Take the fascist buffoons seriously

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That arm movement comes to her so easily and instinctively…

By now, you probably already have heard that on Presidents’ Day, no less, Repugnican U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene suggested, as many right-wing nut jobs and fascists have suggested over the past many years, that the red states and the blue states should have a “national divorce” — that they should split into two different nations.

Clearly, Greene and her treasonous, fascist ilk dearly miss the Confederacy, where the stupid white people in charge of the show could do whatever the fuck they wanted to those within their domain. Clearly, this is what they want: A white-supremacist, “Christian”-nationalist, fascist dictatorship.

Indeed, Greene actually has fleshed out her right-wing whack-job wish list for her “national divorce,” and of course she doesn’t suggest that any of the elements of it should be achieved democratically, so presumably, the red-state wonderland is to be an authoritarian/autocratic regime (conveniently, with “patriots” just like Greene in charge of everything, no doubt).

Among the many items on Greene’s sick-and-twisted, fascist wish list:

• Any individual moving from the blue-state nation to the red-state nation may not vote for five years, because as a former blue-stater, “You can live there [in Red-State Wonderlandia], you can work there, but you don’t get to bring your values [there].” Again: Greene wants a fascist dictatorship a la the Confederacy — not a democracy.
• “We would immediately alleviate the need for departments like the Department of Education. States would have full control of their public education. Education would look different all over the country.” In other words, essentially, local fascist warlords would control what information your child could and could not receive in school. The Repugnican-fascists claim that they oppose, say, the madrasa, but what they want is to set up “Christo”fascist, madrasa-like “schools” of their own.
• “Red states would likely ban all gender lies and confusing theories, Drag Queen story times [“drag queen” isn’t capitalized, but if Greene wants to show them such respect, I suppose that’s OK], and LGBTQ indoctrinating teachers, and China’s money and influence in our education while blue states could have government controlled gender transition schools.” I’m not sure how China gets wrapped up with the treasonous fascists’ fake “threat” of the LGBTQ community, but, again, Greene is calling for dictatorship, not freedom, here; the only way that you are allowed to exist in Red-State Wonderlandia is to present at all times as strictly stereotypically masculine or feminine, based upon your genitalia, and the police of Red-State Wonderlandia will police your sexual practices, obviously. Because freedom! And yes, it’s the left’s dream to have “government controlled gender transition schools” in which all boys are forced to become girls and vice-versa. Because Marjorie Taylor Greene would not lie to you about these “very important” matters!
• “Red state schools would bring back prayer in school and require every student to stand for the national anthem and pledge of allegiance while blue states would likely eliminate the anthem and pledge all together and replace them with anthems and pledges to identity ideologies like the Trans flag and BLM.” Again, “trans” isn’t capitalized, but it’s sweet that the English-challenged Greene gives transgender individuals such respect. But you gotta love Greene’s hyperbole. Yes, in the blue-state schools, the transgender flag, which is a pretty light blue, pink and white, would replace the U.S. flag, I’m sure. And yes, in the name of religious freedom, let’s force our schoolchildren to recite one “Christo”fascist denomination’s fucking little prayer. And it’s not like Nazi Germany required such public displays of “patriotism” as pledging allegiance to Adolf Hitler. (Oh, on that note, if the blue-state flag would be the transgender flag, then surely, Red-State Wonderlandia’s flag would be the Confederate flag or perhaps even the Nazi flag.)
• Continuing in her straw-man “arguments,” Greene opines: “Perhaps some blue states would even likely have government funded Antifa communists training schools. I mean elected Democrats already support Antifa, so why not. Red states would ban biological males from all girls/women’s sports and all girls/women’s places of privacy.” I don’t know — it wasn’t Antifa that treasonously attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, although the fascist fucktards tried to pin that on Antifa — and Antifa, being anti-government, as I understand it, certainly isn’t a wing of the Democratic Party, as Greene lies that it is. (Antifa’s main enemy is fascism — thus its name — which is why fascists like Greene go apeshit over Antifa.) And why Greene smashes together “Antifa communists training schools” — again, Greene needs to learn English (actually, German would be a much better fit for her) — with transgender females in girls’ and women’s sports I have no idea, but I do know that transgender females who want to participate in girls’ and women’s sports is not at fucking all the pressing issue that the Repugnican-fascists want all of us to believe that it is. (For today’s Nazis like Greene, however, clearly, trans is the new Jew. Fascists must always have their scapegoats.)
• “Red states would maintain the truth that there are only two genders and would require the biological identity of each person’s gender on their identification, not how the person identifies. If you choose to identify differently you can, but if you want it on legal record you’ll need to move to a blue state in order to be legally free to lie to yourself and others about your identity.” Again, there is that freedom, that individual liberty, that Greene loves so fucking much: If she disagrees with how you want to live your life, you forcibly have to live somewhere else. This is not at all like how the Nazis treated groups of people whom they didn’t like in their midst. Not at all!
• “Red states would not have to abide by climate cult lies. Red states would be completely free to build and use fossil fuel energy for their citizens. Oil, natural gas, clean coal, and nuclear power would very likely be growing strong energy sources for red states.” I’m glad that Madge brought this up, because this is exactly what the red states would devolve into in Red-State Wonderlandia: They’d look like a post-apocalyptic wasteland/hellscape, replete with no standing trees and choking air pollution, as well as water that you cannot drink, because the unbound profiteering of a relatively few sociopathic individuals trumped all else. Except that Red-State Wonderlandia’s pollution would harm those of us in neighboring Blue-State Wonderlandia, so yeah, those of us who are sane cannot allow Greene’s Red-State Wonderlandia come into existence. (Also, of course, we actually patriotic, pro-democratic, pro-human-rights Americans cannot allow Red-State Wonderlandia to come into existence so that it can persecute minorities with impunity, as did the Confederacy and Nazi Germany.)
• “In red states, I highly doubt Walmart could place sex toys next to children’s toothbrushes.” Greene thinks about sex toys even more than I do, and I’m a gay man. Next time in Walmart I’ll be sure to look for the supposed sex toys next to the children’s toothbrushes.
• “Law enforcement would likely look different in red and blue states. Red states would likely have highly supported law enforcement officers and well funded agencies. Police officers would be well trained, paid, equipped, and seen as heroes once again, not portrayed as racists [sic] thugs.” Again with the English thing. Why is almost no one on the right proficient in English? They are proponents of “English only” but they couldn’t speak or write their mother tongue correctly if their worthless lives depended on it. That said, yes, I’m sure that policing would look very different in Red-State Wonderlandia; the fire hoses and the attack dogs would be back, I’m sure. (It moves to a blue state or it gets the hose again!) No, not all cops are “racists thugs,” but those who are need to be called out and fired (and, when appropriate, prosecuted), and in Blue-State Wonderlandia, they would be, while in Red-State Wonderlandia, they would be worshipped.
• “Crime rates would be very low. Red state citizens would be safe. Criminals would be locked away swiftly when they broke the law. Justice would be served.” I’m not sure how that would work, since for more than two decades now, the murder rate has been higher in those states that former “President” Pussygrabber won in 2020 than it has been in the states that President Joe Biden won in 2020. This is a long-running Repugnican-fascist lie: that the blue states are rife with crime while the Mayberry-like red states are crime-fucking-free. Indeed, in Red-State Wonderlandia, a bunch of chromosomally challenged mouth-breathers with full access to guns in a Wild-West atmosphere very predictably would mean that the morgues couldn’t even begin to keep up.

