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!
Showing posts with label senate. Show all posts
Showing posts with label senate. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
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.
Saturday, December 25, 2010
Christmas 2010
Here I am in the wee hours of Christmas morning, 2010. The house is quiet, all the bunnies are fed and getting ready for their bedtime. The doves are quiet after a late-night chorus of cooing that had almost all of them going off at the same time. I haven't the slightest idea what motivates them to start singing their songs so late at night, but I'm sure they have a good reason. All the outside lights are turned off and all is quiet and still. It's been over two weeks since I last wrote anything in this blog. I had an art project to finish and just found myself to be extremely busy. Whoever said that retirement would be boring did not know what they were talking about.
Time is running out on 2010, and I for one will be glad to see it go. Not a lot of real good things happened this year. Or maybe I should say, some good things did happen this year but they were outweighed and outnumbered by the not-so-good. This past week has seen a terrible spate of bunnies passing away - one was Sage (featured in a previous post in this blog), a very sweet mini-lop who had suffered through tremendous trials and tribulations but never once lost his beautiful personality nor his graceful serenity. Fuzzy was another bunny who had struggled with numerous health issues for quite a long time and was seemingly doing very well when he crashed on us and had to leave for the Bridge. I lost an injured cottontail that came to me with drooling from the mouth and a mysterious injury so bad that the poor bunny just faded away despite my best efforts. My dear friend Julia lost three of her beloved bunnies this year, two of whom (Duncan and Alyce-Michele) were born into my home on a chilly, damp, dark Tuesday in February 2004. I held them in the palm of my hand when they were mere hours old. In a way, losing them was like a parent outliving a child. There is a sense of great loss, disorientation and disorder, a sense that something happened out of sequence that should not have happened, in a perfect world.
But alas, I'm finding out over and over that this world is far from perfect. Politically, it was a pretty gruesome year, with the midterm elections putting more Republicans in high office than I can remember. In state government it was even worse, as most if not all high state offices went to the Republican candidates. The newly-elected president of the state senate is a crusty old troglodyte named Russell Pearce, who has unashamedly associated himself with Nazi and white supremacist groups in the recent past and does not even bother to conceal his rabid, vitriolic hatred for Hispanics. It's incomprehensible how someone could even consider voting for a vicious old creep like that. Expertly riding a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment, the desiccated, ancient remains of the eternally loathsome Jan Brewer got elected to a full term as governor of this wretched, godforsaken state. Looking like the dried-up husk of a gigantic praying mantis, we are going to be afflicted with her idiocy, stupidity and appalling appearance for the next four years, and that is a damned shame. The voters in this state have to be the stupidest, most hateful and bigoted people on this planet.
It really seems as if stupidity is on the ascendancy in this country. There is such a current of anti-intellectualism nationwide, as if it's a bad thing to have an education and speak and act intelligently. Instead we get the supremely annoying bleating of the incredibly obnoxious Sarah Palin, who insists on shooting off her big mouth every chance she gets and in the process says very little. She is single-handedly dumbing down America every time she opens her yap. Luckily we have heard very little from Sharron Angle, a hot mess of a Senate candidate from Nevada who must be living in another century, or from Christine O'Donnell of Delaware, another loser in a Senate race whose most memorable lines were in a television ad she ran claiming "I am not a witch," and "I'm just like you." God forbid anyone would be just like her. Between Palin, Angle and O'Donnell, women have absolutely nothing to be proud of with these public figures.
I know this country has suffered through periods of massive stupidity before, and we seemed to have gotten through it and survived. Certainly the Reagan administration in the 80s was an eight-year stretch of some of the most mendacious dumbness this country has ever had to slog through. Having a senile, fourth-rate hack actor for a president wasn't the worst of it, because fascist creeps like Alexander Haig, James Watt, Edwin Meese, and James Baker almost made Reagan look moderate. That's because there has always been a resiliency in the American spirit which has allowed it to get through periods of difficulty and somehow its innate better nature came through. There was a little bump of stupidity with the first George Bush presidency, but that was more creepy and weird than stupid. But with the enormous idiocy of George W. Bush, somehow stupidity has become a permanent feature of America and even after Bush we are showing no signs of coming out of it. Like a foreign weed, stupidity has taken root in this country and is spreading with every Republican that comes to office.
As the clock ticks down to 2011 there is a palpable sense, at least to me, that America's better days are behind her. Obama has been crowing mightily about this hot-shit compromise he made with Senate Republicans that back-loaded an additional $800 billion of debt onto this country. Although Obama promised in his 2008 campaign that his administration would be transparent and he would not be involved in backroom deals and bargaining sessions, that is exactly what it was - a quid-pro-quo that clearly ended up in the Republicans' favor by ensuring that the wealthiest one-percent of wage earners in this country would continue to live their opulent lifestyles thanks to the extension of the Bush tax cuts, while the middle-class continues to drown in debt and have their homes foreclosed. We have become a huge debtor nation to the Chinese, who will be sucking this country dry of all its money for many decades to come. In a very real way, young people just starting out in their careers today will be working for the Chinese for most of their lives.
Wealth and resources continue to drain out of this country at an alarming rate, and Congress and the President are content to look the other way and repeatedly postpone any meaningful (i.e., painful) remedies to the situation. We all know what has to be done, but no one has the political courage to do it. So we just pass the burden on to the next generation. What a horrible thing we are doing to children yet unborn, mortgaging their future and condemning them to live in a third-rate country, which is what the U.S. will be in a very short time.
So, I'm finding very little to be cheerful about this particular Christmas season. I'll be glad when it's over, I'm already violently sick and tired of all the awful commercials they show on television over and over again. The automobile commercials have been particularly galling. Who the hell gives new automobiles as Christmas gifts? Seriously, I've never met anyone who did that. Maybe I hang out with a different set of people, but that is just so out of my experience I can't imagine what it must be like. Crass commercialism and greed has been rampant this year, as always, but I've opted myself out of all the craziness and that has been a very good choice.
I can only hope 2011 will be a better year for everyone. I will absolutely not say that it couldn't get any worse, because I'm sure it can, but I sincerely hope we can get back to some good news and good things happening after the past two horrific years. But I have to say I have very little reason to be optimistic.
Time is running out on 2010, and I for one will be glad to see it go. Not a lot of real good things happened this year. Or maybe I should say, some good things did happen this year but they were outweighed and outnumbered by the not-so-good. This past week has seen a terrible spate of bunnies passing away - one was Sage (featured in a previous post in this blog), a very sweet mini-lop who had suffered through tremendous trials and tribulations but never once lost his beautiful personality nor his graceful serenity. Fuzzy was another bunny who had struggled with numerous health issues for quite a long time and was seemingly doing very well when he crashed on us and had to leave for the Bridge. I lost an injured cottontail that came to me with drooling from the mouth and a mysterious injury so bad that the poor bunny just faded away despite my best efforts. My dear friend Julia lost three of her beloved bunnies this year, two of whom (Duncan and Alyce-Michele) were born into my home on a chilly, damp, dark Tuesday in February 2004. I held them in the palm of my hand when they were mere hours old. In a way, losing them was like a parent outliving a child. There is a sense of great loss, disorientation and disorder, a sense that something happened out of sequence that should not have happened, in a perfect world.
