Team Obama mostly ignores issues, pushes utterly uninspiring money race

Wow. Team Obama isn’t even bothering to make false promises anymore. It has become entirely about the dash for cash.

On June 24 I received a fundraising e-mail from Stephanie Cutter, Obama’s “deputy campaign manager,” titled, “We’re getting outspent‏.”

“For the first time in modern American history, the incumbent (that’s us) will get outspent in a re-election campaign — by some estimates as much as 3-to-1,” Cutter whines in the e-mail, asking for a donation of $25 or more.

(Um, why does Cutter have to remind us that Barack Obama is the incumbent? Because we’re too fucking stupid to know what the word “incumbent” means or because where actual progress is concerned, Obama has been so fucking invisible that we need to be reminded that he occupies the White House? Or maybe some combination of both?)

Two days later, on June 26, I received an e-mail supposedly from the Big O himself. “I will be outspent‏” is the title of the e-mail supposedly from Barack.

“I will be the first president in modern history to be outspent in his re-election campaign, if things continue as they have so far,” he proclaims, asking for a donation of $25 or more.

In the e-mail Obama attacks Repugnican Tea Party presidential candidate Mittens Romney for Mittens’ fundraising, even though Obama broke all previous U.S. presidential fundraising records in 2008.

“I’ve got other responsibilities I’m attending to [other than fundraising],” Obama proclaims in his June 26 fundraising e-mail, which is an interesting choice of words, because when he was asked where the fuck he was when the labor movement was fighting for its life in Wisconsin, he replied, “I have a lot of responsibilities.”

The president of the United States of America has so many responsibilities, you see, that he cannot be bothered to actually do anything other than to hold the title of president of the United States of America. (And to fund-raise in order to keep that title.)

Fuck, sure, fine, let’s say, for argument’s sake, that the man is busy – but the battle in Wisconsin went on for well more than a year, from the time of the occupation of Wisconsin’s capital by angry throngs of the pro-working-class in early 2011 all the way through the Wisconsin gubernatorial recall election of earlier this month.

Obama, as busy as he might be, wasn’t so fucking busy that he couldn’t have done a hell of a lot more in Wisconsin than he did (which was next to fucking nothing).

Obama didn’t do anything in regards to Wisconsin because he just doesn’t give a flying fuck about the labor movement and the working class (except for their votes and their campaign contributions, of course) and/or because he is so beholden to his corporate sugar daddies that he was too terrified to actually stand up in any meaningful, effective way for the working class and the labor movement.*

Anyway, the fundraising e-mails from Team Obama continue. On June 27 I received an e-mail titled “Get onboard” from Julianna Smoot, yet another Obama “deputy campaign manager.” In this e-mail she proclaims, “We know the other side is going to have more money in this race. President Obama will be the first incumbent in modern history to be outspent.” In the e-mail she asks for “$25 or whatever you can” give.

On June 27 I received, at my other e-mail address, yet another e-mail from Smoot, this one titled, “If we’re drastically outspent.” It says, in part:

If we’re drastically outspent in this election, there’s a very good chance we will lose to Mitt Romney.

This is a distinct possibility. The financial landscape in this race has changed over the last few weeks.

What concerns me is the Obama supporters I’ve encountered who don’t understand that this is what we’re facing.

The fundraising deadline this week is a test: Are we going to allow the other side to dominate us, or are we going to prove that elections are decided by everyday Americans pitching in what they can?

In this e-mail, Smoot asks for (“only”) “$10 or more.”

Yesterday I received a fundraising e-mail supposedly from Vice President Joe Biden in which he proclaims:

Tomorrow is the biggest fundraising deadline of this election so far. Romney and the Republicans may outraise us again — you can bet they’ll  have a whole slew of special interests who want to see Romney make good on his promise to repeal Obamacare on Day One. …

Unsurprisingly, in the e-mail Joe also asks for a donation of $25 or more.

Today I received yet another fundraising e-mail supposedly from Obama himself, this one titled, “This is important.” It reads, in full:

Robert –

Today is one of the most important fundraising deadlines of this campaign so far.

We might not outraise Mitt Romney.

But I am determined to keep the margin close enough that we can win this election the right way.

To do that I need your help today.

Please donate $25 or more before tonight’s deadline:

https://donate.barackobama.com/Tonight

The stakes in this election are real. Thanks for all your support so far.

Good week.

Barack

These people are nothing if not on the same talking-points memo: Barack Obama might be the first incumbent president to be outspent in his re-election bid in modern history, so give $25 or more today!

What is most disturbing about these e-mails from Team Obama is that while we might get a throwaway line such as “The stakes in this election are real,” there is no mention in these fundraising e-mails of what the stakes actually are, no mention of the working class, the middle class, the struggling. No mention of how our perpetual warfare for the war profiteers and for Big Oil in the Middle East has destroyed the middle class here at home (because, of course, the drone- and assassination-loving Obama has only perpetrated such perpetual warfare); no mention of the beyond-ridiculous income gap between the richest and the rest of us (which persists in no small part because Obama puts Wall Street weasels in charge of his fiscal policy); no mention of the Homo-sapiens-threatening environmental catastrophe that we face; no mention of the persecution at the hands of fascistic wingnuts that women and minority groups, such as “illegals” and other non-whites and non-heterosexual and non-gender-conforming individuals, still experience today in the so-called “land of the free” that values “liberty and justice for all.”

Nope.

All!

That!

Matters!

Is!

That!

Barack!

Obama!

Is!

Not!

Outspent!

By!

Mitt!

Romney!!!!!

The focus on fundraising was bad enough when John Kerry ran for president in 2004.

I remember that when my brother and I organized Meetups for Kerry’s campaign here in Sacramento (quite independently from the actual Kerry campaign), when Kerry was still an underdog, the attendees mostly wanted to talk about the issues that were important to them.

But after it was clear that Kerry, who came back from the dead like Lazarus, was going to win the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination, a self-serving Democratic Party hack, who had never attended any of the previous Kerry Meetups, wholly hijacked the Meetups and made them into Democratic Party presidential fundraising events. Gone were the discussions of issues, and all that she did was ask the attendees to give money.

It was because of that deeply negative experience that I was not active in Obama’s 2008 campaign at all, except (stupidly, in retrospect) to give him at least a few hundred dollars (primarily to knock Billary Clinton out of the primary race) and (stupidly, in retrospect) to vote for him.** (And of course I blogged in support of Obama defeating first Billary and then John McCainosaurus and Sarah Palin, and I did talk him up with friends, family and associates, for whatever sway I might have over anyone else’s vote.)

This time around, though, I have been unable to give Obama a fucking penny, I could not in good conscience tell anyone else that he or she should support Obama’s re-election (even by just casting a vote for him), and in November I plan to vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein for president (Obama’s e-mail remark, “Thanks for all your support so far” notwithstanding…).

I don’t give a flying fuck whether or not Barack Obama is outspent by Mittens Romney, because I don’t see what I got in return for the at-least-few-hundred dollars that I gave Obama the first fucking time.

(I already hear the Obamabots’ chorus, so let me respond: “Obamacare,” Obama’s “signature” “achievement,” even assuming that it’s a good thing, won’t/wouldn’t kick in until 2014. Giving Obama credit now for having turned around the healthcare mess is as stupidly premature as was was giving Obama the Nobel Fucking Peace Prize in 2009. [You'll agree with me when the drones are attacking you...])

On the issues nearest and dearest me — such as the preservation of the working class and the labor movement and the reversal of beyond-ridiculous income inequality; stopping the corporate war machine that is only sucking this nation dry in the holy names of “national security” and “national defense”; and the expansion of equal rights for non-heterosexual and non-gender-conforming individuals — Barack Obama has been a dismal failure, maintaining the steadily decaying status quo at best.

