Veep Biden: We’re all you’ve got

Wow.

Vice President Joe Biden is well known for shooting his mouth off, but for him actually to encourage his fellow Democratic operatives to “remind our base constituency to stop whining and get out there and look at the alternatives,” as he did yesterday in New Hampshire, is surprising to come out of even Biden’s mouth.

Not that there isn’t some truth to Biden’s words; it’s that it’s pathetic that the Democratic Party has come to this: the lesser of two evils.

A voter should vote for your party because the voter is enthusiastic about your party — not because the alternative to your party is even grimmer than is your party.

These days, too many of us voters on the right and the left cast votes more out of opposition to the other party’s candidate than out of enthusiasm for our own party’s candidate.

I have to confess that in 2004 I voted for Democrat John Kerry much more out of my hatred of Repugnican incumbent George W. Bush and his fellow traitors than I did out of a special love for Kerry, whom I simply viewed as the Democratic candidate best placed to be able to deny Bush a second disastrous term in the White House.

I felt a little better about Barack Obama than I did John Kerry — I was snookered to at least some degree by Obama’s promised “hope” and “change,” I am chagrined to admit — and I don’t hate Repugnican John McCainosaurus as much as I hate George W. Bush, but even in 2008 I still was voting against the opponent about as much as I was voting for my candidate.

And while my U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer is OK (she’s considerably better than average for a Democratic politician), I have to say that I’m voting for her on November 2, and that I’ve given her a modest amount of money for this election, at least as much because I can’t stand her Repugnican opponent, Crazy Carly Fiorina, as because I have a special love for Boxer.

And in California’s gubernatorial race, it’s difficult to say which is greater: My love for Jerry Brown or my hatred of Nutmeg Whitman, although I like Brown quite a lot and I think that he’ll be a kick-ass guv (the kind of governor that Repugnican Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2003 promised to be but never has been). As well as I know myself, I’m at least equally motivated to vote for Brown on November 2 out of my like of him as I am out of my utter dislike of his opponent, who would run the state even further into the ground than has Schwarzenegger.

But I digress.

The point that I want to make is that pointing out that the alternative to you is even worse than you are isn’t a strong political position to come from. Biden and the other Democratic operatives should fucking know that.

As a registered Green Party member, I feel no fealty to the Democratic Party. My vote for a Democratic candidate is never guaranteed.

Although President Barack Obama reportedly has told Rolling Stone that “It is inexcusable for any Democrat or progressive right now to stand on the sidelines in this midterm election,” the Obama administration has not given me or any other Democratic or Democratic-leaning voter much inspiration to vote on November 2. Repugnican rich bitches Nutmeg Whitman and Carly Fiorina, who never have held office and wish to buy office, have given me a lot more “inspiration” to vote on November 2 than has the Obama administration.

This doesn’t bode well for 2012.

Fortunately, Obama, Biden & Co. have some time to wake up.

Otherwise, history, methinks, frequently will compare Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter.

I might not have to move to Canada

On March 25, 2010, I wrote:

So in November, I predict, not only will a majority of California’s voters put “Governor Moonbeam” [Democrat Jerry Brown] back into office, but they will make marijuana legal in the state…. 

It will be like the ’70s all over again….

Don’t get me wrong — Repugnican California guv wannabe Nutmeg Whitman, a billionaire former CEO who never has held public office but wants to buy the governorship of the nation’s most populous state, must be brought down. We can’t act as though Jerry Brown already has won the election. We have to fight (… for our right … to paartaaay!).

But when all is said and done, even if Nutmeg doesn’t make some major campaign-killing fuckup, I expect that the majority of California’s voters, hit hard by the economy brought to them by the Repugnican Party, aren’t going to vote for another fucking Repugnican to lead the state.

Megalomaniac wants us to believe that she’s great because she’s a billionaire. But a majority of Californians, I think, are much more resentful of what the super-rich have done to the nation and to the state than they want to emulate the plutocrats….

My guess is that at least 55 percent of the voters will vote “yes” on the marijuana measure — and that many, many of us Californians will discover a new love for gardening….

(My only concern is whether or not the feds will try to step in and block the legalization of marijuana in California like Cruella de Vil coming for the doobies — er, doggies. I haven’t researched that possibility yet.)

So I can envision a California with a Democratic governor again — and not just any Democratic governor, but Gov. Jerry Fucking Brown — and a state that has legalized marijuana, which should have been legalized long ago and which only those who decry a “nanny state” inconsistently hold should remain illegal….

So how is my crystal ball holding up six months later?

Well, the Los Angeles Times reports that Jerry Brown now leads Nutmeg Whitman by 5 percentage points when until very recently polls had showed them neck and neck for some time. I expect Brown’s lead over Megalomaniac Whitman to hold and to expand, and my prediction is that on November 2 he’ll beat Nutmeg, although probably only by a single-digit win. (If the Democrats weren’t so unenthused by the Obama administration’s broken promises of “hope” and “change,” Brown probably would break into the double digits, I surmise.)

