Unsubscribing from the Denver Post

To all my sisters and brothers here in Colorado, The Denver Post has taken it upon itself to endorse Cory Gardner for Senate.  This is less unexpected than it is distasteful.  The Post has always leaned Right, but what is really obnoxious about this choice is that the people who have made it appear be taking this Bible thumping zealot at his word with regard to changing his mind on the issue of personhood - disallowing most commonly used forms of birth control and no abortion even in cases of rape and incest.  It is no secret that even as the rag went to press Gardner has legislation before the House that amounts to personhood.  It is easy enough for him to say now that he has changed his mind. However, 5 will get you 10 that if elected to the Senate this low rent demagogue will return to the lame duck session and put said legislation through. Particularly, if the Right holds a Senate majority.  

I don't give the media many points for brain power, so one could make the case that they are just stupid or naive.  In the final analysis it won't matter a damn.  The bottom line is that there is no percentage for women in having this creep in the Senate.  I'm suggesting that it is worth a protest, that is to say a group cancelling of subscriptions to remind the The Denver Post that they don't have much to lose here, but the women of the State of Colorado have a great deal at stake. 

Finally, I don't subscribe to mainstream publications, but for those who do I submit that there are many places to get information.  It is my opinion, in point of fact, that the farther away from corporate media one gets the better the information.

Autumn in the High Country

Autumn chases Dawn into the light every morning now.  The breeze picks up her feet and dances windy as the Sun sets, splashing September’s gold, crimson and indigo spray from the pool of the Western sky.  The Mighty Rockies breathe the scent of pine and early changing Aspen down over the Prairie.  I imagine I smell the crisp clean chill that is the prelude to Winter drifting from the great red-stone canyon that lines the beautiful Boulder Creek running wild with the blood of the Goddess.  How insignificant we are in the face of such grandeur.  Our schemes and plots are trivial when set beside the glory of the smallest flower.  Daily my home reminds me that we are as the least speck of dust in the eye of the Great Mother who created my Colorado, and if there is a place more beautiful I have never seen it on this side of dreaming or the other.

The Potentate of Puffery

This morning I tuned into Joe Scarborough’s program as I was waiting for it to get light enough outside to commence feeding my rose for the last time this season.  The usual suspects were clustered around the table, pretending to be relevant and wanting desperately to be part of the news rather than just comment.  Scarborough was cutting them off right and left as usual, seeming to insist that his opinions are actually facts. 

I am sure most people remember Scarborough’s tenure as the Congressman from Florida’s 1^st Congressional District from 1994 to 2001.  As near as I could tell he did little save thump the Bible, serve the “right” people, defend fetuses, question the need to feed poor children, and follow the silhouette of Clinton’s penis through a $42,000,000 panty raid.  Yes, Clinton and his intern offended and obsessed the mighty white and righteous, family values Scarborough until his own assistant turned up dead in his Florida office on a summer day in 2001.  The death was ruled accidental – head trauma sustained during a fall.  She was said to have been alone and fainted.  He resigned the same year, and was so affected by the tragedy that he and Don Imus joked about it on air in 2003.  Well, so much for interns and assistants alive or dead.

The incident is never spoken of; certainly not on sorta-kinda-left-leaning MSNBC where at least one Liberal voice has been silenced, that of Markos Moulitsas of the Daily Kos, for daring to flout the taboo.   Indeed, the network has ensconced Morning Joe like a bloated potentate on a downy throne of hubris where he pontificates Monday thru Friday.  Today was no different as he held court surround by his head nodding, always agreeing supplicants.  He led a chorus of critics opining against Obama’s foreign policy, his domestic policy, the color of his tie, the sound of his voice, the cut of his jib and on and on.  Look, I am no cheerleader for the president, many of his policies make my skin crawl; but goddamn it nobody is wrong all of the time. 

I have ask before and I will ask again, can the disinclination of our friends and allies to support us in Iraq against these maniacs driving people onto a mountain top to starve not be in some small way related to the fact that President Obama may have been reduced in the eyes of the world to a paralyzed and near impotent figurehead by a feckless, corporate shilling, yellow journalism loving media and a power hungry, resentful and in many cases well past its sell by date Rightwing Congress?  Can we be so stupid as to not connect the nearly continual and malignant verbal emesis, slander and personality assignation of the Scarboroughs, McCains, Grahams, Palins, Bachmans, McConnells, Boehners, Limbaughs and so many more to the reticence of our friends and the emboldened applause of our enemies?

