It's been nearly two weeks since the 2012 elections and they are still reverberating through the nation. Conservative nut-jobs are getting back into their normal mode of slowly-simmering hateful insanity after an extended period of unbridled paranoid schizophrenia when Obama won a second term (I have to admit I did not help the situation much when I went into full troll mode on a number of news sites, rubbing their noses in their ignominious defeat, and I don't mind telling you I had a really good time doing it).
One thing that has become quite apparent recently is that defeated, disgraced Mitt Romney is definitely on some sort of kick-ass anti-depressant/anti-psychotic drugs. On a recent conference call to his duped and defrauded donors, Romney placed the blame for his decisive, unequivocal loss everywhere except where it really needed to be placed, on himself. It was weirdly pathetic but not really surprising, given his innate cowardice and total lack of integrity, to hear him blame minorities and women for voting overwhelmingly Democratic, and only because they received "gifts" from the Obama campaign. Hispanics received the Dream Act, which Romney called an "amnesty program," college-aged women received free contraception and blacks got more food stamps and welfare. I voted for Obama and I didn't get a single damned present, other than the joy of seeing him re-elected. Where is my gift, god damn it?
It's hard to believe that someone would be so oblivious to the offensive racism and sexism of such remarks, but apparently Romney is that someone. The fact that he thinks the vote of college-aged women can be bought with some free contraception is breathtaking in its arrogant stupidity. Because we know, the only thing young college women care about is contraception. Same thing with the Hispanics only caring about the Dream Act, and as for food stamps I guess it doesn't make a difference to him that the majority of people who get food stamps are white, and a great many of them vote Republican.
The Republicans are STILL doubling-down on their ridiculous trickle-down theory (and it's a testament to the blinding stupidity of their supporters that anyone is even talking about that anymore) and have transmuted that disgraced, discredited ideology into the "makers and takers" line, in which they divide the country into those who supposedly make wealth and those who take it. This is just another toxic permutation of the "us and them" dichotomy that the Republicans have been flogging for decades, to demonize a significant segment of their fellow American citizens by turning them into "the enemy," someone to blame for everything that has ever gone wrong.
Romney also made some other completely incredulous remarks about Bill Clinton calling him up after the election and commiserating with him, and doing everything but come out and say that Romney should have won. It was the weirdest thing ever, and beyond any rational belief. Clinton worked extremely hard for Obama and campaigned tirelessly for him. To think that he would call Romney and tell him that he was the better candidate, is completely insane and batshit-crazy. I've always considered Romney to be incredibly awkward, weird and creepy but his post-election blatherings show with little doubt that he has some serious mental health issues and delusional fantasies which desperately need to be addressed by qualified mental health professionals. What a horrible, infinitely dangerous President he would have been.
So now we're moving away from elections and into the fun-house world of the "fiscal cliff." That is the Congress-made line in the sand that was a product of the debt ceiling fiasco in 2010. Congress and the president couldn't come together to act on the national debt so they created this "poison pill" situation which presumably would force the government into some sort of corrective action on the debt or face horrible, dire consequences as the Bush-era tax cuts go away on December 31, 2012, and everyone wakes up on New Years day with a hangover and a huge extra tax burden.
For some reason the fiscal cliff is being cast as a sort of natural, organic and unavoidable catastrophe, like a 10.0 earthquake or an asteroid collision, and not something completely man-made and artificial. Congress created the fiscal cliff, and is now cowering in fear in front of it as if it was a Frankenstein monster gone wild. Oh what a surprise - imagine creating a financial Armageddon scenario and then actually having to deal with it at some point! Who in Congress ever thought that they would be held responsible for things that they do?
So, both sides are hunkering down in their usual positions: the Obama administration pushing for increased revenue (i.e. taxes) on the ultra-wealthy, and the Republicans screaming that taxing rich people is worse than child molestation and will kill the millions of jobs that those wealthy "job-creators" somehow forgot to create over the last two years. The Republican mantra is that rich people create jobs - something that is definitively and repeatedly refuted by financial experts of every kind, like here, here and here. The middle class creates those jobs, by creating "demand" for products and services and having the money to pay for them. More demand means more jobs - plain and simple. Seriously, how hard is that to understand?
The Obama people have an election triumph and the accompanying political capital on their side, and have shrewdly boxed the Republicans in by saying that they will keep the tax breaks in place for 98% of wage-earners in this country, but allow them to rise back to Clinton-era levels for the upper 2%. If the Republicans push back on that, they will be seen as sacrificing tax breaks for middle class to finance more tax relief for the very wealthy, who already have so much. It will be very interesting to see who blinks first, and my bet is that it will be the Republicans. Obama learned his lesson about caving in to Republicans two years ago, and I will bet any amount of money that now, at the start of his second term, he has nothing to lose by staring the Republicans down and holding their butts to the fire.
So, it promises to be an eventful end to the year, which has been one of the most tumultuous years in recent memory. Between the primaries and the election, and now the fiscal cliff and the upcoming end of the Mayan calendar in December, we can be sure the bullet trains to Crazy Town will be running 24/7 through the end of 2012.
Showing posts with label elections. Show all posts
Showing posts with label elections. Show all posts
Monday, November 19, 2012
Wednesday, November 7, 2012
Election 2012 Wrap-Up
Election 2012 is now history, and what a historic night it was. Barack Obama was given four more years to continue his leadership and his efforts to repair the economy after the 2008-2009 collapse. We can look forward with great satisfaction for continued health care reform and one, maybe two, Supreme Court appointments, which is a huge, huge deal. The news media were all predicting that the presidential election would be a nail-biter clear into the next morning, but in fact the election was called for Obama shortly after 9pm. When Ohio was seen going to the president, it was all over. To no one's surprise, Florida is still undecided because it seems as if it's impossible for them to have an election without a lot of fuss and hoo-hah and delay. Florida is the Drama Queen of the nation.
A number of other regional races took on national significance, and a lot of them did go the right way. Elizabeth Warren, a very capable, intelligent and resourceful woman, took the Massachusetts Senate seat away from empty mannequin Scott Brown. Drooling, knuckle-dragging religious bigots Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, who gained national infamy with their astonishingly ignorant opinions on rape and abortion, went down in flames, and deservedly so.
In non-office related elections, three states - Maryland, Maine and Washington - approved marriage equality, and another state, Minnesota, turned down an initiative to ban it. All wonderful news, and milestones in what I believe is the inevitable march toward full marriage equality, something that absolutely should be a basic American right. Also the first openly gay Senator was named, Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin. In Illinois, Tammy Duckworth ousted loathsome dirtbag Joe Walsh.
As always there were disappointments, and not surprisingly a lot were in Arizona. This benighted, ignorant state chose greasy, buck-toothed scam artist Jeff Flake for the Senate seat occupied by the flabby, flatulent Jon Kyl. Ancient, bloated media whore Joe Arpaio was reelected Maricopa country sheriff for the hundredth time, thanks to all the senile old fools in Surprise and Sun City, all the anti-immigrant bigots and literally millions of dollars which poured into Arpaio's campaign coffer from out-of-state right-wing PACs, who seem to see Arpaio as a conservative (read: racist) icon. Still undecided is the contest for new Congressional District 9, where I live, and I'm hoping Kyrsten Sinema will pull off a win over perennial Uncle Tom, Vernon Parker. I'm also hoping for Anne Kirkpatrick to win over payday-loan-pimp Jonathan Paton in District 1. And late today, Anne Kirkpatrick was declared victorious in her contest.
Also very much on the plus side is that AZ Proposition 204, which would have permanently extended the 1% sales tax, went down in flames with 65% of voters saying no. This tax was passed a couple of years ago on the promise that it was only to be a temporary increase, and greedy special interests in this state thought it would be easy to make permanent. They thought that people would go for anything that nominally was portrayed as helping school children, but voters in this state weren't snookered by this charade and rightfully told them to go pound salt. Also, Proposition 120 the "sovereignty" amendment, a ridiculously blatant and stupid attempt by the state legislature to take control of public lands, also went down very decisively. So, there was a little bit to be thankful for in this wretched excuse for a state.
There were some really funny things that happened last night. Apparently Fox News - Stupid News For Stupid People - was one of the first outlets to declare Obama the winner. One of their commentators, the execrable Karl Rove, went completely batshit crazy ON AIR, frenetically blathering about and trying to grasp any kind of straw, real or imagined, to deny the outcome in Ohio. He looked like a gigantic, bug-eyed catfish who was yanked out of the water and was gasping and thrashing around. Then, one of Fox's newsskanks trotted off stage and stumbled back into their "Decision Room" to confront the number-crunchers with the news that Karl Rove did not approve of their pronouncement. The number geeks practically told her to GTFO, because numbers, unlike everyone on Fox News, do not lie. Ohio was definitely Obama country.
But to me the most amazing and inspiring thing was that despite everything the Republicans tied to do to steal this election - lies, misinformation, voter suppression and intimidation, pathetic, un-American attempts to restrict poll hours or early voting times - everything they tried to do was to absolutely no avail. Most amazing were the American voters who stood in line for an extraordinarily, unbelievably long time (as long as seven hours in some cases) but would not be deterred by Republican skullduggery and dirty tricks. They were going to cast their ballots and would not be denied, and as a result, democracy itself would not be denied.
Political pundits are already furiously dissecting all of last night's happenings and assigning blame and credit as they see appropriate. In my opinion, the Republicans lost the presidential election for two reasons: 1) a pair of profoundly unattractive candidates at the top - Romney and Ryan; and 2) a party which has been co-opted and corrupted by right-wing extremists who made the party very unappealing to the more moderate American electorate. The Republicans thought this election was going to be a cakewalk - they just had to repeat the word "economy" over and over like a mantra and the voters would flock to them - but much to their dismay that did not happen.
Complicating matters for them was that Romney was such a repellent, off-putting candidate who was his own worst enemy. His infamous "47%" remarks kind of scuttled his candidacy at a crucial point, and his own chronic, incurable awkwardness and creepiness turned many voters off, even on a subconscious level. Scrawny, big-eared geek Paul Ryan did not really help much. It seems the Republicans have a really amazing talent in picking very unattractive, unappealing candidates for their elections. They did so in 2008 and thoughtfully repeated the same mistake in 2012, and for that I thank them very much.
Everyone, including me, was fretting about the unprecedented flood of anonymous, untraceable money that was poured into the process by the horrendous Citizens' United Supreme Court ruling, but much to my surprise, American voters - not known for being particularly discerning or resistant to idiotic campaign rhetoric - were not swayed by sham super-PACs with lofty, misleading names like "Americans For Prosperity" (because who in their right mind would be against prosperous Americans?) and "Club For Growth Action" (whatever the hell that means). Quite a few super-wealthy billionaires - casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, for one - dropped a huge chunk of change on Romney's campaign, and essentially threw their money down a rat hole. I wonder how much good that money could have done, donated to food banks or domestic violence shelters, instead of being utterly wasted on a political campaign.
By Anne Romney's own statement, she and her husband are through with politics. We can only hope we've seen that last of that corrosive, elitist, hatchet-faced old trollop. Initially her role in her husband's campaign was to "humanize" him to the voters and make him seem like a regular person. In the end, Anne Romney was the one who needed "humanized," because her presence and role in the campaign proved to be a major misfire. She needs to just throw on one of her pioneer smocks and go be a good little Mormon wifey. It's hard to humanize someone who lacks so very much in terms of basic humanity, and maybe her next dancing horse can do a little jig to make her feel better.
America dodged a huge bullet (more like a thermonuclear warhead) when Romney lost. I can barely imagine how unspeakably awful and horrible a Romney administration would be. Our nation would have become a weird, Frankenstein-like hybrid of theocracy and oligarchy, with government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich becoming the norm.
If I can be indulged for a little bit of tooting my own horn, I wrote in an entry on this blog called "This Just In: Time Marches On," dated almost a year ago November 15, 2011:
"My prediction is that Mitt Romney will be the Republican nominee and will go against Obama in the 2012 election....Obama will coast to his second term."
If you don't mind my saying... Nailed. It.
A number of other regional races took on national significance, and a lot of them did go the right way. Elizabeth Warren, a very capable, intelligent and resourceful woman, took the Massachusetts Senate seat away from empty mannequin Scott Brown. Drooling, knuckle-dragging religious bigots Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, who gained national infamy with their astonishingly ignorant opinions on rape and abortion, went down in flames, and deservedly so.
In non-office related elections, three states - Maryland, Maine and Washington - approved marriage equality, and another state, Minnesota, turned down an initiative to ban it. All wonderful news, and milestones in what I believe is the inevitable march toward full marriage equality, something that absolutely should be a basic American right. Also the first openly gay Senator was named, Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin. In Illinois, Tammy Duckworth ousted loathsome dirtbag Joe Walsh.
As always there were disappointments, and not surprisingly a lot were in Arizona. This benighted, ignorant state chose greasy, buck-toothed scam artist Jeff Flake for the Senate seat occupied by the flabby, flatulent Jon Kyl. Ancient, bloated media whore Joe Arpaio was reelected Maricopa country sheriff for the hundredth time, thanks to all the senile old fools in Surprise and Sun City, all the anti-immigrant bigots and literally millions of dollars which poured into Arpaio's campaign coffer from out-of-state right-wing PACs, who seem to see Arpaio as a conservative (read: racist) icon. Still undecided is the contest for new Congressional District 9, where I live, and I'm hoping Kyrsten Sinema will pull off a win over perennial Uncle Tom, Vernon Parker. I'm also hoping for Anne Kirkpatrick to win over payday-loan-pimp Jonathan Paton in District 1. And late today, Anne Kirkpatrick was declared victorious in her contest.
Also very much on the plus side is that AZ Proposition 204, which would have permanently extended the 1% sales tax, went down in flames with 65% of voters saying no. This tax was passed a couple of years ago on the promise that it was only to be a temporary increase, and greedy special interests in this state thought it would be easy to make permanent. They thought that people would go for anything that nominally was portrayed as helping school children, but voters in this state weren't snookered by this charade and rightfully told them to go pound salt. Also, Proposition 120 the "sovereignty" amendment, a ridiculously blatant and stupid attempt by the state legislature to take control of public lands, also went down very decisively. So, there was a little bit to be thankful for in this wretched excuse for a state.
There were some really funny things that happened last night. Apparently Fox News - Stupid News For Stupid People - was one of the first outlets to declare Obama the winner. One of their commentators, the execrable Karl Rove, went completely batshit crazy ON AIR, frenetically blathering about and trying to grasp any kind of straw, real or imagined, to deny the outcome in Ohio. He looked like a gigantic, bug-eyed catfish who was yanked out of the water and was gasping and thrashing around. Then, one of Fox's newsskanks trotted off stage and stumbled back into their "Decision Room" to confront the number-crunchers with the news that Karl Rove did not approve of their pronouncement. The number geeks practically told her to GTFO, because numbers, unlike everyone on Fox News, do not lie. Ohio was definitely Obama country.
But to me the most amazing and inspiring thing was that despite everything the Republicans tied to do to steal this election - lies, misinformation, voter suppression and intimidation, pathetic, un-American attempts to restrict poll hours or early voting times - everything they tried to do was to absolutely no avail. Most amazing were the American voters who stood in line for an extraordinarily, unbelievably long time (as long as seven hours in some cases) but would not be deterred by Republican skullduggery and dirty tricks. They were going to cast their ballots and would not be denied, and as a result, democracy itself would not be denied.
Political pundits are already furiously dissecting all of last night's happenings and assigning blame and credit as they see appropriate. In my opinion, the Republicans lost the presidential election for two reasons: 1) a pair of profoundly unattractive candidates at the top - Romney and Ryan; and 2) a party which has been co-opted and corrupted by right-wing extremists who made the party very unappealing to the more moderate American electorate. The Republicans thought this election was going to be a cakewalk - they just had to repeat the word "economy" over and over like a mantra and the voters would flock to them - but much to their dismay that did not happen.
Complicating matters for them was that Romney was such a repellent, off-putting candidate who was his own worst enemy. His infamous "47%" remarks kind of scuttled his candidacy at a crucial point, and his own chronic, incurable awkwardness and creepiness turned many voters off, even on a subconscious level. Scrawny, big-eared geek Paul Ryan did not really help much. It seems the Republicans have a really amazing talent in picking very unattractive, unappealing candidates for their elections. They did so in 2008 and thoughtfully repeated the same mistake in 2012, and for that I thank them very much.
Everyone, including me, was fretting about the unprecedented flood of anonymous, untraceable money that was poured into the process by the horrendous Citizens' United Supreme Court ruling, but much to my surprise, American voters - not known for being particularly discerning or resistant to idiotic campaign rhetoric - were not swayed by sham super-PACs with lofty, misleading names like "Americans For Prosperity" (because who in their right mind would be against prosperous Americans?) and "Club For Growth Action" (whatever the hell that means). Quite a few super-wealthy billionaires - casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, for one - dropped a huge chunk of change on Romney's campaign, and essentially threw their money down a rat hole. I wonder how much good that money could have done, donated to food banks or domestic violence shelters, instead of being utterly wasted on a political campaign.
By Anne Romney's own statement, she and her husband are through with politics. We can only hope we've seen that last of that corrosive, elitist, hatchet-faced old trollop. Initially her role in her husband's campaign was to "humanize" him to the voters and make him seem like a regular person. In the end, Anne Romney was the one who needed "humanized," because her presence and role in the campaign proved to be a major misfire. She needs to just throw on one of her pioneer smocks and go be a good little Mormon wifey. It's hard to humanize someone who lacks so very much in terms of basic humanity, and maybe her next dancing horse can do a little jig to make her feel better.
America dodged a huge bullet (more like a thermonuclear warhead) when Romney lost. I can barely imagine how unspeakably awful and horrible a Romney administration would be. Our nation would have become a weird, Frankenstein-like hybrid of theocracy and oligarchy, with government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich becoming the norm.
If I can be indulged for a little bit of tooting my own horn, I wrote in an entry on this blog called "This Just In: Time Marches On," dated almost a year ago November 15, 2011:
"My prediction is that Mitt Romney will be the Republican nominee and will go against Obama in the 2012 election....Obama will coast to his second term."
If you don't mind my saying... Nailed. It.
