Tina Dupuy

There have been occasional cases of polio (poliomyelitis) throughout human history. The Roman Emperor Claudius suffered from a disease as a child thought to be polio: muscle weakness, severe pain and paralysis. But it wasn’t until the summer of 1910 that it became an epidemic in the modern industrialized world. In fact for the next 40 years the summer was called “Polio season.” The numbers polio victims were thought to go up during the hot months. A disease that existed for thousands of years mostly dormant was now full-blown and terrorizing Americans come late spring.

So because, as publisher of Skeptic magazine, Dr. Michael Shermer says, we are “pattern-seeking primates,” it was soon deduced that polio was linked to (wait for it) ice cream. Yes, the reason why the disease was rampant in the summer months is because it was then that children ate more ice cream. It was the sugar. In 1940, Dr. Benjamin Sandler published a paper “The production of neuronal injury and necrosis with the virus of poliomyelitis in rabbits during insulin hypoglycemia” in The American Journal of Pathology. Disregarding all the winter holiday intake of sugary treats, from then on out the anti-polio diet was to cut out ice cream.

We now know outbreaks of polio at the beginning of the last century in America and Europe were from the newly utilized flush toilet. According to Dr. John F. Modlin, current chair of the Department of Pediatrics, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, it was the lack of harmless immunizing infections during infancy due to better sanitation that attributed to the epidemic.

Get that? Not ice cream – flush toilets. May the two never be confused again.

Polio vaccinations were widely introduced in the late 1950s early 1960s and now polio is nearly eradicated in industrialized nations and minimized dramatically in poorer countries.

Now imagine if a celebrity in 1940 had a son with polio and she decided to start a campaign against ice cream because she trusted what Dr. Sandler said. Imagine she believed she was right, so any new evidence or studies refuting her belief were seen through a lens of conspiracy and victimhood. Couple that with getting a national platform on talk shows and news programs to spew her inaccurate garbage on an unsuspecting public – where would that have led us?

It would have taken longer to eradicate polio (meaning more American children suffering) and we’d possibly still look at ice cream with suspicion.

Cut to Marin County, California 2011: The richest county in California (ranking 20^th in the entire nation) is ground zero for a whooping cough epidemic. In the last ten years California has allowed parents to “choose” whether or not to immunize their children. This is because in the wake of a 1998 “study” by “Dr.” Andrew Wakefield falsely linking vaccinations to autism there has been widespread panic among well-meaning parents. So many children in privileged first-world homes are not getting immunized. This year six infants have died in California from whooping cough. Out of the 1500 reported cases so far this year in California – the highest rate of infection is in Marin County. It’s the worst epidemic, according to the CDC, the state has seen in 50 years. Doctors all across the state are telling their patients to get the whooping cough vaccination regardless of age. Now high school freshmen are being required to have the inoculation to enter school in the fall.

Wakefield’s work has been debunked entirely, his work has been called, “intentionally misleading” by the British Medical Journal and his medical license has been revoked. And yet because of celebrities like Jenny McCarthy – the myth lives on, and even measles is making a comeback.

Not getting immunizations is treated like a religious rite. We’re afraid to offend those who have faith in not inoculating their kids to allegedly save them from autism. Which means vintage viruses are in again. It means that the public is now at risk for diseases not seen in two generations.

The important lesson here is being able to change your beliefs when faced with new information. That’s science. The first concept of the atom was the “plum pudding model” by J.J. Thomson It turned out to be inaccurate. But the scientists didn’t stop there. Thomson didn’t stop there.

Sometimes we have to be wrong in order to ever be accurate. We did it with ice cream. We can do it with immunizations.

CORRECTION: The original version mistakenly identified “J.J. Abrams” as conceptualizing the plum pudding model of the atom instead of J.J. Thomson. We regret any confusion.

GOP leaders in Congress don’t want a balanced-budget amendment. The party which rails against government bureaucracy is counting on government bureaucracy to prevent them from successfully changing our founding documents. It’s perfect because they don’t actually want to amend the Constitution – well, not in a serious way. Maybe in a drunken, overly-clever, 1:30 AM in a Hill-adjacent dive bar kind of way: “The 28^th Amendment should outlaw blue food on Wednesdays…that’d be hilarious!!”

