Election score card for November 2011...

Every day seems to bring a new story about how cities, states and individuals are feeling the effects of policies either put in place by republican governments or trumpeted by the republican candidates for president.   Election night is a good time to reflect on the impact of these policies after having them in place – for the most part – since the 2010 mid-term elections just one year ago…

                                                                                     

·         A small town in middle America has had to resort to taking out street lights to save money and close a 5 million dollar budget shortfall.   Variations on this theme are everywhere across the country.  Parks are closing, police departments are being consolidated, libraries are closed as much as they’re open, class sizes balloon and millions of college students – unable to get financial aid any more – are slammed with potentially crushing debt in order to complete their education at the same time as classes are cut and their job prospects suck.

·         The tough immigration law in Alabama has had the effect of scaring the hell out of farm workers who normally line up to work the sweet potato harvest but who now have left the crops to rot in the fields rather than risk the heavy handed “stop & frisk” law enforcement enabled by the new law. 

·         As a result of deep cuts in revenues, government employment is at an historic low, leading to sever cut backs in services as well as playing hell with local economies, as private employers continue to wait before hiring. Republican orthodoxy aside, government workers go to the super market and the shoe store and the Chevy dealer and buy things.  Sure, maybe we don't need multiple deputy sub-committee vice chairmen regulating the county fair pig races.  But government jobs are actual jobs and support actual families.

·         Mississippi is attempting to pass a law that says that “person-hood” begins at the very moment of conception, calling into question all manner of birth control methods in addition to curtailing a woman’s control over her own body and potentially criminalizing 14 year old boys jerking off in the upstairs bathroom.  Or is it just the female zygotes that are in peril?  Hey, I have an idea; why don’t you idiots figure out a way to get your state off the bottom of the list of minimum wage jobs and people on food stamps instead of getting yourselves all worked up about zygotes?

·         Governor Jan “Adolph” Brewer of Arizona, apparently not content with Arizona republicans controlling both house of the legislature, pulls a down and dirty Nixonian hit on an independent head of the redistricting commission, appointed by the legislature, when her and some of her would be Black Shirts objected to the drawing of districts seeming to favor Latinos.  Now she has the Justice Department checking under her desk and going through her dumpsters.  Her explanation was a fine example of someone caught red handed doing something both stupid and borderline illegal; “Well she acted, uh, inappropriately. Well it was very, pretty much obvious that she in communications, and doing things, uh, not in the public, and the people of Arizona deserve that...", at which point she was interrupted by a sympathetic radio host who was probably embarrassed for her. 

·         Ohio voters soundly rejected Governor John Kasich’s pet union -busting and probably unconstitutional bid to prohibit government workers access to collective bargaining and to make them the scapegoats for economic problems brought about largely by policies championed by republicans at the national level.   John, you may want to contact Faux News about getting your old job back.

·         A respected republican-appointed and well known conservative judge in the District of Columbia refused to rule unconstitutional a major component of Obama’s health care reform legislation – the public mandate – handing Obama a victory as the US Supreme Court gets ready to hear a case of its own on a similar issue.  The ruling by Judge Lawrence Silberman – apparently a close confidant of Clarence “Mumbles” Thomas – is expected to be influential to the thinking of the Supremes as they consider a similar case.

·         In a surreal “Through the Looking Glass” moment today, Bitch McConnell accused the democrats on the so-called Super Committee of wanting it to fail, citing as evidence comments made by Chuck Schumer, who observed – quite justifiably – that the committee will probably fail because republicans refuse to consider any new taxes.  McConnell, probably the single most hyper-partisan human being to ever walk the planet and a sour-faced prat, accused Schumer of being partisan and the democrats in general of wanting the committee to fail.  Whoa…pot, kettle, black there, Bitch.  How’s that feel?  

