Reading between the conventions’ lines

Reuters photo

Repugnican Tea Party Speaker of the House John Boehner shakes the hoof of right-wing New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan after Dolan gave the closing prayer at the Repugnican Tea Party Convention in Tampa, Florida, on August 30. Not to be outdone in wingnuttery, the Democratic Party had the right-wing Dolan also give the Democratic National Convention’s closing prayer, in which Dolan expressed his and the Catholick church’s opposition to abortion and to same-sex marriage. Yet the shameless Democratic Party hacks cry foul when those of us who are sane and who reject evil pieces of shit like Dolan claim, correctly, that the two right-wing, pro-corporate parties (which I can think of only as the Coke Party and the Pepsi Party) are becoming more indistinguishable from each other day by day.

About the last thing that you want to pay attention to at the Coke Party’s and Pepsi Party’s quadrennial conventions are the politicians’ speeches.

The vast majority of political speeches are just shameless propaganda, false proclamations of actually giving a shit about the average American, and are not an actual reflection of reality (what it has been, what it is now or what it will be).

No, you look for other clues at the partisan duopoly’s conventions to inform you as to what’s really going on.

The two things that you have needed to know about the Repugnican Tea Party convention are that a black camerawoman for CNN had food thrown at her by white delegates and was referred to as an “animal,” and that an addled, doddering, grumpy old man who wants to take us back to the 1950s (or before) in a way-back machine still is the face of the Repugnican Tea Party. (It was John McCainosaurus in 2008, and Clint Eastwood this time.)

Of course, if you watched any of the Repugnican Tea Party convention coverage (even just brief clips, as I did), you saw, as the camera panned across the convention attendees, that it was a sea of lily-white faces. Seriously, why don’t they go ahead and don their pointy white hoods already? We all know that they want to.

I’ve seen only snippets of Mittens Romney’s acceptance speech. He wore way too much makeup, which only made him look even faker than he already comes across, and his whisper-like, condescending, faux-compassionate voice makes me want to hurl.

This man is a multi-millionaire Mormon. He cares only about his fellow millionaires and his fellow Mormons. If you believe otherwise, then there is something seriously the fuck the matter with you and your grasp of reality.

I don’t need to listen to Mittens’ words. I have only to listen to the strong voice within every time I see even a brief clip of Mittens: This uber-phony man is evil. He has to be phony because if he showed us his true self, enough of us would be repulsed that he’d never win the election. It wouldn’t even be close enough for him to steal it, as appears to be his party’s game plan, a la 2000.

Not that the establishmentarian, Clintonesque Democrats are much better.

I haven’t bothered to watch even a brief clip of Barack Obama’s convention speech. Why? What would be the point? We know what we’re going to get with four more years of Obama: more broken promises, more of the same, more concessions to the corporations and to the right wing, more excuses as to why Obama absofuckinglutely refuses to head an opposition party, which is what the Democratic Party used to be until the slimy baby boomer Bill Clinton destroyed it, as the greedy, corrupt, talentless baby boomers have destroyed or are about to destroy all of our nation’s best institutions (including, of course, Social Security and Medicare. [They destroyed even capitalism, too, but of course, capitalism needed to be destroyed]).

We know that while of course Mittens would be worse than would be Obama (except for Mittens’ fellow Mormons and his fellow millionaires, of course), the prospect of another four more years of Obama is nothing to be excited about.

There were two stand-out events at the Democrats’ convention that, for me, tell me what I really need to know about the party. And again, you won’t find this shit in politicos’ propagandistic speeches.

First, there was Barack Obama once again capitulating to right-wing and “Christo”fascist criticism, demanding that the Democratic Party’s platform, which the delegates had already democratically approved, be changed to add the word “God” and to add that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.

As I wrote, the selfish, anti-democratic actions of the convention’s chair, the slimy Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, were repugant. Clearly Villaraigosa didn’t have the two-thirds voice vote by the delegates that he needed for the alteration of the platform to pass, but he shoved the changes to the platform down the delegates’ throats nonethefuckingless.

The Los Angeles Times today published Villaraigosa’s “defense” of his repulsive actions. He said:

• “It was a lot of ado about nothing.”
• When he was told that others didn’t hear a two-thirds voice vote, he replied smart-assedly, “That’s nice to know. I was the chairman and I did, and that was the prerogative of the chair.”
• “It’s more a media concern than a delegate concern. I can tell you this — the president of the United States said, ‘Wow.’ The president said, ‘You showed why you were speaker of the California Assembly.’ The president, the vice president, Mrs. Obama, all of them acknowledged the decisive way I handled that.”
• “The president of the United States and the leader of my party asked me to do this, and so I’m proud I have a president who believes God and Jerusalem should be in the platform, and so do I.”

What a fucking weasel Antonio Villaraigosa is. To call a blatantly anti-democratic move “decisive” is sick. No, Villaraigosa, you are not “decisive.” You are a fucking self-serving coward.

And it was not “a lot of ado about nothing” and not only a “media concern.” (Blaming shit on the media is quite Palinesque of Villaraigosa, however.) It was the hijacking of the platform that already had been democratically approved, and that is a serious matter. I’m not even a registered Democrat — because of slimeballs like Villaraigosa I’m a registered Green Party member — and I wasn’t even there, but when I watched the clip of Villaraigosa’s actions, I was incensed — as were many delegates who were there, for whom the lying Villaraigosa pretends he can speak. (It wasn’t a “delegate concern” — because he says so!)

“I was the chairman and I did [hear a two-thirds vote], and that was the prerogative of the chair,” Villaraigosa huffed. Bullshit. He did not hear it, which is why he had to hold the voice vote three fucking times (watch the clip yourself), and so when he claims that he did hear it, he fucking lies, but then immediately after his lie, he inadvertently tells us the truth: “that was the prerogative of the chair.”

I’ll translate that from the weaselspeak that Villaraigosa speaks into English: “I was able to abuse my position of power and trust, and so I did so. Fuck you for even questioning my authority.”

And then, Villaraigosa does even more quite inadvertent truth-telling: “The president, the vice president, Mrs. Obama, all of them acknowledged the decisive way I handled that,” and “The president of the United States and the leader of my party asked me to do this, and so I’m proud I have a president who believes God and Jerusalem should be in the platform, and so do I.”

Well, yes, indeed, Barack Obama (and, if Villaraigosa is telling the truth — it’s hard to know, because he’s such a fucking liar — Joe Biden and even Michelle Obama) wanted Villaraigosa to ram the last-minute, “Christo”fascist- and wingnut-placating changes to the party’s platform down the delegates’ throats, and so Villaraigosa the shameless fucking sellout dutifully did so.

But that is a “defense” — that he pleased his puppeteers? That makes what he did OK?

And what does it fucking matter what Barack Obama and Antonio Villaraigosa believe? The party platform already had been democratically approved by the convention delegates. Why bother to have the delegates at all if they can be overriden by power-drunk autocrats like this?

