Sanford Debates Real Person

As much as I have enjoyed the comedic stylings of Mark Sanford, I am looking forward to tonight's debate with Elizabeth Colbert Busch.  It was fun watching that poor anonymous woman trying to hold that poster of Nancy Pelosi steady while Mark rambled on about weird stuff like who is funding Elizabeth's campaign.  And good old Mad Man Mark twisted reality around real good while he stood out there on the sidewalk, waving and saying "hey" to people who walked by wondering what on earth was going on.

But today is the day that the first of those debates that Sanford has been whining were not going to happen, happens.

If you tried to get tickets to the debate, as I did, you will know that it is the hottest event in Charleston.  But fear not; you can live stream this event at 7:00 tonight from ETV.

I also heard that if he does real good, Sam the Eagle has agreed to appear with him.

It goes without saying, Sanford will still lose.

A Heavy Heart

We liberals continue to be defeated by our own in the Democratic Party.  We are unable to stand up for those who we say we represent.

Harry Reid had not only the ability to change the course of the Senate when he had the power to stop the silent filibuster, he had the backing of the American people.  Instead, he made a deal with Mitch McConnell.  Of course, McConnell interpreted the "deal" as Reid backing down, and the Senate republicans continue to batter us -- the American people -- with impunity.

And then there are the Democrats who have never found a cause that is worth standing together on.

Health care?  Gun control?  Taxation?  Whether it's closing loopholes for pharmaceutical companies, gun shows or Exxon Mobil, you will always find a Democrat willing to stand up for the powerful.

There are always good reasons, too.  Mostly, it has to do with risking losing the next election.  This is why the big donors give to both parties.  And why the right wing and fat cats have been able to pick off any liberal that is willing to take a stand against the powerful.

If only.  If only we had the courage of our convictions that the right wing of the Republican Party has.  If we had people that care about the poor, the disenfranchised, those who are unable to fight with millions of dollars and highly paid lobbyists, like for example, elected Democrats, we would be able to get our country back on the right track.

Which leads to the subject of sequestration.  Let's not even talk about whatever possessed Obama to buy into this nonsense.  It sounded reasonable at the time, but in retrospect, we know we are dealing with unreasonable people.  While the poor and the sick are being denied services, the Tea Partiers in our Congress are taking victory laps.  They alone have saved us from our deficit.  And, it turns out, done it without ever having to inconvenience the wealthy and powerful.

It shamed me that our Congressional "leaders" voted to override the cuts to air traffic control in order to cater to those with the clout to be heard.  Oh, and themselves.  And shame on the Democrats who voted in large numbers to undermine the little bit of power the sequestration actually had.

What's it going to take for us to stop spiraling into self-absorbed obscurity?  Money only being spent to make more money for those who already have it; cutting jobs and government services, trains and teachers, bridges and health care.  Strangling regulators who have not in decades had the power to protect us from bad food, bad water, bad air, unsafe airplanes, Wall Street and corporate fraud.  Defunding research that would lead to better lives for ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren.

And while the right wing is taking that victory lap, the moderates are clutching tightly to their own purses afraid of losing their own job security.

So today I am saddened.  Yet I hope there will be a liberal backlash.  I imagine that like the courageous fast food workers, more of the weak in our country will risk everything to stand up to the powerful.  Perhaps mayors and moms will become as powerful an influence on our legislators as the NRA.  And maybe the real small business folks who have been fooled by the right wing into thinking they are being represented will realize that they have been sold out to corporate power.

Maybe President Obama will find his spine on all these issues, as he seems to have done with gun control.

But the bottom line really is -- and the Republican right wing know this -- if we don't care enough to stand together, we are lost.

Forced Pregnancy

Here in the state where our legislators are working with the NRA to put a gun in every home, bar and school, this land where individual rights are supposedly sacred (literally, as in "God-given"), the battle continues to be fierce over controlling those among us least able to fight back.

While our governor is hard at work cutting health benefits for the poor and making sure that a woman of limited means can't buy a birthday cake with her food stamps, we have a whole slew of bills in both houses of the legislature which aim to make sure that if we get pregnant, we are forced to carry that pregnancy to term.

Lee Bright, Senator from Spartanburg, has been called sanctimonious and "not that bright."  Which is a deadly combination for women, children and the poor in general.  And he has set his mind on sending Lindsey Graham the dreaded "challenge from the right."

