Yet another massacre from which the sheeple won’t learn a thing

If this guy is elected (or allowed to steal office a la 2000) in November, there will be more massacres. (More Photoshop jobs on this theme here…)

The United States of America is one big dysfuckingfunctional family.

Every once in a while, one of us snaps and kills a lot of people. The rest of us then all act shocked and horrified and say how “senseless” it was (when really we’re primarily just celebrating the fact that we weren’t among the body count), and then we go back to our lives of self-centeredness and greed that will help create the next massacre.

Every time one of these massacres occurs, I write essentially the same blog piece, but fuck it, as long as it keeps happening, I’ll keep writing the same blog piece. So here goes:

James Eagen Holmes, the 24-year-old accused of having blown away 12 people and injuring 58 others at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, early this morning, did not — I repeat, DID NOT — develop within a fucking vacuum.

No, I promise you, he developed entirely within a social context.

My guess is that Holmes has some screws loose, but the fact of the matter is that Holmes is just one of millions of young Americans whose nation has failed them beyond miserably.

The Associated Press reports that according to a neighbor of Holmes, “Holmes struggled to find work after graduating with highest honors in the spring of 2010 with a neuroscience degree from the University of California, Riverside.”

Holmes isn’t a drop-out pothead. The AP also reports of Holmes that he “enrolled last year in a neuroscience Ph.D. program at the University of Colorado-Denver but was in the process of withdrawing, said school officials, who didn’t provide a reason.”

Yes, Holmes was a Ph.D. candidate, one of our brightest young people. Neuroscience, for fuck’s sake. Sounds pretty close to a brain surgeon to me.

My guess is that like millions of his cohorts, and like millions of members of my generation (Gen X), Holmes graduated from college with a mountain of debt but with no good job prospects whatsofuckingever.

I, too, graduated (in 1990 — during the first George-Bush-induced recession) with a worthless bachelor’s degree but with student-loan debt, and I, too, initially returned to school (to get my master’s degree, which I ultimately didn’t get) because there were no jobs out there and I didn’t know what else to do. (At age 44, I still am a member of what my fellow Gen-X foaming-at-the-mouth leftist Ted Rall calls the “overeducated underclass.”)

Since the 1980s, under Ronald Reagan, who couldn’t blow the Wall Street weasels enough, our higher-education system stopped being about preparing students for good jobs. Those jobs, under the vulture capitalism that Mittens Romney and his ilk perpetrate, perpetuate and defend, have been evaporating from the United States these past few decades.*

The American higher-education system now is about, and for some decades now has been about, handing our young over to the student-loan sharks for their feeding frenzies. Our colleges don’t produce young people who are ready for the good jobs that await them – our colleges instead produce young people who start off in life neck-deep in debt to the student-loan sharks, struggling to survive by taking jobs that are way beneath their abilities.

Starting out like this, many if not most of them never even will catch up, but will lag behind for the rest of their days.

We lie to our youth about the importance of going to college and doing well so that they can get fulfilling, well-paying jobs — jobs that don’t fucking exist and haven’t for some decades now.

Our youth are punk’d royally, so of course they become angry and bitter.

True, not all of them shoot up a movie theater. They just become alcoholics and/or druggies and/or go on Big Pharma’s antidepressants and/or abuse those in their lives and/or immerse themselves in materialism and commercialism and/or become sex addicts or some other type of addicts and/or commit suicide.

Everything is connected, whether we want to acknowledge that fact or not. (And for the most part, we don’t. We prefer what we believe is the safety of our own little bubbles, even though are bubbles are not our own safe houses, but are our own fucking caskets.)

Blowhard Rush Limbaugh recently accused filmmaker Christopher Nolan (“Inception,” the latest “Batman” trilogy, etc.) of, in Nolan’s current “Batman” movie, modeling (or at least naming) Batman’s enemy Bane after Mittens Romney’s vulture capitalism outfit Bain Capital – in order to make a political, anti-Mittens statement.

(Bain, Bane — apparently one-syllable homophones mesmerize great minds like Limbaugh’s.

Of course, the “Batman” comic-book character of Bane was created in 1993, well before Mittens ever decided to run for the White House, but mere facts never stop the likes of Grand Dragon Daddy Limbaugh and his fans.)

It was at a midnight showing of the latest “Batman” installment, “The Dark Knight Rises,” that James Eagen Holmes committed his massacre, and yes, it seems to me, there is a Bain connection here: It is vulture capitalism run amock that created the socioeconomic context within which this latest massacre occurred.

As insane income inequality grows, the pain and suffering of the poor and the middle class and the working class increases, and yes, some of the victims of vulture capitalism do snap and act out.

The only thing that’s shocking is that we don’t see a whole fucking lot more of it.

James Eagen Holmes very apparently snapped under the pressures of the oppressive socioeconomic system that not enough of us fight against. If enough of us did fight against it, our oppression at the hands of the filthy rich, treasonous few would stop.

Instead, way too fucking many of us, such as cops (the taxpayer-funded security guards of the plutocrats, who, of course, pay no taxes themselves) and members of the U.S. military (a.k.a. cannon fodder for Big Oil), and, of course, the Repugnican Tea Party traitors, insanely side with our oppressors instead of with their fellow oppressed.

Better to curry favor with the oppressors, the rich and the powerful, than to be one of their victims, right? Of course, cops and soldiers and “tea party” dipshits are just as much victims as are the rest of us. These fools are the plutocratic oppressors’ tools, whether they realize it or acknowledge it or not.

Of course I don’t advocate massacres in movie theaters — I see a lot of movies myself, including at the Century Theatres in my area** — but it nauseates me to hear the same old predictable bullshit that the American sheeple bleat when massacres (Columbine, 9/11, this morning’s, etc.) are in the news.

We don’t understaaaaaaand, the sheeple bleat.

Yes, the sheeple do understand, at least dimly, at least on some level.

It’s that they don’t fucking care.

If they did, they’d have to change.

And that might even mean — gasp! — having to fight.

The sheeple secretly would prefer more massacres of other sheeple.

P.S. Of course the Mittens and President Hopey-Changey campaigns had to weigh in on today’s massacre. They have to pretend to care about us, you see.

Mittens’ statement was:

“Ann and I are deeply saddened by the news of the senseless violence that took the lives of 15 [sic] people in Colorado and injured dozens more. We are praying for the families and loved ones of the victims during this time of deep shock and immense grief.  We expect that the person responsible for this terrible crime will be quickly brought to justice.”

“Senseless” violence. Right. A brilliant young man can’t find decent work in a nation that doesn’t give a flying fuck about him and sees no future for himself and so he snaps. “Senseless.” Makes no sense at all. None whatsofuckingever. Happened just out of the blue. Randomly. Just one of those things that no one possibly could even begin to explain.

Look how quickly Mittens was to pounce upon the idea of ”justice” for the perpetrator.

It’s funny, because if those truly responsible for today’s terrible crime actually ever were brought to justice, Mittens and his treasonous, plutocratic ilk would be behind bars, where they belong.

But they can rest easy.

So-called “justice” is meted out only to the 99 percent of us, and almost never to the 1 percent.

If you kill a dozen people, like James Eagen Holmes apparently did today, and are a member of the 99 percent, you at least will go to prison.

But if you are a mass murderer and are among the 1 percent, like George W. Bush or Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld or Condoleezza Rice — or yes, like Barack Obama, who loves assassinations (with and without the use of drones) and who loves keeping the traitors who comprise the military-industrial complex happy with billions and billions of our tax dollars that aren’t going to the things that we need, such as job creation, education, health care, environmental protection and infrastructure improvements – you are allowed to run loose.

It’s not just within the arena of the military-industrial complex that mass murderers go free. Corporations’ profits-over-people practices routinely kill scores and scores of innocent people, yet the corporatocrats get off scot-free — even though corporations, according to the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court, are “people.”

“Justice.”

Indeed.

Why would, how could, anyone snap in this oh-so-fair-and-just United States of America?

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*The No. 1 goal of capitalism is not job creation, as the Repugnican Tea Party traitors among us proclaim. The No. 1 goal of capitalism is profiteering. Fucking duh.

Labor is expensive. Under American capitalism, if you can replace your American workers with machines or with other automated systems and/or outsource their jobs to sweatshops overseas, you do so in order to increase your profits.

The vulture capitalists are not job creators. They are wealth aggregators, as fucking evidenced by the fact that over the past several years the wealthiest have gotten even wealthier while the jobs have dried up and rest of us have gotten poorer.

