Barack Obama’s one-term presidency seems fairly unavoidable

Jimmy Carter and the first George Bush both lost re-election primarily because of a shitty national economy. How will “underdog” Barack Obama avoid their fate, even with his “vision”?

So the 2012 presidential race is shaping up to look like a hybrid of the 1980 and the 1996 presidential races.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan famously asked the people of the nation if they were better off, under then-President Jimmy Carter, than they were four years previously.

Today, President Barack Obama freely proclaims that Americans are not better off now than they were four years ago, giving the Repugnican Tea Partiers an early Christmas gift.

Obama proclaims that the 2012 presidential election will be about “who’s got a vision?”

“Vision” doesn’t pay the average voter’s bills, however, and I can’t see what Obama’s “vision” thus far has accomplished — the constitutionality of his “signature” legislative “accomplishment” of health care “reform” is being reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court in its current term – but whatever.

Obama also has found a way to make the nation’s economic collapse all about himself, proclaiming himself to be the “underdog.” Why are you worrying about yourself when you should be focusing on Barack Obama?

These statements, apparently meant to bolster Obama, only demonstrate how out of touch with the common American he is.

And it certainly doesn’t help Obama’s re-election chances that the same young people whom he apparently lied to in order to get into the White House are now filling up Wall Street and other metropolitan areas protesting his solidarity with the Wall Street weasels and other treasonous corporatocrats and plutocrats who tanked our economy.

Obama’s best shot at re-election is that the Repugnican Tea Partiers pick the worst candidate that they possibly could, a candidate so manifestly awful that he or she makes Obama look like George Washington or Abraham Lincoln by comparison. That candidate would be Texas Gov. Rick Perry, but Perry seems to be imploding.

While Perry might have survived Niggerheadgate — he could be criticized fairly if his family hadn’t changed the racist name of the Texas property after they bought it, but it appears that they did — the scandal/“scandal” has cast a spotlight on other aspects of Rick Perry, such as this, as reported by The Associated Press today:

Austin, Texas — Eleven years ago, when the NAACP stepped up a campaign to remove the Confederate battle flag from statehouses and other government buildings across the South, it found an opponent in Rick Perry.

Texas had a pair of bronze plaques with symbols of the Confederacy displayed in its state Supreme Court building. Perry, then lieutenant governor, said they should stay put, arguing that Texans “should never forget our history.”

It’s a position Perry has taken consistently when the legacy of the Civil War has been raised, as have officials in many of the other former Confederate states. But while defense of Confederate symbols and Southern institutions can still be good politics below the Mason-Dixon line,
the subject can appear in a different light when officials seek national office. …

Yup. What plays well in Texas tends to wither on the national scene.

I’m fine for never forgetting our history (indeed, we forget it at our own peril), but the Confederate flag, like the word “nigger,” belongs in the
history books – not on public display, except perhaps at a museum (ditto for the swastika). Besides, the white supremacists who run the state of Texas make damn sure that the publishers of the history textbooks used in the state’s schools don’t offend white (or “Christian” or heterosexual or capitalist or…) sensibilities, so what’s the problem, Ricky?

The Repugnican Tea Partiers seem anxious to identify their champion to go up against Obama, with more and more red states moving up their primary or caucus dates. I doubt that Perry has time to recover in an ever-contracting Repugnican Tea Party presidential primary season. If he were eloquent he might be able to get past Niggerheadgate, but the fact that he has a penchant for stumbling into incoherence during nationally televised debates bodes ill for him.

As much as I never want to see a President Perry, it seems to me that Barack Obama’s best chance for re-election would be if Perry emerges as his opponent. Recent nationwide polls show Obama beating Perry in a hypothetical matchup by three or more percentage points.

Those same polls, however, show former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and Obama within only one to three percentage points of each other, with Romney beating Obama by two percentage points in at least two recent nationwide polls. (I define “recent” as taken within the last month.)

A while back I likened Mitt Romney to Bob Dole, the incredibly wooden and uncharismatic Repugnican Party presidential candidate of 1996, the year that Bill Clinton fairly coasted to re-election.

Against Bob Dole II, Obama would be assured re-election, I thought back then, but back then I’d also thought that the nation’s economy would have shown some improvement by now.

However, the economy shows no signs of improvement between now and Election Day in November 2012, and so my money is on the 2012 presidential election looking like a cross between the 1980 and the 1996 presidential elections: Yes, the Repugnicans will front an uncharismatic candidate whom (unlike was the case with Ronald Reagan) no one is excited about, but, given the shambles that the economy is in, the uncharismatic Repugnican candidate (Mitt Romney, in case that isn’t clear) will beat the Democratic incumbent. The voters will be that thirsty for the change that was promised to them in 2008 but that never was delivered: that they’ll drink sea water, even though drinking sea water will kill you even faster than will plain old dehydration.

Many progressives whom Obama punk’d in Round One with his hollow promises of “hope” and “change” won’t bother to vote in November 2012 at all, having no progressive presidential candidate to vote for. If they do hold their nose and vote for Obama in November 2012, because of their lack of enthusiasm they certainly won’t talk up Obama’s re-election like they talked up his initial election, and if they give Team Obama any money in Round Two, they certainly won’t give as much as they did in Round One.

