Only Prick Santorum thinks that he should continue his quest

Associated Press photo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reports Yahoo! News today:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–

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

The wingnuts’ very bad day

Updated below (Wednesday, February 8, 2012)

Wow.

So the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals today ruled that Proposition 8 — the anti-same-sex-marriage measure that passed by a small majority in California in November 2008 after a hateful, lie-filled campaign by the right (financed largely by the Mormon cult and the Catholick church) – violates the freedoms guaranteed to Californians by the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment, a.k.a. the Equal Protection Clause.*

Sure, the case will go to the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court, but even if the current right-leaning U.S. Supreme Court rules that banning same-sex marriage is not unconstitutional, the composition of the court will change over time, and one day same-sex marriage will be legal in all 50 states.

These things take time — it wasn’t until 1967 that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in Loving vs. Virginia, that no state may outlaw mixed-race marriage.

And it was in 2003 that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Lawrence vs. Texas that, per Wikipedia, “private sexual conduct is protected by the liberty rights implicit in the due process clause of the United States Constitution.” Yet it was just in 1986 that the same court had upheld “sodomy” laws in Bowers vs. Hardwick. The court reverses itself all the time.

Also today, anti-choice wingnut Karen Handel resigned from the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation after the foundation took well-deserved truckloads of shit for having decided to cut off funding to Planned Parenthood — a decision that Handel denies that as the Komen foundation’s vice president for public policy she influenced, but that insiders say of course she did.

Before she went to the Komen foundation, the Repugnican Tea Party’s Handel had run for governor of Georgia in 2010 on an anti-choice platform (never mind that the issue of a woman’s right to an abortion was settled waaay back in 1973 with Roe vs. Wade) and had received the endorsement of fellow wingnut and misogynist Sarah Palin.

Today is a great victory for women and for non-heterosexuals and non-gender-conforming individuals.

The treasonous, ignorant and hate-filled wingnuts among us hate the ideas of equality, of liberty, justice and freedom for all, but the ideals of equality, of liberty, justice and freedom for all — and not just for the oppressive wingnuts — march on nonetheless.

–

*The Fourteenth Amendment reads, in part: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Updated (Wednesday, February 8, 2012):

Wow. Yesterday also was a bad day for the wingnuts because the utterly unelectable Prick Santorum came in at first place in all three Repugnican Tea Party presidential primary contests yesterday in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri. Gilded Boy Mitt Romney came in at second place in Colorado and Missouri and third place in Minnesota.

A protracted Repugnican Tea Party presidential primary fight can only help Barack Obama. Indeed, the media have been reporting that Obama’s favorability ratings are up, and that the latest polls have him beating all of the Repugnican Tea Party presidential contenders in hypothetical matchups.

Again, yesterday was a pretty bad day to be a wingnut.

P.S. Prick Santorum’s attacks against Obama are pretty fucking hilarious, such as this one: “He [Obama] believes he’s the smartest guy in the country and he should tell people what to believe and how to live their lives.”

Yet it’s the Catholick Prick Santorum and his “Christo”fascistic cohorts who want to ban abortion – and perhaps even contraception – and decide who may and may not get married, and otherwise cram their backasswards, patriarchal, misognyist, homophobic, xenophobic, anti-science worldview down our throats.

But nooooo, it’s Barack Obama who wants to “tell people what to believe and how to live their lives.”

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.

Obama sells us farther down the river

Reuters photo

Barack Obama last night hailed the largest, non-military (of course) federal budget cut in U.S. history as a “compromise” (and not a cave-in) and said he hopes for more “compromises” with the Repugnican Tea Party traitors in the future. Goddess save this nation from Barack Obama’s “common-sense” “compromises.”

In December, Barack Obama reneged on his campaign pledge not to extend the unelected Bush regime’s tax cuts for the rich and the super-rich. Last night, Obama caved in to $38.5 billion in federal budget cuts demanded by the Repugnican Tea Party and then announced it as a victory for bipartisanship.

Which side is Barack Obama on?

(That’s a rhetorical question. He always has been, and always will be, on his own side.)