If these treasonous plutocrats were job creators, there would be jobs.

There aren’t jobs because it isn’t about us. It’s all about them, the 1 percent.

**I will see “The Dark Knight Rises,” by the way. I love Anne Hathaway and the character of Catwoman, Nolan is a good director, and Tom Hardy is a hunk (OK, even though as Bane his face is obscured), so I’m there. I just generally avoid trying to see blockbusters on opening weekend.

You are much more likely to be killed in a car accident, or killed by a car while crossing the street, that you are to be shot dead in a movie theater.

Hugo Chavez, convenient devil for a crumbling plutocratic empire

Reuters photo

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez speaks at a news conference in Caracas on Monday. If a “devil” like “dictator” Chavez didn’t exist, the right-wing, pro-corporate Repugnican Tea Party traitors and the center-right, pro-corporate, sellout “Democrats” would have to make him up for their cheap political gain.

The Obama and Romney campaigns are arguing over Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, the corporately owned and controlled mass media report today.

President Barack Obama doesn’t appreciate “the threat” that Chavez is, claim the multi-millionaire Mormon Mittens and his supporters, including Florida’s Marco Rubio, who is only a tool for the pro-plutocratic, Cuba-first wingnuts of Florida whose allegiance is to trying to keep the Cold War alive, not to the welfare of the United States of America.

Team Romney is “scared” of Chavez, as evidenced by how Team Romney has exaggerated the threat that Chavez poses to the United States, the Obamanistas juvenilely have shot back.

Of course, regardless of which corporate bitch wins in November, Obama or Romney, the average American’s socioeconomic status won’t improve significantly, but probably will only continue to worsen.

Of course, neither the Coke Party nor the Pepsi Party wants to talk about that fact, so let’s talk about that Hugo Chavez!

Both Team Romney and Team Obama have Chavez all wrong. On purpose.

Chavez’s greatest “crime” is that he has refused to kiss U.S. corporate ass. He has nationalized his nation’s oil fields, which was dictator Saddam Hussein’s greatest “crime.” (No, the Vietraq War was not about “liberating” the Iraqis from their horrible dictator. It was about liberating the nation’s oil fields for Big Oil, and for the dying American empire to get a military foothold there in order to try to control more of the Middle East’s oil while the American empire continues to rot from within at home.)

Hugo Chavez isn’t a threat to your safety or to mine. He is the repeatedly democratically elected president of a nation who won’t just hand over his nation’s natural resources to Big Oil, the way a good Latin American leader should, so of course the right-wing traitors here in the U.S. have to call him a “dictator,” despite the fact that while George W. Bush was a true dictator, having stolen office despite having lost the 2000 presidential election, Chavez has won his elections fairly and squarely, with international observers saying as much.

Hugo Chavez is demonized by so many fucktarded Americans because he actually is doing his job: trying to achieve the best results for the most number of people in the nation over which he presides. (Contrary to widespread Amerifascist belief, Chavez’s job is not to do what’s best for the corporations and the plutocrats of the United States of America.)

President Hugo Chavez stands in stark contrast to the president of the United States of America, where income disparity is beyond insane and where the president does what’s best for the richest and mostly ignores the rest of us.

The comment of Obama’s that has stirred up the wingnuts is his comment to a Miami television station that “overall, my sense is that what Mr. Chavez has done over the last several years has not had a serious national security impact on us.”

That statement strikes me as true, except, of course, for the fact that the pro-plutocratic, pro-corporate wingnuts define “national security” as the plutocrats’ and their corporations’ ability to continue to profit obscenely all over the globe. The plutocrats’ interests are our interests, and the plutocrats’ interests always are “national security” interests, the plutocrats want us to believe — meanwhile, the richest Americans get richer and the rest of us Americans get poorer, even though supposedly we all benefit when the plutocrats are doing well.

Team Obama, in defending itself from Team Mittens’ lie that the drone-loving, human-rights-hating Obama is soft on national security, has misrepresented Chavez’s influence within Latin America, however.

“People like Hugo Chavez want attention — and that’s exactly what Mitt Romney and his supporters gave him today. Governor Romney is only playing into the hands of Chavez by acting like he’s 10 feet tall,” an Obama spokesweasel proclaimed today.

Really? Hugo Chavez wanted to be made into a political football today by two presidential campaigns that have no intention whatsoever of actually improving most Americans’ lives?

“Hugo Chavez has become increasingly marginalized and his influence has waned. It’s baffling that Mitt Romney is so scared of a leader like Chavez whose power is fading,” the same Obama spokesweasel proclaimed today.

To many Latin Americans who have suffered under American oppression — usually with the U.S. government, including, of course, the CIA, propping up right-wing, actual dictatorships and destroying actually democratically elected left-wing leaders in order to benefit American corporations (as the Amerifascists want to do with Hugo Chavez) – Hugo Chavez is 10 feet tall, it seems to me, and as Latin America continues to democratize, nation by nation, in large part due to the example of Chavez’s bold presidency, to state that Chavez “has become increasingly marginalized and his influence has waned” and that his “power is fading” is demonstrably false.

(Of course, it hasn’t been all of Chavez’s doing. Ever since the Eye of Sauron, which sits atop the Pentagon, changed its gaze from the poor people of Latin America to the poor people of the Middle East a little more than a decade ago, the people of many formerly U.S.-oppressed Latin American nations have been able to make great strides. While George W. Bush’s CIA probably had a hand in the pathetic, failed coup attempt against Chavez by right-wing Venezuelan traitors in 2002, Chavez and other democratically elected Latin American leaders have benefitted greatly from the fact that the evil empire’s Death Star’s military resources have been tied up in the Middle East for more than a decade now.)

That Hugo Chavez is not a hero among the right-wing American oppressors and defenders of obscene income inequality around the globe and the pilfering of other nations’ natural resources for corporate profits is no fucking surprise, but Chavez has plenty of support at home, I’m sure.

“My main concern when it comes to Venezuela is having the Venezuelan people have a voice in their affairs and that you end up ultimately having fair and free elections, which we don’t always see,” El Presidente Obama also told the Miami television station, repeating the pro-plutocratic, right-wing lie that Hugo Chavez has not been democratically elected.

It’s the insanely hypocritical United States of America, of course, that has had rigged presidential elections — the crown jewel of which, of course, is George W. Bush having been coronated by the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court even though his opponent had won not only the popular vote but had won the pivotal state of Florida as well — and for Barack Obama to talk about “having the Venezuelan people [having] a voice in their affairs” and “having fair and free elections” – when all that Team Obama’s e-mails fucking talk about is that Team Mittens is raising more millions, so give Team Obama some money now! — is a sick fucking joke.

We, the American people, don’t have a voice in our own affairs, and we haven’t for decades, since everyone in Washington, D.C., from the president on down, is bought by the highest bidder.

If we want such a voice, we’ll probably have to move to Venezuela or to another actually democratic nation in Latin America.

Obama makes it easy to be Green

Updated below

Unlike both Barack Obama and Mittens Romney, a Green Party president wouldn’t be just a puppet of the corporations.

I yet to have been inspired to give Barack Obama’s re-election campaign a single fucking penny, and I already have cast my (mail-in) vote for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein for California’s June 5 presidential primary election.

I am not sure which is worse: to have had the unelected Bush regime use opposition to same-sex marriage to “win” “re”-election in 2004, or to have the (at-least-actually-duly-elected) Obama administration use support of same-sex marriage to win re-election.

In both cases, we of the “LGBT” “community” are only being used by the “leaders” of the Coke Party and the Pepsi Party in order to raise million$ and in order to pander for votes.

The Obama campaign earlier this month released an incredibly pandering five-minute re-election campaign video in which the Obamanistas act as though all throughout his first term Obama has been fighting fiercely for the LGBT community when, in fact, his fairly recent “breakthrough” announcement that he finally has “evolved” and now supports same-sex marriage — even though he had proclaimed that position way back in 1996 in Chicago, and even though he still maintains that each state should be allowed to decide the issue, meaning that we will continue to have gross inequality and unfairness and injustice throughout the nation – came quite late in his first term.

Yes, the demise of “don’t ask, don’t tell” is a good thing, but let us recall that it was “Democrat” Bill Clinton who gave us “don’t ask, don’t tell” in the first fucking place, as well as DOMA (the so-called Defense of Marriage Act, which the Obama administration does not defend in court, but which remains the law of the land).

The Dems are our friends? They enact awful, discriminatory, unlawful/unconstitutional legislation, and then want to take credit and want praise for reversing it? Really? Really?

