A Simpsons Classic.

Back in the early 1980’s, the wonderous Reagan Administration, and society as a whole, did a bang up job in reacting to the AIDS outbreak. One of the reactionary responses was to prohibit gay men who had sex after 1977 from donating blood. Would it shock you to learn that that ban remains alive and well today, in the 21st century?

Not a single piece of scientific evidence supports the ban,” said Sen. John Kerry, a Democrat, who joined 16 other Democrats and independent Sen. Bernie Sanders in writing Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Margaret Hamburg.

The lawmakers stressed that the science has changed dramatically since the ban was established in 1983 at the advent of the HIV-AIDS crisis. Today donated blood must undergo two different, highly accurate tests that make the risk of tainted blood entering the blood supply virtually zero, they said.

The senators said that while hospitals and emergency rooms are in urgent need of blood products, “healthy blood donors are turned away every day due to an antiquated policy and our blood supply is not necessarily any safer for it.”

Brian Moulton, chief legislative counsel for the Human Rights Campaign,the nation’s largest gay rights group, said they are hopeful that the policy, last reviewed in 2006, will change under President Barack Obama, “who is interested in looking at all the policies that have a discriminatory effect.” The goal, he said, is “to have policies in place that are based on the science” rather than “any discriminatory idea about our community.”

So, wait a minute. What the FUCK! It would be one thing if this policy had not been reviewed since its enactment since 1983, although I would wonder why the Clinton Administration did not review it, since we knew in the 1990’s how to test for HIV. But the policy was reviewed in 2006 during the Bush Administration, and those sick fucks decided to keep the ban in place!!??!!

Republicans and conservatives in general really need to get over their homophobia already.

He is a liar.

This is him last week.

Congressman Castle, who’s running for the Senate, says if he were a Senator now, he’d have joined fellow Republicans in voting to end debate on a 15 billion-dollar jobs bill. […]

Castle says he likes the bill that will be voted on [in the Senate] later this week because it’s more focused on creating private-sector jobs than a job creation measure that passed the House months ago or last year’s economic stimulus package.

That bill that Mike Castle liked so much passed the Senate last week. It went to the House and passed yesterday.

Mike Castle voted against it.

Mike Castle’s flip floppery is now so blatant, frequent, and instanteous, that you cannot chalk up this latest betrayal to a simple change of mind on his part. The truth is Mike Castle was never going to vote for any jobs bill, and he will never vote for any jobs bill. He lied to us last week. Each and every one of us.

The only possible way you can defend him is to say that Castle never said he would vote for the Senate bill if he were in the House. And if that is the case, then you have to assume that Mike Castle is so insane that he votes regularly against bills he likes, and that he enjoys being made appear as a fool.

Delaware does not deserve a Senator so mercurial and so deceptive.

Scott P makes an analogy I have not noticed before, and he is partly right:

Let’s suppose that instead of health insurance, the government mandated that everyone pay for a retirement account. If they were to show ideologically consistency (which is by no means required, or even desired, by today’s GOP), conservatives would be sharply opposed to this measure. However, I don’t hear many Republicans calling for a repeal of, or constitutional challenge to, Social Security. Now, I don’t doubt that many conservatives would love to do away with Social Security, but deep down their main issue is that it takes money from people who support and vote for them, and gives it to people who don’t — not that the big, bad government makes them take part. But again, the program would not work if people were able to pay in on a voluntary basis. Why would a 25 year old pay into a program that they won’t see any money from for 40 years? But without everyone paying in, the program doesn’t work.

Actually, I think your standard big business rich Republican hates Social Security because they hate the poor, and believe in that ridiculous addage that everyone must pick up themselves by their own straps. As Colin Powell once famously said “What if they do not have boot straps?” But I digress.

Where the analogy fails is that Social Security is a public government system. The analogy would be fine if we have public option insurance (a medicare for all) plan available. But right now we do not. Currently, the individual mandates would require us to buy private insurance. I digress one more time to note that while the public option may not pass with the HCR bill now, it will eventually within the next five years as it is popular, it will drive down costs, and idiot Senators will probably need to see the reform plan in action without the public option for a year or two to see that it is needed.

The true analogy that really exposes GOP hyprocrisy on the Individual Mandate is that the GOP’s own Social Security Reform plan back in 2005 would have required we all buy private retirement plans that invest in the stock market. So obviously they have no problem, constitutional or otherwise, with an individual mandate. They just have a problem with a Democrat in the White House.

“The U.S. economy shed fewer jobs than expected in February and the unemployment rate was steady at 9.7% despite stormy weather on the East Coast last month, which the government said may have temporarily hit payrolls and work hours,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

This probably means, save for the blizzards last month, that we would have had a drop in the rate and a rise in the jobs created.