Now the debt ceiling, originally a WWI cap on bonds the government could issue (back when Congress insisted on actually paying for wars), is the catalyst for yet another insincere call to pass a constitutional amendment. Since 1962 Congress has raised the debt ceiling 69 times with no pageantry and little protest. Basically, the debt ceiling is a stupid wonky antiquated law we should scrap altogether.

But instead of a reasonable discussion about the health of our finance laws, the minority party (loosely) controlling one-half of one of the three branches of government is demanding two-thirds of the Congress get together to propose an amendment for then three-fourths of state legislatures to ratify BEFORE allowing the country to pay its creditors in the next few days. This can be summed up in one word: cynical.

It’s like insisting we touch down on Neptune before we land on the Moon again: It means you want to appear to be advocating “big ideas,” when, in fact, you don’t really want to go to either destination and despise travel in general. And since you know Neptune will never happen, you can be for nothing while appearing to be enthusiastically for something – albeit something impossible.

It’s cynical. It shows contempt for governing and a presumption that American’s are too ignorant to catch on.

If Republicans were serious about their newest go-nowhere proposal, they’d quietly try to acquire support from Democrats while trying to gather a consensus from their constituents. Just ask anyone alive during the Equal Rights Amendment debate in 1972. They will tell you how amending the Constitution is a lengthy, drawn-out, overwhelming campaign, and it was meant to be so. The GOP isn’t interested in this process.

Neophyte Senator Rand Paul’s (R-KY) favorite go-to non-solution is “constitutional amendments.” He’s a self-described libertarian. His admitted scorn for government showed when he proposed repealing the 14^th Amendment to eradicate alleged “anchor babies.” This was an idea to strip citizenship from children born in the U.S., thus creating more illegal immigrants. Paul now says he’ll filibuster raising the debt ceiling until a balanced-budget amendment is passed. He told ABC News in June, “We will vote to raise the debt ceiling if we get a balanced-budget amendment.”

With the deadline of Aug. 2 rushing down, Republicans flooded the Sunday morning talk shows this week with a show of solidarity in – you guessed it – cynicism:

Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) on CBS’s Face the Nation: “Why in the world isn’t there the votes for a balanced-budget amendment in the U.S. Senate? That’s the question Americans ought to be asking.”

Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) on NBC’s Meet the Press: “The only plan on the table that’ll keep us from default and will keep us from falling to a negative rating is the Cut, Cap and Balance Plan.” Then he followed with the dubious statistic, “Now folks can say that it’s outrageous to balance our budget, but over 70 percent of Americans think we need to.”

Over on ABC’s This Week, Raul Labrador (R-ID) magically added to the popularity of the GOP’s pet proposal: “Eighty percent of the American people want us to have a balanced-budget amendment. I’m not sure why the President is standing in the way of that.”

Why is the President standing in the way of this sham demand? “I think it’s important for everybody to understand that all of us believe that we need to get to a point where eventually we can balance the budget,” President Obama said at one of the many press conferences on the debt ceiling. “We don’t need a constitutional amendment to do that; what we need to do is to do our jobs.”

Speaking of jobs, that’s what the GOP ran on: jobs. But once sworn in, they’re nothing more than ineffective congressional seat-fillers on the public’s dime.

We as citizens need to call their bluff. They don’t want to amend the Constitution.

Their real goal is the pyrrhic victory of making the President fail because they think the GOP will rise from the country’s ashes.

Is being gay something one chooses? Are we all capable of being gay or lesbian, but the better among us choose to be straight? Tim Pawlenty, former Minnesota governor and current candidate vying for the 2012 GOP nomination, was asked by David Gregory on NBC’s Meet the Press (since Pawlenty has shown himself to be so knowledgeable on Lady Gaga) if being gay is a choice, or if they’re “born this way.” Pawlenty’s answer was telling, “Well, the science in that regard is in dispute.”

And by “telling,” I mean it is now clear he has not read much on the science of homosexuality.

The American Psychiatric Association stopped classifying homosexuality as a mental disorder in 1973. Gay-cure or conversion therapy is condemned by the American Medical Association, American Psychological Association, and the American Counseling Association. Remember those gay penguins? The science is not still out on this one.

Republicans have a bad habit of deferring to science as an authority only when they wish to inject doubt (see: climate change, evolution, round Earth). This is a basic misunderstanding – if not misuse – of science. There are always more questions in science because that’s what science is: an intellectual systematic study – basically tons and tons of questions. So it will appear indecisive if your worldview demands certainty. There used to be unanswered questions about how bees could fly – but we still built legions of planes. On the other hand the “theory” of gravity is not controversial, but if you look hard enough there’s bound to be a crank somewhere disputing gravity on the basis of feeling that it’s wrong.

