Assorted shit

Dick the tease

AFP photo

The Associated Press reports that 69-year-old Dick Cheney’s latest heart attack was his fifth one since he was 37 years old.

Cheney (shown above in a photo taken before he attended Barack Obama’s inauguration in D.C.) had what the AP reports was a “mild heart attack” yesterday.

Every time that you hear that Dick has been taken to the hospital you hope that this is it, but, not to be outdone by Freddy or Jason, he is expected to be released from the hospital any time now.

Many, many deserving people can’t get adequate health care, but war criminals get the best health care possible. There’s no justice.

‘Benedict Brown’ tea-bagged

 

Associated Press photo 

Wingnuts are fucktards.

They’re bashing Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown (shown above at the Wingnuts’ Annual Ball last week) for being a “turncoat” because of his support for a Democratically authored jobs-creation bill.

Retards: Scott Brown is a U.S. senator for Massachusetts. Although he’s a Repugnican, Massachusetts remains predominantly blue. Therefore, he can’t be the Nazi that you’d like him to be if he wants to get re-elected when his term is up in a couple of years.

Two other New England Repugnican senators who voted along with Brown against a Repugnican filibuster of the jobs-creation bill were Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine. Notes the AP:

Snowe and Collins … “survive in New England by a unique set of rules,” said Dante Scala, political science professor at the University of New Hampshire.

He said: “The way they survive with voters in their homes state is by making it clear that, first and foremost, they’re the servants of their constituencies, not the party label. So, they’ll make a point of defying their party and going their own way.”

Brown got little such leeway, despite campaigning as an “independent Republican” and publicly eschewing national supporters.

The political realities of the great blue state of California also disallow Repugnican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger from being the Nazi that the “tea party” dipshits would like him to be.

Schwarzenegger this week alone defended the Obama administration’s stimulus package, stating that it has benefited California “tremendously,” criticized Repugnican politicans who have opposed the stimulus package (but who have reaped its political benefits anyway), and stated that the Repugnican idea that Obama’s health care plan should be scrapped and started over from scratch is “bogus,” “partisan” talk. 

Schwarzenegger isn’t running for re-election, either, as he can’t; he terms out in less than a year.

He probably just doesn’t want to go to hell, and thus figures that he actually should do what politicians should be doing: trying to help people.

Stimulation accomplished

From The Associated Press today:

Washington – The economic stimulus law added between 1 million to 2.1 million workers to employment rolls by the end of last year, a new report released [today] by congressional economists said.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office study also said the $862 billion stimulus added between 1.5 to 3.5 percentage points to the growth of the economy in 2009. The controversial stimulus law combined tax breaks for individuals and businesses with lots of government spending.

The report reflects agreement among economists that the measure boosted the economy. But the wide range of estimates means it won’t resolve the debate over how effective the stimulus has been.

The White House says the stimulus bill has created 2 million jobs and will add another 1.5 million this year as economic recovery continues to take hold.

CBO projects that the stimulus measure to have a greater impact this year, boosting gross domestic product by 1.4 to 4 percentage points and lowering the unemployment rate by 0.7 to 1.8 percentage points.

The report said the most efficient parts of the stimulus include infrastructure projects such as road- and bridge-building and more generous unemployment benefits….

The economy has shed 8.4 million jobs since the start of the recession in December of 2007, though job losses have slowed in the past couple of months.

The stimulus measure has earned mixed grades from a public weary of a bad economy and increasingly concerned about out-of-control budget deficits. Democrats are seeking to renew several parts of the stimulus, however, including aid for state governments and extended unemployment insurance benefits for the long-term jobless….

I’m no economist, but it’s irrefutable the nation started hemorrhaging jobs on BushCheneyCorp’s watch and is recovering under the Obama administration’s watch.

Yet the “tea party” fucktards, like chickens swearing their allegiance to Colonel Sanders, oppose the president who apparently slowly but surely is turning the Titanic back around.

Really: It takes a special kind of fucktard to work against one’s own fucking interests.

Steeling from the donors?

Associated Press photo

Politico has a story on how many Repugnicans are furious that Repugnican National Committee chair Michael Steele apparently has been on a spending spree. The first three paragraphs:

Republican National Chairman Michael Steele is spending twice as much as his recent predecessors on private planes and paying more for limousines, catering and flowers – expenses that are infuriating the party’s major donors who say Repugnicans need every penny they can get for the fight to win back Congress.

