I voted for Jill Stein, fuck you very much.

Updated below

AFP/Getty Images

Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, photographed in Washington, D.C., in July

It wasn’t a difficult decision. It felt at least a bit liberating, in fact, to fill in with my black ballpoint pen the oval next to her name on my mail-in ballot, and putting my completed ballot in the U.S. Postal Service mailbox yesterday gave me the at-least-mild satisfaction of having an important task finished.

President Barack Obama is leading Repugnican Tea Party presidential candidate Mittens Romney by double digits in polling here in California. California and its 55 electoral votes, the nation’s biggest prize, are so not up for grabs that neither candidate is airing any TV commercials here. No mailers, either. Nothing that I have seen, in fact, except what’s on the Internet.

The New York Times’ prognosticator Nate Silver, as I type this sentence, puts Obama’s chances of re-election at just a little below 75 percent and Mittens’ chances of winning the White House at just a little above 25 percent.

Fact is, living in a solidly blue state under the undemocratic, winner-takes-all Electoral College system, my vote for president essentially doesn’t count. I could have voted for Mittens, for fuck’s sake, and the outcome in California wouldn’t have been altered one nano-iota. That Obama would win all of California’s 55 electoral votes on November 6, 2012, was a foregone conclusion long ago.

No, of course I don’t want Mormon multi-millionaire fascist Mittens to win, and of course I recognize that the winner of the election will be Obama or Mittens (and certainly not a third-party candidate), which is why this time around I gave Obama more than $100 in campaign contributions — much less than I gave him in 2008, but, according to an e-mail that the Obama campaign put out earlier this month, only about one in 75 Americans has given Obama one single penny, so hey, even the less than $200 that I’ve given him toward his re-election bid is pretty fucking good, comparatively.

But I almost didn’t vote for Obama in November 2008. When I went to my polling place on Election Day 2008, I had it down to Obama or to independent progressive candidate Ralph Nader, and even when I’d just received my ballot I still had to ponder which candidate to vote for, and at the last minute I went ahead and gave my vote to Mr. Hopey-Changey, knowing that he would carry California whether I voted for him or not, but hoping that he would at least try to deliver the change that he’d promised.

And yes, I also felt that I wanted to take the opportunity to vote for the first non-white president of the nation’s history. It gave me at least a little bit of an uplift to know that I was part of that historical event. (Of course, any Obama-related uplift was blunted by the blow of the passage of Proposition Hate here in California, which happened in large part thanks to the big money and the efforts of Mittens’ Mormon cult and Pretty Boy Paul Ryan’s Catholick church, which, much like the Taliban, seek to shove their theofascist, ignorant, hateful bullshit down the throats of all of us.)

Four years later, it is clear to me that Barack Obama had only said what he’d figured (correctly) would get him elected. Indeed, his take of the popular vote was bigger than either Bill Clinton or George W. Bush ever got.

I could post a litany of reasons why, in good conscience, I could not cast my vote for Barack Obama again, but here are just three of them:

• Obama for the most part just sat idly by while British Petroleum assured us that it had its crude-gushing underwater oil well perfectly well under control. Obama’s inaction was a clear signal to the planet-raping corporations: Do (or don’t do) whatever the fuck you want. The Democratic Party is addicted to your campaign contributions and therefore won’t lift a fucking finger to stop you from destroying the planet.
• Obama had promised before his election that if the right to collectively bargain ever were under threat anywhere in the nation, he’d don a pair of comfortable walking shoes and join the fight himself. Yet when workers in Wisconsin fought for months and months for the survival of their right to collectively bargain, Obama showed his face in Wisconsin not one fucking time. Wisconsinites were on their own, with only very-last-minute support from the national Democratic Party, which was way too little way too late, and resultantly, Repugnican Tea Party Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker survived the gubernatorial recall election against him in June.*
• The Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning-for-fuck’s-sake Obama loves his civilian-killing drones, which, if you are awake, alert and oriented, you should find spine-chilling. A recent study of drone strikes by Stanford Law School and New York University’s School of Law found that ”from June 2004 through mid-September 2012, available data indicate that drone strikes killed 2,562 to 3,325 people in Pakistan, of whom 474 to 881 were civilians, including 176 children.” Um, yeah, “they” don’t hate us for “our freedom.” And what’s to stop drones from being used against American civilians here at home at some point in the future?

Even without those three things, this one thing is more than enough reason not to vote for Punker in Chief Barack Obama again: Obama’s best opportunity to push through a progressive agenda was in 2009 and 2010, when his party controlled not only the White House but also the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives.

Instead of even fucking trying to deliver upon his promises of hope and change for his base, however, Obama in 2009 and 2010 was too busy trying to sing “Kumbaya” with the Repugnican Tea Party traitors in Congress whose only mission was to make sure that the nation’s first non-white president failed. (They even openly had stated that this was their mission from Day One.)

You don’t negotiate with terrorists. You crush them. Which is what Obama should have done.

Obama’s role model, he repeatedly essentially has told us, was Ronald Fucking Reagan, who, in my book, ranks with Richard M. Nixon and George W. Bush as the worst three presidents of my lifetime (I was born in 1968).

Obama’s “signature” “achievement,” the so-called “Obamacare,” contains little to nothing that the wealth-care industry didn’t rubber stamp, and even while proclaiming his support of same-sex marriage, Obama still maintains that each state nonetheless should be allowed to decide whether or not same-sex couples’ constitutional guarantee of equality should be honored or denied.

All of this, yet Barack Obama is on our side?

After the 2008 election, Obama and his surrogates called us progressives — the Democratic Party’s (disappearing?) base — “sanctimonious” members of the “professional left.”

