The Republican War on Women and Arizona's Abuse of Human Rights, Interference with the Practice of Medicine, and Affront to Common Decency

This message from The Progress Report arrived in my email box earlier today.  It offers a clear warning to women (and to the men who love and support the women in their lives) about the stakes this year:

The language of the bill stipulates that a woman would have to show her medical records to her employer in order to even be considered for contraceptive coverage. If a woman were using the pill for one of its intended purposes, an employer could choose to stop insuring her, citing “moral objections,” and the woman would have to pay out of pocket for her contraceptive expenses. If an employer finds that the woman has a medical reason to be taking contraceptives (this means the employer would learn of the woman’s ovarian cysts, early menopause, or any number of other medical issues), he can choose to insure her. But if the findings aren’t to his liking, the woman can be dropped. 

IT’S HAPPENING EVERYWHERE:  In Mississippi, the legislature is looking at legislation that would effectively close the only abortion clinic in the entire state. Kansas is supporting an anti-abortion measure that would cause the Kansas University Medical Center to lose its accreditation. Wisconsin has banned private health insurers from offering abortion coverage. In Idaho, a similar bill would force women to go to crisis pregnancy centers if they wanted an abortion. And Idaho also - along with nine other states - has passed a bill that requires women to have an ultrasound before an abortion.

Contrary to GOP claims, the controversy surrounding health insurance coverage for contraceptives has NO BEARING WHATSOEVER on religious freedom. Let us be perfectly clear what the U.S. Constitution states:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion …”

It means church leaders have NO RIGHT to impose church doctrine on citizens, on the followers of other denominations, on citizens of no religious affiliation, or to enlist the aid of government to enforce church doctrine even on their own parishioners. Please note: 97% of Catholic women use contraceptives - thus going against the teachings of their Church.  In exercising their freedom to chose whatever healthcare options they deem best for themselves, women deserve legal protection from ecclesiastical overreach and abuse:

The religious freedom argument is a foil used by radical clerics 

and social conservatives to bully government  into acting as 

Enforcer and Inquisitor on their behalf.

Simply stated, this argument represents a direct assault on the letter and spirit of the U.S. Constitution. Yet, the GOP, in pandering for votes, is all too ready and willing to sellout your rights to the Inquisition. Worst of all, the GOP wants to empower your employer with the right to pry into your medical records, your private affairs, and your bedroom in the name of religious freedom - and dictate what medical treatment can be prescribed by your doctor.  Furthermore, the GOP wants to empower THE STATE to pry into your uterus with ultrasound probes - sanctioned by laws that are tantamount to sexual abuse.

Now let us consider the above quote within the context of this story, Moroccan Girl Forced to Marry Her Rapist Commits Suicide:

Amina, a 16-year-old girl from Larache in northern Morocco, who was forced to marry her rapist, chose to put an end to her life by swallowing rat poison last Saturday. According to al-Masa'a [ar], Amina was raped by a man ten years older than her when she was barely 15. And to preserve what is called “family honour”, Amina's marriage to her rapist, was arranged. A judge approved the marriage.

According to the same newspaper, Amina took the rat poison while she was in her husband's (rapist's) house. When he noticed that her health was deteriorating, he rushed her to her family's home. On the way he did not stop beating her, said Amina to her family, a few hours before her death.

Meanwhile, the American Taliban - radical social conservatives aided and abetted by the Republican Party including former GOP candidate Michele Bachmann, and candidates Gingrich and Santorum - are determined to outlaw all forms of abortion with no exceptions for incest or rape. Only the moist heartless, despotic authoritarians - who stick their noses into everyone's business - find any merit in further victimizing victims by heaping more shame and pain upon them.  In short, the GOP has morphed itself into a party of voyeurs, sadists, and born-again rapists.

Here is Bill Posey's voting record on issues of vital concern to women:

Voted AGAINST the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act (HR-11)

Voted AGAINST extending the Children’s Health Insurance Program (HR-2)

Voted AGAINST food safety regulations (HR-2749)

Voted AGAINST expansion of anti-hate crimes bill (HR-1913)

Voted AGAINST the Infant Mortality Pilot Program (HR-3470)

Voted AGAINST Planned Parenthood (H-amdt-95)

Voted AGAINST stopgap disaster relief (HR-2608)

Voted YES to authorize the pre-abortion ultrasound requirement (HR-2400)

For years, Republicans have been hellbent on turning back the clock of civilization; turning back hard-won labor laws; turning back the struggles of Suffragettes; turning back civil rights and voting rights; turning an impoverished middle class into an underclass; and turning America yet again into a "half-savage country."

