U.S. Embassy Moving Outside Vatican City Walls.*** Rightwing Blogsphere and Pundits Go Berserk

***Where it always was.


So the U.S. is closing its Vatican embassy and relocating it outside Vatican City, where it always was, and guess what?

The right wing blosphere and punditry went viral with its misinformation, lies, and outrage.  

See, this is how they operate.  Half-assedly learn something the Obama Administration is going to do, take that half-assed information and apply a nefarious motive to it because OBUMMER!  Spread the misinformation and lies to every corner of the rightwing blogsphere.  Get all paliny over it.  

Rinse.  Repeat.

It's wearying.  It really is.  The U.S. Embassy's Vatican move?  There is no there there.  But apparently it's the default reaction to anything the Obama Administration does.  So the best thing to do is let them have their tantrum, close the door, and quietly walk away.


From Time Magazine website:



"...[F]irst you find all the FACTS, things like: Who, What Where When and Why. Then you report those facts. 

 WHAT: The US embassy to the Vatican is moving. 

WHERE: It is moving from what was a private residence to better secured building that is adjacent to the US Embassy to Italy, - the two will maintain separate entrances on separate streets. Oh, and the new embassy is a tenth of a mile CLOSER to the Vatican than the old one was. (and please note that no country has an embassy inside the Vatican City walls - there isn't room.) 

WHY: Because the new location offers more in place security and we will save 1.4 million a year in lease and operating costs. 

WHEN: the move will occur in 2015. The buildings were purchased several years ago during a different administration. 

WHO: Well, since the buildings were purchased under the Bush 2 administration - you should be able to figure out when the plan to move began and whose State Department initiated it. 

What you don't do is try to blame the current president for closing an embassy that isn't closing or imply that the current embassy is inside the Vatican walls when NO country has an embassy inside those walls.

Idjits!

Thanksgiving in the retail Earth

Stopped for gas yesterday, the kind of magnificent, glorious day that makes your heart sing and your body forget its age.  74 degrees, with a few little clouds, the bright sun shining off the newly waxed red convertible, air as fresh as it is anywhere wafting like the smell of jasmine off the blue Atlantic. 

The advertising sign on the gas pump has a picture of bundled up people on a toboggan and snow. My neighbors have begun to put up fake icicles, fake frost, chrome caribou and sleds festooned with lights and  other reminders that Christmas, a month away, is really a pastiche of ancient Northern European winter celebrations.  It's jarring, a disturbing denial of reality as though all the world were northern. It's jarring like wearing a wool suit and wing tip shoes on the beach.

It's in the teens up North where I used to live and when I say live I mean huddle in the dark waiting for Spring, leaving for work in the dark, returning in the dark, spending hours each week shoveling snow in subzero temperatures, but you can't have Christmas without archaic imagery and the more modern but strictly above the 40th parallel iconography as given to us by such bards as the Coca Cola company, Montgomery Wards and all the commercial interests that have latched on to the holiday. The plastic fat men, robed in plastic furs -- the descendants of  a skinny Nikolaos of Myra, will bloom on manicured green lawns bordered by bougainvillea and hibiscus and not an iota of irony will spoil the spirit unless the polystyrene saint is shattered by a falling coconut.

But right on schedule, as it seems, it's cold today, probably won't be more than 70 although with the southern sun it will feel warmer. Wool wrapped people will wait outside Wal-Mart for the retail rampage to begin and driving to dinner with my few remaining family members I may wear one of my old leather jackets and if I can find one, a pair of long pants. It's Thanksgiving in this formerly Spanish bit of the tropics.  Florida where the flowers still bloom, where oranges and bananas and lemons ripen behind the house; Florida where the "pilgrims" never came and the Puritan ventureth not nor did the Europeans ever sit down to dinner with the natives.

But never mind the latitude, it's about the attitude. It's about tradition. It's about a fictional past from far away and as people do, we'll make up our own reality even though it's nowhere as good as the one nature provides and I'll sit indoors eating things I shouldn't instead of sitting by the pool or at a restaurant by the water listening to steel drums and  being thankful for where and what and who I am.

The War on Thanksgiving

The entire country (outside of corporate boardrooms) seems to be up in arms about all the stores being open on Thanksgiving, which is traditionally a national holiday. It all started when Wal-Mart, that bastion of worker abuse, announced that they were going to beat "Black Friday" by a day, and everybody started following suit.