I, for one, don’t forget such slights – I helped put you where you are, and then you turn and shit and piss all over me? Really? – and the Obama administration’s incredibly stupid practice of base-bashing is a large reason why I voted for Jill Stein.

Again, of course I hope that Mittens Romney doesn’t win, but if he does, you can’t blame me.

Blame Barack Obama, who promised hope and change but who has delivered only sweet-sounding rhetoric and even base-bashing, and who has presided over the nation as a Ronald-Reagan-loving Repugnican Lite.

And blame the Obamabots – the blind, mindless, amoral Democratic Party hacks – who to this day have refused to hold the center-right Barack Obama accountable for anyfuckingthing only because he wears the brand-name label of “Democrat,” and who continue to actually buy the Democratic Party’s pandering bullshit that the Democratic Party of today actually gives a flying fuck about us, against the mountain of evidence to the contrary.

Update: I’d wanted to keep my bullet-pointed list of Obama’s fuck-ups to only three items, but Barack Obama has been such a fuck-up that I found it fairly impossible to list only three of his fuck-ups, so I ended up listing other fuck-ups of his elsewhere in my post, and I want to add a fourth bullet point, a point that I’m surprised that I forgot to include in my original post:

• Early on, Obama appointed Wall Street weasels like Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers as his economic advisers, and in 2008, Obama took more money from Wall Street weasels than even John McCainosaurus did — which is probably why Obama rejected the advice of progressive economists, like the Nobel-Prize-winning Paul Krugman, who warned that Obama’s “stimulus” wasn’t nearly enough to restore the nation’s economy. All of this while Obama claims to care sooooo much about the working class and the middle class. Again: Whose side, exactly, is Barack “Talk One Way, Walk Another” Obama on?

–

*A judge in Wisconsin last month struck down Walker’s union-killing legislation, which was a victory for labor, but a victory that neither Obama nor the Democratic Party had a hand in. And the state is appealing the judge’s ruling, so the fight isn’t quite over quite yet.

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.

U.S. now produces only corpses

Associated Press photo

This is all that the crumbling American empire produces and exports these days: death and destruction. Gooooo USA! 

A column that Salon.com’s Glenn Greenwald posted yesterday is pretty spot-on about what the United States of America has become. Greenwald notes that “there is something very significant about a nation that so continuously finds purpose and joy in the corpses its government produces, while finding it in so little else.” (The occasion of Greenwald’s column is the latest U.S.-government-produced corpse, that of Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi [pictured above], whom, like other dictators, the U.S. government opposed, then cooperated with, then opposed again.)

Greenwald begins his column by reminding us of the uber-creepy language that President Hopey-Changey used in early May after the U.S. government summarily had assassinated Osama bin Laden in violation of justice and of international law:

When President Obama announced the killing of Osama bin Laden on the evening of May 1, he said something which I found so striking at the time and still do: “tonight, we are once again reminded that America can do whatever we set our mind to. That is the story of our history.”

That sentiment of national pride had in the past been triggered by putting a man on the moon, or discovering cures for diseases, or creating
technology that improved the lives of millions, or transforming the Great Depression into a thriving middle class, or correcting America’s own entrenched injustices.

Yet here was President Obama proclaiming that what should now cause us to be “reminded” of our national greatness was our ability to hunt someone down, pump bullets into his skull, and then dump his corpse into the ocean.*

And indeed, outside the White House and elsewhere, hordes of Americans were soon raucously celebrating the killing with “USA! USA!” chants as though their sports team had just won a major championship. …

Speaking of sports teams, that is all that the Democratic Party has become: a sports team that many Americans identify with. This is evidenced by the fact that even when Barack Obama violates the U.S. Constitution (e.g., denying assassinees and detainees due process, unilaterally declaring war, etc.) and international law (e.g., assassinating individuals on foreign soil without the consent of that sovereign nation’s government) and sits on his hands in the face of catastrophe (Obama handled British Petroleum’s destruction of the Gulf of Mexico as effectively as George W. Bush would have) – even when President Hopey-Changey acts or fails to act in the same illegal and/or immoral and/or ineffectual manner of which the Dems would have been critical had it been a Repugnican president in power — the Obamabots, if they can’t exactly find it within themselves to celebrate Barack Obama’s George-W.-Bush-like ways, at least keep their mealy mouths shut, and thus empower and enable the lawless, immoral, pro-plutocratic and militaristic Obama regime through their complicity.

This amorality and immorality is why, as Chris Hedges writes, the liberal class (as he calls the Democrats in name only, those who claim to be liberal or progressive but who don’t actually lift a fucking finger for progressive causes, and who, if they don’t actually engage in evil themselves, at least enable the evils encouraged and perpetrated by the right wing) is in its death throes.

The reason that Obama’s re-election prospects are dim, you see, is that the wingnuts prefer actual wingnuts to “liberal” sellouts like Obama – no matter how many baddies/“baddies” he assassinates with our tax dollars as though he were some Big Fucking Badass – and the so-called “independents”/“swing voters,” the majority of whom actually are center-right or even pretty far to the right, also prefer the actual Repugnican candidate to the Repugnican Lite candidate (like Barack Obama).

Actual progressives like me and the millions of other Americans (and those abroad) who are participating in or who at least sympathize with the Occupy Wall Street movement also have no use for Obama — stick a fork in him, because we are done with him and his false promises and his true allegiances – which leaves President Hopey-Changey only with his mealy-mouthed Obamabots, who are so fucking worthless that they might as well donate their organs now so that others can make better use of them.

