That's in the Constitution?

Today the House of Representatives is reading aloud the Constitution of the United States.

Of course it is political stuntery of the first order, but maybe ... just maybe ... they will learn something during the course of it. Most of them probably have never even seen it, let alone read it, and I can imagine the shocked faces when some of its provisions are vocalized:

Preamble:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Promote the general welfare? Is that why the wingnuttery is squeezing its butt cheeks together over the "unconstitutionality" of the Health Care Law? Is that why they want to get rid of government regulation, the environmental and consumer protection laws, etc etc etc?

Article I Section 8
The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States...
To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water...
To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.

Congress is the entity with the power to declare war. That means that our misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan are being done illegally. As was our losing proposition to "bring democracy" to Vietnam. And they are supposed to be making all laws about stuff, not the president making "signing statements" (are you listening, Baby Doc Bush?) that, in essence and in practice, "make" laws.

Article I Section 9
The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.

Tell that to the several hundred prisoners still wasting away in places like Guantánamo. Tell that to the other "enemy noncombatants" who are existing outside the bounds of civilized government. We might have been attacked, but we were certainly not "invaded".

Article II Section 1
[Duties of the President] Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation:
"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

Note there is no "so help me god" at the end of that oath or affirmation. That was added by unwritten convention due to political pandering to the 18th Century equivalent of the Religious Right.

Article V Section 3
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.
The Congress shall have power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted.

It's easy for the wingnuttery to throw around "The T Word" when discussing Obama or various members of the administration or Democrats in Congress, but here's the strict definition.

Article VI
The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

Got that, congressman? No religious test. That's as clear a statement of the Original Intent of the Founders on whether or not this is a "Christian Nation" and that we do have a wall of separation between church and state.

Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

See above. Wall of separation. Period. You can also legally show up at a political rally for Bush wearing an anti-Bush t-shirt. Supposedly.

Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

No wiretaps of citizens' phones, no snooping into our personal lives, no arbitrary actions on the part of the cops who are notorious in certain geographical areas for pulling innocent people over on suspicion of DWB (Driving While Black).

Amendment VI
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

Again, tell that to the Guantánamo detainees. Tell that to Wikileaker Bradley Manning. Tell that to Muslim former Army chaplain James Yee.

So if the members of the House of Representatives can pull themselves away from their cell phones and keep from sexting the teenage House pages long enough to actually listen, they might learn something.

But I doubt it. These people mostly claim to have read their holy bible, and they seem to ignore completely all of that loosey-goosey "love thy neighbor" "turn the other cheek" neo-hippie garbage spewing from the mouth of their actual living god incarnate (i.e., Joshua bar-Joseph, aka "Jesus Christ").

So I take it back. It won't do them any good, and it's just a waste of time that could be better spent by the Rethugs doing what they do best, "The People's Work": Rolling back health care reform, cutting Social Security, and impeaching Barack Obama.

Michelle Bachmann? Really?

Just what we need, another batshit crazy presidential candidate:

“Rep. Michele Bachmann is beginning to consider a presidential run, according to close congressional aides,” the Minneapolis Star Tribune writes. “As part of that effort, the Minnesota Republican is traveling to the early caucus state of Iowa on Jan. 21 to confer with state GOP leaders and address a group of conservative tax activists… While Bachmann has made no firm decision about a White House bid in 2012, ‘nothing is off the table,’ press aide Sergio Gor told the Star Tribune Wednesday, confirming an earlier ABC News report.

When someone from your own staff acts all coy like this about your plans to run for president, you just know that she is going to be running.

Good.

Finally, some much-needed if unintentional humor injected into the presidential race. I can't wait for her and Half-governor Palin to start yapping at each other during the first primary debate.

In the words of several characters in a memorable episode of Seinfeld, "Mmmmm, cat fight!"

When it's all over and they are shown up for the moron losers that they really are, maybe they can enter the Witless Protection program. Neither of them should have the slightest problem getting in.

New: The Day Count & a Bumpersticker

If you look in the right-hand column, you'll see a new feature, the Day Count.

I used to be a propeller head/computer geek when I was gainfully employed (before I retired and became an elderly shut-in on a fixed income) and the other day I was looking through some old JavaScript stuff that I wrote when I was working.

This count-up/count-down script caught my eye, and while I wrote it originally for something else entirely (having to do with Unemployment Insurance), I immediately realized that I could adapt it to another purpose.

Which is what I did. Every day you will see a couple of new numbers, one showing the number of days that John Boner Boehner has been Speaker of the House, and asking the rhetorical question, "Where are all of the jobs?"; the other showing the number of days until the next general election, when we will all concentrate on getting out The Base to vote out the Rethug bastards and put the reins of government back in the hands of Liberals.

Towards that end, I also created a new bumpersticker:


Feel free to make one of your own and use it yourself, but I disclaim any responsibility for whatever might happen to you as a result. People don't fuck with me, generally, because they know I am possibly-crazy Vietnam veteran wearing on his Jeep another bumper sticker that tends to keep them at bay.

Milestone?

Today is some kind of milestone:

The approximate circumference of this planet in miles? 24,000

The number of days that I have been living on it? 24,000

So this means that if I could have walked just one mile a day in the same direction for my whole life, I would have ended up right back where I started.

I don't know why I even know this, or why I think it's so cool to proclaim it like this.

Maybe I need to work on this in therapy.

And BTW, there are 24 hours in a day and 24 bottles of beer in a full case.

Coincidence? I don't think so...

Homeless Guy With a Million-Dollar Voice

You really can't judge a book by it's cover. Just take a listen to this guy:

If he doesn't get a boatload of radio-voice job offers, then there really is something wrong with this country.

Study Shows I'm a Liberal Because of My Brain

Here's some interesting news. A recent study has found that there are some very basic structural and information processing differences between the brains of liberals and conservatives:

In recent years, researchers have been trying to determine whether our political opinions—pro-life or pro-choice? Republican or Democrat?—are guided by fundamental differences between the minds of conservatives and liberals. A number of studies suggest that conservatives think in more structured and stable ways, while liberals reason more flexibly, changing their beliefs as they take new experiences into account.
. . .
The authors conclude that the liberals’ brains were more sensitive to how accurate their ongoing responses were, and were more likely to adapt to changing demands. Conservatives’ brains, on the other hand, might be better equipped for tasks that require a more fixed response style. It remains unclear whether this difference in brain activity is the cause or a consequence of liberal vs. conservative thinking. That is, scientists don’t know whether these brain differences are innate or develop through years of thinking in a certain way. So far, researchers have found no relationship between political orientation and a variety of heritable traits, suggesting that liberalism and conservatism may not be genetically determined.

I was raised in a politically liberal and religiously secular family, and we came by it naturally: On my father's side there were Agrarian Socialists from the sharecropper dirt farms of Oklahoma, and on my mother's side there were Wobblies from the logging camps of the Great Northwest. Neither of my parents would ever be caught dead voting Republican, but aside from voting in every election, they weren't politically active and downplayed by reticence as much as they could the radical past of their families -- but who could blame them, really, since we are talking about the early 1950s, the heyday of the House Unamerican Activities Committee, McCarthyism and witch hunts.

