Repugnican losers are trying to rig the game

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deceased nun is the new Terri Schiavo

Associated Press image

Sister Denise Mosier of Virginia allegedly was killed by a drunk driver earlier this month. The accused driver turns out to have been an “illegal,” prompting a local, apparently politically ambitious Repugnican Tea Party wingnut to politicize Mosier’s death – even going so far as to say that President Barack Obama “[has] blood on [his] hands” for not persecuting those in the nation illegally more fervently – even though Mosier’s fellow nuns have asked that her death not be politicized.

I recently finished reading the chapter in Idiot America about the 2005 Terri Schiavo debacle — the fiasco in which a dying hospice patient in Florida was used shamelessly as a political football by the right wing.

Lest we begin to think that anything has changed here in Idiot America five years later, a wingnut in Virginia now is using the death of a Catholic nun for personal political gain.

Sister Denise Mosier was killed earlier this month by an allegedly drunk driver, a 23-year-old from Bolivia — who, the media report, is not a U.S. citizen and has been in the nation illegally.

Mosier could have been killed by any sort of drunk driver – a male or a female, a minor or an adult, a white person or a non-white person, a U.S. citizen or a non-citizen – but the individual accused of having killed her while he was drunk behind the wheel is an “illegal,” which, in the current political climate in which it’s the “illegals” who are being made into scapegoats while the white-collar criminals remain free, has significance.

The Associated Press notes that Mosier’s order, the Benedictine Sisters of Virginia, have “tried to discourage [anyone from] using [her] death … as a ‘forum of the illegal immigration agenda’ and pleaded for a focus on ‘Christ’s command to forgive.’”

But hey, as the wingnuts said of the dying Terri Schiavo (whom they claimed, quite incorrectly, was being murdered by being allowed to die a natural death in a hospice), the death of a nun allegedly by an “illegal” is “a great political issue.”

Why shouldn’t someone’s personal pain become some wingnut’s political gain?

Corey Stewart, chairman of the board of supervisors of the county where Mosier lived, is trying to reap such gain.

The AP reports that Stewart, yet another stupid white man –

Washington Post image

– “rushed back into the immigration debate after the Aug. 1 accident, firing off a statement that President Barack Obama, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and members of Congress ‘all have blood on their hands.’”

Nice.

No, it wasn’t a tragic accident that killed a nun — something that neither the young Bolivian man (who, if he is guilty as charged) nor the members of his family probably ever will live down.

No, it’s Obama’s fault. And Napolitano’s fault. And Nancy Pelosi’s fault.

Clearly.

“What I’m hoping is that this situation, which because it involves a nun has drawn the nation’s attention, can serve as a catalyst for change and force the administration to come clean about its catch-and-release policies,” the AP quotes Stewart as having said, adding that he also believes that Virginia needs to strengthen its drunken-driving laws.

Sure, but the real red meat of the nun’s death is the illegal immigration issue. Stewart said so himself: “because it involves a nun” and has “drawn the nation’s attention.”

It’s funny how dim individuals reveal their personal political agendas even unintentionally. Stewart essentially has called the nun’s death “a great political issue,” just as an operative for Repugnican U.S. Sen. Mel Martinez of Florida, where the Schiavo debacle unfolded, wrote of the case of Terri Schiavo in a memo that was leaked.

The AP notes that Stewart – a Repugnican, of course – “is seen as a possible lieutenant governor candidate in three years.”

The AP also reports:

The sisters at the Bristow, Va., monastery have buried Mosier, who would have turned 67 on Aug. 26. Two other nuns injured in the crash … have undergone surgery and remain in critical condition.

The man charged in the case, Carlos A. Martinelly Montano, 23, of Bolivia, had two prior drunken driving convictions, but was not required to serve any of his 30-day sentence for the first one. A Prince William County judge required Montano to serve only 20 days of his approximately one-year sentence on his second conviction.

Local officials turned him over to federal immigration enforcement officers after the second incident and after sentencing, but federal officers released him both times while he awaited hearings.

Montano is being held at the Prince William County Adult Detention Center, and the county’s prosecutor is promising to ask a grand jury to consider charges that could put him in prison for 40 years.

Montano entered the U.S. illegally with his parents and siblings, his uncle Luis Ronald Montano told The Associated Press. He attended American schools in New Jersey and Virginia from third grade through high school. He is engaged and is the father of two boys, ages 1 and 2, who were born in Manassas, Va.

For a few years, the family had asked Montano, a T-shirt screenprinter, to seek professional help for his alcoholism. His family took away his cars, but he had taken his mother’s Subaru at the time of the crash.

Luis Ronald Montano said the family understands Carlos has broken the law several times. They worry about the future of his two young sons. They expect he will be deported, but they have hired lawyers in hopes of keeping him here with minimum jail time.

“He’s getting used to crucify all the illegal aliens in the United States,” his uncle said.

The nuns have forgiven Montano. Mercy and forgiveness, the nuns say on their website, are not optional for Christians. …

Stewart criticized [the feds] for releasing Montano, saying the county hands immigrants over [to the feds] “on a silver platter” after they’ve been convicted of crimes “and still [the feds] release them back into communities.” …

Frankly, I trust that the feds don’t need Stewart’s advice, and for him to make a political issue of Mosier’s death when her survivors explicitly have asked him and others not to demonstrates his character. If he truly gave a shit about the nuns, he’d respect their request, but it’s all about him and his political ambitions, so of course he ignores the nuns’ request and goes full steam ahead on his selfish white-supremacist jihad.

Actually, though, Mosier’s death can serve as a “catalyst for change.” Just not the kind of change that Stewart and his ilk hope for.

Mosier’s death and Stewart’s shameless attempt to make political hay out of it can underscore for the nation the fact that while the Repugnican wingnuts used the same-sex marriage wedge issue for the 2004 elections and tried to use the Terri Schiavo case as “a great political [wedge] issue” for the 2006 elections, we don’t have to let the wingnuts of the Repugnican Tea Party use undocumented immigrants as a political wedge issue for the coming November elections, which clearly they’re doing.

We can call them on their shit this time.

To use racism and white supremacism and bigotry and hatred and fear-mongering for political gain is bad (and, I will add, anti-Christian) enough.

To exploit the death of a Catholic nun who in life opposed such things is just fucking satanic – but typical of the members of the Repugnican Tea Party and the other assorted wingnuts.

Win some, lose some

Election results are coming in, and I fail to see how Repugnican wins for the governorships of New Jersey and Virginia are some harbinger of a big Repugnican comeback in 2010, as the media are speculating. There are a lot of purple areas of the United States that routinely go to both Democrats and Repugnicans — including Virginia.

Preliminary results for Maine’s same-sex marriage measure are 52 percent against same-sex marriage and 48 percent for same-sex marriage, The Associated Press reports as I type this sentence.

I hope that those percentages don’t end up as the final result, since here in California a year ago, anti-same-sex-marriage Proposition H8 passed 52 percent to 48 percent… We gay men and lesbians (and other non-heterosexuals) don’t need such deja vu…

Still, however, 48 percent is almost half, and that’s a lot of progress on the issue of same-sex marriage during my four decades on the planet.

As the hateful, bigoted, ignorant old fucks finally kick off, that 48 percent will go above 50 percent. It’s only a matter of time.

It’s great news that the Democratic candidate, Bill Owens, has won the U.S. congressional seat for New York state that the right-wing Repugnicans made such a to-do over when they threw their weight behind the stupid white male Conservative Party candidate and forced out the female moderate Repugnican candidate (who then endorsed Owens, hilariously; hell hath no fury like a woman scorned!).

It was that election that the Repugnicans especially seemed to have tried to make into some sort of referendum on Barack Obama and the Democratic Party, so it’s deeply gratifying that Owens is the victor — especially since, as The Associated Press notes, the U.S. congressional seat that Owens won “has been strongly Republican for decades.”

While I’d love that election to be the bellwether for 2010, that’s just one election — something that the media don’t seem to grasp, because that’s just not very dramatic, is it?

‘Macaca’ redux

Associated Press photo

Repugnican monkeyshines: Above is S.R. Sidarth, the Indian-American who in August 2006 captured Repugnican U.S. Sen. George Allen of Virginia on video calling him “Macaca,” which lost Allen his Senate re-election bid and effectively ended his political career. Today, Repugnican U.S. Rep. Roy Blunt, who plans to run for a U.S. Senate seat for Missouri in 2010, apparently compared President Barack Obama to a “monkey” during a speech he gave at the Values Voters Summit in Washington, D.C. — the same gathering where last year boxes of “Obama Waffles” waffle mix were sold, replete with an Aunt-Jemima-like likeness of Obama.

In August 2006, then-U.S. Senator for Virginia George Allen, a Repugnican, of course, referred to a young American man of Indian descent as “Macaca.” In fact, Allen called the young man “Macaca” while the young man was video-recording one of Allen’s re-election campaign stump speeches. (Smart!)  

Wikipedia recounts it this way:

On August 11, 2006, at a campaign stop in Breaks, Virginia, near the Kentucky border, Allen twice used the word “macaca” to refer to [Shekar Ramanuja] Sidarth, an Indian-American, who was filming the event as a “tracker” for the opposing [Democrat Jim Webb's] campaign.

“Macaca” means “monkey” and is not a racial slur; it is generally used in Francophone African nations, which led to speculation that Allen may have heard the epithet from his mother, a Francophone who grew up in French-colonial Tunisia.

Allen apologized and later said that he did not know the meaning of the word. In 2008, The Washington Post speculated that, were it not for this single utterance, Allen would have been a strong candidate for the 2008 GOP presidential nomination.

How calling someone with brown skin and who is a member of a race that historically has been shit and pissed upon by whitey a “monkey” is not racist escapes me. And why Allen would have used a term whose meaning he didn’t even know (but just happens to mean “monkey”) also escapes me.

Another Wikipedia entry states that the word ”macaca” most definitely is a racial slur, and notes that this is what Allen said to Sidarth on that fateful August 2006 day: “This fellow here, over here with the yellow shirt — Macaca, or whatever his name is. He’s with my opponent… Let’s give a welcome to Macaca here. Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia.”

Never mind that Sidarth was born and raised in Virginia, while Allen was born and raised in California; Allen so warmly welcomed Sidarth to Virginia and to the United States nonetheless.

Welcoming an American-born-and-raised citizen to America because his or her skin is brown isn’t racist? Especially when you are a stupid white man doing the welcoming?

In any case, Allen lost the 2006 U.S. Senate election to Webb — “Allen’s re-election in the 2006 [Senate] race seemed inevitable until he was brought down by [the] video that showed him using a racial epithet when talking to [the] staffer for [Webb],” Wikipedia notes — and Allen has faded into political obscurity (where he belongs) since he called the young brown-skinned man “Macaca.”

So now, Salon.com’s War Room reports that today Repugnican U.S. Rep. Roy Blunt of Missouri, yet another stupid white man, told an interesting little tale at the Values Voters Summit in Washington, D.C.:

…And then [Blunt] told a little story about a group of British soldiers who found themselves posted in a quiet part of India in the late 19th century or the early 20th century. It was, Blunt said, a “very lush, very quiet, very peaceful, very uneventful part of India.”

So the soldiers decided, without much better to do, that they’d build a golf course in the jungle. And then the story got weird. [Quoting Blunt:]

Almost from the day the first ball was hit on this golf course something happened they didn’t anticipate: monkeys would come running out of the jungle and then grab the golf balls. And if it was in the fairway, they might throw it in the rough. And if it was in the rough, they might throw it — they might throw it back at you!

And I can point to great and long detail about how many things they tried to eliminate the monkey problem, but they never got it done.

So finally for this golf course and this golf course only, they passed a rule and the rule was, you have to play the ball where the monkey throws it. And that is the rule in Washington all the time.

Yes, you read that right: the point of the story was that like British golfers, conservatives in Washington have to play the ball where the monkey throws it.

Adds the Salon.com writer:

Blunt, who’s running for [the U.S. Senate seat for] Missouri next year, didn’t explain precisely why he chose an analogy about monkeys to illustrate the difficulties posed by the party that opposes the country’s first black president. (They both like to screw up the white man’s golf game?)

You know, you don’t refer to a non-white person as a “monkey.” To call a non-white person a “monkey” is to dehumanize him or her, is to make him or her less than human, is to make him or her into an animal.

And then once you have dehumanized, animalized, him or her, you then can justify doing whatever you want to do to him or her, such as yelling “You lie!” during his or her nationally televised address to Congress — something that you’d never do to a white president.

These racists are putting their feelers out there, are testing the waters, are seeing how far they can go.

If we let their shit pass, if we let them get away with their blatantly racist bullshit, they will up the ante to the point where one of these white supremacists screaming “You lie!” at the president during a nationally televised address to Congress will be comparatively nothing.

Those of us Americans who don’t want the racist Repugnican Party to drag us even further back to the Dark Ages than the unelected Bush regime did during its eight long years of nightmarish unelected rule have a responsibility to confront racism every single fucking time one of these racist motherfuckers thinks that he or she can get away with it.

Even if it looks borderline, we have to confront it.

A Repugnican U.S. representative from South Carolina (the first state that seceded from the Union after Abraham Lincoln’s election) yelling “You lie!” at the nation’s first black president while being nationally televised: That is an act of racism.

Addison Graves (a.k.a. “Joe”) Wilson was not simply registering his differences of opinion with the Obama administration’s health-care reform ideas, as he and his ilk have since claimed. There is a time and a place for that, and it is not during the president’s nationally televised address to Congress.

Wilson’s intent, it seems to me, was to open the door for even further racist attacks upon the nation’s first black president. 

George Allen didn’t call an Indian-American man “Macaca” — twice – and “macaca” just happens to mean “monkey.”

Roy Blunt didn’t tell a parable that ends with the moral that conservatives in Washington “have to play the ball where the monkey throws it” and not mean it as a reference to President Barack Obama.

“Conservative” these days pretty much means “white supremacist.”

We Americans who are not white supremacists, we Americans who form the majority who voted for Barack Obama, need to search our souls and ask ourselves if we are going to allow the white-supremacist minority to take over our nation.

P.S. Take a look at the official photos of George Allen, Addison Graves (a.k.a. “Joe”) Wilson and Roy Blunt (below, in that order):

What do they all have in common?

All three of them were born sometime from 1947 to 1952, making all three of them baby-boomer assholes, and they all are Repugnican politicians who hail from states that used to be slave states. (And, of course, they’re all stupid white men.)

Be on the lookout for men who match this profile. They’re probably motherfucking racists.