So there you have it, Marjorie Taylor Greene’s “vision” for the United States of America. Again, in a word, the Confederacy 2.0 that she is pushing would be a hellscape.

And don’t get me wrong; I’d be fine with all of the mouth-breathing knuckle draggers forming a nation of their own, but, again, their unbridled pollution and incredibly short-sighted environmental degradation would adversely affect the rest of us, and we absolutely could not allow them to freely persecute those within their borders; their human-rights abuses would be astrofuckingnomical, and right now it’s only the existing federal United States government that is preventing them from carrying out the Nazi-like pogroms that they’d love to carry out, such as against non-white Americans and immigrants who want a better life for themselves, LGBTQ Americans, non-“Christo”fascist Americans, Americans who don’t bow down to all of the obvious evils of capitalism just like bowing down to the golden calf* that is capitalism, et. al., et. al.

Similarly, this is why the American Civil War had to be fought — and won — by the actual patriots: Because the treasonous, evil Confederacy could not be allowed to continue to exist and to continue to persecute certain human beings (black Americans mostly, of course, but others as well) it deemed deserving of persecution.

Marjorie Taylor Greene is, of course, a stunningly fucktarded buffoon. She embarrasses herself daily but is too fucking moronic to even begin to realize it.

But it is at our own peril that we dismiss the likes of Greene as too stupid and too crazy to pose any real threat to the nation. Many thought that Hitler was too buffoonish to ever pose any real threat.

When someone — perhaps especially someone in the United States Congress, no less — presents you with a fucking wish list that paints a fucking fascist horror show, perk the fuck up and fucking pay attention; don’t blithely, lazily tell yourself that it couldn’t possibly happen here.

It could — if we allow it to.

P.S. Don’t get me wrong. Dividing the red states and blue states into two separate nations would be, of course, at least next to impossible, not only logistically, with Red-State Wonderlandia necessarily having to reconstitute its own federal-government functions and offices and its own military, but even just defining red states and blue states can be nearly impossible.

Take Greene’s state of Georgia, for example: Presumably, she’d expect Georgia to be part of the Red-State Wonderlandia that she dreams about almost as she does about sex toys, just as Georgia was part of the Confederacy (indeed, Georgia was among the first seven backasswards, treasonous Southern states to secede from the Union).

Yet Joe Biden won the presidential election in Georgia in 2020 (albeit narrowly), and both of Georgia’s U.S. senators are Democrats.

In a solidly red state, the Democratic candidate for president doesn’t win, even narrowly, and no solidly red state is going to have two Democratic U.S. senators.

So, ironically, Greene very well might have to move to another state, it seems to me, if she wanted to live in Red-State Wonderlandia.

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*It’s funny that the “Christo”fascists equate capitalism with Christianity when Jesus Christ said that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven. You cannot worship wealth and credibly call yourself a Christian at the same time. Jesus Christ was a socialist, as the New Testament makes clear. Those who argue otherwise are lying and/or are incredibly fucking stupid and/or are brainwashed, probably hopelessly so.

Yes, LET’S look at the content of Marco Rubio’s speech

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The vast majority of those who claim that crypto-fascist presidential wannabe Marco Rubio didn’t get enough attention to the content of his recent speech on live national television probably haven’t actually listened to or read his entire speech (which you can do here). Having read every word of Rubio’s speech, and having compared it to reality, I can say that he’s damned fucking lucky that the water bottle got all of the attention. 

Associated Press editor Liz Sidoti wrote a column that she (or Yahoo! News) titled “Our Collective Obsession with the Trivial” that is about as original and insightful as was Repugnican Tea Party Sen. Marco Rubio’s speech that she insinuates was overlooked because of the “trivial.”

Every once in a while we pseudo-chastise ourselves about not being serious enough — but then we jump right back into the “trivial” anyway. Let’s face it: We’re never serious about getting serious. And so the vast majority of us who chastise others about not being serious enough, but focusing too much upon the “trivial,” are hypocrites.

Sidoti — who, ironically, is part of the problem that she whines about (the problem of the mass media’s propagation of “trivia”) — begins her column:

Persistently high unemployment. A sluggish economy. Debt. Deficit. Obesity. Fundamental disputes over guns, immigration and the climate. A to-do list that would exhaust even the most vigorous multi-tasker. A meteor in Russia, even.

Yet what created one of the buzziest brouhahas in America last week? Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s inopportune sip of water on live TV.

Enormous challenges pack the nation’s plate, but this country just can’t seem to get enough of the small stuff….

One hopes that we can multi-task, since we’re (even further) fucked if we can’t.

Yes, issues such as unemployment and a sluggish economy, the federal budget deficit (caused in no small part because of runaway so-called “defense” spending by the traitors who comprise the military-industrial-corporate complex), obesity, and global warming persist, although, of course, not all of our so-called “problems” actually are problems; what we so thoughtlessly label (like lemmings) as “progress,” such as indefinite economic expansion — such as the construction of even more strip malls and fast-food chain restaurants and chain stores — often if not usually only contributes to the further degradation of the planet and to the further threats to the future welfare of Homo sapiens and to countless other species and to perhaps even all life on planet Earth. (Indeed, our idea of “economic expansion,” which widely is considered to be “good,” is predicated upon the ideas that the planet has magically infinite resources and that ever-increasing population growth, which slowly is killing us all, is good.)

But those (like AP editor Liz Sidoti) who claim that we’re ignoring the Big Issues and focusing too much on Marco Rubio’s lying-induced-dehydration-related fucktardation on live national television aren’t seriously looking at the content of Marco Rubio’s speech either.

Rubio’s speech — the Repugnican Party’s response to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address on Tuesday — was just more trickle-down bullshit (what’s trickling down on us is the plutocrats’ urine), just more right-wing platitudes, just more feel-good, propagandistic, “Go U-S-A! We’re No. 1!”  pap that is right out of the 1950s or before.

If you don’t believe me, read Rubio’s speech yourself, but know that in his speech the man-serpent Rubio lied through his venom-dripping fangs right out of the fucking gate. Here is the beginning of his speech:

Good evening. I’m Marco Rubio. I’m blessed to represent Florida in the United States Senate. Let me begin by congratulating President Obama on the start of his second term. [Right…] Tonight, I have the honor of responding to his State of the Union address on behalf of my fellow Republicans. And I am especially honored to be addressing our brave men and women serving in the armed forces and in diplomatic posts around the world. You may be thousands of miles away, but you are always in our prayers. [Fuck our teachers, nurses and others who work hard every day — it’s only if you’re in the military that your job counts, you see.]

The State of the Union address is always a reminder of how unique America is. For much of human history, most people were trapped in stagnant societies, where a tiny minority always stayed on top, and no one else even had a chance. [Because it’s certainly not that way in the United States today, with a tiny plutocratic minority on top of the socioeconomically struggling masses, is it?]

