Magical Elves, sparkleponies and other assorted gay shit

Pro-gay ally NFL player Chris Kluwe’s colorfully titled book is due out next month. Kluwe earlier this month was dropped by the Minnesota Vikings but was picked up by the Oakland Raiders. I’m glad and proud to have him as a fellow Californian; Minnesota’s loss is California’s gain.

I usually comment on gay-rights issues in the news in a timely fashion, but I’ve been slacking as of late. So here I’ll try to catch up:

It was great to see basketball player Jason Collins, the first active player from one of the “Big Four” sports organizations (the National Football League, the National Basketball Association, Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League ), come out late last month, even if there is at least a grain of truth to gay writer Bret Easton Ellis’ criticism that Collins’ treatment by the media “as some kind of baby panda who needed to be honored and praised and consoled and — yes — infantilized by his coming out on the cover of Sports Illustrated” also made Collins a “Gay Man as Magical Elf, who whenever he comes out appears before us as some kind of saintly E.T. whose sole purpose is to be put in the position of reminding us only about Tolerance and Our Own Prejudices and To Feel Good About Ourselves and to be a symbol instead of just being a gay dude.”

And I also was happy to hear the news that pro-gay ally NFL player Chris Kluwe, who was dropped by the Minnesota Vikings earlier this month (perhaps at least in part due to his vocal pro-gay-and-pro-gay-marriage stance), shortly thereafter was picked up by the Oakland Raiders.

If Minnesota didn’t appreciate Kluwe, I’m happy to have him here in California, where Kluwe already has done us some good: Kluwe and another pro-gay ally, NFL player Brendon Ayanbadejo, per Wikipedia, “filed an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court on February 28, 2013, regarding Hollingsworth v. Perry, in which they expressed their support of the challenge to California Proposition 8,” which in 2008 amended California’s Constitution to ban same-sex marriage, a right that California’s Supreme Court had ruled was guaranteed to Californians by the state’s Constitution before the haters later amended it with Prop H8.

I admire the very apparently heterosexual Kluwe, who is heterosexually married and has two children. According to Wikipedia, Kluwe wrote a blog called “Out of Bounds” for a Minnesota newspaper before he quit the blog last year in protest of the newspaper’s having run an editorial in support of the euphemistically titled “Minnesota Marriage Amendment,” which, just as Prop H8 did in California, would have amended the state’s constitution to ban same-sex marriage. (That amendment failed at the ballot box in November, with the haters losing by just more than 5 percentage points, and subsequently the Minnesota Legislature legalized same-sex marriage this month.)

It takes balls and selflessness to fight for a historically discriminated against and oppressed group of people of whom you apparently aren’t a member. Kluwe did the right thing by boycotting the anti-gay newspaper.

Kluwe also has been outspoken about the facts that not all athletes are dumb jocks and that there is more to life than football, even for an NFL player.

And yeah, I’ll probably buy his upcoming book, Beautifully Unique Sparkleponies: On Myths, Morons, Free Speech, Football, and Assorted Absurdities, which is due out next month.

Also this month, three states approved same-sex marriage: Delaware, Rhode Island, and, as I mentioned, Minnesota. (I find it ironic that just after the Minnesota Vikings dropped Kluwe, very possibly at least in part due to his advocacy for same-sex marriage, the state’s Legislature enacted same-sex marriage.)

True, Rhode Island and Delaware are only our 43rd and 45th most populous states, respectively, but Minnesota is our 21st most populous state, and it joins Iowa as another Midwestern state with same-sex marriage. Once the Midwest goes, how far behind can the rest of the nation be?

Finally, I found it to be a pleasant surprise to learn that President Barack Obama, this past weekend in his commencement speech to the graduates of the all-male, historically African-American Morehouse College, remarked, “… and that’s what I’m asking all of you to do: keep setting an example for what it means to be a man. Be the best husband to your wife or your boyfriend or your partner. Be the best father you can be to your children. Because nothing is more important.”

True, Obama’s wording was inelegant.* If you were a man who had married your boyfriend, he would be your “husband” or your “spouse” or your “partner” or however else you chose to refer to him (hell, call him your “wife” if you want to and if he is OK with that; it’s your marriage, not mine). But if you had married him, you probably wouldn’t still be referring to him as your “boyfriend.”

Still, I found it at least a bit encouraging for the president of the United States of America, whatever his other many flaws and missteps might be, basically state in a college commencement address before an all-male audience that marrying a member of the same sex is perfectly fine if that is what is right for the individual.

You never would have heard George W. Bush, or even Bill Clinton, utter those words at a commencement ceremony.

I noted above that Chris Kluwe is “heterosexually married.” I did that on purpose; “married” no longer should automatically mean heterosexually married; “married” should include the possibility of being homosexually married — in all 50 states and in every nation on the planet that recognizes marriage between heterosexuals.

And one day, it won’t matter; “married” will just be married, and no one will much care, if he or she cares at all, whether it’s a same-sex marriage or an opposite-sex marriage.

But it still matters now, and we Magical Elves and our allies have a lot of work to do between today and the day that it no longer matters because everyone (or at least almost everyone) realizes that each and every one of us is a beautifully unique sparklepony.

–

*Slate.com’s William Saletan reports that Obama’s prepared remark was “Be the best husband to your wife or boyfriend to your partner or father to your children that you can be,” but, again, what Obama actually said was, “Be the best husband to your wife or your boyfriend or your partner.”

Saletan writes:

… But this time, the speech didn’t go according to script. Literally. Obama changed the “boyfriend” line from hetero boilerplate to explicitly gay-inclusive. He ad-libbed. And this was a heck of a time to do it. The speech was about what it means to be a man. The president of the United States, who until a year ago didn’t support same-sex marriage, has just put an official stamp of masculinity on male homosexuality. …

That’s certainly a possibility; it’s a valid interpretation, and it would be my interpretation, too, more or less, but, in my viewing of the clip of the remark, it appears to me as though Obama does stumble and/or hesitate a bit in getting the words out, with a nervous-and-unsure-of-himself-sounding inflection on the final word of that sentence, “partner,” and it’s not 100 percent clear to me whether he stumbles over these words because he’s messing them up or because he’s not sure how what he is saying — that it’s perfectly OK for a man to marry a man — is going to be received by his audience (Morehouse College, after all, is in Georgia, a state that isn’t exactly known as a gay-friendly state).