The topic of the unlikely existence of a mythically ethereal being sometimes known as "god" never came up.

So when it came time for me to rebel, I started positing myself as a self-described Republican, pretty much just to piss them off.

In my own defense, however, this was the age of the "Liberal Republican" -- people such as Tom McCall, Mark Hatfield, Charles Percy and Nelson Rockefeller, none of whom would be welcome in today's Rethug party -- so I didn't have to swerve so far to the right as to support the 1964 pre-enlightened version of Barry Goldwater.

About that time I also found myself a member of a religious cult. It's a long and disgusting story, and a part of my life I'd just as soon forget about. None of my closest friends -- except for those lifelong buddies who know about it and accept me anyway -- even know about it, and I'd like to keep it that way. I won't name the cult (you would recognize it immediately) and I managed to work my way out of it in about a year, but I still look back on it with embarrassment.

The only time I am willing to talk about it is when I happen to run into another former member of the cult, and even then I'm a little circumspect about discussing it. But they, like me, experienced the attempted humiliation, the discomfort, the shunning, the alienation of being "churched" (which actually ought to be called "un-churched" or "dis-churched"; it happens when you leave the cult and you are consequently anathema to your former "friends" still in the cult because you are now in thrall to Satan and have embraced your new status as a Son of Perdition).

So where I am going with all of this? Even though I was a professed Republican and a member of a religious cult, all the while it just didn't feel right. It just wasn't who I was -- and not who I am now.

I'm reminded of the Seinfeld episode in which George Constanza gets back together with his ex-girlfriend who became, briefly, a lesbian. When Jerry asked him about it, George said, "it didn't take."

And that was it for me. It just didn't take. And that's because my brain was hard-wired to be a liberal.

This study shows that this is true.

Filibuster Reform Petition

Like most other reality-based carbon-based life forms in this country, I want to see some reform of the US Senate filibuster rules.

The Rethugs have filibustered a record number of times (203 since 2007) but you'd never know how obstructionist they really have been because all they've had to do is threaten to do it. No more of the Jimmy Stewart-like thespian tour de force we saw in Mister Smith Goes to Washington.

Well, that needs to change. When someone is filibustering, the American people need know that. They need to be able to switch on C-SPAN and watch them making a fool of themselves. Can you imagine what weak-assed bumbling arguments they could try to articulate concerning, for example, their opposition to the bill to help First Responders?

To that end, please consider signing the petition over at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Yeah, after you sign you'll be pleaded with to send in some campaign cash, but hey, after the Citizens United decision, you already know that until we finally get publicly-financed campaigns, politics isn't gonna be cheap.

I Miss Alan Grayson Already

Here, in case you didn't see it the first thousand times it went viral, is his speech on the floor of Congress in which he explains the Rethug Health Care Plan:

I really hope that we haven't seen the last of Alan Grayson. And I have a sneaking suspicion that we haven't. We need a lot more straight-shooting take-no-prisoners bona fide liberals in the public arena, and I don't think Grayson is one to hide his light under a bushel.

Snarlin' Arlen's Valedictory Address

I have never been a fan of Arlen Spector, what with his life-long Republicanism until he had that cynical "deathbed conversion" to the Dems when it was obvious that he couldn't win the 2010 Republican primary.

In case we forget, he was also, as counsel for the Warren Commission, the primary author of and chief cheerleader for the infamous -- and impossible -- Single Bullet Theory that held, against all of the evidence, that one single bullet, allegedly fired by Lee Harvey Oswald from a defective weapon, traveled right through JFK apparently without resistance, and then went on to a second career, driving through the chest and several body parts of Texas governor John Connolly, causing numerous wounds, and finally ending up lodged in his thigh. And that it somehow miraculously remained in an almost-pristine and visibly undamaged condition, even though the bullet fragments in Connolly's thigh were proof -- buried under Big John's skin -- that this was impossible.

Nevertheless, here is his complete farewell address (in two parts) -- which he stresses is not a farewell address -- in which among other things he slams both his erstwhile Rethug colleagues and the rightwing mouthbreathing Rethug knuckledraggers on the Supreme Court.

So Arlen, exactly where was all this honesty and doubt and criticism over the last half-century -- and especially the last decade -- when you had every opportunity to voice these concerns?

Nevertheless, here's Snarlin' Arlen at his best:

President Palin? Don't Scoff -- It's Possible

As much fun as it is to contemplate the political curb-stomping that Barack Obama would likely administer to Half-Governor Sarah Palin if she became the Rethug nominee, it could turn out to be one of those "be careful what you ask for because you just might get it" things.

I'm as eager as anyone else with half a brain to see Palin get her ass kicked in a general election, but we anticipate that particular matchup at our peril.

If she actually managed to claw and snarl and lie her way to the top of the heap to become Obama's opponent in the 2012 general election, she just might pull it off and take all the marbles.

Anything can happen: All it would take would be another Iranian-hostage-type situation like the one that destroyed Jimmy Carter's presidency and ushered Saint Ronald into the Offal Office. Or the Rethugs, with the enabling tactics of their sycophantic lackeys and servile toadies in the CPM/SCLM*, could manufacture out of whole cloth some "scandal" -- Obama is a child molester, Obama is a rapist, Obama is a ________ (fill in the blank with your own heinous crime) -- that would sway enough of the Moron-American voting bloc to vote against Obama and for her.

Keep in mind that a December poll pitting her against Obama was, in the grand scheme of things, pretty shocking: A full 40% supported her, vs. only 48% for Obama. That seems like a landslide, but if I have my math right, a shift of only 5% from Obama to Palin would hand her the presidency on a meat platter.

And if that happens, I really do have to get out. I'm way too visible on the left side of the spectrum, what with my membership on the National Advisory Council of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, my long-time membership in the ACLU and my left-wing political and anti-war activism. And of course, this blog.

If I am not already on a new Rethug "enemies list", it's not for lack of trying.

----

[* CPM/SCLM = Capitalist Pig Media/So Called Liberal Media]

Book of the Month: The Grapes of Wrath

Most of the members of my father's extended family were Oklahoma sharecroppers for several generations, until the deadly combination of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl devastation of the 1930s drove them off the land and to the west, where they would face a new brand of poverty, humiliation and starvation in California, Oregon and Washington.

My new book of the month is The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, which tells in harrowing detail the plight of "Okie" Dust Bowl refugees in their flight to what they hopefully but erroneously thought would be greener pastures, oranges free for the picking off of trees, high wages and lots of work.

Reading it, for me, is like reading a biography of my own family. But the book is far more than that, and it's a necessary reminder of the kind of society that the Teabaggers and the everything-for-the-rich Republicans want to take us back to. It's not a pretty sight, but I think periodically the rest of us need to be reminded of those "good old days" that they want to see come around again.

