The Republic of T.

I didn’t think it was possible, but I found something more pathetic than John Boehner scrambling for GOP support for his debt limit bill, only to end up postponing the vote indefinitely. More pathetic even than Boehner telling is caucus to “get their asses in line” and vote for his bill, only to tell his caucus the next day to “get their asses in line” for a big kiss — if it’ll get them to vote for his bill.

What could be more pathetic? They may have brought Boehner to his knees, but the tea partiers literally don’t know what they’re doing in the legislative process.

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“Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.”

~ Mark Twain ~

If our economy was the RMS Titanic, Republicans would be like an ambitious first mate, so eager to seize power from the captain that he steers the ship of state into an iceberg, thinking he’ll take over when the captain goes down with the ship. Republicans have forgotten — or no longer care — they’re on the boat too, and their working very hard to ensure that the country will be nearly ungovernable should they succeed in seizing the reins of government.

If it seems like the White House is arranging deck chairs on the Titanic, the GOP is busy measuring the the captain’s quarters for drapes, even as the ocean pours in. And the tea party orchestra plays on, with just one song on the playlist — “Under the Sea.”

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Answering the question, “Could rehab have saved Amy Winehouse?”, Patti Davis eloquently sums up what I tried to get across in two posts.

The truth is, overcoming an addiction is a solitary journey whether you drive through the gates of the best facility or sit in your room alone staring into the cavern in your soul you’ve tried so hard to run away from. Rehab can give you tools, but you walk the road alone. And as all of us who have made our way out of addiction will tell you, part of it was luck. There simply is no formula that can guarantee a way out, no trail of bread crumbs leading out of the forest. You grab onto something inside you, some part of you that has decided to live without the poisons you love so much, and you hope like hell you can hold on.

We still don’t know whether Winehouse took an overdose of drugs or a lethal combination or bad drugs (or none of the above), but her demons were visible for a long time. Those of us who have experienced the treacherous landscape of addiction and have lived to talk about it have known nights when we teetered on a dangerous boundary line. We held on and made it through. We got lucky. Others who tried just as hard couldn’t hold on — and faded to black.

She’s right.

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It seems like many people in Amy’s life who cared about her had also come to the realization that they couldn’t help her until she was ready to accept help. Again, Russell Brand put it better than anyone else.

When you love someone who suffers from the disease of addiction you await the phone call. There will be a phone call. The sincere hope is that the call will be from the addict themselves, telling you they’ve had enough, that they’re ready to stop, ready to try something new. Of course though, you fear the other call, the sad nocturnal chime from a friend or relative telling you it’s too late, she’s gone.

Frustratingly it’s not a call you can ever make it must be received. It is impossible to intervene.

Amy’s mother, seeing Amy for the last time just a day before her death, seemed to realize that her daughter’s death “only a matter of time.”

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She cheated herself. Like you knew she would.

I can’t say I was surprised by the new of Amy Winehouse’s death. When I heard about her last concert, and saw the video, I thought to myself, “She has a year, maybe more, unless somebody does something.”

And, yet, at the same time I knew that there was nothing anybody could do. No one, that is, except Amy.

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Here are some of the people writing about some of the stuff I wish I had time to write about, for July 19th through July 20th:

• The Ultimate Republican Threat –
• We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Breitbart –
• Why the Wealthiest Americans Are the Real ‘Job-Killers’ –
• Alan Grayson: Devil Take the Hindmost –
• Obama backs Respect For Marriage Act –
• Gay Rights: The Single Thing in this Country Getting Better –
• Senate Confirms First Openly Gay Federal Judge –
• Carl Pope: The Party of Crazy –
• Shirley Sherrod's Case Against Andrew Breitbart Begins –
• The confirmation of Paul Oetken –

I think I’m beginning to get Michelle Bachmann, after the whole migraine story.

The Minnesota Republican frequently suffers from stress-induced medical episodes that she has characterized as severe headaches. These episodes, say witnesses, occur once a week on average and can “incapacitate” her for days at time. On at least three occasions, Bachmann has landed in the hospital as a result.

“She has terrible migraine headaches. And they put her out of commission for a day or more at a time. They come out of nowhere, and they’re unpredictable,” says an adviser to Bachmann who was involved in her 2010 congressional campaign. “They level her. They put her down. It’s actually sad. It’s very painful.”

Bachmann’s medical condition wouldn’t merit public attention, but for the fact she is running for president. Some close to Bachmann fear she won’t be equal to the stress of the campaign, much less the presidency itself.

No, it’s not what you think.

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Casey Anthony is free, having been released from prison and whisked away to a secret post-prison life.

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Here are some of the people writing about some of the stuff I wish I had time to write about, for July 17th through July 18th:

• America’s Disappeared –
• Editorial: The Value of Medicaid –
• Op-Ed Columnist: Letting Bankers Walk –
• Robert Kuttner: The End Game: Saving Obama From Himself –
• The Republicans have no credibility on deficits –

"I want what I want when I want it."

Those are Eric Cantor’s words. No, they’re not words he said recently, but words he chose years ago, for his high school yearbook quote. And while it may seem unfair to bring them up now (After all, how many of us said or did things in high school that make us cringe now?), they’re actually a perfect distillation of not just Eric Cantor’s approach to the debt ceiling negotiations, but that of the tea party contingent he represents: They want what they want when they want it. Or else.

It doesn’t matter that most of the rest of us don’t want what they want. It doesn’t matter that what they want would be disastrous for the economy, and millions of American families. It’s what they want, and they want it now.