The lefties view it as just another example of the corporations treating workers like machines, with no time for their families. The right wing, on the other hand, has a somewhat more nuanced view: knee-jerk patriotism demands that they wail and cry about this abandonment of traditional American values, but brainwashed worship of unfettered capitalism won't allow them to criticize big corporations. So the whole situation makes them angry, but they don't know what to do about it.

The answer is fairly simple, though. If you don't like stores being open on Thanksgiving, don't shop on Thanksgiving. Tell all your friends not to shop on Thanksgiving, and explain why. Social media is an important part of this: send out the word on Facebook and Twitter, post videos on YouTube and Vine, or even post a message on Google+ (if you're particularly fond of the sound of your own voice echoing off empty walls).

You can even slant your message to match your audience. "Abusing the workers" won't resonate with the Fox News crowd, but "destruction of American values" seems to do it for them.

Protests might work, but you'd be giving up your holiday at that point, and it's a little late in the game for that anyway: you aren't going to get massive crowds to help you out. So the best way to get your message across is through your wallet - by not using it. If the profits for sales on Thanksgiving don't pay for the employees to come in that day, the corporations aren't going to do it again.

Iran Contra

To understand why negotiations with Iran represent a historic opportunity, it is instructive to recall events that defined U.S.-Iranian relations since the 1950s.

In 1953, the American CIA and British MI6 intelligence forces instigated the overthrow of Mohammed Mosaddegh, Iran’s first duly elected Prime Minister. Mosaddegh’s policy goals were the establishment of a constitutional democracy and the nationalization of Iran’s oil resources. Nationalization of the oil industry was the singular event that angered American and British interests in the region and inspired the coup against Mosaddegh.

In effect, Mosaddegh’s removal ended Iran’s first – and last - fully democratic government and gave unprecedented power to the Pahlavi monarchy, which ruled Iran in oppression and brutality through a secret police network known as Savak.

The U.S. role in Mosaddegh’s overthrow was kept secret for many years. In retrospect, it is now widely regarded as “paranoid, colonial, illegal, and immoral” and the leading cause of national resentments culminating in the Iranian Revolution of 1979 led by Ayatollah Khomeini.

In essence, it was a seriously misguided policy decision that created generations of Iranian enmity towards the U.S.  We overthrew their government. We did this to them.  We brought this anger and resentment upon ourselves. And you can better understand Iranian attitudes against this backdrop of history.

Most importantly, current negotiations give us an opportunity to right a historic wrong and work towards normalizing U.S.-Iranian relations.

Since the 1950s, Iranian demographics have changed dramatically. The current population is young, Internet savvy, and Western-oriented in terms of aspirations. More to the point, younger generations do not carry the historical baggage and resentments of their forbearers. In time, this generation will take over Iran and alter the future course and direction of the country. That is why it is vitally important to pursue a peaceful resolution to Iran’s nuclear program. Any military option would seal the enmity of the Iranian people through the end of time.

Netanyahu is a neo-conservative and a militarist whose views of history are simply counter-productive. Perhaps Shimon Perez said it best: “The people of Iran are not Israel’s enemies, and the people of Israel are not Iran’s enemies.” This time, I hope the voices of reason prevail.

Remembering the hero

The CNN crawl today is informing us over and over that depending how old the segment of the population is, President John Kennedy's approval rating runs from 89 to 93% or thereabouts.  That's far higher than any incumbent president has enjoyed since we started producing such statistics and considerably higher than he enjoyed in office.  I'm not sure George Washington could match it and I'm pretty sure that's higher than Jesus by a bit.  Of course time, like absence makes the heart grow fonder and of course it makes many of us forget how controversial he was; how much of the same drooling, scurrilous calumny presidents who attempt to make this a greater nation endure from the same sources, the same elements that just can't stop railing and raving about the evil Obaminator.

The route of the Presidential motorcade was lined with spectators and there were signs blaring "all the way with JFK" but there were also posters accusing him of treason, for " betraying the Constitution" and giving support to Communists. There were newspaper editorials condemning him. Like syphilis, crab lice and delusional politics the two legged vermin and their followers are still with us -- and not just in Texas.