But America is exceptional because we believe that every life, at every stage, is precious, and that everyone everywhere has a God-given right to go as far as their talents and hard work will take them. [Not content with just delivering the “American exceptionalism” propagandistic bullshit, the dim bulb Rubio even felt the need to actually use the adjective “exceptional.”]

Like most Americans, for me this ideal is personal. My parents immigrated here in pursuit of the opportunity to improve their life and give their children the chance at an even better one. They made it to the middle class, my dad working as a bartender and my mother as a cashier and a maid. I didn’t inherit any money from them. But I inherited something far better – the real opportunity to accomplish my dreams. [Gotta love this pro-immigrant rhetoric from the same party that for years now has been attacking brown-skinned immigrants from south of the border, immigrants who have just wanted a better life.]

This opportunity – to make it to the middle class or beyond no matter where you start out in life – it isn’t bestowed on us from Washington. It comes from a vibrant free economy where people can risk their own money to open a business. And when they succeed, they hire more people, who in turn invest or spend the money they make, helping others start a business and create jobs….*

This is the tired old “pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps” rhetoric that the right wing just won’t stop spewing. Mom-and-pop businesses for the most part are a thing of the past, having been replaced by the Walmarts with which they just cannot compete long, long ago, yet the Repugnican Tea Party traitors bloviate as though we still live in the days of Mayberry, when, if you wanted to start your own small business and thrive, you could.

In stark contrast to the pretty, red-white-and-blue, Thomas-Kinkade-and-Paul-Harvey-like portrait that right-wing punk Marco Rubio paints of the “exceptional” United States of America, Nobel-Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz just this past weekend posted an opinion piece in the New York Times titled “Equal Opportunity, Our National Myth.”

Whether Stiglitz wrote his piece at least partially in response to the thirsty Rubio’s pack of lies I’m not sure, but in his piece Stiglitz wrote (bold-faced items are my own emphasis, and the links are Stiglitz’s):

…Today, the United States has less equality of opportunity than almost any other advanced industrial country. Study after study has exposed the myth that America is a land of opportunity. This is especially tragic: While Americans may differ on the desirability of equality of outcomes, there is near-universal consensus that inequality of opportunity is indefensible. The Pew Research Center has found that some 90 percent of Americans believe that the government should do everything it can to ensure equality of opportunity. [Rubio and his anti-government ilk actually claim that we should leave it up to the plutocrats to ensure equality of opportunity, because isn’t that what the plutocrats are all about — socioeconomic equality? (It’s always a great idea to put the foxes in charge of the chickens, isn’t it?)]

Perhaps a hundred years ago, America might have rightly claimed to have been the land of opportunity, or at least a land where there was more opportunity than elsewhere. But not for at least a quarter of a century [has that been the case]. Horatio Alger-style rags-to-riches stories were not a deliberate hoax, but given how they’ve lulled us into a sense of complacency, they might as well have been.

It’s not that social mobility is impossible, but that the upwardly mobile American is becoming a statistical oddity. According to research from the Brookings Institution, only 58 percent of Americans born into the bottom fifth of income earners move out of that category, and just 6 percent born into the bottom fifth move into the top. Economic mobility in the United States is lower than in most of Europe and lower than in all of Scandinavia.…

Stiglitz also notes that “the life prospects of an American are more dependent on the income and education of his [or her] parents than in almost any other advanced country for which there is data.”

That blows Marco Rubio and his “exceptional,” red-white-and-blue bullshit right out of the fucking water of which he so badly wants a swig, doesn’t it? Where is the punk Marco Rubio’s Nobel Prize in economics?

And it’s not just that Rubio is a pandering fucking liar who long ago decided to parrot the right wing’s feel-good lies for his own personal and political gain.

It’s that these lies are harmful because they induce individuals to believe that if they just can’t make it in this vicious, dog-eat-dog, everyone-for-him-and-herself American economy, in which the insane income gap between the haves and the have-nots rivals the gap that we saw back in the 1920s, then there is something wrong with them.

In the right-wing worldview, it’s always the individual who is at fault — never the fucked-up system, which always gets off scot-free. The Thomas Kinkade landscape, even though it’s wholly made up and captures nothing of reality, is always just fine; it’s always the individual who is the failure.

So yes, there is plenty about the content of Marco Rubio’s speech to not only find fault with, but to find to be fairly terrifying, since the lying, pandering Rubio obviously is an ambitious asshole.

So let’s dispense with the myth that Marco Rubio’s wonderful speech was overlooked by the fact that he bizarrely acted as though he wasn’t on live national television, that he bizarrely acted as though if he just pretended that we couldn’t see him do something on live national TV, then we couldn’t. His apparent mindset of juvenile and magical thinking, in which he creates reality, could be a whole other blog post (and might be one day, but not today).

Marco Rubio, like the other dumb punks in the Repugnican Tea Party who have been hailed as the party’s “future,” such as Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and Pretty Boy Paul Ryan (who, like Rubio, was parched during his vice presidential debate with Joe Biden, who kicked his punk ass), is only finding out that his flimsy facade won’t withstand the scrutiny of the national spotlight. That’s his fault, not ours.

And I agree wholeheartedly: It’s not about the little water bottle that Marco Rubio grabbed during a live national television address.

It’s about the fact that no one who asserts that we still live in a time that, if it ever existed at all, ceased to exist decades ago, is fit to lead.

You can lead only if you are planted firmly in the present and in the problems of the present — not if you’re still stuck in an episode of “Leave It to Beaver” or “The Andy Griffith Show.”

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*Again, Rubio’s full speech is here. I find most of it not worth regurging here, as most of it is the same, tired old anti-government, pro-fox-and-anti-chicken and anti-fair-taxation (let’s let the rich and their corporations off from paying a fair share of taxes, since then they’ll just give their tax savings to the rest of us, right?) rhetoric that the right wing has been spewing out for some decades now.

But I do find Rubio’s “solution” to the problem of massive student loan debt interesting. In his little speech he said:

“When I finished school, I owed over $100,000 in student loans, a debt I paid off just a few months ago. Today, many graduates face massive student debt. We must give students more information on the costs and benefits of the student loans they’re taking out.”

That’s it. That’s his “solution.”

Wow.

Rubio won’t say that treating our college students like cash cows to be milked for decades after they graduate with their often-worthless-in-this-economy degrees is wrong.

He certainly won’t advocate that we, say, divert some of the billions and billions of dollars from the bloated-beyond-belief U.S. military budget — which is just a way for greedy fucking traitors to loot the U.S. treasury under such guises as “national defense” and “national security” — and use it to at least help our college students (say, perhaps, those who earned the better grades in high school) to pay for college.

No — Rubio’s “solution” is to “give students more information on the costs and benefits of the student loans they’re taking out.” Not to save them from the student-loan sharks, you see, but to just tell them about them.

Meanwhile, under Rubio’s “vision,” the student-loan sharks remain free to savage our students, and the student-loan sharks remain the only source of funding that is available to many if not most of those who want to go to college.

This is leadership?

This is what Joseph Stiglitz, on the other hand, has to say about education and student-loan debt in the U.S. in his New York Times piece:

…Probably the most important reason for lack of equality of opportunity is education: both its quantity and quality. After World War II, Europe made a major effort to democratize its education systems. We did, too, with the G.I. Bill, which extended higher education to Americans across the economic spectrum.

