Millions murdered Trayvon Martin

These editorial cartoons pretty much sum it up, methinks.

I haven’t written much, if anything, about the Trayvon Martin case, since I usually don’t blog about incidents of shootings, stabbings, rapes, etc. unless they have a wider significance.

But the Trayvon Martin case, of course, does have a wider significance.

I don’t know which individual on that fateful night of February 26, 2012, in a gated community in Sanford, Florida, physically posed the larger threat to the other, the 17-year-old Martin, who was black, or the then-28-year-old half-Latino-and-half-white George Zimmerman. (Yes, in this case, the race of the individuals involved has mattered.)

But the indisputable facts are that Zimmerman had a gun and Martin did not, and that Zimmerman shot Martin dead.

The indisputable fact is that Zimmerman was playing cop in a gated community (those two words, “gated community,” speak volumes as to the sociological context of Martin’s death*), and that such vigilantism should be illegal in all 50 states.

There is a reason that actual cops, in order to become actual cops, in most instances have to demonstrate a minimum amount of intelligence and a minimum amount of psychological health: Because you don’t want morons and/or those who have head issues walking around communities with guns, playing cops.

And I can’t see that Zimmerman wasn’t racially profiling Martin: What’s a young black man doing in this gated community? (Let’s fucking face it: The No. 1 function of a gated community is to keep certain “undesirables,” who more often than not have darker skin, out and away from the wealthier and usually lighter-skinned denizens of the gated community.)

Oh, wasn’t that Zimmerman’s mindset? Would Zimmerman have pursued, with his loaded pistol, a young white man who was dressed as a preppy?

And once you have made yourself into a pseudo-cop, don’t you want to “have to” play the role at some point? So wouldn’t you be looking for such an opportunity?

Zimmerman was just acquitted in Martin’s shooting death, but, it seems to me, Zimmerman was guilty at least of manslaughter. In a saner and more just state, such as my state of California, Zimmerman most likely would have been found guilty of at least manslaughter, I surmise. However, the backasswards state of Florida (along with other backasswards states) allows yahoos to walk the streets with guns, and to use those guns to “stand their ground.”

That’s Wild-West bullshit.

Martin wasn’t pursuing Zimmerman on that night. Zimmerman, playing cop, was pursuing Martin. Zimmerman was acting offensively, not defensively. He wasn’t “standing his ground” against an unprovoked attack on his person. No, he was playing cop.**

The state of Florida, along with George Zimmerman, killed Trayvon Martin, along with the gun-nut lobby and, of course, the institutional racism that of course still persists and will persist in the United States of America for some time to come. Martin’s murderers number in the millions.

These “stand your ground” laws need to go, or at least need to be modified to make clear that you aren’t “standing your ground” if you are the fucking aggressor — especially if you are the armed aggressor — against an unarmed (or hell, even armed) individual who has made no threatening advance toward you in public. (“In public” is key there; no, I do not assert that an individual does not have the right to defend his or her own home against an actual intruder, for instance, and for actual self-defense I do support the Second Amendment.)

For the reasons that I have just laid out, I support the NAACP’s and other black community leaders’ push to have Attorney General Eric Holder’s Department of Justice file federal civil-rights charges against Zimmerman, even though such an action probably would touch off a race-based firestorm, given that the U.S. president and the U.S. attorney general are black.

(President Barack Obama is conflict-adverse, however, perhaps especially when it comes to issues of race — recall that he quickly and summarily threw the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Van Jones and Shirley Sherrod, all of whom are black, under the bus when they came under attack from the white-supremacist right wing — so I certainly don’t expect the Justice Department to file federal civil-rights charges against Zimmerman, regardless of how appropriate doing so might be.)

However, the seeking of justice for the very apparent race-based murder of Trayvon Martin needs to go waaay beyond George Zimmerman. It needs to encompass the entire state of Florida and every other state with the so-called “stand your ground” laws, which are a white supremacist’s or other racist’s wet dream: the opportunity to commit race-based murders while claiming self-defense.

If you believe that the U.S. Department of Justice should file civil-rights charges in the Trayvon Martin case, you can sign this petition and/or this petition. I have signed both of them.

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*On that note, I very much look forward to the upcoming sci-fi film “Elysium,” starring Matt Damon and Jodie Foster and written and directed by “District 9” creator Neill Blomkamp, whose 2009 “District 9” apparently was a statement on the white-on-black racism in South Africa.

