Readers to Big Brothers in Washington: Get your minds off sex

Before she became the second woman ever on the U.S. Supreme Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg argued victims’ sex discrimination cases in the Supreme Court. But she started saying “gender” instead of “sex”. After she noticed that the nine male justices’ concentration wandered off – every time she said “sex”.
Our nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (“CBO”) reports that the budget cliff/end-of-the-world Taxmageddon America faces on January 1st will cost us two million American jobs and cause a “significant recession.” But the Do Nothing Congress’s grid-lockers are too busy poking their noses into our bedrooms to save our economy from themselves.
For example, please read “raped women don’t get pregnant” Congressional Science (!) Committee knuckle-dragger Todd Akin’s – and Congressman/vice president wannabe Paul Ryan’s – cosponsored bills that would make it a crime to use most methods of birth control or to have a test tube baby. (Then hide your daughters.) Willard Mitt Romney brags that he “absolutely” would sign Ryan’s medieval bills. And the Republican National Convention’s platform would deny women the “right to choose” after rape, incest or if their health or even their lives were at stake.
Those Big Brother-wannabes must think that we voters have sex on the brain, too. (They may be right for once. For example, a famous columnist complained about lingerie ads his paper had always run next to his column. So the editor moved the ads. After that, only half as many people reported reading the column. So the columnist demanded that the editor move the lingerie ads back.)
Taxmageddon and the budget cliff loom as the price Congress paid to get its Republican grid-lockers to raise the always-routinely-raised debt ceiling, so America could pay its bills. (Like grandpa’s doctor’s Medicare bill or the Social Security check grandma earned long ago. Or our brave soldiers’ paychecks.)
At one point, those grid-lockers offered to not “stop payment” on all those checks if they could “bounce” all their checks to Planned Parenthood for, for example, sex education and mammogram-and-other-cancer-fighting screenings. Now their price is January 1st’s big middle-class tax hike. And a meat-ax cut in often-life-saving services and national defense. Goodbye, jobs. Hello January 1st’s “The Hangover Part III.”
The CBO says that the “business uncertainty” from not knowing if the U.S. would pay its bills cost America one million jobs. And it says that the budget cliff/Taxmageddon will cost us two million more jobs and cause a “significant recession” because Congress needs to get us back on our feet before we start giving blood again. President Obama cut middle class taxes; raising middle class taxes back right now would dry up the money that we pump into the economy as soon as the ink is dry on our paychecks – and on our cash.)
Upping taxes and slashing life-saving services and defense abandons prosperity in favor of “austerity”: like tax-raising, budget-cutting France’s third straight three-month “quarter” of zero growth. Like tax-raising, budget-cutting England’s current negative growth, double-dip recession. Compare Europe to Japan: despite the mess from its tsunami, its previously-stalled economy shot up 4% a year from shot-in-the-arm spending to mop up and rebuild.
Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to balance the budget too soon after he dug us out of Republican President Herbert Hoover’s Great Depression. Nobel-Prize-winning economists agree it helped cause the Recession of 1937. When FDR started spending more, the U.S. recovered from that recession and from the Depression.
Paul Ryan is no Ferris Bueller, the “prodigal economics student.” Ryan learned Hoover’s and FDR’s elementary economics lesson that, as Ryan said when he pushed President Bush’s 2002 and 2008 stimulus proposals, “Unemployment always lags after a recession, even after a recovery.” (Remember getting Bush’s 2008 “Spend this yesterday!” check?)
And, after every one of Ryan’s House Republicans voted to torpedo President Obama’s Depression-preventing stimulus, Ryan wrote four letters to Obama’s Secretary of Energy, Dr. Chu. Ryan’s letters unashamedly panhandled tens of millions in stimulus handouts for his district. To “save or create 7,000 jobs” and cut “greenhouse gases.” (Global warming-denier Ryan recently also denied that he wrote the letters, chummily just signed “Paul.” Then this month, the press dug up copies. Oops!)
With our politicians’ long rap sheets of such hypocrisy, it shouldn’t shock Americans to learn that right after last summer’s debt ceiling fiasco, dozens of “debt-conscious” Republican congressmen took $20,000 trips to the Holy Land, paid for by a special interest group. (The First Commandment of economics is, “Thou shalt not claim there’s such a thing as a ‘free lunch’.”) Some celebrated their huge win with The Great Sea of Galilee Skinny-Dip.
One of our neighboring Republican congressmen admits jumping in like the others did. But we believe him when he says he was one of the congressmen who kept their pants on. We just wish that during their debt ceiling disaster movie (that also trashed America’s credit rating), Ryan and those Republicans had calmly “kept their shirts on.” Instead of locking horns like horny bull moose in rutting season. So much for bipartisanship.
During their frat Party skinny-dip, the Animal Housemembers didn’t succeed in duplicating the biblical miracle of walking on the Sea of Galilee’s water. But some confessed to reversing another biblical miracle and changing wine to water. Changing a lot of wine to water. (See “Hello January 1st’s ‘The Hangover Part III’”, above.)
Mark Twain pointed out that “There is no native criminal class except Congress.” But the F.B.I. says that technically, the only crime committed was “indecent exposure.” (See above, “hide your daughters” – from Ryan’s sex-on-the-brain Animal House frat brothers.)
President Obama’s optimistic “Yes we can!” was “Trumped” during the debt ceiling crisis by grid-locking Republican House Speaker Boehner’s cynical, unforgettably-shouted “Hell no you can’t!” Just like Obama’s “audacity of hope” was Trumped Wednesday night by Ryan’s convention speech’s “audacity of mendacity.” (Even conservative Fox News, run by disgraced President Nixon’s media man, Roger Ailes and often described as “the media wing of the Republican Party”, admitted at one point that Ryan’s convention speech was “deceptive.” And the Washington Post, which exposed Nixon’s Watergate criminal conspiracy that sent 40 of his aides to Club Fed, condemned Ryan’s speech as “misleading.”)
But there’s still time to avoid falling down the budget cliff and battling Taxmageddon. If politicians like Romney and Ryan can just get their minds off sex.
Karen and Tom Lantz live in Hollister. In memory of just-departed cancer victim Steve Vandal: a good friend and a good man.