·         Herman “Touch that right there, honey” Cain continues to deny – not just groping or harassing any women – but of not remembering a dang thing about the women, the situation, the groping, their names, their bra size…wait, strike that.  Anyway, the point is, Herman has shifted his blame from the politically questionable target of Rick “Where’d he touch her again?” Perry to unnamed yet well known “liberals” - those evil bastards responsible for most of what is wrong in America today.  I am sure he’s grateful to have Rush Windbag in his corner helping him as well.  The fat-assed drug addict is busy these days blustering about Cain’s latest accuser and, more specifically, her son, who he compared to nazi brownshirts for encouraging his mom to go public.  Nice, Douchbag.   Pick on a 13 year old defending his mom. ..what a righteous and admirable tough guy you are…dick.

Actually tonight had a whiff of republican desperation and despair as the election result rolled in.  As I was writing this it was declared that Mississippi voters had wisely declined to consider unfertilized eggs to be people.   Lucky for them; their state is too broke to pay their unemployment as they wait for a friendly sperm to swim by.   No, today for the first time in a long while, the net/net of the news didn’t make me want to throw anything at the TV or hurl my lap top out of my car window.  I’ll count that as a win.

Standin' Around Crying...

Herman Cain once again has demonstrated you can never go wrong blaming your problems on the media, as he called out “dishonest” and “nitpicky” members of the media for making him try to explain his virtual ass-grabbing while he was head of the National Restaurant Association.  He had about as much luck successfully doing so as he has had trying to explain why he didn’t know China has nuclear weapons or how the 9-9-9 plan will make taxes fairer for everyone.  The man is a colossal meathead, vacuous and willfully ignorant on the issues but capable of the occasional rhetorical flourish and skilled at giving the tea party crowds what they want to hear, whether it makes any sense or not.  His hand-holding date with his pal, Newt Gingrich the other night gave him an opportunity to spread this swill to a large audience – ironically right in Rick “Hey, he’s a black guy” Perry’s back yard in Houston – out tea-partying Rick to his face, both of them pissing in his corral while debating who was more likely to slash social programs with the most cold-blooded vigor.

That Cain can get a standing ovation from a tea party crowd is not so surprising; what is surreal and very much a Chauncey Gardiner moment was his invocation of Ronald Reagan and his notion of American as that “great city on a hill” at the end of the debate, to stomping cheers and whoops from the mostly white crowd, apparently forgetting a few details like Reagan’s record of relentlessly increasing government spending like there was no tomorrow, to help dig the country out of the oil embargo recession that got him elected. 

Neither of them apparently grasps the irony of complaining about members of the media who are dishonest, as the stiff-haired cheerleaders of Faux News regularly distort and dissemble on their behalf and that of the other brain damaged dwarves on the campaign trail.  I guess it's just a matter of telling the right lies, right Herman?

In a rare exhibition of political guts, Jon Huntsman called Herman out for his garbled explanations and denials, telling him to get his dirty laundry out, sort the colors from the whites and get it cleaned before the filth brings all of the candidates down.

Ron Paul, as is his wont, called a spade a spade, saying the whole thing is blown out of proportion and, more importantly, completely misses the point and obscures the obvious fact of Cain’s lack of basic competence and qualification for the job for which he is running and currently the leading candidate.  

But now today when a fourth woman has come forward – publicly – it looks less and less likely that blaming the media, denying any wrong doing and, finally, refusing to discuss it, will be the most successful long term strategy, no matter how much love you keep getting from the far right. 

I agree with Ron Paul; it is a distraction.  I wish someone would ask Cain for his opinion on the fact that one out of a hundred Americans is in jail.  Or how he reconciles John Boner standing straight faced and saying there’s no money to try to provide jobs or aid to the states for education and cops but plenty of money for the Pentagon – more than they really want - and massive tax cuts for the biggest and richest corporations and the wealthy.

 I’d like to ask him how he feels about the republicans’ systematic attempt to disenfranchise whole blocks of voters to try to limit the votes they think will go against them and steal the 2012 election like some two bit dictator in a banana republic.  And speaking of two bit dictators, how would he handle Hugo Chavez, leader of the most hostile country in the hemisphere but one which provides the US with about the same amount of oil as Saudi Arabia.