But alas, I'm finding out over and over that this world is far from perfect. Politically, it was a pretty gruesome year, with the midterm elections putting more Republicans in high office than I can remember. In state government it was even worse, as most if not all high state offices went to the Republican candidates. The newly-elected president of the state senate is a crusty old troglodyte named Russell Pearce, who has unashamedly associated himself with Nazi and white supremacist groups in the recent past and does not even bother to conceal his rabid, vitriolic hatred for Hispanics. It's incomprehensible how someone could even consider voting for a vicious old creep like that. Expertly riding a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment, the desiccated, ancient remains of the eternally loathsome Jan Brewer got elected to a full term as governor of this wretched, godforsaken state. Looking like the dried-up husk of a gigantic praying mantis, we are going to be afflicted with her idiocy, stupidity and appalling appearance for the next four years, and that is a damned shame. The voters in this state have to be the stupidest, most hateful and bigoted people on this planet.
It really seems as if stupidity is on the ascendancy in this country. There is such a current of anti-intellectualism nationwide, as if it's a bad thing to have an education and speak and act intelligently. Instead we get the supremely annoying bleating of the incredibly obnoxious Sarah Palin, who insists on shooting off her big mouth every chance she gets and in the process says very little. She is single-handedly dumbing down America every time she opens her yap. Luckily we have heard very little from Sharron Angle, a hot mess of a Senate candidate from Nevada who must be living in another century, or from Christine O'Donnell of Delaware, another loser in a Senate race whose most memorable lines were in a television ad she ran claiming "I am not a witch," and "I'm just like you." God forbid anyone would be just like her. Between Palin, Angle and O'Donnell, women have absolutely nothing to be proud of with these public figures.
I know this country has suffered through periods of massive stupidity before, and we seemed to have gotten through it and survived. Certainly the Reagan administration in the 80s was an eight-year stretch of some of the most mendacious dumbness this country has ever had to slog through. Having a senile, fourth-rate hack actor for a president wasn't the worst of it, because fascist creeps like Alexander Haig, James Watt, Edwin Meese, and James Baker almost made Reagan look moderate. That's because there has always been a resiliency in the American spirit which has allowed it to get through periods of difficulty and somehow its innate better nature came through. There was a little bump of stupidity with the first George Bush presidency, but that was more creepy and weird than stupid. But with the enormous idiocy of George W. Bush, somehow stupidity has become a permanent feature of America and even after Bush we are showing no signs of coming out of it. Like a foreign weed, stupidity has taken root in this country and is spreading with every Republican that comes to office.
As the clock ticks down to 2011 there is a palpable sense, at least to me, that America's better days are behind her. Obama has been crowing mightily about this hot-shit compromise he made with Senate Republicans that back-loaded an additional $800 billion of debt onto this country. Although Obama promised in his 2008 campaign that his administration would be transparent and he would not be involved in backroom deals and bargaining sessions, that is exactly what it was - a quid-pro-quo that clearly ended up in the Republicans' favor by ensuring that the wealthiest one-percent of wage earners in this country would continue to live their opulent lifestyles thanks to the extension of the Bush tax cuts, while the middle-class continues to drown in debt and have their homes foreclosed. We have become a huge debtor nation to the Chinese, who will be sucking this country dry of all its money for many decades to come. In a very real way, young people just starting out in their careers today will be working for the Chinese for most of their lives.
Wealth and resources continue to drain out of this country at an alarming rate, and Congress and the President are content to look the other way and repeatedly postpone any meaningful (i.e., painful) remedies to the situation. We all know what has to be done, but no one has the political courage to do it. So we just pass the burden on to the next generation. What a horrible thing we are doing to children yet unborn, mortgaging their future and condemning them to live in a third-rate country, which is what the U.S. will be in a very short time.
So, I'm finding very little to be cheerful about this particular Christmas season. I'll be glad when it's over, I'm already violently sick and tired of all the awful commercials they show on television over and over again. The automobile commercials have been particularly galling. Who the hell gives new automobiles as Christmas gifts? Seriously, I've never met anyone who did that. Maybe I hang out with a different set of people, but that is just so out of my experience I can't imagine what it must be like. Crass commercialism and greed has been rampant this year, as always, but I've opted myself out of all the craziness and that has been a very good choice.
I can only hope 2011 will be a better year for everyone. I will absolutely not say that it couldn't get any worse, because I'm sure it can, but I sincerely hope we can get back to some good news and good things happening after the past two horrific years. But I have to say I have very little reason to be optimistic.
Saturday, November 20, 2010
November News Roundup
Here we are, ripping through November like Cher goes through costume changes at her concerts, and I haven't posted in a couple of weeks. It's been a busy month but let's look at what's been happening.
Those ugly midterm elections are history and we've certainly heard way too much about how the new crop of Repugnantans are descending on Washington like dimwitted locusts with bad haircuts. Right off the bat they are thumping their chests and setting their sites on undoing the health care reform bill passed earlier this year. They might find that a little more difficult than they think, because they have the illusory, overblown courage of someone who is putting way too much confidence in their own talents. The Republicans are going to find out all those Tea Party candidates who got swept into office like a gigantic toilet backing up are not going to just kowtow to everything that new Speaker of the House John Boner, I mean Boehner, spits out at them. Same with Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, who looks like a huge, bulgy-eyed catfish who was yanked out the the water and is gasping for air. Sweet Jesus, those Republicans are some of the most gawd-awful fugly bastards I've ever seen.
But what is shaping up to be a real battle is the extension of the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy. Set to expire at year's end, it would mean every taxpayer would be on the hook for higher taxes. The Democrats and the Obama administration want to keep the tax cuts for workers who make less than $250,000 a year but eliminate them for those who make more. Naturally the Republicans are apoplectic at the prospect of their wealthy overlords paying a penny more tax than they do now, and have vowed to hold a defense appropriations bill hostage until they get what they want. And just recently, the Republicans killed a bill which would have extended unemployment benefits for the millions of people still out of work.
Now let's think about this for a second, shall we? The Republicans want to extend tax breaks to the wealthiest 2% of our population, which would mean the whopping sum of $700 billion over 10 years would not fill the coffers of the Treasury, in this era of soaring deficits and recession-induced tax shortfalls. That is okay to them, but they don't want to extend benefits to all the unemployed people who have to do things like pay mortgages and buy food and pay utilities and send their kids to college. I can't think of anything else that has happened recently which more starkly points out the fact that the Republicans only serve the wealthiest Americans, and couldn't give a rat's ass about the people that actually do meaningful work in this country. After seeing this, it's impossible for me to understand how any middle- or lower-class voter could even think of voting Republican. This is what the Republicans do to people who are not wealthy - they take everything away from the middle class and shower it upon the rich and well-to-do, who already have much more money than they need. Why don't people comprehend this? It's not that difficult - Republicans only care about the rich. It is indeed that simple.
The Obama administration, still smarting from their ass-kicking at the polls, are flip-flopping all over the place and have all but sent up a flare indicating they are in the mood to compromise. The Republicans feel they have the momentum on their side, and they very well might. But if Obama caves to the Republicans and extends the tax breaks for the richest people, I am done with him. He can go directly to hell if he lets the Republicans have their way. It would be political suicide for him to do so, his liberal and progressive base would never forgive him. He would certainly lose my support. Instead of rolling over and playing dead for the Republicans, he needs to spit in their faces and tell them if you want a fight, you're going to get one, and then go to the mat on the tax break extensions, defense appropriations be damned. They need to find out what "party of NO" really means. Bipartisanship is dead, if it ever existed at all, and it's time for Obama and the Democrats to grow a pair and fight the Republicans with their own tactics.