Indeed, sadly, if you also watch the clip, you will hear and see that after Obama asks his audience to “keep setting an example for what it means to be a man,” he has to pause for applause, but then, after he says next, “Be the best husband to your wife or your boyfriend or your partner,” very apparently his audience at first is silent in momentary confusion but then breaks out in some derisive laughter and mumbling and grumbling.

Indeed, in response to this very apparent derision over his remark that a man may marry a man, Obama puts his index finger up to his audience in apparent admonishment over their apparent homophobia.

As I said, we still have a way to go.

George McGovern’s death makes me yearn for real Democrats

Getty Images

The death today of George McGovern, a progressive who ran unsuccessfully against incumbent President Richard M. Nixon in 1972 (and who is shown above right campaigning in 1972 with his first running mate, Thomas Eagleton), only reminds me, shortly before another presidential election, how far the Democratic Party has fallen.

It’s a perverse fact of politics that the possession of intelligence and compassion (concomitantly known as wisdom) often, if not usually, dooms an individual who is running for high public office.

I write that with the death of real Democrat George McGovern* in mind.

I was only four years old when in 1972 Democrat McGovern lost to incumbent Repugnican President Richard M. Nixon in a landslide. A landslide — and look how wonderful Nixon’s second term turned out to be: It was the Democratic Party’s operations that Nixon’s operatives were snooping into in June 1972 in the Watergate scandal, which ultimately led to Tricky Dick Nixon’s resignation in disgrace in 1974. (Nixon’s remains the only presidential resignation in U.S. history.)

The masses often get it wrong.

I don’t remember McGovern’s presidential campaign, of course. The first sitting president I remember seeing on television was Gerald Ford, who followed the disgraced-by-Watergate Nixon, and I seem to remember seeing a perpetually stumbling and falling Ford parodied by Chevy Chase on “Saturday Night Live” more than seeing the actual Ford himself on TV.

I remember seeing also Jimmy Carter on TV, and of course I remember Ronald Reagan and all of those who have followed him. But during Carter’s first and only term, I was an elementary school student who was interested in “Star Wars,” not in politics, and it wasn’t until Reagan’s eight-year reign during most of the 1980s that my political identity started to form.

My father always has been apolitical, not giving a rat’s ass about anything outside of his immediate personal universe, and my mother is one of those “swing voters” who seem to make their presidential picks based upon the logic of a Magic 8 Ball. (My parents reside in Arizona, where they belong, and I in California, where I belong.)

My point in bringing up my parents — which makes me feel like Johnny Depp’s Willy Wonka when the topic of his parents is brought up — is to illustrate that neither of them even attempted to influence my own political views, with one of them being apolitical and the other being politically muddled at best, so the fact that I grew into a left-winger in the red state of Arizona, which is not conducive to the development of little “socialists,” suggests to me that a progressive political viewpoint is the natural path of human development, unless that path is obstructed (such as by committed right-wing parents who probably should be committed, a “Christo”fascist social environment, etc.) and the journeyer cannot overcome those obstructions, as I was able to do.

The first presidential race that I remember caring about was the 1984 race. I was in high school at the time, and I supported Democrat Walter Mondale over the re-election of Reagan, and I don’t know if I even could have articulated very well why I preferred Mondale over Reagan, since it certainly wasn’t my parents who influenced my preference for Mondale. If memory serves it was a visceral thing, my visceral, intuitive identification of Mondale as the truly wise (again, the compassionate and intelligent) candidate and Reagan as the poser, the phony.

Of course, in 1984 the very first presidential candidate whom I supported (not with money, because as a minor I didn’t have any [and are minors allowed to contributed to presidential campaigns anyway?], and not with my vote, because I wasn’t yet 18), very much like McGovern had done in 1972, lost to the Repugnican incumbent in a landslide.

Four years later, in 1988, Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, whom I supported and voted for as a college student (I remember having to sell my plasma as a starving college student, so I’m pretty certain that I wasn’t able to give Dukakis any money), performed barely better against George H. W. Bush than Mondale had performed against Reagan four years earlier.

Um, yeah, so I wasn’t off to a great start in life in my presidential picks, and for 12 long years as I was politically budding, I suffered through first Ronald Reagan and then George Bush I. (I never will forget graduating from college with a worthless degree but with plenty of student-loan debt during The First George Bush Recession of the late 1980s-early 1990s. These early socioeconomic experiences tend to color your political outlook for life, as the Great Depression very apparently colored my Scrooge-like maternal grandmother’s outlook for the rest of her life.)

Then in the 1990s came pseudo-Democrat Bill Clinton, who, although he benefitted from a rebounding economy (how much of the 1990s’ economic rebound was from his policies and how much of it was from the natural course of economic events I’m not certain), gave us such gems as NAFTA, welfare “reform” and DOMA — oh, yeah, and the Monica Lewinsky scandal, because having an intern blow you in the Oval Office never can blow up in your face.

So the first Democratic presidential candidate whom I supported — I rooted for and voted for Clinton in 1992 and in 1996 — and who actually won the presidential election was the so-called Democrat who destroyed the Democratic Party by dragging it so far to the right that the Democratic Party today looks like Repugnican Lite. Yay!

Bill Clinton benefitted from a three-way race in 1992, and won with a plurality, not a majority, of the popular vote, which today’s Democratic hacks forget or ignore. (Dems deny that third-party candidate Ross Perot, who garnered a-very-impressive-for-a-third-party-candidate 19 percent of the popular vote in 1992, harmed George H. W. Bush’s re-election bid, but it seems to me that the majority of Perot’s supporters were right of center and that most of them would have voted for Bush over Clinton. [If memory serves, my Magic-8-Ball-wielding mother voted for Perot, and my guess is that had Perot not been a choice, she would have voted for Bush or would not have voted at all.])