But then we changed, in several ways. While racial segregation decreased, economic segregation increased. After 1980, the poor grew poorer, the middle stagnated, and the top did better and better. [Indeed, the current yawning gap between the rich and the rest of us started under Ronald Reagan, due to his pro-rich, right-wing policies.] Disparities widened between those living in poor localities and those living in rich suburbs — or rich enough to send their kids to private schools. A result was a widening gap in educational performance — the achievement gap between rich and poor kids born in 2001 was 30 to 40 percent larger than it was for those born 25 years earlier, the Stanford sociologist Sean F. Reardon found. …

Unless current trends in education are reversed, the situation is likely to get even worse. In some cases it seems as if policy has actually been designed to reduce opportunity: government support for many state schools has been steadily gutted over the last few decades — and especially in the last few years. Meanwhile, students are crushed by giant student loan debts that are almost impossible to discharge, even in bankruptcy. This is happening at the same time that a college education is more important than ever for getting a good job.

Young people from families of modest means face a Catch-22: without a college education, they are condemned to a life of poor prospects; with a college education, they may be condemned to a lifetime of living at the brink. And increasingly even a college degree isn’t enough; one needs either a graduate degree or a series of (often unpaid) internships.

Those at the top have the connections and social capital to get those opportunities. Those in the middle and bottom don’t. The point is that no one makes it on his or her own. And those at the top get more help from their families than do those lower down on the ladder. Government should help to level the playing field.

Americans are coming to realize that their cherished narrative of social and economic mobility is a myth. Grand deceptions of this magnitude are hard to maintain for long — and the country has already been through a couple of decades of self-deception.

Without substantial policy changes, our self-image, and the image we project to the world, will diminish — and so will our economic standing and stability. Inequality of outcomes and inequality of opportunity reinforce each other — and contribute to economic weakness, as Alan B. Krueger, a Princeton economist and the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, has emphasized. We have an economic, and not only moral, interest in saving the American dream. …

I voted for Jill Stein, fuck you very much.

Updated below

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Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, photographed in Washington, D.C., in July

It wasn’t a difficult decision. It felt at least a bit liberating, in fact, to fill in with my black ballpoint pen the oval next to her name on my mail-in ballot, and putting my completed ballot in the U.S. Postal Service mailbox yesterday gave me the at-least-mild satisfaction of having an important task finished.

President Barack Obama is leading Repugnican Tea Party presidential candidate Mittens Romney by double digits in polling here in California. California and its 55 electoral votes, the nation’s biggest prize, are so not up for grabs that neither candidate is airing any TV commercials here. No mailers, either. Nothing that I have seen, in fact, except what’s on the Internet.

The New York Times’ prognosticator Nate Silver, as I type this sentence, puts Obama’s chances of re-election at just a little below 75 percent and Mittens’ chances of winning the White House at just a little above 25 percent.

Fact is, living in a solidly blue state under the undemocratic, winner-takes-all Electoral College system, my vote for president essentially doesn’t count. I could have voted for Mittens, for fuck’s sake, and the outcome in California wouldn’t have been altered one nano-iota. That Obama would win all of California’s 55 electoral votes on November 6, 2012, was a foregone conclusion long ago.

No, of course I don’t want Mormon multi-millionaire fascist Mittens to win, and of course I recognize that the winner of the election will be Obama or Mittens (and certainly not a third-party candidate), which is why this time around I gave Obama more than $100 in campaign contributions — much less than I gave him in 2008, but, according to an e-mail that the Obama campaign put out earlier this month, only about one in 75 Americans has given Obama one single penny, so hey, even the less than $200 that I’ve given him toward his re-election bid is pretty fucking good, comparatively.

But I almost didn’t vote for Obama in November 2008. When I went to my polling place on Election Day 2008, I had it down to Obama or to independent progressive candidate Ralph Nader, and even when I’d just received my ballot I still had to ponder which candidate to vote for, and at the last minute I went ahead and gave my vote to Mr. Hopey-Changey, knowing that he would carry California whether I voted for him or not, but hoping that he would at least try to deliver the change that he’d promised.

And yes, I also felt that I wanted to take the opportunity to vote for the first non-white president of the nation’s history. It gave me at least a little bit of an uplift to know that I was part of that historical event. (Of course, any Obama-related uplift was blunted by the blow of the passage of Proposition Hate here in California, which happened in large part thanks to the big money and the efforts of Mittens’ Mormon cult and Pretty Boy Paul Ryan’s Catholick church, which, much like the Taliban, seek to shove their theofascist, ignorant, hateful bullshit down the throats of all of us.)

Four years later, it is clear to me that Barack Obama had only said what he’d figured (correctly) would get him elected. Indeed, his take of the popular vote was bigger than either Bill Clinton or George W. Bush ever got.

I could post a litany of reasons why, in good conscience, I could not cast my vote for Barack Obama again, but here are just three of them:

• Obama for the most part just sat idly by while British Petroleum assured us that it had its crude-gushing underwater oil well perfectly well under control. Obama’s inaction was a clear signal to the planet-raping corporations: Do (or don’t do) whatever the fuck you want. The Democratic Party is addicted to your campaign contributions and therefore won’t lift a fucking finger to stop you from destroying the planet.
• Obama had promised before his election that if the right to collectively bargain ever were under threat anywhere in the nation, he’d don a pair of comfortable walking shoes and join the fight himself. Yet when workers in Wisconsin fought for months and months for the survival of their right to collectively bargain, Obama showed his face in Wisconsin not one fucking time. Wisconsinites were on their own, with only very-last-minute support from the national Democratic Party, which was way too little way too late, and resultantly, Repugnican Tea Party Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker survived the gubernatorial recall election against him in June.*
• The Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning-for-fuck’s-sake Obama loves his civilian-killing drones, which, if you are awake, alert and oriented, you should find spine-chilling. A recent study of drone strikes by Stanford Law School and New York University’s School of Law found that “from June 2004 through mid-September 2012, available data indicate that drone strikes killed 2,562 to 3,325 people in Pakistan, of whom 474 to 881 were civilians, including 176 children.” Um, yeah, “they” don’t hate us for “our freedom.” And what’s to stop drones from being used against American civilians here at home at some point in the future?

Even without those three things, this one thing is more than enough reason not to vote for Punker in Chief Barack Obama again: Obama’s best opportunity to push through a progressive agenda was in 2009 and 2010, when his party controlled not only the White House but also the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives.

Instead of even fucking trying to deliver upon his promises of hope and change for his base, however, Obama in 2009 and 2010 was too busy trying to sing “Kumbaya” with the Repugnican Tea Party traitors in Congress whose only mission was to make sure that the nation’s first non-white president failed. (They even openly had stated that this was their mission from Day One.)

You don’t negotiate with terrorists. You crush them. Which is what Obama should have done.

Obama’s role model, he repeatedly essentially has told us, was Ronald Fucking Reagan, who, in my book, ranks with Richard M. Nixon and George W. Bush as the worst three presidents of my lifetime (I was born in 1968).