The Repugnican Tea Party traitors, on the other hand, I surmise, want a Repugnican, any Repugnican, back in the White House more enthusiastically than most of Barack Obama’s (former) supporters want four more years! This enthusiasm gap, I believe, is the biggest threat to Obama’s re-election.*

But, of course, the Obamabots — those invididuals for whom Barack Obama can do no wrong and who have some excuse for virtually all of his miserable failings – will blame Obama’s November 2012 loss on those of us who are actually progressive, who instead of selling out our progressive
principles steadfastly stick to our progressive principles (among which is not the idea of supporting the lesser of two evils). Some of them will even stoop to calling us “racist.” Some of them already have started doing that.

All of that completely fucking ignores, of course, the fact that Barack Obama, early in his presidency, did what even dipshit George W. Bush damn well knew better not to do: to shit and piss all over your base, to extend the middle finger, repeatedly, to those very same people who got you into the White House in the first place.

Competent historians, I believe, will identify that as Obama’s biggest mistake: having shat and pissed all over his base.

Had Obama followed the progressive economic advice that his base gave him from Day One of his presidency, the nation’s economy would have improved. But by trying to win over those whose support he never was going to gain in the first place through his countless “bipartisan” capitulations, by trying to make everyone love him to death, Obama sealed his own fate.

If Barack Obama actually manages to eke out re-election 13 months from now, I will be shocked.

I once expected him to be like Bill Clinton, easily fending off a challenge to a second term by a snooze-inducing Repugnican challenger. But now I expect Obama to be like Jimmy Carter, a one-term Democratic president. Especially when Obama freely publicly admits that we’re not better off now than we were four years ago.

–

*Lest any Obamabot try to deny that there even is an enthusiasm gap, a nationwide McClatchy-Marist poll taken less than a month ago asked, “Do you definitely plan to vote for Barack Obama for re-election as president or do you definitely plan to vote against him?” A whopping 49 percent declared “against him,” while only 36 percent declared for him, with 15 percent declaring that they aren’t sure yet. I surmise that the lion’s share of those 15 percent in the end will vote for the Repugnican Tea Party candidate.

Giffords was on Palin’s hit list

In March 2010, Repugnican Tea Party queen Sarah Palin-Quayle put Democratic U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ name on her hit list and indicated Giffords’ legislative district in Arizona with a graphic of gun crosshairs. Today, Giffords was shot in the head in Tucson.

We don’t know yet whether or not Jared Lee Loughner, the 22-year-old shooter of Democratic U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords of Tucson, ever saw Repugnican Tea Party queen Sarah Palin-Quayle’s Facebook-page hit list — which, along with Palin-Quayle’s Tweeted advice to “Commonsense Conservatives & lovers of America: Don’t Retreat, Instead – RELOAD! Pls see my Facebook page” (which contained her mapped hit list as shown above), I wrote about in March.*

Clearly, however, there are plenty of mentally unstable among us who take such advice as to “RELOAD!” and who take such symbols as gun crosshairs over an elected official’s legislative district quite seriously.

Rep. Giffords is No. 4 on Palin-Quayle’s hit list. Giffords made the hit list because she’s a Democrat in a conservative congressional district who voted for the same health-care reform bill that the Repugnican Tea Party now is trying to repeal.

Of course, members of the Repugnican Tea Party, such as Palin-Quayle and Repugnican Tea Party House Speaker John Boehner, are falling over each other now to express their condolences for the violence that the Repugnican Tea Party condones — and their claims that of course the Repugnican Tea Party does not condone violence!

Fact is, once the idea is put out there, repeatedly, that it’s OK to commit violence against elected officials with whom one disagrees, it kind of doesn’t matter who exactly suggests it (such as Nevadan Repugnican Tea Party U.S. Senate candidate Sharron Angle’s suggestion that “Second-Amendment remedies” might be necessary for those elected officials who just won’t do what we want them to do) or who exactly the suggested targets are; it just contributes toward making the idea of shooting elected officials whom you don’t like the new norm.

They will deny their obvious complicity in actual acts of violence, as the fucking hypocrites never admit their wrongdoings, but those of us few Americans who still value what is left of what we call our “democracy” have to hold the feet of the members of the Repugnican Tea Party to the fire for the violence that they promote. (Figuratively. [For now.])

–

*In that post, titled “Bricks and Stones Can Start a Civil War,” I concluded:

Today, bricks — tomorrow, bullets?

It would be interesting to see what would happen in the aftermath of a “tea-baggin’” fascist actually assassinating someone, and I have to wonder if the question isn’t whether that will happen but when it will happen.

Hey, sign me up for the next civil war! I’ll be happy to fight for the blue states! This next time, though, we need to finish the job!

You betcha!

I still feel that way, by the way. I prefer bloodlessness, but if it’s a bloody civil war that the wingnuts want, I still say: Let’s give it to them!

I LOVE ya, Hugo, BUT…

AFP and Associated Press photos

The government of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez (pictured at bottom above) arrested and released Guillermo Zuloaga (pictured at top above), the head of Globovision, Venezuela’s equivalent of FOX, for violating the nation’s law against disseminating “false information through any medium” “that cause[s] public panic.” After the Venezuela  right wing’s treasonous coup attempt of 2002, such a law is understandable, but most Americans don’t know what happened in even their own nation in 2002, which already is ancient fucking history to them, so they don’t have the context for Chavez’s handling of his critics, who are prone to committing treasonous acts.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is in the news again, this time for his government’s having arrested Guillermo Zuloaga, the owner of Globovision, which, from what I can tell, is Venezuela’s equivalent of FOX.

