Bernie Sanders Last (Middle Class) Action Hero

Bernie Sanders on Obama/GOP tax cuts for the rich:

"In my view, it is a moral outrage... I will do everything in my power to stand up for the American middle class and defeat this agreement."

Not sure what Sanders could do now the trap is sprung. Do you filibuster and screw those two million unemployed Americans whose insurance is set to expire? Or do you suck it up and throw the country into the poor house to fluff a few rich guys' pillows? I hate to go all Archie Bunker, but the government of this country - red and blue - is a f*cking disgrace. With the obvious exception of Bernie Sanders.

Dick Cheney Charged

The new skinny on Cheney...

News breaks that Dick Cheney has been charged with bribery and conspiracy in Nigeria. He is officially a wanted man But:

Although Nigerian government officials said they would seek Cheney's extradition to respond to the charges, it's all but guaranteed the US government won't entertain such a request.

Yup. Let's just keep shining that good ol' light of democracy and justice on the world... by harboring a wanted criminal and refusing to comply with international law. We've probably invaded small countries for less. Ain't hypocrisy grand?

Fighting Words From Obama

Yup, he's finally come out swinging. At his own base.

Two years ago, I could never have imagined my blog being so anti-Obama. Jeez, the guy used to talk like a champ and genuinely sold me on hope and change. But that was then and this is now. Now we've crossed the credibility hump and 'hope and change' are just hollow buzzwords... almost as hollow as Fox News' "Fair and Balanced". And I've had it. Majorly.

So to hear Obama rail against us 'progressives' today not so much stung as inspired a big ol' middle finger directed due north at the White House. Asked by the WSJ what he thought of liberals who accuse him of abandoning core principles and refusing to fight:

The president compared current complaints from progressives to sparring over health care reform, saying that "this is the public option debate all over again." Then, Obama said, while he was able to pass reform Democrats had fought for for a century, they instead viewed it as "weakness and compromise" that there was no public option. "Now, if that's the standard by which we are measuring success or core principles, then let's face it, we will never get anything done."

I don't think I've ever heard such a depressing public admission of weakness from a sitting president. Never such a frantic waving of the white flag when times most demand leadership. OK, Obama, I get it. You're no leader. You can't even whip your own party into line to get a vote going, let alone stand up to the GOP. You have no interest in getting your message out and informing the people so that ignorance doesn't become the default setting for public opinion. Instead you just let the Republicans frame every debate, let their skewed version of reality prevail and then shape your policies to fit. Is there no-one close to you who can quietly and politely point out that you're behaving like a world-class f*cking loser?

True, as you say, "this is a big, diverse country" and "not everyone agrees with us". But you don't even seem to agree with yourself. You won a f*cking landslide and were given a big fat mandate to run as a progressive. And what happened? While Bush famously thought he served only the folks who voted for him,  you have the opposite delusion: you choose to serve only the loudest 20-30% who would never vote for you in a million years while treating those who would support you like so much dog sh*t.

Yes, healthcare reform was a struggle and ended up as an aborted catstrophe. Why? Not because the great American public are somehow philosophically opposed to better healthcare and the mess they ended up with was their preference. It turned into an abortion because you refused to fight. You refused to counter the lies and bullsh*t. You refused to press the case. Basically, you pussied out to the Tea Party and the corporate fascists.

Yes, unemployment insurance might have been blocked by the GOP if you hadn't caved on tax cuts. But you laid the ground work for the GOP taking the unemployed hostage. You led the hostage right into the damn house by caving in advance. Instead of standing up for the middle class and getting this sh*t sorted months ago, you stood up for the f*cking GOP. And now you want to attack me for my unicorn dreams of social justice? F*ck you.

So next time, just be honest. Don't attack me for still clinging to the same principles you sold out for the price of a pat on the back from Mitch McConnell. Don't try and justify your weakness by saying "nothing would get done" if you actually tried. Jeez, that's the definition of the term loser. You're not a loser if you fight and lose, you're only a loser if you never fight at all. So just step the f*ck down and let someone else do the damn job if you can't.

Obama Failure For The Day (Tuesday)

"My job is to do what's right for the American people."

So said Obama at today's ritual public humiliation (you know, those things they used to call presidential press conferences). I'm a stickler for correcting bad copy so...

"My job is to do what's right for the Republican party."

There. Fixed.

Skip The Xanax, It's Conspiracy Theory Time

Let me tell you a story...

After the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, Lenin became the all-powerful dictator of the new USSR. He was the Nietzschean 'super man' in control of his own (and everyone else's) destiny. But even Lenin, the ultimate 'decider', sometimes doubted whether or not he was really in control. Said he:

"The state does not function as desired. The car does not obey. A man is at the wheel and he seems to lead it, but the car does not drive in the desired direction. It moves as another force wishes."