The Times also reports that Democratic U.S. Sen. Barabara Boxer has broken ahead of her Repugnican rich bitch opponent, Carly Fiorina, by 8 percentage points when both of them also had been neck and neck for a while. I predict that Boxer will beat Fiorina, perhaps by double digits.

My take on all of this is that now that California’s voters are paying more attention to the November 2 election, they’re realizing that to return California to the Repugnican Party, which ran us into the ditch in the first fucking place (I mean, as forgettable as the still-amateurish, usurping Repugnican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is, he has been a shitty governor, and he’s a moderate Repugnican whom Nutmeg promises to out-Repugnican), is a very, very poor idea.

There are Nutmeg and Crazy Carly in theory — and then there are Nutmeg and Crazy Carly in actuality. And that’s pretty fucking scary.

Finally, a Field Poll shows that California voters are poised to legalize the recreational use of marijuana, supporting the pro-pot Proposition 19 by 49 percent to 42 percent.

Not that this is an issue of huge importance to me, but it’s clear to me (as it is to lefty columnist David Sirota) that alcohol is responsible for far more damage and death than is marijuana, yet the former is legal and the latter is not. (Yes, our laws should be logical and rational.)

And to deny the masses the release of marijuana while our empire continues to crumble because of Repugnican Tea Party dipshittery and obstructionism — that’s just plain wrong.

Of course, the impending Democratic wins in California probably will lower Californians’ demand for marijuana, since the wins will improve Californians’ lives, but still, I don’t want to hear the “libertarians” and other wingnuts lecture the rest of us, those of us who are sane, about the guv’mint staying the fuck out of our lives while they still want to outlaw marijuana, abortion and same-sex marriage.

In any event, I’m just happy, at least for today, that California’s intelligent voters (those who at least know how to vote in their actual own best interests) as of right now outnumber California’s fucktarded voters (those who think that the members of the Repugnican Party are the ones to fix the mess that the Repugnican Party put us into — and that marijuana actually poses any significant threat to our society).

And that after November 2, I probably won’t have to move to Canada, as nice as I hear Canada is.

In O’Donnell, the voters of Delaware would get what they deserve

Associated Press photo

Sarah Palin-Quayle protegee Christine “Man Pants” O’Donnell, pictured yesterday in Lincoln, Delaware, shouldn’t have to deal with her admission of having “dabbled into witchcraft.” There are plenty of other, better reasons for the voters of Delaware to send her packing.

Don’t get me wrong. I have no sympathy for U.S. senatorial candidate Christine O’Donnell.

People get into politics for two main reasons: for self-aggrandizement and more power (for themselves and for their cronies, usually) or to try to make a difference, try to improve things for everyone. O’Donnell clearly falls into the first camp, as do most (as in more than half of) politicians.

It was in the 1990s that on Bill Maher’s show “Politically Incorrect” that O’Donnell declared that in high school she “dabbled into witchcraft” but “never joined a coven.” (She helpfully added: “One of my first dates with a witch was on a satanic altar, and I didn’t know it. I mean, there’s a little blood there and stuff like that.”)

Clearly only the best and the brightest ever run for the U.S. Senate.

But burning O’Donnell at the stake for her admission of having “dabbled into witchcraft” feels wrong. First of all, it’s 2010 — two thousand fucking ten — and we’re talking about witchcraft being a hindrance to political office?

Even if O’Donnell were into witchcraft now, instead of being (or playing the role of, anyway) a “Christo”fascist, to me that’s religious belief and expression that is protected by the First Amendment. Only until and unless someone harms someone else and/or violates someone else’s rights and/or freedoms can we infringe upon his or her First-Amendment right to freedom of belief and religion.

Yes, it’s ironic that O’Donnell’s witchcraft admission, which aired on national television, might cost her “Christo”fascist votes. (Most of the “Christo”facists will resolve their cognitive dissonance by viewing her as “saved” though, I surmise.) And I might even be tempted to posit that maybe O’Donnell participated in witch hunts in a past life and that this is her karmic comeuppance.

But fuck all of that witchcraft stuff.

There are plenty of other reasons for the voters of Delaware to ditch O’Donnell.

First and foremost, she appears to have committed financial fraud even before she’s taken office. Reports The Associated Press:

Wilmington, Del. — A government watchdog group says Republican Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell used campaign funds to pay her rent and other personal expenses.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has filed a complaint against O’Donnell with the Federal Elections Commission and is asking federal prosecutors to investigate her.

The complaint is based largely on a sworn statement by O’Donnell’s former campaign finance consultant, David Keegan. He says O’Donnell used campaign funds to pay her rent in both March and April 2009, then listed the spending as “reimbursement expenses.”

The complaint also accuses O’Donnell of using campaign funds to pay for gas, meals and a bowling outing.

O’Donnell is a “tea party” favorite who upset longtime U.S. Rep. Mike Castle in Delaware’s GOP Senate primary.

