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

Associated Press image

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s not nearly good enough, Nancy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reuters photos

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

Oh, yeah, there was an election on Tuesday.

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

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

Wow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m not holding my breath, however.

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

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

I hope that that is correct.

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

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

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

Karma is a bitch.

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

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

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

Cunter: ‘tea-partiers’ ‘cheerful,’ liberals ‘violent’

I wasn’t going to blog anymore tonight. Then I read Ann Cunter’s latest lie fest.

Cunter tries to make the case that liberals are violent racists.

It’s funny. In a sick and twisted way. Does she believe her own shit or does she have full awareness that she’s lying through her venom-dripping fangs?

Cunter begins with:

While engaging in astonishing viciousness, vulgarity and violence toward Republicans, liberals accuse cheerful, law-abiding Tea Party activists of being violent racists.

Oh, fuck, I wish that we liberals were violent! (And that the “tea party” fascists truly were “cheerful” instead of hating upon everyone who isn’t a conservative straight white person who identifies as a Christian — you know, the way our tea-bagging founding fathers wanted it to be.)

We liberals should have killed someone when George W. Bush blatantly treasonously stole the White House in late 200o after having lost the popular vote and the state of Florida, of which his brother just coinky-dinkily was governor (and of which the chief elections official just coinky-dinkily also had sat on his election campaign committee). When the unelected Bush regime launched its bogus Vietraq War for Big Oil and for Uncle Dick’s Halliburton, we liberals should have gone on a murderous fucking rampage.

But we didn’t.

Actually, the “tea party” dipshits aren’t widely accused of violence, even though Cunter goes on to beat the “tea-party” spittle story to death. They are, however, accurately widely accused of being racist.

Look at how many non-whites attend “tea party” gatherings. Why, if the “tea party” is a such a big tent, is that tent filled almost exclusively with white people?

And the New York Times reports that less than 1.5 percent of the audience of Faux “News” (which we might as well call the Tea Party Channel) is comprised of black viewers, while around 20 percent of CNN’s and MSNBC’s viewership is black. Why, do you suppose, that is? (Oh, yeah: because blacks are racist. Andrew Breitbart says so.)

Cunter also proclaims:

We also have evidence of liberals’ proclivity for violence in the form of mountains of arrest records. Liberal protesters at the 2008 Republican National Convention were arrested for smashing police cars, slashing tires, breaking store windows, and for possessing Molotov cocktails, napalm bombs and assorted firearms. (If only they could muster up that kind of fighting spirit on foreign battlefields.)

There were no arrests of conservatives at the Democratic National Convention.

Hmmm. My understanding is that the vast majority of those who actually smash police cars, slash tires, break store windows, etc., are anarchists, not liberals, and while I don’t know much about the anarchists, my understanding is that by definition they don’t like liberals, considering liberals to be part of the broken political system that they despise. Actually, I think that they hate any and all political systems, broken or otherwise. (Any anarchists there, feel free to correct me in the comments section if I’m wrong.)

But that aside, again, I only WISH that liberals actually would wreak havoc like Cunter claims they (we) do. Instead, they tend to be notoriously pussy, usually not even fighting back when they are physically attacked. Fucking peaceniks. (And, as Cunter points out, liberals don’t even like to slaughter Muslim babies for the profits of Big Oil in the names of freedom and democracy and God and Jesus and puppies and kittens and fluffy little bunnies and butterflies and marshmallows and cotton candy. Fucking treasonous liberals!)

And if there were no arrests of conservatives at the Democratic National Convention, well, since conservatives tend to be overly comfortable, overprivileged rich fucks, since they tend to sit at the top of the hierarchy, shitting and pissing upon others, what, exactly, do they have to protest? (Oh, yeah: taxes, which the rich fucks’ corporations — which are people just like you and me, don’t you know – don’t even pay anyway. [Oh -- and the black guy won the 2008 presidential election over the old white guy by 7 percentage points, when U.S. history clearly has demonstrated that only white men should ever be president.])

But wait. Cunter’s not done.

“It was a good day when George Bush was merely burned in effigy, compared to Hitler or, most innocuously, compared to a monkey,” she whines.

OK, so go to Google images — images.google.com — and look up “Obama monkey” and “Obama Hitler.” You’ll see lovely images like these:

(You can Google “Obama burned in effigy” on your own. And you know, you’re no one until you’re burned in effigy. Just sayin’.)