“Hope” and “change” are what Obama promised. What he has delivered is more of the same.

I still expect him to win re-election, however. I expect him to garner no more than around 51 or 52 percent of the popular vote in November, but a win is a win. (Indeed, George W. Bush didn’t garner even a full 48.0 percent of the popular vote in 2000, which showed us that if one has the right-wing U.S. Surpreme Court on his side, actually, a loss isn’t always a loss, and Bush garnered only 50.7 percent of the popular vote in 2004, while in 2008 Obama garnered 52.9 percent of the vote, which is 2.2 percent better than Gee Dubya Bush ever did.)

The fact that Americans are fairly evenly split between Obama and Romney — most recent nationwide polls show that both of them are at 40-something percent each, with Obama usually no more than a few percentage points ahead of Romney – is, I think, evidence of the fact that the pro-corporate Democratic Party and the pro-corporate Repugnican Tea Party are so similar to each other (I think of them as the Coke Party and the Pepsi Party) that a good chunk of Americans see no huge difference between the two.

Regardless of which party occupies the White House, the rich get richer and the rest of us get poorer, and the United States of America continues its decline into collapse. A “Democratic” president might slow down that slide a little bit, but the downward slide continues nonetheless.

So: All other things being more or less equal, Presidential Election 2012 will come down to, I think, which candidate is considered by more voters to be more likeable.

Obama, despite his abject failure to use the office of the presidency to benefit the most number of Americans, is considered by most Americans to be more likeable than is the weird-ass Mittens Romney, whose status as both a multi-millionaire and a Mormon*** makes him alien to most of us, because most of us are neither a multi-millionaire nor a Mormon.

Money does not mean everything in an election, which 2010 California gubernatorial candidate Nutmeg Whitman, a billionaire and a long-time personal buddy of Mittens who ran on the Repugnican Tea Party ticket, discovered when she outspent her Democratic opponent Jerry Brown.

Nutmeg spent more than $140 million of her own money in the gubernatorial race, breaking all records for a self-financed political campaign for any elected office in American history. Despite that fact, on Election Day Brown beat her soundly, 53.8 percent to 40.9 percent.

True, in October 2010 California’s voter registration was 44.1 percent Democratic to 30.1 percent Repugnican, which gave Brown a decided edge, but after all of the votes were counted, Nutmeg still trailed Brown by double digits even after she had smashed all previous self-financed-campaign-spending records.

It wasn’t just California’s voter registration statistics that did Nutmeg in. Repugnican Arnold “Baby Daddy” Schwarzenegger, after all, still won California’s 2003 gubernatorial recall election even though at the time the state’s voter registration was 43.7 percent Democratic to 35.3 percent Repugnican.

Baby Daddy’s popularity, his status as a testosterone-movie star and his perceived status as a real he-man, and the perception of the then-incumbent Democratic Gov. Gray Davis as a weakling, overcame the difference in voter registration.

After all, many if not even most voters wanted to be like Schwarzenegger — the way that they perceived him to be, anyway.

Similarly, more of the state’s voters in November 2010 wanted to be like Jerry Brown (who still more or less is considered to be a cool cat here in California, for his age, anyway) than wanted to be like the weird-ass, overprivileged Nutmeg Whitman, whose status as a billionaire CEO whose money gets her (almost…) anything that she wants and with a years-long housekeeper whom she apparently cold-heartedly fired for being an “illegal” because she thought that it would hurt her gubernatorial campaign to have an “illegal” as her housekeeper, were things that the majority of California’s voters, especially in our protractedly shitty economy, could not and still cannot identify with and did not and still do not wish to emulate, any more than the majority of the nation’s voters can identify with or wish to emulate Mittens’ purchasing an elevator for his cars or his making jokes about factory workers being laid off (ha ha ha!).

That, I think, is what Team Obama should be focusing on if Barack Obama wants to win re-election: Not on the fucking money race, which indeed, Obama might not be able to win this time, but on how much Mittens isn’t just like the rest of us.

Mittens is an overprivileged, out-of-touch freak who should not be put in the Oval Office, and while it’s too bad that Team Obama can’t run on Obama’s accomplishments, since he hasn’t found it necessary to even partially deliver on his 2008 campaign promises until his fourth fucking year in office, at least Team Obama has Mormon multi-millionaire Mittens’ freakishness and Obama’s “likeability,” which, if exploited enough, should get Obama his second term, even if he only ekes by.

–

*Obama said of the battle in Wisconsin that eventually saw Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett lose to Repugnican Tea Party Gov. Scott Walker in the June 5 gubernatorial recall election:

“My goal has always been if we can bring parties together, there are ways that we can manage through tough fiscal decisions whether on the federal level or at the state level, but make sure that everybody is a part of it and everybody is doing their fair share, nobody is carrying the entire burden of sacrifice. I think that’s what the American people are looking for – balanced approaches that take everybody’s interests into account.”

Jesus Fucking Christ, in year four of his woefully unremarkable, disappointing first term, Obama still is talking about holding hands and singing “Kumbaya” with the Repugnican Tea Party traitors.

Um, the Repugnican Tea Party traitors want to annihilate what little is left of our labor unions. That is their goal. Their goal is not to “make sure that … everybody is doing their [sic] fair share, [that] nobody is carrying the entire burden of sacrifice.” Their goal is to make damn sure that the haves get even more and that the have-nots get even less.

You cannot take a “balanced approach” with an insane opponent who has no interest whatsofuckingever himself in taking a “balanced approach.” All that you can do with such an opponent is to crush him. You don’t negotiate with terrorists.

**Even then, I was not sure, until I actually completed my ballot, whether I was going to vote for Obama or vote for independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader. If I could do it over again, I would have voted for Ralph Nader again, as I did in 2000.

***No, Mittens’ Mormonism certainly isn’t off limits, just as Obama’s being called a “Muslim” very fucking apparently was not off-limits for the Repugnican Tea Party traitors. Fuck. Obama isn’t a Muslim, but Mittens is a fucking Mormon, and I’m hard pressed to say which group of patriarchal, misognyist, homophobic theofascists I’d prefer to have in charge of the White House: the cabal of stupid old evil men in Salt Lake City or the fucking Taliban.

Obama makes it easy to be Green

Updated below

Unlike both Barack Obama and Mittens Romney, a Green Party president wouldn’t be just a puppet of the corporations.

I yet to have been inspired to give Barack Obama’s re-election campaign a single fucking penny, and I already have cast my (mail-in) vote for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein for California’s June 5 presidential primary election.

I am not sure which is worse: to have had the unelected Bush regime use opposition to same-sex marriage to “win” “re”-election in 2004, or to have the (at-least-actually-duly-elected) Obama administration use support of same-sex marriage to win re-election.

In both cases, we of the “LGBT” “community” are only being used by the “leaders” of the Coke Party and the Pepsi Party in order to raise million$ and in order to pander for votes.

The Obama campaign earlier this month released an incredibly pandering five-minute re-election campaign video in which the Obamanistas act as though all throughout his first term Obama has been fighting fiercely for the LGBT community when, in fact, his fairly recent “breakthrough” announcement that he finally has “evolved” and now supports same-sex marriage — even though he had proclaimed that position way back in 1996 in Chicago, and even though he still maintains that each state should be allowed to decide the issue, meaning that we will continue to have gross inequality and unfairness and injustice throughout the nation – came quite late in his first term.

Yes, the demise of “don’t ask, don’t tell” is a good thing, but let us recall that it was “Democrat” Bill Clinton who gave us “don’t ask, don’t tell” in the first fucking place, as well as DOMA (the so-called Defense of Marriage Act, which the Obama administration does not defend in court, but which remains the law of the land).