The consensus the morning after is that in the budget fight, the Repugnican Tea Party traitors, as usual, won. Reports The Associated Press:

Washington – Republican conservatives were the chief winners in the budget deal that forced Democrats to accept historic spending cuts they strongly opposed.

Emboldened by last fall’s election victories, fiscal conservatives have changed the debate in Washington. The question no longer is whether to cut spending, but how deeply. Rarely mentioned is the idea of higher taxes to lower the deficit.

Their success is all the more notable because Democrats control the Senate and White House.

But more difficult decisions lie ahead, and it’s not clear whether GOP lawmakers can rely on their winning formula. They pushed Democrats to the brink, then gave in just enough to claim impressive achievements, rather than holding the line and triggering a government shutdown that might have yielded far less politically.

The GOP victories came on spending. Their concessions dealt mainly with social issues, where they tried to limit abortions and restrict environmental rules.

House Republicans who care intensely about such social issues may fight harder next time, giving Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, fewer bargaining chips to appease Democrats. Tea party Republicans, some of whom found the cuts too small in [last night's] last-minute agreement, might insist on deeper ones from now on. …

The Repugnican Tea Party traitors in Congress know what they want and they go after it, viciously. They are undaunted by the fact that the Democratic Party controls the White House and the U.S. Senate, and they pay “bipartisanship” lip service, only when they are trying to get what they want. The Democrats, on the other hand, are all too happy to give away the store in the name of “bipartisanship,” even though the other side never acts in true bipartisan spirit.

Even when the Democrats were in control of the White House and both houses of Congress in 2009 and 2010, they were too timid to spend their political capital, and now that opportunity is lost. It would not have been lost in November 2010 had they actually found their testicles that the voters had handed to them and spent their fucking political capital. But no one respects cowards, and people don’t tend to vote for people whom they don’t respect.

This is a long-standing fucking pattern with the Democratic Party.

We got “President” George W. Bush because in late 2000 Democrat Al Gore was too pussy to fight for the White House that he had won. Gore was too above it all to fight, and in the name of his “bipartisanship,” the nation suffered eight long nightmarish years of the unelected Bush regime. (But Ralph Nader, not Al Gore, still gets the brunt of the blame for this.)

In the name of “bipartisanship” under Obama, the rich and the super-rich got their BushCheneyCorp-era tax cuts extended, and the social Darwinist right wing is realizing its long-standing wet dream of shrinking the federal government down to the size that it can be drowned in the bathtub, so that corporations have no restraints on their treasonous, anti-people, anti-planet profiteering whatsofuckingever.

Barack Obama should be a blockade on the right-wing road to totally wiping out the middle class and the working class, but all that he has done thus far is to present a few “bipartisan” speed bumps.

But trust him, ye ignorant, mere mortal! He has A Plan!

No, he doesn’t. Well, yes, he does: his plan is to continue to sell us out — because we let him.

While Obama can’t be bothered to put up a fight, the right wing incrementally moves the boundaries that increasingly squeeze the working and the middle classes and ensure that the rich get richer while the poor get poorer.

The Repugnican Tea Party traitors made ridiculous demands in their federal budget plan, such as defunding Planned Parenthood and defanging the Environmental Protection Agency. They probably never expected to actually get these things, and while the Democrats successfully fought back against those ridiculous demands, the Repugnican Tea Party traitors still got a $38.5 billion budget cut.

According to the AP,

Boehner, a skilled legislator, spent weeks talking with House conservatives who insisted on $61 billion in current-year spending cuts. That was the pro-rated remainder of conservatives’ campaign pledge to cut $100 billion in the 2011 budget year, now half over.

Democrats complained bitterly about the first $10 billion in cuts, but eventually said they could not go above $33 billion. The final deal calls for $38.5 billion in cuts.

Boehner and his lieutenants repeatedly told the adamant budget-cutters, some of them new to public office, that they were getting a good deal. A short time ago, he told them, Democrats would not have considered anything approaching $40 billion. Take your victory and get ready for the next fight, he urged them.

