Obama’s Round Two already shaping up to look just like Round One

Reuters photo

Then-U.S. Sens. Barack Obama and Chuck Hagel yuk it up in Amman, Jordan, in July 2008. Obama is expected to nominate the Repugnican former senator as his secretary of defense any day now, because “bipartisanship,” you see, means that a so-called Democrat does things that no Repugnican Tea Party traitor ever would do in kind.

 Let’s see:

“Democratic” President Barack Obama hasn’t even been inaugurated for his second term, and already he:

• Threw U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice under the bus when she came under attack from the white supremacists and patriarchs, who rather would see U.S. Sen. John Kerry in the position of U.S. secretary of state, since a white male Democrat is better than any other kind of Democrat
• Capitulated on the Bush-regime-era tax cuts for the rich, having promised over and over and over again to increase taxes on inviduals earning more than $200,000 and families earning more than $250,000, but actually having agreed to increase taxes on individuals earning more than $400,000 and families earning more than $450,000  
• Is poised to sell us out on Social Security and/or Medicare in the deferred so-called “fiscal cliff” fight over the federal budget (after all, he and his family are set for life)
• Is poised to name Repugnican former U.S. Sen. Chuck Hagel as U.S. secretary of defense, reinforcing the meme that Democrats are shitty on defense, and doing something that a Repugnican president never would do (i.e., appoint a Democrat to his cabinet, perhaps especially for defense)

Have I forgotten anything? And again, Obama hasn’t even been inaugurated yet for Round Two.

Your vote for Barack Obama on November 6 was significantly different from what Mittens Romney was offering how?

The most immediate next fight in D.C. apparently will be over Hagel, whose nomination might be announced as early as tomorrow, according to Reuters.

Not that Hagel would represent the first time that Obama sold out those who voted for him where it comes to his selection of the U.S. secretary of defense. Recall that Obama, at the start of Round One, lazily, cowardly and stupidly kept on Robert Gates, who under George W. Bush had replaced war criminal Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense in November 2006. Gates stayed on the job as defense secretary under Obama until he retired on July 1, 2011.

My biggest problem with Hagel is that again, a Republican president of today never would put a Democrat on his cabinet (yes, I use “his” because a female Republican president is pretty much an oxymoron), and DINO Obama has sold out the Democratic Party enough as it is.

Yes, I have a real problem with Hagel having referred to former U.S. Ambassador James Hormel in 1998 as “openly, aggressively gay” — we gay men should keep our sexuality strictly and entirely in the closet, just like straight men always do, you see (since when has equality been an American value?) — but I do like Hagel’s reportedly made comments about the “bloated” defense department budget (our national “defense” budget is bloated beyond belief, and mostly represents only the perpetual looting of the U.S. Treasury by treasonous war profiteers) and the insanely disproportionate amount of power and influence that the “Jewish lobby” (I call them the “Israel-first lobby,” because of course not every Jewish American is an Israel firster) has in D.C.

Admittedly, it is unusual for a Repugnican to attack the sacred cows of the military-industrial-corporate complex and the Israel-first lobby, even though both of those sacred cows are milking us dry. And Hagel, himself a veteran of the Vietnam War, also apparently wasn’t enough of a cheerleader for the unelected Bush regime’s illegal, immoral, unjust and unprovoked Vietraq War — which also is unusual for a Repugnican.

But are there no qualified Democrats whom Obama could nominate as defense secretary?

What’s Obama’s logic here? That as long as his nominee as defense secretary uses the Republican label, the Repugnican Tea Party traitors in the U.S. Senate will be OK with it?

“This is an in-your-face nomination by the president to all of us who are supportive of Israel,” Repugnican Tea Party U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham– who, along with Repugnican Tea Party U.S. Sen. John McCainosaurus, was instrumental in Obama’s caving in on the nomination of Susan Rice — already has declared of Hagel’s nomination.

Not that the likes of wingnutty closet case and chickenhawk Lindsey Graham would approve of any of Obama’s nominees, but why the fuck can’t Obama at least respect those who voted for him by ceasing to kiss the ass of the Repugnican Tea Party traitors, who never return the favor in the fucking slightest?

Oh, well.