Those ugly midterm elections are history and we've certainly heard way too much about how the new crop of Repugnantans are descending on Washington like dimwitted locusts with bad haircuts. Right off the bat they are thumping their chests and setting their sites on undoing the health care reform bill passed earlier this year. They might find that a little more difficult than they think, because they have the illusory, overblown courage of someone who is putting way too much confidence in their own talents. The Republicans are going to find out all those Tea Party candidates who got swept into office like a gigantic toilet backing up are not going to just kowtow to everything that new Speaker of the House John Boner, I mean Boehner, spits out at them. Same with Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, who looks like a huge, bulgy-eyed catfish who was yanked out the the water and is gasping for air. Sweet Jesus, those Republicans are some of the most gawd-awful fugly bastards I've ever seen.
But what is shaping up to be a real battle is the extension of the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy. Set to expire at year's end, it would mean every taxpayer would be on the hook for higher taxes. The Democrats and the Obama administration want to keep the tax cuts for workers who make less than $250,000 a year but eliminate them for those who make more. Naturally the Republicans are apoplectic at the prospect of their wealthy overlords paying a penny more tax than they do now, and have vowed to hold a defense appropriations bill hostage until they get what they want. And just recently, the Republicans killed a bill which would have extended unemployment benefits for the millions of people still out of work.
Now let's think about this for a second, shall we? The Republicans want to extend tax breaks to the wealthiest 2% of our population, which would mean the whopping sum of $700 billion over 10 years would not fill the coffers of the Treasury, in this era of soaring deficits and recession-induced tax shortfalls. That is okay to them, but they don't want to extend benefits to all the unemployed people who have to do things like pay mortgages and buy food and pay utilities and send their kids to college. I can't think of anything else that has happened recently which more starkly points out the fact that the Republicans only serve the wealthiest Americans, and couldn't give a rat's ass about the people that actually do meaningful work in this country. After seeing this, it's impossible for me to understand how any middle- or lower-class voter could even think of voting Republican. This is what the Republicans do to people who are not wealthy - they take everything away from the middle class and shower it upon the rich and well-to-do, who already have much more money than they need. Why don't people comprehend this? It's not that difficult - Republicans only care about the rich. It is indeed that simple.
The Obama administration, still smarting from their ass-kicking at the polls, are flip-flopping all over the place and have all but sent up a flare indicating they are in the mood to compromise. The Republicans feel they have the momentum on their side, and they very well might. But if Obama caves to the Republicans and extends the tax breaks for the richest people, I am done with him. He can go directly to hell if he lets the Republicans have their way. It would be political suicide for him to do so, his liberal and progressive base would never forgive him. He would certainly lose my support. Instead of rolling over and playing dead for the Republicans, he needs to spit in their faces and tell them if you want a fight, you're going to get one, and then go to the mat on the tax break extensions, defense appropriations be damned. They need to find out what "party of NO" really means. Bipartisanship is dead, if it ever existed at all, and it's time for Obama and the Democrats to grow a pair and fight the Republicans with their own tactics.
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Lazy, Hazy, Crazy Days
As we limp towards the home stretch of another summer season in paradise, it has been a little surprising how fast the time has gone. We're tearing through August like Lindsay Lohan through a gram of coke. Labor Day is in sight, although not here yet by a long shot, and this weekend promises to be toasty hot (112 degrees F./44 degrees C.) but thankfully dry. The monsoon season has been fairly decent in terms of rainfall, but not in the rafter-shaking thunderstorms that are so entertaining. But we have other means of entertainment, thanks to popular culture and politics.
The primary elections are in full swing, and I have stopped watching local television because of the torrent of boring, stupid, annoying and frankly pretty racist political ads that play in a non-stop rotation 24 hours a day. It seems the illegal immigration issue is a huge hot-button this year, and most candidates here are positioning themselves as far to the right on this topic as possible. Big, ugly, shaved-orangutan J.D. Hayworth, running for the decrepit John McCain's senate seat (and if there's any person who needs to be put out to pasture because he has LOSER written all over him, it's McCain), fairly comes right out and says illegal immigrants should be lined up against the border wall and shot. Hayworth's ads excoriate McCain for having "authored an amnesty bill with Ted Kennedy," as if that's the crime of the century, and McCain's ads seek to portray Hayworth as a really cheesy huckster. In any other context their little pissing contest would be mildly amusing, but in the end the Republican voter will have to choose between these two assholes and their choice will be the next Senator, because whatever tepid Democratic challenger won't have a snowball's chance in hell of winning in this abysmally stupid, wretched state.
Other parts of the country aren't faring much better. In Nevada there is something called Sharron Angle, who truly crawled out from under some radioactive garbage heap in the desert and is spewing her own brand of fundamentalist Christian-tinged idiocy all over the airwaves like fallout from some multi-megaton Stupid Bomb. Inbred skanksicle Sarah Palin continues to explore the outer reaches of ignorance by trying to convince us that "mama grizzlies" are some kind of political force to be reckoned with. According to that dimwitted hillbilly, "mama grizzlies" are conservative women who are fighting mad, but personally, I think the only reason you should label a woman a "mama grizzly" is because she's hairy, she stinks and she has a huge ass. This fabricated subclass of voters is nothing but Soccer Moms v2.0, or the gender-flip version of Angry White Men - something created by political consultants as a weak reflection of some aspect of voter discontent and given corporeal form by the media, who eagerly jump on any idiotic sociopolitical concept dangled in front of them, either out of boredom or complete intellectual bankruptcy. I guess it's some kind of peculiarly Alaskan type of insanity that pitbulls wearing lipstick and mama grizzly bears somehow make it into the national political dialogue. Another reason to hate the poorly-embalmed John McCain because if it wasn't for his clumsy and incompetent presidential campaign in 2008, we probably never would have heard of Palin.
Speaking of Alaska, which is rapidly becoming to this country what an outhouse is to a farm, former senator Ted Stevens died in a plane crash on some remote mountain earlier this week. My sympathies go to the other people who were on the plane, but to Stevens, not so much. He was a corrupt, greedy and arrogant old bastard who squandered millions if not billions of taxpayer dollars sending dozens of nonsensical pork-barrel spending projects to his state, presumably to make it easier for all the methamphetamine dealers to get around. And people try to cast him as some kind of respectable, noble leader. He was a CROOK who masterfully manipulated the admittedly arcane and ridiculous rules of the senate to do the bidding of his oil-company masters, in whose back pocket he very comfortably lived for his entire senate career. The way I see it, his death means one less conservative Republican in the world, and that by itself is a reason for great celebration.