I’ll never give the slimeball Antonio Villaraigosa my vote even for dog catcher. He has demonstrated his character amply.

As has Barack Obama, of course.

Not content that he had alienated enough of his base by anti-democratically using his tool, the fool Villaraigosa, to change the party’s platform against the wishes of the delegates (who clearly are just window dressing, if that), Barack Obama decided that it would be a swell fucking idea to have the right-wing, anti-choice, anti-same-sex-marriage Catholick Cardinal Timothy Dolan give the closing benediction at the Democratic National Convention.

The “Christo”fascist Dolan said these two things in his “benediction” to the Dems:

• “Thus do we praise you [he's talking to "God" here, you see] for the gift of life. Grant us the courage to defend it, life, without which no other rights are secure. We ask your benediction on those waiting to be born, that they may be welcomed and protected.”
• “Empower us with your grace so that we might resist the temptation to replace the moral law with idols of our own making, or to remake those institutions you have given us for the nurturing of life and community.”

If you claim that these are not thinly veiled references to the Dark-Ages Catholick church’s “Christo”fascist stances on abortion and same-sex marriage, then you are a fucking liar or you are a fucking moron. (Or both.)

Dolan also talked about “freedom” and “liberty” in his “benediction” (“bene” is from the Latin word for “good,” but Dolan is evil, so to call it a “benediction” is a contradiction), but in Dolan’s and the Catholick church’s worldview, women may not have the freedom and liberty to make their own fucking reproductive choices, and same-sex couples shall not have the freedom and liberty of marriage equality, but are to be continued to be treated as less than equal human beings, as they have for centuries.

“Freedom” and “liberty” are reserved only for those who agree with Dolan and the right-wing, dying dinosaur that is the Catholick church under the command of Pope Palpatine, you see.

Know that this is how much brazen contempt Barack Obama and the ossified Democratic Party (the best of which it can do is wheel out the right-wing fossil that is Bill Fucking Clinton every once in a while) have for you: to invite a known — a well-fucking-known — right-wing, misogynist, homophobic, patriarchal piece of shit like Timothy Dolan to give the closing “benediction” of the Democratic National Convention.

Barack Obama isn’t concerned in the fucking least about delivering for his base.

He never fucking has been and he never fucking will be.

Barack Obama is way too busy catering to the right wing, you see, pushing the Democratic Party further and further to the right, making it more and more indistinguishable from the Repugnican Tea Party, and his stance toward you is the same arrogant, power-drunk stance that Antonio Villaraigosa has toward you:

Fuck you.

It’s his prerogative.

What are you going to do about it anyway?

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.

Julian Assange, my hero



Reuters photo

WikiLeaks crusader Julian Assange of Australia, shown above in a photo taken last month, is closest that we have to this guy:

I’ve been following the WikiLeaks saga for some time now but until now I have yet to comment. (I actually wanted things to gel a bit before I opened my mouth, believe it or not…)

The inescapable conclusion that I have drawn is that Julian Assange‘s biggest “crime” is that he has stepped on the toes of the powers that be.

Tell a lie and no one really cares. (Look at the volume of lies that the right wing pumps out on a daily fucking basis, and look at how Liar in Chief George W. Bush and his henchpeople had complete impunity for their relentless lying.) Tell the forbidden truth, however, and look out!

Most of the dirty truths that Julian Assange and his associates have put out there pose no threat to national security or to public safety. That’s just bullshit, a red herring put out there by the right wing and the powers that be (yes, including members of the Obama administration).

If the right wing really gave a flying fuck about public safety, we wouldn’t have seen the almost 3,000 people killed on Sept. 11, 2001 (even though then-“President” George W. Bush the month before had received a presidential daily briefing warning “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”) or the almost 2,000 confirmed deaths from Hurricane Katrina.* (You might argue that 9/11 couldn’t have been prevented, but the deaths from Hurricane Katrina most certainly could have been, as there had been ample warning of the impending catastrophe.)

And “national security” sure is flexible, isn’t it? It was perfectly OK when the stupid white men of the unelected, treasonous Bush regime outed Central Intelligence Agency operative Valerie Plame** for petty political revenge against her husband, then-Ambassador Joe Wilson, but we just have to put Julian Assange in prison. Some wingnuts have even called for his assassination.

Assassinating (or even imprisoning) Assange, of course, would only make him a matryr, and hundreds or thousands of us who are on the verge of bloody revolution against the power elite would take his place.

The powers that be need to be very, very careful.

Speaking of the powers that be, I love this news photo:

Associated Press photo

That’s Britain’s Prince Charles and his consort in London on Thursday showing complete and utter shock that the rabble — some of them wonderfully yelling “Off with their heads!” — were able to reach their Rolls Royce during a student protest against the tripling of university tuition.

How could this security breach have happened? everyone is asking – when the real question, in my book, is Why, in the year 20fucking10, when so many of us are in need, do we still have royalty?

That’s an issue for the Brits to resolve (although I firmly am on the side of the students whose future is being compromised by Britain’s selfish power elite), but the equivalent question here in the United States of America is why we still have our own aristocrats, the plutocrats and the corporatocrats who do such things as fight tooth and nail for tax cuts for the wealthy while they fight to push the age for eligibility for Social Security retirement benefits for members of Generation X (and those who follow Gen X) to age 70 (when most of us will be dead before then for lack of health care).

Why do we allow these thieves to steal from us, to destroy our planet, to keep us in perpetual wage slavery and in perpetual bogus warfare, and overall to destroy our future? Why, when there are so many of us than there are of them, and when in reality they need us and we don’t need them, do we allow these wolves to continue to feed on us?

What Julian Assange has done is reveal to the world the communiques of the wolves, for it is by their keeping their behind-the-scenes maneuverings as secret as possible that the wolves maintain their control over us sheep. Destroy the wolves’ secrecy, and you destroy their power. Destroy their power, and you destroy them.

Julian Assange has taken serious shots at the wolves. Therefore, in my book, he is a hero.*** And should anything happen to him, thousands of us, minimally, should rise up and take his place.

P.S. While there is much about libertarian Ron Paul that I don’t like, including his homophobia, his being anti-choice and his support of “states’ rights” (which can be used to support all kinds of oppression of minorities), there are some things about him that I do like, such as his opposition to torture and domestic surveillance, and I love his recent impassioned defense of Julian Assange against the power elite on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. You should watch it here.

P.P.S. I just now found this news photo, taken yesterday at the British embassy in Madrid:

Reuters photo

Wow. Apparently many of us have the same idea…

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*And despite its ubiquitous campaign promises of “hope” and “change,” the Obama administration handled the catastrophic British Petroleum oil spill about as well as the Bush regime would have: in a way that put a corporation over the environment.

**I recommend the film “Fair Game,” which chronicles this treason by the Bush regime. The film screams “Give me my Oscars already!” but it’s worthwhile nonetheless.

***I certainly don’t assert that Assange is an angel. None of us is. However, I separate the information about the power elite that he has revealed to the world from the details of his personal life.

