Repugnican losers are trying to rig the game

Widespread talk of how the Repugnican Tea Party was going to “reform” itself after two national rejections in a row has been a fucking joke. We have our answer already: Of course the traitors have no interest whatsofuckingever in changing their ways.

Now, the Repugnican Tea Party traitors are trying to have the electoral votes in some purple states with Repugnican-Tea-Party-majority state governments changed from winner takes all (which is the case in 48 of the 50 states) to divvying them up (like only Maine and Nebraska do) — but only in those purple states in which this change of the rules would benefit the Repugnican Tea Party traitors, of course.

They’re not talking about divvying up the electoral votes of such deep-red, winner-takes-all states as Texas or Arizona or Georgia. They’re only talking about divvying up the electoral votes of such purple states as Virginia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — states that Barack Obama just won (and that he won in 2008).

It seems to me that this violates the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment – at least in spirit, if not in the letter — because it gives the voters in some states a right that voters in other states do not: Namely, to have their votes make a difference in the Electoral College.

I’ll even play devil’s advocate here: The Repugnican Tea Party traitors’ new scheme, if it had been in place in our last presidential election, would have meant that, for instance, someone who voted for Mittens Romney on November 6 in, say, Virginia or Wisconsin or Pennsylvania still would have had his or her vote count in the Electoral College as long as he or she lived in a congressional district that Mittens won, even though Barack Obama won the majority of all of the votes in those states — but someone who voted for Mittens in, say, deep-blue New York or California, would not have had his or her vote count in the Electoral College, because in those winner-takes-all states, Obama would have received all of the states’ electoral votes.

Is that fair — to give voters in some states more say in the Electoral College than the voters in other states? Shouldn’t every voter’s presidential vote count equally?

Of course, the Repugnican Tea Party traitors, being traitors, aren’t about fairness and equality and democracy. They’re about “winning” at all costs — fairness and equality and democracy be damned.

Of course, the best course of action would be to eliminate the Electoral College altogether, to amend the United States Constitution to abolish it and to replace it with a straight-up popular vote for the presidency.

In a so-called democracy, there is no good reason not to choose the president of the United States based on a popular vote. (“But that’s the way we’ve always done it!” is not a valid argument, since it replaces reasoned analysis with mental laziness [a.k.a. “tradition”].)

The winner-takes-all Electoral College method effectively means that those blue voters in red states and those red voters in blue states have no voice at all, but to have one of the two duopolistic political parties pick and choose which states are to be winner-takes-all and which states are to divvy up their electoral votes — only in order to benefit that party’s presidential candidates – is even worse.

It is unfair as it is that even Nebraska and Maine divvy up their electoral votes when the other 48 states do not, but this hasn’t been a huge unfairness problem thus far, since both states together have only nine electoral votes (at least 270 of the 538 electoral votes are necessary to win the White House).

If the Repugnican Tea Party traitors are successful in rigging the entire Electoral College to benefit themselves, however, millions of voters will be disenfranchised.

The good news in all of this is that if the Repugnican Tea Party were strong, it wouldn’t need to cheat in order to “win” presidential elections, as it did in 2000 (and probably in 2004 as well), and as it is trying to do now.

The bad news is that sluggish, complacent, lazy Americans have a way of just allowing the Repugnican Tea Party traitors to get away with their blatantly anti-democratic bullshit, such as stealing presidential elections and launching bogus wars.

I considered the blatantly stolen presidential election of 2000 to be the biggest blow to American democracy during my lifetime, but what the Repugnican Tea Party traitors are cooking up now, if realized, would make even that seem like child’s play by comparison.

P.S. (Friday, January 25, 2013): My bad: Add Ohio and Michigan to the list of purple states that Obama won in 2008 and in 2012 but that now are controlled by Repugnican Tea Party traitors who have at least talked about divvying up their states’ electoral votes in order to rig future presidential elections for the Repugnican Tea Party.

Four more years (of [largely] the same old shit)!

Reuters photos

I expect little actual progress from the pseudo-progressive President Hopey-Changey over the next four years, but at least during that time I’ll be spared of having to see the Ann-Cunter-like, bleach-blonde harpy Ann Romney trying to fuck us all repeatedly with her strap-on. (Yes, that’s an actual news photo, and so is that one, too.)

Oh, yeah, there was an election on Tuesday.

