Simple Economics

Okay, I need some help here.

I hear every Republican from Limbaugh to Ginta, from Ayotte to Glenn Beck saying the same six sentences: 1/ We have to cut the deficit 2/ We have to cut the deficit by cutting spending. 3/ We have to cut the deficit by cutting spending on pensions of public workers. 4/ We have to cut the deficit by cutting spending on wages demanded by public and private unions.  5/ We have to destroy unions to cut spending and to cut the deficit  6/ We don't like Obama, Obamacare or anything he wants to spend money on, all of which if he is for it, would, by definition  increase the deficit.

I think I've got that right.

I'm not sure where this deficit actually is. I mean, can I look it up on line? Or is it contained in some government publication? Or does Glenn Beck keep it locked in a safe next to his blackboard?

Is it the money we owe on feberal government bonds? Or is it the interest payments we make on those federal government bonds? Or both?

Is there an actual dollar amount we can look up?

Does it change day to day?

If we balanced the budget this year, i.e. spent no more than we took in, would the deficit be smaller? But no, I think the deficit must be like our mortgage--it never gets smaller unless you sell your house and pay it off.  I seem to reall we balanced budgets in the Clinton years and there was talk about "Paying down the deficit," but for some reason, neither Republicans nor Democrats seemed  to think that was a very good idea at the time. The deficit didn't see to matter much then.

So what changed?

Everyone, even Glenn Beck, seems to agree when Saint Ronald Reagan took office he tripled the deficit in four or maybe eight years. And Ronald Reagan is the guy everybody means when they describe themselves as "Reagan Republicans." Which means, I infer, "Good, successful Republicans everyone really liked and wants to be again."

So if Reagan was such a deficit disaster, why do all these Republicans seem to think he was the best Republican ever?

One other thing. Republicans are always talking about how the deficit is just like your own home budget, which for some reason they think everyone does at their kitchen table. Personally, if I tried to do anything other than eat and read the newspaper at my kitchen table,  my wife would be throwing silverware in my direction--I tend to do budgets on my computer, which is not all that far from my kitchen table, so I guess maybe I'm putting  too fine a point on it.

But anyway, the way my budget works is I see how much goes out to pay bills--I call that "Spending." And I see how much comes in--I call that, "Income."

And since there seems to be certain things I have to spend on--house payments, car payments, groceries, the out go is more or less fixed. I might self flagellate over having been foolish enough to buy a house, but I need my car to get to work. And school payments for the kids--well, maybe education is one of those wasteful spending items, but I kind of like my kids and hope if they go to school and actually learn something, maybe someday they can support the baby boomers by paying into social security. So call the education expenses an "Investment." Maybe I'm crazy, but it's just one of those things I remain delusional about. I mean, I hear John Boehner and Mitch McConnell saying every day the deficit is something we are doing to our kids. But, for my money, what we are doing to our kids, or at least what I'm doing to my kids right now, is paying for their education. So, as far as spending goes, okay we won't go out to dinner or buy new shoes or spend on anything other than what my wife considers the bare essentials.

But then, there is the income thing: I can do things to make more money.

The government can do things to make more money: It can raise taxes, for one thing. But last time I remember, the Republicans did not want the government to make more money and they cut taxes. This, I think I understand this correctly, is because the government is: BAD.

Do I have that right?

The deficit is BAD. The Government is BAD. I guess the goverment is more bad than the deficit.  Am I off base here?

But if it really is as simple as my own home budget, the one I write up at the kitchen table, wouldn't the simplest thing be to simply raise taxes?

I can think of a few taxes I wouldn't mind seing raised: Like income taxes on everyone above $250,000, or better yet above $300,000. (I like round numbers, especially those which exempt me.)

And gas taxes. I just paid $3.35 a gallon today. And you know, it wasn't all that painful. If it could eliminate the deficit, I'd be happy to pay $5 a gallon for six months or maybe even a year, which I've read would eliminate the deficit and balance the budget presto slam bang. I figure at 10 gallons a week, that would be an extra $16.50 a week, which would mean maybe skipping one visit to McDonalds. That's the least I can do for my country. It's more expensive than buying one of those red/white and blue stickers for my car or a set of American flag lapel pens, but isn't real patriotism something that should cost you something?

If it is really that easy to do with just one or two tax changes, then what is everyone screaming about?

I mean, we could pay those teachers in Rhode Island and those firemen in Wisconsin and we could finance health care and whatever.

