On Tuesday, while the elections were going on, Jonathan Chait wrote, Netanyahu Clarifies His Chilling Vision for Post-Democratic Israel. The title refers to Netanyahu’s statement that he is against a two state solution — which he followed with a blatantly racist speech about the scary Arabs who were being brought in to vote in buses. So Netanyahu is an imperialist bigot. Everyone has always known that, but now it is explicit. And more to the point, now that is pretty much official Israeli policy.

Had the center-left Zionist Union managed to put together a coalition, it wouldn’t have changed much from an international standpoint. It would have been far better for the Israeli people. The Likud Party is basically libertarian. And domestically, they have overseen a huge increase in inequality. We know how this works from our experience here in the United States: people vote based upon their fears and while they are cowering in their homes, the power elite rob them blind. At least in Israel, there are actual things to fear. Americans are just pathetic.

But Chait wrote something that I am very skeptical about, “If Netanyahu prevails, the nature of Israel’s diplomatic alliance with the United States will have to change — the US cannot continue to extend its UN veto to a country whose government has formally disavowed negotiations.” I seriously doubt that. Chait seems to think our support of Israel is contingent on its good behavior. That isn’t true. I discussed the fundamental issue just last week, Ever More Anti-Venezuela Media Coverage. What our government thinks of other countries is not based upon them being good democracies; it is based on them allowing foreign investment and generally being positive toward the interests of our power elite. Israel could become an official apartheid state and we would claim it was fine just because. The mainstream media, of course, would follow along as it always does.

Interestingly, advocates for Palestine don’t seem to be upset about the election. Abir Kopty wrote, Knesset Elections Prove Again and Again That a Change From Within Is not Possible. Ali Abunimah at The Electronic Intifada wrote, Why I’m Relieved Netanyahu Won. He provided the take away line that seems to be shared among Palestine advocates, “Netanyahu’s re-election is like the ‘Nutrition Facts’ label on a box of junk food: it tells you about the toxic ingredients inside.”

It must be the case that Netanyahu knows that the United States will never abandon Israel. If he isn’t, he’s playing a very dangerous game. If Israel didn’t have the United States to back it, I’m afraid it would have been destroyed a long time ago. But even with US support, this is a questionable way to move. The explicit repudiation of a two state solution is likely to alienate a lot of countries. Of course, from Netanyahu’s standpoint, that may be great. The more external pressure there is on Israel, the more he and Likud can use it to push their elitist agenda to impoverish the poor and enrich the rich.

H/T: Max Blumenthal

According to Rebecca Shabad at The Hill, House GOP Budget Cuts $5.5T in Spending, Balances in Nine Years. She apparently does not mean this as a joke. And it is true that there is this thing that House Republicans are calling a budget and it offers up general categories where various committees should make cuts to programs that are under their authority. It’s the usual thing from Republicans: don’t get specific about cuts because the people generally don’t like what you would have to cut. And balancing the budget in eight years would require absolutely horrible cuts — cuts that would especially affect all those red states that voted in most of these bozos.

What’s especially interesting in the budget is how it does everything it can to repeal Obamacare. But as everyone should know by now, Obamacare actually saves the federal government money. What the Republicans don’t like about the healthcare law is that it raised taxes on the rich. That’s always been their primary problem with the law. So their attacks on Obamacare are a way to un-balance the federal government budget, in the name of giving — What a surprise! — tax cuts to rich people. Well played, oligarchs; well played!

Michael Hiltzik discussed cruelty of this, House Budget Proposes Repeal of an Incredibly Effective Law. He showed how the budget is at odds with the facts about Obamacare, Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security’s disability program. As usual, it is all about pushing the same old conservative ideas. This isn’t about balancing the budget. It is about helping their rich constituents and harming everyone else. And regardless of this fact, they will still get roughly half the votes in the next election.

A big part of the budget is the “block granting” of food stamps and Medicare. This is where they just take the money that they are currently providing in these programs and dump them on the states to do with as they please. But as Ezra Klein reported, How Republican Budgets Hide Huge Spending Cuts in Block Grants. The way this works is by locking in the funding levels. We all know that healthcare costs are rising at more than the rate of inflation; so over time, the funding would die out. Similarly, with food stamps, when a recession comes and more people need help, there won’t be any more money available to help them. The Republicans know what they want to is unpopular, so they come up with these kind of gimmicks to hide what they are doing.

