Barking Labrador

SCOTUS blows a gasket over marriage equality

2015-06-26T13:42:00.002-07:00

I feel compelled to respond to some of the incredibly obtuse nonsense contained in the dissents of the four members of the SCOTUS after the decision affirming the right to marriage equality was announced this morning. These opinions – from Chief Justice Roberts, Scalia, Thomas and Alito – all argue from a particular perspective; the “tradition” of marriage in society. But because marriage – at least in modern western societies – is inextricably bound to religion. SCOTUS opinions that are grounded in religious traditions and notions of marriage almost inevitably leads to a muddled and incoherent mess.

From Roberts, this particularly puzzling blast; “[F]or the good of children and society, sexual relations that can lead to procreation should occur only between a man and a woman committed to a lasting bond.” Huh? John, who else would procreation occur between? Can a man and woman not particularly interested in procreating have a traditional marriage? How about a man and woman who can’t procreate?

But more than these obvious arguments is this essential element; to the extent that marriage as it is currently codified into law creates an advantage for the participants, the equal protection clause requires that the same advantage be available to all Americans. And not to just all Americans seeking to procreate or pursue a lifetime relationship with someone of the opposite sex, religious tradition notwithstanding. It begs the very question of why the state have “marriage laws” to begin with.

But it isn’t Roberts who leads the SCOTUS train off the rails; Scalia once again puts his full, meager intelligence on view with his snarling and sneering opinion. His argument seems to rest on the idea that the 14^th amendment is somehow violated by this simple notion. For reference, here is what seems to be the relevant section:

No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

As marriage laws dictate these privileges, this seems pretty clear to me. Scalia contends that the 5 affirming justices have “discovered a fundamental right overlooked by every person alive at the time of ratification.” But this is disingenuous in the extreme if it is referring to the specifics of same sex marriage. It is true this isn’t addressed; neither is intercontinental airline traffic or laws governing the internet. Somehow we find meaning there in spite of these omissions. So this becomes nothing more than a hissy-fit because Antonin as a Catholic is opposed to the idea – perhaps even repulsed by the idea. But of course his religiously based objections are irrelevant and he should know it.

Alito also smears the constitution with a generous extra heaping helping of religiosity that isn’t and shouldn’t be there. His opinion states; “Today’s decision usurps the constitutional right of the people to decide whether to keep or alter the traditional understanding of marriage.” Sam seems to have confused the constitution with the bible because as far as I know this question isn’t addressed. He goes on to warn ominously, “By imposing its own views on the entire country, the majority facilitates the marginalization of the many Americans who have traditional ideas”, a somewhat overwrought and sweeping statement and one that could easily be applied by a 19^th century segregationist. “Traditional ideas” are just that, and should not have the weight of law.

But Clarence Thomas wins the prize for the most tortured logic on display with a barely coherent rant about how slaves did not lose their dignity because the government allowed them to be slaves, as if one’s dignity is the sole criterion by which to judge. He opines that, “[R]eceiving governmental recognition and benefits has nothing to do with any understanding of ‘liberty’” a statement completely devoid of logic, as not being allowed a benefit conferred on one’s fellow citizens certainly seems to qualify as a diminution of liberty to me.

It seems clear that once again the conservative SCOTUS justices have allowed their religious beliefs to completely infiltrate their understanding of constitutional law and – moreover seem content to rest fundamental decision consciously on that foundation, something that truly would be anathema to the founders. I pains people to come to the realization that, while basic Christian beliefs are incorporated into laws of this country – thou shalt not kill, steal, etc. – they do not form the font from which all that is right flows. As the country’s demographics continue to evolve the recognition of this simple fact by our legislators and politicians will become ever more important. As will reconstituting the current SCOTUS.

2015-03-13T21:46:00.000-07:00

As the drama queens in congress once again strain credulity with a manufactured crisis and tedious hyper-partisan conflict and Faux News continues to shill for high income welfare, a $3.00 an hour minimum wage and Obama's ultimate failure, leading republican presidential candidate Rick "What did I say wrong" Perry suddenly finds himself losing conservative support faster than hot air out of an overstretched balloon, like the intellectually taxed gas-bag that he is. Even his prayerful and exclusive connection to the lord himself may not be enough to save him after he not only shot himself in the foot; he re-loaded his trusty sidearm and squeezed off a few more rounds just to be sure.

Republicans...my response to their response.

2013-02-17T20:52:00.003-08:00

Where was I…? Oh yeah; republicans. First of all, no re-cap of the State of the Union festivities can be complete without a short pause to consider the Marco Rubio rebuttal, wherein he managed to hit the normal republican bullet points while looking for all the world like Richard Nixon debating Kennedy in 1960. So much for the savior of the party. Marco; you’re Cuban man; what’s up with the sweating like a gringo tourista? If you can’t stand the heat, stay the hell away from cameras and claustrophobic studio spaces full of lights while wearing a navy blue suit. Like I said, the substance of the speech was bad enough, highlighted by what seems to be a new republican strategy of trying to relate to normal people – the 47% - by trotting out some tired and apocryphal story of their own terrifying escape from a life of poverty by pulling themselves up by the bootstraps of free markets and low taxation – something like that; it got a little bit garbled there towards the end. Looking incredibly uncomfortable and thereby disingenuous at the same time is hitting the political disaster tri-fecta.

This week, post-SOTU address, also saw the emergence - from whatever rock he lives under - of the Lizard King himself, Dick Cheney, who delivered a lively blast of criticism of Obama’s choices for his national security team, former republican Senator Chuck Hagel and CIA nominee, John Brennan, an avid proponent of drone use and supporter, for the most part, of the Bush/Cheney strategy in the war on terror. I’m not really a fan of either of these guys, although you have to give Hagel props for being his own man and not hewing to the party line, something for which he is currently paying the price. Still, hearing Cheney criticize anyone’s foreign policy choices is laughable – like Kevin Costner criticizing people for making bad movies. This guy thought Elliot Abrams and John Poindexter were the best guys for the job – a couple of two-bit criminals left over from Reagan’s brilliant foreign policy team. He and Rummie assembled a cabal of ruthless swine who still saw commies under every rock and wouldn’t recognize a home grown insurgency if it flew a plane into a building.

But Cheney is becoming well known for crawling out into the light every now and then to howl at the moon and spew politically charged bile like bird shot from a Remington 20 gauge. He is only the most high profile, unapologetically delusional member of a party that seems to be in full retreat and disarray and – ironically – intent on continuing to empty their gun into the same boot.

We have the bleating members of congress yammering on about the danger of approving the Violence Against Women Act, as if losing the women’s vote in the November election by something like 60 – 40 is entirely inconsequential and rooting out the misogynist wing of the party is not as important as just honing their message to women. It isn’t bad enough that some of the delusional evangelical congress members still are insisting that trans-vaginal ultra-sound should be routine for anyone seeking an abortion and that doctors and other health care providers – who take a Hippocratic oath, by the way – should be free to ration care according to their religious beliefs and that birth control is for sluts. Nicely played, fellas. I’m sure you’re on the right track here.

How about some kind of compromise on gun control, an issue where an overwhelming majority of the country favors at least mandatory background checks and a limitation on selling weapons to any hopped-up meth-head who wanders into a convention center on gun-show day. No, the party is so far in the thrall of gun manufacturers that there is no room for a compromise of any sort. Surely the brains of the party understand that this is a politically untenable position and only the black helicopter-fearing, bomb shelter building, snake handling apocalypse fans are so paranoid and stupid to deny that it might be a reasonable idea. But they seem helpless to change the dynamic.

One of the most amazing things to observe is the party’s economic agenda – they seem to have learned nothing from the collapse of the financial system and subsequent malaise made worse by the stubborn insistence that the most pressing problem we face is not the lack of jobs, or Wall Street reform of any significance, or real reform of the tax system but the deficit, a problem that would be solved by nothing more complicated than 10 years of solid economic growth and prosperity driven inexorably by a more prosperous middle class. The average middle class citizen wouldn’t give two shits about the deficit if the bug-eyed Chicken Littles in the party would just shut up about it. They want a job and they’ll worry about the deficit…well, never.

Supported by quasi-intellectuals like George Will the party is in a manifest state of denial over climate change, so much so that it begs the question; even if the clearly measurable changes in climate aren’t caused by human activity, doesn’t it make sense to use our most powerful weapon – modern technology – to offset the impacts? In the end do we really care why the water is lapping around our downstairs windows? If we know that doing “X” will help, why on earth wouldn’t we do that?

Of course a summary of state of the republican party wouldn’t be complete without discussing the prolonged game of chicken they’re playing over the sequester and to a lesser extent, raising the debt ceiling. Paul Ryan and his fellow geniuses continue to insist that the only way to survive is to mercilessly cut everything in the federal budget – except the defense budget, of course, which continues to be sacrosanct and in fact in line to receive more money than they want and they are not shy about asking for the moon. There is no rational reason for this injection of additional money to a war machine that is currently winding down from two wars but nevertheless, some weird combination of fear, hatred and tiny penises compels the party to be willing to cut education funding, pre-natal care, long term care for the elderly, food stamps, unemployment, aid to the states and cities – pretty much anything that isn’t a corporate hand out or largess towards the wealthy in order to build more nuclear submarines, state of the art interceptor aircraft and other shiny objects that al-Qaeda couldn’t care less about.

Much of the recalcitrance is simply a knee jerk reaction and a prolonged hissy fit because Obama won a second term, something I am sure was unimaginable two years ago. McCain admitted that the unprecedented filibuster of republican Hagel’s appointment to Defense was because he was uncooperative and colored outside the lines when he was supposed to be genuflecting before the altar of mindless imperialism and the war in Iraq during Bush’s administration.

The funniest part of the current state of affairs is that when the cameras are on the republicans complain that Obama isn’t serious, he is absent from negotiations, that he needs to come forward with a proposal, etc, etc. But when he does proposed something as a starting point for negotiations, Rubio immediately criticizes him for daring to propose legislation without consultation with congress. It’s so obvious that they are simply continuing the failed strategy of obstruction that cost them the presidency in November. The good news is that the public seems to be tired of them and amateur idiots like Jan Brewer and others of her ilk are slowly losing their influence and credibility. So Marco, and you too, Rand Paul, thanks for giving us your opinion and call us when you get your first new idea.

The State of the Union Blues...

2013-02-13T20:19:00.000-08:00

I couldn’t watch the State of the Union address last night – watching a roomful of politicians is fascinating in the same way as a monkey playing with a loaded pistol is fascinating. I just took a quick look but I especially like to watch John Boner’s face as he sits in grim silence behind Obama looking for all the world as if he’s thinking about a bathroom remodel of whether or not to get undercoat applied to his Mercedes. Sucks to be you, John. The bitter and divisive partisanship at play in Washington and around the country in 2013 makes something like the State of the Union – traditionally a celebration of teeth-gritting cooperation between the parties – into a dangerous opportunity for public embarrassment a la Joe Wilson a couple of years ago. I kept expecting to hear that Ted Nugent was making inappropriate gestures from the cheap seats.

But as I read the media bilge today attempting to make sense of it all, it sounds as if potentially humiliating moments were limited to some eye-rolling and nodding off, at least until the two official responses – first from the mainstream republicans and then from their bug-eyed knucklehead wing, the Tea Party, represented by Rand Paul, a man apparently suffering from a delusion which has him running for president in 2016. He reminds me of the old saying; when the going gets weird, the hallucinating man is king, or something like that.

And that’s a good thing, all things considered. There’s enough embarrassing behavior afoot in Washington already – we don’t need to make it worse through some bizarre spectacle shown on every broadcast television network and half a dozen cable channels watched by millions of citizens; some of them angry and fearful and some of them disillusioned and disgusted but very few of them in the mood to stomach the kind of shit that would be unacceptable in an 8^th grade lunch room.

For the president’s part, he’s got some explaining to do – not only to his base but to citizens all the way across the political continuum - about his use of drones and – perhaps more scary – the garbled doubletalk that attempts to justify their use. If you boil it down they’re saying, “Trust us”, and just in case White House hubris is flowing like cheap champagne in the Super Bowl winners’ locker room I’ll get in line to tell Barack and his minions, that isn’t going to work, especially not on those of us who lived through Nixon and Reagan and the dangerous lunatic criminals they each employed in their chosen righteous cause. Memo to Obama Team; no one trusts you, ex post facto, so you might want to dial back the drone program and re-read the constitution for a few hours.

Specifically, just because the amped up 5-year olds in congress gave you and your predecessors the right to kick ass and take names all over the planet, wherever your fiery wrath takes you, you might want to check with the rest of the world and take their temperature about it. Last I heard there were lots of dead people and collateral damage and if you keep playing this mind-numbing game of “Where’s Waldo” with Al Qaeda big shots in the desert it will probably pay to get slightly better intelligence and wait until they go off for a little alone time before you start tossing Hellfire missiles around. Nothing like dead relatives to give folks more reason to hate us. Plus if the policy is to hunt them down where they live, it’s only a matter of time until there are drones over Munich and Paris and Virginia Beach.

And while we’re on the subject of things that aren’t particularly progressive, why do your federal law enforcement geeks continue to kick down the doors of medical marijuana dispensaries, especially those operating according to state laws? There are lots of real treacherous criminals wandering around Wall Street and K Street and other "respectable" neighborhoods where there is no chance of getting a contact high and where you might dispense some actual justice through the brown-shoed jarheads running the department. Are these guys all ex-jocks still frustrated that the cool stoner kids took hot girls to the prom or what? How can you possibly justify this inordinate attention to pot other than using a very strict and thought-free reading of the law of the land. Anyone who knows anything knows that marijuana and heroin are not remotely in the same class of substance abuse and to continue to pretend otherwise is to further degrade your credibility, something local police departments – to their credit – figured out 10 years ago. Even if the red-eyed guy standing in line doesn’t really have chronic back pain and just wants to get a buzz, who really gives a shit other than perhaps his mother and father? On the other hand, the hyperventilating and crazy son of a bitch down the hall who’s been doing crystal all day and now decides he needs to take his 9MM down to 7-11 so he can get some beer and calm down – well we all know that’s a different story. Go get him and leave the pot heads alone.

Finally, for Christ’s sake, stop deporting people for a month or so. I mean, what’s the end game here? Do you really think that you can get them all out, a la Mitt Romney? If not then you are discriminating by definition and letting pointy-headed bureaucrats run amok, shipping brown people over the border where they land flat in the middle of a drug war that makes East Oakland look like a pillow fight. What’s the point? What are you trying to prove – what a tough guy you are? Let Rick Perry pretend to be a tough guy. You’re from Chicago – you’re supposed to be cool like that. Just stop it unless you really think it’s good for the country to ship the padre de familia back to Mexico, leaving his wife and kids in some hell-hole apartment to eat beans and tortillas and wait for the landlord to come and throw them into the street. Jesus…

Now as to the republicans…(to be continued).

These are the sensible, repected voices of the right?

2013-01-16T08:14:00.001-08:00

You know those recurring dreams where vaguely disturbing things happen to you and it always turns out the same; you fall off a cliff but never hit the ground or you suddenly remember that you signed up for Philosophy 200 back in September and it’s now December and you haven’t been to any of the classes because you forgot all about it? I thought about this over the weekend after reading a couple of republican hack syndicated columnists jabbering on about how we’re all going to die because of the awful, terrible negro, Obama.

Charles Krauthammer and Victor Davis Hanson share an aura of credibility and respectability because they are rumored to have some kind of academic credentials, thus rendering their otherwise inane and repetitious Obama-badgering to be the voice of the loyal opposition. I, however, have drilled deeply into their Cave of Half-Remembered Treachery and am here to tell you the truth. Both of these guys are making a tidy living being professional Obama-haters and undiscerning shills for every right-wing interest group from the NRA to Chevron to the Daughters of the American Revolution to the Elks club down on the corner. So as a public service I am once again going to take my trusty lance to their army of straw men and try to get the smell of red herring out of the house before the company comes over.

Krauthammer’s latest thinly disguised propaganda piece uses the pretense of dissecting the choice of Chuck Hagel for Defense Secretary to flog Obama for not hewing to the neo-con vision of American exceptionalism, a grand-sounding euphemism for global imperialism and genuflection to Israel specifically. He cites three areas where Obama is reverting to his true Obama-ness; military spending, Israel and Iran – sort of a holy trinity of the sacrosanct to the Bill Krystol / Richard Perle church of world domination. Citing the 600 billion in automatic, across-the-board defense cuts to be implemented by the sequester, he fails to recognize John Boner being hoisted on his own petard and makes it sound as if that’s Obama’s number, a number which, if implemented, would leave our military tragically neutered and wandering the world stage like a 20 year old hump-back gelding. His basic criticism – boiled down – is that Obama wants a smaller military, a grim and ominous development for USO bars from Okinawa to Dusseldorf. But really Chuck – virtually everyone not obsessed with some kind of weird Julius Caesar complex understands that after winding down two wars, the military should be smaller.

