New pope, same as the last pope

Reuters photo

Then-Pope Palpatine is shown with then-Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio (now Pope Francis) in 2007. The new pope, who is Italian, only technically is Latin American.

When I saw the initial headline that the newly minted pope is from Argentina, I thought: Yes! They picked a pope from Latin America!

But only technically did they.

When I saw the new pope’s birth name — Jorge Mario Bergoglio (he’s going by Pope Francis) — I thought, Wait a minute: Bergoglio doesn’t sound Spanish…

Indeed, his entry on Wikipedia says that the 76-year-old Pope Francis was born in Buenos Aires in 1936 to Italian parents.

I was hoping for a native Latin American pope, but that was too much to hope for, apparently. We very apparently got yet another pope whose blood is that of the European white man. And as though we haven’t had enough Italian popes.

With his having been born and raised in Argentina, I’m not saying that the new pope isn’t acculturated as an Argentinian (he speaks Spanish as well as Italian, for instance), but let’s not be fooled into thinking that the Catholick church finally picked its first pope of color. It has not.

The Catholick church gets to say that it picked its “first Latin American pope” when, in fact, the Eurocentric church picked a guy with white European blood who only was born in Latin America.

That doesn’t count, in my book.

And I have to wonder if that’s why Bergoglio was picked: because of his appeal as a twofer. He could be called “the first Latin American pope,” on a technicality, but at the same time his selection did not break the looong chain of white-male popes.

Of course, no woman may head the Catholick church, so that’s discrimination against at least half of the human population, so maybe I’m splitting hairs here with the race thing.

Speaking of women, Pope Francis, although he looks like he’s a lot nicer than Pope Palpatine ever looked –

(indeed, in the photo above he kind of looks like Woody Allen playing a cardinal) —  toes the Catholick church’s lines on the issues of abortion (no), contraception (n0) and same-sex marriage (hell no).

Indeed, the former Cardinal Bergoglio had come in at second place when Pope Palpatine was selected in 2005.

Expect no significant changes in the backasswards Catholick church, which I would say changes at a glacial pace, but since the glaciers are all melting, I’ll say at a geological (as in “geological time”) pace.

We still have no real national leader on stopping the use of killer drones

Associated Press image

U.S. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who has aligned himself with the Repugnican Party, the “tea party” and the libertarians, filibustered on the topic of the use of killer drones from yesterday afternoon until early this morning. Unfortunately, Paul’s concerns about the use of killer drones apparently is limited only to their use on “non-combatant” American citizens on American soil, and it seems to me that the upstart Paul’s goal is to promote and position himself as a future president at least as much as it is to tackle the problem of killer drones.

It was a breath of fresh air to see Repugnican Tea Party U.S. Sen. Rand Paul filibuster on the topic of the use of killer drones, a topic that the spineless, useless Democrats in D.C. (who are only about protecting the brand name and who have no sense of right and wrong) have refused to touch, since Papa Obama wuvs his drones, and Papa Obama must not be crossed.

The first slaughter of a human being by a U.S. drone occurred in Afghanistan in November 2001, during the reign of the unelected Bush regime. Pretty much nothing but evil came from the unelected Bush regime, yet DINO President Barack Obama decided to continue with the use of drones as remote-controlled killing machines.*

Most of the the Repugnican Tea Party traitors in D.C. want to preserve the use of human-snuffing drones for use by future Repugnican Tea Party presidents, and while many if not most of the DINOs in D.C. probably have a problem with the use of drones to kill human beings, none of them has the balls to stand up to Obama in a public and meaningful way.

So it was great to see Rand Paul buck both party establishments and speak out against at least one of the obvious problems that the use of human-killing drones poses. (I might say that that problem is their “abuse,” but since I believe that they should not be used at all, I won’t say “abuse,” because that connotes that their use at all might be OK.)

Don’t get me wrong. I could never cast a vote for Rand Paul.

Among other things, he opposes a woman’s right to an abortion even in cases of rape and incest, but would leave it to each state to determine whether or not to allow legal abortion, Roe v. Wade be damned.

At least at one time he held the view that Title II of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits private businesses from engaging in race-based discrimination, is unconsitutional, because a private business should be allowed to discriminate by race if it so wishes.

Although Rand Paul claims to be a strict constitutionalist, he doesn’t like the fact that the 14th Amendment makes anyone who is born on American a soil a U.S. citizen, regardless of the child’s parents’ citizenship status, and so he wants so-called “birthright citizenship” to end (he supports a constitutional amendment to end “birthright citizenship” if it can’t be ended otherwise).

Rand Paul apparently wants to pick and choose among the constitutional amendments, because he vehemently supports the Second Amendment, opposing all gun control. (As I’ve noted before, no civilian needs an assault rifle, and when the so-called founding fathers crafted the Second Amendment, no such weapons 0f mass destruction existed, so to claim that of course the Second Amendment extends to them is quite a fucking stretch.)

Rand Paul personally opposes same-sex marriage but is OK with allowing each state to decide the matter. (I have a personal problem with his personal opposition to it, with his ignorance and his bigotry on the matter, his heterosexism and homophobia, and I also disagree vehemently that any state should be able to decide whether or not to honor any U.S. citizen’s constitutionally guaranteed equal human and civil rights.)

All in all, although the term “libertarian,” which Rand Paul uses to describe himself, implies a love of liberties and freedoms, with the libertarians (most of whom are right-wing white males), it is the same-old, same-old: These liberties and freedoms belong only to white, right-wing, “Christian,” heterosexual men (especially those who have power and money). They were the only ones who (regardless of what the U.S. Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and other founding documents proclaimed) had liberties and freedoms at the nation’s founding, and it should be that way forever, right? Just like the rich, white founding fathers intended!

That’s where Rand Paul is coming from. Indeed, he is considered a member of the “tea party” also. (I suspect that he just jumped on to the “tea party” bandwagon because the “libertarian” bandwagon wasn’t going to get him into the U.S. Senate, but if he says that he’s a member of the so-called “tea party,” and he does, then I’m going to hold him to that.)

While there is nothing that the “tea party” traitors believe that I also believe — far from being “revolutionaries” who are fighting for “freedom,” the “tea-party” dipshits support our corporate oppressors, which makes them treasonous fascists, not revolutionaries, and their belief system, if fully implemented, would bring about the even further enslavement of the American people, not our further freedom – the so-called “libertarians” are right on a few issues.

Rand Paul’s libertarian daddy, Ron Paul, for instance, although a patriarchal, misogynist homophobe also, opposed the Bush regime’s illegal, immoral, unprovoked and unjust Vietraq War, a rarity for someone aligned with the Repugnican Party.

Of course, Ron Paul’s reasoning for his opposition to the Vietraq War wasn’t the same as mine. My main problem with the Vietraq War was the carnage — thousands and thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians as well as more than 4,000 U.S. military personnel died pointlessly in the bogus war — carnage that benefitted only Big Oil and Dick Cheney’s Halliburton and the other subsidiaries of BushCheneyCorp.