Isn’t that what you do in cut-throat negotiations: Always demand much more than you ever actually expect to get (such as $61 billion), so that what you actually do get ($38.5 billion) is still significantly more than what you should get?

And how tough are the Democrats when they claim that they won’t go above $33 billion but then agree to $38.5 billion?

The Democrats should have stuck to their guns for once and allowed the Repugnican Tea Party traitors to shut down the federal government. Instead, as usual, they caved and they put the Repugnican Tea Party traitors further along their path not to our prosperity, but to our complete and total serfdom to our corporate masters.

And this when Barack Obama is telling us that we should re-elect him so that he can finish what he started.

God save us if Obama finishes what he started.

Our only hope at this point is a strong 2012 primary challenge to DINO Barack Obama.

Howard Dean, where are you? Russ Feingold? Hell – Dennis Kucinich?

Someone, anyone with balls — hell, even if she has ovaries.

Just not Barack Obama for 2012. With “friends” like him “on our side,” who needs the Repugnican Tea Party?

Using our troops as human shields doesn’t work anymore

George W. Bush perfected the tactic of turning our troops into human shields for his political gain.

Any criticism of his illegal, immoral, unjust and unprovoked Vietraq War, Bush or one of his henchpeople tried (with at least some success) to recast as an assault on our troops.

Let’s talk about our troops.

The members of the party that loves to send our troops to their maimings and their deaths for the benefit of war profiteers and not out of actual national defense or national security do not wuv our troops.

Further, this patriarchal, macho, misogynist hero-worship bullshit has to stop. Our troops indeed are important for actual national defense, the need for which is rare these days, with most military operations nowadays being about perpetuating the bloated military-industrial complex. But it’s not just our members of the military, law enforcement officers and firefighters who are critical to our nation’s well-being and security. How about teachers? Our nurses? Last but certainly not least, our mothers? (And our scientists and our artists and…)

Repugnican Tea Party Speaker of the House John “Cry Me a River” Boehner proclaims that he’s confident that those Democrats who believe it is important to fund our troops and make real spending cuts will prevail upon Senator Reid and our commander in chief to keep the government from shutting down.”

It’s a thinly veiled threat: If the Democrats don’t give the Repugnican Tea Party traitors what they are demanding, the federal government will be shut down, our troops won’t be funded – and this will put all of us at imminent risk. And it will be the Democrats’ fault.

But what the Repugnican Tea Party traitors are demanding is no meaningful cuts to the bloated budget of the bloated military-industrial complex but the evisceration of the Environmental Protection Agency and the end of federal funding of Planned Parenthood.

Wow. Protecting our environment is part of our national security — as we will see, graphically, as climate change increases over the coming years – but the Repugnican Tea Party traitors want to put corporate profits way ahead of our national security.

And Planned Parenthood is part of our national security as well. The Repugnican Tea Party traitors have been telling us for some months now that we just can’t afford human beings (and we can’t, not when the rich and the super-rich keep getting their tax cuts, when corporations like General Electric pay no fucking taxes, and when all of our tax dollars go to the [in]human greed of the military-industrial complex instead of to human needs).

Yet birth control (yes, including abortion, elective and medically necessary), aside from being great for the planet because of reduced consumption of natural resources and thus reduced pollution due to lower birth rates, is a great fucking solution toward keeping the nation’s population at a sustainable level.

With increasing population and increasing poverty, which is the result of increasing population, comes increasing violence. Therefore, keeping both the population and poverty down keeps down violence, which is part of what you call national security.

But apparently, the Repugnican Tea Party traitors want there to be even more miserable Americans in poverty.

The Repugnican Tea Party traitors, of course, don’t give a flying fuck about national security. They care about treasonously continuing to feed at the trough of the U.S. Treasury via the Pentagon. It’s their legalized thievery from the American people. And perpetual warfare ensures that, like Big Brother in 1984, we have a perpetual supply of fake enemies (like Saddam Hussein, who posed no threat to the U.S.) or true enemies that we created through our own military actions (like Osama bin Laden). It’s a great gig if you can get it — using warfare to create more enemies, which you then use to justify even more warfare, which creates even more enemies, which…

“For them [the Repugnican Tea Party traitors] to want to disguise their bad [federal budget] proposal by hiding behind our troops is really a disservice to our troops,” said she-devil to the right wing U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California.