History and circumstance have a way of  changing what we think we once stood for. Those millions of Americans who listened to Father Coughlin's radio broadcasts, sympathized with the rise of  fascism and racism in Germany and Jim Crow and racism in the US had to tone it down in December of 1941and the public has largely forgotten the depth of right wing outrage since the hundred year struggle for basic civil rights legislation is remembered only in history books and in simplified form. Sure, JFK enjoyed approval ratings of 70% while in office -- a level that has not been equaled since, but had he been able to serve out a term or two: had he been able to achieve detente with Castro and Khrushchev and Ho Chi Min we can be sure the same kind of  right wing rabble would have reduced it to the level Barack Obama now enjoys. 

But we've forgotten.  JFK is a hero, not a Popish danger to Protestant America and  the people who printed those posters, started those rumors, made those accusations slunk back into the baseboards and behind the cupboards before the blood was dry.  We never got an apology, a retraction or an admission from the hate mongers nor will we get any acknowledgement from their heirs and assigns who have taken it all to new depths. We never will.  JFK was a hero - of course we always thought that.   Oh yes it was a terrible thing that someone shot him, but his blood is on their hands, not ours. We never suggested anything and of course we're not suggesting anything when we tell you about that Kenyan, Muslim tyrant -- that constitution trashing, Sharia loving, Jesus hating traitor, that murderer of children, that Hitleresque purveyor of Communist inspired health care and Marxist redistributer of wealth who pals around with terrorists, but violence?  Perish the thought!

A life for a life

summa awilum in mar awilim uhtappid insu uhappadu

-Code of Hammurabi-

If a man has destroyed the sight of another man's son, they shall poke out his eye.

It's no secret that I think the execution of criminals is not a power that should be given a government. Reenacting a murder, repeating the act of violence whether quietly with a needle or loudly with a squad of rifles serves no purpose other than to dignify anger, hatred and blood lust.

The State of Missouri killed serial killer and white supremacist Joseph Paul Franklin yesterday, in a little room and in front of witnesses. It took the mechanism of institutional homicide over 30 years to exhaust all appeals and procedures and last minute delays before strapping him to a table and running phenobarbital into his veins. 

Franklin has been convicted of 8 racially motivated murders and has confessed to a dozen more. He is thought to have committed over 20 in Tennessee, Utah, Wisconsin and Ohio. He has confessed to shooting publisher Larry Flynt, paralyzing him permanently and to wounding civil rights leader Vernon Jordan.  Using a 'deer rifle' he killed two young cousins Dante Brown and Darrell Lane in Cincinnati because they were African American and fully 18 years later was given a life sentence for it, but of course that was moot since he had already been given a death sentence for the similar sniper shooting of Gerald Gordon outside a suburban St. Louis synagogue in 1977. He fired 5 shots into a group of Jewish worshipers, killing Gordon and wounding two others.  God gave him this mission, he said.

So I'm not in mourning for Franklin.  Given the chance to stop his 'divine' calling to kill Blacks and Jews, I would not have hesitated to use lethal force, nor chastised anyone else for doing so,  but of course his mission was long over when they killed him.  Larry Flynt will never walk again nor will those  killed be restored to life. The lives diminished by grief  will not likely be restored to happiness. 

"I hate him for destroying my life, for taking away something precious to me, a life that I brought into this world,"

 said  Abbie Evans Clark, Dante Brown's mother. I hate him too and it wasn't my son he killed. She will likely always hate him.

 "It's devastating. It's a void. You never get over it."

 I'm sure she's right. She feels no forgiveness, she says, and although she knows it won't bring the two boys back,

 "It lets you know that justice will be done for the senseless murders of two innocent boys."

Justice.  One has to ask: what is justice if it's not the undoing of wrong? What is justice if it changes nothing, restores nothing?  

If a man dieth -- doth he revive?

-Job 14:14- 

What is justice if it's inspired by hate and why then is it called justice if hate itself is not justice?  Children are not fungible, not property that can be replaced, like money that can be repaid, like debits and credits on a balance sheet. The death of a murderer does not repay a mother for the loss of her son nor can his life be restored to him. Even El could not restore Job's murdered family to him but only a substitute. Those he once loved are gone forever.


Lex Talionis is what we often call reciprocal punishment. In it's favor, we can say that it determines the limits of punishment -- only one eye for one eye. We talk about repayment, but some crimes cannot be payed back  nor is the victim's sight restored when someone else's is taken away.  Indeed can we talk about justice at all when we admit we want someone dead or worse that God wants someone dead and we need to fulfill his divine will?