Most recently, donors grumbled when Steele hired renowned chef Wolfgang Puck’s local crew to cater the RNC’s Christmas party inside the trendy Newseum on Pennsylvania Avenue, and then moved its annual winter meeting from Washington to Hawaii. [The news photo above was taken late last month in Honolulu…]

For some major GOP donors, both decisions were symbolic of the kind of wasteful spending habits they claim has become endemic to his tenure at the RNC. When Ken Mehlman served as the committee chairman during the critical 2006 midterm elections, the holiday party was held in a headquarters conference room and Chic-fil-A was the caterer.

What’s the problem?

The Repugnicans chose Michael Steele in January 2009 as a knee-jerk response to the November 2008 election of President Barack Obama; they wanted to show the nation that Hey, they can be hip, too!

Obama and Steele have lots in common, including their love of stimulus packages and hanging out in Hawaii, apparently.

Speaking of Hawaii, hey, has anyone checked Steele’s birth certificate?

Maybe the Repugnicans can oust him that way, before he completely empties the safe.

More assorted shit

If the United States of America is so damned big and bad, then why are we so fucking obsessed with the threat (real or imagined) of terrorism?

When were we ever 100 percent safe? Why don’t we fear our cars, since we’re much more likely to die in an automobile accident than we are to die in a terrorist attack? 

Today The Associated Press has not one, but at least two, news items on security for the Super Bowl: “Protecting Against a ‘Lone Wolf’ at the Super Bowl” and “X-mas Bomb Attempt Prods Super Bowl Security Change.”

You know what I’m hoping for?

I’m hoping that members of Code Pink crash the Super Bowl.

They’re good at getting into events — here is a photo of Code Pink members crashing the lie fest — er, testimony — of former Secretary of State Condoleezza “You Know She’s Lying When Her Lips Are Moving” Rice:

— and they never actually harm anyone.

The Code Pink activists are hated because they stand up to The Man, an act that the brainwashed masses deem to be “crazy.” In a democracy, you see, you’re just supposed to just shut the fuck up and let the stupid white men run the show. They know better than you do. I mean, the current state of the nation after the eight years of the Bush-Cheney administration is proof of that. And dissent is uber-unpatriotic, you terrorist-lovin’ pinko. Real patriots march in lockstep with their all-white-male leaders. Every true patriot knows that.

—

I recently wrote:

What the fuck is with the widespread belief that others’ beliefs, no matter how insane and potentially oppressive or even dangerous to others, should be held by all of us as sacrofuckingsanct?

We are allowed to believe whatever we want to believe, but when we believe that others should be oppressed or subjugated, that’s a fucking problem, because our beliefs that others should be oppressed or subjugated often end up in actual oppression or subjugation. Actions often follow beliefs. Hate speech, for instance, often leads to hate crimes. And it’s the hateful beliefs that precede the hate speech.

So just now I read a piece on the murder conviction on Friday of wingnut warrior Scott Roeder, who in May 2009 shot to death — in a church — Dr. George Tiller, who had provided abortions in Kansas.

Here is the money shot of the piece:

During closing arguments Friday, [defense attorney Mark] Rudy urged the jury to reject the murder charge. “No one,” he said, “should be convicted based on his convictions.”

Rudy mentioned leaders who stood up for their beliefs, including Martin Luther King Jr. They were “celebrated individuals (who) stood up and made the world a better place.”

So Scott Roeder was just another Martin Luther King Jr., you see. Except that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down in cold blood, just like Dr. George Tiller was. And Scott Roeder gunned down George Tiller. (Don’t try to understand the “logic”; it will just give you a sick headache.)

Tell you what: After Scott Roeder is gunned down like the dog that he is, then maybe, just maybe, we can start comparing him to someone else who was assassinated. Until then, he isn’t a martyr. He’s an assassin, a murderer. And he was convicted of murder, not convicted of having believed something.

You gotta love his “defense,” though.