From the previews, “Elysium” appears to be a bold statement on the direction in which the United States of America — as well as other nations, too, of course — with their haves and their have-nots, are going.

**A friend of Trayvon Martin, Rachel Jeantel, infamously testified that while she was talking to Martin on his cell phone shortly before he was killed, Martin reported that he was being followed by a “creepy-ass cracker.”

While I don’t know that I’d call George Zimmerman a “cracker,” as he looks Latino to me, and technically isn’t a “cracker,” I imagine that on the night of February 26, 2012, he indeed looked “creepy-ass,” pursuing his victim with a loaded pistol while playing cop. He probably looked crazed, because he apparently was.

And Rachel Jeantel, was treated horribly in the courtroom, was treated as though her English was not clear when it was quite clear if you actually just listened to the words that came from her mouth. Her mistreatment smacked of racism, and that the court allowed this mistreatment of her is yet another indication that there is a huge fucking problem in the state of Florida — and so that, again, it would be quite appropriate for the U.S. Justice Department to act on this.

TIME’s lazy, unimaginative choice

TIME magazine’s having made Barack Obama its “Person of the Year” yet again (it first gave Obama that designation for 2008) reminds me of the ludicrously premature awarding of the Nobel Peace Price to President Hopey-Changey-Droney for 2009.

Not that TIME routinely is exactly creative or visionary in its naming of its annual “Person of the Year.” Winning a U.S. presidential election often if not usually is enough of an accomplishment/“accomplishment” for an individual to win the designation. Jimmy Carter won the designation in 1976 and Ronald Reagan did in 1980. Bill Clinton won it in 1992 and even George W. Bush won it in 2000 and in 2004 — and then, as I noted, Obama won it in 2008 and then again this year.

The Nobel Peace Prize selectors are a lot more creative — the only two U.S. presidents to win the prize during my lifetime (I was born in 1968) were Jimmy Carter in 2002 and, as I noted, Obama in 2009. (Well, Al Gore, who actually won the presidency in 2000, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, but he wasn’t coronated as president by the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court.)

I fail to see why, other than TIME’s lack of vision or creativity or imagination, Obama was named the magazine’s “Person of the Year” again this year.

I mean, TIME’s selection comes right as Obama apparently just handed over U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice’s scalp* to the KKK, headed by Grand Dragon John “Sore Loserman” McCain, so that the much more acceptable old white guy (John Kerry) can be made U.S. secretary of state instead, and as Obama apparently is poised to sell us out to the Repugnican Tea Party fascists on Social Security, and Goddess knows what other historic Democratic achievements the center-right DINO Obama will dismantle during his second term. (Surely Obama will be a progressive president in his second term, the Obamabots theorized. The gloves will be off! Yeah, right. I’m so glad that I voted for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein on November 6.)

TIME’s 2008 designation of Obama as its “Person of the Year” I can accept. He not only beat Billary Clinton in the protracted Democratic presidential primary season, which was a political feat, but his election as the nation’s first non-white president was at least a milestone if not technically a great accomplishment.

But TIME’s 2012 designation of Obama is just fucking lazy.

True, Obama, given his dismal first term, is damned fucking lucky to have been re-elected. He promised “hope” and “change” but delivered more of the same. Instead of pushing through a progressive agenda when both houses of Congress were in his party’s control in 2009 and 2010, he squandered his once-in-a-lifetime political capital by trying to sing “Kumbaya” with the Repugnican Tea Party traitors — and thus his party lost the House to the “tea party” traitors in 2010.

Obama won re-election last month only because the Repugnican Tea Party dipshits incredibly stupidly nominated one of the most unlikeable people on the planet as their presidential candidate for 2012.

Multi-millionaire Mormon Mittens Romney is so freakishly unrelatable that even many if not most Repugnican Tea Party traitors had to hold their noses while they cast their votes for him (better the despicable white guy than the black guy again), so of course Mittens lost the so-called “swing vote.”

Obama didn’t win re-election because he’s so great, but because his opponent was so unbelievably bad, replete with telling his Richie-Rich donors on hidden camera in May that he already had written off 47 percent of the American people as being lost causes.

Fuck, make David Corn of Mother Jones magazine, who broke the “47 percent” story in September, the “Person of the Year.” He did more to win Obama re-election than Obama did.