No one can read this book without getting pissed off at a country that would allow this kind of thing to happen.

BONUS: While you are reading The Grapes of Wrath, I recommend popping this great Woody Guthrie CD into your player and listening to it. It's Dust Bowl Ballads, a terrific compilation of songs that also describe the hell that was the 1930s flight of the Dust Bowl Refugees.

Both John Steinbeck and Woody Guthrie made the trip west along with the migrant worker "Okies" they wrote about, which is why both of these works have that distinctive ring of truth about them that you just can't make up. I am a writer--trust me on this.

Since my father had been untimely ripped from his childhood, the draw of Oklahoma was strong in him, as it often is in those who suffer from a sudden dislocation in their youth. So in 1950 he moved back to NE Oklahoma, dragging me and my mother along with him. We spent five years on a dairy farm near Bristow, until the draconian agricultural policies of Ezra Taft Benson, Dwight Eisenhower's secretary of agriculture (who was later elevated to the lofty perch of "Prophet, Seer and Revelator" of the Moron Mormon Church), drove us into poverty once more and we were forced to again abandon the land and move west. While it wasn't close to the great migration of the 30s, it was personally disruptive to me, as it had once been to my father.

With I think the same motivations that once drove my father back to the state of his birth and childhood, I managed to make several trips back over the years. But I never even considered moving back there. Oklahoma had changed, and so had I. In a state that in the first two decades of the 20th Century had elected a huge number of Agrarian Socialists to office, Oklahoma managed to drive itself as far to the right as it could, ridiculously culminating in this year's ballot initiative that amended the state constitution to prohibit the establishment of Sharia Law(!) in the state. As if that was a problem. But what can you expect from a voting public -- part of the Moron-American Voting Bloc --that is willing to elect a professional dickhead and crypto-Fascist like Tom Coburn to the US Senate?

Anyway, The Grapes of Wrath and Dust Bowl Ballads: Get them, read one and listen to the other. You will not be sorry.

My Anthem for the Next Two Years

Here's Leonard Cohen's stirring Democracy:

(You can read the lyrics here.)

This song ought to be required listening for every politician, instead of that stupid-ass lame-brain teabagger stunt to read the US Constitution aloud before every session of Congress.

BTW, why do we have to rely on Canadian singer-songwriters for progressive/radical commentary songs (Bruce Cockburn is another one) to get our blood running? I'm just wondering...

Holiday Stress

I get it every year, but for some reason it's worse this year than it ever has been.

Maybe it's the bullshit that's happening in Washington DC, maybe something else, but I'm just going to shut down until after the holidays.

I'd like to just disappear into the desert until the New Year, but we don't have a warm desert anywhere nearby, and it's too far to drive to get to the Mojave and The Slabs.

Last year we escaped to Hawaii for a couple of weeks, but we spent all of our traveling money on our trip to France, and now we are stuck in the wet winter of western Washington.

Everybody, have a great holiday and I'll see you after the New Year.

--The F Man

Anybody Get the "I'm Tired" Email Yet?

As I've said before, I'm on some pretty oddball mailing lists, and one of the things that came to me last week was what is apparently a viral email essay written by a guy named Robert Hall (and no, it's not the actor from CSI, even though it purports to be) who is allegedly a Marine Corps veteran and five-term Massachusetts state senator.

It starts out with the title "I'm 63 and I'm Tired", and then it gets into the nitty-gritty:

I'm 63. Except for one semester in college when jobs were scarce and a six-month period when I was between jobs, but job-hunting every day, I've worked hard since I was 18. Despite some health challenges, I still put in 50-hour weeks, and haven't called in sick in seven or eight years. I make a good salary, but I didn't inherit my job or my income, and I worked to get where I am. Given the economy, there's no retirement in sight, and I'm tired. Very tired.
I'm tired of being told that I have to "spread the wealth" to people who don't have my work ethic. I'm tired of being told the government will take the money I earned, by force if necessary, and give it to people too lazy to earn it.
I'm tired of being told that I have to pay more taxes to "keep people in their homes." Sure, if they lost their jobs or got sick, I'm willing to help. But if they bought Mc Mansions at three times the price of our paid-off, $250,000 condo, on one-third of my salary, then let the left-wing Congress-critters who passed Fannie and Freddie and the Community Reinvestment Act that created the bubble help them with their own money.

And it goes on and on with anti-Islamic and racist screeds and a bunch of phony-assed I-pulled-myself-up-by-my-own-bootstraps kind of crap.

You may, if you wish, see the whole thing over at Snopes, whose take on it is that it is true (that Robert Hall said it) but that it was sometimes wrongly attributed to the actor guy Robert Hall who plays the coroner on CSI.

The list that this was sent to is mostly Vietnam veterans of the Rethug-Asshole stripe, but there are a couple of liberals besides me on it and one of them responded to this crap with his own lambaste of the Glenn Beck/Bill Orally/Faux News gobbling morons who believe this shit.

Which, of course, then prompted a flurry of "If you don't like it here why don't you get out you fucking commie!" responses, with North Korea pretty much heading the list of potential new homelands for us commie-nazi-socialist-atheist-pinko liberals.

Naturally I couldn't just sit by and do nothing (but you knew that already). Here is my response to the list:

I have a simple question: Why does this joker claims that the economy is so bad he can't retire, if he's worked every day of his life and owns outright a condo worth 250k?
A lot of people, me among them, have retired and are doing fine on what I suspect is a lot less retirement income than this Robert Hall has available to him.
I suspect that this whole piece of raving is a little long on exaggeration and a little short on actual facts.
But what you can expect from a former politician (he was a Massachusetts state senator) whose political party is not given but which I would bet good money is Republican?
In Glennbeckistan, though (as Winston Churchill so famously said under different circumstances), facts are such precious and fragile things that they must constantly be protected with a bodyguard of lies...
And those of you who are parroting the "if you don't like it here, get out" line: It appears that you are the ones who don't like it here, since you are doing all the complaining. Why don't YOU get out? May I suggest the Ayn-Rand-Libertarian paradise of Somalia as a potential new home base for you, where there are no taxes and no government intervention in your life because there is ... no government.
Just what you want...

I know, it's too easy. It's like shooting fish in a barrel. But so what? It's still fun.

A Lost Generation

A lost generation. That's what it seems like to me, with Obama giving up without a fight and giving the rich motherfuckers their two-year tax cut extension, and the spineless Democrats are going to go right along with it. I really can't see Obama attempting to run for reelection now and trying to gin up that whole "hopey-changey" thing again in two years. I know a lot of people who will not vote for him again because he's Republican-Lite.