Zuloaga was released but was ordered by a judge not to leave the country while he is being investigated. The Associated Press reports that

The [Venezuelan] Attorney General’s Office said in a statement that prosecutors are investigating Zuloaga for allegedly violating a law prohibiting Venezuelans from spreading “false information through any medium,” including newspapers, radio, television, e-mails or leaflets, “that cause[s] public panic.”

Zuloaga, Globovision’s majority shareholder, could face a five-year prison sentence if convicted, the statement said.

Fuck. If we had such a law here in Obamaland, then the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin-Quayle and Glenn Beck all would be behind bars. They routinely spread false information that causes public panic. Hell, doing so is their bread and fucking butter.

I mean, these traitors have turned health care — long considered to be a good thing — into a great evil in the eyes of their fucktarded followers. And they have done so to the point that Democratic lawmakers are being threatened. (Um, I don’t fucking believe any Repugnican claims that they also have been targeted, since not a single fucking Repugnican member of the U.S. House of Representatives has voted for health-care reform, not in the first vote of 219 or the second vote of 220.)

When unstable individuals are incited to threaten democratically elected members of a legislature, that is what you call treason. That is not free speech. That is subverting the will of the majority of the voters by disrupting the democratic process, and disrupting the democratic process is harming the nation — and again, there is a word for that, and again, that word is treason.

So when the likes of Sarah Palin-Quayle puts this on her Facebook page (and yes, “Saturday Night Live” had it right when they noted that a 14-year-old, not a presidential aspirant, has a fucking Facebook page) –

– and Tweets about how her supporters should not “retreat” but should “RELOAD!” — that easily could incite violence that disrupts the democratic process, which makes her speech, in my book, not free but treasonous.

But arresting the she-Nazi for her incendiary speech that easily could incite one of her gun-nut supporters to go out and shoot one of the Democratic lawmakers whom she has targeted with gun crosshairs — well, I don’t know…

I can see the argument in arresting the likes of professional liars Palin-Quayle and Limbaugh and Beck, as I do see them as a threat to the welfare of the nation, including its democracy, but it’s baaad precedent for a government to be arresting its detractors, as virulently anti-democratic as they might be.

You don’t want to wait until they have succeeded in bringing civil war to the nation, but at the same time, arresting people for what their speech and/or actions might lead to but have not yet led to – that’s a mighty slippery slope. 

If you watch the documentary “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” about the failed right-wing coup attempt in Venezuela in 2002 (which the unelected, anti-democratic, right-wing Bush regime fully supported, of course), you will understand better where Hugo Chavez is coming from.

The anti-democratic right-wingers in Venezuela do want to overthrow the democratically elected Chavez, as, um, evidenced by the fact than in 2002 they tried to do so, tried to replace Chavez with a plutocrat whom the people did not elect, but the people of Venezuela rose up and they returned Chavez to power within days.

There is no other word for what the 2002 coup ringleaders did than treason. And I have little doubt that Zuloaga is a traitor, that he puts his and his fellow plutocrats’ interests far above the interests of the common Venezuelan, to the point that he gladly would override the will of the majority of the people of Venezuela to see his and his fellow plutocrats’ interests advanced at the expense of the common Venezuelan.

But a memo to President Chavez: The whole world is watching, Mr. President, and the whole world does not understand the political realities of Venezuela.

Don’t make scumbags like Zuloaga into martyrs.

Don’t give any semblance of credibility to the right-wingers’ false assertion that you are a “murderous” “dictator,” even though you repeatedly have been democratically elected and even though you had not one of the treasonous ringleaders of the 2002 coup attempt executed, although here in the United States execution is considered appropriate punishment for treason.

Don’t let the right wing harm your revolution — our revolution, the world’s revolution – by successfully painting you, in the eyes of the world, as one of the tyrants that they are.

There’s too much at stake.

It’s NOT about health care

For some Americans, the debate that has dragged out for months indeed has been about health care. Those who can’t afford health care, those with serious medical problems who have been screwed over by their for-profit health-care insurance companies, and yes, those Repugnican politicians who are on the side of the for-profit wealth care — er, health care — system that profits obscenely from Americans’ pain and suffering (which, if you oppose, makes you a “socialist”), and the wealth-care corporations, too, of course: for them, it was about health care (that is, trying to obtain health care or profiting obscenely via the long broken and corrupt health-care system).  

For everyone else, though, the battle was somewhere between a referendum on the November 2008 election of President Barack Obama with 53 percent of the popular vote (to Repugnican John McCainosaurus’ 46 percent) and a sort of second civil war; the battle was over whether or not the mostly white, mostly racist, mostly white supremacist Repugnican Party would allow the nation’s first black president to have a major legislative victory.

Those yelling “nigger” and “faggot” and the like at Democratic lawmakers this past weekend — and the Repugnican lawmaker who screamed “baby killer!” at a Democratic lawmaker – yeah, you know, that wasn’t about health care.

That was about a dwindling demographic — the stupid white man and those who support him — that is terrified of the increasing political power that historically oppressed minority groups are gaining. (“Nigger” for blacks and other non-whites, “faggot” for non-heterosexuals, and “baby killer” for those uppity women who want equal rights and who oppose patriarchal rule.)

