Catching up...

So many weird things have been happening lately, it's hard to keep up and sometimes the AAADD (Age Affected Attention Deficit Disorder) just halts you in your tracks. But here's an attempt:

Last Tuesday, Kentucky voters, a perpetually clueless lot apparently, chose eye surgeon Randal "Rand" Paul, son of Ron Paul, as the Republican candidate for the US Senatorial elections to be held later this year.  The next day, in a painfully witless performance on The Rachel Maddow Show, Rand stuck to his position that owners of private businesses, like, say, restaurants, should be able to refuse service to African Americans or anyone else, all the while insisting that he, himself, would not frequent such establishments and that the "free market" would take care of them. I wonder...  He also suggested that the Americans with Disabilities Act should be repealed. And, just to put the ass in dumbass, he claimed that President Obama is being too harsh in blaming British Petroleum for the Gulf of Mexico clustershag that, as I write, is destroying the wetlands around the Mississippi River delta and moving east toward Florida. After all, he said, accidents do happen. As someone else (I've lost track) responded, that's just what you want to hear from the person who's performing surgery on your eyes.

And for good measure, John Stossel, one-time champion for consumers' rights but now a pathetic media whore for FAUX News, backed up Paul, saying that he thought that part of the 1964 Civil Rights Act should be repealed.

The Paul's, and Stossel, claim to be "libertarians," but they're the wrong kind of libertarian. They belong to the selfish, hyper-individualistic, anti-social Ayn Rand-inspired right-libertarians. There are other libertarians, the left-libertarians or libertarian socialists, who combine a desire for reasonable individual freedom with the realization that humans are social animals and that there are many social functions and problems that can only be handled at the scale of government.

Moving on...  Also this week, the Texas State School Board voted to doom Texas schoolchildren to a right-wing revisionist fantasy view of history that, among other things, ignores Thomas Jefferson while making a hero of Joe McCarthy, claims that the Founders intended the US to be a christian nation, and suggests that the United Nations challenges US sovereignty. They also tried to replace "Atlantic Slave Trade" with "Atlantic Triangular Trade," I suppose because that sounds so much more, you know, bloodless, but that, at least, failed to make it into the new history standards.

I wonder what'll happen next week...