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
Election Night Blog
6:44 pm:
It's election night 2012 and I'm here with my blog, Facebook, CNN and a couple of other things on my laptop, in front of my flat-screen TV. I feel so digitally connected and "with-it," I can't even tell you. I'll be making periodic updates to this blog post in real time as stuff happens. Hopefully most everything will be resolved in reasonable time but I am going to be here for the long haul. I will be taking a "Sons of Anarchy" break around 8:30. Ain't gonna miss my SOA.
6:57 pm:
Early results from Massachusetts shows Elizabeth Warren in a slight lead over Dirtbag Deluxe Scott Brown. Kick his sorry ass, Liz!
7:06 pm:
More early results: Obama takes New York, New Jersey, New Mexico and Michigan, Romney takes Texas, Louisiana, Wyoming, North and South Dakota and a couple of other states that no one gives a shit about.
7:08 pm:
Florida is tied 50-50 with 74% of the vote in. PLEASE Florida, don't be a bunch of assholes.
7:15 pm:
Pennsylvania my home state goes for Obama! WOOHOO! Thank you, PA, I am loving you big time.
7:17 pm:
Arizona senate race between Richard Carmona and slimy scum-sucker Jeff Flake still too close to call. It would be SUCH a sweet triumph if Carmona won.
7:29 pm:
Wisconsin goes to Obama and their 10 electoral votes puts him ahead of Romney for the first time tonight, 158-153. I like this trend.
7:42 pm:
NBC News projecting Elizabeth Warren the winner for the Senate seat in Massachusetts, over Scott Brown. YESSSSS! Wonderful, wonderful news!!!
7:46 pm:
Indiana Senate race has Democrat John Donnelly projected to win over fundamentalist asswipe Richard Mourdock ("rape is god's will"). Karma is a bitch and so are you, Mourdock, so grab your ankles and take it up the butt like a good Republican loser.
7:50 pm:
NBC News projects New Hampshire going for Obama! YAAY! This was a hotly contested state and they swung the right way. Democrats making some great gains in Senate races. Keep it up!!!
8:04 pm:
Electoral vote count tied at 162-162. Not worried.
8:06 pm:
Claire McCaskill wins over gigantic bowel movement Todd Akin in Missouri. YES YES YES!!!!
8:17 pm:
Formerly Democratic Senate seat in Kansas goes Republican. Do not like.
8:34 pm:
Arizona, the Land That Time Forget, goes for Romney. This state is full of ignorant, uneducated dirtbags.
8:43 pm:
Minnesota goes to Obama. Whoopee!!
9:00 pm:
Obama wins a BIG, BIG prize - California - 55 electoral votes! Also Washington, Oregon & Hawaii. Damn!!! Obama is in striking distance of victory with 243!!!!!
9:05 pm:
North Carolina goes to Romney. Bastards.
9:12 pm
OH MY GOD!!!!! OHIO GOES TO OBAMA!!!! OBAMA WINS!! THANK YOU JESUS!!!! WOOHOO!!!!!
9:55 pm:
Fox News is going nuts, they are the funniest show on television. Karl Rove is grasping at thin air, trying to say that Romney has a chance in Ohio. Even Fox News' own number crunchers say NFW, Ohio goes to Obama. SO damned funny!
It's election night 2012 and I'm here with my blog, Facebook, CNN and a couple of other things on my laptop, in front of my flat-screen TV. I feel so digitally connected and "with-it," I can't even tell you. I'll be making periodic updates to this blog post in real time as stuff happens. Hopefully most everything will be resolved in reasonable time but I am going to be here for the long haul. I will be taking a "Sons of Anarchy" break around 8:30. Ain't gonna miss my SOA.
6:57 pm:
Early results from Massachusetts shows Elizabeth Warren in a slight lead over Dirtbag Deluxe Scott Brown. Kick his sorry ass, Liz!
7:06 pm:
More early results: Obama takes New York, New Jersey, New Mexico and Michigan, Romney takes Texas, Louisiana, Wyoming, North and South Dakota and a couple of other states that no one gives a shit about.
7:08 pm:
Florida is tied 50-50 with 74% of the vote in. PLEASE Florida, don't be a bunch of assholes.
7:15 pm:
Pennsylvania my home state goes for Obama! WOOHOO! Thank you, PA, I am loving you big time.
7:17 pm:
Arizona senate race between Richard Carmona and slimy scum-sucker Jeff Flake still too close to call. It would be SUCH a sweet triumph if Carmona won.
7:29 pm:
Wisconsin goes to Obama and their 10 electoral votes puts him ahead of Romney for the first time tonight, 158-153. I like this trend.
7:42 pm:
NBC News projecting Elizabeth Warren the winner for the Senate seat in Massachusetts, over Scott Brown. YESSSSS! Wonderful, wonderful news!!!
7:46 pm:
Indiana Senate race has Democrat John Donnelly projected to win over fundamentalist asswipe Richard Mourdock ("rape is god's will"). Karma is a bitch and so are you, Mourdock, so grab your ankles and take it up the butt like a good Republican loser.
7:50 pm:
NBC News projects New Hampshire going for Obama! YAAY! This was a hotly contested state and they swung the right way. Democrats making some great gains in Senate races. Keep it up!!!
8:04 pm:
Electoral vote count tied at 162-162. Not worried.
8:06 pm:
Claire McCaskill wins over gigantic bowel movement Todd Akin in Missouri. YES YES YES!!!!
8:17 pm:
Formerly Democratic Senate seat in Kansas goes Republican. Do not like.
8:34 pm:
Arizona, the Land That Time Forget, goes for Romney. This state is full of ignorant, uneducated dirtbags.
8:43 pm:
Minnesota goes to Obama. Whoopee!!
9:00 pm:
Obama wins a BIG, BIG prize - California - 55 electoral votes! Also Washington, Oregon & Hawaii. Damn!!! Obama is in striking distance of victory with 243!!!!!
9:05 pm:
North Carolina goes to Romney. Bastards.
9:12 pm
OH MY GOD!!!!! OHIO GOES TO OBAMA!!!! OBAMA WINS!! THANK YOU JESUS!!!! WOOHOO!!!!!
9:55 pm:
Fox News is going nuts, they are the funniest show on television. Karl Rove is grasping at thin air, trying to say that Romney has a chance in Ohio. Even Fox News' own number crunchers say NFW, Ohio goes to Obama. SO damned funny!
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
A Different Kind of Storm
Everyone is taking a break from the usual pre-election programming to concentrate on Hurricane Sandy, which just blew through Manhattan and is probably soaking my home state of Pennsylvania right now. The news media went into full-blown apocalypse mode for this, with the kind of breathless whirlpool of coverage usually reserved for assassinations or major earthquakes. Even days before, they were sounding the warning claxons about "Frankenstorm" making its way up the east coast and putting a real damper on everyone's Halloween. And is "claxon" an awesome word or what?
Some people are already saying that the unusual trajectory this storm has taken is related to global warming and the huge, unprecedented reduction in the Arctic ice sheet, which alters ocean currents and air temperatures in such a way that big, weird storms which move in new, unexpected pathways will start becoming more frequent. While it's still probably premature to link the two events, I think there is a great deal of truth in the idea that human-caused climate change will alter the planetary weather engine in ways we can't even yet imagine, and more unpleasant things like these loose-cannon superstorms are in our future.
The other big storm of late has taken a temporary back seat to the march of Hurricane Sandy, and that is the presidential election, now just one week away. It seems like this election has been going on for years, and this last week will no doubt be the most intense week ever, with everybody pulling out all the stops when it comes to trying to sway the last two or three undecided voters out there. It's beyond me how anyone could be undecided about who to vote for.
I've heard people on the radio say that there's "not much difference" between Obama and Romney, and that statement completely blows my mind. In my opinion the two candidates could not be more different, both in style and substance. Obama seems so intellectual, so measured, controlled and sincere; Romney so aloof, privileged, entitled and hypocritical. There is little question that given their backgrounds, Obama truly understands what the middle class people, who are in many ways the backbone of this country, have greatly suffered due to the economic collapse of 2008-2009. He really "gets" what they're going through and empathizes with them. Romney, on the other hand, has had every single thing in his life handed to him, coming from a family of privilege and power, and is completely and utterly clueless about what average people have to go through to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table.
Likewise, the vice presidential candidates are quite different. Biden is loud, gregarious, sometimes prone to embarrassing gaffes and misstatements, but given his background you have no doubt he understands what it is like to go through very rough periods in your life and still manage to triumph over adversity using little more than sheer strength of character. Paul "Lyin" Ryan is an uber-nerd, someone who's obviously much more comfortable around masses of fiscal data and reports than around people, and comes up with a witches-brew of spending cuts to government programs which aid the poor, the elderly and students (to name a few) in order to fund massive, unnecessary defense spending and more tax breaks to the ultra-wealthy one-percenters, who already have so very much but still want to take more and more.
The differences even extend to the candidates' wives. Michelle Obama is beautiful, sleek, intelligent, articulate and very easy for anyone to relate to. She has such great poise and presence, and in my opinion has been one of the most notable and successful First Ladies in recent history. Ann Romney, on the other hand, is brittle, imperious, condescending, sharp-tongued, elitist and thoroughly unsympathetic to anyone outside of her own socio-economic class. With her fake, painted-on country-club smirk and mannerisms, you just know she sits around drinking appletinis with her wealthy cronies, cackling about how pathetic poor people are and complaining about how hard it is to find qualified domestic help these days who won't expect to be paid more than $5 an hour and won't steal you blind behind your back.
There is so very much riding on what happens next Tuesday, but to me one of the most important is the future of the Supreme Court. Latest prediction is that the President-elect will get to choose at least one and possibly two new Justices, and that will directly affect each and every one of us for decades to come. Right now the Court is split 5-4 in favor of upholding Roe v. Wade, but it would only take one Court appointment to reverse that to 5-4 in favor of overturning it. Then you can absolutely certain that anti-abortion zealots would push a test case through the lower courts and into the Supreme Court, and Roe v. Wade would be scrapped, sending the abortion question back into the states, where many if not all of the red states would outlaw it completely. That would be an astonishing tragedy and catastrophe for anyone who holds dear the concepts of freedom and government not making decisions in such an incredibly personal thing such as family planning.
Another very important thing, related to the Supreme Court, is their horrific and spectacularly awful Citizens' United ruling, which unleashed a torrent of untraceable, unaccountable money into a political system already mortally choked and corrupted with cash. One of the most wrong-headed and destructive rulings ever, a top priority should be to overturn it, with a constitutional amendment if necessary. The choice of President could not be more important to this vital legislative task. One candidate will fully support reversing the ruling, and other candidate will do everything he can to keep it in place, because as he famously stated, "Corporations are people, too." I will leave it up to my discerning readers to figure out which candidate is which.
Funny thing about these neoconservatives, they will scream unmercifully about how the evil, incompetent and corrupt government is blatantly interfering in everyone's lives and making choices for them, but they are perfectly fine as long as this interference is with the right to abortion, or marriage equality, or any number of personal-freedom issues they personally oppose. They seem to think that government is evil and satanic if it messes with something they believe in, but perfectly fine and proper if it goes after things they don't. According to them, it's okay if government restricts the freedoms of people they don't like, but it is a horrendous abomination if it seeks to restrict their own freedoms and choices.
Thus is the ultimate contraction in the conservative point of view - as long as government is doing what I like (or conversely, attacking things I don't like), it can have free rein and untrammeled authority to do whatever it pleases. But just let the government try to do something to curtail something in which they fervently believe, for instance, gun control - outlawing the sale of semi-automatic assault weapons comes to mind - then people scream that government is a vile, cancerous conspiracy hell-bent on destroying the very fabric of this nation. Government-provided farm subsidies could not be more "American", but affordable health care is "socialist." It is this cultural and political schizophrenia, this infinitely subjective cherry-picking of what is right and what is wrong, that ultimately dooms neoconservative thinking to the intellectual trash-heap.
One week to election day, and is Hurricane Sandy a metaphor for the shitstorm that may be released on this country as a result - one that will last not a couple of days, but for four long years.
Some people are already saying that the unusual trajectory this storm has taken is related to global warming and the huge, unprecedented reduction in the Arctic ice sheet, which alters ocean currents and air temperatures in such a way that big, weird storms which move in new, unexpected pathways will start becoming more frequent. While it's still probably premature to link the two events, I think there is a great deal of truth in the idea that human-caused climate change will alter the planetary weather engine in ways we can't even yet imagine, and more unpleasant things like these loose-cannon superstorms are in our future.
The other big storm of late has taken a temporary back seat to the march of Hurricane Sandy, and that is the presidential election, now just one week away. It seems like this election has been going on for years, and this last week will no doubt be the most intense week ever, with everybody pulling out all the stops when it comes to trying to sway the last two or three undecided voters out there. It's beyond me how anyone could be undecided about who to vote for.
I've heard people on the radio say that there's "not much difference" between Obama and Romney, and that statement completely blows my mind. In my opinion the two candidates could not be more different, both in style and substance. Obama seems so intellectual, so measured, controlled and sincere; Romney so aloof, privileged, entitled and hypocritical. There is little question that given their backgrounds, Obama truly understands what the middle class people, who are in many ways the backbone of this country, have greatly suffered due to the economic collapse of 2008-2009. He really "gets" what they're going through and empathizes with them. Romney, on the other hand, has had every single thing in his life handed to him, coming from a family of privilege and power, and is completely and utterly clueless about what average people have to go through to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table.
Likewise, the vice presidential candidates are quite different. Biden is loud, gregarious, sometimes prone to embarrassing gaffes and misstatements, but given his background you have no doubt he understands what it is like to go through very rough periods in your life and still manage to triumph over adversity using little more than sheer strength of character. Paul "Lyin" Ryan is an uber-nerd, someone who's obviously much more comfortable around masses of fiscal data and reports than around people, and comes up with a witches-brew of spending cuts to government programs which aid the poor, the elderly and students (to name a few) in order to fund massive, unnecessary defense spending and more tax breaks to the ultra-wealthy one-percenters, who already have so very much but still want to take more and more.
The differences even extend to the candidates' wives. Michelle Obama is beautiful, sleek, intelligent, articulate and very easy for anyone to relate to. She has such great poise and presence, and in my opinion has been one of the most notable and successful First Ladies in recent history. Ann Romney, on the other hand, is brittle, imperious, condescending, sharp-tongued, elitist and thoroughly unsympathetic to anyone outside of her own socio-economic class. With her fake, painted-on country-club smirk and mannerisms, you just know she sits around drinking appletinis with her wealthy cronies, cackling about how pathetic poor people are and complaining about how hard it is to find qualified domestic help these days who won't expect to be paid more than $5 an hour and won't steal you blind behind your back.
There is so very much riding on what happens next Tuesday, but to me one of the most important is the future of the Supreme Court. Latest prediction is that the President-elect will get to choose at least one and possibly two new Justices, and that will directly affect each and every one of us for decades to come. Right now the Court is split 5-4 in favor of upholding Roe v. Wade, but it would only take one Court appointment to reverse that to 5-4 in favor of overturning it. Then you can absolutely certain that anti-abortion zealots would push a test case through the lower courts and into the Supreme Court, and Roe v. Wade would be scrapped, sending the abortion question back into the states, where many if not all of the red states would outlaw it completely. That would be an astonishing tragedy and catastrophe for anyone who holds dear the concepts of freedom and government not making decisions in such an incredibly personal thing such as family planning.
Another very important thing, related to the Supreme Court, is their horrific and spectacularly awful Citizens' United ruling, which unleashed a torrent of untraceable, unaccountable money into a political system already mortally choked and corrupted with cash. One of the most wrong-headed and destructive rulings ever, a top priority should be to overturn it, with a constitutional amendment if necessary. The choice of President could not be more important to this vital legislative task. One candidate will fully support reversing the ruling, and other candidate will do everything he can to keep it in place, because as he famously stated, "Corporations are people, too." I will leave it up to my discerning readers to figure out which candidate is which.
Funny thing about these neoconservatives, they will scream unmercifully about how the evil, incompetent and corrupt government is blatantly interfering in everyone's lives and making choices for them, but they are perfectly fine as long as this interference is with the right to abortion, or marriage equality, or any number of personal-freedom issues they personally oppose. They seem to think that government is evil and satanic if it messes with something they believe in, but perfectly fine and proper if it goes after things they don't. According to them, it's okay if government restricts the freedoms of people they don't like, but it is a horrendous abomination if it seeks to restrict their own freedoms and choices.
Thus is the ultimate contraction in the conservative point of view - as long as government is doing what I like (or conversely, attacking things I don't like), it can have free rein and untrammeled authority to do whatever it pleases. But just let the government try to do something to curtail something in which they fervently believe, for instance, gun control - outlawing the sale of semi-automatic assault weapons comes to mind - then people scream that government is a vile, cancerous conspiracy hell-bent on destroying the very fabric of this nation. Government-provided farm subsidies could not be more "American", but affordable health care is "socialist." It is this cultural and political schizophrenia, this infinitely subjective cherry-picking of what is right and what is wrong, that ultimately dooms neoconservative thinking to the intellectual trash-heap.
One week to election day, and is Hurricane Sandy a metaphor for the shitstorm that may be released on this country as a result - one that will last not a couple of days, but for four long years.
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
Four Weeks
It's now four weeks until the 2012 elections, and things are going just about as expected; that is, chaotic, mind-blowing and depressing all at the same time.
The presidential race is tighter than ever, and while it's pretty normal for the race to get really tight in the last couple of weeks, there is an uncomfortable trend going on. Every time an obscure poll shows a one-point shift in the highly fluid preferences of some media-created segment of voters, it creates a seismic jolt through the news media which is analyzed and re-analyzed to death. The polls are watched with the same intensity and anxiety as the Cuban missile crisis created in the early 60s. For those of you too young to remember that (unfortunately that does not include me) I can tell you those were pretty scary times. There was a palpable fear and terror in the air, obvious even to my ten-year-old self, and a real foreboding of what the future might bring. While a Romney presidency wouldn't quite be the same as a nuclear missile crisis, in many ways it would be every bit as destructive. More on that later.