The right wing’s tactic in cases like this is to try to assassinate the rebel’s character — if not the rebel him- or herself – in order to divert attention away from the damaging information about the power elite that the rebel has revealed.

Way too many of us see this bullshit for what it is, however. If Assange is guilty of any sexual misconduct, that is a separate issue, and Assange’s work of exposing the power elite is larger than is Assange. And should anything happen to him, we must continue his work, because if he weren’t on to something, they wouldn’t be on him as they have been.

‘Obama’s Katrina’ is our fault

Comparisons of the Obama administration’s slow response to the current crisis created by corporate greed in the Gulf of Mexico to the unelected Bush regime’s slow response to the crisis created by Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf of Mexico in 2005 perhaps have been inevitable, but they miss the point.

Yes, both catastrophes have happened in the Gulf of Mexico, but that’s just about where any valid comparison ends. And by making such clumsy comparisons, we risk the failure to prevent more massive oil spills in the future.

The Bush regime didn’t respond to Hurricane Katrina because the Bush regime didn’t give a flying fuck about a bunch of poor black people in Louisiana. Had the eye of Hurricane Katrina been headed for “President” George W. Bush’s Texas, there might actually have been a response.

What prevented the Obama administration from responding faster to British Petroleum’s disaster, however, is the vast amount of power that the mega-corporations have accrued over the past several decades.

Although Obama has claimed that his administration has been on top of BP from day one of its April 20 oil rig disaster, it seems fairly apparent to me that BP kept the Obama administration at bay for some time, and that only after it became glaringly apparent that BP didn’t have the oil leak — which now is being called the worst in U.S. history – under anything like control that the Obama administration finally stepped up to the plate, under increasing political pressure.

We can make all of the Hurricane Katrina comparisons that we want to, but unless and until we, the people, take back our power that we stupidly and slovenly ceded to the corporations, we can expect more catastrophes like BP’s.

We need to take a long, hard look at capitalism and ask ourselves whether some tasks are too important and/or too dangerous to leave to the profit-driven private sector.

The private sector can do everything better, the capitalist swine snort.

Bullshit. The profit-driven private sector keeps cutting corner after corner in order to continually increase profits until we have such things as the current catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico and the actual “death panels” that the for-profit wealth care — er, health care — industry established in order to deny people medical care in order to increase the insurance companies’ profits. (They get filthy rich only if they don’t give you the health care that they’re being paid to provide you when you need it. That’s a great fucking model for health care.) Global warming, too, is a result of corporate greed.

And speaking of global warming, to me the most alarming news today is that meteorologists predict that this year’s Atlantic hurricane season, which begins next week, could be as bad as the 2005 season, which brought us Katrina.

Right about now is the perfect time for hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico. Never claim that things couldn’t get any worse than they already are, because of course they always can.

But I digress…

I’m all for the private sector making and selling things like cars and iPads and television sets and telephones and clothing and computers and movies and porn. Hell, I’m even more or less OK with the private sector continuing to make and sell houses, although the housing debacle would make me want to put a lot more thought into that issue, since housing is a necessity and not a luxury.

But drilling big holes in the ocean to tap oil reserves and maintaining those big holes? Health care? Education? Ensuring an ample supply of clean drinking water?

These kinds of things are too big and/or too important to leave to money-grubbing weasels. They need to be left to the government. To introduce a profit – and thus a corner-cutting — motive into them is inviting disaster, as the crude-oil-coated creatures of the Gulf of Mexico — and those whose living depends upon the Gulf of Mexico — can attest.

And giving such huge tasks as offshore oil drilling entirely to corporations means that the government doesn’t have the equipment or the expertise to deal with any problems that might occur, because over time it’s the corporations that have taken over those tasks. Cutting out the stonewalling corporate middlemen also would mean that problems could be addressed immediately by the government, because the government wouldn’t have to coordinate its efforts with any profit-driven corporation.

And corporate-crony-loving Repugnicans have no right whatsofuckingever to criticize the Obama administration’s sluggish response to the BP debacle when the eight long nightmarish years of rule by the unelected, oily Bush regime created an awfully cushy environment for Big Oil.

The Bush crime family has had oily dealings in Texas and in Saudi Arabia, Dick Cheney’s oily Halliburton wanted and got its Vietraq War and apparently has played a significant part in the current BP disaster, and fuck, even Condoleezza “You Know She’s Lying When Her Lips Are Moving” Rice had had a fucking Chevron oil tanker named after her, for fuck’s sake.

I don’t believe in letting President Obama off the hook for shit that is his responsibility, but we can’t blame Obama for the long-standing socioeconomicopolitical environment that he not only inherited in January 2009, but that all of us have allowed.

We can’t even blame the unelected Bush regime entirely for what it allowed Hurricane Katrina to do to the Gulf Coast in 2005 – after all, we, the people, had just allowed the Bush regime to blatantly steal the White House in late 2000 with no serious opposition from us. We should have been rioting in the streets, should have taken up pitchforks and torches, but instead we sat on our asses, sipping our Slurpees, telling ourselves that this Bush guy couldn’t be that bad. 

Had we acted as the patriotic citizens that we claim to be, “President” Bush, and thus Hurricane Katrina, might have been prevented.

And had we not just allowed our democracy to become a corporatocracy, we probably wouldn’t be witnessing the largest oil spill in U.S. history right now — while a savage hurricane season is just around the corner, ready to spread all of those millions of gallons of crude oil around even more quickly and more widely.

The BP oil spill should be our wake-up call and should teach us a great lesson.

And that lesson is not that we, the people, can continue to pin the blame for our national and global catastrophes on just one person, such as the president of the United States.

That lesson is that we, the people, get the kind of nation and the kind of world that we create and that we allow.

When, and if, we demand – really demand, exerting incredible political pressure – better of the powers that be, we will get better.

For right now, though, we are faced with millions of gallons of crude oil in the Gulf of Mexico while Hurricane Katrina’s sequel looms, and the only people we can blame for that is ourselves.

Can we start the civil war now, please?

Associated Press photo

Barack Obama, shown above during his Lincolnesque formal kick-off of his candidacy for president in February 2007 at the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Illinois, now finally concedes that with the Repugnican Party, “The day has passed when I expected this to be a full partnership.” Yup. Attempting bipartisanship with Repugnicans, who respect the results of the democratic process only when those results go their way, is bullshit and it’s time to open a can of blue-state whup-ass, because that’s all that the fucktarded red states can understand. 

They say that the Civil War even pitted family member against family member.

Yeah, I can see that.

My mother and I today exchanged some pointed e-mails about Arizona’s handling of its “illegal immigrants.” She still lives in Arizona, where I was born and raised and from where I escaped in 1998 to my new home state of California.

I haven’t set foot back in Arizona since I left it, and I don’t plan to any day soon.

