Tin Foil Hat Republicans

          A couple of months ago a guy posted on Freep (Detroit Free Press Online) that there needs to be a spokesperson or champion for the unemployed. The people commenting on his post think he didn’t have a right to say anything at all because he wasn’t from Detroit. They also took exception to his lack of proof or corroborating evidence for the observations he made when in fact all he did was recount his own personal experiences from being unemployed for 17 months. One commenter even faulted his math because he said he’d worked for 22 years and been a journalist for 23—like make up your mind dude which is it? The commenter wasn't smart enough to realize that it could in fact be both. Why do people this ignorant insist on being heard? They’re just clogging up the bandwidth.

          I note this morning, in the same vein, that the new Republican House majority is already throwing its weight behind a cut in jobless benefits. I guess I knew this was going to happen. Even so it saddens me that millions of displaced workers are going to suffer further in the name of fiscal responsibility when it was fiscal irresponsibility in the form of deregulation and shortsighted policy making that cost them their jobs in the first place. I say this even though I am a freaking Republican. I'm all for deficit reduction and judicious spending cuts, but when we undertake these things in service to an overarching ideology rather than common sense we have the capacity to do a lot of harm to innocent people.

          If you see a guy wearing a tin foil hat sitting on a street corner with a cup and a sign that reads “please help,” or “homeless and hungry,” or even “unemployed and beerless,” and you are motivated by the sight to remark that he should get a job, then I would suggest to you that it is already too late for you to don a tin foil hat to protect your brain from being stolen by aliens. That ship has sailed. Honestly I don’t know why I’m bothering to tell you this. That ship has sailed.