Can we abort the wedge issues already?

So if I understand Repugnican Tea Party U.S. Rep. Todd Akin, who is running for the U.S. Senate for Missouri, correctly, if a woman is properly reviled enough – which she should be if she has been the victim of a “legitimate rape” – she will have a revulsion-induced miscarriage should one of her “legitimate” rapist’s spermatazoa successfully fertilize one of her eggs, which very rarely happens in the case of “legitimate” rape anyway. Doctors say so, Akin apparently said. On television.

If revulsion-induced miscarriages were a medical reality, wouldn’t thousands of women have had miscarriages every time they saw and heard the likes of, say, George W. Bush or Sarah Palin or Prick Santorum — or, for that matter, Todd Akin — on television?

A little visit to Wikipedia shows that Akin is a 65-year-old white guy (yet another fucking baby boomer) who calls himself a Presbyterian, and his bio on Wikipedia mentions no medical training whatsoever.

Still, despite his possessing, presumably, no female reproductive anatomy himself, and possessing, apparently, no medical training whatsofuckingever, Akin very apparently feels comfortable pontificating upon women’s reproductive choices — even to the point where he’ll just pull shit out of his ass. 

Wow.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a staunch supporter of women’s reproductive rights. If I were a woman, I wouldn’t want some “Christo”fascist dictating to my uterus.

But abortion as a knee-jerk wedge issue is beyond tiresome.

Abortion was decided in 1973 with Roe vs. Wade, and the Repugnican Tea Party traitors (most of them “Christo”fascists) need to move the fuck on already and let the rest of us have the freedoms and liberties that are guaranteed to us.

But I’m not sure who is worse: the likes of Todd Akin talking out of his toxically patriarchal, misogynist, “Christo”fascist ass or the likes of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chair of the Democratic Party, wasting no time at all in firing off yet another “outrage” fundraising e-mail yesterday. Wasserman Schultz’s e-mail, titled “Legitimate rape,” invites you to “Take a stand for women now.”

When you click on that option, you are then immediately taken to a webpage that asks for your name, e-mail address and ZIP Code. When you enter that information by clicking on a box labeled “TAKE A STAND,” you then immediately are taken not to a webpage on, oh, say, women’s reproductive rights, but  to a fucking Obama Victory Fund 2012 fundraising webpage.

The only, or at least the best, way to “stand up for women,” you see, is to give money to Barack Obama’s re-election campaign.

Every time some Repugnican Tea Party dipshit says something stupid and/or fascistic, which is often, the Dems quite predictably fire off yet another of their “OUTRAGE!” fundraising e-mails. What good is a scandal or pseudo-scandal if you can’t profit from it?

Aren’t even the Democratic Party hacks sick and fucking tired of this predictable, craven bullshit?

Abortion is an important issue, but how about global warming and other environmental destruction (such as the British Petroleum oil spill in which the corporate-ass-kissing Barack Obama was less than fucking worthless)? How about reining in the bloated-beyond-belief military-corporate-industrial complex, which wastes trillions of our tax dollars while we are told that we are parasites and that thus the social safety net (what little of it remains, that is) must be annihilated? How about the growing, yawning gap between the rich and the poor? How about our young people, whose future is incredibly fucking bleak? How about preserving the environment for them, and also for them ending perpetual bogus warfare and other bogus military spending for the greedy, treasonous motherfuckers’ war-profiteering, and how about preserving Social Security and Medicare for them and for us members of Generation X and for future generations instead of blatantly stealing the dollars of those of us in Generation X and Generation Y who have been paying into Social Security and Medicare for decades or for years by denying us what we already have fucking paid for?

No, the partisan duopoly doesn’t want to talk about those issues because those are our most pressing issues.

They want to talk about abortion. Ad nauseam.

Let’s fucking face it already: Neither of the two major political parties is willing or able to tackle our most pressing problems. Whatever the two parties might have been in the past, all that they are now is fundraising machines — and they use visceral social issues and fear of the other party to (try to) get us to give them our money and our votes.

And we allow this state of affairs in a so-called “democracy.”

It seems to me that we have the “democracy” that we deserve.