In fact, I support boycotting Arizona, and I am delighted that my city of Sacramento is expected to add itself to the list of cities boycotting the racist, white supremacist state of Arizona.

In fact, today I saw Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson (himself also a former resident of Phoenix; he used to play for the Phoenix Suns) eating lunch outdoors here in Sacramento. I almost stopped and attempted to speak to him, but I didn’t want to disturb his lunch (he was eating with some other people). Instead I e-mailed him later that I support the boycott, even though he already leans toward it.  

My mother, on the other hand, apparently has imbibed the right wing’s Kool Aid that the nation’s ills have been caused primarily by the poor and powerless brown-skinned peoples from south of the border.

Gee, I didn’t know that the “illegals” were responsible for the nation’s economic meltdown. I’d thought that it was the mostly white white-collar crooks, such as the crew of Goldman Sachs, who did that.

Of course, the reason that the right wing pushes hatred of the “illegals” is not only because the “illegals” are powerless and poor, and can’t fight back, but because it’s a great diversion from the nation’s real enemies: the white-collar criminals, most of whom are Repugnicans and whom the Repugnican Party aids and abets.

I mean, for instance, who’s responsible for the oil that continues to fill the Gulf of Mexico? The Mexicans?

I’m beyond sick and fucking tired of the red-state bullshit. We have Alaska’s Repugnican Sarah “Drill, Baby, Drill!” Palin-Quayle now saying that President Barack Obama is too chummy with Big Oil; we have Arizona’s Borg Queen governor, Jan Brewer, Sen. John McCainosaurus, and McCainosaurus’ primary election opponent, J.D. Hayworth, all Repugnicans, of course, all trying to out-hate each other where it comes to the “illegals” for their personal political gain; and we have Kentucky’s Rand Paul saying that he disagrees with at least some of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and that criticism of British Petroleum is “un-American.”

While my mother is pontificating in her e-mails to me about how much the “illegals” are costing us, it’s funny, because not only do the billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded bailouts go to the corporatocrats, and not only do we, the people, also always end up paying for shit like the Vietraq War and the British Petroleum debacles — both of which Dick Cheney’s Halliburton has had an oily hand in — but Arizona itself is a welfare state.

As I noted in April 2009, Arizona gets back from the federal government about $1.20 for every dollar that it puts into the federal government.

My home state of California gets less than 80 cents for every $1 that it puts into the fed.

Palin-Quayle’s Alaska approaches two dollars back for every dollar that it contributes, and Rand Paul’s Kentucky gets about a buck and a half from the fed for every buck that it puts into the fed.

Yet here are these right-wing asswipes bitching and moaning about the evils of welfare when their states are sponging off of us blue states. The majority of the blue states get less from the federal government than they put into it, while the majority of red states get back more from the federal government than they put into it.

And they hate our president, too, primarily because he’s black.

Well, fuck off, red-staters, because 53 percent of Americans voted for Barack Obama, more than who ever voted for your precious George W. Bush in 2000 (less than a full 48 percent) or in 2004 (less than a full 51 percent).

I’ve had it with the right wing and the red states, and I’m ready for a second civil war.

Of course, the red states can prevent that and secede, and we blue states should fucking let them. They only drag us down anyway.

Texas, a.k.a. Bushland, whose Repugnican stupid-white-male governor already has raised the specter of secession, can be home to the New Confederacy’s capital. Texas, which loves to rewrite American history, would be the perfect headquarters for the coalition of states that don’t want to follow the wishes of the majority of Americans who voted for Barack Obama.

Speaking of whom, since Obama has compared himself to Abraham Lincoln — he formally announced his candidacy for president in Lincoln’s Springfield, Illinois, and he even was sworn in on the same Bible that Lincoln used (I saw the Bible when it was on display here in Sacramento as part of a Lincoln museum exhibit) – Obama could preside over the Second Civil War, if it comes to that. It would be fitting that the nation’s first black president should finish the red-state ass-kicking that Lincoln should have finished but did not.

If the secession of the racist red states won’t happen, I’m fine with another civil war.

I’m fighting fucking mad.

The more things change, the more they stay the same

Voters are suckers.

Even though Barack Obama has failed miserably to deliver upon his campaign promises of “hope” and “change,” voters still believe that there are political candidates out there who are going to change the status quo.

But corporations and the corporatocrats that run them and those who love the corporatocrats (a.k.a. politicians), not the voters, call the shots.

British Petroleum, for instance, was able to keep the federal government at bay until it became glaringly apparent that BP did not have its “little” oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico under control. It should have been the other way around, with the federal government telling BP what to do — right off the bat.

Only after the oily corporate environmental disaster became undeniably apparent did Obama feign anger at the corporatocrats who have filled his campaign coffers.

And we still have our perpetual war in the Middle East for the military-industrial complex, because without war, war profiteering isn’t possible.

It’s almost enough to make you miss George W. Bush. (Almost…)

Obama “threw [him] under the bus,” Obama’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, recently wrote in a letter that he probably didn’t intend to become public.

Obama threw all of us under the bus, and the bus is leaking BP oil all over us.

Voters want to see yesterday’s primary election results as a harbinger of that long-promised-but-yet-delivered “hope” and “change.”

“Will the insurgents sell out?” The Daily Beast asks of wingnut Republican Rand Paul, the son of libertarian wingnut Ron Paul, who won Kentucky’s Repugnican U.S. senatorial primary yesterday, and Democrat Joe Sestak, who beat Democrat-come-lately Sen. Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania’s Democratic U.S. senatorial primary election yesterday.

My answer to that question: Of course they will.

But I’m happy about Specter’s defeat. There is a special place in hell for politicians like Specter and recently Repugnican Florida Gov. Charlie Crist and U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman who switch parties or become independents in order to save their political skins instead of upon principle.

And all of the fossils in the U.S. Senate (Specter is 80 years old) need to retire or to be retired by the voters, like Specter was yesterday. Who do they think they are? U.S. Supreme Court justices with lifetime appointments?

As far as “tea party” favorite Rand Paul is concerned, it would be bullshit to assert that as Kentucky (cue banjo) goes so goes the nation.

The U.S. Census put Kentucky’s white population at 92 percent in 2000. The state’s estimated 2005 white population was 91 percent. I don’t expect the 2010 Census results to be much different. Not exactly a diverse state, Kentucky.

And Kentucky went to George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004 and to John McCainosaurus (another U.S. senator who sorely needs to retire or to be retired) in 2008.

So it’s not surprising that white supremacist “tea party” favorite Rand Paul won yesterday’s Repugnican U.S. senatorial primary in a far-right, white supremacist state.

No one anywhere on the ideological spectrum should expect Rand Paul or Joe Sestak to bring about any “hope” and “change.”

We of all ideological stripes get punked every fucking election.

As long as the corporations continue to call the shots, we, the people, are just window dressing in this little pay-to-play charade that we call “democracy.”