“Some reputable scientists are not 100 percent convinced gravity exists.”

We, as a culture, have decided we’re not going to practice the harems, plural marriages and incest the Christian Bible mentions and instead have opted for love-based non-arranged marriages as the ideal. Our mores are clearly flexible, but somehow the religious right has cherry-picked a hard line on homosexuality. Why? Pure politics.

In the same Meet the Press interview, Gregory described Pawlenty as a “boilerplate Republican.” Gay marriage was a boon to Republicans in the 2004 election. It gave George Bush the “political capital” to attempt social security privatization.

Now an Iowa group called Family Leader has a “marriage vow” pledge they’ve managed to get two GOP candidates (Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann and former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum) to sign. The pledge it’s a primer for plenty of proposed wedge issues: pornography, polygamy, adultery, women in combat, Sharia law and one we haven’t seen in more than 150 years – slavery.

Republicans embrace hot-button social issues as a way to get their disastrous economic policies passed. It’s like Three-Card Monte: while all eyes are on the two grooms – white-collar grand larceny gets decriminalized.

Why is it important for Republicans to insist homosexuality is a choice? Why even get into the logical snag of someone WANTING to WANT to be attracted to the same gender? Here’s why: If you can choose being gay, then homosexuality can be condemned as a moral shortcoming. And the immoral having the audacity to demand acceptance is the perfect rallying cry for the GOP base.

If you can’t choose to be gay, and it’s something you’re born with – then being against homosexual civil rights is just plan old-fashioned prejudice…something the rest of us choose to condemn as a moral shortcoming.

The easiest way to marginalize a group of people is to call their circumstances a “choice.” The poor? A choice. The under-paid? A choice. Drug addiction? A choice? Single motherhood? A choice. Each is arguably more complicated than this dismissive one-word declaration. However, if you disagree – you’re against personal responsibility! Yes, the GOP is the party of personal responsibility…unless it’s abortion rights or whom you wish to marry. Then the Government should save you from yourself.

The actual choice in this issue is choosing to deny science when it doesn’t fit your agenda. The actual choice is choosing to use a group of people who want to become a family as a political prop.

The choice is using “choice” as a way to parlay prejudice against a minority into ballot ink.

In 1950 a largely unaccomplished lawmaker from Wisconsin, Senator Joe McCarthy, alleged that Commie sympathizers were infiltrating the U.S. Government and Hollywood. “Communist subversion!” was the claim; Red Scare, the aim. Televised hearings were held. Lives were ruined. No evidence of his accusations was found. McCarthyism, as it’s now known, is a blight in American history. On a good day it’s a parable. Otherwise, it’s an embarrassment that a hysteria this dark happened in the glare of national limelight.

McCarthyism became deeply unpopular with the American public. Senator McCarthy had a 35% approval rating in November of 1954. A month later the Senate censured him.

Yes, Senator McCarthy – at his lowest point – was TWICE as popular as the 112^th Congress which now boasts a 17% approval rating.

But this 17% proves we are still “united” as a country. Over eight out ten citizens can come together in mutual disdain for the overpaid, underworked body of suit-fillers loitering in our nation’s Capitol.

The 111^th Congress had the lowest approval rating in two decades. But now, even they can hold their previously most-despised heads up high – they averaged 25%.

The 112^th ran on jobs and the economy, giving President Obama a famed “shellacking.” And with a newfound majority in the House the only thing they’ve done is pass “symbolic votes” making an abortion harder to get. So abortion – a procedure the majority of Americans will never need nor seek out – is what the House is singularly focused on preventing, all under the guise of getting Government out of (some of) our lives.

Yes, the GOP has taken a hard right turn. Cap and trade? Health care insurance mandate? The EPA? Unpaid-for wars? Racking up a huge deficit? All are originally Republican ideas which Republicans are now against. And when I say “now against,” I don’t mean they are now for a more liberal alternative. The GOP is now for nothing. In French it’s called laissez-faire. In English it translates into “let it be” or “lazy.” In American politics it means “a do-nothing Congress none of us approve of.”