I get it that after a string of Democratic presidential defeats — George McGovern, Jimmy Carter (denied a second term), Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis — and after long time in the political wilderness during the Nixon/Ford, Reagan and Bush I years — the Democratic Party apparently wanted to pull away, far away, from the egghead image.

Democrat Adlai Stevenson, who lost to Repugnican Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 and again in 1956 yet sought (but did not get) the Democratic Party’s nomination yet again in 1960, seems to have been the eggheaded Democrats’ founding father, at least of our modern era, and indeed, Stevenson was the last presidential candidate from either of the two major parties who, despite having lost a presidential election, was nominated by his party to run in the very next presidential election. (These days, losing a presidential election very apparently means that you’ll never get another shot at your party’s presidential nomination again.)

The last Democratic egghead who lost — but who, surreally, actually won — a presidential election was, of course, Al Gore, who in 2000 won 48.4 percent of the popular vote to George W. Bush’s 47.9 percent, for a difference of more than 500,000 votes.** Only in the United States of America could the candidate who won fewer votes be made — crowned – president by the U.S. Supreme Court and his cronies (such as his brother, who was governor of the pivotal state that he “won,” and the chief elections official of that state who made damn sure that he “won” it), and this is yet another of those wonderful, deeply anti-democratic events during my lifetime that has shaped my current outlook.

So Al Gore’s win/loss in 2000 might have been the death knell for the eggheaded Democratic presidential candidate, but isn’t there some middle ground between a Bill Clinton and an Adlai Stevenson?

You might argue that President Barack Obama more or less fills that middle ground, since he’s known as both intelligent and non-nerdy (and, importantly, highly unlikely to be blown by an intern), but today we have Obama in a race for re-election that shouldn’t be nearly as close as it is, and probably wouldn’t be as close as it is had Obama spent his first two years in office actually delivering upon his ubiquitous 2008 promises of hope and change while both houses of Congress were controlled by his own party, a rare alignment of the stars that never should be squandered, and that even George W. Bush, dipshit that he is, did not squander. (Nor did Bush II, dipshit that he is, shit and piss all over his own fucking base, which seems to be the Obama administration’s and the Obamabots’ favorite fucking pastime.)

In Barack Obama, other than in empty rhetoric and false promises, we see precious little of the spirit of George McGovern that used to infuse the Democratic Party. In Obama we see instead the cynical, opportunistic, center-right spirit of Bill Clinton, an approach that the modern Democratic Party argues is the only approach that works, yet in actuality has no track record of effectiveness.

Again, in my book, Bill Clinton won in 1992 in no small part because of “spoiler” Ross Perot, and again, in 1992 Clinton garnered a plurality (43 percent of the popular vote), not a majority. (The only other president during my lifetime who garnered not even a full 44 percent of the popular vote was Richard Nixon in 1968, the year of my birth.)

Clinton again failed to get a full majority even in 1996 (he got 49 percent of the popular vote), and in his 1996 (and pre-Lewinsky) re-election bid he benefitted from having an incredibly wooden Repugnican opponent in Bob Dull — er, Dole — and he benefitted from a strong economy, which, again, I am not certain how much resulted from his economic policies and how much resulted from the natual ebb and flow of the nation’s economy.

Let’s reflect upon the fact that Barack Obama garnered 53 percent of the popular vote in 2008, which was better that Bill Clinton or George W. Bush ever did in the elections from 1992 through 2004. Obama’s 53 percent in 2008 bested Jimmy Carter’s and John F. Kennedy’s take of the popular vote, too.

How did Obama do it?

Again, he ran on a progressive (if too-vague) platform of hope and change. That was the bait.

Obviously, if Obama hadn’t perceived that that was what the majority of Americans wanted, that wouldn’t have been what he promised.

That progressivism is what the majority of Americans wanted, and that progressivism is what Obama Version 2008 promised (even if gauzily), even though his hacks (the Obamabots) love to engage in historical revision and deny that fact, but what Obama has delivered as president is just more Clintonesque, center-right, “bipartisan,” Repugnican-ass-licking bullshit, replete with Billary Clinton as his secretary of state and Bill Clinton as his current campaign surrogate.

So the news of George McGovern’s death early this morning at a hospice in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, at age 90 only underscores for me, with another presidential election only a little more than two weeks away, the fact that the Democratic Party of today is only a shadow of what it used to be.

I lament that the only presidents named George whom I got during my lifetime are surnamed Bush, and I have to wonder how George McGovern felt about the likes of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, who turned the Democratic Party into the center-right, corporate-ass-licking, lesser-of-two-evils monstrosity of a fundraising machine that it is today.

And I can’t see how I can honor the memory of George McGovern by blackening the oval next to the name of Barack Obama on the mail-in ballot that sits just yards from me right now as I type this sentence, yet unmarked.

–

*Wikipedia’s entry on George McGovern reports, in part:

George Stanley McGovern (July 19, 1922-October 21, 2012) was a historian, author and U.S. representative, U.S. senator and the Democratic Party presidential nominee in the 1972 presidential election.

McGovern grew up in Mitchell, South Dakota…. [After he fought in World War II] he gained degrees from Dakota Wesleyan University and Northwestern University, culminating in a Ph.D., and was a history professor. He was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1956 and re-elected in 1958. After a failed bid for the U.S. Senate in 1960, he was elected there in 1962.

As a senator, McGovern was an exemplar of modern American liberalism. He became most known for his outspoken opposition to the growing U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. He staged a brief nomination run in the 1968 presidential election as a stand-in for the assassinated Robert F. Kennedy.

The subsequent McGovern-Fraser Commission fundamentally altered the Democratic presidential nominating process, by greatly increasing the number of caucuses and primaries and reducing the influence of party insiders.

The McGovern-Hatfield Amendment sought to end the Vietnam War by legislative means but was defeated in 1970 and 1971.

McGovern’s long-shot, grassroots-based 1972 presidential campaign found triumph in gaining the Democratic nomination but left the party badly split ideologically, and the failed vice-presidential pick of Thomas Eagleton undermined McGovern’s credibility. In the general election McGovern lost to incumbent Richard Nixon in one of the biggest landslides in American history. Re-elected senator in 1968 and 1974, McGovern was defeated in a bid for a fourth term in 1980.