–

*Actually, a study in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology concluded that:

Rape-related pregnancy occurs with significant frequency. It is a cause of many unwanted pregnancies and is closely linked with family and domestic violence. As we address the epidemic of unintended pregnancies in the United States, greater attention and effort should be aimed at preventing and identifying unwanted pregnancies that result from sexual victimization.

Granted, this study was published in 1996, but I can’t see that much, if anything, has changed since then. (Human ova are still fertilized in the same way, to my knowledge…)

Prick Insantorum: Global warming is ‘political science’

Reuters photo

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

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

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

“Responsible environmental stewardship.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–

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

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

Is Prick Santorum the biggest dipshit on the planet?

AFP photo

“Christo”fascist Prick Santorum, trying to distance himself from his strong insinuation of yesterday that President Barack Obama isn’t a Christian and he is, today essentially stated that he believes that humankind should do as it pleases to planet Earth. (It’s in the Bible, after all!) Another great “save” there, prick!

Repugnican Tea Party presidential wannabe Prick Santorum, embattled because of his strong insinuation of yesterday that President Barack Obama isn’t a Christian, today “clarified” that he believes that Obama is a Christian, but that it’s Obama’s “worldview” that he takes issue with. The Associated Press reports that Santorum said of Obama today:

“I am talking about his worldview, and the way he approaches problems in this country. I think they’re different than how most people do in America.” …

The former Pennsylvania senator said Obama’s environmental policies promote ideas of “radical environmentalists,” who, Santorum argues, oppose greater use of the country’s natural resources because they believe “man is here to serve the Earth.” He said that was the reference he was making [yesterday] in his Ohio campaign appearance when he denounced a “phony theology.”

“I think that is a phony ideal. I don’t believe that is what we’re here to do,” Santorum said. “We’re not here to serve the Earth. The Earth is not the objective. Man is the objective.” …

Um, when did Barack Obama ever state that we are “here to serve the Earth”?

Um, when did even any “radical environmentalist” state that we are “here to serve the Earth”?

Is Prick Santorum talking about the “Christo”fascist idea of what Paganism is? Is he, in code, calling Obama an Earth-serving Pagan? Is he calling “radical environmentalists” and Obama supporters Pagans? (Not that there is anything wrong with being a Pagan — the majority of them are a lot more fun to be around than are those evil pricks like Santorum who call themselves “Christians.”)

I ask these questions because environmentalism isn’t about “serving” the Earth. It’s about saving it. Not “serving” it, but conserving, preserving it.

Environmentalism isn’t about whether we should put humankind or the planet above one or the other. That’s a false choice fabricated by the science- and planet-hating wingnuts. Environmentalism is about how humankind and the planet (and the rest of the planet’s lifeforms) are so intertwined.

But, if we have to put one above the other, let’s fucking face it: We humankind need the planet, but the planet sure the fuck doesn’t need us. It can do just fine without us, as it did for the billions of years before we human beings arrived on the scene, and if we carry out the insane irresponsibility of Prick Santorum and his ilk far enough, that’s exactly what will happen: The planet will be free of human beings once again, because we human beings will have wiped ourselves out.

The Bible that Santorum — who, while we’re on the topic of serving, clearly serves the Vatican – thumps indeed puts mankind above the Earth and its natural resources, including, of course, all other of its lifeforms. But that Bible was written centuries and centuries ago, and its ignorant authors knew nothing about science. They knew only superstition. Also at that time, the planet’s human population was small enough that indeed it seemed to the human beings of that time that the Earth could take all of the abuse that mankind could dish out.

But now we’re at more than 7 billion human beings, and the planet is showing obvious signs that it can’t take more abuse. The melting North Pole alone demonstrates that fact, and as I’ve found myself having to pop antihistamines significantly early this year because of all of the trees that already are blossoming in Sacramento even though the start of spring is more than a month away, global warming appears to be quite real to me.

Yes, I suppose that it is about “worldview.”

And Prick Santorum’s worldview — in which mankind is the master of the planet and therefore may do to the planet and its resources whatsoever he pleases – is defunct. Worse, it’s a recipe for the extinction of the human race (not to mention the other species that humankind is wiping out right now).