Even TIME magazine’s editor seems to credit changing U.S. demographics to Obama’s re-election more than to Obama himself. Reports Reuters:

[TIME magazine] has tapped U.S. President Barack Obama for its Person of the Year for the second time, citing his historic re-election last month as symbolic of the nation’s shifting demographics and the rise of younger, more diverse Americans.

In announcing its annual selection [today], the magazine called Obama the “Architect of the New America.”

“He’s basically the beneficiary and the author of a kind new America — a new demographic, a new cultural America that he is now the symbol of,” TIME editor Rick Stengel said of Obama, who was also selected for the honor in 2008 when he became the nation’s first black president. …

Obama is the beneficiary of demographic changes and the resultant national cultural changes, to be sure — as well as he was the beneficiary of what Howard Dean built in his failed 2004 Democratic presidential bid (indeed, in 2008 Obama rode Dean’s wave right on into the White House) — but how, exactly, is Obama the “author” or the “architect” of these changes?

Um, aren’t national demographic changes a lot bigger than just one individual?

Barack Obama could fart or sneeze and it widely would be called a great fucking accomplishment.

Only in a dying empire, it seems to me, could this be the case.

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*If you thought that Obama actually was going to defend a person of color from the lynch mob to the death, don’t feel too badly. I also actually thought that maybe this time Obama wouldn’t throw a person of color who is under attack by the white supremacists under the bus, but, of course, just as he did with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Van Jones and Shirley Sherrod, he apparently tossed Susan Rice right under those big wheels.

Because he’s a man of character and courage, you see.

Let’s make him the “Person of the Year” every year!

Desperate wingnuts dust off Obama video to engage in race baiting

It’s always entertaining when the Repugnican Tea Party traitors — whose all-white-or-almost-all-white gatherings, including, of course, the Repugnican Tea Party National Conventions, resemble KKK rallies — accuse blacks of being racist.

In apparent response to Mittens Romney’s hidden-camera remark in May that he has written off 47 percent of Americans, the wingnuts have dragged out a 2007 video that “proves” that President Barack Obama is “racist.”

But there is no fucking comparison between the two videos.

Where to begin?

Then-U.S. Sen. Obama knew that he was being video-recorded in June 2007. Mittens had no fucking idea that he was being video-recorded just a few months ago. So this wasn’t Obama speaking to a cabal of his supporters in, to his knowledge, secret. That was the case, however, with Mittens. Context is everyfuckingthing.

Also, Mittens’ statements in May are a lot more recent, of course, and thus a lot more pertinent to the presidential campaign of today.

And really, we’re dredging up the Rev. Jeremiah Wright again?

Really?

This is all that the wingnuts have? A repeat of their pathetic 2008 presidential campaign? Then they’ve lost already. (Well, they have lost already, but just sayin’…)

I agree with most of what I’ve read about what the Rev. Jeremiah Wright reportedly has said publicly — most of his “controversial” statements strike me as “no-fucking-duh!” statements — and, far from having a problem with Wright, I have lambasted Obama for having thrown Wright under the bus, for having distanced himself from Wright because of the white supremacists and their anti-black race-baiting.

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, to the white supremacists who comprise the Repugnican Tea Party, represents the bogeyman that is the Angry! Black! Man!, you see, and the KKK’ers gather ’round enthusiastically to lynch (politically speaking [these days]) this bogeyman.

It’s difficult to label Barack Obama an Angry! Black! Man!, since the cool, calm and collected Obama either just never has been an Angry! Black! Man! or has been very, very disciplined throughout his public/political career to keep any inner Angry! Black! Man! tightly under wraps, apparently having considered it politically fatal to do otherwise.

I mean, fuck — there is a reason that Barack Obama and neither Jesse Jackson nor Al Sharpton became president, isn’t there?

You’re not allowed to be angry in the deeply dysfunctional United States of America, no matter how deeply you have been wronged. Anger is a normal human reaction to significant to severe injustice, but in the U.S., especially among the wingnuts, displaying anger is considered akin to being mentally ill, or at least emotionally unstable, especially if the angry person is a member of an historically oppressed minority group. (Right-wing white men get away with displaying anger a lot more than do the rest of us, don’t they?)

I’d love to watch Barack Obama just fucking go off in public just once, but we very most likely will never see that.

