Only a Wayback Machine can save the Repugnican Tea Party now

The Repugnican Tea Party traitors should consider hiring Mr. Peabody as a consultant, and they’ll need to go back to even before 1900…

So the Repugnican Tea Party traitors’ talking point now is that in order to win over voters from now on, they have to communicate better.

Wow.

They’ve been communicating quite well, actually. Anyone who has been paying attention should be quite clear on where they have stood. Take the Repugnican Tea Party’s platform that was approved from its last national convention. This is Faux News reporting, too (in August):

Tampa, Fla. — Republicans emphatically approved a toughly worded party platform at their national convention Tuesday that would ban all  abortions and gay marriages, reshape Medicare into a voucher-like program and cut taxes to energize the economy and create jobs. …

There alone, the Repugnican Tea Party traitors alienated most women and almost all non-heterosexuals (there are some self-loathing non-heterosexuals who support the Repugnican Tea Party, but there aren’t a lot of them). There’s no way to “better” “communicate” such stances as that the embryo’s or fetus’ “rights” always trump those of the mother (even, very apparently, in such cases as rape, incest or when the mother’s life would be at risk should the pregnancy continue) or that the U.S. Constitution should be amended to ban same-sex marriage in all 50 states.

Those are the hard-right, misogynist, homophobic and patriarchal stances that the Repugnican Tea Party took in its latest party platform, which wasn’t passed nearly long enough ago for the fascistic traitors who comprise the party to claim now that they just didn’t “communicate” well enough.

It’s not just women and gays whom the Repugnican Tea Party traitors have alienated, of course.

Most of the traitors still are beating up on the brown-skinned immigrants from south of the border, whom they regard as subhuman, much as how the Nazis regarded the Jews and how the Israelis, ironically, now regard the Palestinians.

Ohioan “Joe the Plumber,” one of the poster boys for the stupid white man, who last year ran for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives on the Repugnican Tea Party ticket (of course) declared in Arizona — Ground Zero for the anti-immigrant bigotry and hatred in the U.S.; indeed, Arizona is the South Africa of the Southwest — in August that the U.S. government should “put a damn fence on the border going with Mexico and start shooting.” Those were the words of a candidate for a federal office.

Let’s not leave out black Americans, of course.

A huge chunk of the Repugnican Tea Party traitors still maintain that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and thus his presidency is illegitimate — as though if there had been any problem with Obama’s constitutionally mandated qualifications to be president, neither Billary Clinton nor John McCainosaurus, who must have spent plenty of dough on opposition research and who both wanted to be president very badly, would have discovered it and then worked to oust Obama from the 2008 presidential race.

Michelle Obama can’t do anything without being criticized for it by the white-supremacist wingnuts as being un-first-lady-like. What if Laura Bush — or (shivers) First Lady Ann Romney — had announced the Oscar for Best Picture? Would the Repugnican Tea Party traitors have brayed that that was “inappropriate”?

Of course not — because their main problem with Barack Obama and his wife is that they’re blacks who are in the White House.

And even while we have some of the Repugnican Tea Party traitors claiming that they just need to “communicate” “better,” as I type this sentence we have most of the members of the Repugnican Tea Party publicly hoping that the right-wing-controlled U.S. Supreme Court will eviscerate the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — because despite the fact that the Repugnican Tea Party still advocates measures that keep blacks and other non-whites and other Democratically leaning individuals from voting, such as strict voter identification requirements (in the name of preventing the “voter fraud” that does not exist — that’s in their party platform, too) and insanely long voting lines for black, non-white and other Democratically leaning voters (coupled, of course, with short lines for Repugnican Tea Party voters), race-based voter suppression is a relic from the past, you see.

And if the Repugnican Tea Party traitors can’t suppress enough Democratically leaning voters, fuck it, they’ll just at least try to change the way that we divvy up the electoral votes in the Electoral College, but only in those states that will boost the Repugnican Tea Party. (We’ll leave Texas and the other dark-red states alone, you see.)

It’s clear that the Repugnican Tea Party traitors like, respect and support democracy only when they win/“win” elections. (The quotation marks are for such elections as the 2000 presidential election.) You can’t “communicate” that obvious fact “better.”

We also have Mittens Romney’s comment in October that “47 percent” of Americans are mooches, when, in fact, it’s the 47 percent who voted for Romney who are the takers, while the denizens of the blue states (the “47 percent” whom Romney was referring to) always have been and always will be the makers, supporting the welfare states that are the red states.

Muslims, too, have been bashed relentlessly by the Repugnican Tea Party — aside from advocating the continued mass slaughter of Muslims (such as by incredibly stupidly attacking Iran and by stupidly blindly continuing to support the mass-murderous wingnuts of Israel in their continued Nazi-like mass slaughter of the Palestinians), the Repugnican Tea Party traitors call President Obama a Muslim as a slam — and I can’t see most Muslims ever supporting the Repugnican Tea Party any more than I can see myself ever supporting the Repugnican Tea Party.

As a gay man, am I to just forget what the Repugnican Tea Party just put in its fucking party platform — that my equal human and civil rights guaranteed to me by the U.S. Constitution should be denied to me by an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that specifically singles me out for such discrimination? Am I to just forget that George W. Bush made opposition to same-sex marriage a centerpiece of his 2004 “re”-election campaign? (Speaking of Gee Dubya, am I also to just forget that he blatantly stole office in 2000 and then started a bogus war for which he should be executed as the war criminal that he is?) Am I to just forget that the House Repugnicans right now are spending millions of taxpayers’ dollars to try to keep the so-called “Defense of Marriage Act” alive because the Obama administration refuses to defend the blatantly unconstitutional — and thus the infuckingdefensible — act?

Are women just supposed to forget the Repugnican Tea Party traitors’ clearly articulated stances on such issues as abortion, birth control, rape and violence against women?

Are Latinos just supposed to forget the brown-skinned-immigrant bashing that the Repugnican Tea Party traitors have been using to induce ignorant, bigoted white voters to vote for them?

Are blacks just supposed to forget?

“We need to be asking for votes in the most powerful way possible, which is to have people asking for the vote who are comfortable and look like and sound like the people that we’re asking for the vote from,” Karl Rove (a.k.a. George W. “Bush’s brain”) said just yesterday just in my backyard, here in Sacramento, at the California Repugnican Tea Party traitors’ convention.

How has that tactic been working for the Repugnican Tea Party traitors, though?

They fronted Sarah Palin after Barack Obama had picked Joe Biden (and not Billary Clinton or another woman) to be his running mate. The message was supposed to be that the Repugnican Tea Party is the party that wuvs women.

Women didn’t buy it, and probably were insulted that the Repugnican Tea Party traitors think that they’re that fucking stupid. (I was thusly insulted, and I’m a male.) Despite Palin’s supposedly having demonstrated that the Repugnican Tea Party overnight magically became the party of and for women, Obama in November 2008 won a higher percentage of the popular vote than George W. Bush did in 2000 or in 2004, and he couldn’t have done that without women.

The Repugnican Tea Party traitors then put Michael Steele in charge of the Repugnican National Committee — as the first black head of the party, in obvious cynical response to the election of the nation’s first black president. (Steele, before he became the head of the party, had been only the lieutenant governor of Maryland. That’s how few blacks are in any real position of power within the Repugnican Tea Party.)

Although on Steele’s watch (from January 2009 to January 2011) the Repugnican Tea Party traitors won back the U.S. House of Representatives in 2010 (in the “tea party” “revolution”), the Repugnican Tea Party traitors nonetheless dumped Steele in January 2011 and replaced him with white frat boy Reince Priebus — the usual face of the party.

And although the Repugnican Tea Party traitors lost seats in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2012, on white frat boy Reince Priebus’ watch, just this past January the Repugnican Tea Party traitors nonetheless granted the stupid white man Priebus a second two-year term as head of the Repugnican Tea Party.

As George W. Bush amply demonstrated, the bar is set much, much, much lower for stupid white men than it is for anyone else, perhaps especially for blacks.

Now the Repugnican Tea Party traitors cynically are fronting younger Latino male candidates, such as U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, as a presidential hopeful, and, here in California, Abel Maldonado as a gubernatorial hopeful.

Rubio is a 41-year-old Cuban American, and of course Cuban Americans, being (1) the rich Cubans who had exploited others for their own selfish gain before they had to escape from Fidel Castro’s anti-capitalist revolution or (2) their spoiled spawn (such as Rubio), predominantly are right-wingers who believe that the lighter-skinned should continue to exploit the darker-skinned.

Yet almost two-thirds of Latinos in the U.S. have Mexican roots and only 3.5 percent of them have Cuban roots. So how representative is Marco Fucking Rubio of the nationwide Latino community? (But he’s Latino — close enough, right? Is that not how the white supremacists think? Kind of like how 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia and not one of them was from Iraq, but let’s invade Iraq because that’s close enough, right?)