I suppose that Prick Santorum and his “Christo”fascist ilk want their “Armageddon,” and therefore they’ll do everything in their power to bring it about. (“Armageddon” is not pre-ordained, of course, and any such mass extinction of mankind most likely would be caused by mankind’s own stupid actions, not by some divine intervention.)

Those of us who are sane and who therefore are not bound to the scribblings made by ignorant men centuries and centuries ago, but who value facts and science and logic and reason over ignorance and fear and superstition, indeed have a different worldview than does the Neanderthal Prick Santorum (wait — that’s probably an uncalled-for slam against the Neanderthals).

And those of us who do not share Prick Santorum’s Bible-and-Vatican-based worldview do not wish to go down the dark path that he would drag us, kicking and screaming. As the planet gets hotter and hotter, it would be, indeed, an awful lot like hell on Earth.

Using our troops as human shields doesn’t work anymore

George W. Bush perfected the tactic of turning our troops into human shields for his political gain.

Any criticism of his illegal, immoral, unjust and unprovoked Vietraq War, Bush or one of his henchpeople tried (with at least some success) to recast as an assault on our troops.

Let’s talk about our troops.

The members of the party that loves to send our troops to their maimings and their deaths for the benefit of war profiteers and not out of actual national defense or national security do not wuv our troops.

Further, this patriarchal, macho, misogynist hero-worship bullshit has to stop. Our troops indeed are important for actual national defense, the need for which is rare these days, with most military operations nowadays being about perpetuating the bloated military-industrial complex. But it’s not just our members of the military, law enforcement officers and firefighters who are critical to our nation’s well-being and security. How about teachers? Our nurses? Last but certainly not least, our mothers? (And our scientists and our artists and…)

Repugnican Tea Party Speaker of the House John “Cry Me a River” Boehner proclaims that he’s confident that those Democrats who believe it is important to fund our troops and make real spending cuts will prevail upon Senator Reid and our commander in chief to keep the government from shutting down.”

It’s a thinly veiled threat: If the Democrats don’t give the Repugnican Tea Party traitors what they are demanding, the federal government will be shut down, our troops won’t be funded – and this will put all of us at imminent risk. And it will be the Democrats’ fault.

But what the Repugnican Tea Party traitors are demanding is no meaningful cuts to the bloated budget of the bloated military-industrial complex but the evisceration of the Environmental Protection Agency and the end of federal funding of Planned Parenthood.

Wow. Protecting our environment is part of our national security — as we will see, graphically, as climate change increases over the coming years – but the Repugnican Tea Party traitors want to put corporate profits way ahead of our national security.

And Planned Parenthood is part of our national security as well. The Repugnican Tea Party traitors have been telling us for some months now that we just can’t afford human beings (and we can’t, not when the rich and the super-rich keep getting their tax cuts, when corporations like General Electric pay no fucking taxes, and when all of our tax dollars go to the [in]human greed of the military-industrial complex instead of to human needs).

Yet birth control (yes, including abortion, elective and medically necessary), aside from being great for the planet because of reduced consumption of natural resources and thus reduced pollution due to lower birth rates, is a great fucking solution toward keeping the nation’s population at a sustainable level.

With increasing population and increasing poverty, which is the result of increasing population, comes increasing violence. Therefore, keeping both the population and poverty down keeps down violence, which is part of what you call national security.

But apparently, the Repugnican Tea Party traitors want there to be even more miserable Americans in poverty.

The Repugnican Tea Party traitors, of course, don’t give a flying fuck about national security. They care about treasonously continuing to feed at the trough of the U.S. Treasury via the Pentagon. It’s their legalized thievery from the American people. And perpetual warfare ensures that, like Big Brother in 1984, we have a perpetual supply of fake enemies (like Saddam Hussein, who posed no threat to the U.S.) or true enemies that we created through our own military actions (like Osama bin Laden). It’s a great gig if you can get it — using warfare to create more enemies, which you then use to justify even more warfare, which creates even more enemies, which…

“For them [the Repugnican Tea Party traitors] to want to disguise their bad [federal budget] proposal by hiding behind our troops is really a disservice to our troops,” said she-devil to the right wing U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California.