And those screaming “nigger” and “faggot” and “baby killer” aren’t just “a few bad apples.” The Repugnican Party and the “tea party” is a whole fucking orchard of rotten apples.

The Repugnicans in Congress already are talking about trying to repeal the uppity black president’s landmark legislation. They want to assure their racist/white supremacist base that they’re not going to allow the black president to get anything – or, if he does manage to get anything, to keep it.

And, of course, the Repugnicans and their allies, such as the “tea party” fascists, like democracy only when democracy goes their way.

The “tea party” fascists who “stormed” Capitol Hill this past weekend and called at least one black legislator a “nigger,” spat on at least another black legislator, and called an openly gay lawmaker a “faggot” — and yes, the Repugnican lawmaker who called another lawmaker a “baby killer” – are no different from the mob of Repugnican Party operatives, pretending to be ordinary outraged citizens, who disrupted the ballot-recounting process in Florida in late 2000.

When democracy doesn’t go the wingnuts’ way, they try mob rule. Which is one of the many reasons I call them fascists. (If the boot fits, wear it!)

We let the fascists get away with that shit — their bullying – in late 2000. And look at what it cost us.

We truly patriotic Americans — those of us who respect democracy, even when the democratic process doesn’t give us the outcome that we want – need to stand up to the fascist bullies who want to subvert our democratic system even further than they already have.

We need to push back; that is all that fucking bullies understand.

Um, can we call them racist NOW?

Associated Press photo

“Tea party” fascists — who look all-white or nearly all-white to me — photographed on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., today, where they called Democratic lawmakers, among other things, “nigger” and “faggot.”

Defenders of the “tea party” fucktards have insisted that the “tea party” “movement” is not motivated by racism.

Yet McClatchy Newspapers boldly reports this today:

Washington, D.C. — Demonstrators outside the U.S. Capitol, angry over the proposed health care bill, shouted “nigger” [today] at U.S. Rep. John Lewis , a Georgia congressman and civil-rights icon who was nearly beaten to death during an Alabama march in the 1960s.

The protesters also shouted obscenities at other members of the Congressional Black Caucus, lawmakers said.

“They were shouting, sort of harassing,” Lewis said. “But, it’s okay, I’ve faced this before. It reminded me of the 60s. It was a lot of downright hate and anger and people being downright mean.”

Lewis said he was leaving the Cannon office building across from the Capitol when protesters shouted, “Kill the bill, kill the bill!”

“I said, ‘I’m for the bill, I support the bill, I’m voting for the bill,’” Lewis said.

A colleague who was accompanying Lewis said people in the crowd responded by saying, “Kill the bill, then the ‘n-word.’”

“It surprised me that people are so mean and we can’t engage in a civil dialogue and debate,” Lewis said.

Rep. Emanuel Cleaver , D- Mo. , said he was a few yards behind Lewis and distinctly heard “nigger.”

“It was a chorus,” Cleaver said. “In a way, I feel sorry for those people who are doing this nasty stuff — they’re being whipped up. I decided I wouldn’t be angry with any of them.”

Protestors also used a slur as they confronted Rep. Barney Frank , D- Mass., an openly gay member of Congress. A writer for The Huffington Post said the crowd called Frank a “faggot.”

Frank told the Boston Globe that the incident happened as he was walking from the Longworth office building to the Rayburn office building, both a short distance from the Capitol. Frank said the crowd consisted of a couple of hundred of people and that they referred to him as ”homo.”

“I’m disappointed with the unwillingness to be civil,” Frank told the Globe. “I was, I guess, surprised by the rancor. What it means is obviously the health care bill is proxy for a lot of other sentiments, some of which are perfectly reasonable, but some of which are not.”

“People out there today, on the whole, were really hateful,” Frank said. “The leaders of this movement have a responsibility to speak out more.”

Thousands of demonstrators gathered outside the Capitol [today] as the House Democratic leadership worked to gather enough votes to enact a health care overhaul proposal that has become the centerpiece of President Barack Obama’s domestic agenda. Most were affiliated with so-called tea party organizations that originally sprang up during last summer’s protests of the health care proposals.

Heated debate has surrounded what role race plays in the motivations of the tea party demonstrators. During protests last summer, demonstrators displayed a poster depicting Obama as an African witch doctor complete with headdress, above the words “OBAMACARE coming to a clinic near you.”

Former President Jimmy Carter asserted in September that racism was a major factor behind the hostility that Obama’s proposals had faced. The claim brought angry rebuttals from Republicans….

House Majority Whip James Clyburn, D- S.C., said [today's] ugliness underscored for him that the health care overhaul isn’t the only motivation for many protesters.

“I heard people saying things today I’ve not heard since March 15th, 1960, when I was marching to try and get off the back of the bus,” Clyburn said. “This is incredible, shocking to me.”

He added, “A lot of us have said for a long time that none of this is about health care at all. It’s about extending a basic fundamental right to people who are less powerful.”

“Nigger” and “faggot.” Nice. (Kudos to McClatchy, by the way, for not shying away from using the words “nigger” and “faggot” and instead referring only to “an epithet” or using the God-awful term “the n-word.” The ugliness of the “tea-baggers” needs to be reported in all of its ugliness, and not whitewashed.)