And “don’t ask, don’t tell” doesn’t mean a whole lot to me, someone who doesn’t see why anyone of any sexual orientation would aid and abet the criminal U.S. military in the first place, someone who recognizes clearly what a fucking racket the U.S. military is — it’s not about actual “defense” or “national security” nearly as much as it is about funneling the contents of the U.S. Treasury (billions and billions and billions of our tax dollars) to the pockets of the traitors who comprise the military-industrial-corporate complex. (Well, the nation’s treasury is empty these days, so what they’re doing is making sure that those of us who have to follow them inherit a mountain of national debt.)

The members of the U.S. military these days primarily serve as the thugs for the corporations to exploit other nations’ natural resources — thugs that we, the taxpayers, pay for, even though it’s the plutocrats, and not we, the people, who get the lion’s share of the spoils of the wars that we, the people, pay for.

(The Vietraq War, for instance: Saddam Hussein’s real crime was not that he tyrannized his people, but that he nationalized Iraq’s oil fields. Now that the people of Iraq have been “liberated,” so have the nation’s oil fields — for Big Oil. No one in Iraq died for freedom or for democracy or for puppies or for kittens or for butterflies or for marshmallowy goodness. No, all of them died primarily for the profiteering of Big Oil and the profiteering of the military-industrial-corporate complex, such as Dick Cheney’s war-profiteering Halliburton, which couldn’t profiteer without a war, so the unelected BushCheneyCorp gave it a war from which to profiteer, using 9/11 as a pretext, much as how the members of the Nazi Party had used the Reichstag fire as a pretext to ram their right-wing agenda down their fellow countrymen’s throats. Happy fucking Memorial Day, by the way, and it’s so awfully nice to know that we of the “LGBT” “community” now are “free” to be cannon fodder in the plutocrats’ war profiteering that we call “national security” and “national defense” and the like.)

I suppose that I digress, but I like — well, I love – what Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi had to say earlier this month about Presidential Race 2012:

…But this campaign, relatively speaking, will not be fierce or hotly contested. Instead it’ll be disappointing, embarrassing, and over very quickly, like a hand job in a Bangkok bathhouse. And everybody knows it. It’s just impossible to take Mitt Romney seriously as a presidential candidate. …

This is exactly the John Kerry scenario. Kerry was never going to win, either, and everyone pretty much knew that, too. [No, actually, I, for one, thought that Kerry had a pretty good chance, having recognized that an incumbent president usually is difficult to unseat, and I still suspect that Kerry actually would have won the pivotal state of Ohio, and thus the White House, had the election in Ohio not been overseen by the Katherine-Harris-like Kenneth Blackwell.] But at least in the Kerry-Bush race there was a tremendous national debate over the Iraq war, which many people (incorrectly, probably) thought might end more quickly if a Democrat was elected.

This year, it’s not like that. Obviously Republican voters do hate Obama and genuinely believe he’s created a brutally repressive socialist paradigm with his health care law, among other things. But Romney was a pioneer of health care laws, and there will be dampened enthusiasm on the Republican side for putting him in office. [No, they hate Barack Hussein Obama primarily because he's black. The “Muslim" and “socialist" charges are just code words for “nigger," which you can't utter in the public domain anymore without repercussions. Let's be real about that fact.]

Meanwhile, Obama has turned out to represent continuity with the Bush administration on a range of key issues, from torture to rendition to economic deregulation. Obama is doing things with extralegal drone strikes that would have liberals marching in the streets if they’d been done by Bush. [Absolutely.]

In other words, Obama versus [John] McCain actually felt like a clash of ideological opposites. But Obama and Romney feels like a contest between two calculating centrists, fighting for the right to serve as figurehead atop a bloated state apparatus that will operate according to the same demented imperial logic irrespective of who wins the White House. [Emphasis of that money shot is mine, although the money shot of Taibbi's piece actually might be his hilarious but fairly accurate assertion that this year's presidential election “will be disappointing, embarrassing, and over very quickly, like a hand job in a Bangkok bathhouse."]

George Bush’s reign highlighted the enormous power of the individual president to drive policy, which made the elections involving him compelling contests; Obama’s first term has highlighted the timeless power of the intractable bureaucracy underneath the president, which is kind of a bummer, when you think about it. …

That, to me, is the main reason that I’m not at all excited about this cycle’s presidential race: Both Obama and Romney indeed are calculating centrists. But since the Repugnican Tea Party has succeeded in moving what used to be the center to the right, that makes both Obama and Romney, in my book, center-right candidates. Romney is a bit more to the right than is Obama, but not enough to see the two as much more different from each other than are Pepsi and Coke. The tiny plutocratic minority will continue to do well while the rest of us, the vast majority of Americans, will continue to suffer, regardless of which calculating centrist wins in November.

Obama panders to the left now and then — when he or his spokesweasels aren’t calling us such things as “sanctimonious” members of the “professional left” — but it’s his actions, or lack thereof, that I pay attention to, not his words, especially after his words “hope” and “change” fizzled specfuckingtacularly.

Speaking of Obama’s lack of actions, on June 5, not only will California hold its presidential primary, which will help Mittens finally get the 1,144 delegates that he needs to be the Repugnican Tea Party’s official presidential candidate (he has 1,084 delegates right now, according to Politico), but Wisconsin will hold its gubernatorial recall election.

Unfortunately, as I type this sentence, intrade.com puts Repugnican Tea Party Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s chances of surviving the June 5 recall election at 92.6 percent.*

That’s in no small part because Barack Obama and the national Democratic Party have been conspicuously missing in fucking action where the fight for the right to collectively bargain in Wisconsin has been concerned. Wisconsinites have been on their own since early 2011, after Walker took office and gave tax breaks to the state’s plutocrats and announced that it was the state’s public-sector labor unions that were the cause of the state’s fiscal problems.

In November 2007 at a campaign rally in South Carolina, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama said this: “And understand this: If American workers are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain when I’m in the White House, I’ll put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself; I will walk on that picket line with you as president of the United States of America, because workers deserve to know that somebody is standing in their corner.” (Here is video of that promise.)

Yet Obama has yet to appear once in Wisconsin to stand up for the Repugnican-Tea-Party-beseiged members of the working class and the middle class there. The national Democratic Party has thrown some money Wisconsin’s way at the very last fucking minute, too late to make much of a difference, if any difference at all (Scott Walker’s corporate sugar daddies have thrown many more millions his way than the Dems in Wisconsin have had available to them), but now, I suppose, the national Dem Party can say, and will say — well, actually, it has said – that it did something in Wisconsin, even though this has been just a repeat of the Democratic cowardice and incompetence and sluggardry that we have seen before.**

I remember the debacle that was California’s 2003 gubernatorial recall election all too well: The state’s Dem Party was in incredibly stupid denial that its uber-uncharismatic incumbent governor, Gray Davis, might actually lose the Repugnican-orchestrated recall election, which more than anything else was just a do-over of the 2002 gubernatorial election that the Repugnicans had lost, only this time they would front as their candidate against Gray Davis testosterone-movie-star Arnold “Baby Daddy (We Know Now)” Schwarzenegger. Because of their denial, the state’s Dem Party elites staunchly refused to rally around another Democratic candidate to run against Baby Daddy Schwarzenegger. To do so, the Dem elites rationalized, would be to admit Davis’ impending defeat.

Then-Democratic Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, apparently recognizing that Davis indeed might lose, ran against Schwarzenegger in the recall election, but he did so on his own, without the support of the state party. Had the state party supported Bustamante, or another viable Democratic candidate, he or she might have won the recall election.

It’s incredibly fucking difficult to support a party that absofuckinglutely refuses, repeatedly, to fucking fight for you in return for your support.

Should Scott Walker survive his June 5 recall election, I will chalk that up in no small part to the fact that Barack Obama utterly reneged on his 2007 promise to “put on a comfortable pair of shoes” and join “American workers [who] are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain” — “because workers deserve to know that somebody is standing in their corner.”

We workers do deserve to know that somebody is standing in our corner, but nobody fucking is — at least no one who actually can win the White House in November.

However, I’d much rather vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein again in November, even though of course she can’t win the White House, than to vote again for Barack Obama, to continue to be punk’d by the party that claims that it loves me so much — but that can’t show me such “love” unless it can then use me in its fundraising efforts immediately thereafter.

