Ladies and Gentleman, give it up for California!

Accordingly, insofar as the provisions of sections 300 and 308.5 draw a distinction between opposite-sex couples and same-sex couples and exclude the latter from access to the designation of marriage, we conclude these statutes are unconstitutional.

Here’s a great big Fuckin’-A! for equal marriage rights, and for Californians. My wife and I were married in Santa Cruz, so I feel like my marriage has become that much more legitimate.

And finally, to folks disappointed by this decision, and feel that it threatens the institution of marriage… I understand why you might feel this way, but I can’t sympathize. Your efforts to deny people in loving, committed relationships from realizing the legal and societal benefits of tying the knot have failed, and I couldn’t be happier.

And really, if your marriage could be threatened by this, it means your partner is already gay. There’s nothing you can do about that, but you’re welcome to stay married to them if you want to.

The GOP’s new slogan is already employed by an antidepressant. Now that’s a funny coincidence, and one that points to their incompetence for not checking on it first.

But there’s something else that bothers me about “The Change You Deserve”. For 8 years defense spending has skyrocketed, GOP lobbyists and fund-raisers have enjoyed no-bid government contracts, and corporate profits have been setting records while wages have stagnated and fallen.

America, The Change You Deserve isn’t a message of reform, it’s the Republican Party offering us their spare change. Remember that come November.

Or, The Country Formerly Known As The United States. Apologies to the rest of the world, I’m hoping our paranoid, neurotic bender is coming to an end, but you may want hold off on visiting for another year or so while we sort this out.

This should be a lesson to any American tempted to let our government cross the bright lines laid out by the Constitution, a document created by political philosophers who mistrusted concentration of power, and despised tyranny. Never trust anyone who says, “Trust me, this is for your own good.”

Update: Good Lord. I’m sure there’s a gray area between State Sanctioned Assholery and Human Rights Violation. I am certain that drugging people without their consent and a valid medical reason isn’t anywhere close to that area.

Add this to the list of shit I can’t believe we, as a nation and a people, do (and that I, as a person, am being billed for). Right up at the top of the list of things that are important to me in this election, next to bringing our troops home and pushing hard for energy independence, is how we’re going to turn America back into America again. It seems to me that before we get all excited about the big plans for a Progressive Remodel, we’re going to have to deal with all the broken, rotten shit the previous occupants have left us to clean up.

Want a better name for it? How about, Holiday from Reason and Good Sense, That Promises To Have Absolutely No Beneficial Effects For Anyone? Or, better still, The American Voter Is a Fucking Chump? Because that’s what this idiotic proposal really says: you think that we’re chumps.

So, candidates, if you want to prove to me that you’re:

• incapable of distinguishing good policy from bad
• incapable of supporting good policy by taking a stand and explaining to America why a bad policy is bad
• capable of pushing really, really stupid policy in pursuit of a demagogue-alicious tactical advantage over your opponents
• think that I and my fellow Americans are idiots that will respond positively to this sort of bullshit

Then just keep this stupid shit up.

We’ve had almost 8 years of putting food on our families and making the pie higher. A top priority for me in selecting the next president is whether or not he or she can make some serious traction reducing the myriad mountains of residual stupid we’re going to inherit from the Bush administration. The thought that he or she is going to put whipped cream and cherries on top of them is fucking infuriating.

Cut it out.

Update: Well stated, by hilzoy:

Clinton is presently making a big deal about the fact that she is “a fighter”. After this primary season, I don’t think there can be any doubt about her willingness to fight. What Clinton’s gas tax proposal tells me is what she’s willing to fight for. She is not willing to fight for what she thinks is right in the face of public pressure. She’s not even willing to restrict her compromises to cases in which public pressure to do something stupid already exists. She will sacrifice principle and the public good when it’s expedient for her to do so.

Update 2: I’d thought that the Gas Tax Hollandaise was about as stupid as pandering, half-assed populist proposals were going to get this season. How wrong I was (h/t John Cole).

“We’re going to go after OPEC which remember is a monopoly cartel,” Clinton said. “There’s nothing free-market about it. They sit in some conference room a couple of times a year and decide how much oil they are going to produce and how much they are going to charge for it. So lets change our laws so we can sue them on anti-trust reasons.”

