Tampa and the will to power

As I've been saying since Richard "you sure as hell are a crook" Nixon departed the White house and the Republican War on Truth began, if the Republicans accuse their opponents of something, you can be sure not only that it isn't quite true, but that the accusation is an attempt to distract from their own guilt.  So when the war criminal Allen West disgusts us with the accusation that the Democrats are "the most racist party I've ever seen in my life" we know the opposite is true.

And why doth West protest? Why because the press isn't showing him the respect his hypertrophied ego demands and why would anyone detest the torturer of innocent civilians; despise the accusations that Democrats are Nazis and Communists (at the same time no less?)  It could only be that he's got dark skin, of course. 

And then, there's Paul Ryan, the delight of Tea Perverts everywhere who enlightens us with lies like:

 "And the biggest, coldest power play of all in Obamacare came at the expense of the elderly. ... So they just took it all away from Medicare. Seven hundred and sixteen billion dollars, funneled out of Medicare by President Obama" 

when it isn't actually true -- the cuts are in payments to hospitals, not in coverage to individuals. The cuts are savings  while Ryan's plan would actually deprive Medicare recipients of coverage.  Paul Ryan is a liar, but what did you expect?  The truth would ride out of town with him on a rail and covered with feathers.

And then There's Paul Ryan howling like a damned soul about the "corporate welfare" that was the stimulus package. Welfare and Communism and all that, even though the Republicans asked for a much bigger package and with no requirement to tell us who was getting what - even though Ryan stomped his feet and whined and begged for even more money for Wisconsin companies.  Paul Ryan is a lying, duplicitous, forked tongued son of a bitch, but I repeat myself.  I already said he is a Republican candidate.

And then there's Paul Ryan, the con man, the liar, the swindler, the bearer of false witness -- there's Paul Ryan blaming Obama for the closure of a Janesville Wisconsin plant that was shut down before Obama became president. Ryan, following in the tradition of accusing FDR of  causing an economic crash that started three years before he was elected. And there's Ryan condemning from the platform in Tampa that Obama disregarded the advice of a bipartisan debt committee that Ryan himself condemned. Did I mention that Ryan is a Republican?  Lying is what they do, whether it's lying to start wars, lying about how top bracket tax cuts don't cause recessions when they do and raising them prevents growth when the opposite is true.  That's what history says, but hey, you can't believe history -- history is Liberal. Hell you can't even hear History, it speaks in timorous whispers while the Right Wing roars and threatens and rages from every screen, from every radio speaker and every corporate owned newspaper.

But why lay the lies on Ryan alone? They're all liars and pickpockets and Romney has to take responsibility for it all.  He has to explain why taking the $716 billion in Medicare savings achieved by Obama and spending it will reduce spending and why reducing revenue will pay off the debt. He has to give us more than vague generalities and slogans and promises that are negated by other promises, but he can't because what he says is designed to "energize" people who know nothing and prefer to remain angry at their chosen scapegoats.  

But of course the truth would lose the election for him and of course the New Right isn't about fixing the country anyway, it's about power.  It's not about you or your life, your liberty or your pursuit of happiness; it's about power, power and more power and such such concentrated power that answers only to money -- power over a country that is more and more irrelevant, increasingly deluded and ignorant, ever more bellicose and yet has the power to destroy the world. 

The eye of the idiot

"For dogs have encompassed me; a company of evil-doers have inclosed me; like a lion, they are at my hands and my feet."

 On August 28, 1963, a year short of 50 years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King told us he had a dream.  I wonder if anyone still does. 

Watching and listening to the madness growling and the lies howling across the country, I have mostly nightmares.  If  "America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned" it's now intent on defaulting on any promise it has ever made to anyone but the corporate robber barons, the rabid Christianist insurgents and the anarchists.

We have a self described Anarchist group of US military personnel, a militia plotting to overthrow the government by violence, some members of which are now on trial for murder. We have the most popular cable news network inventing calumnies against our elected government and some of our wealthiest citizens and businesses spending billions on so distorting the truth that we can't remember how we got here and are eager to repeat everything we did to cause the two largest economic catastrophes  in the last hundred years. We have widespread attempts at voter suppression.



No, you can't get to the truth easily these days, but you can bet that if the Republicans are screaming about all the things the demon Democrats and the Beast Obama have done, are doing and are about to do at any minute, you can be sure the truth is that the Republicans have done the same or are engaged in doing it or plotting it.  Yesterday I received a thick envelope in the mail, ostensibly from John McCain but certainly written by others.  Designed in every way to generate a sense of emergency, it insisted that I take the opportunity and use the express mail envelope (postage not included) to mail $2000, or maybe a little less if I want to risk an accusation of Marxism, as AN EMERGENCY DONATION to "stop the billion dollar Obama fundraising Juggernaut." 