There was the first of three presidential debates last Wednesday, and President Obama sent some clone of himself in his place who really wasn't up to the task. Romney was there in full creepy-mannequin mode, looking and acting like Satan's ventriloquist dummy and spewing lies and bullshit like some kind of demented lawn sprinkler set on high. All of a sudden, Romney professed to have found his love and support for 100% of the American electorate, even though back in May of this year he wrote off 47% of those very same people as lazy, useless leeches. Let me just say once and for all that Romney will never EVER know the financial pressures middle-class people have to face in their lives. He was born into a life of wealth and privilege, and anyone who even thinks about installing a CAR ELEVATOR in their home or taking a tax write-off of $77,000 (about 50% more than the $51,914 the average American household earns, according to the Census Bureau) for his wife's DANCING HORSE - categorizing it as a "business expense" (????) - has no idea what it's like to stretch a food budget to the point of breaking or dressing their children in hand-me-downs.
It is painfully obvious that Romney and his imperious, elitist, over-Botoxed trollop of a wife care only for the ultra-wealthy people in their own socio-economic class and will never do anything for the lower classes other than disdainfully look down their noses at them. And there is always the unresolved problem of Romney's refusal to make a full disclosure of his federal income taxes even though the American people have demanded he do so. For someone who proclaims so loudly to be "pro-business" and "pro-American" his propensity for employing offshore tax shelters for his enormous wealth tells a different story. His arrogance is truly monumental, and his contempt for the American people and the values upon which this country was founded is staggering and appalling.
The media have already labeled last weeks' debate as a "game changer," and it's a little hard to believe that after a month or more of Romney being a world-class fuck-up and saying and doing completely preposterous, absurd things, all that could be changed in a 90-minute debate. This just illustrates the short attention span of the American voter, as aggravated and dictated by the 30-minute news cycle.
As if to emphasize the perversity of politics (as if it needed emphasized), none other than Big Bird, a long-running character on the PBS children's series "Sesame Street," was dragged kicking and screaming into the debate when Romney gleefully announced he would "fire" Big Bird as part of his defunding of public television. I won't even mention what a miniscule part of the national budget public television comprises, but it only further illustrates the ignorant, small-minded hatred Republican supporters have for education and the arts. The National Endowment for the Arts is another favorite target, because god forbid we should spend a little bit of money enriching the cultural and intellectual life of this country instead of wasting it on another civilian-killing drone in Afghanistan.
On the state level, elections are no less contested but a lot more tawdry. One of Arizona's senate seats is up for grabs, and slimy scumbag Republican Jeff Flake is up against former Surgeon General Richard Carmona. Flake thought he would have an easy coast right into the Senate, but he's finding it a lot more difficult than he thought, even in a very conservative state like this one. What is really alarming are all the media ads paid for by super-PACs, those heinous abominations the dipshits on the Supreme Court created. But I found out recently that super-PACs are only one facet of this hot mess.
Rich people seeking to sway the outcome of an election can dump a bunch of their money into a super-PAC but they will be identified. But if they choose, they can create a 501(c)(4) "social welfare" entity to dump money into with complete anonymity. These organizations can basically do whatever the hell they please with all this money and lobby for any candidate or legislative agenda. The law says that in May of next year these entities will have to report their funding and donors to the IRS, but the entities can be disbanded at any time (such as right after the election), and will not have to reveal one damned thing about their finances or activities. This is a truly frightening perversion of the American democracy that will go a very long way in completely poisoning and corrupting our system of government. It's like a get-out-of-jail-free card for anyone with a lot of money seeking to buy an election. Once again in this country, money speaks louder than anything or anybody.
Locally, it's even worse and sleazier, with Republican candidates invoking the name and image of President Obama every chance they get as some kind of damning mantra against their opponent. Again funded mostly by super-PACs, these ads seek to link a candidate with Obama in hopes of generating a knee-jerk reaction in the dimwitted, low-information voters that pollute this state. And ancient, pathetic asshole Joe Arpaio is running for Maricopa county sheriff for the 100th time, and despite the fact that he's an 80-year-old jerk and a buffoon, he will most likely get re-elected by the stupid voters in this county.
A Romney presidency would be such an unmitigated disaster for this country on every conceivable level. I honestly don't know which would be worse - the two or possibly three Supreme Court vacancies a President Romney would most likely have an opportunity to fill (leading to an unbreakable conservative majority on the Court for several decades which would overturn Roe v. Wade and prohibit gay marriage, among many other horrible things) or the fact that the US would be a big step closer to a theocracy, in which the Christian religion would have a much bigger say in the lives and liberty of ALL Americans, Christian or not. For a country that was ostensibly founded on religious freedom, government and religion have developed an extremely toxic relationship and a deadly embrace, and the more religion tightens its grip on government, the less freedom and liberty we have.
Americans are so ridiculously obsessed with religion and a lot of them see it as a simple-minded one-size-fits-all cure for the myriad of problems we face. But that is putting your faith in a fairy tale, like relying on Santa Claus to save the world from destruction, and the easiest solutions are rarely the best. Any "solution" to a set of problems which require free-thinking people to conform to a set of rigid, dogmatic and unscientific delusions and corrupted prehistoric claptrap will spell the end of this country faster than any terrorist attack or environmental disaster.
The presidential race is tighter than ever, and while it's pretty normal for the race to get really tight in the last couple of weeks, there is an uncomfortable trend going on. Every time an obscure poll shows a one-point shift in the highly fluid preferences of some media-created segment of voters, it creates a seismic jolt through the news media which is analyzed and re-analyzed to death. The polls are watched with the same intensity and anxiety as the Cuban missile crisis created in the early 60s. For those of you too young to remember that (unfortunately that does not include me) I can tell you those were pretty scary times. There was a palpable fear and terror in the air, obvious even to my ten-year-old self, and a real foreboding of what the future might bring. While a Romney presidency wouldn't quite be the same as a nuclear missile crisis, in many ways it would be every bit as destructive. More on that later.
There was the first of three presidential debates last Wednesday, and President Obama sent some clone of himself in his place who really wasn't up to the task. Romney was there in full creepy-mannequin mode, looking and acting like Satan's ventriloquist dummy and spewing lies and bullshit like some kind of demented lawn sprinkler set on high. All of a sudden, Romney professed to have found his love and support for 100% of the American electorate, even though back in May of this year he wrote off 47% of those very same people as lazy, useless leeches. Let me just say once and for all that Romney will never EVER know the financial pressures middle-class people have to face in their lives. He was born into a life of wealth and privilege, and anyone who even thinks about installing a CAR ELEVATOR in their home or taking a tax write-off of $77,000 (about 50% more than the $51,914 the average American household earns, according to the Census Bureau) for his wife's DANCING HORSE - categorizing it as a "business expense" (????) - has no idea what it's like to stretch a food budget to the point of breaking or dressing their children in hand-me-downs.
It is painfully obvious that Romney and his imperious, elitist, over-Botoxed trollop of a wife care only for the ultra-wealthy people in their own socio-economic class and will never do anything for the lower classes other than disdainfully look down their noses at them. And there is always the unresolved problem of Romney's refusal to make a full disclosure of his federal income taxes even though the American people have demanded he do so. For someone who proclaims so loudly to be "pro-business" and "pro-American" his propensity for employing offshore tax shelters for his enormous wealth tells a different story. His arrogance is truly monumental, and his contempt for the American people and the values upon which this country was founded is staggering and appalling.
The media have already labeled last weeks' debate as a "game changer," and it's a little hard to believe that after a month or more of Romney being a world-class fuck-up and saying and doing completely preposterous, absurd things, all that could be changed in a 90-minute debate. This just illustrates the short attention span of the American voter, as aggravated and dictated by the 30-minute news cycle.
As if to emphasize the perversity of politics (as if it needed emphasized), none other than Big Bird, a long-running character on the PBS children's series "Sesame Street," was dragged kicking and screaming into the debate when Romney gleefully announced he would "fire" Big Bird as part of his defunding of public television. I won't even mention what a miniscule part of the national budget public television comprises, but it only further illustrates the ignorant, small-minded hatred Republican supporters have for education and the arts. The National Endowment for the Arts is another favorite target, because god forbid we should spend a little bit of money enriching the cultural and intellectual life of this country instead of wasting it on another civilian-killing drone in Afghanistan.
On the state level, elections are no less contested but a lot more tawdry. One of Arizona's senate seats is up for grabs, and slimy scumbag Republican Jeff Flake is up against former Surgeon General Richard Carmona. Flake thought he would have an easy coast right into the Senate, but he's finding it a lot more difficult than he thought, even in a very conservative state like this one. What is really alarming are all the media ads paid for by super-PACs, those heinous abominations the dipshits on the Supreme Court created. But I found out recently that super-PACs are only one facet of this hot mess.
Rich people seeking to sway the outcome of an election can dump a bunch of their money into a super-PAC but they will be identified. But if they choose, they can create a 501(c)(4) "social welfare" entity to dump money into with complete anonymity. These organizations can basically do whatever the hell they please with all this money and lobby for any candidate or legislative agenda. The law says that in May of next year these entities will have to report their funding and donors to the IRS, but the entities can be disbanded at any time (such as right after the election), and will not have to reveal one damned thing about their finances or activities. This is a truly frightening perversion of the American democracy that will go a very long way in completely poisoning and corrupting our system of government. It's like a get-out-of-jail-free card for anyone with a lot of money seeking to buy an election. Once again in this country, money speaks louder than anything or anybody.
Locally, it's even worse and sleazier, with Republican candidates invoking the name and image of President Obama every chance they get as some kind of damning mantra against their opponent. Again funded mostly by super-PACs, these ads seek to link a candidate with Obama in hopes of generating a knee-jerk reaction in the dimwitted, low-information voters that pollute this state. And ancient, pathetic asshole Joe Arpaio is running for Maricopa county sheriff for the 100th time, and despite the fact that he's an 80-year-old jerk and a buffoon, he will most likely get re-elected by the stupid voters in this county.
A Romney presidency would be such an unmitigated disaster for this country on every conceivable level. I honestly don't know which would be worse - the two or possibly three Supreme Court vacancies a President Romney would most likely have an opportunity to fill (leading to an unbreakable conservative majority on the Court for several decades which would overturn Roe v. Wade and prohibit gay marriage, among many other horrible things) or the fact that the US would be a big step closer to a theocracy, in which the Christian religion would have a much bigger say in the lives and liberty of ALL Americans, Christian or not. For a country that was ostensibly founded on religious freedom, government and religion have developed an extremely toxic relationship and a deadly embrace, and the more religion tightens its grip on government, the less freedom and liberty we have.
Americans are so ridiculously obsessed with religion and a lot of them see it as a simple-minded one-size-fits-all cure for the myriad of problems we face. But that is putting your faith in a fairy tale, like relying on Santa Claus to save the world from destruction, and the easiest solutions are rarely the best. Any "solution" to a set of problems which require free-thinking people to conform to a set of rigid, dogmatic and unscientific delusions and corrupted prehistoric claptrap will spell the end of this country faster than any terrorist attack or environmental disaster.
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
Forty-Seven Percent
Yesterday marked 49 days until the elections. Seven weeks, and yesterday was a day not quite like any other.
A surreptitious recording of Republican Mitt Romney at a fundraising event last May in Boca Raton, Florida, was leaked to the media, and it was incendiary. Mitt was in his natural element, talking to a bunch of super-rich supporters who paid $50K per plate to get past the front door, and I have no doubt he really meant everything he said. After all, the event was nominally closed to the new media, and he was among his people. He had no reason to put on any airs for them.
At one point Romney make the astonishing statement that he considers 47% of the American electorate to be freeloaders and victims, and are dependent on the government for all their sustenance. 50 million Americans are, according to Romney, shiftless, lazy, and looking for nothing other than a handout. They feel they are "entitled" to have the government provide food, housing and medical care for them, and do absolutely nothing to fend for themselves or pay their own way. They take everything and give nothing in return. Frankly, I would like to get in on that gig.
The news media went absolutely berserk, as they should, and despite everything else going on in the world this was the big news story. The liberal media had a feeding frenzy, and there was an overabundance of red meat to go around. Even a number of more conservative media outlets and newspapers leveled some withering, merciless criticism on Romney, pointing out in no uncertain terms how totally off-base he was.
The Romney campaign went into major crisis mode, but no amount of whiplash-inducing spin could pull this mess out of the toilet. You could just see his campaign managers running around their office in a panic, bumping into each other, not knowing which forest fire to put out first. But the best was yet to come.
The Romney quote really making the rounds is something that you would never believe a candidate for national office would say. Romney said his "job" is "not to worry about those people" because they will vote for Obama no matter what. So, he is writing off nearly half of the electorate because they do not pay federal income tax, and Romney's tax-cut message would be lost on them.
It is certainly true that a lot of people pay no federal income tax. The tax code is structured in such a way that people of very low income, or senior citizens, or members of the armed forces do not have to pay federal income taxes. That doesn't mean they pay no tax at all. They pay all the other taxes everyone else pays - state tax, local tax, sales taxes, payroll taxes. As a matter of fact, middle and lower classes workers pay payroll taxes, and after you earn $106,800 you pay none at all.
Through all of this, Romney looks the same he always has: ridiculous, stupid, awkward, creepy and floundering around like a fish out of water. His performance in his quest for the White House as been a breathtaking series of gaffes and misstatements, from when he managed to insult the United Kingdom over London's Summer Olympics to writing off any chances of peace in the middle East. He has resolutely refused to turn over anything more than the minimum amount of information regarding his federal income taxes, something which has gained new urgency lately given his assertion that a lot of Americans are bums and leeches. I am convinced that he refuses to make public his tax returns because they will show that HE has not paid anywhere near his fair share of federal income taxes, and perhaps none at all for a number of years. I have four words for him, and I wish every news media outlet in the world would keep repeating them over and over to him: What are you hiding?
Even his phony, brittle wife Ann has reinforced all the negative impressions about her and her husband when, in an interview, the subject of his tax returns came up and she snarled in as imperious a tone as she could muster (and she's had a ton of practice) that "you people" (meaning the press and the American electorate) have gotten all the tax information that you're going to get, so be satisfied with that and STFU.
Still, no one is counting Romney and his campaign out because it doesn't matter to most of his Republican supporters what stupid, ill-advised and idiotic things he says or does, they will support him no matter what. Facts be damned, those people will vote for Romney even if he was proven to be a child molester who set a nursing home on fire while selling China white heroin to grade-schoolers. Republicans are never, ever encumbered by facts or reality. Their racist hatred of Barack Obama is stronger than any love of country or sympathy for their fellow citizens.
Presidential candidates have recovered from serious setbacks in their campaign before, but it's hard to see how Romney can run a credible, viable campaign from here on. It would be very interesting indeed to watch Romney's chances flame out and crumble, but it's impossible to overestimate the capacity of the American voter to see what they want to see, and ignore everything else. And above all, this election season is one where substance takes a distant back seat to style, and if your candidate says or does something really stupid, the best thing to do is double-down, dig your heels in, and deny, obfuscate, and deceive. After all, Republicans could not care less about facts. They have put all their faith in voter suppression drives, and none in the voters themselves.
A surreptitious recording of Republican Mitt Romney at a fundraising event last May in Boca Raton, Florida, was leaked to the media, and it was incendiary. Mitt was in his natural element, talking to a bunch of super-rich supporters who paid $50K per plate to get past the front door, and I have no doubt he really meant everything he said. After all, the event was nominally closed to the new media, and he was among his people. He had no reason to put on any airs for them.
At one point Romney make the astonishing statement that he considers 47% of the American electorate to be freeloaders and victims, and are dependent on the government for all their sustenance. 50 million Americans are, according to Romney, shiftless, lazy, and looking for nothing other than a handout. They feel they are "entitled" to have the government provide food, housing and medical care for them, and do absolutely nothing to fend for themselves or pay their own way. They take everything and give nothing in return. Frankly, I would like to get in on that gig.
The news media went absolutely berserk, as they should, and despite everything else going on in the world this was the big news story. The liberal media had a feeding frenzy, and there was an overabundance of red meat to go around. Even a number of more conservative media outlets and newspapers leveled some withering, merciless criticism on Romney, pointing out in no uncertain terms how totally off-base he was.
The Romney campaign went into major crisis mode, but no amount of whiplash-inducing spin could pull this mess out of the toilet. You could just see his campaign managers running around their office in a panic, bumping into each other, not knowing which forest fire to put out first. But the best was yet to come.
The Romney quote really making the rounds is something that you would never believe a candidate for national office would say. Romney said his "job" is "not to worry about those people" because they will vote for Obama no matter what. So, he is writing off nearly half of the electorate because they do not pay federal income tax, and Romney's tax-cut message would be lost on them.
It is certainly true that a lot of people pay no federal income tax. The tax code is structured in such a way that people of very low income, or senior citizens, or members of the armed forces do not have to pay federal income taxes. That doesn't mean they pay no tax at all. They pay all the other taxes everyone else pays - state tax, local tax, sales taxes, payroll taxes. As a matter of fact, middle and lower classes workers pay payroll taxes, and after you earn $106,800 you pay none at all.
Through all of this, Romney looks the same he always has: ridiculous, stupid, awkward, creepy and floundering around like a fish out of water. His performance in his quest for the White House as been a breathtaking series of gaffes and misstatements, from when he managed to insult the United Kingdom over London's Summer Olympics to writing off any chances of peace in the middle East. He has resolutely refused to turn over anything more than the minimum amount of information regarding his federal income taxes, something which has gained new urgency lately given his assertion that a lot of Americans are bums and leeches. I am convinced that he refuses to make public his tax returns because they will show that HE has not paid anywhere near his fair share of federal income taxes, and perhaps none at all for a number of years. I have four words for him, and I wish every news media outlet in the world would keep repeating them over and over to him: What are you hiding?
Even his phony, brittle wife Ann has reinforced all the negative impressions about her and her husband when, in an interview, the subject of his tax returns came up and she snarled in as imperious a tone as she could muster (and she's had a ton of practice) that "you people" (meaning the press and the American electorate) have gotten all the tax information that you're going to get, so be satisfied with that and STFU.