Yes, it is, but keeping them in perpetual warfare in the Middle East for the benefit only of the war profiteers is a disservice to them, too. The way to demonstrate that you truly care about our troops is to never put them in harm’s way unless it’s absolutely necessary to do so. And in those rare times, you do everything in your power to keep them safe.

Thankfully, President Barack Obama is threatening to veto the Repugnican Tea Party’s budget plan that attempts to hold all of us hostage by using our troops as political human shields while achieving the wholly-budget-unrelated right-wing wet dreams of destroying Planned Parenthood and the EPA.

Obama wants to be re-elected, after all, and the stupid white men’s assault upon The People is Wisconsin isn’t working out too well for them right about now (so it’s rather stunning that Repugnican Tea Party U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin now is talking about destroying Medicare and giving the rich and the super-rich even more tax cuts as being fundamental to our “prosperity”). Obama surely doesn’t want to go the way of Wisconsin Supreme Court “Justice” David Prosser or the way that Wisconsin Gov. Scott “Dead Man” Walker is going to go as soon as his recall can begin.

It’s a bad-ass battle right now between the stupid white man, who has always run the show — and who is destroying the very planet (the North Pole is melting, for fuck’s sake) — and the rest of us, the majority of us who favor the fate of the planet over the fate of the stupid white man, hands down.

We’ve already won the battle of global public opinion, but we still have an awful lot of work to do. There are legions of stupid white men and their sympathizers who still need to be neutralized — or, if necessary, destroyed — for the sake of the very planet and of humankind’s continued existence.



Winds of change are blowing leftward

Dare I be hopeful?

The right wing’s second wind seems to have run out of steam already, and the winds of — dare I say? — change are blowing leftward. Let me count the ways:

The Repugnican-Tea-Party controlled Arizona state Senate just shot down some more anti-immigrant legislation, dealing Grand Dragon — er, state Senate President Russell Pearce a blow to his pink baby-boomer face.

This additional mean-spirited, white supremacist, racist, xenophobic legislation among other things would have challenged U.S. citizenship by birth (which is provided for by the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution) and would have required public schools to out the children of illegal immigrants and hospitals to out patients who are illegal immigrants.

Boycotts work, apparently. Arizona state senators, in shooting down the further racist, xenophobic legislation, noted the detrimental effect upon Arizona’s economy by last year’s passage of Pearce’s woefully misguided S.B. 1040.   

Repugnican Tea Party Gov. Scott “Dead Man” Walker is popular within the Repugnican Tea Party – but among the Wisconsin electorate, upon whom his political fate in the state actually rests, um, not so much.

Oh, and today a Wisconsin judge issued a temporary restraining order against Walker’s union-busting legislation from taking effect.

Reports The New York Times today:

A judge issued a temporary restraining order [today] that prevents Wisconsin’s new law cutting collective bargaining rights for public workers from taking effect, at least for now.

The decision, issued by Judge Maryann Sumi of the Dane County Circuit Court, temporarily bars Wisconsin’s secretary of state from publishing the controversial law, one of the procedural requirements for it to come into effect in the state.

Publication had been expected late next week, but Judge Sumi’s ruling delays that until at least March 29, when she plans to hold a full hearing on a lawsuit that questions the validity of the collective bargaining law based on the speedy manner in which it was carried out earlier this month….

Um, yeah, anything done as quickly and dirtily as the Repugnican Tea Party traitors in Wisconsin’s state Senate rammed through their union-busting legislation — and anything done against such a backdrop of public outcry — is probably illegal as well as unethical and immoral.

And the Times notes that the judge “was first appointed to the court in 1998 by Tommy Thompson, a Republican former governor, then elected in 1999 and 2005.” (Emphasis mine.)

Politico reports today that for the first time in the poll’s history, a Washington Post/ABC News poll shows that a majority of Americans — 53 percent — support same-sex marriage. The poll backs up a recent Democratic poll that put the national level of support at 51 percent, Politico notes.