Clearly, for most of the “tea party” fascists it’s not about health care nearly as much as it about their fear that historically oppressed groups are gaining more political power, that the stupid white man is losing political power in a rapidly diversifying nation that still struggles to achieve liberty and justice for all — not just for certain groups that historically have enjoyed an unfair, un-American political advantage over historically oppressed minority groups.

It sounds like the “tea-bagging” fascists want a civil war.

I’ve said it before and I’ve said it again: if it’s a rematch of the Civil War that they want, then by all means, let’s give it to them.

This faggot, for one, is willing to die for the rights of all of us faggots and niggers and the many other historically oppressed minority groups given such epithets by the tyrants of the dwindling majority.

What’s the matter with California?

Updated below (on Sunday, March 21, 2010)

The Field Poll, California’s most prominent polling organization, released a series of fairly surprising polls this past week that got plenty of media attention here in the nation’s most populous state.

The first poll, released Wednesday, shows that Repugnican gubernatorial wannabe Megalomaniac Whitman, a billionaire former CEO who has pumped tens of millions of her own dollars into her ubiquitous television ads, not only trounces her closest Repugnican rival for her party’s gubernatorial nomination, but holds a three-point lead over Democrat Jerry Brown, the state’s current attorney general and former governor who has no (serious) competition for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination.

The poll puts Nutmeg Whitman at 46 percent to Jerry Brown’s 43 percent, with 11 percent undecided.

After the disaster that Repugnican Arnold Schwarzenegger has been as governor — the state that he promised to “save” from twice-elected Democratic former Gov. Gray Davis has only gotten worse under his watch since 2003 – are Californians really going to allow another Repugnican governor?

Moreoever, are they really going to allow someone to buy the governorship? That’s not an exaggeration – that is billionaire Nutmeg’s game plan. The Megalomaniac has never held any elective office before but wants the top elected office of the most populous state right off.

As governor she would be catastrophic. Already she wants to kill the state’s climate-change legislation that even Schwarzenegger supports and she wants to lay off 40,000 state workers in a state that already has enough unemployment problems and already has suffered enough damaging hits to government services.

As Brown has pointed out, as The Associated Press recently paraphrased him as having put it, “California needs an elder statesman who can broker deals to lead it out of its current fiscal morass, not an autocratic CEO who is used to giving orders.” Reports the AP:

[Brown] said CEOs are used to hand-picking their employees, but a governor must confront an independent and sometimes hostile state Legislature and deal with public employee unions and courts that are constantly second-guessing their decisions.

“The political process is about civic engagement, not autocratic executive decision-making in the corporate suite. The two have virtually nothing in common,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press at his campaign headquarters in a converted warehouse in Oakland.

Yup. The autocratic, spoiled rich bitch Nutmeg is not cut of the same cloth of which good governors are made. She’s much more like the Red Queen in Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland” — “Off with their heads!” she already has said of 40K state workers — than she is anything like a stateswoman. 

If Californians think that Schwarzenegger is bad — and they do; his approval rating is around 30 percent and about six in 10 Californians believe, correctly, that the state is worse off now than it was in 2003, when he took 0ffice – then they should elect Nutmeg, who knows as much about being governor as Sarah Palin-Quayle knows about being president.

Speaking of stateswomen, Democratic U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer of California can claim that title, but her election to a fourth term in the U.S. Senate seems uncertain.

A second Field poll, released on Thursday, shows the top Repugnican challenger for the Repugnican Party nomination for the U.S. Senate seat that Boxer now holds, Tom Campbell, with 44 percent to Boxer’s 43 percent. When matched up against the No. 2 Repugnican contestant, the Nutmeg-like Carly Fiorina (who also is a former CEO who wants to buy high office), Boxer beats Fiorina by only one point, 45 percent to 44 percent.

Like we really need more Repugnican white men – or more Repugnicans, period — in the U.S. Senate. What the fuck?

It wasn’t that long ago that the stupid white men of and led by the unelected BushCheneyCorp ran the nation into the ground, a stupid white man continues to run the great state of California into the ground, and yet the voters of California are poised to replace Barbara Boxer with another stupid white man (or with a stupid white man in woman’s clothing, like Palin-Quayle is).

I recognize that a lot can change in the coming months before the November 2010 election, but I find these 40-something-percent matchups between the Democratic and Repugnican candidates in the blue state of California to be way too close for comfort.

The culprit, I think, is the same phenomenon that put Repugnican pretty boy Scott Brown into the U.S. Senate for Massachussetts in the wake of the death of Ted Kennedy: the dumbfuck vote, which consists mostly those who identify themselves as “independents” or “swing voters.” They get the bulk of their political “information” from the candidates’ television ads. Because TV commercials are a great source of complete and unbiased information. Every intellectual knows that.

So, if you are just filthy rich, like Nutmeg Whitman is, you can buy office, since your base consists of the dipshits who don’t know anyfuckingthing about politics but who vote anyway.

The third Field poll released this past week (yesterday) perhaps is the most encouraging of the three. It shows that Californians’ favorability rating of President Barack Obama has fallen since he took office, but still remains at a majority, with 52 percent of Californians approving of the job he’s doing. Obama’s highest point among Californians was a year ago this month, when he had a 65-percent job-approval rating.

The poll showed Californians evenly split over Obama’s handling of health care, with 45 percent favoring his handling of it thus far and 45 percent disfavoring it thus far.