We’re going to break up OPEC’s cartel, comprised of sovereign nations. We’re going to use U.S. federal antitrust laws to do it. By suing them. Somewhere.

Looks like someone’s trying to lock up the “Idiot Voter” block. The next pander should be aimed squarely at the block of folks who vote for candidates based on weather-related phenomena.

Ladies and Gentlemen, John Cole*!

And you know what? They may be assholes, or jerks, or whatever term you want to use, but they sure as hell didn’t run this economy into the ground. They aren’t responsible for turning a huge surplus into a several hundred billion dollar deficit. I have yet to read any memos from Barbra Streisand detailing how we should spy on American citizens.

…

Maybe it is because I am totally and unrepentantly in the tank for Obama, but I just can’t get worked up over what his pastor said. Maybe it is because I am not religious, and I am used to religious people saying things that sound crazy. Or maybe I just refuse to spend any more time and energy getting worked up over and denouncing, distancing, and rejecting the wrong people- people who really don’t matter in the big scheme of things. If you have a memo from Jeremiah Wright to John Yoo showing how we should become a rogue nation, let me know. If you have pictures of Jeremiah Wright voting against the GI Bill, send it to me. If you have evidence of Jeremiah Wright training junior soldiers on the finer aspects of stacking and torturing naked Iraqi captives, pass them on.

To which I’d like to add, in a much less civil tone, Fuck You Fox, MSNBC, CNN, and your Ilk. Jon Stewart said it nicely and politely that night on Crossfire. I’m not that polite.

* It should be noted that this is not an endorsement for either candidate, but rather a celebration of a bird well flipped at our travesty of a sham of a mockery of two travesties of a broadcast journamalism corps.

Issues I care about heading into this year’s elections*

• Protecting the Constitution, and making sure that those we entrust with power and authority to take care of our business don’t have the inclination or opportunity to abuse that trust.
• Iraq. Iraq. Iraq. Over 4300 American troops killed, tens of thousands profoundly wounded, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed. A billion and a half dollars a day. Another 6 months? A year? Ten? A hundred? Another 4300 deaths? 43,000? Another trillion dollars? More? Hey, is anyone keeping an eye on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border region?
• The horrible reality that we’ve crossed a bright line, and we’re now a country that disappears people and tortures them to death. We have to do more than just bringing that to an end, we have to atone.
• The scarcity of the planet’s remaining resources, the continuing overabundance of humans, and how we (both as a nation and as a species) will feed, clothe, transport and employ ourselves after cheap, easy oil.
• The possibility that our children, and perhaps our grandchildren, will be endlessly fighting wars in countries all over the world over those scarce resources.
• The fact that our Government is still, more than two years later, unable to do a fucking thing to adequately help new Orleans, a major American city, rebuild after being devastated by a hurricane.
• The possibility that the Middle Class American Dream of a decent home in a decent city with decent schools may become unattainable for most of us.
• The frightening possibility of someone in my family having a serious medical problem, either that it would ruin us, or (more terrifying) that we may be refused treatment.
• A host of other issues relating to my family’s welfare, our nation’s viability as a free and democratic republic, and to our survival as a species.

Issues political journalists and pundits care about**

• Low bowling scores.
• Orange juice instead of coffee.
• The controversial use of the words “frustrated” and “bitter” to describe people’s… frustration and bitterness.
• Troubling displays of “elitism” and “condescension” towards “real Americans” (whatever those terms mean to television media stars with multi-million dollar salaries who live in New York, D.C., and Los Angeles).
• Any celebrity gossip or vicious rumor that gets Drudge’s red light flashing.
• What others in the Consultant Class of the D.C. Establishment thinks about the above points, and what they think about what other consultants and pundits think about them.

Of course, both lists are incomplete. But each is a fair representation. And I think that my list, though incomplete, pretty well illustrates what I believe is at stake in this election (and likely for every election to follow in my lifetime). And notice, curiously, all the things in the first section mean as much to the Pundit Class as the things in the second section mean to me. So, what do I think of Political Journalism in America?