Throughout his career, McGovern was involved in issues related to agriculture, food, nutrition, and hunger….

Wikipedia also notes that anyone running against the incumbent Nixon would have had an uphill battle anyway, but after high-profile Democrats such as Ted Kennedy, Walter Mondale and Hubert Humphrey and other Democrats declined to be McGovern’s running mate, McGovern picked U.S. Sen. Thomas Eagleton, whom McGovern later replaced with Kennedy clan in-law Sargent Shriver after Eagleton’s history of treatment for mental illness came to light, casting doubt on his fitness to handle the presidency if it came to that, and raising doubts about McGovern’s judgment.

Wikipedia notes that Team McGovern didn’t vet Eagleton thoroughly and that Eagleton and his wife intentionally kept Eagleton’s hospitalizations for mental illness from McGovern. Bloomberg notes that less than a week after McGovern had proclaimed that he supported Eagleton “1,000 percent,” he replaced Eagleton with Shriver.

Bloomberg notes that McGovern later wrote in his autobiography, “I did what I had to, but the Eagleton matter ended whatever chance there was to defeat Richard Nixon in 1972. In the minds of many Americans the Eagleton episode convicted me of incompetence, vacillation, dishonesty and cold calculation, all at the same time.”

Bloomberg notes that “The Eagleton misstep ushered in today’s rigorous vetting of potential vice presidential candidates,” which doesn’t really explain what happened with Dan Quayle or Sarah Palin, but whatever…

**You might argue that the last Democratic egghead who ran for president actually was John Kerry in 2004, and while he does hail from Massachusetts, a la egghead Michael Dukakis (indeed, Kerry was Dukakis’ lieutenant governor), Vietnam vet Kerry ran such a war-hero campaign (the “swiftboaters’” defamation of him notwithstanding) that, in my estimation, anyway, he fairly escaped being branded as an egghead.

Mittens’ Etch A Sketch is at full tilt

Unfortunately, in the United States of Amnesia, you pretty much can “shake it up and … start all over again”* — and to a stunning degree, get away with it.

I watched last night’s presidential debate online as it unfolded live.

While everyone is declaring Mittens Romney the “winner,” I don’t see it.

It’s obvious that the multi-millionaire Mormon Mittens has shifted his message abruptly to the center in order to appeal to the so-called “swing voters” (a.k.a. “undecideds,” “independents,” etc.). It wasn’t nearly long ago enough (it was in May) that Mittens told his fat-cat donors that 47 percent of us Americans can go fuck ourselves that we now can believe Mittens’ claim of last night that he just wuvs every last one of us.

I believe the Mittens of May, not the Mittens of October.

Only when we reduce the presidential debates to pure theater, in which truthfulness doesn’t matter (theater is, after all, fiction), only when we view the presidential debates as entertainment, like a wrestling event, can we say that Mittens “won” last night’s debate.

Mittens lied every time his lips moved – contrary to his claims, a Mittens presidency would look like much the illegitimate George W. Bush presidency did, but we wouldn’t even have Big Bird — but hey, Mittens steamrolled all over senior-citizen moderator Jim Lehrer of PBS (whom Mittens badly wants to fire)! What a bad-ass alpha male Mittens is!

Frighteningly, it apparently is the “swing voters” who (at least largely) decide presidential elections these days, and if you are one of them, you just now are paying attention to the presidential race and you have no idea that just the day before yesterday, Mittens was singing a hard-right tune. If you just first tuned in last night and you believe everything that you are told, indeed, Mittens, from his debate performance — and, like it is with theater, it was a performance – might not strike you as that bad a guy.

Luckily, we need look only to the presidential debates of 2004 – in which John Kerry clearly cleaned dipshit George W. Bush’s clock, yet Bush “won” “re”-election nonetheless – to remind ourselves that a real (in Bush’s case) or imagined (in Barack Obama’s case) poor performance in the presidential debates certainly doesn’t spell certain doom for an incumbent president’s election (real or imagined) to a second term.

I expect Mittens to gain a percent or two in the nationwide polls over the next week, but I don’t expect that boost to last, and I still expect Barack Obama to win re-election. I expect that Obama will have learned from the chatter after his first debate with Mittens and will adjust his game accordingly.

The question remains, however, as to how easily the New and Improved! Mittens can dupe the “swing voters” who just now are paying attention.

–

*The infamous Etch A Sketch quote, recall, was that of (former?) senior Mittens campaign operative Eric Fehrnstrom, who in March told CNN, “I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up, and we start all over again.”

When you shake up an actual Etch A Sketch, everything disappears without a trace. Real life, however, isn’t that neat and tidy, yet Team Mittens apparently is going forward with the Etch-A-Sketch plan nonetheless. Indeed, according to the Mittens playbook, we’re even to just erase already the infamous “47 percent” remark that Mittens uttered just back in May.

Bibi/Mittens 2012!

Reuters photo

The unelected, treasonous Bush regime, in order to sell its Vietraq War, lied about the specter of the “smoking gun” manifesting itself as a “mushroom cloud.” Wingutty war monger Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin (“Bibi”) Netanyahu today before the United Nations General Assembly, in lying about a casus belli to launch a war on Iran, couldn’t even be that sophisticated, and chose instead the bomb from the board game Stratego. (Yeah, very unfortunately, that’s not a Photoshop job…)

I was going to title this “Romney/Netanyahu 2012,” but let’s face it: Shadow U.S. President Mittens Romney is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s little bitch, not vice-versa, so we’ll put Netanyahu at the top of the ticket, and to call these two right-wing, war-mongering, Islamophobic, walking and talking fucking jokes by their actual surnames is to give them respect that neither deserves.

Today at the United Nations, Netanyahu embarrassed himself and his nation by lying that Iran is close to attaining nukes and poses a threat not only to Israel but also to the entire Middle East, Europe and the United States. (See the sad and pathetic news photo illustration above.)