Has he made mistakes?  Oh yes many, and some in my mind profoundly damaging.  However, I will say that the first president I remember was Dwight David Eisenhower.  I come from a solid, hardcore Liberal, Working Class background.  My parents were both FDR Democrats and union organizers.  I was a Fabian Socialist in my youth.  I am a committed Democratic Socialist today.  Because I have always worked for a living and aligned myself with the Working Class, I have devoutly believed that I couldn't be a Republican because I carried a lunchbox and certainly couldn't afford to be ignorant.  Accordingly, I have studied the body politic closely for nearly half a century and state without equivocation that I have never seen one man blamed for so much by so many with so little evidence.  I have never seen one person asked to unilaterally shoulder the psychic Shadow of a nation or the responsibility for the broken faith, fraud and malfeasance of generations of overpaid, over empowered, parasitic political hacks. 

No one person is responsible for the deepening mess this country faces every day.  No one person is responsible for the bloodbaths, the famines, the terror, the disease and the sorrow of this world.  It is time to start holding everyone accountable for their part.  It isn't good enough to just say Obama did it anymore.

Know Your Limits Politicians

I am a bit disturbed about politicians who presume to practice medicine. Not long ago the five Ambulance Chasers for Jesus on the Supreme Court took it upon themselves to redefine conception, implantation, contraception and abortion. Now, we have members of the political class bantering about whether or not to fast track drugs for the treatment of Ebola.

It is my considered opinion after 35 years working in the medical world and 65 years on this planet that such decisions belong in the hands of the CDC, the World Health Organization, the highly ethical and selfless doctors who serve in the field where these diseases present themselves, and above all in the hands of the patients who are facing death without said drugs.

Politicians need to stick to doing what they do best - peddling influence.

Myths and Morons

I think the Ebola virus is being used to divert attention from Palestine and our humanitarian crisis at the border?  Let’s be clear.  Ebola isn't something you want to take out for a spin, but in this country we practice Universal Precautions which are defined as: an approach to infection control [that] treats all human blood and certain human body fluids as if they were known to be infectious … , (Bloodborne Pathogens Standard 29 CFR 1910.1030(b) definitions).  

In addition, we practice aseptic technique which among other things means gloving, gowning, establishing sterile fields and in this case maintaining strict isolation.  Further, this virus isn't airborne which means you can’t catch it from the guy sitting next to in the bar, and it doesn't have a silent incubation period.  You have to be sick to pass it on.  All of this means that it is highly, highly I say, unlikely that Ebola will take up residence in this country the way it has in Africa where Universal Precautions and Aseptic Technique aren't routinely observed.

So, the next time some media hump starts going on and on about the potential spread of the virus by the people coming home for treatment, or a Bachmann starts running off at the mouth about the kids at the boarder possibly bringing it in, understand that you are being diverted, man; you are being played.  

If you want to get upset about something consider the fact that people speak with alarming acceptance and implied approval about the Free Market Capitalist predators in the Pharmaceutical Industry who have never developed nor are they likely to start developing a vaccine for Ebola.  The reason, no incentive; what is the only incentive for these people – money.  Now I realize that I am an old battle scared Socialist who tends not to view the obsessive acquisition of money in a favorable light, but really?  

Trash Talk

I am not an Obama apologist.  I carry water for no politician.  Indeed with damn few exceptions I can scarcely stand the sight of the lying humps.  From the early days of Mr. Obama’s administration I began questioning his policies.  Starting with the healthcare debate, running through Chained CPI, the drone strikes, TPP, the Keystone XL Pipeline, offshore drilling and our unrelenting and mule-headed position that no matter what Israel does or how she does it she is only defending herself in the most righteous of causes. 

I have lost friends, then and since, because I refused to cease and desist in my dissent with regard to many of his policies – to keep my mouth shut and follow where led.  I submit that dissent is as necessary for the health of this Republic and its people as clean air.  Further that it is the oldest and noblest of our patriotic traditions.  I reserve the right to dissent loudly and often whenever and wherever I see fit – the cops in Chicago in '68 didn’t shut me up and peer pressure from the Left won’t either.  I am an old woman who speaks her mind, and when old women speak their mind the tribe does well to listen.

I don’t stand alone, but with many who oppose much of this president’s agenda.  We are Liberals – not Progressives, Moderates, Centrist, Clintonites, Hillary’s Women, or Obama’s army – but Liberals.  We hold to a strict code of social and economic justice.  We do not practice war, and certainly not wars of convenience.  We shutter at unbridled Capitalism, the excesses of the Free Market and corporatism.  We honor people over profit, the planet over greed; and we do not define freedom and liberty in terms of religious opportunism.  That is to say that Christians, Jews, Pagans, Muslims, Buddhists, Atheists, none of the above and people who just don’t think about it own equally this nations promise of freedom and have every right to express their liberty in the interests of their own happiness.  No platform, party or person is more deserving of our loyalty than the cause.  We are the Liberals, but not the enemy.