Obama’s “signature” “achievement,” the so-called “Obamacare,” contains little to nothing that the wealth-care industry didn’t rubber stamp, and even while proclaiming his support of same-sex marriage, Obama still maintains that each state nonetheless should be allowed to decide whether or not same-sex couples’ constitutional guarantee of equality should be honored or denied.

All of this, yet Barack Obama is on our side?

After the 2008 election, Obama and his surrogates called us progressives — the Democratic Party’s (disappearing?) base — “sanctimonious” members of the “professional left.”

I, for one, don’t forget such slights — I helped put you where you are, and then you turn and shit and piss all over me? Really? — and the Obama administration’s incredibly stupid practice of base-bashing is a large reason why I voted for Jill Stein.

Again, of course I hope that Mittens Romney doesn’t win, but if he does, you can’t blame me.

Blame Barack Obama, who promised hope and change but who has delivered only sweet-sounding rhetoric and even base-bashing, and who has presided over the nation as a Ronald-Reagan-loving Repugnican Lite.

And blame the Obamabots — the blind, mindless, amoral Democratic Party hacks — who to this day have refused to hold the center-right Barack Obama accountable for anyfuckingthing only because he wears the brand-name label of “Democrat,” and who continue to actually buy the Democratic Party’s pandering bullshit that the Democratic Party of today actually gives a flying fuck about us, against the mountain of evidence to the contrary.

Update: I’d wanted to keep my bullet-pointed list of Obama’s fuck-ups to only three items, but Barack Obama has been such a fuck-up that I found it fairly impossible to list only three of his fuck-ups, so I ended up listing other fuck-ups of his elsewhere in my post, and I want to add a fourth bullet point, a point that I’m surprised that I forgot to include in my original post:

• Early on, Obama appointed Wall Street weasels like Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers as his economic advisers, and in 2008, Obama took more money from Wall Street weasels than even John McCainosaurus did — which is probably why Obama rejected the advice of progressive economists, like the Nobel-Prize-winning Paul Krugman, who warned that Obama’s “stimulus” wasn’t nearly enough to restore the nation’s economy. All of this while Obama claims to care sooooo much about the working class and the middle class. Again: Whose side, exactly, is Barack “Talk One Way, Walk Another” Obama on?

—

*A judge in Wisconsin last month struck down Walker’s union-killing legislation, which was a victory for labor, but a victory that neither Obama nor the Democratic Party had a hand in. And the state is appealing the judge’s ruling, so the fight isn’t quite over quite yet.

Can we abort the wedge issues already?

So if I understand Repugnican Tea Party U.S. Rep. Todd Akin, who is running for the U.S. Senate for Missouri, correctly, if a woman is properly reviled enough — which she should be if she has been the victim of a “legitimate rape” — she will have a revulsion-induced miscarriage should one of her “legitimate” rapist’s spermatazoa successfully fertilize one of her eggs, which very rarely happens in the case of “legitimate” rape anyway. Doctors say so, Akin apparently said. On television.

If revulsion-induced miscarriages were a medical reality, wouldn’t thousands of women have had miscarriages every time they saw and heard the likes of, say, George W. Bush or Sarah Palin or Prick Santorum — or, for that matter, Todd Akin — on television?

A little visit to Wikipedia shows that Akin is a 65-year-old white guy (yet another fucking baby boomer) who calls himself a Presbyterian, and his bio on Wikipedia mentions no medical training whatsoever.

Still, despite his possessing, presumably, no female reproductive anatomy himself, and possessing, apparently, no medical training whatsofuckingever, Akin very apparently feels comfortable pontificating upon women’s reproductive choices — even to the point where he’ll just pull shit out of his ass. 

Wow.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a staunch supporter of women’s reproductive rights. If I were a woman, I wouldn’t want some “Christo”fascist dictating to my uterus.

But abortion as a knee-jerk wedge issue is beyond tiresome.

Abortion was decided in 1973 with Roe vs. Wade, and the Repugnican Tea Party traitors (most of them “Christo”fascists) need to move the fuck on already and let the rest of us have the freedoms and liberties that are guaranteed to us.

But I’m not sure who is worse: the likes of Todd Akin talking out of his toxically patriarchal, misogynist, “Christo”fascist ass or the likes of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chair of the Democratic Party, wasting no time at all in firing off yet another “outrage” fundraising e-mail yesterday. Wasserman Schultz’s e-mail, titled “Legitimate rape,” invites you to “Take a stand for women now.”

When you click on that option, you are then immediately taken to a webpage that asks for your name, e-mail address and ZIP Code. When you enter that information by clicking on a box labeled “TAKE A STAND,” you then immediately are taken not to a webpage on, oh, say, women’s reproductive rights, but  to a fucking Obama Victory Fund 2012 fundraising webpage.

The only, or at least the best, way to “stand up for women,” you see, is to give money to Barack Obama’s re-election campaign.

Every time some Repugnican Tea Party dipshit says something stupid and/or fascistic, which is often, the Dems quite predictably fire off yet another of their “OUTRAGE!” fundraising e-mails. What good is a scandal or pseudo-scandal if you can’t profit from it?

Aren’t even the Democratic Party hacks sick and fucking tired of this predictable, craven bullshit?

Abortion is an important issue, but how about global warming and other environmental destruction (such as the British Petroleum oil spill in which the corporate-ass-kissing Barack Obama was less than fucking worthless)? How about reining in the bloated-beyond-belief military-corporate-industrial complex, which wastes trillions of our tax dollars while we are told that we are parasites and that thus the social safety net (what little of it remains, that is) must be annihilated? How about the growing, yawning gap between the rich and the poor? How about our young people, whose future is incredibly fucking bleak? How about preserving the environment for them, and also for them ending perpetual bogus warfare and other bogus military spending for the greedy, treasonous motherfuckers’ war-profiteering, and how about preserving Social Security and Medicare for them and for us members of Generation X and for future generations instead of blatantly stealing the dollars of those of us in Generation X and Generation Y who have been paying into Social Security and Medicare for decades or for years by denying us what we already have fucking paid for?

No, the partisan duopoly doesn’t want to talk about those issues because those are our most pressing issues.

They want to talk about abortion. Ad nauseam.

Let’s fucking face it already: Neither of the two major political parties is willing or able to tackle our most pressing problems. Whatever the two parties might have been in the past, all that they are now is fundraising machines — and they use visceral social issues and fear of the other party to (try to) get us to give them our money and our votes.

And we allow this state of affairs in a so-called “democracy.”

It seems to me that we have the “democracy” that we deserve.

—

*Actually, a study in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology concluded that:

Rape-related pregnancy occurs with significant frequency. It is a cause of many unwanted pregnancies and is closely linked with family and domestic violence. As we address the epidemic of unintended pregnancies in the United States, greater attention and effort should be aimed at preventing and identifying unwanted pregnancies that result from sexual victimization.

Granted, this study was published in 1996, but I can’t see that much, if anything, has changed since then. (Human ova are still fertilized in the same way, to my knowledge…)

Prick Insantorum: Global warming is ‘political science’

Reuters photo

No, it would take courage to stand up to the fossil fuels industry, not to kowtow to it for personal and political gain, and to fight for Americans would be to fight for what’s in our best interests, and the continued long-term degradation of the planet for the short-term profiteering of the filthy rich few is not in our best interests. It’s what you call treason.