Whether or not Jesus cares enough to weep any more, I do.  I do at least when the growing rage allows it.   Yes, yes, I know.  You poor victims of truth, justice and common decency will tell me as you've been doing since you turned the most prosperous nation on earth into the largest debtor with a cynical smile on your face -- you'll tell me I'm simply wrong and generally stupid because I'm angry at the "legitimate rape of America."

It's the logic of liars, the argument of the evil and if God has forsaken us, or left us behind, which may be a better translation, we're still too stupid to know it. We're legitimately stupid enough to see God's will in our own evil that we nod together like hollow bobble heads and agree with the Robertsonians that God saved the Republican convention from getting wet but if an asteroid fails to fall on the Democratic convention, it will mean nothing.


But in a way, that's true. This is America and meaning is in the eye of the idiot.

Matt and Mitt

And all that shit.

You can't say they don't try to please everyone, and since most people are idiots, or at least made equivalent to idiots by their ignorance, their faiths, beliefs, prejudices and anger; the way to please one idiot without offending the other is to make ambiguous hints, to use a  mouthpiece to provide plausible deniability and to make it sound like it's only a joke. You libtards got no sensa humor! Just jokin' here.

"No one’s ever asked to see my birth certificate. They know that this the place that we were born and raised.”

For example, we have Willard Mitt Romney "joking" that everyone knows where he was born ( not like that watermelon thief hiding in the woodpile) for the benefit of  Detroit's demented minions who might suspect that WMR is secretly one of the boys.  Indeed Mitt is good at making everyone think he's secretly on their side rather than being simply ambitious for power. 


My memory is good enough to remember son Matt ( how cute) bloviating his Birther bullshit last year,  of which  Raw Story is good enough to remind us.  I also remember  Plastic Matt  "joking" about how Plastic Mitt would release his tax returns after Obama would release his (already released) birth certificate. Just adorable, who cares if it's true?


Reminds me of all the folks I know who take pains to be polite in public but trot out the racist epithets in conspiratorial tones when they feel safe. Yes Rombo and company are good at playing both sides of everything without actually stating any principles and their constituents are really bad at noticing.  Have you noticed?

OMG!

Could it be that Anne Coulter just said something I agree with?  I think I need to wash out my brain with Lysol.  But I guess it's not quite that bad.  Yes, I do believe that the oh so Typically Tea Twit Tod Aiken is a swine, but I would stop short of using nuclear weapons on him as she demands ( rather messy at best) but I don't think he's not a real Republican as she asserts and I certainly don't, as most of my saner readers will agree,  think the Democratic Party financed his campaign just to make the Republicans look ridiculous.  Hell. they've looked ridiculous for over 30 years.

“What he cares about is his own ego,” said Arrogant  Anne of the Thousand Ton Ego on Insanity Hannity's Fox News show.  She complained about his lack of knowledge of medical facts, as well one could expect of a propagandist who carefully researches and checks her facts to be sure none of her assertions actually corresponds with any.


I probably should rephrase that to use the word 'whined' in ironic emulation of her favorite phraseology:  Anne went wah - she went wah, wah wah.

The Legitimate Rape of Freedom

I went to bed ruminating about the predicted course of Tropical Storm Isaac which had it ravaging the West coast of Florida from fort Meyers to Tampa next week.  Am I a bad person for dreaming that a random raging force of  nature might do what our miserable excuse for a righteous God never seems to do and tear the Tampa Convention Center to pieces, rending flesh from barbarian bone and yet somehow leave the Tampa General Hospital just across the channel intact to tend to any decent folk who got caught out in the storm?  Perhaps I am, but the teeth and claws of the GOP are as visible to anyone with eyes to see as if they were painted red with gore -- as indeed they are -- and who will be there to rescue us when the wolf has eaten Grandma (and blamed it on Obama?) Sadly today's National Hurricane Center prediction shows Hurricane Isaac passing to the west of Tampa, leaving only some wind and rain to drown out the demented cries of a dying country.

It won't be quite loud enough of course, to obscure the lies and libels, the slanders, the fabrications or the calls for armed insurrection against the decent, the humane or the lovers of freedom  -- nor wet enough to wash away the Tea. But don't bring your guns to Tampa.  It was OK for the toothless Tea Whores to bring firearms to Democratic meetings and threaten to use them, but the GOP has banned guns at their sabbath.