I mean, you have to know that when someone is corrupt even while still in the chute, it can only get worse once he or she is out of the chute. After the BushCheneyCorp brazenly, blatantly stole office in late 2000, how could it have come as a shock that they then would launch a bogus war, using the worst terrorist attack upon American soil as their pretext? I mean, first presidential election fraud and then even more treason in the form of a bogus war? Who possibly could have known?

Her apparent financial fraud is enough to keep Christine O’Donnell far, far away from the U.S. Senate, but there’s more. Reports Yahoo! News:

The witchcraft flap is just the latest of O’Donnell’s comments from the 1990s to surface and give fodder to those who say she’s too politically unseasoned to win November’s open-seat race against Democrat Chris Coons.

O’Donnell told Bill O’Reilly that scientists have created mice that possess human brains; she said on “Politically Incorrect” that she would not lie to Nazis if she was hiding Jews in her house; and she reportedly said that women should not be permitted entry to military service institutions.

The left has also criticized her denunciation of masturbation.

What, no one of the right wing masturbates? (Or I suppose that they do, but they feel horribly guilty afterward and they lie about it.)

Actually, the masturbation prohibition brouhaha to me is more serious than a funny little sexual joke. To me it goes to O’Donnell’s apparent willingness to force her own crackpot religious beliefs upon others while still claiming to be a slave to “liberty” and “freedom,” as she and her “tea-partying” ilk do. (It’s freedom and liberty for them, you see. Fuck the rest of us.)

If I could say just one thing to her, I suppose that it would be: Stay out of my man pants, Christine!

In fairness to O’Donnell, her comment about human brains and mice brains might have been misquoted or she might have misspoken. She might actually have commented, or meant to have said, that some human beings possess the brains of mice. That is entirely believable. It would explain the existence of the “tea party.”

I most certainly would lie to any Nazis if I had Anne Frank holed up in my house, although hopefully I’d have left the Nazi-occupied country before it even came to the point that I had to deal with any of the Nazis.

I don’t know why anyone — anyone — would join the U.S. military these days when the U.S. military hasn’t been about actual defense since World War II, but has only acted as taxpayer-funded thugs for the corporatocrats and plutocrats, and has only kept the leech of the military-industrial complex perpetually fat with the lifeblood of the tax-paying people, but I don’t believe in discriminating against anyone who is stupid enough to actually join the U.S. military who meets reasonable requirements, such as a minimum age and minimum physical fitness. (Hell, maybe the U.S. military, for all of the damage that it does to us, at least helps to clean our gene pool…)

Anyway, O’Donnell already has demonstrated, amply, that she isn’t fit to serve as dog catcher, which even the head of Delaware’s Repugnican Party stated. (The same news article recounts O’Donnell’s blatant lie that she won two of Delaware’s three counties against Joe Biden in 2008 when, in fact, she didn’t win one county. [That can’t be a misstatement. That can only be a blatant fucking lie.])  

If the voters of Delaware actually elect Christine O’Donnell, they’ll get what they deserve, just as the majority of Americans who just allowed BushCheneyCorp to steal the White House in late 2000 got what they deserved, including the current economic meltdown, as it was foreseeable. (Unfortunately, the rest of us Americans have had to suffer, too.)

Jon Stewart’s Rally for Nihilism

Updated below

These Obama-campaignesque graphics promote faux competing political rallies that may or may not actually happen next month in Washington, D.C.

I love Jon Stewart. Always have. Probably always will. But his faux October 30 “Rally to Restore Sanity” at the National Mall in Washington, D.C. (which may or may not actually be an actual gathering, since, according to The Associated Press, no permit has been granted for any such rally) misses the mark.

I’m all for sanity and reason, and I love the fact that Stewart is mocking Glenn Beck’s “Christo”fascist rally to “restore honor” last month at the National Mall in D.C.

But I’m disturbed that Stewart apparently is afraid of proudly wearing the mantle of liberalism or progressivism but instead talks about a “million moderate march” of the “70- to 80-percenters” (Americans whom he claims are moderates, despite the fact that the left wing and the right wing both seem to have the support of at least around 30 percent of the electorate, leaving no more than around 40 percent actually in the middle). 

Stewart, in his Thursday announcement of his “Rally to Restore Sanity,” paints both those on the left and the right as not having lives, and thus they are politically vocal — you know, having nothing else better to do.

You know, we don’t have enough civil and political engagement in the United States of America as it is, so for Stewart to (probably unintentionally) be popularizing political apathy, or at least political nonparticipation, doesn’t serve our nation or the system that we call “democracy,” that I can see.

I understand that most Americans have (to a large degree self-inflicted, unnecessarily) busy lives, but to broadly brush those who do take a stand on political issues as losers with too much time on their hands is harmful, not helpful. Even if I disagree wholeheartedly with the “tea-baggers” (and I do), at least they make time for civic and political engagement, even if I view their gatherings as akin to KKK rallies (and I do). 