Californian Repugnican Tea Party member Abel Maldonado is 45 years old, and while unlike Marco Rubio he is Mexican-American, he couldn’t win even the post of state controller in 2006 or lieutenant governor in 2010. And he ran for the U.S. House of Representatives last year but lost. And he is Californian Repugnicans’ Great Latino Hope.

When will the Repugnican Tea Party traitors realize that the voters can recognize a wolf in sheep’s clothing? Will Marco Rubio (and others who fit his demographic) magically work to win over Latino voters to the Repugnican Tea Party any more than Palin and Steele worked to win over women and black voters?

And is Karl Rove not blatantly asserting that appearance is all that matters when he advises his fellow Repugnican Tea Party traitors “to have people asking for the vote who are comfortable and look like and sound like the people that we’re asking for the vote from”?

Fuck substance, right? Fuck the Repugnican Tea Party’s continuing history of oppressing certain groups of people, right? Just put a right-wing sellout like Sarah Palin or Michael Steele or Marco Rubio out there and the voters won’t know the difference, right?

The Repugnican Tea Party traitors can find a wingnut or two (or maybe even three) among any minority group and front him or her or them as a candidate. It’s not nearly enough, though, to wipe out decades of the party’s bigotry and discrimination that not only is historical but still continues as I type this sentence.

Perhaps especially when the Repugnican Tea Party then blames its electoral losses on the tokens whom it once fronted and then replaces them with the traditional stupid white men (there was no Palin repeat in 2012 — no, it was two stupid white men on the Repugnican Tea Party presidential ticket, the way that it always had been pre-Palin, and, as I noted, Reince Priebus kept his job as the party’s head even though the booted Michael Steele apparently had done a better job than Priebus did) the party loses even more ground with the groups whose votes it claimed it wanted. You won’t score points with these groups by turning your tokens into your scapegoats.

Even Mittens Romney, for fuck’s sake, reportedly has manned up enough to blame his campaign for his loss in November.

“I lost my election because of my campaign, not because of what anyone else did,” Romney reportedly said on Faux News today.

However, while Romney reportedly quite correctly identified his “47 percent” remarks as being damaging to his campaign — insulting almost half of the nation’s voters on video isn’t a great idea — he also reportedly attributed his loss to the loss of black and Latino voters.

As much as I don’t want to defend Mittens Romney, who would have been a disastrous president, the fact is that there was nothing that his campaign could have done to win over black and Latino voters, given his own fucking party’s disastrous historical relations with those groups.

Actually, I guess that I’m not defending Mittens, because his apparent belief that there was anything that he could have done to magically win over black and Latino voters demonstrates, I think, how stupid he and his ilk believe black and Latino voters are, and how superiorly crafty and clever the white man is, that black and Latino voters are just going to forget decades of bigotry and discrimination at the hands of the Repugnican Party because some white-male Repugnican Tea Party candidate comes up with just the right hocus-pocus, mindfuck rhetoric to hypnotize them into voting for him over their own best interests.

No amount of attempted-Jedi-mindfuck rhetoric and no amount of tokens (like Marco Rubio or Sarah Palin) are going to help the Repugnican Tea Party traitors in future elections. Only a small percentage of the members of the minority groups that historically have been oppressed by the Repugnican Tea Party (and women, of course, are no minority group) are going to fall for this the-foxes-actually-wuv-the-chickens bullshit.

No, what the Repugnican Tea Party traitors sorely need now is a time machine so that they can go back in time – waaay back in time – and treat certain groups of people a whole lot better than they did over at least many decades.

I wish them luck with that.

Mittens’ binders full o’ women, Barack’s back, and other thoughts

Updated below

Damn is the Internet fast.

Mittens Romney claimed during tonight’s presidential debate that when he became governor of Massachusetts, he was dismayed by the fact that the applicants for his cabinet positions were overwhelmingly (or entirely) male. So, he said, he had his staffers compile for him “binders full of women” candidates so that he could put some women on his cabinet.

“Binders full of women” struck me as an awful — some might say “inelegant” – way to put it, and I wasn’t alone. Already “binders full of women” has gone viral:

More here and a lot more here.

It’s funny how someone inadvertently can reveal his or her true feelings about a group of people, isn’t it? I have a co-worker whose word choice routinely (very apparently unwittingly) reveals her homophobia/heterosexism, and here is Mittens claiming to wuv women yet talking about them as though they were objects to be stored in binders.

Condescension and objectification – that’s the way to win the women’s vote, Mittens!

Speaking of women, this is probably the only news that my favorite presidential candidate, the Green Party’s Jill Stein, is going to make: That she and her running mate were arrested for disorderly conduct while trying to enter the presidential debate hall in New York today.

I love the Green Party and we’re long overdue for a woman in the Oval Office, but um…

Here is a photo of Stein and her running mate right before their arrest:

LongIslandReport.org photo

Don’t get me wrong — I disagree with the partisan duopoly that we have in the Coke Party and the Pepsi Party, and it long has rankled me that third parties are shut out of the presidential debates, preserving the partisan duopoly, but I don’t see that this tactic of the sit-down from the 1960s works.

I mean, in politics image is everything, and looking like you are members of the Occupy movement — and I support the Occupy movement (I’ve given money to my local Occupy movement, in fact) — may not be the best image to project.

Just sayin’.

I’m not saying that Stein did something wrong, that she doesn’t have a point, that she isn’t the victim of injustice.

I’m saying that it (apparently orchestrating your own arrest for disorderly conduct) probably isn’t the best way to project power. I’m saying that it looks a bit lame and weak, and that not many people want to be part of a group that is perceived to be lame and weak, and so that therefore, it probably can’t be a great recruitment tool.

I had hoped that the Green Party would really take off after 2000, but it has only languished. I suspect that the best way to change the Democratic Party — to make it actually progressive and to make it actually for the people (and no, corporations are not people) – is to infiltrate it, much like the “tea party” fascists infiltrated the Repugnican Party, which I now routinely call the Repugnican Tea Party, since the “tea party” Nazis were so successful in infiltrating the party.

It just seems easier to re-form (not “reform” but re-form) an existing party that has gone astray than to try to to make it on your own as a third party…

Not to let Barack Obama off of the hook.

His campaign included this image in another of its endless fundraising e-mails that it sent tonight, just after the debate:

You’re supposed to click on the image in the e-mail, which then oh-so-helpfully diverts you to a user-friendly fundraising web page.

The e-mail, titled “Get Barack’s back,” reminds me of an editorial cartoon that I saw recently in which a man reading a newspaper remarks to his wife of Obama, “I thought he was supposed to have my back!”

My sentiments exactly. This Cult of Obama thing, in which it’s our “duty” to “have Obama’s back” — it’s a real reversal of the idea of the public servant, isn’t it?

Seriously, though, is it, “Ask not what we can do for our country, but ask what we can do for Barack Obama”?

It’s a turn-off for this left-winger.

And truly, I wouldn’t be so put off by the command to “Get Barack’s back” if for these past three-plus years, after I gave him hundreds of dollars and my vote for his 2008 campaign, I felt much more strongly that he had mine.

Update: Some more women-in-binders-themed images from the Tumblr site titled “Binders Full of Women”:

This one, from elsewhere, though, is probably the funniest one that I’ve seen thus far:

And the Internet is abuzz with the report that Mittens lied even about his binders-full-o’-women story. (I had doubts about his story, which is why, when I wrote about his claim, I called it a claim. [Seriously, though, the man lies so fucking much that if he told me the sky were blue, I'd check it out.]) 

The report is that a women’s advocacy group had started to create the binders containing profiles of female candidates for high-ranking Massachussetts state government posts before it was even known whether Mittens or the Democratic gubernatorial candidate would win the election, and that Team Mittens was simply given the binders after Mittens won — making Mittens’ claim that he had his staff seek out the binders full o’ women at his direction (because the wuvs the womens so much) yet another fucking Mittens LIE.

Obama wins Round Two (but the media will call it a draw)

Reuters photos

The up-close-and-personal town-hall format of tonight’s presidential debate, and the criticism that President Barack Obama received for not having called out Mittens Romney on his string of blatant lies during the first 2012 presidential debate, resulted in a fiercer second debate performance by Obama tonight. And moderator Candy Crowley proved herself to be no Jim Lehrer, also to Mittens’ disadvantage.

That’s just anticipatory, my prediction* for tonight’s second presidential debate, which, as I post this, begins in less than a half-hour. (I am watching the debate live online and of course will write about it here, in this same post, later tonight.)

What I’m really looking for in tonight’s debate is to see if Mittens Romney repeats Pretty Boy Paul Ryan’s execrable attempt during last week’s vice presidential debate to make a mountain of political hay over the killing of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11.

At the time of Mittens’ initial politicizing of the murder of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others in the American consulate in Libya, I saw an editorial cartoon depicting Mittens slapping his presidential bumper sticker on Stevens’ headstone. It was quite apropros.