I'm glad Joseph Paul Franklin is dead.  I hate him down to the bottom of my soul, but I do not love my hatred. I do not ennoble it. I do not justify it or try to reconcile it with my reverence for life. I feel no better and am no better now that he's dead. I don't think we are safer. I don't think we are any closer to fulfilling that longing for harmony in all things we've likely had since our beginning. I don't think we reach it in our various faiths -- neither in the laws of Missouri or the law codes of Ur-Nammu or Hammurabi or edicts of Telepinu or the Hebrew Halacha.

Some things cannot be made right nor losses recovered and when we act out of hate, when we justify hatred,  perhaps only hate itself is served or preserved.

We Interrupt Your Regularly Scheduled Hysteria...

for a reality check.

As much as the clown-mouths in the punditry claim the roll-out of the A.C.A. is the end of President Obama's Everything, as much as the sand-brained ninnyhammers hope for the total destruction of the Obama Universe and all of his messiah-worshipping minions, we have news for them:

Na Ga Happen.

Was this a blow to the implementation of the A.C.A.?

Yes.

Could the roll out have been done better?

Yes.

Is it like Katrina?  The Iraq War?  Watergate? Monicagate?

No.  No.  No.  And NO!

The TeaPublicans have lost their reason as they pray for the End Times of the Obama Administration. As certain as Radical Redneck will steal or morph into another blog identity,  the TeaPublicans will at some point wake up and realize that this is only the end of the first year of President Obama's second term.  The American people have very short memories.  This bungled kick-off will be forgotten.  The A.C.A. will enroll the number of people it needs to enroll.  The TeaPublicans will continue to obstruct, sabotage, and tell their followers that THIS IS IT FOR OBAMA!  And they'll zombie-follow that narrative as though it were true, until reality hits them between their beady little eyes. Because we know those benighted folks tend to live in an alternate reality where merely wishing for fantasies makes them so.

So for those of us who understand how politics works and how the TeaPublicans will always overestimate their predictions of utter failure and collapse for the opposition, just remember what the estimable Douglas Adams said:

Turn off the noise.  Don't listen to what the flying monkeys are howling about on the teevee; and fer gawdsake stay away from the blogs where the best they can come up with is telling the world that the FLOTUS has a large posterior.  That passes for intelligent political discussion on that side.  No. Really.  What are you worrying about if that's the level of discourse there?  

Stay Calm and Sign Up for the A.C.A. 

Washington Post editor Bob Woodward has spoken a small bit of reality and on Fox News Sunday, no less. The pundits are all wrong. ObamaCare isn’t Obama’s Katrina or his Iraq, or even his Watergate (notice these are all Republican scandals that Republicans are dying to falsely equivocate onto a Democrat. 

Nope. 

 According to Woodward, Obama is incompetent (of course), but he had good intentions. “What this is, it’s a mess clearly, but what it isn’t, and I think you have to look at the question of motive. And the President’s motive here, even though there were deep problems with the implementation, he wants to do something good for 30 million people and get them health insurance. 

So this isn’t Watergate, this isn’t Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.”




Yes, we can admit this was incompetence.  Now name a two-term president who didn't run into trouble in his second term.  This isn't like President Ronald Reagan's criminal Iran-Contra scandal where actual laws were broken and where dozens of people in his administration were criminally indicted.  This isn't the sort of incompetency that President George W. Bush presided over where thousands of people died; and this isn't a juicy sex scandal ala President Bill Clinton, either.

Mr. Obama will get through this.  His motives are admirable even if his aides failed him, and he took the blame for it.

It's up to those of us who believe that universal health care is a right not a privilege to counter the unrelenting harpies whose only contribution to helping millions of uninsured and underinsured Americans is to hope for President Obama's health care plan to fail.

We're better than that.  

Much better.


Check this out:


Six Things the Media Doesn't Understand About Obamacare

Liberterrorism?

The notion that the Government is cracking down on freedom in general and preparing to freeze our accounts and restrict movement of money because of that elusive financial apocalypse the right wing has been predicting since Obama was elected, is the bread and butter of such opinion sources as the Daily Paul,  Natural News, and Alex Jones' Infowars.com  who amongst too many others to count are celebrating the false report that Chase Bank is limiting cash withdrawals and outgoing international wire transfers.  The story lacks only truth to be shocking. You can read a more honest appraisal at Forbes.  True, Chase is upping fees on certain kinds of business checking accounts, but pace the Liberterrorists, no one in Government is forcing them to do it and what we're seeing is Capitalism at work. Chase simply wants to make more money. Don't we all?

