Definitions

When is a tax increase not a tax increase?

I don't know. It seems that reducing subsidies on oil companies is "a tax increase", but reducing them on people getting medical care is, "a needed reduction in spending".

That, at least is the message the Republicans in the House and Senate are sending me. Calls to recoup moneys being paid out to oil companies are being vigorously fought by John Boehner, who has said, "raising taxes" is "off the table" to deal with the perceived imminent disaster caused by our national deficit.

Never mind that passing a new tax cut (the Bush Tax Cuts) was seen as, "responsible".

Never mind that the proposal to move Medicare to a "voucher" system which won't cover the costs of the insurance it replaces (while almost certainly increasing overhead, and moving money to insurers.... the same insurers doing things like, "purging" small businesses who have the gall to hire employees who actually use the insurance the paid for).

No, that you see, is, "Financial Responsibility", and "looking out for the future", where gas will continue to be cheap, and people won't be paying good tax dollars to get something they personally need.

No, they will be spending billions to see to it that the folks who brought you The entertainments of Deepwater Horizon, flammable water continue to get a government paycheck, on top of their record profits.

Ok for me...

I've been thinking about the flap over Common speaking as part of a poetry reading at the White House.


More to the point I've been looking at the messages being sent, and how who is saying what seems to matter more than what was being said.

Which makes me think this isn't about Common, per se, because Common wasn't saying anything we've not heard a lot of; save that Common is, "on the left", and black.

What was the message in the poem being protested? It was that if the police are being unjust, then the speaker in the poem was reserving the right to resist them. That's one of the core arguments of the people who are more insistent on the right to keep and bear arms than I am. It's the stated message of the, "open carry" protesters. They insist they aren't showing up at political rallies to intimidate. They are peaceful, but they want to remind, "The Government" that the people reserve the right to turn them out, by force, if they utterly fail to treat them fairly.

How does that differ, in content, from this:

I walk like a warrior from them I won’t run
On the streets they try to beat us like a drum
In Cincinnati, another brother hung
Again he won’t see the sun, with his family stung
They want us to hold justice, but you’ve handed me none

That's a specific grievance, the deaths of fifteen black men in Cincinatti, either in police confrontations, or in police custody.

And it's not as if the Open Carry Movement is completely sanguine about the power of the police: Where, and when, it's legal to record the police

This is the sig-line of a poster in that thread (he is an active member of the forum, with 6,333 posts in 2 1/2 years).

I am not anti Cop I am just pro Citizen.

U.S. v. Minker, 350 US 179, at page 187
"Because of what appears to be a lawful command on the surface, many citizens, because of their respect for what only appears to be a law, are cunningly coerced into waiving their rights, due to ignorance." (Paraphrased)

I don't that attitude is all that out of line. I also don't know that it's not consonant with Common's poem.

But let's look at someone with a slightly higher profile, Sharon Angle, erstwhile candidate for US Senator for Nevada, "I hope that's not where we're going, but you know if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying my goodness what can we do to turn this country around? I'll tell you the first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out."

It's a bit ambiguous what she meant by that (she was running against Reid). She said she wasn't arguing for shooting Reid, but just what Common meant could be called ambiguous too.

So Common's message, that the police/state, might be overreaching, and abusing the people they are supposed to serve, and armed force might be needed to confront/combat them, seems to be something The Right doesn't mind, when people like them say it.

So what, I am forced to wonder, made Common, "not like them,"?