Yes, it is, but keeping them in perpetual warfare in the Middle East for the benefit only of the war profiteers is a disservice to them, too. The way to demonstrate that you truly care about our troops is to never put them in harm’s way unless it’s absolutely necessary to do so. And in those rare times, you do everything in your power to keep them safe.

Thankfully, President Barack Obama is threatening to veto the Repugnican Tea Party’s budget plan that attempts to hold all of us hostage by using our troops as political human shields while achieving the wholly-budget-unrelated right-wing wet dreams of destroying Planned Parenthood and the EPA.

Obama wants to be re-elected, after all, and the stupid white men’s assault upon The People is Wisconsin isn’t working out too well for them right about now (so it’s rather stunning that Repugnican Tea Party U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin now is talking about destroying Medicare and giving the rich and the super-rich even more tax cuts as being fundamental to our “prosperity”). Obama surely doesn’t want to go the way of Wisconsin Supreme Court “Justice” David Prosser or the way that Wisconsin Gov. Scott “Dead Man” Walker is going to go as soon as his recall can begin.

It’s a bad-ass battle right now between the stupid white man, who has always run the show — and who is destroying the very planet (the North Pole is melting, for fuck’s sake) — and the rest of us, the majority of us who favor the fate of the planet over the fate of the stupid white man, hands down.

We’ve already won the battle of global public opinion, but we still have an awful lot of work to do. There are legions of stupid white men and their sympathizers who still need to be neutralized — or, if necessary, destroyed — for the sake of the very planet and of humankind’s continued existence.



To hell in a handbasket — on crack



This the is “vision” that the Repugnican Tea Party has for the United States of America.

The members of the Repugnican Tea Party in the U.S. House of Representatives promised to make jobs and the economy their No. 1 issue. But let’s tick off what they’ve actually “accomplished” thus far:

• They read the U.S. Constitution to us aloud — minus those unpleasant portions about slavery, of course.
• They have attacked Planned Parenthood and women’s rights.
• They have attacked the Environmental Protection Agency.
• They are engaged in a nationwide union-busting campaign that benefits only their corporate and plutocratic benefactors pimps.
• They have attacked our public servants, even our public-school teachers.
• They have attacked National Public Radio, and got the scalp of NPR’s president and CEO.
• Tomorrow they are to began McCarthyesque hearings on what a danger to the nation Muslim Americans are.

In short, the Repugnicans in the House have done nothing substantial toward bringing about national economic recovery.

They know that this is what they should be addressing, however, because they frequently are using the economy as their bullshit excuse to fulfill their Wingnut Wish List.

We can’t afford NPR, they claim, when in fact, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (NPR’s parent) – and Planned Parenthood — get a fucking pittance from the federal government compared to the bloated military-industrial complex, which is draining our nation of its lifeblood, a huge threat to the continued existence of our nation. (Many other empires collapsed due to military overextension and concomitant domestic rot.) Our public servants, too, get a negligible portion of the federal budget, and they’re worth every penny of their underpaid salaries.

The treasonous Repugnican Tea Party House members’ intent in these aforementioned instances isn’t to save us money – it’s to censor/silence NPR (and the Public Broadcasting System), to deny women their right to self-determination of their own fucking uteri, and to destroy every last governmental hurdle to complete corporate control of the nation.

It’s about the wingnuts in the U.S. House of Representatives throwing huge chunks of red meat to their base of plutocrats and “Christo”fascists. (The upcoming House hearings on “the Muslim problem” — remember Adolf Hitler’s “Jewish problem”? — especially are an early Christmas gift to the “Christo”fascists.)

If the Repugnican Tea Party members of the House were serious about tackling the nation’s federal budget deficit that “President” George W. Bush created by giving tax breaks to the rich and the super-rich while wasting hundreds of billions of our tax dollars in bogus warfare, they would make the rich and the super-rich pay their fair share of taxes and they would seriously, meaningfully cut the bloated budget of the military-industrial complex.