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Here are some of the people writing about some of the stuff I wish I had time to write about, for July 14th through July 15th:

• Wanker of the Day: Mitch McConnell –
• Wanker of the Day: Mitch McConnell –
• Wanker of the Day: Mitch McConnell –
• Wanker of the Day: Mitch McConnell –
• Wanker of the Day: Mitch McConnell –

Here are some of the people writing about some of the stuff I wish I had time to write about, for July 12th through July 14th:

• Wanker of the Day: Mitch McConnell –
• Greg Sargent:
  Bachmann on debt ceiling: Up is down, black is white –
• Sky Falls on Rupert Murdoch –
• ‘There’s no way they could possibly be this stupid’ –
• No Jobs + Shredded Safety Net = Disaster for Women –
• Why GOP leaders are looking for the exits –
• ‘I Am Not a Statistic’: The Invisibility of the Unemployed –
• The GOP’s Sick Priorities –
• Debt talks reveal the Republicans’ apocalyptic war on government –

The latest Michele Bachmann gaffe once again has eyes rolling and heads shaking among the commentariat. The irony is, it’s not really a gaffe. In fact, it’s not even that far from today’s conservative mainstream. It might even be closer to conservative orthodoxy than right-wing fringe. And that raises a serious question: What — or, more appropriately, WTF — has happened to the party of Lincoln?

By now, everyone has heard about Michele Bachmann’s latest gaffe. This time, it wasn’t a statement she made, but a statement she signed. The Family Leader, an Iowa-based conservative Christian organization led by Bob Vander Platts, introduced a pledge last week — “The Marriage Vow: A Declaration of Dependence upon MARRIAGE and FAMILY” — that Republican presidential candidates campaigning in Iowa were encouraged to sign.

Bachmann was the first to sign the pledge, which included this unfortunate statement as the first bullet point in its supporting argument.

Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA’s first African-American President.

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So, Newt Gingrich has refused to sign that anti-gay marriage pledge.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich refused to sign Iowa social conservative Bob Vander Plaats’s anti-gay-marriage pledge, saying through a spokesman that it had a long list of problems.

Mr. Vander Plaats already made one change, removing a sentence that suggested African American children fared better under slavery.

“We told him that we couldn’t sign it in its current form,” said Mr. Gingrich’s spokesman, R.C. Hammond. “We’re happy to work with him to get some more precise language.”

This? From America’s patriotic philanderer?

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• Sobriety Chip Web Clip Art
  (tags: sobriety AA addiction)

As of today, I’ve been clean and sober for 19 years. Nineteen years. Six thousand nine hundred and thirty five days, one at a time.

I remembered last night, while watching Intervention.

It’s kind of amazing when I stop and think about it, as I did this morning while we were getting the kids ready to go this morning; Dylan to daycare and Parker to day camp. It put our usual morning routine into perspective, because today I’m living I life I’d never have had if I hadn’t gotten sober when I did. In fact, I might not have been here at all, and I’d have missed all of this.

Now, one of the things that keep me going is that I never want to do anything that would take me away from the people I love.

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A light bulb burned out in our house last night. It popped when I turned on the light switch and — as dim bulbs usually do — burned intensely bright just before it went dark for good. That bulb reminds me of the Republican majority in the House, which is set to vote on a measure to repeal energy efficiency standards for light bulbs.

Republicans in Congress are pressing for a vote on one of the stranger elements of their environmental agenda a ban on the adoption of energy-efficient light bulbs.

If passed during Tuesday’s scheduled vote, a bill championed by presidential contender Michele Bachmann and others would repeal a law phasing out incandescent bulbs from 2012.

The beautiful irony of it is that the efficiency standard sponsored by a Republican representative and signed by George W. Bush himself.

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I’m livin’ in a box
I’m livin’ in a cardboard box…

“Living in a Box,” Living In A Box, 1987

As my early obsession with funky looking eco-cars shows, I’m sometimes drawn towards quirky things that go against the grain of the mainstream. So, of course I was intrigued by this video about the Eco-Cube — a project to “build a compact home” no bigger than 10x10x10 feet “in which one person could live a comfortable, modern existence with a minimum impact on the environment.”

Interesting, especially when you take a couple of things into consideration about housing and the current economic crisis/recession.

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Both Casey Anthony’s defense team and her parents issued statements after her acquittal. Her parents, in their statement, said something that the defense couldn’t say, but might have alluded to: We may never know what happened to Caylee.

Three years later, and we don’t know what happened to this child. Let’s remember there are countless missing children whose names we don’t even know. We don’t know what happened to them either, and may never know. There’s 48 cold cases of missing kids in Maryland alone.

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“If there was any justice in this world…” People usually say that when they believe they’ve witnessed a miscarriage of justice in either the legal or cosmic sense. Someone walks away scott free, though common sense and everything but concrete evidence says they’re guilty. Someone with little to recommend them in the way of talent, intelligence or ambition falls ass-first into good fortune, while others more talented and deserving toil in obscurity. Someone gets way more than their 15 minutes in the spotlight, while others get no time at all.

We’ve probably all said it, after witnessing things like those described above. “If there was any justice in this world,” somebody would be getting what we think they deserve. Of course, we don’t stop to think that “If there was any justice…” is just the flip side of saying, “There but for the grace of God go I.”

And so, we’ve finally come to the end of the Casey Anthony trial…

On the one hand, this doesn’t feel like justice.

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