So this happened:

Five South Dakota lawmakers have introduced legislation that would require any adult 21 or older to buy a firearm “sufficient to provide for their ordinary self-defense.”

The bill, which would take effect Jan. 1, 2012, would give people six months to acquire a firearm after turning 21. The provision does not apply to people who are barred from owning a firearm.

Nor does the measure specify what type of firearm. Instead, residents would pick one “suitable to their temperament, physical capacity, and preference.”

The measure is known as an act “to provide for an individual mandate to adult citizens to provide for the self defense of themselves and others.”

That idiot John Cole thinks this is inherently ridiculous, but for all the wrong reasons; Atrios doesn’t think it makes sense either. But here’s the thing: of course it does, if you agree with the ‘logic’ of HCR.

Here’s how that ‘reasoning’ goes: everyone needs healthcare at some point in their lives, therefore it’s a necessary function. Instead of providing that necessary function via government, it is legal to FORCE your citizens to pay private companies up to 20% of their income, annually, who are then not actually required to provide any meaningful care, not even the care necessary to keep them alive.

True story.

So the gun-nut version of that logic is: everyone needs *security* at some point in their lives. Sensible people would want to provide this security through a public option, ie, government operated police and military forces. But HCR shows us that you can instead force citizens to pay unreliable private companies for their necessary functions instead.

A slightly better analogy would be to abolish all police forces in the state and then force everyone to hire Blackwater mercs to patrol the streets, but otherwise it’s a spot on comparison. Actually, I take that back; Blackwater is bound by contract laws, whereas insurance companies routinely violate their policies with impunity.

So you’d get a better deal from Blackwater. (and no, I won’t call them ‘Xe’ or whatever Artist-Formerly-Known-As name they’re using this week)

Remember this?

President Obama claims that he likes to take his time and check his facts before making public statements.

So why did he lie about Social Security to promote his tax giveaway to the wealthy?

President Barack Obama rewrote the history of the Social Security system during a Dec. 7 press conference, claiming that only widows and orphans originally benefited from the program.

…

But the president’s claim is not true. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law in 1935, benefits were not originally intended just for widows and orphans. From the SSA’s own historical page:

SSA: The two major provisions relating to the elderly were Title I- Grants to States for Old-Age Assistance, which supported state welfare programs for the aged, and Title II-Federal Old-Age Benefits. It was Title II that was the new social insurance program we now think of as Social Security. In the original Act benefits were to be paid only to the primary worker when he/she retired at age 65. Benefits were to be based on payroll tax contributions that the worker made during his/her working life. Taxes would first be collected in 1937 and monthly benefits would begin in 1942. (Under amendments passed in 1939, payments were advanced to 1940.)

*cue sad trumpets*

In fact, Obama has it precisely backward; Social Security advanced its most critical, longest-lasting and core benefits FIRST, then expanded to cover widows and orphans, not the other way around.

This is important because it counteracts the core of his ‘point’; in Obama’s world, Good Moderate Centrist Ideas Advance Incrementally. There’s no goal that you can’t advance in tiny bits and pieces to make compromises and everyone feel all warm and fuzzy.

The real world doesn’t work that way; sometimes a compromise is worse than no policy at all, like with his ‘health care reform’, which delivers the citizens into serfdom to line Wellpoint’s pockets.

It’s true that Social Security advanced over time, but that’s because its core, critical, initial function was solidly designed and wildly popular. You can build, but you need to build on success, on a solid foundation, a well-executed central portion of your plan. Obama doesn’t believe that because it means there’s not always room to bargain with his friends across the aisle, so he twists the facts about the single most immensely successful Progressive program of all time to fit his pet political theories.

Think it’s a casual slip-up? Well, if it is, then he’s about as incurious and ill-educated as our last Commander in Chief, because he’s been peddling this revisionist history (also known as a ‘lie’) despite being called on it, for months:

This isn’t the first time the president has made the error when discussing Social Security’s origins. The conservative Media Research Center’s Newsbusters.org found the president made a similar claim during an interview with Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart back in October of this year.

When the hacks at Newsbusters are better scholars of Progressive history than you are, you have a serious problem.

It’s not often we get to see a smaller story that so perfectly crystalizes a large social problem but this one out of Arizona sums up America’s woes very well:

Late last month, Mark Price, an Arizona father who had been battling leukemia for a year, died due to complications related to chemotherapy treatment he was receiving. Price had been awaiting a bone marrow transplant, but the state’s Medicaid program — Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System (AHCCCS) — had denied his application due to cuts to funding for transplant programs championed by Gov. Jan Brewer (R) and fellow Republicans. At the last minute, an anonymous donor came forward and offered to pay the $250,000 for the procedure, but by then it was too late.

