Not that I claim to know more than Pope Benedict's first-person Nazi expertise, but his claim that Nazis were about atheism is somewhat bizarre:

The Pope used this speech to warn Britain about "aggressive forms of secularism" and "atheist extremism" in society. He recounted Britain's stand against the Nazis, then stated "As we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the Twentieth Century."

In a few short sentences, Benedict threw down a gauntlet by linking the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany with atheism. While, to be fair to the Pope, the Nazis had no real love for Catholics, Nazi Germany was a religious state. The Nazis drew upon both Christianity and Pagan influences. Nazi paraphernelia proudly proclaimed Gott mit uns (God with us). Nazi propaganda routinely referred to political enemies as atheists as a means to vilify them, and Hitler himself is reported by at least one close aid to have confirmed his Catholicism late into the war.

Not only has the Pope bought into the lie that the Nazis were atheists, but apparently he has forgotten the history of an organization he was part of, both as a member of the Hitler Youth and as a member of an anti-aircraft gun crew.

Speaking the lie to the Pope's claim are the various Nazi artifacts with Christian iconography and messaging on them.

Perhaps the Pope should have talked about Stalin. After all, the Soviet Union was an atheist totalitarian regime. But perhaps Stalin did not suit the Pope's purpose for various unknown reasons.

Let's repeat that:

Gay couples don't have equal rights. Gay people do.

As far as I know, couples are not mentioned in the US Constitution. However, people are. We the people (etc etc etc). So when the mainstream media, stuck in their tired old frames, too stuck in their ways and prideful of their privilege, go on and on about a "victory for gay couples," you need to step back and think about what's really happening.

The court ruled that gay people have equal rights.

And when you think about this, it's a no-brainer.

Example: If I want to marry Jane, and the government says, "No, you can't," what it's really saying is, "No, you can't marry Jane because you are a woman." Of course, if I were a man, sure, I could marry Jane.

That is plain and simple sex discrimination. It's not about gay-ness. It's not about couples. It's about the government requiring that I be of a certain sex in order to marry Jane.

This is why the right-wing hysteria over gay marriage is so misplaced and overblown — all the more so when it's a tea bagger. Tea baggers are big on saying how they're for shrinking government, but they sure want the government to protect them from their own homophobia.

For an eloquent post on this topic, see Derek Powazek's post:

In much of the news coverage today, I’ve seen the phrase “Pro-Gay Marriage” used to describe the people who are celebrating Judge Walker’s ruling. But this rubs me the wrong way.

I’m not Pro-Gay Marriage, I’m Pro-Equality. I’m not Pro-Gay Rights, I’m Pro-Common Sense. I’m Anti-Discrimination. I’m Anti-Enshrining Your Queasiness About Buttsex In My Constitution. I’m Pro-When The Constitution Says We’re All Equal, It Means We’re All Equal.

I’m married, and it matters. It changes the way I look at the world, and the way the world looks at me. It comes with state and federal benefits and rights. Withholding those things from same-sex couples is discrimination, pure and simple. If you support withholding rights from people because of who they are, you’re a bigot. Period.

My grandmother taught me two important lessons. The first was tolerance. Enjoy people who are different from you. It’s the variety that makes life wonderful. The second was to always look out for the rights of others. Because if you sit by and let discrimination happen, you’ll be next.

So if you're against gay marriage, here's the easy solution: Don't do it. Now wasn't that easy? (If not, maybe you should ponder a bit on the source of your opposition.)

[Photo: Happy face of hate, by Burns! (cc)]

They claim to be about "getting the government off of our backs." The problem here is that the Tea Party seems to be salivating at the opportunity to enact on the state level laws that prohibit equal rights for gays, women and even racial minorities. Listen past the opening salvos about big government and you realize that what the tea baggers really want is to replace federal government authority with state government authority. Their central assumption is that states have inherent rights but individuals do not.

Witness their reactions to last week's court ruling striking down the Defense of Marriage Act as applied to Massachusetts:

A spokeswoman for one of the biggest Tea Party umbrella organizations, Tea Party Patriots, said that social questions were not part of their mission.