Netanyahu clearly is trying to influence the November U.S. presidential election by fear-mongering, and Netanyahu and Mittens Romney very apparently are working together – which whiffs of treason to me, since the American people in 2008 elected Barack Obama as their president and commander in chief, not Mittens Romney (not that the Repugnican Tea Party traitors ever worry about actually being elected).

It can’t be a coinky-dink that the same day that Netanyahu was lying to the United Nations about Iran (which reminds me of how Colin Powell held up that vial of white powder and lied to the UN about the threat that Iraq posed), Mittens declared on the campaign trail: “It is still a troubled and dangerous world. And the idea of cutting our military commitment by a trillion dollars over this decade is unthinkable and devastating. And when I become president of the United States, we will stop it. I will not cut our commitment to the military.”

Mittens does not for a fucking nanosecond care about the welfare of the average American. He already declared that he doesn’t give a flying fuck about at least 47 percent of Americans.

Mittens’ only interest is in pleasing his (would-be) plutocratic cronies of the military-corporate complex, who want to continue to suck, treasonously, billions and billions and billions of our Americans’ tax dollars for their bogus warfare and their bogus “defense” against bogus “threats” while the majority of us Americans are told that the nation just can’t afford us.

I can see where the wingnut Bibi would be so fucking clueless as to the mood of the American people, since he lives in Israel, but Mittens has no such fucking excuse.

After we, the American people, were royally punk’d on Iraq, we have no fucking appetite to now launch a bogus war on Iran.

We are the United States of Amnesia, that is true, but nonetheless it’s still way too fucking soon for the (aspiring) war criminals to start lying to the American people again about why we must invade another nation and to expect the American people to buy the fucking lie again this time. (Indeed, it was only 9/11 that allowed the Bush regime’s lies about Iraq to go so unchallenged in the first place. Indeed, 9/11, which the Bush regime just allowed to happen, was the unelected, treasonous regime’s Reichstag fire.)

Mittens is losing* the presidential race, so expect his war-mongering to continue. Fear is all that he has left to peddle, since the multi-millionaire’s claims of compassion for the American people are so fucking ludicrous, even without that hidden video of his fundraising dinner for his fellow plutocrats/aristocrats in May, but so out of touch is Mittens from the common American that he apparently has no idea that what worked in 2004 to get “President” George W. Bush “re”-elected won’t work in 2012.

–

*The polls are looking increasingly worse for Mittens these days, with Gallup’s daily tracking poll putting Obama at 50 percent and Mittens at 44 percent, and other nationwide polls taken within the past two weeks also putting Obama at 49 percent or 50 percent and leading Mittens by 3 percent to 7 percent.

That doesn’t sound all that awful for Mittens, but the U.S. president isn’t chosen based upon the popular vote, but is chosen based upon the Electoral College, and it’s Obama who has the easiest path to the 270 electoral votes needed to clinch the election.

The New York Times’ presidential prognosticator Nate Silver, whose blog I read religiously, as I type this sentence projects that while Obama on November 6 will win 51.3 percent of the popular vote to Mittens’ 47.6 percent, Obama, who is leading Mittens considerably in the critical battleground states, will win more than 315 electoral votes while Mittens won’t garner even a full 225. Silver thus right this moment puts Obama’s chance of being re-elected at more than 80 percent.

(I’m such a fan of Silver, that sexy geek, that I’ll probably buy the new book that he has out.)

So it will be awkward, methinks, for Mittens to campaign over the next several weeks. I mean, he essentially has lost the election already, but he has to pretend that he hasn’t, has to continue to go through the motions of campaigning.

Again, since he has nothing to lose, expect him to continue the fear- and war-mongering. Again, it’s all that the pathetic gold-plated piece of shit has left.

Freeloaders comprise Mittens’ base — not Barack Obama’s

Better than a sex tape: Repugnican Tea Party presidential wannabe Mittens Romney helpfully explains to (potential) rich, right-wing donors in May that the supporters of Barack Obama are “dependent upon government” and “pay no income tax,” even though the majority of the states that Mittens is likely to carry in November pay less in taxes than they get back from the federal government, essentially making them welfare states that are dependent upon the blue states.

Mittens Romney has it half-correct in the now-infamous, secretly taken video of him talking to his Richie Rich donors in May.

Indeed, recent polls show that Barack Obama right now has the support of about 47 percent to 50 percent of the nation’s voters — and that Mittens has the support of around 45 percent.

In the hidden video of him talking to (potential) donors on May 17, which has been brought to light by Mother Jones magazine, Romney said:

“There are 47 percent of the [American] people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it.

“That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what… These are people who pay no income tax. …

“[M]y job is is not to worry about those people. I’ll  never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

It’s probably true that there is nothing that any 2012 Repugnican Tea Party presidential candidate could have done or could do to cut significantly into the fairly solid support that President Barack Obama has, which indeed sits around 47 percent to 50 percent, at least somewhere in the upper 40s.

It’s also probably true that there’s nothing that Obama could do to cut deeply into Mittens’ about-45-percent support. These 45 or so percent are largely (not entirely, I suppose, but mostly) white supremacists who wouldn’t vote for Obama because he’s black.

It’s also true that Obama shouldn’t worry, and in his first term thus far he should not have worried, about getting the support of these racist, white-supremacist haters whose support he never was going to get anyway because of the color of his skin. Obama thus far into his first term should have focused instead upon delivering for his base.

Had he done so, we would see a lot more enthusiasm for Obama’s re-election than we do now. A progressive agenda, instead of a “bipartisan,” Repugnican-Tea-Party-and-corporate-ass-licking agenda, would have resulted in the change that Obama relentlessly promised.

It strikes me that Obama is doing as well in the polls as he is now only because Mittens Romney is such a fucking catastrophe as a presidential candidate. Being a multi-millionaire and a Mormon, both of which demographics make him very unlike the average American voter, Mittens really has needed to be likeable. But call that strike three: multi-millionaire, Mormon and unlikeable.

Mittens very most likely is out.

Which brings me back to the secret video that Mother Jones brought to light.

In the video, Mittens repeats the relentless right-wing lie that the denizens of the blue states are lazy parasites “who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them” and “who pay no income tax.”