As I watch Barack Obama for the next four years continue to sell out those who voted for him — and continue, just like Bill Clinton did, to make the Democratic Party more and more indistinguishable from the Repugnican Party (I lovingly think of the two corporation-loving and individual-hating parties as the Coke Party and the Pepsi Party) — at least I won’t feel nearly as punk’d this time as I did during Obama’s first term, because while I stupidly voted for Obama the first time, on November 6 I cast my vote for the Green Party candidate for president.

As George W. Bush once so wisely declared: Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again!

See you around, fools.

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

Reuters photo

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

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

Wow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s legalized thievery is what it is.

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

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

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

Multi-millionaire Mittens is a “Christian”?

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

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

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

Not that Barack Obama is any fucking angel.

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

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

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

We’re fucked.

Unless we revolt.

And soon.

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

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

This system is irfuckingredeemable.

—

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

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

Ozzie Guillen guilty of telling the truth

Associated Press photo

In a nation that only claims to value the freedom of speech, Miami Marlins manager Ozzie Guillen was suspended for five games for having made comments to TIME magazine that (gasp!) offended Miami’s right-wing, pro-plutocratic Cuban Americans. Guillen is pictured above apologizing at a press conference in Miami today for having voiced his opinion on a politically charged matter, something that in a truly free nation he should not have been pressured to apologize for.

Before today I hadn’t heard of Ozzie Guillen, who is the manager of the Miami Marlins. Before today, I wasn’t even sure what type of sports team the Marlins is (um, it’s a baseball team).

While I am not big on sports (although I’m OK with men’s diving…), I am big on politics, and Cuba and Venezuela and the socialist revolution that has swept many of the nations of Latin America (since the United States has been meddling in the Middle East for the past 10-plus years instead of in Latin America, which for decades had been the target of the Eye of Sauron, which sits atop the Pentagon) are of great interest to me.

Ozzie Guillen made the mistake of exercising his right to free speech in Miami, Florida, you see.

Apparently Guillen recently told a reporter for TIME magazine, “I love Fidel Castro,” but then amended that comment: “I respect Fidel Castro. You know why? A lot of people have wanted to kill Fidel Castro for the last 60 years, but that motherfucker is still here.”

TIME also reports that Guillen, a native of Venezuela, has stated that he has respect for Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez as well.

Guillen might have realized that praising or even appearing to perhaps be praising Cuban leader Fidel Castro in Miami — which is home to the Ritchie Riches (would that be los Ricardos Ricos?) who fled Cuba when Castro’s revolution ended the capitalistic orgy there, and home to their brainwashed progeny — might not have been the brightest thing to do, politically speaking, but the Cuban Americans who want his head on a pike — here is a mob of them outside of a press conference that Guillen held in Miami today to apologize for words that he had no reason to apologize for:

— are telling us a lot more about themselves than they are about Guillen: Namely, that they’re fucking hypocrites, that while they criticize Fidel Castro’s regime for stifling political dissent, they feel no hypocrisy or shame in doing the same fucking thing themselves.

It’s always perfectly OK to stifle left-wing political speech, you see, but it’s never OK to stifle right-wing political speech. Speech that is free only when you agree with it makes the whole idea of free speech moot, but that point is lost on the right-wing nutjobs, who by definition are hypocrites.

I don’t know everything that Fidel Castro has done, and therefore I don’t give him my 100 percent approval, but the fact of the matter is that, whether you love him or hate him or are indifferent to him, despite the United States’ decades-long attempt to cripple Castro’s rule — hurting the people of Cuba more than it ever hurt Castro himself, I’m sure — the fact of the fucking matter is that Fidel Castro indeed is one tough cookie to still be standing after all of these decades.

Hugo Chavez, too, is one tough cookie, having survived a blatantly treasonous and anti-democratic right-wing (and probably CIA-and/or-otherwise-unelected-Bush-regime-assisted) attempt to overthrow him in 2002 and replace him with an unelected, pro-plutocratic, right-wing usurper. That’s just a fucking fact, whether you love Chavez or hate him or are indifferent to him.

But Guillen’s biggest “crime” here, it seems to me, is that he hasn’t bowed down before the statue of the golden calf that is capitalism.

It is interesting that capitalists won’t shut the fuck up about “freedom,” yet they wish to deny everyone the basic fucking freedom of praising — indeed, even just discussing — any other economic system than capitalism, in which the goal is to become filthy rich yourself by fucking over everyone else.

I tell you fucking what: Mittens Romney, to name just one multi-millionaire, did not do multi-millions of dollars’ worth of work.