We actual progressives can thank Obama, however, for thoroughly exposing how much the Democratic Party, since Bill Clinton, has sold us Americans out to our corporate/plutocratic overlords. Chris Hedges asks us:

What kind of nation is it that spends far more to kill enemy combatants and Afghan and Iraqi civilians than it does to help its own citizens who live below the poverty line? What kind of nation is it that permits corporations to hold sick children hostage while their parents frantically bankrupt themselves to save their sons and daughters? What kind of nation is it that tosses its mentally ill onto urban heating grates? What kind of nation is it that abandons its unemployed while it loots its treasury on behalf of speculators? What kind of nation is it that ignores due process to torture and assassinate its own citizens? What kind of nation is it that refuses to halt the destruction of the ecosystem by the fossil fuel industry, dooming our children and our children’s children?

An Obamanation, I might answer.

And Hedges answers, I think, the question of why the Occupy Wall Street movement has been so successful:

The liberal class functions in a traditional, capitalist democracy as a safety valve. It lets off enough steam to keep the system intact. It makes
piecemeal and incremental reform possible. This is what happened during the Great Depression and the New Deal. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s greatest achievement was that he saved capitalism. Liberals in a functioning capitalist democracy are at the same time tasked with discrediting radicals, whether it is [Martin Luther] King [Jr.], especially after he denounced the war in Vietnam, or later Noam Chomsky or Ralph Nader.

The stupidity of the corporate state is that it thought it could dispense with the liberal class. It thought it could shut off that safety valve in order
to loot and pillage with no impediments. Corporate power forgot that the liberal class, when it functions, gives legitimacy to the power elite. And the reduction of the liberal class to silly courtiers, who have nothing to offer but empty rhetoric, meant that the growing discontent found other mechanisms and outlets.

[All emphasis in this block quote is mine. Indeed, the success of the Internet as a political organizing tool is due to the fact that the duopoly of the corporate-ass-licking Coke Party and Pepsi Party stopped addressing the common American's needs and interests long ago, and thus the common American has found alternative routes, has flowed around the obstruction that is the partisan duopoly that masquerades as "democracy" in the United States of America. And now we see Occupy Wall Street as yet another adaptive response to the utter ineffectiveness refusal of the two parties to represent us, the people.]

Liberals were reduced to stick figures, part of an elaborate pantomime, as they acted in preordained roles to give legitimacy to meaningless and useless political theater. But that game is over.

Human history has amply demonstrated that once those in positions of power become redundant and impotent, yet retain the trappings and privileges of power, they are brutally discarded. The liberal class, which insists on clinging to its positions of privilege while at the same time refusing to play its traditional role within the democratic state, has become a useless and despised appendage of corporate power. And as the engines of corporate power pollute and poison the ecosystem and propel us into a world where there will be only masters and serfs, the liberal class, which serves no purpose in the new configuration, is being abandoned and discarded by both the corporate state and radical dissidents. The best it can do is attach itself meekly to the new political configuration rising up to replace it.

An ineffectual liberal class means there is no hope of a correction or a reversal through the formal mechanisms of power. It ensures that the frustration and anger among the working and the middle class will find expression now in these protests that lie outside the confines of democratic institutions and the civilities of a liberal democracy. …

[T]he liberal class, by having refused to question the utopian promises of unfettered capitalism and globalization and by condemning those who did, severed itself from the roots of creative and bold thought, the only forces that could have prevented the liberal class from merging completely with the power elite. The liberal class, which at once was betrayed and betrayed itself, has no role left to play in the battle between us and corporate dominance. All hope lies now with those in the street. …

Yup. Because although the United States of America quickly is on its way to becoming something like the way that it is portrayed in the very dark movie “The Road,” we Americans aren’t ready to become cannibals quite yet, and we would prefer that the trillions of our dollars that are being used to kill people abroad (mostly so that the oil corporations can steal and profit obscenely from other nations’ oil) instead would be used for necessities here at home, such as health care, shelter and food.

Because even if we were to feast upon the corpse of Moammar Gaddafi, which reportedly cost us more than $1 billion to obtain, it wouldn’t feed very many of us Americans for very long.

–

*On May 2, I similiarly wrote:

… More chilling than the words and actions of my jingoistic cohorts, of whom I expect precious little, however, are those of President Barack Obama, of whom, despite his string of broken campaign promises, I still expect more.

“Today we are reminded that as a nation there is nothing we can’t do,” Obama proclaimed today about the snuffing out of bin Laden. (“We do big things” is one of the campaign slogans that Obama rolled out during his last State of the Union address, since “hope” and “change” don’t work anymore.)

Jesus fuck.

When we make such feel-good statements as “as a nation there is nothing we can’t do,” are we really supposed to say that about the killing of one individual? Even someone like Osama bin Laden?

Is this what “American greatness” has come to: our ability to kill one man after 10 years, hundreds of billions of dollars and the killing of tens of thousands before him? (That’s a rhetorical question, but I’ll answer it anyway: Yes.) …

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.)

Assorted shit

I don’t fucking trust that British Fucking Petroleum has fucking plugged the fucking hole in the fucking Gulf of Mexico

Really, need I say more about today’s “good news”?

–

Minority advocacy groups aren’t inherently “racist”

Now that the wingnutty white supremacists don’t have ACORN to kick around anymore, they’re targeting other groups that advocate for black Americans, such as the NAACP.

These black-advocacy groups are “racist,” the “tea-partying” dipshits allege.

The “tea party” is almost all white, yet its members claim that they’re not racist.

No!

They are all about “freedom” and “liberty” and “democracy” and “small government” and puppies and kittens and butterflies and cotton candy and…

(I was having this discussion with a conservative co-worker of mine today and at least twice I very apparently Freudianly referred to the “tea party” as the “white party.”)