From what I can discern, Ron Paul’s biggest problem with the war was not the cost in human lives, but was that the war, he argued in October 2002, was unconstitutional**; the U.S. Congress just giving the U.S. president carte blanche approval to declare war was akin to monarchism, he declared. I agree with that, but it was the foreseeable death and destruction, not the constitutional arguments, that were my biggest concern during the Bush regime’s run-up to its Vietraq War in 2002 and early 2003.

It also has been the gargantuan fiscal cost of the Vietraq War to the American taxpayers that has concerned Ron Paul and other libertarians — and that has been a huge problem, too, as the cost of the Vietraq War is a nice chunk of our federal budget deficit — but it troubles me that Ron Paul and his fellow libertarians haven’t focused on the human costs of such bogus warfare.

Still, I suppose, although we did our calculations very differently, at least Ron Paul came to the same, correct answer: The United States never should go to war unless it absolutely, absolutely is necessary, and, as the U.S. Constitution mandates, the U.S. Congress must keep the U.S. president in check when it comes to waging war, and must never abdicate its sole constitutional authority to declare war to the president, under any circumstances.

And wars of choice for war profiteering — robbing the U.S. treasury via bogus warfare — are intolerable. And they are treasonous. Knowingly taking the nation to war with another nation based upon lies cannot be anything other than treason, except, of course, also war crimes and crimes against humanity.

On the topic of the use of drones to slaughter human beings, Rand Paul, much like his daddy, at least partially comes to the right answer, but with calculations that are too cold.

In his nearly 13-hour filibuster, Rand Paul’s main or even only concern about the use of drones, I understand from the media coverage of his filibuster, is that killer drones might one day be used on “non-combatant” American citizens on American soil, in blatant violation of the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee that no U.S. citizen shall be deprived of his or her life or liberty as punishment for an accused crime or crimes without first having been granted a fair trial.

That’s way too narrow a problem to have with the use of killer drones.

Why should only American citizens be granted such fairness, decency and justice? Is not every human being on the planet worthy of such fairness, decency and justice, or are Americans superior to other human beings? Are only American lives valuable?

Further: Drones are a cowardly, lazy and sloppy way to kill, and their use quite foreseeably could explode to the point that innocent people all over the world (including in the U.S., of course) are being maimed and slaughtered by drones, like something out of one of the “Terminator” movies.

Therefore, the use of drones to slaughter human beings should be prohibited worldwide. Their use should not be prohibited only against American citizens, whether on American soil or whether on foreign soil, whether they are deemed “combatant” or “non-combatant,” but should be prohibited against any human being. You can’t trust the average adult with the “proper” use of a killer drone any more than you can trust the average child with the proper use of a shotgun.

Sadly, however, even Rand Paul’s public stance on killer drones is to the left of the public stance taken by the DINOs (which mostly is an eery silence).

DINO Nancy Pelosi, for instance, on the subject of the use of drones to slaughter human beings, to my knowledge only has offered a reassurance that of course Barack Obama never would use a drone to kill a “non-combatant” American citizen on American soil.

That’s not nearly good enough, Nancy.

Maybe Obama would not, but what if another election-stealing would-be war criminal like George W. Bush got into the White House? That could happen in less than four full years.

It would be wonderful if our “representatives” in Washington would actually lead, which means having an eye on the future — fuck, even the near future.

As Rand Paul stated himself during his filibuster, it’s not about Barack Obama (whose handlers constantly are asking us if we have his back when it sure would be nice if he had ours). It’s about the principle of the use of drones to slaughter human beings becoming so widespread and so out of control that we Americans or we human beings anywhere on the planet can’t fucking leave our own homes without worrying about whether or not a fucking drone might maim or kill us that day, accidentally or intentionally.

Neither Rand Paul nor any other member of U.S. Congress, to my knowledge, has stated publicly that that is the issue here.

And I’m still very leery of Rand Paul. I have no idea how much his filibuster actually was about the use of killer drones against “non-combatant” Americans on American soil and how much it was showboating because he has presidential aspirations.

It fairly clearly was such showboating when he remarked during a hearing in January to then-Secretary of State Billary Clinton on the subject of the September attack on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, Libya: “Had I been president and found you did not read the cables from Benghazi and from Ambassador Stevens, I  would have relieved you of your post.”

He came off as a major prick because, well, he apparently is a major prick.

Although he’s only in his third year in the U.S. Senate, Rand Paul already was talking about his being president one day while he was attacking a woman who has been in national politics far longer than he has been. Would he have talked like that to a white male secretary of state? I doubt it. It was a sickening, nauseating display of that stupid-white-male sense of entitlement again.

While I’m glad that someone finally spoke out against the use of killer drones in some meaningful way in D.C., the patriarchal, misogynist, homophobic, xenophobic and apparently racist/white-supremacist Rand Paul would make as awful a president as his daddy would have, and, because he limited his argument against killer drones to the protection of only “non-combatant” American citizens on American soil — and, of course, whether or not someone targeted for slaughter by drone is a “combatant” or a “non-combatant” in many cases could be up for interpretation, and thus is wide open to abuse — we still have no real leadership in Washington, D.C., on the subject of drones used to slaughter human beings.

–

*DINO Barack Obama’s having continued the use of drones to slaughter human beings is one of the many reasons that I could not cast a second vote for him in November 2012. Obama is an immoral man, perhaps not immoral as most of the Repugnican Tea Party traitors are, but still immoral. The lesser of two evils is still an evil.

**In his October 2002 speech in which he stated his opposition to the U.S. Congress giving then-”President” Bush the power to declare war on Iraq, Ron Paul also stated, “There is no convincing evidence that Iraq is capable of threatening the security of this country, and, therefore, very little reason, if any, to pursue a war.”

That is common knowledge now, and during the build-up to the Vietraq War it was clear to me, also, as just a consumer of the news, that Iraq posed no threat to the U.S. and that the treasonous members of the unelected Bush regime were lying through their teeth (“aluminum tubes,” “yellowcake from Niger,” “mushroom clouds,” “anthrax,” etc.) and were dead-set upon invading Iraq no matter what.

In his speech Ron Paul also interestingly stated that the impending Vietraq War did not pass the “Christian” litmus test for a “just war.” He said:

First, it [the “Christian" litmus test for a just war] says that there has to be an act of aggression; and there has not been an act of aggression against the United States. We are 6,000 miles from [Iraq's] shores.

Also, it says that all efforts at negotiations must be exhausted. I do not believe that is the case. It seems to me like the opposition, the enemy, right now is begging for more negotiations.

Also, the Christian doctrine says that the proper authority must be responsible for initiating the war. I do not believe that proper authority can be transferred to the president nor to the United Nations.

In his speech Ron Paul also, besides engaging in the usual libertarian United Nations-bashing (the U.S. should call the global shots, not the UN, you see), attacked the Bush regime’s neo-conservative concept of “pre-emptive war,” stating, “No matter what the arguments may be, this policy is new; and it will have ramifications for our future, and it will have ramifications for the future of the world because other countries will adopt this same philosophy.”

It’s too bad no one is that far-sighted when it comes to the use of human-slaughtering drones!