No. The only way to make that kind of money is to exploit others. You “win” in capitalism by paying your employees as little as you can get away with (including fucking them over on benefits, of course, and doing such things as firing them just before they can retire and collect retirement benefits, and by shutting their factories down and getting cheaper labor elsewhere, as Mittens can tell you all about) and by overcharging your customers for your product or service as much as you possibly can. You also “win” in capitalism by despoiling the environment in your insatiable quest for ever-increasing profits. In health/wealth care, the idea is to charge as much as you can for health insurance coverage, yet to deny as many health insurance claims as possible in order to increase your profits. Just like Jesus would do! Gooooo capitalism! (Indeed, the right wing loves to intertwine Christianity and capitalism, when even a grade schooler could read the New Testament and tell you that Jesus Christ, according to his own words, was against the rich and for the poor and was dead-set against shameless profiteering.)

The kind of shit that we see committed in the economic system of capitalism is not called “stealing” or “plundering” or even “exploitation,” however. It’s called “business” and “free enterprise” and the like, and while it’s sociofuckingpathic to knowingly harm others for purely selfish, personal gain, in the United States of America it is widely considered to be quite normal — even admirable.

If capitalism were so fucking inarguably inherently and self-evidently great, however, then why do the vast majority of its adherents try to prohibit the rest of us from even discussing capitalism’s obvious weaknesses and evils and from discussing other socioeconomic systems that might work better for us?

Why do the capitalist hypocrites claim that the “free marketplace” is the only way to go, but they absolutely won’t tolerate a free fucking marketplace of ideas?

Are they afraid that capitalism — which, increasingly, is good for only a few — can’t survive in such an environment?

And Cuban Americans need to shut the fuck up already. The Cubans who fled to the United States after Castro took over for the most part were the filthy rich Cubans who were exploiting other, poorer Cubans. And these rich Cubans’ beloved right-wing leader whom Fidel Castro overthrew, Fulgencio Batista, himself was a dictator who had thousands of his political opponents slaughtered — only he supported the plutocrats, so he was a good dictator, you see.

Castro’s Cuba has struggled not because socialism inherently cannot work, but primarily because the pro-plutocratic fascists in the United States for decades have done everything in their power to cripple Cuba and then say, “See? Communism doesn’t work!”

And old-school, big-“C” Communism indeed didn’t work, but little-“s” socialism can. Democratic socialism is the ideal socioeconomic system. (Old-school Communism wasn’t democratic, its major problem.) I’d even settle for a hybrid socioeconomic system, at least for now, with the essentials for human well-being and dignity, such as as quality health care and quality education, being made available to all regardless of their ability to pay for them, with the private sector able to continue to sell non-essentials. (Indeed, it looks as though Cuba is evolving into such a hybrid socioeconomic system itself.)

Corporatism, if we allow it to, will kill us all. The right wing now assures us that even more of the same will cure what ails us. That is as sane as asserting that the cure for arsenic poisoning is more arsenic.

And the people of Cuba, it seems to me, are much better off under Fidel and Raul Castro than they would be under another Fulgencio-Batista type, a “good” dictator who sells out his nation and his nation’s people to corporations for his own selfish gain and the selfish gain of his fucking cronies, who (and whose progeny) now populate Miami.

Ozzie Guillen has my support. I support his right to free speech, and I support a robustly free marketplace of ideas.

It’s too bad that the freedom-hating, anti-American wingnuts in Miami and their sympathizers do not.

Eddie Munster vants to suck our blood

Putting yourself in the public spotlight is risky. You might succeed spectacularly. Or you might have Jon Stewart remarking of you on his show that he didn’t know that “Eddie Munster grew up to be a J.C. Penney catalog model.”

Indeed, Repugnican Tea Party U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, with his widow’s peak, indeed resembles the little Munster —

— which at least one individual pointed out as early as January.

But worse than being compared to Eddie Munster would be being compared to vampiress Sarah Palin, and I have the feeling that Paul Ryan is going the way of Sarah Palin: an individual in his or her 40s with presidential aspirations who isn’t all that bad on the eye but whose wingnutty policies are for shit and who just isn’t ready for political prime time.

As I have noted, very apparently the Repugnican Tea Party thought that they could put Paul Ryan’s pretty face on their wet dream of privatizing (and thus destroying) Medicare and ensuring that the rich and the super-rich never pay their fair share of taxes again — and that Paul Ryan alone was enough lipstick to put on that monster pig.