Now, if we could just bring all those boys and girls home from chasing phantoms in Afghanistan and Iraq, then we'd have money to spare. We could pay off the deficit, build roads, finance schools and even maybe have a real health care system.

Wouldn't that be nice?

Kelly Ayotte might even say, "Absolutely."

Michele Bachmann, Farm Socialist

I'm happy to report that darling of the Tea Party, vanquisher of all things socialist, Grand Inquistor of creeping socialism, and representative of the hardy people of Minnesota, Michele Bachmann, has been sucking at the government teat, the biggest nipple of them all, actually, the farm subsidy program, to the tune of $250,000.00. These payments have occured over years.

Ms. Bachmann tells us President Obama is a creepy Islamofascist, determined to convert our fair capitalist nation into a government run collective and all the while, she takes the government dole.


Of course, farm subsidies pose a far bigger problem than simply revealing Ms. Bachmann for what she clearly is.

 We pay farmers to grow the wrong crops: corn, soy, alfalpha, and we subsidize ogres like Monstano and their patented genes to reduce the diversity of our crops, making us sitting ducks for the next micro organism which develops a taste for the one or two varieties of plant in our fields. It's a case of unintended consequences, of which Ms. Bacmann is more than happy to avail herself.

Some CEO's take a dollar a year salary, after they've made millions for years, when things turn sour for their company, or when embarrassing issues arise. They say, Hey, the principle of the thing matters more to me at this point, because I'm rich enough to be able to afford my principles.

Not so with Ms. Bachmann.

So that fine example of moral rectitude and conservative purity, that soul mate of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, who extol her daily, is, in fact, happy to be paid by the government she abhors.

Government handouts for welfare queens, government pensions, Medicare, Social Security all ananthemas for Ms. Bachmann.

Well, who is the welfare queen now? I guess, if you are a corporate welfare queen, that doesn't count. Certainly, if you are a Federal employee (as is Ms. Bachmann) getting a government hand out, well, that doesn't count either.

Kelly Ayotte,Sheriff Arpaio: Birds of a Feather (Or Down to Pink Underpants)

When Kelly Ayotte decided to attend a rally to celebrate Sheriff Joesph Arpaio, you might have thought, well, she really didn't understand who this man is, or she never would have gone. 

But she did more than go, she embraced him and all he stood for.

"He's a really dynamic person and a true leader in the fight against illegal immigration," Ayotte said. 

Ayotte thinks she is being bold and tough when she endorses certain ideologies, and she frequently uses the word "absolutely" thinking it shows she is not one of those mealy mouthed politicians who are trying to dance around a subject by adding lots of qualifications. So she says things like, "I absolutely support and believe in marriage as between a man and a woman." 

But then, when she realizes her "absolutist" stand has gotten her into trouble, and she has to carve out an exception to the absolute, as in the instance she was asked whether or not she would support a federal law, the Defense of Marriage Act, and she realized she couldn't really do that coming from a state where the citizens had passed a gay marriage law in a legislature which is as close as you can get to an unpaid, citizen's legislature she absolutely back pedaled without missing a beat: "It's absolutely for states to decide marriage."


So here is a woman who has mastered the art of appearing to be resolute, absolutely resolute, while actually waffling.


This may be why she admires the dynamic Sheriff Joseph Arpaio, of Arizona, who may not be well known in New Hampshire--he has never run in a primary in this state. (But he has traveled her to rub shoulders with Ayotte.)  


So who is this man Ayotte so admires?


He's the sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, and he cultivates the "tough" image by doing things like humiliating captives, prisoners in the county jails. In 2005, he forced seven hundred prisoners, wearing nothing but pink underwear and flip flops, handcuffed, shackled to shuffle along a four block parade in the bright Arizona day to a new jail. 


"I put them on the street so everybody could see them."


He enjoyed the spectacle so much, he repeated the stunt with 900 prisoners a little later.


Ayotte described Arpaio as "dynamic," and in a sense he did change the way things were done in Maricopa County. Having control over the county jails, he found he did not have enough brick and mortar jails, so he set up a tent city for prisoners and surrounded it with barbed wire. "I put them next to the dump, the dogpound, the waste-disposal plant," he said, and he cut their food to two meals and reduced the cost per meal to thirty cents a day. "It costs more to feed the dogs than it does the inmates," he was proud to say. He put up a big neon sign on a guard tower, "Vacancy." You could see that sign for miles.


It must be noted most of the inmates of these jails, baking in the Arizona heat, have not been convicted of anything, but are awaiting trial.


