Political Irony

Wouldn’t it be ironic if, after spending billions of dollars on prisons, police, and the war on drugs, the real answer to reducing crime was as simple as getting rid of lead in our environment?

That’s the conclusion of new research that strongly indicates that the hidden villain behind violent crime, lowered intelligence, and even attention deficit disorder is the use of lead in fuels (and to a lesser extent, in paint).

What? You think we already stopped using lead? Not really. We still use it in aviation fuel, spewing lead into the atmosphere. And for no good reason.

But the real irony is why this research isn’t getting more attention. Could it be that the prison industry doesn’t want you to know that our prison-building frenzy wasn’t really necessary? Or that vastly expanding the number of police and creating paramilitary swat teams didn’t actually do all that much to reduce crime? Or that the war on drugs was a complete waste of money?

And just because we banned lead in automobile gasoline doesn’t mean it isn’t still around, saturating the soil in American cities where car traffic was the most dense during the time that all gasoline was leaded. And every time the wind kicks up some dust, we are breathing it again. We have the technology to remove this lead and potentially bring down crime rates significantly, but we do nothing.

Why?

We should be screaming about this. We are poisoning our children. And the cost of the clean-up is small compared to the cost of doing nothing, paid in lower IQs, increased crime, and health problems.

Because of recent shooting tragedies, the Obama administration is attempting to increase gun safety with new regulations. In response to that, a number of right-wing organizations declared Saturday to be “Gun Appreciation Day”, with activities across the nation.

With predictable results:

• Three people injured and sent to hospital at a gun show in Raleigh, NC when a shotgun went off while the owner was removing it from a case. The show was closed for the rest of the day.
• An accidental shooting at a gun show near Cleveland, OH, sent another person to the hospital with injuries to his leg and arm.
• A person loading a gun outside a gun show in Indianapolis, IN shot himself in the hand when his gun went off accidentally.

You would think that people who presumably have some training in gun safety would not do this poorly.

And these weren’t the only moments of crazy. At a demonstration in Davenport, IA, a state representative told the crowd that “serving overseas in the Navy taught him the importance of allowing average citizens to defend themselves against dictators”. At a rally in Frankfort, KY, a Tea Party leader told the crowd “Your government is out of control.” And Senator Rand Paul announced that he wants to introduce legislation to overturn Obama’s recent executive orders on firearms, and also said that teachers should be armed at school.

I totally support the right of people to own guns, but I’d like to close the loopholes that allow violent felons and the mentally ill to easily obtain guns, and to require gun owners to receive gun safety training (just like drivers are required to have car safety training). But these nut jobs somehow think that the second amendment is the only part of the constitution that is exempt from any limits. And if you pass even the most benign regulations increasing gun safety, they start making vague and not-so-vague threats of violence.

Not to mention that these idiots are claiming that Martin Luther King Jr. — a man shot and killed by a gun — would be in favor of gun rights.

David Sirota has a really good column in Salon today: “Ayn Rand is for children” that explores the mystery of why some people think the fiction of Ayn Rand actually describes a reasonable political ideology. And his argument of why it does not can also serve as a 12-step guide to how to grow out of an immature belief in her ideological sham.

One of Sirota’s arguments rings particularly true with me — that part of the problem with Americans is that we don’t travel. We don’t ever see those parts of the world that are living in the Randian world of rampant, unregulated capitalism, with “no obvious environmental, public health, or workplace safety laws”, where there is no social safety net, and the poor don’t look like the “takers” or “moochers” that American politicians accuse them of being.

According to government data, only 30 percent of Americans even possess a passport (which is a very low rate compared to citizens in other industrialized English-speaking countries). Additionally, of those who do, only a fraction use their travel papers to visit parts of the developing world that perfectly spotlight the failures of the Rand vision.

Sirota also experienced the same thing as I did, when on visiting China realized that it is communist in name only, and “as some American CEOs will openly admit, if you want to see a more purely Randian version of a socially darwinist free market than exists in America, head straight across the Pacific Ocean to China.” Where hopefully you won’t get sick from the massive pollution problems they are having.

Sirota’s bottom line?

To be a Rand groupie is to flaunt your immaturity, your ignorance, your desperation to justify greed or your lack of international travel. It is, in other words, to admit your blindness to how so much of the world already lives, and to ignore what America would look like if “Fountainhead Shrugged” was seen as a public policy manual rather than what it really is: a dangerous farce.

[from Media Matters]

Even Fox News hosts can’t keep from laughing at their own latest over-the-top Obama conspiracy lie — their lead line for the Obama inauguration “Does Obama believe in the Constitution he’ll swear to defend?”

One hopes that this segment by Jon Stewart was the reason AIG decided to not sue the US Government for $25 billion:

Well, I guess unbridled greed does have at least one limit — public embarrassment.