Graham, bless his heart, has determined he will out-crazy Bright, and particularly in the area of arming every one of our citizens.  To protect them from our government.  Which he represents.

Senator Graham has filled the void left by the moronic Jim DeMint this year, with a memorable quote on gun rights always at the ready.  You just can't out right-wingnut someone who argues against banning high capacity magazines this way:

"Would I be a reasonable American to want my family to have the 15-round magazine in a semi-automatic weapon, to make sure, if there's two intruders, she doesn't run out of bullets?" he asked. "Am I an unreasonable person for saying that in that situation, the 15-round magazine makes sense?"

So God apparently told Senator Bright to stay away from gun rights and take on that other enemy of the people of South Carolina -- women.

He has right out of the starting gate sponsored the Personhood Act (S 83), and just in case we didn't get it, the Life Begins at Conception Act (S 87), along with a lot of other batshit paranoid bills involving Sharia law (S 81) and funding of prisoners wanting sexual reassignment therapy (S 80).

But then he was quiet.  Too quiet.

Because this week he was back at it with three new forced pregnancy bills:

S 618 seeks to insure that if you work for the state of South Carolina, your health insurance will not cover abortions.  So only state employees of means -- for instance someone like Lee Bright -- would be able to afford to pay for a family member to terminate a pregnancy.  Assuming you work in a lesser capacity for the state of South Carolina, and don't have the financial wherewithal of Senator Bright, you not only will not be able to afford an abortion, but you likely won't be able to afford the baby you have been forced to have.

If not having insurance coverage doesn't work, there are two other bills brought to you by Senator Bright:

S 623 is lovingly called the Human Heartbeat Protection Act (sigh), and its companion forced pregnancy bill is S 626, the incredibly named Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act.  What they really do is prohibit abortions at 12-weeks and 20-weeks.

Make no mistake.  Lee Bright is not much different than the Taliban who have radicalized the concept of Shariah law to control Muslim women.  He seeks the power and notoriety of fellow wackos Jim DeMint and Lindsey Graham.  One would hope that on the national stage he would become as neutralized as Todd Akin after his "legitimate rape" pronouncement.

But meanwhile, we have to deal with him here, in South Carolina, as he attempts to make his name by decimating the rights of women.

I believe the very first thing we should do is more appropriately name this fight.  By calling it abortion, we have allowed ourselves to be focused on the fetus, and whatever aspect of "life" the religious radicals want to speculate upon.

What we really have here is forced pregnancy.  What is being legislated is the right of the lawmaker to control a woman's body, and her trained medical doctor's treatment of her.

We don't have here anything like a concern for infants and children, and surely no concern for the welfare of a pregnant woman.  These laws come from ignorance and seek to coerce.  Whether a woman is being forced to wear a veil so as not to enflame the desires of men who cannot be expected to control themselves, or to carry to term a pregnancy that is not of her choice, the purpose is the same.

We need to loudly oppose these bills, and Senator Lee Bright.  We need to tell our legislators to stop forced pregnancy legislation.  We need to inform the people of South Carolina that this is going on, else we become the next state to fall victim to these most un-Christianlike religious freaks.  Our daughters, our sisters, our mothers, our friends and neighbors, are at the edge of the precipice, where their bodies and their lives will be under the control of the State.

If you asked Lee Bright, what he stands for is freedom from state control.  But what he means is the freedom to control.

He Said She Said They Said

I took the plunge and went to Mark Sanford's campaign website today.

Apparently, he can't find anything negative to say about anything Elizabeth Colbert Busch said.  So his strategy is to attack her through anyone she may have sat in the same room with, or who may have been mentioned in the same newspaper she may have read pretty much since the Clinton administration.

I know.  This is bizarre, but it really speaks of Sanford's desperation.  And his really weird reasoning processes.  Not to mention the lack of respect he has for the intelligence of his voting public.

For example, one of the two items on page one of the Sanford for Congress website claims that Colbert Busch is refusing to debate with Sanford despite the fact that a debate is scheduled for April 29th.  Apparently, the Sanford campaign made up a story that his opponent had agreed to a debate on the 17th and then claimed that she backed out. And then claims that she has "no time for debates."  And then, in case you hadn't yet got the point he adds:  "Since Colbert Busch won't debate...."  Even though she in fact, will.