Stewart also apparently lumps the likes of the 9/11 “truthers” in with the left, which is a categorical error. A conspiracy theorist may be a leftist, a right-winger, a moderate (as Stewart seems to love so much) or fairly entirely apolitical. A conspiracy theory is a conspiracy theory, and it may be politically ideologically inspired or not. (The conspiracy theories about Barack Obama certainly seem to be politically ideologically inspired, as well as inspired by racism and white supremacism, but I see little political ideology in the 9/11 conspiracy theories, which seem to be more about a generic “government” than even about a political party or even about certain politicians.)  

Stewart also apparently lumps in the members of Code Pink, who have worn red paint on their hands at public hearings to give the (correct) message that certain public officials have blood on their hands, with the gun nuts who have thought it a great idea to bring assault rifles to public political rallies. I don’t know about you, but I am a lot more concerned about socially retarded, NRA-card-carrying, wingnutty males carrying assault rifles in public than I am about some pissed-off progressive women wearing red paint on their hands at public hearings.

Stewart in announcing his rally also focuses on the more extreme messages that are put out there. Sure, comparing one’s political opponent to Adolf Hitler more often than not is trite and usually is inaccurate. (One of Stewart’s pre-made signs for his rally, he joked, reads: “I Disagree with You, but I’m Pretty Sure You’re Not Hitler.”)

However, to stop at the argument as to whether or not George W. Bush accurately can be compared to Adolf Hitler overlooks the fact that George W. Bush, while he didn’t exterminate six millions Jews and millions of others, was responsible for the deaths of at least tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians.

And that’s the problem (or at least one of the largest problems) that I have with “moderates” — “moderates” are almost always willing to overlook a certain amount of evil. Six million innocents slaughtered: Baaaaad! “Only” tens of thousands of innocents slaughtered in our name and in the name of “liberation”: Meh — we can overlook that! People die in war! (“But this was a bogus war!” you remind the “moderate,” who then promptly shuts down because he or she no longer wants to discuss politics.)

So I have a problem with Jon Stewart further fostering the already too-prevalent attitude of “I’m too busy to be a politically active citizen,” “Politics is for losers,” etc.

More often than not the reason that “moderates” hate political messages isn’t that the messages are extreme as much as that the messages themselves, being about politics, remind the “moderates” that the “moderates” haven’t bothered to educate themselves about or involve themselves in politics — and who wants to be reminded of their deficits?

Way too many people in the mushy middle, these “moderates,” these “independents,” these “swing voters,” claim that their centrism puts them on higher ground than the left or the right when, in fact, the actual case is that they’re just too fucking lazy and/or wussy to carefully study both sides of the arguments and then pick a side, good or evil.

I see nothing to admire in someone who’s too lazy or cowardly or selfish to pick a side on our most serious, most pressing issues. I see it as an abject abdication of one’s civic duty. (And I’d call it un-American, too, except that political and civic laziness seem to be as American as apple pie and cell phones and SUVs.)

Jon Stewart’s faux right-wing nemesis, Stephen Colbert, has announced that, in response to Stewart’s “Rally to Restore Sanity,” on October 30 he’s going to hold a competing “March to Keep Fear Alive,” which is a lot closer to how the right wing actually operates than how the left wing operates according to Jon Stewart. (Colbert admonishes us to “never forget — ‘reason’ is just one letter away from ‘treason.’ Coincidence? Reasonable people would say it is, but America can’t afford to take that chance.”)

I can’t help but notice that in the faux October 30 rallies of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who apparently are supposed to be diametrically politically opposed to each other, we see the right wing and the apolitical, mushy middle represented, but we see no real representation of or for the left wing, which is telling. So far to the right has the nation’s political discourse gone, and so much do media corporations (Comedy Central is corporate, of course) fear pissing off the right wing, that Jon Stewart’s “clarion call” for centrism is seen as the counterbalance to the extreme right.   

I get it that ultimately it’s all a joke — Stewart and Colbert appear on Comedy Central, for fuck’s sake — but let’s face it, in this day and age, entertainment and news are so intermixed that the line between the two is so blurry as to be invisible, and millions of Americans get their political “news” from Jon Stewart’s show on Comedy Central.

And Jon Stewart is telling these Americans that it’s OK to use one’s busy-ness as an excuse to be apolitical, and Jon Stewart is telling these Americans, essentially, that all impassioned public political speech essentially is the same, and that those who participate in impassioned public political discourse are losers who should get lives.

Jon Stewart isn’t promoting democracy or civic and political engagement. He’s promoting (again, probably unintentionally) nihilism.

And we have more than enough of that already.

—

Update: I see that fellow sexy gay blogger Glenn Greenwald has taken on this topic too, and basically he said what I said, only in his more academic style. First and foremost, Greenwald also talks about the false equivalencies between the left and the right that those who proclaim themselves to be centrists/moderates put forth.