And then there's the curious case of one Steven Slater, a Jet Blue flight attendant who had a little bit of a mental breakdown after a profanity-laced conflict with a passenger, and literally bailed out of the parked aircraft in spectacular fashion. Now, I have been on plenty of flights where passengers act like total assholes, doing swinish, selfish things and treating the in-flight personnel as drink-fetchers and personal assistants. Also, I have on occasion seen flight attendants act like total bitches and be as rude and contemptuous as possible toward passengers (who only do insignificant things like pay their salaries and provide them with employment), for no other reason then they can. This is particularly true of United Airlines, which has the nastiest flight attendants I have ever seen, and Northwest Airlines, which has the oldest and the crankiest. But the truth is, anywhere you work you will get extremely frustrated and fed-up with the bad aspects of the job and this particular person just snapped. I would not react well if some loathsome pig called me a m*f*er, but undoubtedly Slater did not handle the situation well. It was his job to be nice to idiots, no matter how awful they are. If he was an investment banker and someone did something rude to him on a plane, then yeah, he could rip them a new butthole. Nonetheless, I am on Team Slater and feel that he does need some kind of sanction for deploying the emergency slide, but jail time is so not appropriate. Not as long as Sarah Palin walks the world free.
So, I am going to sit back and relax this weekend, and enjoy my life without letting batshit-crazy political ads raise my blood pressure and ruin my day. I have a very sweet, playful little 5-week-old bunny named Desiree running around the house having a great time jumping and dancing and playing. I have lots of other rabbits whose sweetness and gentleness constantly make me realize what is truly important and valuable in this life. And for that, I am grateful.
The primary elections are in full swing, and I have stopped watching local television because of the torrent of boring, stupid, annoying and frankly pretty racist political ads that play in a non-stop rotation 24 hours a day. It seems the illegal immigration issue is a huge hot-button this year, and most candidates here are positioning themselves as far to the right on this topic as possible. Big, ugly, shaved-orangutan J.D. Hayworth, running for the decrepit John McCain's senate seat (and if there's any person who needs to be put out to pasture because he has LOSER written all over him, it's McCain), fairly comes right out and says illegal immigrants should be lined up against the border wall and shot. Hayworth's ads excoriate McCain for having "authored an amnesty bill with Ted Kennedy," as if that's the crime of the century, and McCain's ads seek to portray Hayworth as a really cheesy huckster. In any other context their little pissing contest would be mildly amusing, but in the end the Republican voter will have to choose between these two assholes and their choice will be the next Senator, because whatever tepid Democratic challenger won't have a snowball's chance in hell of winning in this abysmally stupid, wretched state.
Other parts of the country aren't faring much better. In Nevada there is something called Sharron Angle, who truly crawled out from under some radioactive garbage heap in the desert and is spewing her own brand of fundamentalist Christian-tinged idiocy all over the airwaves like fallout from some multi-megaton Stupid Bomb. Inbred skanksicle Sarah Palin continues to explore the outer reaches of ignorance by trying to convince us that "mama grizzlies" are some kind of political force to be reckoned with. According to that dimwitted hillbilly, "mama grizzlies" are conservative women who are fighting mad, but personally, I think the only reason you should label a woman a "mama grizzly" is because she's hairy, she stinks and she has a huge ass. This fabricated subclass of voters is nothing but Soccer Moms v2.0, or the gender-flip version of Angry White Men - something created by political consultants as a weak reflection of some aspect of voter discontent and given corporeal form by the media, who eagerly jump on any idiotic sociopolitical concept dangled in front of them, either out of boredom or complete intellectual bankruptcy. I guess it's some kind of peculiarly Alaskan type of insanity that pitbulls wearing lipstick and mama grizzly bears somehow make it into the national political dialogue. Another reason to hate the poorly-embalmed John McCain because if it wasn't for his clumsy and incompetent presidential campaign in 2008, we probably never would have heard of Palin.
Speaking of Alaska, which is rapidly becoming to this country what an outhouse is to a farm, former senator Ted Stevens died in a plane crash on some remote mountain earlier this week. My sympathies go to the other people who were on the plane, but to Stevens, not so much. He was a corrupt, greedy and arrogant old bastard who squandered millions if not billions of taxpayer dollars sending dozens of nonsensical pork-barrel spending projects to his state, presumably to make it easier for all the methamphetamine dealers to get around. And people try to cast him as some kind of respectable, noble leader. He was a CROOK who masterfully manipulated the admittedly arcane and ridiculous rules of the senate to do the bidding of his oil-company masters, in whose back pocket he very comfortably lived for his entire senate career. The way I see it, his death means one less conservative Republican in the world, and that by itself is a reason for great celebration.
And then there's the curious case of one Steven Slater, a Jet Blue flight attendant who had a little bit of a mental breakdown after a profanity-laced conflict with a passenger, and literally bailed out of the parked aircraft in spectacular fashion. Now, I have been on plenty of flights where passengers act like total assholes, doing swinish, selfish things and treating the in-flight personnel as drink-fetchers and personal assistants. Also, I have on occasion seen flight attendants act like total bitches and be as rude and contemptuous as possible toward passengers (who only do insignificant things like pay their salaries and provide them with employment), for no other reason then they can. This is particularly true of United Airlines, which has the nastiest flight attendants I have ever seen, and Northwest Airlines, which has the oldest and the crankiest. But the truth is, anywhere you work you will get extremely frustrated and fed-up with the bad aspects of the job and this particular person just snapped. I would not react well if some loathsome pig called me a m*f*er, but undoubtedly Slater did not handle the situation well. It was his job to be nice to idiots, no matter how awful they are. If he was an investment banker and someone did something rude to him on a plane, then yeah, he could rip them a new butthole. Nonetheless, I am on Team Slater and feel that he does need some kind of sanction for deploying the emergency slide, but jail time is so not appropriate. Not as long as Sarah Palin walks the world free.
So, I am going to sit back and relax this weekend, and enjoy my life without letting batshit-crazy political ads raise my blood pressure and ruin my day. I have a very sweet, playful little 5-week-old bunny named Desiree running around the house having a great time jumping and dancing and playing. I have lots of other rabbits whose sweetness and gentleness constantly make me realize what is truly important and valuable in this life. And for that, I am grateful.
Friday, April 30, 2010
Roller-Coaster Ride From Hell
This has been some kind of week; it's like the cosmic floodgates of crazy opened wide and unleashed a deluge, nearly drowning us in bizarre behavior and really bad things. I know that Mercury is in one of its frequent, damnable retrogrades until May 13, and that usually means strangeness and perversity will prevail, but Mercury must be retrograding itself clean out of the Solar System because tons of weird shit have been happening all over.
Oh, speaking of "shit", we heard that word, or variations of it, echoing off the august alabaster walls of Congress as Senate hearings into the vile machinations of Wall Street raged on for five hours. The leaders of various financial firms got their buns raked over the coals by angry Senators, but they must have been wearing asbestos underwear because they didn't seem to be much phased by the whole ordeal. Maybe when you know you're making 50 million dollars this year you don't need to take some crotchety old man with a gavel seriously. I think that Wall Streeters know that their lobbying money has bought them protection from any meaningful reform, especially because the people trying to navigate the country out of the crippling, damaging recession are the very same people who caused it. So they don't have anything to worry about.
Very disturbing story about an environmental catastrophe unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico as a British Petroleum oil rig spews over 200,000 gallons of crude oil a day into the rich seafood beds and delicate wetlands ecosystem off the Louisiana coast, a truly special and unique part of the world that can't seem to catch a break when it comes to natural disasters. I wonder where that shithead Sarah Palin is now - we don't seem to be hearing a lot from her on one of her favorite subjects, offshore drilling. Who can forget her childish, simplistic chant of "Drill, baby, drill" at last summer's Republican convention, and the sight of all those wrinkled, pinched faces of the dessicated old people madly cheering her on. If I could, I would ask her, "Hey Sarah, how's that drilly-spilly thing working for you?" We'll see how far offshore drilling goes now.