So was that just megalomaniacs' paranoia, an occupational hazard for dictators? Or was there really some secret third party of plutocrats controlling and manipulating events to their own advantage? Who knows. But follow the money... what ultimately came of the "Communist" revolution? More than 70 years of big profits for the investor class via Cold War boom sectors like military technology, currency speculation, the space race and all that highly profitable anti-Communist hysteria that kept the free world turning in an ever more right-wing, business-friendly direction.

Just a glance at what's going on in America today makes you wonder that the rich are not-so-secretly in charge. Always have been, always will be. It's nothing to do with anti-Semitism and crazy Nazi bullsh*t, it's nothing to do with David Icke's frigging lizard people, aliens or whatever... the rich, irrespective of race, religion or planetary origin, just happen to be in charge. And whatever "We The People" want, we only get it if it happens to be in line with what they want too.

Just take a look at the Koch brothers financed Tea Party - a movement of popular frustration bought and paid for by the self-same guys Tea Partiers should claim to be fighting. I wonder how many times 'baggers wake up in the middle of the night wondering, just like Lenin, who's really steering their car? Maybe they don't... but they sure as hell should.

So if even blood-spitting 'kill the rich' Bolsheviks could be secretly put in power by the rich for their own ends, set up like pawns in some massive undercover operation, makes you wonder how easy The Tea Party or Obama 2008 would have been to pull off. Are they both just witting or unwitting stooges of the plutocrats lubed up with a bunch of phony-baloney populist talk?

Either way, I'm not the only nut out here. Says Stephen Lendman at the anti-corporate thepeoplesvoice.org:

Believing Obama is progressive is like calling a cat a dog. Only the delusional think so. He's, in fact, hard-right, a neocon, a warrior president, a corporatist pursuing anti-populist policies favoring wealth and privilege, not social justice when more than ever it's needed. He's a fraud, an elitist, chosen years ago, then put on a fast track to power. Big monied interests love him. So do war profiteers and members of America's aristocracy. He's one of them. 

Maybe my disappointment with Obama is just temporarily fogging my brain with conspiracy theories and delusions... maybe this is all nuts. But I'm not sure. Look at it this way, before anti-Communist hysteria took hold, there used to be a powerful labor movement in America. Working people got together, fought for their own interests and won. Do we think the mega-wealthy don't have enough resources and necessary smarts to pull off the exact same thing in reverse? If you just use the term "rich guy union" in place of "international secret conspiracy to rule the world" doesn't it sound more plausible? Definitely more plausible than thinking the rich have been winning the class war for decades by pure dumb luck.

Conspiracy? Whatever...

Random Picture of The Day

Happy Holidays!

Quote Of The Day

Cheap of me to rip off Andrew Sullivan's quote of the day... but it's a doozy:

“In a free society, we are supposed to know the truth. In a society where truth becomes treason, we are in big trouble.” -- Ron Paul on Wikileaks.

Man, I so want to hate Ron Paul all the time. But he just keeps popping out sane thoughts from time to time to put me off my game. Props where props due.

Random Picture of The Day

Some hick d*ckhead in Idaho builds a 10-foot-tall KKK snow man, concerned parents at a nearby elementary school call the cops... but the story is made by the crashingly cheesy USA Today headline:

"KKK snowman gets frosty response from neighbors"

Ah... the newspaper headline pun. So sad yet so funny... the journalistic equivalent of a clown funeral. Jon Stewart was all about this last week.

Let's Play The Race Card...

I like those off-beat surveys that pop up and make you wonder "who wants to know this sh*t and why?" But this one, surely says more than it knows:

Oprah Winfrey, Glenn Beck, Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Sarah Palin, comprised the list that LifeWay Research presented to Protestant pastors along with the question, “Which, if any, of the following people do you believe are Christians?”

Bush and Palin topped the list with most Protestant pastors checking them off as Christians while Beck's Mormonism put him low with only 27% (Mormon, Shmormon...). But Oprah and Obama? Only 41% thought Obama was a Christian and a staggering 81% thought Oprah wasn't. Hmm... could I play the race card here black folks? I think I might have a flush...

A Protestant pastor would have to be f*cknuts insane to think two American public figures of Oprah and Obama's stature would not self-identify as Christian. The only way they could possibly assume differently is if the words 'white', 'male', 'conservative' and 'Christian' were interchangeable and/or synonymous in Protestant circles. Tell me it ain't so?

Parasites Destroying The Host

I have a lot of respect for Robert Reich. But I'm also kind of a d*ck... so I'll use this picture.

Robert Reich, Munchkin-like economic rocket scientist, poses the following question:

Quiz: What's responsible for the lousy economy most Americans continue to wallow in?