The thing is, he’s been asked questions like that and answered them sounding like what he is; a personable man who is completely out of his depth and hasn’t a clue really about most anything.

His continuing appeal to the far right of the republican party is a true mystery but maybe it’s the same reason America embraced The Cosby Show; here is a non-threatening black guy who smiles a lot and makes them laugh and feel comfortable.  It’s like it’s a relief that he’s not sporting a big fro and he’s not pissed off at them for being white.  But seriously; president?  First Bachman, then Perry, now Cain...who’s next?  Carrot Top...?  Somewhere Jon Huntsman is smiling...
 

How I Learned to Stop Worrying about the Deficit and Love Defense Spending…

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Some folks is even whiter than me...

The republican party is usually good for a laugh as it tries to reconcile its normal racial politics with race itself, particularly as it pertains to the very few not-crazy prominent black conservatives - like Clarence Thomas, for example – and especially when one of them does something stupid and is called out for it.  That’s why it was so funny today to see the comments made by deranged she-Satan, Ann Colter, talking about presidential candidate, (ack…gag…coff, coff…ack), Herman Cain.   So much of her incendiary political napalm is subtly racial that when she is trying to defend one of her precious and few black comrades that are being attacked in the media it still comes out like she’s telling "nigger" jokes in a 1950’s southern sorority house.

She was on Sean Hannity’s show on Faux News last night and ran this little bit of brain-dead racism at Sean who, typically, was too dull to catch it: “our blacks are so much better than their blacks” because “you have fought against probably your family, probably your neighbors… that’s why we have very impressive blacks.”   Whoaaa sister…sounds like you’re being a little possessive there, don’t you think.  I’d be willing to bet that Herman isn’t likely to respond well to having a skanky, no-ass white princess like you calling him one of “our blacks”.  They’s good workers though, ain’t they Ann?  Sounds like you come out the back of the plantation house and want Herman to hitch up the wagon so you can show him off to the neighbors.

The hilariously repugnant comments were repeated later as she apparently still feels that any publicity is good publicity and may actually believe she is doing some good, defending a republican candidate for president in her usual half-crazed pit bull bitch way while dissing Obama in the same breath for not having American slave ancestors.  Whew…that is a sure way to make the republican tent bigger and more inviting to minority voters Ann, and I think you should just keep on jabbering this same incredibly ignorant rant as often as possibly in inner cities across the land. 

While the mainstream press and other members of the media have gotten themselves all worked into a lather over Cain’s bad dirty jokes and creepy innuendo, the public is stifling a yawn.  Why?  Well raise your hand if you’re surprised that a politician turns out to be a hypocrite, particularly as it pertains to their behavior when the cameras aren’t running.   Hell, Newt probably puts on a thong and does muscle poses for Callista and who among us wants to know anything about that? 

Being sexually twisted is certainly not limited to republicans or African Americans or any other category of politician.  There seems to be a picture of someone’s dick under every rock.  Sexual scandal has become so commonplace – my guess is that, aside from a psychotic hyper-religious fringe element, no one cares.  Or we just chalk it up to a sort of “new normal” in aberrant behavior and move on to the next thing.  On the other hand, the ordinary racism underlying so much of the modern republican party rhetoric is a more serious thing in a country becoming less white every day. 

Double electrified fences guarding the Mexican border is only a ridiculously blatant example of what passes for “ideas” coming from republican candidates for dealing with race-tinged issues.   It’s a casual country club racism in many cases; “We love the way Juan takes care of the grounds…” – or it can be the rabid, frothing overt variety inherent in much of the vitriol coming from the most extreme elements of the tea party.  But when it becomes clear that a party is systematically trying to disenfranchise voters of color who might well favor a president of color with borderline unconstitutional manipulation of access to the voting booth, the fundamental racism is revealed.  Bony-assed Ann Colter is just enough of a publicity hound that she doesn’t care about this reveal if it sells a few more volumes of her toxic screed.  Huzzah!  I say make her the key note speaker at the republican convention to high light the nomination.  At the moment it looks as if it will be either  the country club version in Mitt Robbery, (“Are you nuts?  You can’t have a wet back mowing my lawn, fer chrissake!  I’m an important politician!”) or the southern red-neck version in Rick “Hey Fernando; come on and bus my table now, hurry up…” Perry.  Either way it will be the leading lights of the party intelligencia – like Ann & Sean and Glen Beck – rolling out the red carpet leading to the podium and that’s a beautiful thing.