That last part is really fucking funny, because Mother Jones — to which I probably am going to subscribe, since the magazine apparently just brought down Mittens Romney’s presidential campaign — in February of this year also published an article on how the red states still are sucking the blood of the blue states in terms of how much the states get back from the federal government in comparison to how much money they put into the federal government. (I wrote about this phenomenon way back in April 2009. My figures at that time were from 2005.)

Per Mother Jones, from 2010 figures, these are the top 10 states in terms of how much they get back from the federal government for every $1.00 that they put into the federal government:

1. New Mexico: $2.63

2. West Virginia: $2.57

3. Mississippi: $2.47

4. Hawaii: $2.38

5. Alabama: $2.03

6. Alaska: $1.93

7. Montana: $1.92

8. South Carolina: $1.92

9. Maine: $1.78

10. Kentucky: $1.75

My home state of California gets only 87 cents per dollar. The other blue-state powerhouse, New York, gets only 72 cents per dollar.

The writer of the February 2012 Mother Jones article concludes that:

• “Most politically ‘red’ states are financially in the red when it comes to how much money they receive from Washington compared with what their residents pay in taxes” and that
• “The states that contributed more in taxes than they got back in spending were more likely to have voted for Obama in 2008 and were more likely to be largely urban” and that
• “Of the 22 states that went to [John] McCain in 2008, 86 percent received more federal spending than they paid in taxes in 2010. In contrast, 55 percent of the states that went to Obama received more federal spending than they paid in taxes. Republican states, on average, received $1.46 in federal spending for every tax dollar paid; Democratic states, on average, received $1.16.” [Emphasis mine.]

So it’s not just that Mittens Romney has insulted about half of the American electorate by deeming us “dependent upon government” and possessing an outsized sense of “entitlement” – by calling us, in essence, lazy freeloaders.

It’s also that he’s a motherfucking liar, and that the true freeloaders in the United States of America live the in the majority of the states that Mittens is most likely to carry in November.

Fucking freeloaders are Mittens Romney’s base, not Barack Obama’s.

It is those of us in the blue states who are carrying the red-state parasites, who have the audacity to call us blue-staters the parasites.

If the red-staters believe that they have it so bad, we should let them secede.

I am one Californian who is beyond sick and fucking tired of subsidizing the welfare kings and queens of the red states who enjoy their entitlements while they call us blue-staters who make their entitlements possible the lazy socialists who want something for nothing.

Thoughts on the Repugnican Tea Party convention I did not watch

Full disclosure: I haven’t watched even one second of the Repugnican Tea Party National Convention that happened this past week. Not even one second of a video clip. I probably will watch a clip of Clint Eastwood’s infamous, reportedly surreal performance later, but in general, for me, watching any of the quadrennial KKK convention is like how it is for the characters in that scene in “Lord of the Rings” in which Gandalf speaks the dark language of Mordor: unpleasant, perhaps even painful.

I will make some remarks, though.

It’s interesting that one of the biggest news items that came from the convention is that two delegates were tossed out for having thrown nuts at CNN camera woman Patricia Carroll, who is a 34-year-old black woman and a native of Alabama, and for having remarked at the time: “This is how we feed animals.”

(Funny — animals throw shit, yet these animals were referring to an actual human being as an “animal.”)

Carroll said of the incident: “This is Florida, and I’m from the Deep South. You come to places like this [she apparently was referring to Florida and/or to Tampa and/or to the Repugnican Tea Party National Convention in the Tampa Bay Times Forum] [and] you can count the [number of] black people on your hand. They [white people] see us [black people] doing things they don’t think I should do.”

Carroll also said that such an incident “could happen to me at the Democratic convention or standing on the street corner. Racism is a global issue.”

Racism indeed is a global issue, but I’d be shocked if she were treated like that at the Democratic National Convention. Not that the Dems are perfect — far from it; thus, I’m a registered member of the Green Party – but your chances of facing discrimination at a Democratic crowd are much lower than at a KKK convention.

I mean, come on. Does Carroll really feel that way or does she feel pressure to parrot the false equivalency between the Repugnican Tea Party and the Democratic Party (“Both parties are responsible for/guilty of [fill in the blank]!!!”) that the corporately owned and controlled mainstream media, including her employer CNN, love to spout, despite its demonstrable falsity?

Some have claimed that the “feed[ing] animals” crack was a slam at members of the media in general, and that therefore it wasn’t an incident of racism, but would the apparent white supremacist fucktards have thrown food at a white male camera operator? Fuck no. (Similarly, President Barack Obama has been publicly disrespected by wingnuts in ways that a white male president never would be.) 

The other big news item from the KKK convention was that Pretty Boy Paul Ryan told so many lies during his speech that members of the stage crew had to rush out with a fire extinguisher because his pants had begun to smoke.

I won’t delve into Ryan’s lies, because with Ryan it’s like it is with Condoleezza Rice: How can you tell that they’re lying? When you see that their lips are moving.

I will say, however, that I take issue with Ryan’s remark, early in his speech: “I accept the calling of my generation to give our children the America that was given to us, with opportunity for the young and security for the old — and I know that we are ready.”

Um, Paul Ryan is not ready to be even vice president, and certainly is not ready to be president if it came to that, and Ryan wants to destroy Medicare and Social Security as we know it, yet here he is, claiming like George W. Bush used to claim, that it’s vitally important to him to ensure that our young people of today will have what our old people of today have — while at the same time proclaiming that of course today’s young people can’t expect to receive what today’s and yesterday’s old people have received; there will have to be significant cutbacks in Medicare and Social Security. Or hey, better yet, privatize both programs to ensure that the treasonous plutocrats can then loot the Medicare and Social Security funds entirely!

They want it both fucking ways.

They can’t have it both fucking ways.

And it incenses me that Paul Fucking Ryan claims Generation X when Generation X does not claim Paul Ryan.

Generation X is not about aiding and abetting millionaire baby boomers like Mittens Romney in sucking up every last crumb before the greedy fucking baby boomers finally kick off, leaving nothing for those of us who have to follow behind them like circus slaves have to follow elephants with shovels.