I can’t find that ’toon now, but while searching for it I did find a couple of others:

Beyond the shamelessness of using the attack on the American consulate in Libya for political gain, it’s a fucking laugh that it is the Repugnican Tea Party traitors who are going to keep us safe.

Four Americans died in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, but more than four fucking thousand Americans** died preventable deaths during the watch of the unelected “President” George W. Bush on September 11, 2001, and in late August 2005 when Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana and other Gulf Coast states.

There had been plenty of warning that both Osama bin Laden and Hurricane Katrina would strike the U.S., but the Vacationer in Chief George W. Bush couldn’t be bothered to do anything about either threat.

Whether or not the attack on the American consulate in Libya could have been prevented or not — it seems to me that it’s quite difficult to keep an American consulate in any Middle Eastern nation safe — the way to respond to such an incident is first to examine what went wrong and then to do things differently.

Putting another right-wing, swaggering, plutocratic chickenhawk in the White House is not doing things differently, and under a President Mittens, I believe, we’d see a lot more American deaths than we have under President Barack Obama.

We’ve seen already how well Mittens is received on the world stage — a Mittens presidency would be reminiscent of that of George W. Bush. Making the world hate us makes us less safe, not safer, and Repugnican presidents have a way of making the world hate us.

For all of Obama’s shortcomings, we (those of us who inhabit the reality-based world, that is) can’t say that he hasn’t kept the nation safe. Yet that is what I expect Mittens insanely to do tonight.

Update:

I found that cartoon:

Update: Fifteen minutes in, I’d say it’s a draw-leaning-toward-Obama. Mittens makes pledges, such as regarding job creation, but surreally, he offers no specifics. His first prickish attempt to steamroll moderator Candy Crowley of CNN failed.

Update: Obama, apparently having learned from Round One, freely states that Mittens isn’t telling the truth, and we’re seeing a fairly feisty Obama tonight.

This debate on oil, coal and alternative energy production is way too reminiscent of the 2008 debates. The wingnutty mantra of “Drill, baby, drill!” hasn’t changed. Indicative, I believe, of how the right wing does its damnedest to prevent progress.

Update: I don’t for a nanosecond believe Mittens’ claim that he won’t give the rich and super-rich tax breaks and that he wuvs the middle class (um, aren’t we the 47 percent he was disowning just back in May?). I believe that his plan is to give them tax breaks right away, and his “five-point plan” sounds like Herman Cain’s “9-9-9” plan…

I believe Obama’s assertion that Mittens’ plan is to give the plutocrats their tax cuts and spend even more on the military-corporate complex, bloating the federal budget deficit even further — just like George W. Bush did.

Update: Mittens’ attempts to run over Candy Crowley aren’t going nearly as well for him as they did during the first debate, and I think that Mittens’ aggressive, steamrolling behavior is indicative of his character.

On the topic of women’s issues (specifically, women in the workforce), Mittens claims that as governor of Massachusetts he essentially engaged in affirmative action where women are concerned. Um, aren’t the wingnuts against that?

Meh. I look at the patriarchal Mormon cult that Mittens supports and women’s status within the Mormon cult that Mittens supports. That fact, I believe, is a much better barometer of the truth than are Mittens’ words in his post-Etch-A-Sketch-shaking phase.

Update: A great question from an audience member (who said that she is “undecided” but seems to lean toward Obama) for Mittens was how he is different from George W. Bush (a.k.a. He Whose Name Shall Not Be Mentioned). Mittens first lied that he “appreciate[d]” the question that mentioned He Whose Name Shall Not Be Mentioned and then blathered about how he wants to focus on small businesses, whereas the Bush regime focused on Big Business, and how he wants to focus on jobs.

Obama retorted, correctly, that just as Gee Dubya did, Mittens would only give tax breaks to the rich and otherwise support the plutocrats.

Update: Mittens brought up Ronald Reagan, which I guess was meant to neutralize the mention of George W. Bush.

It strikes me that this presidential election isn’t entirely unlike the 2000 election: We are to believe that vulture capitalist multi-millionaire Mittens Romney, whose religion is all about elevating the right-wing, “Christian” white man over the rest of us, is a “compassionate conservative,” which is what George W. Bush claimed he is, and we know how well George W. Bush worked out.

It’s interesting when liars like Mittens actually promise to govern progressively. They’re lying through their fangs, of course, but the fact that they are lying that they will be progressive is proof that progressivism is superior to what the wingnuts actually stand for.

Update: Mittens just used the term “illegals” in the discussion of immigration. Wow. I wonder if they’ll be talking about that tomorrow. “Illegals” is a charged word that reveals, I believe, how Mittens regards those who are in the nation without documentation.

Update: The attack in Benghazi finally came up. Mittens claimed that Obama didn’t take the situation seriously enough, which is interesting, given that when George W. Bush received the August 6, 2001, presidential daily briefing titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,” Bush was on vacation in Crawford, Texas, and on August 29, 2005, the day that Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana, George W. Bush was celebrating John McCain’s birthday in Arizona.

It’s sickening that the Benghazi incident is being used by Team Mittens as a political football, and it’s sickening that the back-and-forth on the Benghazi incident is the only topic thus far that has caused the studio-audience members (in violation of the rules…) to applaud first for Obama and then for Mittens.

Update: Mittens has used the topic of gun violence to try to bring up another anti-Obama pseudo-scandal, “Fast and Furious.” I get it that it’s his role to tarnish Obama, but – Oh, cool: Moderator Candy Crowley has redirected Mittens back on topic. Clearly, Mittens was too comfortable with the Jim Lehrer treatment.

As I was saying, I get it that Mittens wants to tarnish Obama, but I don’t think that the anti-Obama pseudo-scandals from which the members of the right-wing blogosphere get their rocks off are going to appeal to a general audience.

Update: So according to Mittens, China is our big economic enemy, and we must stop sending our jobs overseas. Nevermind that Mittens made his millions via corporations whose profits skyrocketed through cheap labor overseas. Wow.

Again, Mittens is lying that he’d stop the flow of jobs overseas, but in his lie, he admits that sending jobs overseas (which he actually supports) is the wrong thing to do.

Update: It’s winding down. Mittens says that the biggest misperception of him is that he doesn’t care about “100 percent of the people.” Well, um, he was video-recorded in May saying that he has written off 47 percent of us.

He has used the phrase “100 percent” at least three times now, which underscores what a gaffe his “47 percent” remark was. (A “gaffe” as in he wouldn’t have said it had he known he was being video-recorded, not a “gaffe” as in that he “misspoke” or put it “inelegantly.” He knew exactly what he was saying and he meant exactly what he was saying.)

Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!: Obama saved the best for last, reminding us, finally, of Mittens “47 percent” remark.

Obama got the last word in the debate, and my impression now, now that the debate is over, is pretty much what it was early in the debate: That Obama won the debate, but that he didn’t deliver a knock-out punch.

I expect the corporately owned and controlled mass media to call the debate a draw.

Whatever, but if Obama continues his trajectory, he will deliver the knock-out blow next week.

Obama is a smoother debater than is Mittens. Obama can deliver a blow smoothly and without apparent arrogance, whereas Mittens practically salivates all over himself when, in his mind, he has delivered a body blow, such as his bullshit on Benghazi and his bullshit on “Fast and Furious.”

If you take all of Mittens’ “blows” tonight combined, they don’t add up to that one “47 percent” remark of his that he made, as, Obama put it tonight, “behind closed doors” not even a full six months ago, and while the incident in Benghazi and “Fast and Furious” haven’t touched you or me personally, being categorized as half of the American people whom Mittens Romney doesn’t give a shit about: That is personal. That does affect us.

And that is the central (albeit secretly video-recorded) campaign promise that Mittens Romney, as president, would fulfill: That he would ignore at least 47 percent of the nation.

–

*My initial title of this post was “Obama wins!” Then I changed it to “Obama wins Round Two!” and then I changed it to its current title, once it seemed clear to me that Obama won but probably wouldn’t get credit for having won.

**Per Wikipedia, 2,977 were killed by the 19 hijackers on September 11, 2001, and more than 1,830 were killed by Hurricane Katrina.

‘Mean’ Uncle Joe beats the Boy Scout at the starting line

Reuters photo

Vice President Joe Biden smiles dismissively at a boyishly overeager liar Paul Ryan during tonight’s vice presidential debate, which was easy to call for Biden not even a full 15 minutes in.

It’s not even a full 15 minutes into the vice presidential debate as I type this sentence, but already Paul Ryan is coming off as a juvenile. It’s that boyish, whiny voice and those boyish expressions — Ryan comes off as a fucking Boy Scout – which might work for him in our youth-worshipping nation if the topic weren’t as serious and mature as foreign policy.

Joe Biden, coming off as experienced and smiling dismissively as Ryan lies, is kicking Ryan’s ass, and there probably is nothing else that I’ll need to write.

Ryan needed to show that we could trust him as president of the United States if it came to him becoming the president of the United States.