Our problem with our belligerent little brother Israel is a vexing one politically. There are so many Israeli constituencies, from hallucinating evangelicals to the George Patton-wannabe chicken hawks who lay in bed at night with erections thinking about the 7^th Armored Division charging across Kordestan hell-bent for Tehran and the obstinate 17^th century monks huddled in the Grand Mosque plotting our demise. This is just stupid, as has been American policy towards Israel and Iran for the last 25 years. Unless you want to sanction bombing them back to the Bronze Age, they aren’t going anywhere. You’d think we might come to understand that putting a gun to their head isn’t going to accomplish anything but every time an American president whispers the word “negotiate” these guys start foaming at the mouth. They apparently never got over their personal Peacock, the Shah, being ignominiously kicked out and are determined to make up for it, turning what under other circumstances might just be another Middle Eastern country suspicious of us for our knee-jerk support for Israel into a scary nuclear monster trying to destroy us. I know lots of Iranian people and generally find them to be friendly but tough negotiators who like “things” just like we do and like the Chinese do and like most people do. Turning them into cartoonish and mysterious haters of the Great Satan is counter- productive.

I’m personally ambivalent about Israel – I can sympathize with 60 years of jittery nerves, bus-bombings, and widespread hatred from their neighbors. But I also know that if every time my neighbor’s kid lost a ball in my yard I took a high-powered rifle and shot out their windows I probably wouldn’t get much sleep at night either. And they need to stop building god damned apartment buildings.

But for my money Krauthammer’s most damning position is his exaltation of the little war criminal, Henry Kissinger, to some kind of semi-deity and Middle Eastern savant. Never mind that the little bastard sits in his New York City brownstone with security armed to the teeth and is afraid to venture much past Massachusetts for fear of being Pinochet’d into his own damp jail cell. The little prick probably dreams of extraordinary rendition at night – rotting in some stinking prison in Outer Nowhere is too good for him. But he’s Krauthammer’s idea of a statesman.

In his latest column for the San Jose Mercury, Victor Davis Hanson – and by the way; it’s a sure sign that someone is a blowhard if they use three names when surely two will do – regurgitates his usual litany of republican talking points, augmented nicely by a veneer of doom and foreboding. I wanted to punch him but I’ll just hit these one by one instead.

The central premise is that the idea of some kind of gun control is creating panic akin to that which would occur is one of those big-ass spaceships were hovering over New York or Los Angeles, so just-plain-folks are flocking to gun stores, arming themselves to the teeth and checking their supply of Twinkies in the basement for fear the faceless bureaucrats of the ATF will soon be going door-to-door to seize Grandpa’s 12 gauge. As paranoid fantasies go, this is a good one – some addled gun owners seem to have this as their recurring dream. He then goes on the blame violent video games and the depraved glitterati of Hollywood for making Adam Lanza go nuts and kill 26 people. He neglects to mention that Lanza’s mother was the source of the weapon in question and misses the irony of her buying it for self defense purposes. Vic, if she did have Grandpa’s 12 gauge for protection, young Adam would likely never perpetrated his nightmarish crime and we might not be having this conversation. Some simple safety measures, eh? Like maybe a trigger lock or a gun safe and Adam is still in his room playing World of Warcraft and listening to German death metal.

He segues into a rant about health insurance and higher taxes on income over 400k, bemoaning the fact that these valiant embodiments of American bootstrap success are being punished – made hapless victims – and the government is, by implication, going to give their hard earned money to the shiftless among us. In a particularly obvious falsehood, he sympathizes with those who have been playing fair and buying insurance and who now must subsidize, “many who could, but chose not to buy health insurance”, somehow obfuscating the fact that making those people pay for their insurance or health care one way or another is the very essence of Obama-care.

He ends on this cheery note; “No wonder the fear that a growing government will infringe on such traditional freedoms is stampeding millions of panicky Americans in all directions.” Of course this is insulting in several ways, the most egregious being the implication that Americans are as stupid as cockroaches, something that – I’m afraid – he and the rest of the right wing intelligencia truly believe down to their souls…or whatever it is that occupies the space where there should be a soul.

My recurring dream is the clamor and screeching of these relentless voices spewing misinformation and outright lies to advance their agenda, cloaked in faux patriotism, racism and contempt for those whose striving hasn’t resulted in “success”. It’s one thing to want a smaller government – I certainly do. It’s something else to take that very traditional American ideal and twist it into hatred and fear and treason. Listening to some of the over-heated rhetoric coming from the sputtering and bug-eyed republican members of the House of Representatives, I am frankly surprised that they haven’t been hauled off by the secret service for a sweaty conversation in some dusty warehouse in Maryland. To have these ostensibly respected members of the conservative media fomenting this kind of hyperventilating nonsense is regrettable. I think tonight I’ll take an Ambien and see what happens…

Belly flopping off the fiscal cliff; or how I lost the capacity for rational thought

2013-01-05T10:11:00.000-08:00

The laundry list of right wing complaints post fiscal cliff has been amusing to observe – all of the big gun conservative commentators have weighed in on the madness sure to follow what, in their minds was an ill-advised decision to let common sense prevail and maintain some semblance of dignity in the congress. Now they are in hot pursuit of the Deficit / Liberal / Obama boogie-man with torches held high, in full throat, giving us a good excuse to once again examine and break down the reasons for their concern. There are many such voices in the media these days but I will try to stick to those who I am pretty confident are not hallucinating regularly but whose partisan freak-flag is flying high just the same.

Victor Davis Hanson, eminent Hoover Institution historian and right-wing hack, published an article recently titled “2012: Call it the year when dreams died” an ominous sounding rehash of everything wrong in the world and why it is all the fault of Obama or other liberal impulses, all of which have suspicious origins and will surely doom us left unchecked by the wise men of the right – like himself. And while thumbing through a laundry list of left-wing folly, dismissing legitimate concerns about - as he derisively calls them - “the most vulnerable”, (as if they don’t really exist and are just a figment of deluded liberals’ imaginations), perpetuating the wild-eyed right-wing conspiracy fantasy about Benghazi and justifying the paranoid Brown-shirts leading the NRA, he compares Obama to Nixon in a wild swing and a miss attempt to further demonize him. Never mind that Hanson probably voted for Nixon both times he ran - he tries to make the logically questionable case that the two were equally venal and criminal and worthy of contempt. This is - of course - laughable in its entirety. Obama is nothing more than a 1974-vintage moderate republican who only looks like a bug-eyed frothing spawn of Fidel Castro when compared to dangerous lunatics who have seized control of the modern republican party.

He goes on to somehow equate Obama’s re-election with the crash of the Greek economy, the election of Mohamed Morsi in Egypt, the overblown, sputtering fireworks being launched to great and emotional fanfare in North Korea and Kim Slutashian carrying Kanye's love child. Right, Vince – of course this all makes sense in your twisted world view. Now climb back up into Hoover Tower and try to lie down for a while with a wet cloth over your forehead and when you wake up, there will be armed guards outside the kindergarten class room where your grandchildren are reading My Pet Goat in honor of the man most responsible for the current and much ballyhooed “trillion dollar deficits” and Quetin Tarrentino will have seen the light and entered the seminary.

My local paper is full of letters and articles from sputtering right-wingers expressing bitter disappointment, particularly now that John Boner has finally acquiesced and cut a deal “to avert the dreaded fiscal cliff”, a phrase so ubiquitous as be rendered meaningless – the brittle-haired local news readers staring glassy-eyed at the camera could read it over and over and keep a straight face but that’s because they don’t seem to care much about what it is they’re reading. For most other sentient beings the phrase is met with either a yawn or a roll of the eyes. Memo to news producers everywhere; endless repetition of hyperbole turns it into just more verbal Fruit Loops for the hungry maw of 21^st century information consumer. It – by turns – scares us or bores us but it doesn’t seem to motivate the knuckleheads in Washington.

For example, here is a letter suggesting that the deal was “typical Obama; punish the successful and reward the nonperformers”, as if this sums up Obama’s political strategy in one incoherent blast of thinly disguised racism.

Here’s another lamenting that the “liberal media”, (could that include me???), has successfully cast republicans as “racists, homophobes, sexists, and gun-nuts”, a fairly accurate description as far as I can tell, at least in as much as the most vocal and influential voices on the party are concerned. If you don’t like being portrayed that way, ask yourself how these clowns get elected? This correspondent, who is the president of something called, “The Conservative Forum of Silicon Valley”, goes on to blame the media for the fact that the unprincipled representatives he presumably supports, ”betrayed their core beliefs” by voting for a deal with no spending cuts, evidently not paying enough attention to the hated media to notice that the spending cuts are yet to come and are being negotiated as this is written. I know that the word "negotiation" is not in the republican lexicon anymore, which explains how fuming hatred trumps reasoned political dialogue once again.

The sad fact is that this imaginary crisis and its intellectual companion, raising the debt ceiling, does nothing more than distract the country from the real work of reform that most reasonable observers agree needs to occur. If I am Obama now and see that the fired up tea party rabble are demanding dollar-for-dollar cuts to match the increase in the debt ceiling, I would propose line items cuts to a defense budget so bloated as to embarrass Jabba the Hut. Here’s a news flash to the Three Corner Hat crowd; defense takes up over 50% of the federal budget. Anyone serious about cutting need only take a hard look at the defense budget and the savings start leaping off the page. Instead Paul Ryan and his ilk fuel their post-puberty obsession with Ayn Rand by suggesting the “nonperformers” be cast aside to fend for themselves so that the deserving can go and join the generals choking down turkey legs, warm stout and Cuban cigars.

Instead of arguing about how long to extend unemployment benefits, take an aircraft-carrier’s worth of money and go build a bridge somewhere. Reform the tax code so people and corporations aren’t rewarding for lying through their teeth and maybe you could lower some rates. Stop wallowing in the institutional stupidity that seems to have spread through Washington like a cholera epidemic and try to form rational thought above the level of a four year old playing with an empty cardboard box. Instead of screaming “No!!!” hysterically every time Obama or the democrats suggest voting for something completely non-partisan and innocuous, like the Violence Against Women act, come out from under the covers, look around and see that the world is changing and if you insist of staying there in bed, sucking your thumbs and pouting, you will eventually be no more relevant to the current political process in this country than Henry Kissinger.

Holiday Disfunction on Capitol Hill...

2012-12-28T14:06:00.000-08:00

For the last few days I have been thinking about the increasingly strange place of the public restroom in modern life. After all, in a 21^st century heretofore characterized by people wandering around relentlessly focused on the tiny screen of their personal devices – cocooned in pixilated armor that shuts out everyone around them – it is worth considering the public restroom, where we engage in a semi-ritualistic and vaguely unsettling communal excretory function in a dizzying variety of settings, from the lobby restroom of the Fairmont Hotel to the ballpark to the skeeviest gas station restroom along the interstate. Really; what else is there that’s like that?

But no; due to the ongoing toxic cock fight in our nation’s capitol, that profoundly important academic exploration will have to wait. Instead we’re compelled to offer our opinion and commentary on the dramatic and largely imaginary impending confrontation with the dreaded “fiscal cliff”. The combination of a snappy nickname with months of breathless hyperbole has everyone on edge; consumer confidence numbers were down over 6 points, which is a pretty significant drop, especially considering that most other economic indicators have been positive since the election. The media has found this to be nearly irresistible – empty headed and vacuous as they are - and so the cable news shows are filled with quasi-experts of every stripe yammering away and offering their opinion, all accomplishing nothing other than to increase national anxiety.

The one good thing to come of it is the further unmasking of the republican party, exposing them as the clueless band of obstructionist traitors they seem to have become. Has there been one good idea to come from the right over this issue? Is there any indication that they might pursue a different solution than that which they have been mumbling and nattering about for the better part of a year? Do they pay attention to anything other than the marching orders delivered to them from the corporate bag-men and plutocrats controlling their agenda?

I have been listening to John Boner for two years and he has had literally nothing of substance to say since the 2010 mid-terms. For him to stand up in front of a forest of microphones and try to claim that they’re the ones doing all of the compromising and making all of the practical and substantive proposals and Obama is the one responsible for the impasse is laughably predictable because he totally lost control of his bug-eyed, frothing, tea-party infested mob who fervently believe that bringing the government to its knees is their holy and patriotic duty. And if a few unwashed foreigners, old people and shiftless minorities have to suffer because of it, all the better.

For their part, the democrats continue to trot out two of the most demonstrably ineffective “leaders” in the House and Senate in modern history. Harry Reid looks like a slightly addled and sleepy assistant professor of 16^th century Slavic languages, like he needs to be dusted off and pointed to the podium on the Senate floor where he gets all worked and says “Gosh darn it” and spouts other such inflammatory rhetoric while being completely ignored by 90% of his colleagues, who would rather play cribbage for cigarettes than listen to his jabbering.

In the House they depend on Nancy Pelosi, possibly the most polarizing figure in an entire congress of loony, hallucinating reactionaries and partisan hacks. Everyone hates her, probably even her own staff, and her effectiveness was amply demonstrated during the first half of Obama’s first term when she alienated virtually everyone in the country with her cartoonish liberalism and icy bitchiness. Even Obama probably doesn’t want to take her calls.

In this muddle of self-interest, corruption and treacherous partisanship is it any wonder that nothing happens? At some point Obama has looked around and said, “One more round of phone calls and that’s it – we can go off the god damn cliff for all I care anymore”.

If the tea party rabble wants to bring down the government, Thelma and Louise-ing it off the fiscal cliff seems like a good start so why does anyone expect that any kind of deal can be struck that includes them? Boner needs to man-up, tell them to kiss his ass, and make a deal. Seventy-five percent of the country wants a deal that includes some cuts and some tax increases. What is he afraid of – his legacy? As it stands, his legacy is that he was a hyper partisan but fundamentally ineffective speaker who, when the country needed him most, ignored what was right to score cheap political points that ended up gaining him nothing. Wow – how’s that sound for the old tombstone, Johnny?

If I was you I might think about doing something drastic and outside the box, like getting together with your soul-brother Mitch McConnell and inviting the little fuehrer, Grover Norquist, along with you. Drop some ruffies in his scotch and leave him tied to the capitol flagpole with his pants around his ankles as a warning to the delusional tea party knuckleheads that they need to get in line and follow your lead. That’s what leaders do, Johnny – they lead. If it takes well reasoned convincing or a public flogging, your job is to cut a deal and move on, not to throw up your hands and head for St. Kitts for the holidays.

Where are the statesmen on The Hill – nodding off over Courvoisier and Cubans down at the club, waiting for someone to tell them to go back and get in their chairs? How hard can it be? Have these people ever negotiated anything? Geez – it’s pathetic.

I’ll bet they have really cool restrooms though…

Institutional Stupidity and the Rise of the American Asshole

2012-12-17T21:05:00.001-08:00

Institutional stupidity is the tendency for organizations to compartmentalize functions such that no one person or group is fully in control of the output of the organization nor does any one person or group completely understand how the organization works. Instead each of these parts performs its task according to a set of process rules which – because they are isolated from the whole – are likely to be less efficient as a result. Indeed, these isolated functionaries are more likely to inadvertently work at cross purposes to the most effective function of the enterprise.

The finest example of institutional stupidity is ubiquitous, on display all around us every day – automobile traffic. Why do I say this is an example of institutional stupidity? Think back to the last time you had to go to the DMV for a driving test. Think about the questions; how far behind the car in front of you should you be when approaching a school bus on the side of the road with its lights flashing? How many feet should you be from an intersection where you are making a turn before turning on your indicator? This is an overwhelmingly technical approach to teaching people how to drive that completely ignores the most critical aspect of the art of driving. It has no philosophical component – it doesn’t address things like common courtesy, cooperation, the big picture. Instead it focuses on the almost useless minutia and technically “correct” way to drive without teaching the skill of driving. Why is this?

When it comes to driving, the emphasis on tiny details results in millions of people who can operate a car semi-successfully but who are shitty and dangerous drivers and a menace on the roads; assholes, in other words – completely unconcerned about others, selfish and inconsiderate, as if they are the only car on the road. Now multiply by 10 million.

It is because, like so many modern bureaucracies, it is more important to them to follow procedures established by faceless superiors than to actually teach people how to drive. I call this “window-washing syndrome” – the typical organizational focus on process to the detriment of accomplishing the ostensible goals in the most efficient manner. In other words, emphasizing the washing of the window in tedious detail while neglecting the goal of actually getting it clean.