Of course, Paul Ryan, like Mittens, is a millionaire. (While Chris Matthews recently quipped that Mittens was born on third base, I’d say that it’s more accurate to say that Paul Ryan was born on third base, while Mittens was born on home plate.)

Both Ryan and Mittens come from wealthy families. Neither is a rags-to-riches story. Ryan isn’t the millionaire that Mittens is, but he is Mittens’ Mini-Me.*

And in his big speech yesterday, Mittens himself proclaimed, in part:

“This president [Barack Obama] can ask us to be patient. This president can tell us it was someone else’s fault. This president can tell us that the next four years he’ll get it right. But this president cannot tell us that you are better off today than when he took office. America has been patient. Americans have supported this president in good faith. But today, the time has come to turn the page.”

It’s true that Barack Obama has been a disappointing president. It was only last night that I finally gave Obama a penny toward his re-election — I gave him an online donation of $30, and that was inspired more from the unfair Repugnican Tea Party attacks upon him, especially this past week, than it was inspired by any hope or change that he’s actually delivered. I may or may not give him a little more money, and I most likely will not vote for him, since he’ll win my state of California and all of its 55 electoral votes in the winner-takes-all Electoral College no matter how I vote, even if I vote for Mittens. We’ll see.

President Obama’s failure is not that he has governed too far to the left. It’s that he’s too beholden to his corporate sugar daddies (he took much more from the Wall Street weasels than even John McCainosaurus did for the 2008 campaign, and then proceeded to put Wall Street weasels in charge of his economic policy) and he has focused too much on this “bipartisanship” bullshit (whether he sincerely believes that there’s any such thing or whether that’s just been rhetoric, I don’t know) instead of taking care of his base — you know, those of us who actually put him in office.

Consequently, Obama has not enacted the progressive vision that he at least implicitly promised us he would. The pro-corporate, center-right Clintonista brand of the Democratic Party has been killing us, just more slowly than has the Repugnican Tea Party.

A real — that is, an actually progressive, and not a Clintonista – Democratic president would have taken advantage of having had the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives controlled by his party in 2009 and 2010 and would have pushed through an actually progressive agenda, not thoroughly squandered it by having tryied to sing a rousing round of “Kumbaya” with the fascists in Congress who never are going to support anything that he says or does anyway (largely, in this case, because of his race).

But if I had to choose between four more years of Barack Obama or four (or even eight!) years of Mittens Romney, if a gun were pointed to my head and I had to choose the lesser of the two evils, it would be Obama, hands down. No question.

Mittens Romney declared in his speech yesterday that “the time has come to turn the page.”

What he doesn’t say is that he wants to turn the page of the American history book back to the 1950s, when women and non-whites had no rights, when gays were arrested solely for being gay or even just being suspected of being gay, when the nation lived in perpetual fear of overseas enemies (real or fabricated, but largely fabricated), when those who disagree with the right-wing fascists were called “anti-American” “Communists” and oppressed (many of them lost their jobs), when there were no environmental protection laws or agencies, when it was easier to suppress the voting rights of the “undesirables,” when, in short, right-wing, “Christo”fascist, (presumably) heterosexual, vulture capitalist, planet-killing, war-mongering white men — like Mittens Romney and Paul Ryan — ran the whole fucking show. 

Indeed, did the Repugnican Tea Party unearth its 2012 party platform from a time capsule buried in the 1950s?

I’m betting that more than half of us Americans on Election Day will reject Mittens’ agenda of dragging all of us back to the time when only people just like Mittens ran the show. The only way that I can see Mittens “winning” in November is if his treasonous, fascistic party is able to suppress enough Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters. They’re certainly trying.

And Clint Eastwood – the man has made some good films, but really, if you have to have a senile old man make your case for you, then maybe your case is not that strong.

–

*Wikipedia notes of Paul Ryan:

Ryan was born in Janesville, Wisconsin to Elizabeth A. “Betty” (née Hutter) and Paul Murray Ryan, a lawyer, and was the youngest of four siblings. A fifth-generation Wisconsinite, his father was of Irish ancestry and his mother is of German and English ancestry….His great-grandfather, Patrick William Ryan (1858–1917), founded an earthmoving company in 1884, which later became P. W. Ryan and Sons and is now known as Ryan Incorporated Central. Ryan’s grandfather was appointed U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Wisconsin by President Calvin Coolidge.

Ryan attended St. Mary’s Catholic School in Janesville, where he played on the seventh-grade basketball team. He attended Joseph A. Craig High School in Janesville, where he was elected president of his junior class and subsequently named prom king. As class president Ryan also gained a seat on the school board, making it the first time he held political office.Between his sophomore year and junior year, Ryan took a job working the grill at McDonald’s. He was on his high school’s ski, track and varsity soccer teams and played basketball in a Catholic recreational league. He also participated in several academic and social clubs including the Model United Nations.R yan and his family often went on hiking and skiing trips in the Colorado Rocky Mountains.

When he was 16 and working a summer job, Ryan received a worried phone call from his father’s secretary. He came home to find his 55-year-old father lying dead in bed after suffering from a heart attack.His grandfather and great-grandfather also died from heart attacks, at ages 57 and 59 respectively, inspiring Ryan’s later interest in health and exercise. Following the death of his father, Ryan’s grandmother moved in with the family and because she struggled with Alzheimer’s Ryan had to help care for her while his mother studied at college in Madison, Wisconsin. Due to his father’s death Ryan received survivor’s benefits through Social Security until his 18th birthday, which were saved up in order to pay for his college education. …

So Social Security sure worked out pretty well for Paul Ryan. But since he already got his…

Before he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, Ryan worked for the construction company founded by his grandfather (Ryan Incorporated Central), and Ryan’s wife was a tax attorney when they met, so again, we’re not talking about an impoverished family here. Ryan’s net worth (due mostly because he married into a rich family) is in the range of $4 million to $5 million – which, again, compared to Mittens’ net worth of more than $250 million, makes Paul Ryan Mittens’ Mini-Me.