The white-supremacist wingnuts’ game, though, is pretty fucking transparent: Since Obama doesn’t play the role of the Angry! Black! Man!, let’s try to make him “guilty” by association! That Rev. Jeremiah Wright is an Angry! Black! Man! — and Obama once sang his praises! Therefore, Obama is a closet Angry! Black! Man!

Also, Obama pointed out — correctly — in the “damning” 2007 video that the wingnuts have dredged up as some sort of proof of something, that the victims of Hurricane Katrina have been neglected, before and after the hurricane hit Lousiana in August 2005, primarily because most of Katrina’s victims are/were black.

Um, that’s just a fucking fact. The fact is that the victims of Hurricane Katrina were considered expendable. The vast majority of Katrina’s victims were poor black people, not even poor white people. (Was even one rich white person killed by Katrina? I doubt it. Hundreds of poor black people, however, were.)

To point out these fucking facts does not make Obama or any other black person “racist.”

It’s incredibly shameful that Katrina’s victims overwhelmingly have been black Americans (I write “have been” because the suffering hasn’t ended), but that’s a national stain that the nation needs to fucking deal with, not try to keep covered under the red-white-and-blue carpet.

This ugly stain under the carpet is the problem, not the person who simply points out its continued existence when the rest of us would rather just ignore it and act as though if we just don’t talk about it, it doesn’t fucking exist and we therefore are guilt-free.

But in the sick and twisted, evil “logic” of the Repugnican Tea Party traitors (and other assorted white-supremacist wingnuts) among us, it is “racist” for a member of an historically oppressed race to even talk about unpleasant history.

This is their “argument” in their latest desperate attack upon Barack Obama, a race-baiting attack employing the bogeyman of the Angry! Black! Man! that only demonstrates their racism, not Barack Obama’s or anyone else’s.

I haven’t planned to vote again for Barack Obama, given how much he has caved in to the traitors on the right and has not enacted the progressive agenda that he at least implicitly promised us on the left that he would, but I can tell you this: A sustained, race-based and racist/white-supremacist attack on Obama by the right-wing traitors from now until Election Day probably would be more than enough to induce me to give him my vote again.

You lost the Civil War, you treasonous bitches.

You don’t want a rematch.

Burn your race cards, Obamabots!

Gee, I guess that I’m a big fucking racist for expecting more of Melissa Harris-Perry than her race-baiting article in The Nation.

All kinds of excuses have been put out there to cover for Barack Obama’s lackluster presidency:

He inherited a huge fucking stinking, steaming mess from the unelected Bush regime. The Repugnican Tea Party traitors in Congress have been fighting him tooth and nail, have been doing everything in their power to ensure that he is a one-term president, regardless of the damage that this is causing the nation.

These excuses are legitimate enough. Obama did inherit a huge fucking stinking, steaming mess. The Repugnican Tea Party traitors have done all that they can to cripple him.

But Obama won’t win re-election on excuses. I know of no president who ever won re-election based not upon his actual accomplishments while in office, but upon his making even a strong case that others were responsible for his lack of accomplishments.

And although he’s not responsible for what he inherited, the fact of the matter is that when the iron was red hot, Obama didn’t strike. While he should have come in with guns a-blazin’, Obama instead has used a drinking straw and spitballs. Timidly.

The result is that although he had both houses of Congress in his party’s control for all of 2009 and 2010, and when he had the nation’s good will for most of that time, Obama did diddly squat. Oh, he achieved health care “reform” — “reform” that the health care weasels gave their blessing to and “reform” that isn’t scheduled to kick in until 2014, for fuck’s sake.

Obama is guilty of having squandered spectacularly what probably will turn out to have been his one and only shot at making a big difference. He had his big opportunity and he blew it. Forever.

But no. The problem actually is that white liberals are actually racist.

That is the poisonous talking point that Nation writer and MSNBC talent Melissa Harris-Perry has injected into the national conversation. The title of her Nation piece pretty much says it all: “Black President, Double Standard: Why White Liberals Are Abandoning Obama.”

My God. (And I don’t even believe in God.)

Um, for starters, we white liberals didn’t abandon Obama. Obama abandoned us. Or, perhaps more accurately, he punk’d us from the very beginning, telling us what he’d figured we wanted to hear in order to get our money and our votes.