Many mid-level management positions have been eliminated in the 21^st century wired world of commerce after being recognized for the useless drag on innovation and success that they are, bogged down in ass-covering and following procedure and letting the work of the enterprise suffer as a result. How many times have you sincerely asked someone with whom you are forced to interact and negotiate, “Why do we have to do it this way?” only to be told, “Because we have to do it according to the guidelines” or some equally brain-dead explanation? Not only is this thoughtless and lazy, it leaves the interpretation of these guidelines to drones and apparatchiks who may not be best able to provide one that is correct.

This fetish with process is rampant and is the single most common characteristic of organizations from Cub Scout troops to giant corporations. The result is institutional paralysis and stasis if they’re lucky or an orgy of bad decisions if they’re allowed to run free. The American car industry was, until recently, a fine example of this trickle down stupidity. Hummers for the general public? Really? What were they thinking? If decisions come about as a result of the Holy Process, then they are unquestioned by anyone and foisted on the public, often with great fanfare. Where is the intellectual QA? Absent, because nobody can be trusted to take one look at it and say, “Oh my god, no!”

We’ve just witnessed this at the University of California, an institution with a long and storied tradition of higher learning and one doubtless populated by professors worthy of the various Nobels and Pulitzers gathering dust in their offices but one also run by state bureaucrats plagued by the disease of institutional stupidity. They have a university-wide logo, dripping with tradition, albeit, somewhat cluttered by modern standards of marketing design, what with the Latin, the candle, an open text book and so on. So someone gets the brilliant idea to simplify it – a euphemism for dumbing it down – to an amorphous blob of blue and yellow which was met by nearly universal derision. It was summarily withdrawn in a matter of days and the person or persons responsible for the decision are now hiding under their beds, confused and sucking their thumbs while the regents write the obscenely large check to the marketing design group who designed it.

Schools are also fertile breeding grounds for institutional stupidity, where teachers – for whatever reason – teach their students how to pass tests rather than how to learn; how to get to the next level without learning much of anything useful on the journey. Thus we have high schools churning out waves of ignorant, illiterate graduates, all of whom feel that they not only have to go to college, but that they are entitled to do so. College professors then discover them sitting mute and glassy-eyed in the back rows of classrooms across the country getting “C’s” if the curve is distorted enough or failing miserably if it isn’t.

Somehow four or five or six years later they emerge with a diploma, dumb as a bag of hammers, and they’re now proliferating into low level jobs in retail and customer service or, if the know someone, at the DMV where this cycle of inbred stupidity flourishes all over again. They can’t think – all they can do is go down a list and check off those things they’re supposed to do until it’s time to go home and they can get in their cars, crank up their Rhianna CDs and drive home like assholes.

Why are the people who wait on us in stores and businesses everywhere so terrible at their jobs? Because they’re stupid. And deep down they know they’re stupid; they watch Jeopardy and can’t answer a single question. Knowing that they’re stupid and lots of people are smarter than them pisses them off. At the same time they feel they deserve better or are too good for the job because – after all – they graduated from college. They are intellectually lazy, arrogant, dismissive and contentious – assholes, in other words. Voila! The cycle is complete.

Perhaps it’s because of the economic chaos of the last five or six years, but it also seems that everyone is really, really angry. I was in line the other day when the local post office opened – there was a queue of maybe ten people waiting. The door was opened by a grey-haired Filipino guy who took his place behind the counter and started waiting on us. After five minutes another guy in line started muttering darkly, then louder and louder until he was yelling at this poor civil servant – himself a long-term captive in a fortress of organizational dysfunction – who tried to explain that he couldn’t call anyone to help him at the counter, as he was the only counter-person there. But the angry, entitled guy wouldn’t hear it, and continued to demand that he get someone up there to help him. A couple of times he could see someone moving around in the back and he yelled at them to get out front and “wait on us”. Clearly, this guy was an asshole – a self-important nihilist slamming his way around the world with no thought other than what’s important to him. Humility? Too threatening.

In August I had a – thankfully – negative biopsy. I have insurance with a major provider and, other than waiting somewhat anxiously to find out the deductible damage, I figured the professionals at the insurance company and the hospital would take care of the details. Three and a half months later it is still as tangled as a plate of spaghetti. I got a letter from the insurance company telling me they were trying to get the hospital to provide documentation that the procedure wasn’t for a “pre-existing condition”. I thought that was odd given that it was a biopsy – by definition that seemed to eliminate the possibility of it being pre-existing. When I asked the sweetly drawling customer service rep about that she said, “We’re not sayin’ it is – we’re just askin’ if it is.” Ah, well that clears it up then, doesn’t it? And when I asked her why they had to go through this exercise, she said, “Well sir, that’s just what we have to do.” Is there a tiny spark of intellect in there anywhere? I didn’t detect one.

In organizations, they say, shit rolls downhill, meaning the top of the house makes a decision or approves a change and it proliferates down the food chain to the lowest level employees. But it becomes like that parlor game – I think it’s called Chinese Whispering or something – where each person whispers the same thing to the person next to them in turn and everyone laughs when what comes out at the end is nothing like what goes in at the beginning. Ha! That makes for a fun drinking game but is less amusing when applied to corporate governance and organizational behavior. Shit not only rolls down hill; it gets stinkier and stinkier as it gets closer to the bottom until those charged with implementation are holding their noses and vomiting in the street.

Rigid adherence to process has evolved in some less-than innovative organizations until it entirely pre-empts thinking. People not used to thinking regularly, then, can’t be trusted to think for themselves, take responsibility, or make decisions and so more box-checking processes evolve until no one understands why anything is being done anymore – they’re all just doing it and going home.

We wouldn’t presume to offer a prescription for this daunting problem, as the drones are firmly entrenched with no sign of relinquishing their mindless hold on the cultural and business institutions all around us – or even recognizing that this crushing stupidity is a menace to American civilization as we know it. Instead, now that we’ve got our blood pressure under control, we are inclined to instead pass along the ubiquitous advice of the English when faced with intractable difficulties; keep calm and carry on. And don’t let on that you know anything is wrong.

Cliffhanger Blues, or how I learned to stop cooperating and destroy the country…

2012-11-29T21:42:00.001-08:00

In the old Roadrunner cartoons, Wiley Coyote never did learn his lesson about reckless behavior around precipitous drops, railroad tunnels or dangerously balanced giant boulders. He was constantly crushed, flattened, trampled and blown-up as a result of his idiotic, simple-minded persistence toward accomplishing one goal; to kill the Roadrunner. Sound familiar?

As the media resounds with ominous warnings and sincere and earnest sounding attempts to warn us all of the looming catastrophe, republicans are acting as if they won the recent election and hold all the cards in what is supposed to be an honest and transparent negotiation over cutting the deficit. Never mind that the deficit is an enormous, steaming pile of hokum, a fantastic boogey-man dreamed up by conservative intelligencia terrified at the prospect of a nation not ruled by them and their fat-cat, mostly white, mostly rich brethren to frighten the ignorant about a danger that doesn’t really exist. Robert Reich, a very bright guy, has been attempting to make the point that the so-called fiscal cliff is nothing but a republican obsession that completely misses the point and he hasn’t gotten much traction.

It’s not the fixation with the deficit itself that is so repugnant; that’s just another in a long line of mistaken priorities and take-your-eye-off-the-ball-isms that have characterized the republican right for the last forty years – a highly developed aptitude for consistently being on the wrong side of history, whether it’s foreign policy and over-hyped danger from sinister enemies like an about-to-collapse Russia in the Eighties, the Sandinistas and Saddam Hussein right on through to gay marriage and the war on drugs. It’s the nature of conservatives to want to keep things the way they are most comfortable – like it's Alabama in 1961.

Now, rather than engaging in an honest effort to heal the country and solve some problems, they are simply reverting to their historical talking points – tax breaks for “job creators”, an end of regulation to allow unfettered exploitation of resources, the destruction of unions and the general maintenance of a royalist oligarchy inhabited by…well, them.

One lesson they seemed to have learned from the election, at least temporarily, is that the dependence on angry social conservatives to carry their flag only succeeded in having that banner planted on a tiny little irrelevant corner of the country where nobody gives a shit. They have adopted at least the appearance of regret over all of the hatred they so recently were encouraging and are making friendly noises about immigration reform and changing their misogynistic positions on women’s issues, if for no other reason than self preservation as a viable political institution. I find it damning that they are – in 2012 – adapting to a reality that has been in place for at least twenty-five years but again, that’s the nature of conservatism. I would have expected that anyone proposing that women get raped because they were asking for it somehow would have been tarred and feathered and run out of the party long ago – it makes these concessions sound to me like a liberalization of convenience, but that remains to be seen.

Today the news was full of reports of John Boner’s deep disappointment with the Obama administration’s latest proposal for resolving the issues that he and his boneheaded colleagues packed in dynamite and lit the fuse on 6 months ago, thinking that Obama was dead in the water and their nominee was going to be a shoe-in. They were never serious about any negotiation over their big, bad deficit – it was a party drunk of the fermented tea of a truck load of hopped-up freshmen representatives bent on changing the world to fit their peculiar vision. Now that they have been repudiated in a landslide election debacle, they don’t have any intelligent plan. Their plan consists of “you give us everything we want or you aren’t serious about solving the country’s problems” rhetoric and constant pleas for the president to engage in honest negotiation, as if they’re waiting patiently for him to finish his breakfast and get down to business. From what I can see, all their talk about “accepting revenue increases” comes down to stripping the middle class of their only tax break – the mortgage interest deduction – and some cockamamie gibberish about limiting charitable deductions for the rich – a completely tone-deaf and comical idea that would accomplish very little except to demonize the poor and underprivileged and deprive them of even their current pathetic lot in life. Nice idea...

Meanwhile, Romney has lunch with Obama today, and the mind reels with comic possibilities over that one. Then Mitt went down to Capitol Hill to drop in on his android-like running mate, the intellectual core of the party, a man who can reach across the aisle, a man who specialized in bald-faced lying during the campaign and was lucky to hold onto his seat in the house, Paul “Lyin’ Ryan. They were supposed to be meeting so that Romney and he could discuss substantive issues related to the deficit impasse but I say they sat awkwardly in fat leather chairs for 15 minutes sipping gin and then quickly hit the hand sanitizer hoping never to see each other again. It’s not like there were ever any reports of them bonding on the campaign bus.

And finally we have the spectacle of Mitch McConnell, the single most treacherously partisan human in the congress, yammering on about the seriousness of the situation and doing back-flips to avoid any increase in tax rates for his chosen constituency – the .1%. He wants no part of Obama’s own ideas for solving the make believe crisis – he wants him to propose “solutions” that republicans can accept – in other words, to do what he wants him to do. It’s preposterous but the guy is relentless and has absolutely no shame – he should be tried for treason as soon as possible.

Going back to Mr. Reich, he is correct in stating that the whole narrative around the “looming fiscal cliff” is a bunch of nonsense and that we should take advantage of historically low rates, borrow even more money and get people working again – that’s the only thing that is going to jump start the economy – not some arm-wrestling contest over an esoteric notion like the deficit that, if Faux News would just shut up about it, no one would care about.

Obama has all the cards, though, and if he just stays firm, maybe we can avoid driving the economy back into a recession by doing precisely the wrong thing at the wrong time. Play the ace of trumps, Barack…

"Honey; I thought you said that god damn dog went to the pound" - post election barking

2012-11-23T22:03:00.003-08:00

As we shift from the election season to the Christmas season, your favorite Labrador is ready to go back to work after a long stretch of self-congratulation after Obama was able to fend off the forces of evil, tedious right wing lies, distortion, obfuscation and various attempts to change the subject and Mitt and Ann Romney’s patrician cluelessness. Of course, we have a few thoughts about the stormy and nerve-racking thirty day period from mid-October to mid-November before we move on to other pressing business.

After Obama’s somnambulant stagger through the first debate there were nervous moments amongst the progressive portion of the electorate as a punch-drunk Romney seemed to have landed some wild and flailing blows, enough to stagger Obama, as if he came to the stark realization that – yeah, remarkably, I can still fuck this up if I’m not careful. Right wing knuckleheads in the media went into full frothing overdrive, gleefully rubbing their hands together over the prospect of 10 million illegal immigrants spontaneously self deporting like the German army leaving Russia in 1944 – the tattered remnants of a massive attempted takeover leaving in a trail of downcast and disoriented farm workers, bus boys, gardeners and nannies trudging south to the morose strumming of a mariachi band. The Obama ground game had to go nuclear.

Thanks to Romney’s penchant for self-destructive jabbering and Paul Ryan’s douche-baggieness, Obama was able to right himself with no small amount of help from Super-storm Sandy’s long, lingering onslaught up the east coast. In retrospect, Romney was the weakest republican candidate since…well, since the last one. John McCain and Sarah Palin were arguably the worst ticket for national office, ever, but it’s widely understood now that the republicans didn’t want to win in 2008 so they let an addled McCain pick whoever he wanted while Dick Morris and Karl Rove laughed their asses off over 20 year-old scotch. They all knew that the economy was a complete disaster so they made the political calculation that they should retreat to fight another day, surrendering 2008 and pointing to this election, thinking that their subsequent strategy of opposing Obama at every turn insured that he wouldn’t get any traction and by 2012 would be presiding over an economy coughing and wheezing like a tubercular, alcoholic Ratso Rizzo.

In the end nothing worked like these geniuses planned; their treasonous colleagues in congress humped Obama’s leg and pissed on his shoes for the better part of two years and while there was plenty of anti-Barack sentiment among some segments of the electorate – particularly the closeted KKK voters yearning for the lost America that never really existed – all this dishonorable little strategy succeeded in doing was to make everyone to the left of Mitch McConnell really, really angry. How’s that taste, Karl? Personally I am still hoping that somehow the Justice Department can pin something on you and the treacherous gang of criminals who pay you and make you somebody’s prison bitch like you so richly deserve. “Squeal like a pig, boy…” Ahem…uh, sorry.

So anyway, there was plenty of fun to be had in the aftermath of the election as sputtering right-wing media whores from coast to coast took turns having apoplexy on camera as they tried to explain away an almost 100 electoral vote spanking. Their pathetic attempts to “broaden the base” and be more inclusive were almost as insulting to the targeted demographics as Mitt’s own royalist condescension. Their stumbling attempts to try to talk about attracting Hispanics to the republican party were so unnatural and awkward they might as well have said, “We need to get more negroes to vote for us – let’s buy some barbeque.” The fact that Hispanics would, given half a chance, probably be sympathetic to the republican platform in terms of social issues makes their inability to transcend their own racism and say something coherent to them all the more laughable.

The post-mortem regarding women, young people, gays – Mitt’s 47% - was just as sadly hilarious. To attract more women they want to simply recruit more women business types to appeal to pocketbook issues. And while that might be a good idea, you might want to cull your ranks of the kind of misogynistic morons whose ideas about biology have all the sophistication of a witch-doctor. As Tina Fey so brilliantly put it, “If I have to listen to one more grey-faced man with a $2 haircut explain to me what rape is, I’m going to lose my mind!” Maybe having Ann Romney yammering on about how hard her and Mitt’s life has been wasn’t the best way to attract women votes either. She is definitely not the “I’m every woman” that poor Whitney Houston was singing about.

Finally, and perhaps most damning of all, was the avalanche of lies that surrounded the entire republican campaign. Sure, Obama and the democrats put a favorable spin on things, to their advantage – that’s understood. But the republican’s whole campaign was built on a foundation of lies, fever dreams, and hallucinations to such an extent that even the stalwart republican mouthpieces in the media were clearly embarrassed to try to defend the shit that was routinely coming out in Romney/Ryan TV ads and stump speeches.

Now as Obama settles in for a second term and the whole happy gang of them wrestle with the ominous sounding “fiscal cliff”, all we’re left with is the specter of George Will’s smirking, sarcastic, contemptuous ramblings, denying climate change and generally harassing Obama and the democrats from behind the cherry trees lining the Potomac. It’s sad and pathetic, really. There is serious work to do in this country – everyone knows that and acknowledges it. If the republicans want to save themselves as a viable political entity they need to tell Grover Norquist to go fuck himself, roll up their sleeves and make some deals. Obama wants a legacy as much as any normal human – just like John Boner. But at this point all Boner has for a legacy is two and a half years of stubborn obstruction and mealy-mouth finger pointing and he needs to understand that all that’s going to get him is a place in infamy as the most corrupt, inept and useless speaker in the history of congress. How about it, John? Do you think you can find some adults down there among the old, fat-cat, white men on your side of the aisle in time for us to get this thing moving again? We all sure as hell hope so.