Repugnican Tea Party presidential frontrunner Prick Santorum’s fuck-the-planet insanity rolls on, belching greenhouse gases into the atmosphere as it chugs.

In the swing state of Ohio today, he pronounced that as president the continued support for the coal industry and approval of the Keystone Pipeline would be part of his “responsible environmental stewardship,” reports The Los Angeles Times.

“Responsible environmental stewardship.”

Fuck. That’s just like calling the promotion of burgers, fries and milkshakes “responsible health promotion.”

President Barack Obama — who, recall, sat on his hands while British Petroleum filled the Gulf of Mexico with crude for weeks but claimed that it had everything under control — has “radical environmental policies,” Santorum declared today.

Radical, indeed. If Barack Obama (who shot down the Keystone Pipeline, at least for now [it is presidential election season, after all], but who does not oppose the obviously environmentally disastrous practice of fracking) is a “radical” Earth-server, what could we expect to see from President Santorum once a deep-sea oil well blows?

The L.A. Times reports that Santorum said to a crowd in a “once-booming steel town” in Ohio today: “Ladies and gentlemen, we need someone who understands, who comes from the coal fields, who comes from the steel mills, who understands what ordinary working people in American need to provide for themselves and their families.”

No one on the left opposes “ordinary working people in America” being able to “provide for themselves and their families” — the vast majority of us are “ordinary working people,” too — but continuing to burn coal and other fossil fuels — aside from the fact that the majority of the profits from burning fossil fuels go to the plutocrats who comprise the Repugnican Tea Party and with whom the members of the Repugnican Tea Party love to cuddle, not to “ordinary working people” — might be good for the relatively short-term employment of a minority of Americans, but it’s bad fucking news for the long-term survival of all Americans and all human beings.

Leadership is about responsibility, ab0ut encouraging your flock to do the right thing, not the easiest thing for right now. Wisdom and wise leadership are about viewing the long term, not the short term at the expense of the long term.

Prick Santorum’s policy of fucking over current and future generations for continued environmentally disastrous profiteering demonstrates that he not only isn’t fit to sit inside the Oval Office, but that he is no Christian. (You know, I just can’t see Jesus Christ fucking over others for his own selfish, personal, political and monetary gain.)

And willfully screwing over current and future generations for a profit (or for political or other personal gain) isn’t just bad policy. In my book, it’s treason — it’s putting one’s own selfish interests above the best interests of the masses.

It’s predictable that over the coming weeks Prick Santorum’s rhetoric is only going to become even more extreme. He’s a huge fucking hypocrite* as well as possibly the most stupid man who walks the planet. And he is, in my book — and I don’t throw this label around lightly — evil.

Santorum also proclaimed today, since he wants the votes of Ohioans, because his getting the presidency is far more important than is anything else, even the continued ability of the planet to sustain human life itself: “I refer to global warming as not climate science, but political science.”

Really? Prick Santorum is a scientist? He is qualified to speak on the topic of climatology?

No, Prick Santorum is not a scientist, but is a politician who gladly will sell out us Americans in order to satiate his lust for the most politically powerful position on the planet. If he were backed by the fast food industry instead of by the fossil fuels industry, he would declare that studies that show the harmful effects of junk food are just “junk science.” Just “political science.” Ha ha!

Because Prick Santorum cares only about Prick Santorum. He doesn’t give a flying fuck about you or your children or your children’s children.

—

*For instance, in Prick Insantorum’s worldview, it’s “playing politics” for us progressives to fight for our Americans’ right to use birth control, but it’s not “playing politics” for him and his fellow “Christo”fascists to fight to replace the U.S. Constitution with the decrees of the Vatican, such as its Dark-Ages opposition to birth control. (Because the “Christo”fascists never engage in the ugly practice of politics!)

And it’s “playing politics” for us progressives to fight for environmental preservation, but it’s not “playing politics” to take money from the fossil fuels industry in exchange for making such pronouncements as that global warming is “political science.”

Is Prick Santorum the biggest dipshit on the planet?

AFP photo

“Christo”fascist Prick Santorum, trying to distance himself from his strong insinuation of yesterday that President Barack Obama isn’t a Christian and he is, today essentially stated that he believes that humankind should do as it pleases to planet Earth. (It’s in the Bible, after all!) Another great “save” there, prick!

Repugnican Tea Party presidential wannabe Prick Santorum, embattled because of his strong insinuation of yesterday that President Barack Obama isn’t a Christian, today “clarified” that he believes that Obama is a Christian, but that it’s Obama’s “worldview” that he takes issue with. The Associated Press reports that Santorum said of Obama today:

“I am talking about his worldview, and the way he approaches problems in this country. I think they’re different than how most people do in America.” …

The former Pennsylvania senator said Obama’s environmental policies promote ideas of “radical environmentalists,” who, Santorum argues, oppose greater use of the country’s natural resources because they believe “man is here to serve the Earth.” He said that was the reference he was making [yesterday] in his Ohio campaign appearance when he denounced a “phony theology.”

“I think that is a phony ideal. I don’t believe that is what we’re here to do,” Santorum said. “We’re not here to serve the Earth. The Earth is not the objective. Man is the objective.” …

Um, when did Barack Obama ever state that we are “here to serve the Earth”?

Um, when did even any “radical environmentalist” state that we are “here to serve the Earth”?

Is Prick Santorum talking about the “Christo”fascist idea of what Paganism is? Is he, in code, calling Obama an Earth-serving Pagan? Is he calling “radical environmentalists” and Obama supporters Pagans? (Not that there is anything wrong with being a Pagan — the majority of them are a lot more fun to be around than are those evil pricks like Santorum who call themselves “Christians.”)

I ask these questions because environmentalism isn’t about “serving” the Earth. It’s about saving it. Not “serving” it, but conserving, preserving it.

Environmentalism isn’t about whether we should put humankind or the planet above one or the other. That’s a false choice fabricated by the science- and planet-hating wingnuts. Environmentalism is about how humankind and the planet (and the rest of the planet’s lifeforms) are so intertwined.

But, if we have to put one above the other, let’s fucking face it: We humankind need the planet, but the planet sure the fuck doesn’t need us. It can do just fine without us, as it did for the billions of years before we human beings arrived on the scene, and if we carry out the insane irresponsibility of Prick Santorum and his ilk far enough, that’s exactly what will happen: The planet will be free of human beings once again, because we human beings will have wiped ourselves out.

The Bible that Santorum — who, while we’re on the topic of serving, clearly serves the Vatican — thumps indeed puts mankind above the Earth and its natural resources, including, of course, all other of its lifeforms. But that Bible was written centuries and centuries ago, and its ignorant authors knew nothing about science. They knew only superstition. Also at that time, the planet’s human population was small enough that indeed it seemed to the human beings of that time that the Earth could take all of the abuse that mankind could dish out.

But now we’re at more than 7 billion human beings, and the planet is showing obvious signs that it can’t take more abuse. The melting North Pole alone demonstrates that fact, and as I’ve found myself having to pop antihistamines significantly early this year because of all of the trees that already are blossoming in Sacramento even though the start of spring is more than a month away, global warming appears to be quite real to me.