The Dems are our friends? They enact awful, discriminatory, unlawful/unconstitutional legislation, and then want to take credit and want praise for reversing it? Really? Really?

And “don’t ask, don’t tell” doesn’t mean a whole lot to me, someone who doesn’t see why anyone of any sexual orientation would aid and abet the criminal U.S. military in the first place, someone who recognizes clearly what a fucking racket the U.S. military is — it’s not about actual “defense” or “national security” nearly as much as it is about funneling the contents of the U.S. Treasury (billions and billions and billions of our tax dollars) to the pockets of the traitors who comprise the military-industrial-corporate complex. (Well, the nation’s treasury is empty these days, so what they’re doing is making sure that those of us who have to follow them inherit a mountain of national debt.)

The members of the U.S. military these days primarily serve as the thugs for the corporations to exploit other nations’ natural resources — thugs that we, the taxpayers, pay for, even though it’s the plutocrats, and not we, the people, who get the lion’s share of the spoils of the wars that we, the people, pay for.

(The Vietraq War, for instance: Saddam Hussein’s real crime was not that he tyrannized his people, but that he nationalized Iraq’s oil fields. Now that the people of Iraq have been “liberated,” so have the nation’s oil fields — for Big Oil. No one in Iraq died for freedom or for democracy or for puppies or for kittens or for butterflies or for marshmallowy goodness. No, all of them died primarily for the profiteering of Big Oil and the profiteering of the military-industrial-corporate complex, such as Dick Cheney’s war-profiteering Halliburton, which couldn’t profiteer without a war, so the unelected BushCheneyCorp gave it a war from which to profiteer, using 9/11 as a pretext, much as how the members of the Nazi Party had used the Reichstag fire as a pretext to ram their right-wing agenda down their fellow countrymen’s throats. Happy fucking Memorial Day, by the way, and it’s so awfully nice to know that we of the “LGBT” “community” now are “free” to be cannon fodder in the plutocrats’ war profiteering that we call “national security” and “national defense” and the like.)

I suppose that I digress, but I like — well, I love – what Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi had to say earlier this month about Presidential Race 2012:

…But this campaign, relatively speaking, will not be fierce or hotly contested. Instead it’ll be disappointing, embarrassing, and over very quickly, like a hand job in a Bangkok bathhouse. And everybody knows it. It’s just impossible to take Mitt Romney seriously as a presidential candidate. …

This is exactly the John Kerry scenario. Kerry was never going to win, either, and everyone pretty much knew that, too. [No, actually, I, for one, thought that Kerry had a pretty good chance, having recognized that an incumbent president usually is difficult to unseat, and I still suspect that Kerry actually would have won the pivotal state of Ohio, and thus the White House, had the election in Ohio not been overseen by the Katherine-Harris-like Kenneth Blackwell.] But at least in the Kerry-Bush race there was a tremendous national debate over the Iraq war, which many people (incorrectly, probably) thought might end more quickly if a Democrat was elected.

This year, it’s not like that. Obviously Republican voters do hate Obama and genuinely believe he’s created a brutally repressive socialist paradigm with his health care law, among other things. But Romney was a pioneer of health care laws, and there will be dampened enthusiasm on the Republican side for putting him in office. [No, they hate Barack Hussein Obama primarily because he's black. The “Muslim" and “socialist" charges are just code words for “nigger," which you can't utter in the public domain anymore without repercussions. Let's be real about that fact.]

Meanwhile, Obama has turned out to represent continuity with the Bush administration on a range of key issues, from torture to rendition to economic deregulation. Obama is doing things with extralegal drone strikes that would have liberals marching in the streets if they’d been done by Bush. [Absolutely.]

In other words, Obama versus [John] McCain actually felt like a clash of ideological opposites. But Obama and Romney feels like a contest between two calculating centrists, fighting for the right to serve as figurehead atop a bloated state apparatus that will operate according to the same demented imperial logic irrespective of who wins the White House. [Emphasis of that money shot is mine, although the money shot of Taibbi's piece actually might be his hilarious but fairly accurate assertion that this year's presidential election “will be disappointing, embarrassing, and over very quickly, like a hand job in a Bangkok bathhouse."]

George Bush’s reign highlighted the enormous power of the individual president to drive policy, which made the elections involving him compelling contests; Obama’s first term has highlighted the timeless power of the intractable bureaucracy underneath the president, which is kind of a bummer, when you think about it. …

That, to me, is the main reason that I’m not at all excited about this cycle’s presidential race: Both Obama and Romney indeed are calculating centrists. But since the Repugnican Tea Party has succeeded in moving what used to be the center to the right, that makes both Obama and Romney, in my book, center-right candidates. Romney is a bit more to the right than is Obama, but not enough to see the two as much more different from each other than are Pepsi and Coke. The tiny plutocratic minority will continue to do well while the rest of us, the vast majority of Americans, will continue to suffer, regardless of which calculating centrist wins in November.

Obama panders to the left now and then — when he or his spokesweasels aren’t calling us such things as “sanctimonious” members of the “professional left” — but it’s his actions, or lack thereof, that I pay attention to, not his words, especially after his words “hope” and “change” fizzled specfuckingtacularly.

Speaking of Obama’s lack of actions, on June 5, not only will California hold its presidential primary, which will help Mittens finally get the 1,144 delegates that he needs to be the Repugnican Tea Party’s official presidential candidate (he has 1,084 delegates right now, according to Politico), but Wisconsin will hold its gubernatorial recall election.

Unfortunately, as I type this sentence, intrade.com puts Repugnican Tea Party Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s chances of surviving the June 5 recall election at 92.6 percent.*

That’s in no small part because Barack Obama and the national Democratic Party have been conspicuously missing in fucking action where the fight for the right to collectively bargain in Wisconsin has been concerned. Wisconsinites have been on their own since early 2011, after Walker took office and gave tax breaks to the state’s plutocrats and announced that it was the state’s public-sector labor unions that were the cause of the state’s fiscal problems.

In November 2007 at a campaign rally in South Carolina, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama said this: “And understand this: If American workers are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain when I’m in the White House, I’ll put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself; I will walk on that picket line with you as president of the United States of America, because workers deserve to know that somebody is standing in their corner.” (Here is video of that promise.)

Yet Obama has yet to appear once in Wisconsin to stand up for the Repugnican-Tea-Party-beseiged members of the working class and the middle class there. The national Democratic Party has thrown some money Wisconsin’s way at the very last fucking minute, too late to make much of a difference, if any difference at all (Scott Walker’s corporate sugar daddies have thrown many more millions his way than the Dems in Wisconsin have had available to them), but now, I suppose, the national Dem Party can say, and will say — well, actually, it has said – that it did something in Wisconsin, even though this has been just a repeat of the Democratic cowardice and incompetence and sluggardry that we have seen before.**

I remember the debacle that was California’s 2003 gubernatorial recall election all too well: The state’s Dem Party was in incredibly stupid denial that its uber-uncharismatic incumbent governor, Gray Davis, might actually lose the Repugnican-orchestrated recall election, which more than anything else was just a do-over of the 2002 gubernatorial election that the Repugnicans had lost, only this time they would front as their candidate against Gray Davis testosterone-movie-star Arnold “Baby Daddy (We Know Now)” Schwarzenegger. Because of their denial, the state’s Dem Party elites staunchly refused to rally around another Democratic candidate to run against Baby Daddy Schwarzenegger. To do so, the Dem elites rationalized, would be to admit Davis’ impending defeat.