Not even a full 2o minutes now into the debate, Ryan has failed to do that.

I do find it interesting how the female moderator, ABC’s Martha Raddatz, is doing a much better job than PBS’s Jim Lehrer did.

Is she just more assertive than Lehrer? Or are Ryan and Biden unwilling to steamroll over a female moderator? Or is it some combo of the two?

At any rate, she’s doing what she should be doing, which is not letting Paul Ryan get off the hook with his bullshit the way that Lehrer allowed Mittens Romney to do when he debated President Barack Obama last week.

Update: As I type this sentence, Joe Biden is addressing a final topic, that of abortion. Wow. Biden — whose response is that he accepts his Catholic church’s pro-life doctrine but could never himself “impose” that view on a woman, who has the right to make decisions regarding her own body – blew Ryan (whose stated stance is that abortion should be allowed only in the cases of rape, incest or when the mother’s life is in danger because of the pregnancy) out of the water, and there goes the women’s vote that dumbass pundits claimed was swaying toward the Mittens/Pretty Boy ticket.

Update: The debate is over. Kudos to Martha Raddatz for a job well done, and I have to wonder if the topic of women’s rights would have come up at all had a male moderated.

Joe Biden probably didn’t have to be quite as aggressive as he was, but if aggression was such a fucking bonus for Mittens Romney, then why would it be such a liability for Joe Biden?

Is it that right-wingers are allowed to be aggressive, but left-wingers aren’t allowed to be? That there is a double fucking standard there? (A: Yes, there is.)

Finally, again, Paul Ryan just isn’t presidential. Not with that whiny, adolescent voice, his fakey-fake, wide-eyed expressions, his over-practiced, memorized (and thus insincere-sounding) rhetoric, and really, I see twentysomethings walking around with that duck’s-ass hairdo that the fortysomething Paul Ryan wears. (No offense, twentysomethings, but I don’t want you sitting in the Oval Office, not even the most precocious among you. There is so much to be said for life experience, especially in the so-called leader of the so-called free world…)

Call me shallow, but it seems to me that, for better or for worse, it is these impressions — certainly not tedious policy details – that sway the American voters, and thus it seems to me that Joe Biden accomplished his mission of halting Team Mittens’ post-first-presidential-debate momentum.

P.S. Here is the Reuters photo that already has become iconic of the 2012 vice presidential debate:

Reuters photo

Again, I expect to hear all day tomorrow how “mean” Old Uncle Joe was to poor widdle Paulie Ryan, even though Mittens Romney’s flat-out prickish debate behavior was called a strength. And this from the corporately owned and controlled mass media that supposedly have a left-wing bias.

Let me be clear, though: Joe Biden won the debate not because he can talk over people, but because he demonstrated that he is fit to assume the presidency if it came to that, and he demonstrated — with plenty of help from Paul Ryan — that the himbo/he-Palin Paul Ryan is not.

Is Mother Earth trying to rid Herself of Repugnicans?

Tropical Storm Isaac hasn’t even become a hurricane yet and has yet to reach Florida, but already Isaac’s ominous approach has induced the Repugnican Tea Party traitors to effectively cancel the first day of their scheduled four-day KKK-like convention in Tampa (Monday).

At this point, I don’t see how Isaac could not ruin the quadrennial KKK convention.

Even if Isaac doesn’t make a direct hit on Tampa, Isaac is expected first to visit the southern tip of Florida as a category-one hurricane late tomorrow night or early Monday morning, and then is expected to make landfall in the Gulf Coast as a category-two hurricane late Tuesday night or early Wednesday morning, according to AccuWeather.com:

AccuWeather.com image, August 25, 2012

Future Hurricane Isaac is expected to rake the coast of the western portion of Florida and perhaps also the coastal areas of neighboring Southern states Alabama, Mississippi and maybe even Louisiana, which needs another hurricane like Mittens Romney needs another million dollars.

Even if Isaac spares Tampa, I don’t see how the Repugnican Tea Party traitors can continue their convention while a category-two hurricane has just hit the Gulf Coast without looking like the major-league assholes that they are. For that matter, I don’t see how they can even begin their convention belatedly on Tuesday while a category-two hurricane is expected to make landfall in the Gulf Coast in less than 24 hours without looking like the major-league assholes that they are.

I hate it when the wingnuts ascribe catastrophic events (hurricanes, earthquakes, 9/11, etc.) to us homos or to supporters of women’s reproductive-choice rights or the like, but fuck if it doesn’t look like Mother Nature is trying to wipe the planet-killing Repugnican Tea Party traitors off of the face of the planet like a dog trying to rid itself of fleas. It’s like she knew that they were going to be concentrated in Tampa and so she sent Isaac their way.

Maybe Mother Nature finally was sent over the edge when the Mittens Romney/Pretty Boy Paul Ryan team essentially announced in Ohio today that while women may not control their own uteri, they may open their own businesses, because, you see, that’s the only actually important endeavor that there is in this man’s world: making money and perpetuating the evil that is capitalism. (“Women need our help,” Mittens proclaimed in the critically important swing state of Ohio today, but he wasn’t talking about help with women’s reproductive rights or with their equal rights or help caring for their families. He was talking solely about helping them in the business world.)

In all seriousness, the toxic masculine worldview that Team Mittens/Ryan represents has been destroying the planet for some time now, and if it takes some acts of the Goddess to clean the toxic mess up, I’m all for it.

P.S. I noticed this striking paragraph, this interesting tidbit, buried in this Associated Press story on Isaac:

Cuba has a highly organized civil defense system that goes door-to-door to enforce evacuations of at-risk areas, largely averting casualties from storms even when they cause major flooding and significant damage to crops.

Wow. I guess that this is one of the reasons that the wingnuts vociferously slam Fidel Castro’s administration of Cuba: Unlike the “leaders” here in the United States, land of the “free,” Castro actually saves the poor people of his nation from drowning and otherwise dying in hurricanes.

That evil, evil man!

Mrs. Mittens is NO feminist

AFP photo

Former first lady of Massachusetts Ann Romney is shown with her multi-millionaire husband last month, above, and in 1969, the year of their marriage, below. Mrs. Mittens and the Mittens campaign would have you believe that she’s been the typical stay-at-home mom, just as Mr. Mittens and his campaign would have you believe that he’s your average Joe (the Plumber), too. Bullshit.

Reuters image

First off, I agree wholeheartedly that any assertion that most stay-at-home moms don’t work is sexist, misogynist, patriarchal and flat-0ut wrong.

It can be a struggle to keep up with even minimal housekeeping for myself and my partner whom I can’t marry because I don’t have equal human and civil rights here in “the land of the free” (where it comes to paying taxes, however, interestingly, I’m quite equal, even more equal than are our loving, tax-evading corporations and our tax-evading, patriotic plutocrats who benefit from them). I can’t imagine adding a child to the mix, even just one, fairly low maintenance, type-B child, the kind you don’t have to ever worry about committing a massacre at his school (I guess that the film “We Need to Talk About Kevin” is still fairly fresh in my mind…).

So yes, most stay-at-home parents are unfairly regarded as having it easy by many who aren’t stay-at-home parents.

But how hard or how easy did Ann Romney — who with Mittens Romney popped out five puppies between 1970 and 1981 – have it?

After all, multi-millionaires like Mittens Romney tend to have plenty of hired help.

But how hard, exactly, Ann Romney has or has not labored as a mother — which is something that we probably cannot ever know — misses, I think, the much larger point.

And that point is: Did Ann Romney, as a Mormon, have any other choice but to become a stay-at-home mother?

Or even more specifically, did Mittens give her any other choice?

Wikipedia notes of Ann Romney: “She converted to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in 1966 [she was born in 1949, so she was a teenager at that time]. She attended Brigham Young University and married Mitt Romney in 1969 [when she was about 20 years old].” Ann Romney’s bio on Wikipedia, especially the information contained under the heading “Early life,” certainly implies that if she hadn’t dated Mittens in high school, she never would have converted from an Episcopalian to a Mormon. My reading of her bio is that it appears that if she wanted to be with Mittens, she had no choice but to convert to Mormonism.

Ann Romney had her first of five sons in 1970, when she was still an undergraduate and when she was, what, all of 21 years old? That seems awfully young to me for Ann Romney to have her entire life already mapped out for her, but that’s what the Mormon cult does: it maps our your entire life for you, whether you’re a male or a female.

The Mormon cult doesn’t care what the individual wants. The Mormon cult considers the individual to be lost and sinful and evil, and the Mormon patriarchy essentially is God, so the individual must do as the Mormon patriarchy commands the individual to do – or be tossed out of the cult (which is the best fucking thing that can happen to any Mormon [except, perhaps, a minor who cannot yet provide for him- or herself]).

So let’s keep all of this in mind before we start to think of Ann Romney as a feminist because one (female*) Democratic Party operative’s  words have been construed as an attack on all stay-at-home moms. Ann Romney, the wife of a multi-millionaire and the former first lady of Massachusetts, for fuck’s sake, is not your typical stay-at-home mom.