And we're having our own shitstorm here in Arizona, as the whole nation goes ape shit (yes, I'm going to use that word as much as I can, while I can). The local news shows babble on breathlessly about the economic "backlash" this bill will cause us. In sonorous tones they announce the conventions that are being canceled left and right. The first convention canceled was for some immigration lawyers' group, so that wasn't exactly a horrible shock. But hotel owners are already declaring Armageddon and claim to be teetering on the edge of ruin. Various big-city governments, most notably San Francisco, Dallas and New York, have cut business ties with our fair state. But we've seen this before - Arizona caught all kinds of crap when it refused to honor Martin Luther King. Despite all the dire predictions, over 60% of Arizonans approve of the new law and Governor-Without-A-Mandate Jan Brewer's approval rating has gone up around 15 percentage points. What does that say about us, that we somehow invite and look forward to economic ruin? I guess this little psychodrama has to play itself out and by next week everybody will have moved on to the next manufactured crisis, and life here will return to relative normalcy. People have very short memories, especially when it comes to disasters.
I hope we can get some rest this weekend and nothing awful happens for a couple of days, at least. It would be just our luck that some flashpoint in the world will pop off, like North Korea or Iran, and all of a sudden everybody's attention will go over there. Either that or some dimwitted Hollywood starlet will make another public appearance without panties or someone will uncover a nest of 50 new Tiger Woods mistresses or some shameless trollop will parade around in a bikini with Nazi tattoos on her butt. And everyone will be interested in that.
Mercury, give us a break and un-retrograde yourself. We can't stand much more of this cosmic craziness.
Oh, speaking of "shit", we heard that word, or variations of it, echoing off the august alabaster walls of Congress as Senate hearings into the vile machinations of Wall Street raged on for five hours. The leaders of various financial firms got their buns raked over the coals by angry Senators, but they must have been wearing asbestos underwear because they didn't seem to be much phased by the whole ordeal. Maybe when you know you're making 50 million dollars this year you don't need to take some crotchety old man with a gavel seriously. I think that Wall Streeters know that their lobbying money has bought them protection from any meaningful reform, especially because the people trying to navigate the country out of the crippling, damaging recession are the very same people who caused it. So they don't have anything to worry about.
Very disturbing story about an environmental catastrophe unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico as a British Petroleum oil rig spews over 200,000 gallons of crude oil a day into the rich seafood beds and delicate wetlands ecosystem off the Louisiana coast, a truly special and unique part of the world that can't seem to catch a break when it comes to natural disasters. I wonder where that shithead Sarah Palin is now - we don't seem to be hearing a lot from her on one of her favorite subjects, offshore drilling. Who can forget her childish, simplistic chant of "Drill, baby, drill" at last summer's Republican convention, and the sight of all those wrinkled, pinched faces of the dessicated old people madly cheering her on. If I could, I would ask her, "Hey Sarah, how's that drilly-spilly thing working for you?" We'll see how far offshore drilling goes now.
And we're having our own shitstorm here in Arizona, as the whole nation goes ape shit (yes, I'm going to use that word as much as I can, while I can). The local news shows babble on breathlessly about the economic "backlash" this bill will cause us. In sonorous tones they announce the conventions that are being canceled left and right. The first convention canceled was for some immigration lawyers' group, so that wasn't exactly a horrible shock. But hotel owners are already declaring Armageddon and claim to be teetering on the edge of ruin. Various big-city governments, most notably San Francisco, Dallas and New York, have cut business ties with our fair state. But we've seen this before - Arizona caught all kinds of crap when it refused to honor Martin Luther King. Despite all the dire predictions, over 60% of Arizonans approve of the new law and Governor-Without-A-Mandate Jan Brewer's approval rating has gone up around 15 percentage points. What does that say about us, that we somehow invite and look forward to economic ruin? I guess this little psychodrama has to play itself out and by next week everybody will have moved on to the next manufactured crisis, and life here will return to relative normalcy. People have very short memories, especially when it comes to disasters.
I hope we can get some rest this weekend and nothing awful happens for a couple of days, at least. It would be just our luck that some flashpoint in the world will pop off, like North Korea or Iran, and all of a sudden everybody's attention will go over there. Either that or some dimwitted Hollywood starlet will make another public appearance without panties or someone will uncover a nest of 50 new Tiger Woods mistresses or some shameless trollop will parade around in a bikini with Nazi tattoos on her butt. And everyone will be interested in that.
Mercury, give us a break and un-retrograde yourself. We can't stand much more of this cosmic craziness.
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Apocalypse Deferred
Personal note: Exactly one year ago this day I wrote the first entry in my new blog. In it I took Meghan McCain to task for being, well, Meghan McCain. Writing "Careless Whispers" has been a supremely interesting experience for me and I've enjoyed it very much. When I wrote my first entry I thought I would run out of things to say after like 5 posts but now, after 73 posts, I feel I'm just hitting my stride. Sometime this summer I will be posting my 100th entry and will take a look back then. But until that time, I thank everyone for reading my blog and the great feedback you have provided. You would do me a great honor if you continue to read my ramblings.
After more than a year of bickering and fighting, including a summer full of testy town hall meetings, innumerable marches and protests, the highly entertaining spectacle of insanely misspelled signs and endless commentary and disinformation campaigns, health care reform became law of the land when an obviously pleased Barack Obama signed the bill in a jubilant ceremony at the White House. As we are constantly reminded, the fight is not yet over and the Republicans are girding their wrinkled, pasty loins for an Armageddon scenario of plans to "repeal" the law and poke holes in the federal requirements under the guise of "states rights."
I suppose we can't expect the Republicans to do anything else, but graceful losers they are not. In fact on Sunday night when the House of Representatives was taking their final ratification votes the Repubs had to hide behind unborn babies and try to get the whole bill referred back to committee (e.g., killed) for not "protecting the unborn." This was preceded earlier in the afternoon by opponents screaming racist and homophobic slurs to members of Congress and even spitting at one of them. Such a lovely example to show the world. The attempt to use the abortion issue for their own nefarious purposes stunk to high heaven of back-against-the-wall desperation and scorched-earth policy - they were prepared to do anything, no matter how ridiculous or cowardly, to try to scuttle all the effort to reach this point. Luckily, it did not work, but it did result in the hilariously surrealistic scene of Rep. Bart Stupak, a staunch anti-abortionist and until then the darling of the Republican opposition for nearly torpedoing the whole bill over abortion funding, being called a "baby killer" by some misinformed moron from Texas.
So the legal challenges are only just starting, and we are going to hear about attempts to derail health care reform far into the foreseeable future. The task of carrying out reform has just begun and it's not going to be pretty or pleasant, despite all the other extremely pressing matters we must address as a nation. But probably the most important task that remains to be done is to get Rush Limbaugh out of the country, because he promised on his radio program in a very public fashion to leave the country if health care reform passes. I strongly believe we should hold him to that promise and get his big fat obnoxious ass out of the country and over to some other country we really hate, like North Korea. After all, if they threw his flabby bulk into a big stew pot and cooked him up, he could feed all of Pyongyang for over a year.