As I have noted, I voted by mail for Green Party candidate Jill Stein for president — yes, practically speaking, as a protest vote – but I knew that President Barack Obama would win my state of California by an overwhelming margin, and he did: thus far in California’s vote counting, Obama has 59.3 percent to Mittens Romney’s paltry 38.4 percent. (Stein, in case you were wondering, is at No. 4, with a whopping 0.6 percent of the state’s vote.)

What I didn’t expect, however, was that as a result of Tuesday’s election — elections, as they say, have consequences – the California Legislature would be on the verge of having a two-thirds “super-majority” in both houses, the state Senate and the state Assembly.

Wow.

This “super-majority” — if utilized – makes the Repugnican Tea Party traitors in the Legislature even more irrelevant than they already were before Tuesday.

Not that the Democrats will use their power, of course. Although “super-majority” power, if used to its full extent, would make even the centristy Democratic California Gov. Jerry Brown fairly irrelevant, since the Legislature could override his vetoes, there are plenty of center-right “Democratic” California legislators who could threaten any two-thirds threshold.

And, of course, already Jerry Brown has assured spooked California Repugnicans — whose registrants don’t comprise even a full 30 percent of registered Californian voters (the Dems, on the other hand, have almost 44 percent of the state’s registered voters) and whose party doesn’t hold a single statewide office – that his party won’t do too much to upset them, even though, of course, were the state’s parties’ positions of political power reversed, the Repugnicans would ram their right-wing agenda through ruthlessly.

When George W. Bush was “re”-elected in 2004 with a measly 50.7 percent of the popular vote, he called the election results a “mandate.” A “mandate.”

That’s how the Repugnican Tea Party traitors roll: They don’t care even if they don’t even win the popular vote (recall the 2000 presidential election) — they just want to be in power no matter fucking what. They want to shove their Randian, theofascist, neo-Nazi agenda down our throats whether we, the people, give them our permission, via our votes, to do so or not. (So of course if you’re perfectly willing to steal power even when you lost the election, 50.7 percent would be, I suppose, relatively speaking, a “mandate.”)

Votes remain to be counted, but right now Obama is sitting at 50.6 percent of the national popular vote to Mittens’ 47.9 percent. Obama on Tuesday sewed up 332 electoral votes to Mittens’ 206. Including the all-important Ohio and Florida, Obama on Tuesday won all of the states that he won in 2008 (when he garnered 52.9 percent of the popular vote and 365 electoral votes), except for two of them, Indiana and North Carolina, which aren’t exactly solid-blue states anyway.

(Indeed, in eight of the last 10 presidential elections, including Tuesday’s, North Carolina went for the Repugnican, and in nine of the last 10 presidential elections, including Tuesday’s, Indiana went for the Repugnican, so Obama’s win in those two states in 2008 was the exception, not the rule, and his loss in those two backasswards states on Tuesday was the rule, not the exception, even though the pathetically straw-grasping Repugnican Tea Party traitors have tried to make some hay out of the fact that Obama didn’t win those two states again on Tuesday. [Indeed, the bar, when it is set by whites, is always set higher for blacks than it is for whites.])

Cheer up, though, white-supremacist wingtards! Mittens did better than John McCainosaurus and Sarah Palin did in 2008. They garnered only 45.7 of the popular vote and 173 electoral votes against the guy with the Kenyan ancestry.

Of course, while George W. Bush in 2004 declared 50.7 percent of the popular vote to be a “mandate” and the fascist traitors who comprise his party talked of a “permanent [Repugnican] majority,” only two years later, in 2006, the Repugnicans lost the U.S. House of Representatives and Democratic California U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi became the first woman to become speaker of the House in U.S. history, and then two years after that, in 2008, Barack Obama, the nation’s first non-white president, won a higher percentage of the popular vote than either George W. Bush or even Bill Clinton ever had.

So some caution needs to be exercised before declaring a “permanent [insert party name here] majority,” or even a “mandate” based on not even a full 51 percent of the popular vote, but at the same time, to the victor goes the spoils, and the so-called “leaders” of the Democratic Party need to stop acting like losers even after they’ve fucking won.

(Yes, on the heels of his second electoral victory, Obama still is talking about cooperation with the Repugnican Tea Party traitors in Congress, even though the past four years have demonstrated amply that you cannot negotiate with such terrorists, because the assumption that they are rational creatures capable of compromise is patently incorrect.) 

The Repugnican Tea Party traitor-fascists act like winners even after they’ve lost, and if the damage that they’ve wreaked upon the nation is to be reversed (if that’s even possible at this point [it very most likely isn't, perhaps especially in regards to global warming]), the Democrats really need to stop snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

I’m not holding my breath, however.