The headlines are grim.  Darkness is descending on America … falling on hills, plains, and deserts; falling on farms, villages and cities; falling on the living and dishonoring the dead.

Obama's gas

I confess, I'm a loud-mouth critic of people who insist on driving heavy and dangerous trucks to the office or to do daily errands, but a guy who nevertheless owns a vehicle that gets, with a good tailwind, about one mile per gallon.

It's a boat, of course and these days I think carefully about where I'm going with it before I leave the dock. I probably don't use too much more than 500 gallons a year, which is still a whole lot less than I used to use as a commuter driving a small car. If gasoline rose to 5 or 6 or 7 dollars a gallon at the fuel docks, I probably wouldn't change the number of hours I put on the boat, but if I were driving to work, as many of you do, that 7500 pound, 8-12 mpg "SUV" or super heavy duty monster truck might just get traded for something less absurd.

So I have to make another confession: I secretly wish fuel prices would soar long enough to make urban hipsters go back to taking the bus or driving Fiat 500's, and suburbanites trade in their grotesque fashion statements for cars.

Of course the noises bubbling up from the bottom of the national cesspool have been blaming Barack Obama and "liberals" for those scary numbers that appear on gas station signs, as if it were the president or some government office that dictated prices on the free world market rather than the laws of supply and demand and the mechanisms of capitalism. I'm tempted to say that the self-appointed guardians of the free market either haven't the most elementary idea of how those markets work or perhaps are simply too dishonest to risk not blaming Obama for rising world demand. No sir, there's no pea under that particular walnut shell and if even a small proportion of Republicans had the mental wherewithal to deal with the notion that economic recovery means increased demand for resources, they might figure out that those screaming the loudest have a vested interest in a collapsing economy. As the infamous Rush once said: "I hope he fails."

So yes, some Republicans, some voices from the corporate owned media are also wishing for a big increase because the public is stupid enough, or so they hope, to believe that the "socialist" Obama is behind it all. You'll remember John McCain making that moronic accusation when gas prices soared under George Bush. No, he didn't blame Bush or the huge demand for fuel his wars gave us, he blamed Obama, because that's what Republicans do, they blame the other guy for their own actions; they blame the opposition for the workings of the natural forces of the same free markets they pretend to worship.

No, the old song is about the holy market and how all the ugly features of unrestrained capitalism like disregard for public safety and the powerlessness of an oppressed work force would wither away if we only let them drill for oil in your town's reservoir or chain your kids to a punch press the same way those Commies do, but the reality is that they have a very selective interest in capitalism and the high priests of 'enlightened self interest' are trying as hard as they can to take the enlightenment out of it.

So yes, rising energy costs sap the strength of the recovery and so that's just what a certain party wants so that they can go on pretending there is no recovery or that it would be a much better recovery if only they had someone like that Mad Monk Santorum in the White House. So maybe "jobs, jobs, jobs" is now last month's mantra because we're creating more jobs every week that were created under that 8 year Republican debacle. So it's time to turn on a dime and let's put on that Jumpin' Jack Flash disc 'cause now it's all gas, gas, gas.

Act Now! No Time to Lose!

Henry Kissinger -- the name could be a metonym for dishonest defense of imperialism and reckless disregard for the consequences of military action, and so it's no surprise to hear him tell us to ignore the consensus of all 16 US intelligence agencies that there is no evidence Iran is building or is about to build nuclear weapons.

Yes, of course they could all be wrong and there is always the argument from cliche that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but even in a nation of emotionally disturbed amnesiacs like the US, some might want to remember our useless attack and occupation of Iraq for which we continue to suffer and will continue to suffer for a very long time. In case you don't remember, that country had no nuclear, chemical or biological weapons or the materials or technology needed to produce huge, heavy nuclear prototypes much less the probably fictional "suitcase" bombs we were told could be smuggled into the US at any moment. Act now!

On CNN's GPS with Fareed Zakaria yesterday, Kissinger told us he was "uneasy" with the intelligence and that we should ignore it as we ignored the lies about Iraq and make the presumption that a bomb was forthcoming.

“I am very uneasy with the so-called intelligence report that say we don’t know whether they are actually working on nuclear weapons. I think we should start from the premise that they are undergoing all this in order to achieve a military capability. I don’t think that is a disputable point.”