‘Benghazigate’ is the delusion of the NEW 47 percent

Associated Press photo

Sore loser Arizona U.S. Sen. John McCainosaurus, flanked by closet case South Carolina U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham and by New Hampshire U.S. Sen. Kelly Ayotte as apparent window dressing in order to deflect charges of misogyny, claimed today that they are “more troubled” after their meeting with United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice about “Benghazigate” today than they were before the meeting. As though there were any other fucking possible outcome of the meeting, right?

What if they whipped up a “scandal” but no one fucking cared?

That’s the question facing the Repugnican Tea Party traitors.

Even after presidential debate moderator Candy Crowley last month wonderfully unexpectedly handed the beyond-pathetic Mittens Romney’s ass to him on a platter for having tried to make the killing of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, in September into a Big Fucking Deal — and watching Crowley, who apparently was “supposed” to just sit there like a good potted plant like the barely animated corpse Jim Lehrer did, rain on the puffed-up Mittens’ self-righteousness parade was very infotaining – the Repugnican Tea Party traitors still won’t shut the fuck up about Benghazi.

Which is fine. In the right-wing echo chamber, Benghazi indeed is a Big Fucking Deal. It’s their Monica Lewinsky. So they think.

Outside of the right-wing echo chamber, however, are those of us of the reality-based world, who view the Benghazi incident as what it was: an unfortunate incident that should be prevented from happening again (as far as that is possible), a problem that should be (to the extent that it can be) solved. We also view the Benghazi incident as what it isn’t: an appropriate, fair opportunity to turn the violent deaths of four Americans into poisonous political weaponry for the treasonous right wing.

Those of us who inhabit the reality-based world see in “Benghazigate” not a quest for justice, but we see embittered, old, right-wing white men (Mittens, John McCainosaurus, Lindsey Graham, Faux “News” hacks, et. al.) attacking the black woman and the black man whom they believe should not be in power because they are not right-wing white men. We see “Benghazigate” for what it is: yet another opportunity for the Repugnican Tea Party traitors to, once again, attack the black man in the White House.

“Benghazigate” ringleader Arizona U.S. Sen. John McCainosaurus, perhaps the biggest sore loser in U.S. history, has even essentially stated that he is using his and his cohorts’ sustained attacks on United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice to get to Barack Obama (Obama is the real criminal here, McCainosaurus has proclaimed).

If this were a court case, of course Judge McCainosaurus, having run against Obama for the presidency but having lost miserably, would have to recuse himself because of his obvious conflict of interest and his blatant inability to be fair and balanced, to be impartial.

But don’t expect such fairness from a crusty, right-wing, racist old white man from Arizona, the South Africa of the Southwest.

It’s hysterically ironic, because as I type this sentence, Mittens’ share of the popular vote (some states still are processing ballots) stands at 47.4 percent (to Obama’s 50.9 percent).

We have, I believe, a new 47 percent — the percentage of Americans who live in the Land of Make-Believe.

The new 47 percent see a righteous crusade in “Benghazigate.”

The rest of us see the same old attacks of right-wing white men upon blacks whom they believe should not hold their positions of power because of their race. (And the rest of us realize that right-wing white men dog-piling upon a black woman, a la Anita Hill, doesn’t work in the Repugnican Party’s favor anymore.)

The rest of us remember that those who are making a Big Fucking Deal out of the four Americans who were killed in Benghazi didn’t utter a fucking peep about the more than 4,400 American military personnel who have been killed in the unelected, treasonous Bush regime’s illegal, immoral, unprovoked and unjust Vietraq War for Dick Cheney’s Halliburton’s war profiteering (and for the war profiteering of other subsidiaries of BushCheneyCorp, and for the greasy profiteering of Big Oil, of course).

If it’s a right-wing, white male president who has caused the wholly unnecessary deaths of more than 4,400 American military personnel by knowingly and intentionally falsely declaring that a Middle Eastern nation that isn’t a threat to the U.S. whatsofuckingever actually is a grave threat to the U.S. (replete with “mushroom clouds”), that, you see, is A-O-fucking-K.

But should four Americans be killed under the watch of a black, centrist president (the wingnuts love to call Obama a “socialist,” but he’s no socialist) — that, you see, is an outrage! An OUTRAGE!

This graphically demonstrates how high the bar is set for blacks in the world of the new 47 percent, the world of the right-wing white supremacists who cast their votes for Mittens Romney: A white, right-wing president is directly responsible, because of his litany of treasonous lies, for more than a thousand times the number of deaths of Americans on foreign soil than the number that happened on the watch of the black, centrist president, but the black, centrist president is to be lynched while the white, right-wing president — who is a traitor if ever there was a traitor in the history of the United States of America — still roams among us freely.

That, to the new 47 percent, constitutes “justice.”

Remember that when you watch the treasonous, white supremacist, misogynist likes of John McCainosaurus and Lindsey Graham frothing at the fangs about Susan Rice and “Benghazigate.”

P.S. The Repugnican Tea Party traitors apparently are involving female Repugnican Tea Party U.S. Sen. Kelly Ayotte in their attempted lynchings of Susan Rice and Barack Obama in order to make them look less misogynist, but it’s McCainosaurus and Graham who are doing all of the talking.

This Associated Press news story, for instance, has Ayotte only singing the “I’m more troubled today [than I was yesterday]” chorus as a back-up singer to McCainosaurus and Graham, and it’s clear that the trio of traitors had decided even before they met with Susan Rice today that they were going to be “more troubled today” than they were before today, no matter what had transpired in the meeting.

Fucking liars and fucking traitors.

The handjob-in-a-Bangkok-bathhouse presidential campaign

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

– Rolling Stone political writer Matt Taibbi, May 7

It’s difficult to write about this year’s presidential race, since it’s so substance-free.

We all know what Repugnican Tea Party candidates Mittens Romney and Pretty Boy Paul Ryan are all about: the continued radical redistribution of wealth, from the very many to the very few. (Right-wingers oppose the redistribution of wealth only when such redistribution benefits the many instead of the few. Then, it’s “communism” or “socialism” or some other “anti-American” “evil.”) And Team Romney/Ryan are about the Orwellian, Randian relabeling of those of us serfs who produce for our plutocratic overlords as “parasites” when it’s the plutocrats who are the parasites on the rest of us – not vice-versa.

Class warfare, indeed.

And we all know that President Barack Obama, the lesser of the two evils, won’t/wouldn’t do much more in a second term than he has(n’t) done thus far. An Obama re-election, while not the hell that a President Romney would mean for us, would mean four more years! of whatever the hell it is that you could call these past three-plus years.