Then he got hold  of an Army tank, painted the howitzer muzzle with a red and yellow flame pattern and painted, "Sheriff Apaio's War on Drugs," on each side and rode it in the Fiesta Bowl Parade.


The man has a sense of showmanship.


Under his supervision, jailers used stun guns on prisoners strapped into restraint chairs. 


This was less of a success in one sense: The county lost a six million dollar suit in federal court to the family of a prisoner who died, strapped into a  chair, electrocuted by Arpaio's men.


His deputies raid Latino towns and when he heard a swine flu was coming from Mexico, he said, "We should close the border."  Immigrants, he said bring crime and disease. 


You can see the appeal he must have had for Ayotte, who thought he had the right idea about how to deal with immigrants, no matter what else you might think of the man.


He wanted to interrogate school children about their immigration status.


He is a celebrity in the conservative circles in which Ayotte travels. He's debated Alan Dershowitz, the famous Harvard professor and defense attorney. Arpaio is not an unknown quantity in the ranks of the righteous right.


Of course, Arpaio flaunts his tough guy attitude from the safety of a position behind his armed guards--the prisoners are unarmed and shackled, not much threat to the sheriff. 


He's the classic sadist. He has all the power. He strips, humiliates and taunts. He's a one man Abu Ghraib. 

He's loved in Maricopa County, at least by his fellow travelers. "The Sheriff, he's a dynamo," one of his prison guards told The New Yorker. 

That maybe  where Kelly Ayotte got the word, "Dynamic." 


She maybe read the New Yorker article which came out before she called Arpaio "Dynamic."


During candidate debates they usually ask the contenders, "Who are your heroes?"


It's usually a softball question, a gooey moment for the candidate to say something about Mother, George Washington or somebody safe.


But it sometimes can be revealing, because when you mention a particular person, what the candidate and what the public knows about him does not rise to the level of a complete biography. A person's public image is a shorthand for a set of beliefs and feelings. 


Kelly Ayotte chose to embrace Arpaio. 


Tough guy. Tough on immigration.


The classic bully. Tough in the Abu Ghraib way: When you've got a man naked, beaten, chained, when you've got your dogs lusting for the man's vital organs, some of which are only too visible and unprotected, when you've got your men with their guns trained on the man, then you can be real tough and oh, so brave.


Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.  That's where our Joe Arpaio is from.  A whimp in hero's clothing.


But conservative about immigration, as is Ayotte, with all that has come to mean.

For Absolutely Kelly Ayotte, I guess you call that "Dynamic."

Diagnosis of a Breed Disorder

"Mr. President, you don't believe in the Constitution. You believe in socialism."
                  --Tweet from Representative Paul Broun, Republican-Georgia during the State of the Union Address

"We saw an unprecendented explosion of government spending and debt at President Obama's direction; unlike anything we've seen in the history of our country.[We] have come to Washington with a commitment to follow the Constitution and cut the size of government."
                    --Michele Bachmann,


Writing just after World War II, during the ascendancy of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the John Birch Society, several professors from Columbia and Harvard , Richard Hofstadter, Seymour Martin Lipset and Daniel Bell tried to make sense of what they came to call the "Radical Right." At various times they referred to the rising, vociferous, some would say hysterical, voices the "Paranoid Right," or the "Unreasoning Right."

Certain characteristics of the syndrome were noted: 1/ A dread of conspiracy 2/ A certainty that America was being threatened by change  which would be harmful and 3/ Frustration with  the "Mainstream Media" which was said to be ignoring, ignorant of or even complicit in  the conspiracy 4/ A feeling on the part of the spokesmen they were personally threatened or had already been harmed, even though by every observable criteria, these people, whether they were rich or Redneck, were not being harmed at all. 5/ A sense of impending doom rooted in the conviction the forces conspiring to destroy America were largely unseen, unappreciated by the distracted masses of hard working, well-meaning Americans who were preoccupied with their own mundane but less critical problems and the fate of the world rested with the talented,  eternally vigilant individuals who vainly sounded a call to arms to a sleeping giant of a population.
     More recently, another characteristic symptom of people afflicted with this syndrome has emerged: A rapid, high pitched voice, sort of a screech, which might bring to mind a man who sees his airplane crashing to earth while his fellow passengers snooze, read, listen to music on headphones, oblivious to the approaching catastrophe.

Typical of this syndrome is hallucinations of socialism or communism or fascism seen crawling up walls, lurking behind seemingly benign looking Congressmen, Presidents or Speakers of the House.