The main idea of Harris-Perry’s piece is that white liberals have been harder on Obama than they ever were on Bill Clinton because Obama is black and whites generally are harder on blacks than they are on other whites, that whites expect more of blacks than they do their fellow whites.

Certainly that phenomenon can manifest itself in some situations. Certainly racism continues in the United States of America, not only against blacks but also “illegals” and other racial minority groups. Certainly there is no “level playing field” in the United States. Blacks, kept down for generations, never had the wealth or other privilege to hand down from generation to generation, like many whites did, so the “level playing field” argument is bullshit.

Of course the majority of the “tea party” fascists are white supremacists and racists whose gatherings look and feel like KKK rallies. I agree 200 percent with Morgan Freeman on this. I’ve written about it many times.

But to pull out the race card on your allies?

Really?

So basically, to the race-card-carrying Obamabots, Barack Obama is beyond reproach. Anyone who has any problem with him must be racist. There can be no other possible explanation.

This is convenient for Obama and his Obamabots, of course. The race card in this case would serve as a perpetual get-out-of-jail-free card for Obama. He would out-Teflon right-wing icon Ronald Reagan, whose praises Obama can’t sing loudly or frequently enough. (You never heard George W. Bush worshipping a Democratic president, did you?)

Or maybe instead of calling it the race card, we should call it the race mace — you know, you hit someone over the head with a mace.

Anyone who even thinks of being critical of Obama will keep his or her mouth shut, lest he or she be clobbered publicly with the race mace.

You know, this is, in spirit, thuggery. This is, in spirit, terrorism (which I define, broadly, as the use of intimidation on others in order to get one’s own way). Oh, and it’s slanderous or libelous, too. It’s not much different, in spirit, from the right wing’s calling someone a Communist in the 1950s in order to silence him or her. Defamation is fun!

But the race mace doesn’t work on this white liberal.

As someone who has had black boyfriends, charges by people who don’t know me that I’m a racist fall off of me like water falls off of a duck’s ass. And as someone who gave Barack Obama hundreds of dollars and my vote in 2008 — not because I’m a guilty white liberal but because I truly believed that he was the best viable candidate — I really don’t need some race-mace-carrying terrorist calling me a “racist.”

Why did I give Obama hundreds of dollars and my vote? Well, most if not all of the money that I gave him for the 2008 cycle I gave to him during the drawn-out 2008 Democratic primary contest. Why? Because I wanted him, not Billary Clinton, to be the 2008 Democratic presidential nominee.

Why?

Because I’d figured that a Billary Clinton presidency would be just like the first Clinton presidency. I didn’t want another sell-out, triangulating Democrat in name only in the White House. I wanted a progressive in the White House.

And although Obama and the Obamabots deny it now, Obama did offer himself up as the anti-Billary, as the true progressive in the race. “Hope” and “change” are about progressivism — not about maintaining the status quo or speaking softly and carrying a tiny twig.

Now, however, in Obama’s third year, many have speculated that he has governed even further to the right than Billary would have governed had she become president. Many have speculated that a President Billary would have smacked down the Repugnican Tea Party traitors in Congress, unlike the balls-less Obama, who stupidly only spoke about singing kumbaya with the Repugnican Tea Party traitors while their supporters portrayed him as a witch doctor with a bone through his nose, as a chimpanzee or a monkey, as a cultivator of watermelons on the White House lawn, etc. These aren’t people you try to play nice with. These are people you take down.

Comparing Bill Clinton’s presidency to Obama’s presidency is comparing apples to asparagus. I don’t need to go into the details of that — writers David Sirota and Joan Walsh (both “racist” white liberals, don’t you know) did a pretty good idea of deconstructing Harris-Perry’s bullshit thesis, and so I don’t need to do that here, but mostly, the economic times of the two presidencies are so different that it renders the comparison of the two fairly pointless.

Obama is not being judged by white liberals based upon the color of his skin, but based upon the content of his character. His character defects include his unwillingness to fight for those who put him where he is with our money, our time and energy, and our votes; his breaking one campaign promise after another; and his habit of throwing his former supporters under the bus when he finds it politically expedient to do so.