P.S. Disclaimer: I have been registered with both the Green Party and with the Democratic Party. Currently I am registered with the Green Party, in large part because I can’t stomach the Democrats’ pseudo-progressivism, their unwillingness to fight the Repugnican Tea Party traitors, and the party’s ever-increasing move to the right. Background:

In 2000 I voted for Green Party candidate Ralph Nader for president because he was the candidate whose platform most closely matched my own beliefs and values, and because it was obvious that Democrat Al Gore was going to win all of California’s electoral votes anyway (and, of course, he did).

In 2004 I supported and voted for Democrat John Kerry, primarily because preventing a second term by the unelected Bush regime was my No. 1 priority, and Kerry early on struck me as the strongest candidate to put up against Bush. (Of course, the spineless, incompetent Dems didn’t let me down; when it was announced that Kerry had “lost” the pivotal state of Ohio, Kerry couldn’t concede fast enough, and shortly after the election, word came out that Kerry had not spent millions of dollars that he’d collected, millions that might have made a difference in the outcome of the election.)

In 2008 I still was not sure, as I entered my polling place, whether I would vote for Barack Obama or whether I would vote for Ralph Nader again. I knew that Obama would win all of California’s electoral votes anyway, just as it was a foregone conclusion that Gore would win them in 2000 and that Kerry would win them in 2004. (Until we get rid of the Electoral College, millions of Americans’ votes for president won’t really matter at all.) At rather the last minute, I blackened the oval by Obama’s name.

That is a mistake that I won’t make again, unless, perhaps, by some miracle it actually looks like Mittens Romney might win California. (That, of course, will not happen.)

Update (Monday, May 28, 2012): Oops. I wrote above that Mittens should seal the deal on June 5. Actually, Mittens is expected to finally reach 1,144 delegates tomorrow, when Texas holds its presidential primary. If for some reason Mittens does not get enough of Texas’ 155 delegates — Reuters reports that he needs fewer than half of those to reach the magic 1,144 — then he would get the remaining delegates on June 5, when California and four other states hold their primaries. (The very last state in the presidential primary season is Utah, which doesn’t vote until June 26.)

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*As I type this sentence, intrade.com gives Mittens Romney only a 38.7 percent chance of winning the White House and gives Obama a 57.4 percent chance of winning re-election, which seems about right to me, about 40 percent to 60 percent.

**While I have yet to give Obama another penny for his re-election – I gave him hundreds of dollars in 2008, primarily during the 2008 Democratic primary fight because I believed that as president he would be significantly more progressive than would Billary Clinton – I have given hundreds of dollars towards the recall elections in Wisconsin, because that, to me, is where the real fight has been, and because, as I noted, the Wisconsinites for the very most part have been on their own, having been abandoned by the Obama administration and the national Democratic Party.

Biden’s endorsement of same-sex marriage is not nearly enough

So Vice President Joe Biden today on “Meet the Press” said that he supports same-sex marriage.

When host David Gregory asked Biden, “You’re comfortable with same-sex marriage now?”, Biden replied: “Look, I am vice president of the United States of America. The president sets the policy. I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women, and heterosexual [men and women marrying] are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties. …”

That to me sure sounds like an endorsement of legalized same-sex marriage — full marriage equality for same-sex couples – in all 50 states, but the White House was quick to back-pedal and say that no, Biden actually still is “evolving” on the issue of same-sex marriage just as President Barack Obama is.

Whether Biden’s nationally televised endorsement of same-sex marriage is just a calculated political game of good cop-bad cop, or whether Biden was, at least in the Obama White House’s opinion, just shooting his mouth off again, I’m not sure, but in either case, I am not moved, perhaps especially in light of this fact:

MSNBC quotes a White House “aide” as having stated: “The vice president was saying what the president has said previously — that committed and loving same-sex couples deserve the same rights and protections enjoyed by all Americans, and that we oppose any effort to roll back those rights. That’s why we stopped defending the constitutionality of Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act in legal challenges and support legislation to repeal it.  Beyond that, the vice president was expressing that he too is evolving on the issue, after meeting so many committed couples and families in this country.”

Um, no, Biden did not say that “he too is evolving on the issue” of same-sex marriage. He said, “I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women, and heterosexual [men and women marrying] are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties.” He said “men marrying men” and “women marrying women.” He did not say, “Committed and loving same-sex couples deserve the same rights and protections enjoyed by all Americans.” He did not use such mealy-mouthed language that public-relations hacks love to employ, believing that they are word-magicians who are bamboozling all of us with their ingenius hocus-pocus. He was not talking about the separate-and-unequal, second-class, unconstitutional substitutions for marriage, such as civil unions and domestic partnerships. He was talking about same-sex marriage.

Obama’s pussy, trying-to-have-it-both-ways public political stance is that each state reserves the right to determine whether or not to institute legalized same-sex marriage, and he very apparently sees no problem with forcing non-heterosexual Americans to drink from different drinking fountains by offering them only cheap imitiations of marriage, such as domestic partnerships or civil unions, which he supports. Publicly, at least, he very apparently thinks that these unconstitutionally separate-and-unequal substitutions for marriage are A-OK. (He used to teach constitutional law, too. He truly must have sucked ass at that as much as he sucks ass at being president of the United States of America.)

This “states’ rights” “argument” is the fucking coward’s way out, and if President Abraham Lincoln had adhered to such cowardice as the “states’ rights” “argument,” slavery probably would have lasted a lot longer than it did. (Funny that Obama’s official kick-off of his 2008 presidential campaign in February 2007 had him mimicking Abraham Lincoln at the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Illinois:

Associated Press photo

Barack Obama is no fucking Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln had balls. Big balls.)

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not nearly enough that Joe Biden supports same-sex marriage. He’s just the vice president. I and millions of other non-heterosexual Americans are to hope for Barack Obama to die or to otherwise become incapacitated, so that President Biden can fight for our equal human and civil rights, since President Obama refuses to do so? Is that it? Is that the kind of change that we are to hope for?

No, fuck Barack Obama.

Nothing short of his full endorsement of same-sex marriage in all 50 states could induce me to give him my vote in November or to give him a fucking penny toward his re-election.

Obama also has been a dismal disappointment as far as labor rights are concerned. Early next month, Wisconsinites will decide in a recall election whether or not to allow Repugnican Tea Party Gov. Scott Walker to keep his job for his decision to try to destroy the state’s labor unions, a project that he apparently started immediately after his election in November 2009 (if not even beforehand).

(Walker claimed that the labor unions were making the state go broke, but he had had no problem giving the state’s plutocrats tax cuts. In bad economic times, you see, it’s the working class and the middle class who are to suffer even more — not the plutocratic elite, who, like on the Titanic, are the ones who get the lifeboats while the rest of us are to drown in the icy sea.)

In November 2007 at a campaign rally in South Carolina, Barack Obama said this: “And understand this: If American workers are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain when I’m in the White House, I’ll put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself; I will walk on that picket line with you as president of the United States of America, because workers deserve to know that somebody is standing in their corner.” (Here is video of that promise.)

Yet when Wisconsin became a battleground for the life of its labor unions in early 2010, when national media attention was focused on the state’s capital, where the fuck was President Barack Obama? He couldn’t find a comfortable pair of shoes? Despite his clear promise to stand up for — in person — “American workers [who] are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain,” Obama showed his face not once in Wisconsin. Not once.

How about the British Petroleum debacle? Obama sat on his hands as BP’s oil well in the Gulf of Mexico filled the gulf with crude oil for months in the summer of 2010, making it the largest marine oil spill ever. Clearly the corporate-ass-kissing Obama White House took a back seat to BP and to Big Oil in the environmental catastrophe.

Yet despite his colossal failures of leadership — and these are just three of them – the sweet-talking Barack Obama, who is as slick as the millions of barrels of crude oil that have filled the Gulf of Mexico, wants, even apparently expects, the money and the votes of gay men and lesbians (and other non-heterosexuals and non-gender-conforming Americans who want equal human and civil rights right now – none of this “evolving” bullshit), the money and the votes of the members of labor unions, and the money and the votes of environmentalists.

Barack Obama does not deserve this money or these votes. He makes promises and he breaks them. He asks you to put him or to keep him in power, yet once you do, he does not deliver for you, but tells you that in the future, in the future, in the future, he will use his public office for the public good.

You have absofuckinglutely no reason to believe that Barack Obama the sweet-talking and self-interested two-faced coward will be any more effective in a second term than he has been thus far. None.

(On a related note, when “Meet the Press’” Gregory asked Biden if the Obama administration would come out for same-sex marriage in a second term, Biden replied, “I don’t know the answer to that,” adding, “This is evolving.”)