Instead, the Repugnican Tea Party is on a campaign to make the United States of America more and more like a third-world nation:

• Get rid of the Environmental Protection Agency — so that climate change accelerates, making the entire planet resemble the planet in the movies “The Road” or “WALL-E” or “Idiocracy.”
• Get rid of Planned Parenthood and outlaw abortion – so that we have many more mouths that we can’t feed and many more consumers of the planet’s limited resources, accelerating climate change and other environmental catastrophes.
• Privatize all of the public schools so that only the children of the rich and super-rich can get a decent education, and institute only right-wing and pro-corporate curricula in what remains of the crumbling, old public school system.
• Destroy all of the labor unions so that the corporations have no barriers in their mistreatment and exploitation of their wage slaves.
• Get rid of NPR and PBS – so that the only source Americans have of “news” and “information” is Faux “News” and the other right-wing, pro-corporate media.
• Continue to ignore homelessness and continue to build gated communities, in which the rich and the super-rich live, protected by their private security thugs, while everyone else lives in crime-infested squalor.
• Attack Muslims, literally and figuratively — so that we have perpetual enemies/“enemies” and thus perpetual warfare, a la George Orwell’s 1984.

This is some serious shit. Life as we know it — indeed, the very ability of the planet to sustain human life itself – is at stake if we, the people, don’t fight back against the traitors who spend every waking hour calculating how they can destroy us for their own selfish benefit.

We, the people, cannot depend upon the members of what excellent writer Chris Hedges calls the “liberal class” in his book  Death of the Liberal Class.

Members of the so-called liberal class* include such hypocritical cowards as the supposedly pro-labor Barack Obama, who has remained mostly silent while tens of thousands of pro-labor Wisconsinites are in their third week of protests to keep the middle class and the working class in Wisconsin alive, and Vivian Schiller, the CEO and president of NPR who, instead of holding her ground against the right-wing assault on NPR, cut and run in order to appease the right-wing fascists who are out to destroy the nation.

We’re on our own.

No one is going to save us from the fascistic onslaught that we are witnessing now — except ourselves.

–

*I have a problem with the term “liberal class,” since these cowardly, self-serving hypocrites aren’t actually liberal. They pay lip service to liberal ideals, but their actions and their inaction only help the right wing. They are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Win some, lose some

Posted November 2, 2010, 10:50 p.m.

Associated Press photo

You say Boehner, I say blogging material: Anyway, here Repugnican U.S. Rep. John Boehner’s steel-cold blue eyes well up with tears as he ponders how he’ll abuse his new-found power to further help the filthy rich at the expense of the dipshits who actually believe that the Repugnicans actually care about them (and also at the expense of the rest of us).

Tonight’s election results turned out to be what I’d expected: A win for Democratic Governor-Elect Jerry Brown and for Democratic U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer here in my home state of California, a ref — er, a repudiation of Repugnican millionaires and billionaires who want to buy office, at least here on the Left Coast.

I had expected Proposition 19, which would have legalized the use of marijuana here in California, to fail, as polls had predicted that it would. (Marijuana, like same-sex marriage, will be legal in all 50 states one day; we just have to wait for a lot of old fucks to kick off and take their stodgy, outdated beliefs with them to their graves.)

I had expected Proposition 23, Big Oil’s attempt to hamstring the fight against climate change in California, to fail, and it did, enabling California to remain at the forefront of combatting climate change.

And last but not least, I had expected the Democrats to lose some seats in the U.S. Senate but to retain their majority, and I had expected the Democrats to lose control of the U.S. House of Representatives.

The upshot of the Repugnicans winning control of the House is that (1) I’ll have plenty of blogging material for the next two years, as Repugnican Ohio Rep. John Boehner, to me, with those icy cold blue eyes of his (I have blue eyes also, but mine are warm blue eyes, thank you very much), is Evil Incarnate, and (2) the Repugnicans in the House certainly won’t be able to fix the nation’s economy, any more than the same surgeon who botched your operation is the one to fix the damage that he created, and therefore I expect that in 2012 the Democrats will regain the House after the fickle voters swing back to the Dems, and that the Dems will keep the White House, as well as make up for at least some of today’s losses in the Senate. 