Defending the decision to deny AHCCCS the money to pay for Price’s transplant, Brewer said that the “bottom line is that the state only has so much money and we can only provide so many optional kinds of care, and those are one of the options that we had to take” — implying that saving Price’s life was “optional.”

This is actually the second death as a result of Brewer’s cruelty:

Now, the University of Arizona Medical Center has told the press that another patient passed away in late December because they were unable to get their organ transplant funded. Although the attending physicians declined to release the name of the patient out of respect for the family’s privacy, they confirmed that the patient that passed away was one of the 98 Arizonans cut off from organ transplants by Brewer and the GOP-controlled state legislature. He “was our patient. He was on our list,” said surgery department spokeswoman Jo Marie Gellerman.

By completely removing the funding for organ transplants, monstrous sadist Brewer has created a perverse form of serial murder, where she gets to watch 98 innocent people die, one by one, and suffer no legal consequences. She’s the John Wayne Gacy of gubernatorial politics, only nobody’s talking about putting her in prison for two murders to date, and 96 more to come.

And here’s the rub that transforms this sociopathic, cold-blooded sadism from a bizarre and horrific sideshow in Arizona, state of the damned, into a window on all that’s wrong with American society. Not only is this monstrous, and cruel, and evil, but it’s also precisely, absolutely the wrong policy on amoral, technocratic grounds too, which has brought out some of the last sane or principled elements in the Republican party, believe it or not:

After learning about the plight of the 98 Arizonan patients, Steven Daglas, an Illinois State GOP Central Committeeman, worked with several others to analyze the Arizona state budget and finances to develop funding solutions that would allow the state to fully fund the transplants for all of the remaining patients without actually raising any new revenue. The possible solutions included using $2 million from an AIG settlement that the state of Arizona will receive or “transferring $1.2 million in funds that Arizona once planned to use to build bridges for endangered squirrels.” Yet even after repeatedly sending his proposal to Brewer since December, Daglas has received zero response from the governor. He told The Arizona Republic that she may be ignoring his proposal out of the fear that he’s trying to politically damage her, but he explained, “I’m a Republican guy from Illinois…We’re just concerned about these transplant patients and want to help“:

…

As Arizona98.com notes, “The fact our mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters (hard-working citizens and good people) have been deemed expendable at a price of $13,877.56 per human life still does not make sense.”

Update
“I refuse to believe that any person or state will spend $1.25 million to save 5 squirrels a year, but not 98 human beings. It can’t be true. That just doesn’t make any sense,” Daglas told ThinkProgress.

Of course it is true, unfortunately. I’m all in favor of bridges to help wildlife cross roads, so the demagoguing on the basic idea of a wildlife crossing bridge is also unfortunate. More to the point though, look what we’re talking about in terms of raw economics. Under 14k to save a human life.

Think about that for a moment. Arizona has decided that it won’t spend 14k to save a human life. How much, in a cold, detached, purely capitalistic sense, is a human life worth?

Well, there’s considerable disagreement on that point, but it’s definitely far more than 14k a year. For example, GDP per capita in the United States, even during this awful downturn, is about $45,000. It absolutely and completely makes perfect economic sense, from a Scrooge-esque point of view, to spend 14k to ensure that you continue to get, on average, 45k pumped back into society. That’s a 300% return on your investment, assuming that the person only lives one additional year! Of course, many transplant patients will live far longer than that.

This is where America’s insanity becomes manifest. Not only are we cruel, monstrous, and inhumanly sociopathic, we’re also incredibly, inexplicably stupid and self-destructive. Evil is one thing; self-injurious evil is another. America isn’t just crazy, it seems full to the brim with self-loathing, slashing at its wrists even as it tries to destroy anyone and everyone around it in the global community.

It should go without saying that this strategy does not have great long-term prospects. America will be brought down, not by the might of an ideological adversary like the Soviet Union, or by the nebulous forces of international terrorism, nor even by its own blackened heart, but by our short-sighted stupidity.

In Mel Brooks satire ‘Spaceballs’ perhaps the best line comes from Dark Helmet, speaking on the nature of Good and Evil:

Dark Helmet: So, Lone Star, now you see that evil will always triumph because good is dumb.

Of course, what Helmet failed to see is that evil can, in fact, be even dumber, self-destructive as well as ruthless, and thus lead to its own destruction. So it is with Arizona, and America, in the early 21st century.