I'm particularly pissed off since I worked so hard to get him elected. That whole Hopey Changey Thing isn't working out for me, or anyone I know. When I voted for Obama, I wanted another FDR and instead I it looks like got another Clinton (who, to be fair, was the best Republican president of the 20th Century)

All the Dems have done is kick the problem down the road two years, so the tax cuts will expire in an election year. Can you imagine the Democrats trying to do anything with it when they are in an election cycle? No, I didn't think so, and in the meantime the deficit that could have been partially plugged by that tax income will just get bigger and bigger.

It's a missed opportunity, and a HUGE one. Now it'll be a cold day in hell when those two-percenters have to pay anything resembling their fair share of taxes in this country, and in the meantime we'll have a country coming apart at the seams and the only tailors who can sew it back together are Chinese...

And the Rethugs will finally have their way, a government so small that they can drown it in a bathtub.

I'm seriously thinking about getting out. The only problem with that is that there is no reasonable way to actually get off the planet...

Ironically this news came on the very day that I was being sworn in as the Democratic Party Precinct Committee Officer in my local party.

Oh, the humanity...

The Mormons and the Constitution

It's an article of faith -- or a "prophecy" from one or another of the old "prophet, seer and regulator revelator" guys at the top of the Mormon hierarchy -- that one day the US Constitution will "hang by a thread" and it will be up to a Mormon to save it.

Could it be we've already found our boy? Newly-elected Teabagger senator from Utah, Mike Lee, a scion of "Mormon royalty"-- he is a direct descendant of John D. Lee, infamous for being Brigham Young's scapegoat for the savage Mountain Meadows Massacre of white settlers who had the gall to cross Mormon land -- says that the Constitution is "divinely inspired" and he personally knows ('cause god told him, presumably) how to interpret it.

Here's Buzzflash's Mark Karlin:

What is the difference between religious fundamentalists and so-called "strict constructionists"? Actually, they are two sides of the same coin.
First, they both believe that the Constitution and the Bible are divinely granted documents. Secondly, they believe that there is a literal interpretation to both, and that they are the ones who know what that is. Thirdly, anyone who disagrees with them is either a heretic or un-American, or both.
The New York Times makes note of one newly elected Tea Party Republican senator:
Mike Lee, a 39-year-old Republican from Utah, has the most impeccable establishment legal credentials: the son of Rex Lee, a solicitor general under President Reagan, he attended law school at Brigham Young and later clerked for Samuel Alito on the U.S. Court of Appeals and then the Supreme Court. But on the campaign trail, especially during his heated primary battle with the three-term Republican incumbent Bob Bennett, Lee offered glimpses of a truly radical vision of the U.S. Constitution, one that sees the document as divinely inspired and views much of what the federal government currently does as unconstitutional.
This radical viewpoint is what characterizes the "Repeal Amendment" movement, which I wrote about yesterday. It is the fanatical, cultist viewpoint of those who believe that only they have the divine knowledge to understand "God's word" in the Bible and in the Constitution.
For these extremists, the Constitution is not a document of men and women that threw off the shackles of a Europe still governed by the claim of divinely sanctioned royalty, but rather, like the Ten Commandments (an apt analogy), a manifestation of the will of God - and an exclusive Christian God at that.
"As your U.S. senator," Lee promised during the campaign, according to the Times, "I will not vote for a single bill that I can't justify based on the text and the original understanding of the Constitution, no matter what the court says you can do."

Of course Lee is just the one, having labored in the august halls of the SCOTUS as a clerk for Scalito, to know exactly (and rather smugly I might add) just what the Constitution allows.

BTW, be sure to read that inner link to How Radical Is the Republican Leadership in Congress? Very.:

How radical is the Republican leadership in Congress? Let's just say that some of them make anarchists look like "centrists."
Eric Cantor, who was elected incoming house majority leader by the GOP caucus, is backing a plan, according to Talking Points Memo (TPM), "to blow up the Constitutional system and replace it with one that would give state governments veto power over federal laws."
A few years back, such an anti-constitutional notion would have been considered the province of unbalanced individuals and extreme, right-wing cultists. Now, the notion of states overriding the Constitution and federal law has apparently become mainstream for the Republican Party.
Of course, it would take an amendment to the Constitution, called the "Repeal Amendment," to eviscerate the founding document of our nation and our legal system. Cantor, for his part, thinks that this is a good idea, saying: "The Repeal Amendment would provide a check on the ever-expanding federal government, protect against Congressional overreach, and get the government working for the people again, not the other way around. In order to return America to opportunity, responsibility, and success, we must reverse course and the Repeal Amendment is a step in that direction."
According to TPM, one of the main goals of the Repeal Amendment is to overturn the 17th Amendment, which allows for the popular election of senators. This is an objective both the Tea Party and Antonin Scalia share, as BuzzFlash pointed out in a recent commentary. This fits in well with the perplexing notion that the "rabble of democracy" is a danger to the Republic!

So back to little Mikey Lee. He probably believes -- truly believes -- in the kind of crap he's spewing, and since he's already part of Mormon royalty, how hard can it be for him to already think he's The One who will save the Constitution?

The Return of "Hanoi Jane"

Six years ago, when I was involved in the Veterans for Kerry movement, this email started being sent around along with a photoshopped picture of Jane Fonda with John Kerry. It was a repeat of one that first started making the viral circles in 1999, when Jane appeared on ABC's list of "Women of the Century".

Back then the whole Hanoi Jane thing hadn't been very well researched and people were willing to believe anything they heard about her, even to the point of buying into this nonsense. And I guess things haven't changed very much. People are still stupidly angry about this, and six years ago when I did "respond all" reply about the lies in the email, I got death threats -- yes, death threats!

Now the same email is making the viral rounds, but this time Barack Obama's name is thrown into the mix because… well, I don't know why and neither, apparently, does anyone else, except for the belief that he is a traitor equal with or even surpassing Hanoi Jane.

So here's the text of the email – I've had to clean up the punctuation and the spacing to make it more understandable (not that it helped, but I'm not responsible for the content, just the presentation)