I wrote back in May that it was writer John Avlon’s string of such false equivalencies, one after the other, as well as his blatant hearsay that he presented as fact, that prevented me from being able to get into his book Wingnuts. Much of what I wrote about Avlon, unfortunately, could be said also of Jon Stewart. I wrote of Avlon in May:  

About all that [Avlon] points to, in the 18 pages [of Wingnuts] that I was able to stomach, in order to exemplify the far left or the far right are some examples of some political figure, usually George W. Bush or Barack Obama, being compared to Adolf Hitler. Ooooo! Insightful!

However, while skimming through his book, I noted that apparently anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan is a “wingnut” for having stood up against the Bush regime’s bogus Vietraq War that killed her son — a war that the majority of Americans now acknowledge, fucking finally, was a bogus war.

Hmmm… A woman’s young son is killed for non-existent weapons of mass destruction, Dick Cheney’s Halliburton profits obscenely in that bogus war (as do the BushCheneyCorp’s other oily subsidiaries), and because she has the gall to protest her son’s pointless death, that makes Sheehan a “wingnut,” according to Avlon, who, I take it, hasn’t had a loved one killed in the Vietraq War or ever even been in harm’s way himself. 

Overall, Avlon reminds me of a lazy, mediocre parent or teacher who witnesses two children fighting, and, because he doesn’t want to bother to try to figure out what they’re fighting about — and whether one child might actually be in the right and the other child might actually be in the wrong — he labels both fighting children as equally guilty. There. Done with it. Why bother to unravel the facts? And why take sides?

Except that the real world is so much more complex than that, and our crumbling democracy didn’t really need another book put out there to tell people that instead of closely examining the facts and taking a principled stand on important issues based upon the facts, they need to just join the mushy middle, because obviously there’s no difference between the impassioned right and the impassioned left (or, as Avlon calls everyone who isn’t a milquetoast, apolitical, apathetic sleepwalker, the “wingnuts”)….

For Avlon to make the false equivalency between the far left and the far right — to lump everyone who feels strongly about politics together as “wingnuts” — isn’t only grossly inaccurate, but it’s dangerous to our already endangered, dumbed-down democracy.

Those last three paragraphs I could have written about Stewart, unfortunately — and Stewart, too, pointed out that members of both the left and the right have compared a sitting president to Adolf Hitler, as though this were some stunning insight.

Anyway, Greenwald writes on this topic:

I think Jon Stewart is one of the most incisive and effective commentators in the country, and he reaches an audience that would otherwise be politically disengaged. I don’t have any objection if he really wants to hold a rally in favor of rhetorical moderation, and it’s also fine if, as seems to be the case, he’s eager to target rhetorical excesses on both the left and right in order to demonstrate his non-ideological centrism.

But [an] example he chose to prove that the left is guilty, too — the proposition that [George W.] Bush is a “war criminal” — is an extremely poor one given that the general in charge of formally investigating detainee abuse (not exactly someone with a history of leftist advocacy) has declared this to be the case, and core Nuremberg principles compel the same conclusion.

Leave aside the fact that, as Steve Benen correctly notes, Stewart’s examples of right-wing rhetorical excesses (Obama is a socialist who wasn’t born in the U.S. and hates America) are pervasive in the GOP, while his examples of left-wing excesses (Code Pink and 9/11 Truthers) have no currency (for better or worse) in the Democratic Party.

The claim that Bush is “a war criminal” has ample basis, and it’s deeply irresponsible to try to declare this discussion off-limits, or lump it in with a whole slew of baseless right-wing accusatory rhetoric, in order to establish one’s centrist bona fides.  

It’s admirable to want to apply the same standards to both sides, but straining to manufacture false equivalencies doesn’t accomplish that; sometimes, honestly applying the same standards to each side will result in a finding that one side, at least in that regard, is actually worse.

When that’s the case, a person engaged in truly independent, non-ideological inquiry — rather than the pretense of such — will expressly acknowledge the imbalance, not concoct an equivalency where it doesn’t exist.

By stark contrast, Stephen Colbert’s “March to Keep Fear Alive” seems extremely well-focused and on-point.

Yup.

Colbert, because he’s only pretending to be a right-winger, has that pretension as cover, but Jon Stewart just couldn’t bring himself to be a strong standard-bearer for the left. Instead, apparently in order to appeal to the apolitical, he apparently felt that he had to assert quite incorrectly that the left is just as insane as is the right — thus actually undercutting, not strengthening, his position.

Finally, I wrote that “millions of Americans get their political ‘news’ from Jon Stewart’s show on Comedy Central,” and this article posits that while the old farts get their “news” from Faux “News,” the members of the younger demographic indeed get their “news” from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

Holding a journalism degree, I find it incredibly odd, if not sad and pathetic, that Americans who want real news these days have to turn to Comedy Central. (Well, OK, there is MSNBC. I love Rachel Maddow.)