There will be and there already are howls about spending and taxes and budgets, but put in the form of a passion play that has more to do with reversing the guilt for having started a war on invented information -- the most expensive war in our history -- and proposed that it would cost nothing if only we relieved the richest of us of a few more percent in taxes. They'll go on pretending that a middle class tax cut was a tax hike, that no additional gun control was somehow a "gun Grab" and that restoring Ronald Reagan's tax relief for the richest Americans, many of whom like Mitt Romney paid paid nothing and are still paying almost nothing was "the largest tax hike in history" and a flirtation with Marxism.  They'll continue the tradition of posing pornography, legal birth control, the "personhood" of fertilized eggs and abortion as the great issues of the day and the same people who claim that the universe is only a few years older than the pyramids will howl like idiots about how 14 year old girls won't get pregnant if the rape wasn't forceful enough and how women with hydrocephalic babies can't actually die in childbirth. They'll stand on the bloodstained platform or their vampire religion and call for the subjugation of women, the abandonment of the old and sick and weak and claim we simply can't survive if we do what everyone else in the free, modern world does.  They'll suggest a country with a double standard of morality, where the government sleeps in your bed but not in theirs and where they pay nothing and obey no rules. 



No, sorry Messrs. Romney and Ryan, I'd like you and your numbered accounts in Bermuda and Luxembourg and Liechtenstein washed out into the Gulf, never to be seen again and soon to be forgotten by the madmen, the congenitally stupid, the misogynists, the sexual perverts who support all the silly, stupid, racist rhetoric. I'd like to drown the contempt for facts, for science, for mathematics, for history and of course  your contempt for anyone who didn't lie cheat and steal their way to wealth and power, but of course I can't.


I can't because this is a stupid country, a petty, angry, prejudiced, bigoted, selfish and deluded country who thinks it would be better off and safer with no government at all. We're the country that elected George Bush twice and Richard Nixon twice and Spiro Agnew and savaged everyone that spoke up. This is the party that was outraged at anyone who said the economy was unsustainable and now sneers and snarks about how the economy is unsustainable.  This is the country that cheered at the biggest borrow and spend spree and now looks at the spendthrift culprits as saviors. Perhaps we deserve our fate. Perhaps we deserve even worse.  Perhaps a better nation might some day emerge from the stinking wreckage, but probably not and probably some other power will come to dominate the world -- a power who cares less for the kind of country we pretended to be and insisted we were while we danced around a bonfire chanting as America died.

Abortion, Women's Rights and the American Taliban: Paul Ryan

You might want to read this article outlining the new CBS Pittsburgh Interview with Paul Ryan. Brief as it is, it's quite revealing as a portrait of a man desperate to avoid engaging with or even acknowledging the implications of his own ideas.  Any sentient protein-based life form can see that there is no daylight between Paul Ryan and Todd Akin when it comes to refusing federal funding of abortion in cases of  rape and incest.  This is very important stuff.  I think that for too long, even feminist discourse has tended to trivialize the issue at hand – it isn't simply about "choice" in some consumerist "which product should I buy?" sense, it's about the stripping away of a fundamental right: the right of women to control their own destiny, at least to the extent any of us can do that  And if you can't do that, what the hell can you do?

In spite of the homey manner and the jeans on a fellow like Rep. Ryan, there's precious little daylight between the American Fruitcake Right and the Taliban when it comes to attitudes towards female integrity, autonomy and equality.  Read the article – in it you hear an anxious young man confronted with the abominable language initially included in a bill he cosponsored: "forcible rape" (aka "legitimate rape" in case you're compiling a lexicon of the stupid-idiot-imbecile things Republicans say), the sheer arrogance and oblivious madness of which he tries to quell by repeating the new post-Akin-debacle mantra, "Rape is rape. Rape is rape, period. End of story."  Nice try, asshole, but you're on record as an Akin man.

The Romney campaign has really stepped in it regarding this all-important issue of female equality and autonomy.  Governor Romney, in his usual wanna-be slickster way, is trying to sidle away from what every sane person knows is his actual position, but he can't: he's got Paul Ryan, who's been legislatively "palling around" with American Taliban types like Todd Akin, and of course he has the GOP platform itself, which seems to have been borrowed from the overseas Taliban.  (Perhaps the Taliban should file a copyright infringement suit over the pro-life extremist plank of the Republican Party.  I suspect lawyers would find whole paragraphs lifted verbatim from that odious outfit's Great Book of Hating Perfidious, Whorish Womankind.  Okay, I made the title up – but you get the idea.)  Even Mitt, an ethical and ideational Houdini if ever such was, can't get out of this one: his and his running mate's stated, in-print or on-video ideas speak against the two like wicked deeds on the Day of Judgment.