I expect the next four years to look and feel much like the past four, although I expect things here in California to improve more quickly than they improve – if they ever improve — nationally, since here in California we have demonstrated how to edge the Repugnican Tea Party traitors more and more closely to the endangered species status that they oppose so much.

As California goes, so goes the nation, it has been said.

I hope that that is correct.

P.S. Of course I’m happy that on Tuesday the voters of three states — Maine, Maryland and Washington — voted for same-sex marriage, being the first states to adopt same-sex marriage upon a popular vote, and pushing the number of states that have same-sex marriage from six (before Tuesday) to now nine. (The other six states are Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York and Vermont. The District of Columbia also has same-sex marriage, as do two U.S. Native American tribes, apparently.)

The 2008 election results were a bittersweet pill here in California, because although Barack Obama had become the nation’s first black president based upon his ubiquitous campaign promises of hope and change (and to a large degree they were just that – promises — we know now), Proposition Hate had shot down same-sex marriage, which the California Supreme Court had ruled earlier in the year was every Californian’s constitutional right.

If same-sex marriage were put up to a vote again in California today, of course it would pass this time — even though, let me be clear, no one’s constitutional guarantee of equality ever should have to be put up to a fucking vote — and it’s gratifying to see that the Mittens Romney-Pretty Boy Paul Ryan ticket, representing the Mormon cult and the Catholick church respectively, were rejected by the majority of the nation’s voters, since the Mormon cult and the Catholick church were the biggest sponsors of Proposition Hate, in their attempt to shove their brand of theocracy and theofascism down our throats, Taliban-style.

Karma is a bitch.

(Just like Ann Romney is. I am sooooo happy not to have to see her fucking face as first lady for the next four years, by the way. Ann Romney reminds me of an Ann Cunter who actually ate something. Why are so many Repugican Tea Party women bleach-blonde harpies who act like sorority chicks who are getting revenge upon all of us for the ponies that they never got as spoiled little girls?)

P.P.S. For all of their post-election sore-loserism crying and whining, the white-supremacist Repugnican Tea Party traitors are fucking lucky that we are seeing a for-the-very-most-part bloodless, demographic revolution in the United States, and not (thus far, anyway…) the actual bloody revolution that the Repugnican Tea Party traitors deserve to have launched against them, a la the French Revolution.

After all, the “47 percent” that Mittens “Let Them Eat Cake” Romney talked about in May when he didn’t know that he was being video-recorded actually is a bit more than 50 percent, we see from Tuesday’s presidential election results.

Is Mother Earth trying to rid Herself of Repugnicans?

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

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

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

AccuWeather.com image, August 25, 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That evil, evil man!

When it rains, it pours: NAACP now is on board with same-sex marriage

I still believe that President Barack Obama, for his ubiquitous campaign promises of “hope” and “change,” publicly came out for same-sex marriage too late in his presidency — the time to do the right thing is (almost) always right now — and I still believe that Obama publicly came out for same-sex marriage only after he’d calculated that it was politically safe to do so (and maybe even only after he’d calculated that it was politically harmful to continue not to do so).

And I certainly don’t want to be told that I should be thankful that Obama politically went out on a limb for my fellow non-heterosexuals and otherwise non-gender-conforming individuals when, in fact, we helped put him in the Oval Office, and when, in fact, our equal human and civil rights always have been and always will be far more important than is one politician.

All of that said, Obama’s belated pro-same-sex-marriage proclamation seems to be having benefits that perhaps even he didn’t foresee.

Not only have leaders within the black community such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton proclaimed that they support same-sex marriage — Jackson not long ago enough was adamant that same-sex marriage is not about civil rights – but the NAACP yesterday announced its support of same-sex marriage, calling same-sex marriage a civil right.

The Associated Press quotes NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous as having proclaimed: “Civil marriage is a civil right and a matter of civil law. The NAACP’s support for marriage equality is deeply rooted in the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution and equal protection of all people.”

Wow.

True, Jealous is a young black leader — he’s 39, the youngest president that the NAACP has ever had — and it’s true that younger people are much more accepting of same-sex marriage and other equal human and civil rights for non-heterosexuals and non-gender-conforming individuals than are older people. And it’s true that there are many, many older people (and yes, plenty of younger people), of all races, who are going to take their homophobia with them to their graves, regardless of what Barack Obama or Benjamin Todd Jealous or Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton or you or I have to say about same-sex marriage and equal human and civil rights for all.