He threw the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Van Jones and Shirley Sherrod, all of them, under the bus. As soon as the white supremacist fascists on the right started to attack these individuals, Obama just dropped them like flaming dog shit. That alone speaks volumes about his character. (To be fair and balanced, when Bill Clinton very similarly threw former surgeon general Jocelyn Elders under the bus, that was a travesty of justice, too. And again, I’d supported Obama over Billary to prevent that kind of thing from happening again. And speaking of the Rev. Wright, you really should read his recent interview with Chris Hedges. Wowser.)

The fact of the matter is that whether they like it or not, blacks need the support of us white liberals. Blacks can’t afford to alienate us en masse. They just can’t. Politics is a blood sport — not a kumbaya marathon — and you need as many players on your side as you can get.

(We gay people, too, can’t do it on our own. We need the support of heterosexuals. It would be incredibly fucking stupid of us to alienate those liberals who support us by claiming that in actuality they are
homophobes.)

What I’m saying is: Burn your race cards, Obamabots.

The president of the United States of America, whoever that is at the time, must be open to criticism from the left and from the right. No president or other leader should be exempt from criticism because of his or her gender, race or sexual orientation.

A leader should be judged for such things as his or her accomplishments — or lack thereof — and for his or her character. On these measures, white liberals (and black liberals and other liberals) have not judged Barack Obama unfairly.

To give Obama a break because he is black is as racist as is expecting him to outperform his white cohorts, although since there can be only one U.S. president at a time, and as every presidency is different because times change, Obama doesn’t have any true cohorts, and certainly not Bill Clinton, whom he at least tacitly promised us he wouldn’t be.

To support Obama primarily because he is black is as racist as opposing him primarily because he is black.

Ironically, those who so casually try to pin the slanderous or libelous label of “racist” on white liberals who dare to criticize the nation’s first black president are racist themselves.

I still love Melissa Harris-Perry, though. I’ve seen her on MSNBC and I like her.

Her Nation article and the shit that she has stirred up, though — not so much.

The more things change, the more they stay the same

Voters are suckers.

Even though Barack Obama has failed miserably to deliver upon his campaign promises of “hope” and “change,” voters still believe that there are political candidates out there who are going to change the status quo.

But corporations and the corporatocrats that run them and those who love the corporatocrats (a.k.a. politicians), not the voters, call the shots.

British Petroleum, for instance, was able to keep the federal government at bay until it became glaringly apparent that BP did not have its “little” oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico under control. It should have been the other way around, with the federal government telling BP what to do — right off the bat.

Only after the oily corporate environmental disaster became undeniably apparent did Obama feign anger at the corporatocrats who have filled his campaign coffers.

And we still have our perpetual war in the Middle East for the military-industrial complex, because without war, war profiteering isn’t possible.

It’s almost enough to make you miss George W. Bush. (Almost…)

Obama “threw [him] under the bus,” Obama’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, recently wrote in a letter that he probably didn’t intend to become public.

Obama threw all of us under the bus, and the bus is leaking BP oil all over us.

Voters want to see yesterday’s primary election results as a harbinger of that long-promised-but-yet-delivered “hope” and “change.”

“Will the insurgents sell out?” The Daily Beast asks of wingnut Republican Rand Paul, the son of libertarian wingnut Ron Paul, who won Kentucky’s Repugnican U.S. senatorial primary yesterday, and Democrat Joe Sestak, who beat Democrat-come-lately Sen. Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania’s Democratic U.S. senatorial primary election yesterday.

My answer to that question: Of course they will.

But I’m happy about Specter’s defeat. There is a special place in hell for politicians like Specter and recently Repugnican Florida Gov. Charlie Crist and U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman who switch parties or become independents in order to save their political skins instead of upon principle.

And all of the fossils in the U.S. Senate (Specter is 80 years old) need to retire or to be retired by the voters, like Specter was yesterday. Who do they think they are? U.S. Supreme Court justices with lifetime appointments?

As far as “tea party” favorite Rand Paul is concerned, it would be bullshit to assert that as Kentucky (cue banjo) goes so goes the nation.

The U.S. Census put Kentucky’s white population at 92 percent in 2000. The state’s estimated 2005 white population was 91 percent. I don’t expect the 2010 Census results to be much different. Not exactly a diverse state, Kentucky.

And Kentucky went to George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004 and to John McCainosaurus (another U.S. senator who sorely needs to retire or to be retired) in 2008.

So it’s not surprising that white supremacist “tea party” favorite Rand Paul won yesterday’s Repugnican U.S. senatorial primary in a far-right, white supremacist state.