Subj: Never Forgive a Traitor
*Never Forgive A Traitor* For those of you too young to remember *_Hanoi Jane_ *is a bad person and did some terrible things during the Vietnam war. Things that can not be forgiven!!!!
* and now OBAMA wants to honor her......!!!!
In Memory of LT. C.Thomsen Wieland who spent 100 days at the Hanoi Hilton*
IF YOU NEVER FORWARDED* *ANYTHING IN YOUR LIFE FORWARD THIS SO THAT EVERYONE WILL KNOW!!!!!!
_ She really is a traitor_.
A TRAITOR IS ABOUT TO BE HONORED KEEP THIS MOVING ACROSS AMERICA
This is for all the kids born in the 70's and after who do not remember, and didn't have to bear the burden that our fathers, mothers and older brothers and sisters had to bear..
Jane Fonda is being honored as one of the '100 Women of the Century.' BY BARBRA WALTERS
Unfortunately, many have forgotten and still countless others have never known how Ms. Fonda betrayed not only the idea of our country, but specific men who served and sacrificed during Vietnam*
The first part of this is from an F-4E pilot. The pilot's name is Jerry Driscoll, a River Rat.
In 1968, the former Commandant of the USAF Survival School was a POW in Ho Lo Prison the ' Hanoi Hilton.'
Dragged from a stinking cesspit of a cell, cleaned, fed, and dressed in clean PJ's, he was ordered to describe for a visiting American 'Peace Activist' the 'lenient and humane treatment' he'd received.
He spat at Ms. Fonda, was clubbed, and was dragged away. During the subsequent beating, he fell forward on to the camp Commandant 's feet, which sent that officer berserk.
In 1978, the Air Force Colonel still suffered from double vision (which permanently ended his flying career) from the Commandant's frenzied application of a wooden baton.
From 1963-65, Col. Larry Carrigan was in the 47FW/DO (F-4E's). He spent 6 years in the 'Hanoi Hilton',,, the first three of which his family only knew he was 'missing in action'. His wife lived on faith that he was still alive. His group, too, got the cleaned-up, fed and clothed routine in preparation for a 'peace delegation' visit.
They, however, had time and devised a plan to get word to the world that they were alive and still survived.
Each man secreted a tiny piece of paper, with his Social Security Number on it , in the palm of his hand.
When paraded before Ms. Fonda and a cameraman, she walked the line, shaking each man's hand and asking little encouraging snippets like: 'Aren't you sorry you bombed babies?' and 'Are you grateful for the humane treatment from your benevolent captors?' Believing this HAD to be an act, they each palmed her their sliver of paper.
She took them all without missing a beat.. At the end of the line and once the camera stopped rolling, to the shocked disbelief of the POWs, she turned to the officer in charge and handed him all the little pieces of paper..
Three men died from the subsequent beatings. Colonel Carrigan was almost number four but he survived, which is the only reason we know of her actions that day.
I was a civilian economic development advisor in Vietnam , and was captured by the North Vietnamese communists in South Vietnam in 1968, and held prisoner for over 5 years.
I spent 27 months in solitary confinement; one year in a cage in Cambodia ; and one year in a 'black box' in Hanoi My North Vietnamese captors deliberately poisoned and murdered a female missionary, a nurse in a leprosarium in Ban me Thuot , South Vietnam , whom I buried in the jungle near the Cambodian border. At one time, I weighed only about 90 lbs. (My normal weight is 170 lbs)
We were Jane Fonda's 'war criminals....'
When Jane Fonda was in Hanoi , I was asked by the camp communist political officer if I would be willing to meet with her..
I said yes, for I wanted to tell her about the real treatment we POWs received... and how different it was from the treatment purported by the North Vietnamese, and parroted by her as 'humane and lenient.'
Because of this, I spent three days on a rocky floor on my knees, with my arms outstretched with a large steel weights placed on my hands, and beaten with a bamboo cane.
I had the opportunity to meet with Jane Fonda soon after I was released. I asked her if she would be willing to debate me on TV. She never did answer me.
These first-hand experiences do not exemplify someone who should be honored as part of '100 Years of Great Women.' Lest we forget....' 100 Years of Great Women' should never include a traitor whose hands are covered with the blood of so many patriots.
There are few things I have strong visceral reactions to, but Hanoi Jane's participation in blatant treason, is one of them. Please take the time to forward to as many people as you possibly can.. It will eventually end up on her computer and she needs to know that we will never forget.
RONALD D. SAMPSON, CMSgt, USAF 716 Maintenance Squadron, Chief of Maintenance DSN: 875-6431 COMM: 883-6343*
PLEASE HELP BY SENDING THIS TO EVERYONE IN YOUR ADDRESS BOOK. IF ENOUGH PEOPLE SEE THIS MAYBE HER* *STATUS WILL CHANGE*

Okay, aside from the fact that this first surfaced in 1999 (that was when the Women of the Century list was published), what else does the writer have wrong?

Pretty much everything, it seems.

Snopes has a very long article, Hanoi'd with Jane which debunks nearly every point in this email:

Were Jane Fonda's actions treason, or were they the exercise of a private citizen's right to freedom of speech? At the time, the legal aspects of this question were moot: President Nixon was engaged in trying to wind down American involvement in Vietnam and had to face another election in a few months, so politically he had far more to lose than to gain by making a martyr out of a prominent anti-war activist. (No requirement in either the Constitution or federal law states that the U.S. must be engaged in a declared war, or any war at all, before charges of treason can be brought against an individual.)
On the one hand, Jane Fonda provided no tangible military assistance to the North Vietnamese: she divulged no military secrets, she gave them no money or material, and she did not interfere with the operations of the American forces. Her actions, offensive as they were to many, were primarily of propaganda value only. On the other hand, Iva Ikuko Toguri (also known as "Tokyo Rose") was convicted of treason for making propaganda broadcasts on behalf of the Japanese during World War II (although she claimed her betrayal was forced and was eventually pardoned many years later by President Gerald Ford), and Fonda's efforts could fall under the definition of "giving aid and comfort to the enemy." It is also undeniable that some American soldiers came to harm as a direct result of Fonda's actions, an outcome she should reasonably have anticipated.
The most serious accusations in the piece quoted above, that Fonda turned over slips of paper furtively given her by American POWs to the North Vietnamese and that several POWs were beaten to death as a result, are untrue. Those named in the inflammatory e-mail have repeatedly and categorically denied the events they supposedly were part of.
"It's a figment of somebody's imagination," says Ret. Col. Larry Carrigan, one of the servicemen mentioned in the 'slips of paper' incident. Carrigan was shot down over North Vietnam in 1967 and did spend time in a POW camp. He has no idea why the story was attributed to him, saying, "I never met Jane Fonda." In 2005, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that Carrigan "is so tired of having to repeat that he wasn't beaten after Fonda's visit and that there were no beating deaths at that time that he won't talk to the media anymore."
The tale about a defiant serviceman who spit at Jane Fonda and is severely beaten as a result is often attributed to Air Force pilot Jerry Driscoll. He has also repeatedly stated on the record that it did not originate with him.
Driscoll said he never met Fonda, as the e-mail claims — and therefore, never spit on her and didn't suffer permanent double vision from a subsequent beating. "Totally false. It did not happen," Driscoll said.
"I don't know who came up with [my] name. The trouble that individual has caused me!" he said, referring to the time he has spent repeatedly denying the persistent myth.
Mike McGrath, President of NAM-POWs, has also stepped forward to disclaim the story: Please excuse the generic response, but I have been swamped with so many e-mails on the subject of the Jane Fonda article (Carrigan, Driscoll, strips of paper, torture and deaths of POWs, etc.) that I have to resort to this pre-scripted rebuttal. The truth is that most of this never happened. This is a hoax story placed on the internet by unknown Fonda haters. No one knows who initiated the story. Please assist by not propagating the story. Fonda did enough bad things to assure her a correct place in the garbage dumps of history. We don't want to be party to false stories, which could be used as an excuse that her real actions didn't really happen either. I have spoken with all the parties named: Carrigan, Driscoll, et al. They all state that this particular internet story is a hoax and they wish to disassociate their names from the false story.
Despite the claims of hundreds of Vietnam veterans who maintain they were "there" and can affirm these tales as true, Jane Fonda actually met with only a handful of American POWs in North Vietnam, and even they have spoken out on the record to disclaim the story: "The whole [e-mail] story about Jane Fonda is just malarkey," said Edison Miller, 73, of California, a former Marine Corps pilot held more than five years. Miller was among seven POWs who met with Fonda in Hanoi. He said he didn't recall her asking any questions other than about their names, if that. He said that he passed her no piece of paper, and that to his knowledge, no other POW in the group did, despite the e-mail's claims.
In fact, Fonda carried home letters from many American POWs to their families upon her return from North Vietnam.