And she certainly is no feminist.

No feminist supports a patriarchal, misogynist institution like the Mormon cult or the Repugnican Tea Party.

A feminist supports a woman’s freedom to live her life the way that she wishes to live her life. That means that if she doesn’t want to marry a man or have children, she doesn’t have to — and that, of course, she may use birth control to her heart’s content, and that should she get pregnant but not wish to give birth, she may terminate the pregnancy under the rights guaranteed to her by Roe vs. Wade.**

Ann Romney does not support such freedom for women. Ann Romney is a feminist like Sarah Palin is a feminist.

–

*The Associated Press notes that the Democratic operative, named Hilary Rosen, “at first buckled down and refused to apologize” for having asserted on CNN Wednesday night that Ann Romney, as a stay-at-home mom “who never worked a day in her life,” is unqualified to talk about the nation’s economy. “But after [Michelle] Obama tweeted her support for all mothers, Rosen said she was sorry to have offended [Ann] Romney or any other women,” the AP reports, adding, “A parent herself, Rosen said her point, stated poorly, was that Ann Romney had the luxury of choosing whether to work outside the home, whereas most American women must work to pay the bills.”

Again, I disagree that Ann Romney, after she converted to Mormonism apparently primarily or even solely to be able to be able to marry Mittens, “had the luxury of choosing whether to work outside the home.” I don’t believe that she had any such choice at all.

**Feminism also means, of course, that lesbians, bisexual and transgendered women deserve all equal human and civil rights, and that if a woman truly wants to be a stay-at-home mom, if that brings her fulfillment, then her choice for her own self-fulfillment should be admired and respected. She should not be deemed a sellout if that is not what she is. (Ann Romney, though – pleeeaaaaase. She certainly seems like such a sellout to me.)

Only Prick Santorum thinks that he should continue his quest

Associated Press photo

No, wait — his wife (pictured with him above in Wisconsin on Friday) also thinks that he should keep going because it would be so cool to be first lady! So that’s two people.

Repugnican Tea Party presidential wannabe Prick Santorum won’t stop wailing and whining that it’s a great fucking idea for him to continue his impossible quest for his party’s 2012 presidential nomination, even all the way to the party’s convention in August.

In Wisconsin, where Prick will lose to Mittens Romney tomorrow, Prick proclaimed today: “I think it would be a fascinating display of open democracy, and I think it would be an energizing thing for our party to have a candidate emerge who’s a — who isn’t the blessed candidate of the Republican establishment. I think that’s a good thing; it’s a good narrative for us. It makes this election a short election; the shorter this election in the fall, the better off we are, not the worse.”

I’m not sure exactly what Prick means by “the shorter this election in the fall, the better off we are.” Does he mean that if Mittens is declared the party’s 2012 candidate sooner rather than later, all of the additional time and attention focused exclusively upon Mittens will induce Mittens to lose in November? Does Prick even mean that the least amount of time and attention focused exclusively upon him, the better?

In any event, the Repugnican Tea Party candidate, whoever it is (but who very most likely will be Mittens), most likely will lose to incumbent Barack Obama anyway. While I suppose that it’s not absolutely impossible for the wooden, milquetoast multi-millionaire Mittens to somehow pull off a victory in November, I certainly can’t see Americans chosing Prick Santorum over Barack Obama.

(Indeed, recent nationwide polls* have shown Obama with a 2 percent to even an 11 percent lead over Mittens in a hypothetical matchup, but with a 5 percent to 14 percent lead over Prick.)

It was Prick Santorum’s having led the charge against women’s access not only to abortion (a right guaranteed to them in 1973 by the U.S. Supreme Court Roe vs. Wade), but also to birth control, for fuck’s sake, that no doubt has decimated women’s support of the Repugnican Tea Party presidential ticket in the crucial swing states.

Reports Yahoo! News today:

Female voters in battleground states are rallying around President [Barack] Obama in droves, according to a new USA Today/Gallup poll released [today], suggesting a gender gap could pose one of the Republicans’ biggest challenges in this fall’s general election race.

Obama led Mitt Romney by 18 percentage points among female registered voters in the nation’s top 12 swing states. The gender gap between Obama and Rick Santorum was 15 points. USA Today reports that this is the “first significant lead” the president has held in these key voting states.

Those leads represent big gains for the president, compared to previous swing state polls conducted by USA Today/Gallup, according to USA Today:

The biggest change came among women under 50. In mid-February, just under half of those voters supported Obama. Now more than six in 10 do while Romney’s support among them has dropped by 14 points, to 30 percent. The president leads him 2-1 in this group.

Recent Quinnipiac University polls conducted in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania bore out similar results. Female voters supported the president over Romney or Santorum by 6 to 19 percentage points in these three states.

Democrats are likely to use these poll numbers to fuel their argument that the Republicans are alienating female voters this cycle by focusing on women’s issues, something which is also likely to shape Democratic voter outreach efforts.

Democrats have branded congressional Republicans’ coordinated opposition to free birth control this year as well as Romney’s stated pledge to end Planned Parenthood as key actions in the Republican party’s “war on women.” (The party also lumps in conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh’s verbal attacks on Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke.) …

Attacking women’s right to use contraception was a huge fucking blunder that the incredibly fucktarded Prick Santorum primarily pushed. Mittens, who probably never would have broached the topic of contraception on his own, apparently didn’t want to be out-wingnutted by Prick and so he jumped onto the anti-birth-control bandwagon, and then when Grand Dragon Rush Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute” for having promoted women’s right to access to birth control, the branding of the Repugnican Tea Party as the party against women’s right to access to birth control, for fuck’s sake, became cemented.

Prick Santorum, with his backasswards, “Christo”fascist, papal proclamations — with his far-right-wing worldview in which only staunchly conservative, white, (presumedly) heterosexual, “Christian” males have any rights and have the lion’s share of all of the power – already has damaged his party for the November 2012 presidential election, probably irrevocably so, yet Prick argues that the best thing for his party is for him to remain in the race for as long as possible.

Prick-friendly or potentially Prick-friendly states (Indiana, North Carolina and West Virginia) aren’t on the primary election calendar until next month, however, while Mittens should win Wisconsin tomorrow and five Northeastern states (including New York) plus the District of Columbia tomorrow and later this month, and if Prick loses his home state of Pennsylvania to Mittens on April 24, I don’t expect Prick to fight on even into next month.

There’s all of that and the fact that according to the latest Gallup daily tracking poll, Mittens now leads Prick 43 percent to 25 percent among the members of their party nationwide. That 43 percent is Mittens’ highest showing ever in the daily tracking poll in this election cycle, and Prick peaked in the daily tracking poll way back in mid-February, when the highest that he polled was 36 percent.

Prick has said that he’d be happy to be Mittens’ running mate — indeed, after having lost his last election (his 2006 re-election bid to the U.S. Senate for Pennsylvania) by a whopping 18 percentage points, being even vice president would be a big step up for Prick — but after the damage that Prick has caused Mittens, not only with the women’s vote but with his “Etch-A-Sketch” bullshit, I don’t expect Mittens to pick Prick, who pretty much is the male Sarah Palin. (I expect Mittens to try to appeal to the Latino vote and to the youth vote by picking the obnoxious Marco Rubio, U.S. Senator for Florida, who, like many if not most of his fellow Cuban Americans, has sold out to right-wing whites.)

The chance of an incredibly stupid, “Christo”fascist, Pope-Palpatine-ass-licker like Prick Santorum being only a heartbeat away from the presidency, however, probably would be enough to induce me to hold my nose and to give President Hopey-Changey some money and maybe even my vote.

–

*By “recent” I refer to the five nationwide polls posted on pollingreport.com that were taken between March 10 and March 26. Anything older than this, in my book, isn’t recent. The average of these five polls shows Obama 6.2 percent ahead of Mittens and 10.4 percent ahead of Prick. November is, at least today, looking pretty good for Obama.

Assorted shit Sunday!

On Cuba, Pope Palapatine just hates the competition

Reuters photo

A Cuban woman on Friday sits under a banner in Havana announcing the impending visit of Pope Palpatine. If the Cuban government were as evil as Palpatine claims it is, it probably wouldn’t let him set foot on the island in the first fucking place. Palpatine proclaims that Marxism is dead, yet it’s backasswards Catholicism that is dying in the more developed nations of Europe and the United States, and Latin America remains the last bastion of the dying Catholic empire.

“Today it is evident that Marxist ideology in the way it was conceived no longer corresponds to reality,” Pope Palpatine decreed of the government of the nation of Cuba on Friday, in advance of his scheduled visit there tomorrow.

I love the apparently unintended irony of that statement: “Marxist ideology in the way it was conceived no longer corresponds to reality.”

Um, what about Catholicism?