So devoid of substance is this presidential race that the narcissistic, shallow, cold-blooded Paul Ryan’s workout routine is considered “news,” and so coveted has been a shirtless pic of Ryan that the gossip website TMZ has put a watermark on the Paul Ryan shirtless pic from six years ago that it managed to find and present to the world:

Thankfully, in TMZ’s online poll, as I type this sentence, 85 percent of the respondents proclaim that the chicken-legged Ryan’s looks will not influence their vote, while only 15 percent say that Ryan’s looks will/would be a factor in their voting decision, and 58 percent of the respondents say that they would not do the nasty with Ryan, while 42 percent say that they would. Seventy-seven percent claim that they would rather get it on with Ryan Gosling than with Paul Ryan, while only 23 percent choose the surnamed Ryan over the first-named Ryan. And asked whether we’ll ever have a President Paul Ryan, 69 percent say no and only 31 percent say yes.

This is what American politics has been reduced to. Just so you know.

This is the result of decades of “infotainment” and celebrity culture and corporately owned and controlled non-journalism poisoning what we still call our “democracy.”

So watered down and insipid all of it has become that we have Mittens Romney proclaiming the obvious as though it were scandalous.

This past week Mittens proclaimed that President Barack Obama is “running [for re-election] just to hang on to power, and I think he would do anything in his power” to remain in office.

Duh.

Most presidents run for a second term, and Mittens has not been running for president since at least 2008 because he wants power?

Yeah, you know, I think that the vast majority of those who run for president want the power of the presidency. (What they would do with that power, of course, is another matter.)

The very definition of “politics” (the broad definition) is the use of power.

Barack Obama is to be shamed for wanting to retain his power, but we are to believe that Mittens doesn’t want the same power? (Or, at least, are we to believe that Mittens actually would use such power for good?)

And what about former “President” George W. Bush? When he ran for a second, unelected term, didn’t he “just [want] to hang on to power”? Or are only Democratic candidates power-mongers?

Such sheer hypocrisy is what it means to be a wingnut or a Mormon, and in multi-millionaire Mittens we have both.

Mittens this past week also proclaimed that Barack Obama’s re-election campaign is driven by “division and attack and hatred.”

Let’s see: The Mormon cult and the Repugnican Tea Party both believe that women, non-whites, non-heterosexuals, non-“Christo”fascists, non-citizens, non-capitalists, et. al., et. al. should be/should remain second- or third-class citizens, and that only right-wing, “Christo”fascist, white, heterosexual, patriarchal, capitalist males should continue to run the show, but somehow that’s not “division” or “hatred” or an “attack” on those of us — who are the majority of the human beings who inhabit the United States of America – who don’t fit those demographics and who disagree that those with those demographics should continue to have an insanely unfair amount of political power in what is supposed to be a representative democracy.

No, when Mittens’ Mormon cult — and Paul Ryan’s Catholick church – actively supported Proposition Hate here in my home state of California, that was an attack, a personal attack on my equal human and civil rights guaranteed to me by the constitutions of my nation and my state.

That was a divisive attack based – steeped – in hatred.

Women should not be allowed to control their own uteri; same-sex couples should not be allowed to be married; “illegals” should be deported immediately (or, as Joe the Plumber, who is running for the U.S. House of Representatives for Ohio on the Repugnican Tea Party ticket, recently put it, “put a damn fence on the border going with Mexico and start shooting”); the filthy rich should continue to get richer and the rest of us should continue to get poorer; and Hey, let’s start another war in the Middle East! — as John McCainosaurus hilariously sang during the last presidential election cycle, “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran!”

But the Repugnican Tea Party traitors and the members of the Mormon cult are nice people, you see, because they don’t use profanity or salty language (like that evil Joe Biden!), and they smile lovingly while they propose to destroy you with such euphemistically named plans as Pretty Boy Paul Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity,” which is only a blueprint for the continued prosperity of the richest among us at the continued expense of the rest of us.

It’s difficult for Team Romney/Ryan to talk substance when their only goal is to ensure that the richest and the most powerful among us gain even more wealth and more power while the rest of us lose even more wealth and even more power than we’ve lost since at least Ronald Reagan’s reign in the 1980s. When you are concealing your true aims – because your true aims are patently evil – there isn’t much of substance for you to say. Thus, you are reduced to such hypocritical, ludicrously insubstantial charges as that your political opponent — wait… for… it… — wants power!

Not that Barack Obama has much more to run on. He promised us, incessantly, “hope” and “change.” Instead, he has delivered much of the same, and has been one of our nation’s most mediocre, most disappointing presidents.

But even that, sadly, is head and shoulders above what the Romney/Ryan ticket offers, and that is catastrophic for the United States of America.

As Ted Rall concludes in his latest column,

If all Democratic strategists have to do to attract progressive voters is to frighten them with greater-evil Republicans, when will people who care about the working class, who oppose wars of choice, and whose critique of government is that it isn’t in our lives enough ever see their dreams become party platform planks with some chance of being incorporated into legislation?

In recent elections (c.f. Sarah Palin and some old guy versus Barry), liberals are only voting for Democrats out of terror that things will get even worse.

That’s no way to run a party, or a country.

Well, I, for one progressive, have refused to give President Hopey-Changey (a.k.a. President Lesser of Two Evils) a single fucking red cent for his re-election, and come November 6, I probably will cast my vote for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein or maybe even Peace and Freedom Party presidential candidate Roseanne Barr.

Throwing away my vote, you say?

No. To vote for the pure, raw evil or to vote for the lesser of the two evils — that would be to throw away my vote.

Prick finally takes a hint

Reuters photo

Prick Santorum’s wife Karen cries today as he announces in Pennsylvania that he has dropped his bid for the presidency. This piece is about Prick, not his wife, but I think that this news photo is pretty fucking funny.

So apparently Prick Santorum didn’t want the additional embarrassment of losing his home state of Pennsylvania to Mittens Romney on April 24, so he dropped out of the race for the 2012 Repugnican Tea Party presidential nomination today, declaring, “This game is a long, long, long way from over. We are going to continue to go out there and fight to make sure that we defeat President Barack Obama.”

Didn’t Herman Cain say pretty much the same thing, that he wouldn’t drop from sight? Where has he been lately?

History will record Prick Santorum as the candidate who tried to drag the Repugnican Tea Party so far to the right — among other things, espousing the ideas of banning contraception and so-called “obscene” pornography, which have been with us for more than four decades now — that he ensured President Barack Obama’s re-election.

Prick’s “Christo”fascist jihad was pointless from the beginning. There was little question that the multi-millionaire Mittens would win the nomination, so all that Prick accomplished in his run for the nomination is having made the most insanely far-right members of the Repugnican Tea Party hate Mittens the Mormon from Massachusetts even more than they already did, and having turned off the so-called “swing voters” (the majority of whom love their birth control and their porn) by the millions.

And the women’s vote may be, in the end, what dooms Mittens, whom intrade.com gives less than a 40 percent chance of beating Obama in November.

Salon.com reports on a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll that shows that women support Obama by 57 percent, with only 38 percent of them supporting Mittens, a gap of 19 percent. (According to the poll, Mittens has 52 percent of the men’s vote and Obama has 44 percent, a gap of only 8 percent.)

Mittens himself didn’t really push the anti-contraception bullshit — Prick Santorum and Grand Dragon Rush Limbaugh and others did — but Mittens, not wanting to alienate the far right, didn’t distance himself enough from it, and he has been tarnished from the fiasco nonetheless, as his party is known now as the party that has declared war upon America’s women.