Another feature: A religious reverence for that secular Bible, the Constitution, in whose words are seen absolute values, like the right of any individual American to keep and bear arms, unto an arsenal of attack rifles, land mines, grenades, what have you.

Especially threatening is the presence of Big Brother which may take the guise of black helicopters, jack booted villains or something really odious called the Federal Government or sometimes simply "The Federal Bureaucracy."

The way this sneaky socialistic Federal Guvment gets control of your bank account and brain is sometimes by radio waves, but often more subtly, with reckless spending which results in big deficits which enslaves not just you but your grandchildren. Somehow, less mention is made of your children, with whom you may have a more complicated relationship, but your grandchildren, now there are true innocents.

And there is a proclivity for playing with words and language and images to conjure up spooky things, or to morph one image into another:

So, we have the "Death Tax,"  which this Banshee Right labeled the estate Tax.  I mean, an estate tax is something a really rich person who has an estate and probably a chateau has to pay so his neer do well kids don't get all the wealth but it has to be repaid to the country which made the accumulation of all that wealth possible.


And we have the transformation of an image. "Guns don't kill people. People kill people." So we are reminded the real villain is not the instrument but the person wielding it, which is fair enough. Of course, if you want to put a fine point on it, as the NRA is doing, people  do not kill people, bullets do.

But the larger point is, it's the maniac with his finger on the trigger. To which I can only think, there are people who should not be allowed to play with guns or sharp objects. And there are certain objects which we likely ought to restrict, like fertilizer bombs or hand grenades or land mines,  or Browning Automatic rifles or fifty caliber machine guns or Uzis or formula one racing cars driven on I-95.

So, if a man plants land mines in his front lawn because he is sick and tired of the neighbor's kids from trampling his grass, well land mines don't kill kids, crazy old men do.

Now, I don't know what the NRA stance is on land mines, but I would submit land mines should not be sold in your local Walmart store because you never know what lunatic out there might see that landmine in the glass counter as he's wheeling his cart by and think, "Oh, that would be good for blowing up the neighbor's kids."  So you don't want to put such objects out there which will attract loonies like honey does flies.  A crazy person magnet, that land mine.

And if you accept there are maniac magnets trying to get sold, and we have an interest in not providing the maniac with the means to be a homicidal maniac, well then you have gun control.

And none of this has anything to do with the maintenance of a militia--you remember what militia men look like--those guys with the three cornered hats, the vest, the long musket and the nifty knee stockings and the square jaws and the Norman Rockwell faces.  That's a long way from Timothy McVeigh and that psychiatrist in Ft. Hood who shot dead unarmed soldiers who were doing what soldiers do lots of--waiting on lines.


Oh, and one last feature of this particular form of brain worm: Whenever a tax or a spending program or anything you find objectionable appears, it's always unprecedented and never been seen before in the history of this nation--which, of course is a tautology--but let's not quibble.
Has recent federal spending really been on a scale never seen before? I don't really know, and I'm sure Michele Bachmann does not know. This would involve complex mathematical formula e to compare 2010 dollars to 1864 dollars or 1944 dollars and knowing what the GNP for those years were and stuff like that.

But you can bet your bottom dollar that we were spending a lot more of the nation's wealth during any year of the American Civil War than we did during the recent bank bail outs.  I can say that with great confidence because, like Ms. Bachmann, I am totally unencumbered by hard facts.

Who Loves Ya Baby?

 "Listen, Rush, of all the scary things in this health care bill..the scariest thing is this: The government , if this passes, will be able to go into your bank account or anybody's bank account--I just read this last night--anybody's bank account, take the money out to fund this monstrosity. Did you know that?"
   --Caller to Rush Limbaugh


"He's right folks, he's right."
     --Rush Limbaugh


"This is the crown jewel of socialism."
     --Michele Bachmann


"Around this chamber, looking upon us are the lawgivers--from Moses to Gauis to Blackstone to Jefferson. By our actions today, we disgrace their values."
    --John Boehner


"This is not about healthcare. It never has been about healthcare.  This is about what does he call it?  Remaking America. This is government taking control of 1/6th of the economy. They will take your arteries, your values and your pancreas. Yes, you heard me. Your pancreas is at stake. "
        --Glenn Beck




"And he was easily riled, likely to shout
Frequently wrong but never in doubt."
         --Cheryl Wheeler
        "Frequently Wrong But Never in Doubt"


So, now here in the state of New Hampshire, the Live Free or Die state, in the town of Exeter, just seven miles up the road from our fair town of Hampton, the Exeter Hospital is in a death struggle with Blue Cross Anthem, wrangling over costs.