The House cannot go any further to the right. America’s top 1% has twice the net worth of the bottom 80%. Add to that – we don’t even ask the uber-super-rich to pay much in taxes. Bloomberg News/Businessweek put it like this: “It may seem too fantastic to be true, but the top 400 end up paying a lower rate than the next 1,399,600 or so.” And the House passed the Ryan Budget Plan (another symbolic vote), lowering taxes on the top brackets even more, shifting the burden to the rest of us and forcing seniors to “choose” their health care “options.” This is a “plan” that still won’t cut the deficit or balance the budget (but will raise the debt ceiling – hint).

The GOP tried to peg President Obama as a radical socialist when he really just turned out to be a moderate pragmatist. So now Congress has to be against everything a moderate pragmatist is for…which ends up meaning their platform is – NOTHING.

Republicans like to say this country is right of center, which is akin to saying the average American child is slightly above average. They say this, but then they go way off to the extreme right “cut and run up the deficit” when in the House majority.

So if Congress can’t go any further right and their approval rating has never been lower – how about turning in the other direction? The majority of Americans want abortion to be legal. Even more want the rich to have their taxes raised. We all want infrastructure. We all want Americans to have jobs. We all want our seniors to have health care. We want fair laws and reasonable immigration. We tell pollsters, at least, that we are also moderate pragmatists. But somehow we’ve elected a group of do-nothings the Know Nothings would denounce as dogmatic.

The House of Representatives needs to start representing America and not just their rapidly-righter-facing ideology. Pyrrhic victories are not actually victorious for a country with a struggling economy.

The iconic illustration of the Great Depression depicts Americans somberly standing in breadlines. The iconic illustration of our Great Recession? It’s going to be GOP congresspersons on their government-funded Blackberry’s tweeting jabs about the president on taxes…while in recess (of course).

Really, who are these 17% of Americans who approve of these people?!

Walmart is the biggest retailer in the world. It boasts of having 1.2 million Americans on their payroll. Its reported annual profits are around $13 billion. So it’s safe to say since it is so big – and so ubiquitous – and so obviously successful – the government can now stop subsidizing it.

Let me explain: I was covering the first stop for the Progressive Caucus’ “Speak Out for Good Jobs Now” listening tour held in Minneapolis attended by Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.) and Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) among others. The first audience member to speak was one Girsheila Green, a young mother from Compton, California, who has worked at Walmart for three years. Ms. Green told the crowded church how in her tenure with Walmart, she’s received two raises and is now a manager. She makes nine dollars an hour (one dollar above the laughably-low California minimum wage). She pulled from her pocket three cards she claimed most Walmart employees at her store have: a 10 percent Walmart employee discount card, her employee ID and her EBT card (what used to be called food stamps).

She relayed that 80 percent of her store is on food stamps. I’d argue one is too many.

It’s true, Girsheila doesn’t have to work at Walmart if she feels she’s not being paid enough. She can go work somewhere else. She’s not being forced to work for a wage that won’t feed her family. The same argument can be made for child labor, dangerous working conditions and other labor issues settled in the 20^th century by workers standing up for their rights.

Girsheila’s individual choice is not the issue at all. Since Walmart, the largest private employer in the country, generally doesn’t pay its “associates” or “Walmart family members” enough to live on – the giant multi-national corporation is relying on the U.S. government to feed its employees. We, as taxpayers, pay for Walmart’s cost-cutting tactics. Profit? Privatized. Nutrition? Socialized.

Think of how many employees use their food stamp cards to buy groceries at the store where they WORK. It’s like a nurse having to file bankruptcy due to medical bills.

It would be different if Walmart were a struggling little start-up where loyal employees believed in the company’s vision, so being temporarily paid less than an intern is understandable.

But since Walmart is by all measurements a success – it’s no longer okay for them to benefit from government handouts. They need to pay people who work for them like people who work for them and not like disposable volunteers in blue vests.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), just-announced candidate for the GOP presidential nomination, testified in 2005 to the Minnesota Senate. She stated if we eliminated the (laughably low) minimum wage, we could wipe out unemployment. Yes, instead of paying one person eight dollars an hour which makes him eligible for food stamps and (in some cases) Medicaid – let’s pay eight people one dollar an hour and they can be eligible for food stamps, Medicaid AND General Assistance. Basically, allow the government to take care of the work force so private industry can have the profit. This is corporate welfare. This is also corporate socialism. The government covers what Walmart gets away with not covering.