The Republicans are spitting mad and all look like they took a huge crap in their Depends and can't find anyone to change them. They are vowing revenge in the midterm elections and while that is not a threat to take lightly, so much can happen in six months and once the American people get to see that health care really will make many lives better, their attitudes will soften and maybe they'll see that it was a good idea after all. But history was truly made last Sunday, March 21, 2010, and we will be looking back on that date for many, many years to come.
After more than a year of bickering and fighting, including a summer full of testy town hall meetings, innumerable marches and protests, the highly entertaining spectacle of insanely misspelled signs and endless commentary and disinformation campaigns, health care reform became law of the land when an obviously pleased Barack Obama signed the bill in a jubilant ceremony at the White House. As we are constantly reminded, the fight is not yet over and the Republicans are girding their wrinkled, pasty loins for an Armageddon scenario of plans to "repeal" the law and poke holes in the federal requirements under the guise of "states rights."
I suppose we can't expect the Republicans to do anything else, but graceful losers they are not. In fact on Sunday night when the House of Representatives was taking their final ratification votes the Repubs had to hide behind unborn babies and try to get the whole bill referred back to committee (e.g., killed) for not "protecting the unborn." This was preceded earlier in the afternoon by opponents screaming racist and homophobic slurs to members of Congress and even spitting at one of them. Such a lovely example to show the world. The attempt to use the abortion issue for their own nefarious purposes stunk to high heaven of back-against-the-wall desperation and scorched-earth policy - they were prepared to do anything, no matter how ridiculous or cowardly, to try to scuttle all the effort to reach this point. Luckily, it did not work, but it did result in the hilariously surrealistic scene of Rep. Bart Stupak, a staunch anti-abortionist and until then the darling of the Republican opposition for nearly torpedoing the whole bill over abortion funding, being called a "baby killer" by some misinformed moron from Texas.
So the legal challenges are only just starting, and we are going to hear about attempts to derail health care reform far into the foreseeable future. The task of carrying out reform has just begun and it's not going to be pretty or pleasant, despite all the other extremely pressing matters we must address as a nation. But probably the most important task that remains to be done is to get Rush Limbaugh out of the country, because he promised on his radio program in a very public fashion to leave the country if health care reform passes. I strongly believe we should hold him to that promise and get his big fat obnoxious ass out of the country and over to some other country we really hate, like North Korea. After all, if they threw his flabby bulk into a big stew pot and cooked him up, he could feed all of Pyongyang for over a year.
The Republicans are spitting mad and all look like they took a huge crap in their Depends and can't find anyone to change them. They are vowing revenge in the midterm elections and while that is not a threat to take lightly, so much can happen in six months and once the American people get to see that health care really will make many lives better, their attitudes will soften and maybe they'll see that it was a good idea after all. But history was truly made last Sunday, March 21, 2010, and we will be looking back on that date for many, many years to come.
Friday, February 26, 2010
Theatre of the Damned
Washington certainly is a bottomless pit when it comes nutty behavior. Politicians dip deep into the well of insanity and never fail to bring home the crazy in gigantic trainloads. It would probably be a little more amusing if they weren't dicking around with billions and trillions of our dollars and basically screwing with the future of the entire planet and every living creature on it. Things have been getting a little tedious lately with all the sex scandals, such as South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford and disgraced Presidential candidate John Edwards, among many others. Let's face it - hearing about old white guys getting their swerve on and acting like hormone-crazed frat boys rates pretty high on the "ick" scale. I'm an old white guy and I think it's pretty unsavory. But occasionally the denizens of Capitol Hill outdo themselves when it comes to massive silliness and a true spectacle emerges for our entertainment and edification.
That's what happened at the Health Care Summit held yesterday in DC. President Obama got together with a roomful of Democrats and Republicans, ostensibly for a come-to-Jesus meeting where they would thrash out the different philosophies that have been colliding recently and preventing any real progress in fixing our ailing health care system. The Republicans have been complaining that they've been shut out of the whole process and Obama said, you want to come to the table to talk? - fine, we'll do just that. But instead of hammering out some kind of compromise that both sides would be able to support, however unenthusiastically, what we got were both sides digging in their heels and preening and posturing for the camera, and saying precious little of any use.
The live television coverage let us sit in on this confab, which truly did look like the staff meeting from hell. On one end we had the unnaturally orange Representative John Boehner, or John Boner as I like to call him, pontificating and blustering in true Congressional fashion while saying absolutely nothing. On the other side we had Senate majority leader Harry Reid, who looks like he should be managing an H&R Block office in Akron, getting ready to work on someone's taxes. In the middle was Obama, uncomfortable with his role as ringmaster in this hellish Cirque du Batshit. Next to him was Vice President Joe Biden, looking and sounding surprisingly cogent and on the ball. Joe Biden looks like your uncle who always seemed to have had a little too much to drink even at 8 in the morning, and who would laugh at his own jokes and screw up everything no matter how simple. When Biden appears to be the voice of reason and sensibility in any gathering, you know things are on the verge of heading south in a big way.
But there were a couple of fun things to watch in this whole seven-hour grindfest. One was Obama sniping with his former Presidential rival John McCain. Obama had to tell McCain that the "campaign was over" and he should drop his tired blathering. McCain cackled in his usual cringe-inducing, pseudo-pedophile way and said that was something he was "reminded of every day." I bet he is. Why anyone gives this silly old man any airtime at all is beyond me. He looks like a character from The Muppet Show that was created to be an understudy for Statler and Waldorf, the two old hecklers in the balcony, but was discarded because it was too creepy.
But the most amazing thing was a brilliant segment on yesterday's "Hardball with Chris Matthews" show. They put together little snippets of the speeches the Republicans gave at the summit, and it clearly and hilariously showed them repeatedly using the exact same words and language. With robotic consistency that would make the Cylons from Battlestar Galactica jealous, they shamelessly used the same phrases over and over again, which consisted of "start over," "clean sheet of paper," and "step back." It was pretty eye-opening to see how thoroughly rehearsed and coached the Republicans were. It's like they had been drilled to within an inch of their lives like third-graders learning math tables and were told, probably by Darth Cheney, that if they strayed one iota from the party line they would dissolve into a messy puddle of goo like the Nazi Ark-snatchers at the end of "Raiders of the Lost Ark." It was plainly obvious that they weren't saying what they truly felt and thought, but were slavishly parroting what their puppet masters told them to say. In a time and place where we really needed the participants to be actively engaged in finding a solution to possibly the biggest crisis we have to face today, what we got was the same-old-same-old, much to no one's surprise.
And President Obama still does not get it. For some reason he still clings, Don Quixote-like, to his dream of bipartisanship even though it's been made painfully clear over and over again that the Republicans have no intention at all of cooperating. They only want Obama and the Democrats to fail, no matter how much it would cost the country. Like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, a bipartisan agreement is both irresistible and unattainable for Obama. The Republicans have always said that it's their way or the highway, but Obama still tries to hold out hope that they'll come on board. Now the Republicans are spitting mad that the Democrats will push the health care overhaul through using the process of reconciliation, which is a way of combining the Senate and House health care bills and only requires a simple 51-vote majority, instead of the inconvenient 60-vote supermajority. When Republican Lamar Alexander tried to do a pre-emptive strike and chastised the Democrats for threatening to use reconciliation, Harry Reid in an amazingly righteous show of cojones told the Repubs to STFU because since the 1980s, reconciliation has been used more than 20 times mostly by Republicans, and if it was good enough for Republicans in the past it's good enough for Democrats now.
