Post Christmas blues

I have a lot of things to be grateful this Christmas, but have to say that I have felt like crap since Christmas day. Today, whatever I had then turned into a sinus infection complete with a touch of conjunctivitis. Blerg.

But in the meantime, I have been watching the blogs and reading the news. Some of it has been positive, from my perspective, but there are some really amazingly troubling things coming up. Republicans are set to take over the house in January, and their list of goals and pronouncements are just hard to believe. After watching the banks explode our economy with recklessness, the incoming chair of the Financial Services committee said that his view was that Washington regulators were "here to serve the banks" rather than regulate them. Seriously. And that isn't all. Republicans are lining up to defund food safety, regulatory reform, and health care. Please tell me who they serve?

The new incoming chair of a committee on science and technology says that watching the oil bubble out of the BP well exhilarated him.

Sigh.

They have already killed tax hikes on the rich, and are actually making rules in the House that allow them to increase the deficit through tax cuts, but not through spending. You know, for healthcare, or food safety, or keeping the banks from just gambling with your money. The rich, after all, will do very well under Republican leadership. They already are.

I get some of this. I get the idea that capitalism rewards risk and that we believe that people should work hard. I get that. I get opposition to giving people handouts. I get that.

What I don't get is how hard conservatives work to make things harder on the poor and the working class. Look at the entire payday loan industry, which makes corporations millions off the people who can least afford it. I love how my religious conservative colleagues can get up in arms about lotteries and casinos that, they say, exploit the poor, but I have never seen them say the same thing about payday loans, or laws that make it harder to get out of bankruptcy.

No, money is for those who have it. Those who don't, in the conservative model, are simply on their own. After all, if they don't have money, then they must not deserve it. Fred, at Slactivist catches this story about people evicted from their mobile home park, and who can't afford to move the trailer. But the rich see that as an opportunity.

I get that from soul-less and greedy assholes. I really do. They are like the people who sell crack to kids. They don't care. What I don't get is how many Christian conservatives seem to celebrate (at worst) or tolerate (at best) policies that clearly make life harder on those who are already struggling, and make things easier for those who already have all they need. If someone can explain to me how that comes even close to representing anything remotely Christian, I would really like to hear it. It certainly violates everything I was raised to believe, but also certainly represents mainstream Republican beliefs.

WWJD?