Then-Democratic Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, apparently recognizing that Davis indeed might lose, ran against Schwarzenegger in the recall election, but he did so on his own, without the support of the state party. Had the state party supported Bustamante, or another viable Democratic candidate, he or she might have won the recall election.

It’s incredibly fucking difficult to support a party that absofuckinglutely refuses, repeatedly, to fucking fight for you in return for your support.

Should Scott Walker survive his June 5 recall election, I will chalk that up in no small part to the fact that Barack Obama utterly reneged on his 2007 promise to “put on a comfortable pair of shoes” and join “American workers [who] are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain” — “because workers deserve to know that somebody is standing in their corner.”

We workers do deserve to know that somebody is standing in our corner, but nobody fucking is — at least no one who actually can win the White House in November.

However, I’d much rather vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein again in November, even though of course she can’t win the White House, than to vote again for Barack Obama, to continue to be punk’d by the party that claims that it loves me so much — but that can’t show me such “love” unless it can then use me in its fundraising efforts immediately thereafter.

P.S. Disclaimer: I have been registered with both the Green Party and with the Democratic Party. Currently I am registered with the Green Party, in large part because I can’t stomach the Democrats’ pseudo-progressivism, their unwillingness to fight the Repugnican Tea Party traitors, and the party’s ever-increasing move to the right. Background:

In 2000 I voted for Green Party candidate Ralph Nader for president because he was the candidate whose platform most closely matched my own beliefs and values, and because it was obvious that Democrat Al Gore was going to win all of California’s electoral votes anyway (and, of course, he did).

In 2004 I supported and voted for Democrat John Kerry, primarily because preventing a second term by the unelected Bush regime was my No. 1 priority, and Kerry early on struck me as the strongest candidate to put up against Bush. (Of course, the spineless, incompetent Dems didn’t let me down; when it was announced that Kerry had “lost” the pivotal state of Ohio, Kerry couldn’t concede fast enough, and shortly after the election, word came out that Kerry had not spent millions of dollars that he’d collected, millions that might have made a difference in the outcome of the election.)

In 2008 I still was not sure, as I entered my polling place, whether I would vote for Barack Obama or whether I would vote for Ralph Nader again. I knew that Obama would win all of California’s electoral votes anyway, just as it was a foregone conclusion that Gore would win them in 2000 and that Kerry would win them in 2004. (Until we get rid of the Electoral College, millions of Americans’ votes for president won’t really matter at all.) At rather the last minute, I blackened the oval by Obama’s name.

That is a mistake that I won’t make again, unless, perhaps, by some miracle it actually looks like Mittens Romney might win California. (That, of course, will not happen.)

Update (Monday, May 28, 2012): Oops. I wrote above that Mittens should seal the deal on June 5. Actually, Mittens is expected to finally reach 1,144 delegates tomorrow, when Texas holds its presidential primary. If for some reason Mittens does not get enough of Texas’ 155 delegates — Reuters reports that he needs fewer than half of those to reach the magic 1,144 — then he would get the remaining delegates on June 5, when California and four other states hold their primaries. (The very last state in the presidential primary season is Utah, which doesn’t vote until June 26.)

–

*As I type this sentence, intrade.com gives Mittens Romney only a 38.7 percent chance of winning the White House and gives Obama a 57.4 percent chance of winning re-election, which seems about right to me, about 40 percent to 60 percent.

**While I have yet to give Obama another penny for his re-election – I gave him hundreds of dollars in 2008, primarily during the 2008 Democratic primary fight because I believed that as president he would be significantly more progressive than would Billary Clinton – I have given hundreds of dollars towards the recall elections in Wisconsin, because that, to me, is where the real fight has been, and because, as I noted, the Wisconsinites for the very most part have been on their own, having been abandoned by the Obama administration and the national Democratic Party.

Biden’s endorsement of same-sex marriage is not nearly enough

So Vice President Joe Biden today on “Meet the Press” said that he supports same-sex marriage.

When host David Gregory asked Biden, “You’re comfortable with same-sex marriage now?”, Biden replied: “Look, I am vice president of the United States of America. The president sets the policy. I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women, and heterosexual [men and women marrying] are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties. …”

That to me sure sounds like an endorsement of legalized same-sex marriage — full marriage equality for same-sex couples – in all 50 states, but the White House was quick to back-pedal and say that no, Biden actually still is “evolving” on the issue of same-sex marriage just as President Barack Obama is.

Whether Biden’s nationally televised endorsement of same-sex marriage is just a calculated political game of good cop-bad cop, or whether Biden was, at least in the Obama White House’s opinion, just shooting his mouth off again, I’m not sure, but in either case, I am not moved, perhaps especially in light of this fact:

MSNBC quotes a White House “aide” as having stated: “The vice president was saying what the president has said previously — that committed and loving same-sex couples deserve the same rights and protections enjoyed by all Americans, and that we oppose any effort to roll back those rights. That’s why we stopped defending the constitutionality of Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act in legal challenges and support legislation to repeal it.  Beyond that, the vice president was expressing that he too is evolving on the issue, after meeting so many committed couples and families in this country.”

Um, no, Biden did not say that “he too is evolving on the issue” of same-sex marriage. He said, “I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women, and heterosexual [men and women marrying] are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties.” He said “men marrying men” and “women marrying women.” He did not say, “Committed and loving same-sex couples deserve the same rights and protections enjoyed by all Americans.” He did not use such mealy-mouthed language that public-relations hacks love to employ, believing that they are word-magicians who are bamboozling all of us with their ingenius hocus-pocus. He was not talking about the separate-and-unequal, second-class, unconstitutional substitutions for marriage, such as civil unions and domestic partnerships. He was talking about same-sex marriage.

Obama’s pussy, trying-to-have-it-both-ways public political stance is that each state reserves the right to determine whether or not to institute legalized same-sex marriage, and he very apparently sees no problem with forcing non-heterosexual Americans to drink from different drinking fountains by offering them only cheap imitiations of marriage, such as domestic partnerships or civil unions, which he supports. Publicly, at least, he very apparently thinks that these unconstitutionally separate-and-unequal substitutions for marriage are A-OK. (He used to teach constitutional law, too. He truly must have sucked ass at that as much as he sucks ass at being president of the United States of America.)

This “states’ rights” “argument” is the fucking coward’s way out, and if President Abraham Lincoln had adhered to such cowardice as the “states’ rights” “argument,” slavery probably would have lasted a lot longer than it did. (Funny that Obama’s official kick-off of his 2008 presidential campaign in February 2007 had him mimicking Abraham Lincoln at the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Illinois:

Associated Press photo

Barack Obama is no fucking Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln had balls. Big balls.)

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not nearly enough that Joe Biden supports same-sex marriage. He’s just the vice president. I and millions of other non-heterosexual Americans are to hope for Barack Obama to die or to otherwise become incapacitated, so that President Biden can fight for our equal human and civil rights, since President Obama refuses to do so? Is that it? Is that the kind of change that we are to hope for?

No, fuck Barack Obama.

Nothing short of his full endorsement of same-sex marriage in all 50 states could induce me to give him my vote in November or to give him a fucking penny toward his re-election.

Obama also has been a dismal disappointment as far as labor rights are concerned. Early next month, Wisconsinites will decide in a recall election whether or not to allow Repugnican Tea Party Gov. Scott Walker to keep his job for his decision to try to destroy the state’s labor unions, a project that he apparently started immediately after his election in November 2009 (if not even beforehand).

(Walker claimed that the labor unions were making the state go broke, but he had had no problem giving the state’s plutocrats tax cuts. In bad economic times, you see, it’s the working class and the middle class who are to suffer even more — not the plutocratic elite, who, like on the Titanic, are the ones who get the lifeboats while the rest of us are to drown in the icy sea.)