Right now, same-sex marriage is legal in Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont and the District of Columbia. It’s coming to your state soon.

The pundits more and more  are calling President Barack Obama’s re-election in November 2012 more or less a foregone conclusion.

While Obama is a weak president, a Bill Clinton carbon copy, and while I resist the lesser-of-two-evils “argument,” quite admittedly what the Repugnicans are offering up is much worse than is another four years of Obama: such jewels as union-busting (and anti-environmentalism) in the name of job recovery; attempting to destroy national treasures like Planned Parenthood and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in the name of reducing the federal budget deficit (while the sacred cows of the bloated military-industrial complex and the too-low tax rates for the rich and the super-rich — the real causes of the federal budget deficit — go unaddressed); and blaming “illegals” and other minorities — and labor-union members – for the nation’s economic collapse when it is the still-unprosecuted Wall Street crooks who drove the economy into the fucking ditch.

Less than a full three months in power after the mid-term elections, Repugnican Tea Party traitors in the U.S. House of Representatives and in some of the states (like Wisconsin), drunk on power, already shot their political wads in their stunningly politically tone-deaf political overreach. Promising to aid the economy, they instead have focused on trying to achieve their right-wing wet dreams, such as union-busting, outlawing (or at least severely restricting) abortion, continuing to make political piñatas out of “illegals,” keeping same-sex marriage illegal in most states, and yes, attacking National Public Radio.

But in a rapidly diversifying United States of America, the electorate is resisting continued rule by stupid white men. That’s the good news.

The bad news?

Well, what do you do if the voters are rejecting your agenda? If you are of the Repugnican Tea Party ilk, you do your best to fix the elections.

Reports Yahoo! News recently:

If some GOP lawmakers get their way, it could be a whole lot tougher for people across the country to cast a ballot in the upcoming 2012 presidential election.

Boosted by major electoral gains in state legislatures nationwide in the 2010 campaign, Republican lawmakers in 32 states are pushing measures that would require citizens to show a state identification or proof of citizenship to vote.  Meanwhile, in New Hampshire, GOP lawmakers are proposing new limits on college students who vote in the state, potentially eliminating a key base of electoral support for Democrats in the state ahead of the upcoming presidential election.

As the Washington Post’s Peter Wallsten writes, the measures have set off a partisan battle over voting rights across the country, with Democrats accusing Republicans of trying to suppress voters, including young people and minorities, who would cast their ballots for President Obama and other Democratic candidates next year.

In New Hampshire, Republicans are pushing to end rules that allow same-day voter registration in the state, which has often provided key swing votes for candidates from all parties in the state. State GOP lawmakers are also proposing new limits on students, including a bill that would allow them to vote in college towns only if they or their parents had established permanent residency in the state.

Some GOP lawmakers in New Hampshire have billed the measures as an attempt to crack down on voter fraud in the state — but recent remarks from the newly elected GOP state House speaker have suggested otherwise.

In a recent speech to a tea party group in the state, House Speaker William O’Brien described college voters as “foolish.” “Voting as a liberal. That’s what kids do,” he said, in remarks that were videotaped by a state Democratic Party staffer and posted on YouTube. Students, he said, lack “life experience” and “just vote their feelings.”

GOP lawmakers in the state have distanced themselves from O’Brien’s remarks.

“It’s a war on voting,” Thomas Bates, vice president of Rock the Vote, a youth voter-registration group, told the Post. “We’d like to be advocating for a 21st-century voting system, but here we are fighting against efforts to turn it back to the 19th century.”

Meanwhile, Republicans have also revived measures that have been debated on and off over the last several election cycles that would require voters to provide state-issued IDs at the polls.

In Wisconsin, GOP lawmakers are moving forward with legislation that would block students from using school-issued identification to verify their identity at the polls. Meanwhile, in North Carolina, Republicans are preparing to introduce a similar measure requiring state IDs — a plan that the North Carolina Board of Elections has said could be problematic for African-American voters, a key base of support for Obama in 2008.

