Being the Change I Wish to See

Obama to Cantor: "Don't Call My Bluff"

Today is Thursday. Tuesday, the Republicans surrendered and quit negotiating for anything they wanted for raising the debt ceiling. President Obama did not accept their surrender or the conditions they proposed.

First, by quitting, the Legislative branch is refusing to do its job. The President found that to be completely unacceptable. They aren’t getting off Scott-free. Governing takes work, it takes compromise, and it takes those we elected to step up and do what is hard to do. This means these divorced-from-reality Republicans (we’re talking to you, Eric Cantor) will have to stuff their ideology and pledges to Grover Norquist in a drawer, grow a spine, and pay the country’s debts.

The Republicans proposed to give President Obama the full authority to request a bill to raise the debt ceiling. The bill would contain the debt ceiling hike and language that the amount ($2.5 trillion) must be offset by budget cuts, eliminate tax loopholes and some subsidies, and enforce all tax laws to improve revenue collections.

Are red lights and sirens going off in your head? They are in mine.

By adding the spending cut and revenue hike language, it takes a lot of heat off the Legislative branch, and puts it on the President. But the debt ceiling would be raised and the President would decide what is cut and what revenue is increased. The Legislative branch would not be able to interfere with any decisions the President makes.

Here’s the kicker. The President would request the bill from Congress. The Congress would write a bill disapproving the President’s request to raise the debt ceiling and offset the hike with cuts and revenue increases, as described above. The debt ceiling would not be a one-time number increase either. It would be increased in three increments through December 2012.

In my head, the lights just got redder and the sirens just got louder.

The House and Senate would pass the bill of disapproval and send it to the President for signature or veto. The President would veto the bill, thereby raising the debt ceiling and giving himself full authority and responsibility to decide what is cut and what revenue is raised. There would not be enough votes in the Senate to override the President’s veto, and probably not in the House either.

Such a bill would put all the budget cuts and revenue increases on the President’s shoulders alone. Republicans would then use each incremental increase against Obama throughout the 2012 campaign.

Were I President Obama, I would not have agreed to those terms either.

By surrendering, the Republicans lost the game. They emasculated themselves to a President who has the balls to have three pirates shot in the head and successfully have Osama bin Laden found and killed. This President will not be held hostage, nor will he allow the country to be held hostage by a minority rogue group of ideologues. They underestimated his willingness to negotiate and put things on the table to mean he is weak and would cave in to their every demand.

Talks to raise the debt ceiling resumed yesterday, continued today, and will continue with the Republicans in a weaker position as each day passes and gets closer to August 2.

What will likely happen is some bill with cuts and/or revenue increases will come out of the House, and make it through the Senate. If it’s a reasonable bill and contains a balance of revenue and cuts, the President will sign it.

If it is not reasonable or only contains cuts, the President could still veto it at 11:00 p.m. on August 1 and still get a single-sentence debt ceiling increase passed and signed before midnight when the default would actually happen.

The President and Democrats would end up with the needed bill with no strings attached. This is how debt ceilings have always been handled. There may have been a bit of jockeying, but they never went so far as to think a default could be allowed.

If no debt ceiling increase bill passes by midnight on August 1, the President can invoke the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, avoiding a default.

To push Republicans along, Moody’s is threatening to drop the U.S. bond rating from AAA to AA, and Standard & Poor’s is threatening to downgrade the U.S.’s credit rating, which would be very bad.

See my recent post “What will happen if the U.S. doesn’t raise the debt ceiling?” for more information on the consequences of a default.

Photo from Huffington Post, July 14, 2011

Technorati Tags: Autust 2 2011, Barack Obama, choosing to ignore facts, debt ceiling talks continue, Eric Cantor, GOP surrender not accepted, national debt ceiling

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Charles Darwin, the author of On the Origin of Species and the man who discovered evolution and wrote the scientific doctrine of it, was extremely torn between his faith and love for his wife and the factual science he learned from his many years of study of the data and samples he collected on his 5 year journey on the HMS Beagle. He didn’t publish his book until after his wife’s death because she believed fundamentally in the Bible stories of creation, and they were the underpinnings of her faith.

We now know that evolution is more than a theory and has been studied thoroughly for more than 150 years. In 150 years, no one has found any defensible evidence that disproves Darwin’s theory of evolution. People have attempted to make up evidence, but none has been found using the scientific method.

No one bought “Creation” to distribute and show in U.S. theaters because they thought there might be right-wing backlash? Schools take backlash for teaching evolution all the time. Theaters can’t risk a little backlash, even in progressive cities like New York, Boston, San Francisco or LA? Wussies. Since when did the art world become noncontroversial?

Rachel’s point is a vitally important one. What does this attitude mean for the U.S. long-term? Has America decided facts are no longer important? The Republicans surely seem to have decided that over the past 8-9 years. By deciding that the study of facts and rational thought are not important, where will that lead the country 20-30 years from now? Will there once again be only 4 elements instead of 118? Will medicine devolve into the study of the humors (blood, bile, phlegm) again? This fact-free attitude scares me, too.

But it doesn’t scare me too much because the people who spout the vitriol about Darwin and evolution being the truth are a very noisy, but rather small minority of Americans. The problem is we have a silent majority. The majority needs to stand up, shout out the facts and drown out the wing-nuts once in a while. The loud minority seems to live within their own little world so much that they don’t know a much bigger world that vastly outnumbers them is out here.

I don’t believe that the majority of mainstream Americans disregard facts. A fair number of Americans either don’t believe evolution is the factual explanation or aren’t sure. If you add those two groups together, the result is larger than the number who believe it is the truth, making them the minority. But most of the people who aren’t sure say so because they haven’t studied biology and admit they aren’t sure because they don’t know the facts.

I don’t believe there will be fewer scientists in the future, there will probably be more. Schools today focus a lot harder on teaching 4 maths and 4 sciences in high school, algebra 1 & 2, geometry, advanced math, physical science, biology, chemistry and physics. Four English classes are also required now. In my generation, 1-2 sciences, 2 maths and 3 English courses were required if you weren’t college bound. Most students today are college bound, even if it’s a 2-year associate degree from a community college. Colleges are still filling up with young minds desiring lots of facts and hard, rational thought.

Even Catholic schools today teach evolution as the facts in biology and leave Biblical creation in religion class. Some southern Baptist preachers have stopped insisting the Bible’s creation stories are facts. They are stories that were told to primitive, semi-nomadic people to explain things they couldn’t understand. What do we do when we don’t understand something? We either ignore it or we make up stories to tell ourselves that make some sort of sense to us.

Understanding the real mechanisms (processes) of how the universe came to be, understanding the human body and modern medicine, and understanding and delving deeper into chemistry and physics in no way means one can’t still have deep faith in God. As a scientist myself, I believe God is much bigger, more complex and much harder to fathom than He was before modern science. It doesn’t mean He doesn’t exist. Personally, I believe God created the big bang and evolution. I never bought the “poof” theory of the Bible creation stories. Nothing on this planet or in the universe that we have studied happens without a process.

But going as far as not showing a movie in the U.S. about the writer of the Theory of Evolution and his dilemma between his faith and the facts he couldn’t ignore? Ridiculous!

Hopefully, “Creation” will be available for rent or purchase on DVD…

Technorati Tags: choosing to ignore facts, Creation the movie, creationism v evolution, Darwin, facts v fact-freedom

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