As you may have heard, the FAA began warning of massive flight delays due to the sequester’s impact on flight control. So the FAA gets a sequester exemption.
As someone planning a couple of flights later in the year, this is good news. Except that, as Echidne, LGM and the Prospect point out, air traffic control is only one of countless functions threatened by the sequester (that was the point). Federal public defenders in the Boston office (where Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s case is being handled) may have to take furloughs, for instance, which is lousy for defendants who can’t afford their own lawyer. So why should the FAA get an exemption and not budget items that deal with the social safety net, kids in Head Start, legal rights, etc.
The obvious answer: Flight delays hit people with money enough to hire their own lawyers and get their kids in a good school. It affects federal politicians (as Echidne’s link points out). So they create an exception. Which is a depressing reminder how little the rest of us count. And, of course, defeats the point of the sequester, which was to spread pain all around and make sure everyone’s ox was gored. If the oxen the rich and powerful value are protected, then it’s a bad deal.
Digby, meanwhile, turns in a nice historical post pointing out that people have been screaming Deficit Doom for two decades now. Why do you realize that in 2012, Social Security and Medicare will eat up 100 percent of the federal budget?
In other news San Francisco’s Gay Pride parade had initially announced Bradley Manning would be one of the grand marshals (a symbolic gesture as he’s still in prison). Then SF Pride’s board president Lisa Williams announced that no, he was off the gig and that she wouldn’t “tolerate” any signs of support for him. Glenn Greenwald wonders why the group can tolerate funding from Bank of America, Wells Fargo and other corporations with a record of illegal activities (or alleged activities) but finds Manning’s conduct too horrifying to accept. His conclusion is that Williams is a pro-Obama activist so she’s going to side with the White House on Manning—and that in general, gay equality, while a good thing, isn’t going to disrupt the status quo as far as the distribution of power and wealth in the US.
There’s a great deal of lively discussion of this topic in the comments at alicublog. Some commenters argue there’s no more reason to expect gays to be generally liberal than any other group, and that only the Repubs’ rampant bigotry keeps many gays voting Dem. Further discussion follows on whether this is anything new (has the movement been co-opted by sellouts or were all gays really rock-throwing revolutionaries in the days of Stonewall) and whether it’s reasonable to expect gays to be political radicals any more than straights.
This debate puts me in mind of Randy Shilts’ Conduct Unbecoming, about the history of gays in the military. Shilts says in the book that for years, the ban on gay soldiers wasn’t even an issue because gay activists, as leftists, didn’t think the right to join the military was anything to fight for.
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