You can’t compare such groups as the NAACP or the National Council of La Raza and the “tea party.” Such groups as the NAACP and La Raza, first of all, are comprised of historically oppressed minorities. Each word there is important:

Historically.

Oppressed.

Minorities.

The “tea party,” in contrast, is comprised of the historically oppressive majority. Again:

Historically.

Oppressive.

Majority.

Apples.

Oranges.

Even if there are plenty of blacks and other racial minorities who hate whitey (and whitey has given them plenty of cause), the sociopolitical fact is that, although the white demographic is shrinking (thank Goddess), the white race still has the most sociopolitical power in the United States of America.

But that’s not enough for the white supremacists and the members of the white party — er, the “tea party.”

They want all of the power.

They’d love nothing more to put all of the minority-advocacy organizations out of business. They’d do that by any means they could, such as by repeating their bullshit, slanderous allegation that for a historically oppressed minority group to stand up for its own interests constitutes “reverse racism” or some other form of hatred.

An individual Anglo can be victimized, of course, as can any individual. But Anglos, as a group, hardly are victims.

It isn’t about race in and of itself that racial minority advocacy groups exist. They exist to counteract an historical gross power imbalance, and to gain more sociopolitical power by acting together, instead of being divided and conquered, which is what the “tea-party” dipshits and their ilk want to happen to all of the historically oppressed minority groups.  

In a similar vein, I’ve supported the Human Rights Campaign, the largest advocacy group for non-heterosexuals in the U.S., not because I hate heterosexuals, but because we non-heterosexuals have to work hard at balancing the scales of sociopolitical power and because I want to make conditions for those non-heterosexuals who come after me to be better than they were for me.

As far as the “tea-party” dipshits are concerned, those of us Americans who abhor gross injustice and unfairness have the patriotic duty to stand up against them when we see them — just as we did during the Civil War era.

–

The Devil told me to finally write about Sharron Angle

Associated Press photo

“Tea-party”/Repugnican U.S. Senate candidate Sharron Angle (shown above in Las Vegas last month) compares her time as a Nevada state legislator to Moses’ and Jesus Christ’s “preparatory time.” You know: Moses, Jesus – Sharron Angle. The lineage that God intended!

Sharron Angle, the Repugnican/“tea-party” candidate for the U.S. Senate in Nevada, says, in effect, that God is her campaign manager. Well, at least God has wanted her to run for the U.S. Senate against incumbent Democratic Sen. Harry Reid, she says.

That’s a fascinating claim. If God wants one candidate to win, then clearly He wants the other one to lose, right? So if you want to win an election, you just be the first candidate to claim God’s endorsement, right?

And how can anyone argue that God doesn’t support you over your obviously satanic opponent? Where’s his or her proof?

It’s a beautiful strategy — uh, one that might win.

Never misunderestimate the power of the dumbfuck vote. (Three names: Jesse Ventura. George W. Bush. Arnold Schwarzenegger.)

A writer for Salon.com makes an interesting argument that Angle’s victory or loss against Reid in November might be a factor in whether or not her fellow “tea-party” pea in a pod Sarah Palin-Quayle will emerge as the Repugnican Party’s presidential nominatee in 2012. It’s worth reading.

The Associated Press notes that “Angle, a Southern Baptist, has called herself a faith-based politician who prays daily. Among her positions, she opposes abortion in all circumstances, including rape and incest.”

For all of Angle’s supposed good Christian and family (and “pro-life”) values, chillingly, she has spoken repeatedly of the deployment of “Second-Amendment remedies” should she and her ilk not succeed at the ballot box in transforming the United States of America into what the “tea party” wants it to be — a “Christian” version of the Taliban.

Rachel Maddow covered this Angle angle a while ago, but it’s worth watching if you aren’t already aware of what a dangerous lunatic Sharron “Second Amendment” Angle is.

Sharron Angle makes Harry Reid look damned good — and that’s pretty bad.

–

Please cry for me, Argentina

Argentina has legalized same-sex marriage.

Argentina.

Here in the United States of America, the so-called “land of the free,” we have legalized same-sex marriage in only a handful of states because of the death grip that the theocratic “Christo”fascists have on our democracy.

In my home state of California, we had legalized same-sex marriage briefly after the Repugnican-dominated California Supreme Court ruled that to prohibit same-sex marriage violates the rights guaranteed to Californians by the California Constitution.

Then, the Mormon cult and the Catholick church poured millions of dollars into a last-minute campaign of lies and smears to get the anti-same-sex-marriage Proposition 8 passed in November 2008, 52 percent to 48 percent. (Prop Hate altered the state’s Constitution itself, thus overriding the state’s Supreme Court’s decision.)

For all of the wingnuts’ blather about freedom, if I wanted to marry my boyfriend of nearly three years, I’d have to marry him in another state or in another fucking country. Like Argentina.

It’s long been my belief that Latin America, which is rapidly democratizing now that the United States has been too busy meddling in the Middle East instead of in Latin America for the past several years, is our best hope here in the U.S. for true democracy, freedom and opportunity for all.*

I hope that that democratic socialist spirit spreads here — sooner rather than later.

–

*Admittedly, we need to keep an eye on Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, who, while I still love him, and who I hope maintains democratic socialist control of Venezuela, which is better for the people than is exploitation by greedy capitalist swine, seems to have been going a bit overboard as of late…

Assorted shit

If they’re right, what are they worried about?

AFP photo

Arizona’s two U.S. Senators, stupid white men John McCainosaurus and John Kyl, both Repugnicans, of course, have slammed the Obama administration’s filing of a federal lawsuit against their state’s planned illegal racial profiling against Hispanics, which is set to begin July 29.  

The Repugnican Party elite predictably are whining that the Obama administration today made official its lawsuit attempting to strike down Arizona’s unconstitutional and racist anti-brown-person law.