You know, at least with Mittens Romney we would know what we were getting. The enemy clearly would be the enemy.

Which is worse:

Someone like Mittens, who at least is fairly up front about the fact that as president he wouldn’t lift a fucking finger to help non-heterosexuals achieve equal human and civil rights, that as president he would help further destroy what’s left of our labor unions and our middle class in order to further enrich the filthy fucking rich, and that as president of course he would side with Big Oil and other corporations over the environment – or — someone like Barack Obama, who explicitly or implicitly promises us progressives that he’s on our side, but then, once we’ve put him in office, fucks us over anyway?

And memo to Joe Biden: You also stated on “Meet the Press” today, “I think ‘Will & Grace’ probably did more to educate the American public than almost anything anybody has ever done so far.”

“Will & Grace,” Joe?

Really?

It’s a fucking sitcom, Joe. A fucking sitcom. One that ended six years ago this month.

That’s the best example that you can come up with to show how gay-friendly and how politically correctly accepting of non-heterosexuals that you are?

That’s like saying to a gay man, “I have a gay cousin in New York City. Maybe you know him!”

As well-intended as it might be, it’s better to say nothing at all than to reveal that you actually have no fucking clue about the historically oppressed minority group that you’re talking about.

Prick Insantorum: Global warming is ‘political science’

Reuters photo

No, it would take courage to stand up to the fossil fuels industry, not to kowtow to it for personal and political gain, and to fight for Americans would be to fight for what’s in our best interests, and the continued long-term degradation of the planet for the short-term profiteering of the filthy rich few is not in our best interests. It’s what you call treason.

Repugnican Tea Party presidential frontrunner Prick Santorum’s fuck-the-planet insanity rolls on, belching greenhouse gases into the atmosphere as it chugs.

In the swing state of Ohio today, he pronounced that as president the continued support for the coal industry and approval of the Keystone Pipeline would be part of his “responsible environmental stewardship,” reports The Los Angeles Times.

“Responsible environmental stewardship.”

Fuck. That’s just like calling the promotion of burgers, fries and milkshakes “responsible health promotion.”

President Barack Obama – who, recall, sat on his hands while British Petroleum filled the Gulf of Mexico with crude for weeks but claimed that it had everything under control – has “radical environmental policies,” Santorum declared today.

Radical, indeed. If Barack Obama (who shot down the Keystone Pipeline, at least for now [it is presidential election season, after all], but who does not oppose the obviously environmentally disastrous practice of fracking) is a “radical” Earth-server, what could we expect to see from President Santorum once a deep-sea oil well blows?

The L.A. Times reports that Santorum said to a crowd in a “once-booming steel town” in Ohio today: “Ladies and gentlemen, we need someone who understands, who comes from the coal fields, who comes from the steel mills, who understands what ordinary working people in American need to provide for themselves and their families.”

No one on the left opposes “ordinary working people in America” being able to “provide for themselves and their families” — the vast majority of us are “ordinary working people,” too – but continuing to burn coal and other fossil fuels – aside from the fact that the majority of the profits from burning fossil fuels go to the plutocrats who comprise the Repugnican Tea Party and with whom the members of the Repugnican Tea Party love to cuddle, not to “ordinary working people” — might be good for the relatively short-term employment of a minority of Americans, but it’s bad fucking news for the long-term survival of all Americans and all human beings.

Leadership is about responsibility, ab0ut encouraging your flock to do the right thing, not the easiest thing for right now. Wisdom and wise leadership are about viewing the long term, not the short term at the expense of the long term.

Prick Santorum’s policy of fucking over current and future generations for continued environmentally disastrous profiteering demonstrates that he not only isn’t fit to sit inside the Oval Office, but that he is no Christian. (You know, I just can’t see Jesus Christ fucking over others for his own selfish, personal, political and monetary gain.)

And willfully screwing over current and future generations for a profit (or for political or other personal gain) isn’t just bad policy. In my book, it’s treason — it’s putting one’s own selfish interests above the best interests of the masses.

It’s predictable that over the coming weeks Prick Santorum’s rhetoric is only going to become even more extreme. He’s a huge fucking hypocrite* as well as possibly the most stupid man who walks the planet. And he is, in my book — and I don’t throw this label around lightly — evil.

Santorum also proclaimed today, since he wants the votes of Ohioans, because his getting the presidency is far more important than is anything else, even the continued ability of the planet to sustain human life itself: “I refer to global warming as not climate science, but political science.”

Really? Prick Santorum is a scientist? He is qualified to speak on the topic of climatology?

No, Prick Santorum is not a scientist, but is a politician who gladly will sell out us Americans in order to satiate his lust for the most politically powerful position on the planet. If he were backed by the fast food industry instead of by the fossil fuels industry, he would declare that studies that show the harmful effects of junk food are just “junk science.” Just “political science.” Ha ha!

Because Prick Santorum cares only about Prick Santorum. He doesn’t give a flying fuck about you or your children or your children’s children.

–

*For instance, in Prick Insantorum’s worldview, it’s “playing politics” for us progressives to fight for our Americans’ right to use birth control, but it’s not “playing politics” for him and his fellow “Christo”fascists to fight to replace the U.S. Constitution with the decrees of the Vatican, such as its Dark-Ages opposition to birth control. (Because the “Christo”fascists never engage in the ugly practice of politics!)

And it’s “playing politics” for us progressives to fight for environmental preservation, but it’s not “playing politics” to take money from the fossil fuels industry in exchange for making such pronouncements as that global warming is “political science.”

Repugnican Tea Party’s recipe for hell on earth: More babies, more warming

Vice President Joe Biden is under attack again from the Repugnican Tea Party traitors, this time for apparently having voiced his support of China’s one-child policy.

What would the Repugnican Tea Party traitors do without Joe Biden? Biden is known for saying impolitical things, and while former veep Dick Cheney should be executed for his war crimes and his crimes against humanity (as should George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice, et. al.), the “tea party” traitors’ bullshit line is the President Barack Obama (somehow) is responsible for everything that Biden says and does.

What I take Biden’s reported statement to mean is that he’s understands that China’s government decided to limit the nation’s population growth. However, China allegedly has “coercive birth limitation policies, including forced abortion and sterilization,” which Biden opposes, according to a statement issued by Biden’s office.

Of course, the Repugnican Tea Party traitors have been all over this, insinuating that Biden endorses everything that the Chinese government does. Reports Yahoo! News:

“China’s one-child policy is gruesome and barbaric,” former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, a 2012 contender, said Tuesday in a statement. “Instead of condoning the policy, Vice President Biden should have condemned it in the strongest possible terms. There can be no defense of a government that engages in compulsory sterilization and forced abortions in the name of population control.”

“China’s one-child policy has led to the great human tragedy of forced abortions throughout China, and Vice President Biden’s refusal to ‘second-guess’ this horrendous policy demonstrates great moral indifference on the part of the Obama Administration,” presidential candidate Rick Perry, governor of Texas, said in a statement Tuesday. “Americans value life, and we deserve leaders who will stand up against such inhumanity, not cast a blind eye.”

So Joe Biden is a baby killer, you see, and by extension, so is Barack Obama.

Of course, as the American empire continues to collapse, with talk of Social Security and Medicare being wiped out because there are too many Americans to take care of, now would be a great time for the United States of America to seriously begin to consider reining in its own population growth.

Do I advocate forced sterilization or forced abortions? Of course not. And neither does Joe Biden (or Barack Obama or anyone else within the Democratic Party high command), which fucking liars Mitt Romney and Rick Perry – who call themselves “Christians” despite their blatant fucking lies – both fucking know.

Of course, Perry and Romney and their ilk are just pandering to the mouth-breathers’ belief that it’s a swell idea to keep popping out the puppies, whether we are taking care of these puppies or not, and are putting out there the blatant lie that if re-elected, Barack Obama will initiate forced abortions and forced sterilizations! And the Repugnican Tea Party’s base of ignorant, fearful fucktards will believe it — after all, Mitt Romney and Rick Perry said it!

What would be responsible public policy, however, would be for the government to pay for voluntary sterilization. After all, it would be much less expensive for all of us taxpayers to pay for one sterilization procedure than to have to pay for another human being (public school expenses, health care expenses, infrastructure expenses due to population growth, Social Security, etc.).

However, the key is voluntary. Nothing forced.

A sane, responsible population of people that isn’t incredibly stupidly hell-bent on its own fucking destruction keeps itself in check, under control. 

