I often wonder if in the deep recesses and secret chambers of Wall Street, Corporate America or the Vatican there is a video of Republican executives and legislators from all over the country and Washington having sex with farm animals. What else but blackmail can explain the rash of suicidal legislation that has erupted across this country? Take Bill McDonnell or Governor Ultrasound as Maddow calls him, of Virginia. This guy wanted to be the VP nominee for the Republicans. After signing a highly controversial bill that his constituents overwhelming disapprove of, nobody in their right mind would put him on a national ticket. He is term limited. His career could be over.
Scott Walker in Wisconsin is looking at recall. Last I heard Ohio’s Governor Kasich has an approval rating hanging tight at 30%. People in his state had enough of him within the first few months of his reign of terror. Again last I heard Rick Scott of Florida is enjoying an all time high approval rating – 38%. This is another chump who wants to balance the state’s budget on the backs of the most vulnerable. Rick Snyder has a recall movement gaining on him. He is the sap who decided that Michigan towns (particularly poor towns) could be taken over by Emergency Managers effectively displacing the authority of elected officials in those towns. There are others, but this is enough to demonstrate that the Republican Party is on the verge of self inflicted eradication. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t care. However, the fact that it is happening at all is of some interest and for the same reason that any anomaly in nature is interesting.
On the moral rectitude scale I have always placed most politicians somewhere between family annihilators and child molesters. So, the fact that the Governors mentioned above are displaying all the class of a cop beating up a drunk, as Raymond Chandler would say, and are doing unethical, misogynistic, racist and vile things is to be expected. On the self love scale I place politicians right up top with Emperor Tiberius and Catherine the Great. So, the fact that they are doing these things to their own detriment is very much unexpected. We are watching a bunch of self aggrandizing, self promoting narcissus commit suicide. It is incongruent in the extreme.
Think about Jonestown and a bunch of delusional people willingly swallowing poison Kool-Aid. Perhaps if one considers Citizens United the Kool-Aid and the poisonous idea that no matter what you do in office gobs of money will keep you in office the parallel is exact. Neither Citizens United nor the Kock brothers seem to be able to stop the snowball rolling toward Walker. Let us hope that the others take heed and understand that when the people get feed up there isn’t enough money in the world to save their ass.
The Blunt Amendment is an end run around Obama's Affordable Care Act. It is collusion between insurance companies and employers, aided and abetted by politicians, with women's health as a smoke screen. Beyond the proselytizing about birth control and someone being made to pay for someone else's sexual behavior is the old movable moral feast inherent in the marriage of dirty politics and carnivorous capitalism to a free market valued above the human beings it is suppose to serve. This Amendment would eventually extend into every area of health care, every procedure, treatment option and preventative care regime for every working American and their family. It is my opinion that Blunt is a duplicitous stooge. He doesn't give a damn about birth control, fetuses, sexual behavior or God. Blunt has found a new way to have oral sex with his contributors.
This game is as old as politics itself – tell someone who has nothing that someone else is stealing from them. Then invoke the Puritan Ethic as a way of bringing the “thieves” to book. In the end the money changers will be let back into the temple and everyone else thrown out – all of this in the name of a much feared, motherless-father God.
It is impossible to overestimate the American people’s naiveté. It is impossible to overestimate the tendency of those who think shallowly to follow closely those who have been corrupted deeply. Thus, by the time the good sheep wake up they are being led to the inevitable slaughter without the slightest idea how they got there.
The Blunt Amendment died in the Senate, yesterday. Fear not, like the ghost of Jack the Ripper, it will return in another form. The devil can always find a new playground. Then the tug-of-war begins again between the dishonorable and the marginally principled with the American people being trampled in the middle.
Questions: Had the Blunt Amendment passed today, or should it pass in the future, will men be prohibited from having vasectomies? If employers can dictate care and treatment plans to their employees will they use cost as a criteria for lodging a quasi moral objection to access to health care? If a necessary procedure is denied to a man or woman resulting in death what is the employer's liability? It seems to me that all these politicians on the Right are blowing smoke out their ass to the detriment of their own party’s political future.
None of this is about birth control. It is about hating women and seeing yet another opportunity to grind the Working Class underfoot.
When I hear some Chicken Little screeching from inside a cathode ray tube that, “The sky is falling because government is too big and is interfering in the lives of its citizens,” I wonder who they really serve and what they really stand for. If the noise is coming from some shill of the long, bent arm of the far Right, organized religious community then what I hear them saying cautiously is, “Government is too large and interfering in the lives of its citizens. We must shrink government, render it impotent, so we can interfere in the lives of its citizens and they can’t stop us.”
If the hysteric in question is an apparatchik of that festering, pus whole known as corporate America, and further insists that capitalism and the free market are represented by two stars on the flag, then I must conclude that shrinking government and rendering it impotent will make way for the corporatists to exploit the working man and woman with impunity after they step in and take over.
When big religion and big money join themselves at the hip as they are doing more and more today, then back in time we go before the labor laws and labor unions, before the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, back to the Dark Ages, feudal lords and serfdom. In this world the likes of John and Jane Doe are worked to death, their children have no other expectation, and the Church tells them to suffer in silence because it is good for their soul. This vile racket is known as bait and switch.