But the good news is that old bigots do die, that they have fewer days ahead of them than they have behind them. And as today’s younger bigots grow older and their bigotry becomes less and less acceptable, at least they increasingly will keep their stupid fucking mouths shut and keep their ignorance and hatred to their miserable selves.

Given that blacks have been the one racial group in the United States most opposed to equality for non-heterosexuals and non-gender-conforming individuals, having the likes of Obama and Jealous and Jackson and Sharpton now proclaiming that the black community should share the civil rights pie already with non-heterosexuals and non-gender-conforming individuals should, within a few years, I surmise, put a fairly solid majority of Americans (say, at least 55 percent of them) in favor of equality for all.

There is a pretty good article on the topic of black homophobia that Slate writer William Saletan posted in November 2008, shortly after the nation elected its first black president — and after black voters were the largest racial group of voters in California who voted down same-sex marriage by voting yes on Proposition 8. Saletan begins:

[November 4, 2008] was a good day to be black. It was not a good day to be gay.

Arkansas voters approved a ballot measure to prohibit gay couples from adopting kids. Florida and Arizona voters approved measures to ban gay marriage. But the heaviest blow came in California, where a gay-marriage ban, Proposition 8, overrode a state Supreme Court ruling that had legalized same-sex marriage.

A surge of black turnout, inspired by Barack Obama, didn’t help liberals in the Proposition 8 fight. In fact, it was a big reason why they lost. The gay marriage problem is becoming a black problem.

The National Election Pool exit poll tells the story. Whites and Asian Americans, comprising 69 percent of California’s electorate, opposed Proposition 8 by a margin of 51 percent to 49 percent. Latinos favored it, 53-47. But blacks turned out in historically high numbers — 10 percent of the electorate — and 70 percent of them voted for Proposition 8. …

I remember that Election Day well. I had cast my vote for Barack Obama, only to learn within the following days that while I had supported the black community, the black community had coldly turned its back on me.

Saletan’s article even indicates that perhaps black homophobia helped get George W. Bush a second term in 2004:

A report from the pro-gay National Black Justice Coalition attributes President Bush’s 2004 re-election in part to the near-doubling of his percentage of the black vote in Ohio, which he achieved “by appealing to black churchgoers on the issue of marriage equality.” This year, blacks in California were targeted the same way.

The NBJC report paints a stark picture of the resistance. It cites surveys showing that “65 percent of African Americans are opposed to marriage equality compared to 53 percent of whites” and that blacks are “less than half as likely to support marriage equality and legal recognition of same-sex civil unions as whites.”

It concludes: “African Americans are virtually the only constituency in the country that has not become more supportive over the last dozen years, falling from a high of 65 percent support for gay rights in 1996 to only 40 percent in 2004.” Nor is the problem dying out: “Among African-American youth, 55 percent believed that homosexuality is always wrong, compared to 36 percent of Latino youth and 35 percent of white youth.”

Saletan then goes, at some length, into the black homophobes’ “mutability”/“immutability” “argument,” which I just don’t fucking buy. (Who chooses to be a member of an historically reviled and oppressed minority group? Fucking duh.) I still surmise, as I wrote recently, that most homophobic blacks remain homophobic primarily because (1) they want to remain, in the national story, the only victims of prejudice and discrimination and oppression, because their identity is wrapped up in race-based victimhood, real or imagined/fabricated, and (2) because they want there to be one minority group that even they still can shit and piss upon, because it’s better to be near the bottom of the sociological dog-pile that is the United States of America than it is to be at the very bottom, isn’t it?

This is cruelty and hypocrisy, of course, to demand equality for one’s own minority group but to continue to shit and piss upon the members of another historically oppressed minority group. When the historically hated and oppressed become the haters and oppressors of others, it’s pretty fucking ugly. (Are you listening, Palestinian-oppressing Israelis?)

And, of course, homophobia within the black community doesn’t just hurt gay whites like me. It hurts blacks in many ways. Being rejected by your own family for not being heterosexual and/or gender-conforming contributes to such problems as drug and alcohol addiction, emotional and psychological disorders, suicide attempts, and the contraction of sexually transmitted diseases, because individuals who have come to believe that they are shit for not being heterosexual and/or gender-conforming often don’t worry too much about protecting themselves because they probably want to die anyway, their self-esteem is that low.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in fact, reports:

African Americans face the most severe burden of HIV of all racial/ethnic groups in the United States. Despite representing only 14 percent of the US population in 2009, African Americans accounted for 44 percent of all new HIV infections in that year. Compared with members of other races and ethnicities, African Americans account for a higher proportion of HIV infections at all stages of disease — from new infections to deaths.