The real point of this no-debate nonsense, though, is to highlight all those commie pinko left-wing liberals that she would rather be meeting with in DC on the day of that fictitious debate.  The point being that she is actually fund raising among people of her own party, while claiming that she will bring an independent mind to the issues facing Congress.  Which I guess means that Sanford will not.

I don't know.  I think when it comes to infamous people supporting your campaign, I would have to go with a few of Mark's big dollar donors.  You've probably heard of David Koch, of Americans for Prosperity fame, who while helping fund Mitt Romney's run for the White House, also released a letter to members of Congress warning them not to support aid to Hurricane Sandy victims.  Then there is perennial Rick Santorum fan Foster Friess, whose real claim to fame may not be so much his great wealth or bad judgment in backing candidates, but his cute comment about how back in his day, women used to put Bayer aspirin between their knees for cheap birth control.

Other donors to Sanford's campaign are billionaire and hedge fund manager extraordinaire, Richard Chilton, Jr., and the ever hilarious Fred Malek whose scandals just have to be enumerated, as did Elspeth Reeve in The Atlantic Wire last year:

Every year or so, poor old Fred Malek, the GOP fundraiser, has to suffer through a callback to his youthful indiscretions, like that one crazy time in his twenties that he and his friends were caught drunkenly barbecuing a dog on a spit, or the wacky moment in his thirties when he counted the Jews in the Bureau of Labor Statistics so President Nixon could demote them, or the hilarious time in his sixties when the Securities and Exchange Commissioned ordered him to personally pay a $100,000 fine for allegedly using taxpayer funds to reward a political supporter. *(Youth!)

Finally, let's not accuse Mark of just having out-of-town big name friends.  Thomas Ravenel, who Sanford was forced to suspend from his position as Treasurer in 2007 after indictment on federal charges of cocaine distribution, has no hard feelings.  He donated $500 to the campaign.

I think I'll take a liberal's support over that cast of characters any day.

The other item on the home page of the website features all that fear-mongering the-union-is-coming-to-take-your-jobs nonsense with regard to Boeing's move to North Charleston.  There is a strident cartoon that features how stupid we are here in South Carolina.  There are two notable things about this article:  first of all, it doesn't mention how many gazillion dollars our current governor and friend of Sanford gave out in tax breaks to the Boeing corporation, and secondly, it has absolutely nothing to do with Colbert Busch.

So Mark Sanford, whose lies put South Carolina in the national headlines more than once during his gubernatorial career, wants us to just trust him one more time.

But the best he can do on the front page of his website is spin more lies about his opponent.

Who will you trust?

Vote

Elizabeth Colbert Busch

May 7

Fear Feeding Fear Feeding Terrorism Feeding Fear

My son, in Boston, is safe tonight.  But when one of us is attacked, aren't we all?

It is the NRA, in the name of the weapons makers and sellers, that have for wealth and power instilled fear in the most fearful among us.

It is the idiots we have elected to Congress, who are afraid of taking a moral stand against weapons, for wealth and votes, who have refused to stand tall against those who raise arms against us.

Because of this, terrorists feel free to wield bombs, as well as guns, against us.  And each time we are attacked, our enemies in the NRA and in Congress feed the fear.

They claim that we need weapons to defend ourselves from our government.  And this is what weakens us, and makes us vulnerable to those who would use those weapons -- that we are afraid to give up -- against us.

I don't pledge allegiance to a flag, but I trust my country far more than those who are screaming -- screeching -- about the 2nd Amendment.  And I don't praise my god against your god, but I try to live under a set of morals that is universal.

As long as we fear, we are vulnerable.  As long as we fear, we will be led.  As long as we fear, we will not be acting for what is right, only for what will momentarily quell the fear but will only make us more vulnerable.

We need to elect politicians that will act for what is moral, and will not feed our fear for their gain.

Or we will continue to be attacked and afraid and attacked yet again.

A gun on every corner will not protect us from those carrying guns.  And when we are afraid, those with weapons will always find a way to attack.

Win-Win for the NRA

I'm not really impressed with our dysfunctional Congress slowly coming around to background checks for gun purchases.  For one thing, it's nowhere near enough to change the tragic increase in gun violence.  For another thing, this is going to likely be an attack on that catchall  category of people we call the "mentally ill."

The shooter at Sandy Hook took one of his mother's guns.  Now, call me cynical but a woman who has had some problems with the school but maintains what sounds like an armory maybe was a contributing factor in this tragedy.  After all, she did take her mentally ill son out to target practice as a way of attempting to bond.  Either way, she would not have been affected by a background check law.