I think it is disputable in the extreme, considering that we're listening to a war criminal involved in and culpable for massacres, invasions and genocides in Indochina, East Timor, Chile, Cyprus and Bangladesh talking about fomenting yet another dubious and probably disastrous war.

Kissinger and warmongering toadies like Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu tell us we have no time to lose; that the time to attack is now as Former Secretary of State Rice once told us. Shoot first and pretend there is no question to ask, lest the "smoking gun" of evidence turn out to be a mushroom cloud. Frankly I think we have everything to lose, including our future and any basis upon which to base the proposition and pose of being a force for good in this world.

Ruck Fush II: Black Clouds on the Horizon

There is a distinct possibility that I am spending entirely too much of any given day thinking about Rush Limbaugh. (As in "I need to scrub my brain with steel wool, because the words 'Limbaugh' and 'sex' have appeared in the same sentence.") But sadly for someone with an active imagination, he is in the news of late. And sex is involved.

So, question time. Rush has been married for roughly twenty of the sixty-one years he has infested this earth. He is known to have acquired Viagra (and a few other substances) through a number of sources. A few of them were even legal.

So, it's probably safe to assume that he had sex with one or more of his wives. (I started to have this mental image of him being lowered onto her with a crane, but then my gag reflex kicked in and I spent the rest of the night gripping the porcelain throne and dry-heaving...)

He doesn't have any kids. So I'm guessing that either birth control was involved, or those D-cup man-boobs have very little to do with him being morbidly obese.

Now, you take a man who hasn't seen his winkie without a full-length mirror in decades, a man with a documented willingness to lie about any subject in the world, a known drug addict with a fondness for cigars that smell like petrified turds: you take that man, and then you note that he is currently married to a reasonably hot woman half his age, and you know one thing as a universal truth.

That man is rich.

You know for a fact that she didn't marry him for his looks, or for his charming personality. He wouldn't have a chance in hell of landing this woman if he didn't have in excess of seven figures in the bank.

So, we have a woman who is willing to occasionally allow this bloated half-human slime to bounce his sweaty nethers against hers for a few seconds, before a thin dribble of lifeless sperm oozes out and he rolls over, exhausted, and falls into a bourbon-induced coma.

(And the next day, while he's railing against whatever liberal plot he claims is destroying America this time, she dashes off for a morning of passion with Reynaldo, the Dominican pool boy.)

So, in essence, the former Kathryn Rogers is having sex for money. Which would apparently mean that, by Limbaugh's definition, she's a prostitute.

I'm just saying...

But that is neither here nor there. More importantly, before anybody loses control of their gag reflex, let's turn away from this sordid scene of the human Hindenburg and his harlot, and consider one fact.

What does it say about America that Rush Limbaugh has been sending up racist dogwhistles for over twenty years, but it's his sexism that finally causes him to start hemorrhaging advertisers at an alarming rate? Why is it sex and not race that brings him down?

This fat bastard has been sexist for years: I mean, admittedly, there are more white women than black people in America, but bigotry is bigotry, isn't it? From the beginning of his program, before he was even syndicated, he was using the term "feminazi" to refer to... well, to any woman who said anything that wasn't strict Judeo-Christian submission to a man. And it isn't like he's ever pulled back from that position.

I have long told you, for example, Undeniable Truth of Life No. 24, written back in 1987: Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream of society.

See, I recently made fun of an idiot who titled a blog post "In Defense of Pat Buchanan and the First Amendment," where I finally had to explain to him, in tiny little words, why Pat Buchanan qualified as racist. And Limbaugh uses exactly the same tactics as Buchanan: he dog-whistles his way through life.

It all boils down to the "Southern Strategy" of the GOP, as explained by Lee Atwater, advisor to Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, and later Chairman of the Republican National Committee.

You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can't say 'nigger' -- that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me -- because obviously sitting around saying, 'We want to cut this,' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than 'Nigger, nigger.'

And there you have one of the core strategies of Rush Hudson Limbaugh III.

There are dozens of articles out there listing the various racist things he's said, going back to his earliest days in the radio. His empty-eyed zombie supporters will then find one that isn't properly sourced, and claim that the whole list is therefore invalidated. So the best way to play this little game is to find the ones that still exist in recorded form.

Unfortunately for Rush, this is not a difficult thing to do. Watchdog groups like Media Matters have literally hours of the stuff.