Not only is our economy collapsing, due mostly to the plutocrats’ treasonous greed, of course – we have plenty of wealth in the United States; it’s that our wealth has been stolen from us since the Reagan years through a thousand cuts and has been concentrated in the treasonous hands of the plutocratic few, who enjoy the protection of the treasonous Repugnican Tea Party — but let’s face it, the more individuals we have using our resources, the faster our resources are depleted, and the planet suffers, too, such as with increased global warming from the increased use of fossil fuels from the increase in the number of consumers of fossil fuels.

Of course, Romney and Perry and their ilk not only want Americans to keep popping out babies that we can’t take of, but they “don’t believe” in global warming, as though global warming weren’t science — which it is — but were something like the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. Reports The Associated Press:

Bedford, N.H. — GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry told New Hampshire voters [last week] that he does not believe in manmade global warming, calling it a scientific theory that has not been proven.

“I think we’re seeing almost weekly, or even daily, scientists that are coming forward and questioning the original idea that manmade global warming is what is causing the climate to change,” the Texas governor said on the first stop of a two-day trip to the first-in-the-nation primary state.

He said some want billions or trillions of taxpayer dollars spent to address the issue, but he added: “I don’t think from my perspective that I want to be engaged in spending that much money on still a scientific theory that has not been proven and from my perspective is more and more being put into question.” …

It’s entirely untrue that global warming is just a theory that the world’s scientists aren’t agreed upon. There is virtually universal agreement among the world’s scientists that global warming is very real and is a serious problem.*

It’s that Rick Perry is the governor of Texas, Big Oil’s No. 1 state, and his campaign contributors, and his party’s campaign contributors, give Perry and his ilk an awful lot of money not to “believe” in global warming. The science, you see, as Al Gore put it, is inconvenient to those who profit obscenely, at our long-term expense, from continuing to destroy the planet via the use of fossil fuels — just as, as Gore also pointed out, the discovery that tobacco causes cancer sure rained on Big Tobacco’s parade of profiteering. (And, as Gore also pointed out, Big Tobacco tried to lie about the science about the harmful and even lethal effects of its products for as long as it could, just as Big Oil is doing now.) 

Now, the whole Texas secession thing aside, I view taking money from Big Oil in order to allow Big Oil to continue to harm us, the people, to amount to treason. A public servant is supposed to serve the people, not harm the people for selfish personal gain. Yet here is traitor Perry calling others traitors. That’s typical of the hypocrisy of the right wing, though, of course.

Not to be outdone by Perry, a week after Perry announced that he “doesn’t believe” in global warming, Romney pretty much did the same thing, saying, also in New Hampshire, ”Do I think the world’s getting hotter? Yeah, I don’t know that but I think that it is. I don’t know if it’s mostly caused by humans. What I’m not willing to do is spend trillions of dollars on something I don’t know the answer to.”

Of course, the problem isn’t really the spending of trillions of dollars — after all, we blow that much money on bogus wars for the war profiteers. The problem is not allowing Big Oil to continue to profiteer from our demise because of our planet’s demise. Big Oil doesn’t want its big profits jeopardized, and its cronies within the treasonous Repugnican Tea Party care more about Big Oil’s continued obscene profits than they care about the welfare of the rest of us or our planet.

Only one of the Repugnican contenders, former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, who doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning the 2012 Repugnican Tea Party presidential nomination because he is the sanest of the bunch of contenders, recently declared, “To be clear: I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy.”** Oh, those of his ill-chosen party do.

But while one is entitled to his or her opinions, one is not entitled to his or her facts — whether one falsely claims that global warming is not a reality or falsely claims that Joe Biden (and other Dems) support forced abortions and/or forced sterilizations.

And the claim of the majority of the Repugnican Tea Party traitors that reality indeed is whatever they deem reality to be — all of that inconvenient science be damned — is the dictionary definition of the word “insanity,” which is a break from reality.

And the insanity of the likes of Mitt Romney and Rick Perry isn’t just their cute quirkiness. Their insanity threatens all of us and the entire planet, because in the most powerful political office of the United States of America, their insanity would be gargantuanly amplified.

A responsible leader leads us where we need to go, even if many or even most of us are are not thrilled about having to make the journey.

We need to keep our population in check. We clearly can’t take care of those who already are here in the United States, so why contribute to our national misery by popping out even more puppies?

We sure love our fossil fuels, but they’re killing us, as surely as a person with terminal lung cancer who still loves his or her cigarettes is only hastening his or her own demise.

Perry, Romney & Co. claim to care about life, but short-sighted policies that in the long run threaten all life on the planet aren’t what I’d call pro-life.

To support policies that guarantee continued runaway profiteering and personal political gain in the short term but that cause long-term damage to the nation and to the world isn’t just short-sighted, irresponsible and insane. It’s treasonous.

Based upon just the two critically important issues of population control and global warming alone, the choice for president in November 2012 should be pretty fucking crystal clear to those of us who are not absofuckinglutely insane.

–

*The Associated Press notes that “Perry’s opinion runs counter to the view held by an overwhelming majority of scientists that pollution released from the burning of fossil fuels is heating up the planet. Perry’s home state of Texas releases more heat-trapping pollution carbon dioxide — the chief greenhouse gas — than any other state in the country, according to government data.” (Emphasis mine.)

**Huntsman also recently stated: “The minute that the Republican Party becomes the … anti-science party, we have a huge problem…. When we take a position that isn’t willing to embrace evolution, when we take a position that basically runs counter to what 98 or 100 climate scientists have said … I think we find ourselves on the wrong side of science and, therefore, in a losing position.”

The only thing there I disagree with is that the Repugnican Tea Paty already is the anti-science party. It isn’t becoming the anti-science party.

Assorted shit (gay pride month edition!)

Homophobes take another blow

Reuters photo

Former federal Judge Vaughn Walker (pictured above in April), who last year correctly ruled that to prohibit same-sex marriage is unconstitutional, came out after he retired from the federal bench in February. Homophobes  shamelessly had challenged the ability of Walker, who had been appointed by the first President George Bush, to be able to rule fairly on same-sex marriage, but today another federal judge, who also was appointed by the first President Bush, affirmed that Walker did not inappropriately rule on the case.

If I could say two words to the “Christo”fascists who still oppose legally recognized same-sex marriage in all 50 states, it might be something like this: “Surrender, Dorothy!”

Same-sex marriage in all 50 states is going to be a reality within the next decade, most likely. So for the supposedly freedom-lovin’ wingnuts to keep expending their time, money and energy trying to stop the inevitable — life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and justice for all — is a fucking waste. (If they were true Christians, they’d spend their time, money and energy helping people, as Jesus Christ instructed his followers to do, instead of trying to keep others down so that they can feel better about their miserable selves.)

Today the homophobes suffered a significant defeat when federal Judge James Ware rejected their “argument” that another federal judge, the now-retired Vaughn Walker, should have recused himself from ruling on Proposition Hate – the anti-same-sex-marriage proposition that passed narrowly in California in November 2008 – because he has been in a long-term same-sex relationship himself.

Walker – who, like Ware, was appointed by the first President George Bush – correctly ruled last year that Prop Hate violates the protections granted to all Californians by the U.S. Constitution.*

(When judges who were appointed by Repugnican presidents are ruling against the haters, the haters’ days are numbered, methinks.)

As The Associated Press notes, today’s ruling that Walker had no reason or obligation to recuse himself from ruling on the matter of same-sex marriage “does not settle the legal fight over Proposition 8. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is considering whether Walker properly concluded that denying gays and lesbians the right to marry violates their rights to due process and equal protection.”

But the ruling does make it much more difficult for the homophobes to try to pick and choose the judges who hear their bullshit homophobic arguments.

To the “Christo”fascists and other assorted wingnuts, only conservative, heterosexual, “Christian” white male judges should be able to rule on anyfuckingthing. Indeed, in Ware’s ruling he noted that female and non-white judges historically have been accused of not being able to rule impartially in certain cases — a right-wing “argument” that the law rejects.

“The sole fact that a federal judge shares the same circumstances or personal characteristics with other members of the general public, and that the judge could be affected by the outcome of a proceeding in the same way that other members of the general public would be affected, is not a basis for either recusal or disqualification,” Ware wrote in his ruling.

Indeed, one easily could counter-argue that a heterosexually married (or perhaps even a heterosexual but single) judge should recuse him- or herself from ruling on same-sex marriage, but how far would that argument get?