“As far as an assertion of states’ rights goes, I believe it’s a good thing,” said Shelby Blakely, executive director of The New Patriot Journal, the group’s online publication. “The Constitution does not allow federal regulation of gay marriage just as it doesn’t allow for federal regulation of health care.”

“But I don’t want to come off saying I support gay marriage,” she added.

No of course not. In fact, the social gains of the past 50 years seem to be in the crosshairs of tea baggers from Rand Paul to Sarah Palin to Sharron Angle.

And then there's tea bagger heaven: Arizona, where "papers please" is not a line from a Nazi in a World War 2 movie but rather a populist mantra.

This is not libertarian. This is authoritarian.

Let's look at a definition of Libertarianism:

Libertarians believe that individuals should have complete freedom of action, provided their actions do not infringe on the freedom of others.

—Encyclopedia Brittanica

Libertarianism describes a range of political beliefs that advocate the maximization of an individual's ability to think and act with few constraints from large social structures, such as government,[1][2][3] and the minimization or even abolition of the state.

—Wikipedia

An advocate of the doctrine of free will

—Mirriam-Webster ("libertarian")

The Tea Party, with it's stated goal of establishing greater authority to state governments, is not libertarian. In fact, when you look at the code words, off-the-record remarks, and actions of Tea Party leaders and supporters, it becomes clear that the Tea Party is actually about authoritarianism. To the Tea Party, the federal government's oppression is that it prevents them from oppressing gays, oppressing women (especially with regard to healthcare), and oppressing racial minorities.

And yet the Beltway crowd seems to buy into the claim that the Tea Party is libertarian.

E.J. Dione seems to think the Tea Party makes the common mistake:

The rise of the tea party movement is a throwback to an old form of libertarianism that sees most of the domestic policies that government has undertaken since the New Deal as unconstitutional. It typically perceives the most dangerous threats to freedom as the design of well-educated elitists out of touch with “American values.”

In a fascinating article analyzing the Tea Party — and the prevalence of women tea baggers — Ruth Rosen identifies some disturbing characteristics:

One important difference, however, is race. At Tea Party rallies you don’t see faces with dark complexions. Another important distinction is that men and women are drawn to this sprawling movement for a variety of overlapping but possibly different reasons. Both men and women seem to embrace an incoherent “ideology” which calls for freedom from government, no taxes, and an inchoate desire to “take back America,” which means restoring the nation to some moment when the country was white and “safe.”

She goes on to note how the conservative brand of "feminism" isn't quite the feminism that states that "Feminism is the radical idea that women are people." On the contrary:

Here is a great irony. Since 1980, when the backlash began attacking the women’s movement, young secular American women have resisted calling themselves feminists because the religious right-wing had so successfully created an unattractive image of a feminist as a hairy, man-hating, lesbian who spouted equality, but really wanted to kill babies. Now, Palin is forcing liberal feminists to debate whether these Christian feminists are diluting feminism or legitimizing it by making it possible to say that one is a feminist.

When I read what women write on Christian women’s web sites, I hear an echo from the late nineteenth century when female reformers sought to protect the family from “worldly dangers.” Frances Willard, leader of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, urged millions of women to enter the public sphere in order to protect their families, to address the decadent consequences and casualties of capitalism, to win suffrage, and to fight for prohibition, all in the name of protecting the purity of their homes and families.

For many contemporary evangelical Christian women, their motivations are similar. They want to enter the public sphere or even run for office to eliminate abortion, protect marriage, contain sexual relations, oppose gay marriage and clean up the mess made by the sexual revolution. [Emphasis added.]

This doesn't sound like liberty. It sounds like vesting greater freedom to state governments so they can oppress entire classes of people with impunity.

Am I wrong? If so, I'd love to see some proof.