I think that it would be a very, very good idea.

* I’m know I’m not alone in prioritizing these issues, many many folks do. But I don’t presume to speak for the American electorate.

** These absurd, presumptuous assholes, however, are under the illusion that they’re qualified to speak for the American electorate (or Real America™ as they refer to it).

Devilstower at DailyKos asks Robert Zubrin, author of Energy Victory: Winning the War on Terror by Breaking Free of Oil, about the importance of getting off foreign oil, and about the potential role of biofuels in kicking the habit.

Most of what I’ve heard about biofuels as a drop-in replacement for petroleum is pretty pessimistic, and I’m skeptical about the scalability of combustion-oriented solutions given the dire climate situation we’re facing. However, Mr. Zubrin does raise interesting points about how biofuel can dramatically change our foreign policy vis-a-vis the Middle East.

This year, the USA will import 5 billion barrels of oil. At $100/bbl that is $500 billion dollars taxed out of the US economy by the collection of foreign governments known as OPEC, some of whom are using it to promote terrorism directed against the United states and numerous other countries. When George Bush took office in 2001, we were paying $90 billion per year for foreign oil. So the Bush administration has effectively responded to 9-11 by increasing our financing of the enemy fivefold — and now we are actually paying OPEC more than we are paying our own defense department (the US DOD budget this year is about $435 billion).

Not only that, but this OPEC price rigging is driving our economy into a recession. Consider this: The Congress just passed a law to take $150 billion out of the treasury to pass out to taxpayers in the hope that they will spend it and thus stimulate the economy away from falling into a recession. However, even as Congress is raiding the treasury to try to put $150 billion into our pockets, OPEC is taking $500 billion out of our pockets. That is an economic de-stimulus package three times as big as the effort Congress is paying for.

The fact that we’re paying the Saudis more than our astronomical defense budget is stunning. But if our economy’s being slapped around a bit, the rest of the world is taking a vicious beating to keep up with OPEC’s prices.

People need to understand this: OPEC’s price rigging amounts to a huge extremely regressive tax on the entire world economy. Setting oil prices at $100/bbl is harmful to the advanced industrial countries, but it is brutally destructive to the third world. It is one thing to pay $100/bbl for oil when you live in a country where the average worker makes $45,000 per year. It is quite another when you make $1000 per year. Effectively, the high oil price amounts to taking hundreds of billions of dollars away from the world’s poorest people and giving it to the world’s richest people.

Think about this: In 2006, Saudi Arabia, with a population of 24 million people (15% of whom work) raked in $200 billion in foreign exchange from its oil exports. In the same year, Kenya, with a population of 36 million people (the majority of whom work) earned $2.5 billion in foreign exchange in exports of all categories combined. Distributed elsewhere, the $200 billion taken by the Saudis for their overpriced oil would double the foreign exchange of 80 countries comparable to Kenya.

Now, personally, I’m a bigger proponent of conservation and human-powered transportation, or at least more focused on those pieces of the puzzle. Neither is a panacea, but applied where easily applicable, I think both will be important components of an alternative energy strategy. While biodiesels, hybrids and plug-in electric vehicles will reduce emissions, I just don’t see how adding a giant, toxic battery to every 2-3 ton car on the road is going to clear up the many problems that car-oriented culture creates. We’ll still be left with this:

72 people by car, bus, and bike

Also, reading through the comments, there’s abundant skepticism to Zubrin’s assertions (ranging from polite disagreement, to personal attacks, to Ultimate Pissing Championship strikes and choke holds, ’cause that’s how DailyKos comments roll). Amidst the din, there are some serious objections worth weighing, and I’ll be curious to see if these are addressed in the book, as well as what Zubrin’s literary critics have to say. Maybe he’s wrong, or short-sighted, or maybe he’s even full of shit.

But no single solution is going to solve our energy problems, and it’s going to take time to bring oil alternatives online. In the very near term, I think that these two points, about OPEC’s toll on our economy, and that of the global economy, are valid and definitely worth consideration. Whether or not Mr. Zubrin’s particular argument for how to deal with these problems is viable, the goal’s still worth pursuing.