No one anywhere on the ideological spectrum should expect Rand Paul or Joe Sestak to bring about any “hope” and “change.”

We of all ideological stripes get punked every fucking election.

As long as the corporations continue to call the shots, we, the people, are just window dressing in this little pay-to-play charade that we call “democracy.”

The Rev. Wright is right (again)

From The Associated Press today:

Hampton, Va. – President Barack Obama‘s controversial former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is blaming “them Jews” for keeping him from speaking to the president.

Wright, the former pastor of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ, said he hasn’t spoken to Obama since he became president.

“Them Jews ain’t going to let him talk to me. I told my baby daughter that he’ll talk to me in five years when he’s a lame duck, or in eight years when he’s out of office,” Wright told the Daily Press of Newport News following a Tuesday night sermon at the 95th annual Hampton University Ministers’ Conference.

“They will not let him to talk to somebody who calls a spade what it is…. I said from the beginning: He’s a politician; I’m a pastor. He’s got to do what politicians do.”

Obama was a longtime member of the church but resigned from it and cut ties with Wright after videos surfaced during the presidential campaign showing Wright’s sometimes provocative sermons. Wright’s incendiary comment included shouting “God damn America” and accusing the government of creating AIDS.

In the interview Tuesday, Wright also criticized Obama for not sending a U.S. delegation to the World Conference on Racism held recently in Geneva, Switzerland, saying Obama chose not to for fear of offending Jews and Israel.

“Ethnic cleansing is going on in Gaza. Ethnic cleansing (by) the Zionist is a sin and a crime against humanity, and they don’t want Barack talking like that because that’s anti-Israel,” Wright said.

The White House declined to comment to the Associated Press [today] on Wright’s remarks. A phone message left by the AP at Wright’s home wasn’t immediately returned.

Politico follows up, reporting that Wright has clarified, “I’m not talking about all Jews, all people of the Jewish faith, I’m talking about Zionists. I’m talking about facts, historical facts. I’m not talking about emotionally charged words.”

My sentiments exactly. To criticize even the genocide of the Palestinians at the hands of the “victimized” Israelis is to be called an anti-Semite, and this bullshit has to stop.

So does the unchecked power that the Zionists have in Washington. As I noted earlier today:

A total of 14 U.S. senators, or 14 percent of the U.S. Senate, are Jewish; there will be 15 Jewish U.S. senators once Minnesota’s U.S. Senate race is finally decided, as both Democrat Al Franken and Repugnican Norm Coleman are Jewish. Jews comprise no more than 2 percent to 2.5 percent of the American population, yet they are wildly overrepresented in high political office. Two of the nine U.S. Supreme Court justices, almost a quarter of them, are Jewish. But nooo, American Jews are such powerless victims!

Not all powerful American Jews in Washington are Zionists, of course, but I wholeheartedly agree with Wright’s assessment that the Israel-first lobby has such a grip on Washington and on the White House that yes, indeed, President Obama skipped the World Conference on Racism in order not to piss off the Jews and Zionists who are so powerful in Washington.

(Wright’s assertion that “them Jews” — er, Zionists — are preventing his meeting with President Obama I am not nearly as sure of, but I don’t dismiss his assertion out of hand; I’d need to know more before I could decide one way or the other.)

No one who wants to be elected president of the United States would dare to piss off the Israel-first lobby, represented most prominently by the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee, whose logo shows how much in bed the Zionists are with the power elite in Washington:

Yes, that’s the Star of David, which is on Israel’s flag, mashed up with the red, white and blue of the American flag, symbolizing that the United States and Israel are one and the same. “Fucking presumptuous” would be to put it mildly.

The problem that the likes of Wright and I — who don’t have a problem standing up to the Zionists — have is not a matter of one’s religious affiliation or ethnic background. It’s not about the crazy neo-Nazi belief that Jews are inferior to any other group of people, like the majority of the Israelis seem to believe that the Palestinians are inferior to them.

It’s about THE ABUSE OF POWER IN A SO-CALLED DEMOCRACY.

When fewer than 3 percent of Americans are Jewish but Jews and Zionists hold as much power as they do in the United States, it’s time to examine how it came to be this way, what it means for the future of the American democracy that such a small group of people have gained so much power, and what, if anything, should be done about it.