Black homophobia — and its attendant ignorance and fear and stunning lack of education and enlightenment – probably is the No. 1 reason for those grim statistics, and, of course, heterosexual black women are less likely to contract HIV and other STDs if their black male sexual partners who actually are homosexual or bisexual don’t feel pressured to lead double lives in order to give the appearance of heterosexuality in order to please the homophobic bigots in their lives. (The CDC reports than for 2009, “Most [85 percent of] black women with HIV acquired HIV through heterosexual sex. The estimated rate of new HIV infections for black women was more than 15 times as high as the rate for white women, and more than three times as high as that of Latina women.”)

And, of course, it’s much easier for me and other non-heterosexuals and non-gender-conforming individuals to be supportive of the members of the black community if we have the same love and respect from them that they want from us.

With equal human and civil rights for everyone, everyone wins.

Except, perhaps, for the members of the right wing, who have opposed equal human and civil rights, who have opposed liberty and justice for all, forever.

That so many blacks have shared that trait with the white wingnuts is nothing short of tragic.

P.S. Here is the text of the NAACP’s decision to support same-sex marriage, from the organization’s website:

The NAACP Constitution affirmatively states our objective to ensure the “political, educational, social and economic equality” of all people. Therefore, the NAACP has opposed and will continue to oppose any national, state, local policy or legislative initiative that seeks to codify discrimination or hatred into the law or to remove the constitutional rights of LGBT citizens. We support marriage equality consistent with equal protection under the law provided under the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. Further, we strongly affirm the religious freedoms of all people as protected by the First Amendment.

Of course, that last sentence, an apparent afterthought, apparently had to be thrown in there in order to appease the churchgoing set. Of course, one’s religious freedoms do not include the “right” to impose his or her own religious beliefs upon everyone else, which the churchgoing set has a problem understanding, thus their incredibly insane claim that they are victimized if they are not allowed to victimize others, because their religious beliefs include the supposedly Bible-based victimization of others.

Not being a member of the black community, I don’t know how much sway the NAACP has within the black community. The organization’s website proclaims:

The NAACP has addressed civil rights with regard to marriage since Loving vs. Virginia declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional in 1967. In recent years the NAACP has taken public positions against state and federal efforts to ban the rights and privileges for LGBT citizens, including strong opposition to Proposition 8 in California, the Defense of Marriage Act, and most recently, North Carolina’s Amendment 1, which changed the state constitution’s to prohibit same-sex marriage.

While I am happy to see the NAACP’s comparison of same-sex marriage rights to mixed-race (heterosexual) marriage rights, if it is true that the NAACP showed “strong opposition to Proposition 8 in California,” the fact that 70 percent of the state’s black voters voted down same-sex marriage nontheless indicates, unfortunately, that the NAACP doesn’t have an awful lot of sway within the black community, at least not here in California or in North Carolina or in the other states where black voters have shot down same-sex marriage in much higher percentages than have their white, Latino and Asian counterparts.

Katherine, Kenneth and Ken: Three Ks make KKK

Associated Press photo

Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett is a Mormon and a co-chair of fellow Mormon multi-millionaire Mittens Romney’s presidential campaign in Arizona. The Repugnican Tea Party traitor Bennett (photographed above in November with Repugnican Tea Party Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, who initially appointed him to his post) says that there is a possibility that he will remove Barack Obama from Arizona’s November ballot because of lingering “questions” over Obama’s U.S. citizenship. Do the “tea party” traitors really want a rematch of the Civil War?

In late 2000, it was good enough for the Repugnican Tea Party traitors to block a recount of Florida’s presidential votes and to have the right-wing “justices” on the U.S. Supreme Court crown George W. Bush as president, even though Al Gore had won not only the popular vote, but the state of Florida as well.

(In order for Gee Dubya to “win” the pivotal state of Florida, it was awfully helpful for him to have his brother Jeb as Florida’s governor and also to have the state’s secretary of state, Katherine Harris, in his pocket as well. Harris served not only as her state’s chief elections official, but she served as co-chair of her state’s committee to elect Gee Dubya as well. No conflict of interest there!)

In 2004, Repugnican Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, among other things, made damn sure that Repugnican-heavy precincts had plenty of voting booths but that Democratic-heavy precincts had too few, making Democratic voters (or would-be Democratic voters, anyway) wait in line for hours.