His favorite tactic (and that of much of the White Right Wing) is to paint Obama as a usurper, an outsider. He's different from "you and me," and so he's scary! He's the "Halfrican-American," the "angry black guy" from Kenya who's taking over the country: Limbaugh draws on the stereotype that all black men are gang members and thugs, and therefore, that Obama is dangerous.

Rush then reinforces this with continual references to Kenya, to Obama being "more African in his roots than he is American" and "behaving like an African colonial despot." Why specifically an African colonial despot? Well, see, Africa is full of black people! And it's in chaos! Which is what Obama is going to do to us!

And Limbaugh is fairly open about it. Not like Newt Gingrich, who calls Obama "the food stamp president" (see, all black people are on food stamps), but then gets to talk about "more people have been put on food stamps by Barack Obama than any president in American history" (a lie, by the way - that record is still held by George W. Bush). Rush doesn't hide behind code words like "food stamps" and "entitlement society" - he comes right out and tells you that Obama is going to confiscate your house.

This guy's -- this guy obviously has got a new role model, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. The next thing to look out for is for Obama to take the farms. Well, that's what Zimbabwe, that's what Mugabe did, he took the white people's farms.

That little clip actually covers many of Limbaugh's little tricks, all tn two minutes and forty-four seconds of your life that you'll never get back. It's got Obama looking up to African dictators, it's got America spiraling into chaos, Obama taking your house - hell, early on, he even get's the subconscious "violence" reference in, saying "Bernanke and Obama are out of bullets, that they've got nothing left in the quiver." See? The angry black guy is dangerous! He has guns! (And bows and arrows, because Africans use arrows, right?)

Well, with his sponsors running away from Rush Limbaugh so fast that he has to play dead air and PSA's, maybe we're finally hearing the death rattle of the Rush Limbaugh show. But let's not remember him just as some bile-spewing, misgynist asshole: there were so many other reasons to hate him.

I'm betting on Mitt Romney and Halliburton

Seeing as how I won't be able to get Social Security till my late 60's, and the retirement plans through my employer will be gutted as well, I've become an active investor.

I go through all the charts and examine the trends and fundamentals and other stuff investors are supposed to do. For the most part that's all nonsense. The real deal is investing in whoever has the power to do whatever it wants. Nobody has more power than Halliburton.

I use the word "nobody" to describe Halliburton since the republican elite chosen one, Mitt Romney, and the Supreme Court have declared corporations individuals.

Grand old bag of the republican party, Barbara Bush, just endorsed Mitt Romney. I guess this means the Bush clan is saving Jeb for 2012. It also means Halliburton will get more juicy government, no bid contracts. This is whether or not President Obama wins in November. Just as information was manipulated to get us into Iraq and made Halliburton a fortune, information will be manipulated to get us into something with Iran making Halliburton another fortune. Everyone, and that includes our representatives in Congress want to be seen as "tough."

I'll put my creds as a lefty against anyone. When I was a freshman I took the pro Jimmy Carter position and debated it in front of most of the high school student body. But I'm also a realist and greedy pig.

Today I bought shares of Halliburton stock. I feel dirty. But it's a good, naughty, like I saw dirty pictures when I was an adolescent and got away with it kind of feeling. This must be how Dick Cheney felt when he and his energy company pals thought up an energy policy that made them loads of money and knew there was nothing anyone could do about it.

It's not bad being Dick Cheney.

Ruck Fush

Winston Churchill is occasionally said to have made the statement "Show me a young Conservative and I'll show you someone with no heart. Show me an old Liberal and I'll show you someone with no brains." This is, of course, a lie. As Paul Addison of Edinburgh University put it:

Surely Churchill can't have used the words attributed to him. He'd been a Conservative at 15 and a Liberal at 35! And would he have talked so disrespectfully of Clemmie (Clementine, the Baroness Spencer-Churchill, his wife), who is generally thought to have been a lifelong Liberal?

And I like to think that I'm proof of the exact inverse of that theory, regardless of which idiot said it.

As a young man, I entered the military as a relatively moderate conservative. I listened to Rush Limbaugh, I had few interests in helping anyone but myself, I was known to make sexist and (yes, I'm afraid) racist jokes once in a while.