Ironically, in their homophobic attacks on Walker, the pro-Prop Hate crowd only further proved that non-heterosexuals in the U.S. routinely face bigotry, hatred and discrimination – which is going to speed up, not slow down, the eventuality of same-sex marriage in all 50 states.

But this fact apparently escaped the homophobic abject fucktards, who are capable only of stupidity, fear and hatred, not of reason.

–

Black homophobes still suck ass

Associated Press photo

“Comedian” Tracy Morgan, pictured in March, has apologized for having said some hateful things that you really can’t apologize for, not credibly, anyway.

Way back in 2005 I posted a piece titled “Black Homophobes Suck.”

Among other things in that piece (which I think you should read if you have the time), I wrote about how a so-called leader in the black community actually wrote in a letter to me that being gay or lesbian might be a choice or it might be a “birth defect” and closed the letter with, “Take care of yourself health wise,” an apparent reference to her apparent belief that all gay men must have HIV or must be just about to contract HIV, since all that being a gay man means is taking cock up the ass as often as possible.

Alas, little has changed since 2005.

In the news recently has been black “comedian” Tracy Morgan’s anti-gay rant during a recent stand-up performance that you can’t just apologize for.

According to an audience member, among many other things, such as suggesting the President Barack Obama has been as pro-gay as he has been only because he is pussy-whipped, Morgan stated that being gay or lesbian is a choice and that “if his son [were] gay he better come home and talk to him like a man … or he would pull out a knife and stab that little [nigger] to death.”

Morgan also reportedly made the unfunny, already-made (by comedian Carlos Mencia, long, long ago) “joke” that if gay men can take a dick, they can take a joke – ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

The audience member further stated that

The sad thing is that none of this rant was a joke. [Morgan's] entire demeanor changed during that portion of the night. He was truly filled with some hate towards us. As far as I could see, 10 to 15 people walked out. I had to fight myself to stay seated, but I knew if I got up … he won.

I understand where this man, the audience member, is coming from: When someone tells an anti-gay joke/“joke,” you can tell what kind of space it’s coming from, whether it’s truly a joke or whether it’s coming from a space of bigotry and hatred and meanness.

The routine of Carlos Mencia that I saw on television years ago that I just made reference to did not strike me as coming from a space of actual hatred of gays, so it did not repulse me. Similarly, some years ago, the creators of “South Park” created an episode in which a classroom gerbil named Lemmiwinks must save his own life after having been inserted into a gay man’s rectum, for fuck’s sake.

On the face of it, that’s pretty fucking homophobic and stereotypical (I am one gay man who knows of no other gay man who ever inserted a small mammal into his rectum), but the way in which the episode was done does not give me the impression that the creators of “South Park” actually are homophobic. Therefore, I was able to laugh at the episode, even if at least on the face of it it’s pretty fucking homophobic. (Anyone who truly believes that gerbils are a routine part of the gay man’s sexual repertoire probably is beyond help anyway, so I can’t even really knock the “South Park” creators for having put out a negative and damaging view of gay men, even if they aren’t homophobic themselves.)

Anyway, Tracy Morgan sounds like he’s as out of control as is his character on the NBC show “30 Rock,” and after his homophobic rant, I don’t think that I can watch that show anymore (I’ve watched several of the early episodes via the Internet, mainly because I love Tina Fey and a co-worker recommended the series to me).

I hope that NBC dumps Tracy Morgan. After all, any star of any major network show who made blatantly racist (or, say, anti-Semitic) remarks in seriousness should expect to get fired, so why not Morgan?

Also in the news, it recently was reported that U.S. Rep. Allen West, a black Repugnican whose district is in Florida, recently fired an intern for having sent an unauthorized pro-gay Tweet in response to Tracy Morgan’s homophobic rant. (I read the Tweet, and it seems to me that it could have been meant sarcastically, which actually would make it an anti-gay message, but whatever…)

The reportage of the firing of West’s intern notes that West has called same-sex marriage “an oxymoron.”

Gee, that’s nice. There was a time when pro-slavery white supremacists would have called the term “a free black man” an “oxymoron.” (Just as white supremacists might call being born black a “birth defect.”)

As long as your own freedoms and liberties and rights are secured, that’s all that fucking matters, right?

I wrote way back in 2005: “Black homophobes will attack injustice that affect them — racism — but fuck the rest of us minority groups. They don’t have a problem with oppression in general; they have a problem only with being oppressed themselves.”

Nothing has changed, has it?

Some have actually suggested that we non-heterosexuals visit with members of the black community to convince the homophobes within the black community that we are deserving of their approval or respect or the like.

I say: Fuck! That! Shit! We non-heterosexuals shouldn’t have to fucking grovel on our hands and knees for equal human and civil rights any more than blacks ever should have had to or should have to today.

We non-heterosexuals should boycott all black homophobes, just as we would boycott any other homophobe, regardless of his or her race. I, for one, won’t spend a penny on anything that has Tracy Morgan in it. (That won’t be hard to do, since Tina Fey, certainly not Morgan, is the creative genius behind “30 Rock,” and since Morgan isn’t, in my estimation, remarkably talented anyway.)

And I invite black homophobes to commit some introspection and to ask themselves why it’s so fucking important to them to be able to have one historically oppressed minority group that even they, also members of a historically oppressed minority group, can shit and piss upon – and whether or not this is moral.

–

Still not much to be proud of

It’s “gay pride” month, but the corporatization of the gay and lesbian “community” continues.

It’s interesting: While gay men and lesbians (and other non-heterosexuals and non-gender-conforming individuals) proclaim that they won’t take it from the heterosexists and the homophobes anymore, they’ll still gladly bend over for the corporations.

Memo to the gay and lesbian “community”: The corporations don’t love us.

In October 2009 I posted on my blog “An Open Letter to Joe Solmonese,” who is the president of the Human Rights Campaign, and I e-mailed a copy of the open letter to the HRC.

In the letter (which, I think, you should read, if you have a few minutes), among other things, I criticized the HRC for accepting corporate money from corporations that, while they might have pro-gay-and-lesbian-et.-al. policies (at least on paper), are harmful to human beings and to the planet.

In the fall 2009 issue of HRC’s membership magazine (titled Equality), I noted, I saw full-page ads for Chevron, Shell Oil, American Airlines and Citigroup — corporations that, respectively, are killing the planet with the continued production of fossil fuels, drastically underpay their employees (their pilots, in the case of American Airlines), and, as Wall Street weasels, are partially responsible for the Wall Street meltdown that has tanked our nation’s economy.

I seem to remember getting some e-mail reply from HRC — not from Joe, of course, but from some lackey – stating that HRC supports those corporations that at least pay lip service to being pro-gay-and-lesbian (my words, not hers), and that if I have a problem with this, then I can have my subscription to Equality canceled.

I didn’t ask to have my subscription canceled, thinking that it would just run itself out, but I’m still getting the magazine even though I stopped giving HRC money a long time ago, disgusted by its corporate ass-licking and its selling out of the gay and lesbian community to the fucking corporations.

Nothing has fucking changed, because in the current (spring 2011) issue of HRC’s Equality is a full-page ad for — wait for it — that paragon of corporate responsibility — keep waiting for it — drum roll, please! — British Petroleum!

Yes, my non-heterosexual and non-gender-conforming brethren and sistren, BP loves us!

(Along with the full-page ad for British Petroleum in the current issue of Equality are full-page ads for Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Chase, Chevron and Deloitte, all banking fraudsters, planet destroyers and Wall Street weasels. And American Airlines has another full-page ad.)

Not just to pick on HRC.

Locally, Sacramento’s annual gay pride festival earlier this month for the first time ever got rained out, which, naturally, resulted in low attendance, and the organizers of the festival subsequently actually apparently unashamedly and unabashedly sent out a fundraising e-mail asking people to just fork over $40-something because the festival didn’t recoup its costs this year (and they calculated that the average person would have spent $40-something at the festival were it not for the rain).

Well, the festival was held two weeks earlier this year than it was last year, increasing the chances of rain, it seems to me, but that aside, the fundraising e-mail actually read: “Pride 2011 was always going to be different for many reasons. Our corporate sponsorship support was the highest ever, with over two dozen sponsors this year. We invested in more marketing and promotion to hit the far reaches of our area to bring as many LGBT people and our supporters to [Sacramento] on June 4th….”

The first thing that the e-mail lists is the “highest-ever” “corporate sponsorship.”

Why has the gay and lesbian “community” become so fucking dependent upon corporate sponsorship over the years?