Yes, I suppose that it is about “worldview.”

And Prick Santorum’s worldview — in which mankind is the master of the planet and therefore may do to the planet and its resources whatsoever he pleases — is defunct. Worse, it’s a recipe for the extinction of the human race (not to mention the other species that humankind is wiping out right now).

I suppose that Prick Santorum and his “Christo”fascist ilk want their “Armageddon,” and therefore they’ll do everything in their power to bring it about. (“Armageddon” is not pre-ordained, of course, and any such mass extinction of mankind most likely would be caused by mankind’s own stupid actions, not by some divine intervention.)

Those of us who are sane and who therefore are not bound to the scribblings made by ignorant men centuries and centuries ago, but who value facts and science and logic and reason over ignorance and fear and superstition, indeed have a different worldview than does the Neanderthal Prick Santorum (wait — that’s probably an uncalled-for slam against the Neanderthals).

And those of us who do not share Prick Santorum’s Bible-and-Vatican-based worldview do not wish to go down the dark path that he would drag us, kicking and screaming. As the planet gets hotter and hotter, it would be, indeed, an awful lot like hell on Earth.

Using our troops as human shields doesn’t work anymore

George W. Bush perfected the tactic of turning our troops into human shields for his political gain.

Any criticism of his illegal, immoral, unjust and unprovoked Vietraq War, Bush or one of his henchpeople tried (with at least some success) to recast as an assault on our troops.

Let’s talk about our troops.

The members of the party that loves to send our troops to their maimings and their deaths for the benefit of war profiteers and not out of actual national defense or national security do not wuv our troops.

Further, this patriarchal, macho, misogynist hero-worship bullshit has to stop. Our troops indeed are important for actual national defense, the need for which is rare these days, with most military operations nowadays being about perpetuating the bloated military-industrial complex. But it’s not just our members of the military, law enforcement officers and firefighters who are critical to our nation’s well-being and security. How about teachers? Our nurses? Last but certainly not least, our mothers? (And our scientists and our artists and…)

Repugnican Tea Party Speaker of the House John “Cry Me a River” Boehner proclaims that he’s confident that those Democrats who believe it is important to fund our troops and make real spending cuts will prevail upon Senator Reid and our commander in chief to keep the government from shutting down.”

It’s a thinly veiled threat: If the Democrats don’t give the Repugnican Tea Party traitors what they are demanding, the federal government will be shut down, our troops won’t be funded — and this will put all of us at imminent risk. And it will be the Democrats’ fault.

But what the Repugnican Tea Party traitors are demanding is no meaningful cuts to the bloated budget of the bloated military-industrial complex but the evisceration of the Environmental Protection Agency and the end of federal funding of Planned Parenthood.

Wow. Protecting our environment is part of our national security — as we will see, graphically, as climate change increases over the coming years — but the Repugnican Tea Party traitors want to put corporate profits way ahead of our national security.

And Planned Parenthood is part of our national security as well. The Repugnican Tea Party traitors have been telling us for some months now that we just can’t afford human beings (and we can’t, not when the rich and the super-rich keep getting their tax cuts, when corporations like General Electric pay no fucking taxes, and when all of our tax dollars go to the [in]human greed of the military-industrial complex instead of to human needs).

Yet birth control (yes, including abortion, elective and medically necessary), aside from being great for the planet because of reduced consumption of natural resources and thus reduced pollution due to lower birth rates, is a great fucking solution toward keeping the nation’s population at a sustainable level.

With increasing population and increasing poverty, which is the result of increasing population, comes increasing violence. Therefore, keeping both the population and poverty down keeps down violence, which is part of what you call national security.

But apparently, the Repugnican Tea Party traitors want there to be even more miserable Americans in poverty.

The Repugnican Tea Party traitors, of course, don’t give a flying fuck about national security. They care about treasonously continuing to feed at the trough of the U.S. Treasury via the Pentagon. It’s their legalized thievery from the American people. And perpetual warfare ensures that, like Big Brother in 1984, we have a perpetual supply of fake enemies (like Saddam Hussein, who posed no threat to the U.S.) or true enemies that we created through our own military actions (like Osama bin Laden). It’s a great gig if you can get it — using warfare to create more enemies, which you then use to justify even more warfare, which creates even more enemies, which…

“For them [the Repugnican Tea Party traitors] to want to disguise their bad [federal budget] proposal by hiding behind our troops is really a disservice to our troops,” said she-devil to the right wing U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California.

Yes, it is, but keeping them in perpetual warfare in the Middle East for the benefit only of the war profiteers is a disservice to them, too. The way to demonstrate that you truly care about our troops is to never put them in harm’s way unless it’s absolutely necessary to do so. And in those rare times, you do everything in your power to keep them safe.

Thankfully, President Barack Obama is threatening to veto the Repugnican Tea Party’s budget plan that attempts to hold all of us hostage by using our troops as political human shields while achieving the wholly-budget-unrelated right-wing wet dreams of destroying Planned Parenthood and the EPA.

Obama wants to be re-elected, after all, and the stupid white men’s assault upon The People is Wisconsin isn’t working out too well for them right about now (so it’s rather stunning that Repugnican Tea Party U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin now is talking about destroying Medicare and giving the rich and the super-rich even more tax cuts as being fundamental to our “prosperity”). Obama surely doesn’t want to go the way of Wisconsin Supreme Court “Justice” David Prosser or the way that Wisconsin Gov. Scott “Dead Man” Walker is going to go as soon as his recall can begin.

It’s a bad-ass battle right now between the stupid white man, who has always run the show — and who is destroying the very planet (the North Pole is melting, for fuck’s sake) — and the rest of us, the majority of us who favor the fate of the planet over the fate of the stupid white man, hands down.

We’ve already won the battle of global public opinion, but we still have an awful lot of work to do. There are legions of stupid white men and their sympathizers who still need to be neutralized — or, if necessary, destroyed — for the sake of the very planet and of humankind’s continued existence.



To hell in a handbasket — on crack



This the is “vision” that the Repugnican Tea Party has for the United States of America.

The members of the Repugnican Tea Party in the U.S. House of Representatives promised to make jobs and the economy their No. 1 issue. But let’s tick off what they’ve actually “accomplished” thus far:

• They read the U.S. Constitution to us aloud — minus those unpleasant portions about slavery, of course.
• They have attacked Planned Parenthood and women’s rights.
• They have attacked the Environmental Protection Agency.
• They are engaged in a nationwide union-busting campaign that benefits only their corporate and plutocratic benefactors pimps.
• They have attacked our public servants, even our public-school teachers.
• They have attacked National Public Radio, and got the scalp of NPR’s president and CEO.
• Tomorrow they are to began McCarthyesque hearings on what a danger to the nation Muslim Americans are.

In short, the Repugnicans in the House have done nothing substantial toward bringing about national economic recovery.

They know that this is what they should be addressing, however, because they frequently are using the economy as their bullshit excuse to fulfill their Wingnut Wish List.