The federal lawsuit against the South Africa of the Southwest proclaims, in part, “In our constitutional system, the federal government has pre-eminent authority to regulate immigration matters. This authority derives from the United States Constitution and numerous acts of Congress. The nation’s immigration laws reflect a careful and considered balance of national law enforcement, foreign relations, and humanitarian interests.”

Yup. That’s a little civics lesson for the fucktards of Arizona.

Of course, the white Repugnican politicians in Arizona, such as the Borg Queen governor, Jan Brewer, and presidential loser Sen. John McCainosaurus, don’t actually give a fuck about the issue of immigration nearly as much as they just want an easy political target for their upcoming elections in November, and the relatively poor and powerless Hispanics are fairly easy to sacrifice on the bloody Repugnican altar. (It was gays and lesbians whom the Repugnican Party sacrificed for the dumbfuck vote in 2004, recall; this election year it’s the Hispanics.)

Brewer and McCainosaurus and their ilk also want to get Brownie (er, whitey?) points from their white supremacist supporters for symbolically having taken on the nigger in the White House by pushing an unconstitutional, reprehensible anti-immigrant law that they knew the White House would oppose. (Fuck you. You know it’s true.)

Bottom line is, when the economy tanks, the bleating masses start beating up on immigrants. That’s what happens around the world, and that’s what’s happening here in the “melting pot.”

Of course, the Repugnican elite are all too happy to have the uneducated, skinheaded Joe the Plumbers and Dale the School Bus Drivers blame the poor and the powerless brown-skinned for the nation’s economic nosedive instead of the real culprits, the filthy rich white crooks who have bled, and continue to bleed, this nation dry.

In any event, if the white supremacist Repugnicans (I know, redundant…) of Arizona are so sure that their new little law is constitutional, why do they blast the Obama administration for challenging it in the federal court system?

Surely if they’re right, they’ll be vindicated legally.

(But they aren’t, so they won’t be.)

–

 Michael Steele, anti-affirmative-action poster boy?

Associated Press photo

Repugnican Party head Michael Steele probably could have gotten away with his history gaffe, but stating that the Afghanistan war, which his party launched and wholeheartedly supports, is unwinnable, probably is the last straw for the party’s first black chairman, who is the result of affirmative action gone wrong.

On Jan. 30, 2009, I blogged:

Apparently we’re supposed to believe that the Repugnican Party no longer is racist because the Repugs just selected a black man as the chair of the Repugnican National Committee.

Uh, this is the very same political party for which a white guy who also ran for the chairmanship included on his CD promoting his campaign for the party chairmanship the songs “Barack the Magic Negro” and “The Star-Spanglish Banner.”

And because Sarah Palin-Quayle is a female, that doesn’t mean that the Repugnicans suddenly are feminists, either. (Palin-Quayle, among other things, such as being a “Christo”fascist and a global-warming denier, is anti-choice.)

The selection of Sarah “Heartbeat Away” Palin-Quayle was just a knee-jerk Repugnican response to Billary Clinton; apparently women voters were supposed to have just flocked to Repugnican John McCainosaurus in droves because Barack Obama rather than Billary had won the Democratic presidential nomination.  

Just as Palin-Quayle was only a reflexive response to Billary Clinton, so new Repugnican Party chair Michael Steele, former lieutenant governor of Maryland, is only a reflexive response of the Repugnican Party to the election of Democrat Barack Obama as president.

Both Steele and Palin-Quayle are stupid white men on the inside, regardless of the color of their skin and regardless of what’s between their legs.

I once heard (in person) Al Sharpton say of Condoleezza Rice (I paraphrase): “Condoleezza Rice is of my color, but she is not of my kind.”

I’m confident that Sharpton would say the same of Steele.

Steele’s selection is indicative of the Repugnican Party’s desperation, not of its sudden redemption.

I stand by that rant, and boy, have things taken a turn for Steele.

Look how hard the Repugnicans had to hunt for a black guy within their party to counter the election of Barack Obama – the best that they could do, apparently, was a former lieutenant governor.

The Repugnicans long have wanted to dump the fumbling and bumbling Steele, but he’s held on thus far.

However, his recent remarks on the war in Afghanistan – that President Barack Obama started the war, which Steele deemed a war of choice, when, in fact, it was “President” George W. Bush who started the war in Afghanistan in October 2001, before his unelected regime launched the Vietraq War in March 2003, and that the war in Afghanistan is unwinnable, when the Repugnican Party supports the war because the Repugnican Party supports perpetual warfare for the war profiteers and for Big Oil and other corporate cronies – should be the good excuse that the Repugnicans have been looking for to dump Steele, which they’ve been reluctant to do up to now because they didn’t want to look racist.

Look, they cynically picked Steele because they’re racist.

Clearly the man is a dipshit who wasn’t qualified for the job but who met the main job requirement that his skin isn’t white. Steele’s selection as head of the Repugnican National Committee seems to have been the result of bizarre Repugnican affirmative action — bizarre because Repugnicans historically have trashed affirmative action as being the hiring or promotion of unqualified or underqualified non-whites or women over more qualified white men.

Pundits don’t expect Steele to be booted before the November elections, however. They do, however, expect him to lose his job in January, when the chairmanship of the RNC is up for grabs again.

–

Does New Orleans need a mercy killing already?

Just when you thought things couldn’t get worse for post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, The Associated Press reports today that now oil from the ruptured British Petroleum well in the Gulf of Mexico — Hey, is that thing still spewing oil? We don’t hear much about that anymore because they finally fixed it, right? Right??? – is seeping into Lake Pontchartrain.

My rather modest proposal is that we just nuke the holy living fuck! out of New Orleans right now!