Still, no one is counting Romney and his campaign out because it doesn't matter to most of his Republican supporters what stupid, ill-advised and idiotic things he says or does, they will support him no matter what. Facts be damned, those people will vote for Romney even if he was proven to be a child molester who set a nursing home on fire while selling China white heroin to grade-schoolers. Republicans are never, ever encumbered by facts or reality. Their racist hatred of Barack Obama is stronger than any love of country or sympathy for their fellow citizens.
Presidential candidates have recovered from serious setbacks in their campaign before, but it's hard to see how Romney can run a credible, viable campaign from here on. It would be very interesting indeed to watch Romney's chances flame out and crumble, but it's impossible to overestimate the capacity of the American voter to see what they want to see, and ignore everything else. And above all, this election season is one where substance takes a distant back seat to style, and if your candidate says or does something really stupid, the best thing to do is double-down, dig your heels in, and deny, obfuscate, and deceive. After all, Republicans could not care less about facts. They have put all their faith in voter suppression drives, and none in the voters themselves.
Sunday, September 2, 2012
A Gathering Storm
It's Labor Day 2012 weekend, and tomorrow marks the traditional start of the presidential election campaign. There are 65 days till the election, and it's safe to say that all forms of media, especially television, will be flooded with diatribes from both sides, vilifying and demonizing the other, in their insane quest to pick up as many votes as possible, by any means.
This year, it's going to be different. We have something called the Citizens' United ruling in place. In a moment of stunning, breathtaking insanity, the Supreme Court decided that it's perfectly all right to inject a monstrously huge amount of money into an election system already choked and corrupted beyond recognition by dirty money. In a move that seems incredibly un-American, extremely wealthy individuals can pour money into what are called "super PACs", completely anonymously and shielded from discovery and in effect, buy the American democracy. Democracy, like justice, has always been available for purchase by the highest bidder, but this ruling makes it much, much easier for the election to be swayed by whichever side can line up more billionaire donors. If this doesn't go against everything on which this nation was founded, taking elections away from the common people and giving them over to the super-rich, nothing does.
Another stunning development is the diabolical, blatantly biased laws passed by state governments restricting and complicating the act of voting. Everything from selectively shortening early voting periods to ridiculous, unreasonable photo-ID requirements, and more, has been utilized by Republican-controlled state legislatures to make it more difficult for the poor and minority voters (whose choices skew very much toward Democratic candidates). Advocates of these Jim Crow 2.0 laws claim they are necessary to prevent "voter fraud," but it is a scorched-earth, Draconian solution to a very small problem. Studies have repeatedly shown over and over that voter fraud is an extremely rare occurrence, several orders of magnitude smaller than what would be needed to swing any important national or regional election. It's like using a neutron bomb to get rid of a fly. It's so obvious to everyone that these laws are not geared to prevent voter fraud, but instead to make it as hard as possible for people to vote, some of whom have been voting for decades. And in a democracy, isn't the whole point to make it easy for as many people as possible to vote? Voters are what make democracy what it is.
The Democrats are having their national convention in Charlotte, NC, this coming week. It will no doubt be nowhere near as freakish and insanely toxic as the recent Republican psycho-fest in Tampa. That convention was a hellish parade of the truly ugly and repulsive in American politics. From a snide diatribe by the repulsively obese Chris Christie, to Anne Romney's scripted-to-the-last-comma snooze-inducing attempt to "humanize" her extremely wooden, awkward and creepy husband, to the much-ballyhooed screed by veep candidate Paul "Lyin'" Ryan in which he STILL hasn't said anything interesting and valuable, the convention was one of the most repellent, distasteful things shown on television so far this year. Republicans seem to be making a Herculean effort to be the source of the most repulsive media of all time, between the convention and the primary debates.
Still, no one was prepared for the supernova of batshit-craziness when film icon and new poster boy for dementia Clint Eastwood did a stunningly bizarre piece of performance art by talking to a chair where an invisible Obama was seated. Almost universally panned by pundits and critics, it will go down as one of the weirdest, creepiest and saddest things ever. It did have one delightful effect - Mitt Romney also gave what was billed as the most important political speech of his whole life after Clint got finished embarrassing himself, but very few people were talking about that the next day. Everyone was reeling at how pathetic and sad Eastwood appeared on stage, in front of all those puckered, withered and desiccated faces of all those boring old white people at the convention.
This election will also be different in that it will most likely not be a war for the hearts and minds of independent voters, but more of a battle to see which side can get their bases the most riled up. The country has gotten so very polarized over the past few elections that the number of undecided voters has shrunk to a small sliver. I can't imagine there are many people who look at Obama and Romney and consider flipping a coin to make the choice easier. The vast majority of voters, myself included, have had their minds made up for many many months. The election can be held this coming Tuesday for all I care, I'm 100% ready to get it over with. There is absolutely nothing in this enormous universe which would make me switch my vote, so why do I have to put up with all the bullshit? The country is split down the middle, with very few swing votes, and the emphasis now is to get your core constituencies all cranked up and excited to cast their votes.
As is typical for paranoid-hysterics, Republican leaders drone ominously about how the very soul and existence of the United States of America is on the knife-edge, teetering at the abyss of destruction, and everything will surely be lost if Obama gets re-elected. Notably, a judge in Lubbock, TX opined that there will be "civil war" and a lot of civil disobedience if the election doesn't go their way. While those remarks can be easily dismissed as mentally-disturbed rantings of some inbred, cousin-marrying Texas hillbilly, it does illustrate the demented fear-mongering to which the Republicans are stooping this year. Always known as the party of fear, the Republicans are pulling out all the stops in their hell-bound campaign to frighten and terrify all their racist supporters, promising them that the Apocalypse Pizza Company will be delivering an extra-large to their front door if the black guy gets back into the White House. Desperate, fearful people do desperate things, and crazy, paranoid rednecks do really horrible, ugly, desperate things.
So, no matter who wins this election, pretty much 50% of the people in this country are going to be very, very angry and upset. Depending on how the Congressional elections go, we may be in line for a gridlocked, hyper-partisan government that will accomplish absolutely nothing. As the world enters a critical period on so many fronts - the environment, global economics, terrorism - having a paralyzed, divided superpower such as the USA will only make the world a much more dangerous place than it ever has been, or that it needs to be.
This year, it's going to be different. We have something called the Citizens' United ruling in place. In a moment of stunning, breathtaking insanity, the Supreme Court decided that it's perfectly all right to inject a monstrously huge amount of money into an election system already choked and corrupted beyond recognition by dirty money. In a move that seems incredibly un-American, extremely wealthy individuals can pour money into what are called "super PACs", completely anonymously and shielded from discovery and in effect, buy the American democracy. Democracy, like justice, has always been available for purchase by the highest bidder, but this ruling makes it much, much easier for the election to be swayed by whichever side can line up more billionaire donors. If this doesn't go against everything on which this nation was founded, taking elections away from the common people and giving them over to the super-rich, nothing does.
Another stunning development is the diabolical, blatantly biased laws passed by state governments restricting and complicating the act of voting. Everything from selectively shortening early voting periods to ridiculous, unreasonable photo-ID requirements, and more, has been utilized by Republican-controlled state legislatures to make it more difficult for the poor and minority voters (whose choices skew very much toward Democratic candidates). Advocates of these Jim Crow 2.0 laws claim they are necessary to prevent "voter fraud," but it is a scorched-earth, Draconian solution to a very small problem. Studies have repeatedly shown over and over that voter fraud is an extremely rare occurrence, several orders of magnitude smaller than what would be needed to swing any important national or regional election. It's like using a neutron bomb to get rid of a fly. It's so obvious to everyone that these laws are not geared to prevent voter fraud, but instead to make it as hard as possible for people to vote, some of whom have been voting for decades. And in a democracy, isn't the whole point to make it easy for as many people as possible to vote? Voters are what make democracy what it is.
The Democrats are having their national convention in Charlotte, NC, this coming week. It will no doubt be nowhere near as freakish and insanely toxic as the recent Republican psycho-fest in Tampa. That convention was a hellish parade of the truly ugly and repulsive in American politics. From a snide diatribe by the repulsively obese Chris Christie, to Anne Romney's scripted-to-the-last-comma snooze-inducing attempt to "humanize" her extremely wooden, awkward and creepy husband, to the much-ballyhooed screed by veep candidate Paul "Lyin'" Ryan in which he STILL hasn't said anything interesting and valuable, the convention was one of the most repellent, distasteful things shown on television so far this year. Republicans seem to be making a Herculean effort to be the source of the most repulsive media of all time, between the convention and the primary debates.
Still, no one was prepared for the supernova of batshit-craziness when film icon and new poster boy for dementia Clint Eastwood did a stunningly bizarre piece of performance art by talking to a chair where an invisible Obama was seated. Almost universally panned by pundits and critics, it will go down as one of the weirdest, creepiest and saddest things ever. It did have one delightful effect - Mitt Romney also gave what was billed as the most important political speech of his whole life after Clint got finished embarrassing himself, but very few people were talking about that the next day. Everyone was reeling at how pathetic and sad Eastwood appeared on stage, in front of all those puckered, withered and desiccated faces of all those boring old white people at the convention.
This election will also be different in that it will most likely not be a war for the hearts and minds of independent voters, but more of a battle to see which side can get their bases the most riled up. The country has gotten so very polarized over the past few elections that the number of undecided voters has shrunk to a small sliver. I can't imagine there are many people who look at Obama and Romney and consider flipping a coin to make the choice easier. The vast majority of voters, myself included, have had their minds made up for many many months. The election can be held this coming Tuesday for all I care, I'm 100% ready to get it over with. There is absolutely nothing in this enormous universe which would make me switch my vote, so why do I have to put up with all the bullshit? The country is split down the middle, with very few swing votes, and the emphasis now is to get your core constituencies all cranked up and excited to cast their votes.
As is typical for paranoid-hysterics, Republican leaders drone ominously about how the very soul and existence of the United States of America is on the knife-edge, teetering at the abyss of destruction, and everything will surely be lost if Obama gets re-elected. Notably, a judge in Lubbock, TX opined that there will be "civil war" and a lot of civil disobedience if the election doesn't go their way. While those remarks can be easily dismissed as mentally-disturbed rantings of some inbred, cousin-marrying Texas hillbilly, it does illustrate the demented fear-mongering to which the Republicans are stooping this year. Always known as the party of fear, the Republicans are pulling out all the stops in their hell-bound campaign to frighten and terrify all their racist supporters, promising them that the Apocalypse Pizza Company will be delivering an extra-large to their front door if the black guy gets back into the White House. Desperate, fearful people do desperate things, and crazy, paranoid rednecks do really horrible, ugly, desperate things.
So, no matter who wins this election, pretty much 50% of the people in this country are going to be very, very angry and upset. Depending on how the Congressional elections go, we may be in line for a gridlocked, hyper-partisan government that will accomplish absolutely nothing. As the world enters a critical period on so many fronts - the environment, global economics, terrorism - having a paralyzed, divided superpower such as the USA will only make the world a much more dangerous place than it ever has been, or that it needs to be.
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
My Arizona-versary
Today is my Arizona anniversary, the "Arizona-versary" of the title. Nineteen years ago today, I completed my journey to Phoenix and officially took up residence in Arizona.
I still remember that day, July 31st, 1993. It was a Saturday, and I woke up in a Palm Springs motel with my two cats at the time, and left early for the 4-hour drive east to Phoenix.
It was a warm morning, and the sun already felt hot as it began its climb up from behind the distant mountains. As I left the Coachella valley for the open desert the landscape spread out in all directions, a seemingly-endless vista of burnt, sun-blasted earth in innumerable shades of black, brown, gray and beige, dotted with short, squat, desiccated shrubs and tall, stark saguaro cacti, stuck with their arms held up to the sun, as if begging for mercy that would only come in the rare years when we would have a wet, rainy springtime. Off in the distance I could sometimes see a lone hawk or eagle, doing pirouettes in the sky as it expertly rode the updrafts and currents, spinning higher and higher in the empty azure firmament, searching for a bit of sustenance in this harsh, unyielding and unforgiving world.
The land flattened out into a broad plain as I approached the California-Arizona border and the Colorado river valley. My entry to my new home state was marked only with a large sign on the side of the road, bidding me Welcome to Arizona and showing a cactus wren sitting in a saguaro blossom. Almost on cue, the craggy mountains and rough, rocky hills started up again, and would remain constant fixtures for the rest of the ride. Interstate 10 took me through Quartzite, a quirky, haphazard and confused jumble of a desert town, where double-wide trailers, recreational vehicles, and restaurants with early-bird dinner specials hold sway. Quartzite is one of those surreal deep-desert outposts, teetering on the edge of reality, where you could come and blend into the desert and no one would ever hear from you again. I was to learn that Arizona is full of such places - places where humans could turn into ghosts, and vice versa.
Two hours later I arrived in Phoenix and got the keys to my new apartment. I brought the cats in and let them out of their carriers to explore their new home, and moved in the clothing and furnishings I was able to cram into my car. The bulk of my furniture was still on the moving van, in transit from Burlingame, CA, and would not arrive for another 5 days. I slept on an air mattress and sat on blankets and towels. In spite of the forced austerity, it felt like home, and the cats and I were happy.
The next day, Sunday August 1st 1993, was HOT. The high temperature was 117 degrees, something I had not even dreamed of, let alone experienced. I walked around a little bit in the morning when it wasn't that bad, but very soon a stifling, claustrophobic stillness enveloped everything, and even the buzzing of the cicadas in the palo verde trees became quieter. I retreated to my bedroom and laid on the air mattress, listening to the faint cooing of the native doves outside.
As I start my 20th year of living here, I think about the fact that I have spent nearly a third of my entire life in Phoenix. Arizona is a very beautiful, diverse state, and about the only thing we are missing is the beach and the waterfront, although for the braver of those among us, Rocky Point (Puerto Penasco) in Mexico has the oceanfront. You can find mountains and cool fragrant pine forests in the north, rolling mountains and ski resorts in the east, the funkiness and rustic charm of Tucson in the south and Nogales on the Mexican border, and the bizarre surrealism of the western deserts, where the land cannot make up its mind whether it wants to be Arizona or California and keeps switching back and forth.
We have the astonishing national treasure of the Grand Canyon, truly a wonder of the world, and the turquoise-and-red-rock spiritual theme park that is Sedona. There is also Meteor Crater, a gigantic, mile-wide hole in the ground about 40 miles east of Flagstaff, blasted out by a huge iron-nickel meteor about 75,000 years ago. It is an amazing site and worth seeing. It's even more amazing if you see if outside the window of a jetliner:
So many interesting things to see and do, so many charming little places to visit, like Jerome, Flagstaff and Tubac. But there is a downside to living here, and that revolves around the political climate here.
Unfortunately Arizona is a place of extreme bigotry and intolerance. There is prejudice everywhere, against Mexican immigrants, against Native Americans, against women, against gay people, against people who practice non-Christian religions or don't believe at all. As is shamefully typical among extreme conservatives, if you are not a white, Anglo-Saxon, heterosexual male, you are looked down on as being different and therefore, somehow flawed.
The state government on all levels is a total joke, rife with corrupt, hate-filled idiots and bigots who are re-elected time after time again by an electorate too stupid or uninterested to care. This is an election year, and the local television stations show political ads over and over again ad nauseum, mostly pertaining to a senate race between a pudgy ginger asshole named Wil Cardon and a slimy-slick snake-oil salesman aptly named Jeff Flake. Both are falling over each other trying to lay claim to the title of Most Conservative candidate, they each accuse the other of doing the bidding of the Antichrist himself, Barack Obama. In a lot of places dragging the president's name through the muck of a penny-ante pissing contest like that would be regarded as extremely vulgar and classless, but here in Arizona, nothing could be more normal or acceptable. Or expected.
Old habits die hard here in AZ, and that innate conservatism is reflected in the voting booth. Back in 2010 I was a poll worker for the midterm elections and was assisting an elderly woman in voting. She was confined to a wheelchair and just getting around was a huge effort, but she proudly told me she was in her early 90s and has voted in every single election. I thought that was wonderful until I watched her fill in her ballot, and she just went down the list of candidates and voted for whoever was a Republican. She had no idea who she was voting for; she could be voting for Adolf Hitler or Charles Manson, but she only needed to know they were Republican. I can't help thinking that blind, knee-jerk voting like that was the last thing the Founding Fathers intended when they created this democracy.
With clueless, indiscriminate voters like that, it is no wonder that when you're elected to public office here and you're a Republican, you've got a job for life and don't have to do another single thing again if you don't want to. This predictable, party-line voting means the dumbest, most bigoted and most loathsome assholes in the state become Republicans and get sent to the state legislature and to Congress to push their extreme-right agendas. The state legislature in particular is overloaded with fat old Nazi sympathizers and hate-filled fundamentalist Christians. It's a little disturbing that if you're a fundamentalist Christian, man or woman, and you're only 30 years old, you look old and mean and crotchety like you're in your 80s. Hatefulness of that magnitude makes you old and ugly before your time.
There's an old adage that goes something along the lines of, if you know someone who is crazy, quirky, nonconformist and a little off-center and they mysteriously disappear, eventually they will turn up in San Francisco. Likewise, if you know someone who's bigoted, intolerant, mean-spirited, uneducated and filled with bile and they too disappear, they will eventually turn up in Arizona. And probably in the state legislature.
I still remember that day, July 31st, 1993. It was a Saturday, and I woke up in a Palm Springs motel with my two cats at the time, and left early for the 4-hour drive east to Phoenix.
It was a warm morning, and the sun already felt hot as it began its climb up from behind the distant mountains. As I left the Coachella valley for the open desert the landscape spread out in all directions, a seemingly-endless vista of burnt, sun-blasted earth in innumerable shades of black, brown, gray and beige, dotted with short, squat, desiccated shrubs and tall, stark saguaro cacti, stuck with their arms held up to the sun, as if begging for mercy that would only come in the rare years when we would have a wet, rainy springtime. Off in the distance I could sometimes see a lone hawk or eagle, doing pirouettes in the sky as it expertly rode the updrafts and currents, spinning higher and higher in the empty azure firmament, searching for a bit of sustenance in this harsh, unyielding and unforgiving world.