In November 2007 at a campaign rally in South Carolina, Barack Obama said this: “And understand this: If American workers are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain when I’m in the White House, I’ll put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself; I will walk on that picket line with you as president of the United States of America, because workers deserve to know that somebody is standing in their corner.” (Here is video of that promise.)

Yet when Wisconsin became a battleground for the life of its labor unions in early 2010, when national media attention was focused on the state’s capital, where the fuck was President Barack Obama? He couldn’t find a comfortable pair of shoes? Despite his clear promise to stand up for — in person — “American workers [who] are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain,” Obama showed his face not once in Wisconsin. Not once.

How about the British Petroleum debacle? Obama sat on his hands as BP’s oil well in the Gulf of Mexico filled the gulf with crude oil for months in the summer of 2010, making it the largest marine oil spill ever. Clearly the corporate-ass-kissing Obama White House took a back seat to BP and to Big Oil in the environmental catastrophe.

Yet despite his colossal failures of leadership — and these are just three of them – the sweet-talking Barack Obama, who is as slick as the millions of barrels of crude oil that have filled the Gulf of Mexico, wants, even apparently expects, the money and the votes of gay men and lesbians (and other non-heterosexuals and non-gender-conforming Americans who want equal human and civil rights right now – none of this “evolving” bullshit), the money and the votes of the members of labor unions, and the money and the votes of environmentalists.

Barack Obama does not deserve this money or these votes. He makes promises and he breaks them. He asks you to put him or to keep him in power, yet once you do, he does not deliver for you, but tells you that in the future, in the future, in the future, he will use his public office for the public good.

You have absofuckinglutely no reason to believe that Barack Obama the sweet-talking and self-interested two-faced coward will be any more effective in a second term than he has been thus far. None.

(On a related note, when “Meet the Press’” Gregory asked Biden if the Obama administration would come out for same-sex marriage in a second term, Biden replied, “I don’t know the answer to that,” adding, “This is evolving.”)

You know, at least with Mittens Romney we would know what we were getting. The enemy clearly would be the enemy.

Which is worse:

Someone like Mittens, who at least is fairly up front about the fact that as president he wouldn’t lift a fucking finger to help non-heterosexuals achieve equal human and civil rights, that as president he would help further destroy what’s left of our labor unions and our middle class in order to further enrich the filthy fucking rich, and that as president of course he would side with Big Oil and other corporations over the environment – or — someone like Barack Obama, who explicitly or implicitly promises us progressives that he’s on our side, but then, once we’ve put him in office, fucks us over anyway?

And memo to Joe Biden: You also stated on “Meet the Press” today, “I think ‘Will & Grace’ probably did more to educate the American public than almost anything anybody has ever done so far.”

“Will & Grace,” Joe?

Really?

It’s a fucking sitcom, Joe. A fucking sitcom. One that ended six years ago this month.

That’s the best example that you can come up with to show how gay-friendly and how politically correctly accepting of non-heterosexuals that you are?

That’s like saying to a gay man, “I have a gay cousin in New York City. Maybe you know him!”

As well-intended as it might be, it’s better to say nothing at all than to reveal that you actually have no fucking clue about the historically oppressed minority group that you’re talking about.

Voters soundly reject the wingnut agenda

“Elections May Signal a Pause in Conservative Trend,” the Los Angeles Times reports of yesterday’s elections throughout the nation in an odd-numbered election year.

“May Signal a Pause”?

No, I think it’s fair to conclude that the political pendulum already has swung back to the left.

(Admittedly, though, we’re such a flip-flopping nation — thanks mostly to the “independent”/“swing” voters — that although Barack Obama’s re-election chances lately have been looking better and better, it’s not inconceivable that Mitt Romney just might be the next Flip-Flopper in Chief.)

In 2008, a left-wing wave enabled “Hopey-Changey” Obama to win “swing” states that Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry couldn’t win in 2004. The 2010 mid-term elections, by contrast, brought us Repugnican John “Cry Me a River” Boehner as the new speaker of the U.S. House and governorships that flipped from Democrats to Repugnicans, such as with Wisconsin’s Scott “Dead Man” Walker and Ohio’s union-buster in chief, John Kasich. An emboldened Repugnican Tea Party in 2010 also enacted unconstitutional and un-American legislation against those who commit the heinous crime of breathing while brown-skinned (a.k.a. “illegals”).

Yesterday, Ohio voters shot down Kasich’s union-busting legislation that was even more draconian than was Walker & Co.’s. (Walker & Co. at least had had the sense to exempt cops and firefighters, because the [mostly-white-]male-dominated professions are far more important than are the female-dominated professions, such as teaching and nursing, you see.)

Mississippi voters yesterday voted down a draconian anti-abortion measure (again: Mississippi); Mainers repealed a Repugnican Tea Party state law that would have ended the state’s long-standing same-day voter registration (and which was part of the Repugnican Tea Party’s nationwide campaign to suppress Democratic-leaning voters); and in what to me might be the greatest victory yesterday for the left, the architect of Arizona’s illegal (unconstitutional) and immoral anti-immigration legislation, Repugnican Tea Party state Sen. Russell Pearce, a stupid white man who until now has been the president of the state’s Senate, was recalled and replaced with a moderate Repugnican. The L.A. Times notes that it was Arizona’s “first recall election of a sitting lawmaker.”

(Disclosure: I donated money toward Pearce’s removal from office, even though I live in California. [Unfortunately, I was born and raised in Arizona.] And I did so gladly. [I also, late in the game, gave a donation to the campaign to overturn the Repugnican Tea Party's labor-busting legislation in Ohio.])

So: Even in a state that is as red as is Arizona, there was a consequence at the ballot box for the race-based hate campaign that Pearce and his ilk started, the campaign that literally cost the state dearly (because of the bad name that the Repugnican Tea Party racists gave the state throughout the world, making Arizona seen, correctly, as the South Africa of the U.S. Southwest – and the resultant boycotts of the state). Pearce’s head on a pike should serve as a warning sign to those who dare to follow in his pointy-white-hooded footsteps.

In Wisconsin, in reaction to Walker & Co.’s assault on public-sector labor unions, while Democrats were not able to wrest control of the state’s Senate from the Repugnican Tea Party, recall elections that were held in Wisconsin this past summer did cost two Repugnican Tea Party state senators their seats (and no Democratic lawmaker lost his or her seat in the state’s recall mania). The state’s Senate now is comprised of 17 Repugnican Tea Party members and 16 Democratic Party members.

I expect the Democrats to recapture the state’s Senate in the November 2012 elections — and I fully expect Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker to be recalled in 2012. (Wisconsinites can start the recall process against him in January 2012. I’ve given money toward that cause already, and I’m sure that I’ll give more, because the Repugnican Tea Party traitors need to continue pay the price for so stupidly and so treasonously having attacked the working class and the middle class.)

These off-year election victories – especially for labor (and thus for the middle class and the working class) and for those of us who despise the race-based persecution of brown-skinned “illegals” (and those incorrectly believed to be “illegals” because of the color of their skin) – bode ill for the Repugnican Tea Party brand in November 2012, as does Herman “Gropey-Feely” Cain’s ongoing crusade to soil the already soiled Repugnican Tea Party brand even further.

The cocky Repugnican Tea Partiers way overplayed their hand after their victories in the 2010 mid-term elections, and next year they’re going to continue to pay the price for their gross political miscalculations.