Even if he kept any misogynist views that he might have (well, probably has) to himself, however, what does it say about Mittens’ worldview that he belongs to the staunchly patriarchal Mormon cult, which teaches that women’s primary role in the world is to support men and to raise men’s children?

(That’s what Prick’s Catholic cult and Mittens’ Mormon cult have in common, by the way: rigid hierarchy and patriarchy, misogyny and homophobia, to name three. It’s no surprise that the two cults teamed up to push Proposition H8 here in California; they love to persecute non-heterosexuals as well as women ,and they want to dictate to all of us what we may and may not do with our own genitalia.)

Again, Prick Santorum wasn’t going to beat Mittens Romney anyway. But what he did accomplish is having made millions within his party dislike and mistrust Mittens even more than they already had, and he has trashed the Repugnican Tea Party’s national brand name.

Prick’s brand of wingnuttery sells well in the reddest states, but that’s not nearly enough support to win a national election. Indeed, for a while now, Prick Santorum has had the support of no more than about a quarter of the members of his own party.

He should have quit when he was behind, but his apparent stubbornness and ego and lust for power apparently kept him in the race.

Oh, well. Because of Prick Santorum I don’t see that I’ll feel the need to give Barack Obama another penny or another vote.

Obama very apparently has it in the bag, so I can save some money and cast my vote for the person I’d truly like to see run the nation: the Green Party candidate, most likely.

YES, Mittens’ Mormonism MATTERS (and other heretical thoughts on this Easter Sunday)

Ah, Easter Sunday.

No better day (except Christmas, perhaps) to discuss religion.

The Los Angeles Times’ website had two interesting headlines this past week. The first, posted Thursday, was “Sen. Hatch Predicts Obama Campaign to ‘Throw Mormon Church’ at Romney.” It begins:

In a prediction of underhanded campaign tactics to come, [Mormon U.S.] Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) told GOP delegates Tuesday that he foresees that President [Barack] Obama’s campaign will try to use Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith against him.

“You watch, they’re going to throw the Mormon church at him like you can’t believe it,” Hatch said.

He later reiterated his point on Wednesday in Draper, Utah.

“For them to say they aren’t going to smear Mitt Romney is bologna. It’s way out of bounds, but that’s what is going to happen.”

Hatch, also a Mormon, and seeking re-election in a state with more than 60 percent of the population following the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints [the Mormon cult], specifically pointed his finger toward Obama’s campaign adviser David Axelrod and White House aide David Plouffe.

“Let me tell you something. The Obama people have some of the best political consultants in the country and they don’t get there because they’re always wonderful people. They’re very tough,” Hatch said. “I’ve met with Axelrod, he’s the best there is in the business. Plouffe, you’ve got to say he’s one of the best. And there is nothing they won’t do.” …

Yesterday, the L.A. Times ran another story, authored by someone else, with the headline “Obama Praised – and Pummeled – on Matters of Faith.”

Indeed, as the story points out:

… Few presidents have spoken about their religious faith as often, as deeply or as eloquently as Obama. “We worship an awesome God in the blue states,” he declared at the 2004 Democratic convention, and he has sought since then to rebuild ties between the Democratic Party and the world of faith.

Yet no president has faced such sustained hostility over issues of faith, including Republican charges that he is waging a “war on religion,” widespread suspicion about the sincerity of his Christian faith, and the persistent legend that he is a practicing Muslim. … [Emphasis mine.]

Indeed, Barack Obama’s having tossed some bones to the believers in God as A Super-Duper Wish-Granting and Punishment-Doling Big Santa Claus in the Sky on Crack – He’s making a list and checking it twice; he’s going to find out who’s naughty and nice! He knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake! – always has unsettled me, someone whose views on religion decidedly do not follow those of the pack of wolves in sheep’s clothing.

However, I’ve lived with Obama’s occasional God crap because (1) I’ve pretty much had no choice, and (2) I’ve never had the sense that he would govern the nation theocratically — and certainly not as a Muslim!

The problem that the “Christo”fascists have with Obama is not that he has waged an actual “war on religion.” He has not. He has not ordered that any churches or any church publications be burned or banned, that any religious leaders be burned at the stake or crucified or even just exiled.

Shit, the Obama administration allows “Christo”fascist organizations to, as I understand it, blatantly violate their tax-exempt status by openly participating in politics and in political campaigns, such as in the “Christo”fascists’ jihad against women, non-heterosexuals, non-whites, non-“Christo”fascists, et. al.

(Disclosure: I never will forgive the Mormon and Catholic cults for their hateful, mean-spirited, anti-Christian support of the incredibly hateful, mean-spirited, anti-Christian Proposition 8, which wrote the hatred of and the discrimination against an historically oppressed minority group into the state’s constitution here in California.)

It has been business as usual for the “Christo”fascist churches under President Obama*, and any drop-off in church membership can be attributed to the fact that the backasswards, anti-science and anti-reality “Christo”fascism, which picks certain groups out for continued persecution and subjugation, in direct violation of the actual teachings of Jesus Christ — I need only point to the “Christo”fascists’ ongoing war on women, in which both Catholic Prick Santorum and Mormon Mittens Romney are active, bomb-lobbing enemy combatants – doesn’t fucking work in 2012, if it ever worked at all (it did not).

But the right-wing fascists love to blame everything, even their own miserable failings — perhaps especially their own miserable failings — on the nation’s first black president.

The problem that the “Christo”fascists have with Obama is not that he is waging some “war on religion,” but that he is not giving favored status to the stupid white men – like the cabals of stupid, old, evil white men who lead the Mormon cult and the Catholic cult, who would love to get their hands on the White House via Mormon Mittens Romney or Catholic Prick Santorum — stupid, evil white men who use the names of God and Jesus to try to advance their own personal lust for power and money.

Historically there have been two broad visions of Christianity.** The historically dominant one is the one supported by the likes of Prick Santorum and Mittens Romney, the one in which certain power-grubbing men have all of the power and the only way to God and Jesus and “salvation” is through these men — which is awfully convenient for these men, but not so great for the rest of us. They have the monopoly on God and Jesus and “salvation,” you see, and they will defend this monopoly because no one with a ridiculous amount of power and money will part with it without a fight.

The other vision of Christianity is a minority vision. It views spirituality as a personal matter that the individual must cultivate within herself or himself. Indeed, under this vision some gargantuan “Christian” institution cannot somehow magically “save” the individual merely by the individual’s identification with or membership of the institution. The individual has to do the work of “salvation.” No one else can do it for her or him.

Indeed, Jesus himself is recorded to have said, “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.” (Matthew 6:5 and 6:6)

I see no other way to interpret that than that Jesus was saying that prayer is an intensely personal, not a public, matter, yet the “Christo”fascists are all about prayer in public, even in our public schools, although Jesus himself clearly called such practitioners and advocates “hypocrites.”

Jesus also had choice words about rich people, such as “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” (Matthew 19:24)

Hmmm. Is multi-millionaire Mittens Romney going to heaven?