But thus far, the majority of Americans apparently would prefer to keep Medicare intact and to make the rich and the super-rich pay up rather than to gush all over Paul “He Works Out, You Know!” Ryan.

But Rep. Ryan apparently thinks that he’s some hot shit, taking on the president.

In case Ryan didn’t notice, his Gov. Scott “Dead Man” Walker-like tactics aren’t going over very well in his own home state right now, so why does he believe he has a strong political base from which to take on Barack Obama?

The uber-cocky Ryan has accused Obama of being a “campaigner-in-chief” for publicly having taken exception to Ryan’s plan to destroy Medicare and to make the rich richer, and indeed, Ryan is brazenly denouncing everyone who doesn’t embrace his so-called “path to prosperity” that gives the rich and the super-rich even more tax breaks while soaking the working class, the middle class and the poor even more than they have been soaked over the past several decades. (So it is a “path to prosperity” — just not our prosperity!)

And it’s ludicrous to hear Ryan accuse Obama of being political, when of course Ryan is being at least as political, and, as they are both politicians engaging in politics, of course they’re being political. (Of course, the charge that the other side is being “political” isn’t meant to denote that the other side is engaged in the struggle for power, which is the very definition of engaging in politics, but is meant to connote that the other side is being unreasonable, that of course the other side would agree with your very reasonable proposal(s) if he or she would just be reasonable instead of “playing politics.”)

On the heels of calling Obama political (in a bad way), Paul “I’m Rubber and You’re Glue” Ryan announced that Obama’s denunciation of his plan to destroy Medicare and further enrich the rich has only strengthened the Repugnican Tea Party’s support of Ryan’s plan in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Oh, please. The stupid white men who comprise the majority of the Repugnican Tea Party traitors in the House of Representatives support Paul Ryan over Barack Obama? Shocker!

Paul Ryan’s idea of destroying Medicare and enriching the rich isn’t “bold” or the like. It’s a colossally shitty idea is what it is. Not only is it horrible public policy (and, I will add, anti-Christian) to allow the wealth care profiteers to shamelessly profit even further from Americans’ pain and suffering via the bloated wealth care-industrial complex, but to attack Medicare is as politically smart as it was for George W. Bush to attack Social Security.

Nor is it OK to assure current oldsters that they’ll be OK, but that the rest of us are fucked where Medicare and/or Social Security is/are concerned. I’m 43 years old and I’ve been paying into Social Security and Medicare since my teens, and I want both benefits, fuck you very much, Mr. Ryan; you’re not going to fuck me up the ass — no matter how much you look like a J.C. Penney catalog model.

Cutting the bloated-beyond-belief budget of the military-industrial complex and making the rich and the super-rich pay their fair share of taxes, as I have noted, will keep afloat Medicare, Social Security and other government programs that benefit the majority of the American people instead of further enrich the rich.

So of course Ryan’s “path to prosperity” — his own prosperity and that of his right-wing ilk, not yours and mine — does not include cutting the “defense” budget or making the rich and the super-rich pay their fair share of taxes.

Which demonstrates that he’s not serious about resolving the federal budget deficit. He’s serious about making the rich richer and the poor poorer. He’s a radical-right-wing ideologue, not a problem solver, especially since his proposed “solutions” would make the problems worse, not better.

Unfortunately, Ryan seems to represent a reliably red congressional district. He won his seven two-year House terms with an average of 64 percent of the vote, so he probably would be very difficult to unseat, even in Wisconsin, in which the Repugnican Tea Party is under fire right now.

However, Ryan’s deceptively titled “path to prosperity” can be relegated to the dustbin of U.S. history, where it belongs, and hopefully, he’ll never rise any higher than the U.S. House of Representatives, where he essentially is just a saner-seeming version of Michele Bachmann.

Social Darwinism does NOT apply to the poor CHILDREN among us

Associated Press photo

Repugnican South Carolina Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer apparently is a believer in eugenics for the poor among us. You know, just like Jesus was. Jesus always said about the poor: “You gotta nip ’em in the bud!” (Look it up. I’m sure it’s in there somewhere...)

Memo to Repugnican South Carolina Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer: Zac Efron wants his face back.

Second memo to Repugnican South Carolina Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer: WTF?

No, really. Everyone is focusing on your recently having compared the poor to “stray animals” that, if we feed them, only “breed.” That kind of talk from a Repugnican doesn’t shock me. It’s from the Nazi playbook: First relegate a group of human beings to subhuman status, and then you can justify oppressing them.