However, it being the case that Stewart has so much influence — regardless of the argument as to whether he should have that much influence — Stewart should wield his influence much more carefully and responsibly. Falsely conflating the left and the right as Stewart has done is reckless and irresponsible, because, while he ostensibly is a comedian, millions of Americans take him quite seriously.

Nutmeg breaks self-financing record

Reuters photos

Repugnican Nutmeg Whitman (pictured above in Los Angeles yesterday), who apparently is trying to make up for that pony that she never got for Christmas, thus far has sunk almost $120 million of her own funds into her campaign for California’s governorship, breaking the previous self-campaign-financing record by around $10 million. 

Billionaire bitch Megalomaniac Whitman, who never has held elected office before, in her quest to be the next governor of California, the nation’s most populous state, has broken the U.S. record for self-campaign financing that previously was held by billionaire Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York City.

Bloomberg had held the record — $109 million for his 2009 mayoral campaign, according to the Los Angeles Times — until Nutmeg gave herself a money shot of another $15 million this week, pushing her to $119 million of her own funds to her gubernatorial campaign thus far, according to the Times.

Wow. What kind of egomaniac spends that kind of money on the chance of winning office?

Think of what good that much money could do for people — but instead, Nutmeg is blowing it on the gubernatorial lottery.

The Sacramento Bee’s website notes that “Whitman has said she will spend whatever it takes to win, and predicted ultimately putting in up to $150 million into her campaign.”

Megalomaniac Whitman sorely needs to lose on November 2, not only because her rehashed, pro-corporate Repugnican agenda is the last thing that the struggling state of California needs, but because the voters of California need to send the billionaires a loud and clear message:

We! Cannot! Be! Bought!

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If you are interesting in donating to Jerry Brown’s campaign for governor of California, you can click here to do so.

Christine ‘Man-Pants’ O’Donnell wins in Delaware, assuring Repugnican loss

Associated Press photo

Looks like she’s had a lot of practice: “Tea party” dipshit Christine O’Donnell won Delaware’s Repugnican Party primary today after having used sleazy, homophobic tactics. O’Donnell is such an unhinged wingnutty dingbat that her victory today virtually assures a Democratic win for the state’s U.S. Senate seat in November.

“Tea party” candidate Christine O’Donnell, whose main campaign tactic against her opponent, Repugnican Party establishment candidate U.S Rep. Mike Castle, was to paint him (correctly or incorrectly) as gay, won the Repugnican Party primary for a seat in the U.S. Senate for Delaware today.

The Sarah Palin-Quayle-endorsed O’Donnell — who shouted out to Castle, “Mike, this is not a bake-off; get your man-pants on” (whatever “man-pants” are) and whose campaign ad indicated that Castle has cheated on his wife with another man — is sooo incredibly bad that the state’s Repugnican Party says that it won’t support her for the general election. Reports The Associated Press:

Despite her win, O’Donnell will enter the fall campaign as an underdog to Chris Coons, a county executive who was unopposed for the Democratic nomination.

Republican officials said as the votes were being counted the party would not come to her aid if she won the primary, citing a string of disclosures about her personal finances and other matters.

The state party chairman, Tom Ross, said recently she “could not be elected dogcatcher.”

I can’t see “tea party” dipshit Sharron “Second Amendment Remedies” Angle winning the U.S. Senate seat for Nevada in November, either.

It’s long been recognized that while wingnuts often can do well in Repugnican primaries, they often struggle in general elections, as the general electorate doesn’t share their wingnuttery.

I wish the “tea party” many continued victories in Repugnican Party primary elections in the future.

Newt focuses on Obama’s Kenyan roots

White supremacist wingnut Newt Gingrich, who apparently plans to run for the 2012 Repugnican Tea Party presidential nomination, now says that President Barack Obama has a “Kenyan, anti-colonial” worldview.

Because Gingrich really, really wanted to, but could not, just hold up this PhotoShopped poster widely disseminated among the racist, white supremacist, tea-partying Obama-haters:

Ha ha ha ha ha!

Racism is funny!

Bill Clinton sucks anyway, Nutmeg

Associated Press photo

Billionaire bitch Nutmeg Whitman, pictured above with her Repugnican buddies John McCainosaurus, Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney at a fundraiser in April,  thinks that she can pit Demorcatic icon Bill Clinton against Democratic icon Jerry Brown. She won’t succeed in using Bill Clinton as a wedge, and her multiple lies about Jerry Brown’s record only underscore the fact that she has no fucking record of public service of her own.

Bill Clinton is in the news today. I wish that he’d just go the fuck away. But, true to his baby-boomer blood, he refuses to retire from the spotlight.

You’d think that after he had an intern give him head in the Oral — er, Oval Office, he’d have disappeared from public view in shame. But he knows no shame.