Skipping toward Armageddon

AFP photo

The oil slick caused by British Petroleum’s failed offshore drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico (pictured above) is now roughly the size of Puerto Rico, according to The Associated Press. Conventional American “wisdom,” however, has been that offshore drilling is a brilliant fucking idea.

It’s funny, because the wingnuts and I agree on one thing: these do indeed seem to be the end times.

Only the wingnuts and I have a very different view of the causes of the end times.

The wingnuts view President Barack Obama as something like the anti-Christ — if they don’t believe that he actually is the anti-Christ. (In all seriousness, a recent Harris poll shows that about one in four Repugnicans believes that Obama just might be Mr. 666. This is why I call them “wingnuts”; it’s not just that they disagree with me — it’s that they are stark, raving lunatics.)

Obama, in my view, would be instrumental in ushering in the end times not because he’s the anti-Christ. Certainly not because he’s half-black (as the white supremacists among us believe) and not even because he’s “not an American citizen” or because he’s a “socialist” or a “Muslim” or a “terrorist” or some combination of these — as the wingnuts believe — but because he fiddles while the American empire burns.

Now is the time to tackle the nation’s worst problems, not to pander and cater to the “centrists” who claim that the sky isn’t falling even though there are big blue chunks of sky littered at their – our – feet. Now is the time for swift, bold action to prevent total fucking national – and global – meltdown.

Just maintaining the status quo isn’t enough; just keeping our heads above water isn’t enough, because the polar ice caps are melting, you see, and the water is going to keep rising and rising.

It takes a fucking catastrophe for Barack Obama to do the right thing, unfortunately.

He was against offshore drilling (when he was sucking in millions and millions of liberals’ dollars in his campaign for the White House) before he was for it (after he got to the White House) – and now, as crude oil fills the Gulf Coast, he says that maybe offshore drilling is a bad idea after all.

How many global catastrophes will it take for Obama to deliver that “hope” and “change” that he promised?

Obama is a “socialist”?

Oh, I wish!

Socialists, you see, do what’s right for the most number of people and for the planet – not what’s right for the minority plutocrats and corporatocrats, and Obama and the Democratic Party still are very much in bed with the corporatocrats and plutocrats.

The only difference between the Democrats and the Repugnicans is that the Repugnicans love to be whores for the corporatocrats and plutocrats, while the Democrats don’t enjoy putting their legs up in the air for their corporate and plutocratic johns quite as much.

Again, the wingnuts and I seem to agree that these are the end times, but we wholly disagree on the causes.

It’s the wingnuts who would bring us to total ruination, with their love of perpetual war and global pollution and despoilation for corporate profits in the names of Jesus and God and freedom and democracy, and Obama’s role in the end times isn’t that he’s the anti-Christ, but that he’s allowing the wingnuts to make Armageddon their self-fulfilling prophecy; and he’s allowing them to take the rest of us with them.

I’m all for moderation and centrism when we can practice them, but these are desperate times. Our ability to bring about our total destruction has outstripped our willingness to stop our total destruction, it is clear, and therefore now is no time for centrism or moderation, but it is time for drastic measures, and the more we put off doing the right thing, the more drastic will be the measures that we will have to take as a result of our inaction against impending catastrophe.

And, as Ted Rall writes in his excellent current column, the predictable, typical American claims that We just couldn’t have known! are complete and utter bullshit. 

We know.

We just don’t care.

Recently I rediscovered the 1970s song “Rock Me on the Water,” written by one of my long-time favorite artists, Jackson Browne. I downloaded and listened to Browne’s and to Linda Ronstadt’s renditions of the song, whose lyrics start off like this:

Oh, people, look around you;
the signs are everywhere.
You’ve left it for somebody other than you
to be the one to care.
You’re lost inside your houses;
there’s no time to find you now.
Your walls are burning and your towers are turning.
I’m going to leave you here and try to get down to the sea somehow…

Those lyrics are timely.

Except that now we cannot escape even to the sea – for it now is coated with oil, in no small part because a sizeable number of us believe in the philosophy of “Drill, baby, drill!”

More assorted shit

If the United States of America is so damned big and bad, then why are we so fucking obsessed with the threat (real or imagined) of terrorism?

When were we ever 100 percent safe? Why don’t we fear our cars, since we’re much more likely to die in an automobile accident than we are to die in a terrorist attack? 

Today The Associated Press has not one, but at least two, news items on security for the Super Bowl: “Protecting Against a ‘Lone Wolf’ at the Super Bowl” and “X-mas Bomb Attempt Prods Super Bowl Security Change.”

You know what I’m hoping for?

I’m hoping that members of Code Pink crash the Super Bowl.

They’re good at getting into events — here is a photo of Code Pink members crashing the lie fest — er, testimony — of former Secretary of State Condoleezza “You Know She’s Lying When Her Lips Are Moving” Rice:

– and they never actually harm anyone.

The Code Pink activists are hated because they stand up to The Man, an act that the brainwashed masses deem to be “crazy.” In a democracy, you see, you’re just supposed to just shut the fuck up and let the stupid white men run the show. They know better than you do. I mean, the current state of the nation after the eight years of the Bush-Cheney administration is proof of that. And dissent is uber-unpatriotic, you terrorist-lovin’ pinko. Real patriots march in lockstep with their all-white-male leaders. Every true patriot knows that.

—

I recently wrote:

What the fuck is with the widespread belief that others’ beliefs, no matter how insane and potentially oppressive or even dangerous to others, should be held by all of us as sacrofuckingsanct?

We are allowed to believe whatever we want to believe, but when we believe that others should be oppressed or subjugated, that’s a fucking problem, because our beliefs that others should be oppressed or subjugated often end up in actual oppression or subjugation. Actions often follow beliefs. Hate speech, for instance, often leads to hate crimes. And it’s the hateful beliefs that precede the hate speech.

So just now I read a piece on the murder conviction on Friday of wingnut warrior Scott Roeder, who in May 2009 shot to death — in a church – Dr. George Tiller, who had provided abortions in Kansas.

Here is the money shot of the piece:

During closing arguments Friday, [defense attorney Mark] Rudy urged the jury to reject the murder charge. “No one,” he said, “should be convicted based on his convictions.”

Rudy mentioned leaders who stood up for their beliefs, including Martin Luther King Jr. They were “celebrated individuals (who) stood up and made the world a better place.”

So Scott Roeder was just another Martin Luther King Jr., you see. Except that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down in cold blood, just like Dr. George Tiller was. And Scott Roeder gunned down George Tiller. (Don’t try to understand the “logic”; it will just give you a sick headache.)

Tell you what: After Scott Roeder is gunned down like the dog that he is, then maybe, just maybe, we can start comparing him to someone else who was assassinated. Until then, he isn’t a martyr. He’s an assassin, a murderer. And he was convicted of murder, not convicted of having believed something.

You gotta love his “defense,” though.