We can’t afford NPR, they claim, when in fact, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (NPR’s parent) — and Planned Parenthood — get a fucking pittance from the federal government compared to the bloated military-industrial complex, which is draining our nation of its lifeblood, a huge threat to the continued existence of our nation. (Many other empires collapsed due to military overextension and concomitant domestic rot.) Our public servants, too, get a negligible portion of the federal budget, and they’re worth every penny of their underpaid salaries.

The treasonous Repugnican Tea Party House members’ intent in these aforementioned instances isn’t to save us money — it’s to censor/silence NPR (and the Public Broadcasting System), to deny women their right to self-determination of their own fucking uteri, and to destroy every last governmental hurdle to complete corporate control of the nation.

It’s about the wingnuts in the U.S. House of Representatives throwing huge chunks of red meat to their base of plutocrats and “Christo”fascists. (The upcoming House hearings on “the Muslim problem” — remember Adolf Hitler’s “Jewish problem”? — especially are an early Christmas gift to the “Christo”fascists.)

If the Repugnican Tea Party members of the House were serious about tackling the nation’s federal budget deficit that “President” George W. Bush created by giving tax breaks to the rich and the super-rich while wasting hundreds of billions of our tax dollars in bogus warfare, they would make the rich and the super-rich pay their fair share of taxes and they would seriously, meaningfully cut the bloated budget of the military-industrial complex.

Instead, the Repugnican Tea Party is on a campaign to make the United States of America more and more like a third-world nation:

• Get rid of the Environmental Protection Agency — so that climate change accelerates, making the entire planet resemble the planet in the movies “The Road” or “WALL-E” or “Idiocracy.”
• Get rid of Planned Parenthood and outlaw abortion — so that we have many more mouths that we can’t feed and many more consumers of the planet’s limited resources, accelerating climate change and other environmental catastrophes.
• Privatize all of the public schools so that only the children of the rich and super-rich can get a decent education, and institute only right-wing and pro-corporate curricula in what remains of the crumbling, old public school system.
• Destroy all of the labor unions so that the corporations have no barriers in their mistreatment and exploitation of their wage slaves.
• Get rid of NPR and PBS — so that the only source Americans have of “news” and “information” is Faux “News” and the other right-wing, pro-corporate media.
• Continue to ignore homelessness and continue to build gated communities, in which the rich and the super-rich live, protected by their private security thugs, while everyone else lives in crime-infested squalor.
• Attack Muslims, literally and figuratively — so that we have perpetual enemies/“enemies” and thus perpetual warfare, a la George Orwell’s 1984.

This is some serious shit. Life as we know it — indeed, the very ability of the planet to sustain human life itself — is at stake if we, the people, don’t fight back against the traitors who spend every waking hour calculating how they can destroy us for their own selfish benefit.

We, the people, cannot depend upon the members of what excellent writer Chris Hedges calls the “liberal class” in his book  Death of the Liberal Class.

Members of the so-called liberal class* include such hypocritical cowards as the supposedly pro-labor Barack Obama, who has remained mostly silent while tens of thousands of pro-labor Wisconsinites are in their third week of protests to keep the middle class and the working class in Wisconsin alive, and Vivian Schiller, the CEO and president of NPR who, instead of holding her ground against the right-wing assault on NPR, cut and run in order to appease the right-wing fascists who are out to destroy the nation.

We’re on our own.

No one is going to save us from the fascistic onslaught that we are witnessing now — except ourselves.

—

*I have a problem with the term “liberal class,” since these cowardly, self-serving hypocrites aren’t actually liberal. They pay lip service to liberal ideals, but their actions and their inaction only help the right wing. They are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Win some, lose some

Posted November 2, 2010, 10:50 p.m.

Associated Press photo

You say Boehner, I say blogging material: Anyway, here Repugnican U.S. Rep. John Boehner’s steel-cold blue eyes well up with tears as he ponders how he’ll abuse his new-found power to further help the filthy rich at the expense of the dipshits who actually believe that the Repugnicans actually care about them (and also at the expense of the rest of us).

Tonight’s election results turned out to be what I’d expected: A win for Democratic Governor-Elect Jerry Brown and for Democratic U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer here in my home state of California, a ref — er, a repudiation of Repugnican millionaires and billionaires who want to buy office, at least here on the Left Coast.

I had expected Proposition 19, which would have legalized the use of marijuana here in California, to fail, as polls had predicted that it would. (Marijuana, like same-sex marriage, will be legal in all 50 states one day; we just have to wait for a lot of old fucks to kick off and take their stodgy, outdated beliefs with them to their graves.)

I had expected Proposition 23, Big Oil’s attempt to hamstring the fight against climate change in California, to fail, and it did, enabling California to remain at the forefront of combatting climate change.

And last but not least, I had expected the Democrats to lose some seats in the U.S. Senate but to retain their majority, and I had expected the Democrats to lose control of the U.S. House of Representatives.

The upshot of the Repugnicans winning control of the House is that (1) I’ll have plenty of blogging material for the next two years, as Repugnican Ohio Rep. John Boehner, to me, with those icy cold blue eyes of his (I have blue eyes also, but mine are warm blue eyes, thank you very much), is Evil Incarnate, and (2) the Repugnicans in the House certainly won’t be able to fix the nation’s economy, any more than the same surgeon who botched your operation is the one to fix the damage that he created, and therefore I expect that in 2012 the Democrats will regain the House after the fickle voters swing back to the Dems, and that the Dems will keep the White House, as well as make up for at least some of today’s losses in the Senate. 

In politics, you rarely get everything you want.

Today, in politics we got most of what I wanted — and, I daresay, now the Democrats will fare better in 2012 than they would have had they retained control of the House of Representatives today.

Wingnuts: Pollution is FUNNY!

At least ever since George W. Bush stole office in late 2000, right-wing fucktardation increasingly has come as less and less of a surprise to me, but still I am able to be surprised occasionally by the abject retards on the right.

Reportedly, the  Carson-Gore Academy of Environmental Sciences in Los Angeles, named after environmentalists Rachel Carson and Al Gore and set to open its doors next week, was built over several industrial storage tanks containing toxins that might pose a danger to the school. A nearby gas station also might pose environmental risks to the school.

The reaction of the right to this news?

Celebration.

“As construction crews worked through the weekend to replace the polluted soil [which scientists had said should make the school safe], the irony of [Al] Gore’s name sitting atop a deemed toxic site has proved irresistible to the right,” reports Politico, quoting one wingnut as having crowed, “You really can’t make this stuff up. As such, it’s quite fitting a school be named after these two radical environmentalists that could end up harming the very students that attend it.”

So the same bunch of assbites who support polluting corporations — it’s always been corporate profits over people and profits over the environment to the wingnuts — are relishing the fact that a school has been built over and near possibly harmful corporate waste because this will allow them to continue to poke fun at Al Gore.

Ha ha ha ha ha!

The punch line of this “joke” is that the right wing wants to deliver to us is a world that looks like something out of the uber-bleak film “The Road.” Or “WALL-E,” maybe.

But they’re not traitors or anything for wishing our continued environmental degradation so that they can, in their sick and twisted minds, score some political Brownie points.

Really — the fact that it’s hard to find an environmentally safe place on which to build a school is an occasion for laughter. And leading the chorus of laughter are those who support corporate pollution in the first place.

I fear not that our empire is dying, but that it’s already dead and rotting.