A. Big government, bureaucrats, and the cultural and intellectual elites who back them.

B. Big business, Wall Street, and the powerful and privileged who represent them.

Of course, Reich is too nuanced and thoughtful to give answer B a resounding "well, duh" as I would. But he does say the answer is mostly B:

In reality, the lousy economy is due to insufficient demand - the result of the nation's almost unprecedented concentration of income at the top. The very rich don't spend as much of their income as the middle.

Shame then that the standard conservative tune is all about B with blame "big labor" thrown in as a complimentary minor key. But the bigger shame, as Reich points out, is that the Obama admin and large numbers of Democrats are also playing the same tune these days. So how can we ever dig our way out of this damn hole when no-one's willing to acknowledge reality?

The rich in America no longer give a f*ck about social responsibility. They've abandoned any sense of shared prosperity they might have had ten years ago. Now they just sit, Gollum-like, on their own ever-growing piles of 'precious' while the whole country turns into Honduras all around them. There is no trickle down. There is no "redistribution of wealth". Just a massive sucking of wealth upwards where it stays forever like a hamburger in a fat guy's colon. The rich are the parasite that's killing its host. And no-one in politics, GOP'er or Democrat, seems to have balls and perspicuity enough to face what's happening.

But I can't really hate a Republican for siding with the rich. That's all they've ever done. It's those Democrats who stay quiet on naming and blaming, stay quiet on offering non-RNC-approved  reality, and who stay quiet on offering solutions that make me f*cking sick. It's almost as if the two parties have merged and are now working for the same goal: a Republican government in 2012. As Reich concludes, that's what will happen unless the Dems sac up and start truthing against the "blame big government" lie.

Debt & Double Standards

As two million more Americans get their benefits yanked in the name of deficit reduction, the news of just how much money the feds loaned the banks as the financial crisis hit seems a tad schizophrenic by comparison. According to newly revealed data, those same people who are now advising the government to nickle and dime old folks, the unemployed and government employees happily payed out $9 trillion in "overnight loans to major banks and Wall Street firms" to keep them afloat in September 2008.

So the message is clear: The government's got Wall Street's back. But regular people who drag ass out of bed and go to work every day? You're on your own. If the banks were too big to fail, the American middle class must be too small to succeed.

Obama Failure For The Day (Monday)

So there are some things this president will stand up and fight for. Today President Patty Hearst, GOP Stockholm Syndrome victim, announces a two-year wage freeze on all government workers except for the military.

Hey, what else would you expect from a Democrat champion of the people than tax cuts for the Koch brothers and a pay cut for the mail man? If the GOP was a gang, Obama would be "blood in" at this point.

Obama Failure For The Day

From TPM:

The vote this morning was 53-36 to extend the Bush tax cuts on incomes below $250,000 -- seven votes short of the 60 needed.

Don't tell me I can't blame Obama for this. Don't tell me I've got to go along with the passive-aggressive whining about "obstructionist Republicans" that's become a cover-all excuse for every Democrat failure. Sure, the GOP are a bunch of c*nts and they're destroying this country. But so are the Dems and our limp-as-hell president who couldn't fight his way out of a paper bag with a f*cking bazooka. The shame goes on...

Gay Ibises & "Straight" Conservatives

When it comes to 'choice' there's only one that conservatives seem to support: the supposed "choice" not to be gay.

But this whole notion of choosing whether or not to be gay has always baffled me. And it seems to get everywhere. Here's a for instance: MSNBC posts a story "Study says pollution makes birds gay" describing how scientists have concluded excess levels of mercury pollution are responsible for turning white ibises in Florida gay. Odd? Yes. Something of a thinker? Maybe. But if you were a "gay = choice" conservative, you might respond like this guy:

"Please. another flawed experiment to fool libtards into believing gay is not a choice."

So said some random conservative type venting his spleen in the comments section. So... let's skip past the 'everything-scientists-say-is-somehow-part-of-a-liberal-plot-to-take-over-the-world' bullcrap and ponder instead the subtext. Like most knuckle draggers, this guy's absolutely convinced being gay is a choice. So, basically, he's implying he'd happily suck a d*ck too but because he's "straight", he exercises self control and chooses not to? How the hell does that work?

As a straight guy I've never been attracted by some sagging scrotum glimpsed through the steam in a locker room. I've never felt a primordial stirring of my loins seeing that virtual Macy's Day parade of ass tops in the Home Depot plumbing aisle. I've never sprouted a guilty boner while polishing the shaft of my rifle... In short, I'm attracted to women not men. There's no choice, no decision-making process. It's just the way it is for me.