I suppose that I could have assassinated “President” George W. Bush and been compared to Martin Luther King Jr. for having done so. After all, if Tiller was responsible for taking innocent lives and therefore his killer was a hero like MLK, well, mass murderer George W. Bush is responsible for having taken many more innocent lives, including the lives of more than 4,300 U.S. troops who have died as a result of his bogus Vietraq War for the war profits of Dick Cheney’s war-profiteering Halliburton and the other war-profiteering subsidiaries of BushCheneyCorp – and the lives of thousands upon thousands of innocent Iraqis, whom he permanently “liberated.”

You know, wingnuts, you really don’t want to go down that path, that one’s beliefs justify killing others. You lost the Civil War to us blue-staters, remember.

—

Speaking of abortion, The Associated Press reports today that New Repugnican Hero Scott Brown is pro-choice:

Republican Sen.-elect Scott Brown of Massachusetts says he opposes federal funding for abortions, but thinks women should have the right to choose whether to have one.

Brown tells ABC’s “This Week” that he disagrees with his party’s position that the Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion [Roe v. Wade] should be overturned.

Brown says the abortion question is one that’s best handled by a woman, her family and her doctor. He also says more effort needs to go into reducing the number of abortions in the U.S.

Brown has said the GOP shouldn’t take his vote for granted on every issue. He says he’s fiscally conservative but more moderate on social issues….

I’m not sure how much of Brown’s stance is out of political necessity, given that he’s in the blue state of Massachusetts, and how much of it is out of any actual sanity, but I think it’s funny that the wingnuts — who would prefer Brown to say, like wingnut football hero Tim Tebow has said, that he’s happy that his mama didn’t abort him — don’t have Brown on board with them on the issue of women’s right to have control over their own fucking uteri.

Speaking of fiscal conservatives, I’m totally down with fiscal conservatism — the taxpayers’ dollars should be spent judiciously and responsibly – but I have a real fucking problem with the Repugnicans’ philosophy of spending hundreds and hundreds of billions of the taxpayers’ dollars on the war profiteers via bogus wars but refusing to spend the taxpayers’ dollars on the taxpayers. 

Where in the fuck were the cries of “fiscal conservatism!” when the unelected BushCheneyCorp created a record federal budget deficit, with most of that money funneled to the traitors who comprise the military-industrial complex?

Um, yeah.

—

A little more on John Edwards, and then hopefully I’ll never feel compelled to write about the loser again.

While I have no plan to buy former Edwards aide Andrew Young’s tell-all book The Politician, I found this recent reportage from Salon.com’s War Room to be interesting:

Young’s book also elaborates on the now-dominant theme of Edwards as a narcissist on an epic scale. If half of what the book says is true, the candidate’s obsession with his appearance was, if anything, underestimated during the campaign.

Preoccupied with the appearance of his hair and his weight, he scorned state fairgoers as “rednecks” who would try to force feed him. According to Young, Edwards delivered one line that seems a bit too perfect: “I know I’m the people’s senator, but do I have to hang out with them?”

I never bought Edwards’ supposed populism, which is why I never supported him for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Do I blame Edwards for not being thrilled to be hanging out with rednecks? No. I’m not thrilled to hang out with rednecks, either. They tend to be not very bright, not very curious, and they tend to fear — and to oppress and even to aggress upon – those who don’t look, act and believe just like they do.

But the difference between Edwards and me is that I don’t lie about my feelings about rednecks.

—

Finally, I like this line in an AlterNet piece about why the U.S. Supreme Court fucked up when the five wingnuts on it ruled that corporations have the First Amendment right to spend an unlimited amount of money on political ads: “Simply put: money is not speech [and] corporations are not people.”

Yup. I especially believe the latter part: corporations are not people.

One certainly could argue that money is needed to disseminate one’s message, but the First Amendment reads:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Nothing in there about corporations having the same rights as do individual people — nothing about corporations in there at all — and the courts have ruled consistently that what appear (correctly or incorrectly) to be restraints on free speech are constitutional if they are content neutral.

Restraining corporate influence on the national political dialogue is not about suppressing individuals’ free speech; to the contrary, it’s about ensuring that the individual’s voice is not completely drowned out in the national dialogue by Big Money.

To allow that to happen would be to hasten the conversion of our democracy into a complete corporatocracy, which has been going on for some decades now.

No one who understands and cares about our democracy would be OK with its hostile takeover by the corporations, which represent the largest threat to our democracy, by far.

Forgo the Christmas sweater and see Zemeckis’ ‘A Christmas Carol’

Film review (with gratuitous political commentary)

In stills from Robert Zemeckis’ version of “A Christmas Carol,” Ebenezer Scrooge, voiced by Jim Carrey, is confronted by the tortured ghost of his deceased business partner Jacob Marley and is shown by the Ghost of Christmas Past the love that he gave up for the pursuit of money.

God bless Robert Zemeckis for bringing us “A Christmas Carol” at the same time that Glenn Beck (assuming that he really writes all of the books that are released under his name) has released his children’s picture book The Christmas Sweater (yes, I know, it’s frightening, a children’s book by the likes of Glenn Beck; if it is not a sign of the coming Apocalypse, then I don’t know what is).

Full admission: I would never purchase one of Glenn Beck’s books. I would never financially support a stupid white man, a dry drunk who claims that he is all about traditional values. Yes, Glenn Beck wants to drag all of us, kicking and screaming, back to the good old days — you know, the days when stupid white men like he, drunk on power, had complete control of everything, and we uppity women, non-whites, non-heterosexuals and non-Christians knew our place. (Um, yeah, that’s why if I had a child, I wouldn’t allow him or her to possess a copy of anything by Glenn Beck. Because I truly care about family values, and white supremacism, racism, misogyny, homphobia, xenophobia and “Christo”fascism are not family values.)

Anyway, although I’d never read anything by Beck, amazon.com does give this description of The Christmas Sweater (the full “novel” that the children’s picture book, released a year after the “novel” was released, is based upon) :

In Beck’s debut novel, the conservative radio and TV host makes a weak attempt at a holiday classic in the vein of It’s a Wonderful Life.

Despite his single mother’s financial hardships, 12-year-old Eddie is certain this Christmas he will receive his much-desired Huffy bike. To his dismay, what he finds under the tree is “a stupid, handmade, ugly sweater” that his mother carefully modeled after those she can’t afford at Sears (one of four places she keeps part-time jobs).

Eddie tosses the sweater and insults his mother before the two go visit his grandparents at their farmouse. On the drive home, though, Eddie’s exhausted mother falls asleep at the wheel and crashes, dying instantly. Sent to live with his grandparents, an increasingly bitter and angry Eddie lashes out at his accommodating guardians, engages in typical teenage angst and grapples with belief in God.

For all his focus on traditional family virtues like respect, love and forgiveness, Beck’s lightweight parable cruises on predictability, repetition and sentimentality.

That’s priceless: A materialistic baby boomer like Glenn Beck is going to lecture our kiddies hypocritically that they shouldn’t want stuff. Like the likes of Beck would pick the homemade sweater over the Huffy bike. And it’s incredibly and sickly ironic that Beck and his Fox “News” fully support the system of wage slavery in which a single mother would have to work more than one job, yet here is Beck writing about the tragedy of a single mother who has to work more than one job.