Put them out of their misery, you know.

Give them the final relief of knowing that probably nothing worse could happen to them after that.

Just my own rather modest proposal.

Stupid white male traitors on parade

Associated Press photo

President Barack Obama talks with Gen. Stanley McChrystal aboard Air Force One in October. Obama has recalled McChrystal to Washington, D.C., to discuss remarks that McChrystal made to Rolling Stone magazine about the military efforts in Afghanistan that McChrystal has been leading.

Is it something in the water?

A bit too much crude oil, perhaps?

The federal district judge who blocked President Barack Obama’s obviously reasonable six-month moratorium on offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico has had investments in offshore drilling? Even having owned stock in Transocean, the corporation that had leased the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig to British Petroleum before the rig blew up in the Gulf of Mexico two months ago?

Unsurpisingly, the judge, one Martin Feldman, who was appointed by Ronald Reagan, appears to be another overprivileged old stupid white man who puts his own selfish financial interests above not only justice but also above the common good.

Fuck the rest of us! He wants to be rich!

The Repugnicans piss and moan about “activist judges,” but I’m sure that they’re just perfectly fucking fine with judges who rule according to their own financial portfolios.

Because he did not recuse himself, Feldman should be removed from his post of power. He obviously cannot wield power responsibly and thus does not deserve to continue to wield it.

Similarly, corporations that violate the public trust (such as British Petroleum, Halliburton, Blackwater, etc., etc.) should be dissolved — not allowed to simply reorganize under another name (such as Blackwater, which is now “Xe.”)

The composition of the judiciary sorely needs to be evaluated. It’s supposed to be about justice for all — it shouldn’t be the fucking rich white boys’ club that it is. The Associated Press reported earlier this month:

More than half of the federal judges in districts where the bulk of Gulf oil spill-related lawsuits are pending have financial connections to the oil and gas industry, complicating the task of finding judges without conflicts to hear the cases, an Associated Press analysis of judicial financial disclosure reports shows.

Thirty-seven of the 64 active or senior judges in key Gulf Coast districts in Louisiana, Texas, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida have links to oil, gas and related energy industries, including some who own stocks or bonds in BP PLC, Halliburton or Transocean — and others who regularly list receiving royalties from oil and gas production wells, according to the reports judges must file each year. The AP reviewed 2008 disclosure forms, the most recent available.

Those three companies are named as defendants in virtually all of the 150-plus lawsuits seeking damages, mainly for economic losses in the fishing, seafood, tourism and related industries, that have been filed over the growing oil spill since the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded April 20, killing 11 workers….

Then there is Gen. Stanley McChrystal, in charge of the debacle in Afghanistan, thinking that it’s a good idea to slam his commander in chief in Rolling Stone.

Don’t get me wrong. We shouldn’t be in Afghanistan. Even if things at home weren’t crumbling, even if the American empire weren’t rotting from within, I’d be against our being in Afghanistan, but given that we can’t keep it together here at home — that ruptured oil well that has continued to spew millions of gallons of crude oil for more than two months now, for example — I’m especially against our military overextension.

And I’m usually all for freedom of speech and in general I abhor hierarchies and people at the top of hierarchies gagging those below them, but, it seems to me, it truly is a matter of national security when a general, any general, publicly slams the commander in chief while that general is in charge of an ongoing combat operation.

Further, as many problems as I have with President Barack Obama, I can’t recall any general or other such high-ranking military official having publicly slammed George W. Bush during his or her command in the Vietraq War, even though the unelected, treasonous Bush regime thoroughly botched its illegal, immoral, unprovoked and unjust invasion and occupation of Iraq and left plenty to be criticized.

I can’t help but think that the facts that Obama is black and that he widely is viewed as an “elitist” because he isn’t an abject dumbfuck as is G.W. Bush — we can’t trust eggheads to be good commanders in chief, the conventional “wisdom” (a.k.a. “common sense”) goes, although to be a good commander in chief you have to be intelligent – contributed to McChrystal’s incredibly poor judgment in slamming Obama to Rolling Stone.

McChrystal should have resigned if he felt that he couldn’t follow Obama.

Now, he should resign because instead of telling Obama that he couldn’t follow Obama, he told Rolling Stone that he couldn’t follow Obama.

This behavior – a federal judge flagrantly acting in very apparent conflict of interest and a general in charge of a war slamming the commander in chief — seems to be white male (over)privilege rearing its ugly head.

It needs to stop — because it’s treasonous* — and the stupid white men who are acting in their own best interests instead of in the best interests of those they are supposed to be serving need to be treated like the traitors that they are.

The crumbling American empire cannot endure even more treason than it already has endured beginning at least since the treasonous BushCheneyCorp blatantly, treasonously stole the White House in late 2000.

–

*My broad definition of treason is an action or a refusal to act that benefits oneself or one’s own relatively small group at the expense of the nation as a whole. This, I believe, is the spirit of the crime of treason, although it is not the technical, legal definition of the term.

Thus, under my definition, things like stealing presidential elections and starting bogus wars for the war profiteers (such as Dick Cheney’s Halliburton), and selfishly siding with corporations instead of with the people (such as the aforementioned federal judge and U.S. Rep. Joe “Shakedown” Barton of Texas), constitute treason.

If this definition of treason were widely adopted, the traitors would stop being traitors, would stop harming the nation for their own selfish interests.

Time for the Green Party

It’s in the air now — progressives want an alternative to what the Obama administration and the Democratic Party are offering them.

The hope and change that Barack Obama promised us has turned into a disappointment of Clintonesque proportions — and the Democrats control the White House and both houses of Congress this time.

President Obama is a “socialist”? Oh, I wish!