Well, the show is over and the Health Care Summit of 2010 is history. Comedic history, but history nonetheless. What Obama said was absolutely true, and that is the American people do not need another year of pointless, mind-numbing debate, which is what it would take to come up with another health care bill from scratch, as the Republicans want. We simply can't afford to keep the status-quo; health care has to be fixed and even the stripped-down, neutered bill we have now is better than nothing. We can only hope the Democrats can find a way to get this done, since the Republicans will not lift a finger to help and will in fact obstruct at every opportunity. They are truly the "Party of No," as in No Brains, No Help, and No Morals.
That's what happened at the Health Care Summit held yesterday in DC. President Obama got together with a roomful of Democrats and Republicans, ostensibly for a come-to-Jesus meeting where they would thrash out the different philosophies that have been colliding recently and preventing any real progress in fixing our ailing health care system. The Republicans have been complaining that they've been shut out of the whole process and Obama said, you want to come to the table to talk? - fine, we'll do just that. But instead of hammering out some kind of compromise that both sides would be able to support, however unenthusiastically, what we got were both sides digging in their heels and preening and posturing for the camera, and saying precious little of any use.
The live television coverage let us sit in on this confab, which truly did look like the staff meeting from hell. On one end we had the unnaturally orange Representative John Boehner, or John Boner as I like to call him, pontificating and blustering in true Congressional fashion while saying absolutely nothing. On the other side we had Senate majority leader Harry Reid, who looks like he should be managing an H&R Block office in Akron, getting ready to work on someone's taxes. In the middle was Obama, uncomfortable with his role as ringmaster in this hellish Cirque du Batshit. Next to him was Vice President Joe Biden, looking and sounding surprisingly cogent and on the ball. Joe Biden looks like your uncle who always seemed to have had a little too much to drink even at 8 in the morning, and who would laugh at his own jokes and screw up everything no matter how simple. When Biden appears to be the voice of reason and sensibility in any gathering, you know things are on the verge of heading south in a big way.
But there were a couple of fun things to watch in this whole seven-hour grindfest. One was Obama sniping with his former Presidential rival John McCain. Obama had to tell McCain that the "campaign was over" and he should drop his tired blathering. McCain cackled in his usual cringe-inducing, pseudo-pedophile way and said that was something he was "reminded of every day." I bet he is. Why anyone gives this silly old man any airtime at all is beyond me. He looks like a character from The Muppet Show that was created to be an understudy for Statler and Waldorf, the two old hecklers in the balcony, but was discarded because it was too creepy.
But the most amazing thing was a brilliant segment on yesterday's "Hardball with Chris Matthews" show. They put together little snippets of the speeches the Republicans gave at the summit, and it clearly and hilariously showed them repeatedly using the exact same words and language. With robotic consistency that would make the Cylons from Battlestar Galactica jealous, they shamelessly used the same phrases over and over again, which consisted of "start over," "clean sheet of paper," and "step back." It was pretty eye-opening to see how thoroughly rehearsed and coached the Republicans were. It's like they had been drilled to within an inch of their lives like third-graders learning math tables and were told, probably by Darth Cheney, that if they strayed one iota from the party line they would dissolve into a messy puddle of goo like the Nazi Ark-snatchers at the end of "Raiders of the Lost Ark." It was plainly obvious that they weren't saying what they truly felt and thought, but were slavishly parroting what their puppet masters told them to say. In a time and place where we really needed the participants to be actively engaged in finding a solution to possibly the biggest crisis we have to face today, what we got was the same-old-same-old, much to no one's surprise.
And President Obama still does not get it. For some reason he still clings, Don Quixote-like, to his dream of bipartisanship even though it's been made painfully clear over and over again that the Republicans have no intention at all of cooperating. They only want Obama and the Democrats to fail, no matter how much it would cost the country. Like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, a bipartisan agreement is both irresistible and unattainable for Obama. The Republicans have always said that it's their way or the highway, but Obama still tries to hold out hope that they'll come on board. Now the Republicans are spitting mad that the Democrats will push the health care overhaul through using the process of reconciliation, which is a way of combining the Senate and House health care bills and only requires a simple 51-vote majority, instead of the inconvenient 60-vote supermajority. When Republican Lamar Alexander tried to do a pre-emptive strike and chastised the Democrats for threatening to use reconciliation, Harry Reid in an amazingly righteous show of cojones told the Repubs to STFU because since the 1980s, reconciliation has been used more than 20 times mostly by Republicans, and if it was good enough for Republicans in the past it's good enough for Democrats now.
Well, the show is over and the Health Care Summit of 2010 is history. Comedic history, but history nonetheless. What Obama said was absolutely true, and that is the American people do not need another year of pointless, mind-numbing debate, which is what it would take to come up with another health care bill from scratch, as the Republicans want. We simply can't afford to keep the status-quo; health care has to be fixed and even the stripped-down, neutered bill we have now is better than nothing. We can only hope the Democrats can find a way to get this done, since the Republicans will not lift a finger to help and will in fact obstruct at every opportunity. They are truly the "Party of No," as in No Brains, No Help, and No Morals.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Apocalypse Now!
Anybody who thinks living in the desert is boring needs to come and visit when we are having one of our crazy weather weeks, like we are now. It's true during the overwhelming majority of the year our weather is consistent to the point of being boring - for long periods of time we are saddled with blue, cloudless skies, warm-to-hot temperatures and a delightfully dry climate. It's during the summer monsoon season and in the current mid-winter rainy spell when our Chamber-of-Commerce weather takes a hike and we get something completely different.
You need to remember this is a place where even a 30% chance of getting less than a tenth of an inch of rain gets everyone really excited and giddy with anticipation. So when the Rain Gods decide to bestow copious quantities of their liquid blessings on us - presumably to make up for denying us even a trace of precious moisture for as long as 180 consecutive days - it is a big, big deal. The local news media have gone into full-on apocalypse mode and the weather service has been issuing flash-flood warnings every five minutes. The weather people are all over TV predicting a possibility of getting half a year's worth of rain this week alone, and they are fairly squealing with delight and shivering with apprehension at the same time. Good times!
So while we are preoccupied with actually getting wet when we take a step outside, there has been a lot of craziness going on in the real world. The aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti continues to loom large and ugly before the world, as rescue and relief agencies scramble in a desperate attempt to contain the terrible humanitarian disaster. Luckily we are not in the middle of hurricane season, because I could not imagine what would happen if a major hurricane started to bear down on that most unlucky place.
But another earthquake, this one of a political nature, happened on Tuesday when Republican Scott Brown scored an unexpected victory in a race to fill the Senate seat of the late Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts. Such a victory was pretty much ruled out as wildly impossible just a few short weeks ago, when Democrat Martha Coakley had a double-digit lead in the polls which was regarded as insurmountable. So she decided to take an extended Christmas vacation while her opponent tirelessly worked the campaign trail. That may turn out to be the most expensive Christmas vacation ever for the Democrats, because Brown's election shattered the Democrats' sixty-seat supermajority in the Senate, giving the Republicans carte blanche to filibuster everything except the brand of toilet tissue used in the Senate rest rooms.