To those who enjoy Wal-Mart’s ample profits – it’s welfare check money laundering. To those who tout “free market” principles, that’s not one of them.

Bachmann, who hopped on the tea party bandwagon when it first rolled out on socialized roads, has decried the government even though her family farm and husband’s clinic have received government money. Bachmann denied this money has benefited her personally; her financial disclosure forms completely contradict that statement.

Bachmann and the tea party are like a 30-year-old who lives comfortably in the family home while railing against parental tyranny and bemoaning the mediocrity of the meals his mother cooks.

In the real world, taxpayers should stop subsidizing Walmart’s low wages. Let them pay their employees a living wage. Better yet, let them live up to their own rhetoric when they hire their legions of working poor – let them be treated like “family.”

The whole idea of a democracy is accepting you’ll never fully get your own way in government. Yes, I know we celebrate the imagined rugged individual pulling on his sole-proprietorship bootstraps fully autonomous while enjoying socialized infrastructure and tax subsidies – it’s what makes America great….and charmingly peculiar. But letting consensus dictate means all individuals at some point are going to be let down. It’s an inevitability: Death, taxes and disappointment.

So you don’t like everything President Obama has done? No one should. We’re Americans!

Disappointment is good. The worst thing in a democracy is for one person or a group to be elated because all their pet issues are satisfied completely. Dictators are satisfied. Unanimity is tyranny. The very quotable Sir Winston Churchill once said, “Democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.”

And if we took a vote on that – we wouldn’t all agree.

Our Founding Fathers get painted with a brush known as “hindsight bias.” Because our government is stable with the same constitution for over 200 years we think of our founders as having planned it so they must have seen it all coming. People don’t concur on the Founding Fathers’ beliefs and intentions nor did the Founding Fathers themselves. They were split between the Jeffersonians, the Federalists, the Anglophiles and the Francophiles and even those respective groups were not in lockstep.

The Hamilton-Burr duel was the climax of the conflict of the Democratic-Republicans and Federalists. That Founding Father, Alexander Hamilton whose portrait is in your pocket on the ten-dollar bill, was killed as a result of political acrimony starting at the beginning of the country. The only thing The Founders agreed upon completely was being alive during the 18^th Century.

Modern politicians, like those trying to appeal to the tea party, will claim they understand the Founding Fathers’ intentions and how we’ve gotten away from them. Yes, there was a perfect time in the past and if we just change accordingly we’ll be perfect again.

So if the Founding Fathers fought with each other in vigorous debate (Thomas Jefferson and John Adams also had a falling out after the 1800 election) and none of us will ever be 100% content with our government as it is the nature of democracy – why is the phrase “the pursuit of happiness” in our Declaration of Independence? Candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, Herman Cain mistakenly said “happiness” is in the Constitution. It isn’t. And the phrase is now a battle cry for accumulating affluence – or doing what we feel like.

Dr. Carol V. Hamilton wrote in the History News Network, “The Greek word for “happiness” is eudaimonia.  …[Its] invoking Greek and Roman ethics in which eudaimonia is linked to aretê, the Greek word for ‘virtue’ or ‘excellence.’ In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle wrote, ‘the happy man lives well and does well; for we have practically defined happiness as a sort of good life and good action.’  Happiness is not, he argued, equivalent to wealth, honor, or pleasure. It is an end in itself, not the means to an end.”

Meaning “happiness” as Jefferson knew it when he included the phrase meant serving your community and seeking the greater good. Happiness to him was more altruism than bankroll. Think of soup kitchen coordinators as pursuing happiness. Think of poll workers as pursuing happiness. Think of adult literacy volunteers as pursuing happiness. Think of social workers and foster parents as pursuing happiness. Think of the Red Cross as pursuing happiness. Think of firefighters, paramedics and police officers as pursuing happiness. Think of your neighborhood council members as pursuing happiness. Think of PTA members as pursuing happiness. Think of public defenders as pursuing happiness. Think of free clinic physicians as pursuing happiness. Think of community organizers and advocates for the poor as pursuing happiness. Think of church leaders as pursuing happiness. Think of mentors as pursuing happiness. Think of civic nerds and all those annoying people who put you on their community actions mailing lists as pursuing happiness.

That is “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

But that doesn’t mean there’s no conflict and that we’re happy. We’re not meant to be happy. We’re in a democracy.