I suppose that I could have assassinated “President” George W. Bush and been compared to Martin Luther King Jr. for having done so. After all, if Tiller was responsible for taking innocent lives and therefore his killer was a hero like MLK, well, mass murderer George W. Bush is responsible for having taken many more innocent lives, including the lives of more than 4,300 U.S. troops who have died as a result of his bogus Vietraq War for the war profits of Dick Cheney’s war-profiteering Halliburton and the other war-profiteering subsidiaries of BushCheneyCorp — and the lives of thousands upon thousands of innocent Iraqis, whom he permanently “liberated.”

You know, wingnuts, you really don’t want to go down that path, that one’s beliefs justify killing others. You lost the Civil War to us blue-staters, remember.

—

Speaking of abortion, The Associated Press reports today that New Repugnican Hero Scott Brown is pro-choice:

Republican Sen.-elect Scott Brown of Massachusetts says he opposes federal funding for abortions, but thinks women should have the right to choose whether to have one.

Brown tells ABC’s “This Week” that he disagrees with his party’s position that the Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion [Roe v. Wade] should be overturned.

Brown says the abortion question is one that’s best handled by a woman, her family and her doctor. He also says more effort needs to go into reducing the number of abortions in the U.S.

Brown has said the GOP shouldn’t take his vote for granted on every issue. He says he’s fiscally conservative but more moderate on social issues….

I’m not sure how much of Brown’s stance is out of political necessity, given that he’s in the blue state of Massachusetts, and how much of it is out of any actual sanity, but I think it’s funny that the wingnuts — who would prefer Brown to say, like wingnut football hero Tim Tebow has said, that he’s happy that his mama didn’t abort him — don’t have Brown on board with them on the issue of women’s right to have control over their own fucking uteri.

Speaking of fiscal conservatives, I’m totally down with fiscal conservatism — the taxpayers’ dollars should be spent judiciously and responsibly — but I have a real fucking problem with the Repugnicans’ philosophy of spending hundreds and hundreds of billions of the taxpayers’ dollars on the war profiteers via bogus wars but refusing to spend the taxpayers’ dollars on the taxpayers. 

Where in the fuck were the cries of “fiscal conservatism!” when the unelected BushCheneyCorp created a record federal budget deficit, with most of that money funneled to the traitors who comprise the military-industrial complex?

Um, yeah.

—

A little more on John Edwards, and then hopefully I’ll never feel compelled to write about the loser again.

While I have no plan to buy former Edwards aide Andrew Young’s tell-all book The Politician, I found this recent reportage from Salon.com’s War Room to be interesting:

Young’s book also elaborates on the now-dominant theme of Edwards as a narcissist on an epic scale. If half of what the book says is true, the candidate’s obsession with his appearance was, if anything, underestimated during the campaign.

Preoccupied with the appearance of his hair and his weight, he scorned state fairgoers as “rednecks” who would try to force feed him. According to Young, Edwards delivered one line that seems a bit too perfect: “I know I’m the people’s senator, but do I have to hang out with them?”

I never bought Edwards’ supposed populism, which is why I never supported him for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Do I blame Edwards for not being thrilled to be hanging out with rednecks? No. I’m not thrilled to hang out with rednecks, either. They tend to be not very bright, not very curious, and they tend to fear — and to oppress and even to aggress upon — those who don’t look, act and believe just like they do.

But the difference between Edwards and me is that I don’t lie about my feelings about rednecks.

—

Finally, I like this line in an AlterNet piece about why the U.S. Supreme Court fucked up when the five wingnuts on it ruled that corporations have the First Amendment right to spend an unlimited amount of money on political ads: “Simply put: money is not speech [and] corporations are not people.”

Yup. I especially believe the latter part: corporations are not people.

One certainly could argue that money is needed to disseminate one’s message, but the First Amendment reads:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Nothing in there about corporations having the same rights as do individual people — nothing about corporations in there at all — and the courts have ruled consistently that what appear (correctly or incorrectly) to be restraints on free speech are constitutional if they are content neutral.

Restraining corporate influence on the national political dialogue is not about suppressing individuals’ free speech; to the contrary, it’s about ensuring that the individual’s voice is not completely drowned out in the national dialogue by Big Money.

To allow that to happen would be to hasten the conversion of our democracy into a complete corporatocracy, which has been going on for some decades now.

