Rand Paul: He’s for a woman’s choice…of toilet

See Rand. See Rand rant.

See Rand rant about the right to choice when it comes to selecting toilet, light-bulb, dishwasher, washing machine, etc:

From ABC’s The Note:

Sen. Rand Paul, R-KY, today went off on a tirade about toilets in the midst of an Energy & Natural Resources Committee hearing on energy efficiency standards for certain appliances.

His unwitting victim was Kathleen Hogan, the deputy assistant secretary for energy efficiency at the Department of Energy.

“You’re really anti-choice on every other consumer item that you’ve listed here, including light bulbs, refrigerators, toilets – you name it, you can’t go around your house without being told what to buy. You restrict my choices, you don’t care about my choices,” Paul said to her. “You don’t care about the consumer frankly. You raise the cost of all the items with your rules, all your notions that you know what’s best for me.”

[…]

“This is what your energy efficiency standards are. Call it what it is. You prevent people from making things that consumers want. I find it really appalling and hypocritical and think there should be some self-examination from the administration on the idea that you favor a woman’s right to an abortion, but you don’t favor a woman or a man’s right to choose what kind of light-bulb, what kind of dishwasher, what kind of washing machine. I really find it troubling – this busy-body nature that you want to come into my house, my bathroom, my bedroom, my kitchen, my laundry room. I just really find it insulting and I find that all of the arguments for energy efficiency – you’re exactly right we should conserve energy, but why not do it in a voluntary way? Why do it where you threaten to fine me or put me in jail if I don’t accept your opinion? In America we believe in trying to convince our neighbors, but not trying to convince them through the force of law. I find this a ntithetical to the American way.”

There’s more. Be sure to watch the entire video.

Oh, and apparently this was a 20 year tirade in the making:

When Paul finally paused, Hogan smiled, and then another senator asked if he should go ahead with his own comments or let Paul continue.

“I was just kind of enjoying it,” Paul said. “I’ve been waiting for 20 years to talk about how bad these toilets are and this was a good excuse today.”

Isn’t that lovely? Rand Paul enjoys wasting congressional hearing time to whine about his kitchen and plumbing at a time when…

• Only 1 in 7 Americans has confidence that an economic recovery has taken hold (Bloomberg March 4-7 polling)
• Two-thirds of states have cut mental health services (NAMI)
• Productivity increased 5.2 percent from the recovery-(in name only)’s start to the end of 2010, but wages rose by only 0.3 percent, meaning “just 6 percent of productivity gains have gone to our newly more-productive workers” and the other 94 percent has gone to–you guessed it–profits. (Wapo/WSJ)

Those are just a few of the depressing statistics I came across in the past 24 hours.

In 2008, then-vice presidential candidate Joe Biden said the number one issue facing middle class families was a “three-letter word” J-O-B-S.

In 2010, Boehner and the GOP asked, “Where are the jobs?”

The amount of stupidity, incompetence, and malfeasance coming from DC somehow manages to grow exponentially day by day.

Perhaps this should be a new litmus test: if a candidate can’t even find a working toilet or light bulb, then Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect US Senate or House seat.

If a Democratic Administration looks to Reagan, and a Republican Congress looks to Coolidge, then this isn’t divided government, this is a same-ideology marriage.

I have 6 letters for both parties:

ENOUGH.

You want to talk about choice…let’s talk about choice.

I want a choice on the ballot other than between the annihilation of collective bargaining rights for public workers (for political, rather that stated budgetary, purposes) and dead silence from the White House.

I want a choice other than between Republicans who want to investigate the toilet’s of women for evidence of fetal murder and Democrats who would pass health care on the backs of women’s civil rights and enable Republicans to use those rights to then further degrade them while distracting and avoiding doing anything on the economy.

I want a choice other than between a party that doesn’t even “believe” in evolution and climate change and another party whose president sat back and observed while oil and dispersant accumulated in our environment, ecosystem, and food supply in the “worst environmental disaster this country has faced.”

I want meaningful alternative to a politics that either actively scapegoats ordinary people as personally “irresponsible” or implicitly suggests it by asking them to “sacrifice.”

I want the choice between Medicare-for-All or a Swiss-style regulated healthcare system–not the false dichotomy between the so-called good Obama HCR and the perfect public option that we weren’t supposed to let be the enemy of Obama’s junk insurance mandate.

I want more than the options of libertarian “cut welfare to Israel…and kill public education” and Obama kowtowing to Israel and pushing corporate scheme of charter schools to accomplish what is supposed to be public and thereby a societal equalizer.

I want a choice besides Democrats who cave-by-design and Republicans who ram things through illegally.

I want a choice other than Republicans who would hold up people’s unemployment benefits and a Democratic president who won’t even mention poverty in his State of the Union address.

Enough with all these incredibly narrow options. Enough with being between Barack and a Rand place. America deserves real choices.

I think if we had more public officials doing right by their constituents, these officials would have been waiting 20 years to rant about the path that has led the US to rank dead last in a comparison of income equity and other measures while Australia ranks first: