Why the NSA? Look to Brazil right now

Associated Press photo

Increasingly, a faceful of pepper spray is how the plutocrats (via their thugs, of course) respond to commoners who dare to demand better conditions. Commoners are told that if they — we — want substantial change, we have to use the system that already has proven itself to be ineffective in meeting our needs and to be unwilling to change in any significant way. This young Brazilian woman is attacked by one of the plutocrats’ thugs during a massive protest in Rio de Janeiro this week. (What, she doesn’t look like a seriously dangerous person to you?)

Take a look at what’s happening in Brazil right now and you’ll see what the primary purpose of the National Security Agency and the rest of the U.S. domestic surveillance infrastructure is: It’s to control us chickens in the case of a significant chicken revolution — and to keep the minority of Colonels Sanders safe from us majority chickens.

It’s great to see Brazil explode, great to see the people of Brazil reject the plutocrats’ shiny, new sports stadiums while so many Brazilians go without. I love news images like this:

Associated Press images

Those images, also taken in Rio de Janeiro this week, are vibrant images of democracy, of freedom struggling to be born. The plutocrats — of course — tell us, no, these young people are criminals, when it’s the plundering plutocrats who are the criminals, the traitors, the enemy, and who cause far more damage to nations and to the world than do those who struggle for a better world.

Not dissimilarly to the sociopoliticoeconomic dynamic in Brazil, while the government of the United States of America squanders our tax dollars on such unnecessary things as a bloated-bey0nd-belief military (including, of course, our bogus wars) and a blatantly anti-constitutional vast domestic spying apparatus (to be clear, it’s as wrong to spy on the peoples of other nations as it is wrong to spy on Americans), “our” government tells us, the people, that our government just cannot afford us.

The plutocrats continue to get only richer, regardless of what the nation’s economy is doing, while the rest of us are told that we have to accept “austerity” measures. Curious, isn’t that?

Such grievous injustice inherently is sociopolitically unstable — thus, we have the vast spying infrastructure to give our plutocratic overlords the heads up should the chickens rise up and come for them.

Will it work?

I’m thinking that it won’t.

Once the government that stopped representing the actual interests of we, the people, long ago, actually starts to maim and kill everyday Americans who have risen up to protest, all hell will break loose.

You will see Americans who never have joined together before — such as those of us on the actual left (and not Barack Obama’s and the Obamabots’ “left”) and the right-leaning-but-also-civil-liberties-loving libertarians — joining together, even if only uneasily and even if only temporarily, to take back our government. Those in the middle will have to pick a side, as those in the middle had to do during the American Revolution.

How out of touch are our elitist overlords?

They assure us that the NSA prevented a “terrorist” attack upon the treasonous, thieving weasels of Wall Street — as though we commoners are going to be thrilled to hear that the precious asses of the millionaires and billionaires of Wall Street, who robbed us fucking blind, have been kept safe through the use of our tax dollars — so that they can continue to rob us fucking blind.

That’s some continuing fucked-up shit, to continue to try to push off on to the American people the blatant propaganda that what’s good for the plutocrats actually is good for us commoners.

What’s good for the plutocrats of course is not good for the rest of us, and if — when — the sleeping giant awakens, the NSA won’t be enough to save the Colonels Sanders from the legions of chickens who finally have had far more than enough.

Mittens on the topic of money for nothing (he’s an expert)

Reuters photo

Corporate welfare queen Ann Romney enjoys watching her horse compete in the Olympics in London today (seriously), while in the United States today, her hubby Mittens extolled the value of “good, hard work” – for the rest of us.

Repugnican Tea Party presidential wannabe Mittens Romney, whacking the perennial political piñata that is the “welfare queen” or “welfare cheat,” declared today that President Barack Obama has reversed the “great accomplishment” of former President Bill Clinton’s welfare “reform” and declared, “If I am president, I will put work back in welfare. We will end a culture of dependency and restore a culture of good, hard work.”

Wow.

Let’s talk about “good, hard work” and a “culture of dependency” — a plutocratic elite who blatantly steal hundreds of billions of our tax dollars via such things as bogus warfare, which benefits the likes of Big Oil and the war profiteers, such as Dick Cheney’s Halliburton (which was granted no-bid federal contracts for the Vietraq War that Cheney pushed), and corporate welfare, such as the hundreds of billions of our tax dollars that were just handed over to the “too-big-to-fail” Wall Street weasels as their reward for having tanked our nation’s economy.

That kind of welfare — corporate welfare — is perfectly OK to the treasonous, pro-plutocratic, anti-working-class right wing.

We can give hundreds of billions of American taxpayers’ dollars to those who already are filthy rich (who, being the Benedict Arnolds that they are, pay as little in taxes themselves as they can get away with).

But we can’t give a fucking penny of our own tax dollars to those poor and working-class Americans who supposedly just don’t want to work.

Welfare can be for a person only if we define a person as a corporation.

Gee, just how hard, do you think, does the typical multi-millionaire like Mittens Romney actually work?

Do you think that Mittens ever scrubs a toilet or mops a floor? Or ever even makes his own meal? Does his own laundry? Does he even drive himself anywhere?

Yeah, Mittens has it hard. He’s a hard worker. He does good, hard work.

I tell you what: Mittens Romney has not done tens of millions of dollars’ worth of actual work.

No. He has been the beneficiary of a sick and fucking twisted socioeconomic system that allows a few — especially those who, like Mittens, were born into wealth and privilege – to steal the wealth of the many.

The only way to become a multi-millionaire is to fuck people over. You pay your employees much less than the value of their labor and you charge your customers much more than the actual value of your product or service. That’s how you get rich. Not through good, hard work.

It’s legalized thievery is what it is.

The last thing that our plutocratic overlords want is for us, the masses, to realize that it is they, the plutocrats, who are our real enemy, the real drain on our nation, so they tell us that it’s actually the weak and the powerless who are destroying this nation: immigrants who want a better life for themselves, same-sex couples who want the equality that is guaranteed to them under the U.S. Constitution, “welfare queens” or “welfare cheats,” Muslims or those who look like they might be Muslims (especially as evidenced by their use of a turban), et. al., et. al.

No, I tell you, it is the strong and the powerful who are destroying this nation. The weak and the powerless are just trying to survive. They are not the enemy.

However, in the supposedly bad-ass United States of America, it’s popular to pick on the powerless,* including and perhaps especially the poor, even though we supposedly are a “Christian” nation and Jesus Christ’s Number One teaching is to love one another as we love ourselves and to take care of the least among us, including, of course, the poor, and of the rich, Jesus remarked that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven (Mark 10:25).

Multi-millionaire Mittens is a “Christian”?

Not if we define a “Christian” as someone who actually follows the teachings of Jesus Christ.

If Mittens were a Christian, someone who follows the teachings of Jesus Christ, he would forego the houses and the cars and the car elevator and the thoroughbred horse in the Olympics, and he’d use his millions (well, our millions that he stole from us in the system that is rigged against us) to help out some people in need – instead of kicking the poor while they already are down for his own personal political gain.

That’s not Christian. That’s quite anti-Christian.

Not that Barack Obama is any fucking angel.

Team Obama will not be accused of going easy on the “welfare queens/cheats,” you see, and so also today, Obama’s mouthpiece Jay Carney declared that Team Mittens’ claim that Obama is trying to roll back Bill Clinton’s cold-blooded, right-wing welfare “reform” is “categorically false” and “blatantly dishonest.”

With “friends” like these so-called “Democrats” in our corner, who needs the fucking Repugnican Tea Party?

Seriously — the economy is our nation’s Number One problem (outside of global warming, of course, which makes pretty much every other problem that we might have pale by comparison), and we have both the Repugnican Tea Party presidential candidate and the Democratic Party presidential candidate fighting over which party will stick it to the poor the most, which party will kick those Americans who already are down and out the hardest.

We’re fucked.

Unless we revolt.

And soon.

When the system fails you this fucking miserably — when both parties of the partisan duopoly are against you and for the rich — it’s time to replace the system.

Not to “reform” the system — but to scrap it and start over.

This system is irfuckingredeemable.

–

*We never launch one of our imperialistic military invasions on a nation that actually can defend itself, do we?

No, we bomb a comparatively defenseless nation like Iraq or Afghanistan or Pakistan and then applaud ourselves, even though our “victory” is like that of an NFL team over a junior-high-school flag-football team.

Michele, we hardly knew ye (and other notes on the horse race)

Reuters photo

Repugnican Tea Party U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann announces today that her sixth-place finish in yesterday’s Iowa caucuses has induced her to quit her quest for the White House.  

We won’t have Michele Bachmann to kick around anymore. At least not for a while.

Bachmann dropped out of the Repugnican Tea Party horse race after garnering only 5 percent — sixth place — in the Iowa caucuses yesterday. 

Yahoo! News quotes Bachmann’s communications director as having told reporters of Bachmann, “She doesn’t see where she made mistakes. None of us, you know, see where there were mistakes made.”

Gee, maybe that was their primary problem: their inability to recognize their mistakes. 

I remember when “President” George W. Bush, on at least one occasion before a television camera, struggled to come up with any mistakes that he’d made as “president” when a reporter had asked him to list any.

The inability to enumerate any of one’s mistakes is a pretty fucking serious pathology.

Speaking of Gee Dubya, it is interesting that his name rarely comes up in the 2012 Repugnican Tea Party presidential horse race when he was his party’s last occupant of the White House, for a full eight years.

It is as though extraterrestrials shoved memory-erasing probes up our collective national rectum, completely wiping out our collective memory of the years 2001 through 2008, idn’t it? Indeed, we went right from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama, did we not?

Speaking further of Gee Dubya, about the only time He Whose Name Shall Not Be Mentioned has come up this quadrennial go-around is when people have asked if we really want another governor of Texas ascending to the Oval Office.

Speaking of Texas governors, unlike even Michele Bachmann, Texas Gov. Prick Perry can’t take a hint. Despite coming in at fifth place in the Iowa caucuses yesterday (with only 10 percent of the vote), Perry has proclaimed that he will compete in the January 21 South Carolina primary, where, he remarked, “real” Repugnican Tea Partiers will vote, as opposed to those “quirky” Iowans.

Iowans indeed are quirky, although “quirky” sounds like a dangerously minimizing euphemism for “bat-shit-crazy theofascist.” 

However, Perry should have done better in Iowa, with its plethora of “Christo”fascists to whom he is trying to appeal. If he doesn’t appeal to the “quirky” Iowans, it’s difficult to see him appealing to the Repugnican Tea Party nationally.

The Associated Press reports that Perry today “said voters in South Carolina share his values and that he feels confident he will do well there.”

Share his values? Is that code for Texas and South Carolina both being bastions of white supremacists who long for the “good old days” of the Confederacy? (“Quirky” Iowa, of course, never was part of the treasonous Confederacy, but both Texas and South Carolina seceded from the Union before President-Elect Abraham Lincoln even took office in 1861.) 

Prick Perry had an uphill battle as it was, joining the horse race relatively late and reminding everyone of the last governor of Texas who went to the White House – the “president” who was so shitty that the members of his own party pretend as though his two terms hadn’t even happened – but Perry blew it by acting like a drunken Alzheimer’s patient in the nationally televised debates and in other public appearances.

He might do fairly well in fellow secessionist state South Carolina, but only 11 states formed the Confederacy, and Perry would have to do much better than that to win his party’s nomination.

Perry has only himself to blame for his failure, not “quirky” Iowa or anyone or anything else (with the possible exception of Gee Dubya, of course, for having soured the nation, even his own party, on governors from Texas).

Hopefully, though, Perry will do horribly in South Carolina and we’ll be done with him then.

Ditto for Rick Santorum.

However, at least one pundit posits that Santorum, because he trailed permacandidate Mitt Romney, the party establishment’s choice (indeed, 2008 party presidential candidate John McCainosaurus just endorsed Romney), by only eight (yes, 8) votes yesterday in the Iowa caucuses, might make it even beyond “Super Tuesday” on March 6.

I can’t see Santorum winning the 2012 Repugnican Tea Party nomination. Do the Repugnican Tea Partiers really want to front against President Barack Obama a candidate who lost his last election (his 2006 re-election bid to the U.S. Senate for Pennsylvania) to his Democratic challenger by 18 percent, which Wikipedia calls “the largest margin of defeat for any incumbent senator since 1980 and the largest margin of any incumbent Republican senator ever”?

And how can Santorum, whose fundraising and organization lag woefully behind permacandidate Romney’s, catch up now, even if he does get the lion’s share of Newt Gingrich’s and Bachmann’s and Perry’s supporters? (Gingrich came in at fourth place in Iowa yesterday, by the way, which I’d find more encouraging if McCainosaurus also hadn’t come in at fourth place in Iowa in 2008 yet still won his party’s nomination.)

But I can see Santorum dragging the whole mess out, although hopefully not nearly as long as Obama and Billary Clinton dragged out the Democratic Party’s 2008 presidential primary season (in which Obama didn’t emerge victorious until June 2008).

Oh, well.

It will, I suppose, provide more blogging fodder, and a prolonged fight between the establishmentarian Repugnicans, represented by Romney, and their “tea party” wing, represented, for the moment, by Santorum, might only swing even more “swing voters” Obama’s way in November 2012.

Obama sucks* and does not deserve to be re-elected, but push come to shove — and you’d have to push and shove me pretty hard — I suppose that I’d prefer his re-election over another Repugnican in the White House. I, for one, have not forgotten the eight long years of unelected rule by George W. Bush.

P.S. How could I forget Ron Paul? He did, after all, come in third place in the Iowa caucuses yesterday (at 21 percent, just behind Romney and Santorum, who were tied at 25 percent), and anyone who makes the top three in Iowa generally is considered to be a viable candidate for his or her party’s presidential nomination.

Well, let’s face it: Paul has a few positions that even progressives like me agree with, and Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald is correct that Paul, while wrong on many if not most issues, has brought up some critically important issues that neither the Coke Party nor the Pepsi Party wants brought up in a presidential campaign. But the bottom line is that Paul isn’t taken seriously even by his own party, so what progressives think of Paul is a fairly moot point.

Ron Paul is treated like his party’s crazy old uncle, and having attained only to the U.S. House of Representatives, Paul never really had a chance anyway. (This was unfortunately true for Democratic Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who is treated like his party’s crazy uncle [he was my ideological favorite for 2004, but his nationally presidential unelectability was clear, and so I supported John Kerry, whom I viewed as much more electable] – and fortunately true also for Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann.)

If Ron Paul wants to run as an independent/third-party candidate, he has my blessing, though. Although many if not most Democrats deny it, it seems to me that the third-party presidential bid of billionaire H. Ross Perot (yet another Texas special) largely was a reason that Bill Clinton denied the first George Bush a second term in 1992.

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*The Obamabots have easily toppled “defenses” of President Hopey-Changey — you should read Ted Rall’s recent column titled “How to Talk to an Obama Voter (If You Must)” for a list of a few of these “defenses” and why they’re bullshit. Here, I think, is the money shot:

Obamabot Talking Point: If I don’t vote for Obama, the Even Worse Republicans win.

Answer: So vote for Obama. Or don’t vote. It makes no difference either way. Voting is like praying to God. It doesn’t hurt. Nor does it do any good. As with religion, the harm comes from the self-delusion of thinking you’re actually doing something. You’re not. Wanna save the world? Or just yourself? That, you’ll have to do outside, in the street.

But perhaps Rolling Stone political writer Matt Taibbi delivers the most scathing criticism of President Hopey-Changey that I’ve seen (at least in a long time) in his recent piece titled “Iowa: The Meaningless Sideshow Begins.” The money shot of the piece, I think, is this (the links are all Taibbi’s and the emphases are mine):

… But the ugly reality, as Dylan Ratigan continually points out, is that the candidate who raises the most money wins an astonishing 94% of the time in America.

That damning statistic just confirms what everyone who spends any time on the campaign trail knows, which is that the presidential race is not at all about ideas, but entirely about raising money.

The auctioned election process is designed to reduce the field to two candidates who will each receive hundreds of millions of dollars apiece from the same pool of donors. Just take a look at the lists of top donors for Obama and McCain from the last election in 2008.

Obama’s top 20 list included:

• Goldman Sachs ($1,013,091)
• JPMorgan Chase & Co ($808,799)
• Citigroup Inc ($736,771)
• WilmerHale LLP ($550,668)
• Skadden, Arps et al ($543,539)
• UBS AG ($532,674), and…
• Morgan Stanley ($512,232)

 McCain’s list, meanwhile, included (drum roll please):

• JPMorgan Chase & Co ($343,505)
• Citigroup Inc ($338,202)
• Morgan Stanley ($271,902)
• Goldman Sachs ($240,295)
• UBS AG ($187,493)
• Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher ($160,346)
• Greenberg Traurig LLP ($147,437), and…
• Lehman Brothers ($126,557)

Obama’s list included all the major banks and bailout recipients, plus a smattering of high-dollar defense lawyers from firms like WilmerHale and Skadden Arps who make their money representing those same banks. McCain’s list included exactly the same banks and a similar list of law firms, the minor difference being that it was Gibson Dunn instead of WilmerHale, etc.

The numbers show remarkable consistency, as Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Citigroup all gave roughly twice or just over twice as much to Obama as they did to McCain, almost perfectly matching the overall donations profile for both candidates: overall, Obama raised just over twice as much ($730 million) as McCain did ($333 million).

Those numbers tell us that both parties rely upon the same core of major donors among the top law firms, the Wall Street companies, and business leaders – basically, the 1%. Those one-percenters always give generously to both parties and both presidential candidates, although they sometimes will hedge their bets significantly when they think one side or the other has a lopsided chance at victory. That’s clearly what happened in 2008, when Wall Street correctly called Obama as a 2-1 (or maybe a 7-3) favorite to beat McCain.

The 1% donors are remarkably tolerant. They’ll give to just about anyone who polls well, provided they fall within certain parameters. What they won’t do is give to anyone who is even a remote threat to make significant structural changes, i.e. a Dennis Kucinich, an Elizabeth Warren, or a Ron Paul (hell will freeze over before Wall Street gives heavily to a candidate in favor of abolishing their piggy bank, the Fed). So basically what that means is that voters are free to choose anyone they want, provided it isn’t Dennis Kucinich, or Ron Paul, or some other such unacceptable personage.

If the voters insist on supporting such a person in defiance of these donors – this might even happen tonight, with a Paul win in Iowa – what you inevitably end up seeing is a monstrous amount of money quickly dumped into the cause of derailing that candidate. This takes overt forms, like giving heavily to his primary opponents, and more covert forms, like manufacturing opinions through donor-subsidized think tanks and the heavy use of lapdog media figures to push establishment complaints. …

President Hopey-Changey can’t even pretend to be on the side of the 99 percent when it’s the 1 percent – the Wall Street weasels and their allies – who gave him many more millions than they gave even to McCainosaurus in 2008.

And it’s the numbers next to the bullet points above that explain why I refer to the Democratic Party and the Repugnican Party as the Coke Party and the Pepsi Party: the two are fairly indistinguishable. (I am, by the way, a registered member of the Green Party, and proudly so.)

Rejected by both parties, OWS must be doing something right

Updated (Wednesday, November 23, 2011)

Associated Press photo

An OWS’er hands President Hopey-Changey a note while the prez campaigns for re-election in New Hampshire today. Unfortunately, this is the only way to get a message to the president from the 99 percent of us, despite the love for the Occupy Wall Street movement that the treasonous Repugnican Tea Party falsely claims the Democratic Party establishment has.

While the Repugnican-Party-co-opted “tea party” traitors are old (tri-cornered) hat, the Occupy Wall Street movement seems to have staying power. Why? Because while the “tea party” traitors always have protected our plutocratic corporate overlords — the cause of our nation’s economic collapse — and thus were easy to absorb into the pro-plutocratic, pro-corporate Republican Party establishment, the OWS’ers have defied our overlords.

If OWS weren’t a force to be reckoned with, the treasonously pro-plutocratic Repugnican Tea Party wouldn’t put out fundraising e-mails like this one from the party’s congressional fundraising arm, which I received today (yes, I’m on the enemy’s e-mail list):

Dear Supporter,

Democrats have made it clear who they are thankful for — the Occupy Movement protesters who have cost taxpayers millions of dollars, desecrated the American flag, hurt small businesses across the country, displayed contempt for law enforcement officials, tolerated anti-Semitism, and become the laughing stock of mainstream America.

In fact, Nancy Pelosi just sent out a fundraising email emphasizing her and Democrats’ continued support for the discredited protesters.

Democrats stand with them. We don’t. We stand with entrepreneurs who make this country, and the men and women in uniform who protect our liberties every day.

I urge you to make an immediate contribution of $20 to send a message that you stand with small businesses and law enforcement.

Your immediate $20 contribution will let Democrats know that their divisiveness and class warfare will not work in their relentless pursuit to regain the Speaker’s gavel.

 Thank you,

 Pete Sessions, NRCC Chairman

P.S. Don’t miss your chance to send a message. A contribution of $20 will send a clear message that you stand with small businesses and law enforcement.

I do congratulate Sessions (or his ghostwriter) for packing so many bold-faced fucking lies and bullshit talking points into one fundraising e-mail, though. Let’s see:

• Yes, the free expression of speech might cost the taxpayers some money. Freedom isn’t free, as the wingnuts love to remind us. (Our tax dollars fund the Secret Service, which is protecting Herman Cain, for instance.) Of course, those OWS’ers who exercise their First Amendment rights are taxpayers, too. It’s not just the wingnuts who pay taxes, and of course the richest wingnuts avoid paying their fair share of taxes like the fucking plague.
• I’m not sure about the flag desecration thing, but my response to that would be something like this: So the fuck what? You’re butt-hurt over a piece of cloth? Grow the fuck up and get some real priorities in life, pseudo-patriotic dipshit!
• “Hurt small businesses.” Right. Like the pro-corporate Repugnican Tea Party really gives a shit about small businesses and entrepreneurs. Um, how many small businesses are even left in the pro-corporate environment the Repugnican Tea Party traitors can’t support enough? Two? Three? This isn’t the 1950s anymore, when just about anyone could start his or her own business. Corporate pervasiveness in all areas of our lives makes modern entrepreneurship nearly impossible, as does the shitty American economy that’s likely to last at least for years.
• “Displayed contempt for law enforcement officials.” Um, would that be before or after the immoral, unprovoked and unjust (if not also illegal) use of pepper spray and other forms of unnecessary violence on non-threatening protesters? Puhfucklinglease. Right-wing (mostly white male) cops whose salaries the citizens pay show contempt for citizens who wish to exercise their First Amendment rights in any meaningful, effective way — unless those citizens are “tea party” traitors whom the cops agree with. (In that case, they get to exercise their First Amendment rights without being pepper-sprayed or otherwise molested by the pigs.)
• “Tolerated anti-Semitism”? There is one guy who shows up to every protest with his sign about Jewish bankers, but he represents every OWS’er. Right.
• “The laughing stock of mainstream America.” Um, wouldn’t that be serial sexual harasser Herman Cain, who thinks that the president can overrule the U.S. Supreme Court and that we have to prevent China from getting the nukes that it has had since the 1960s; public drunk Rick Perry, who’s always at a loss for words; wide-eyed lunatic Michele Bachmann, and all of the other pathetic Repugnican Tea Party presidential wannabes? The OWS’ers, in fact, have the sympathy of most of the nation and the world. They might be laughed at only by the wingnuts, whose opinion 0n any matter is less than worthless anyway.
• What Repugnican Tea Party fundraising e-mail would be complete without mention of Princess Nancy Pelosi? Yes, she’s worse than Satan himself. She hides under your child’s bed at night and scares the holy living shit out of him or her. Does the mere mention of Nancy Pelosi still work on the wingnuts to make them open their wallets? Is it a Pavolvian thing?
• “The men and women in uniform who protect our liberties every day.” Those would be the very same people whom the Repugnican Tea Party traitors send overseas to fight their illegal, immoral, unjust and unprovoked wars for the war profiteers and the corporateers, such as Dick Cheney’s Halliburton. If the Repugnican Tea Party traitors actually gave a shit about our troops, they wouldn’t put them in harm’s way unless it were absolutely necessary. But mentioning our troops — and insinuating that Democrats, liberals and progressives hate our troops — apparently elicits that right-wing Pavlovian response that is good for fundraising, so let’s just gratuitously mention our troops in our fundraising e-mails. (After all, our troops aren’t just great cannon fodder for corporations’ profiteering – they’re great for political fundraising, too!) 
• “Democrats stand with them.” No, the Democrats don’t stand with the OWS’ers unless it’s to try to co-opt and exploit them. I mean, the Dems always want chumps’ votes and money.

That last point is demonstrated by the fact that today at a re-election campaign appearance in New Hampshire by President Hopey-Changey, an OWS’er put a note in the prez’s hand that read:

Mr. President: Over 4,000 peaceful protesters have been arrested while banksters continue to destroy the economy with impunity. You must stop the assault on our First Amendment rights. Your silence sends a message that police brutality is acceptable. Banks got bailed out. We got sold out.

Indeed, President Hopey-Changey’s silence on the Occupy Wall Street movement (which is quite similar to his silence that we saw regarding Wisconsin earlier this year while labor was fighting for its life against the pro-plutocratic, anti-working-class Repugnican Tea Party) and his silence on the blatant 1-percent-protecting-police brutality against OWS’ers has been deafening, so for the Repugnican Tea Party to assert that the Democratic Party establishment and the Occupy Wall Street movement are two peas in a pod is yet another fucking right-wing lie.

The Occupy Wall Street movement is something that neither the Coke Party nor the Pepsi Party (as I think of the nearly indistinguishable Repugnican Tea Party and Democratic Party) anticipated: a movement of citizens who are beyond sick and tired of having been sold out to our plutocratic corporate overlords by both of the major parties, who are as mad as hell and aren’t going to take it anymore, and have taken it to the streets. Who knew that the slaves would ever actually revolt?

The Democratic Party’s response to the OWS’ers has been to ignore them, for the most part — and not to criticize them publicly, lest they still be able to co-opt them – and the Repugnican Tea Party’s response has been to malign them, such as in the fundraising e-mail above. (Indeed, the OWS protesters have been “discredited” only by the traitors who comprise the Repugnican Tea Party who at the same time hypocritically accuse others of being “divisive.”)

If the OWS’ers weren’t on to something, if they weren’t a threat to the status quo, they wouldn’t be treated this way by the Coke Party and the Pepsi Party.

Their treatment at the hands of both parties is testament to their — to our — strength.

Long live the Occupy Wall Street movement, the people’s movement that the “tea party” “movement” never was and never will be.

Update (Wednesday, November 23, 2011): I didn’t adequately give the context of the episode in New Hampshire involving President Hopey-Changey yesterday.

What happened is that during his speech to his Obamabots, President Hopey-Changey was interrupted by a group of OWS’ers who attempted, using the “human mic[rophone],” to give him a message of their own. However, they weren’t far into their message before they were drowned out by the Obamabots, who started chanting “Obama, Obama, Obama…” (Creative!)

Therefore, apparently, after Obama concluded his speech, the OWS’er pictured above hand-delivered to Obama the message that the OWS’ers had tried to deliver to him.

Rachel Maddow’s show featured a clip of Obama stating during his speech in New Hampshire that he ran in 2008 primarily in order to benefit our young people. Right. That’s why the youth-powered OWS has been so successful: because Obama has been so great for our young people. Watching Obama lie through his fucking teeth about how great he has been for our young people made me want to take a shower with a wire brush.

And the Obamabots – the Democratic Party hacks who have no progressive principles whatsofuckingever but who obediently support the Democratic Party no matter fucking what, like it’s no more than their favorite sports team — knee-jerkingly defending Obama once the OWS’ers started their “human mic” demonstrates that the Repugnican Tea Party’s claim that the Democratic Party establishment and the OWS’ers are in bed together is bullshit.

The Democratic Party hacks do not support OWS because OWS points out how the Democratic Party has sold out the 99 percent of us. OWS’ers are the millions of us whom Barack Obama betrayed with his false promises of hope and change.

P.S. Via Joe. My. God., this is a graph of how much the Wall Street weasels have cost us, vs. how much the OWS protests have cost us:

Joe. My. God. notes that “wingnut blogs are going apeshit over the just-released estimate on police overtime and other costs related to OWS.”

Of course the wingnuts wholly ignore the costs that they have incurred, such as the trillions of dollars that we blow on bogus warfare via the military-industrial complex, the budget for which the Repugnican Tea Party traitors don’t want to reduce by a single fucking dime.

And how much have the “tea party” protests cost us? (Well, we know that the pepper-spray budget for “tea party” protests is nil, since “tea partiers” never get pepper-sprayed by the cops who sympathize with their wingnutty agenda.)

SEIU sells us out

SEIU President Mary Kay Henry should be selling Mary Kay instead of selling out the members of one the nation’s largest labor unions. 

I am a dues-paying member (almost $50 a month) of Service Employees International Union, better known as SEIU.

I’m very pro-labor. Pro-SEIU? Um, not so much.

On Thursday I received an e-mail from SEIU President Mary Kay Henry with the probably hyperbolic subject line “The fight of our lives.”

The e-mail reads, in part:

Dear Robert,

You’ll probably hear about it on the news very soon, but I want you to be the first to know.

Today, with great pride and a sense of purpose, the 2.1 million members of the Service Employees International Union have endorsed President Barack Obama for re-election.

President Obama is the only candidate for president who shares our vision of America as a land of opportunity for everyone. We need a leader willing to fight for the needs of the 99 percent, and stand with hard working families to say that the world’s wealthiest corporations must pay their fair share.

Please join us in returning President Obama to the White House so he can keep fighting for more jobs and less nonsense.

You’ve probably seen how hard it is to get the concerns of working people taken seriously in our political process. Here’s why:

Our economy and democracy have been taken over by the wealthiest one percent.

These bankers and CEOs have used their wealth and excessive political influence to treat our state and federal governments like their personal cash drawer – spending lavishly on elections and then pressuring legislators to give them even more instead of creating jobs. It shows in the results. …

We know what’s really important. We know that after a decade of tax breaks for the rich and out-of-control gambling on Wall Street, things have gotten much harder for working Americans. We know that if these problems aren’t taken care of now, the next generation will have it even worse. …

President Obama is working to turn things around, but he needs help from all of us to be heard over his wealthy opponents, people who seem to believe that the only thing wrong with the economy is that they have to share it.

From now until Election Day next November, we need to dedicate ourselves to this goal. We will knock on doors, we will talk to our friends and neighbors and co-workers, and we will fight shoulder-to-shoulder alongside working families across this nation to show the one percent that they aren’t the only ones willing to fight for America’s future. …

In solidarity,
Mary Kay Henry, President, Service Employees International Union

I’m a dues-paying member of SEIU, but there’s no way in hell that I’m going to help President Hopey-Changey continue to punk those of us who put him in office. I will give Obama not one red fucking cent (I gave him hundreds of dollars for his 2008 bid) and I will not give him my vote again. Nor could I, with a straight face and a good conscience, try to convince others that they should support Barack Obama’s re-election, as SEIU would have me do.

Mysteriously missing in Henry’s propagandistic e-mail is the promise that Barack Obama made to labor on the campaign trail in November 2007 (here is video of it): “And understand this: If American workers are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain when I’m in the White House, I’ll put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself; I will walk on that picket line with you as president of the United States of America, because workers deserve to know that somebody is standing in their corner.”

Where were Obama’s “comfortable shoes” when the state of Wisconsin this year was a battleground for labor, for the rights of the middle class and the working class against the greedy, thieving plutocrats, represented by Repugnican Tea Party Gov. Scott Walker & Co.?

Obama didn’t show his face in Wisconsin once and could be bothered to make no more than one or two weak, vague statements in support of Wisconsin. Wisconsinites have been doing it on their own.

Where is Obama speaking out against the police brutality that we are seeing against non-threatening citizens who want to voice their grievances in a meaningful way, and not in the toothless, politically ineffectual way that our treasonous and oppressive plutocratic overlords have proscribed for us (the meaningless, politically ineffectual way that Obama himself no doubt endorses)?

Mary Kay Henry’s proclamations in her propagandistic e-mail are outright lies or delusions or some combination thereof.

Indeed “We need a leader willing to fight for the needs of the 99 percent, and stand with hard working families to say that the world’s wealthiest corporations must pay their fair share.” That leader is not President Hopey-Changey, however. At best, Barack Obama is the lesser of two evils, and for millions of us, that isn’t good enough anymore — thus, the Occupy Wall Street movement.

And Henry shouldn’t even have gone here: “These bankers and CEOs have used their wealth and excessive political influence to treat our state and federal governments like their personal cash drawer – spending lavishly on elections and then pressuring legislators to give them even more instead of creating jobs. It shows in the results. …”

As Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald points out in his recent column that is critical of SEIU’s shameless and pathetic attempt to co-opt the Occupy Wall Street movement such as by using its signature phrases “1 percent” and “99 percent,” Barack Obama has done nothing but coddle the Wall Street weasels. You should read Greenwald’s entire column, but here, in my opinion, is the money shot:

… But whatever else is true, the notion — advanced by SEIU — that it’s the Democratic Party and the Obama White House working to bring about these changes and implant these values of the 99 percent is so self-evidently false as to be insulting. …

… [D]oes SEIU think that people will just ignore these key political facts? How does anyone think these protesters will be convinced that it’s exclusively the GOP — and not the Democratic Party and the Obama White House — who “protect the rich” when: Wall Street funded the Democrats far more than the GOP in the 2008 election; the Democrats’ key money man, Charles Schumer, is one of the most devoted Wall Street servants in the country; Obama empowered in key positions Wall Street servants such as Tim Geithner, Larry Summers, Bill Daley, Rahm Emanuel, and an endless roster of former Goldman officials; JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon has been dubbed “Obama’s favorite banker” after Obama publicly defended his post-bailout $17 million bonus; the president named the CEO of GE to head his jobs panel; the DCCC and DSCC exist to ensure the nomination of corporatist candidates and Blue Dogs whose political worldview is servitude to the lobbyist class; the Democratic president, after vocally urging an Age of Austerity, tried very hard to usher in cuts to Social Security and an increase in the age for Medicare eligibility; and the Obama administration has not only ensured virtually no accountability for the rampant Wall Street fraud that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis, but is actively pressuring New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and others to agree to a woefully inadequate settlement to forever shield banks from the consequences of their pervasive mortgage fraud.

That’s just a fraction of the facts one could list to document the actual factions to which the Democratic Party has devoted itself. If one wants to argue that the GOP is more opposed to progressive economic policies than Democrats, that’s certainly reasonable. If one wants to argue that, on balance, voting for Democrats is more likely to bring about marginally more of those policies than abstaining, I think that, too, is reasonable.

But to try to cast the Democratic Party and the Obama administration as the vessel for the values and objectives of the Occupy movement is just dishonest in the extreme: in fact, it’s so extreme that it’s very unlikely to work. Those who believe that further empowerment of the Democratic Party is what is most urgently needed can make their case and should pursue that goal — they should try to generate as much citizen enthusiasm as possible behind them — but they should stop trying to depict and exploit the Occupy movement as an instrument for their agenda.

Exactly. As Greenwald claims, “SEIU officials have long been among Obama’s closest and most loyal allies in Washington.”

This is why I stopped financially supporting the Human Rights Campaign: Clearly the HRC elites are much more interested in hobnobbing with Washington, D.C.’s elites than to actually fight for the rights of non-heterosexuals and non-gender-conforming individuals. It was clear to me where money that is donated to HRC goes: to its elites so that they can be socialites in D.C.

HRC gives Barack Obama a full pass on the fact that he still claims that he is “evolving” on the issue of same-sex marriage, even though in 1996, when he was running for the Illinois state Senate, he responded to a campaign questionnaire that he supports same-sex marriage. (“I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages,” he wrote. Of course, as president he has fought efforts to prohibit same-sex marriage as much as he has put on his “comfortable shoes” to fight for labor.)

But the if the HRC elites were to actually challenge Obama on the fact that he’s a fucking liar who sells his supporters out, then the HRC elites wouldn’t get to rub shoulders with the elites in D.C. anymore.

Go ahead and give money to the HRC if you want to, but know that HRC won’t use your money to actually fight for your rights.

Similarly, I can tell you that as a dues-paying member of SEIU, I never got a voice or a vote in the union’s endorsement of Barack Obama’s re-election (which I didn’t even know was coming). Apparently only the union’s elites and insiders got such a voice. The rest of us, who got no fucking voice, are too busy actually working — so that we can pay the SEIU elites’ salaries with our dues, so that they can then sell us out.

I am pro-labor, but SEIU President Mary Kay Henry should resign. She should do something that she’s actually good at — perhaps she should be selling Mary Kay instead of selling out the members of one of the nation’s largest labor unions.

P.S. I e-mailed Mary Kay Henry that she should resign. If I get a response, I’ll share it, but I doubt that I will. To the SEIU elites I’m only good for my dues, which the SEIU elites use to sell me out.

Stormtroopers gone wild!

Updated below (on Saturday, November 19, 2011)

To anyone who believes that I’ve been hysterical in my last few posts, I offer this photo from The Associated Press:

Associated Press photo

The photo’s caption reads: “A police officer uses pepper spray on an Occupy Portland protestor at Pioneer Courthouse Square in Portland, Ore., Thursday, Nov. 17, 2011.”

Yes, that’s not water — that’s pepper spray. And clearly the young woman is such a dire threat to the jackbooted thugs who serve and protect the 1 percent that spraying her directly in the face with a massive amount of pepper spray was necessary for the stormtroopers’ safety.

Where is Barack Obama speaking out against these outrages?

Oh, right — he puts Wall Street weasels on his cabinet and makes them his advisers. He’s on the side of the 1 percent.

Face it, folks, if you haven’t already: Barack Obama just isn’t that into you. He’s not on the side of the 99 percent. He wants your money and your vote — it got him into the White House, after all – but expect only empty promises from President Hopey-Changey in return.

And the message is clear: The 1 percent decide where and when and how the rest of us can protest and demonstrate. They make sure that our protests and demonstrations are so restricted that they can be toothless at best. Our plutocratic overlords even have established so-called “free-speech zones,” for fuck’s sake. If we step outside of these rigidly, plutocratically proscribed “free-speech” lines, we will be pepper-sprayed — or worse.

Look at the news photo above and reflect upon the fact that this is the blue state of Oregon that we’re talking about. If this is what the plutocratic-protecting pigs are doing on the Left Coast, what’s next? Can concentration camps for anti-plutocratic, anti-corporate dissenters be far behind?

Update (Saturday, November 19, 2011):

If you are wondering about the young woman who took the blast of pepper spray to the face, The Oregonian yesterday posted a piece on her. The Oregonian identifies the woman as Liz Nichols, a “soft-spoken 20-year-old who’s only about 5 feet tall,” and reports of her:

Raised in Mountain Home, Ark., a town of about 1,600, she plans to stay in Portland as long as the Occupy movement is alive. She’s motivated to protest by the plight of her parents. Her mother has multiple sclerosis and her father was disabled by a back injury. They’re both surviving on his Social Security disability checks.

 The Oregonian reports of the pepper-spray incident caught by a photographer:

A police van blared a warning, telling people they risked arrest if they ventured into the street. Nichols and others stayed on the sidewalk. Laura Seeton,  a 31-year-old Portlander who locked arms with Nichols, said they had nowhere to go as people in back pushed and the riot police in front shoved back.

“It was terrifying,” Seeton said.

Nichols said a policewoman jabbed her in the ribs with a baton and pressed it against her throat. That made her angry.

She yelled at the officer, saying she was being mistreated. That’s when another officer shot her with pepper spray. A photo by The Oregonian’s Randy L. Rasmussen, which flashed across social media websites, shows Nichols was sprayed from a few feet away.

“It felt like my face, ears and hands were on fire,” she said.

She dropped to the ground, and police yanked her into their ranks.

“She was dragged away by her hair and disappeared into the black of their uniforms,” Seeton said.

Why in the fuck are our so-called “police officers” not only pepper-spraying non-threatening citizens, but also actually dragging women by their hair? This kind of police brutality is different from that practiced by dictators’ thugs how?

I also thought that I would share this cartoon on the topic of nonviolence by Ted Rall:

That’s pretty much it, in a nutshell, but also worth reading is Rall’s recent column on the topic, titled “The Occupier’s Choice: Violence or Failure.” And if you haven’t read his book The Anti-American Manifesto yet, what the fuck is the matter with you?

Cry us a river, Barry!

AFP photo

President Hopey-Changey’s apparent response to Occupy Wall Street is that we should feel sorry for him and stick with him, even though he allied himself with the Wall Street weasels years ago.

Predictably, after having pissed and shat all over his base since January 2009, and seeing that in response to his utter presidential ineffectiveness the Occupy Wall Street movement has grown long, long legs, President Hopey-Changey is acting contrite these days. (Contrite for him, anyway.)

Obama has whined to ABC News: “I guarantee it’s going to be a close election because the economy is not where it wants to be, and even though I believe all the choices we’ve made have been the right ones, we’re still going through difficult circumstances. That means people who may be sympathetic to my point of view still kind of feel like, yeah, but it still hasn’t gotten done yet.”

And it’s never going to get done. Not under Barack Obama.

It’s too late for Obama to change course. Against the advice of progressive economists like the Nobel-Prize-winning Paul Krugman, Obama early in his presidency allied himself with the Wall Street weasels, and there is no going back from that. And any actually progressive, substantial economic policy changes that he might enact now — but he would never do that — would still take many, many months, at the minimum, to improve the nation’s economy.

Obama had his chance to push through a progressive agenda in 2009 and 2010, when he had the nation’s good will and both houses of Congress controlled by his party — and when he got to decide what his national economic policy would be.

Obama blew it. Big time. And it’s too late now.

There are no do-overs for the U.S. presidency. You get one shot to get it right. And the rare alignment of the Oval Office and both houses of Congress being held by your party is an opportunity that you don’t fucking squander.

Barack Obama – who is arrogant, not audacious – has given us progressives absolutely no reason to believe that his second term would be a substantial improvement over his first.

So cocky is Obama that I surmise that he truly believes that despite his do-nothing presidency, he is so fucking charming that he is going to co-opt the Occupy Wall Street movement. We progressives have broken up with him, and because he is naught but a rock obstructing the stream, we are flowing around him — witness the Occupy Wall Street movement – but he refuses to acknowledge those facts.

Even if Obama’s current contrition were heartfelt — it isn’t; it’s purely political – it isn’t nearly enough. Obama’s displays of contrition don’t make up for the fact that over the past three years average Americans — 53 percent of whom voted for President Hopey-Changey – have continued to lose economic ground, not gain it, while the rich and the super-rich have been doing just fine.

The only kind of person I can see voting for Barack Obama in 2012 is the type of person who believes that his or her alcoholic, abusive mate is going to turn things around! Really this time! And that his or her alcoholic, abusive mate is the best that he or she can do, and that staying with his or her abusive, alcoholic mate is better than being alone.

The rest of us, who have some fucking self-respect, prefer our solitude over our continued abuse at the hands of the “Democratic” Party establishment elites, who, instead of actually doing anything for us, only offer us excuses for their ineffectiveness and more empty promises that they’ll do better in the future if only we continue to support them.

The spirit of the Occupy Wall Street movement is that of the person who finally has left his or her abusive partner. He or she doesn’t know what the future holds, but he or she knows that it has to be better than more of the fucking same.

Barack Obama’s one-term presidency seems fairly unavoidable

Jimmy Carter and the first George Bush both lost re-election primarily because of a shitty national economy. How will “underdog” Barack Obama avoid their fate, even with his “vision”?

So the 2012 presidential race is shaping up to look like a hybrid of the 1980 and the 1996 presidential races.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan famously asked the people of the nation if they were better off, under then-President Jimmy Carter, than they were four years previously.

Today, President Barack Obama freely proclaims that Americans are not better off now than they were four years ago, giving the Repugnican Tea Partiers an early Christmas gift.

Obama proclaims that the 2012 presidential election will be about “who’s got a vision?”

“Vision” doesn’t pay the average voter’s bills, however, and I can’t see what Obama’s “vision” thus far has accomplished — the constitutionality of his “signature” legislative “accomplishment” of health care “reform” is being reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court in its current term – but whatever.

Obama also has found a way to make the nation’s economic collapse all about himself, proclaiming himself to be the “underdog.” Why are you worrying about yourself when you should be focusing on Barack Obama?

These statements, apparently meant to bolster Obama, only demonstrate how out of touch with the common American he is.

And it certainly doesn’t help Obama’s re-election chances that the same young people whom he apparently lied to in order to get into the White House are now filling up Wall Street and other metropolitan areas protesting his solidarity with the Wall Street weasels and other treasonous corporatocrats and plutocrats who tanked our economy.

Obama’s best shot at re-election is that the Repugnican Tea Partiers pick the worst candidate that they possibly could, a candidate so manifestly awful that he or she makes Obama look like George Washington or Abraham Lincoln by comparison. That candidate would be Texas Gov. Rick Perry, but Perry seems to be imploding.

While Perry might have survived Niggerheadgate — he could be criticized fairly if his family hadn’t changed the racist name of the Texas property after they bought it, but it appears that they did — the scandal/“scandal” has cast a spotlight on other aspects of Rick Perry, such as this, as reported by The Associated Press today:

Austin, Texas — Eleven years ago, when the NAACP stepped up a campaign to remove the Confederate battle flag from statehouses and other government buildings across the South, it found an opponent in Rick Perry.

Texas had a pair of bronze plaques with symbols of the Confederacy displayed in its state Supreme Court building. Perry, then lieutenant governor, said they should stay put, arguing that Texans “should never forget our history.”

It’s a position Perry has taken consistently when the legacy of the Civil War has been raised, as have officials in many of the other former Confederate states. But while defense of Confederate symbols and Southern institutions can still be good politics below the Mason-Dixon line,
the subject can appear in a different light when officials seek national office. …

Yup. What plays well in Texas tends to wither on the national scene.

I’m fine for never forgetting our history (indeed, we forget it at our own peril), but the Confederate flag, like the word “nigger,” belongs in the
history books – not on public display, except perhaps at a museum (ditto for the swastika). Besides, the white supremacists who run the state of Texas make damn sure that the publishers of the history textbooks used in the state’s schools don’t offend white (or “Christian” or heterosexual or capitalist or…) sensibilities, so what’s the problem, Ricky?

The Repugnican Tea Partiers seem anxious to identify their champion to go up against Obama, with more and more red states moving up their primary or caucus dates. I doubt that Perry has time to recover in an ever-contracting Repugnican Tea Party presidential primary season. If he were eloquent he might be able to get past Niggerheadgate, but the fact that he has a penchant for stumbling into incoherence during nationally televised debates bodes ill for him.

As much as I never want to see a President Perry, it seems to me that Barack Obama’s best chance for re-election would be if Perry emerges as his opponent. Recent nationwide polls show Obama beating Perry in a hypothetical matchup by three or more percentage points.

Those same polls, however, show former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and Obama within only one to three percentage points of each other, with Romney beating Obama by two percentage points in at least two recent nationwide polls. (I define “recent” as taken within the last month.)

A while back I likened Mitt Romney to Bob Dole, the incredibly wooden and uncharismatic Repugnican Party presidential candidate of 1996, the year that Bill Clinton fairly coasted to re-election.

Against Bob Dole II, Obama would be assured re-election, I thought back then, but back then I’d also thought that the nation’s economy would have shown some improvement by now.

However, the economy shows no signs of improvement between now and Election Day in November 2012, and so my money is on the 2012 presidential election looking like a cross between the 1980 and the 1996 presidential elections: Yes, the Repugnicans will front an uncharismatic candidate whom (unlike was the case with Ronald Reagan) no one is excited about, but, given the shambles that the economy is in, the uncharismatic Repugnican candidate (Mitt Romney, in case that isn’t clear) will beat the Democratic incumbent. The voters will be that thirsty for the change that was promised to them in 2008 but that never was delivered: that they’ll drink sea water, even though drinking sea water will kill you even faster than will plain old dehydration.

Many progressives whom Obama punk’d in Round One with his hollow promises of “hope” and “change” won’t bother to vote in November 2012 at all, having no progressive presidential candidate to vote for. If they do hold their nose and vote for Obama in November 2012, because of their lack of enthusiasm they certainly won’t talk up Obama’s re-election like they talked up his initial election, and if they give Team Obama any money in Round Two, they certainly won’t give as much as they did in Round One.

The Repugnican Tea Party traitors, on the other hand, I surmise, want a Repugnican, any Repugnican, back in the White House more enthusiastically than most of Barack Obama’s (former) supporters want four more years! This enthusiasm gap, I believe, is the biggest threat to Obama’s re-election.*

But, of course, the Obamabots — those invididuals for whom Barack Obama can do no wrong and who have some excuse for virtually all of his miserable failings – will blame Obama’s November 2012 loss on those of us who are actually progressive, who instead of selling out our progressive
principles steadfastly stick to our progressive principles (among which is not the idea of supporting the lesser of two evils). Some of them will even stoop to calling us “racist.” Some of them already have started doing that.

All of that completely fucking ignores, of course, the fact that Barack Obama, early in his presidency, did what even dipshit George W. Bush damn well knew better not to do: to shit and piss all over your base, to extend the middle finger, repeatedly, to those very same people who got you into the White House in the first place.

Competent historians, I believe, will identify that as Obama’s biggest mistake: having shat and pissed all over his base.

Had Obama followed the progressive economic advice that his base gave him from Day One of his presidency, the nation’s economy would have improved. But by trying to win over those whose support he never was going to gain in the first place through his countless “bipartisan” capitulations, by trying to make everyone love him to death, Obama sealed his own fate.

If Barack Obama actually manages to eke out re-election 13 months from now, I will be shocked.

I once expected him to be like Bill Clinton, easily fending off a challenge to a second term by a snooze-inducing Repugnican challenger. But now I expect Obama to be like Jimmy Carter, a one-term Democratic president. Especially when Obama freely publicly admits that we’re not better off now than we were four years ago.

–

*Lest any Obamabot try to deny that there even is an enthusiasm gap, a nationwide McClatchy-Marist poll taken less than a month ago asked, “Do you definitely plan to vote for Barack Obama for re-election as president or do you definitely plan to vote against him?” A whopping 49 percent declared “against him,” while only 36 percent declared for him, with 15 percent declaring that they aren’t sure yet. I surmise that the lion’s share of those 15 percent in the end will vote for the Repugnican Tea Party candidate.

Dinner with President Hopey-Changey? No thanks

Associated Press photo

Robert — I need to ask you one last thing before tonight’s midnight deadline:

If you know you’re going to donate to this campaign eventually, what’s stopping you from doing it right now?

You were one of the people who got this movement off the ground. In fact, you were a part of all this before I was.

If you’re going to be a part of history in 2012, it’s time to get off the sidelines.

So, before midnight, will you chip in what you can and say you’re in?

This has never been about Barack and me.

We’re just two guys. It’s folks like you out there who will decide this election.

And what you’re capable of is incredible — if you decide to do it.

https://donate.barackobama.com/Friday-Deadline

Thank you,

Joe

P.S. — That deadline also applies to the dinner Barack is having with four supporters. Donate today and you’ll be automatically entered for the chance to be there.

That’s the fundraising e-mail that I received today under the signature of Vice President Joe Biden, since I haven’t donated a penny to Barack Obama’s re-election campaign, since I haven’t jumped at the chance to have dinner with Obama, his latest apparently desperate fundraising gig.

(Obama would not want to do dinner with me, and since he has taken to assassinating American citizens as of late, in blatant violation of the U.S. Constitution [but for which the Obamabots, as always, forgive him, no doubt], for me it might be a fatal mistake to dine with the man, since if I were in his presence I couldn’t see myself mincing words.)

Speaking of Joe Biden, he has been in the news today for having said in a Florida radio interview yesterday that the Obama re-election campaign will have to suck it up even though the Obama administration inherited the economic mess from the unelected Bush regime (“unelected Bush regime” is my term, not his — the spineless Dems would never talk like that, since it’s the truth, since it’s strong language, and since they are horrified of the possibility of offending those who would never vote for a Democrat anyway).

Reuters reports that Biden stated, “Even though 50-some percent of the American people think the economy tanked because of the last administration, that’s not relevant. Right now we are the ones in charge and it’s gotten better but it hasn’t gotten good enough…” and “Understandably, totally legitimately, this is a referendum on Obama and Biden, the nature and the state of the economy.”

Biden’s remarks have been considered “controversial” by the Obamabots, but Biden was just telling the truth.

Blaming the BushCheneyCorp for the economy won’t win Obama re-election, even though the BushCheneyCorp is the No. 1 reason that the economy is in the toilet. Politics isn’t fair.

However, while we can’t blame Obama for the mess that he inherited, we can blame him for how he has handled it.

How has Obama handled Wall Street after the Wall Street weasels (redundant) tanked our economy through blatant fraud?

He has given the Wall Street weasels billions and billions in bailouts, he has appointed Wall Street weasels as his economic advisers, and his justice department hasn’t put a single Wall Street weasel behind bars.

Obama has ignored the good advice of such progressive economists as the Nobel-Prize-winning Paul Krugman and Robert Reich (Bill Clinton’s former labor secretary), who were unanimous in declaring early in Obama’s presidency that Obama wasn’t doing nearly enough for economic recovery.

Obama hasn’t been supportive of U.S. Rep. Elizabeth Warren, who, entirely unlike Obama, has had the balls to take on the Wall Street weasels.

I gave Elizabeth Warren a donation of $25 today for her bid for the U.S. Senate for Massachusetts.

I haven’t given Obama even the bargain-basement amount of $3 that he has been requesting for the chance to have din-din with him.

The Obamabots, I suppose, would say that I and other white liberals no longer support Obama because he’s black. They find this race-baiting lie to be comforting, although this lie and its repetition can only hurt Obama’s re-election chances, which right now already are looking like a snowball’s in Hades as it is.

The fact is that I give my money and my votes to those who do more than pay lip service to progressive principles, regardless of their race or gender.

Elizabeth Warren has been fighting the Wall Street weasels. Obama has been putting them in his Cabinet.

I see my money and my vote as an investment in my own future. Elizabeth Warren appears to be a good investment, and I donated hundreds of dollars to the efforts in Wisconsin to preserve its public-sector labor unions, since Obama couldn’t be bothered to lift a fucking finger to help the working people of Wisconsin in their battle against the union-busting far-right wing, and I consider that to have been an investment in my own future, too.

As an investment, Barack Obama, on the other hand, is a junk bond. He promised, promised, promised, but he hasn’t delivered. He punk’d me once. (In the 2008 cycle I gave him hundreds of dollars and my vote.) Never again.

Speaking of Wall Street, young people whose futures President Hopey-Changey has compromised by fiddling while Rome burns for the third week now occupy Wall Street in protest of its abuses that Obama hasn’t been much bothered about.

Instead of asking people to pay for the chance to dine with him, perhaps President Hopey-Changey might buy dinner for some of the young protesters who now occupy Wall Street.

It’s the least that he could do.

Assorted shit (gay pride month edition!)

Homophobes take another blow

Reuters photo

Former federal Judge Vaughn Walker (pictured above in April), who last year correctly ruled that to prohibit same-sex marriage is unconstitutional, came out after he retired from the federal bench in February. Homophobes  shamelessly had challenged the ability of Walker, who had been appointed by the first President George Bush, to be able to rule fairly on same-sex marriage, but today another federal judge, who also was appointed by the first President Bush, affirmed that Walker did not inappropriately rule on the case.

If I could say two words to the “Christo”fascists who still oppose legally recognized same-sex marriage in all 50 states, it might be something like this: “Surrender, Dorothy!”

Same-sex marriage in all 50 states is going to be a reality within the next decade, most likely. So for the supposedly freedom-lovin’ wingnuts to keep expending their time, money and energy trying to stop the inevitable — life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and justice for all — is a fucking waste. (If they were true Christians, they’d spend their time, money and energy helping people, as Jesus Christ instructed his followers to do, instead of trying to keep others down so that they can feel better about their miserable selves.)

Today the homophobes suffered a significant defeat when federal Judge James Ware rejected their “argument” that another federal judge, the now-retired Vaughn Walker, should have recused himself from ruling on Proposition Hate – the anti-same-sex-marriage proposition that passed narrowly in California in November 2008 – because he has been in a long-term same-sex relationship himself.

Walker – who, like Ware, was appointed by the first President George Bush – correctly ruled last year that Prop Hate violates the protections granted to all Californians by the U.S. Constitution.*

(When judges who were appointed by Repugnican presidents are ruling against the haters, the haters’ days are numbered, methinks.)

As The Associated Press notes, today’s ruling that Walker had no reason or obligation to recuse himself from ruling on the matter of same-sex marriage “does not settle the legal fight over Proposition 8. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is considering whether Walker properly concluded that denying gays and lesbians the right to marry violates their rights to due process and equal protection.”

But the ruling does make it much more difficult for the homophobes to try to pick and choose the judges who hear their bullshit homophobic arguments.

To the “Christo”fascists and other assorted wingnuts, only conservative, heterosexual, “Christian” white male judges should be able to rule on anyfuckingthing. Indeed, in Ware’s ruling he noted that female and non-white judges historically have been accused of not being able to rule impartially in certain cases — a right-wing “argument” that the law rejects.

“The sole fact that a federal judge shares the same circumstances or personal characteristics with other members of the general public, and that the judge could be affected by the outcome of a proceeding in the same way that other members of the general public would be affected, is not a basis for either recusal or disqualification,” Ware wrote in his ruling.

Indeed, one easily could counter-argue that a heterosexually married (or perhaps even a heterosexual but single) judge should recuse him- or herself from ruling on same-sex marriage, but how far would that argument get?

Ironically, in their homophobic attacks on Walker, the pro-Prop Hate crowd only further proved that non-heterosexuals in the U.S. routinely face bigotry, hatred and discrimination – which is going to speed up, not slow down, the eventuality of same-sex marriage in all 50 states.

But this fact apparently escaped the homophobic abject fucktards, who are capable only of stupidity, fear and hatred, not of reason.

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Black homophobes still suck ass

Associated Press photo

“Comedian” Tracy Morgan, pictured in March, has apologized for having said some hateful things that you really can’t apologize for, not credibly, anyway.

Way back in 2005 I posted a piece titled “Black Homophobes Suck.”

Among other things in that piece (which I think you should read if you have the time), I wrote about how a so-called leader in the black community actually wrote in a letter to me that being gay or lesbian might be a choice or it might be a “birth defect” and closed the letter with, “Take care of yourself health wise,” an apparent reference to her apparent belief that all gay men must have HIV or must be just about to contract HIV, since all that being a gay man means is taking cock up the ass as often as possible.

Alas, little has changed since 2005.

In the news recently has been black “comedian” Tracy Morgan’s anti-gay rant during a recent stand-up performance that you can’t just apologize for.

According to an audience member, among many other things, such as suggesting the President Barack Obama has been as pro-gay as he has been only because he is pussy-whipped, Morgan stated that being gay or lesbian is a choice and that “if his son [were] gay he better come home and talk to him like a man … or he would pull out a knife and stab that little [nigger] to death.”

Morgan also reportedly made the unfunny, already-made (by comedian Carlos Mencia, long, long ago) “joke” that if gay men can take a dick, they can take a joke – ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

The audience member further stated that

The sad thing is that none of this rant was a joke. [Morgan's] entire demeanor changed during that portion of the night. He was truly filled with some hate towards us. As far as I could see, 10 to 15 people walked out. I had to fight myself to stay seated, but I knew if I got up … he won.

I understand where this man, the audience member, is coming from: When someone tells an anti-gay joke/“joke,” you can tell what kind of space it’s coming from, whether it’s truly a joke or whether it’s coming from a space of bigotry and hatred and meanness.

The routine of Carlos Mencia that I saw on television years ago that I just made reference to did not strike me as coming from a space of actual hatred of gays, so it did not repulse me. Similarly, some years ago, the creators of “South Park” created an episode in which a classroom gerbil named Lemmiwinks must save his own life after having been inserted into a gay man’s rectum, for fuck’s sake.

On the face of it, that’s pretty fucking homophobic and stereotypical (I am one gay man who knows of no other gay man who ever inserted a small mammal into his rectum), but the way in which the episode was done does not give me the impression that the creators of “South Park” actually are homophobic. Therefore, I was able to laugh at the episode, even if at least on the face of it it’s pretty fucking homophobic. (Anyone who truly believes that gerbils are a routine part of the gay man’s sexual repertoire probably is beyond help anyway, so I can’t even really knock the “South Park” creators for having put out a negative and damaging view of gay men, even if they aren’t homophobic themselves.)

Anyway, Tracy Morgan sounds like he’s as out of control as is his character on the NBC show “30 Rock,” and after his homophobic rant, I don’t think that I can watch that show anymore (I’ve watched several of the early episodes via the Internet, mainly because I love Tina Fey and a co-worker recommended the series to me).

I hope that NBC dumps Tracy Morgan. After all, any star of any major network show who made blatantly racist (or, say, anti-Semitic) remarks in seriousness should expect to get fired, so why not Morgan?

Also in the news, it recently was reported that U.S. Rep. Allen West, a black Repugnican whose district is in Florida, recently fired an intern for having sent an unauthorized pro-gay Tweet in response to Tracy Morgan’s homophobic rant. (I read the Tweet, and it seems to me that it could have been meant sarcastically, which actually would make it an anti-gay message, but whatever…)

The reportage of the firing of West’s intern notes that West has called same-sex marriage “an oxymoron.”

Gee, that’s nice. There was a time when pro-slavery white supremacists would have called the term “a free black man” an “oxymoron.” (Just as white supremacists might call being born black a “birth defect.”)

As long as your own freedoms and liberties and rights are secured, that’s all that fucking matters, right?

I wrote way back in 2005: “Black homophobes will attack injustice that affect them — racism — but fuck the rest of us minority groups. They don’t have a problem with oppression in general; they have a problem only with being oppressed themselves.”

Nothing has changed, has it?

Some have actually suggested that we non-heterosexuals visit with members of the black community to convince the homophobes within the black community that we are deserving of their approval or respect or the like.

I say: Fuck! That! Shit! We non-heterosexuals shouldn’t have to fucking grovel on our hands and knees for equal human and civil rights any more than blacks ever should have had to or should have to today.

We non-heterosexuals should boycott all black homophobes, just as we would boycott any other homophobe, regardless of his or her race. I, for one, won’t spend a penny on anything that has Tracy Morgan in it. (That won’t be hard to do, since Tina Fey, certainly not Morgan, is the creative genius behind “30 Rock,” and since Morgan isn’t, in my estimation, remarkably talented anyway.)

And I invite black homophobes to commit some introspection and to ask themselves why it’s so fucking important to them to be able to have one historically oppressed minority group that even they, also members of a historically oppressed minority group, can shit and piss upon – and whether or not this is moral.

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Still not much to be proud of

It’s “gay pride” month, but the corporatization of the gay and lesbian “community” continues.

It’s interesting: While gay men and lesbians (and other non-heterosexuals and non-gender-conforming individuals) proclaim that they won’t take it from the heterosexists and the homophobes anymore, they’ll still gladly bend over for the corporations.

Memo to the gay and lesbian “community”: The corporations don’t love us.

In October 2009 I posted on my blog “An Open Letter to Joe Solmonese,” who is the president of the Human Rights Campaign, and I e-mailed a copy of the open letter to the HRC.

In the letter (which, I think, you should read, if you have a few minutes), among other things, I criticized the HRC for accepting corporate money from corporations that, while they might have pro-gay-and-lesbian-et.-al. policies (at least on paper), are harmful to human beings and to the planet.

In the fall 2009 issue of HRC’s membership magazine (titled Equality), I noted, I saw full-page ads for Chevron, Shell Oil, American Airlines and Citigroup — corporations that, respectively, are killing the planet with the continued production of fossil fuels, drastically underpay their employees (their pilots, in the case of American Airlines), and, as Wall Street weasels, are partially responsible for the Wall Street meltdown that has tanked our nation’s economy.

I seem to remember getting some e-mail reply from HRC — not from Joe, of course, but from some lackey – stating that HRC supports those corporations that at least pay lip service to being pro-gay-and-lesbian (my words, not hers), and that if I have a problem with this, then I can have my subscription to Equality canceled.

I didn’t ask to have my subscription canceled, thinking that it would just run itself out, but I’m still getting the magazine even though I stopped giving HRC money a long time ago, disgusted by its corporate ass-licking and its selling out of the gay and lesbian community to the fucking corporations.

Nothing has fucking changed, because in the current (spring 2011) issue of HRC’s Equality is a full-page ad for — wait for it — that paragon of corporate responsibility — keep waiting for it — drum roll, please! — British Petroleum!

Yes, my non-heterosexual and non-gender-conforming brethren and sistren, BP loves us!

(Along with the full-page ad for British Petroleum in the current issue of Equality are full-page ads for Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Chase, Chevron and Deloitte, all banking fraudsters, planet destroyers and Wall Street weasels. And American Airlines has another full-page ad.)

Not just to pick on HRC.

Locally, Sacramento’s annual gay pride festival earlier this month for the first time ever got rained out, which, naturally, resulted in low attendance, and the organizers of the festival subsequently actually apparently unashamedly and unabashedly sent out a fundraising e-mail asking people to just fork over $40-something because the festival didn’t recoup its costs this year (and they calculated that the average person would have spent $40-something at the festival were it not for the rain).

Well, the festival was held two weeks earlier this year than it was last year, increasing the chances of rain, it seems to me, but that aside, the fundraising e-mail actually read: “Pride 2011 was always going to be different for many reasons. Our corporate sponsorship support was the highest ever, with over two dozen sponsors this year. We invested in more marketing and promotion to hit the far reaches of our area to bring as many LGBT people and our supporters to [Sacramento] on June 4th….”

The first thing that the e-mail lists is the “highest-ever” “corporate sponsorship.”

Why has the gay and lesbian “community” become so fucking dependent upon corporate sponsorship over the years?

Can we not do anything on our own without corporate handouts, for which there are always strings attached?

Is bigger always better? Do we have to do everything huge? Is a huge amount of money necessary for every endeavor? Can nothing be home-grown? (Ironically, it seems to me, if the organizers of the rained-out Sacramento gay pride festival hadn’t focused on making the event so huge, the rain-related losses wouldn’t have been as huge. The bigger things are, the harder they fall.)

Anyway, I replied to the shameless fundraising e-mail with this: “Maybe the Rain Goddess was pissed off over that record-level corporate sponsorship, the selling out of the LGBT community to profits-over-people corporations by the same people who claim to care about and to be helping the LGBT community. Just sayin.’”**

(Unsurprisingly, I haven’t received a response to my response, and no, I don’t claim that I always play along nicely with the other kiddies in the sandbox…)

This gay pride month, if it were up to me, the gay and lesbian “community” would ponder this question: How are we of the gay and lesbian (and bisexual and transgendered and…) “community” doing ourselves a favor by fighting for equal human and civil rights for all non-heterosexuals (and for all non-gender-conforming individuals) while further enslaving ourselves and others to our corporate overlords, who have only their profits, not our best interests, at heart?

But I’m not queen just yet…

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*In his ruling, Walker concluded:

Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis [emphasis mine] in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license. Indeed, the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California Constitution the notion that opposite-sex couples are superior to same-sex couples. Because California has no interest in discriminating against gay men and lesbians, and because Proposition 8 prevents California from fulfilling its constitutional obligation to provide marriages on an equal basis, the court concludes that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional.

Indeed, that you just don’t like a whole class of people is not sufficient cause to deny this class of people equal human and civil rights as guaranteed to them by the U.S. Constitution.

**Not even to pick only on the gay and lesbian “community” in Sacramento — other festivals in Sacramento have been ruined by a corporate omnipresence, such as a recent festival for Asians and Pacific islanders here in Sacramento that I recently attended at which McDonald’s and Wells Fargo had prominent presences. (Indeed, McDonald’s provided the only place to sit down to eat — provided that you were eating McDonald’s, of course, because I don’t know about you, when I think of Asian and Pacific islander food, I immediately think of McDonald’s.)