The takers

You'd think George W. Bush was never born or had never been president, since you never hear from him or about him and are often accused of some kind of dementia if you mention his legacy.  To be sure, I'm grateful that he's keeping quiet and hasn't spent years making dire predictions of doom and accusations of treason like other parts of the still twitching corpse of his administration -- none of which have come to pass, by the way. Perhaps his quiet reclusiveness has to do with the GOP plan to redact him from the record so that they can't be accused of wrecking the country and a good part of the world with their drool-down economics, but I'll be kind since I'm grateful not to hear from him for any reason.

Mitt Romney however, is a sore loser; bleating about how Obama only won because of all the 'massive' handouts to the "takers" which is his way of derogating minorities without having to call them wogs and worse.  You'll notice that he prefers to name corporate takers who pay little or no taxes but get huge subsidies "job creators" and forgets that the demand for goods and services from the lesser elements create more jobs than Bain Capital ever did, but typically, he gives no examples of handouts that can be attributed to Obama and leaves it to the  prejudices of his piteous and self-pitying audience to fill in the blanks with the usual subjects. Those people aren't real, 100% Americans as the Klan has long told us.

What he does mention is the 'dream act' which would give an advantage toward legal residency to unwitting and accidental immigrants that have something to offer; an education, a valuable skill, military service: something more than or at least as good as Romney's own immigrant ancestors from Mexico brought here. It's similar to plans proposed by the invisible ex-president himself, but that was then, when Romneycare was a good thing to Republicans and we had a "commander guy" in the oval office bleeding the economy dry.

But as for the "takers" as the malphemism dubs most of us of lesser means than the Oligarchs, surely Romney isn't talking about whole states: states like Texas, Florida, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee and North Carolina which gobbled up nearly a quarter of all federal revenues allotted to the other 47 states.  Six of those seven states, incidentally, have gathered more than 25,000 signatures in petitions to secede from "the greatest country that ever existed since the Jurassic."  But don't call those states, those places where literacy and having front teeth are considered "elitist," takers. 

They're just sore losers and they want their Confederacy back; their culture of God, Guns, grinding poverty and degradation.  Don't call them takers, it's far too kind.  Don't call those companies who employ only foreign workers and don't pay taxes here takers.  Let's just keep sniping and snarking and snarling like sore losers for four more years.  Let's look forward to obfuscation and obstruction and the end of Obama in 2016 when we can put some rich, white Republican back in the manse where rich, white Republicans belong -- and laissez les mal temps rouler!

Swinging 'round the circle

Observing the American political process, do we really need a geneticist to tell us we're getting stupider?

• Take the American Bigots Family Association -- please. We need to "clamp down" on immigration because those genetically inferior races Socialist immigrants always vote for Democrats says a spokesman who would never make anyone think of the Nazis.

• Failed VP candidate Paul Ryan says he lost the election not because he's a dangerously unbalanced and stupid dirt bag but because the genetically inferior races 'Urban' voters turned out to vote.

• National Disgrace Fox News exhumed that vicious Swift Boat ad after a Washington Post suggestion that John Kerry might be the next Secretary of Defense, continuing their tradition of smearing wounded combat veterans who aren't demented, neo-Fascist, psychopathic liars Republicans.

• Demented, neoFascist psychopathic liar Grover Norquist told us all that the dynamic Romney/Ryan duo lost because Obama's "attack ads" called Romney a "poopy head." Whorequist ( sorry, that's a typo) maintained that his party has a mandate not to raise taxes even if it causes the destruction of the nation.

• Ambulatory pustule Rush Limbaugh affirmed that the Republican loss was all about Rush Limbaugh and his grotesquely dishonest, racist, bigoted, misogynist, indecent, seditious Conservative commentary.

"I am, by the way, the primary reason the Republican Party will keep losing, until I am denounced by the Republican Party."

Unfortunately that grotesquely dishonest, racist, bigoted, misogynist, indecent, seditious Conservative commentary is just what the enemies of all things good and decent Republicans like about him

Losers

John Perr at Crooks & Liars today quoted Romney as having said about his wife Ann, back in 2007 "Her positions I do not think are terribly relevant to my campaign"   Hell, his own positions haven't been either! "Whatever you wish I would say - well I just said it" would be more accurate.