Just like his mentor Katherine Harris, Kenneth Blackwell also was co-chair of his state’s committee to “re”-elect Gee Dubya, even though he was the state’s chief elections officer. Unshockingly, with the help of Blackwell, Gee Dubya “won” the pivotal state of Ohio in 2004, giving us four more years of his unelected rule.

Now comes the Repugnican Tea Party secretary of state of Arizona, Ken Bennett, who initially was not elected, but who initially was appointed to his post by Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer after former Arizona Secretary of State Brewer ascended to the governorship when Democratic former Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano stupidly left the state to become Barack Obama’s secretary of “homeland security” and to leave Borg queen Jan Brewer in charge. (Arizona’s constitution provides that the state’s secretary of state becomes governor in the event of a vacancy in the governorship. Arizona has no lieutenant governor.) 

Reuters reports that Ken Bennett, a Mormon, “is Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s campaign co-chairman in Arizona.”

No shock there, right? This is a pattern that we’ve seen.

But Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennnett is talking about the possibility of his removing incumbent president Barack Obama from Arizona’s November ballot altogether.

Why bother to stop the vote (re-)counting?

Why bother to suppress the Democratic or Democratic-leaning voters, such as by falsely labeling them as felons (as Katherine Harris did) or by making them wait in line for hours to be able to vote (as Kenneth Blackwell did) or by making them show state-issued ID cards in order to be able to vote (as the legislatures of the red states are doing or are trying to do)?

Just remove the Democratic candidate from the ballot altogether!

Clearly, Ken Bennett is a fucking political genius.

Bennett says that he has received some e-mails from constituents, you see. Constituents who are “concerned” that Muslim socialist Barack Hussein Obama is not a U.S. citizen.

Not e-mails from anti-democratic, white-supremacist fascists. No. E-mails — and we all know that all e-mails, by definition, are credible and respectable – from concerned citizens. Concerned. Citizens.

So let’s see. Let’s run the logic of this:

Billary Clinton wanted to be president of the United States of America very badly. Repugnican Tea Party fossil John McCainosaurus also in 2008 wanted to be the next prez. Maybe not as badly as Billary did, but: Do you really fucking think for one nanosecond that if there had been any actual problems with Obama’s qualifications to be U.S. president, neither Billary nor the McCain-Palin camp, with millions of dollars at their disposal, would have discovered this fact through their opposition research? And prevented Obama from continuing in his quest for the Oval Office?

The birther dipshits have failed in the court system, too. Notes Wikipedia:

Although Obama was confirmed as president-elect by Congress on January 8, 2009, and sworn in as president on January 20, 2009, litigation continued into his presidency. Numerous individuals and groups have filed state or federal lawsuits seeking to have Obama disqualified from standing or being confirmed for the presidency, or to compel him to release additional documentation relating to his citizenship.

By mid-December 2008, at least 17 lawsuits had been filed challenging Obama’s eligibility in states including North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Hawaii, Connecticut, New Jersey, Texas and Washington. No such suit had resulted in the grant of any relief to the plaintiffs by any court. All of the cases have been rejected in lower courts. Three post-election suits were dismissed by the Supreme Court of the United States. [Emphasis mine.]

The U.S. Supreme Court coronated George W. Bush as president but won’t touch the birther bullshit.

This fact also speaks volumes.

But here comes Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett — who, as well as helping out Mitt Romney in Arizona even though Bennett is the state’s chief elections official, according to the Los Angeles Times also has his eye on Arizona’s governorship in 2014 — saying, according to the Times, that he hasn’t ruled out the possibility of removing Obama from Arizona’s ballot if the state of Hawaii does not meet his demands regarding Obama’s birth certificate. Reports the Times:

Asked if he would keep Obama’s name off the state’s 2012 ballot if Hawaii fails to fulfill his request, Bennett said: “That’s possible. Or the other option would be I would ask all the other candidates, including the president, maybe to submit a certified copy of their birth certificate. But I don’t want to do that.”

So, to recap: Neither Billary nor McCainosaurus disputed Obama’s American citizenship during the 2008 campaign. The right-wing, president-selecting U.S. Supreme Court has refused to touch the matter of Obama’s citizenship. And Arizona’s Ken Bennett remains the only chief elections official of any of the 50 states to try to make Obama’s citizenship an “issue” at this time. And he certainly is the only state’s chief elections official who has raised the specter of removing the incumbent president from the November ballot altogether.

