In Solidarity

This is why so many men and women continue to support Bernie. By contrast Pelosi proudly displays her hubris, bragging about being "a capitalist" which from out here in the real world, where people actually work for a living, often looks like legalized corruption. The Bible thumpers suck up to a man who worships himself and his wealth only, scream about the immorality of abortion for the sake of LIFE, support war and capitol punishment and deny help to children at risk - ours and everybody else's. Both are repulsive beside Sanders whose faith is in a world of hope born of charity. His vision is based upon the sense that we can't escape our common needs and dependence upon one another. His liturgy is solidarity.

Whether you like Bernie or not, and be clear I don't much give a damn, a reckoning with his decency, his honor and his integrity is unavoidable. Bernie Sanders has been the same guy, standing for the same values since he first appeared on camera being drug off a campus in cuffs.

While the proud, the haughty, the ignorant and the self destructive gaze at themselves in a cracked mirror, both political parties seem to be set on going the way of the Wigs. The Democrats betrayed their base long ago, and continue in denial of that fact. The Republicans have crawled in bed with, to borrow a phrase from another religion's book, the Anti-Christ whom they insisted is their rightly ordained savior and prophet.

It is time for a new paradigm, time to put people over profit. It is time for a leap in consciousness. It is time to stop blaming one another and time to start teaching and learning together for the resistance and in solidarity.

Bernie Sanders

Chaos

Rick Wilson is a very smart man. He is a Conservative. I don't dislike smart, sane Conservatives. I dislike Conservatism. To me it is another way of saying, "I am the center of the living universe." As a life long Socialist, committed to Social, Economic and Environmental Justice I reject the stagnation and selfishness of Conservatism.

Having said this and understanding that there are one or two things in this article with which I take strong issue, it is a must read. I don't say that often, but Wilson has expressed exactly the meaning and the potential of Trump's administration. The end won't be easy or pretty, but this egotistical hump's agenda is not sustainable. It WILL all come crashing down - I suspect sooner, rather than later. The people who voted for him will deny it; the people who didn't vote at all will swear they did; those who promoted and/or supported him will hide their heads in shame and run for cover.

Henceforth, I shall only refer to him as Chaos. I can't and won't bring myself to call him president. That office was vacated on January 20th.

President Chaos Collides With Reality

A Little Lady

Let us speak of a sweet spring evening over 4 decades ago, in a large hospital in a major U.S. city, say Denver, where the staff of the ER takes a  call from the EMS crew in the field that they are bringing in a female adolescent who is hemorrhaging – we will call her Little Lady.  Upon being received in the Emergency Bay it is immediately determined that she is unresponsive due to blood loss and cannot be stabilized nor her hemorrhaging stopped outside of the OR.  Accordingly, Little Lady is taken to surgery where she is found to have sustained a hole in the wall of her uterus and uterine artery.  An emergency, partial abdominal hysterectomy is performed – leaving her Fallopian tubes and ovaries intact – to save her life.  She is taken to the ICU post op where she remains unresponsive. Some days later it is determined that she is in, what we would call today, a persistent vegetative state.  Little Lady is transferred to a nursing home to live out her “life.”  Within the year she dies, covered with bed sores and still unable to respond to her grieving parents.

Little Lady’s back-story isn’t unusual for that time. It is simply this, she “falls” pregnant – pay attention to the language, it matters.  The sperm donor, for he can be called nothing else, refuses to take any responsibility. Why should he, no one can prove “it is his.”  So, our Little Lady goes with two friends, savings from her part-time job in hand, to a butcher working out of a garage in Downtown Denver who will help her “out of trouble.” The “doctor” must have known what he did when he punctured the uterine wall and artery.  He must have, because he took the time to pack her uterus and vagina with dirty oil rags before sending her home to bleed out.  He knew also that he would be gone before the door closed behind her; she wouldn’t fare well without medical attention; no one would look very hard for him and no one “could prove he killed her.”

When Little Lady arrives home, she goes to bed pleading a headache. Mom with the instincts of an excellent parent checks on her once or twice. The last time she finds her lying in a pool of blood that is soaking through the rags and onto her sheet.  You know the rest.

The understanding that Little Lady would have survived today because her abortion would have been safe and clean, doesn’t seem to resonate with the Ryans, McConnells, their idiot president or the arrogant bastard he drug out of Colorado Conservatism to nominate for the Supreme Court.   They would never have the guts to admit what really lies behind their phony Christianity and lame moral superiority, although Trump came close.  They would never say, what I surmise they believe that Little Lady deserved what she got.  She had sex without permission of their miserable moral order.  She got “knocked up” all on her own.  The boy isn’t culpably; boys will be boys.  Remember that all boys want to marry a virgin, even if they don’t mind screwing the asses off of 266 before they find one.  The 266 deserve what they get – butchers, dirty hands, piss filled alleys, oil rags, coat hangers and knitting needles. 