If his millions have bought him a method of shrinking himself so that he can squeeze through the eye of a needle, then sure.

But seriously, here is “Christo”fascist Mormon tool Orrin Hatch insinuating that all discussion of Mittens Romney’s Mormonism should be off limits, yet it’s been wide open fucking season on Barack Obama’s religious beliefs since before he took office. How conveniently convenient it is for the Mormon cult that we should be able to discuss Barack Obama’s religious beliefs (or supposed lack thereof) ad nauseam, but that to discuss Mittens’ religious beliefs is, according to Mormon cult spokesnake Sen. Orrin Hatch, “way out of bounds.”

This is the rank hypocrisy that Hatch and his “Christo”fascist ilk have been so steeped in for so long now that they apparently can’t even see it; they take it for granted like a fish takes water for granted.

Whatever Barack Obama does or does not actually believe about God and/or Jesus, I don’t much care, as long as he doesn’t try to govern the nation theocratically. In a nation of diverse believers and non-believers, to govern theocratically is to govern only for some and not for all. The only way to govern for all is to govern secularly.

I, for one American, don’t want theocracy. I want secular democracy. I have good reason to believe that Mittens Romney would take marching orders from the cabal of stupid, old, evil white men in Salt Lake City. Every Mormon is expected to obey and to answer to the cabal in Salt Lake City, which is to have the supreme authority in Mormons’ lives. Mormons ultimately don’t answer to their country. They answer to the cabal in Salt Lake City. I lived among Mormons in Arizona. I know.

Nor do I want Pope Palapatine’s puppet, Prick Santorum, in the Oval Office. I don’t have to worry about him being elected president, since he has a snowball’s chance in hell of that ever happening, but I’m not OK with him being vice president any more than I was OK with Sarah Palin being a heartbeat away from the highest political office in the land.

On this Easter Sunday, I want to tell the “Christo”fascists of the world: Fuck you. For centuries you have been calling the shots and persecuting your detractors in the names of God and Jesus Christ, using rank hypocrisy as your main weapon of choice. Your anti-Christian reign is ending. You know it, which is why you are in your death throes — and better, the rest of us who for centuries have been your victims know it.

–

*Indeed, as the L.A. Times notes:

Obama gets generally high marks from faith organizations for maintaining, and in some ways strengthening, the Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships begun by [former "President"] George W. Bush. Obama faced pressure from secular liberals to scuttle the office, which was seen as blurring the line between church and state. Instead, he used it to reach out to faith groups across a broad spectrum of theology and politics.

“The president was very bold in deciding not just to drop something that a lot of people who supported him thought was not a great idea,” said Stanley Carlson-Thies, who served under Bush in what was then called the Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives.

Under Joshua Dubois, a Pentecostal minister Obama appointed to head the office, it has expanded its focus from primarily funneling government contracts to faith-based groups to also engaging religious organizations as volunteers. It has, for instance, trained churches and other religious organizations in disaster preparedness and response. It also enlisted more than 1,000 churches in a Job Clubs program to help the unemployed.

A rather different message has emerged from the Republican presidential contest. “This president is attacking religion, and is putting in place a secular agenda that our forefounders would not recognize,” his likely Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, has said. …

**For more on this, see the writings of Elaine Pagels, perhaps especially her seminal The Gnostic Gospels.

She begins her conclusion of that work with this paragraph:

It is the winners who write history — their way. No wonder, then, that the viewpoint of the successful majority has dominated all traditional accounts of the origin of Christianity. Ecclesiastical Christians first defined the terms (naming themselves “orthodox” and their opponents “heretics”); then they proceed to demonstrate — at least to their own satisfaction — that their triumph was historically inevitable, or, in religious terms, “guided by the Holy Spirit.”

In her work, Pagels chronicles how Christianity, quite early on, was hijacked by power-hungry, ruthless men who wished to mangle the message of Jesus Christ into something that no longer freed people, all people, as it was intended to do, but into something that instead enslaved people and that served these power-mad men and their own selfish, ultimately petty interests.

This bastardization of the teachings of Jesus Christ began as early as with Bishop Irenaeus, who within the two centuries after the death of the historical Jesus determined which early Christian gospels (there were many of them, not just four of them) would become official and “true” and which would be deemed apocryphal and “heretical.” Irenaeus advocated for a rigid, all-male hierarchy that decided all matters, against the early gnostic Christians’ belief that spirituality is an individual practice, not an institutional or hierarchal practice, and that this is what Jesus Christ taught.

Once the early patriarchal/hierarchal “Christian” church gained the military strength of the Roman empire under Roman Emperor Constantine about a century after Irenaeus, this bastardized vision of Christianity as a rigid patriarchy that could persecute — even slaughter – others in the names of God and Jesus became the dominant form of “Christianity” that we know today.

The early gnostic Christians — the true Christians, in my book — who by definition opposed hierarchy and militarism, were no match against the unholy alliance between the early patriarchal/hierarchal “Christians” and the militaristic Roman empire. They were, in essence, crucified, and their teachings, including the gnostic gospels, deemed “heretical” by the early patriarchal/hierarchal “Christian” church, were lost. (Many of the gnostic gospels later were discovered, however, especially the find in Egypt in 1945, as Pagels chronicles in her books on the topic.)

Bringing this true Christianity back would be, symbolically, the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and that, in my book, is the real message of Easter today.

Assorted shit Sunday!

Gallup polling: Prick Santorum remains in free fall

Associated Press photo

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

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

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

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

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

What has killed Prick Santorum?

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

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

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

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

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

–

I killed Andrew Breitbart!

AFP photo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–

Rush is sorry — for the loss of advertising revenue

AFP photo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–

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

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

‘Christo’fascist agenda? Over THEIR dead bodies!

The Associated Press reports that “Christo”fascist presidential hopeful Prick Santorum “has said that he wouldn’t try to take away the birth control pill or condoms but that states should be free to ban them. He told a Christian blog last year that as president he would warn the nation about ‘the dangers of contraception’ and the permissive culture it encourages. He’s also questioned whether women should be in combat and said that ‘radical feminists’ have undermined the traditional family by ‘convincing women that professional accomplishments are the key to happiness.’” Oh, and he believes that Roe vs. Wade should be overturned (which 72 percent of Newser’s users have deemed “scary”) and he recently declared that as president he would try to “overturn” any U.S. Supreme Court ruling in favor of same-sex marriage — even though the U.S. president of course may not “overturn” the nation’s highest court, something that a high-school freshman should know.

Wow. What does it say about the Repugnican Tea Party — and its presidential chances in November — that Prick Santorum has been leading Mitt Romney in national polls of Repugnican Tea Party presidential preference this month?

True, in these recent polls Santorum has been leading Romney by only two to four percentage points, but still: Santorum’s last gig in U.S. politics was losing his re-election bid to the U.S. Senate in 2006 by 17.3 percentage points. Wikipedia notes that Santorum’s 2006 Democratic opponent, Bob Casey Jr., enjoyed a “margin of victory [that] was the largest ever for a Democratic [U.S.] Senate nominee in Pennsylvania, and the largest margin of victory for a [U.S.] Senate challenger in the 2006 elections.” And Pennsylvania often if not usually is a presidential swing state, which indicates that its voters are pretty much in line with the nation’s voters as a whole.