Of course, I’m not sure how many of those Californians who disfavor Obama’s handling of health care are wingnuts who buy the health care = “socialism” crap that the wealth care weasels — whose only concern is to continue to profit obscenely from Americans’ pain and suffering — have been pushing and how many of them oppose his handling of health care because it’s not aggressive and/or progressive enough.

After health-care reform legislation finally fucking passes — which apparently will be as soon as tomorrow — we might see increases in the number of Californians who state that they approve of Obama’s job performance and his handling of health-care reform.

And a coattail effect of the Democratic Party actually having accomplished something, and having accomplished something pretty big, might help Barbara Boxer and Jerry Brown in the polls, too.

Of course, it’s also important for long-time Democratic politicians like Boxer and Brown not to take their support by the fickle voters of California for granted. It is my impression that California’s voters will vote for a Repugnican in order to punish a Democrat whom they believe takes their vote for granted — even though voting Repugnican almost always is against the voter’s own best interests.

And those who don’t understand politics (those who get their political “information” from candidates’ TV commercials) really seem to believe that the solution always is to just change parties — even if the party they are thinking of switching to just recently trashed the nation and the state.

That problem — abject stupidity — I don’ t have a quick and easy solution for, unfortunately.

Update (Sunday, March 21, 2010):

Today the Field Poll has released yet another poll, this one showing that Repugnican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s approval rating has hit an all-time low of 23 percent.

“This is the poorest assessment that voters have ever given Schwarzenegger and is statistically equivalent to the all-time record low job appraisal that voters gave to [Democratic Gov.] Gray Davis shortly before he was recalled from office in 2003,” the Field Poll notes.

The Sacramento Bee quotes Field Poll director Mark DiCamillo as deeming this fact to be “ironic.”

Repugnicans are distancing themselves from Schwarzenegger, claiming that his low approval rating doesn’t really matter because he isn’t really a Repugnican — that is, he isn’t enough of a Nazi for them, even though his father was a Brownshirt…

Assorted shit

Obama gets his balls back?

President Barack Obama has endorsed a plan that would allow the Democratically controlled Congress to pass health-care reform with a simple majority vote without being hamstrung by an obstructionist Repugnican filibuster.

Repugnicans are agog, of course, but the filibuster is only a Senate rule, and Senate rules can be changed. (Indeed, during the years of rule by the BushCheneyCorp, the Repugnicans threatened to do away with the filibuster with their “nuclear option.”)

Perhaps the Democrats should kill the filibuster altogether; that would suit the minority — again, the minority – Repugnicans right.

The Senate’s Repugnican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said that the Democrats’ doing away with the filibuster would be “met with outrage” by the American public — never mind that the Repugnicans themselves were poised to do so. (Do as the Repugnicans say, not as they do, please.)

McConnell is full of shit. The majority of Americans, who voted for Obama in November 2008, are fine with Obama’s agenda being enacted on simple majority votes. They prefer that progress over the gridlock that the Repugnicans want.

The tea-baggers will fume once health-care reform is passed on a simple majority vote, but fuck them — they’re going to fume anyway, as long as Obama continues to commit the crime of presiding while black.

—

Supremes refuse to kill same-sex marriage in D.C.

WTF?

The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to kill same-sex marriages in Washington, D.C.

Notes The Associated Press:

Washington, D.C., [now] is the sixth place in the nation where gay marriages can take place. Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont also issue licenses to same-sex couples.

To prepare for [same-sex marriages], the [D.C.] marriage bureau changed its license applications so they are gender-neutral, asking for the name of each “spouse” rather than the “bride” and “groom.” …

The [same-sex] marriage law was introduced in the 13-member D.C. Council in October and had near-unanimous support from the beginning. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty signed it in December, but because Washington is a federal district, the law had to undergo a congressional review period that expired March 2.

Notes AFP:

Although the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday refused a request to hold a referendum on gay marriage, which would have delayed the day the law took effect in Washington, it said opponents of gay marriage could seek to hold a “ballot initiative” in the capital to try to get the act repealed.

That would be similar to what happened in California, where residents voted in a referendum in November 2008 — known as Proposition 8 — to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman, overturning a state supreme court decision six months earlier which legalized gay marriage.

Interesting… The U.S. Supreme Court apparently doesn’t want to decide on the matter 0f same-sex marriage, but is willing to allow the people of each state (and D.C.) to decide the matter for themselves.

While that’s not as bad as the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that there is no constitutional right to same-sex marriage (because there is), I still find it fucked up that anyone’s equal civil and human rights should be put up for a vote.

Whose equal civil and human rights should we put up for a vote next?

The response from wingnuts to the U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal to stop the D.C. same-sex marriages was predictable. Reports AFP:

Outside the courthouse, a handful of protesters held up banners and chanted slogans, saying the United States was doomed because it has allowed same-sex marriage.

“When this Congress acted to let fags marry in D.C., they bound this country,” anti-gay activist Shirley Phelps-Roper, who had travelled to Washington from Kansas, told AFP.

“This is the last generation. This nation’s destruction is imminent and they did it to themselves,” said Phelps-Roper, brandishing signs reading “America’s doomed,” “God hates you,” “You’re going to hell” and “Fag marriage.”

You know, if these are the “end times,” it’s only because the end-timers have brought the end times on. It wouldn’t be a “fag” who causes Armageddon; it would be a wingnut.