Just how serious is the budget? Not very. Shabad reported that Tom Price’s new budget would “reduce $400 billion in spending from [Paul] Ryan’s budget.” That’s the already savage and unrealistic pseudo-budget that Paul Ryan produced last year. You see, it has to be. When Ryan proposed to balance the budget in ten years, many Republicans were against this. How could it take ten years to balance the budget! That was deeply un-serious — a political con job. But still the far right of the party are delusional. So this year, they come back, thinking that the loons might accept eight years. They won’t, of course. They think you just cut everything but the military and everything will be fine. Deep thinkers they ain’t — and I’m not even talking about the social costs; such a move would throw the US economy (and thus also the world’s) into a far worse situation than we were in during the Great Depression. But government is the problem, am I right?!

Note also that if the Republicans did quickly balance the budget and throw the country into depression, this would change the results of the budget projections. The budget uses dynamic scoring — but very deceptively, of course. Price uses it to claim that cutting all this government spending is going to make the economy take off. But that won’t happen. Not only will the budget not be propped up as they suggest, it will go the other way. In fact, it could be so bad that the deficit gets worse because so much less tax revenue comes in.

But the budget is not meant to be serious. Even before the budget was released, Stan Collender at Forbes reported, GOP Has Nothing but Bad Choices on the Budget. He explained that the Republicans are trying to create a budget that can make its way to reconciliation — thus bypassing the Senate filibuster. But who cares? Obama will just veto it anyway. And because of that, there are a lot of hard-line conservatives who probably won’t vote for it. Because, you know, they should just balance the budget this year.

This is the status of the Republican Congress. This is what they call governing. They can’t even make their symbolic gestures work. It’s pathetic. So why is it that they control Congress?

On Friday, Michael Hiltzik wrote, In Obamacare Case, These Politicians Are Firing at Their Neediest Residents. It is about how people like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio are big proponents of the King v Burwell case, even though it is going to hurt huge numbers of the people they nominally represent. In Florida, for example, the average Obamacare subsidy people get is more than 75% — changing premiums from $376 to $82. If the Supreme Court find for the plaintiffs King, it will cost Florida more than $5 billion per year. He ended the article by asking them a rhetorical question, “Who in the world do you think you represent?”

More interesting to me is that “the attorneys general of Oklahoma, Alabama, Georgia, Nebraska, South Carolina and West Virginia” filed a friend-of-the-court brief on the side of the plaintiffs. These are people who really should care about the practical side of governing. But ideology trumps all for these people, it would seem. Notice that they are running their states in exactly the opposite way that their beloved private sector would. This is a simple matter: the federal government is offering free money to the people of these states. And these ideologues think it is better to deprive them.

If they wanted to, people like Attorney General Scott Pruitt, who was apparently the guy who pushed this whole thing, could make the case that conservative Social Security recipients always make, “We paid for this!” Oklahoma could just say that they are already taxed and so it just makes sense for them to take the benefits. There is a strange kind of irrationality in all of this. Just the same, Pruitt isn’t directly affected: he will still get his government provided healthcare. He’s only screwing the people of Oklahoma. But it does bring us back to Hiltzik’s question: who does he think he represents?

Georgia, which was also part of this brief, has 90% of the people buying insurance on the individual market getting subsidies. Oklahoma has the lowest percentage at 81%. These are just not numbers that politicians would push against if we lived in an actual democracy. The areas that most need Obamacare are the ones most likely to be harmed by the wishes of their politicians. And notice: these are not those hated welfare recipients; these are the working poor. And they are the ones who Republicans throughout the country think need extra hardships lest they start feeling too good about their multiple minimum wage jobs and subsidized healthcare.

Meanwhile, these are the politicians who Scalia and Alito think will come to the rescue if the Supreme Court guts the healthcare law. Of course, I discussed this last week, Conservatives Want Obamacare Do-Over. Effectively, they want to require that Obamacare be passed twice — knowing full well that it was a herculean task the first time. But having politicians put “kick me” signs on the backs of their people shows that this is all about giving the Supreme Court political cover — and nothing more.