Finally, what I find awesomely arrogant about Ryan's interview is the segment where he dismisses any attempt on the Democrats' part to – well, you know, distract women from the real issues of the day: “And I don’t think they’re going to take the bait of all these distractions that the President is trying to throw at them,” says the candidate as quoted in the linked article.  Obviously, women's rights don't count in the Republican book as among those real issues.  No, they're just a cheap diversionary tactic to keep us from realizing that B. Hussein Obama is a Kenyan communo-fascist who swore an oath over chicken-blood to destroy the Great Satan from within.  And I think we can all agree, that's the only thing we should be considering as loyal Amurcans come election day.  At least those of us who can still vote – you know, WHITE MEN.

Revealing the Boogeyman

In a recent post, Post Racial America? Hell to the No!, I focused on a disturbing web site (www.niggermania.com)  that  has the most blatantly racist content that I've seen anywhere on the Internet. My good friend Mark left a comment on that post in which he expressed his mixed feelings about giving the site any attention:  "It is so obviously designed to shock that it would seem that more attention is exactly what they want."

Mark has a valid point, but my focus isn't to give this site attention, at least not of the type that it desires. Ignoring the boogeyman doesn't make it go away; ask any five-year old. The wise parent turns on the closet light and reveals to the child that the boogeyman is just an over stuffed clothes hamper.

The depth of depravity that feeds racism at this level counts on being able to stay in the shadows. They don't want those of us who find their beliefs repulsive to see them. They want to skulk around in dark corners, leaking false information designed to influence the weak minded and fearful into sharing their beliefs. They provide links to studies rejected by legitimate researchers that purport to offer scientific proof of outlandish claims of the inferiority of those whom they hate. Their goal is to recruit followers.

They count on that the people who would find their beliefs reprehensible will remain unaware of their presence. They don't expect to appeal to everyone.  Like any cult, they target the weak, those who believe that they have been marginalized by the larger society. The leadership of racist hate groups may have access to personal wealth but the rank and file followers are working class people. The power of the leadership arises from persuading those followers that the reason that they don't have the job, the house, the car, and all other material measures of success is because of the "lazy, shiftless, violent other" most often identified as Black or Hispanic.
Belief in these conclusions, which are presented as based in irrefutable fact, promotes a climate where legitimate protestations of discrimination made by black people are often met with accusations of "playing the race card."

People tend to form their worldview based on the prism through which they see the world. If you don't hold vile racist beliefs, it is harder for you to imagine the extreme levels of such beliefs as expressed on web sites like this one. We have a need to make sense of the world, to neatly order our belief system. I believe that the reason good people so often fail to take action to stop evil is because we have no frame of reference to help us see and understand the evil. We can't imagine that anyone possesses this kind of hate for others.

We need to open the closet doors, shine a flashlight under the bed and force the boogeymen out into the open to be revealed to be nothing more than sniveling cowards fixated on their own inadequacies. Desperate to persuade themselves that labeling others as inferior will somehow make them recover their long lost dignity.

Came across an interesting article that discusses another racist hate site and why it matters that we call out such sites on their promotion of racism.

Boxing with Racism--Do Something!

Some of my readers on my personal blog have raised a legitimate question as to what can we do about such blatant racism as espoused at www.niggermania.com (NMC). It's time for those of us who believe that racism is a cancer that eats away at this country to make our voices heard. It doesn't work to look the other way and dismiss such vicious displays of racism because we don't want to give them attention. They are not going away because we refuse to look at them.

I've tracked down the host for the offensive web site. It's a company called Black Lotus Communications (BLC).

BLC specializes in hosting sites that are looking for an extra layer of security to protect the site from attack. NMC complains about being shut down by hackers in the past and started a parallel site at dot net to make certain that their faithful fans are not shut out in case one site is hacked.

I spoke with someone in customer service at BLC (1-800-789-1977 or 1-866-477-5554) who stated that BLC did no check out the content of the sites that it hosts. When I expressed my disgust with the NMC site, he stated that I could send an email to BLC at abuse@blacklotus.net

BLC is also on Facebook. I liked the site so that I could post a copy of the email that I sent BLC via the abuse address.

Why focus on BLC? Because money talks. A business has a vested interest in how it is perceived by the public; it also has a responsibility for the choices it makes. Below is my email to BLC. Want to do something about racism, then tell BLC that you oppose racism and take issue with their role in providing it with a forum. Show www.niggermania.com that they are not in charge.