Yes, wingtards, please make Prick Santorum your 2012 presidential nominee. Please!

The Associated Press reports today that Santorum proclaimed to “tea party activists and evangelical voters in [swing state] Ohio … that [President Barack] Obama’s agenda is ‘not about you. It’s not about your quality of life. It’s not about your jobs. It’s about some phony ideal. Some phony theology. Not a theology based on the Bible. A different theology.’”

Wow. So, according to Prick Santorum, a U.S. president should govern based upon “a theology based on the Bible.”

I don’t want a U.S. president governing based upon “a theology based upon the Bible” any more than I want a U.S. president governing based upon the Koran or the Torah or the Book of Mormon or any other backasswards, patriarchal, misogynist, xenophobic, homophobic, militaristic book written by ignorant men who lived and died (with the exception of the newbie Mormons, of course) centuries and centuries ago.

Prick Santorum told his crowd of KKK’ers in Ohio today that Barack Obama’s agenda isn’t about them, but Prick Santorum’s agenda isn’t about the majority of the rest of us Americans, who reject his “Christo”fascist, far-right-wing agenda, who believe in the individual’s right to use contraception, which Prick Santorum, a puppet of Pope Palpatine, is on the record as opposing; who believe in a woman’s right to govern her own uterus; and who believe in the right of any two adults who wish to marry each other to do so. (Yes, nationwide polls show that a solid majority of Americans favor giving same-sex couples some legal status, if not full marriage equality, and even then, many (if not most) nationwide polls show that those who favor full marriage equality rights for same-sex couples have broken the 50.0 percent mark.)

History has demonstrated that theocracy results in violence and bloodshed between different religious factions, and that secular government is the best kind of government to prevent this.

Is this what the “Christo”fascist Prick Santorum and his “Christo”fascist supporters want, I wonder — a bloody jihad against those of us who refuse to submit to their Bible-based bullshit? Just like we see with the Taliban?

You say Rick Santorum, I say American Taliban.

The “Christo”fascists in the United States of America have the freedom to live their lives as they wish. If they believe that contraception and/or abortion are evil, then they do not ever have to use contraception or ever get an abortion. Neither contraception nor abortion is forced upon them by the government. If they believe that same-sex marriage is evil, then they don’t have to marry a member of their own sex. The government doesn’t force them to marry members of their own sex, either.

The “Christo”fascists are free to believe whatever insanity they wish to believe, a right that they exercise to the fullest. The government does not force them to believe in evolution or global warming, and if they want to shield their offspring from facts and science and sanity, then they may school their little spawn at home. (That’s child abuse, in my book, but they have that right.)

What really rankles the “Christo”fascists is not that they cannot live their own lives as they see fit, despite their ludicrous claims of victimhood, their ridiculous propaganda about a supposed “war on religion” when, in fact, Americans are free to pray at home and in their places of worship of their non-existent, Zeus-like deity, and are free to express and to disseminate their ideas about this non-existent deity, and U.S. churches remain untaxed, may with impunity blatantly discriminate against individuals based upon their sex and race and sexual orientation and gender conformity (and, of course, based upon their religious beliefs), and, despite their untaxed status, still the churches blatantly insert themselves in the political process (like the Mormon cult’s and the Catholick church’s involvement in Proposition H8).

U.S. churches long have had special rights and privileges and immunties that we non-“Christo”fascists do not possess (try not paying your taxes, or blatantly discriminating against women or non-whites or those whose religious views differ from your own in your workplace, for example), yet they cry “victimhood.”

No, what really rankles the “Christo”fascist minority is that there are tens and tens of millions of us Americans who reject their Bible-based bullshit, and, because the “Christo”fascists’ backasswards worldview doesn’t survive the scrutiny of reality and logic and reason, they need as many converts as they can get in order to be comfortable in their bullshit, backasswards beliefs.

And I have little doubt that if they couldn’t convert us, they would kill us, if they could. Just like the Taliban.

So — preventing a “Christo”fascist like Prick Santorum from ever getting into the Oval Office is, literally, a matter of life or death, and the majority of us Americans who reject the “Christo”fascist agenda need to stand up to the “Christo”fascist minority and proclaim: Over your dead bodies will we go back to the Dark Ages to which you believe you can drag us.

It’s NOT the economy? STUPID!

I had thought that we would hear about nothing except for the economy and jobs and the supposed miracle of capitalism from now until Election Day in November.

Nope.

The issue du jour is contraception.

Contraception because Prick Santorum, a Catholick, is Pope Palpatine’s puppet, obviously. Concerns that John F. Kennedy would take marching orders from the Vatican were way overblown, but in the case of Santorum, they very apparently are not. And Pope Palpatine is the pope who believes that the slightly more liberal reforms of the Vatican II should be rolled back. Since the Vatican II took place between 1962 and 1965, that means that Pope Palpatine wants to drag us at least back to the 1950s, if not to the good old days of the Dark Ages themselves.

The wingnuts can get a chunk of Americans on board with their anti-abortion stance, but even then, polls show that no more than a quarter of Americans believe that all abortions should be prohibited and that a solid majority of Americans believe that abortion always should be allowed or should be allowed in most cases.

On their anti-contraception stance the wingnuts also have only minority support.

Even a Faux “News” poll taken this month that asked, “The new Obama health care law requires that employer health plans provide birth control coverage as part of preventive services for women. Overall, do you approve or disapprove of requiring employer health plans to cover birth control for women?” found that 61 percent said they approved, 34 percent disapproved, and 5 percent said they weren’t sure.

But what was supposed to have been a war on unemployment and economic stagnation this presidential election season instead has become, under the “leadership” of the Repugnican Tea Party “Christo”fascists, a war on women and on gays.

Prick Santorum believes that women should not serve in combat roles in the U.S. military. Not that that is sexist or anything.

Initially Prick proclaimed that women shouldn’t be in combat because of “the types of emotions involved.” When there was a backlash because he apparently had asserted that women are too emotional to be able to serve in combat roles, he backtracked, and said no, he didn’t mean that — he meant that the effectiveness of the men in combat would be diminished because they’d be too worried about the safety of their weak female comrades.

(“So my concern is [that] being in combat in that situation [the situation of women serving alongside men in combat roles], instead of being focused on the mission, they [male soldiers] may be more concerned with protecting someone who may be in a vulnerable position, a woman in a vulnerable position,” Santorum said.)

Great “save,” there, Prick: It’s not that women are too emotional — it’s that men are too emotional about women’s inherit weakness.

Not content with putting just one foot in his mouth, Santorum’s mouth sucked in his entire body as though his mouth were a powerful black hole. He also declared:

“Women have served and do serve and do wonderful things within the military and … they do have opportunities to serve in very dangerous positions…. And I certainly understand that and respect that and admire women for doing so, but I think on the front line of combat is not the best place and it’s not maximizing what they can bring to the table.”