The land flattened out into a broad plain as I approached the California-Arizona border and the Colorado river valley. My entry to my new home state was marked only with a large sign on the side of the road, bidding me Welcome to Arizona and showing a cactus wren sitting in a saguaro blossom. Almost on cue, the craggy mountains and rough, rocky hills started up again, and would remain constant fixtures for the rest of the ride. Interstate 10 took me through Quartzite, a quirky, haphazard and confused jumble of a desert town, where double-wide trailers, recreational vehicles, and restaurants with early-bird dinner specials hold sway. Quartzite is one of those surreal deep-desert outposts, teetering on the edge of reality, where you could come and blend into the desert and no one would ever hear from you again. I was to learn that Arizona is full of such places - places where humans could turn into ghosts, and vice versa.
Two hours later I arrived in Phoenix and got the keys to my new apartment. I brought the cats in and let them out of their carriers to explore their new home, and moved in the clothing and furnishings I was able to cram into my car. The bulk of my furniture was still on the moving van, in transit from Burlingame, CA, and would not arrive for another 5 days. I slept on an air mattress and sat on blankets and towels. In spite of the forced austerity, it felt like home, and the cats and I were happy.
The next day, Sunday August 1st 1993, was HOT. The high temperature was 117 degrees, something I had not even dreamed of, let alone experienced. I walked around a little bit in the morning when it wasn't that bad, but very soon a stifling, claustrophobic stillness enveloped everything, and even the buzzing of the cicadas in the palo verde trees became quieter. I retreated to my bedroom and laid on the air mattress, listening to the faint cooing of the native doves outside.
As I start my 20th year of living here, I think about the fact that I have spent nearly a third of my entire life in Phoenix. Arizona is a very beautiful, diverse state, and about the only thing we are missing is the beach and the waterfront, although for the braver of those among us, Rocky Point (Puerto Penasco) in Mexico has the oceanfront. You can find mountains and cool fragrant pine forests in the north, rolling mountains and ski resorts in the east, the funkiness and rustic charm of Tucson in the south and Nogales on the Mexican border, and the bizarre surrealism of the western deserts, where the land cannot make up its mind whether it wants to be Arizona or California and keeps switching back and forth.
We have the astonishing national treasure of the Grand Canyon, truly a wonder of the world, and the turquoise-and-red-rock spiritual theme park that is Sedona. There is also Meteor Crater, a gigantic, mile-wide hole in the ground about 40 miles east of Flagstaff, blasted out by a huge iron-nickel meteor about 75,000 years ago. It is an amazing site and worth seeing. It's even more amazing if you see if outside the window of a jetliner:
Unfortunately Arizona is a place of extreme bigotry and intolerance. There is prejudice everywhere, against Mexican immigrants, against Native Americans, against women, against gay people, against people who practice non-Christian religions or don't believe at all. As is shamefully typical among extreme conservatives, if you are not a white, Anglo-Saxon, heterosexual male, you are looked down on as being different and therefore, somehow flawed.
The state government on all levels is a total joke, rife with corrupt, hate-filled idiots and bigots who are re-elected time after time again by an electorate too stupid or uninterested to care. This is an election year, and the local television stations show political ads over and over again ad nauseum, mostly pertaining to a senate race between a pudgy ginger asshole named Wil Cardon and a slimy-slick snake-oil salesman aptly named Jeff Flake. Both are falling over each other trying to lay claim to the title of Most Conservative candidate, they each accuse the other of doing the bidding of the Antichrist himself, Barack Obama. In a lot of places dragging the president's name through the muck of a penny-ante pissing contest like that would be regarded as extremely vulgar and classless, but here in Arizona, nothing could be more normal or acceptable. Or expected.
Old habits die hard here in AZ, and that innate conservatism is reflected in the voting booth. Back in 2010 I was a poll worker for the midterm elections and was assisting an elderly woman in voting. She was confined to a wheelchair and just getting around was a huge effort, but she proudly told me she was in her early 90s and has voted in every single election. I thought that was wonderful until I watched her fill in her ballot, and she just went down the list of candidates and voted for whoever was a Republican. She had no idea who she was voting for; she could be voting for Adolf Hitler or Charles Manson, but she only needed to know they were Republican. I can't help thinking that blind, knee-jerk voting like that was the last thing the Founding Fathers intended when they created this democracy.
With clueless, indiscriminate voters like that, it is no wonder that when you're elected to public office here and you're a Republican, you've got a job for life and don't have to do another single thing again if you don't want to. This predictable, party-line voting means the dumbest, most bigoted and most loathsome assholes in the state become Republicans and get sent to the state legislature and to Congress to push their extreme-right agendas. The state legislature in particular is overloaded with fat old Nazi sympathizers and hate-filled fundamentalist Christians. It's a little disturbing that if you're a fundamentalist Christian, man or woman, and you're only 30 years old, you look old and mean and crotchety like you're in your 80s. Hatefulness of that magnitude makes you old and ugly before your time.
There's an old adage that goes something along the lines of, if you know someone who is crazy, quirky, nonconformist and a little off-center and they mysteriously disappear, eventually they will turn up in San Francisco. Likewise, if you know someone who's bigoted, intolerant, mean-spirited, uneducated and filled with bile and they too disappear, they will eventually turn up in Arizona. And probably in the state legislature.
Thursday, June 7, 2012
R.I.P. Democracy
It would appear that America's rather fanciful 236-year experiment with democracy is officially over. Once given the backhanded compliment of being the "worst form of government on earth, except for all the others," democracy was nonetheless touted as the best that the human race could come up with, and something to which all nations should aspire. And, when it comes to giving the average citizen a say in what happens to their lives, American democracy could once lay claim to being the best of the best. But something called the Citizens United ruling put an end to that, in dramatic fashion.
Democracy itself has a long and storied history, originating with the ancient Greeks and spreading to many areas of the world since then. It has gone through refinements and tweaking, as all dynamic, living ideas will, but there comes a time when a tweak will turn into something much more toxic and poisonous.
Big news this week was the attempted recall of governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker. Walker and the other Republican bloodsuckers in that state went on a rampage against public sector unions - you know, representing all those greedy and overpaid teachers, police officers and firefighters - and passed unprecedented legislation to take away their collective bargaining rights, which had been in place for decades. Blaming the unions for being the source of a huge budget deficit, Walker and his stooges decided that the bargaining rights were at the root of everything that ever went wrong anywhere since the beginning of time, and they had to go. People of all types went understandably nuts, and huge protests paralyzed the state capitol daily. The country was treated to the extraordinary spectacle of Democratic state legislators fleeing to a neighboring state to avoid a quorum in the legislature to pass the heinous bill.
All this was a blatant and obvious attempt at union busting, since unions are widely seen as sympathetic to Democrats and a source of campaign funds for them. Republicans hate employee unions, for lots of reasons. They're seen as fighting for annoyances such as fair treatment of workers, equitable wages and benefits, and for taking profit out of the coffers of corporations. Back in the 1950s and 1960s unions had great power, but the advent of the right-to-work movements in states, particular southern states, curtailed that power.
Unions have been on the run for a long time now due to rapidly declining membership and influence, and Republicans smelled blood. They took a gamble on creating a showdown with the unions, and Wisconsin became the crucible for that battle. Recall petitions were signed and an election was scheduled. At first it seemed that Walker would be shown the door in quick fashion, but a little problem cropped up.
It seems that the US Supreme Court ruled on something called the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010. That ruling stated that "the First Amendment prohibited the government from restricting independent political expenditures by corporations and unions." This meant that corporations and other outside influences, could dump as much money as they wanted into elections to try and sway the outcome. When the ruling came down, the entire country gasped in stunned disbelief at such an outlandish concept - that corporations have a measure of freedom of speech, and that can somehow be transmuted into enormous amounts of money being allowed to pour into an electoral system already choked to death with special-interest dollars. That's like giving a smoker with stage 4 lung cancer a carton of cigarettes and saying, "Enjoy them, there's lots more where they came from!"
Also aided by a ridiculous loophole in Wisconsin law which imposed a $10K upper limit on contributions to the Democratic challenger, Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett, but not on incumbent Walker, Republican money poured in. The national Republican Reichstag regarded this as a test case, a prelude to the presidential election this fall, and pulled out all the stops to win. The following graphic tells you everything you need to know about the amount of money that poured into that state, and where it came from:
The Wisconsin media was flooded with nonstop advertising, and Republican Z-listers like Nikki Haley, some trollop governor from somewhere who is portrayed as a Tea Party "rising star" (read: amoral famewhore), was dragged in for campaign appearances. The Republican blitzkrieg worked, and Walker won the election 54% to 45%. And therein came the death of democracy.
It is an epically tragic commentary on the political system of this country that, in a very real sense, whoever has the most money wins. Money buys advertising, and with enough of it, opinions can be swayed. It's really sad that so many voters can be influenced by what they see on television or in print, and accept it without one iota of critical thought. Some people believe anything they see on television, and Citizens United just opened up the floodgates for a huge torrent of biased, blatantly prejudiced misinformation to rush in, and the financial backers of this tsunami of bullshit don't even have to tell you who they are.
The Wisconsin recall was only a little glimpse into hell, a tiny preview of the carnage that's going to happen in the upcoming November elections. As a direct result of Citizens United, it's been estimated that the Republican side will raise and spend a billion dollars trying to buy the White House and the Senate. And the gods help us all, they may very well do it.
For democracy to work, it's absolutely critical that those being governed are informed, engaged and fully participating in the process. That's the part that's missing. American voters are by far too lazy, ignorant and uneducated to learn enough about the issues facing them to make intelligent choices. Instead, they choose to let other people tell them what to think and do, and their vote will go for whoever created the slickest and most eye-catching political advertisement. For the vast majority of voters, that is far easier than actually "learning" about the problems they have and "making good choices". Let Rush Limbaugh and the Koch brothers tell you what to do. Just sit back, pop open another brewski, and pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. It will all be over before you know it.
Right after the Citizens United ruling was announced in 2010, I said that in future decades, people will look back at this time and say, "This is where it all started, this is the exact point in time where everything started to go to hell." I believed then and I more firmly believe now, that the Citizens United ruling will go down in history as one of the absolute worst, if not THE worst, Supreme Court ruling ever. The only ways to correct this spectacularly bad ruling is for the Supreme Court to reverse itself in a future case and admit they had made a truly awful, terrible ruling (very unlikely) or for Congress to willingly pass laws turning off the spigot to an unlimited supply of corporate money pouring into their campaigns. Yeah, THAT'LL happen. Citizens United is a stunningly, breathtakingly bad example of how horribly wrong things can go.
I believe the full effect of that ruling in the future will be far, far worse than anything we can imagine today. It will be seen as the day democracy died.
Democracy itself has a long and storied history, originating with the ancient Greeks and spreading to many areas of the world since then. It has gone through refinements and tweaking, as all dynamic, living ideas will, but there comes a time when a tweak will turn into something much more toxic and poisonous.
Big news this week was the attempted recall of governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker. Walker and the other Republican bloodsuckers in that state went on a rampage against public sector unions - you know, representing all those greedy and overpaid teachers, police officers and firefighters - and passed unprecedented legislation to take away their collective bargaining rights, which had been in place for decades. Blaming the unions for being the source of a huge budget deficit, Walker and his stooges decided that the bargaining rights were at the root of everything that ever went wrong anywhere since the beginning of time, and they had to go. People of all types went understandably nuts, and huge protests paralyzed the state capitol daily. The country was treated to the extraordinary spectacle of Democratic state legislators fleeing to a neighboring state to avoid a quorum in the legislature to pass the heinous bill.
All this was a blatant and obvious attempt at union busting, since unions are widely seen as sympathetic to Democrats and a source of campaign funds for them. Republicans hate employee unions, for lots of reasons. They're seen as fighting for annoyances such as fair treatment of workers, equitable wages and benefits, and for taking profit out of the coffers of corporations. Back in the 1950s and 1960s unions had great power, but the advent of the right-to-work movements in states, particular southern states, curtailed that power.
Unions have been on the run for a long time now due to rapidly declining membership and influence, and Republicans smelled blood. They took a gamble on creating a showdown with the unions, and Wisconsin became the crucible for that battle. Recall petitions were signed and an election was scheduled. At first it seemed that Walker would be shown the door in quick fashion, but a little problem cropped up.
It seems that the US Supreme Court ruled on something called the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010. That ruling stated that "the First Amendment prohibited the government from restricting independent political expenditures by corporations and unions." This meant that corporations and other outside influences, could dump as much money as they wanted into elections to try and sway the outcome. When the ruling came down, the entire country gasped in stunned disbelief at such an outlandish concept - that corporations have a measure of freedom of speech, and that can somehow be transmuted into enormous amounts of money being allowed to pour into an electoral system already choked to death with special-interest dollars. That's like giving a smoker with stage 4 lung cancer a carton of cigarettes and saying, "Enjoy them, there's lots more where they came from!"
Also aided by a ridiculous loophole in Wisconsin law which imposed a $10K upper limit on contributions to the Democratic challenger, Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett, but not on incumbent Walker, Republican money poured in. The national Republican Reichstag regarded this as a test case, a prelude to the presidential election this fall, and pulled out all the stops to win. The following graphic tells you everything you need to know about the amount of money that poured into that state, and where it came from:
The Wisconsin media was flooded with nonstop advertising, and Republican Z-listers like Nikki Haley, some trollop governor from somewhere who is portrayed as a Tea Party "rising star" (read: amoral famewhore), was dragged in for campaign appearances. The Republican blitzkrieg worked, and Walker won the election 54% to 45%. And therein came the death of democracy.
It is an epically tragic commentary on the political system of this country that, in a very real sense, whoever has the most money wins. Money buys advertising, and with enough of it, opinions can be swayed. It's really sad that so many voters can be influenced by what they see on television or in print, and accept it without one iota of critical thought. Some people believe anything they see on television, and Citizens United just opened up the floodgates for a huge torrent of biased, blatantly prejudiced misinformation to rush in, and the financial backers of this tsunami of bullshit don't even have to tell you who they are.
The Wisconsin recall was only a little glimpse into hell, a tiny preview of the carnage that's going to happen in the upcoming November elections. As a direct result of Citizens United, it's been estimated that the Republican side will raise and spend a billion dollars trying to buy the White House and the Senate. And the gods help us all, they may very well do it.
For democracy to work, it's absolutely critical that those being governed are informed, engaged and fully participating in the process. That's the part that's missing. American voters are by far too lazy, ignorant and uneducated to learn enough about the issues facing them to make intelligent choices. Instead, they choose to let other people tell them what to think and do, and their vote will go for whoever created the slickest and most eye-catching political advertisement. For the vast majority of voters, that is far easier than actually "learning" about the problems they have and "making good choices". Let Rush Limbaugh and the Koch brothers tell you what to do. Just sit back, pop open another brewski, and pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. It will all be over before you know it.
Right after the Citizens United ruling was announced in 2010, I said that in future decades, people will look back at this time and say, "This is where it all started, this is the exact point in time where everything started to go to hell." I believed then and I more firmly believe now, that the Citizens United ruling will go down in history as one of the absolute worst, if not THE worst, Supreme Court ruling ever. The only ways to correct this spectacularly bad ruling is for the Supreme Court to reverse itself in a future case and admit they had made a truly awful, terrible ruling (very unlikely) or for Congress to willingly pass laws turning off the spigot to an unlimited supply of corporate money pouring into their campaigns. Yeah, THAT'LL happen. Citizens United is a stunningly, breathtakingly bad example of how horribly wrong things can go.
I believe the full effect of that ruling in the future will be far, far worse than anything we can imagine today. It will be seen as the day democracy died.
Thursday, December 15, 2011
Dump the Trump
The Republican presidential nomination process is like a toilet overflowing with backed-up sewage. Things just seem to lurch from ridiculous to horribly awful. Part circus freak show, part media shitstorm from hell, this political Theatre of the Damned is like a really unfunny caricature of what a nominating process would be if all the participants were dangerously mentally ill, addicted to meth, and completely and utterly without morals or any redeeming value whatsoever.
In retrospect it seems that Tim Pawlenty made the best move ever when he bailed out of this revolving crapfest early, only because he was as boring as white bread with mayonnaise and nobody liked him at all. He has since become a full-time pimp for Romney, but even that is a huge step up from associating with the likes of Batshit Bachmann and Rick Santoilet, even though Pawlenty is blatantly campaigning for the vice-president spot on the ticket, should Romney be nominated.
These past couple of months have seen the spectacular flame-out of Rick Perry, governor of Texas and once regarded as a shoo-in for the nomination. An astonishingly unqualified and incompetent candidate, his callousness and limitless stupidity rapidly became too apparent to ignore because of a series of jaw-dropping gaffes, flubs and misstatements. How anyone could even consider this simple-minded dolt as Oval Office material shows how degraded and corrupted the American political system has become. I said it before, but Perry has succeeded in what was universally regarded as an impossible task - making George W. Bush look good.
We also witnessed the equally-spectacular downfall of Herman Cain, a black conservative who seemed to revel gleefully in a level of arrogant stupidity usually reserved for politicians in the Deep South or the Arizona state legislature. I don't know if he really thought his faux-populist shtick of acting like jus'-plain-folks was going to catapult him into the White House, but he openly mocked and ridiculed things that any President would have to take seriously, as with his "Uz-Becky-Becky-Becky-Stan-Stan" comment. For a while, his poll numbers were inexplicably rising, but the media firestorm about his penchant for cheating on his wife and breaking his marriage vows (such is the Republican "family values" rule - do as I say, not as I do) will kind of serve as a pre-echo for what will happen to fellow candidate Newt Gingrich should he survive this process and make it to the general election.
There is nothing to be said about bottom-feeding, second-tier candidates Michelle Bachmann and Rick Santoilet that hasn't been said before, so I will skip over them and give them the attention they deserve, which is none at all. I will mention that Bachmann's latest mental health call-for-help is her statement about the Iraq war, saying that we should not pull our troops out after 8.5 bloody, hideously expensive years but instead stay there longer. I think the $800 billion that that ill-advised conflagration cost this country will haunt us for a much longer time than Bachmann will spend in a mental institution after she is inevitably committed.