The Future of Dissent, Obstruction and Treason...a post-election speculation

2012-09-28T19:06:00.000-07:00

The frantic flailing around for a message from the Romney camp has been comical to watch but it is accompanied by more sinister and disturbing events as well that aren’t nearly as funny. As the poll numbers continue to swing in Obama’s favor and Romney’s climb to the presidency seems more and more far-fetched, the reactionary forces of divisiveness are making a feverish, last ditch effort to save him and are fighting like a terrified poodle thrown into the middle of a lake.

The usual nitwits in the right wing media are bloviating at full blast in a brazen attempt at mass obfuscation. If they raise the decibel level high enough maybe everyone will just cover their ears and, by doing so, miss the incoherent and hysterical nonsense coming out of Romney’s mouth. I have to admit, watching bony-assed blonde skank Ann Colter on The View trying to tell Whoopi Goldberg what black people think was hilarious. But Colter and Rush Blowhard and Hannity and Beck are clowns whose circus – unfortunately – will never pack up and leave town in a trail of elephant shit and big shoes.

So while reasonable conservative voices like David Brooks and George Will and even William Kristol – and I can’t believe I’m saying that – seem resigned to Mitt’s implosion and ultimate drowning, tea party congressional operatives and Brown Shirt governors intent on voter suppression in the name of fighting imaginary voter fraud are working harder than ever to rally the mob to the White House gates with torches blazing and pitchforks held high. The hatred and frustration are palpable.

I listen to Brooks on NPR today and when asked to characterize the state of the race, he gave a verbal shrug of his shoulders and said, basically, Romney’s fucked it up beyond all measure and the only thing left to do is get into the betting pool and guess how many electoral votes he’s going to get.

Romney's obstructionist colleagues in the congress – before taking recess until after the election – tossed a procedural stink bomb from the balcony beforehand, killing a veteran’s jobs bill that was fully funded and drafted by republicans as well as democrats. Anything to deny Obama a victory, even if they look like treasonous chicken hawks in the process. They had no explanation and their particular constituency probably doesn’t require one or maybe couldn’t understand it if it was provided. They see everything through the lens of Obama-hate and pissing on his shoes trumps even taking care of kids damaged by ridiculous misadventures in imperial dick measuring contests like Bush’s war with Saddam Hussein. So sad; a puffed up Texas frat boy starting a war of honor with a third rate Stalin wanna-be that ends tragically – if predictably – for hundreds of thousands and the shameless republican heroes in congress then deny our soldiers a hand up to rejoin the job market. Maybe these middle aged white men don’t think of returning veterans – many of whom are minorities – as worthy of a hand. Or maybe they’re brainwashed into thinking there is some cockamamie Ayn Rand-ian principle at stake – as if the soldiers haven’t proven themselve self reliant enough at this point.

VP choice and prince regent in waiting, Paul Ryan is also creating as much distance as he dares to, privately complaining bitterly about the disorganization and lack of a focused message put forth by Romney’s advisors. Hey Paul; this is what happens when naked ambition meets the cartoonish reality that is the current republican party and maybe – since you’ve been a part of it for 14 years – you should have had some inkling that hubris and a bucket of preposterous lies could be overcome by the simple incompetence of the dullard you chose as a nominee.

So the question becomes, what happens November 7^th in the aftermath of a Romney loss – potentially, a blowout loss? Is it reasonable to assume the ignorant and disenchanted citizens of the far right are going to capitulate and move forward in a spirit of patriotic cooperation? Are the delusional religious fanatics suddenly going to reconsider a more secular path in life and have compassion and empathy for those whose lives are far different from theirs? Are the greed heads and corporate whores going to see the light of altruism, close their accounts in the Caymans and work in soup kitchens on the weekends? Somehow I don’t think so. In fact, there is an ominously grim vibe lurking under the babble of excited voices in these last 30 days before the election.

It wasn’t so long ago that the misguided white Hitler youth Timothy McVeigh parked a truck full of ammonium nitrate and diesel fuel in front of the federal building in Oklahoma City and delivered a terrifying wake up call to the country. Tragically, some people are still asleep.

It’s easy to understand how the ignorant become the fearful become the haters and eventually become the bombers. They see no options. And the right wing fear mongers who are making a living being paranoid, hyperventilating blowhards aren’t going to stop; not while they’re still being paid a fortune for vomiting incendiary gibberish over the public airwaves.

I enjoy target shooting; I have several old WW II vintage rifles and enjoy shooting them much like someone would enjoy taking a 48 Ford coupe out for a drive once in a while. And during trips to the gun range I often encounter people – always men – who scare the shit out of me, who look as if they don’t leave their room much and who can be seen methodically unpacking semi-automatic .223’s or enormous hand guns worthy of Dirty Harry. Watching them shoot, there is no sense of joy or even enjoyment – only a kind of grim determination that’s deeply unsettling.

I don’t know how much of the bitterness and hatred that seems to flow easily from the far right is hyperbole, an isolated group of people whose rants are taken out of context or blown out of proportion. But I do think the political climate is fractured and a game changing Obama victory might be the last straw for some. If that happens the tea party voices who have spent the last four years encouraging sedition will have to answer to everyone else at last.

Mitt spits the bit in moment of unscripted candor...

2012-09-20T10:25:00.000-07:00

There’s not a lot more that can be said about Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign that hasn’t already been said recently and if I pummeled him like I’m inclined to, it would just seem cruel; like piling on, kicking him when he’s down, lashing him to the roof of the car and driving for 8 hours in 50 degree temperatures. No, that’s not my style. I have no problem eviscerating the guy when he seems like a viable threat but to continue to hammer him now for all of the stupid, thoughtless, hysterical things he’s said in the last couple of weeks would be unseemly.

But much can be said about his party and, more specifically, the power guys in the party. And make no mistake about it; they’re all men - men that smell like Cuban cigars and old money. I’m sure they sitting around somewhere wondering how they fucked this up but if they could see beyond the bubble in which they all seem live, it’s really very simple.

They thought they could just throw their jock straps out onto the field and beat Obama this year. A lot of things were in their favor; their criminal co-conspirators in the congress had successfully sabotaged any and all attempts by the president and the democrats to fix the economy, using the filibuster more times than during any other administration in history to block every initiative Obama naively put forth. People were still hurting and by and large he was getting the blame. But this overconfidence led to their current doomed situation and the candidate who is looking more like a monumental loser every passing day.

Looking back it’s so obvious what happened; while it looked as if Obama was wounded, it also looked as if the problems plaguing him were long term with no easy solutions. Anyone winning in 2012 was going to be in a position of “put up or shut up”, with enormous pressure to turn simplistic political promises into action; meaning jobs and economic growth. At a time of global economic chaos there is only so much an American president can do. My guess is, the smart guys in the room – guys like Christie and Rubio and Rob Portman – took a look around at the train wreck that Bush created and decided that running another day might be the wiser course, the better to preside over a more prosperous part of the 21^st century. One by one they demurred.

That left the field open to what turned out to be a madcap clown car full of delusional quacks and long shots and, of course, Romney, who probably figured it was his turn. Surveying the field and seeing the likes of Bachman and Santorum speaking in tongues, the nutty professor in Gingrich, long-time candidate Ron Paul and cockamamie pizza entrepreneur Herman Cain probably reinforced his belief that he and Ann could start picking out new curtains for the White House and not worry about the troubling details – like having some kind of coherent message.

What he didn’t expect – and what the suits with the cash didn’t foresee – was that this far-right field would suck the whole party to the edge of the cliff and cause moderates and independents to run away in terror. Ceding the campaign to the tea party-wing made for a lot of bold talk but compressed the base so that when Mitt has a month like the last one – where he is buried in an avalanche of his own ignorance – there’s no one left to support him and his poll numbers look like the stock market charts for January 2009. When Peggy Noonan calls you out for looking like an incompetent hack, you’re in trouble.

In a final bit of irony, the default choice of Romney, rather than holding the party together to achieve the goal of recapturing the oval office for the republicans, has cleaved it into a more profound minority status by alienating those party loyalists not captive to religious fervor or the cult of personality embodied in nut-cakes like Grover Norquist. This leaves behind fertile ground for the emergence of a viable third party.

For all that he has accomplished, Obama is far from the perfect fit for the country at this moment. He has alienated many progressives and libertarians with drone strikes abroad and what is widely seen as an excessive expansion of government domestically. His justice department has been a nightmare. There is plenty of room for support to coalesce to his right. Center leaning moderate democrats - blue collar workers and union supporters who are socially conservative and the more business friendly but socially liberal supporters - could easily join with socially moderate republicans willing to compromise on economic and taxation issues and get to a number that would make a third party candidate seem more credible than the fringe third party candidates – sincere and earnest though they may be – currently on the ticket.

Now as Mitt frantically turns up in swing state pancake houses and chamber of commerce luncheons to fulfill the campaign’s newest strategy of re-introducing him to an increasingly skeptical public, the short term result seems pre-ordained; Obama wins comfortably and brings a few members of congress with him. If – and this is a biggie – he gets enough congressional support to actually implement some of his heretofore blocked initiatives, this whole scenario may be delayed and we may have some new political star emerge from an energized democratic party to run in 2016. If, however, he scrapes out a narrow win with a recalcitrant congress remaining to hump his leg and piss on his shoes for four years, my prediction is a very angry and disillusioned electorate in 2016 hungry for a change that goes beyond flipping the same two-party coin to try the other side.

Could we have a viable third party to stand the political status quo on its head for the rest of the 21^st century? The next six weeks may hold the answer. Stay tuned and make sure to vote!

Mitt Romney strides mightly across the world stage, trips and falls on his face...

2012-09-15T10:48:00.002-07:00

The grim black clouds that have been gathering over the Romney campaign ever since his convention -and what had to be a surprising media consensus that they came off as a bunch of ambitious, opportunistic liars - suddenly started pissing down rain this week as Mitt shoved both expensive loafers into his mouth with his preposterous reaction to the attack on the US embassy in Libya. Just today I watched a number of heretofore Romney-leaning pundits who sound ready to wash their hands of the vacuous bastard and begin their planning for Jeb Bush in 2016. Huzzah!!! Nicely played, Mitt. You and Karl Rove can now look forward to long winter nights amongst the fine leather and wood paneling in your New Hampshire vacation home, staring sullenly into the fire and pounding the 20 year old scotch while asking yourselves a series of tough questions, starting with WTF.

David Brooks, syndicated columnist for the New York Times, thought to be a sober, intelligent man – a voice of reason in the conservative movement – was on Charlie Rose the other night bemoaning Romney’s thoughtless response and ill-conceived press conference – the one that left the press corp who follow him open-mouthed in disbelief. Laura Ingraham, the snarky radio talk-show host and someone who apparently is part of the republican intelligentsia – commenting on the Romney blunders, suggested disbanding the party if they can’t beat Obama in this election.

Mitt, even Faux News is pissing on your shoes in frustration at your venal and self-serving yammering in the face of a national tragedy. You don’t even have the good sense to understand the political protocol and hold your fire for 24 hours. You come off like Sarah Palin with a penis.

Of course, he had his defenders; Rush Blowhard blustered through his radio show repeating “he’s right, he’s right”, evidently drunk on the republican strategy of the endlessly repeated lie. Bill Kristol, intellectual godfather of the modern republican party also followed this course, while notorious bleach-blonde, bony-assed skank, Ann Colter, embellished this line a bit by saying the media’s focus on Romney’s venality only served to prove he was right, thus hitting two favorite republican birds with one stone.

Watching Mitt stammer through the next day, after someone apparently told him what an ass he made of himself, was hilarious. Now the trick for Democrats – and they’re not good at this – is, don’t get cocky, keep your eye on the ball, watch out for the voter suppression governors and other duplicitous members of Mitt’s shadowy cabal because surely to god they are not going to give up the fight even if they have given up on him. He should be thankful Obama is black; without the closeted KKK vote Romney would be sitting at the bar in the Salt Lake City Hilton swilling gin and writing his concession speech.

Rick Scott in Florida is doubling down on his attempt to suppress the vote there in such a way as he should be in jail, not the governor’s office in Tallahassee and in spite of a court ruling against all such moves. Pennsylvania and Ohio are deeply enmeshed in voter suppression efforts. The Secretary of State in Kansas, totally off his meds, went full-on birther and threatened to keep Obama off the ballot, thereby negating the need for more conventional voter suppression. I take this to be a good sign – here’s why;

Now in addition to trying to defend their incoherent domestic agenda of unsustainable tax cuts, increased defense spending, laissez-faire environmental and regulatory policy and eat-the-poor social policy, they have to set a back fire to protect their flank from the altogether reasonable perception that their candidate is a dangerous lunatic on the world stage and more likely to blunder into world war III than do anything constructive to advance our interests and make the world safe for democracy. What do they have left? The only thing they can point to is that Romney isn’t Obama and while that may resonate with some of the knuckle-draggers and tin-foil hat crowd around the country it's likely not enough to carry the day and get 270 electoral votes. So they have to amp-up the fraud, theft and treason wing of the party to salvage what they can.

I suspect that little insect, Karl Rove, had a contingency plan all along. If Romney pukes on himself focus on retaining a majority in the House and continue to hump Obama’s leg for another four years, hoping that the country is still wobbling on its axis in 2016 when another Bush can ride to the rescue and begin the New Republican Century – albeit, somewhat delayed.

Either way he wins – he continues to be the most notorious pimp in the biggest El Dorado and the right-wing world will still revolve around him. That’s tragic for the last tattered vestiges of the former party of Lincoln, as the disenchanted moderates will continue to leave the party until all that’s left is an ungainly Ork army of delusional drones pinning for a country that was left behind 75 years ago. Hey Karl – bitterness and anger are mighty motivational forces but eventually bitter and angry people just fall over dead and we’re all better off without them. And if Obama and the democrats can’t govern successfully – and the jury is definitely still out about that – so be it. I hear Tom Friedman has been hinting around about a third party – maybe 2016 is the year.

The last, worst fear of the Ruling Class; Mitt gives a speech for the new American Century

2012-08-30T20:18:00.002-07:00

Watching the refrigerator-white circus that is the republican convention this week and listening to the various speeches I’ve been struck by one underlying theme; I’ll call it “other-ness”. Much of the rhetoric of the party is based on this notion of “the other”, whether in fear or revulsion or contempt. For that matter, the modern republican party – and it’s mentally dull cousin, the tea party – have little else to offer of any substance.

Have either Paul Ryan or Romney offered a detailed version of their budget plans? For all his wonder-boy veneer, Ryan has left gaping holes in his plan in terms of the loathsome and grim details of spending cuts and tax reform. The dullards in the party care only that his budget cuts out “those other people”, with whom they share no particular affinity; who, as a matter of practical policy reality, they deem to be less American than they themselves and who therefore deserve to get nothing and like it. They’re isolated, frightened, cornered by events so far beyond their control as to be incomprehensible and they’re not feeling particularly generous.

These feelings play right into the republican mythology – the things the party used to stand for - of self reliance, hard work for a day’s pay and – lest we forget – a legacy of divisive racial exploitation, bigotry and the white man’s manifest destiny. To the simple minded, the personification of 50 years of coddling “the others” has been made manifest in Barack Obama, a black man with a Muslim name. And the ruthlessness with which the old-money power brokers of a minority party have wielded this abject fear has been breathtaking to behold.

Take a step back for a moment and examine the republican bogeyman of the last 18 months; the deficit. As a practical matter, it’s something of very little consequence to most average American voters – too esoteric, really, for it to be tangible. The party’s pinning Obama with this make-believe crisis gives them a perfect justification for the cuts to the social safety net they’ve long sought and which their ignorant tribe is all too willing to see them undertake. But the beauty of this strategy is that, to the extent that there is a crisis, it’s one primarily the result of the policies of eight chaotic years of republicans running wild; a drastic explosion of the cost of two wars accompanied by a tax cut for the ruling class collided with a once-in-a-generation financial storm that blew over the house of cards economy created by 25 years of republican de-regulation and laissez faire capitalism. Presto! One hell of a deficit in eight short years and a shitstorm to deal with as George the Dim retreated to the relative safety of his pseudo-ranch in Crawford.

To clean up this unprecedented mess Obama had no choice but to throw money at the economy. His success has been muted by the sheer size of Bush’s fuck-up and the traitorous behavior of the petulant republicans after having their party ruined by an upstart leading an enormously popular revolt. His attempt to keep the economy afloat has been magically transformed by the opposition into a careless and ill-conceived give away to the undeserving – to “them”. Not to real Americans - to illegal immigrants and the poor and – ironically – to working class, blue collar union workers in the form of the auto industry bail out for which he is inexplicably chastised even today.

Somehow the republicans have succeeded in making the country more polarized than I remember, even in the madness of 1968.