But then I met people. I learned things. I discovered that a "society" made up of devoted followers of Ayn Rand would simply fall into chaos: with every member dedicated to their own selfish pursuits, the fabric of that society would eventually fall to shreds. Why would a Randian want to join the police, or the enlisted ranks of the military, where nobody gets rich? A philosophy of selfish materialism can only work if it is allowed to grow, like a wart or a tumor, out of an otherwise healthy society.

Look up the history of the "robber barons" in industrial America to see how well that worked out.

So, I slowly overcame my shameful past - and I have to admit, much of the cause of this has to do with trying to live up to the example of the Trophy Wife, one of the few truly good people I have ever met.

In a way, I suppose that means that I'm worse than the "ordinary" liberal (if such a thing exists) - I'm a Born-Again Liberal. I came from the darkness of selfish ego, into the white light of humanity.

But, yes, I used to listen to Rush Limbaugh. I thought he was funny. I haven't thought so in years.

And now, he's going on his national soapbox, and calling a private citizen a slut. Because he's an bloated, lying bag of ass. He is the herpes sore on the face of society.

This is what Rush Limbaugh is saying.

What does it say about the college coed Susan Fluke, who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex? What does that make her?

It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She's having so much sex she can't afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex. What does that make us? We're the pimps... the johns, that's right. We would be the johns... no! We're not the johns. Well... yeah, that's right. Pimp's not the right word.

OK, so, she's not a slut. She's round-heeled. I take it back.

Her name, you oozing pile of rotting feces, is "Sandra." And those ellipses are there, not because I cut anything out, but because the drugs are finally taking their toll and his ability to spew bile and lies occasionally goes off-track. Hopefully, the memory lapses will get worse, and he'll shut up altogether.

(Actually, if there was any justice in the universe, he would get Parkinson's and be completely unable to communicate. That isn't happening, and therefore, there is no god. Q.E.motherfuckingD.)

See, that's what Rush said. It is, of course, unrelated to reality, but it's what right-wingers want to hear. Because the last thing they want is for people to know what Ms Fluke actually said.

A friend of mine, for example, has polycystic ovarian syndrome, and she has to take prescription birth control to stop cysts from growing on her ovaries. Her prescription is technically covered by Georgetown's insurance because it's not intended to prevent pregnancy.

Unfortunately, under many religious institutions and insurance plans, it wouldn't be. There would be no exception for other medical needs. And under Sen. Blunt's amendment, Sen. Rubio's bill or Rep. Fortenberry's bill there's no requirement that such an exception be made for these medical needs...

In 65% of the cases at our school, our female students were interrogated by insurance representatives and university medical staff about why they needed prescription and whether they were lying about their symptoms.

For my friend and 20% of the women in her situation, she never got the insurance company to cover her prescription. Despite verifications of her illness from her doctor, her claim was denied repeatedly on the assumption that she really wanted birth control to prevent pregnancy. She's gay. So clearly polycystic ovarian syndrome was a much more urgent concern than accidental pregnancy for her.

After months paying over $100 out-of-pocket, she just couldn’t afford her medication anymore, and she had to stop taking it.

I learned about all of this when I walked out of a test and got a message from her that in the middle of the night in her final exam period she'd been in the emergency room. She'd been there all night in just terrible, excruciating pain. She wrote to me, "It was so painful I'd woke up thinking I’ve been shot."

Without her taking the birth control, a massive cyst the size of a tennis ball had grown on her ovary. She had to have surgery to remove her entire ovary as a result.

On the morning I was originally scheduled to give this testimony, she was sitting in a doctor's office, trying to cope with the consequences of this medical catastrophe.

(Those ellipses are because I did cut some stuff out. Go read the whole thing. And yes, Mr Santorum. This woman had to be medically sterilized because you are opposing birth control. It would be ironic if it weren't so goddamned sad.)

That's Rush Limbaugh for you. More than happy to lie on any subject, at any time.

Now, Rep. Jackie Speier is calling for a boycott of his sponsors. And I think that's a pretty damned good idea: the right wing will whine that he's having his free speech suppressed, but he's welcome to say whatever he wants to; he just also gets to take responsibility for his lies.

Now, because Rush is a turd, Quicken Loans, Sleep Train, LegalZoom.com and Sleep Number have all pulled ads over this. (If you want to say thanks, they all have contact us or feedback somewhere on those links I gave - but you should know you'll probably end up on a mailing list.) However, there are others.