The grandest media grandstand of all for this blathering smorgasbord of idiots, dopes, bigots and racists has been the debates, which amounts to a well-lit, televised, cautionary tale of what might happen if human evolution suddenly reversed itself several million years. The comparatively-sane John Huntsman and Ron Paul were also thrown into this toxic stew of ignorance, presumably for a sassy little splash of color.
The cast of ancillary supporting characters that came along with this pathetic parade of drones and morons is equally appalling. Sarah Palin had the national news media inexplicably enthralled for a while, waiting for her to say she's in the running for President. Luckily even a slatternly egomaniac like her realized that it would be pointless. Land whale and future Subway sandwich spokesblimp Chris Christie threatened to jump into the running, and the thought of him jumping anywhere is enough to send you running for the nearest earthquake shelter, but decided otherwise when he noted that every comedian in the country was dredging up every fat joke known to man and aiming them at him. Suprisingly, dimwitted amateur witch Christine O'Donnell appeared out of nowhere and endorsed Mitt Romney's candidacy, saying that she likes him "because he's been consistent since he changed his mind." I did NOT make that up.
But there is one person in this repellent, unsavory witches-brew of recessive genetics who has consistently proven over and over again that tacky, classless and boorish behavior knows no socioeconomic boundaries, and that is oafish, stubby-fingered vulgarian Donald Trump. Whether he is beating the bushes with that tired, discredited birther nonsense or staging a publicity-stunt campaign for presidency himself, this roadkill-crested gargoyle has shown there is no depth too low for him to sink to in order to keep his name in the public eye. Feeding on self-promotion like a vampire feeds on Type O negative, Trump has shown a preternaturally creepy talent for turning one of his many ridiculous screw-ups into a publicity bonanza for himself and his obnoxious, flatulent image. The latest fiasco was to stage a Republican debate with Trump as moderator. When only two of the candidates agreed to show up and all the others refused, the "debate" was exposed for the absurd fraud that is was, and was canceled. Just how f**ked up do you have to be to make Michelle Bachmann think you're too crazy to deal with? I don't think there's a way to measure that.
This has got to be the weirdest, most bizarre and depressing nomination season in decades, and it shows no sign of dying down. Now, the flabby, pudgy-faced Newt Gingrich, him of the three wives, is having his turn at the top of the polls, but even Republican pundits expect him to start falling pretty darned soon. And for some unknown, damnable reason we have to be concerned with what a bunch of overweight, pasty-faced, religious-nutjob farmers in Iowa are thinking about as their January 3rd caucuses draw near. I mean, who gives two shits about what those idiots think? They are not even slightly representative of the American populace and their opinions should not even matter. All this points out how irretrievably wrecked and poisonous the American political system is. It's probably the worst possible way to pick the person to fill the most critically important job in the world.
In retrospect it seems that Tim Pawlenty made the best move ever when he bailed out of this revolving crapfest early, only because he was as boring as white bread with mayonnaise and nobody liked him at all. He has since become a full-time pimp for Romney, but even that is a huge step up from associating with the likes of Batshit Bachmann and Rick Santoilet, even though Pawlenty is blatantly campaigning for the vice-president spot on the ticket, should Romney be nominated.
These past couple of months have seen the spectacular flame-out of Rick Perry, governor of Texas and once regarded as a shoo-in for the nomination. An astonishingly unqualified and incompetent candidate, his callousness and limitless stupidity rapidly became too apparent to ignore because of a series of jaw-dropping gaffes, flubs and misstatements. How anyone could even consider this simple-minded dolt as Oval Office material shows how degraded and corrupted the American political system has become. I said it before, but Perry has succeeded in what was universally regarded as an impossible task - making George W. Bush look good.
We also witnessed the equally-spectacular downfall of Herman Cain, a black conservative who seemed to revel gleefully in a level of arrogant stupidity usually reserved for politicians in the Deep South or the Arizona state legislature. I don't know if he really thought his faux-populist shtick of acting like jus'-plain-folks was going to catapult him into the White House, but he openly mocked and ridiculed things that any President would have to take seriously, as with his "Uz-Becky-Becky-Becky-Stan-Stan" comment. For a while, his poll numbers were inexplicably rising, but the media firestorm about his penchant for cheating on his wife and breaking his marriage vows (such is the Republican "family values" rule - do as I say, not as I do) will kind of serve as a pre-echo for what will happen to fellow candidate Newt Gingrich should he survive this process and make it to the general election.
There is nothing to be said about bottom-feeding, second-tier candidates Michelle Bachmann and Rick Santoilet that hasn't been said before, so I will skip over them and give them the attention they deserve, which is none at all. I will mention that Bachmann's latest mental health call-for-help is her statement about the Iraq war, saying that we should not pull our troops out after 8.5 bloody, hideously expensive years but instead stay there longer. I think the $800 billion that that ill-advised conflagration cost this country will haunt us for a much longer time than Bachmann will spend in a mental institution after she is inevitably committed.
The grandest media grandstand of all for this blathering smorgasbord of idiots, dopes, bigots and racists has been the debates, which amounts to a well-lit, televised, cautionary tale of what might happen if human evolution suddenly reversed itself several million years. The comparatively-sane John Huntsman and Ron Paul were also thrown into this toxic stew of ignorance, presumably for a sassy little splash of color.
The cast of ancillary supporting characters that came along with this pathetic parade of drones and morons is equally appalling. Sarah Palin had the national news media inexplicably enthralled for a while, waiting for her to say she's in the running for President. Luckily even a slatternly egomaniac like her realized that it would be pointless. Land whale and future Subway sandwich spokesblimp Chris Christie threatened to jump into the running, and the thought of him jumping anywhere is enough to send you running for the nearest earthquake shelter, but decided otherwise when he noted that every comedian in the country was dredging up every fat joke known to man and aiming them at him. Suprisingly, dimwitted amateur witch Christine O'Donnell appeared out of nowhere and endorsed Mitt Romney's candidacy, saying that she likes him "because he's been consistent since he changed his mind." I did NOT make that up.
But there is one person in this repellent, unsavory witches-brew of recessive genetics who has consistently proven over and over again that tacky, classless and boorish behavior knows no socioeconomic boundaries, and that is oafish, stubby-fingered vulgarian Donald Trump. Whether he is beating the bushes with that tired, discredited birther nonsense or staging a publicity-stunt campaign for presidency himself, this roadkill-crested gargoyle has shown there is no depth too low for him to sink to in order to keep his name in the public eye. Feeding on self-promotion like a vampire feeds on Type O negative, Trump has shown a preternaturally creepy talent for turning one of his many ridiculous screw-ups into a publicity bonanza for himself and his obnoxious, flatulent image. The latest fiasco was to stage a Republican debate with Trump as moderator. When only two of the candidates agreed to show up and all the others refused, the "debate" was exposed for the absurd fraud that is was, and was canceled. Just how f**ked up do you have to be to make Michelle Bachmann think you're too crazy to deal with? I don't think there's a way to measure that.
This has got to be the weirdest, most bizarre and depressing nomination season in decades, and it shows no sign of dying down. Now, the flabby, pudgy-faced Newt Gingrich, him of the three wives, is having his turn at the top of the polls, but even Republican pundits expect him to start falling pretty darned soon. And for some unknown, damnable reason we have to be concerned with what a bunch of overweight, pasty-faced, religious-nutjob farmers in Iowa are thinking about as their January 3rd caucuses draw near. I mean, who gives two shits about what those idiots think? They are not even slightly representative of the American populace and their opinions should not even matter. All this points out how irretrievably wrecked and poisonous the American political system is. It's probably the worst possible way to pick the person to fill the most critically important job in the world.
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
This Just In: Time Marches On!
My, my, I've been really bad lately. It's been over a month since I've posted anything here. I know, the world has not ended but it hasn't gotten measurably better, has it? Coincidence? I think not.
Autumn is in full swing here and I must say I am really enjoying the weather. We've had a little bit of rain recently and it's made everything smell and look wonderful. My roses bushes in the front of the house are blooming, and these autumn roses are quite beautiful. Even better, the little shamrocks in the front are growing like crazy and getting their little white flowers on them. I have these shamrocks that grow every year, they will be lush and green with dozens if not hundreds of little white flowers that open during the day and close at night. They'll do that until it starts getting hot, next May, and then the die off, only to remain dormant throughout the hot summer, and start to grow again right around Halloween.
I've been busy writing, just not in my blog. I am writing Chapter 7 of my "Archangel Chronicles" book, my science fiction opus. This chapter is called "Fallen Angels" and one of the things I am going to deal with is the death of a major character. I love writing stories, because it allows me explore my own emotions through my characters. It allows me to take a look at my own beliefs and analyze them. "Fallen Angels" is about death and betrayal, about growing older and feeling left behind as the world changes all around you, and about the value of friendship and relations with others.
I've been working pretty hard on "Fallen Angels" for the past two weeks, and that's the way I write. I usually have two or three writing projects going on at the same time. Sometimes, I'll be working on one project and another project will suddenly become ready to write, so I will switch projects and concentrate on the newer. An idea will bang around inside my head, sometimes for months and even a year or more, and then all of a sudden it will be ready to write, and then it just pours out. Sometimes I can't even keep up with how fast the story evolves and comes out. When I'm in this dedicated writing mode, I think about the story incessantly, night and day. Usually I spend two to three hours every night writing, until I get everything out of my head and written in a Word document.
I am also writing a book of rabbit stories, titled "Songs of Abundance and Beauty: The Stories of Josiah." I have three stories completed out of a projected 8 to 10 individual stories. I have an idea for another Josiah story but it is not ready yet. I tried to start writing it back in the spring but it just wasn't fulled developed yet. I have no doubt when it is ready, it will come pouring out of me, as the other stories have.
There are some really silly, ridiculous things going on with the Republican race for their presidential nominee. Far too much nonsense has transpired since stubby-fingered vulgarian Donald Trump insulted everyone's intelligence with his ersatz faux-candidacy for me to really address everything individually. Trump's "candidacy" was much more of a publicity stunt or a failed reality show than a serious attempt at a presidential run, and he certainly did not present himself in the best possible light during that exercise in stupidity. But plenty of other candidates have stepped up and showed the world in amazing detail just how stupid, ignorant and pathetic Republicans can be.
There's Mitt Romney, who has apparently been running for president since 1994 and hopefully taking his final crack at it right now. He is an arrogant, two-faced, hypocritical liar, and will say and do anything, no matter how contradictory or ridiculous, to get votes. His Mormon background is doing him no favors, and it will be hard to imagine all the good-ole-boys and bigoted Christian fundamentalists getting behind someone whose religion is widely regarded as a dangerous cult of people wearing magic underwear.
Texas governor Rick Perry burst on to the scene last spring with much fanfare, and he was widely expected to coast into an easy win as the Republicans' choice. Trouble is, there were a couple of little bumps in the road, and those bumps were his own stupidity. It's hard to believe that someone would make a complete idiotic dunderhead like George W. Bush look halfways intelligent, but damned if Perry doesn't do that. Perry is an astonishing dope, totally without class or any redeeming qualities, and was definitely proven during a recent televised debate how totally and utterly unqualified he is to be anything other than governor of Texas. Because apparently Texans elect only stupid idiots to be their governor.
The very execrable, loathsome Newt Gingrich has somehow decided he needs to run for President this year, even though he has more bad baggage and generalized ickiness from his multiple marriages and two decades in politics than he can ever get over in the general election. Maybe this is his last attempt at some kind of relevance since his heyday, such as it was, was fully 15 years ago. Anyway, he is far less intelligent than he or his supporters like to believe, and if he gets the Republican nomination, that's fine by me, because he will be shredded like Chinese chicken during the general election.
Herman Cain, what is there to say about him? A black conservative whose every speech and pronouncement is a celebration of idiocy and stupidity, Cain is a gender-and-race mirror-image of Sarah Palin. Pizza Boy is being called on the carpet for his predilection for getting touchy-feely with women who crossed his path when he was head of the National Restaurant Association. He seems to have an eye for blonde white women, and when one of them tried to blow the whistle on his hanky-panky, he had the Restaurant Association pay her a whole year's salary if she would just shut her trap and go away. Then he insists that such pay-offs are standard practice in the world of Washington lobbyists, because apparently no one in that line of work can keep their hands to themselves. Now all these little dalliances and indiscretions are starting to come back to haunt him, like the Ghosts of Pizzas Past, and personally I think it would be a lot of fun to watch if it wasn't so stomach-turning and just plain tawdry.
There are a couple more people, like Ron Paul and John Huntsman, who are far too normal and comparatively sane to be attractive to the conservative scumbags and batshit-crazy Tea Partiers that make up most of the Republican party these days. Then you get to the really mentally ill, beyond-batshit candidates like Michelle Bachmann and Rich Santoilet. There's not much I can say about either of them, other than the fact that Bachmann needs some very serious and intensive mental health care, along with her gigantic nelly queer of a husband, and Santoilet needs to get laid or something because he's just far too sanctimonious and fake-pious for this planet. Realistically neither of these "candidates" has a snowball's chance in hell of getting anywhere near the White House, which is as it should be, and Bachmann in particular needs to go back to wherever she came from and spend her days exchanging shoes and underwear with her "husband."
My prediction is that Mitt Romney will be the Republican nominee and will go against Obama in the 2012 election. Unless there is some major economic disaster in this country, in which the stock market drops below half its current value, or the Eurozone completely collapses, or North Korea or Iran lose their minds and start waving nukes in the air, Obama will coast to his second term. The Republicans themselves will tell you they are very unhappy and unenthusiastic about the current roster of candidates, and that will be their downfall in November, 2012.
As for me, I'm just going to continue caring for my rabbits, writing my stories, painting my artwork, spending time with my friends, and enjoying life every single day.
Autumn is in full swing here and I must say I am really enjoying the weather. We've had a little bit of rain recently and it's made everything smell and look wonderful. My roses bushes in the front of the house are blooming, and these autumn roses are quite beautiful. Even better, the little shamrocks in the front are growing like crazy and getting their little white flowers on them. I have these shamrocks that grow every year, they will be lush and green with dozens if not hundreds of little white flowers that open during the day and close at night. They'll do that until it starts getting hot, next May, and then the die off, only to remain dormant throughout the hot summer, and start to grow again right around Halloween.
I've been busy writing, just not in my blog. I am writing Chapter 7 of my "Archangel Chronicles" book, my science fiction opus. This chapter is called "Fallen Angels" and one of the things I am going to deal with is the death of a major character. I love writing stories, because it allows me explore my own emotions through my characters. It allows me to take a look at my own beliefs and analyze them. "Fallen Angels" is about death and betrayal, about growing older and feeling left behind as the world changes all around you, and about the value of friendship and relations with others.
I've been working pretty hard on "Fallen Angels" for the past two weeks, and that's the way I write. I usually have two or three writing projects going on at the same time. Sometimes, I'll be working on one project and another project will suddenly become ready to write, so I will switch projects and concentrate on the newer. An idea will bang around inside my head, sometimes for months and even a year or more, and then all of a sudden it will be ready to write, and then it just pours out. Sometimes I can't even keep up with how fast the story evolves and comes out. When I'm in this dedicated writing mode, I think about the story incessantly, night and day. Usually I spend two to three hours every night writing, until I get everything out of my head and written in a Word document.
I am also writing a book of rabbit stories, titled "Songs of Abundance and Beauty: The Stories of Josiah." I have three stories completed out of a projected 8 to 10 individual stories. I have an idea for another Josiah story but it is not ready yet. I tried to start writing it back in the spring but it just wasn't fulled developed yet. I have no doubt when it is ready, it will come pouring out of me, as the other stories have.
There are some really silly, ridiculous things going on with the Republican race for their presidential nominee. Far too much nonsense has transpired since stubby-fingered vulgarian Donald Trump insulted everyone's intelligence with his ersatz faux-candidacy for me to really address everything individually. Trump's "candidacy" was much more of a publicity stunt or a failed reality show than a serious attempt at a presidential run, and he certainly did not present himself in the best possible light during that exercise in stupidity. But plenty of other candidates have stepped up and showed the world in amazing detail just how stupid, ignorant and pathetic Republicans can be.
There's Mitt Romney, who has apparently been running for president since 1994 and hopefully taking his final crack at it right now. He is an arrogant, two-faced, hypocritical liar, and will say and do anything, no matter how contradictory or ridiculous, to get votes. His Mormon background is doing him no favors, and it will be hard to imagine all the good-ole-boys and bigoted Christian fundamentalists getting behind someone whose religion is widely regarded as a dangerous cult of people wearing magic underwear.
Texas governor Rick Perry burst on to the scene last spring with much fanfare, and he was widely expected to coast into an easy win as the Republicans' choice. Trouble is, there were a couple of little bumps in the road, and those bumps were his own stupidity. It's hard to believe that someone would make a complete idiotic dunderhead like George W. Bush look halfways intelligent, but damned if Perry doesn't do that. Perry is an astonishing dope, totally without class or any redeeming qualities, and was definitely proven during a recent televised debate how totally and utterly unqualified he is to be anything other than governor of Texas. Because apparently Texans elect only stupid idiots to be their governor.
The very execrable, loathsome Newt Gingrich has somehow decided he needs to run for President this year, even though he has more bad baggage and generalized ickiness from his multiple marriages and two decades in politics than he can ever get over in the general election. Maybe this is his last attempt at some kind of relevance since his heyday, such as it was, was fully 15 years ago. Anyway, he is far less intelligent than he or his supporters like to believe, and if he gets the Republican nomination, that's fine by me, because he will be shredded like Chinese chicken during the general election.
Herman Cain, what is there to say about him? A black conservative whose every speech and pronouncement is a celebration of idiocy and stupidity, Cain is a gender-and-race mirror-image of Sarah Palin. Pizza Boy is being called on the carpet for his predilection for getting touchy-feely with women who crossed his path when he was head of the National Restaurant Association. He seems to have an eye for blonde white women, and when one of them tried to blow the whistle on his hanky-panky, he had the Restaurant Association pay her a whole year's salary if she would just shut her trap and go away. Then he insists that such pay-offs are standard practice in the world of Washington lobbyists, because apparently no one in that line of work can keep their hands to themselves. Now all these little dalliances and indiscretions are starting to come back to haunt him, like the Ghosts of Pizzas Past, and personally I think it would be a lot of fun to watch if it wasn't so stomach-turning and just plain tawdry.