And thousands of patients have a received  letters from the private insurance company telling them they need to find new doctors because the company is severing ties with the doctors' group attached to the hospital as well as severing ties to the hospital.


These patients are being told, not by the government but by that darling of all the conservatives quoted above, A PRIVATE COMPANY, PRIVATE ENTERPRISE, they cannot keep their doctors of many years and need to chose one from the company's list.


Now, you might ask yourself, how much worse could a government run program be?
And you might ask yourself, how much better does the private sector look now?

Or as Sarah Palin might say, "How's that private sector thing working for ya now?"


One thing about Medicare, it's mission is to provide health care.
What do you think the mission of the private health insurance company is?


Could it be to protect the interests of its stockholders? (Just a thought)


With Medicare, you've got this huge bureaucracy to deal with, which can be pretty frustrating, but eventually, the doctor gets to talk to another doctor in Medicare and usually, after enough noise and complaint, Medicare does the right thing.

And you can, if all else fails, call your Congressperson, which people do a lot, when Medicare gets them riled. And, actually, it works.


Not true with the private insurer. Not because the insurance company people are evil--well, some of them are, bu that's another story--but because they have a different mission, which is to make money for the stockholders.
 
As the good folks of Exeter, NH have discovered. 

But hey, we know all about the evils of the Democrats' law because we read about it last night, on the internet, so it must be true. So true. He's right. And the government is after your pancreas. (!) Yikes. 

Now, you might ask, what would the government even want with my pancreas? Or my arteries, which by now are not likely all that pretty. 


It could have been worse, Glenn might have discovered the government was after some other body parts which would have made us wonder about him, but the pancreas and arteries sound reasonably clean.


The gov'ment's coming in those black helicopters to collect your pancreas.  That's what they do when they are fixing to set the crown jewel of socialism, you know that don't you? They put it in a bed of pancreas.  That's true. I read it on the internet.


The question you've got to ask yourself: How much worse could the government be than what you have experienced with your own private insurer?

I mean, if the government wants your pancreas, can you imagine what Blue Cross Anthem or MVP might want?

So Like a Rush

Nationalizing businesses, nationalizing banks is not a solution for the democratic party, it's the objective.

                  --Rush Limbaugh

Every time the government grows we lose more of who we are.

                  --Glenn Beck

The nine scariest words in the English language: "I'm from the government, and I'm hear to help you."
                    --Ronald Reagan

I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made.
It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach.
Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.

                     --Franklin Delano Roosevelt


As Hendrick Hertzberg pointed out in Monday's New Yorker (1/24/11) when the news broke about the Tuscon shootings, no one's first thought was that some unhinged leftist was responsible.

As President Obama said, we'll never know what formed the mind of the killer.

 But we all have a pretty clear hunch, an intution, however unscientific, certain kinds of minds are receptive to certain kinds of messages. The hyperbolic paranoid right has been putting out urgent Jerimiads for years, and if you think black helicopters in the sky are attempting to control your mind with radio waves, well then, you have not been directed to take a shot at Rand Paul or Glenn Beck or John Boehner; you know who the traitors are.

When Spiro Agnew was spewing forth his vitriol as Vice President, the newspapers were so inundated with anti Semetic and anti efete liberal letters they simply decided to print none of them, for fear of what they would incite. That was hate speech then. I don't know what those editors would make of what Glenn Beck is saying now.

Someone told me at work the other day that Social Security was an outrage: It was theft from her personal bank account. As surely as if a highwayman had robbed her, she had no choice but to give up her money or her life and freedom if she did not hand over her hard earned cash. She sent me a long email listing the horrible things that Social Security has done or that have been done to Social Security over the years: The card was never meant to become a national ID card, but just try signing into a hospital without giving up that number; the funds were supposed to be held for pensioners, but the account has been raided by Congress to fund the rest of the government and so on.

And I had to agree with her about the hits Social Security has taken--the email she forwarded (one can only guess the source) were like seeing the trees--lots of bad things have happened to a very good idea. But one has to see the forest, of course:Social Security is, has been and continues to be and will continue to be one of the greatest successes of any government on the planet.

That's why the Republicans hate it so. That's why they want to "Privatize" i.e. destroy it.

If they could turn it into a part of the New York stock exchange, they would. In fact, that's exatly what they tried to do when George W. Bush was president. The GOP didn't recall any of that--every memory of that effort vanished as soon as the stock market tanked in 2009.