Condi Rice – token woman, African-American and West Coast elitist intellectual – gave a speech brandishing her Reagan legacy and credentials and it was just another sad attempt to demonize “the other”. Those people who would…I don’t know exactly – do things we don’t like? The nebulous enemy we are endlessly fighting, the forces in the world that won’t acquiesce to our wishes to have our way – even in a noble cause – because they have things they want too.

In what passed for a foreign policy speech this summer, Romney said, "I am an unapologetic believer in the greatness of this country. I’m not ashamed of American power.” Well, Mitt, maybe you should – if not be ashamed – perhaps give some thought to alternative ways of settling vexing issues around the world by some means other than parking the 7^th fleet offshore and scaring the hell out of everyone, US citizens included. Your foreign policy advisers include almost 20 of the same knucklehead chicken hawks responsible for what is widely considered to be an historically tragic period of American foreign policy, presided over by the reptilian Dick Cheney, a man’s man who is so full of shit he’s already been discarded and ignored as surely as Sarah Palin, and Donald Rumsfeld, who’s exalted sense of righteousness led him to plan for an Iraqi campaign lasting months, where we would be welcomed as heroes.

Chris Christie, a man who’s foreign policy experience is limited to ordering large quantities of Chinese take-out once a week, also puffed his considerable chest out this week, yearning for Romney’s election and the start of “a new American century”, apparently unaware of how idiotic that sounds to the rest of the world.

Even the republican embrace of the religious right and the evangelical community can easily be seen for the cynical manipulation that it is; how easy it is for angry and scared people of religious faith to be turned into a hateful rabble who cling to their faith but forget the basic principles that should have drawn them to faith in the first place – contempt for the poor, people of color, different religions, gays and lesbians and anyone not planning for the second coming. The powerful guys smoking the good cigars and drinking the expensive scotch don’t give a shit about John 3:14 – they want to be in charge and as long as stoking the worst in their addled minions accomplishes that, they happily play along.

The country is coming apart at the seams, separating into tribes like some god damn science fiction novel. Or as Paul Ryan would put it, “the useless class” and the triumphant, self made class, like himself – never a job outside of government - and Mitt, the turkey vulture of the East. The election may be the last gasp of the barricaded-in-their-homes-scared-shitless goaded into extreme intolerance by modern robber barons, hedge fund whores, oil companies seeing their demise in every Prius on the road and the last dying remnants of the Ruling Class. The good news is, the “others” will eventually win. As hard as slimy little vermin like Karl Rove pray alone at night for a republican century, he is far too evil for whoever he’s praying to to listen.

But don’t kid yourselves; if Romney wins it’s going to be a grim and frightening time for all of us who aren’t rich or drugged. It will be as if we didn’t learn a damned thing since 2000 or, if we did, we can’t bring ourselves to uncover our eyes long enough to wake up and make the nightmare stop. At the end of the day, those who are curled into a ball with the blanket over their heads will only be hiding from the inevitable – we might as well spend the next three months making sure that doesn’t happen.

Post Racial America, My Ass; Romney's Latest Act of Mad Desperation...

2012-08-24T08:18:00.003-07:00

There has started to be a vaguely familiar bad odor clinging to the Romney campaign for the last couple of weeks, you know, like the smell of a neglected cat box the first time you stop over at the apartment of that girl you just met. Or like when you don’t notice that you stepped in dog shit at your brother’s house and leave your shoes in your garage when you get home. The next day you wander through the house sniffing and looking puzzled. As I sniffed the funky vapor trail thoughtfully, I suddenly recognized what it was; desperation and fear.

How else to explain the complicated pivot the campaign has taken regarding welfare reform. In a complete non sequitur, in the middle of a trivial pissing match over Mitt’s tax returns, Medicare and the choice of smirking Ayn Rand groupie, Paul Ryan as the party’s vice presidential candidate, suddenly it has become the issue of utmost importance. There has been an avalanche of ads proclaiming that the Obama administration is trying to remove the work requirement in the program and the campaign has trotted out tried and true boldfaced liars and two bit criminals, like John Sununu, to appear on news outlets everywhere, stridently accusing Obama of acting like the communist Muslim activist he is by letting welfare mothers and other slothful alcoholics and cripples lay around on their sofa all day drinking cheap wine and inhaling paint fumes.

There’s nothing surprising about this as a tactic; baseless accusations repeated over and over to an ignorant base is par for the modern republican course. What is mildly surprising – and the source of the odor of desperation – is the unabashed racial code providing the subtext to the entire, empty exercise. And for that – and the mountain of cash required to sustain the assault of noxious media – you can thank treacherous little insect Karl Rove. And therein lays the key to connecting the dots – let’s give that a try.

As has been pointed out so eloquently by Bernie Sanders, there are 26 billionaires who make up the vast majority of the donors sustaining the republican party, particularly since the lead up to the 2010 mid-term elections. Orchestrated by Rove, this group of stealthy rich white men has been advancing one of the most reactionary agenda since Barry Goldwater. But if you’re going to pony up that kind of serious money, you expect to get a pretty good return on investment. The tragic error Rove made was in the clown-car full of dangerous lunatics, religious fanatics and half-baked knuckleheads who started last year vying for the nomination.

I’m sure at one point it looked as if Obama was so doomed to failure - due to unfolding events around the world coupled with the obstructionist traitors in congress - that Rove could hold his nose and select a career also-ran like Romney from amongst this bunch and still prevail. The problem has turned out to be that, in spite of determined efforts by the republicans in congress to establish themselves as the most “do-nothing” group in history, and systematic voter suppression efforts by equally seditious governors across the country, tremendous success in foreign policy and an improving economy have boosted Obama into the lead in the polls coming down the home stretch.

Now as Romney tries earnestly to project some sort of gravitas by dragging Ryan around the country saying, “Why don’t you take that one, Paul…?”, their tired economic prescription of tax cuts for high income earners and scorched earth social policy have coalesced into a cocktail that no one who’s still sober wants to drink again. Been there, threw up on that. So what does a slimy little turd blossom like Rove do? Why play the race card, of course. And although the modern republican party has been able to continue to exist as a minority party in the US for the last 40 years through a skillful use of racial politics to attract the increasingly marginalized and angry middle class uneducated white vote, this may be a bridge too far, even for them.

Which brings us back to the dirty campaign regarding welfare - Obama hasn’t advocated dropping the work requirement for welfare recipients; he simply acquiesced to the wishes of a group of governors – a number of them republican – for some flexibility in how this requirement is implemented and managed. The Romney people know this full well. But Rove doesn’t care about niceties like telling the truth – he follows a republican tactic that goes back at least to the Reagan administration and the pack of near criminals employed through that dark and loathsome eight years; if you can’t prove it, I didn’t do it. And the corollary is, of course, if I say it enough times, it becomes true. Combine the two approaches and you have the toxic swill now being promulgated by the Romney campaign across the land – accuse the Terrible Negro of trying to help out his shiftless, crack addicted brothers and sisters by making it easier for them to spend all day on the stoop drinking cheap wine out of a paper bag while the angry and hurting white working class has to support them. It’s so obvious.

But in American today we have an unfortunate confluence of extreme partisanship and ignorance and these low-information, wounded and angry voters can be swayed by the endless repetition of ads, even those universally judged to be false. And remember; we’re not talking about ads which merely spin an issue in one direction or another – they’re lies, the Romney people know they’re lies and have nonetheless adopted a clear strategy to run them anyway, to get the base fired up going onto their convention in Tampa next week. This is unprecedented political cynicism and a prescription for an Orwellian, dystopian future that should keep us awake at night.

The main reason that an empty-headed, vacuous candidate like Romney is even close in late August of an election years is that the people who have a vitriolic hatred of Obama are far more enthusiastic in their feelings than those of us who are now disappointed or disaffected by him or who think Joe Biden is an idiot. It’s demonstrably easier to be filled with righteous indignation in opposition to something than to support something about which you may be somewhat ambivalent. But really, do you want to live in an America run by a cloistered group of rich white guys who may be prone to god-knows-what level of psychosis and dysfunction? Do we want the neo-con geniuses responsible for two horribly destructive wars back in the White House playing video games with the live of American soldiers? Do we want oil companies free to punch holes in the ground everywhere there’s a sniff of oil? Do we really want to discard a proven 80 year-old social safety net in favor of some quasi-Randian notion of self reliance and laissez-faire capitalism?

Are we really that afraid of the blurring of racial distinctions that we want to cling to our misty notion of a mostly white America full of June and Ward Cleavers living comfortably on Pine St. with a black maid and Hispanic gardener? Let’s drag this putrid ad campaign out into the light and discuss it for what it really is; a desperate appeal to fear and the latest evidence that the republican party has sold its soul to the devil and he looks a lot like a chubby little turd blossom from Texas named Rove.

If I could talk to Barack alone for 10 minutes...

2012-08-16T10:29:00.001-07:00

In the interest of following the modern empty-headed media trend of bashing both parties and spreading the blame for the current contagion with which we are infected to politicians of all stripes, (even though loyal readers know that I certainly disagree), I am going to flog Team Obama for both their failings through the first term as well as their miserable failure in designing an effective campaign to date. So off we go; here’s an open letter to Barack Obama and his dizzy and uncoordinated minions.

Dear Barack; Let me start by saying that your election in 2008 was a surprisingly joyous occasion for me. I’m nearly 60, came of age in the late 60’s hoping like hell that I didn’t get drafted, cursing Nixon, and developing an uncanny ability for rolling joints with one hand while driving, not necessarily in that order. It made me happy for several reasons; first, it meant that the previous 8 years of an incredibly frightening dimwit wandering near the red telephone with his reptilian prince regent and a cabal of ruthless greed-heads was not the start of an inexorable, flaming spiral of death, fear and madness. You may not realize just how comforting that was.

It meant the march of the right wing reactionaries - begun with the election of the sweating, swarthy, jabbering paranoid Dick Nixon and blossoming with his near-sighted war criminal turned statesman, Henry Kissinger bombing Laos and Cambodia back to the 16^th century while want-to-be secret agent G. Gordon Liddy and his clumsy band of third rate second story men fucked up a simple break in at the Watergate - had been at least temporarily halted by an almost inexplicable surge of mass cooperation, collaboration and wrenching disgust at what our government had become – water-boarding liars and thieves and amoral criminals. It felt good.

It also meant a lot to me that an intelligent man of color was elected, a truly historic event that my generation had been working towards for nearly 50 years. It meant that the regressive cavemen like George Wallace and Strom Thurmond had lost, once and for all and finally. It may be a cliché but in truth, we are living the great American experiment writ large – the stereotypical melting pot is still cooking and we are not nearly done with the inevitable blurring of the races just as surely as we aren’t done with the blurring of gender roles, adjusting to the global economy, and figuring out how to stop from destroying the planet. You weren’t a rich old white man and that was incredibly refreshing. And in truth, had you been, with the same rhetoric and policies and vision for governing, you probably wouldn’t have been elected, even running against a fossilized cold warrior like McCain and an empty-headed ditz like Palin.

Unfortunately for you, this monumentally important event took place in the context of the disastrous culmination of years of misguided economic policy, deregulation, and selfishness and as you slid behind the wheel to an Earth, Wind and Fire soundtrack you probably knew that the brakes were about to go out and the wheels were going to fall off. A determined conspiracy theorist, as a matter of fact, could easily suspect that the nomination of McCain and his subsequent punch-drunk selection of Palin may have been a signal that the republicans wanted no part of the last four years, knowing full well that it was a catastrophic train wreck waiting to happen and not wanting it to happen on their watch. That particular bit of insight proved to be true; angry and frightened American started turning on you immediately, expecting you to fix things the day you took office and those not hiding under the bed with a blanket over their heads began muttering darkly in about the summer of 2009.

But I am not here to defend you – in spite of you having my sympathy, the truth is you have fucked this up a number of ways and there’s no getting around it.

You should have recognized early on that being conciliatory with the republicans was going to get you nowhere. They began plotting your 2012 defeat the day you were inaugurated and it was clear anything you proposed, they would oppose. Instead you negotiated and negotiated right up until the 2010 mid-terms when they ate your lunch. You squandered an historic opportunity by even bothering.

Your justice department has been a nightmare; ignoring the financial criminals completely, chasing pot dispensaries and letting the crew-cut jar heads run amock along the border. There’s really been almost no difference between Holder running the department and the series of brown shirts and Wall Street collaborators running it for George the Dull. Holder is no Alberto Gonzales but in truth he hasn’t accomplished much either and chasing illegal aliens and stoned cancer patients is no way to build a lasting legacy. Meanwhile smirking pricks like Jamie Dimon are testifying in front of congress and pissing on your shoes.

You promised to end the war in Iraq and you did that; congratulations. In spite of blow-back from right wing warriors and chicken hawks who never met a war they couldn’t support, we’ve finally ended that doomed adventure in cheap revenge and dick-measuring begun by Dubbya the dumb ass and cheered on by the cadre of neo-con geniuses in the White House basement. Good job. Now get us the hell out of godforsaken Afghanistan. Sure, there were political considerations to doubling down with another surge but face it; Karzai and his tribe of cronies and fixers are just a bunch of thieves and bandits and imagining for one second that we can turn this dusty, goat-ridden place into some kind of exotic resort destination and productive member of international society is a fool’s errand of the highest order and it’s long past time to tell him, “it’s over – you guys figure it out”.

One point made repeatedly by republicans and patriotic conservatives – not necessarily the same thing – is that you have missed a chance to root out all of the mind-boggling duplication, waste, inefficiency and just systemic chaos in government. Have you tried to interface – as a private citizen – with any federal government bureaucracy lately? It’s a sucking tar pit and a fundamental reason Americans are disillusioned and pissed off about their government. It’s this monumental “thing” that only seems to restrict us and not actually assist us in accomplishing anything useful. Under the circumstances, this is probably a second term issue but I thought I’d mention it.

But my biggest complaint isn’t something you chose to do or not do; honorable people can disagree as to priorities and necessities. My biggest problem is that your team messaging sucks; it’s absolutely inept. If this is the best that Axelrod can do, he’s gotta go. With all that you accomplished – in the face of staggering and treasonous opposition – most of the country still doesn’t know that they got a tax break, thinks of “stimulus” as a dirty obscenity, hates the idea of bailouts but are supporting the opposition, who themselves benefited from them and who – now that they don’t need you any more – are clamouring for your defeat and calling you a failure. There is no understanding of the economic fundamentals making employment such an intractable problem, even though Robert Reich, Paul Krugman and Joseph Stieglitz have been giving free lectures on the topic for two years.

A perfect example; you let the republicans totally control the narrative around the Keystone Pipeline flap and it ended up being characterized as you being a tree-hugging environmental wack-job instead of a story about the incredibly dirty, boondoggle and waste of time that it was / is. Nevertheless, you hadn't cancelled it; just called for further review and planning to take care of concerns expressed by people in Oklahoma - not exactly a hot bed of Greenpeace activists. Why wasn't someone out there telling the true story of stinking oil sands and the fact that all of that oil would be refined and exported, not used domestically? Where were your people as you were blamed for rising gas prices by all of the republican candidates and their Faux News propagandists?

Why isn’t there a coherent message from your people to boost your successes as much as republicans inflate your failures or invent them for you? And now – in the last crucial months of the campaign – you’re still not giving anyone a reason to vote for you; you’re bashing Romney and Ryan and looking petty and small and weak by doing so. Give people a reason to give you a second term!!! Stop worrying about Mitt’s tax returns – he asked Ann for permission, she said no, so that’s it. You spent the entire first two years of your administration and most of your political capital passing the ACA, it was validated by the Supreme Court, now move on. Ryan’s budget’s an easy target so fire away but what are you going to do in the next four years?

Look, Barack; let’s be real – there is 45% of the country that is going to support you and 45% who hate you. If you could change that whole black thing it might be less. But you need to get the 10% in the middle and you’re not going to do that by preaching to the choir.

Romney is an empty suit and Ryan’s a self-serving far-right reactionary – you should be able to defeat them without all this drama if the democrats could just focus on telling people how they are going to benefit – how we’re all going to benefit – by re-electing you. But they are doing a terrible job of it so far.

Your barking pal,

Romney has his VP choice made for him and awkward smiles are the order of the day...

2012-08-14T08:07:00.001-07:00

The Paul Ryan era officially kicked off over the weekend with large, enthusiastic crowds of punch-drunk celebrity chasers armed with tiny glowing cameras or awkwardly pointing cell phones, trying desperately to capture a moment, so they could say that they were there that weekend when the turgid and frightening politics of the second decade of the 21^st century became incarnate in the mindlessly grinning Mitt Romney and his side-kick, the smirking brown-noser and career right wing sycophant, Paul Ryan. Slavish but dimwitted media hordes dutifully reported this arranged marriage as some kind of potential tipping point – “a real game changer”, seemed to be the consensus – and the chattering class on Sunday morning television also had a field day talking about what it all means. Well, I’m glad they asked.