In light of all of this, three things need to happen:

• The state of Arizona, the South Africa of the Southwest, needs to be (continued to be) boycotted for its backasswards, white supremacist/racist bullshit, such as its blatantly unconstitutional “breathing while brown” legislation, its blatantly white supremacist infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio*, and for its secretary of state, who, along with Katherine Harris and with Kenneth Blackwell, we now can induct into the Chief State Elections Officials’ Hall of Shame.
• Federal legislation needs to be passed that prohibits any state’s chief elections official from participating in any political candidate’s campaign, even just on paper. This is a no-fucking-brainer. You cannot have a fair election when the top elections official has a horse in the race. Subordinate state elections officials also should be prohibited from being active in any political campaign that their elections office oversees. Otherwise, it’s a blatant and anti-democratic conflict of interest. 
• The actual democracy- and freedom-loving residents of Arizona need to recall Ken Bennett. In November they successfully recalled the architect of the state’s “breathing while brown” legislation (a.k.a. SB1070, which the state’s legislature passed in April 2010), former Arizona state Senate President Russell Pearce (who is yet another fucking Mormon). They can recall Bennett, too.

And, of course, should Bennett actually remove Barack Obama from Arizona’s ballot – which is, I think, unlikely, and the threat of which I believe most likely is just his political ploy to get the white-supremacist/racist vote – the federal government would need to intervene forcefully in such a blatantly anti-democratic violation of a state’s citizens’ voting rights.

And we real Americans would need to consider the need to pay Arizona a visit with our torches and pitchforks, because this bullshit will not stand, and this bullshit is the stuff of which civil wars are made.

P.S. Fun Ken Bennett trivia! Wikipedia notes that in 2006 Bennett’s son, Clifton, pled guilty to sexual battery, specifically, to having rectally violated at least one fellow minor:

A 2006 plea bargain involving [Bennett's] son, Clifton, became controversial after several parents of victims accused [Bennett] of exerting undue influence to affect the case. In what a county attorney described as a summer camp “hazing ritual” gone wrong, Clifton [Bennett] and another man inserted a broomstick into the rectums of at least 18 boys in over 40 separate incidents.

Ultimately Clifton [Bennett], only 17 years old and a minor, pled guilty to one count of aggravated assault. Clifton was sentenced to 30 days in jail and three years’ probation. [Democratic] Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard said he “had questions about the handling of the case,” but that his office had no authority to intervene. Yavapai County Attorney Sheila Polk defended the plea bargain and accused the news media of misrepresenting the issue.

A nut usually doesn’t fall far from the tree, does it?

And why is such sadism apparently so prevalent within the Mormon cult, such as how the 18-year-old Mittens Romney led a band of thugs to commit assault and battery on a young gay man? Romney called his forcible cutting of the young gay man’s hair a “prank,” but that isn’t a “prank” — that is assault and battery, a crime — and today, it would be classified as a hate crime.

Mormons are evil.

–

*Reuters notes that “In March, Maricopa County Sheriff [Joe] Arpaio declared Obama’s birth certificate a forgery following an ["investigation"] by a volunteer posse, acting at the request of conservative ["tea party"] activists in the Phoenix valley.” Of course, such a federal matter is not within any county sheriff’s jurisdiction, but white supremacists like Joe Arpaio, who is in deep shit with the feds for his office’s blatantly racist mistreatment of Latinos in Arizona, come to believe that they are omnipotent.

Prick Insantorum: Global warming is ‘political science’

Reuters photo

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

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

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

“Responsible environmental stewardship.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–

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

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

‘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.

Repugnican Indiana secretary of state found guilty of felonious voter fraud

Associated Press photo

Repugnican Indiana Secretary of State Charlie White (pictured above in June 2011) today was found guilty of felonious voter fraud. Gee, could it be that the true face of voter fraud in the United States of America is not brown-skinned and brown-eyed?

For all of the right-wing, democracy-hating traitors’ viral lies about rampant voter fraud being committed on the left – in order to make it more difficult for likely Democratic voters to vote by passing voter-suppression legislation because of this supposed rampant voter fraud on the left – the worst enemies of a fair and untainted democratic process always have been on the right.

Think Repugnican Katherine Harris, the former secretary of state of Florida, who made damn sure that George W. Bush “won” that pivotal state in 2000, even though he lost it, and how she not only was the state’s top elections official, but c0-chaired the state’s committee to elect Gee Dubya at the same time.

Think ditto for Repugnican Ken Blackwell, the former secretary of state of Ohio, who made damn sure that George W. Bush “won” “re”-election in that pivotal state in 2004 — even though Blackwell also as the state’s top elections official also was a co-chair of the state’s committee to “re”-elect Gee Dubya.