There are a couple more people, like Ron Paul and John Huntsman, who are far too normal and comparatively sane to be attractive to the conservative scumbags and batshit-crazy Tea Partiers that make up most of the Republican party these days. Then you get to the really mentally ill, beyond-batshit candidates like Michelle Bachmann and Rich Santoilet. There's not much I can say about either of them, other than the fact that Bachmann needs some very serious and intensive mental health care, along with her gigantic nelly queer of a husband, and Santoilet needs to get laid or something because he's just far too sanctimonious and fake-pious for this planet. Realistically neither of these "candidates" has a snowball's chance in hell of getting anywhere near the White House, which is as it should be, and Bachmann in particular needs to go back to wherever she came from and spend her days exchanging shoes and underwear with her "husband."
My prediction is that Mitt Romney will be the Republican nominee and will go against Obama in the 2012 election. Unless there is some major economic disaster in this country, in which the stock market drops below half its current value, or the Eurozone completely collapses, or North Korea or Iran lose their minds and start waving nukes in the air, Obama will coast to his second term. The Republicans themselves will tell you they are very unhappy and unenthusiastic about the current roster of candidates, and that will be their downfall in November, 2012.
As for me, I'm just going to continue caring for my rabbits, writing my stories, painting my artwork, spending time with my friends, and enjoying life every single day.
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Delicious Dilemma
I know I said I was going to stay away from political rants but sometimes they are just too good to pass up. As always, anything that makes Republicans look even more idiotic and loathsome than they naturally are makes me squeal and giggle like a Girl Scout who just sold all her cookies to the fat family down the street.
The 2012 Presidential election is still a year and a half away but the campaign is just getting started. The Democrats know who their nominee is going to be, so no issues there. All eyes are focused on the Republicans and their gaggle of potential candidates. And what a load of creepy, disgusting and appalling dirtbags they are. They range from the merely tiresome and eccentric, such as Texas Representative Ron Paul - who has been down this road a number of times and failed miserably, and will do so again - to really despicable, toxically ignorant buttheads like Romney, Gingrich, Santorum, Bachmann, Pawlenty and just about everyone else in that sorry Theater of the Inbred that is the G.O.P.
Luckily the sun appears to be setting on a couple of the more misguided candidates. The nation was diverted, willingly or not, for a couple weeks by the sad, sorry sideshow of Donald Trump, egomaniac, narcissist par excellence, and stubby-fingered vulgarian who did what he does best, promote himself and his hair to anyone who will pay attention. He thought he had a winning issue with the "birther" controversy, until their intended target Barack Obama produced a valid Hawaii birth certificate for himself and permanently shut down that little cottage industry. Right afterward, all the gas went out of Trump's presidential bid, but not before he tried to take credit for everything from the birth certificate itself to the killing of Osama bin Laden. By that time the rest of the country wised up to what a charlatan and cheap huckster Trump is and has been merciless in their criticism and condemnation of him for wasting all our time with his bullshit. And rightfully so.
Newt Gingrich's ill-advised presidential bid was barely out of the gate when he stumbled and landed right on his Pillsbury-doughboy face. He made the unforgivable sin of criticizing Paul Ryan's Economic Plan/Welfare for the Super Rich on Meet The Press last Sunday. The Republicans are pinning all their hopes on Ryan's plan, and they know they absolutely need to get everyone in the G.O.P. on board with it. The Newtster must have missed that memo, because he called Ryan's plan "right-wing social engineering," among other things, and was immediately drop-kicked by nearly every Republican pundit around and taken to task in the harshest possible terms. His remarks were in direct contrast to Ronald Reagan's golden rule, "Thou shalt not speak ill of fellow Republicans." Newter suddenly realized he stepped into a vast sea of manure of his own making, and clumsily tried to make amends by accusing the mainstream media of tripping him up with a deliberate "gotcha" question, but even Republican spin-meisters knows the only person who "got" Gingrich was himself. Watch his support and money dry up faster than the leathery skin of his weirdly robotic, bug-eyed wife.
So, who's left in this assortment of assholes, I mean, candidates? Mitt Romney, the apparent front-runner, has a huge amount of baggage he brought with him from his time as Governor of Massachusetts, where he put in place a universal health care system which was the model for Obama's health care reform package, something that Republicans absolutely love to hate and are trying to derail every way possible. Rick Santorum from Pennsylvania stepped on a land mine when he criticized John McCain for knowing nothing about enhanced interrogation, a.k.a. torture. I think McCain knows a little bit about torture, after five years of it when he was a Vietnam era P.O.W., and military service is an experience that Santorum has notably missed. It seems the G.O.P.'s best hope for the White House, Mike Huckabee, is happier being a much older, really ugly version of Ricki Lake on his own surreal, cringe-inducing talk show.
The B-listers on the G.O.P. side don't fare much better. Tim Pawlenty is universally regarded as terminally boring and bland. Current Governor of Indiana Mitch Daniels is also regarded as profoundly charisma-challenged. Former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson does not attend church, is pro-choice, and is in favor of legalizing marijuana, so he has zero chance with the drooling, knuckle-dragging evangelicals that dominate the early primaries. Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin are holding up the batshit-crazy wing of the party. South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham is burdened with a southern accent, which automatically makes you sound stupid and retarded, so no thanks, I don't think so.
And then there are the Z-listers, people who think they can run as a Republican through some confluence of massive self-delusion and mental illness. These include the token black candidate Herman Cain - former CEO of Godfather Pizza, a real pre-requisite for the White House; former U.N. ambassador John Bolton - who is like some weird hybrid of Mark Twain and Charles Manson; gay-rights activist Fred Karger - HAHAHAHA!; career flight attendant Tom Miller - also HAHAHAHA!; and Houston businessman Vern Wuensche. This is the second go-round for ol' Vern, who campaigned in 2008 and came in tenth in Iowa and New Hampshire before bailing out. His campaign material makes the interesting assertion that "businesses which survive do so through the good decisions of those who run them and they are therefore exceptionally qualified for public office," which is, of course, a totally awesome thing to say.
So, for this field of potential office-seekers, which completely covers the whole range of qualities from "abysmal" to "vile" and back, their first test of electoral viability will be the Iowa caucuses. Set in the monochromatic, frozen wastes of Iowa in winter, the candidates must put on their best evangelical-Christian, Sunday-go-to-meetin' clothes and work hard to appeal to one of most homogenous, non-diverse, and non-representative populations in the entire country. Required to cozy up to mostly old, white, obese farmers and their bloated, bovine wives, the candidates will be elbowing each other out of the way to get to the extreme-conservative end of the political spectrum. And thus we have the delicious dilemma that I mentioned about half a million words ago - namely that the Republicans need to appeal to the far-right-wing-nutcase branch of the party to get through the primaries, and then have to back-track and refute everything they said and scramble to the political center to appeal to everyone else in the general election. You can be sure that the Democrats will be closely watching every bit of action in the early primaries and the attack ads will practically write themselves. The Republicans have clearly painted themselves into a political corner early on, by casting their lot with the ultra-conservative factions in this country and they will have a terrible time trying to get the independent voters they so desperately need in the general election.
And I will be watching their struggle with a huge amount of gleeful satisfaction.
The 2012 Presidential election is still a year and a half away but the campaign is just getting started. The Democrats know who their nominee is going to be, so no issues there. All eyes are focused on the Republicans and their gaggle of potential candidates. And what a load of creepy, disgusting and appalling dirtbags they are. They range from the merely tiresome and eccentric, such as Texas Representative Ron Paul - who has been down this road a number of times and failed miserably, and will do so again - to really despicable, toxically ignorant buttheads like Romney, Gingrich, Santorum, Bachmann, Pawlenty and just about everyone else in that sorry Theater of the Inbred that is the G.O.P.
Luckily the sun appears to be setting on a couple of the more misguided candidates. The nation was diverted, willingly or not, for a couple weeks by the sad, sorry sideshow of Donald Trump, egomaniac, narcissist par excellence, and stubby-fingered vulgarian who did what he does best, promote himself and his hair to anyone who will pay attention. He thought he had a winning issue with the "birther" controversy, until their intended target Barack Obama produced a valid Hawaii birth certificate for himself and permanently shut down that little cottage industry. Right afterward, all the gas went out of Trump's presidential bid, but not before he tried to take credit for everything from the birth certificate itself to the killing of Osama bin Laden. By that time the rest of the country wised up to what a charlatan and cheap huckster Trump is and has been merciless in their criticism and condemnation of him for wasting all our time with his bullshit. And rightfully so.
Newt Gingrich's ill-advised presidential bid was barely out of the gate when he stumbled and landed right on his Pillsbury-doughboy face. He made the unforgivable sin of criticizing Paul Ryan's Economic Plan/Welfare for the Super Rich on Meet The Press last Sunday. The Republicans are pinning all their hopes on Ryan's plan, and they know they absolutely need to get everyone in the G.O.P. on board with it. The Newtster must have missed that memo, because he called Ryan's plan "right-wing social engineering," among other things, and was immediately drop-kicked by nearly every Republican pundit around and taken to task in the harshest possible terms. His remarks were in direct contrast to Ronald Reagan's golden rule, "Thou shalt not speak ill of fellow Republicans." Newter suddenly realized he stepped into a vast sea of manure of his own making, and clumsily tried to make amends by accusing the mainstream media of tripping him up with a deliberate "gotcha" question, but even Republican spin-meisters knows the only person who "got" Gingrich was himself. Watch his support and money dry up faster than the leathery skin of his weirdly robotic, bug-eyed wife.
So, who's left in this assortment of assholes, I mean, candidates? Mitt Romney, the apparent front-runner, has a huge amount of baggage he brought with him from his time as Governor of Massachusetts, where he put in place a universal health care system which was the model for Obama's health care reform package, something that Republicans absolutely love to hate and are trying to derail every way possible. Rick Santorum from Pennsylvania stepped on a land mine when he criticized John McCain for knowing nothing about enhanced interrogation, a.k.a. torture. I think McCain knows a little bit about torture, after five years of it when he was a Vietnam era P.O.W., and military service is an experience that Santorum has notably missed. It seems the G.O.P.'s best hope for the White House, Mike Huckabee, is happier being a much older, really ugly version of Ricki Lake on his own surreal, cringe-inducing talk show.
The B-listers on the G.O.P. side don't fare much better. Tim Pawlenty is universally regarded as terminally boring and bland. Current Governor of Indiana Mitch Daniels is also regarded as profoundly charisma-challenged. Former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson does not attend church, is pro-choice, and is in favor of legalizing marijuana, so he has zero chance with the drooling, knuckle-dragging evangelicals that dominate the early primaries. Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin are holding up the batshit-crazy wing of the party. South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham is burdened with a southern accent, which automatically makes you sound stupid and retarded, so no thanks, I don't think so.
And then there are the Z-listers, people who think they can run as a Republican through some confluence of massive self-delusion and mental illness. These include the token black candidate Herman Cain - former CEO of Godfather Pizza, a real pre-requisite for the White House; former U.N. ambassador John Bolton - who is like some weird hybrid of Mark Twain and Charles Manson; gay-rights activist Fred Karger - HAHAHAHA!; career flight attendant Tom Miller - also HAHAHAHA!; and Houston businessman Vern Wuensche. This is the second go-round for ol' Vern, who campaigned in 2008 and came in tenth in Iowa and New Hampshire before bailing out. His campaign material makes the interesting assertion that "businesses which survive do so through the good decisions of those who run them and they are therefore exceptionally qualified for public office," which is, of course, a totally awesome thing to say.
So, for this field of potential office-seekers, which completely covers the whole range of qualities from "abysmal" to "vile" and back, their first test of electoral viability will be the Iowa caucuses. Set in the monochromatic, frozen wastes of Iowa in winter, the candidates must put on their best evangelical-Christian, Sunday-go-to-meetin' clothes and work hard to appeal to one of most homogenous, non-diverse, and non-representative populations in the entire country. Required to cozy up to mostly old, white, obese farmers and their bloated, bovine wives, the candidates will be elbowing each other out of the way to get to the extreme-conservative end of the political spectrum. And thus we have the delicious dilemma that I mentioned about half a million words ago - namely that the Republicans need to appeal to the far-right-wing-nutcase branch of the party to get through the primaries, and then have to back-track and refute everything they said and scramble to the political center to appeal to everyone else in the general election. You can be sure that the Democrats will be closely watching every bit of action in the early primaries and the attack ads will practically write themselves. The Republicans have clearly painted themselves into a political corner early on, by casting their lot with the ultra-conservative factions in this country and they will have a terrible time trying to get the independent voters they so desperately need in the general election.
And I will be watching their struggle with a huge amount of gleeful satisfaction.
Friday, December 31, 2010
Year-End Roundup
On the last day of December, as 2010 slithers out the back door with its forked tail between its legs, let's take a look back at the travesty that was this year. And what a load of crap it was.
Let's get to the annual Stupidest State of the Year award. This award goes to one of the 50 states which has scaled the heights of batshit-craziness and has truly embarrassed itself (and the rest of the nation) on a planetary scale. To review, here are the criteria used to assess the idiocy:
1) General level of inborn stupidity among the residents
2) Venal, corrupt or insane governor/executive branch
3) Prevailing religious tyranny
4) Batshit-crazy or fundamentalist-controlled regulators or legislature
5) Potential for global embarrassment and species degradation
And the nominees this year are:
1) Alaska - this state continues to blaze new trails in the frontiers of stupidity, due mostly to its most infamous quitter-ex-governor, Sarah Palin. Like a hideous, never-ending bout of herpes, Palin continues to pollute the airwaves and insult everyone on earth with her deadheaded idiocy and non-stop doltishness. Always choosing to heap insult upon injury, she not only came out with another completely stupid, utterly pointless and unnecessary book, but also was in a reality show on the TLC channel (and everyone at TLC can die in a fire for inflicting this pile of stinking, festering manure on us). She had company this summer in the form of Joe Miller, the Tea Party candidate for Senate, a creepy-crusty guy who lost in a write-in election to the incumbent and at this writing is still fighting his loss in court. To Joe Miller: STFU. You lost, no one wants you. Go away and take Palin with you.
2) Arizona - I really didn't think this state could get any more ridiculous and insane, but they sure proved me wrong in the midterm elections. Not only did the clueless, idiotic voters in this state elect as governor the moldering, decomposing remains of some ancient, disease-ridden hooker, but somehow decided that putting more Republicans in office than ever will somehow make things better. Obviously letting their racism and bigotry do the thinking for them, Arizona has indeed taken several giant steps backward into the morass of ignorance from whence it came. This is such a beautiful state, but the politics are incredibly hateful, moronic and depressing.
3) Florida - The Sunshine State appeared to be spiraling into a sinkhole of dumbness this summer with some weird three-way race between Tea Party token-Hispanic candidate Marco Rubio, some other guy and Charlie Crist, doing something completely incomprehensible for some unknown reason. Everyone was hoping that a hurricane would blow in from somewhere and sweep all the crazy nutjobs out to sea, but that would leave the state with a population of maybe a couple hundred people.
4) New Jersey - this state got a huge black eye with the advent of Jersey Shore, and even when the show picked up its greasy self and went to South Beach in Florida, New Jersey still suffered. Now a huge snowstorm has buried most of the state in 2 feet of snow. If I was a Christian I would say that God is punishing those people with bad weather for all the horrendously stupid things they did but then I realize that if that were true, then I would be dodging meteor storms and cataclysmic earthquakes for living in Arizona.
5) South Carolina - The people of S.C. will always be damned for inflicting a weird, vicious, insane creep like Jim DeMint on the national scene. It's almost as if some monster chewed up and swallowed Tom DeLay, got sick, and vomited up Jim DeMint. The Democratic candidate for Senate this fall was someone named Alvin Greene, I think, and seeing him on television painfully struggling to say something even remotely sensible was sad and pathetic to the extreme. Apparently, someone has talked him into running for some other office, which is a damned shame, like making fun of retarded people. Hey, South Carolina, ENOUGH ALREADY!
Quite the sorry slate this year, but the decision is in: The Stupidest State is ... ARIZONA! Yes indeed, the state where I live has busted through to the front of the pack and has left everyone (almost everyone - Alaska was a close second) in its dust. It's become clear that Arizonans are not even bothering to disguise their racism, since all politics in this state turn on the illegal immigration issue. That was the source of the Republican sweep of this state. Most analysts agree that earlier in the year, polls indicated that the deceased, insect-like Jan Brewer was stumbling clumsily through her term-without-a-mandate as governor and would surely lose to the Democratic candidate. Then she signed SB 1070, the infamous statute which, besides making everyone in this state look like a prejudiced pinhead, gives law enforcement Nazi-like powers to compel dark-skinned people to "show their papers" on demand. The Arizona voters surmised that if a Democrat was in the governor's office, that bill would not have been signed; and in fact if Janet Napolitano had still been governor, there's no way that bill would have become law. So, if one Republican in high office garnered such good results, then putting them in all the other state offices would be a great idea, they thought. Except that it's not. This state has solidified the perception that the country has of us - of a bunch of boorish, poorly-educated, trailer-park meth-heads who hate immigrants. Because of the astonishingly fabulous job this state has done in sabotaging its own image and portraying itself in the worst possible light, it truly deserves the Stupidest State of the Year Award.
The pop-culture wreckage of this year is all over the landscape, dominated by a really annoying little anal fissure named Justin Bieber. He seems to be fancying himself as some sort of rapper/crooner and is cobbling together something vaguely resembling a career from the ritalin-addled obsessions of hordes of 12-year-old girls, for whom watching the same miserable music video on YouTube 2500 times is just another day. I think there's a real good chance that his expiration date is coming up soon and he will be pushed to the sidelines by some other marginally-talented young twerp who will capture the illicit, pre-pubescent attentions of the tweeners. Eww, it was unpleasant to even write that sentence. Ferociously trying to claw their way back from the desert of obscurity on one of those blindingly pathetic New Year's Eve shows (and yes, we still love you Dick Clark but for God's sake GIVE IT UP ALREADY!) is the two-headed monster calling itself the "New Kids On The Block/Backstreet Boys Reunion," to which I pose a simple question: WHY??? Way too old to be cute and too lightweight to be taken seriously, these people need to do something with their lives. And fast.