In politics, you rarely get everything you want.

Today, in politics we got most of what I wanted — and, I daresay, now the Democrats will fare better in 2012 than they would have had they retained control of the House of Representatives today.

Wingnuts: Pollution is FUNNY!

At least ever since George W. Bush stole office in late 2000, right-wing fucktardation increasingly has come as less and less of a surprise to me, but still I am able to be surprised occasionally by the abject retards on the right.

Reportedly, the  Carson-Gore Academy of Environmental Sciences in Los Angeles, named after environmentalists Rachel Carson and Al Gore and set to open its doors next week, was built over several industrial storage tanks containing toxins that might pose a danger to the school. A nearby gas station also might pose environmental risks to the school.

The reaction of the right to this news?

Celebration.

“As construction crews worked through the weekend to replace the polluted soil [which scientists had said should make the school safe], the irony of [Al] Gore’s name sitting atop a deemed toxic site has proved irresistible to the right,” reports Politico, quoting one wingnut as having crowed, “You really can’t make this stuff up. As such, it’s quite fitting a school be named after these two radical environmentalists that could end up harming the very students that attend it.”

So the same bunch of assbites who support polluting corporations — it’s always been corporate profits over people and profits over the environment to the wingnuts — are relishing the fact that a school has been built over and near possibly harmful corporate waste because this will allow them to continue to poke fun at Al Gore.

Ha ha ha ha ha!

The punch line of this “joke” is that the right wing wants to deliver to us is a world that looks like something out of the uber-bleak film “The Road.” Or “WALL-E,” maybe.

But they’re not traitors or anything for wishing our continued environmental degradation so that they can, in their sick and twisted minds, score some political Brownie points.

Really — the fact that it’s hard to find an environmentally safe place on which to build a school is an occasion for laughter. And leading the chorus of laughter are those who support corporate pollution in the first place.

I fear not that our empire is dying, but that it’s already dead and rotting.

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.

The cliff swallows of Thunder Valley

Blogger’s note: I usually don’t write things like this — I suppose that with my background in journalism, I find these things to be a bit too fluffy — but fuck it; I thought that I’d give it a try…

An illustration of cliff swallows in the wild (click to enlarge)

My boyfriend and I often go out to eat. I suppose that’s what a lot of gay couples do. We’re not rich, but we can afford to dine out, we don’t have to worry about having any kids in tow, and dining out frees up our time from having to go food shopping and having to cook and wash the dishes.

We often go to a casino here in the Sacramento area, called Thunder Valley, that is within 10 minutes’ driving distance from my boyfriend’s apartment. I don’t like Thunder Valley, really, except for its huge internationally themed buffet. (Buffets are killing me, though. I’ve gained at least 30 pounds since I’ve been with my boyfriend for the past two and a half years, with our frequent trips to buffets. Asian buffets, an Indian buffet, Thunder Valley’s buffet…)

A trip through a smoky casino for me is like a trip through hell. Casinos are full of miserable, desperate entities trying to satisfy their insatiable addictions all at once: gambling, smoking, drinking — and yes, overeating at the buffet… If heroin were legal, they’d be shooting up at the casinos, too. (For the record, I’m not a big drinker, I never could be a daily smoker, and as far as gambling is concerned, I don’t even know what I’m doing and I don’t like to do things unless I’m good at them. But hey, you have to eat…)

During our last trip to Thunder Valley for the buffet, about a week ago, I noticed that the birds that build spherical nests of mud under the eaves of a tower that is located at the far end of the casino’s large parking lot were back in force.

“Mud swallows” my boyfriend calls them, but my Internet research shows that they actually are called cliff swallows. They build houses of mud, yes, and “mud swallow” is a more interesting name, but it’s not what they’re actually called. Wikipedia says of the cliff swallow:

Cliff swallows breed in large colonies. They build conical mud nests and lay three to six eggs. The natural nest sites are on cliffs, preferably beneath overhangs, but … man-made structures are now the principal locations for breeding….

European settlement provided many new nest sites on buildings, but the population declined in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the supply of unpainted barns declined. There has been a subsequent revival as dams and bridges have provided suitable sites.