Feel free to use by email below; do make some paraphrases to make it your own.  I signed my email and included my contact information.

My email to Black Lotus Communications:

I object to the content of two web sites hosted by Black Lotus Communications. The material contained therein consists of extremely racist language and ideology that offends common decency.

Black Lotus Communications hosts a web site at IP address 208.64.126.126. The IP address is for two sites, www.niggermania.com and www.niggermania.net. The administrator for both sites is Thomas Shelly. 

I assume that Black Lotus Communications does not review the content of web sites for which it provides hosting services.  You may want to rethink this policy. 

These sites advocate for blatant racism and despite a facetious policy that the site allows no hate speak, the entire site is about hate speak.

The first amendment prohibits the federal or state government from impeding freedom of speech but the prohibitions against restriction of speech do not apply to private businesses. You are not compelled to provide hosting services for this type of racist filth. In addition, there is an exception that allows for even government censorship of hate speech intended to incite violence. I believe that some of the comments on these sites rise to that level.

These sites are offensive to any person with a sense of ethics and values, not just black people. 

1. Visit the sites for yourself.
2. Read this article which I've posted about this site, Post Racial America? Hell to the No!  Your name is not mentioned in it but it will be in my followup posts.  It's up to you what is said about your business. I only write the truth. By the way, I'm also published at an online zine, LA Progressive.  
3. Stop hosting this filth. Make it clear that the boundaries of decency do not allow room for such vile racism to be bandied about. Would you provide a forum for support of child abuse, domestic violence or other aberrant behaviors? Why provide a forum for racism?

Willard Mitt Romney Rated III

Well, it now appears that Governor Romney has gone back and had a gander at those flighty tax return thingies, and he says he's paid over 13% on ever' one o' em all the way back to at least the late Devonian Epoch.  Interested party-animals see this article in HuffPo, your source for all things no doubt unfair and unbalanced (and maybe even "unhinged") regarding Republican office-seekers and office-holders. 

Great Father T-Rex!  Mitt must be pathologically arrogant to think that anyone ought to take his word for anything after all the ridiculous stuff he's been pumping into the ether regarding President Obama's policies.

See, there's this notion called "transparency." You may have heard of it sometime or other.  The point is that an office-seeker shouldn't expect the little people -- the plebes if you will -- simply to take his or her word for everything; the governor is asking us Lilliputs for something big, so let's see the tax returns.  Let him put 'em out there and be done with it. Every time he opens his corporate pie-hole without doing so -- no offense since corporate pie-holes are a prominent part of people too, my friends -- he looks even less credible to millions of voters in these United States than he already looks.  (Which is pretty impressively non-credible already, come to think of it.)

And by the way, why on Planet Dollar is Mitt Romney so darned proud when he says he's long paid at least 13%? Or even 20%, counting charity? Does that get one into some kind of honor society in Thurston-Howellville? Most ordinary folk pay MORE THAN THAT, whether they like it or not. All in all, just another silly attempt by a very, very rich man to sound like a social contributor rather than an offshorer and "overseaser" of perhaps too much of his much money to the Caymans and Switzerland.

Go-Bama and Biden Unchained 2012!

You've got to be kidding, part III

When is a joke not a joke?  When it's about Allen West the convicted war criminal winning the Republican primary for Florida's House District 18 Tuesday. He has been running as a war hero of course, Florida being a kind of Bizarro World where things are their own opposites.

It's considered a swing district and is a snake pit of  Tea Party sentiment. So much so that his opponent  has been ostracized from the Republican party for even suggesting himself as an alternative to West, that Fascist son of a bitch. That was enough to christen him and all his supporters as Communists in the minds of the local Teabastards.  Crowder, a formerly popular county sheriff lost abysmally of course,  having only a few thousand bucks, decades of intimate familiarity with the district and good job performance to advertise as opposed to West, who never has lived in the district but had the bottomless pockets of the terrorist Right to fund him.

It remains to be seen who will prevail, but the completely unknown 29 year old Democratic candidate is unlikely ever to win in this Republican cesspool although there once was a one term Democrat in that office after  traditional values Mark Foley made a fool of himself with teenage boys.  

I'd call it another unfunny joke that  former State Representative William Snyder also carried away the nomination to Replace the pariah Sheriff Crowder. Snyder, as our State Rep strongly supported an Arizona Style "show me your papers" law, which of course made him very popular in this overwhelmingly pretend-Christian area where there are more Churches than dentists and Fluoride is banned in the water supply because it's a Communist plot but only "Liberals" worry about the Arsenic and pesticides and Mercury.

Of course our future as a nation is a pretty unfunny joke too, isn't it?