort of white, middle America, gun toting – I mean, it’s scary. They’re seriously racist, racist people,” unquote.

This wasn’t a big deal to some of us, except that we were pissed that NPR was firing people for telling the truth.

People at NPR lose their jobs for telling the truth? I guess that’s why people at Fox have job security. #teaparty

It turns out that it was even worse than that.  

The Blaze reports what really happened.

4. The “seriously racist” Tea Party

But the clip in the edited video implies Schiller is giving simply his own analysis of the Tea Party. He does do that in part, but the raw video reveals that he is largely recounting the views expressed to him by two top Republicans, one a former ambassador, who admitted to him that they voted for Obama.

This is the key point right here: Schiller and his boss, Vivian Schiller, were fired largely for the claim that he was expressing his own views of the Republican Right, which confirms the right-wing view of NPR. What we now know is that he was quoting some large Republican donors, not expressing his own views (although it does appear that he was endorsing those views).

Still, if the headline had been, “According to NPR executive, top Republicans accuse Tea Party of xenophobia” it would have been no big deal.

What made it a big deal was the way O’Keefe used editing to lie about what Schiller said.

So this raises a big question in my mind: why haven’t people learned yet? We know now that the very fact that James O’Keefe says something, that is prima facie evidence that it’s a lie?

And why do serious people and organizations get their panties in a twist, and immediately take precipitous and irrational action, when we hear one more of these lying stories from O’Keefe?

It’s not just a dream for individuals. We grow up in the United States with the idea, hope, or plan to own our own home. Not everyone expects to do it, but it’s definitely part of the American idea,, what used to be called without irony the American dream. Even if your vision of the dream isn’t a house in the suburbs with a lawn, a swing hanging from the tree in your front yard, and you grilling burgers out on the deck, it’s still a big thing for Americans. Why else would we have shows on cable around the clock showing people looking for that perfect house to buy?

Public policy for years has supported homeownership. In fact, our biggest subsidized housing program is the mortgage interest deduction. We spend $117 billion a year on it. The idea is that homeownership leads to stable communities, which may have some legitimacy to it.

But when you buy a house, or try to buy a house, you’re not thinking about building a stable community, or public policy. You’re thinking that you’ll have a place to call your own, or that you won’t have to move every year when your lease is up, or you won’t have a landlord to deal with and tell you whether you can paint, or hang pictures, or have parties.

The dream’s taken a beating the last couple of years. We’ve had the subprime mortgage crash, people losing their jobs, and millions of foreclosures.

Oh yes, we’ve had one other thing: fraud.

First off, we know now that the entire subprime industry, and the crash of the subprime bond market was built on fraud.

We also know that a lot of the foreclosures have been the product of fraud, and it’s worth going into a little detail about that.

A mortgage is really two different transactions: the loan, a contract between the borrower and the lender, and the mortgage, whereby a property owner gives the secured party (remember: mortgagee rhymes with Simon Legree) the right to take the property away by foreclosure if the borrower doesn’t pay. These mortgages get traded around, sold, so that the bank who gave you your loan might not be the bank you send your payment to every month; and if you fall behind the bank or mortgage company who owns the right to foreclose might be someone you’ve never heard of.

One thing we’ve learned lately is that the foreclosure system has been rife with fraud. If the bank forecloses on your mortgage it’s like any other court case: the bank has to prove that it owns the right to foreclose, that it is the owner of your mortgage. This can be tricky if your mortgage has been bought and sold a few times between the day you signed the mortgage and the day the bank takes you to court. What has become obvious is that there are many, many foreclosures based purely on fraudulent affidavits. Banks have employed people, now referred to as robo-signers, whose job has just been to sign affidavits that establish the chain of title for these mortgages. These are essential to these foreclosures, because if the foreclosing bank can’t establish that each one of the transactions in the chain of title happened the way they claim, the bank isn’t entitled to foreclose.

As it happens, a lot of these affidavits are just lies. The banks and other financial institutions doing these foreclosures, including big institutions like Wells Fargo (it’s not just stagecoaches any more!) J.P, Morgan, and GMAC, have been routinely going into court lying about their ownership of the mortgages. It’s even happening here in Vermont.

It was so bad that even the Federal Reserve woke up and took notice. This week a special panel of the Federal Reserve released its report on mortgage foreclosures. They actually looked in detail at 500 foreclosures, and guess what: they found that 100% of the foreclosures were justified. Not a single wrongful foreclosure was wrongful!

But what about the robo-signers, you ask? It turns out that the standards of this study were so lax that no matter what improprieties, fraud, and lies were committed by the foreclosing lender, if the homeowner was behind in their mortgage payments the foreclosure was considered to have been justified.

I guess nobody needs to concern themselves too much with billions of dollars’ worth of fraud in millions of foreclosures.

In related news, the Republicans in Congress also took action on foreclosures last week. Never let it be said they are blind to the suffering of their fellow Americans.

So what did they do? The Republicans in Congress voted to defund the federal program set up to provide relief to homeowners in foreclosure so they could keep their homes.

Should I repeat that?

According to Congressman Chaka Fattah, who is continuing to fight for the homeowners, “House Republicans today took another pound-foolish step by voting to de-fund the Emergency Mortgage Relief Program. This bridge-loan program provides a lifeline for middle-class homeowners who face foreclosure through no fault of their own because of the predatory and economy-wrecking policies of Wall Street”.

And the Republicans never tire of accusing us of using “class warfare” when we point out who’s winning the class war, and whose side the Republicans are on.

Congressman Fattah is obviously too polite to say this, but the most appropriate response to the Republicans in the face of this latest outrage is very clear.

In the words of the late Ashley Morris: Fuck you, you fucking fucks.