I was trying to think of good things that happened this year, but I came up short. It's been a tough year on all levels. I think back of all the beautiful, wonderful bunnies we've lost - Duncan, Alyce-Michele, Eliza, Sage, Fuzzy, Amelia - to name a very few, and I start to realize how depressing this year has been. The year ends more poorly than it started, it has been a net loss emotionally and spiritually. I would like to think 2011 will be better, but I have little reason to be optimistic.
Let's get to the annual Stupidest State of the Year award. This award goes to one of the 50 states which has scaled the heights of batshit-craziness and has truly embarrassed itself (and the rest of the nation) on a planetary scale. To review, here are the criteria used to assess the idiocy:
1) General level of inborn stupidity among the residents
2) Venal, corrupt or insane governor/executive branch
3) Prevailing religious tyranny
4) Batshit-crazy or fundamentalist-controlled regulators or legislature
5) Potential for global embarrassment and species degradation
And the nominees this year are:
1) Alaska - this state continues to blaze new trails in the frontiers of stupidity, due mostly to its most infamous quitter-ex-governor, Sarah Palin. Like a hideous, never-ending bout of herpes, Palin continues to pollute the airwaves and insult everyone on earth with her deadheaded idiocy and non-stop doltishness. Always choosing to heap insult upon injury, she not only came out with another completely stupid, utterly pointless and unnecessary book, but also was in a reality show on the TLC channel (and everyone at TLC can die in a fire for inflicting this pile of stinking, festering manure on us). She had company this summer in the form of Joe Miller, the Tea Party candidate for Senate, a creepy-crusty guy who lost in a write-in election to the incumbent and at this writing is still fighting his loss in court. To Joe Miller: STFU. You lost, no one wants you. Go away and take Palin with you.
2) Arizona - I really didn't think this state could get any more ridiculous and insane, but they sure proved me wrong in the midterm elections. Not only did the clueless, idiotic voters in this state elect as governor the moldering, decomposing remains of some ancient, disease-ridden hooker, but somehow decided that putting more Republicans in office than ever will somehow make things better. Obviously letting their racism and bigotry do the thinking for them, Arizona has indeed taken several giant steps backward into the morass of ignorance from whence it came. This is such a beautiful state, but the politics are incredibly hateful, moronic and depressing.
3) Florida - The Sunshine State appeared to be spiraling into a sinkhole of dumbness this summer with some weird three-way race between Tea Party token-Hispanic candidate Marco Rubio, some other guy and Charlie Crist, doing something completely incomprehensible for some unknown reason. Everyone was hoping that a hurricane would blow in from somewhere and sweep all the crazy nutjobs out to sea, but that would leave the state with a population of maybe a couple hundred people.
4) New Jersey - this state got a huge black eye with the advent of Jersey Shore, and even when the show picked up its greasy self and went to South Beach in Florida, New Jersey still suffered. Now a huge snowstorm has buried most of the state in 2 feet of snow. If I was a Christian I would say that God is punishing those people with bad weather for all the horrendously stupid things they did but then I realize that if that were true, then I would be dodging meteor storms and cataclysmic earthquakes for living in Arizona.
5) South Carolina - The people of S.C. will always be damned for inflicting a weird, vicious, insane creep like Jim DeMint on the national scene. It's almost as if some monster chewed up and swallowed Tom DeLay, got sick, and vomited up Jim DeMint. The Democratic candidate for Senate this fall was someone named Alvin Greene, I think, and seeing him on television painfully struggling to say something even remotely sensible was sad and pathetic to the extreme. Apparently, someone has talked him into running for some other office, which is a damned shame, like making fun of retarded people. Hey, South Carolina, ENOUGH ALREADY!
Quite the sorry slate this year, but the decision is in: The Stupidest State is ... ARIZONA! Yes indeed, the state where I live has busted through to the front of the pack and has left everyone (almost everyone - Alaska was a close second) in its dust. It's become clear that Arizonans are not even bothering to disguise their racism, since all politics in this state turn on the illegal immigration issue. That was the source of the Republican sweep of this state. Most analysts agree that earlier in the year, polls indicated that the deceased, insect-like Jan Brewer was stumbling clumsily through her term-without-a-mandate as governor and would surely lose to the Democratic candidate. Then she signed SB 1070, the infamous statute which, besides making everyone in this state look like a prejudiced pinhead, gives law enforcement Nazi-like powers to compel dark-skinned people to "show their papers" on demand. The Arizona voters surmised that if a Democrat was in the governor's office, that bill would not have been signed; and in fact if Janet Napolitano had still been governor, there's no way that bill would have become law. So, if one Republican in high office garnered such good results, then putting them in all the other state offices would be a great idea, they thought. Except that it's not. This state has solidified the perception that the country has of us - of a bunch of boorish, poorly-educated, trailer-park meth-heads who hate immigrants. Because of the astonishingly fabulous job this state has done in sabotaging its own image and portraying itself in the worst possible light, it truly deserves the Stupidest State of the Year Award.
The pop-culture wreckage of this year is all over the landscape, dominated by a really annoying little anal fissure named Justin Bieber. He seems to be fancying himself as some sort of rapper/crooner and is cobbling together something vaguely resembling a career from the ritalin-addled obsessions of hordes of 12-year-old girls, for whom watching the same miserable music video on YouTube 2500 times is just another day. I think there's a real good chance that his expiration date is coming up soon and he will be pushed to the sidelines by some other marginally-talented young twerp who will capture the illicit, pre-pubescent attentions of the tweeners. Eww, it was unpleasant to even write that sentence. Ferociously trying to claw their way back from the desert of obscurity on one of those blindingly pathetic New Year's Eve shows (and yes, we still love you Dick Clark but for God's sake GIVE IT UP ALREADY!) is the two-headed monster calling itself the "New Kids On The Block/Backstreet Boys Reunion," to which I pose a simple question: WHY??? Way too old to be cute and too lightweight to be taken seriously, these people need to do something with their lives. And fast.
I was trying to think of good things that happened this year, but I came up short. It's been a tough year on all levels. I think back of all the beautiful, wonderful bunnies we've lost - Duncan, Alyce-Michele, Eliza, Sage, Fuzzy, Amelia - to name a very few, and I start to realize how depressing this year has been. The year ends more poorly than it started, it has been a net loss emotionally and spiritually. I would like to think 2011 will be better, but I have little reason to be optimistic.
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Idiocracy in the Desert
There was a sci fi/fantasy movie a couple of years ago called "Idiocracy," in which a really stupid person went into some kind of hibernation and woke up 500 years later, to find that society had been so thoroughly dumbed-down that he was now the smartest person on the planet. In a really depressing example of life imitating art, one can have a similar experience in Arizona and you don't even have to hibernate for five centuries. Usually five minutes will do it.
The midterm elections are history, and not a moment too soon. While such elections are typically hostile toward the party in power, these were particularly ugly. The American electorate can always be counted on to make a stunning variety of horrible choices at every turn, picking the most batshit-crazy, bigoted and ignorant candidates imaginable. It's almost like the Republicans or the Tea Partiers or whatever the hell they are calling themselves nowadays said, "Hey America! Check out this completely insane, repellent, moronic candidate we dredged up from under a giant pile of manure. Nobody in their right mind would vote for this mess, right?" And America says, "Are you kidding? Of course we'll vote for them! We can't wait to get to the polls to make sure all levels of government are overstuffed with the most incompetent, racist, prejudiced and paranoid-schizophrenic people available!" After all, we are Americans and that's what we do.
The US House of Representatives now has a Republican majority although the Senate still stays under Democratic control, albeit with less of a majority than before. There were a few bright spots on the national level, with the tragically mentally ill Sharron Angle losing to incumbent Senator Harry Reid in Nevada. Thank you so much, Nevada, you have restored my faith in you more than you can know. Thank you, Delaware, for soundly defeating and humiliating witch fetishist and secret masturbation addict (you know she is) Christine O'Donnell. Thank you, California, for electing Jerry Brown and retaining Barbara Boxer. I'm really not that excited about legalizing marijuana although I do support the idea. Thank you, West Virginia, for sending your Democratic governor to the Senate. And thank you, New York, for sending that pasty-faced tub of bacon grease Carl Paladino back to whatever mutant alien breeding farm he came from. I take tremendous satisfaction in all their failures, especially since it is a big slap in the face to the braying, grating Sarah Palin, who strongly backed a lot of the losers. It was a bad night for some other of her so-called "mama grizzlies" as Carly Fiorini, Linda McMahon and Meg Whitman very deservingly went down to defeat despite Palin's endorsements. The words "Sarah Palin" and "loser" go together so very well.
We were also subjected to the monumentally surreal, stomach-churning spectacle of the presumptive next Speaker of the House John Boner, I mean Boehner, blubbering and slobbering on national television at how he worked so hard overcoming so many obstacles in his life to get to where he is. If he worked one-tenth as hard on his legislative efforts as he does trying to look like a fluorescent carrot with his cheap skin bronzer, he might have something to talk about. His display last night was cringe-worthy to the extreme, and the ick factor was way off the scale. It's going to be really tough having to listen to his maudlin sentimentality and overwrought stupidity for the next two years.
But the really disgusting stuff was reserved for the state of Arizona (big surprise), the worst being that we will have to put up with the decaying, disgusting remains of Jan Brewer in the governor's office for the next four years. How this puckered, haggard, old sarcophagus even walks around by herself is a mystery, since corpses are usually not that ambulatory and she looks like she died a good 20 years ago. There are 3,000-year-old Egyptian mummies in the British museum that look much better than she does.
All this has to do with SB 1070, Arizona's anti-immigrant law. That is the sole basis for Brewer's success, since her blinding stupidity, overwhelming incompetence and all-around repulsiveness would normally scare away most people. SB 1070 was also the centerpiece of all the other Republican campaigns, as they loudly crowed their undying support for that misguided measure, and undoubtedly was a big factor in returning the bill's chief architect, the corpulent, sweaty Russell Pearce of Mesa, to office. Voters have figured out that if previous governor Janet Napolitano (i.e. any Democrat) had still been in office that bill would never have been signed. Brewer, as all Republicans do, found a way to appeal to the basest, most prejudiced and degenerate aspects of human nature and harness them for their benefit. You have to hand it to the Repugnantans, they sure know how to take an enormous pile of shit and build it into an empire.
The only good thing that happened here is that shockingly, Arizona voters were smart enough to reject an NRA-backed initiative, Proposition 109, which would have amended the state constitution to make hunting and fishing a right. I think what frightened most people is the prospect of the state legislature making wildlife management decisions, because it is well known that they can and will screw up absolutely everything they touch. Dear NRA: Eat shit and die. Love, Steve. But in fact Republicans have increased their stranglehold on the government of this wretched, benighted state by sweeping their candidates into most state-level offices.
It's baffling to me why so many middle-class people vote Republican, even though it is directly contrary to their own economic interests. Republicans have and always will be the puppet-party of the ultra-wealthy, seeking huge tax breaks for their rich donors at the expense of the lower classes at every possible turn. They've even taken to hiding behind the facade of "small businesses," seeking to keep Bush-era tax breaks for the upper-class in place because they say a lot of these so-called "upper-class taxpayers" are really small business owners. When in reality, small businesses make up a tiny minority of the over-$250,000 a year taxpayers. Just as they maintain the estate tax is a bad idea because it makes hard-working farm families pay taxes on the family farm when the owner dies, when in fact it just shields the wealthy from paying taxes on their vast accumulated money. They also say rich people should get tax breaks because they will invest that money in other businesses, which is probably true if you own a yacht showroom, ski resort or a Lexus dealership, but mostly this "trickle-down" theory of economics is a cruel, self-serving hoax.
Looking forward, the Republicans are now in charge of the House of Representatives, and they will be shouldering at least part of the responsibility for whatever happens next. They will no longer be able to blame the Democrats for everything that has happened since the dawn of history, because they now have some power. Power comes with accountability - a very painful lesson the Democrats have learned - and the Republicans may not like having to actually answer to voters for the bad stuff that will inevitably come down the pike. Also they may find out that getting in bed with the Tea Party might not be as wonderful an experience as they imagined, since a lot of the T.P.-ers have been just as hostile to Republicans as they are to Democrats. But I'm sure we haven't seen the last of Representative Boner, I mean Boehner, sniveling and blubbering on television about his wonderful life, while the rest of the country suffers. It's painfully obvious that "embarrassment" and "shame" are two concepts completely alien to Republicans.
The midterm elections are history, and not a moment too soon. While such elections are typically hostile toward the party in power, these were particularly ugly. The American electorate can always be counted on to make a stunning variety of horrible choices at every turn, picking the most batshit-crazy, bigoted and ignorant candidates imaginable. It's almost like the Republicans or the Tea Partiers or whatever the hell they are calling themselves nowadays said, "Hey America! Check out this completely insane, repellent, moronic candidate we dredged up from under a giant pile of manure. Nobody in their right mind would vote for this mess, right?" And America says, "Are you kidding? Of course we'll vote for them! We can't wait to get to the polls to make sure all levels of government are overstuffed with the most incompetent, racist, prejudiced and paranoid-schizophrenic people available!" After all, we are Americans and that's what we do.
The US House of Representatives now has a Republican majority although the Senate still stays under Democratic control, albeit with less of a majority than before. There were a few bright spots on the national level, with the tragically mentally ill Sharron Angle losing to incumbent Senator Harry Reid in Nevada. Thank you so much, Nevada, you have restored my faith in you more than you can know. Thank you, Delaware, for soundly defeating and humiliating witch fetishist and secret masturbation addict (you know she is) Christine O'Donnell. Thank you, California, for electing Jerry Brown and retaining Barbara Boxer. I'm really not that excited about legalizing marijuana although I do support the idea. Thank you, West Virginia, for sending your Democratic governor to the Senate. And thank you, New York, for sending that pasty-faced tub of bacon grease Carl Paladino back to whatever mutant alien breeding farm he came from. I take tremendous satisfaction in all their failures, especially since it is a big slap in the face to the braying, grating Sarah Palin, who strongly backed a lot of the losers. It was a bad night for some other of her so-called "mama grizzlies" as Carly Fiorini, Linda McMahon and Meg Whitman very deservingly went down to defeat despite Palin's endorsements. The words "Sarah Palin" and "loser" go together so very well.
We were also subjected to the monumentally surreal, stomach-churning spectacle of the presumptive next Speaker of the House John Boner, I mean Boehner, blubbering and slobbering on national television at how he worked so hard overcoming so many obstacles in his life to get to where he is. If he worked one-tenth as hard on his legislative efforts as he does trying to look like a fluorescent carrot with his cheap skin bronzer, he might have something to talk about. His display last night was cringe-worthy to the extreme, and the ick factor was way off the scale. It's going to be really tough having to listen to his maudlin sentimentality and overwrought stupidity for the next two years.
But the really disgusting stuff was reserved for the state of Arizona (big surprise), the worst being that we will have to put up with the decaying, disgusting remains of Jan Brewer in the governor's office for the next four years. How this puckered, haggard, old sarcophagus even walks around by herself is a mystery, since corpses are usually not that ambulatory and she looks like she died a good 20 years ago. There are 3,000-year-old Egyptian mummies in the British museum that look much better than she does.
All this has to do with SB 1070, Arizona's anti-immigrant law. That is the sole basis for Brewer's success, since her blinding stupidity, overwhelming incompetence and all-around repulsiveness would normally scare away most people. SB 1070 was also the centerpiece of all the other Republican campaigns, as they loudly crowed their undying support for that misguided measure, and undoubtedly was a big factor in returning the bill's chief architect, the corpulent, sweaty Russell Pearce of Mesa, to office. Voters have figured out that if previous governor Janet Napolitano (i.e. any Democrat) had still been in office that bill would never have been signed. Brewer, as all Republicans do, found a way to appeal to the basest, most prejudiced and degenerate aspects of human nature and harness them for their benefit. You have to hand it to the Repugnantans, they sure know how to take an enormous pile of shit and build it into an empire.
The only good thing that happened here is that shockingly, Arizona voters were smart enough to reject an NRA-backed initiative, Proposition 109, which would have amended the state constitution to make hunting and fishing a right. I think what frightened most people is the prospect of the state legislature making wildlife management decisions, because it is well known that they can and will screw up absolutely everything they touch. Dear NRA: Eat shit and die. Love, Steve. But in fact Republicans have increased their stranglehold on the government of this wretched, benighted state by sweeping their candidates into most state-level offices.
It's baffling to me why so many middle-class people vote Republican, even though it is directly contrary to their own economic interests. Republicans have and always will be the puppet-party of the ultra-wealthy, seeking huge tax breaks for their rich donors at the expense of the lower classes at every possible turn. They've even taken to hiding behind the facade of "small businesses," seeking to keep Bush-era tax breaks for the upper-class in place because they say a lot of these so-called "upper-class taxpayers" are really small business owners. When in reality, small businesses make up a tiny minority of the over-$250,000 a year taxpayers. Just as they maintain the estate tax is a bad idea because it makes hard-working farm families pay taxes on the family farm when the owner dies, when in fact it just shields the wealthy from paying taxes on their vast accumulated money. They also say rich people should get tax breaks because they will invest that money in other businesses, which is probably true if you own a yacht showroom, ski resort or a Lexus dealership, but mostly this "trickle-down" theory of economics is a cruel, self-serving hoax.
Looking forward, the Republicans are now in charge of the House of Representatives, and they will be shouldering at least part of the responsibility for whatever happens next. They will no longer be able to blame the Democrats for everything that has happened since the dawn of history, because they now have some power. Power comes with accountability - a very painful lesson the Democrats have learned - and the Republicans may not like having to actually answer to voters for the bad stuff that will inevitably come down the pike. Also they may find out that getting in bed with the Tea Party might not be as wonderful an experience as they imagined, since a lot of the T.P.-ers have been just as hostile to Republicans as they are to Democrats. But I'm sure we haven't seen the last of Representative Boner, I mean Boehner, sniveling and blubbering on television about his wonderful life, while the rest of the country suffers. It's painfully obvious that "embarrassment" and "shame" are two concepts completely alien to Republicans.
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