Because you see, what Prick Santorum believes is that contraception should be illegal and that women should not be allowed to serve in combat roles in the U.S. military. They should be pregnant and barefoot in the kitchen, and what he means by “what they can bring to the table,” apparently, is dinner.

Not to be outdone by Prick Santorum, Mitt Romney — whose Mormon cult, along with Santorum’s Catholick church, funded Proposition H8, which federal judges last week ruled was an unconstitutional assault of the hateful and bigoted majority on a minority group — declared at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday that by prohibiting same-sex couples from other states from getting married in Massachusetts, “On my watch, we fought hard and prevented Massachusetts from becoming the Las Vegas of gay marriage,” adding, “When I am president, I will defend the Defense of Marriage Act and I will fight for an amendment to our Constitution that defines marriage as a relationship between one man and one woman.”

Yes, Mitt Romney is proud that as governor of Massachusetts he made damn sure that no one could come there for their equal human and civil rights, that he limited the evil of equal human and civil rights to Massachusetts only, and as president he would write the hatred of and the unconstitutional, unjust and immoral discrimination against a minority group into the U.S. Constitution if he ever got his mitts on the Oval Office, and indeed, during his CPAC speech on Friday he declared, “I can’t wait to get my hands on Washington.”

Gee, I can’t wait, either.

It is clear what the Repugnican Tea Party “vision” for the United States of America is. Just look at their remaining four presidential candidates: all four of them are right-wing, patriarchal, misogynist, homophobic, racist white men (yes, even the anti-choice Ron Paul, who is no liberal or progressive).

There is no place in the Repugnican Tea Party worldview for those of us who do not wish to continue to kowtow to stupid white men, despite the ugly U.S. history of stupid white men oppressing the rest of us.

There is no place in the Repugnican Tea Party worldview for intelligent and self-respecting women, for those of us who are not white (although we are a little more acceptable if we want to be white), for those of us who are not right-wing “Christians” (“Christo”fascists), for those of us who are not heterosexual, for those of us who are not gender- and gender-role-conforming,  for those of us who do not worship the golden calf that is unbridled capitalism.

And together, we, the historically oppressed by stupid white men, are the majority of Americans.

Given that only about a quarter — certainly no more than about a third – of Americans agree with Prick Santorum’s and Mitt Romney’s hard-right-wing worldview, what this means is that under a President Romney or a President Santorum, we would have a tyranny of the minority.

And we already had that under George W. Bush, since he never was elected by a majority of the American people in the first place.

Obviously, Romney and Santorum right now are trying to out-wingnut each other for the primary season (it’s safe to write off Ron Paul, and very most likely Newt Gingrich, too), and we would expect either eventual victor to moderate his message for the general election.

But how do you forget such patriarchal, misogynist and homophobic proclamations as they are making now?

I see precious little difference between putting the Mormon cult or the Catholick church in the White House than putting the Taliban in the White House.

What all three groups agree upon is that men should rule, that women should be wholly subservient to and obedient to men, that there should be perpetual warfare, and that gay men and lesbians and other non-heterosexuals and non-gender-conforming individuals, as well as non-believers, should be oppressed, certainly, but ideally, exterminated.

What I predict, however, is that the Repugnican Tea Party’s focus on social issues is going to boost Barack Obama’s re-election chances.

As much as the “swing voters” should care about the rights of women and non-whites and and non-heterosexuals and other historically oppressed minority groups, what the majority of them care about is their wallets and pocketbooks.

The U.S. economy seems to be improving, but not fast enough for the Repugnican Tea Party to ignore the economy and to instead focus instead on whom to hate and to oppress. The haters already hate. Preaching to the white-pointy-hatted choir isn’t going to sway the “swing voters,” who just want to be able to pay their bills. And, regardless of what I think about them, it’s the “swing voters,” not those of us who are committed to the far right or to the far left, who decide presidential elections these days.

Why this gay man supports Planned Parenthood

On the surface, I suppose, I, as a gay man, have the least reason of any demographic group to support Planned Parenthood.

I don’t have to worry about experiencing an unplanned pregnancy because I’m not a woman. I don’t have to worry (very much at all) about accidentally impregnating a woman because I prefer members of my own sex. I don’t have to worry about contracting breast cancer. (Very probably.)

But I clearly see that we’re all connected, and that a right-wing attack on one of us is a right-wing attack on all of us.

That, and let’s face it: the right-wing hatred of women and the right-wing oppression of women overlaps with the right-wing hatred and the right-wing oppression of gay men. The patriarchal right wing values males and male heterosexuality and the masculine, and devalues females (regardless of their sexual orientation) and devalues gay men, because gay men, to the right wing, are part of the feminine that must be subjugated (indeed, in some cases, even, destroyed).

So whenever Planned Parenthood comes under attack by the misogynists, be they female-hating men or self-hating women, whether it be an attack by the self-loathing women who “lead” the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation or an attack by the women-hating stupid white men of the treasonous Repugnican Tea Party who for now control the U.S. House of Representatives, I give Planned Parenthood another donation, usually of at least $20 or $25.

Seriously: These right-wing attacks on Planned Parenthood must be great business for PP. (Similarly, when National Public Radio and/or Public Broadcasting Service come under attack from the right wing, I give them donations, too.)

The Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation sure made a serious misstep by deciding to side with the right wing and fuck over Planned Parenthood. I have given to the Komen foundation at least once before, but I very most likely never will again. I would not be surprised if the foundation folds. (Indeed, it should, and others should assume the work of battling breast cancer.) You can’t say that you are for women and women’s rights but that you are against Planned Parenthood.

I also support Planned Parenthood because overpopulation harms all of us, regardless of our sex or sexual orientation.

Parenting experts have concluded that gay men and lesbians as a group probably make better parents than many if not most heterosexual couples because, among other reasons, same-sex couples who become parents obviously want to be parents, while about half of pregnancies that occur within heterosexual couplings are accidental. (What percentage of those unwanted pregnancies are terminated, I am not certain.)

For all of the societal ills of which gay men and lesbians (and other non-heterosexuals and non-gender-conforming individuals) are (most often wrongfully) accused, the one thing that we are not guilty of is contributing to overpopulation and its many attendant problems, which include the depletion of the planet’s natural resources from increased human consumption of those resources, increased pollution from human activity (and increased global warming, of course), and the more immediately obvious sufferings that overpopulation causes, such as hunger, poverty, poverty-related crime, and the fact that there is a serious “quality-control” issue when more human beings are produced than can be adequately cared for, which includes not only meeting their physiological needs, but meeting their psychospiritual needs as well. (Indeed, humankind, despite what so many awful heterosexual parents appear to believe, does not live by bread alone.)

It’s ironic — one of the most shit-and-pissed-upon groups of people on the planet (non-heterosexuals and non-gender-conforming individuals) probably are the ones best equipped to save it.

In the meantime, I continue to support Planned Parenthood, which is at least decreasing the amount of damage that those who (easily can) take their reproductive ability for granted are doing to all of us.