And I myself believe that we have an overpopulation problem. However, I don’t single out any certain class of human beings for extinction by starvation, like you do. Not even the Repugnicans do I single out for such treatment, although I’m confident that the species and the planet — and hell, the universe — would be much better off without them.

What really gets me, Loooootenant, is your apparent “logic” that poor children have lower academic performance because they get free or reduced-cost meals at school.

You said this:

“I can show you a bar graph where the free and reduced lunch has the worst test scores in the state of South Carolina. You show me the school that has the highest free and reduced lunch, and I’ll show you the worst test scores, folks. It’s there, period.”

Unless I cannot understand simple English, Zac, your “argument” seems to be that if we give schoolkids free or reduced lunches, their test scores will go down. Don’t feed ’em, and their test scores will go up! Duh! It’s a no-brainer! Gotta make those lazy kids work for it! Kids these days! They have no work ethic! They think there’s such a thing as a free lunch!

This is the comment of yours, Zac, that is getting people riled up:

“My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You’re facilitating the problem. If you give an animal or a person ample food supply, they will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that….”

But I find your comment apparently correlating the availability of free or reduced-cost school lunches to low school test scores to be even more ludicrous.

To be fair, and not to be a hypocrite, I don’t give the homeless adults in my neighborhood any money because I know — I know — that they’ll only use it for alcohol or cigarettes or drugs. I even have instructed people visiting me in my ’hood not to “feed the bears.”

Truth be told, I don’t want alcoholic or junkie homeless people in my ’hood. And by giving them even pocket change I don’t want to give them incentive to stay in my ’hood and continue to panhandle.

I do blame their lot largely for the fact that our tax dollars go to human greed — to such traitors as the war profiteers like Dick Cheney’s Halliburton — instead of to human needs. I’ve lived where I live since 2001, and every year that the unelected BushCheneyCorp was in office, the numbers of homeless people I’ve seen in my neighborhood climbed annually.

Still, these homeless people — like the one alcoholic guy who kept sleeping on my porch (thanks, BushCheneyCorp!) — can be problematic, and no, truthfully, I don’t want them in my neighborhood; what I want is for my tax dollars to go toward helping them instead of to bogus wars for the military-industrial complex. 

But these homeless people are adults.

You, Lt. Gov. Efron, are against aiding poor children. Children.

No matter how good a child’s parent or parents may or may not be, you don’t punish the child for the child’s parent(s).

Zac, I understand your Repugnicans’ love of social Darwinism. You don’t want the masses to correctly conclude that it is because of the greed of the rich and the super-rich and the exploitation of the working class and the poor by the rich and the super-rich that we have so many poor people in the United States of America.

The rich and the super-rich fear an uprising of the have-nots. (They look at places like Venezuela, which has had a real revolution, with sheer terror.) Therefore, the rich and the super-rich blame the poor for being poor.

And they pay their spokesnakes, such as Glenn Asscrack and Rush Blowhard and Sarah Palin-Quayle, to put the message out there that it’s the poor people’s own damned fault that they’re poor. Even the poor children, too, according to you, Zac.

Lt. Gov. Efron, to clarify: Children don’t do poorly in school because they get free or reduced-cost lunches, if that is the point that you were trying to make. They tend to do poorly in school if they come from poverty-striken households, however. Their parents may not have had the education to be able to help their children very much, and their parents may not be able to afford things like books or other educational materials for the home. Working single parents may have little time and energy with which to help their children with school. 

Our mission — as Americans and as Christians, if we call ourselves Christians — is to help poor children, not to deny them free or reduced-cost school lunches, a la Ebenezer Scrooge.  

To suggest otherwise is unAmerican and unChristian.

I wholeheartedly support birth control. Abstinence clearly isn’t doing the trick. We get all of these immaculate conceptions even with abstinence. As I said, we need to reduce our population (by attrition; down, boy!). I’ve even used the term “breeder” myself to describe someone who irresponsibly brings a child into this already-overpopulated world.

But I don’t discriminate based upon socioeconomic class. Everyone needs to think twice about reproducing these days. Everyone.

But those children who already are here: We need to take care of them. Regardless of how we might judge their parents.

Only a Repugnican would assert otherwise.

I hope that your political career is over, Zac. Really, you deserve it.