Okay, another question: Who the fuck is Ronald D. Sampson? A casual reading of this email might lead you to believe that HE was the POW who was tortured ("I spent 27 months…" "I was on a rocky floor…"

Actually he was not there. His name does not appear on ANY lists of POWs (see for example, POW Network) and it's tempting to think he's one of those Stolen Valor dickwad wannabe's, but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and choose to decide that the email just got garbled in the viral spread.

Here's more from Snopes:

The source of the story about a prisoner forced to kneel on rocky ground while holding a piece of steel rebar in his outstretched arms still affirms that account as true, though. Michael Benge was a senior agro-forestry officer with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) who was working in South Vietnam when he was captured by the Viet Cong in 1968 and held prisoner for five years:
He was at a Hanoi prison in 1972 when a political officer he hadn't seen before asked whether he would like to meet Fonda. "I said yes," he wrote in a 1999 letter that protested the Fonda honors, "for I would like to tell her about the real treatment we POWs received and how different it was from the treatment purported by the North Vietnamese."
Benge said he doesn't know who pilfered his story from his letter and attached it to the Carrigan and Driscoll fictions.
In the 1972 incident, "I think I had maybe a little smarter-than-the-average bear [political officer] who knew I was being cynical," Benge said recently. Benge said he spent the next three days kneeling on a rocky floor with a steel bar on his outstretched hands. Whenever his arms dipped, he was struck with a bamboo cane, he said.
North Vietnamese guards might be the only people able to verify Benge's torture account independently. But, McGrath said, Benge's account is "consistent with [North] Vietnamese policy and conduct about people who didn't cooperate."

If you are the recipient of one of these Hanoi Jane emails, I would hope that at the very least you will trash it and not pass it on. Passing these things on without checking into their veracity actually dishonors people like Jerry Driscoll and Larry Carrigan. It is calling them liars, and that, incidentally, is the best pushback you can have to the person who sent you the email in the first place.

That is how I handled it, and the person who sent it lost no time in sending out the correction to everyone he sent it to.

I don't know how many of those have resulted in death threats, but I'm willing to bet that he got some.

Taking a Few Days Off

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, with all that that implies... Those of you who are from "families" know what I mean. I'll be taking on my IBIL* with a full load of verbal double-ought buckshot, and since I can't really eat anything, I'll be on my absolute best behavior...

I have a temporary cap on my back molar with an injunction from my dentist not to eat anything that could fuck it up. Which means that I'll be drinking my Thanksgiving dinner. Which means I may say something I could end up regretting later, when the IBIL burbles something in praise of the Rethugs or the Teabaggers or Michelle Bachmann or Mama Grisly or the US Chamber of Commerce...

Which means that even if She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed manages to bail me out of jail in time for the pumpkin pie, I'll still need a few days to recover.

See you next week.

----

[*IBIL = Idiot Brother-In-Law]

When Even Motor Trend is Against You...

...you know you've crossed some kind of line.

Except if you are Rush Limpdick, the pimple-assed draft dodger, who recently went on a rant about the new Chevrolet Volt being named MT's Car of the Year.

From what I can tell, Rusty doesn't like it because he doesn't like it. He's never driven one, he's never even seen one. But it's electric and doesn't use a lot of gasoline, so it must be bad.

Motor Trend, surprisingly, unwilling to buy into the whole "That's just Rush being Rush" justification that the rest of the media uses an excuse not to call him on his bullshit, shot back -- and shot back big -- in a column by Todd Lassa, called Rush to Judgment:

You said, “Folks, of all the cars, no offense, General Motors, please, but of all the cars in the world, the Chevrolet Volt is the Car of the Year? Motor Trend magazine, that’s the end of them. How in the world do they have any credibility? Not one has been sold. The Volt is the Car of the Year.”
So, Mr. Limbaugh; you didn’t enjoy your drive of our 2011 Car of the Year, the Chevrolet Volt? Assuming you’ve been anywhere near the biggest automotive technological breakthrough since … I don’t know, maybe the self-starter, could you even find your way to the front seat? Or are you happy attacking a car that you’ve never even seen in person?
Last time you ranted about the Volt, you got confused about the “range,” and said on the air that the car could be driven no more than 40 miles at a time, period. At least you stayed away from that issue this time, but you continue to attack it as the car only a tree hugging, Obama-supporting Government Motors customer would want. As radio loudmouths like you would note, none of those potential customers were to be found after November 2.
Back to us for a moment, our credibility, Mr. Limbaugh, comes from actually driving and testing the car, and understanding its advanced technology. It comes from driving and testing virtually every new car sold, and from doing this once a year with all the all-new or significantly improved models all at the same time. We test, make judgments and write about things we understand.
Chevrolet has not sold one Volt because it’s not on sale yet. It will not sell 10,000 this first model year (although GE plans to buy truckloads for its fleet), because it takes time to ramp up production. See, Rush, because we’re the World’s Automotive Authority, we get access to many cars before they go on sale.
Rush to Judgment imageBut, harrumph. In its attempt to force cars that don’t use much gas on us — how un-American/un-ExxonMobil/un-Halliburton is that? — the Obama administration is offering a $7,500 tax credit on the Chevy Volt, grabbing tax breaks and credits right out of the deserving, job-creating pockets of America’s richest individuals. How dare he?
This is another of your distortions, Rush, repeated by the otherwise more level-headed George Will in The Washington Post last Sunday. The $7,500 Obama tax credit is an expansion of President Bush’s hybrid credits from the last decade. The Obama tax credit extends to the new Nissan Leaf, too, but if you or Will slammed that car, I’ve not heard or read it. I’d be surprised if you did, though, as Nissan is building the Leaf in a non-union factory in a right-to-work state represented by two Republican senators. A factory located there because Tennessee offered Nissan big tax credits. Maybe you’re worried that if the $7,500 tax credit works, too many people will buy the Volt, and that could reduce the need for oil drilling tax credits?

Nyuk, nyuk nyuk...Take that, asshole.

There's more to this, so be sure to check out the whole story, and especially the last line. There is also a ton of comments on it, and there are surprisingly few dittoheads in there, but a lot of people who are going to subscribe to MT because of this.

