So?

Kirk Johnson, "States' Rights Is Rallying Cry of Resistance for Lawmakers". March 16

FIRST, what Pierce said, as a general maxim:

Ask me what I'd do, and I'd probably vote for the ongoing POS that is the Senate bill. However, I would like both Kevin and Matt -- or John -- to explain the "stepping-stone" argument to me. Why , precisely, should I believe that, that once we pass the POS, any opportunity to improve it, largely by the process of political evolution, will remain? Am I to believe that, gifted with a federal mandate requiring people to buy their products, the insurance companies will drop over time their resistance to the kind of health-care system that exists everywhere else in the industrialized world? That they will desist from the practice of buying enough legislators to eviscerate any subsequent attempts to reform the new system to the advantage of their consumers? Why would they do this? Please show your work.

Nothing, nothing whatsoever supports naiveté about Centrists and Centrism anymore. The only Exit door in that direction leads you to rejoining the Right, like y'all did for Iraq. There was no excuse, in 2008, for anyone of voting age to've been innocent of the eight-year attempted palace coup of 1992-2000; there was no excuse for anyone with a passing familiarity with domestic politics, let alone someone with an Ivy League BA in political science, to imagine there'd been anyone in the Republican party interested in vanquishing the Evils of Partisanship, except insofar as it was liberal Democratic partisanship, for the past forty years. There was no reason to imagine that Reagan's "successes" were due to anything other than the accident of "conservative" legislative hegemony by states with more livestock than people, and the cowardly retreat of real Democrats faced with losing an election they lost anyway. There's no getting around what (Nothing) Congress accomplished after being given a clear mandate for change in 2006. And Nothing is more than it accomplished with historical majorities in 2008.

In Utah, lawmakers embraced states’ rights with a vengeance in the final days of the legislative session last week. One measure said Congress and the federal government could not carry out health care reform, not in Utah anyway, without approval of the Legislature. Another bill declared state authority to take federal lands under the eminent domain process. A resolution asserted the “inviolable sovereignty of the State of Utah under the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution.”

Y'know, I remain unconvinced the idiots in Utah can run Utah, without adding in the 70% the Feds take care of so the locals can busy themselves marrying their 14-year-old cousins and waiting for the Archangel Monsanto to bring 'em some more Heavenly Dinner Plates. So fuckin' let 'em try, already. It's obvious the only thing that's ever gonna meet these illiterate fits of teenaged pique is calling 'em on it. They think canned sheep hunts in Former National Parks are going to make up the revenue difference when the people who now tour Utah no longer want to go to the Former National Parks because of the canned sheep hunts? Okay. Only let's set twenty years operating expenses, in advance, as the price for taking them back next time.

Utah, not surprisingly, has been a net recipient of Federal tax money 17 of the last 25 years (okay, so maybe those eight other years are surprising); seems like a fine time for the New Hampshire and Minnesota and Illinois legislatures to turn off the spigot. South Dakota's averaged a 40% lagniappe over that period. Let 'em make up the difference taxing ammo.

Forget missing George Bush; can't anybody here remember him? These fucks can't run a million-dollar parade. They can't beat a country with no army. Run the modern world? Fuck, they can't even figure out how to run from it. In Utah. Jesus H. Christ With An Assault Rifle, whatever happened to the good ol' country wisdom that when you catch your smartass ten-year-old smoking a cigarette you make him smoke the whole pack?

Let Kansas teach its schoolchildren that Jesus rode dinosaurs. What, exactly, will the rest of us lose? The bright kids in Kansas will figure it out anyway, and move someplace civilized, and the rest of the state can listen to the corn grow and hope to die before it gets sick. Okay, so this doesn't bode well for the sheep, but the hip-wader industry will flourish. It's an Ill Wind.

Incidentally, an interesting object lesson in the sort of mindlessness which got us here when, snug in its American Exceptionalist cocoon, it decided to humor these 19th century frontier inbreds in the name of Faux Balance, has been on view in, of all places, local Indianapolis teevee news, where, for one, Reconcilliation is the first parliamentary procedure they've ever paid any attention to, and, two, some guy with a phony diploma who's been practicing as a psychologist has gotten more attention than all the phony practitioners of the Daniels administration combined, even after they were caught tossing a billion at Mitch Roob's former employer. Never mind that the sort of harm the guy could have caused by pretending to be a psychologist is about the same as what a real psychologist can. It's the biggest story ever, helped along by every teaser and graphic that says he was pretending to be a doctor. If the guy's office had been a housekeeping disaster, or full of cats, and he'd left a baby in his car while he ran in for cigarettes, I swear at least one of the anchors would be having uncontrolled orgasms on screen.