Almost as telling as the loser  Allen West's insistence that the frivolous law suits he keeps filing, trying to get recount after recount the law does not entitle him to, are "not about me" but rather about justice.  It's about you West and about time you got your "war hero" ass the hell out of town and be content that you weaseled out of an 11 year sentence at Leavenworth.

And of course Obama didn't win fair and square either.  People, you know, second rate people who should know their place, like Women and such voted for Obama because he lied and told them Republicans would march them into "rape camps" if Romney was elected, says Michael Graham, one of the Tea Party's maddest hatters.  You never heard of Rape Camps?  They're right over there next to the Death Panels and the filing cabinet where they keep Obama's Kenyan birth certificate and his Bin Laden autographed Koran.

What, you're just now noticing that the GOP is only a replica of a conservative party and probably put here by body snatching alien invaders who ate the originals?  What were you thinking and what were you thinking with?

To take up arms

Is it really worth blogging any more?  Am I just wasting time and words trying to point out the obvious to people so deeply immersed in that flip side of belief: Denial?  If we can vote out a candidate and yet have to endure endless recount after recount of early ballots for no reason even if all of them don't add up enough to elect him anyway?  Yes, I'm talking about Allen West, still pretending he's the new District 18 Representative: Allen West, still defended by Republican Zombies who feel "honored" to be in the presence of a war hero and a gentleman, as they describe him: who is still being served by an army of  Boca Raton lawyers financed by secret financiers.  Why bother?  I'd rather teach calculus to a cabbage.

Should we even try to save the United States from the malignant, festering, putrid, gangrenous growth spreading from the decayed remains of the Confederacy?  a Texas GOP treasurer excretes a 'newsletter' which rages:

“Like the remainder of Lee’s army after Gettysburg, it is our duty to keep fighting to the bitter end, in hopes that Providence might shine upon our cause before it is too late, we must contest every single inch of ground and delay the baby-murdering, tax-raising socialists at every opportunity. But in due time, the maggots will have eaten every morsel of flesh off of the rotting corpse of the Republic, and therein lies our opportunity.”

He advocates the dissolution of the Union and the secession from it by Texas and the other hate-states.  If this be not treason; if this isn't a declaration of war, then why look elsewhere for our enemies?  Hell, why bother with reason when the madmen are assembling in the streets?  If this is not a clear and present danger to America, what is?  And why cannot we stop all the endless psychotic raving and invoke the "Bush Doctrine" and shock and awe these bastards until there's no one left to carry on the insurrection?  Enough reasoning, explaining, proving -- no one was ever argued out of insanity. No one ever succeeded in converting Lenin or Stalin or Mussolini or Pol Pot or Idi Amin to decency and reason by blogging and no one ever will.  Perhaps it's time to take up arms against a sea of madness and eliminate the Confederacy once and for all. Herein lies our opportunity -- our freedom, our survival!

Kind of Blue?

Anyone who saw Karl Rove raging around the Foxhole in the moments after Fox News and all the others called the election for Obama -- and anyone watching him waving a tablet with numbers on it and squeaking madly yesterday; explaining why Obama beat the Great White Dope, might not suspect that this is all over now or that the nation has decided or will decide that the United States has now gone kind of blue. 

They might look to the past and not expect the far right will settle down and go along with the tide of the future any more than they did after the humiliation of Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon.  Ask Bill Clinton about the revenge of the Republicans or their patience while waiting for retaliation.  Hell no, the fight is still on, and while Fox News broadcasts and there are people who watch it; while Limbaugh roars and while Coulter hisses and snarls like a syphilitic witch, it's still on. While money talks, it's not over.

Hell no, you can be sure that for the coming years, Obama will have won only  by "suppressing the vote," by enlisting the help of the Black Panthers or the Neptunian Trotzkyite Front -- or by any other means apparent only to the collectively paranoid psychotic Tea Party base. Their number one priority will not now cease to be the removal from office by any means possible, the blocking of every initiative and the unrestrained and unfounded vilification of Barack H. Obama.  To them, they are still the majority and when they lose it can't be their own fault.

Democratic urges to make nice and play well with others, and Democratic expectations of a sudden comity and cooperation may be dangerously premature. We're not facing a chastened and contrite enemy, newly motivated to re-examine its outmoded assumptions and tired tenets, we're standing next to a wounded and very powerful beast, and what beast has a conscience?  The Republican machine is hardly moribund and is still as red, still as rich and even more motivated to lie, cheat, steal and filibuster than ever.

The GOP may be a party in grief and shock, it may be acting out the first two stages of that Kübler-Ross hypothesis: anger and denial, but any expectation that we'll see an attempt to bargain honestly, much less to get to any kind of acceptance in the near or near-distant future -- or perhaps ever, is terribly premature, in my opinion.  Yes, we may have dodged a bullet this week and the next four years may be a reprieve from the GOP success in their war against human rights, liberty and Democracy and perhaps  the war against real Capitalism, but we have to temper our great expectations. 2014, 2016 are the numbers of the beast and there never will be an end of their era.

Wild America

  And he will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man's hand against him

Genesis 16:12

Florida is one of those places where wild men, or more accurately from the Hebrew, "wild asses" have a lot of presence.  Looking, county by county, precinct by precinct, you can see how much influence place of residence has on one's voting choices.  In a sea of red, virtually any county having a university is blue, for instance, but life is more complex than that and there are many factors that affect what kinds of people vote in certain ways. But Florida is not much different than the US in general other than that Florida is usually quite near 50/50 in any election and so small differences have a big influence on elections.

CNN.com posted some fascinating data yesterday; the sort of thing that delights a Freakonomics fan eager to see correlations between things we don't ordinarily think about as well as those things we usually do.  Sure, some of the categories are tautological.  Conservatives and Republicans vote red. That white men tend to be red and white women only a bit less so, isn't surprising either, but the way income plotted against political leanings varies by income bracket surprised me, at least.  It's not quite true that more money makes for more red leanings.

But age is a very strong factor with those over 65 being substantially more Republican  and those under 30 being even more strongly biased the other way.  Not much surprise at all there, nor is racial identification Vs. politics surprising even if it's possibly the strongest correlation.  People identifying themselves as white are about 69% red Vs. about 7% for claimants to African-American status.

But the one of so many factors that screams for attention and doesn't get enough of it I think,  is that religion, or religious identification seems to be one of the most dominant factors of all and that if you want to predict how someone will vote, asking what group they identify with and how often they attend functions  will give you a good prediction. In terms of religious fervor alone: if you never attend services, you're 62% likely to be blue. Go more than once a week and that drops to 36%.

Call yourself Protestant and you're 42% likely to be blue, but Catholics, not surprisingly to me, are closer to 50% Liberal minded.  But lump Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and others together into "other" and any one of those others has a  whopping 74% chance of  voting blue.  Atheists?  Almost the same at 70%.  The name you call God, if you in fact believe in one, may have more influence on your choices than all the reasons you give yourself regarding economic or foreign policy.

No, there's nothing intrinsically weird about any of these many categories, but it's sometimes not what you would have thought and there are quite a number of things that obviously are factors in that complex equation determining what we perhaps not so accurately call our free choice!  We all like to think we make our choices independently and based on facts, but the numbers suggest strongly otherwise. They suggest that what we accept as truth and as facts has everything to do with our micro-cultural involvement. Whether we're skeptical or gullible, authoritarian or libertarian may have something to do with life experience but obviously not entirely.  We're tribal animals and although we're able and eager to find tribes to belong to, some of our illusion of free will may be just that.  Illusory.

THE PEOPLE’S BUSINESS

The people voted, we have spoken and the message is “enough with the partisan bickering and obstructionism. Get off your dead asses and be about the people’s business for which you were elected!”

Looking at some of the news feeds, the White House sure gets it. No time to celebrate and hang out until January waiting for inauguration.  The President is still the President and he has wasted no time building on the voter mandate. He and Biden have been talking to GOP leaders in the House and Senate about what the election results mean to each of them and that they must all pull together and be about the People’s business for which they were elected.

Of course, Boehner is couching his comments on compromise, “Republicans are willing to consider some form of higher tax revenue as part of the solution — but only "under the right conditions." See article

David Axelrod warned Republican leaders to take lessons from Tuesday's vote. "Hopefully people will read those results and read them as a vote for cooperation and will come to the table," Axelrod said. "And obviously everyone's going to have to come with an open mind to these discussions. But if the attitude is that nothing happened on Tuesday, that would be unfortunate."

But let us not forget that the People’s business is our business.  Yes, we kept the White House for four more years but now is NOT the time to rest on our laurels, stick out our tongues and blow raspberries at the opposition.  There has been far enough of that kind of rather childish and ultimately unconstructive behavior over the last six years.

The divisions in the country run deep, mistrust and malice fueled by the shadowy entities at each end of the wingnut spectrum has been allowed to grow and fester to epic proportions. We, the People, must now stand up, hold our lights up high and declare an end to the hostilities.

We are Americans; this land is my land, this land is your land. We don’t agree politically, so what? Those on the right will not get to steer the direction government takes but they will get some of the things they want.  The same will happen on the left and even in the middle. It’s called compromise and I cannot imagine a country this size where the people can do anything else but compromise.

I hope others will join me in putting aside all the vitriol and empty rhetoric and set our minds to the ways we can convey our desires and demands. Write or call your representatives at the state and federal level. Blog, talk, reach out but above all else stay above the fray, keep pushing an intelligent message and remember that this is what caused the People to vote the way they did.

Yes, we won the race to keep the White House but our country is far from healthy and we all  still have a lot of work to do.

BUMPER STICKERS FOR THE NEW ERA

ROMNEY REJECTED!!!

Houston, the ego has landed

crash landed that is. 



If 2012 was the end of an error, it was Romney's error and the Republicans' error and although it won't be the end of their policy of taking us for idiots in order to take us to the cleaners, at least we won't have to listen to the nasty pastors predicting Antichrists and Apocalypses and the rest of their superstitious idiocies for a few hours.  We will get a rest from scurrilous fake economists telling us how tax cuts make us rich and pay our bills.  We'll have a few minutes peace from being told that Obama is responsible for the disaster that occurred before he was elected, for raising gas prices and all of those brainless and fraudulent claims that even the most idiotic and uninformed partisan has to strain to believe. We won't have to look at Mutt's  Botoxed and whitewashed face or listen to his ever shifting spectrum of lies and distortions and calumnies and complaints.   At least for a while.  They'll be back trying to bring down America within a day or so, or maybe sooner, like hyenas on a gazelle. They'll be back to make up ever more bizarre legends, ever more nonsense stories to fool the ignorant and bigoted and all designed for the benefit of a handful of people.



And we'll see them again in 2016, yapping about flag pins and the size of the flags on campaign jets and how the Democratic candidate eats Christian babies and was born on Mars and is financed by Commies from Kyrgyzstan, but their days do have a number as the population grows more diverse and younger, and angry, Bigoted, Southern white men go to sleep with their ancestors and their grandaughters date dark skinned men and have children more likely to piss on their Confederate ashes than to admire them.



Romney lost and he deserved to lose and the people who financed him and used him as a megaphone for their hate filled propaganda deserved to lose and to quote a favorite chant of  that androgynous and whining witch  Anthrax Coulter:  



Liberals Republicans go WAH -- they go WAH, WAH, WAH.

"As We Stand Here Before You Today": November 6th, 2012

"As I stand here before you today" is my favorite hackneyed political trope -- thus the post's title.

Well, as I sit here and type before you today, the nation is adjudicating the contentious case of Barrack H. Obumuh versus Willard Mittens (R)-Money the Eighteenth.  Who is to win, and who to lose?  Gagner ou ne pas gagner?  C'est la la question.

This large carnivorous dinosaur has snarled with sufficient intensity at Nate Silver on location at the NYT to bring the odds up to a whopping 90.9 per cent -- 90.9 per cent odds, that is, in favor of a relatively narrow victory for the president in both the electoral college and the popular vote.  Here's hoping he doesn't change them now that I've gone home to await the results.  You never know about that Nate -- statistics and numbers, you know.  Even the most terrifying dinosaur has only limited powers over statistics and arithmetics.  And frankly, I'm seldom granted more than "mildly disquieting" status, so....

Thanks to all who have participated in the process, either helping out at polling stations, donating money, or just plain voting.  All of it is important, and part of the civic life of the country.  Thanks in advance to the candidates for "putting themselves out there," however much or little we may agree with some of them.  It's exhausting to run for office these days, and it takes a good deal of commitment and sacrifice of one's privacy and even, at times, one's personal dignity -- something I think all sides should be able to agree on.  We will all see the results soon, and then, as the Shakespeare line goes, "the end is known."