Bill Clinton resurfaced in a television commercial put out by billionaire Repugnican California gubernatorial Nutmeg Whitman in a rehashed clip of a television debate with Jerry Brown during the 1992 contest for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Clinton’s accusations against Brown in the clip from 1992 (“He raised taxes as governor of California. He had a surplus when he took office and a deficit when he left. He doesn’t tell the people the truth”) are wrong, according to The Associated Press, which today noted:

The source of Clinton’s criticism [of Brown in the 1992 clip] was a CNN report by Brooks Jackson, who issued a statement over the weekend on Factcheck.org saying he had mischaracterized Brown’s record on taxes.

“Brown is right; I made a mistake in my 1992 report,” Jackson wrote.

Specifically, Jackson said he picked the wrong year in concluding that California’s state taxes were higher when Brown left office than in his first year.

The Associated Press also notes that “As governor from 1975 to 1983, Brown built the state’s surplus to $6 billion, but he and the Legislature spent much of it — about $4.4 billion — bailing out local governments and schools after [the school-tax-cutting] Proposition 13 passed.”

But Team Nutmeg has decided to run with the clip of Bill Clinton misspeaking on or lying about Brown’s gubernatorial record even after Clinton’s intentional or unintentional inaccuracies in the clip have been demonstrated.

Why?

Because there is Democratic Party icon Bill Clinton criticizing Nutmeg’s Democratic opponent Jerry Brown (even if Clinton is lying or mistaken), and Repugnicans gladly will shamelessly lie if they perceive that enough voters will buy it.

Of course, most of the fucktards who would vote for Megalomaniac Whitman hate Jerry Brown and Bill Clinton anyway, and California’s solid Democrats aren’t going to be swayed by a Nutmeg Whitman ad that attempts to pit Bill Clinton vs. Jerry Brown. Brown has solid Democratic support here in California.

Even so: Fuck Bill Clinton anyway.

He was a shitty president.

Clinton counter-criticizes those of us of the professional left, bragging about his having created a “Third Way,” which amounted to little more than the creation of Repugnican Lite that plagues us to this day in Barack Obama’s Clintonesque/milquetoast administration. And if Clinton’s “Third Way” was the way to go, why was the 2000 election so close that the BushCheneyCorp was able to steal it? (Did Bill Clinton the horndog invent the three-way, too, I wonder?)

And who was it who said that every time that a Democrat acts like a Repugnican, the voters will go ahead and vote for the Repugnican?

That’s about all that we’ve learned from Bill Clinton, who sorely needs to take up golf.

I don’t mind still hearing from Jimmy Carter, who at least didn’t have sex with any intern, that we know of — and who stuck to his progressive guns, even if it cost him re-election.

But sellout Bill Clinton sucks ass, and it’s long past time for him to take a long nap on a big bed of mothballs.

And Nutmeg Whitman — what a God-awful pathetic excuse for a human being. It’s not that hard for her to dredge up some negative TV clip regarding Jerry Brown because Jerry Brown has served the state of California for several years. He has a record that someone like Megalomaniac Whitman — who has no fucking political record to speak of (except for the fact that she is approaching the highest amount of personal funds ever spent on a poltical campaign, more than $100 million thus far and behind only New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg) — can distort.

Nutmeg hasn’t held a single elected office, not even city council member, and most of the time she can’t even be bothered to vote.

If Californians are stupid enough to elect  Nutmeg Whitman on the heels of Repugnican gubernatorial disaster-movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger — who is more moderate than is Nutmeg — then they deserve the even bigger disaster that they’ll get.

P.S. I’m so sick of the Clinton Dynasty that I gave Barack Obama money primarily during his primary campaign fight against Billary Clinton in order to knock her out of the race. And it’s too bad that he made her his secretary of state. We’ve had enough of the Clintons.

This is all I’m going to say about 9/11

The unelected Bush regime beat the nation over the head with 9/11 for many years, so sue me if I long have been 9/11’d out.

As nightmarish as it was to have had to experience the reign of BushCheneyCorp after the stupid, fat and lazy American public just allowed the right-wing thieves (redundant…) to steal the White House in late 200o, the traitors who comprised the Bush regime were, in their own sick, twisted and treasonous way, brilliant. I mean, they took a spectacularly tragic event that they’d been warned about but did not prevent — and used it for political gain.   

It was only until the mid-term elections of 2006 that the Repugnicans no longer could wave the bloody shirt of 9/11 for political gain.

What have we Americans learned since Sept. 11, 2001?

Absofuckinglutely nothing.

We were attacked on Sept. 11, 2001, because we wantonly had slaughtered Muslims, or allowed them to be slaughtered or allowed or caused them to die, in the Middle East. In fact, the main reasons given by 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden himself (and other members of al-Qaeda) for 9/11 were: the U.S.-led sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s, which resulted in the deaths of untold numbers of Iraqi civilians, including children; the presence of the U.S. military in Saudi Arabia after the first George Bush war on Iraq; and the U.S. government’s blind, slavish support of Israel.

So: What has changed since then?