—

KKKopycats plaguing University of California campuses?

There are news reports about racist/white supremacist and anti-Semitic incidents cropping up at University of California campuses, including UC San Diego, UC Davis and UC Santa Cruz.

While I believe that university students — and everyone – should not be subjected to hatred and intimidation, I have to wonder how many of these acts (which thus far have been acts of vandalism and the intentional or unintentional creation of offensive displays, and not of violence) are the acts of actual haters and how many of them are the acts of copycats who don’t hate nearly as much as they just get a thrill from stirring shit up.

I can see male students who are young, dumb and full of cum thinking that it’s great entertainment to put a swastika on something, or to put a mock Ku Klux Klan hood on display, and then watch the ensuing reaction.

Stupid, yes. Racist/white supremacist? Not necessarily, not if the perpetrators aren’t actually racist/white supremacist.

Things not intended as racist or white supremacist can be interpreted that way, too.

For instance, The Associated Press reports that at UC San Diego recently, a noose was found dangling from a library bookshelf and that

UC San Diego campus police said they had completed their investigation into the noose incident and turned their results over to the city attorney on Tuesday for possible hate crime charges.

One of the students responsible for the noose apologized to the university community in an anonymous letter published Monday in the campus newspaper. She said the noose was formed while she and friends were playing around with a piece of rope and had no meaning as a lynching symbol.

The student said she is not black, but is a minority.

The student’s story is plausible, but the noose put the campus into an uproar nontheless. So think of what a display that is meant to stir people up can do.

Everyone needs to take a deep breath and act rationally, not emotionally. WWOD? (That’s “What Would Obama Do?”) He would be as cool as a cucumber high on weed. He wouldn’t freak out.

Actual racists and white supremacists shown to have violated laws against hate speech and hate crimes should be prosecuted. Dumbfucks who thought that it sure would be funny to stir up shit by making it appear as though their handiwork were the handiwork of an actual hater should be prosecuted under the appropriate criminal law, such as vandalism or disorderly conduct or disturbing the peace.

And again, we need to calm the fuck down.

There are crazies out there who feed on our frenzy, and if we don’t feed them, they’ll just go away.

Mitt Mystique wins again in Mass. in wake-up call for complacent Dems

 

Associated Press photo 

Repugnican Massachusetts state  Sen.  Scott Brown celebrates his come-from-behind win of the late Ted Kennedy’s U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts today. With him is Repugnican former Massachussetts Gov. Mitt Romney. Can you tell which one is which? (Neither can I…) 

“In an epic upset in liberal Massachusetts,” The Associated Press breathtakingly reports right now, “Republican Scott Brown rode a wave of voter anger to defeat Democrat Martha Coakley in a U.S. Senate election [today] that left President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul in doubt and marred the end of his first year in office.” 

Oh, please. 

“Epic”? 

Embarrassing to the Democratic Party, to be sure, but “epic”? 

Look: According to the accounts that I’ve read, Democratic candidate Martha Coakley, Massachusett’s attorney general, sat on her ass — er, laurels — while her Repugnican challenger Scott Brown actually campaigned. It widely has been reported that he even campaigned across the state in his pickup truck, apparently to make the voters of Massachusetts think that he is one of them.  

Wikipedia notes that Brown is an attorney who is married to a local TV reporter and that the couple own “a 3,000-square-foot primary home [in Wrentham, Mass.], a second home in Rye, New Hampshire, three small rental units in Boston, and a timeshare on the Caribbean island of Aruba.” 

So yes, Scott Brown is just like you — if you’re an attorney, if you’re married to a local TV reporter, and if you are loaded. (And if your pubes have appeared in a national magazine…)

Brown “rode a wave of voter anger”? Maybe. Or maybe he just lied — er, campaigned — harder than did his opponent. (Which is what the consensus of the news accounts has been.) 

Further to pick on The Associated Press’ overblown lead paragraph, when did the Democrats ever have a solid, filibuster-proof 60-vote majority? There always have been those problematic senators wanting to have their asses licked because they threatened to withhold their vote among the 60 if their demands weren’t met. 

The “public option” died some time ago, did it not? “Barack Obama’s health care overhaul” — “Obamacare,” as the wingnuts love to call it — was in doubt long before today’s election in Massachusetts. 

And how can you “mar” the end of a new president’s first year that was lackluster at best anyway? 

I don’t see that much has changed as a result of the election in Massachusetts today. I don’t see some automatic Repugnican resurgence. 

It’s true that we live in the United States of Amnesia, and that after a group of stupid white guys just ran the nation into the ditch after their eight long nightmarish years of unelected rule, the voters in Massachusetts apparently thought that it was a swell idea to put another stupid white guy in charge of things. 

But, I surmise, even if we can extrapolate voter sentiment in Massachusetts to voter sentiment nationwide, that would be because voters have unrealistic expectations as to how long it takes to turn the Titanic back around. 

George W. Bush and crew didn’t get us into our predicament in just one year; it is unrealistic to expect Team Obama to get us out of it in just one year. 

But hey, Scott Brown is hot! In fact, in 1982, he was a centerfold for Cosmopolitan: 

 

Nice treasure trail there, Scott! (But it looks like there was some manscaping going on there, and, as I recently noted, I hate that.)