Now, think Repugnican Charlie White — the secretary of state of the state of Indiana who has been found guilty of, of all things, felonious voter fraud. (Harris and Blackwell also are, in my book, felons, but many if not most such felons never see the inside of a prison cell because they never are convicted because their status as elitists protects them from being subjected to the criminal justice system, which is only for those of us who don’t have money and power.)

Reports The Associated Press today (emphases are mine):

Indianapolis — Indiana’s top elections official could lose his job and his freedom after jurors convicted him of multiple voter-fraud-related charges [today], leaving in flux the fate of one of the state’s most powerful positions.

Republican Secretary of State Charlie White has held on to his office for more than a year despite being accused of lying about his address on voter registration forms.

A Hamilton County jury found White guilty of six of seven felony charges, including false registration, voting in another precinct, submitting a false ballot, theft and two counts of perjury. He was acquitted on one fraud charge.

White expressed no outward emotion as the verdict was read, and later said outside the courtroom: “I’m disappointed for my family and the people who supported me.”

It wasn’t immediately clear what would happen to White’s elected office. He has resisted calls to resign from Democrats and Republicans, including Gov. Mitch Daniels, but state law bars anyone convicted of a felony from remaining in office.

White’s attorney, Carl Brizzi, said he will ask the judge to reduce the charges to misdemeanors because his client has no criminal background and has a long record of public service. [Bullshit -- a felony is a felony, and to let White off the hook with a misdemeanor or misdemeanors is to say that voter fraud committed by a state's top elections official is no big deal.]

Daniels announced [today] he had appointed White’s chief deputy, Jerry Bonnet, as interim secretary of state.

“I have chosen not to make a permanent appointment today out of respect for the judge’s authority to lessen the verdict to a misdemeanor and reinstate the elected office holder,” Daniels said in a statement. “If the felony convictions are not altered, I anticipate making a permanent appointment quickly.” …

The jury verdict came after a weeklong trial in which White, who had vigorously protested the charges in hearings before a state elections panel, presented no defense.

Prosecutors said he used his ex-wife’s address instead of a condo he had with his fiancée because he didn’t want to give up his $1,000-per-month Fishers Town Council salary after moving out of that district. He faced seven felony charges, including voter fraud, perjury and theft.

White, 42, has said the charges ignored a complicated personal life in which he was trying to raise his 10-year-old son, plan his second marriage and campaign for the statewide office he won that November. He said he stayed at his ex-wife’s house when he wasn’t on the road campaigning and did not live in the condo until after he remarried. …

No sentencing date was set. …

Republican special prosecutor John Dowd expressed satisfaction about the verdict.

“We believe it was about someone who violated the law and cheated the system — and gamed the system,” Dowd said. “And, obviously, the jury thought the same way.” …

During his closing arguments, assistant special prosecutor Dan Sigler Jr. argued that White knew that he was committing voter fraud but did it anyway for political power.

“If we aren’t going to enforce election law against the secretary of state of Indiana, who are we going to enforce it against?” Sigler said.

Indeed.

Where was the right-wing criminal James O’Keefe’s hidden camera, I wonder, when the right-wing, white male Repugnican Indiana secretary of state was committing voter fraud?

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.

God would have torched it sooner

Before and after: A gargantuan monument of Jesus Christ in Podunk, Ohio, was felled by Zeus’ thunderbolt last night, leaving only skeletal remains.

Associated Press photos

It would be sooooo tempting to read divine intervention into the destruction by lightning of the tacky six-story monument of Jesus Christ in Ohio last night.

I mean, the fiery demise of the “touchdown Jesus” is much more symbolic than are the things that the “Christo”fascists traditionally acribe to punitive divine intervention, such as hurricanes, earthquakes and AIDS.

But God, it seems to me, would have intervened a long time ago — the monument was erected in 2004, and I can’t see God letting that God-awful thing stand for nearly that long, so I’m thinking that this is the proof that there is no God that philosophers have been searching for for centuries.

But seriously, couldn’t the $300,000 that was spent on the “touchdown Jesus” have been used for much better things, like, um, oh, I don’t know – feeding, clothing and sheltering the poor? As Jesus Christ instructed us to do?

What about the Bible’s prohibition against idolatry?

And didn’t the story of the Tower of Babel teach the “Christians” anything?

Just sayin’.

Amen.

P.S. Of course, the wingnutty church vows to rebuild the monument. Jesus Fucking Christ…