Romney was at a point in the campaign where it was becoming clear that he had nothing to offer; no big idea, no grand unified theory, nothing on which to realistically base a national presidential campaign except the simple proposition that he isn’t Obama and, by the way, Obama is a bad guy and a failure and hey, it’s my turn. Heady stuff for the red meat crowd that reluctantly supported him after the circular firing squad that was the republican primaries but not much to hang your hat on as a substantive plan for the country.

Worse, Mitt was becoming kind of a laughing stock; clinging to his wife on a wave runner with a dopy grin, mumbling gibberish trying to defend his “work” at Bain Capital, trying to figure out a safe place to hide his tax returns, all while secretly attending all night meetings of the Toastmasters Club to polish up his extemporaneous speaking and trying not to sound like a rich privileged dork every time he opened his mouth. Plus he had Ann with her multiple Cadillacs and dancing horse and hilarious attempt to relate to women by touting her own incredibly privileged life to get some street cred. No, Mitt had nothing. He was slipping in the swing-state polls and clearly floundering.

So the party bosses met, probably in the basement of the Skull & Bones Club at Yale or some other bastion of rich, white men, and – over Cuban cigars and tumblers full of Patron – tossed around a few ideas they hoped would pull poor Mitt’s loafers out of the muck of his stultifying personality.

The ghost of Ayn Rand haunts places like that; the devil that sits on the shoulders of the powerful to whisper sweet right wing aphorisms into their ears; “Fuck the poor and the doomed”, she whispers. “They don’t deserve anything but the hideously banal and crushingly awful lives they’ve been given” comes the soft caress of her voice. “They want YOUR money”, she says and the old white men nod their heads and murmur and grumble and curse just as softly. “Give the insipid nominee some intellectual heft by choosing one of the party’s young turks, one who worships me as well”, she coyly suggests.

Well, maybe it wasn’t quite like that. But the choice of weasely tea party pin up boy wonder Ryan surely is either brazen overconfidence in the extent to which the country is pissed off at Obama or a choice intended to give him some seasoning so he’s ready to run in 2016 when they fully expect to have fucked up the country so badly that the democrats are unable to catch their breath until about 2050. Another four years of John Boner and the rest of the hyena pack snapping at Obama until he’s exhausted might just do the trick, an ominous thought for anyone wanting to live to mid-century with a shred of human dignity.

So enter Paul Ryan, a career politician if there ever was one. For 14 years he has represented a small wedge of Wisconsin cheese, centered on Janesville, a city of 60-odd thousand people, 92% of whom are white, located near the Illinois border, just south of Lake Koshkonong. Middle America personified, in more ways than just geography.

Janesville used to have a big GM plant – the oldest one in North America – cranking out SUVs and employing half the town. It closed in 2008 as the economy tanked and the market for huge, gas-sucking vehicles collapsed as well. But today, thanks to federal stimulus money and grants, Janesville has re-invented itself as a logistics and distribution center for the Midwest and is doing OK. Ironic, it’s fair to say, that the federal government – the one that the tea party rabble love to rail against, that needs to be slashed to the bone to eliminate waste and promote self reliance a la Ayn Rand - saved the town that Ryan represents.

Just as it’s ironic that, after Ryan’s father died when he was 16, he was able to use social security benefits to go to college – the same social security program that Ryan now insists has to be killed to be saved, privatized, so his Wall Street pals can manage your money for you like the geniuses that they are - allowed him to attend Miami of Ohio University and find his way to D.C., where he has stuck like a burr.

Ryan clearly enjoys the media meme that he’s some kind of budget Yoda, a serious man, a deep thinker, substantive and bi-partisan, etc., etc. But in his 16 years in congress he has yet to pass one bill of any consequence. His biggest legislative achievement has been to sponsor a bill re-naming some dismal and forgotten post office building somewhere for his other hero, Ronald Reagan.

But most damning is his performance during the two-term reign of George the Dull, during which he consistently supported policies – like enormous tax cuts for no apparent reason – that put us in the fiscal mess for which he now has the balls to blame Obama. Mr. Budgetary Genius voted for two wars during this time and somehow it didn’t occur to him that we might want to figure out some way to pay for them other than to decide 10 years later that the old and the poor and the less-than-rich should be responsible, as if sending their sons and daughters to do the fighting wasn’t contribution enough.

“America...just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable”
― Hunter S. Thompson

The nightmare scenario running through my head for the last few nights has been this; they get elected, Mitt drops over dead, and we’re left with an utterly unprepared Paul Ryan and a sinister cabal of neo-con foreign policy and national security advisors scheming in the basement, looking to reignite the drive for American empire in the 21^st century and smite any unruly god damn Arab or other anti-Semite who dares get in the way. “Mecca this, you swarthy pricks”, they cry as the big board lights up with all manner of military hardware, fine tuned to raise hell. “And ignore the Russians and the Chinese – they’re atheists or Buddhists or some god damn thing – who cares what they think.”

In his own way, Ryan is just as scary as Sarah Palin was – he just doesn’t give the camo-clad mouth breathers a hard-on, so the danger is more subtle. But as a fine example of the current republican trend towards the mindless dismantling of government as domestic policy and caged wolverine foreign policy, he’s a bright light shining from inside the beltway, a grinning, genial personification of the new right.

My open letter to Mr Romney...

2012-08-09T08:54:00.004-07:00

I just got back from vacation last Sunday at 11:00 PM and, as often happens, wandered around in a fog for about 24 hours before I snapped out of it. There is something about hours cooped up in the confined and uncomfortable space of an airplane that causes my brain to downshift and my ass to hurt. I’ve also found that spending a week on the shore of Lake Huron, confining my TV viewing to old movies and swimming everyday also unravels the tightly wound spool of gibberish normally haunting my brain like inter-planetary white noise. It calms me down and excretes the daily toxins – like someone is sucking the snake bite that threatens to render me comatose.

So anyway, I was in this semi-blissful state when I went to the mail box to retrieve our daily assortment of largely commercial correspondence. I grabbed the fistful of brightly colored envelopes with all manner of inducements - subtle and brazen and stupid - and walked back to the house, where I proceeded to absently sort through them before tossing the whole useless pile into the recycling when one in particular caught my eye. There amidst the coupons for discount manicures and cheap oil changes was a letter – all red, white and blue – from Mr. Mitt Romney, candidate for president. And it was addressed to me…!

As loyal readers of this hyper-ventilating series of rants know all too well, I am not in Mitt’s demographic, to say the least. I believe I have made it clear that I think he is a dorky sock-puppet candidate lacking even one original idea, propped up by a bunch of desperate and treacherous bastards who should all be in jail and leading a coalition of greed-heads, delusional religious fanatics and low IQ, mouth-breathing racists. Clearly Mitt’s fund raising apparatus mistook me for somebody else. That became obvious as I read his pitiful, patronizing and disingenuous series of clichéd republican talking points, anchored by this stunning paragraph that I may well frame and hang in my office;

“You are one of our Party’s most prominent members and I would be honored if you would join my team as a major contributor. Your maximum $5,000 contribution will signal your support for my candidacy and help elect a fiscally conservative Republican with real-world business experience.”

Geez, once I stopped retching I could just feel the old adrenalin squirt directly into my blood stream until I thought my eyes might pop right out of my vibrating skull. Seriously, Mitt, I don’t know where to start. So consider this an open letter in response to your plaintive yet completely devious and phony appeal to the fascists and the tragically ignorant.

Dear Mitt; Thank you so much for taking the time to send me your heartfelt plea for money, but I think I am going to pass. I have it on good authority that you and the rest of your swinish cabal raised 100 million dollars in July and since I couldn’t really shake loose much more than $20 bucks I am sure you guys will be OK without it and I’m sure it would just get lost in one of the “small-bill” bags that get tossed in the corner for you to use to pay for scotch and thousand dollar hookers. That’s American as hell and it’s tempting but not this time.

And I am a little uneasy with some of aspects of your campaign, to be blunt.

Your “fuck the doomed” approach to dealing with the unemployed and those less fortunate citizens not born with a thousand dollar Italian tassel loafer in their mouth seems overly harsh to me. Not everyone who is poor is a shiftless freeloader who is getting what they deserve – a little empathy goes a long way. And as your more fervent religious supporters may be able to help you understand, there is that whole New Testament thing you may want to brush up on. Sure, sure; Joe Smith isn’t in there talking to angels. Still, it does contain a few worthy passages you might find useful.

In your letter you say that you want to “rebuild the foundation of the American economy based on the principles of free enterprise, hard work and innovation” but my understanding of your business experience is that it consists largely of taking advantage of struggling companies by stripping them clean of any valuable assets like a plague of locusts, and shipping their employment overseas. And forgive me if I hear a little bit of republican fire-up-the-base code in that statement; free enterprise, as opposed to socialism, hard work as opposed to lazy-ass minority welfare cheats and innovation, just to pander to the rich propeller-heads of Silicon Valley.

Then there is your whole-hearted and idiotic embrace of the bug-eyed neo-con denizens of the Bush White House basement to design your foreign policy, which consists primarily of parking an aircraft carrier in the nearest body of water and bombing the shit out of any country that won’t play ball with the moneyed interests of “our party”. If you had been paying attention at all during the last 10 years you may have noticed that jingoistic belligerence as foreign policy leaves a lot to be desired and there is more to achieving peace in the Middle East than having closeted circle jerks with Netanyahu.

Two of your “day one” policies also make me queasy; you say you will “begin to eliminate the overregulation that us smothering business growth” and, at the same time, “initiate comprehensive market-driven energy policies to encourage development of American resources”. That sounds suspiciously like you and your East Texas pals want to start punching wells all over the place, water and air quality and public safety be damned as long as they can turn a quick buck. I mean really; who wants god damn wind mills cluttering up the landscape and those stupid little electric cars and hybrids. The only people who drive those are Birkenstock-wearing ex-hippies who probably have a glove box full of pot, right?

But my biggest problem with you and your traitorous allies in congress and across the country is you’re a bunch of stone cold liars. Your latest advertisement, regarding the Obama administration’s welfare policy is so blatantly false it makes my head hurt. The porcine little miscreant, Karl Rove, is probably sitting in a bath tub full of warm mayonnaise giggling madly as he fanaticizes about the new republican century – a disturbing image to be sure. But you guys aren’t going to get away with it. PT Barnum may have been partially correct when he said there’s a sucker born every minute – if this wasn’t true, Rush Blowhard would be just another pill-popping fat guy loser living in a van down by the river. But the corollary has also long been held to be just as true – you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

So despite the compelling “Please rush” stamp on your return envelope, I won’t be contributing to your sleazy little enterprise, not now and not ever. If my worst nightmare comes true and you do get elected to “restore America’s greatness", god help us all.

Your pal,

The Barking Dog at the Back Fence

"Let me tell you how it will be - there's one for you, nineteen for me..."

2012-07-19T16:15:00.001-07:00

There are few things I enjoy more than the hue and cry of anguished republicans complaining that the democrats are being meanies. It really does my heart good. After watching successive republican Romney surrogates and presidential wanna-be’s bitch-slap Obama for months with no real response in kind, watching them fulminate over some semi-hard hitting campaign ads is deeply satisfying.

I think the reason it took so long for any kind of systematic democratic reply to the hallucinating fantasies being kicked around the right-wing, nut-case blog-a-sphere is Obama’s people were out of breath from laughing so hard they couldn’t catch their collective breath. When you go back and look at the sorry-ass collection of delusional knuckleheads trying to win the nomination it’s plain to see the difficulty in taking them seriously. Michelle Bachman…? Really…?

But Romney – the fair-haired prince regent-in-waiting who managed to emerge from the sucking mud hole of the primaries – is now right there, walking around spewing whatever fabricated nonsense he’s told to spew so there is finally someone they can take seriously. And as an extra happy circumstance, he is only slightly less of an amiable dunce than republican Zeus, Ronald Reagan.

Now we have the patrician Romney complete with Swiss bank accounts, bags of money stashed in The Caymans and Bermuda, and a history of mercilessly managing companies with a slash & burn style that General Sherman would have admired, rolling up the sleeves on his $150 dollar dress shirts so he looks like a regular guy and yammering about Obama being out of touch with ordinary Americans. I think the silver spoon that he has had in his mouth his whole life has finally pierced his medulla oblongata.

The howling shouts of “Hey, that’s not fair…” are only the least offensive of the noxious smoke cloud being generated on Mitt’s behalf as he tries in vain to come up with some plausible reason for defying years of tradition and not releasing his personal tax returns. His wife, Ann – you know; the one driving Mitt around on a wave runner recently – has as much as said, screw tradition – we’re not giving you anything else. This is the same woman who tried to portray her life as a stay-at-home- mom, living in luxury at one of the several Romney family compounds as being equivalent to the lives of working mothers across America – the same working mothers who would lose access to health care services like birth control, pap smears and safe, legal abortion, and would be denied the opportunity for equal pay for equal work and have to scramble to find child care if her husband is elected, all in the name of self reliance and personal responsibility. Yeah, Ann; that really resonates.

Worse – and, frankly, funnier – are the defenders of Romney’s obfuscation and dissembling over his finances and proposed budgetary priorities; Dick, “The Iguana” Cheney, staunch defender of the constitutional prerogative to torture suspects and send them off blindfolded to the kind of dank and stinking dungeons that probably haunt his dreams, is prominently featured. It’s a pretty sure bet he won’t be joining that bible study group trip to Israel any time soon. Every terrorist within 500 miles would be strapping on the C-4 and booking a plane ticket. John Sununu is another distinguished criminal emeritus of the glory years who piped up with some steaming horse shit this week in a stunningly idiotic rant that made the news, if only for being bizarre.

And Tim Pawlenty, bitter first-loser in the primaries who is still apparently ambitious enough to be hoping for a position in the Romney cabinet, came to the defense of Romney’s fucking horse. Really, Tim…? The one for which they claim some kind of cockamamie tax deduction while looking down their nose at “those people” who happen to need government services for something legit – like eating.

Of course we’ve come to expect people like Rush Blowhard to pontificate loudly to his audience of shut-ins and people wearing tin foil hats – “Why, Obama hates America…unequivocally”, as if the audience knows what that word even means. And my personal favorite, only because I want to see him cry – is John Boner, Speaker of the House, in a spittle-flecked screed that was priceless, proclaiming that voters don’t want to know about Mitt’s tax returns, they want to know about jobs. His sudden concern for the jobless would be touching if he and his treasonous cronies hadn’t spent the last three and a half years doing everything in their power to make sure we ended up in just this place at this time – four months to go before the election and the economy is still sputtering. He contemptuously asked the rhetorical question, why isn’t the president more worried about the jobs of ordinary Americans, and I threw up in my mouth a little bit. Hey John, in case you forgot, he proposed a job plan – unlike you and McConnell and rest of the Benedict Arnold Society up there on the hill – and you wouldn’t even vote on it. Where is your proposal, by the way? (Again, a rhetorical question since it has long been clear you don’t have one.)

No, the only way Obama is going to get anything done, including adding jobs, is if he wins and you and your buddies – young donation-slut Eric Cantor, tea party poster boy, Paul Ryan – all of you, get voted out of the majority and get the hell out of the way. Then Obama can fail or succeed on the merits of the programs he implements, not because you pink-tie-wearing freaks won’t let him.

And by the way, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, it’s time for you to go too. I have never been witness to such utterly incompetent party leaders as the two of you. Pack up your JFK posters and get the hell out of there with them.

Anyway, where was I? Ah yes – Romney and his taxes or lack thereof; I say if he doesn’t want to release them he shouldn’t have to – it will provide the big stick to use to make him into a piñata all summer long and provide a lot of laughs to anyone who appreciates irony at its best.

"It's only a lie, if YOU don't believe it..." G. Costanza

2012-07-11T18:33:00.001-07:00

I will have to give the republicans credit; they have firm control of their messaging. While the obtuse yet vapid nominee-in-waiting, Mitt Romney, struggles to put a positive spin on what increasingly appears to be a personal financial plan based largely on dodging taxes with mysterious off shore accounts, his colleagues, minions and surrogates blast away at Obama’s proposal to extend the Bush tax cuts for all income up to $250,000 per year but to restore them for any income in excess of that. The democrats should be so coherent. Instead we have the spectacle of 17 members of the House lining up with the crypto-fascists calling for the attorney general’s head on a platter and several cowardly members shamefully voting with the republicans to repeal the ACA and now oppose even this fairly responsible action to meet the ostensibly critical goal of deficit reduction and tax fairness. I mean, let's face it; if you're bringing in net income over 250k, you're doing OK.