P.S. The Associated Press notes that Bauer, age 40, was “a child of divorce who benefited from free [school] lunches himself.” That’s precious.

Keep wanting that revolution

Will the American poor ever go after the American rich’s riches? Uh, no, because the rich own a vast propaganda machine (the flagship of which is Fox “News”) that has convinced the poor that the redistribution of wealth is a bad thing for them.

Lefty editorial cartoonist and columnist Ted Rall concludes his current column:

…What happens next, I think, is that people will do what large numbers of people always do when they need money and food but can’t find a job: They will start to think about the rich, who still have all the wealth they accumulated while money was still circulating. And they will take it from them.

It might be the easy way, through liberal-style income redistribution. Or it might be the hard way. Either way, it goes against the laws of nature to expect starving people to allow a few individuals to sit on vast aggregations of wealth….

With the economic distress we’re likely to see in the coming year or two or three, revolution will become increasingly likely unless money starts coursing through the nation’s economic veins, and soon.

Will it be a soft revolution of government-mandated wealth distribution through radical changes in the tax structure and the construction of a European-style safety net, as master reformer FDR presided over when he saved capitalism from itself?

Or will the coming revolution be something harder and bloodier, like the socioeconomic collapse that destroyed Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union?

To a great extent, what happens next will depend on how Barack Obama proceeds in his first weeks as president.

Damn — do even I write that apocalyptically?

Don’t get me wrong; I do wish for another American revolution. But I don’t have my hopes up that fat-assed Americans will put down their Big Gulps and get out of their lard-hauling scooters long enough to, um, revolt. (Oh, they’re revolting, all right, but in a different sense of the term…)

I mean, a pattern emerges: A man named George Bush takes Oval Office and wrecks the economy; the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Then a Democrat takes the helm and the economy recovers; there is (relative) prosperity, under which Americans grow fat and lazy. Then, because Americans are fat and lazy and can’t be bothered with something like preventing the utter destruction of their democracy, another man named George Bush steals office and wrecks the economy, just like his fucking father did. Then another Democrat takes the helm. Presumably the economy will recover and even eventually blossom under President Barack Obama and Americans will become even fatter and lazier.

But after President Obama will Americans be fucking stupid enough to put another Bush into the White House, as Grandpappy George Bush suggests they should, in his son Jeb? (Will Americans perhaps even allow Jeb Bush to steal the White House like his brother did?)

I mean, aren’t we being played? A Repugnican president (usually with the surname of Bush) brings the nation to the brink of utter ruin and then a Democrat fixes things, only to have the whole cycle repeat itself?

Revolution?

I’m not going to buy a pitchfork or a torch just yet.

Obama’s numbers in the public opinion polls are pretty fucking good. To a solid majority of Americans, Obama is fucking Superman. Or at least Batman (and, as Catwoman noted in the second Tim Burton “Batman” movie, Americans are always waiting around for some hero to save them from their own fucking messes).

A Gallup poll taken last month found that 32 percent of Americans listed Barack Obama as their most admired man living today anywhere in the world. George W. Bush came in a distant second place at only 5 percent. (John McCainosaurus? He came in third place, with only 3 percent. I’m surprised that he did as well as he did on Nov. 4…)

Polls taken last month found that at least 75 percent of Americans approve of the job that Obama is doing thus far in his transition to the White House.

Obama’s shit doesn’t stink — at least right now. He’s riding high.

Americans seem to fully expect Obama to save them.

As long as things don’t get much, much worse than they are now, I don’t see the forcible redistribution of wealth that the Repugnican plutocrats so fear.

The tagline of Rall’s current column reads: “There’s Plenty of Money Around. Let’s Take It.” That’s my dream (and apparently Rall’s, t0o) and a plutocrat’s nightmare, but the Repugnicans, with their incessant propaganda campaigns, have convinced enough stupid poor people that the redistribution of wealth somehow is a bad thing for them — “socialism” and “Communism,” you know — that the rich and the super-rich and the super-fucking-rich are pretty safe, I think, atop their mountains of cash that they stole from the rest of us.

And just enough Americans have bought Barack Obama’s promises of “hope” and “change” — last month 63 percent of Americans polled said that they feel “hopeful” for 2009, while only 35 percent said “fearful” — that I don’t see that revolution coming any day soon.

When things are this shitty, things have to improve only a little for people to think that things have turned around again, even though the bar keeps getting lower and lower and lower. 

Yeah — we’re being played…