Hurricane Charlie hits Florida

Tampa Bay Times image

This unaltered, copied-and-pasted photo of Charlie Crist looks like there is a storm behind him. Or is it supposed to be an image of Hurricane Charlie, yet another hurricane fucking up the Repugnican Tea Party National Convention?

Former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, who used to be a Repugnican but now calls himself an independent, has added to the tempest in Florida by declaring in the Tampa Bay Times today that he endorses President Barack Obama for re-election.

This probably is the money shot of Crist’s commentary:

As Republicans gather in Tampa to nominate Mitt Romney, Americans can expect to hear tales of how President Obama has failed to work with their party or turn the economy around.

But an element of their party has pitched so far to the extreme right on issues important to women, immigrants, seniors and students that they’ve proven incapable of governing for the people. Look no further than the inclusion of the [Missouri U.S. Rep. Todd] Akin amendment in the Republican Party platform, which bans abortion, even for rape victims.

The truth is that the party has failed to demonstrate the kind of leadership or seriousness voters deserve.

Unsurprisingly, Crist is being attacked by the right for his Reverse Zell Miller.*

This shot at Crist is hilarious, though, in its unintended hypocrisy:

“Today we have seen a repugnant display from a self-centered, career politician. While the people of Florida, and thousands of visitors who’ve traveled here, are facing an emergency, Charlie Crist has demonstrated, yet again, that his political ambition will always come first.”

That is a statement from the chair of Florida’s Repugnican Tea Party, Lenny Curry.

Curry uses the impending Hurricane Isaac as an excuse as to why Charlie Crist shouldn’t get political in the state of Florida right now, yet the entire fucking Repugnican Tea Party has yet to cancel its convention in Florida, despite the destruction that future Hurricane Isaac promises to bring upon the state and the Gulf Coast.

To be a member of the Repugnican Tea Party is not only to be a traitor to the United States of America, but it is to be an incredible fucking hypocrite, too.

–

*Zell Miller is the conservative “Democrat” who, in one of his last acts in office (he was a U.S. senator for the backasswards state of Georgia from July 27, 2000 to January 3, 2005), appeared as a speaker at the 2004 Repugnican National Convention, where he endorsed George W. Bush’s “re”-election over the election of Democratic candidate John Kerry and bashed the Democratic Party. I was saddened to see when I looked him up on Wikipedia that Miller, who has acid for blood, apparently is still alive, kept so by his sheer spite.

Team Obama mostly ignores issues, pushes utterly uninspiring money race

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert –

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

We might not outraise Mitt Romney.

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

To do that I need your help today.

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

https://donate.barackobama.com/Tonight

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

Good week.

Barack

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

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

Nope.

All!

That!

Matters!

Is!

That!

Barack!

Obama!

Is!

Not!

Outspent!

By!

Mitt!

Romney!!!!!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prick finally takes a hint

Reuters photo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Obama’s ‘Etch-A-Sketch’ moment?

So this exchange between U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev was caught on a live microphone today:

President Obama: On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this – this can be solved, but it’s important for him [incoming Russian President Vladimir Putin] to give me space.

President Medvedev: Yeah, I understand. I understand your message about space. Space for you…

President Obama: This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility.

President Medvedev: I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir.

Is this going to become Obama’s “Etch-A-Sketch” moment? That is, is Obama going to be pilloried for playing the game of politics the way that it is played?

A spokesperson for Mittens Romney was criticized for having simply pointed out the obvious fact that a fall presidential campaign is different from the primary season presidential campaign — duh.* If you don’t tailor your message to your audience — and the national audience is very different from a deeply partisan audience — then you’re a clueless fucktard who is going to fail with your audience. (Thankfully, it is Prick Santorum’s apparent refusal to modify his far-right-wing, “Christo”fascist message that will prevent him from ever sitting in the Oval Office.)

Not dissimilarly, Obama was uttering an obvious political truth: that a U.S. president has a degree of freedom in his (or, someday, her) second term that he (or she) does not have in his or her first, when re-election still is a consideration. It’s not Obama’s fault that a U.S. president is granted only two four-year terms and thus is a “lame duck” in his or her second term. As much as the wingnuts love to blame everything on the nation’s first black president, that political constriction is what he inherited.

Those who don’t recognize these obvious political realities are ignoramuses, and those who do recognize them but who nonetheless attempt to use them as political weapons are hypocrites unless they are trying to change the current political climate themselves. (And, of course, they’re not.)

Still, it’s not as though Obama has carte blanche in his second term. (I can’t see myself voting for President Hopey-Changey again, but I believe that he most likely will be re-elected.) Obama during his second term still would have the consideration of keeping the Oval Office in the hands of his own party come November 2016, so while his second term would give him more political wiggle worm than he has had thus far, I don’t expect a second Obama term to be much more aggressively progressive than has been his first term (which is a huge reason why I’m not giving him a penny this second go-around and why I very most likely will not give him my vote a second time).

Obama will prove to be, I surmise, far more cautious in his second term than was “President” George W. Bush, who bragged about the shitload of “political capital” that his 2004 “re”-election “win”** supposedly gave him, even though Bush had garnered only 50.7 percent of the popular vote in 2004.

While Bush sat on his laurels during his second term as the unelected-but-U.S.-Supreme-Court-coronated monarch of America, Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 pretty much swept away his party’s chances of keeping the White House come November 2008. (Recall that on the day that Katrina made landfall in the Gulf Coast, August 29, 2005 — and would leave more than 1,800 confirmed dead in its wake – Bush was in Arizona having birthday cake with John McCainosaurus to celebrate the latter’s 69th birthday, even though forecasters had predicted at least two days in advance that Katrina likely was to be devastating to the Gulf Coast.)

In his second term I expect Barack Obama to be much more vigilant than that.

–

*Of course, given Mittens’ reputation as a flip-flopper, the Team Mittens spokesperson could have chosen his words much better than to have uttered: “I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch-A-Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all over again.”

It was quite foreseeable that the “Etch-A-Sketch” comparison would boomerang.

**The pivotal state of Ohio probably was stolen in 2004, just as the pivotal state of Florida most definitely was in 2000.