And what kind of kid’s book has the protagonist’s mother dying in a car wreck? Beck is one sick and twisted piece of shit, and I wouldn’t want my kids reading something by a sick and twisted piece of shit.

But I digress.

There is egomaniac Glenn Beck, who likens himself to Thomas Paine — yes, he actually released a book actually titled Glenn Beck’s Common Sense: The Case Against an Out-of-Control Government, Inspired by Thomas Paine — and then there is the real deal, Charles Dickens.

Wikipedia notes that Dickens, who lived from 1812 to 1870, “was the most popular English novelist of the Victorian era and one of the most popular of all time. He created some of literature’s most memorable characters. His novels and short stories have never gone out of print. A concern with what he saw as the pressing need for social reform is a theme that runs throughout his work.”

Yup. While Beck writes a story about a boy who must feel awfully guilty that he wanted a bicycle over the sweater made for him by his mother, who works in sweat shops that Beck and Fox “News” support and who then dies in a grisly car wreck, Dickens was about doing something about the sweat shops.

Dickens was not about lecturing the downtrodden to just shut the fuck up and thank God for whatever they do have, which, from what I can tell, is the central message of The Christmas Sweater, a message that the plutocrats and corporatocrats are only too happy to have their Darth Vader in Glenn Beck deliver to our impressionable kiddies. (Further, why do the corporatists like Beck incessantly advertise their products and then criticize anyone for actually wanting one of their products, like a Huffy bike? They can’t fucking have it both ways.)

“A Christmas Carol” is, let’s face it, socialist.

The main character of “A Christmas Carol” is the Dick-Cheney-like Ebenezer Scrooge, who, when he sees the damage that his miserliness has caused others, does a 180 and decides to stop stealing other people’s money from them via the legalized thievery that is called “capitalism” (a.k.a. “just business”) and decides to give their rightful wealth back to them instead.

That’s hardly the Christmas message that the likes of “Fox” News’ Glenn Beck want to put out there, that the plutocrats should share the wealth that they have stolen and thus ease the suffering of the many around them. Why, that’s — socialist!

(Of course, Jesus Christ himself preached, over and over again, in black and white in the New Testament, about the evils of the rich [my favorite being his declaration that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven] and the virtue of helping the less fortunate, so Jesus must have been a socialist, too. And doesn’t Christmas come from Jesus Christ?)

But we can’t have a socialist/“socialist” — that is, a truly Christian — Christmas message put out there, so it’s the likes of Beck, with his fucking Christmas sweater, who are to save the day for the ultra-super-rich.

OK, my political commentary is over, so let me dive into Robert Zemeckis’ “A Christmas Carol.” I just wanted to put it into some sociopolitical context first.

Zemeckis, who brought us the “Back to the Future” trilogy and “Forrest Gump,” lately has been giving us computer-aided fare, with “The Polar Express,” “Beowulf” and now “A Christmas Carol.”

I’ve seen all three of those films, and, like Roger Ebert declared that he would do in his review of Zemeckis’ “A Christmas Carol,” I won’t regurgitate the plot of “A Christmas Carol,” which everyone already knows, but I will talk about the technological aspects of Zemeckis’ latest.

Zemeckis’ craftspeople are getting better at capturing realistic human expressions (especially human eyes), but they’re not fully there yet. I found the creepy unnaturalness of the characters’ CGI eyes in “The Polar Express” to be too much to even be able to get into the film (which, if memory serves, I saw at an IMAX theater, so it was even bigger and even more unintentionally scary).

“Beowulf” was an improvement on the CGI technology that Zemeckis uses these days, but “Beowulf” suffers from a poor storyline (isn’t Beowulf what high schoolers dread they’ll have to read?) and a poor screenplay (as well as from testosterone overload, a la “300”). Of all of the stories that Zemeckis could have adapted, why Beowulf?

No, we didn’t need another “A Christmas Carol,” either. You’re right. We didn’t. Except that we probably did. In these BushCheneyCorp-induced times of economic collapse and the subsequent national environment of fear and uncertainty that that collapse has caused, it doesn’t hurt to be reminded of the fact that the reason that there is so much poverty and suffering around us is that there are so many Ebenezer Scrooges around us.

Of course, Dickens’ story relies on four spirits to induce Ebenezer Scrooge to change his ways. In our case, we can’t count on spirits preventing the plutocrats from completely destroying our nation (although I must wonder if the ghost of Ronald Reagan would replace the spirit of Dickens’ Jacob Marley were a ghost to appear before the Scrooges of today). We, the people, might have to take matters into our own hands — the threat of which is why we have such things as “Fox” News and its henchmen like Glenn Beck.

(There I go again…)

Anyway, Zemeckis’ “A Christmas Carol” has the eye thing down, at least where it comes to the character of Ebenezer Scrooge. Zemeckis’ CGI Scrooge is quite humanlike, but it’s the other characters, especially the extras in the streets, on whom the CGI technicians presumedly spent less time and effort, that have that unnatural, not-quite-human look that we have seen in “The Polar Express” and “Beowulf.”

Zemeckis makes the burly Ghost of Christmas Present surprisingly hunky, replete with a copious amount of apparently proudly displayed strawberry-blond chest hair (although apparently Zemeckis was fairly faithful to the appearance of the Ghost of Christmas Present as he appeared in Dickens’ original novel), and Zemeckis interprets the Ghost of Christmas Past interestingly — as a human-candle hybrid, with the head of the ghost being the flame of a white candle that occasionally flickers as the ghost speaks (which I, like Ebert did, found to be an interesting special effect).

Much of Zemeckis’ “A Christmas Carol” is like a roller-coaster ride, with the latter three spirits zipping Ebenezer here and there, over rooftops and landscapes, in order to show him where he fucked up his life in the past, how his miserliness has harmed others in the present, and how his miserliness will affect him in the future if he doesn’t change his ways drastically.

The greatest liberty that Zemeckis took with “A Christmas Carol” is the segment in which he has Scrooge shrink to the size of a mouse during his time with the Ghost of Christmas Future. At first I took umbrage with this liberty — Dickens never shrunk Scrooge! – and other reviewers have said that they didn’t like it, but Zemeckis at least ultimately makes it work, especially when the mini-Scrooge finds himself in the home of his impoverished maid, who is talking to her husband about Scrooge after his death.  

Jim Carrey (who also gave us the live-action Grinch, recall) did an excellent job voicing Ebenezer Scrooge and the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future. (Well, OK, he is credited with being the voice of the grim-reaper-like Ghost of Christmas Future, but I don’t recall that that ghost says a word…) Why Carrey has taken so much shit from reviewers, proclaiming in their sheep-like unison that One Jim Carrey is enough!, I don’t know. Jealousy over Carrey’s talents, maybe?