Brown still looks edible — here he is gloating some more today: 

 

Associated Press photo 

– and apparently he has a bit of that Mitt Romney thing going on; apparently, your soul can be as black as pitch, but if you look good, the voters of Massachusetts will give you their vote. (Call it the Mitt Mystique, I guess…) 

I see nothing but good coming from Brown’s win. 

The Democrats have been way too fucking complacent. They needed this wake-up call. 

But an “epic” loss for the already shaky Democrats it ain’t. Per The Associated Press, Brown won today with only 52 percent of the vote to Coakley’s 47 percent, with 97 percent of the state’s precincts reporting. That’s not an “epic” landslide. It was a close election. 

And U.S. Sen. Brown will be up for re-election in only three years, as that’s when the six-year term for the U.S. Senate seat that he won today ends.  

Wake up and get to work, Democrats. 

Stop taking votes for granted, even in places like Kennedyland, and don’t let the voters be fooled by more rich Repugnican former centerfolds who successfully bamboozle the voters into thinking that they’re just one of them.

Dems finally have some (‘ping-pong’) balls? And Howard Dean for 2012?

Yahoo! News reports today:

Now that the House and Senate have both passed separate health care reform bills, the legislative process shifts to ironing out the differences. This typically involves having a formal conference committee containing members of both the House and the Senate. The goal is to reconcile the two bills, creating a final bill that both chambers will vote on.

In a surprise turn, according to Jonathan Cohn of the New Republic, Democrats intend to employ an obscure tactic, informally known as “ping-pong,” to shut Republicans out of the final negotiations and speed the bills toward completion.

In “ping-pong” the legislation is bounced back and forth between the House and the Senate, controlled by just the Democratic leadership in each chamber and the White House, until a final agreement can be reached.

A game of “ping-pong” sounds great to me. Under the eight long nightmarish years of the unelected Bush regime, the majority Repugnicans in the House and Senate routinely shut the minority Democrats out of the legislative process.

Fuck the Repugnicans, and if the Democrats give the Repugnicans a nasty taste of their own medicine, then hallefuckinglujah!

In November 2008, a majority of Americans voted for Barack Obama and his promise of change; they didn’t vote for Repugnican obstructionism and the Repugnican agenda of putting the plutocrats’ agenda ahead of the American people’s agenda.

Fuck “bipartisanship.” The Democrats should go full steam ahead while they can.

—

I’m happy to see some buzz about former Democratic presidential candidate and former Democratic Party head Howard Dean maybe seeking the 2016 — or even the 2012 — Democratic presidential nomination.

Although yeah, it’s unlikely that Dean would challenge Obama for his second term, what poetic justice that would be if Dean did so — if between now and then Obama doesn’t deliver upon all of that hope and change that he promised us.

Thus far, it looks as though Obama punk’d us, that we’re no better off under him than we would have been under his rival Billary Clinton, and some competition from an actual (that is, progressive and populist) Democrat would do the smug, too-comfortable Obama some good.

If Obama doesn’t turn it around, he won’t get my vote in 2012 (I’m about 75 percent sure that he’ll run for re-election, by the way), and should he actually have a viable challenger in 2012 who is a real Democrat, I’ll throw my support to his challenger.

Health care reform is not the new black

Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is taking flak for having said, on the Senate floor, of the Repugnicans’ obstructionism in expanding health care for all Americans, not just for those who can afford to pay for for-profit health care (a.k.a. wealth care): “You think you’ve heard these same excuses before? You’re right. In this country there were those who dug in their heels and said, ‘Slow down, it’s too early. Let’s wait. Things aren’t bad enough’ — about slavery.”

Well, it’s absolutely true that the Repugnicans are all about slowing down progress. Anything and everything that has benefitted someone at the expense, literal or figurative, real or perceived, of the stupid rich white man, the Repugnicans have fought tooth and nail.

But comparing the Repugnicans’ obstructionism on health care reform to their obstructionism on equal civil and human rights for non-whites is a strange comparison, unless you want to get into detail, such as how most Americans are wage slaves for rich white masters who don’t want their wage slaves to have even adequate health care and who want to profit obscenely even from their wage slaves’ illnesses and medical problems.

Gay, not health care reform, is the new black, and has been for some time now. It was anti-equal-civil-and-human-rights-for-non-heterosexuals ballot measures that brought the wingnuts to the polls in 2004 and that continue to bring them to the polls today.

The wingnuts, most of whom claim to be followers of infamous hater Jesus Christ, have to hate someone, and while they hate blacks, they can’t be overtly racist these days, so they use code for “nigger,” such as by asserting that President Barack Obama is a Muslim, a socialist and/or a citizen of Kenya, not of the United States. (Again, this otherness is just a substitute for the otherness of “nigger.”)

The wingnuts still can openly hate non-heterosexuals, however. While virtually no one would have a KKK bumper sticker on his or her car, and few would attend a public KKK rally, you see these homophobes at public anti-gay rallies with their signs (often with their children in tow) and you see their hateful anti-gay bumper stickers on their cars, because it’s still OK to openly hate on non-heterosexuals.

Because, again, gay is the new black.

And while Harry Reid criticizes the Repugnicans for proclaiming on health care reform, “Slow down, it’s too early. Let’s wait,” that’s exactly what many if not most of the Democrats are telling us non-heterosexuals where it comes to equal human and civil rights for us: Slow down. It’s too early. Let’s wait.

Did I say that gay is the new black?