I admit, while I am no fan of either downstate Representative John Atkins (R-Drunk) or Senator Joe Booth (R-Georgetown), I thought the bill they were cosponsoring, HB 357, which allegedly would forbid Delaware’s housing authorities from prohibiting their tenants to own firearms, was initially innocuous, because on first impression it seems to be a law that would allow law abiding sane citizens without criminal records the possession of firearms in their own homes, no matter if their own homes are public housing. And it is obvious why HB 357 is being sold to us in that fashion, because even I as a liberal who recognizes that the Second Amendment does exist and people have a right to keep a gun in their own home.

My mistake was not reading the legislation yet, only reports about the legislation. Luckily for us, Governor Markell and his aides did read HB 357. In a letter to both Atkins and Booth earlier this week, Governor Markell indicates that the bill goes way beyond that.

The legislation, Markell wrote, “will put the public at significant risk if enacted. This legislation prohibits state and local governments, our universities and colleges, our schools and others from imposing or enforcing common sense measures designed to protect our citizens from illegal gun violence.”

If the bill were to become law, Markell wrote, it would undo regulations that prohibit guns:

• In day care centers and preschools.

• On school buses.

• In the classroom buildings, dormitories and sporting facilities of the University of Del- aware, Delaware State University and Delaware Technical & Community College.

• In neighborhood group homes for people with mental illnesses.

• On DART buses and in taxis and limousines.

• In state parks and forests outside of hunting seasons and areas designated for hunting, including on beaches and in playground areas.

The bill also would undo regulations prohibiting most state employees from possessing firearms while on state property or conducting state business, and in various facilities operated by public housing authorities.
“Reversing these protections would not be a rational extension of the right to bear arms, but rather a dangerous introduction of guns into settings where there is reasonable and appropriate basis to exclude them,” Markell wrote.

Booth said he intended to address only the housing authority bans and protect the tenants’ Second Amendment rights, not to undo a laundry list of other firearms regulations.

Does Booth even read his own legislation? Did he even write it? Because listen to what an affliate of the NRA has to say about the bill:

House Bill 357 would address a patchwork quilt of regulations, such as those cited by Markell, according to John Thompson, president of the Delaware State Sportsmen’s Association, a National Rifle Association affiliate. “This bill was written to reach any regulation by a state agency that would prohibit firearm possession or ownership,” said Thompson, a lawyer and the sportsmen’s association’s lobbyist in Legislative Hall.

Thompson and his underlings at the DSSA and his affliates at the NRA wrote this bill. And they intended this bill to do away with every common sense gun control regulation we have in this state. And they found Joe Booth and John Atkins to do their bidding for them. Joe Booth and John Atkins are either a fool in not knowing what their own legislation intends to do, or they are liars attempting to sell a bill of goods to Delawareans.

If Joe Booth or John Atkins wants to allow citizens who live in public housing to own guns, fine, let’s have that debate, and let’s write that narrowly tailored legislation. But for the love of God, do it yourself and do not be a stooge for the NRA.

Let’s see which party is absolutely evil in its use of the most devastating anti-democratic immoral legislative tool ever invented. Indeed, when you use reconciliation, God kills a kitten.

E.J. Dionne lays out the GOP lie:

Republicans, however, don’t want to talk much about the substance of health care. They want to discuss process, turn “reconciliation” into a four-letter word and maintain that Democrats are “ramming through” a health bill. It is all, I am sorry to say, one big lie — or, if you’re sensitive, an astonishing exercise in hypocrisy.

In an op-ed in Tuesday’s Post, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) offered an excellent example of this hypocrisy. Right off, the piece was wrong on a core fact. Hatch accused the Democrats of trying to, yes, “ram through the Senate a multitrillion-dollar health-care bill.”

No. The health-care bill passed the Senate in December with 60 votes under the normal process. The only thing that would pass under a simple majority vote would be a series of amendments that fit comfortably under the “reconciliation” rules established to deal with money issues. Near the end of his column, Hatch conceded that reconciliation would be used for “only parts” of the bill. But why didn’t he say that in the first place?

Hatch grandly cited “America’s Founders” as wanting the Senate to be about “deliberation.” But the Founders said nothing in the Constitution about the filibuster, let alone “reconciliation.” Judging from what they put in the actual document, the Founders would be appalled at the idea that every major bill should need the votes of three-fifths of the Senate to pass.

Hatch quoted Sens. Robert Byrd and Kent Conrad, both Democrats, as opposing the use of reconciliation on health care. What he didn’t say is that Byrd’s comment from a year ago was about passing the entire bill under reconciliation, which no one is proposing. As for Conrad, he made clear to The Post’s Ezra Klein this week that it’s perfectly appropriate to use reconciliation “to improve or perfect the package,” which is the only thing that Democrats have proposed doing through reconciliation.

Hatch said that reconciliation should not be used for “substantive legislation” unless the legislation has “significant bipartisan support.” But surely the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts, which were passed under reconciliation and increased the deficit by $1.7 trillion during his presidency, were “substantive legislation.” The 2003 dividends tax cut could muster only 50 votes. Vice President Dick Cheney had to break the tie. Talk about “ramming through.”