I'm no Freud, but perhaps the "gay = choice" thing is informed by the believer's own internal struggle to stay "straight", the conflict between their bicurious yin and their bigoted yang...

So do conservatives hate gays because they see them as weak for giving in to temptation? Or are "straight" conservatives just jealous that gays are having their c*ck and eating it too? Either way, they seem to think gay guys are just straight guys who just fell off the wagon. It's just plain weird.

Fame...

Every day, new people get famous for a few minutes, get chewed up and crapped out by the media. Our popular culture runs on making and breaking instant celebrities. But I always wonder how many of these instant celebrities are actually pleased to be in the spotlight? Like, say, if you were arrested for whacking off in a theater during a screening of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Would you try to live that down? Or would you use up your one phone call from jail to hire a publicist? Honestly, I'm not even kidding.

People do dumb sh*t every day. But some people (usually in Florida) do dumb sh*t that stands out enough to capture the imaginations of connoisseurs of weirdness like me. Then the weirdos become internet memes because enough of us talk about them. Then they get to be novelty guests on late night talk shows. Then they might even get Dr Phil or Jerry Springer building entire episodes of their shows around them... This week "Public Masturbation: Good or Bad"?

So the choice is clear for this guy: do you live the rest of your life under the cloud of being 'that guy who got caught rubbing one out during Harry Potter'? Or do you embrace the opportunity instead? Hmm...

C*nt of The Year: John Barrasso

John Barraso: C*nt of the year

C*nt of the year award won hands down by John Barrasso (R WY) for single-handedly blocking unemployment insurance for two million Americans and cost of living increases for seniors.

Some people might say, hey, let's not drag the discourse down, let's not name call... but how the f*ck are you supposed to talk about self-aggrandizing pr*cks like Barrasso without resorting to obvious truths? Tell me a way to describe this globule of subhuman garbage in less-than-insulting terms and I'll give it a shot. Until then, I'll just wish a long, slow death from ass cancer on John f*cking Barrasso.

Stockholm Sydrome?

Can't argue with this... at least I can't:

"It was the right time to quit, because if I had still been smoking this week, I would have been sorely tempted to stab a butt out in my eyes, to spare me from having to witness a Democratic presidential administration fly apart at the seams...and not because of some nefarious right-wing plot or media malfeasance. No, Mr. Obama and the pinheads who advise him did this to themselves, and it is disgraceful beyond all measure to behold."

Says William Rivers Pitt at Truthout. He goes on to talk about the various explanations floating around to explain Obama's monumental failure to live up to his own promise:

There is a lot of talk about Mr. Obama's character, or lack thereof, these days. He's not a fighter, he's too conciliatory, he's weak, he's unprepared, he's a secret Republican, etc. I have an outside-the-box theory about Obama that may explain all this: Stockholm Syndrome. The malady arises when a hostage situation goes on long enough that the hostages begin to identify with their captors, and in some cases, go so far as to stand up for them, and even defend them in public and in the courts. The GOP has been pounding on Mr. Obama since his presidential campaign began almost four years ago, and I think the pressure and stress might have blended his sense of direction. Left has suddenly become right, and the Democratic President of the United States has become the most eloquent advocate for everything he was elected to put a stop to.

Stockholm syndrome? It might be an 'outside-the-box theory' but, really, does it seem so far-fetched when you see Obama on TV, all doe-eyed and weirdly tranquilized, still blathering about "reaching across" to a bunch of thugs who'd only reach back so they could clamp their hands around his throat? Yup, it's starting to look like president Patty Hearst got elected.

DADT: Conservatives Think The Troops Are P*ssies

Picture courtesy of the Fried Wire archives...

John McCain is still burning up government time on the (literally) no-brainer issue of DADT. For him, repealing this dumb policy would be "premature".

Man, it really makes me laugh how conservatives like McCain push 'support our troops' into some kind of militarist religion but happily insult those same troops by projecting their own homophobic neuroses onto them. Every time some bigoted tw*t starts yapping about DADT, the implication is that the troops are just too fragile, too overly sensitive to mix it up with gays. Like they can dodge bullets, risk death every day but can't handle the idea of sharing a shower with a gay dude in case he catches a glimpse of their wiener? It's truly pathetic.

Douche bag McCain, more than anyone else, needs to man up, shut up and get psychiatric counseling instead of seeking to rationalize his own phobias by dressing them up as policy arguments. Can you imagine that Geico ad with R. Lee Ermey yelling at McCain "You know what makes me sad? You do, you homophobic jack wagon!"

Just as with racism, I no longer see the viciousness so much. Granted, I'm neither gay or non-white so I do have the luxury of detachment. But from my perspective, all I see are scared, inadequate little people who should be more pitied than despised. All these 'isms' and the 'ists' who perpetuate them are just pathetic.