Clear Channel Communications
200 East Basse Road
San Antonio, TX 78209

Public Relations: (210) 822-2828
publicrelations@clearchannel.com

John Hogan
President and CEO, Clear Channel Media and Entertainment
JohnHogan@ClearChannel.com (that's a guess)

Tony Alwin, Senior VP - Creative, Marketing and Public Relations
(602) 381-5700
TonyAlwin@ClearChannel.com (that's on the website)

Carbonite, Inc.

177 Huntington Avenue
Boston, MA 02115
Main Office: 617-587-1100
Toll Free: 877-665-4466

David Friend, Co-founder and CEO

Tom Murray – VP, Marketing
617-587-1100

Century 21 Real Estate
International Headquarters
1 Campus Drive
Parsippany, NJ 07054

Web comment form

Richard W. Davidson, President and CEO

Bev Thorne, Chief Marketing Officer
and owner of the Evergreen Farm

4 Bass Lane
Lebanon, NJ 08833
(908) 236-9550
info@theevergreenfarm.com

Michael Callaghan, VP, Strategic Marketing
mike.callaghan@century21.com
(from a site called Lead411.com, who's going to spam me forever)
973-407-5238

ProFlowers

Web contact (or try "site feedback")
wecare@customercare.ProFlowers.com
800.580.2913

William Strauss, CEO
Proflowers.com
5005 Wateridge Vista Dr
San Diego CA 92121-5780

And that's just the easily available public information.

WILL WE EVER GET ALONG AGAIN?

Politics has devolved into a mud slinging, drunken brawl
with participants screaming insults and spreading wild rumors taken up as
gospel truth and then spread throughout the land via the internet.

Many people are lazy; upon hearing or reading some
extremely incendiary information, the more outrageous the better, they simply
reproduce the misleading propaganda and pass it on over the ‘net to hundreds,
even thousands of people.

Today I was “de-friended” on facebook by someone who was
apparently upset that I found the article they had posted was false on
snopes.com and I commented on it. That tells me this person and most likely
many of the readers have no interest in whether they are providing accurate
information but simple want something to hang their noose on.

In this case it was the bastardly, dastardly Obamacare.
The article insinuates that the bill that was passed has language that calls
for mandatory implantation of tracking devices into citizens.
According to snopes, where I quickly found the
information about this article, the bill that was passed no longer has the
particular language that referenced implanted devices but even it if did, the
actual intent of the passage was to be able to track information from
electronic devices including implanted devices LIKE PACEMAKERS…

There is a veritable thick gooey soup of lies, tricks and
hateful messages seeping and oozing into every nook and cranny of our cyber
world. Abortions cause cancer, gay marriage threatens heterosexual marriage,
people don’t have jobs because they are lazy, people don’t have healthcare
because they are stupid, our country is a Christian nation and all other beliefs
are here only to dupe the citizenry and pry them away from those solid
Christian values that only they have.

I’ve been around long enough to have seen the best and
the worst of local and national politics but never have I lived through a time
when this country was so deeply divided. It probably hasn’t been this bad since
the War Between the States.

No matter what happened in the political arena in
elections past, ordinary citizens would pack up their tents, go home, visit
with their neighbors and get on with the business of living. Not so today – the
level of animosity and disrespect for governance has not abated in four years.

So, I can’t help but wonder if this country is so broken,
if the people are so bereft of moral standards and common sense that we may
never be able to get along again.

And,if that’s the case, how will it be resolved? Another civil war? Two new
countries?

What a depressing state of affairs….

Let them get pregnant, like God intended.

What's worse than a bunch of creepy old man religious perverts conspiring against the health and well being of women? Well, perhaps a creepy young woman trying to make sure -- using copious amounts of taxpayer money -- to fight a requirement that health insurers cover the modest cost of birth control. Worse still, she's fighting something that in some cases is a medical necessity and in very many cases will prevent women from becoming unable to work and winding up in poverty and their children on public assistance.

Such things don't seem to matter to GOP apparatchiks like Pam Bondi, Florida Attorney General who is suing the Federal Government over the Affordable Care Act, a law that is starting to provide health care to Florida's 4.5 million uninsured and access to contraception. As the ACA will come before the US Supreme Court this month, the redundancy of this suit is as obvious as the smug unconcern Bondi has for truth, justice and freedom from the tyranny of religious nuts.