All of this goes a long way past people “voting against their interests.” I fully understand why a woman would vote against her economic interests in the name of stopping abortion. But this goes beyond that. Similarly, Sam Brownback totally screwed over his state’s economy, yet the “people” voted him back in by almost 4 percentage points. It seems that there is no level of incompetence or mindless ideology that can hurt you some places if you have an “R” after your name on the ballot. How bad will it have to get before things change? Is there a bottom? I’m beginning to think that there isn’t.

One of the best things that John Belushi ever did on Saturday Night Live was a commentary about voting on Weekend Edition. The joke was, as always, that Belushi got totally carried away. But his reasoning was valid: the drug laws are ridiculously harsh. And he mentioned that there were people doing a decades in Texas prisons because someone found a cannabis seed on them. That’s still largely true. But nowhere is the total overreaction to drug use so extreme as it is in our schools where “educators” are only too proud of the “zero tolerance” programs.

To get a good idea of just how ridiculous such programs are, consider Bedford Middle School in Virginia. They aren’t messing around! That’s why they had to destroy an 11-year-old’s life. You see, he brought what looked like a cannabis leaf to school. He showed it to some of his fellow students. Someone ratted him out. Or at least, that’s what the school maintains; the boy claims this isn’t true; but that is the worst case for what he did: he was pretending that he had a tiny leaf from a plant that has been wrongly vilified in this country for decades. He was not only suspended for a year from school, but the administration handed the kid over to the police so that they too could bring their power to bear on destroying the young boy’s life. There was just one problem: it wasn’t a cannabis leaf. As you are probably aware, there are a lot of plants with leaves that look like cannabis. In fact, people joke about it all the time.

When a police officer came out to the school, she did a field test on the leaf — three times. It indicated that the leaf was not, in fact, cannabis — three times. But she arrested the boy anyway. She also swore to a magistrate that the boy was in possession of the illegal plant. And the school, of course, never thought twice — much less three times. The boy had to go. I’m sure in their mind, the very idea that the boy would claim that the leaf was cannabis is enough to damn the rest of his life. Zero tolerance! Am I right?!

After the police dropped the charges for lack of evidence, the boy’s parents, Linda and Bruce Bays, asked the school to rehear the case. But the school wouldn’t do it, claiming, “The court system and the school system were two different entities.” They don’t need no stinkin’ evidence! The school also required that this 11-year-old be evaluated for a substance abuse problem. It’s funny that our society has totally bought into the 12-step cult as a “cure” for drug addiction. But the founders of the 12-step movement would have thought the idea of an 11-year-old drug addict ridiculous.

Regardless, a pediatric psychiatrist found that the boy didn’t have a drug problem, but he was suffering from depression and anxiety as a result of the humane approach of this school’s “zero tolerance” program. After the psychiatrist recommended that the best thing was for the boy to go back to school, the administration relented and he was scheduled to return this week. But he will be on probation until the year is up on the suspension that they gave to him. Meanwhile, the Bays are suing the school and the sheriff’s department.

As expected, the school is arguing that even if the leaf wasn’t the real thing, just the idea that it was justified their actions. The Bays’ lawyer had a very good, although not necessarily legally powerful counter to that, “If the school argues now that they were justified in suspending him for possession of lookalike marijuana, that’s disingenuous because they’ve never argued that prior to the suit being filed.” Indeed. And regardless, the school is supposed to protect children, not abuse them.

The Bays think that their son was set up by a couple of boys who don’t like him. That’s certainly possible. But even if the kid is totally guilty, so what? In his report in The Roanoke Times, Dan Casey added a personal experience of his own:

Ultimately, that’s what it’s all about. How is the behavior of the school — regardless of its guidelines that were not developed in a rational manner, anyway — helpful to the process of protecting all the children at Bedford Middle School, much less the Bays’ son? Clearly, it doesn’t. They not only thought a year’s suspension was appropriate, they thought that giving an 11-year-old a felony was a good idea. And for what? Because he brought to school a single non-dried leaf of something that looked like Cannabis sativa? It’s outrageous. They should all be fired and never allowed around a child again. But of course that won’t happen.