According to an e-mail from PT Shamrock.com, a Libertarian organization dedicated to misleading people about the need to get their money out of the country before the Liberals confiscate it and give it to "the takers," Chase customers have received the following letter:

Dear Business Customer,

Starting November 17, 2013:
- You will no longer be able to send international wire transfers. 

You will still be able to send domestic wires and receive
both domestic and international wires. We'll cancel any international
wire transfers, including reccurring [sic] ones, you scheduled to be sent
after this date.

- Your cash activity limit for these accounts(s) will be $50,000 per
statement cycle, per account. Cash activity is the combined total
of cash deposits made at branches, night drops and ATMs and cash
withdrawals made at branches (including purchases of money orders)
and ATMs.

These changes will help us more effectively manage the risks involved
with these types of transactions. 

No they haven't.  Unfortunately devotees of Paul and Jones and all the other panic profiteers will take it at face value without taking a moment to check the facts. Some won't even notice the misspelling and poor wording, the urge to believe being as strong as it is.  The confusion between the artifacts of free market capitalism and  Federal authoritarianism  continues to be the medium in which the fungus of  Right Wing politics is grown -- and grown in the dark, of course.

SOME DEMS NEED TO FIND THEIR SPINES

I'm pretty pissed off right now at spineless Democrats who can't wait to throw our President and the new ACA initiative under the bus in an effort to get re-elected.
Actually, I'm just pretty pissed off at my crappy work week so far so I'm spoiling for a good rant but even if I wasn't having a bad week I'd be angry anyway.
I was really hot that a Democratic controlled senate and house couldn't give us a more sweeping national program that probably would have eliminated most of the problems we are struggling with today.
Nothing this big is going to seamlessly and smoothly roll into the American landscape without some hills to climb. Not all of the legislation is great and some of it may need to eventually be eliminated as not workable. But ACA is a work in progress.
The President has offered a fix that will at least get us by another year when hopefully everyone will have a better idea how the system is going to work.
The insurance companies, no doubt encouraged and supported by the GOP and Tea Baggers cancelled policies in order to stir up the populace and create a panic.
So now the President has them in an awkward position as with his fix they can reinstate these people for another year. It will be interesting to hear their reaction.
As for those Dems that are joining "the sky is falling" parade, you piss me off for being spineless, self-serving twits with no more concern for the people of this country than the Repungetans. This waffling will NOT save your seat, it just accentuates your idiocy.
Thank goodness we have some Dems left with enough sense to take this one step at a time instead of trying to throw MORE legislation at the wall to see what sticks, like some of their more dimwitted constituents.
I expect the talking globs of the GOP to spout all the gloom and doom, it's their job - what excuse do Democrats who voted for ACA have?

Richard Cohen's Washington Post Column Made Me Gag

What Richard Cohen wrote:




"Today’s GOP is not racist, as Harry Belafonte alleged about the tea party, but it is deeply troubled — about the expansion of government, about immigration, about secularism, about the mainstreaming of what used to be the avant-garde. People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children. (Should I mention that Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?) This family represents the cultural changes that have enveloped parts — but not all — of America. To cultural conservatives, this doesn’t look like their country at all."

So what's Cohen trying to write here?  That the Tea Party is not racist but a bi-racial couple triggers a gag-reflex in the deepest part of their "conventional" and unhappy souls?  Why would a perfectly normal couple cause a gag reflex in anyone, except racists?  He contradicted himself in two sentences, while exposing his ick factor at the same time.

And why the "used to be a lesbian?" dig?  Didn't he make his point about his miscengenation revulsion without having to pile on his homophobia as well?  

At a time in this country when we have a bi-racial president and a bi-racial first couple of the largest city in America, how could anyone, let alone a newspaper columnist in a top U.S. publication, write something as ignorantly reactionary as Cohen did?  What cave has he been living in that caused him to think bi-racial marriages were anything but conventional?

Cohen is stuck somewhere in the Ozzie and Harriet 1950s where that family of actors, a fantasy of Hollywood teevee executives, existed in the lives of very few "conventional" families of actual Americans.

I believe in freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the freedom to let a guy, who also writes opinion columns for a prominent newspaper, expose himself for the wanker that he is.