Repug Tea Party traitors down in Wisconsin

Reuters photo

Wisconsinites on March 12 celebrate the return to Madison of the state’s 14 Democratic state senators who had done their best to prevent Repugnican Tea Party traitors’ union-busting legislation from taking effect. The union-busting legislation that the Repugnican Tea Party traitors apparently illegally rammed through the state Legislature still remains in legal limbo, and today petition signatures to start the recall election process for one of the state’s Repugnican Tea Party senators who voted for the union-busting legislation were submitted.

There is so much that I could say, but this news story from The Associated Press today pretty much speaks for itself:

Madison, Wis. – A week ago, Wisconsin Republicans thought they’d won the fight over the state’s polarizing union-rights bill. They’d weathered massive protests, outfoxed Senate Democrats who fled the state and gotten around a restraining order blocking the law by having an obscure state agency publish it. They even started preparations to pull money from public workers’ paychecks.

But the victory was short-lived. A judge ruled [today] that the restraining order will stay in place for at least two months she while considers whether Republicans passed the law illegally. It was the second blow to Republicans in as many days after the same judge declared [yesterday] that the law hadn’t been properly published and [thus] wasn’t in effect as they claimed.

Republicans now must either wait for the case to wind its way through the courts or pass the law again to get around complaints it wasn’t done properly the first time. One GOP leader said [today] he didn’t see much point in that.

“We passed the law correctly, legally the first time,” Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald said in a statement. “Passing the law correctly and legally a second or third time wouldn’t change anything. It certainly wouldn’t stop another activist judge and (a) room full of lawyers from trying to start this merry-go-round all over again.”

[In Repugnican Tea Party traitor lingo, an “activist judge” is a judge who does not rule the way that the Repugnican Tea Party traitors want him or her to rule. (A judge who rules in the Repugnican Tea Party traitors’ favor of course is a great fucking judge.)]

The law would force public employees to pay more for their health care and pension benefits, which amounts to an 8-percent pay cut. It also would eliminate their ability to collectively bargain anything except wage increases no higher than inflation.

Republican Gov. Scott Walker has said the law is needed to help schools and local governments deal with cuts in state funding he expects to make to address an estimated $3.6 billion shortfall in the next two-year budget. His spokesman referred questions [today] to state Department of Administration officials, who declined to comment.

Democrats have said the bill is meant to weaken the public employee unions that have been some of their strongest campaign supporters. Its introduction in mid-February set off a month of protests that drew up to 85,000 people to the state Capitol and sent Senate Democrats scurrying to Illinois to block a vote in that chamber.

Republicans eventually got around the Democrats’ boycott by removing fiscal provisions from the bill so it could be passed with fewer senators present.

Dane County Circuit Judge Maryann Sumi has been considering a lawsuit that claims Republican lawmakers violated the state’s opening meetings law when they met to change the bill. The lawsuit filed by Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne says the state’s open meetings law requires 24 hours notice of a meeting but Republicans provided barely two. Republican legislative leaders say proper notice was given under Senate rules.

Sumi heard testimony [today] from people who said they heard about the meeting only minutes before it began. They said they arrived to find long lines at the Capitol’s entrances and by the time they reached the room where the meeting was held, police wouldn’t allow them in….

Sumi gave the attorneys until May 23 to make additional arguments, delaying a decision for nearly two months and possibly longer. Even when she does rule, one side or the other is likely to appeal in an attempt to get the case to the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The state has already appealed her restraining order to the high court, but it has not said whether it will hear the case and is under no deadline to do so.

Two other, separate lawsuits also have been filed, which could further drag out the matter.

Anger over the bill also has prompted recall efforts against 16 state senators, including eight from each party. [Today], Democrats announced they had collected enough signatures for a recall election against one of the Republicans. [Emphasis mine.]

Ah, The Associated Press saved the best for last. Yes, recall election proponents today were to have filed their recall election petition signatures against Repugnican Tea Party Wisconsin state Sen. Dan Kapanke, whom Daily Kos (via AlterNet) calls “the most vulnerable of all the eight Republican state senators” who are the targets of recall efforts in Wisconsin. Daily Kos notes that

Kapanke represents a district that [Barack] Obama won with 61 percent of the vote in 2008. Our Daily Kos/PPP poll shows him trailing a generic Democrat by a whopping 55 percent to 41 percent. An earlier MoveOn Survey USA poll showed Kapanke trailing a generic opponent by an even worse 57-percent-to-41-percent margin.

Kapanke is in a lot of trouble. He is also not alone. Last week, recall petition organizers against Republican state Sen. Randy Hopper announced they had enough signatures, too….

Hopper, a freshman who only won his seat by 163 votes, trails a generic Democrat 49 percent to 44 percent in our polling. In the MoveOn/Survey USA polling, he trails 54 percent to 43 percent. Both polls were taken before the scandal about Hopper’s mistress receiving a state job with a 35 percent raise exploded….

So the union-busting law in Wisconsin remains on hold, and the 33-member Wisconsin state Senate should return to a Democratic majority in the foreseeable future. (The Dems have to gain only three state Senate seats to get a majority of 17 to 16. While I have read about recall-vulnerable Repugnican Tea Party state senators, I have yet to read that any of the eight Democratic state senators who have been the targets of recall petitions actually are vulnerable.)

Why does Wisconsin matter? Why do I care? Why should you care?

Because Wisconsin was supposed to the be the first domino to topple in the treasonous Repugnican Tea Party’s war against the working class and the middle class. A victory for the Repugnican Tea Party traitors in Wisconsin would have emboldened the traitors elsewhere in the nation.

But rather than the quick, clear-cut victory against the working class and the middle class that Wisconsin Repugnican Tea Party Gov. Scott “Dead Man” Walker & Co. expected, they instead have met not only resistance by tens of thousands of citizens showing up at the state Capitol in Madison in protest for weeks, but all of them can expect themselves to be subjected to recall elections as soon as they can be.

Walker & Co. didn’t say anything about union busting when they campaigned because they knew that union busting wouldn’t fly at the ballot box. They had to shove their union-busting legislation through quickly and dirtily precisely because it’s against what the majority of Wisconsinites have wanted.

Now, they are paying the price, and not only has the Repugnican Tea Party experiment in Wisconsin failed, but it has stimulated the Democratic Party’s national base in a way that the Democrats couldn’t do themselves in the mid-term elections this past November, and 2012 is all over for the Repugnican Tea Party traitors except for the crying.

–

You can contribute to the recall election efforts in Wisconsin here. I have.

Plutocrats have declared class war

Wisconsin Repugnican Tea Party Gov. Scott Walker — brought to you by (and bought off by) the Billionaire Brothers – has claimed that his legislation that attempts to destroy Wisconsin’s public-sector labor unions isn’t about destroying Wisconsin’s public-sector labor unions.

(It’s simply and only about the state’s budget, he has claimed, even though the 20-minute recording of him believing that he’s speaking to one of his billionaire benefactors demonstrates that he’s a fucking liar whose word is worthless.)

Supposedly it’s not about union-busting, yet the Repugnican National Committee today put out a fundraising e-mail (yes, I’m on the enemy’s e-mail list) under the signature of the new RNC head Reince Priebus (a Richie Rich frat boy) with the subject line of “Fight Obama’s Union Bosses.”

The fundraising e-mail (which asks for as much as $2,012) reads:

Over the past week, Democrats and their Big Labor Union Bosses [you have to love the strategic capitalization there; why didn't they just use all caps?] have been subverting the democratic process, intimidating taxpayers and walking out on the job in order to secure generous taxpayer-funded benefits for themselves at a time when everyone else is cutting back. [Of course, the rich and the super-rich aren't cutting back. They always do just fine, regardless of the nation's economic situation.]