Why is it that everything that the Repugnican Tea Party traitors claim is their motivation actually has or would have an opposite effect? Busting unions makes employment much worse, not better, and their claims to care about “preventing election fraud” — which is yet another “crisis” fabricated by the right – actually are all about depriving a huge group of Americans the right to vote, or at least about erecting more hurdles between them and the voting booth.

The good news is that if the Repugnican Tea Party were strong, it wouldn’t have to try to disenfranchise voters, as it has been doing since at least the blatantly stolen presidential election of 2000.

The bad news is that this shit so often works, at least in the short term.

We truly patriotic Americans have to be vigilant.

The right is weak, and the winds of change are blowing in our favor, but the right is not dead yet.

To hell in a handbasket — on crack



This the is “vision” that the Repugnican Tea Party has for the United States of America.

The members of the Repugnican Tea Party in the U.S. House of Representatives promised to make jobs and the economy their No. 1 issue. But let’s tick off what they’ve actually “accomplished” thus far:

• They read the U.S. Constitution to us aloud — minus those unpleasant portions about slavery, of course.
• They have attacked Planned Parenthood and women’s rights.
• They have attacked the Environmental Protection Agency.
• They are engaged in a nationwide union-busting campaign that benefits only their corporate and plutocratic benefactors pimps.
• They have attacked our public servants, even our public-school teachers.
• They have attacked National Public Radio, and got the scalp of NPR’s president and CEO.
• Tomorrow they are to began McCarthyesque hearings on what a danger to the nation Muslim Americans are.

In short, the Repugnicans in the House have done nothing substantial toward bringing about national economic recovery.

They know that this is what they should be addressing, however, because they frequently are using the economy as their bullshit excuse to fulfill their Wingnut Wish List.

We can’t afford NPR, they claim, when in fact, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (NPR’s parent) – and Planned Parenthood — get a fucking pittance from the federal government compared to the bloated military-industrial complex, which is draining our nation of its lifeblood, a huge threat to the continued existence of our nation. (Many other empires collapsed due to military overextension and concomitant domestic rot.) Our public servants, too, get a negligible portion of the federal budget, and they’re worth every penny of their underpaid salaries.

The treasonous Repugnican Tea Party House members’ intent in these aforementioned instances isn’t to save us money – it’s to censor/silence NPR (and the Public Broadcasting System), to deny women their right to self-determination of their own fucking uteri, and to destroy every last governmental hurdle to complete corporate control of the nation.

It’s about the wingnuts in the U.S. House of Representatives throwing huge chunks of red meat to their base of plutocrats and “Christo”fascists. (The upcoming House hearings on “the Muslim problem” — remember Adolf Hitler’s “Jewish problem”? — especially are an early Christmas gift to the “Christo”fascists.)

If the Repugnican Tea Party members of the House were serious about tackling the nation’s federal budget deficit that “President” George W. Bush created by giving tax breaks to the rich and the super-rich while wasting hundreds of billions of our tax dollars in bogus warfare, they would make the rich and the super-rich pay their fair share of taxes and they would seriously, meaningfully cut the bloated budget of the military-industrial complex.

Instead, the Repugnican Tea Party is on a campaign to make the United States of America more and more like a third-world nation:

• Get rid of the Environmental Protection Agency — so that climate change accelerates, making the entire planet resemble the planet in the movies “The Road” or “WALL-E” or “Idiocracy.”
• Get rid of Planned Parenthood and outlaw abortion – so that we have many more mouths that we can’t feed and many more consumers of the planet’s limited resources, accelerating climate change and other environmental catastrophes.
• Privatize all of the public schools so that only the children of the rich and super-rich can get a decent education, and institute only right-wing and pro-corporate curricula in what remains of the crumbling, old public school system.
• Destroy all of the labor unions so that the corporations have no barriers in their mistreatment and exploitation of their wage slaves.
• Get rid of NPR and PBS – so that the only source Americans have of “news” and “information” is Faux “News” and the other right-wing, pro-corporate media.
• Continue to ignore homelessness and continue to build gated communities, in which the rich and the super-rich live, protected by their private security thugs, while everyone else lives in crime-infested squalor.
• Attack Muslims, literally and figuratively — so that we have perpetual enemies/“enemies” and thus perpetual warfare, a la George Orwell’s 1984.