Who us?

So the idea that American citizens have to be forced to plan for the future is an anathema to Republicans. I'm a free born man of the U.S.A. I should not be forced to do anything. Any government does that is a tyranny.

It's a very pretty  fantasy: Never force any citizen to do anything against his will.

The problem happens when a thousand motorcyclists who wanted to ride without helmets do not die. They shout Live Free or Die, but the thing is, they do not actually die. If they died, okay, they made their choice. But instead they are paralyzed quadraplegics.

And guess what happens then? Guess who has to pay for their care, their respirators, their bladder catheters? Not those free spritis, not Glenn Beck. The government winds up with the bill. The citizens.

And when people who are young and healthy and figure they don't need health insurance because they are not sick, they are probably, statistically speaking, correct. Yes, truth be told, we need the young who are healthy and not likely to draw from health accounts to pay into these so all the old gomers who are sick can have a bigger pot from which to draw. Sad but true. The young support the old.

But the thing is, as Atul Gawande suggests in his article about medicare care of the uninsured in Camden New Jersey, it's these uninsured who are wrecking the medical financial system. And some of the uninsured are those young paralyzed motorcyclists. Most are not. Most are drug addicts, elderly, mental ill, mentally incompetant, unemployed immigrants. A lot of them are people Glenn Beck would have no sympathy for. People he would throw to the wolves and he would tell us we are going to bring the country down with all our sympathy and willingness to let them suck from the government teat.

But he never spells out what he would do with these people in the ER. What do you want us to do with them Glenn? Rush, got any answers? John?

One building in Camden sent fifty seven patients, mostly elderly,  to the Emergency Room with falls resulting in three million dollars in health care bills. Looking at a block by block analysis of hospital costs, Dr. Jeffrey Brenner discovered that over six years nine hundred people in two buildings accounted for more than four thousand hospital visits and two hundred million dollars in health care bills. One patient had three hundred and twenty four admission in five years. One patient alone cost the system $3.5 million dollars over six years.

But does big John Boehner want to force any of these system destroyers to buy medical insurance?  Some of them had Medicare, no doubt. Many did not.

But even if all of them had Medicare, none of them were capable of taking care of themselves in the sense none of them stayed out of the ER. So what's your solution to this problem, oh all knowing rightist seers?

What if I said, maybe the government should get in there with some public health initiative and spend a little money up front so we can stop the financial hemorrhaging downstream?

Oh, government take over! Socialism! End of America as we know it. We've given up the best and most essential part of ourselves as Americans.


Would Glenn or Rush describe the government intrusion of forcing people to buy health care insurance as anything other than tryanny, government in your wallet, government destroying free choice, government controlling minds with radio waves and computers?

No, for John, Rush, Glenn and all the paranoid right, the delusion of the perfectly free soul is too precious to give up in the face of these cold statistics. Your freedom to live off the grid is more important than the idea that your lack of planning becomes my emergency. 

Actually, my problem is your  idea that we each should have the choice of living off the grid.

Take that idea to abducto ad absurdum and none of us should be forced to not uriante in the streets, or to defecate in the town square, or to have indoor toilets with a hook up to the town sewer lines. 

Take it further and none of us should be pushed around by the department of public health to get our kids vaccinated against the measles or against polio and we should be able to send our unvaccinated kids to school to infect others.

But then again, that isn't such an absurd argument that live free types haven't made it.

Public health, be damned. Give me my gun.

Until of course, we need help. Then just take me to the ER.

PENIS ENVY

So I have been thinking more about why Republicans are so vociferous about saying people should carry guns, own guns, be gun toters.

It could be they are simply trying to distinguish themselves from wimpy Democrats who keep telling everyone violence and dominance and chest puffing are bad and we should all sing Kumbaya.

But I think it's something else.

I got an intuition when President Obama came to speak at a Portsmouth high school and at least one Live Free or Die stater arrived with a very impressive looking, lethal black gun strapped to his hip. He looked very powerful and dangerous. He was an out of work assembly line worker. Or something. But you could see from his self satisfied smile he felt good about himself, wearing that gun. He was gun proud. He was an important man. The media were all over him. He was important.

He was, in fact, as powerful as the leader of the free world, because he was clearly capable of killing President Obama, which made him as powerful as the President.

Any man with a gun is as powerful as the most powerful world leader.

So, that's it. We Republicans sell you self respect. Just buy a gun. We won't help you get a job, make more money, pay for your medical bills, take care of your parents.

But we'll get you your gun.

Getting hard yet?