Here in the U.S., we have far-right-wing Catholic nutjob Prick Santorum telling us that as president — as Pope Palpatine’s puppet in the White House – he would support banning contraception, abortion, same-sex marriage and “obscene” pornography (which would be pretty much all pornography).

The U.S. Supreme Court in 1973 (in Roe vs. Wade) ruled that abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy is always legal, and the same year essentially ruled (in Miller vs. California) that the porn that we see today that widely is considered to be legal is protected free speech (and not “obscenity”).

The far-right-wing Pope Palpatine, however, views the mildly progressive reforms of the Catholic church of the 1960s as having gone too far, and believes that the church should revert to the “good old days” before the 1960s.

But Marxism is outdated?

In order to remain relevant any ideology needs to change and grow with the times — which the patriarchal, misogynist, homophobic, anti-science Catholic church refuses to do, which is why its membership is hemorrhaging in the U.S. and Europe — but with rampant global capitalism destroying the planet at record pace, Marxism is even more relevant today than it was when Karl Marx was still kicking around, when the greedy, selfish capitalists’ ability to destroy the entire fucking planet wasn’t nearly what it is now.

Pope Palpatine’s real problem with the government of Cuba, of course, is that he fucking hates the competition for the minds, hearts and souls of the masses.

It long has seemed to me that the people of Cuba have been far better off under Fidel Castro than they ever would be under the tyranny of capitalism, which sees the masses only as a means of making a tiny few obscenely richer in such noble names as “democracy” and “freedom,” or under the theocratic tyranny of the Catholic church, which, like a virus, only wishes to subvert the time, energy and money of the masses from their own benefit to propping up the decaying carcass of the Catholic church, an all-male hierarchy that should have met its extinction long ago.

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Prick Santorum still stuck on his Etch-A-Sketch bullshit

Associated Press photo

Prick Santorum lamely still waves an Etch-A-Sketch Friday in Shreveport, Louisiana, a state where such retarded tactics apparently work.

The anti-Mittens “Etch-A-Sketch” thing wasn’t worth exploiting in the first place, since its exploitation was based upon wildly twisting its source’s rather obvious intended meaning, but Prick Santorum, having nothing else to offer, continues to use the lame tactic that ultimately only is hurting his own fucking party.

On CBS’ “Face the Nation” today, Prick declared, “Even though a lot of folks are saying this race is over, the people in Louisiana said, ‘No, it’s not.’ They still want to see someone who they can trust, someone who’s not running an Etch-A-Sketch campaign, but one who has their principals written on their heart, not on an erasable tablet.”

Really, how much mileage does Prick believe that he’s going to get out of this retarded diatribe?

Of course Prick won Louisiana yesterday and previously won some other Southern states (including Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee): The Southerners are all a bunch of mouth-breathing inbreds to whom Prick’s preaching about the supposedly Jesus-Christ-based hatred and oppression of self-respecting women, gay men and lesbians, non-Christians, non-whites and many others appeals. Truly: The Prick Santorum voters’ mantra must be: “We love him! He hates everyone we hate!”

Actually, the Repugnican Tea Party presidential race is over. According to The Associated Press, Mittens Romney thus far has more than twice as many delegates as does Prick Santorum, 568 delegates to 273. Newt Gingrich has a paltry 135 and Ron Paul an even paltrier 50, and even if you gave those 185 delegates to Prick, he still would trail Mittens by more than 100 delegates.

The next big state on the Repugnican Tea Party presidential primary season calendar is Wisconsin, which votes on April 3. Even if Prick should eke out a win in Wisconsin (he did win neighboring Minnesota and Iowa, but Mittens won neighboring Michigan and Illinois), Mittens should clean up in April, with several Mittens-friendly states on the calendar, including New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Delaware, and if Mittens actually wins Prick’s home state of Pennsylvania on April 24 — and remember that Prick lost his 2006 U.S. Senate re-election bid in Pennsylvania by 18 percentage points — then we probably will see Prick actually toss his Etch-A-Sketch prop into the garbage for good.

By that time, though, Prick will only have further damaged Mittens, whose lack of charisma, whose alleged opportunistically changing political positions — accurately and fairly or inaccurately and unfairly — are criticized by the members of his own party as well as by the members of the opposing party, and whose exalted status as a multi-millionaire in a nation whose commoners still struggle economically — as well as his membership in the Mormon cult — never made him a strong candidate against Barack Obama anyway.

Still, Mittens is the best that the Repugnican Tea Party traitors have got, which apparently even they increasingly are recognizing, as evidenced by the fact that Mittens these days is polling in the low 40s in the Gallup daily tracking poll, while Prick can’t even break 30 percent.

And most national polls show a much tighter race between Obama and Mittens than they do between Obama and Prick. Even a Faux “News” poll taken earlier this month puts Obama at only four percentage points ahead of Mittens, 46 percent to 42 percent, and a whopping 12 percentage points ahead of Prick. (A Bloomberg poll taken around the same time has Obama and Mittens tied, at 47 percent each, and Obama six percentage points ahead of Prick.)

The good news in all of this is that the “Christo”fascists, with whom the Richie Riches of the old guard Repugnican Party struck an unholy alliance because the 1 percent can’t win elections on their own, these days apparently are more of a drain than a help to the GOP, at least presidentially.

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Wild West bullshit needs to be made illegal in all 50 states

I haven’t weighed in yet on the apparent race-based murder of Trayvon Martin –

Associated Press image

– the 17-year-old who apparently was gunned down in Florida late last month by a vigilante named George Zimmerman who claims that he shot the black teen in self-defense, even though the teen reportedly was “armed” with only a bag of Skittles and some iced tea.

I will get this out of the way, though: As a blue-eyed white guy, I’m happy that George Zimmerman looks like this:

Reuters image

– and not, say, something like this:

Associated Press photo

– or this:

(That’s a photo of the Archie-Bunker-like Andrew Breitbart that was taken before he went to hell early this month and a photo of “Joe the Plumber” and some other yahoo with a dead bear that I found on the Internet. [I'm sure that it was a fair fight with the bear, you know, mano a mano, because those right-wing white guys are so fucking tough!])

Seriously, though, when I read the name “George Zimmerman,” I’d thought that yet another stupid whitey had gunned down someone for the crime of breathing while being brown or black, and I was, admittedly, at least a little relieved to discover that Zimmerman is half-white and half-Latino.

However, that fact is of no consolation to Trayvon Martin’s family, I’m confident, and what can you say about such a senseless slaughter that very apparently was race-based to at least some degree (and probably a large degree)?

The news today on the Trayvon Martin case is that Zimmerman and his family and friends are fearful for his safety, and so he is hiding at an undisclosed location.

Jesus fuck – is this another right-wing attempt to make the victimizer into the actual victim here?

The Trayvon Martin case screams for us to examine (at least these) four social phenomena (in no certain order): The one in which the victimizers claim to be the actual victims; the one in which many right-wing Latinos, perhaps especially in backasswards Florida, think that the ticket to being accepted by whites is to join whites in their oppression of blacks; the one in which armed-and-dangerous fucktards think that it’s OK for them to play cops and robbers with real guns and real bullets; and the phenomenon, the cancer, of the gated community, which is sick and fucking twisted and probably not what Jesus Christ had in mind, that the rich, who can only become rich through exploiting others, should barricade themselves in ritzy neighborhoods while everyone else slowly dies from poverty.

Most of the focus on the Trayvon Martin case seems to be around the race of the slaughtered and the slaughterer, and while of course the evil of racism still is alive and well in 2012 (the incredibly racist “Don’t Re-Nig” anti-Barack-Obama-re-election bumper sticker is one of many examples that I could give), it seems to me that not enough attention is being focused upon the fact that Zimmerman slaughtered Martin while Zimmerman was volunteering on a neighborhood watch — The Associated Press notes that “Martin was shot dead after Zimmerman, 28, a white Hispanic neighborhood watch captain, believed the young man walking through the gated community looked suspicious.”

Since when did neighborhood watches involve vigilantes gunning people down in the streets? 

The American empire indeed is crumbling all around us, but is this what we have come to — the return of the wild West?

States (like Florida and more than a dozen others) that have so-called “stand-your-ground” laws, which allow people to cap other people in the streets willy-nilly – and which make you wonder if certain paranoid, fearful, gun-loving individuals want to find “reasons” to cap other people in the streets willy-nilly — need to repeal these laws voluntarily or the federal government needs to step in and nullify them, as these woefully misguided laws blatantly violate the United States Constitution.

You have the constitutional right to defend your home from actual grave threats (that is, threats that might actually put you in your grave…), and you have the constitutional right to own a gun, but I have the constitutional right to be able to walk down the street without fear of you blowing me away because you, for some fucking reason, deem me to be a “threat.”

Assorted shit Sunday!

Gallup polling: Prick Santorum remains in free fall

Associated Press photo

Except perhaps for the crying, it’s all over for Repugnican Tea Party presidential wannabe Prick Santorum (shown above feasting on ribs in Memphis, Tenn., today). His peak has passed and it’s all downhill for him from here.