Classrooms have been left empty and Democrat [sic] lawmakers in Wisconsin and Indiana are literally running away from their responsibilities [they're not protecting their constituents or anything like that...] – fleeing their states instead of making the tough choices required to move our country forward. [They're not caving in to plutocratic pressure like good little peacenik-y liberals usually do, those assholes!]

Enough is enough. Now is the time to stop Barack Obama’s Union Bosses and to show your support for Republicans who are standing up for the taxpayers and middle class families. [Because clearly, the Repugnican Party has a history of helping the working and the middle class! Even though they fight for tax cuts for the rich and the super-rich and are engaged in a national union-busting campaign right now!] Robert, I’m counting on GOP grassroots leaders like you [hee hee hee...] to help us win this fight.

The Republican National Committee has a new ad campaign that is taking the fight to the Obama Democrats and their Big Labor Union Bosses. But we need your help to spread our commonsense [sic -- and ha!], conservative message of fiscal discipline [again, the rich and super-rich, such as the treasonous Wall Street fat cats who put our nation into economic collapse, are exempt from fiscal discipline, but the rest of us are not] to voters in every corner of the country….

This obviously is a nationally coordinated Repugnican Tea Party attack on what is left of the middle and working class after Ronald Reagan, George Bush I and George Bush II did their best to destroy it. (And no, the triangulating Bill Clinton wasn’t much of a friend to labor, either.)

According to the Repugnican Tea Party traitors’ propaganda, it’s perfectly fine for the Repugnican Tea Party to take millions upon millions of dollars from the rich and the super-rich, like the Koch brothers – and to send out fundraising e-mails asking for as much as $2,012 – in order to get their pro-plutocratic, anti-worker, anti-middle-class legislation passed via paid-off, corrupt politicians like Scott Walker.

But when labor unions — no, wait, that’s BIG BAD LABOR UNION BOSSES! – put money into the political process on behalf of the members of the middle class and the working class whom the labor unions exist to protect, it’s a gross abuse of power!

So, under the Repugnican Tea Party plan, the rich and the super-rich get even more undue influence in the political process, while the working class, the middle class and the poor get even less influence. Consequently, the rich continue to get richer and the poor continue to get poorer.

Yes, it’s an all-out class war. No doubt. And the plutocrats, through the Repugnican Tea Party, have declared this war upon the middle and working class.

The plutocrats and the Repugnican Tea Party traitors are playing the victim, too, claiming, later in the e-mail that I referenced above that “These Union Bosses have sent thousands of out-of-state union jack booted [sic] thugs into Wisconsin and and [sic] Indiana to try and [sic] intimidate lawmakers and thwart the will of the people.”

Oh, fuck me and call me a waaaaambulance!

“Union Bosses,” “union jack booted thugs.” Which century are we living in?

These so-called “union jack booted thugs” are nurses, teachers and other government employees and other unionized workers standing up for workers’ rights, and the vast majority of the protesters live in the states in which they are protesting, but speaking of shenanigans from “out of state,” it’s perfectly fine for the plutocrats from out of state to meddle in Wisconsin, but according to the fascists on the right, none of their opponents are allowed to.

The Repugnican Tea Party traitors want those of us on the left to unilaterally disarm.

Fuck them.

The right wing started it. We need to end it.

I encourage you to attend an anti-fascist rally at your state’s capital at noon tomorrow if you can. Click here for more information.

I’ll be at the rally here in Sacramento, and I even have my sign ready to go already:

“Tea Party” Traitors (Word document)

If you like it, feel free to use it, too.

This is class war, and we of the middle class and working class can’t afford to lose.

I see homeless people

I just read about an apparent new trend — how widespread it is, I’m not sure — in which individuals are creating Facebook pages for their local homeless people. No, not charitably or humanitarianly (is that a word?), but as in turning the homeless into online local “celebrities,” as objects of satire and ridicule, without their knowledge, apparently.

Rude. And wrong.

However, I am guilty of having nicknamed most of my neighborhood homeless people, whom I affectionately think of “homies.” However, I’ve never shared my nicknames for them (or my term “homies”) with them, and I never would. And I certainly never would take their photos and post them to the Internet, and I most certainly wouldn’t start a Facebook page for any of them, because that shit is mean and isn’t funny. (It’s not as bad as “bum fights,” true, but it’s still bad.)

Over the years — I’ve lived in the same Sacramento apartment for nine years now, because I really, really hate to move – in my neighborhood there have been:

• “Chimney,” the old guy who smoked like one. He was an old, tall, very thin white guy with a long white beard who used to hang out within a radius of only a few blocks of my apartment. He’d listen to the radio, mostly talk radio (not right-wing talk radio, that I could discern), and sometimes I’d see him reading, usually a newspaper, which he probably got from a trash can or a dumpster, I always surmised. If he drank, I never detected it. However, because of his lack of hygiene he smelled to high heaven, so much so that when passing him on the sidewalk I would hold my breath for several seconds, but for me it was a live-and-let-live situation. He never seriously bothered me, except sometimes to ask me questions about my comings and goings that made me at least mildly uncomfortable, but, except for how he smelled, especially on a hot day, he was rather harmless. He never asked me for anything at all, that I can recall, not a penny, not a bite of food. I think that he utilized at least some of the local services for the homeless at least sometimes, but I’m not sure. Unfortunately, after I had become used to having him around for years — he was a fixture of my immediate neighborhood – some months ago, Chimney simply disappeared. A neighbor of mine whom I don’t know used to let Chimney hang out in front of his apartment, sitting on a chair, where he had the shade of a small tree. (Where Chimney slept at night, I don’t know to this day.) I would ask my neighbor what happened to Chimney, whose real name, I believe, was John, but I’m afraid of what the answer probably would be. Chimney/John was around for so many years that his sudden disappearance seems like it could indicate only one thing.
• “Frankenhobo,” who walks like Frankenstein’s monster, with his arms outstretched and his legs far apart. He is and old man who is so perpetually dirty that I think he’s white, but he actually could be of another race (that is, he might not be Anglo). He walks slooooowly and often stops dead in his tracks, for no apparent reason, sometimes for a long time, before ambling on slowly again. His arms he often waves about jerkingly and apparently uncontrollably. My best guess is that he fried his brain on drugs years ago. He’s harmless, but you don’t want to get within noseshot of him. He never speaks, but he once, recently, made a very strange, very loud noise outside of my apartment as I was leaving for work, if memory serves. At first I thought maybe he’d had a major medical episode, and right in front of my apartment, since he had sounded like a large, cud-chewing animal bellowing in distress, but I saw him then continue to amble on. Frankenhobo’s range is much larger than was Chimney’s; I see Frankenhobo all over the place, even outside of my neighborhood (and I’ve seen him within the past week), and he seems to walk all day long. Where he goes at night I have no idea.
• “Crazy Hide-Her-Face Lady” was a white woman probably in her 40s. She would wear all black, including a black trenchcoat, I believe it was, and black gloves, too, if memory serves, no matter how warm the weather (Sacramento hits the 100s in the summertime). When you came anywhere near her she immediately would hide her face with her hand. I know that “Crazy Hide-Her-Face Lady” isn’t a very nice nickname for someone, but as she never spoke and as I never spoke to her — she would run away, actually, when you would approach her direction on the sidewalk, even if you were on the other side of the street – I never shared it with her. Like Quasimodo used to hang out at at Catholic church, Crazy Hide-Her-Face Lady used to hang out primarily in the vicinity of the large Catholic church in my neighborhood. Like Chimney, she disappeared, too, but that was a long time ago. Given her youthfulness compared to Chimney’s, I’d like to think that she disappeared for a better reason than Chimney apparently did. I always wondered why she felt the need to always hide her face from view. I never noticed any facial disfigurement or the like, so I always wondered if some severe childhood trauma was responsible for it.
• “Crazy Bark-at-My-Dog Lady” is a white woman in her late 50s to 60s, I’m guessing, who seems to dress too well to be homeless, but she’s mentally ill, it’s pretty clear. I see her at neighborhood coffeehouses, wearing full-length dresses, usually, no matter what the weather, and too much makeup. She seems quite in her own little world, chatters to herself, and rarely, if ever, to anyone else, that I ever have observed. Whenever I walked my now-deceased long-haired Chihuahua past Crazy Bark-at-My-Dog Lady, she inevitably would make an “Arf! Arf!” sound at my dog. This annoyed me greatly, but as my dog completely ignored her and was not spooked by her whatsoever, I let it go. (I could not have a Dorothy-is-indignant-because-Toto-is-being-terrorized moment, very unfortunately…) I saw Crazy Bark-at-My-Dog Lady just a day or two ago. As I no longer have my dog (her name was Kit, by the way; I named her after the kit fox and she lived for a good 15 years or more), I might have to rename Crazy Bark-at-My-Dog Lady someday, except that as I no longer have my dog, these days she ignores me altogether, so a new nickname for her probably is not forthcoming. 
• “Cardboard” is a woman who, I am guessing, is at least in her 50s. Her ethnicity is difficult to discern, as she sits in a plastic chair and surrounds herself almost entirely with pieces of cardboard, and I believe that she keeps her head and face concealed with a scarf or scarves or some other material. She seems humped over and I’m not sure if that’s her spine or if she intentionally keeps herself hunched over, cowering from her environment. As she employs the pieces of cardboard regardless of the weather, I’m not sure how much of it is for protection against the elements and how much of it is from her belief that the cardboard protects her from the world. This woman usually sets up her cardboard camp right in the middle of the sidewalk and people just pretend that she isn’t there. “Cardboard,” I know, is not a very clever nickname. “Fort Lady” doesn’t really seem to fit, since she doesn’t build an actual fort like my brothers and I used to build out of cardboard boxes when we were kids. I’ll work on it…
• Finally, there is this little white-bearded troll of a man whose name is John. I’ve yet to nickname him, but “Troll” seems appropriate. Like my boyfriend is, this man is one of those people I call “vaguely ethnic-looking”: you know that he isn’t Anglo, but you’re not sure exactly what he is: Italian? Jewish? Arab? Some mixture? What? He’s at least in his 50s and he’s the only one of these people I’ve described who I know is an alcoholic, and it’s OK with me if he wants to drink and pickle his liver — it’s his liver — but it wasn’t OK with me when he was sleeping on my front porch. Well, I would have been OK with him sleeping on my front porch, actually, except that he’d leave cigarette butts and other trash on it, and he wouldn’t leave at sunrise, but he would sleep in — on my fucking front porch. Once I took Kit outside for her morning walk around 9 a.m. or 10 a.m. on a Saturday or Sunday. He was still on my porch. I gave him a dirty look, which I thought was a clear communication of, “Your ass had better not still be here when I return from this walk.” But when I returned with Kit, he still was there. Unfuckingacceptable. It was that time or shortly thereafter that I blew up at him. I normally don’t scream at people, but I yelled at him at the top of my lungs, and every other word was “fuck” or one of its derivatives. It was the only thing I knew to do after I’d already instructed him at least three or four times previously to stop sleeping on my porch, since he’d thought that he could stay there all day and litter liberally. My having gone ballistic on him worked. He no longer sleeps on my porch. I still see him lurking around my apartment sometimes, usually with a bicycle. When I see him from my porch I usually shoot him a stone-cold look. So that he remembers. So far, it has worked.

I probably sound callous, but the fact is that after at least nine years of living in my neighborhood, I’m quite used to seeing homeless people. I don’t like being a member of a society that doesn’t take care of its most needy, especially with all of these self-proclaimed “Christians” running around amongst us, but at the same time, I’m quite middle class and there isn’t much, if anything, that I can do for these people in terms of any long-term solution, and further, I am of the full belief that I play plenty in taxes already and that my tax dollars should go to things like helping the homeless — and preventing homelessness in the first fucking place — instead of to things like bogus wars for the oil-military-industrial complex and to corporate welfare.

As a member of the middle class, which is disappearing with the polar ice caps, I feel thoroughly fucked up the ass (in a bad way) as it is; using what money I have left over after taxes and other paycheck deductions, and after my monthly rent check to my slumlord, to help the homeless people in my neighborhood would make me feel like a colossal fucking chump.

If we of the middle class pay out of our own pockets for what our tax dollars already should be covering, when will the abuse of our tax dollars ever end?

I do care, but I don’t have any solutions, especially when it strikes me that I’d be the only one trying to solve the problem.

I like to think that I’m at least one notch above the vast majority of my cohorts who see the homeless people who populate my neighborhood and yet don’t see them, my cohorts who probably don’t even bother to take a moment to give the homies nicknames.

Sally Struthers has hijacked my e-mail

A tearful Sally Struthers used to be the only one we had to worry about. Now, charitable organizations are trying to make us feel guilty right and left so that we strain our already-strained wallets even further. Oh, well. I guess that in these times it’s always nice to know that someone somewhere always has it worse off than you do…

You’d never know that we’re in a severe economic downturn, given the number of fundraising appeals that I receive via e-mail and snail mail every day.

I understand that charitable organizations are hurting — many have gone under and many more are threatened with going under — but Jesus fuck, we of the working class are not just nickeled and dimed, but we are are five-dollared and 10-dollared to death as it is.

So why the big push on fundraising e-mails and snail mails now? Who has money that they can just give away? The rich don’t give (they don’t even want to pay their fair share of taxes) and the middle class can’t afford to give — not anymore. 

I have to wonder if the cost of sending the snail-mail fundraising appeals is even recouped by those who actually can afford to send anything in.

And it pisses me off royally that if we of the working and middle class want anything good in our nation, we have to fucking donate to charities and/or we have to volunteer our time when we already are working one or two (or maybe even three) jobs.

Why don’t our fucking tax dollars go toward helping those who need help instead of to endless bogus wars in the Middle East for the war profiteers of the military-industrial complex? And to bailing out corrupt corporations?

We of the working and middle class get screwed right and left. We are the only ones who pay taxes — corporations avoid paying their fair share of taxes like the plague – and if we want a better world, we have to pay even more out of pocket and/or give even more of our already limited time and energy to charitable organizations. It’s sick, twisted and wrong.

So is the e-mail that I received today with this subject line: “The dog with no lips: Her inspiring story‏.”

“The dog with no lips.”

I couldn’t make that kind of shit up.

And here is a nice visual to go along with the Humane Society of the United States’ fundraising appeal:

The name of the lipless dog is Fay, of Missouri. She lost her lips from having been used in dog fighting. (Her story is here.)

Don’t get me wrong. I’m an animal lover. I hate animal cruelty. I would string up those who treat dogs and other animals as Fay was treated, except that people are animals, too, and again, I’m against animal cruelty. (Besides, only the Repugnicans and the “Christians” endorse torture.)

I have donated to the Humane Society and yes, even to PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) and to other animal-welfare organizations.

But Jesus fuck, are we of the working and middle class not already shell-shocked enough that we have to receive e-mails with pictures of lipless dogs?

And again, why aren’t my tax dollars already going to the needy instead of to the fucking greedy?

Unfortunately, this overload of fundraising appeals at the worst possible time makes me want to give even less, not more.

If I’m not the only one who feels that way — and I can’t imagine that I am — then the charitable organizations are harming, not helping themselves by not knowing when and where to stop.