“A Christmas Carol,” although fully titled “Disney’s A Christmas Carol” (shudder – that a corporation would co-opt the anti-corporate Dickens is sickening), probably isn’t for small children. I found the slack-jawed ghost of Jacob Marley to be at least moderately disturbing, so I can’t imagine that most small children wouldn’t find it to be even more disturbing.

But most older children and adults – except for the plutocrats and corporatocrats and their supporters, of course, who equate the easing of poverty with “socialism” and who would regard Ebenezer Scrooge as a Great American Capitalist Hero – will enjoy Zemeckis’ “A Christmas Carol,” not only for its technological achievements (and you must see it in 3-D if it’s playing near you in 3-D), but also for the fact that it remains faithful to the spirit of Dickens’ short novel — which is the true spirit of Christmas.

Fuck Glenn Beck and his fucking Christmas sweater.

My grade: A

Are there ANY competent journalists left?

I earned a bachelor of science in journalism, so I think that I’m qualified enough to ask that question.

Recently, former President Jimmy Carter stated what those of us Americans who are intelligent and honest and sane already knew: that much of the opposition to President Barack Obama is rooted in racism.

This is the complete text of one of the first news stories that I read on Carter’s statement, from MSNBC:

In an interview with NBC’s Brian Williams, former Democratic President Jimmy Carter attributed much of the conservative opposition that President Obama is receiving to the issue of race.

“I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man,” Carter said.

[Carter added:] “I live in the South, and I’ve seen the South come a long way, and I’ve seen the rest of the country that share the South’s attitude toward minority groups at that time, particularly African-Americans.”

Carter continued, “And that racism inclination still exists. And I think it’s bubbled up to the surface because of the belief among many white people, not just in the South but around the country, that African-Americans are not qualified to lead this great country.

“It’s an abominable circumstance, and it grieves me and concerns me very deeply.”

OK, now Carter very most likely made his comments because the incident in which Repugnican U.S. Rep. Addison Graves (a.k.a. “Joe”) Wilson (of first-to-secede South Carolina) yelled “You lie!” at President Obama during Obama’s nationally televised address to Congress on the topic of health-care reform was still quite fresh in the national memory.

Now, nowhere in Carter’s comments do you see Carter state that anyone who opposes Obama’s health-care reform plans is actually just a racist. Carter doesn’t focus on whether or not one agrees with or opposes what the wingnuts like to call “Obamacare.”

Carter clearly states that it is the “intensely demonstrated animosity” that smells racist to him.  

Again, this is what Carter actually said: “I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man.”

What Carter meant, I believe, is that it was the highly unprofessional, disrespectful, beyond-the-pale act of any U.S. representative, perhaps especially a white man from the South, yelling “You lie!” at President Obama that points to racism — not Wilson’s or anyone else’s opposition to Obama’s health-care reform plans.

Yet somehow many if not most journalists have rewritten history to indicate that Carter actually said that if you oppose Obama’s health-care reform plans, you’re a racist.

There is this, in full, from The Associated Press today:

Former President Bill Clinton says he doesn’t think racism is a principal factor in resistance to President Barack Obama’s plan for overhauling health care.

Interviewed [today] on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Clinton said “there’s no question” racism exists in some outbursts in recent months. But he also said he believes “if he were not an African-American, all of the people who were against him on health care would still be against him. They were against me, too.”

Clinton said that “I sympathize with” former President Jimmy Carter’s feeling that racism accounts for the strenuous opposition to Obama, but said “that’s not what’s driving” Obama’s critics. Clinton said: “What’s driving them is they don’t want health care.”

WTF? Who truly doesn’t want health care? Was Clinton being flippant?

I’m not sure which of them had it wrong, Bill Clinton or the AP writer — or both of them — but again: Carter never said that if you oppose Obama’s health-care reform plan then you must be a racist.

However, let’s be clear: from allegations that “B. Hussein Obama” is an “Islamofascist” sympathizer to allegations that he’s a “socialist” (oh, I wish that he were!) to allegations that he is not an American citizen, the real problem that the vast majority of those who spew forth such allegations have with Obama is that he’s not white.

And if I had to put my money on it, I’d bet that the majority of those who attend “tea parties” bitching and moaning about taxes (even though hundreds of billions of American taxpayers’ dollars have gone to the war profiteers, such as Dick Cheney’s Halliburton, via the bogus Vietraq War) and bitching and moaning about the “socialist” “takeover” of health care are using these issues only as fronts for the fact that they’re just pissed off that their guy, John McCainosaurus, lost the November 2008 presidential election to Obama — whether racism has been the main factor in their preference for the McCainosaurus-Palin-Quayle ticket over the Obama-Biden ticket or not.

But back to my original point: Journalists need to get it right.

“Former President Bill Clinton says he doesn’t think racism is a principal factor in resistance to President Barack Obama’s plan for overhauling health care,” the AP story above begins.

Who in the hell ever said that it was?

Certainly not Jimmy Carter.

Let’s not let the national dialogue on race and racism be shut down because we first misquote luminaries like Jimmy Carter and then attack our own misquotes — or because we allow others to do that. The national dialogue is too important for us truly patriotic Americans to allow that to happen.

Speaking of tea parties, I have to share this ’toon with you:

That ’toon is from murraythenut.com. Many (if not most…) of the ’toonist’s ’toons are just scatological, but his political ’toons are great. Here’s another:

And another:

I love Murry the Nut.

Anyway, finally, yes, Bill Clinton is correct that the wingnuts opposed health-care reform when he was president, too. That’s historical fact. However, never did a stupid white male member of Congress yell “You lie!” or anything else like that while Clinton was giving a nationally televised address to Congress.

Ask yourself why it is that nothing like that happened to Bill Clinton but happened to Barack Obama.

And finally finally, I hope that Clinton was only being facetious when he said that the opponents of Obama’s health-care reform plans don’t want health care.

Of course they want health care. It’s that the right-wing noise machine, funded by millions and millions of corporate dollars, wants the masses to believe that anything that Obama proposes that isn’t good for the corporatocrats and plutocrats is “socialist” (which means “anti-American”) and is even anti-Christian.

These plutocrats/corporatocrats and their wingnutty mouthpieces like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh wrap themselves in the American flag and in the shroud of Turin to the extent that they have convinced millions of easily duped Americans that to oppose the stupid-white-male power structure — such as to wish that health care should be available to all Americans, and that no one should profit obscenely from Americans’ pain and suffering, as is the case under the current wealth care system – is to oppose the nation and patriotism and puppies and kittens and even God and Jesus Themselves.

We, the people, elected Barack Obama as president. Those Americans who are so stupid as to support the plutocrats and corporatocrats and their cheerleaders (like Beck and Limbaugh and Fox “News”) — just like the chickens supporting Colonel Sanders – are the minority.

We, the majority, need to ignore the loud-mouthed minority, and we, the majority, need to proceed with the business that we, the majority, elected President Barack Obama to do.