Gallup’s daily tracking poll shows that Prick’s biggest national lead over permacandidate Mittens Romney was in mid-February, when Prick briefly enjoyed a 10-percent lead on Mittens, 36 percent to 26 percent.

Now, however, it’s Mittens at 36 percent and Prick at only 22 percent.

Toward the end of February, Prick lost his lead and was tied with Mittens, and since then, Mittens has been gaining while Prick has been losing.

The latest Gallup daily tracking poll shows Prick at only 5 percent ahead of Newt Gingrich, and if the trend continues — and I expect it to — within a week or two at the most, Prick will be back in the lower-tier Gingrich territory from whence he came.

What has killed Prick Santorum?

Two things, that I can see, right off: One, Mittens has been running for president for years, so Prick has been up against Mittens’ advantage in money and in organization. Even if Prick didn’t put not only his foot but his entire body into his mouth every time he spoke, it would have been an uphill battle against Mittens, who doesn’t know why he wants to be president, but only knows that he wants to be president very, very badly, like Gollum wanted that shiny ring.

Two, every time the insane Prick opens his mouth, abject insanity rolls out. Where to begin? Satan is responsible for the nation’s troubles. States should be allowed to outlaw contraception. Women should not be allowed to serve in combat roles in the U.S. military because of the “emotional” issues involved. The Dutch routinely involuntarily euthanize — that is, murder — their elderly in order to save on health-care costs. That’s just a partial list of Prick Santorum’s Greatest Hits.

It’s fairly clear that the more that the Repugnican Tea Party traitors have gotten to know Prick, the more concerned they’ve been that he cannot beat Barack Obama in November (because he cannot).

Some wingnuts claim that all of this drawn-out intraparty fighting is only making Mittens emerge an even stronger candidate. Bullshit. That’s just spin. Prick Santorum’s “Christo”fascist, batshit crazy pronouncements are turning women voters, sane voters and “swing” voters off from the Repugnican Tea Party in droves, and it’s fucking obvious that even Mittens’ own party isn’t crazy about him, or he would have been the clear front runner these past several weeks.

A primary season candidate who isn’t well-liked by even his own party cannot do very well in the general election. Fucking duh.

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I killed Andrew Breitbart!

AFP photo

The bombastic, tightly wound Andrew Breitbart (shown above in 2011) was a prime candidate for a heart attack. In the end, he killed himself — the best thing that he accomplished in his too-long life.

The news item “Andrew Breitbart Death Sparks Conspiracy Theories” remains in the top 10 of Yahoo! News’ most popular news stories right now, two days after its first appearance.

The wingnuts’ chatter is that “warrior” Breitbart was just about to release some “damning video footage” of a young Barack Obama, so that Breitbart’s death at age 43 sure looks suspicious!

Other wingnuts are more committed (and all of them should be committed): Barack Hussein Obama had Andrew Breitbart killed! There! Can! Be! No! Other! Explanation!

Don’t get me wrong. If Obama had Breitbart snuffed out, then I would start to support Obama again. (Thus far I haven’t given Obama’s re-election campaign one red cent, and thus far I don’t plan to vote for Obama again.) Seriously, Obama’s having Breitbart taken out would be at least something substantial toward his 2008 campaign promises of “hope” and “change.”

But watch any video footage of Breitbart’s explosive public appearances, and the question becomes why he didn’t die even sooner.

The bombastic, uber-type-A Breitbart was a tightly wound asshole, to put it mildly, and if such men in their 30s have heart attacks — and they do — then it’s no huge shock that Breitbart died and went to hell at age 43.

Now, apparently the braggart Breitbart did proclaim last month in D.C. at the Conservative Political Action Conference (which I think of as the Wingnuts’ Ball) that he had video footage of an Obama “from his college days to show you why racial division and class warfare are central to what hope and change was sold in 2008.” (Funny that the white supremacist Breitbart would accuse anyone else of “racial division,” and “class warfare” is perpetuated by the treasonous plutocrats whom the treasonous piece of shit Breitbart supported during his miserable, too-long life.)

But Breitbart also “proved” that Shirley Sherrod was a “racist” (via incredibly dishonestly edited video footage for which she sued him for defamation), remember? Breitbart’s credibility was for shit, and to believe that the petty, vindictive, self-promoting braggart Andrew Breitbart had anything substantial on President Barack Obama that no one else has come up with until now, the fourth year of Obama’s first term, is akin to believing that Obama is not a U.S. citizen (a right-wing myth/lie that persists to this day, even though the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court, which put George W. Bush into the White House, for fuck’s sake, repeatedly has refused to look into it).

Anyway, Andrew Breitbart died of natural (and quite karmic) causes, just as Barack Obama indeed is a U.S. citizen.

I don’t expect the results of Breitbart’s autopsy to be released publicly, though. They very most likely will show that the prime candidate for a heart attack actually died of a heart attack, and that isn’t the narrative that the wingnuts want to be told.

We have to blame the black guy in the White House for everything, you see — even for the deaths of wingnuts whose unhealthy lifestyle habits made them ticking fucking time bombs.

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Rush is sorry — for the loss of advertising revenue

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Wingnutty bloviator Rush Limbaugh has likened his calling Georgetown University student Sandra Fluke a “slut” on his hate radio show to Bill Maher’s supposedly having called Sarah Palin a “cunt,” as though there were no difference at all between the two situations. (Fluke is shown above talking in D.C. on Feb. 23 on the topic of women’s access to birth control at an informal hearing convened by House Democrats after House Repugnican Tea Party traitors and misogynists allowed only anti-contraception men to “testify” in their “hearing” on birth control.)

I recently watched the video footage of fascist gasbag Rush Limbaugh calling a pro-contraception female college student a “slut.”

Limbaugh’s use of the misogynist epithet was quite deliberate. He was speaking slowly, clearly, deliberately. He didn’t call her a “slut” in a fit of rage.

“My choice of words was not the best, and in the attempt to be humorous, I created a national stir. I sincerely apologize to Ms. [Sandra] Fluke for the insulting word choices,” Limbaugh stated yesterday, in the midst of the fact that at least seven advertisers thus far have pulled their ads from his far-right-wing talk radio show.

What a fucking coward Limbaugh is, first calling a young woman a “slut” for supporting women’s rights (are men who want to use condoms or other forms of male birth control or Viagra or the like ”sluts”? No, they’re “studs,” in Limbaugh’s misognynist, patriarchal world), and then lying through his fangs that he was trying to be “humorous.” No he fucking wasn’t. He was being quite venomous and quite serious, and only when there was backlash does he claim that he was only being “humorous.”

I hope that blowhard Rush Limbaugh drops dead right now and follows his fellow Archie Bunker clone Andrew Breitbart to hell.

Ha ha ha! I was only trying to be humorous!

But seriously, I would celebrate Grand Dragon Daddy Rush Limbaugh’s death even more than I celebrated Breitbart’s, and I cannot understand what political gain the Repugnican Tea Party traitors are hoping for in attacking women and women’s right to use birth control and to make other decisions regarding their own reproductive systems, a right that has existed for several decades.

When the Repugnican Tea Party traitors made homophobia one of their main platforms for traitor and war criminal George W. Bush’s “re”-election in 2004, they were picking on an historically oppressed minority group, as the Repugnican Tea Party cowards love to do.

But women make up 50.8 percent of the American population, and self-loathing women who agree with the misogynist, patrirarchal likes of Limbaugh (I call them cunts, because they are cunts*) are a minority of women. 

Rolling out a campaign against women and their right to contraception was a huge fucking mistake. Team Obama must be giddy.

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*Limbaugh, trying to defend his use of the word “slut,” claimed that Bill Maher has called Sarah Palin a “cunt.” Um, Sarah Palin and her ilk are cunts because their fascistic ideology and their support of fascism harms many people, earning them that title, and there’s a huge difference between calling a college student who spoke in D.C. on women’s reproductive rights a “slut” and a woman who sought high national political office a “cunt.”

Palin made herself fair game when she decided to make herself such a high-profile public figure. For Limbaugh to attack a young woman who is not nearly the public figure that Palin is, however, is indicative of how cowardly and craven the death-deserving Limbaugh is.

‘Christo’fascist Prick Santorum is being crucified in the nationwide polls

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Butt Juice Boy apparently could be reacting to his latest national poll numbers, but this photo was taken on February 14, when he still had a significant lead over perma-presidential candidate Mittens. That lead since has evaporated, thank (the non-existent, Zeus-like, Judeo-Christian) God.

Stick a fork in him; Repugnican Tea Party presidential wannabe Prick Santorum is just about ready to be added to the heap of not-Mittens who peaked and then fizzled.

At the height of his ascent earlier this month, Gallup’s daily tracking poll showed Santorum a full 10 percentage points (36 percent to 26 percent) ahead of Mittens Romney, who has been running for president for the past century or so.

