Never Again

I wish just once when the media brings up the subject of contraception in connection with businesses that don't want to pay for it, someone would ask if this includes vasectomies.  If it doesn't then what we are talking about is just more of the same old patriarchal bullshit that renders women spittoons for sperm and incubators for babies. This is not to be tolerated.  As a woman who took to the streets nearly 50 years ago to set women free and the granddaughter of a woman who suffered jail and hunger strikes in the struggle for the vote I say, "By the Goddess that is the Mother of us all never again!"

We must remove this religious tyranny from the government of this Republic.  Since when does business, commerce, Capitalism have moral authority over the conscience of the individual?   Since when does a fully enfranchised citizen of these United States subvert her personal choices and constitutionally quarantined right of choice to a for-profit and inorganic entity which enjoys neither citizenship nor the ethical right to enfranchisement?  This is intolerable.  We must vote the people who have enabled this treachery against women and offense against the founding principles of our secular state out of office.  We must ban together and go to the polls this year shouting, “By the Goddess that is the Mother of us all never again!”

The Party

Ted Nugent belongs in an asylum.  To say that he is misanthropic doesn't begin to cover it.  It is my personal belief that this man will say anything, do anything to keep his face in front of a camera.  His cruelty is boundless and his cynicism without precedent, save of course the person running for governor who has little problem with what Nugent says because he supports the 2nd Amendment.  The candidate in question, one Greg Abbott, is not fit to serve anymore than Nugent is fit for primetime television.   

Is it possible that the Party that wants the American people to endow its elected officials with the trust that it feels this president does not deserve, is willing to ground its gubernatorial election rhetoric in a slogan used by the Nazis to slander the Jews and others that they murdered?  Is it possible that these pillars of moral rectitude are too thick to know that the vast majority of Americans also association this slur with the bad old days before the evolution of social consciousness that gave us the Civil Rights Movement and the Voting Rights Act?  Finally, is it possible that this Party of threadbare morality and rotting values does not know that the words "subhuman mongrel" fill those of us outside of its intellectually paralytic base with not only distrust but with enmity and disgust? 

Unfortunately, I think it is possible on all counts.  Those who vote for members of this Party do so at their own risk.  What the Nazis and bigots of years gone by taught us is that such vicious smears metastasize to anyone who can be used as a scapegoat.  It is the nature of scapegoats that they must be replenished from time to time.

Ted Nugent on the Campaign Tail Calls President Obama a "Subhuman Mongrel"

The Sleeping Giant

Can someone please tell me why anyone gives a bloody damn if Barbie is on the cover of Sports Illustrated?  I realize that there are people in this country who would call the police on Christ for moaning too loud on the cross and have elevated complaining to an Olympic event, but when the hell did adulthood become obsolete? 

A man is sitting in Florida hoping that Stand Your Ground is more important than the life of the black child he murdered.  The Congress of these United States plays partisan games in that brothel on Capitol Hill, peddling influence for Jesus while breaking the back of the American Middle Class.  Some cluck from the 1% makes national news whining about persecution, and the idiot interviewing him doesn't seem to realize that this is a bit like accusing David of persecuting Goliath with his little sling shot.  Karzai is turning terrorists loose in Afghanistan, and the American South is awash in poisonous chemicals.  The east is buried under snow, and the west is in drought. 

Through it all we are worried about a doll whose breasts accounts for 60% of her body weight appearing on the cover of a magazine.  Really, are we this far gone into the land of the deliberately and chronically anesthetized?

Cry Me a River

While the Republican echo chamber squeals and screams and screeches about the latest CBO (Congressional Budget Office) report prophesying the Affordable Care Act allegedly costing 2,000,000 jobs in the future, the truth is struggling out from under all the politically motivated hysteria.  In point of fact, the CBO report is talking about nothing of the kind.  The issue is not job loss but the number of labor hours workers will decide to supply. 

Let’s put it another way.  A man working sixty hours a week to keep his family insured and fed will be able to cut his hours and take his family’s health insurance with him because of subsidies.  An unsung benefit of the Affordable Care Act and its attendant subsidies is that a woman working for some dick in the corner office who treats her like rubbish will be able to tell him what he can do with his job and go find another position working for someone who understands the difference between service and servitude.  She will not have to forfeit her health insurance.

My dad used to say, “I can’t be a Republican.  I carry a lunch box.”  His axiom holds true today.  That the Right has no use for the Working Class has been made abundantly clear over the last three decades.  That they oppose choice for those they believe they have a right to control – workers and women - is beyond question.  It is all part of the same thing, and it is all wrong. 

Having said this and to paraphrase the brilliant Ezra Klein; there is something perverse in the psychology of people who after refusing to pass any kind of jobs bill - even to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure - are now lamenting with tears of indignation an imaginary loss of jobs in order to discredit healthcare insurance reform that will benefit workers and the poor.