In the stampede to crush unions in Wisconsin, one Republican stood up to the bosses. Here's his statement (quoted in its entirety in the theory that a government publication is in the public domain):

Senator Schultz Statement on Budget Repair Bill Vote March 9, 2011

As someone who as spent the better part of the last four weeks working toward and hoping for a compromise, this is a difficult night.

I’ve had the honor and privilege of representing folks in Southwest and South Central Wisconsin for 28 years, and where I come from ‘compromise’ isn’t a dirty word.

I’ve received tens of thousands of emails, thousands of phone calls and letters, and spent hours meeting with thousands of citizens in my district. I’ve heard personal and heartfelt stories of friends and neighbors, and they ask for just two things.

First, be inclusive by listening and working with your colleagues on both sides of the aisle to reach a compromise which addresses our fiscal crisis. Second, public employees are willing to make sacrifices on things like wages and benefits, but we need to preserve collective bargaining as a tool which has helped keep labor peace in this state for decades.

Ultimately, I voted my conscience which I feel reflects the core beliefs of the majority of voters who sent me here to represent them.

I look forward to working with my colleagues in the days ahead as we now need to join together to work through what promises to be a difficult budget.

If you want to thank him, here's his Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/senatordaleschultz?sk=wall And his e-mail address: Sen.Schultz@legis.wi.gov;

Okay, I can't let go of this.

 First off, as I pointed out the other day, the Westboro Baptist Church's case at the Supreme Court had to be a slam dunk if someone this stupid could win it.

She was on TV again yesterday and even Chris Wallace was incredulous at her theological position that Obama is the Beast of Revelation–yes, Mr. 666 himself.

Still, what I find interesting about this lawyer, who works for the Kansas Department of Corrections and has had her license suspended at least once, is her choice of language.

For instance, if you listen to the tape from yesterday, you'll see that her way of expressing agreement with something Wallace said was “That's a big 10-4.”

And you may recall that her favorite locution when she talked about being confrontational, a phrase she used repeatedly when arguing at the Supreme Court, was “up in their grill.” She really uses that exact phrase every time she talks about it.

What about you? Do you have a favorite Margie Phelps phrase I haven't mentioned yet?

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve written before about the subprime mortgage crash and how it happened. We learned shortly after it happened that a major element was the Republicans’ insistence on the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which they snuck into the budget at the end of 2000. This act prohibits the federal and state governments from any regulation of derivatives, and this led to the creation of the credit default swaps that were the direct cause of the collapse of AIG and the other mortgage-backed bond funds. (An interesting sidelight is that the provision was inserted at the insistence of Texas senator Phil Gramm, whose wife Wendy directly benefits from this kind of trading.)

The Big Short looks at this from a different perspective.  

Author Michael Lewis, whose first book, Liar’s Poker, was a view of Salomon Brothers from the inside, set out to find out if any of the people who were claiming, after the crash, that they had seen it coming really had.

What he found was that there were a very few, literally a handful, of investment analysts and investors who had seen the crash coming, and had made major investments that took advantage of the vulnerabilities they were able to find in the mortgage bond sector. What he also found was that these mortgage bonds, which were supposedly Triple A, virtually risk-free investments, were in fact based mainly on what we now know were mortgages that were guaranteed, and even designed, to fail. And finally, all the information needed to find these vulnerabilities was in the public domain, and it was only by a combination of corruption and gross incompetence that the market swallowed up these worthless bond instruments.

This is a fascinating account of how people who supposedly know what they’re doing, and supposedly know way more about investments than you or me, conspired to cause the collapse of the American economy and throw millions of people out of their houses. As such, it is required reading for anyone who wants to understand how we got into our current economic situation.

View all my reviews

UPDATE: In compliance with a court order the protesters have left the capitol.

http://www.isthmus.com/daily/a…

Just a short post tonight. I came across a blog you may find interesting, written by an activist involved in the occupation of the Wisconsin State House.

The information is fragmentary, but it appears that the protesters have taken the governor to court for his actions in barring access to the capitol in violation of the state constitution.

The Blog from Inside the Capitol Endures…

Keep checking back for updates.

To anti-choicers, a woman is nothing but a container for a fetus.

From the Plain Dealer:

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Two fetuses will be presented as witnesses before an  Ohio legislative committee that is hearing a bill to outlaw abortions  after the first heartbeat can be detected inside a woman’s womb.

Don’t worry, kids. If you wind up being born you can look forward to having your rights trampled and your needs ignored.

You, me, and every other political dissident.

Let’s be clear about this: Fred Phelps and his whole family are scum. They should get cancer and die.

The Westboro people brought their circus to Montpelier a couple of years ago and I think the people of my town, particularly the high school students, handled it very well. In other words, treating them with the ridicule they deserve.

Still, they were right in the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court was right in ruling in their favor.

You know the facts, so I won’t spend a lot of time on them. To gain publicity for their vile ideas, these people go to events, like military funerals, and hold up their vicious signs, and they hope they will either get on TV or provoke some kind of reaction from the sane people in attendance, who are justifiably offended by their odious display. When they did it at the funeral of Matthew Snyder his family sued them and got a judgment for five million dollars.

Now the Supreme Court has overturned the judgment, holding that their actions are protected by the First Amendment. The legal questions in this case were so easy that even Scalia and Clarence Thomas got them right.

You don’t have to like it, but here’s the thing about the First Amendment: we don’t need it to protect our right to say things that don’t bother anybody. We don’t need it except when we’re pissing people off.

And if you’re reading this, odds are that you find that you need to say things that piss people off.

What the Supreme Court said today is that you can piss people off and the government isn’t allowed to stop you.

We all need that.