The Aurora shooter had apparently stolen a gun from a friend or acquaintance.

The Tucson shooter was allowed to buy a gun because his name did not appear when a background check was performed, although he had been suspended from college due to "mental health problems."

And this is where the right to own a semi-automatic weapon smacks into the right to be mentally ill.

Most people who are mentally ill, even those who are suspended from colleges, are not going to go on a shooting rampage.  Their right to private medical records is being trashed so that we can continue to buy and sell assault weapons.

In a country that does not want to pay for mental health care, we are now branding a very large and diffuse group who also have constitutional rights.

And the reason has nothing to do with the right to bear arms.  It has to do with the right of arms manufacturers to increase their profits.

And let's make no mistake about the NRA's position here.  The NRA has no particular need to be rational, much less compromise.  If the idiots in Congress can be hooked into supporting having armed guards in schools, that's easy profit for the NRA's constituency, the arms manufacturers.  To hell with the deficit, war is war.  And if we don't get armed guards, it doesn't matter.  Because every time Wayne LaPierre or Lindsey Graham open their mouths about the Second Amendment, that small percentage of paranoid individuals who own all the guns in the country just head on out and buy a few more weapons, and a lot more ammunition.

So it's a win-win for the NRA and for our gun industry.

But I would like to get back to the slippery slope of identifying who is mentally ill.  If you are going to keep arms out of the hands of irrational and aggressive people, we need to look at some of the crazier statements made by some with power and celebrity.

We have Senator Graham bragging on how fast he can reload as an argument against limiting gun capacity.

And then there is Louis Gohmert who equates gun deaths with death by hammer.

Of course, there is Wayne "bad guy with a gun" LaPierre, whose vision for American is one of everybody locked and loaded.

Please don't forget Alex Jones, who turns apoplectic at the thought of someone taking his gun.

There's a very large leap when you decide to add the mentally ill to the NICS Index.  It's a fact that the dangerous mentally ill walk among us.  It's also a fact that they have the right to privacy.  They have the right to not take meds or get into therapy.  And, in fact, it is more likely that the dangerous mentally ill will be far harder to identify than those who are not dangerous.  So background checks will either be useless or a witch hunt.  Or both.

Now doesn't it make far more sense to take assault weapons off the streets?

No More Gimmicks

Mark Sanford is no stranger to gimmickry.  When he ran for the US House of Representatives in 1994 he went door to door handing out fake billion dollar bills to point out the dreaded government deficit.  He is at it again, with his reputed hand-made plywood signs that tout that he will save tax dollars.

Sanford truly is single-mindedly focused on saving money, but that doesn't mean he is going to save us money.  As governor, he paid $74,000 in fines on 37 ethics violations, agreeing to pay the fine in order to avoid a hearing.  His claims of innocence were based on his contention that the charges were unfair because others had done the same thing.

You should know that the ethics violations included spending tax dollars on personal travel expenses.

When Mark Sanford says he wants to save money, he is first and foremost talking about saving his own.

Not that he doesn't stand up for his principles.  For example, in 2009 he fought the state legislature over whether to take federal stimulus money.  Sanford of course refused the stimulus dollars.  When the legislature overrode his veto he filed a lawsuit against the state.  That's right, during the economic crisis, not only was Sanford refusing money that would help keep teachers, police and firefighters employed, he was using South Carolina's resources to fight the state legislature's legally won right to accept the funds.

So we know that Sanford is obsessive over money, but we also know, from his record as governor, that his judgment is poor, and he will cost us more money than he would ever save.

We also know that he is so convinced of the rightness of his own beliefs that he will never compromise.

For some, that attitude may be desirable in a member of Congress.  But for those of us who are feeling the effects of a do-nothing Congress, of "representatives" whose purpose is to prevent government from doing its job while continuing to take its salaries and perks, we know we don't want Mark Sanford adding to the dysfunction.

We have a better alternative.  Elizabeth Colbert Busch is businesswoman who has successfully coordinated university research and corporate interests toward creating a burgeoning wind turbine industry in South Carolina.

Isn't it time we elected someone to the House of Representatives that will work for us rather than do nothing and pocket the difference?

Elizabeth Colbert Busch

House of Representatives

Vote on May 7