The most recent Gallup daily tracking polls (those taken within the past week), however, show Santorum and Romney in a dead heat, with each of them garnering 29, 30 or 31 percent. If the trend continues — and I expect it to — then Santorum will go the way of Herman Cain, Prick Perry, Michele “Eyes Like Deer’s in Headlights” Bachmann and Newt Gingrich.

While the Repugnican Tea Party traitors clearly still aren’t enthused about Mittens, they also seem to be concerned that there’s no way in hell that Prick Santorum can win the White House.

Their concern is justified, as Santorum’s hard-right “Christo”fascist proclamations continue.

Santorum of course insists that President Barack Obama should not have apologized to the people of Afghanistan after it was made public that multiple copies of the Koran were burned there by the U.S. military, reportedly by mistake.

Reports The Associated Press today:

Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum criticized President Barack Obama’s apology for the burning of Korans in Afghanistan, adding that Afghanistan should apologize to the U.S. for the deaths of four U.S. soldiers during six days of violence sparked by the incident.

“There was nothing deliberately done wrong here,” Santorum said [today] on ABC television’s “This Week.” “This was something that happened as a mistake. Killing Americans in uniform is not a mistake. It was something that [was] deliberate.”

More than 30 people have been killed in clashes since it emerged Tuesday that copies of the Muslim holy book and other religious materials had been thrown into a fire pit used to burn garbage at Bagram Air Field, a large U.S. base north of Kabul. Protesters angry over Koran burnings by American troops lobbed grenades [today] at a U.S. base in northern Afghanistan and clashed with police and troops in a day of violence that left seven international troops wounded and two Afghans dead.

“The response needs to be apologized for by (President Hamid) Karzai and the Afghan people for attacking and killing our men and women in uniform and overreacting to this inadvertent mistake,” Santorum said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “That is the real crime here, not what our soldiers did.”

The president’s apology suggests that there is blame and that the U.S. did something wrong “in the sense of doing a deliberate act,” Santorum said.

Santorum says that rather than saying he was sorry, Obama should have only acknowledged that burning copies of Islam’s holiest book in a trash pit was wrong and taken responsibility for the incident, “but to apologize, I think, lends credibility that somehow or another that it was more than that.” …

Big tough guy, Butt Juice Boy is! Being an American means never having to say that you are sorry! Fuck yeah!

The fact is that the United States’ war machine has occupied the sovereign nation of Afghanistan for more than a decade now. The people of Afghanistan just want the United States’ stormtroopers out of their fucking country already — as would we Americans if our nation had been occupied by a foreign power for more than a decade.

We don’t need to remain in Afghanistan; it’s that the treasonous, thieving weasels who comprise the military industrial-complex must fabricate national security threats in order to justify its existence, which sucks trillions of dollars — our tax dollars – from the U.S. Treasury. No supposed national security threats = no continued kaaa-ching kaaaaa-chiiing for them.

After more than a decade of having occupied Afghanistan, the members of the U.S. military should know by now to be very careful about how they handle copies of the Koran. That Korans were burned even reportedly inadvertently at this point in the occupation shows, at the minimum, the gross insensitivity of the occupiers toward the occupied.

The burning of the copies of the Koran isn’t, of course, solely or even primarily what the people of Afghanistan are protesting right now. It’s their decade-plus occupation that they are protesting, and in their nation’s occupation far more Afghanis have died than have Americans, who shouldn’t still be in Afghanistan in the first fucking place.

And while Santorum hypocritically proclaims that “Killing Americans in uniform is not a mistake. It was something that [was] deliberate,” the killing of Afghanis by members of the U.S. military for the past several years now in most instances certainly hasn’t been a mistake, but has been deliberate, and while Santorum calls on Afghanistan to apologize to the United States for the recent American deaths there, the United States almost never apologizes for those whom it slaughters, justifying even the slaughter of innocents as just an unfortunate part of the “war on terror” and the “spread of democracy.”

Perhaps Prick Santorum is right, though. The United States shouldn’t apologize to the people of Afghanistan – it should just withdraw from their nation. Now. Just as President Hopey-Changey had promised during his 2008 presidential campaign that we would. (The recent slaughter in Afghanistan, to me, only underscores the fact that our continued occupation of the nation is just another of Obama’s broken campaign promises.)

Prick Santorum is full of shit, of course, that Obama’s apology for the Koran burnings “lends credibility” to the idea that the Korans were burned intentionally. When one nation offends another, an apology often if not usually is in order. (It is, after all, what Jesus would do.)

The only problem with Obama’s apology is that it means nothing, that it rings pretty fucking hollow, in light of the fact that the United States still occupies the sovereign nation of Afghanistan.

Apologizing almost always is the right thing to do, but don’t expect bad-ass Prick Santorum to apologize to the Netherlands for his recently having pulled it completely out of his santorum-filled rectum that the Netherlands, as a cost-cutting measure, routinely involuntarily euthanizes old people who don’t wear bracelets that read, “Do not euthanize me.” Indeed, he falsely claimed to his audience of fearful wingnuts that half of the Netherlands’ instances of euthanasia are involuntary — that is, murder — and that therefore the elderly in the Netherlands avoid hospitals, lest they be snuffed out at the bean-counters’ command.

Yes, let’s put the boy genius Prick Santorum in charge of U.S. foreign policy. Let’s!

Not content with alienating every other nation on the planet, Prick Santorum also very apparently wants to subject all Americans to his brand of hard-right-wing Catholicism, despite the fact that no more than a quarter of Americans identify themselves as Catholic.

Reports The Associated Press today:

Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum said [today] that he doesn’t believe in the separation of church and state, adding that he was sickened by John F. Kennedy’s assurances to Baptist ministers 52 years ago that he would not impose his Catholic faith on them.

“I don’t believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute,” Santorum, a devout Catholic, said in an interview from Michigan on ABC’s “This Week.”

“The First Amendment means the free exercise of religion and that means bringing people and their faith into the public square.”

Santorum’s latest foray into the hot-button, faith-based issues that so fire up the party’s evangelical base comes as his chief rival for the Republican nomination, Mitt Romney, begins to pull ahead slightly in the state of Michigan, where [Romney] was born and raised.

Both Michigan and Arizona hold their primaries Tuesday. …

Beyond Michigan, however, Santorum’s startling stances on social issues like birth control and religion are getting the most attention countrywide.

He’s been unapologetic about some of his more controversial remarks, even reiterating [today] his past remarks that Kennedy’s 1960 speech in Houston made “me want to throw up.”

“To say that people of faith have no role in the public square? What makes me throw up is someone who is now trying to tell people that you will do what the government says,” Santorum said. “That now we’re going to turn around and impose our values from the government on people of faith.”

America is all about embracing diversity, he added. [Unless, of course, you are a non-Catholick, a self-respecting woman or a non-heterosexual, among others.]

“What we saw in Kennedy’s speech was just the opposite, and that’s what’s so upsetting about it,” he said.

No, the problem that Prick Santorum – who, just like Dan Quayle, is no John F. Kennedy — has with JFK is that JFK did not promise to move the Oval Office to the Vatican – like a “good” Catholick “should,” and like Prick Santorum would do should he get his “Christo”fascist claws on the presidency.

But it’s true that separation of church and state in the United States never has been absolute. I actually agree with Prick on that point, but again, for very different reasons. I mean, despite the concept of the separation of church and state, we still have “In God We Trust” on our currency and our pledge of allegiance still contains the phrase “one nation under God.”

We Americans who aren’t fans of Prick Santorum and his ilk have yet to have a U.S. president who didn’t at least on occasion evoke the name of the Judeo-Christian, non-existent, Zeus-like deity, and we have to endure the “Christo”fascists’ insane theocratic rhetoric at the national level at least every four years.

The “Christo”fascists like Santorum claim that they’re not allowed to practice their backasswards religions when, in fact, the reality is that their theocratic bullshit is shoved down the throats of us who don’t want it far more often than it ever is the other way around.

While it is clear what kind of president Santorum would be — Pope Palpatine’s puppet (he virtually admits this himself) – it is not entirely clear to me what kind of president Mittens would be in terms of attempting to shove his own religious beliefs down the nation’s throat.

Knowing what I know of Mormons (I lived among them in Arizona), I can’t see Mittens not being beholden to the cabal of stupid evil old white men in Salt Lake City. A tenth of Mitt’s millions, after all, goes to Salt Lake City, as the cult requires. Mormons’ No. 1 allegiance is to be to the cult – not to the country. However, having been the governor of a blue state, it very well could be the case that Mittens just has the sense to keep his mouth shut about his plans to essentially move the nation’s capital to Salt Lake.

I won’t take the risk of assuming that Mittens would be less “Christo”fascist and theocratic than would be Prick. Both of them are unacceptable as president, and I’m not alone in believing that: Barack Obama beats both of the “Christo”fascists by a comfortable margin in most recent nationwide polls.

Thank God.