Progressive powerhouses MoveOn.org, Democracy for America, SEIU, Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen, People for the American Way and other progressive groups have created “Stand for Democracy,” a project whose goal is to “take back our democracy from corporate corruption.” (I urge you to visit the website and pick your top five progressive concerns if you haven’t already done so.)

Are liberals falling out of love with Obama? asks The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza today. (His answer, as far as I can tell, is maybe. My answer is Hell yes!)

Jane Hamsher of the progressive blog Firedoglake proclaims in a fundraising e-mail today:

The progressive movement is at a crossroads…. Progressives must now choose: Do we pursue a corporate-sponsored model functioning within the [Democratic Party] that ultimately accepts the party’s goals, or are we willing to fund an independent movement, capable of freely advocating for progressive values from the outside?

It seems to me that the best bet to counter the Democratic Party’s pay-to-play, corporate-ass-kissing, Repugnican-Lite politics is to rejuvenate the Green Party.

Why try to create a new progressive party or movement when one already exists?

The Green Party already is established around the nation, is an international party, and its “ten key values” are right in line with progressivism:

1. Grassroots democracy

2. Social justice and equal opportunity

3. Ecological wisdom

4. Nonviolence

5. Decentralization

6. Community-based economics and economic justice

7. Feminism and gender equity

8. Respect for diversity

9. Personal and global responsibility

10. Future focus and sustainability

In short, the Green Party is antithetical to the “tea party” and the Repugnican Party and represents what the Democratic Party sometimes pays lip service to but rarely or never delivers because it’s too beholden to the corporatocrats and is terrified of losing the dumbfuck (a.k.a. “swing” or “independent”) vote.

If British Petroleum’s ruination of the Gulf of Mexico and the Democratic Party’s impotent response to the crisis doesn’t warrant breathing new life into the Green Party, then I don’t know what the hell will.

I hear the counter-argument: But a strong Green Party will only help the Repugnicans!*

Meh.

Serious competition is the only thing that will drag the Democratic Party from the Clintonesque center to the left. Without serious competition to the Democratic Party, all that we’ll ever fucking get from the Democratic Party is more empty promises of hope and change.

Neither we nor the planet can survive much longer on such empty promises.

–

*I also hear people clamoring: Ralph Nader (the Green Party candidate) threw the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush!

However, the Green Party’s website correctly points out:

The Supreme Court spoiled [the 2000 presidential election]: [Democratic candidate] Al Gore won the 2000 election. [Republican] George W. Bush became president when a biased U.S/ Supreme Court allowed election manipulation by Florida Republicans.

Al Gore Spoiled [the 2000 election]: Gore ran a weak campaign with no clear message. He failed to defeat Bush in the debates and even lost his home state of Tennessee. Millions of Democrats voted for Bush compared to the few hundred thousand who voted for Nader.

Democratic senators spoiled [the election]: When the Black Caucus challenged Bush’s election victory in January 2001, not one Democratic Senator stood up in support. Senate Democrats failed to push for an investigation of the Florida vote debacle.

The Democratic Party spoiled [the election]: For many years, Democrats never objected when officials removed African American and other voters from the voter rolls in Florida and other states. Why didn’t the Democrats sue when 90,000 Florida voters were disqualified earlier in 2000? Why were Democrats (including Gore) silent about disqualified votes in the weeks after the election?

To lambast Ralph Nader for having exercised his American and his constitutional right to run for president is undemocratic and un-American.

I voted for him in 2000 and I wish that I had voted for him in 2008 instead of Barack Obama.

McCarthyism redux is a best-seller

Wow. The jihadists and I are colluding and I didn’t even know it!

So I thank one Andrew C. McCarthy (a descendant of Joseph McCarthy, I wonder?) for bringing this fact to my attention.

McCarthy’s book, titled The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America, is at No. 34 on amazon.com’s top 100 best-selling books list as I type this sentence.

McCathy might argue that he’s not conflating fundamentalist Islamists with us members of the American left — I’ll probably never know his arguments, because I’ll never read his wingnutty book(s) — but clearly that’s what he has done.

But there is plenty about fundamentalist Islam that I, a rabid fucking moonbat, oppose.

For starters, I don’t even fucking believe in God.

When you talk about God, I have to ask you: Where, exactly, does God live? On Fantasy Lane right next to the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus?

I don’t care if you’re Muslim, Christian or Jewish, if you believe in a God as some sort of male entity that is omniscient and omnipotent and favors your team over all of the others, I think that it’s time for you to grow the fuck up and to start thinking for yourself.

Then there’s the fact that I’m gay, and that gay men are routinely killed and otherwise persecuted by fundamentalist Islamic extremists.

One of the many things that the fundamentalist Islamist extremists and the American right wing have in common, in fact, is their shared belief that non-heterosexuals should be persecuted — because that’s what the non-existent God wants.

What else? I disagree with patriarchy and misogyny, which, along with the persecution of non-heterosexuals, puts the American right wing a lot more in league with the fundamentalist Islamic extremists than it puts the American left wing.

I also vehemently oppose theocracy, and the fundamentalist Islamic extremists are all about theocracy — as are the American wingnuts, who, to give just a partial recitation of their theocratic wish list, want prayer in our public schools, want it taught in our public schools that evolution is just a “theory” and that bullshit creationism is at least equal to the “theory” of evolution, want abortion outlawed based upon their religious beliefs, and want same-sex marriage outlawed based upon their religious beliefs. 

McCarthy cites Muslims as “sabotaging America,” yet if the American right wing had their way, we’d be living in a theocracy just like the fucking Taliban, something that I and my fellow leftists vehemently oppose. 