In general, I'm politically right of center when it comes to fiscal issues. Obviously, after the catastrophic banking crisis of 2008, when we saw up close that the virtues of the invisible hand of the market come with a price: markets crash and revivals can be long in coming and very painful to wait for. The cost to our society has been very dear so far, and is looking to get worse before we see a meaningful upturn. Sometimes letting the market just do its thing can simply be too devastating to bear. Yet when things are going well, it's generally good to just stay out of the way of what the market does well. In other words, the cycles of markets are too turbulent to just let them run wild, but it's mainly the lows that we have to worry about.

I look at it like floating in a pool. Just let the buoyancy happen. But if you start to go under, do something about it.

Last night I caught Paul Krugman's appearance on Charlie Rose, where he talked about the price we're paying for fiscal austerity. His main point was that austerity now only shrinks the economy, and that the Fed is already as low as it can be on interest rates so there's really nothing more they can do to stimulate private sector growth to compensate for cuts in government economic activity. Krugman says we need another stimulus now to get the economy moving again. In the two previous major economic slowdowns, the emergence from the doldrums came, in the 1880s, from the railroad boom and, in the Great Depression, from World War 2. In the first case, technological innovation and a new industrial market led to economic expansion. In the latter case, the massive government spending on the war effort kicked the market into gear. Krugman asserts that now we're at a moment in time where we need one or the other to get us out of this mess, or we risk falling into deflation and rising unemployment.

In other words, we're sinking below the surface and we need either a boogie board or we better start activity swimming to get our heads above water.

To me it seems obvious that a national effort pushing development of alternative energies and energy-efficient technologies could prove to be the technological innovation that leads to new industrial markets. America could even become a manufacturing nation again, an exporter of goods.

In the meantime, though, we need some kind of spending to invest in our infrastructure — fix our crumbling bridges, our pothole-filled roads, our collapsing schools; build up our information infrastructure before we end up being on par with the third world — do things that put people to work improving our commons that is beyond the purview of any single corporation and bet on the future potential of this country.

The Republicans, however, and not a few conservative Democrats, are in a psychological brain-lock triggered, I believe, in no small part by their own buyer's remorse: After racking up trillions of dollars of national debt under the Bush Administration, and setting the stage for the bank meltdown that cost us trillions more in not just bailout funds but also lost economic growth and activity, the GOP has suddenly glommed onto the idea that they need to stop spending. Their anuses have puckered tightly shut and they'll be damned if they unclench.

And this anal retentive fear of spending is exacerbated by the right-wing's culture of bedwetting fear, which is showing itself in conservative attacks on immigrants, on equal rights for gays, on equal rights for blacks (because of course the Civil Rights legislations of the 1960s are problematic, says tea bagger candidate Rand Paul and others), and so on.

So the panic-stricken conservatives are blocking even aid to the unemployed — as if unemployed works who are looking for work but cannot find it were the real problem of our economy. Like nervous children who never learned how to swim, the right wing leaders are locking onto us all, frozen in fear, dragging us all down under water.

Yet the Republicans declare that such panic is virtuous.

Changing metaphors for a moment, let's look at our economy as a house. In general, you want to run your house in sound fiscal order. But sometimes you just have to spend. You have to spend if the roof is leaking. You have to spend if the water main breaks. You have to spend if the electrical wiring shorts out. You can't just say, "Well we spent too much on the credit cards throwing parties, so now we refuse to fix the broken water heater." (Maybe you shouldn't have spent so much on your war parties in the first place, Senator Mitch McConnell!)

Now is not the time to give in to conservatives' panic. We are not a country that displays its best out of fear. When we face the challenges head-on and mobilize our resources, we tend to triumph. When we react in fear and trepidation, we tend to make mistakes that cost us for years, even decades.

Yes, we need to get a handle on our long-term national debt. It's fucking frightening how big it has gotten in the last 10 years. But now's not the time. First we have to prime the economic engine again, and kick things into gear, get people working. Working people spend. Working people feel better about themselves. A working nation is empowered.

Then, when the economy is humming along again (which, by the by, also means government revenues are rising again), that's when we cut spending. Let's fix the house first, then worry about the monthly budget. Let's swim now, while we can, before we drown.