Well, let’s see: The U.S. killed even more innocent Iraqi civilians in George W. Bush’s Vietraq War for Big Oil and for the war profiteering of the war profiteers, such as Dick Cheney’s Halliburton; the U.S. military moved its main base in the Middle East from Saudi Arabia to Iraq, which, to my understanding, still violates the fundamentalist Islamist belief that no infidel should be allowed to occupy Muslim land; and the U.S. government still licks the ass of Israel, which can do no wrong and which enjoys the blind, slavish support of both parties in the duopolistic dog and pony show that we call “democracy.”

While I’m not asserting that when Osama bin Laden shouts “Jump!” Americans should ask “How high?”, it seems clear to me that Americans are hated around the world because they just allow their government and their military (which are only in the service of the corporatocrats and the plutocrats) to shit and piss upon the poorer, weaker peoples all around the globe — yet these same Americans fully expect to be adored around the world just the same.

Why do they hate us?

They hate us because we’re stupid.

They hate us because we’re xenophobic — we don’t even bother to try to learn about other cultures, but we function from the stubborn but incorrect belief that other cultures have just failed at being us. We just assume that they want to be just like us (they don’t) but that they just can’t pull it off because they don’t have what it takes.

They hate us because we’re hypocrites. (To give just one of many examples, the U.S. government maintains that Israel may have nukes but that Iran may not. And for the only nation ever to have nuked another nation to be dictating who does and who does not get to have nukes — because you just can’t allow one nation to nuke another nation —  is pretty fucking insanely hypocritical.)

They hate us because we have no empathy whatsofuckingever. We use the occasion of the anniversary of 9/11 to wallow mawkishly in our own national pity party about the 3,000 or so Americans who were killed on Sept. 11, 2001, while we don’t say a word about the tens of thousands of civilians whom we allowed our government to kill or cause to die in Iraq using 9/11 as a pretext. We talk only about American losses because we consider only Americans to be fully human. Yes, they hate us because we don’t consider them to be fully human.

They hate us because we’re greedy, fat and lazy — and that we use violence around the globe to support our ability to be fat and lazy.

They hate us because we’re destroying the very planet, such as with global warming.

They hate us because we are, in a word, Rome, which I surmise also was rather hated throughout the world.

We fat, lazy and stupid Americans should remember: Rome fell.

Happy International Burn a Koran Day.

MUCH worse than ACORN

Remember the whipped-up ACORN “scandal”?

Wingnuts accused ACORN — the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now — of election fraud when some paid ACORN organizers apparently submitted falsified voter registration cards in order to give the appearance that they’d registered more voters than they actually had.*

Of course, these non-existent voters never actually were going to cast a ballot and skew any election results — as they were non-existent, and non-existent people cannot vote.

But in backasswards Arizona, the South Africa of the Southwest, Steve May, a Log Cabin Repugnican who is a candidate for Arizona’s Legislature, has recruited homeless people to run for elected office on the Green Party ticket in order to siphon votes away from Democratic candidates and thus to help Repugnican candidates.

That is election fraud.

A Green Party spokesman in Phoenix, Erik Anderson, said of May’s ballot recruits: “We are actively opposing them. We’re encouraging all Green Party voters not to vote for them. We don’t know them.”

May, whom I used to kind of admire for having come out of the closet, even though he’s a fucking Repugnican and a (former?) Mormon in Arizona, has revealed himself to be nothing but a common Repugnican piece of slime.

Maybe Steve May and former BushCheneyCorp “re”-election campaign manager and former Repugnican Party head Ken Mehlman, who finally came out recently, can fucking marry each other in one of the few states that have same-sex marriage despite Mehlman’s and May’s support of the party of haters that always has shit and pissed upon gay men and lesbians and other non-gender-conforming people.

As a member of the Repugnican Party and a Repugnican Party candidate for office, May has no legitimate reason to recruit anyone to run for office under the Green Party ticket or any other party’s ticket with the glaringly obvious intent of helping his own party at the polls.

Why would a Repugnican recruit others to run on another party’s ticket unless malfeasance were involved?

Arizona’s Green Party has petitioned a federal judge to have the fraudulent candidates removed from the state’s ballots. I hope that the state’s Green Party succeeds. (And I will note that federal intervention is critical in red states like Arizona, which are all about violating civil rights and allowing election fraud that benefits the Repugnican Tea Party. That’s why the red states scream about “states’ rights”: so that they can get away with murder, sometimes literally.)

And I sincerely hope that Steve May, who has acted in bad faith with the intent of aiding his own political party at the polls through blatant misrepresentation and through the cynical bastardization of the democratic process, has broken the law and that he is prosecuted for it to the fullest extent of the law. And I hope that he fucking loses his campaign, too.

Steve May not only makes gay men look bad and not only has attacked the party that I belong to (the Green Party), but he belongs behind bars along with Arizona’s corrupt Repugnican governor, Jan “What’s My Name?” Brewer, the white supremacist Wicked Witch of the Southwest.

—

*ACORN’s biggest crime, of course, is that it helped so many poor black people. We know from Hurricane Katrina where the Repugnican Tea Party stands on that.