Rootin' for Newton

Okay, I just can't help myself. After looking at the polling results in Florida, it looks like Mint Rawmoney is pulling ahead of our boy Newt in tomorrow's primary, but I still can't help but root for The Newt to somehow pull it out at the end.

And that's because I think Newtie would be the ideal candidate for Obama to trounce in the November election. But we are now seeing, in its most raw form, the pernicious and corrupting influence that money has on politics after the infamous Citizens United SCOTUS decision.

Mittens now is way ahead in the polling, not a surprise after he outspent The Gingrinch by a factor of something like four to one.

I heard a joke on the radio today: Someone asked a guy why he developed an instantaneous dislike for Mitt Romney, and he said that it saved him time...

So the Rethug party is faced with a very odd choice. They can either support a guy who is so rich he can buy Congress lock stock and barrel, who is also a devout member of the Mormon Church, or they can support one of the two Catholics who are still in the race. And this is a party that has its base in the old Solid South, filled with knuckledragging cretins who hate Catholics and who think that Mormonism is not Christian but rather is in fact an out-and-out cult.

May you live in interesting times...

A Little Love...

...for our good friend Dusty over at Left Wing Nut Job, who is fighting some serious medical problems.

Hang in there, kid. I'm a seven+ years melanoma survivor myself (yet another "souvenir" from my forced vacation in Vietnam in 1968-69).

Even though I am now walking around with only half a thumb, I'm living (so far) proof that you can beat the fucker! I'll keep having a good thought for you.

Jessica Ahlquist and the American Taliban

First of all, major kudos to sixteen-year-old Jessica Ahlquist of Cranston RI, who successfully -- and it appears, single-handedly -- forced her high school to remove a prayer banner posted on the school wall.

Her thanks? Death threats from local & national "Christians" (aka the American Taliban), social isolation, and it even came down to the refusal of floral delivery outfits to deliver congratulatory flowers and wreaths to her.

I'm sure that "imprecatory prayers" were also in the mix. So much for that whole "turn the other cheek" crap from that proto-hippie Jesus guy.

My hearty congratulations to Jessica for her principled stance against the minions of religious orthodoxy, and those who wish to congratulate her in a more monetary fashion can go here to make a donation.

You go, girlfriend!

Republican Racism: The New Ten Top Hits

It used to be that the Rethugs used "dog whistle" politics to display their just-under-the-surface racism. They could talk about the infamous Chicago "welfare queen", for example, without actually coming out and saying she was Black, but everyone knew who she was.

Ronald Reagan was a master of this, but even he kept it more or less symbolic. That's why he could, without even a blip on the media radar, go to Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1980 to announce his candidacy for the presidency, standing on hallowed ground watered by the blood of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, the three civil rights workers who had been murdered there in June 1964.

But in the ensuing 31 years, the party's racism has become more visible, more blatant, and more of a siren call than a dog whistle.

Over at Alternet, African-American commentator Chauncy De Vega has an insightful (and inciteful) piece entitled The 10 Most Racist Moments of the GOP Primary (So Far) that is well worth the read.

In it are the usual suspects: Newt Gingrich wanting to make "poor inner-city children" (code for "Black") work as janitors and bitch-slapping that uppity Juan Williams on Dr. Martin Luther King's birthday while standing under a huge Confederate flag and Rick Santorum calling, in essence, Black people "parasites" who are lazy and want to live off the hardwork earnings of White people, but there's also our old buddy, Herman Cain, calling Black Americans out for living under the generous hand of the Democratic Party "plantation" system, and equating conservative Blacks as runaway slaves. And let's not forget Michelle ("Our Negroes are better than their Negroes") Bachmann claiming that slavery was actual good for Black people.

It's appalling that the Rethugs don't even think they have to try to appear not to be racists any more.

State of the Union and Kerry's Face

Like many people, I watched Obama give the annual State of the Union speech last night. Blah-blah-blah, election year, yadda yadda yadda... I kind of miss the days when Baby Doc Bush was bound to come out with something totally fucking off the wall, like "human-animal hybrid switchgrass" and shit like that. I used to watch him just for those little surprises, and I was rarely disappointed.

But no doubt about it, Obama is a dynamic speaker, and he came out aggressively, if not combatively, in sticking it to the Rethugs on a lot of points. The most fun of the night was watching de facto Speaker of the House and full-time asshole Eric Cantor keeping a stone face but squirming in his seat like a schoolboy with pinworms every time they cut away to him.

Beyond that, did everybody see John Kerry's face? He looked like he'd been mugged. Jesus, what the fuck happened to him?

She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed had an answer: Teresa (his wife and inadvertent heir to the Heinz fortune) smacked him up the face with a ketchup bottle when he came home late. reeking of cheap whiskey and cheaper perfume.