Romney’s struggle is the more amusing of these developments. Watching him attempt to convince voters that he really has no knowledge of the nature of his tax-sheltered investments, where they are, why they’re there and that, moreover, it’s OK because he hasn’t broken any laws, is like handing the democratic national committee and big stick and saying, “Hit me”. And they seem to have been able to get their arms around the idea and are calling for him to release his tax returns and explain how his avoiding paying more than 15% tax is patriotically American and appropriate behavior for a presidential candidate. Good for them; lord knows they have been maddeningly inept at getting a coherent message of their own out even as Mitt and his treacherous cronies have given them a target rich environment that Schwartzkopf would salivate over.

Mitt still hasn’t given us a single new idea about anything. He is the personification of the anti-Obama-at-all-costs interests in the country and seems to be against anything and everything that Obama favors. But asked to lay out a plan for economic progress should he be elected he reverts like Pavlov’s dog to an inane script about cutting taxes and regulations and repealing the health care law; that’s about it. David Brooks, of the New York Times, insists that Mitt has a health reform plan that he is not yet sharing but that begs the question; what the hell is he waiting for? Was there ever a better time to offer an alternative to Obamacare than in the immediate aftermath of the recent Supreme Court decision upholding it? Instead he simply reverted to a vow to repeal it at his first opportunity, offering nothing to replace it even as there is wide agreement among republicans on the need for real reform. Well, Mitt?

He, along with every republican talking head in the land, is in a sputtering indignant froth selling the toxic notion – put forth in Justice Roberts’ decision – that the individual mandate is a tax and therefore an Obama flip-flop and broken promise and the largest middle class tax increase every, etc., etc. Of course it was obvious the minute Roberts upheld the law based on this somewhat twisted notion of a tax that it would be seized upon by the Norquistians and used as a bludgeon. Even as they were sitting around swilling the good scotch and cursing the day that Roberts was ever confirmed they were plotting to try to turn the tax idea to their advantage. They conveniently ignore the issue of personal responsibility for the scofflaws as it doesn’t conveniently fit their “Don’t Tread on Me” narrative. So the party ostensibly committed to libertarian personal responsibility is forced to advocate for leaving the sick and dying in the street to fend for themselves or letting them rip off the rest of us, getting sick on our dime – anything to oppose the POTUS on his main legislative achievement.

Now that Obama has bitch-slapped them with a new glove – the extension of the Bush tax cuts on income up to $250,000 – the volume of tortured howling from the right has become deafening, with bug-eyed hyperbole and predictions of doom coming from all of the usual suspects. The irony apparently escapes them, as it often does; Romney is hiding his money in secretive havens more often used by the drug dealers and the BeBe Rebozzo’s of the world than a normal presidential candidate while his party is doing its best to stir up the rabble with over-amped blather about gigantic tax increases and their imminent danger to the economy of the republic – the same economy that they have been blatantly trying to sabotage since 2008. Statistics show that all of the loudly proclaimed concern for “small businesses” is a complete falsehood – estimates are that only 3% of small business owners will be significantly impacted by the tax and – very important – only on that portion of their net income that exceeds $250,000 per year.

The level of toxic, treasonous bile coming from the right these days is a clear reflection of the losing streak they are currently on; the ACA, Arizona’s immigration law and now Obama hammers them with this tax issue. There is a high degree of difficulty associated with their attempt to wiggle free of the pin and despite the millions and millions of dollars they have available, they may not be up to the task.

Now we have the photos of a wet and grinning Mitt, posed Dukakis-like on the back of a wave runner operated by his wife and presumably somewhere off the Hamptons or La Jolla or somewhere else that he has one of his auxiliary homes. This is the single worst presidential candidate of my life time and the picture of him looking like a duffus clinging to his wife is an apt metaphor for his whole political life. This is a guy who is running - terrified – from his one and only good idea like it’s a horde of zombies. His campaign is based on distortion, fear, hatred and a whole series of noxious lies supported by a relative handful of billionaires and abetted by slimy money-grubbing allies in congress who are fighting desperately to carry out their four year-old marching orders; a systematic betrayal of their fellow citizens for the benefit of corporate sponsors and a racist tea party rabble clinging to the hope that things can go back to the way they imagine they used to be. What a country.

The Supremes reign supreme...and weirdness ensues.

2012-06-29T19:57:00.001-07:00

I should have known when I woke up Wednesday morning in a cold sweat from a feverish dream in which George Will – dressed like Angus Young – was licking Antonin Scalia’s neck with Clarence Thomas singing Windmills of Your Mind in the background that things were about to take a weird turn. I couldn’t have known just how weird things were going to get though – the media since yesterday morning has been like a terrifying and inexplicable front page of the World Weekly News being read aloud by Chet Huntley on acid. In other words, thanks to the unexpected courage of Chief Justice John Roberts, the shit has hit the fan.

The ominous tsunami of bad news that has been wounding Obama like so many banderillas is suddenly overshadowed – at least for a few days – by the outraged cries of right wing pundits, congressional drones and empty-headed Faux News commentators as they try to figure out what the fuck happened. How did their carefully orchestrated take-down of Obama get scuttled by one of their own – a George W. Bush appointee and heretofore conservative stalwart like Roberts? It is puzzling but certainly not inconceivable if you think about it from his perspective.

Remember that the health care reform law – the ACA – was born out of republican DNA as a response to that uppity bitch, Hillary Clinton, and her bridge-too-far attempt to reform health care in Bill’s first term. The fundamental aspects of what is derisively called Obamacare came straight from the lineage leading back to Hillarycare that passes right through Romneycare to the present. And the intensity of the opposition has the same roots, going back to backroom fascist and nativist Bill Kristol, who devised a no holds barred obstructionism-as-policy strategy and whose threats to Bob Dole, waiting in the wings for his chance to run for president, galvanized the entire unruly republican mob, led by Newt Gingrich. This rabble’s subsequent fervent overreach over Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky’s blow job provides a direct link to the extreme partisanship we see all around us today.

Roberts is 57 years old and appointed to the court for life. That could be a hell of a long time, time enough to create a lasting legacy akin to the great Chief Justices of the past. Does he want his legacy stained by extremist partisans – traitors, really – who expect him to march in lock step, bowing to their every whim? Probably not. Instead he has begun what we can only hope becomes a legacy of even-handed, well thought out decisions that aren’t overtly political – a course of action that is anathema to the right wing intelligencia who feel like their ideas, as promulgated on some wrinkled and blood stained piece of ancient parchment somewhere, are the only ones with any merit.

And that doesn’t take into account hallucinating conservative wing-nut scholars like Michelle Bachman who was quoted as saying – and we’re paraphrasing because her transmission was garbled – “Anytime the Supreme Court renders something constitutional that is clearly unconstitutional, that undermines the credibility of the Supreme Court. I do believe the court's credibility was undermined severely today.” That counts as a relatively lucid comment from her but illustrates what I call “the new treason”; pseudo-patriotic gibberish hiding what is really borderline sedition and, in some cases, borderline criminal behavior in the name of righteous but poorly thought out principles. If a Supreme Court decision regarding what is constitutional is subject to a mob gathering with burning torches and political opposition simply saying, “No it isn’t”, what does constitute the rule of law? Who is going to decide in their stead? Bachman? John Boner and the other semi-criminal elements that pretend to represent Americans in Congress? Grover Norquist? Newt Gingrich?

No, Roberts somehow put on his big boy robe and decided to make a decision based on logic as he saw it and more’s the honor in that.

Meanwhile Scalia and his dim-wit sidekick, Mumbles Thomas, revealed themselves to be the overtly political creatures they are. Scalia went off on a foaming-at-the-mouth rant about a decision against which he dissented in the question of Arizona’s immigration policy, slamming Obama in a virtually unprecedented partisan screed, essentially accusing Obama of criminality in his executive order imposing aspects of the long-obstructed Dream Act. Never mind that the issue at hand was an Arizona law regarding overt usurpation of federal laws governing in immigration; Scalia decided to vent. This is the guy who said that riding out to the lake in Cheney’s four-by-four for a weekend of duck hunting wasn't enough to require him to recuse himself from a case involving the Vice Reptile because they weren't actually sharing a duck blind.

And the weirdness is peaking around the contempt of congress vote against Attorney General Eric Holder, led by oily southern California congressman Darryl Issa, high school dropout and a charter member of jarheads for Nixon. Issa is a repugnant little creature, who became a multi-millionaire selling car alarms – not exactly a constitutional scholar.

I have no idea of the details of the infamous botched gun operation in Mexico – "Fast and Furious". I didn't pay any attention to it when it was happening and don’t know the details. But from what I gather, some kind of sting was initiated during the last days of the Bush administration and carried out by Holder and his justice department brown shirts. It got screwed up through who-knows-what bureaucratic bumbling and incompetence and then – as is often the case – the pointy-headed apparatchiks running it scattered once the lights came on and a massive cover-your-ass operation swung into action.

Issa has admitted that there is no evidence for Holder being guilty of anything, nor is there any evidence that the White House was involved in anything remotely resembling a cover up. Evidently there is still some kind of investigation going on requiring a certain amount of discretion and Holder is not turning over every piece of paper that Issa asked for. But they have turned over thousands of papers related to the operation, they have agreed to meet privately and provide any information that Issa and his boys want and still they ask for more.

Now none of this is particularly unusual – the list of Attorney Generals who have dissembled and obfuscated and stone walled etc., is a long list containing the name of virtually every Attorney General who ever served. But never has congress voted to accuse them of contempt. Think about that – is this sordid little fuck up so unique and extraordinary that it warrants this blathering partisan outrage? My guess is, no. Is it a coincidence that the NRA – a cowering herd of paranoids who spend their weekends firing semi-automatics at imaginary black helicopters – let it be known that anyone who DID NOT VOTE YES for the charge of contempt of congress would be held accountable by them come November? Is this a congress that represents you? A sniveling pack of cowards with not 1% of the political courage of John Roberts?

Of course he does have that “appointed for life” thing going for him – no denying that. But unless all you ever wanted in life was to be a politician, you just can’t be afraid to have principles and put them on display instead of shoving them into the nearest closet at the slightest hint of political blow back like they were porn tapes and your mother-in-law was pulling into the driveway. Issa is nothing but a creepy political opportunist who has probably been promised some special donations if he can just hump Obama’s leg like a rabid Pekinese through August and then his work will be done.

I am continually astonished and repulsed by the level of pure hatred overwhelming our national politics in the last 20 years but this nasty grease fire is threatening to burn down the house and the barn and the whole damn works if we don’t all get off our asses and do something about it. The next few months are crucial. If Obama loses to Mitt the cyborg, there will be a pall of darkness that falls on this country the likes of which haven’t been seen since 1850. Republicans with their hair on fire are already talking about taking up arms in rebellion against the tyranny of the Awful Negro. We’re running out of time to give ourselves a chance for the country we were all expecting in the 21^st century.

As Obama gets relentlessly pummled, some free campaign advice.

2012-06-12T21:10:00.000-07:00

The last couple of weeks have seen some ominous developments in the presidential race as David Axelrod seems to have lost control of the political narrative and Romney surrogates have emerged to savagely bash and batter Obama like a pack of hallucinating Dingoes going after a wounded bandicoot.

It’s interesting to watch as Tim Pawlenty and Jeb Bush and other prominent conservative voices serve up a strident defense and long-winded interpretations of republican orthodoxy and dogma in place of Romney, who can’t seem to keep his tassel loafer out of his mouth.

In the aftermath of the Wisconsin recall election, he took to the stump with a wildly off base explanation of Scott Walker’s victory and a barely coherent attack on Obama’s call for an economic policy that stops the bleeding of government jobs and maintains funding for public safety workers, teachers and infrastructure. His bleating speeches in front of Obama haters were reflexively cheered and applauded, until even Scott Walker himself had to demur and gently disagree with Mitt’s enthusiastic but empty headed ridicule of Obama for wanting to hire more cops and firemen. Walker may be a union busting fascist but even he knows that, no matter how disgusted the public may be with union over-reach and sense of entitlement, they don’t want fewer cops on the street or people manning the fire stations around town or even teachers to try to educate their children.

Aside from the consistent blame-the-awful-negro-for-everything strategy barely hidden beneath the surface of much of conservative super-PAC advertising there is also the repeated refrain of failure, failed policies, failed presidency, fail, fail, fail. And the news that triggered this choking avalanche of overheated rhetoric is last month’s employment report, showing a net job creation of only 69,000 and, worse, extended a downward trend that wiped out the good vibes generated over the winter and which had made Obama look like an easy winner over whoever emerged from the savage slap-fight that the republican primaries devolved into.

Axelrod seems to be content with a strategy of turning the other cheek, staying calm and carrying on, and that is admirable. But in the face of this sustained onslaught of lies, hyperbole, distortion and more lies, being presidential and dignified will only keep you from utter disaster and that is not a very promising prescription for winning the election in November. So in the interest of getting Obama re-elected and fending off the specter of living in a mind-numbing plutocracy for a significant portion of the rest of my life, I am going to help Dave focus on the task at hand and – more importantly – show him how to keep the rats from slowly and viciously eating his candidate’s face while he sleeps.

Republicans calling Obama a failure while they actively work to obstruct his every initiative and make sure he is a failure is something that needs to be pointed out as the despicable treachery it is. How can they say his policies failed if they never allowed his policies to be tried? Isn’t that what elections are for? If a president’s program is put in place and doesn’t work, that one thing. Fair enough – let’s try something else. But since the 2010 mid-term elections Obama’s initiatives have essentially been stopped dead in the water so how can they be deemed to have failed? Of course, to the Right this is a purely rhetorical question; they’ve failed because we say they have failed and we’re damn proud of it too.

So certain things need to be pointed out again and again and again over the next six months until even the most dull-witted Faux News consumer can’t help but have the audio running through his head. Key points the Obama campaign needs to make repeatedly can be divided into three general categories; what I did, who tried to stop me, and who supports my program. Let’s take the last one first.

People who support the idea that there has been a fundamentally damaging shift in income and increase in the inequality of income distribution and feel that reforming the tax code to correct this will help the economy include Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize winner, Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize winner and Robert Reich, Labor Secretary under Bill Clinton and professor of economics at UC Berkeley who helped craft economic policy the last time we had a surplus in the Federal budget. All three of these able men have written that the obsession over the deficit while simultaneously cutting taxes and spending is exactly the wrong thing to do to rev up the economy.

On the other side we have Grover Norquist, former Nixon-youth, earnest supporter of Ollie North and hater of taxation in any form with or without representation, corporate water-boy Paul Ryan, who has a BA from Miami of Ohio and a Delta Tau Delta pledge pin and whose mysteriously vague budget plan has been enthusiastically endorsed by Mitt Romney for its merciless stripping of any public benefit involving tax money in favor of more corporate largess and assistance to the uber-wealthy, and Michelle Bachman, who has voices in her head and not much else. The Congressional Budget Office has concluded that Ryan’s budget proposal would be a disaster in terms of public policy for the vast majority of Americans and that Romney’s plan would vastly increase the size of the deficit boogie-man which is allegedly the inspiration for the Right’s current economic prescription. I think Obama’s team wins this one – they just need to go out and repeat the correct prescription relentlessly. And they’re not…

Now as to what he can point to as significant achievements, there is a long list and, in one of the many perplexing developments of Obama’s campaign to date, they seem to have a very difficult time coherently laying them out in any kind of easily understood narrative. I cannot understand either the difficulty or the reluctance to highlight these accomplishments other than the certain knowledge that they will illicit immediate and fiery ridicule – much like the orgy of slash and burn ridicule being ladled onto Obama for an innocuous but clumsy comment attempting to highlight the fact that public sector job loss is an anvil-like drag on the economy due to the deficit cutting frenzy in congress but the private sector is continuing to create new jobs. As a matter of fact, the private sector has created 3.7 million new jobs since the president took office – the strangulation of the public sector has lost 500,000.