Can we not do anything on our own without corporate handouts, for which there are always strings attached?

Is bigger always better? Do we have to do everything huge? Is a huge amount of money necessary for every endeavor? Can nothing be home-grown? (Ironically, it seems to me, if the organizers of the rained-out Sacramento gay pride festival hadn’t focused on making the event so huge, the rain-related losses wouldn’t have been as huge. The bigger things are, the harder they fall.)

Anyway, I replied to the shameless fundraising e-mail with this: “Maybe the Rain Goddess was pissed off over that record-level corporate sponsorship, the selling out of the LGBT community to profits-over-people corporations by the same people who claim to care about and to be helping the LGBT community. Just sayin.’”**

(Unsurprisingly, I haven’t received a response to my response, and no, I don’t claim that I always play along nicely with the other kiddies in the sandbox…)

This gay pride month, if it were up to me, the gay and lesbian “community” would ponder this question: How are we of the gay and lesbian (and bisexual and transgendered and…) “community” doing ourselves a favor by fighting for equal human and civil rights for all non-heterosexuals (and for all non-gender-conforming individuals) while further enslaving ourselves and others to our corporate overlords, who have only their profits, not our best interests, at heart?

But I’m not queen just yet…

–

*In his ruling, Walker concluded:

Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis [emphasis mine] in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license. Indeed, the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California Constitution the notion that opposite-sex couples are superior to same-sex couples. Because California has no interest in discriminating against gay men and lesbians, and because Proposition 8 prevents California from fulfilling its constitutional obligation to provide marriages on an equal basis, the court concludes that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional.

Indeed, that you just don’t like a whole class of people is not sufficient cause to deny this class of people equal human and civil rights as guaranteed to them by the U.S. Constitution.

**Not even to pick only on the gay and lesbian “community” in Sacramento — other festivals in Sacramento have been ruined by a corporate omnipresence, such as a recent festival for Asians and Pacific islanders here in Sacramento that I recently attended at which McDonald’s and Wells Fargo had prominent presences. (Indeed, McDonald’s provided the only place to sit down to eat — provided that you were eating McDonald’s, of course, because I don’t know about you, when I think of Asian and Pacific islander food, I immediately think of McDonald’s.)

This is all I’m going to say about 9/11

The unelected Bush regime beat the nation over the head with 9/11 for many years, so sue me if I long have been 9/11’d out.

As nightmarish as it was to have had to experience the reign of BushCheneyCorp after the stupid, fat and lazy American public just allowed the right-wing thieves (redundant…) to steal the White House in late 200o, the traitors who comprised the Bush regime were, in their own sick, twisted and treasonous way, brilliant. I mean, they took a spectacularly tragic event that they’d been warned about but did not prevent — and used it for political gain.   

It was only until the mid-term elections of 2006 that the Repugnicans no longer could wave the bloody shirt of 9/11 for political gain.

What have we Americans learned since Sept. 11, 2001?

Absofuckinglutely nothing.

We were attacked on Sept. 11, 2001, because we wantonly had slaughtered Muslims, or allowed them to be slaughtered or allowed or caused them to die, in the Middle East. In fact, the main reasons given by 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden himself (and other members of al-Qaeda) for 9/11 were: the U.S.-led sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s, which resulted in the deaths of untold numbers of Iraqi civilians, including children; the presence of the U.S. military in Saudi Arabia after the first George Bush war on Iraq; and the U.S. government’s blind, slavish support of Israel.

So: What has changed since then?

Well, let’s see: The U.S. killed even more innocent Iraqi civilians in George W. Bush’s Vietraq War for Big Oil and for the war profiteering of the war profiteers, such as Dick Cheney’s Halliburton; the U.S. military moved its main base in the Middle East from Saudi Arabia to Iraq, which, to my understanding, still violates the fundamentalist Islamist belief that no infidel should be allowed to occupy Muslim land; and the U.S. government still licks the ass of Israel, which can do no wrong and which enjoys the blind, slavish support of both parties in the duopolistic dog and pony show that we call “democracy.”

While I’m not asserting that when Osama bin Laden shouts “Jump!” Americans should ask “How high?”, it seems clear to me that Americans are hated around the world because they just allow their government and their military (which are only in the service of the corporatocrats and the plutocrats) to shit and piss upon the poorer, weaker peoples all around the globe — yet these same Americans fully expect to be adored around the world just the same.

Why do they hate us?

They hate us because we’re stupid.

They hate us because we’re xenophobic — we don’t even bother to try to learn about other cultures, but we function from the stubborn but incorrect belief that other cultures have just failed at being us. We just assume that they want to be just like us (they don’t) but that they just can’t pull it off because they don’t have what it takes.

They hate us because we’re hypocrites. (To give just one of many examples, the U.S. government maintains that Israel may have nukes but that Iran may not. And for the only nation ever to have nuked another nation to be dictating who does and who does not get to have nukes — because you just can’t allow one nation to nuke another nation —  is pretty fucking insanely hypocritical.)

They hate us because we have no empathy whatsofuckingever. We use the occasion of the anniversary of 9/11 to wallow mawkishly in our own national pity party about the 3,000 or so Americans who were killed on Sept. 11, 2001, while we don’t say a word about the tens of thousands of civilians whom we allowed our government to kill or cause to die in Iraq using 9/11 as a pretext. We talk only about American losses because we consider only Americans to be fully human. Yes, they hate us because we don’t consider them to be fully human.

They hate us because we’re greedy, fat and lazy — and that we use violence around the globe to support our ability to be fat and lazy.

They hate us because we’re destroying the very planet, such as with global warming.

They hate us because we are, in a word, Rome, which I surmise also was rather hated throughout the world.

We fat, lazy and stupid Americans should remember: Rome fell.

Happy International Burn a Koran Day.

Obama can’t win

 

There is plenty about President Barack Obama not to like, but, like him or dislike him, it’s a fucking fact that with the right wing the man just can’t win.

Lately I’ve seen rather strange news stories about how the White House has been emphatic that Obama has been sufficiently angry! about British Petroleum’s devasation of the Gulf of Mexico.

Reports French news agency AFP today:

Washington – President Barack Obama insisted [today] he was “furious” about the U.S. oil [leak] disaster but that “yelling” would be pointless, as aides rejected claims he had shown insufficient emotion over the crisis….

In a new attempt to demonstrate its engagement, the White House said Obama would make his third trip to the Gulf of Mexico coast [tomorrow], and he appeared on CNN talk show “Larry King Live” to discuss the catastrophe.

“I would love to just spend a lot of my time venting and yelling at people, but that is not what I was hired to do — my job is to solve this problem,” Obama said.

“I am furious at this entire situation. This is something where somebody didn’t think through the consequences of their actions,” he added.

Obama has been besieged on multiple fronts, and is dealing with the Gulf crisis, the Gaza flotilla raid and North Korea’s belligerence, not to mention the slowly recovering economy.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs hit back at a growing media frenzy, along the lines that the president should simply “do something” to stop a gushing undersea well clogging the Gulf with a thick slick of oil.

“If jumping up and down and screaming would fix a hole in the ocean, we’d have done that five or six weeks ago,” Gibbs said.

Gibbs has been peppered with questions in recent days over whether Obama, known for a cool, intellectual demeanor, is doing enough to convey anger and dismay over the disaster.

Some normally sympathetic commentators have also been tearing into him, frustrated at his “no-drama” persona….

Gibbs argued Obama would gain nothing by going on television and throwing a tantrum.

“Pounding on a podium isn’t going to fix a hole in the ocean,” he said….

My main criticism of Obama’s handling of BP’s disaster is that he seemed to have trusted BP’s apparent lies that it had everything under control — and/or Obama seemed to be too intimidated by the mega-corporation to take control of the situation sooner, and if so, that’s a dangerous situation for a nation that calls itself a democracy.

Last on my list of criticisms would be that Obama hasn’t displayed enough anger, and I have no doubt that if he had done that, the very same assholes who now are saying now that he hasn’t been emotional enough would accuse him of being overly emotional and too unstable for a U.S. president.

And it would be a huge mistake to put the blame on Obama when the blame rests squarely on BP, Big Oil and the Repugnican Party, which has been aiding and abetting Big Oil at least since George W. Bush stole the White House in late 2000 and then launched his illegal, immoral, unprovoked and unjust war on Iraq in March 2003 in order to open its sovereign oil fields to Big Oil and to provide Dick Cheney’s war-profiteering Halliburton with war profits.