Fear and loathing in Zuccotti Park...

Ever since I read The Great Shark Hunt, Hunter S. Thompson’s anthology of various essays, articles and literary madness many years ago, I have looked at Pat Buchanan differently.  In the book, Thompson describes – several times – occasions where he and Buchanan got together for a few late night Bass ales and conversation and Thompson clearly had a sort of reluctant admiration for the pugnacious former Nixon speech writer, spear-carrier for the right, and bombastic publicity magnet.  I’ve always thought of listening to Pat as a good way to keep track of what the enemy is doing because, unlike many of his ideological brethren, he doesn’t cause me to retch and throw things.

That’s why his take on Occupy Wall Street caught my attention on The McLaughlin Group this weekend.  Pat said he thought that the protest – specifically in New York but one could project to other major cities as well – would probably end badly as the weather gets colder and everyone starts to lose their patience.  I think he’s right. 

The Occupy protests have made their point and from here on they are in danger of becoming a liability in terms or what the end game should be; getting previously uncommitted voters to lean to the left just enough to recognize that the republicans are a bunch of corporate whores who are only interested in getting people back to work if it is non-union, no benefits, slashed wages corporate servitude in keeping with the modern ruling class narrative of “global competitiveness”.   Essentially corporations have moved jobs overseas to low wage / no benefits countries and are tacitly telling us all that, if we want jobs back in America some sacrifices need to be made so they can maintain their profits.  And by the way, if we do that we want you pay more in taxes too, because some of you ner do well low life snivelers don’t even pay taxes now.

I am sensing a tremendous campaign afoot in the republican ranks to discredit the Occupy protests by linking them to Huey Newton and Jane Fonda and calling attention to the lack of demands, as if a list of demands might prompt corporate interests to reconsider their selfish and greedy policies for some rationally negotiated improvement.  Ha!!!  There is also a whiff of fear in the bug-eyed press appearances and statements being made by an increasingly shrill cadre of right wing foot soldiers – Bitch McConnell, Eric “the Fearful” Cantor, poster-boy and Hitler youth look-alike Paul Ryan and a covey of republican governors across the country trying mightily to disenfranchise the young and the old, the poor and unemployed middle class and people of color.  And the sense that the 1%ers are getting nervous is also reflected in the flurry of rhetoric coming from the dullards running for the republican nomination.  How else to explain retrograde and widely discredited economic policies like a flat tax suddenly being pushed as the idea of the month by chumps like Rick “Hell, I don’t know if it will really work” Perry and Herman “Goering” Cain.

Perry in particular is just a fountain of warmed over Reagan era ideas; ideas that history has longed judged to have been a series of fairy tales and hallucinations with no more chance of working than a handful of magic beans and Harry Potter’s wand.  Between his “sure fellas; come and get it” energy plan that’s nothing more than a 30 year old industry wish list, to his stale flat tax idea pushed with the accompanying sales pitch of promoting “fairness”, not only are corporate and ultra wealthy interests not caving in, they’re doubling down.   It’s like they’re saying, “Hey, you want to stir up shit and cause us trouble; we’ll take the food off your table and have you living in a box behind the bowling alley.” 

Cain's plan would raise taxes by about 58 percent for the bottom 20 percent of earners, double them for the middle class, and cut them by 249 percent for the top fifth of the income ladder, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.   Yet he continues to wander the country at random repeating the same tired lie over and over and over again, that it won’t do the very thing that everyone knows it will do.  His handlers are clearly counting on the ignorance of the low information voters, as Mike Lofgren referred to them, to carry the day simply based on blind acceptance of a ludicrous idea.  How is this possible? 

