Karma is a Bitch

The definition of Karma simply stated is, what goes around comes around or what you put out in the world comes home to bite you in the ass sooner or later.  Pagans believe that the return flight carries three times the wallop on impact.

Anyone who doesn't believe in Karma might want to take a look at the modern day Republican Party.  In 2009 they invested their time, energy and hope in something called the Tea Party.  The object was to use these people to defeat the Affordable Care Act.  Were they worried about the American people losing access to a high standard of care?  No.  Were they worried about the American people losing their jobs?  No. They were worried about the impact the ACA would have on their mega buck donors from big insurance.

In the end the ACA became the law of the land without compromising care as we know it, jobs or the position of insurance companies in the health care delivery industry.  However, the Tea Party has persistently eroded the Republican brand, wrenching control of the primary process out of the hands of the establishment and handing it over to a loud, vicious band of marauding extremists who wish to destroy the very institution that gives the Republican Party or any other political party a reason to exist – government.

Currently it is necessary for anyone who wishes to survive in GOP politics beyond the primary season to sound as crazy and destructive as the Tea Party itself.  Thus, we have Grandpa Get-It-Up McCain and the Viagra Boys Band, lead singer Lindsey Graham, smearing President Obama at every opportunity.  Their comments get more and more outrageous as the days leading up to primary season fade into yesterdays.  I am sure most of them realize that if the nut-jobs stand for general election, in many cases, the seat goes to the Democrats.  The persistent chants, Benghazi, Benghazi, IRS, IRS, he’s weak, he’s weak ring through the Beltway and the media at large with the desperation of people who know that what they are saying is wrong, has been disproven and in time of war may even be treasonous. Certainly they would have asserted treason if Bush were still in office.  Indeed they did, if memory serves, for anyone who dared opposed the war in Iraqi.

The media’s failure here is that they never counter the Rightwing mantras with solid facts.  To wit; a month or so before Benghazi the Republican House cut millions in funding from State’s budget which was destined in part for defense of our missions.  The constant carping on the IRS investigations of Right leaning organizations overlooks the fact that they investigated as many if not more Left leaning groups.  The charge that Obama is weak is particularly egregious in that the GOP had no such problem with Bush’s handling of Putin moving into Georgia in 2008.  Many of the Right’s suggestions for Obama today – pulling out of the G8, sanctioning of high level Russian officials, etc. – are already under consideration by the Administration.

Without question the party of Lincoln, what is left of it is trapped by its own stupidly, greed and corruption which led to acceptance of the Tea Party in the first place.  It is an appalling thing to see elected officials ripping and tearing at someone wholly unrelated to their problems just to avoid solving those problems.  The Republican establishment’s dilemma is the Tea Party and attaching Obama won’t solve that dilemma it just exacerbates the destruction of the brand.  For the same reason that infection in one person can’t be cleared by giving someone else an antibiotic – this will only exacerbate the infection into sepsis.

Another Issue

President Obama has given the Republicans something to chew on with his new budget.  More importantly, he has given the Democrats something to run on.  It is worth investigating this document and spreading the information around via Facebook, Blogs, etc.  It seems to me that the line is clearly drawn.  Do you support the workers and the Middle Class, the creation of jobs through repairing our crumbling infrastructure and closing tax loopholes for the big rich; or do you prefer the status quo that promotes income inequality and the socioeconomic exploitation of the vast majority of the American people?  In addition to promoting voting rights by helping people get registered to vote in whatever way we can, disseminating information about the rights of rapists to apply for custody and visitation rights when their criminal behavior results in pregnancy, we now have a new fulcrum with which to turn voters toward the defense of their own economic interests. 

The last resort of the Republican Party is to hide behind cultural issue.  God, guns and gays - as Obama once put it - will blind some people to what is being done to them by an army of shabby souls, two-for-a-nickel-Elmer Gantries thumping the Bible with one hand, peddling influence with the other and more than happy to have their heads up corporate America’s ass to such an extent that they are talking through someone else’s vocal chords.   Those myopic voters need to be written off as lost in the wilderness.  That should not stop us from soliciting the ear of those who teeter on the verge of consciousness.

Obama's Budget Sets Up Election-Year Debate with Republicans

You Have Got to be Kidding

It may come as a surprise to some women in this country, however, in 31 states rapists are able to sue for custody and visitation rights when their victim carries the child of their assault to term.  It seems that in many cases this is not a matter of "father's" rights being legislated so much as it is a matter of there being no law against a rapist insinuating himself into the lives of his victim and offspring in perpetuity.  

What women choose to do about a pregnancy that stems from rape is an absolutely individual and personal decision that no one, least of all the bloody state, should have a right to comment on. When she decides to keep the child there should be no question of her assailant having the right to use the courts to violate her again. 

Many legislators, cowards that they are, seem to have determined that it is best to leave this issue in the hands of the judicial branch. Nonetheless, ideological bias, religious intolerance and frightful misogyny are not unknown to the bench.  Therefore, it is imperative that state governments take a clear stand on the side of the victim and her child, refusing to allow a violent offender to force his way into another area of her life. 

What follows is a link that will give you an idea of where your state and others stand in this matter.

31 States Allow Rapist to Sue for Custody and Visitation Rights

Going Down the Rabbit Hole

In the theory of American Jurisprudence there is a concept that holds the U.S. to be a nation of laws not men.  Other than being toxic on its face, two things are wrong with this.  First, the law in this country is the oldest whore on the block.  Second, some legislators would seem to have taken the exclusion of women literally.  

Question: how do you subvert a people to the status of serf in service to a small, ruling plutocracy?  Answer: you empower a disempowering religious interpretation with the force of law, claiming that it has always been that way; then you force people to have more children then they can feed.  Women in this country post feminist awakening and Roe v. Wade must first be stripped of their dignity in order to force them back into a box.  Thus, they are either crime scenes or incubators for the children of violent criminals.

The result of all of this is a population that will serve silently and for  nothing because they see no way out.  This is known in some circles as the long con.

The article that follows should be a matter of concern for all Americans, female and male.  Read it, share it and remember it all the way to the polls.  Any Republican who does not denounce this colludes in it and should be held accountable in November.

31 States Allow Rapist to Sue for Custody and Visitation Rights

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?