Let the Rehab Begin!

I'm talking about the rehabilitation of George W. "War Criminal" Bush. Not a real rehab, mind you, just his reputation.

He's just published his obviously ghost-written book, he's making the rounds of friendly journalists and he's trying to pass himself off as being the reluctant one when it came to the Iraq war.

Jesus, does he know no shame? Bad question, of course not.

But why is this happening? Why is it happening now?

I have two answers to that:

(1) It's been two years since the fucker was in office, long enough for the ADHD Moron-American Voting Bloc to forget about all the bad stuff he did, long enough for the Obama-haters over at Faux News (along with their card-carrying fellow travelers in the CPM* -- Matt Lauer anyone?) to gin up enough antipathy towards the current president that even Bush looks good by comparison. Plus who can remember, ten years after, that Bush was the cheerleader-in-chief for the Iraq war, that he said before he even ran for president that he was going to "get" Saddam Hussein?

(2) There's just two years until the next election, and the Bush name has to be "cleared" to pave the way for Little Jebbie to run for president.

Jesus wept. I hope that Caribou Barbie, aka Mama Grisly, stomps him in the primaries. I really do. You betcha! Jebbie would be out of the picture and she'd be easy to beat in the general election.

After all, I think we've already had enough members of the Bush Crime Family in the presidency. I doubt whether we could survive another one.

Okay, back to the question of rehab: I think Dubya really needs some. Anyone remember the stop-smoking program that administered an electric shock every time you tried to light up? I think Dubya would be well served by something similar. Say, something with 1,000 volts, and just enough amps to make smoke almost come out of his eyes... Just for a little while, say an hour or so, followed by a cooling off period under a dripping wet cloth placed strategically over his nose and mouth.

After all, "the lawyer" told him that it wasn't torture.

I'd like to know if he'd agree when it was being done to him...

------

[CPM = Capitalist Pig Media]

JFK Assassination Anniversary

Those of us of a certain age can tell you in great detail exactly where we were, what we were doing, and who we were with when we heard the news of death of John Fitzgerald Kennedy on November 22, 1963. But not all of us. Interestingly enough, former president George H. W. Bush, for example, couldn't recall where he was and what he was doing, nor could E. Howard Hunt, later of Watergate fame...

Okay, before I go all tinfoil hat on you, I will tell you up front that I never believed in the official answers to the JFK Assassination.

I don't need to go into the whole thing, since by now everyone knows the story, and those who buy into the Warren Report are incapable of listening to evidence to the contrary, and those of us who believe that there was some kind of conspiracy going on have our usual suspects and we are not willing to entertain motions to dismiss.

A terrific blog on the assassination is Oswald's Mother, and it's one that should be required reading for even a casual student of the events of Dallas 1963.

Think you know something about Lee Harvey Oswald? Think you know everything? You'll change your mind after you read the four-part Oswald Was One Weird Dude.

And what is probably the most complete and best book on the real history behind the JFK Assassination is Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann's Ultimate Sacrifice:John and Robert Kennedy, the Plan for a Coup in Cuba, and the Murder of JFK, which is probably about as close as we are going to come to a "Unified Field Theory" of the Kennedy Assassination.

It's a pretty long book, but it is heavily footnoted and documented. And it is a "must read" for students and critics of the Warren Report and the subsequent government coverups of both the JFK and the Robert Kennedy Assassinations.

"...and the ground shook..."

Yea verily.

It came as a total surprise to me that Pope Benedict (heretofore known only for his eggs) actually is going to come out in favor of the use of -- shock! -- condoms.

But there's a caveat (there always is) to this: "Only in certain circumstances", he says.

Presumably that will include pedophile priests who are buttfucking altar boys, so the little angels won't have a demonstrable proof that Father Fuckmeindeass actually did anything...wrong...to little Johnny.

Given the advances in DNA evidentiary chemistry, it seems that once again the Catholic Church is one step behind (cue sneering chuckle) the rest of us...

Apparently Joe Miller Reads this Blog...

Yesterday I said, "Joe Miller needs to demand a recount -- something went wrong with the poll-stuffing machinery in Alaska this month..."

Today I see that Senate Loser Miller has asked a judge not to certify the write-in election.

Aside from the fact that the fucker is a sore loser, it rankles me that he would actually follow my advice and act like the spoiled child/Sarah-Palin-leg-humper that he is and throw a temper tantrum because he actually LOST the fucking election.

What an asshole.

Fraud at the Polls

Okay, I'm not a fan of Dancing With the Stars. In fact, I've never even seen part of an episode, but I was in a conversation tonight with three of my guy friends whose wives watch the show, and no one could figure out why stiff-as-a-stick unmarried teen mom Bristol Palin was still in the competition.

Well, here's why: The Mama Grisly Palinistas have mobilized to stuff the ballot boxes, as it were, with votes for little Bristol:

While Bristol Palin denies any Tea Party conspiracy theories, there's no denying that conservatives have been pushing for votes for Bristol, using blogs and Twitter to start a movement. But what isn't widely known is the evidence—via message board comments on some conservative sites—that this mobilization involves fixing this (albeit meaningless) election through a technical snafu on ABC's website, which allows Palin's supporters to cast an infinite number of email votes...

Jesus, if they are willing to cheat on something as meaningless as this, then what would they be willing to do when it comes to the real thing?

Joe Miller needs to demand a recount -- something went wrong with the poll-stuffing machinery in Alaska this month...

A Decision in Alaska

No, I'm not talking about the decision to change the channel before Sarah Palin's "nature show" starts, or ten seconds into it.

What I'm talking about is this: Finally, the Alaska senate race is over, and Lisa Murkowski has made history by being the first victorious write-in candidate in something like a million years.

I'm actually of two minds about the whole thing. I'm glad that Teabagger darling and Sarah Palin leg-humper Joe Miller lost, but the seat is still in the hands of the Rethugs.

So I'm not really celebrating, as such. Well, just a little in the way of schaudenfreude over yet another of Palin's hand-picked candidates biting the pillow dirt...

Today's Quote Worth Considering

Here's a quote that you may find interestingly descriptive. See if you can guess who said it and when.

The really dangerous American fascist... is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power... They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective, toward which all their deceit is directed, is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.

I'll bet you would have guessed that the speaker was some modern progressive, e.g., Keith Olbermann or Big Eddie Schultz. But this was written by US Vice President Henry Wallace, and it appeared in the NY Times on April 9, 1944.

That was 66 years ago, but it describes with chilling accuracy what we are faced with today. He rather eerily predicts the rise of the current corporate oligarchy and the malevolent creation of Faux News.

Wallace was a seer, a futurist, a modern Cassandra, whose warnings we have ignored at our peril.

But we will anyway, because that vast Moron-American Voting Bloc^TM is still alive and well active, as was demonstrated in this month's midterm elections.