The so-called Super Committee tasked with coming up with some way to reduce the deficit, the reddest of red herrings in itself, is the perfect current example of the corporate class pushing this remorseless agenda of shoving the tax bill down on to the lowest quartile of Americans.  Intransigent republicans have absolutely no interest in even the most carefully considered proposals to raise revenue if it has any hint of a tax increase on the top 10% - the job creators, to use Bitch McConnell’s surrealistic description.  This phrase always begs the question, so where the fuck are the jobs?  But we know where they are – they’re in Asia for the most part.  They’re sure as hell not in Pennsylvania of Illinois or Michigan.  And Rick, a million unskilled minimum wage jobs doesn't mean they are in Texas either.

No, I think it’s time for the Occupy protestors to pack up their tents and head home for the winter.  Register to vote, go door to door, work for some worthy politician – assuming you can find one – write letters, talk to your friends and neighbors – just don’t let these sleazy bastards turn something good and real and noble into a shit-storm of tainted media, exaggerations and distortions.  You all did some good, now take Pat’s advice, leave the park and go home and get to work – running these creeps out of town on a rail.

Legalize it...!

I had intended to write today about the staggeringly schizophrenic spectacle of the Obama justice department in California flying reconnaissance missions over orange groves and almond orchards in concert with brown oxford-wearing rural sheriffs with crew cuts and aviator shades, spending millions of dollars feverishly looking for legal marijuana plantations hiding in plain sight.  Worse, when they find them,  they are now threatening to seize the land upon which this pungent and sticky green bounty is found, and take it from families who have been working the same land for generations and who have State of California issued permits to grow the stuff for legal and licensed medical marijuana dispensaries.   I hope the irony of this isn’t lost in the description.

The single most valuable cash crop you could possibly grow – more valuable than saffron or white truffles – is confiscated by law enforcement in operations costing millions, taken to the nearest incinerator and gleefully destroyed by these same self righteous but incredibly dull jar-heads while their spokesperson says things like: "The California marijuana industry is not about providing medicine to the sick," claimed Laura Duffy, the San Diego-based US Attorney at the October 8 Sacramento press conference. "It's a pervasive, for-profit industry that violates federal law."  Hmmmm…sounds a lot like Goldman Sachs to me.  

The thing is, this genie is way out of the bottle and – just like gay marriage and other social abominations – you’re not going to get it back in no matter how many puckered up soldiers you enlist to help.  Too many people are clear that – while not a particularly productive undertaking – ingesting pot shouldn’t be a crime.  Old Laura there probably goes back to the hotel room after a long day of railing against the evils of “for profit” but illegal agricultural industries, kicks off her stubby-heeled sensible justice department pumps and sucks down a couple of cocktails from the mini-bar.  I wonder if the irony of it all ever strikes her.

In any case, this ludicrous and brain-dead government use of our tax dollars had me ready to call out Obama, a former pot smoker and current user of the far more insidious and deadly – but legal – substance, tobacco, until I read a story today in which it was reported that these guys don’t even talk to Eric Holder when they decide to burn down the cornfield – they decided to do that all on their own.  Well butter my butt and call me a biscuit…I guess the sight of large groups of well behaved if somewhat addled cancer patients with orange Cheeto mustaches just gave them the willies so bad that they decided to do something about it on their own.  God knows we can’t take a chance that dangerous class 1 drugs are being used recreationally.  That would be…I don’t know; sinful…? 

It’s a funny situation when you think about it.  If you don’t think Phillip Morris already has research green houses somewhere growing the most kick-ass ganja imaginable, you’re naïve.  But for some reason the corporate royalty is hesitant to fully endorse the a move toward legalization so it has become a very grass (ar, ar) roots thing – the growing and distribution is a people’s industry, if you will, promulgated right under the flared nostrils of “the man” and it appears to me that someone somewhere is getting pissed off about it.  I can see fat guys in conference rooms practically bursting their suspenders, sputtering, “Well..well…we just can’t HAVE this, god damn it!” 

