I want my Obamaphone!

The younger generation, and to me that means almost everyone, sees a cellular phone as something much more than a telephone.  It's a symbol even if everyone and his 5 year old kid has one and the semiotic value has much to do with the snob quotient, the joy of having something before anyone else has one, and very little to do with making phone calls. So judging from the jealousy in Rush Limbaugh's voice, the phone to have, the phone he doesn't have, is the Obamaphone.

No, being filthy rich won't help, in fact it has no price and it's so exclusive it doesn't actually exist.  It's just another vintage lie from past Republican campaigns, wandering zombie-like from lectern to podium to  press conference to blog page to radio show.  Yes.  Yes indeed.  There is one born every minute and a Tea Party con-man to take him.

If you're dumb enough to believe that Barack H. Obama is handing out free telephones to the gleefully unemployed "takers" along with the free money he takes from you and hands out to leeches and bums and welfare queens -- you're just the sort of person the Tea Party wants on its side.  That's why they keep telling you you can't have one of these phones even though your life's blood is being drained in order to pay for thousands of them.  That's Tea Party Dumb.  That's Drudge Report Dumb.  That's the sort of dumb Kansas Senatorial candidate Milton Wolf  hopes Kansans are when he uses this moldy, mangy, sleazy and threadbare lie  to make people so angry they'll vote for a piece of shit like him.

Recently a frozen virus was dug up in Antarctic ice and it's still viable after 300,000 years.  Republican lie makers can only dream of such near-immortality, but their lies do last, don't they?  They still believe Democrats started the Great Depression, that Barack Obama started the near-Depression years even before he was elected and they still believe 47% of Americans live tax free and get free money, food, lodging and telephones and people like Rush Limbaugh pay far too much of their hard lied-for income so that lazy black women can have free cellphones to talk on while they lay around eating free food and waiting for the welfare check.

Now there has been a program in place to provide phones for the indigent so that they can look for jobs, but it's private money and it was started by George W. Bush, just like the recession and two wars and the record spending and unemployment they think you're dumb enough to blame on Obama.

And are they right about you -- you Tea Party stooge, you Limbaugh-listening, Fox-following empty headed fool?  If you're one of those, eat your heart out.  You can't have an Obamaphone or one of those special Welfare Queen Edition Cadillacs or any of that free money and you can't have a country with any future either. And that's no lie.

Something Rotten in the State of North Carolina

By (O)CT(O)PUS

There seems to be a callous, "fuck-you" attitude metastasizing cancer-like throughout the state of North Carolina.  Recently, former Secretary of State Colin Powell condemned newly enacted voter suppression laws in North Carolina, warning fellow Republicans: “These kinds of actions do not build on the base. It just turns people away."

Now, authoritarians in the state of North Chinalina Carolina are turning against religious groups that minister to the poor:

Raleigh Police Threaten to Arrest Church Volunteers for Feeding the Homeless: 

Nearly every weekend morning for six years [my bold], church groups have passed out free biscuits and coffee to the homeless at Moore Square in downtown Raleigh, N.C. This Saturday at 9 a.m., when volunteers from Love Wins Ministries arrived, 100 sausage biscuits and coffee carafes in hand, Raleigh police officers met them on the sidewalk and threatened to arrest them if they passed out the food. 

A city ordinance, officers said, banned food distribution in public parks. 

Hugh Hollowell, an ordained Mennonite minister and the executive director of Love Wins, was outraged. The ordinance was no surprise — the city requires that groups purchase an $800 permit to use the park, and since that would require non-profits to pay $1,600 per weekend to distribute food, Love Wins never sets up in the park but on the sidewalk along its edge [my bold].  $1,600 could, after all, buy a lot of biscuits and coffee. 

More than 70 people had already lined up outside the park for the free breakfast when the cops issued their threat. Soup kitchens do not operate in the county or city on the weekends, and so the Love Wins breakfast is one of the only ways the homeless can have a free, warm breakfast on the weekends. Feeding the homeless, Hollowell told TIME, is a spiritual calling. 

Love Wins is not the only group in Raleigh that has been told to cease and desist in recent weeks. Church in the Woods and Human Beans Together, two groups that also serve meals downtown, report being told to stop feeding the homeless without prior notice, too. 

“Rather than threatening to arrest people for sharing food with people experiencing homelessness, these folks should be applauded for dealing with the hunger that is faced daily by the homeless population nationwide,” said Jerry Jones, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless. “Cities are just trying to cut off homeless people’s source of food in hopes of forcing them out of downtown areas.”

How low can North Chinalina Carolina go!