Of course the "truth" is a little more mundane -- he was playing hockey and got smacked with a hockey stick. At least that's the official word from Kerry's office... Which I suppose is believable, if you've ever been to a hockey game. As Rodney Dangerfield once said, "I went to the fights and a hockey game broke out."

Attention Whore

As if we didn't need any more reminders that bloviating blow-hole Newtie Gingrinch is an attention whore, today he comes out and says he won't play if he can't be cheered on by his mindless slavering fans.

Newt "threw down a gauntlet" to the media -- which he naturally both loves and hates -- calling NBC's Brian Williams to task for trying to keep the debate audience quiet:

"I wish, in retrospect, I had protested when Brian Williams took them out of it because I think it's wrong. And I think he took them out of it because the media is terrified that the audience is going to side with the candidates against the media, which is what they've done in every debate." For future debates, Mr. Gingrich said "we're not going to allow that to happen."
"The media doesn't control free speech," he added. "People ought to be allowed to applaud if they want to. It was almost silly."

Got that? Free speech. Yeah, free for Gingrinch, not so free for those who came to see a debate (such as it is) and not the chanting spectacle of a bunch of Newtie robots gathered up from the Teabagger clubhouse and required to check their brains at the door.

It's long been a proven mind control tactic, getting people to act together, feeding off each others' energy and reinforcing the in-group mentality.

You don't have to look any further than military basic training which employs cadence chants and group actions to train soldiers to act and think together as a unit. And of course Nazi Germany was notorious for this. Watch Leni Reifenstahl's propaganda masterpiece Triumph of the Will for a textbook example of this in action.

Sidebar: Did you ever notice how many times Newtie has called something "silly"? It's been a lot over the years. Can't he come up with any other descriptive adjectives? Here's what Dictionary.com has to say about "silly":

1. weak-minded or lacking good sense; stupid or foolish: a silly writer.
2. absurd; ridiculous; irrational: a silly idea.
3. stunned; dazed: He knocked me silly.

Given that, I'm willing to stipulate that Newt Gingrinch know silly when he sees it. Except when he's looking in the mirror...

A Delete Key for Slavery

The Farnsworth family has deep roots in Tennessee. One of my relatives was a poker-playing whiskey-drinking buddy of Andrew Jackson, and his brother, my direct ancestor, built one of the first hominy mills in Central Tennessee. Some of my cousins still live there.

So over the years I approached my Tennessee roots with an odd mix of pride and shame. While the state saw the establishment of one of the very first colleges intended specifically for African-Americans in the nation, we can't forget that the Ku Klux Klan was also organized there. Fast forward to 1968 and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King in Memphis, and you can see that the civil rights struggle for black Americans has a long and shadowy history in the state.

So it doesn't come as a surprise -- although sadly it really should -- that the Tennessee Tea Party ("oh, no, we're not racists!") is now pushing for a rewrite of school history textbooks to downplay the whole issue of the so-called Founding Fathers owning slaves, because it makes them look bad...

As if the Tea Party hasn't got enough on its hands with their rewriting reimagining of the rest of American history.

The Head Teabagger in Tennessee, Hal Rounds, along with others of his bent says that:

they want the state legislature to force teachers to teach history in the way they see it. In other words, they want to re-write history to exclude the fact that the Founding Fathers owned slaves, because according to The Memphis Commercial Appeal, the group wants to address “an awful lot of made-up criticism about, for instance, the founders intruding on the Indians or having slaves or being hypocrites in one way or another.”
The group wants to change textbook selection criteria to say that “No portrayal of minority experience in the history which actually occurred shall obscure the experience or contributions of the Founding Fathers, or the majority of citizens, including those who reached positions of leadership.” It’s a fancy way of saying let’s take the role of minorities out of our American history textbooks so our past leaders will look good. [Emphasis added]

You can't help but think that the next step will be to remove any mention of the Holocaust from the history of WWII because it makes the Germans look bad...

The Gift That Keeps On Giving...

Newtie Gingrich
Crawled out of his ditch
And shot off the legs of his rival.

And with that little piece of song-parody doggerel, I am celebrating the victory of Fig Newton Gingrich over Mittens Rawmoney in South Carolina yesterday.

If anyone on the Rethug side ought to be easy to beat come November, it's Newt.

Yayy!!!

Ice Storm

Everyone knows "Murphy's Law" but there are some adjuncts to it, one of which is the "Unspoken Law", which holds that as soon as you make a comment on something, if it's good it goes away and if it's bad, it happens...

After crowing the other day about keeping our electricity, fate stepped in and dealt a cruel hand. I (and some 250,000 of my closest friends) were without power for a couple of days after an ice storm hit right on the heels of the snow storm.

We were powerless for 41+ hours (others, not so fortunate, are still without electricity) and nothing makes you realize how dependent you are on technology than being deprived of it.

After the first night in a house that sank to 41 degrees internal temperature, I said, "Okay, I get it. You made your point. Now can I have some warmth?" I didn't get an answer to that plea, however.