Every time I see a news story on TV about one of these pharmacies I marvel at the neat display cabinets holding all manner of varieties and permutations, like a counter-culture Baskin Robbins for stoners, a crazy impossible dream when I was in my 20’s, something you could speculate about and then laugh at the absurdity of it all, with Commander Cody in the back ground.

So Barack – brother man – put on the Super Fly soundtrack, call Eric Holder and tell him to chill, dude.  California pot growing is here to stay, like it or not.  Why don’t you have him hunt down some real criminals? 

"What chance does a returnin' deceased war veteran have of finding a job...?"

The recent announcement that all US troops would be out of Iraq by January 2012 was greeted with a collective yawn by both the national media and an American public typically too pre-occupied with the question of whether or not Mormons came from outer space and who got kicked off Dancing With The Stars to care much about the war in Eye-rack anymore.   So in the interest of seizing upon and fully understanding and appreciating this historic moment, I think it’s necessary to re-visit Dubbya’s Folly, just to make sure we assign it its proper place in early 21^st century history.

Not since the heroic invasion of Panama by Bush the Elder to make sure his junior grade bag-man, Manuel Noriega kept quiet about being a laundromat for Contra drug money has there been a more obscenely stupid and wasteful exercise undertaken to prove the size of one’s dick.   Now after years of chaos and bloodletting in the name of hubris and ignorance – and despite desperate and intense lobbying by the pentagon – all but a small force retained for protection of the embassy will be removed. 

Oddly, this move has not precipitated any outcry or even any comment from the chicken hawk wing of the republican party nor from any of their tribe of candidates.   After the fuss they have made over Obama’s foreign policy in general and his handling of the dynamic and volatile situation in the Middle East in particular, this silence is puzzling.  Can it be there is so little to which one could point and triumphantly say, “There…see what we accomplished!” that they want no association with an episode which history will undoubtedly deem ill advised at best and perhaps tragically criminal at worst?   

Or maybe it is that they sense that the public is anesthetized to all things Iraqi; the waste and corruption and grim death that we have observed taking place in the background while most of us go on with our business.  We’ve lived through – we hope - the one great financial crisis of our lives – most of us – we have lost our homes and jobs and fortunes and are so preoccupied with getting from today to tomorrow that we hardly notice.  It seems pretty clear that there isn’t going to be much traction in barking about Obama’s Iraq policy; particularly in contrast to his handling of the economy.  So a day that may have seemed like a dream out of reach to many young Americans who served there doing their best in a preposterously shitty situation has been announced and most everyone is busy doing other things.  

From The Nation Magazine – “Withdrawing the 48,000 remaining US troops will save approximately $50 billion annually. The direct cost of the Iraq War over the past decade has been $800 billion, with indirect expenditures like veterans’ care pushing the long-term cost into the range of $6 trillion, in the estimate of scholars Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz. More than 4,500 Americans have lost their lives in the conflict, while more than 30,000 were wounded. Iraq itself remains one of the poorest countries in the world, with millions of dead, wounded and displaced people."

Mission accomplished, eh, George?  Whatever the justification of the month has been since the 2003 capture of Saddam, the will of the majority of Iraqis has finally become important enough to carry the day and beat back the sense of ownership and entitlement of the Pentagon warriors who today, behind closed doors, may be ruefully and wistfully smoking cigars and channeling the ghost of Patton, saying, “God forgive me but I do love it so.”  Well don’t go all nostalgic fellas; last I looked we are still sending drones to blast scampering Taliban bad guys in Afghanistan and Pakistan so you’ll still have jobs.

But in the face of continued republican attacks on government spending, is it inevitable that our post-war amnesia leads the pitifully underfunded VA to offer even fewer programs and benefits to returning veterans?  Obama’s announcement yesterday of a government / industry partnership to offer 25,000 jobs to returning veterans and their spouses is encouraging but with the actual war in the rear view mirror would a President Romney...(ack...gag, coff, coff...), continue to devote the resources necessary to do the right thing for the military personnel  republicans always seem so anxious to deploy in the name of “preserving our freedoms and way of life”?  I’m not so sure.  But it would be nice if they at least acknowledge them...