This is some serious shit. Life as we know it — indeed, the very ability of the planet to sustain human life itself – is at stake if we, the people, don’t fight back against the traitors who spend every waking hour calculating how they can destroy us for their own selfish benefit.

We, the people, cannot depend upon the members of what excellent writer Chris Hedges calls the “liberal class” in his book  Death of the Liberal Class.

Members of the so-called liberal class* include such hypocritical cowards as the supposedly pro-labor Barack Obama, who has remained mostly silent while tens of thousands of pro-labor Wisconsinites are in their third week of protests to keep the middle class and the working class in Wisconsin alive, and Vivian Schiller, the CEO and president of NPR who, instead of holding her ground against the right-wing assault on NPR, cut and run in order to appease the right-wing fascists who are out to destroy the nation.

We’re on our own.

No one is going to save us from the fascistic onslaught that we are witnessing now — except ourselves.

–

*I have a problem with the term “liberal class,” since these cowardly, self-serving hypocrites aren’t actually liberal. They pay lip service to liberal ideals, but their actions and their inaction only help the right wing. They are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Tim Tebow anti-choice ad not harmless

I watched the infamous Tim Tebow anti-choice Super Bowl ad, and I have to conclude that it isn’t harmless. That it skirts around its objective — the subjugation of women – probably makes it even more dangerous because it wishes to appear to be harmless. (The title of the book Friendly Fascism comes to mind right now…)

No, I didn’t expect to see a shrieking bloody embryo in the ad, but the ad gets its anti-choice message across nonetheless. At the end of the ad, which features friendly sounding singers in the background, is the message: “For the full Tebow story go to FocusOnTheFamily.com” and “Celebrate family. Celebrate life.” 

If nothing else, the 30-second ad directs the viewer to the website of the “Christo”fascist group Focus on the Family. CBS probably wouldn’t have aired an ad for any other hate group, but it aired the ad for Focus on the Family.

The Nation sums it up well:

The Tim Tebow/Pam Tebow [Super Bowl] ad has finally aired, and it is about as vanilla as an Andy Williams Christmas special. This is none too surprising. After all, CBS actually co-produced the ad to run seamlessly with the rest of its slick Super Bowl coverage.

This has the anti-choice right wing on the blogs mocking the National Organization for Women and Planned Parenthood for “making a big deal over nothing.” But the concerns of NOW and Planned Parenthood were absolutely spot-on when you saw the final shot of the ad: “This message is brought to you by Focus on the Family.”

The idea that Focus on the Family — an organization that believes in reparative therapy for LGBT people, that likens abortion rights to the Nazi holocaust, and that has shadowy connections to open hate groups — gets this kind of a mammoth public forum is an absolute disgrace.

As for the ad, Pam Tebow speaks about the choice to ignore her doctor’s advice and risk her own life. She has every right to stand on a soapbox with her hunky, Heisman-winning son, and tell other women about the benefits of ignoring your doctor.

But the idea that CBS would provide the platform for such a message without so much as a medical disclaimer is simply wrong.

Also, the idea that Focus on the Family, an organization that stands unequivocally for the view that other women should be denied Pam Tebow’s choice, would get this kind of prime commercial real estate exposes CBS as a frighteningly fraudulent operation.

They should offer free commercial time to Planned Parenthood. And if Roe v. Wade is ever deemed unconstitutional, I hope the executives at CBS ponder their role in this process. Maybe it will cross their minds when they are taking their daughters on a first-class trip to France for legal, safe abortions.

Somewhere, Edward R. Murrow weeps.

Well, Murrow has been crying uncontrollably for some years now, starting no later than when the major American television networks acted not as critical journalists, but as “embedded” cheerleaders for the unelected Bush regime’s “shock and awe” when it launched its bogus Vietraq War in March 2003. The networks treated this “shock and awe” like a fucking sporting event — like the Super Bowl.

That was when I stopped watching television.