No one who understands and cares about our democracy would be OK with its hostile takeover by the corporations, which represent the largest threat to our democracy, by far.

Mitt Mystique wins again in Mass. in wake-up call for complacent Dems

 

Associated Press photo 

Repugnican Massachusetts state  Sen.  Scott Brown celebrates his come-from-behind win of the late Ted Kennedy’s U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts today. With him is Repugnican former Massachussetts Gov. Mitt Romney. Can you tell which one is which? (Neither can I…) 

“In an epic upset in liberal Massachusetts,” The Associated Press breathtakingly reports right now, “Republican Scott Brown rode a wave of voter anger to defeat Democrat Martha Coakley in a U.S. Senate election [today] that left President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul in doubt and marred the end of his first year in office.” 

Oh, please. 

“Epic”? 

Embarrassing to the Democratic Party, to be sure, but “epic”? 

Look: According to the accounts that I’ve read, Democratic candidate Martha Coakley, Massachusett’s attorney general, sat on her ass — er, laurels — while her Repugnican challenger Scott Brown actually campaigned. It widely has been reported that he even campaigned across the state in his pickup truck, apparently to make the voters of Massachusetts think that he is one of them.  

Wikipedia notes that Brown is an attorney who is married to a local TV reporter and that the couple own “a 3,000-square-foot primary home [in Wrentham, Mass.], a second home in Rye, New Hampshire, three small rental units in Boston, and a timeshare on the Caribbean island of Aruba.” 

So yes, Scott Brown is just like you — if you’re an attorney, if you’re married to a local TV reporter, and if you are loaded. (And if your pubes have appeared in a national magazine…)

Brown “rode a wave of voter anger”? Maybe. Or maybe he just lied — er, campaigned — harder than did his opponent. (Which is what the consensus of the news accounts has been.) 

Further to pick on The Associated Press’ overblown lead paragraph, when did the Democrats ever have a solid, filibuster-proof 60-vote majority? There always have been those problematic senators wanting to have their asses licked because they threatened to withhold their vote among the 60 if their demands weren’t met. 

The “public option” died some time ago, did it not? “Barack Obama’s health care overhaul” — “Obamacare,” as the wingnuts love to call it — was in doubt long before today’s election in Massachusetts. 

And how can you “mar” the end of a new president’s first year that was lackluster at best anyway? 

I don’t see that much has changed as a result of the election in Massachusetts today. I don’t see some automatic Repugnican resurgence. 

It’s true that we live in the United States of Amnesia, and that after a group of stupid white guys just ran the nation into the ditch after their eight long nightmarish years of unelected rule, the voters in Massachusetts apparently thought that it was a swell idea to put another stupid white guy in charge of things. 

But, I surmise, even if we can extrapolate voter sentiment in Massachusetts to voter sentiment nationwide, that would be because voters have unrealistic expectations as to how long it takes to turn the Titanic back around. 

George W. Bush and crew didn’t get us into our predicament in just one year; it is unrealistic to expect Team Obama to get us out of it in just one year. 

But hey, Scott Brown is hot! In fact, in 1982, he was a centerfold for Cosmopolitan: 

 

Nice treasure trail there, Scott! (But it looks like there was some manscaping going on there, and, as I recently noted, I hate that.)

Brown still looks edible — here he is gloating some more today: 

 

Associated Press photo 

— and apparently he has a bit of that Mitt Romney thing going on; apparently, your soul can be as black as pitch, but if you look good, the voters of Massachusetts will give you their vote. (Call it the Mitt Mystique, I guess…) 

I see nothing but good coming from Brown’s win. 

The Democrats have been way too fucking complacent. They needed this wake-up call. 

But an “epic” loss for the already shaky Democrats it ain’t. Per The Associated Press, Brown won today with only 52 percent of the vote to Coakley’s 47 percent, with 97 percent of the state’s precincts reporting. That’s not an “epic” landslide. It was a close election. 

And U.S. Sen. Brown will be up for re-election in only three years, as that’s when the six-year term for the U.S. Senate seat that he won today ends.  

Wake up and get to work, Democrats. 

Stop taking votes for granted, even in places like Kennedyland, and don’t let the voters be fooled by more rich Repugnican former centerfolds who successfully bamboozle the voters into thinking that they’re just one of them.