These are the famous swallows whose return from Villa Ventana, Argentina every year to the Mission San Juan Capistrano in California on (or around) March 19 is celebrated with a festival. In recent years, the swallows have failed to return to the mission.

Like all swallows and martins, cliff swallows subsist primarily on a diet of insects which are caught in flight.

I Googled “cliff swallow Thunder Valley” and I discovered that the three-story tower-like structure at the far end of the parking lot of the casino was built specifically for the swallows (see page 9 of this PDF) – so that they wouldn’t continue to build their nests of mud on the huge casino building itself.

The cliff swallows of Thunder Valley have built dozens of their mud nests on the tower structure built for them in the casino parking lot. The mud nests – which, with their little entrances, remind me a bit of igloos – are so numerous and so close to each other that they indeed form a colony, as Wikipedia referred to, and the swallows’ colony reminded me of the gargantuan apartment complex that my boyfriend lives in not too far away, with hundreds of people all stacked on top of and around each other. (And the stucco exterior of his apartment complex isn’t so different from those nests of dried mud…)

For several minutes my boyfriend and I watched hundreds of the swallows swoop everywhere, leaving the colony in large synchronized groups like fighter pilots on sortees, and then returning to their little mud nests. They reminded me a bit of bats, and the thought crossed my mind that the word guano refers to both the shit of colonies of bats and of colonies of birds. What, exactly, was the mission of the swallows that my boyfriend and I watched leaving and returning to their colony at the casino in waves, I’m not sure; obtaining food for their young, primarily, I’m guessing, and perhaps also retrieving more nest-building material.

I was slightly concerned that with my boyfriend and I watching them right under their colony of nests, perhaps we’d get dive-bombed, as birds protect their young, but the swallows apparently felt safely far away enough from us that we posed no threat to their colony.

I wondered if perhaps the birds are endangered, and that’s why the casino operators didn’t just destroy their nests — which, with a power hose one rather easily could do, I surmise – and which are, admittedly, rather messy to a building, perhaps especially the muddy outlines that are the ruins of old mud nests from breeding seasons past, nests that disintegrated a time ago. But Wikipedia indicates that the birds aren’t endangered, that they have no protected status, so apparently the casino’s main concern has been that the birds just don’t build their rather messy nests on the casino’s main building.

Far from being a nuisance, I found the cliff swallows of Thunder Valley to be the most interesting thing about the casino — and while the tower-like structure in the casino’s parking lot was built for them, they apparently were an unintended part of the casino.

The cliff swallows of Thunder Valley are in stark contrast to the casino itself, a monster of artificiality, quite out of tune with nature, as are its inhabitants, smoking, drinking and gambling, out of tune with nature and with themselves.

I had instructed my boyfriend to park at the far end of the casino’s parking lot so that we could watch the colony of swallows, and indeed ours was the only car that far out into the parking lot. (People obsessed with gambling, drinking and smoking — and yes, eating – you see, don’t worry too much that they don’t walk enough.) Here are these incredibly cool swallows, just like at San Juan Capistrano, but people don’t go to Thunder Valley for the swallows.

While we human beings embrace our artificial environments, the cliff swallows of Thunder Valley will have none of our artifice. My boyfriend and I noted several artificial nests on the tower-like structure that were put there for them. These man-made nests are located significantly below the natural nests above them immediately under the tower’s eaves, which is where the swallows prefer to nest, more shielded from the elements, and these man-made nests are too geometrically perfect, which is what made me first suspect that they are fake.

When I then noticed the metal strip to which they are affixed to the tower, I definitively knew that they are fake, and my boyfriend and I, to our delight, saw not a single swallow enter or leave a single one of the man-made nests. The swallows would have nothing to do with them.

The cliff swallows, it seems to me, are smarter than are we.

P.S. Video about the 2008 construction of what many call “the world’s biggest birdhouse” at Thunder Valley Casino is here. I find the subtly (or maybe not-too-subtly) anti-environmentalist attitude of the typical casino-goer who is interviewed in the local TV news piece to be typical but to be depressing… Here is some close-up footage of nesting cliff swallows.