And filibuster they shall, with Obama's centerpiece health care reform legislation as target numero uno. How incredibly sad for this country that the one, best chance we had at fixing the horrendously broken health care system pivoted on this one election. The Republicans are almost delirious with joy and are making no attempt at all to conceal their glee at this major setback. Not only is losing the seat extremely painful for the Democrats, but particularly galling is the irony that it is Ted Kennedy's seat, who was the main champion of health care reform for most of his career. Blame is being flung far and wide, although most pundits agree that a deeply incompetent, totally mismanaged campaign by Coakley was the main cause of the failure. This is very very bad news for Democrats.
Brown's victory is bad enough, but today it was announced that the Supreme Court ruled that corporations should be able to spend money in political campaigns. Let's review, shall we: Our electoral system is already choked and corrupted beyond measure by corporate lobbyists of all types, and we all realize that's a big problem. So what should we do? Oh, I know, said the Supreme Court: Let's open up the wonderful world of campaign spending to the big corporations and allow them even more latitude to influence and corrupt the elections, large and small, in this country. Freedom of speech issue, said the Supremes. Hey, news flash, you crotchety old farts: People have freedom of speech, corporations don't. What is so hard about that? Corporations aren't people, and they should not be afforded freedom of speech protection. One needs only to view one of the slanted, ridiculous ads for something called "Clean Coal" - a complete contradiction if there ever was one - to get some idea of the heights of idiocy this will lead to.
Had enough depressing news? Let's wallow in a little more, and take a look at the strange case of John Edwards. Former Senator and presidential hopeful, Edwards was regarded as a rising Democratic star with a long, bright future in front of him until he decided to cheat on his cancer-striken wife and have an affair with a filmmaker. When word of the affair was leaked, Edwards got on every media outlet he could and denied, denied and denied some more. When rumors started spreading about him fathering a child with his mistress, Edwards donned the cloak of Righteous Indignation and proclaimed far and wide across the land that the story was utterly and completely free of merit. Today, he backtracked on all that and admitted yes indeed, everything was true. Apparently the upcoming tell-all book by a former campaign aide which will assert that Edwards offered to pay hush money for the rest of his life if he assumed paternity of the child in question (which he did) prompted Edwards to 'fess up to his tacky indiscretion.
I think the part that bothers people, including me, the most is the ease and facility with which Edwards deliberately and with all premeditation lied to the entire country repeatedly by denying something he knew full well had happened. This is why people have no respect for politicians nowadays, because they prove themselves to be compulsive, adroit and inveterate liars over and over again, until they are backed up against the wall and have no choice but to admit their sins. How extremely sad we have people of such dismally low morals in high public places.
And the rain keeps falling outside on the dry dusty desert, from a featureless gray sky, trying but not quite able to wash away our sins.
You need to remember this is a place where even a 30% chance of getting less than a tenth of an inch of rain gets everyone really excited and giddy with anticipation. So when the Rain Gods decide to bestow copious quantities of their liquid blessings on us - presumably to make up for denying us even a trace of precious moisture for as long as 180 consecutive days - it is a big, big deal. The local news media have gone into full-on apocalypse mode and the weather service has been issuing flash-flood warnings every five minutes. The weather people are all over TV predicting a possibility of getting half a year's worth of rain this week alone, and they are fairly squealing with delight and shivering with apprehension at the same time. Good times!
So while we are preoccupied with actually getting wet when we take a step outside, there has been a lot of craziness going on in the real world. The aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti continues to loom large and ugly before the world, as rescue and relief agencies scramble in a desperate attempt to contain the terrible humanitarian disaster. Luckily we are not in the middle of hurricane season, because I could not imagine what would happen if a major hurricane started to bear down on that most unlucky place.
But another earthquake, this one of a political nature, happened on Tuesday when Republican Scott Brown scored an unexpected victory in a race to fill the Senate seat of the late Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts. Such a victory was pretty much ruled out as wildly impossible just a few short weeks ago, when Democrat Martha Coakley had a double-digit lead in the polls which was regarded as insurmountable. So she decided to take an extended Christmas vacation while her opponent tirelessly worked the campaign trail. That may turn out to be the most expensive Christmas vacation ever for the Democrats, because Brown's election shattered the Democrats' sixty-seat supermajority in the Senate, giving the Republicans carte blanche to filibuster everything except the brand of toilet tissue used in the Senate rest rooms.
And filibuster they shall, with Obama's centerpiece health care reform legislation as target numero uno. How incredibly sad for this country that the one, best chance we had at fixing the horrendously broken health care system pivoted on this one election. The Republicans are almost delirious with joy and are making no attempt at all to conceal their glee at this major setback. Not only is losing the seat extremely painful for the Democrats, but particularly galling is the irony that it is Ted Kennedy's seat, who was the main champion of health care reform for most of his career. Blame is being flung far and wide, although most pundits agree that a deeply incompetent, totally mismanaged campaign by Coakley was the main cause of the failure. This is very very bad news for Democrats.
Brown's victory is bad enough, but today it was announced that the Supreme Court ruled that corporations should be able to spend money in political campaigns. Let's review, shall we: Our electoral system is already choked and corrupted beyond measure by corporate lobbyists of all types, and we all realize that's a big problem. So what should we do? Oh, I know, said the Supreme Court: Let's open up the wonderful world of campaign spending to the big corporations and allow them even more latitude to influence and corrupt the elections, large and small, in this country. Freedom of speech issue, said the Supremes. Hey, news flash, you crotchety old farts: People have freedom of speech, corporations don't. What is so hard about that? Corporations aren't people, and they should not be afforded freedom of speech protection. One needs only to view one of the slanted, ridiculous ads for something called "Clean Coal" - a complete contradiction if there ever was one - to get some idea of the heights of idiocy this will lead to.
Had enough depressing news? Let's wallow in a little more, and take a look at the strange case of John Edwards. Former Senator and presidential hopeful, Edwards was regarded as a rising Democratic star with a long, bright future in front of him until he decided to cheat on his cancer-striken wife and have an affair with a filmmaker. When word of the affair was leaked, Edwards got on every media outlet he could and denied, denied and denied some more. When rumors started spreading about him fathering a child with his mistress, Edwards donned the cloak of Righteous Indignation and proclaimed far and wide across the land that the story was utterly and completely free of merit. Today, he backtracked on all that and admitted yes indeed, everything was true. Apparently the upcoming tell-all book by a former campaign aide which will assert that Edwards offered to pay hush money for the rest of his life if he assumed paternity of the child in question (which he did) prompted Edwards to 'fess up to his tacky indiscretion.
I think the part that bothers people, including me, the most is the ease and facility with which Edwards deliberately and with all premeditation lied to the entire country repeatedly by denying something he knew full well had happened. This is why people have no respect for politicians nowadays, because they prove themselves to be compulsive, adroit and inveterate liars over and over again, until they are backed up against the wall and have no choice but to admit their sins. How extremely sad we have people of such dismally low morals in high public places.
And the rain keeps falling outside on the dry dusty desert, from a featureless gray sky, trying but not quite able to wash away our sins.
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