President Obama has reversed his stance on accepting PAC money. To those on the Left who are annoyed with him I say, wake up and smell the roses. This ain't your daddy's election season. If he doesn't raise money the way the Republicans are raising it, he'll lose. I hate Citizens United and all it brought with it, but I hate Romney and Santorium more. The Republicans who are also argumentative on the subject might remember that PACs were an attempt on their part to once again stack the deck. They can't win a fair fight, they never could. If Obama beats them at their own game, that would be the GOP's problem. Finally, the American people need to ask themselves why campaign ads determine where they cast their vote. What is this, a beer commercial? You buy the brand with the glitziest ads and the blonde with the biggest tits? If we pay attention and start thinking for ourselves, Citizens United and PACs will be moot points.
There has been a kind of creeping insanity in the Democratic Party for years. It started when they became afraid of the word Liberal. Carl Jung said, and I am paraphrasing now, "When you separate yourself from some part of your humanity that from which you are separated returns as disease." Welcome to Bedlam.
It isn’t just the Democrats; it is whole damn body politic. Some days I think that I have awakened in the movie, "Snake Pit." The sensation is reinforced by the fact that Geithner looks like Robert Stack. Jan Brewer reminds me of Lady Macbeth in her final scene - washing her hands and completely out of her mind. Rick Scott and Scott Walker are mental defectives riding the crest of madness. That helium balloon in New Jersey is a megalomaniac and, I believe, a sadist. Obama is the first man of color to prominently play Hamlet. Caught in an Existentialist crisis and driving himself nuts because he can’t make and stick to a bloody decision. In short they are all nuts, man.
Shakespeare loved madness as a color on his pallet. It makes a point. Today, the point is that the system has moved so far into the dysfunctional that only the seriously, clinically, dysfunctional can survive.
When insanity becomes the norm, the sane become a threat to the state. When our insane government has its head so far up Wall Street and corporate America’s ass that their whole world looks like a gallbladder, the sane are not suppose to notice. When we do we are undermining capitalism. When the insane put on stiletto heels, stroll up and down the Washington Mall singing “Hey Sailor” to every passing lobbyist, the sane are not suppose to know that they are whores. When we do we are undermining the free market.
It is a mark of lunacy to personify concepts. Capitalism and the free market are concepts – they don’t eat, sleep or go to the toilet. They are simply thought forms unless you are crazy enough to imagine them to exist as living entities and drag them around like a breathing teddy bear. If that is your bag, then everyone who doesn’t’ want to play with your bear is a threat to the state.
Some days I think that I have awakened in the movie, “Snake Pit,” and that Geithner really is Robert Stack and as crazy as all the other loons running the place. I can’t get out, and there is no point in screaming. My voice would be lost amid the screams of a million others.
It is time that we begin to reframe the argument around abortion. Heretofore, the dispute has been laid out as a struggle between two cultural and diametrically opposed camps. The veneer is gradually slipping away as the nation considers the rise of Karen Handle – failed gubernatorial candidate from Georgia and pro-life Christian – to the board of Susan G. Komen. This seems to have signaled an auspicious moment for the far Right to deal another vicious and dangerous body blow to Planned Parenthood and the thousands of poor women for whom they provide health care. Apparently, there is no hard proof that Handle was responsible for pulling Komen’s support. Just as there is no proof that God exists, still many believe He does.
It is my Constitutionally protected opinion that once again the long arm of the Fundamentalist Right has over-reached out of its box and into the daily lives of other people. Once again in the name of the loving, compassionate and tolerant Christ, they have seen fit to blackmail this society into accepting their “values” by holding the health care of the most vulnerable for ransom. There is a word for this – extortion.
When my Italian ancestors engaged in this behavior back in the 40’s and 50’s, iron was clamped on their wrists and ankles. J. Edgar’s boys lead them away to be convicted of racketeering under the Rico Statute. They were part of a criminal empire lead by Lucky Luciano. He ran his organization on vice and weakness.
Twenty-first Century racketeers, members of a New Age criminal empire, have built their organization on religion and fear. They don’t give a damn about fetuses, babies, children, women, the poor or even Jesus who they slander every time they open their hate filled mouths. The object of their racket is money, power and political capital – not unlike Lucky’s.
We have to see these people for what they are and fully understand the travesty of Susan G. Koman. When that lady was lying in her bed dying of metastatic breast cancer and asked her sister to create a foundation to work for the cure, I doubt seriously that she added the caveat, “Only if no one is having an abortion.” The idea that the nobility of Ms. Koman’s gesture on behave of her sisters is being crushed under the weight of political pressure brought to bear by a gang of grasping, grabbing, sociopathic infant souls is an outrage. Yet, sadly Susan G. Koman for the Cure is no more.
The organization must be marginalized, as the poor women in this country are, have been and will be marginalized if these conmen and women have their way. We should continue giving our donations directly to Planned Parenthood. Perhaps we need a new ribbon. One thing I am sure of, if we defend Planned Parenthood with our money and our votes the rats will start to run and quickly.