About the only thing that I can think of that a jihadist and I would agree upon is that the Muslims and the Arabs of the world have been getting the shitty end of the stick at the hands of the Jews and self-proclaimed “Christians” for some time now.

But even then, to me it’s solely an issue of fairness and evenhandedness, whereas to your jihadist it’s an issue of his (or her) belief that Islam is the Only One True Religion of the World, as the Jews and the “Christians” believe their religions are.

So if McCarthy has insinuated that the American left and the jihadists are in league, as it strikes me that he has, that claim is easily fucking annihilated.

Perhaps what McCarthy is really getting at is that if you aren’t a “Christian” and if you aren’t a right-wing nutjob, then you aren’t a real American, and thus you are trying to “sabotage America.”

This bullshit sells, very apparently.

We have all of these dumbfuck white people all throughout the nation, but mostly in the red states, polluting the gene pool, worried that those who have (in no certain order) different religious beliefs, different political ideologies, different nationalities, different languages, different physical appearances and/or different sexual orientations or gender identities are ruining! the! nation! when, in fact, it’s the stupid white men — the George W. Bushes and the Dick Cheneys and the British Petroleum CEOs and the Glenn Becks – who are responsible for the fact that the American Empire is teetering on collapse.

I imagine all of these self-righteous white fucktards buying books like The Grand Jihad thinking that they’re actually accomplishing something by consuming wingnutty media that only already confirm their ignorant, whacked-out beliefs, when, in fact, all that they’re accomplishing is to make McCarthy and his ilk richer and the nation dumber.

Most of the best-selling political titles on amazon.com are wingnutty titles, and this used to be more distressing to me than it is now. Now, I tend to view it as evidence of the right wing’s death throes. They’re desperate. Things are changing and they can’t handle it. They’re faced with an increasing number of people in the United States of America who don’t look, act, speak and believe like they do, and they’re so fucking insecure that this drives them batty. The Great White Arizonan Freakout is just one example of this.

I sure hope that we on the left are a danger to the continued existence of the American right wing. But Muslims?

Estimates on the number of Muslim Americans range from 1.3 million to 7 million. That’s not a lot of people in a nation of more than 300 million. The 7 million estimate comes from the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which one might argue has a reason to inflate its figure of 7 million, since it’s a Muslim advocacy group. I tend to think that the actual number lies somewhere between the Pew Research Center’s estimated 2.5 million and the U.S. News & World Report’s estimated 5 million.

American Jews are estimated to be around 6.5 million, yet, as I have noted, they are overrepresented in both houses of Congress and elsewhere in Washington, such as on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Um, there is one (1) Muslim American in Congress, Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota, who in 2006 became the very first Muslim elected to Congress. 

So we hardly have an Islamo-Manchurian Congress or D.C., as amazon.com’s description of McCarthy’s sad and pathetic little book seems to suggest.

If we really want to be paranoid about a special interest group having a grip on Congress and D.C., we’d be better off pointing a finger at the Jews rather than at the Muslims. But the Zionist/Israel-first lobby busily slanders the Muslim and Arab communities and feigns victimhood (I guess that you can call it a perpetual Holocaust) in order to divert your attention from the fact that the Zionist/Israel-first lobby actually is quite powerful within the United States of America, even driving its foreign fucking policy, for fuck’s sake.

If Muslims drove the United State’s foreign policy, the American right wing would be up in arms, but they’re strangely quite perfectly OK with the Zionist/Israel-first lobby driving the nation’s foreign policy.

And as far as a dangerous left wing goes, Barack Obama is horribly disappointing to us on the left, and a series of news articles, such as this one, have been appearing on this subject lately.

Obama a “socialist”?

Oh, I fucking wish! He’s not even a Democrat — he’s a corporatocrat, a Repugnican Lite.

Obama’s party controls the White House and both houses of Congress and has for more than a year now, and what’s he doing right now? He’s practicing how to appear to be angry! And today he actually said, more than a month into the British Petroleum debacle, that he’s now researching “whose ass to kick.”

Oo!

Obama said he’s going to “kick” “ass”!

I’m so moist — not!

While I wish the president the best of luck with his Mr. Spock- or Data-like attempt to display human emotion, he has a long way to go to get my vote again in November 2012. If I could do it over again, I’d have voted for Ralph Nader instead of for Obama in November 2008.

Fact is, the greatest danger to the United States of America remains the American right wing, which has brought us such wonderful things as 9/11 (Osama bin Laden himself has stated that U.S. military intervention in the Middle East and U.S. support of Israel were major reasons why he masterminded the 2001 attacks [Google it]), the Vietraq War (which was sold to the nation by the unelected Bush regime as retaliation for 9/11, even though Iraq had had nothing whatsofuckingever to do with 9/11, which the Bush regime knew fully well) and the British Petroleum debacle, the latter two of which Dick Cheney’s Halliburton had a strong hand in. Oh, and Hurricane Katrina. And the largest federal budget deficit in the history of the nation (and Halliburton, with its no-bid war-profiteering contracts, had a hand in that, too — fuck, and even a hand in Hurricane Katrina, since Halliburton is a part of Big Oil, which contributes to global warming, which contributes to stronger hurricanes).

Fuck. The America-hating fundamentalist Islamic extremists only wish that they could inflict just a fraction of the damage on the United States of America that the American right wing has over the course of the past several years. The illegal, immoral, unprovoked, unjust and wholly unnecessary Vietraq War, to give just one example, not only has overextended our military and driven up our federal budget deficit, but it has resulted in the wholly unnecessary deaths of more than 4,400 of our troops since the treasonous Bush regime launched it in March 2003.

My guess is that Osama bin Laden is somewhere in a cave thinking: “Mission accomplished!”

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.