We have a gas heater, but it's out in the garage and relies on electricity to force the warm air into the cold interior. I also had installed last year a "hot water on demand" system that, while it uses natural gas, still relies on ... electricity ... to make it work.

We had to go "old school" for our entertainment (old school being circa 2001) and use an old CD player that also plays .mp3 format tracks. Luckily I'm a fan and collector of so-called Old Time Radio shows, so after 34 episodes of Lum 'n' Abner, along with three episodes of Lights Out and three episodes of Sherlock Holmes, the lights finally came on and we fought like children to get in the shower first.

After an overnight temperature hovering in the 20s, we lost three trees out of a total of 19 on our small city lot (planted around the outside edge so none fell on the house), and a bunch of limbs that dropped off all around the neighborhood with annoying frequency and loud reports that sounded like gunshots, the temperature rapidly warmed up to nearly 50 when a coastal front finally moved in with enough rain to melt the ice. At one point I had to go outside to warm up, since the outside temperature was higher than the inside temperature...

It's a crazy world, all right, and if I hear one more person say some sarcastic remark about "so much for global warming" I'm gonna strangle 'em...

Snow Day

Up here in the Wet Corner of the country, our usual precipitation is in the form of rain, with an only occasional "thick rain" (aka snow), so it's with some surprise that I learned this morning that we have had a record amount of snowfall in just one day.

This is it, over 10 inches overnight, and it's been a living freezing hell to drive in. Not for me so much, since I have a Jeep (gotta love that four-wheel drive), but other drivers are pretty much idiots who don't know snow from their pubic hair. Keeping an eye out for morons is pretty much a full-time job in good weather; when it snows all bets are off.

Now there's a freezing rain outside, so I am comfortably ensconced inside, with a chilled bottle of Full Sail Amber and some über cheesy-retro horror movies (Plan 9 From Outer Space, Robot Monster) to watch on the the DVR.

Speaking of which, this morning I wasn't getting very good reception on the TV, so I went outside to take a look at The Dish. It had about three inches of snow plastered to its almost-vertical face, which I was able to dust off fairly easily. But I was impressed with the picture I did get through all the snow, so kudos to Dish Network for their equipment.

So now it's time for the snow to go away. We've managed to get our yearly supply early (it generally snows two or three times per year, about two inches per snowfall, and it's gone in a couple of days) and I'm pleased about that, but come on, enough is enough. At least we haven't lost our electricity. That comes from living on the same power grid as the state capitol grounds and the governor's office, I think -- I'm just sayin'...

My Nonexistent FBI File

Back in the youthful days of the federal Freedom of Information Act I submitted a written request to the FBI to see exactly what they had on me. I'd heard of people getting copies of their "permanent record" only to find that a bunch of things had been "redacted" for reasons of privacy or national security, even to the point of getting a dozen pages (which they had to pay for, by the way) of nothing but blacked-out type.

I was interested in knowing what they had, and I knew that they had to have something. My best friend at the time had been under investigation for several years as a "dangerous radical" and had been set up and busted on a phony dope charge by the local police who were working with the Feebs.

After his arrest, as soon as they got him into custody at the police station the Feebs took over and demanded to know his connection to something called "The White Panther Party" (this was shortly after the FBI raid on the White Panther headquarters in Portland OR) and interrogated him on the current whereabouts of Weather Underground fugitive Bernadine Dohrn.

It was a crazy time, and the Feebs, for all their vaunted "professionalism", didn't fuck around with the subtle niceties of the US Constitution. I guess he was lucky at that, since they didn't mark him for "special rendition" to some godforsaken third world country that didn't have any laws against torture.

So what makes me think that my relationship with this friend caused the Feebs to start a file on me?

Because we were roommates at the time, and this was not one of those thrown-together-in-a-college-dorm thing. We were active in the anti-war movement and living in a small "urban commune", and everyone else in the house was also followed and interrogated and hassled pretty much at the same time.

So when my FOIA request came back with the notation "could not locate records responsive to your request" I had my suspicions that they weren't being entirely forthright about it.

So now, some 35 years later, I ran across this article, Revealed: The FBI's Secretive Practice of "Blackballing" Files over at Truthout.org:

Have you ever filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the FBI and received a written response from the agency stating that it could not locate records responsive to your request?
If so, there's a chance the FBI may have found some documents, but for unknown reasons, the agency's FOIA analysts determined it was not responsive and "blackballed" the file, crucial information the FBI withholds from a requester when it issues a "no records" response.

Okay, so there we go. My file, apparently, was of such a magnitude of a threat to national security that not only were its contents blacked out, but so was the entire file.

So I guess I'm also lucky not to have been "specially rendered" myself... I'm also lucky that I haven't shown up on somebody's "no fly" list.

I'd file a new FOI request, but at this point I don't think I can afford, at 25 cents per page, the cost of it. After all, I am an elderly shut-in on a fixed income these days.