It seems to me that blacks are much more often compared to monkeys or other non-human primates than are whites, and that whites comparing blacks to monkeys is quite different from mostly whites comparing a white guy to a monkey*, and really, I don’t think that the right or the left has a monopoly on the trite Hitler comparison, although if Barack Hussein Hitler truly wants to round up and exterminate six million “tea-partying” wingnuts, hey, I’m down with that. (But that will never happen, the FEMA concentration-camp conspiracy stories notwithstanding, because, as I said, liberals are pussies.)

Cunter even manages to scrape together some names of Democratic politicians who have made racist or racist-sounding statements in the past, and, of course, she has to mention that the late Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd in his youth used to be a member of the KKK, which he spent the rest of his life regretting and denouncing. (Well, she doesn’t remind us that he was young and that he regretted it the rest of his life. An oversight, I’m sure.)

Cunter neglects to mention Repugnican racist politicians like Strom “Baby Daddy” Thurmond, Trent Lott (whose political career imploded when he stated that segregationist Thurmond should have been elected president in 1948), George “Macaca” Allen, Jeff(erson) Sessions, John Ashcroft, George Bush I (remember the Willie Horton ad?) and George Bush II (remember the robo-calls that John McCain had fathered a black child, which had Karl Rove’s greasy fingerprints all over them? And how helpful Bush II was to the black victims of Hurricane Katrina?), Katherine Harris (and her purging of black voters from Florida’s voter rolls so that Bush II could “win” Florida), and, of course, David Duke. (Cunter actually writes that we liberals “have zero examples of conservative racism.” Uh, smoking dope isn’t legal yet, Ann.)

And these “incidents”/incidents of liberal-on-conservative violence/“violence” that Cunter recounts are, as violence goes, pretty tame. And quite anecdotal — hardly a fucking national pandemic, unfortunately. The worst of them she recounts is that a guy at a MoveOn.org event bit off a portion of a wingnut’s finger.

Again, cool shit like that doesn’t happen nearly enough.

I wonder what one of Cunter’s fingers tastes like. Careful, though, my fellow violent liberals. I’m guessing that she has acid for blood.

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*I used to love the comparisons of George W. Bush to a chimpanzee, although the comparisons were an insult to the intelligence of our closest living cousins.

The comparisons of Bush to chimps was a statement on his lack of intelligence, however. The prime aim of comparisons of blacks to non-human primates, however, is to suggest that they are subhuman – and thus, that it’s justified to treat them as such. 

Big difference. But just another innocent oversight on Cunter’s part, I’m certain.

Time for the Green Party

It’s in the air now — progressives want an alternative to what the Obama administration and the Democratic Party are offering them.

The hope and change that Barack Obama promised us has turned into a disappointment of Clintonesque proportions — and the Democrats control the White House and both houses of Congress this time.

President Obama is a “socialist”? Oh, I wish!

Progressive powerhouses MoveOn.org, Democracy for America, SEIU, Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen, People for the American Way and other progressive groups have created “Stand for Democracy,” a project whose goal is to “take back our democracy from corporate corruption.” (I urge you to visit the website and pick your top five progressive concerns if you haven’t already done so.)

Are liberals falling out of love with Obama? asks The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza today. (His answer, as far as I can tell, is maybe. My answer is Hell yes!)

Jane Hamsher of the progressive blog Firedoglake proclaims in a fundraising e-mail today:

The progressive movement is at a crossroads…. Progressives must now choose: Do we pursue a corporate-sponsored model functioning within the [Democratic Party] that ultimately accepts the party’s goals, or are we willing to fund an independent movement, capable of freely advocating for progressive values from the outside?

It seems to me that the best bet to counter the Democratic Party’s pay-to-play, corporate-ass-kissing, Repugnican-Lite politics is to rejuvenate the Green Party.

Why try to create a new progressive party or movement when one already exists?

The Green Party already is established around the nation, is an international party, and its “ten key values” are right in line with progressivism:

1. Grassroots democracy

2. Social justice and equal opportunity

3. Ecological wisdom

4. Nonviolence

5. Decentralization

6. Community-based economics and economic justice

7. Feminism and gender equity

8. Respect for diversity

9. Personal and global responsibility

10. Future focus and sustainability

In short, the Green Party is antithetical to the “tea party” and the Repugnican Party and represents what the Democratic Party sometimes pays lip service to but rarely or never delivers because it’s too beholden to the corporatocrats and is terrified of losing the dumbfuck (a.k.a. “swing” or “independent”) vote.

If British Petroleum’s ruination of the Gulf of Mexico and the Democratic Party’s impotent response to the crisis doesn’t warrant breathing new life into the Green Party, then I don’t know what the hell will.

I hear the counter-argument: But a strong Green Party will only help the Repugnicans!*

Meh.

Serious competition is the only thing that will drag the Democratic Party from the Clintonesque center to the left. Without serious competition to the Democratic Party, all that we’ll ever fucking get from the Democratic Party is more empty promises of hope and change.

Neither we nor the planet can survive much longer on such empty promises.

–

*I also hear people clamoring: Ralph Nader (the Green Party candidate) threw the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush!

However, the Green Party’s website correctly points out:

The Supreme Court spoiled [the 2000 presidential election]: [Democratic candidate] Al Gore won the 2000 election. [Republican] George W. Bush became president when a biased U.S/ Supreme Court allowed election manipulation by Florida Republicans.

Al Gore Spoiled [the 2000 election]: Gore ran a weak campaign with no clear message. He failed to defeat Bush in the debates and even lost his home state of Tennessee. Millions of Democrats voted for Bush compared to the few hundred thousand who voted for Nader.

Democratic senators spoiled [the election]: When the Black Caucus challenged Bush’s election victory in January 2001, not one Democratic Senator stood up in support. Senate Democrats failed to push for an investigation of the Florida vote debacle.

The Democratic Party spoiled [the election]: For many years, Democrats never objected when officials removed African American and other voters from the voter rolls in Florida and other states. Why didn’t the Democrats sue when 90,000 Florida voters were disqualified earlier in 2000? Why were Democrats (including Gore) silent about disqualified votes in the weeks after the election?

To lambast Ralph Nader for having exercised his American and his constitutional right to run for president is undemocratic and un-American.

I voted for him in 2000 and I wish that I had voted for him in 2008 instead of Barack Obama.

Repugnican lynch mobsters show us what they’re made of: treasonous shit

It’s interesting to watch the Repugnicans and other assorted wingnuts when things don’t go their way.

Remember the Repugnican cries of “Sore Loserman!” when BushCheneyCorp blatantly stole the presidential election of 2000, the election that Democrat Al Gore had won?

It’s funny, because even though Gore won the 2000 popular vote by more than a half-million votes and thus was the clear choice of the majority of the American voters, and even though George W. Bush “won” the pivotal state of Florida — even though his brother was governor at the time, and even though Florida’s top elections official, Repugnican Katherine Harris, had sat on the state’s committee to elect Bush (no conflict of interest there!), and even though the U.S. Supreme Court, by a vote of five right-wingers to four left-wingers, voted to stop the Florida recount and to crown Bush Jr. as “president” – the Repugnicans insisted that nonetheless Bush was the rightful, legitimate president.

Now, in President Barack Obama we have a president who actually was elected legitimately, but the same Repugnicans who cried “Sore Loserman!” won’t accept it.  

First there were the April 15 “tea parties” — which supposedly were about taxes but actually were about the fact that Omigod! Omigod! Omigod! There’s a black! guy in the White! House! – and now there are the Repugnican/wingnut disruptions of elected officials’ town halls.

I wasn’t going to write about the disruptions of the town halls until I saw this news tidbit from The Associated Press today:

Washington, D.C. – As they head home to their congressional districts for the August recess, lawmakers who support health care reform are bracing for protests and demonstrations that threaten to turn violent.

In North Carolina, a congressman who backs overhauling health care had his life threatened by a caller upset that he was not holding a public forum on the proposal.

Democratic Rep. Brad Miller received the call Monday, one of hundreds the congressman’s office has fielded demanding town-hall meetings on the health care proposal, said his spokeswoman, LuAnn Canipe. She said the callers were “trying to instigate town halls so they can show up and disrupt.”

“We had one of those kind of calls that escalated to what we considered a threat” on the congressman’s life, Canipe said [yesterday]. “These are some strong-arm tactics, and we are trying to deal with and trying to talk to people in good faith about health care reform.”

Earlier this week, White House officials counseled Democratic senators on coping with disruptions at public events this summer.

In the week since the House began its break, several town-hall meetings have already been disrupted by noisy demonstrators.

The latest occurrence was at back-to-back town hall meetings held by Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., which got so raucous police had to escort people out.

Dingell vowed [yesterday] to push ahead with Democratic-led efforts to extend coverage to all, saying he won’t be intimidated by protesters.

“I am eager to talk about the bill with anyone who wants to discuss it. That doesn’t open the door to everyone who wants to demagogue the discussion,” Dingell said in a statement.

The boos, jeers and shouts of “Shame on you!” at the events in a gym in Romulus, Mich., mirror what other Democrats are encountering around the country. Activists have shown up at town-hall meetings held recently by Arlen Specter, D-Pa. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., was greeted by about 200 protesters at an event in Denver, about half supporting Democrats and half opposed.

In Saratoga Springs, N.Y., about 20 protesters showed up at an event held by Democratic Rep. Scott Murphy to let him know they oppose the health care plans in Washington. They carried signs saying: “Obamacare Seniors beware! Rationing is here,” and “If socialized medicine is best … why didn’t Ted Kennedy go to Canada?”

The episodes have drawn widespread media attention, and Republicans have seized on them as well as polls showing a decline in support for President Barack Obama and his agenda as evidence that public support is lacking for his signature legislation.

Pushing back, Democrats have accused Republicans of sanctioning mob tactics, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., accused protesters earlier this week of trying to sabotage the democratic process.

Miller never had plans to hold a town-hall meeting during the August recess, Canipe said. Instead, he was sitting down with smaller groups of people to discuss the plan. During one of those smaller gatherings [yesterday], hundreds of people from a group called Triangle Conservatives peacefully protested at Miller’s Raleigh office.

The threatening caller, when told by a staffer that Miller was not planning a meeting, claimed the congressman didn’t want to meet with people face to face because he knew it would cost him his life, according to Canipe. The staffer then asked if the caller was making a threat. The caller, said Canipe, replied that there are a lot of angry people out there.

The U.S. Capitol Police confirmed [yesterday] they were looking into a threat against a congressman, but wouldn’t provide further details.

So not only are the wingnuts disrupting public forums, but they are making death threats against those elected officials who refuse to hold public forums that the wingnuts only will disrupt?

This is the same fake-mob mentality that we saw in the fight for the 2000 presidential election results, in which Repugnican operatives in Florida pretended to be ordinary American citizens so angry about an “injustice” that they were rising up against it:

This angry mob, which successfully stopped the recount in Miami-Dade County during the 2000 [presidential] election standoff, was portrayed by the media as an uprising by Florida voters.

Here are the identities of the protesters:

1. Tom Pyle, policy analyst, office of House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas)
2. Garry Malphrus, majority chief counsel and staff director, House judiciary subcommittee on criminal justice
3. Rory Cooper, political division staff member at the National Republican Congressional Committee
4. Kevin Smith, former House Republican conference analyst and more recently of Voter.com.
5. Steven Brophy, former aide to Sen. Fred D. Thompson (R-Tennessee), now working at the consulting firm KPMG
6. Matt Schlapp, former chief of staff for Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-Kansas), now on the Bush campaign staff in Austin
7. Roger Morse, aide to Rep. Van Hilleary (R-Tennessee)
8. Duane Gibson, aide to Chairman Don Young (R-Alaska) of the House Resources Committee
9. Chuck Royal, legislative assistant to Rep. Jim DeMint (R-South Carolina)
10. Layna McConkey, former legislative assistant to former Rep. Jim Ross Lightfoot (R-Iowa) now at Steelman Health Strategies

(From about.com)

The Repugnicans can’t get a legitimate mob of concerned citizens together because the Repugnicans represent the super-rich and there just aren’t enough of the super-rich to form legitimate citizen mobs.

As the recent 68-31 vote in the U.S. Senate for the confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court demonstrates, the winguts are no more than about a third of the U.S. population, but they still want to run the show — by force, if they have to.

Fuck the faux mobs. We need to treat them like they are: mobsters. Criminals. Traitors – because they think that they, the minority, can run roughshod over the rest of us, the majority.

They think that if they just throw enough tantrums, we’ll give in.

We gave in to their tantrums in late 2000 and George W. Bush became “president” even though he’d fucking lost the election to Al Gore.

Look what giving in to the vocal minority’s tantrums in late 2000 cost the nation.

Never again.

These sore losermen need to sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up — or we need to make them sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up, because their actions now are not democratic, but are treasonous.

The vocal minority fucking lost the presidential election of 2008 — by a margin too great for them to be able to steal yet another presidential election — and, to paraphrase my great senator, Barbara Boxer, these traitors need to learn that elections have consequences. And we, the majority of the American people, need to teach them that.

The (semi-)new(d) faces of the remnants of the Repugnican Party

Associated Press photo

Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher of Ohio – a.k.a. “Joe the Plumber” — speaks at a rally for Repugnican presidential candidate John McCainosaurus in Ohio in late October. “Joe the Plumber” says that it’s perfectly OK to refer to non-heterosexuals as “queer,” which sure makes you wonder what his words for black people and other assorted people are. “Joe the Plumber,” who just might be named the next pope, also recently pontificated, “God is recognized as, if you will, America’s religion.” So not only is God not a deity, but is a religion, but the United States of America has a national religion, and that religion is called “God.” I have learned so much from “Joe the Plumber”!

So who do the Repugnicans and the wingnuts have now to inspire a new generation of young people?

Well, not counting Sarah “Fahrenheit 451” Palin-Quayle, they have Carrie “No Offense!” Prejean and “Joe ‘Some of My Best Friends Are Queer but I Wouldn’t Let Them Anywhere Near My Children’ the Plumber.”

Miss California Carrie Prejean, the 21-year-old breast-enhanced bimbo who decided to become a poster girl for the homo-hating National Organization for Marriage after stating during the Miss USA pageant that she opposes same-sex marriage (adding: “No offense!”), probably is going to be stripped of her crown, thank Goddess.

It’s not for the right reasons, really, but I like the probable result anyway.

Reports The Associated Press today:

The directors of the Miss California USA pageant are looking into whether title holder Carrie Prejean violated her contract by working with a national group opposed to same-sex marriage and by posing semi-nude when she was a teenage model.

Pageant spokesman Roger Neal said [yesterday] it appears Prejean has run afoul of several sections of the 12-page contract that all prospective contestants were required to sign before competing in the November state contest.

The detailed document prohibits the titular [titular -- that's great...] Miss California from making personal appearances, giving interviews or making commercials without permission from pageant officials.

In the last 10 days, Prejean has made televised appearances at her San Diego church and on behalf of the National Organization for Marriage, a group opposed to same-sex marriage.

The contract also contains a clause asking participants to say whether they have conducted themselves “in accordance with the highest ethical and moral standards.” As an example, it asks if they have ever been photographed nude or partially nude.

“As you can see from the contract, she violated multiple items,” Neal said in an e-mail to The Associated Press.

A photo of Prejean wearing only pink panties with her back turned to the camera appeared Monday on the gossip blog theDirty.com.

[Here it is:

 ] 

[Prejean] issued a statement early [yesterday] saying she posed for the shot when she was a 17-year-old model [oh, she was a minor -- that makes it better!] and objected to its release as an attempt to belittle her religious faith: “I am a Christian, and I am a model. Models pose for pictures, including lingerie and swimwear photos.”

Prejean spokeswoman Melany Ethridge said she could not comment on the contract because she was unfamiliar with its contents. Ethridge said she had not heard the pageant directors were reviewing it.

Prejean, a San Diego native who attends San Diego Christian College, was named the first runner-up to Miss North Carolina in the Miss USA pageant April 19. Her response to a question during the pageant that she opposed same-sex marriage made her a media sensation, darling of religious conservatives and the target of embarrassing disclosures.

Her post-pageant activities also have estranged her from the two directors of the state pageant, who under the terms of the contract have almost unlimited control over Miss California’s activities, including the right to revoke her crown for breaching its provisions.

On the day last week that Prejean was in Washington with National Organization for Marriage leaders to announce her support for a new advertisement the group created based on her pageant experience, Keith Lewis, co-director of the California contest, expressed concern.

“There is a contract that all participants sign that is very involved and very intricate and limits a lot of their activities,” said Lewis, a Los Angeles talent agent.

Meanwhile, the Miss Universe Organization, which also owns the Miss USA pageant, confirmed [yesterday] that it had sent a letter demanding the National Organization for Marriage to remove the Prejean spot from the air and the group’s website. It includes footage from the April 19 pageant.

The Miss Universe Organization “neither sanctions nor disapproves of the viewpoints expressed in the advertisement but cannot allow its copyrighted material to be used without permission to support the National Organization for Marriage’s political agenda and fundraising efforts,” organization President Paula Shugart said.

NOM executive director Brian Brown said the group did not plan to comply with the pageant’s request. [Good; I hope that the Miss Universe Organization sues NOM and wins.]

“It is clearly fair use, and all they are attempting to do is silence us by using false legal claims,” Brown said. “But they have another thing coming if they think these ads are coming down. None of us are relenting, least of all Carrie.”

NOM President Maggie Gallagher also issued a statement [yesterday] sympathizing with Prejean over the release of her modeling picture and saying it did not disqualify her as a traditional marriage advocate.

“Of course Carrie is not perfect,” Gallagher said. “On a personal note, as a former unwed mother, I want to say to Americans: You don’t have to be a perfect person to have the right to stand up for marriage.”

Gallagher, with whom I exchanged hostile e-mails years ago over an ignorant, bigoted, homo-hateful column that she wrote, sorely needs to go fuck herself. Of course she states that “You don’t have to be a perfect person to have the right to stand up for marriage.” Because being a homo-hating wingnut is all about being a fucking hypocrite.

Thankfully, Prejean, being the genius that she is, very apparently blatantly has violated the terms of her contract with the Miss California organization, which allows the organization to strip Prejean — who gives California, the Miss California organization, the Miss USA organization and the Miss Universe Organization all a bad name – of the title of Miss California without having to use her homo-hatred as the reason, whether it’s the reason or not.

Of course, there is no doubt that Prejean and her new fascist buddies at NOM nonetheless will cry that she’s a martyr for the “cause” of stripping non-heterosexuals of their equal human and civil rights.

Speaking of homo-haters, “Joe the Plumber,” the darling of the McCainosaurus-Palin-Quayle campaign and the remants of the Repugnican Party, if you haven’t heard by now, told Christianity Today that “queer” is a perfectly appropriate, acceptable term for non-heterosexuals. And that he loves his “queer” friends but that they know that he wouldn’t allow them anywhere near his children.

From the interview with “Joe the Plumber” in Christianity Today:

Christianity Today: In the last month, same-sex marriage has become legal in Iowa and Vermont. What do you think about same-sex marriage at a state level?

“Joe the Plumber”: At a state level, it’s up to them. I don’t want it to be a federal thing. I personally still think it’s wrong.

People don’t understand the dictionary — it’s called “queer.” “Queer” means “strange and unusual.” It’s not like a slur, like you would call a white person a “honky” or something like that.

You know, God is pretty explicit in what we’re supposed to do — what man and woman are for. Now, at the same time, we’re supposed to love everybody and accept people, and preach against the sins.

I’ve had some friends that are actually homosexual. [Actual homosexuals in Ohio!] And, I mean, they know where I stand, and they know that I wouldn’t have them anywhere near my children. But at the same time, they’re people, and they’re going to do their thing.

Nice!

You know what? I wouldn’t want a “Christo”fascist like “Joe the Plumber” anywhere near my children (if I had any, I mean, of course) or any child, lest his “Christian,” “family” “values” rub off on them and they grow up to be skinheads or the like.

The “states’ rights” “argument” that “Joe the Plumber” employs was used by the white supremacists in the South; they figured that it was better to have at least some states in which it was still OK to shit and piss upon blacks. No, you don’t leave the matter of equal human and civil rights up to each state. Equal human and civil rights for all Americans must be federally protected. 

And memo to Joe: The term “queer” is hate speech when used by a homo-hater, most fucking certainly is a slur as much as are such words as “faggot” or “dyke” or “nigger” or “coon” or “chink” or “Jap” or “spic” or “wetback” or  “raghead” or “Hajji” or “Macaca” or “kike” or “cracker” or yes, “honky.”*

That the wingnuts are using dumbfucks like “Joe the Plumber” and Miss California to appeal to our youth is a great thing, since the majority of our youth oppose the hatred, bigotry and ignorance that Prejean and the plumber stand for.

I think that Human Rights Campaign President Joe Salmonese probably had it right when he remarked of “Joe the Plumber’s” remarks about non-heterosexuals: “It would matter if ‘Joe the Plumber’ mattered. One thing among many things we learned in the 2008 campaign is that he doesn’t.”

True, but we can’t assume that the “Christo”fascist beast is dead.

In the same interview with Christianity Today, “Joe the Plumber” named Sarah “She-Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing” Palin as an idol of his:

Christianity Today: Who do you see as the emerging leaders for the Republican Party?

“Joe the Plumber”: There isn’t one.

You got the RNC [Repugnican National Committee] talking about repackaging principles and values to make them hip and cool to the younger generation. You can’t repackage them. They are what they are. You can’t make what they are.

I like Sarah Palin a lot, actually. I just don’t know if that’s where God’s leading her. I just know the Republican Party’s done its best to blackball her. I don’t know what her agenda is. If she ran, would I vote for her? Absolutely. John McCain was the lesser of two evils.

Would Americans ever be dumb enough to allow Sarah Palin-Quayle or someone like her into the White House? They did, after all, allow George W. Bush into the White House…

*Even though, as an Anglo, it seems to me that terms for white people like “cracker” or “honky” aren’t as severe (and certainly aren’t as numerous) as are the slurs for black people; “whitey,” I think, is worse than “cracker” or “honky,” but even “whitey” pales in comparison (bad pun fully intended) to such terms as “spade” and “sambo” and “jigaboo” and “jungle bunny.”

Memo to the ’Pugs: You fucking LOST

Associated Press photo

Someone needs to explain to the clearly addled John McCainosaurus that the asswipe is not co-fucking-president and needs to explain to the rest of the Repugnicans that in a democracy, losing the election means that you are out of fucking power.

You gotta hand it to the Repugnicans: Even when they are in the minority, even when the majority of the American people have soundly rejected Repugnicanism, the ’Pugs act as though they still have an impressive amount of political muscle to flex.

Reports Reuters:

WASHINGTON – Senator John McCain said [yesterday] that President Barack Obama should [have included] Republicans in his plans sooner if he really [wanted] their support after the bitter debate over the $787 billion economic stimulus bill.

McCain, who lost the 2008 presidential election to Obama, and other Republicans complained they had been left out of negotiations on the legislation by Democrats who hold majorities in both houses of Congress.

McCain said the bill was filled with non-emergency spending paid for with borrowed money that future generations will have to pay back.

“I think that the majority of people understand that this was generational theft,” McCain told Reuters.

[The hundreds of billions of dollars spent on the unelected Bush regime's wholly unnecessary, bogus Vietraq War would not qualify as "generational theft," of course, because that was Repugnican spending of American taxpayers' dollars, you see.]

The Arizona senator said many other issues coming up will require a bipartisan effort that he said has been lacking so far from Obama and the Democrats.

“I hope they’ve learned a lesson,” he said. “I hope that they will reverse course, and sit down, negotiate from the beginning, so you’re in on the takeoff, so you can be in on the landing.”

McCain met Obama two weeks after the November 4 election and agreed that “Americans of all parties want and need their leaders to come together and change the bad habits of Washington” to solve urgent challenges.

Obama initially hoped for an overwhelming majority for passage of the stimulus bill, but the debate quickly dissolved into the traditional argument in which Democrats backed a package more weighted to spending programs and Republicans advocated tax cuts.

Acknowledging scaled-down ambitions for the vote, Obama on Thursday said “I hope they act in a bipartisan fashion, but no matter how they act,” the legislation should help the economy.

The stimulus bill ultimately passed the House of Representatives with no Republican support. It was expected to garner the votes of three Republican moderates in the Senate [and it did].

“No one could view this as having a scintilla of bipartisanship,” said McCain, who has often annoyed his own Republican colleagues by working with the opposition party.

“The message of the election was, sit down and work together. They obviously are not doing that,” he said.

No, the message of the November 4 election was not “sit down and work together.”

The November 4 election was a repudiation of Repugnicanism. You don’t look to solutions from those who were in power for eight fucking years and who nearly destroyed the American empire in the process — any more than you go back to the first incompetent surgeon who botched your surgery in order to correct his botch job. But nice try, McCainosaurus.

When George W. Bush “won” “re”-election by only 50.7 percent of the popular vote in 2004, he and his henchpeople called it a fucking “mandate.”

A fucking “mandate.” They didn’t talk about power sharing or bipartisanship. Nooooo, they talked about their “mandate.” 

Miraculously, 50.7 percent of the popular vote was not what it actually was, a squeaker, but was a “mandate” in 2004, but Barack Obama’s 53 percent of the popular vote on Nov. 4, 2008 only can be called a call for bipartisanship and power sharing!

On Nov. 4, 2008, the American people put the Repugnicans out of power and the Repugnicans need to shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down. And it is the Democrats in Washington who need to tell them to do that, as the Repugnicans told the Democrats to do when the Repugnicans were in power for eight long disastrous years.

And if the Democrats in Washington won’t tell the Repugnicans to shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down, then we, the people, who put the Democrats in power, need to do that job for them.

Assorted shit

Associated Press photo

OK, so Rod “$enate $eat for $ale” Blahblahblahblah (pictured today above) by a unanimous vote of the Illinois state Senate is now the former governor of Illinois, but does anyone think that he’ll ever really go away?

That he’ll have a book published is a foregone conclusion; the punishment for wrongdoing in the United States of America is that you get to make big $$$ writing a book. (At least it will be legal for Blahblahblahblah to sell his book to the highest bidder…)

Let’s just hope that Blahblahblahblah doesn’t decide to go into porn…

Ted Haggard, either…

…

The poor Repugnicans are struggling to define their core principles.

Gee, I can help them with that. I can condense the ’Pugs’ core principle into one simple word: treason.

They stole the 2000 presidential election (via Florida and via Ohio probably the 2004 election, too) and they started the bogus Vietraq War, which has resulted in the wholly unnecessary deaths of at least 4,236 of our military personnel — and in the looting of about $600 billion of American taxpayers’ dollars thus far, most of which has gone to the pockets of war profiteers like Dick Cheney’s Halliburton.

The Repugnicans are perfectly OK with hundreds of billions of Americans’ tax dollars going to war profiteers via a bogus war — after all, they can’t just loot the U.S. treasury directly – but the Repugnicans are against spending billions of American taxpayers’ own dollars on Americans.

And the Repugnicans want to make sure that the super-rich pay as little in taxes as possible, while the common American taxpayer takes it up the ass.

The Repugnicans sold out the nation to the super-rich and the Repugnicans want to prevent the nation’s recovery from that sellout.

Yup, in a word, treason.

There, I’ve done their work for them.

If they want to add a few more words to their core principles, plutocracy, racism, misogyny, “Christo”fascism, homophobia, xenophobia, nationalism/jingoism and hypocrisy all come to mind.

…

Residents of Tikrit in Iraq have erected a sort of shrine to the Iraqi journalist who hurled his shoes at former “President” George W. Bush at a press conference in Baghdad last month:

Reuters photos

I never get sick of the shoe thing.

And this is the first statue in honor of George W. Bush that I’m aware of…

Repugnicans, ‘Christo’fascists and other assorted wingnuts: Crafty or insane?

For the past eight years the Repugnicans and wingnuts have been in charge of the nation like the patients being in charge of the insane asylum.

Now that they legitimately have lost power because their way of doing things nearly destroyed the nation and its democracy — I believe that a World War III-lovin’ McInsane/Palin-Quayle administration very well might have meant the end of our nation (perhaps even the world) as we know it — what are they going to do now?

They’re going to cry that they are the victims now — never mind the fact that they’ve been the oppressors for the past eight years, from stealing two presidential elections in a row (Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004) and starting the bogus Vietraq War (which was meant to make Dick Cheney’s war profiteering Halliburton and the other war-profiteering subsidiaries of BushCheneyCorp even richer more than it was meant to accomplish anything else, so, when you think about it, that “mission accomplished” banner was accurate) to their last-gasp act of trying to oppress gay men and lesbians even more than they’ve already been oppressed.

So now you have the fascist gay-hating Mormons claiming that those who are fighting back against their unprovoked hatred are, in fact, actually the haters. That’s like the Nazis, who also persecuted gay men and lesbians, claiming that they were, in fact, the victims.

And now when they lose elections, the Repugnicans claim election fraud. Election fraud. The only way that they could “win” the White House in 2000 and in 2004 was to commit election fraud, and having a Repugnican state secretary of state in Florida in 2000 (Katherine Harris) and in Ohio in 2004 (Kenneth Blackwell) sure in the hell made that a lot easier.

The National Repugnican Senatorial Committee today put out an e-mail (I ended up on their e-mail list somehow) with the subject line of “Mischief in Minnesota?” suggesting that because Democrat Al Franken is ahead of Repugnican Norm Coleman in Minnesota’s recount of the U.S. Senate race between them, only vote-counting fraud possibly could explain Franken’s lead.

No, fascist motherfuckers, see, there are these things called ballots, and they can be counted, each and every fucking one of them. Unlike your whacked-out religious beliefs — such as that global warming is just God hugging us more closely – the results of an election can be proven.

Even though the Repugnican-dominated U.S. Supreme Court stopped the ballot-counting in Florida in 2000 so that George W. Bush could “win,” the results of an election can be determined. Hand-counting every last ballot can be incredibly tedious, to be sure, but in a democracy, that’s what you do.

Elections are won by the number of votes received, not by which side screams the loudest, as the Repugnicans “won” the White House in 2000 only because they screamed the loudest.

Let the wingnuts and the “Christo”fascists and the Repugnicans cry “victim” all they want.

We’re taking our nation back. With or without them, whether they like it or not. And we should not hesitate to wield our majority power, as when they were in the majority they never hesitated to wield theirs.

I do wonder, though, when the wingnuts and the Repugnicans and the “Christo”fascists surreally hypocritically claim victimhood, whether they are so insane as to truly believe that they actually are victims when, in fact, they’ve always been the victimizers, or whether they’re actually pretty politically astute as to knowingly falsely claim victimhood for political gain.

In any case, we need to call them on their shit and keep them in their place. Even though they’re in the minority now, they’ll still try to run the show.