Sold as another attempt at "smaller" government, it's really nothing but a power play by the Religious Rich to make their perverted, obsessive, inhumane and antique dogmas into public policy no matter the cost. Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi may not be one of these foul, disgusting old men, but she sure as hell works for them while collecting a salary paid by the people she'd like to keep barefoot and pregnant and poor and in thrall to the superstition salesmen with the effrontery to use our freedom of religion and our tax revenues against us.

Oh please

Marvelous Mitt must be desperate to have something scary to say to distract Republicans from the religious wedge issues the public is getting tired of. He'd rather not talk about religion anyway and he needs of course, to distract from the dumb things he keeps saying. So he's had to come up with something dumber, if not quite original.

Remember when Darth Cheney told us in solemn tones that "Obama will be tested" and that there would be an onslaught of terrorist attacks should we be so foolish as to elect him; that candy-ass, ultra-liberal crypto-pacifist, watermelon stealing coward? Well Republicans may not remember, but we all know the result - more terrorists killed than ever and that includes Osama bin Laden. I think he's passed the test.

No, he didn't take our guns, he didn't make capitalism or Christianity illegal, he didn't appoint Jesse Jackson as Secretary of State and he didn't give us a huge middle class tax increase or a confiscatory corporate tax rate. He didn't institute Sharia law. In fact he's usually done the opposite of what the Chicken Littles have been squawking about for 4 years now.

So a return to objective reality not being possible when your entire platform and your strongest base are pickled in delusion and ignorance, what option does he have but to go nuclear? That's right, if we re-elect the president, the world will be blown up in a nuclear holocaust says Mr. Bluster of the plastic face.

" If I’m president, that will not happen. If we re-elect Barack Obama it will.”

I couldn't make this shit up, but then, I couldn't make this Mitt up. I couldn't vote for him either.

“Ahmadinejad having fissile material that he can give to Hezbollah, Hamas, and that they can bring into Latin America, and that they can potentially bring across the border into the United States to let off dirty bombs here — or more sophisticated bombs here.”

Sure Mitt, Just like Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons were potentially going to be smuggled into Peoria in a briefcase even though he had none, nor the means to make them, and we had to blow a few trillion and kill nearly a million to wipe him out -- and why is Obama going to get us into a nuclear war? Why, says make it up as you go along Mitt, because he hasn't been threatening to blow Iran off the surface of the planet for even thinking about it and possibly because according to the Secretary of Defense, Iran hasn't been doing much more than thinking and blustering about building one.

"Potentially." It's such a great word to weave a plot around. Potentially I'm an NBA linebacker who writes music like Mozart and travels the world in his magic submarine fighting for justice. Is Romney potentially a President? Oh please.

Plan B From Outer Space

It's hard to observe the growing and comical chaos in the GOP without thinking of B movie icon Ed Wood and his Plan 9 From Outer Space, wherein space aliens resurrect dead humans as zombies and vampires to stop evil men from creating the 'Solaranite' bomb. With the Republican circus trying to breathe life into mouldering, uncouth candidates reciting ancient and eldritch formulae to fight the evil Bill of Rights, secularism and the Obama Bomb, it's harder and harder to avoid the suspicion that this is only a movie.

With the economy showing signs of recovery and the ability to substantiate the hysterical portraits of Obama as a Kenyan Communist, Indonesian Socialist ally of big banks, Wall Street and the World Caliphate fading, the GOP must feel like Ed Wood trying to piece together a movie with $273.50 left in the checking account and an unwritten plot. The rising star candidate and the great white hope is making such a fuss about the need for a gospel-based theocracy with sex by permission only that any platform they can cobble together at this point would be so far beyond city limits and so rickety it can't support itself much less a coherent and discernable political position.

Whispers are being heard, CNN.com writes today, about coming up with a new candidate for the GOP ticket and ditching the Chameleon, the Worm and the cut-rate Rasputin. Finding any brand new candidate with any potential of being passed of as sane or decent (if not quite qualified) is remote, as the Tea Party element and the Holy Rollers simply won't accept him any more than they did Huntsman. The rest of the black-hearted Plutocrats aren't going to support Ron Paul and even if they could bring back Reagan from the dead, he wouldn't pass muster as a Conservative in today's party. Who ya gonna call?

The prospect of an open convention with desperate delegates acting like football hooligans in Tampa this August must have Republican strategists doubled over with cramps trying to come up with a plan B before the Grand Old Barrel goes over the falls in November.

With an inability to field a credible candidate so late in the game, the voters are going to have to reconsider a blind allegiance to a party that can't run itself much less a complex 21st century superpower.