That distinction belongs to the far Right side of the political spectrum, their parasites, sycophants and pretenders to the throne.  When John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Steve King, Louie Gohmert, John Boehner and others start trash talking over the airways about President Obama’s policies they are not proffering disagreement, opposition, or even dissent.  They are in the process of destroying a man they hate.  They have materially weakened the fabric of this nation, eroded the structure of this Republic and compromised our standing in the world with their unending and obscene display of hubris and contempt for the President of the United States.  This is not politics or the spectacle of government.  No, this is the deliberate, systematic, orchestrated and premeditated annihilation of the man’s presidency, his character and his legacy.  Since we the people elected this man twice by clear majority their hatred, hubris and contempt cannot help but rebound on us. 

I believe that we have been made to appear weak in the eyes of our enemies not because Obama is weak – he isn’t weak.  I don’t like a lot of what he does, but he isn't weak.  Our perceived weakness rests in the fact that our enemies know that these resentful old men and the women who follow them about regurgitating their venom would side with the enemies of this nation before they would be seen to support President Barack Obama.  If that doesn't frighten you in the world we live in then you must have nerves of steel, a large liquor supply or be incredibly uninformed.

Mama Ain't Happy

The First Amendment has been twisted, contorted, tortured and misrepresented so as to make it possible for corporations to buy our political system, gun nuts to surround unarmed women in coffee shops and people with a mouth full of vitriol and a mind full of hate to jump around like hyenas on crack shouting at and threatening small children crossing our borders.  Anyone who opposes this distortion of our values, this self serving, childish and idiotic agenda is called anything from Un-American to evil and many times offered violence by way of demonstrating that equality is a thing of the past in this great Republic of ours. 

It is understood that along with equality, sanity has been lost in the great desire to homogenize, Christianize, propagandize and sterilize the American landscape as with cruelty and stupidity we pickup our social order and return to the beginning of the last century when men were white, their women and children were property and everyone else was disposable.  The vanguard of evolutionary regression sweeping this country and back peddling through over half a century of civil rights legislation is a quintet of old men in long black robes safely ensconced behind a 252-foot buffer zone in Washington D.C.  A handful of elitists with more power than they are able to use judiciously do not a recipe for liberty make, not for workers, not for voters and certainly not for women.

Many egregious things have come out of the Scalia Court; the asinine notion that Roberts is running it is to my way of thinking one of the most insulting.  The ventriloquist and his dummy notwithstanding, the assertion that freedom of religion can be used in a secular state to displace the rights of half the population is beyond insulting and borders on a Jack-the-Ripper-Ted-Bundy kind of pathological misogyny.   Still, this is not just a woman’s issue.  Any man who is married to a woman in childbearing years and works for a “closely held,” deeply religious employer trying to use God to shave a few pennies off their group insurance plan best not count on his dick to guarantee that his wife can access contraception through his policy. 

The idea that any of this is about freedom of religion is a hoot in the first place.  It is about freedom for one religion – Scalia, Roberts, Thomas, Alito and Kennedy’s religion.  This is not about God or loving God or following Christ.  It is about establishing a state sponsored morality and belief system ordained by a cabal of puffed up mouthpieces who far and away resemble the priests of the Inquisition more than ever they resemble the loving Christ they claim to follow so bloody devoutly.  They are in effect through law, the old whore, reordering the nature of the human species.  At the top of the food chain is the corporate person followed by the rich person with the rest of us falling somewhere below – women generally near the bottom.

The corporate person does not breathe air, it breathes money.  Living on the Free Market the way other people live in their houses and communities, the corporate person is chained to its bottom line the way we are anchored to our atmosphere.  This is Corporate Person’s Achilles Heel.  This is where women need to strike.  Organized boycotts on a very large scale with millions of women participating would be our best weapon of choice.  There can be no question that corporations like Hobby Lobby rely upon the consumerism of women.  Indeed around 80% of all consumer dollars are spent by women.  This is real power.  To that end I am joining other women in the process of putting together a project that would facilitate the use of our power.  We have agreed upon the name, “Mama Ain't Happy” for our organization. 

Now I am anticipating the old canard that women are so often exposed to when taking up a cause for their own benefit.  This would be the big picture argument.  You know the one.  It goes something like this, “There, there dear while I understand your concerns you must look at the big picture.  Large scale boycotts – if a group of women could even achieve such a thing, doubtful – could be very harmful to the economy.  Jobs, people need jobs.  I understand that this wasn't fair, but hey.”  

Most of you know that I lack tact for the most part, particularly when I am annoyed.  The big picture argument annoys me at the best of times.  I have been very clear in the past with my answer to this particular line of bullshit.  As always I will be happy to suggest that anyone who cares to make such an argument can take their big picture and insert it in whatever orifice it will fit with a whole lot of KY Jelly and a big “good luck with all that,” because Mama ain't happy and with any luck that will mean that somebody ain't gonna make no money no how.