Are we going to stand for this shit again? Can any of us look at a girl or woman in our lives and not say, HELL NO? We must rally around a woman’s right to exercise her health care options in a safe and clean environment.  This filthy, stinking patriarchy, its perverted misogynistic God and hatred of women must not condemn another Little Lady to death.  We must rally around our sisters’ rights as we have rallied around our LGBTQ brothers and sister and our Muslim brothers and sisters.  We must fight.  It is a matter of life and death.  Abortion isn’t going away. Safe abortion is at risk of being taken away.

Resist!

Enough is Enough

I have been following the marches across the country and the world on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.  I am hearing a lot of carping, sniping and sniveling from the Clinton and Sanders camps. This wasn't just media foolishness, as I thought initially, designed to distract from the importance of the marches.  It was the real thing.

As I said to a friend of mine in a message on Twitter, Jesus Aloysius Horatio Christ, pull up your big kid pants, grow a set of whatever you need and stop whining.  The nomination is over.  I didn't like the way it ended.  I didn't think it was fair, but it is OVER. The election is over.  I was stunned, shocked and angry; but this I know, Bernie's people didn't defeat Clinton.  A corrupt DNC; a negligent media; the FBI; I think the Russians and that anemic putz who runs Wikileaks had a piece of it; the bloody Republican voter suppression humps in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and the lazy lizards belonging to the 45% who didn't get off their asses and vote defeated Clinton.  It's left us in a nightmare; it's horrible, but it's OVER.

In the first hour of Trump's administration he hurt millions of people. He increased mortgage interest rates and began to undermine the ACA. He'll work in the dark, in the closet, under the table and behind the bookcase, but he is working for the rich and their corporate interest wherever he is working. He is in office for one reason, to make money for himself and his cronies.

Clinton, the nomination and the election are yesterday. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, as the Bard said, is the issue. Donald J. Trump - liar, conman, cheat extraordinaire with the vocabulary skills of a dyslexic goldfish and all the charm and class of a gang of kids rolling a drunk - is our problem now. We must not be divided to be conquered; we must not be diverted and Gaslighted. We must not let the media or its pet huckster throw sawdust in our eyes so we can't see what is going on in front of us.

We weren't all on the streets today, but we are all focused, ready to work just the same. Let's shovel the bullshit into the ashcan, dry our tears, bandage our wounds and get to work forming common cause. It is worth as much as our survival.

For Remembrance Sake

Mario Como said,"We campaign in poetry and govern in prose." True enough - although our poetry is rapidly becoming pornography.  Como's theory is true except for Joe Biden.  He campaigns, governs, walks and lives in poetry.  Biden is American poetry - sharp, sweet and subtle; roundly wise and humorous; gracious and open; simply stated and clear of mind.

A little while ago President Obama gave his Vice President the President's Medal of Honor with distinction.  Like a true poet, Biden wept, spoke in terms of lavish praise and deep humility.  His profound and rich Irish soul reached out to everyone in the room; especially to the man who was honoring him.  That was today.

In not to many tomorrows we will leave the Age of Obama and enter the Season of the Infantile. Biden's poetry will be replaced by zealotry, witless sycophancy, and duplicity masquerading as loyalty out of pure self interest. Dark clouds are gathering all around this America that has for too long pandered to the lowest common denominator; traded the common good for the merely trite and traded its dignity and civility for practiced stupidity and proudly held bigotry.

Other countries have weathered this storm in long ago yesterdays. Italy, Spain and Germany paid a terrible price for this indulgence in the simpleminded comfort of mob rule and scapegoating. I suspect we will too.

Nonetheless at this moment we have Joe Biden's poetry. Let us celebrate this day, mark it for remembrance sake. We will need good things to look back upon as today fades into tomorrow and becomes yesterday.

The Wages of Karma

I don't care whether you believe this shit or not, the irony is rich. On the 20th of January the Office of the President of the United States will be vacant, and the circle jerk will begin. Scandal followed by revelations of wrong doing followed by doubt and conspicuous theories of all kind as we watch what is left of our institutions crumble before our eyes. Trump proposes to shove his corrupt cabinet down our throats without so much as a "one moment please," from the whores in the House and Senate. The moral Right waxes moral as it suffers the little children to come unto the Lord, providing they can pay for a ticket.

All we need is Monty Python. This is the Holy Grail of American idiocy. I am so glad we are friends and can enjoy this together. Shakespeare couldn't have written this; Jung couldn't have imagined it; the next four years will be a surreal absurdity beyond the wildest dreams of Poe or Coleridge on opium or Fitzgerald and Hemingway in their cups.

Intel chiefs presented Trump with claims of Russian efforts to compromise him

The Editor of the Wall Street Journal is flattering himself if he thinks most people expect any better than duplicity and obfuscation from his rag. For a year the MSM enabled Trump's lying, distorting and coning the people. For a year all Trump all the time shut out every other candidate and issue in the primary and through much of the election.

Now with the aid and assistance of a corrupt media and two corrupt parties, Karma will come home to roost starting January 20th. Let us resolve to tell his voters in unison when the whining starts as they realize what they have done, "Shut the fuck up. You earned this." Let us further resolve to remind the MSM every chance we get that they are not trusted and need not worry anymore about not being trustworthy.

Wall Street Journal Editor Says His Newspaper Won’t Call Donald Trump’s Lies ‘Lies’