Bob Cesca, of The Hufffington Post, laid out the balance of the positive side of the ledger quite concisely recently so, rather than re-inventing the wheel; "GDP is growing steadily, though still sluggish. Jobs are being added every month. Unemployment is slowly declining. The deficit is shrinking. Middle and working class taxes are lower. Inflation is nearly an entire percentage point below the average that began in the middle 1920s (long term average is 3.43%, while our current rate is 2.3% and dropping). The price of oil dropped below $90 last week and stockpiles are huge -- the highest level in 22 years. New home sales are up by 10 percent over a year ago. Moody's Analytics called this a "genuine rebound" in housing, and mortgage rates remain tantalizingly low. Consumer debt is declining and corporate profits -- despite the president's false reputation as a profit-hating commie -- are nearly double what they were in the boom times of 1999. 9.75 percent at the end of 2011, compared with 5.7 percent in the final quarter of 1999. The Dow has doubled since the deepest, darkest days of the Great Recession and some analysts suggest that the DJIA should be around 20,000, not 13,000, given all of these positive indicators." That seems pretty clear – why aren’t they able to put this into a speech to counter-act all of the determined republican dissemination of fear and doom and failure? Obama’s administration has the lowest annualized rate of growth in government spending of any modern president – look it up.

And the third – and, I think, crucial leg of this stool is to highlight the willful obstructionism of the republican party as an institution since the day he was elected. As a matter of fact, the plan to fight everything Obama proposed probably started among the pale underbelly of the republican party the day a delirious John McCain proudly announced Sarah Palin as his running mate. The full extent of this traitorous behavior is almost too much to get one’s arms around. But just to scratch the surface, on January 20^th, 2009, a meeting was held in Washington and attended by the leading lights of the republican congressional delegation, along with Newt Gingrich. At this meeting it was decided that they would do everything in their power to sabotage Obama at every turn, regardless of the consequences. They vowed to challenge the democrats on every single bill and show unyielding and complete opposition to every Obama policy proposal. The same cabal of republicans who supported all of the Bush/Cheney policies leading to the economic crisis; the Bush tax cuts, war in Iraq and Afghanistan with no way to pay for it, and completely unregulated financial markets ,now reversed themselves, even opposing Obama's national security initiatives. According to the Dailey Kos,

“Senators: Jim DeMint, Jon Kyl, Tom Coburn, John Ensign, and Bob Corker have:

- Filibustered more Bills (over 300) than any Congress combined in US History.
- Voted NO on every single piece of Legislation brought to the Floor including:

NO on Al Franken's Anti-Rape Amendment,
NO on Lilly Ledbetter,
NO on Fair Pay Act,
NO on Anti-Outsourcing Bill (2010)”

In addition, there’s this, also from The Dailey Kos report; “Representatives: Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy, Rep. Pete Sessions, Jeb Hensarling, Pete Hoekstra and Dan Lungren have voted NO on every single piece of Legislation including:

NO on increasing FEMA during natural disasters

This opposition seems almost unbelievable coming from the same people who form a cock-a-mamie Greek Chorus filling the airwaves every day with incessant criticism and the idea that Obama’s policies are ruining the economy. Sadly it’s a strategy that seems to be working. The last week or so has seen the media – perhaps sensing Obama’s vulnerability – practically teeing up questions for these right-wing liars and handing them the driver. And there seems to be a determined attempt to rehabilitate the Bush family's image. Even as George the Dull has the lowest post-presidency approval rating of the modern era - and well deserved - brother Jeb goes on Charlie Rose and defends him as best he can for god knows what reason. Poppy is treated like some kind of weird elder statesman instead of the sinister criminal he really is. It's all part of the same attempt to convince American voters that even the foulest examples of republican duplicity and irresponsibility are "good guys".

If Obama’s campaign people were able to effectively counter all of this blather with a sustained response it wouldn’t be so frightening. But they have seemed remarkably inept and unfocused and have ceded the high ground to Mitt Fucking Romney of all people, the most vacuous, empty, unprincipled republican nominee I can ever remember who wanders bug-eyed from event to event, tie carefully loosened, spewing the chosen nonsense of the day with impunity.

Meanwhile it was reported today that republican-supporting PACs, billionaires and supporting organizations have exceeded the fund raising of their democratic counterparts by 8 to 1, virtually insuring that their message will continue to prevail unless we all get off our asses and do something about it. I, for one, intend to do just that.

The Sun Never Sets on Republican Ridicule of Alternative Energy

2012-06-01T13:42:00.000-07:00

I’m not sure why the putrid scent of desperation still clings to the republicans at a time when Team Obama is treading water, at best, and hoping like hell that something can kick the economy back into gear. But it is. Yesterday, a few miles across the Dumbarton Bridge, with the glow of Facebook world headquarters visible in the distance, empty suit Mitt Romney stood on a dusty road shoulder presiding over a hastily organized photo op in front of the now shuttered remnants of ill-fated solar manufacturer Solyndra’s facility, flogging the dead horse of this poster child to Obama’s "failed energy policy and economic cronyism". Nice try, Mitt, but in case you didn't notice, the horse is dead.

At the same time another of the many republican media hacks, syndicated columnist Victor Davis Hanson, published an op-ed in the San Jose Mercury essentially calling the Obama cabinet a pack of criminals and bumbling fools. This hyperbolic characterization mostly stems from their various human foibles and clearly defensible policy decisions with which he happens to disagree, including funding of alternative energy projects at the expense of more generous subsidies for big oil. This fixation with Solyndra puzzles me.

Isn’t the fundamental principle underlying the unfettered capitalism favored by the republican party for the last 50 years embodied in the concept, big risk / big reward? Since when does their economic philosophy include punishing risky investment in pursuit of a huge reward? Is it only when the risk is born by the public and the reward is reserved for corporations, private investors and heartless bastards like himself that failure is acceptable? In regards Solyndra, to paraphrase Otter in the movie, Animal House, let’s face it; we fucked up – we trusted them. The clowns at Solyndra probably weren’t the horse to bet on. But the right wing is determined to repeatedly run over the horse with bulldozers to make their point.

What strikes me is the fervor with which the republicans attack this particular misstep. It not only serves as a surrogate for Obama economic policy in general, it allows republicans to reinforce the notion that the very idea of alternative energy production is quaint but naïve and provides an opening for them to pimp for the oil company benefactors that keep them in business. Hanson’s column goes so far as to suggest that the US has the largest oil and gas reserves in the Western world and all of our problems would be solved if we could just have unobstructed drilling and exploitation of those reserves anywhere they occur. He is dismissive of any ecological concerns that get in the way of “progress” and has a scorched earth development philosophy that would make James Watt blush. He trots out 20 year old tax liens and assorted other horseshit accusations in the pursuit of partisan advantage, while never mentioning the jackals on Wall Street who precipitated the economic crisis for which he and Mitt are so eager to blame Obama.

Is that all you’ve got? Seriously? Or let me ask it this way; what’s your best idea, Mitt? Just give us one.

OK, while we wait for that, why don’t we cut to the chase? Romney appeals to two segments of the republican party; the stiff-collared patrician, Bill Buckley, conservative wing and the we-hate-that goddamn-negro-Obama wing and that’s pretty much it. This current push is to try to convince the independents who voted for Obama last time that he had his chance and blew it and now they need to turn the ball over to the Mitt-ster so he can try to use his knuckle-curve to get us out of the mess. This is the danger for Obama – he has to convince those people that it will all still work; he just needs another year. And the sad truth is, as slow as it is, the housing market – the overwhelming drag on the economy – is recovering, albeit way too slowly for most people to notice. So if Mitt does happen to win, he could be as ineffective as King Edward II and if the housing market improves enough to pull the economy out of the doldrums he can stage-dive off the White House balcony and adoring crowds would probably carry him up Pennsylvania Avenue – life’s a bitch, Barack, but it is what it is.

That’s why you need to push Boner and McConnell and the other traitorous swine in congress relentlessly through the summer and talk jobs, jobs, jobs. Screw the deficit. That’s all bullshit and an underhanded way for the republicans to accomplish their long-dreamed of social engineering in the name of responsible governing and conservative austerity; also bullshit, as both Paul Krugman and Robert Reich will testify. You need to hitch the wagon to those guys, drop any impulse towards cooperation and collegiality with the donkeys in the House and put the hammer down. Otherwise your legacy may end up being the unpopular, one-term guy who just happened to save the country from doom.

Cynical Irony and disingenuous pandering, thy name is Mitt…

2012-05-26T22:05:00.000-07:00

I was driving home recently listening to NPR when a story came on detailing the latest attempt to attack Obama by Mitt Romney out on the stump and I almost spit Diet Pepsi all over my dashboard. Here was Mitt Romney, candidate of a republican party which has de-funding of government on all levels as its main operational principle and which has gone to court to fight bilingual education all over the country, speaking to a group of Hispanic small business owners and claiming that education reform as designed and prescribed by him is suddenly the most important issue of our time. It’s laughable to watch Mitt stumble around trying to find an opening so he can land that one knock-out punch. And since nothing else he or the Koch Brothers or Karl Rove or any of their congressional minions have tried has gotten any traction, Mitt trots out faux concern for education and hope that somehow we can ignore his imperious and patrician background long enough for it to stick.

Moreover, he had the gall to flat out accuse Obama of putting campaign donations from the teachers’ unions ahead of improving education and to blame him for the state of education today when John Boner and the rest of the unruly and bug-eyed rabble in the House of Representatives are starving local and state governments of funding, causing a catastrophic reduction in the number of teachers available to educate the children he pretends to care about so deeply. He makes me want to puke.

This is the guy who has a schizoid immigration policy in a party that is certainly not known for being sympathetic to the Hispanic community, shedding big fat, toxic crocodile tears about the sad state of minority education. His party is almost universally contemptuous of the public school system and yet he promises these Hispanic business people that he would lead the charge to make certain that their children get the education they deserve. Meanwhile he is proposing and supporting an economic agenda – designed by weasely wunderkind Paul Ryan - that would cut public funding for schools – and virtually everything else - and turn it over to “for-profit” educational companies, meaning that the very minority children with whom he is pretending to empathize won’t be able to afford his grand private education and will be stuck with underfunded, crippled public schools of last resort. Who can believe this guy about anything?

The republicans to try to pretend that they are concerned about education but that concern only runs deep enough to include cutting teacher salaries – directly or indirectly – and starving public schools by slashing the Federal budget’s aid to state governments. Much of that aid is directed to education at the state level and the deficit boogie-man haunting republican dreams is resulting in unprecedented chaos most clearly manifested in the state of American education. They have made public employee unions – and the teacher’s union specifically – the enemy and the targeted example of corruption, complacency, mismanagement, laziness, incompetence, sexual depravity and bad personal hygiene. They would prefer to either send their kids to private schools like Mitt himself if they’re wealthy enough or home school them if they’re delusional, fanatic and socially terrified enough.

Schools – like much of government – have significant waste and disorganization that should be addressed. There needs to be a way to get the almost comically incompetent teachers drunk on tenure out of the classroom and into retirement or another line of work. There needs to be a way to get parents engaged in the process of educating their own children and make them understand that sending their children to school isn’t the same as taking your car in for service. Overlapping responsibilities, unnecessary layers of management and tenure combined with non-English-speaking students conspire to make modern education less than ideal. But the only solution you achieve by yanking the ventilator off the struggling patient is to kill them – not a great outcome unless you just don’t give a shit and are sick of paying the electric bill to run the thing.

Romney hasn’t bothered to lay out his brilliant plan to resolve these issues and empty promises are the order of the day in political campaigns but the idea that he is going to portray himself as the last great hope for education is hilariously incompatible with reality.

Blame Obama for having a jack-booted justice department that is focused on all the wrong things, blame him for being a little bit timid and underfunding the stimulus program, blame him for spending the first two years of his term trying to be the level-headed community organizer pleasing everyone instead of using the bully pulpit to kick ass and take names and get things done. I think he made a mistake spending so much political capital on health care even if it will turn out to be a signature achievement. But to blame him for the state of education in an age of a dumbed down, discouraged and angry population and schools starved for funds, all the while pretending to have the answer is Romney being a cyborg gas-bag who truly believes nothing but who will say anything to try to be president. That really is who he is…

"Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son..." - thoughts on the Obesity Epidemic in America

2012-05-10T17:04:00.003-07:00

I heard a report recently that well over one-third of the adults in the United States are obese and that number is climbing rapidly with no end in sight. Twenty percent of children are obese. My first thought on hearing this, was, “What the hell is wrong with us?” Twelve states have obesity rates over 30% - in the year 2000, none were that high. How in the world have we let this happen? It’s inexplicable, as if 40% of adults were still smoking. But obesity will kill you just as surely as smoking will and maybe more. Relentless and mostly government ordained education about smoking has resulted in the number of smokers in the adult population being cut in half since the 50’s. Maybe that will happen with obesity too. But being fat is so obviously a bad thing that it still begs the question; why is this happening?

My own opinion – ungrounded and pure speculation – is that modern life has become so complex, and the volume and velocity of information so completely overwhelming, that average people trying to confront those complexities just shut down. They resort to the simple things in life, the things that are cognitively economical and physically rewarding. They eat, they shop, they grab on to a religious belief like grim death, they work, if they can, and they go to bed at night exhausted, dazed and satiated. When they get up in the morning, the world is still the same fucked up place and their life is still careening out of control. But eating feels good, especially sugary, fat-loaded clusters of empty calories, so they eat their way through a day that is filled with blasts of random and non-stop information, a thousand decisions that amount to nothing, a shitty job – if they have a job – and emotional whiplash at every turn.

Then they turn on the TV and see Orwellian political gibberish coming out of multiple media outlets whose own 24 hour new imperative demands that they “update” and report every garbled utterance of the professional political class to these weary souls all day every day. What do they understand and believe? What do they take to be real? Who do they believe? I say they eat a big greasy cheeseburger of simple political thought and wash it down with a 40 ounce Big Gulp of comforting nonsense they want to hear and finish it with a few doughnuts of scantily disguised hate speech and racism. Bob’s yer uncle, they’re as mentally obese as they are physically.

It doesn’t help that news outlets beat to death anything that remotely seems like news. For evidence, take stock of the coverage of Obama stating the obvious; that he is in favor of gay marriage. I mean, c’mon; who is surprised by this? No one. Is it surprising that he said it without equivocating or detailing a dozen caveats? Yeah, probably. Since no politician does something like this without carefully doing the math as to what it means, you can bet that the Obama camp thinks it helps more than it hurts and it was pretty clear anyway from the man’s overall policies that this would inevitably be the end game.

But now that he’s being criticized by everyone from Romney – who can’t seem to quite decide how he wants to frame the criticism – to goof-ball Howard Stern to Rush Blowhard to Meagan McCain to Billy Graham’s son, Franklin, it is THE story everywhere you turn. Somewhere some overweight dimwit is probably having a second cheeseburger just because he’s so upset about the whole story and trying to reconcile his own confused feelings for that tall guy who stocks shelves at the drug store. Is there anyone who was going to vote for Obama who now isn’t? Maybe, though for the life of me I couldn’t describe them to you. It seems to me far more likely that progressive independents who were considering sitting it out in disappointed protest now feel like maybe he has enough balls to vote for after all. I know it made me happy for that very reason. It’s as if he finally said, “Fuck you back-ass mouth breathers. This is right and that’s what I think. Let’s move on to something important.”

Of course there may have been a whole bunch of his campaign geniuses who peed themselves when he said it but they were largely an overly timid bunch of pussys anyway.

But back to the central thesis of this post – and there is one: when potential voters, who have mentally shut down and refuse to process anything more complex than who should get thrown off Dancing with the Stars, hear the garbled rants and bug-eyed screeds that Romney has been frantically tossing off for the last two weeks, it’s, "Honey, get me another plate of ribs and mashed potatoes."

He takes credit for the resurgence of the US auto industry after being boldly and with great certainty on record as saying they should all go bankrupt and that would fix what ailed them. It takes guts to try to pull that off but he’s counting on that guy on his couch with the TV tray believing him just because he’s so god damned earnest about it. He totally sounds like he believes himself when he excoriates Obama for his tragic mishandling of the concerns of small business, evoking the magic voo doo doll of Jimmy Carter to measure the extent of Obama’s failure.

I’m sure couch guy doesn’t think twice when the republicans propose a defense budget larded with even more unnecessary shit than the Pentagon wants and say it’s absolutely critical to build a missile defense capability on the US east coast in case the Iranians somehow overnight roll out some nukes that could reach that far before the Israelis bomb them into oblivion.

I’m sure he’s bedazzled by the reptilian charm of Paul Ryan and his “let-them-eat-cake” budget and believes that if we just kill more poor people and give rich people more money he can get off his couch and head to Wal-Mart with a full wallet and a shopping list two feet long.

To me, the same I-don’t-give-a-shit-anymore attitude that turns ordinary people into heart attack prone diabetics gives license to the Super PACs to spew their toxic swill with impunity too. And you don’t have to be Ivan Pavlov or even Karl Rove to know that endlessly repeated lies become the truth if for no other reason than ubiquity to a certain portion of the population. How has our country come to this? How did the ferocious hatred for “the other” become institutionalized? I wish I knew. For now, I’m need to go out and get some chicken wings…