-----

[HT to H.E.R.B. for reminding me about the Wallace quote]

The "Stolen" 1960 Election

Even though it's been fifty years, the hoary old urban legend about how Mayor Daley dragged dead voters to the polls to skew Chicago's totals, thereby handing the election to Kennedy when Nixon was the real winner, is still around.

Most recently in a letter to the editor of my own local newspaper:

A tribunal of the 9th Circuit ruled that because prisons house a disproportionate number of minorities, prisoners should have the right to vote.
Lost in the reasoning was the fact that, since minorities generally have lower life expectancies than whites, at any given point in time minorities are also disproportionately represented in cemeteries.
Using the same logic, dead people must, therefore, also have the right to vote.
Democrats in particular have long recognized this injustice, and to their credit have taken the lead in ensuring that votes of the deceased are counted.
Let’s not forget that it was dead voters in West Virginia and Illinois who put John F. Kennedy in the White House.
Here in Washington, King County Democrats in particular have been relentless in their pursuit of justice, and as a result, dead voters have tipped the balance in close races in recent years. They have done so again in this election.
Our hats should be off to them. Dead voters have become a powerful Democratic voting bloc, taking their rightful place alongside other powerful Democratic voting blocs such as felons, illegals, Trekkie-conventioners, and noseringed-Americans — all proudly standing up for the rights of the oppressed.

Okay, I'll give the guy points for cleverness. But cleverness is not smartness. Here's my reply:

Here we go again with the so-called "stolen" 1960 election, in which "dead voters" in Illinois swung Chicago and therefore the state of Illinois from Nixon to Kennedy, which in turn allowed JFK to "steal" the election from Richard Nixon. Philip Jones' letter (11-14) says so, and he also throws in a new and previously unidentified "dead voter" state, West Virginia (which went for JFK by a margin of 5.42% -- still close but not close enough to have “dead voters” make a difference).
However, the so-called “dead voter poll fraud” in Illinois, even if it were true, wouldn't have mattered because of the Electoral College: Regardless of popular vote, 269 electoral votes were needed to win. The final count was 303 Kennedy, 219 Nixon; 15 votes went to a segregationist-democrat candidate.
Illinois had a total of only 27 electoral votes and they were not enough to swing the election to Nixon.
Do the math: 269 votes needed to win; switch 27 Illinois votes from Kennedy to Nixon and it’s still Kennedy 276, Nixon 246.
Even if you dubiously throw in West Virginia’s 8 electoral votes, the final tally is Kennedy 266 and Nixon 254; with no one exceeding the 269 vote threshold the contest then goes to the heavily-Democratic-controlled House of Representatives, and Kennedy still wins.
I wish people would do just a little research into their opinions before displaying their ignorance for all to see. Looking up the 1960 election results took me about 6 seconds.

You can check it out for yourselves at Wikipedia's US Presidential Election 1960, Freakonomics' Did Richard Daley Steal the 1960 Election for Kennedy? and Slate's Was Nixon Robbed?

Glenn Beck and Anti-Semitism

Glenn Beck might be easily dismissed as just the latest in a line of self-created Anti-Semitic media demagogues (Father Charles Coughlan, anyone?), but for the fact that he is drawing a very large audience of low-information low-education viewers who hang on his every word.

And increasingly that word is "Jew". It's the Jews, physically embodied in Beck's favorite whipping boy, George Soros, who are tearing this country apart, whose "Jewish" banking has caused the current economic troubles, whose lavish "Jewish" monetary support of "socialist" and "communist" organizations, such as MoveOn.org and Media Matters is resulting in the "takover" of this country by those fascist-communist-socialist-atheists...

Beck recently ran a three-day attack on George Soros, which began on the anniversary of Kristallnacht. Coincidence? Maybe, but for someone who pretends to be such a fucking know-it-all expert on the whole Nazi thing, it's hard to swallow that it was just coincidence.

It's also especially hard for the Holocaust Survivor community, which had this to say:

Fox news commentator Glenn Beck may have thought he had an easy target in the controversial financier George Soros – but he didn't reckon with Jews who care about Holocaust remembrance and don't take kindly to reckless charges being thrown into the political maelstrom.
“It's totally over the top,” said Anti-Defamation League director Abraham Foxman about Beck's latest outburst.
What Beck said: Soros, a child in Hungary who survived by living with a non-Jewish family, “used to go around with this anti-Semite and deliver papers to the Jews and confiscate their property and then ship them off. And George Soros was part of it. He would help confiscate the stuff. It was frightening. Here's a Jewish boy helping send the Jews to the death camps. And I am certainly not saying that George Soros enjoyed that, even had a choice. I mean, he's 14 years old. He was surviving. So I'm not making a judgment. That's between him and God. As a 14-year-old boy, I don't know what you would do. I don't know what you would do. But you would think that there would be some remorse as an 80-year-old man or a 40-year-old man or a 20-year-old man, when it was all over, you would do some soul searching and say, 'What did I do? What did I do?'”
Soros, Beck went on, “is not a fan of the state of Israel. George Soros is -- many people would call him an anti-Semite. I will not. I don't know enough about all of his positions on Jews. I know his mother, in George Soros's own words, his mother was an anti-Semite. And so he just has this weird, weird world view. He's also an atheist.”
Beck said he wasn't judging Soros – but that's sure what it sounded like to a lot of listeners.
The ADL's Abe Foxman is also a child survivor who lived only because his parents turned him over to his Catholic nanny.
. . .
The issue of the Shoah “is so sensitive that I'm not even sure Holocaust survivors themselves are willing to make such judgments,” Foxman went on “For a political commentator or entertainer to have the audacity to say, there's a Jewish boy sending Jews to death camps, that's horrific. It's totally off limits and over the top.”
Beck's comments “were either out of total ignorance or total insensitivity,” he said.

Glenn Beck is not a total moron. He knows what he is doing, and what he is doing is riding the crest of a wave that is old in history, even in American history. It's sometimes forgotten that the Ku Klux Klan had other targets besides black people: Catholics and Jews were also on the Hate List.

Henry Ford (yes, that Henry Ford) was a notorious anti-Semite in the 1920s, publishing an extremist rag called The Dearborn Independent, which was responsible for the first US publication of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Father Coughlan with his increasingly strident radio broadcasts was the wave rider in the 1930s, but after WWII and the liberation of the death camps, when the horrors of the Holocaust were finally known and almost undeniable, the American strain of Anti-Semitism had to go underground, as it were.

But it's still there, and all it's waiting for is the proper fertilizer and watering for it to spring into full bloom. And Glenn Beck is fertilizing it like crazy with all the shit that keeps spewing out of his mouth.

And don't forget that Glenn Beck is a Mormon, and if you scratch a Mormon deep enough, you'll likely come up with someone that doesn't like Jews: First of all, they've got a lot of nerve passing themselves off as "The Chosen People" when it is obvious from the Book of Mormon that they may have once had that designation but subsequently lost it. It's pretty obvious who has that mantle now if you just look at what the Mormons call Utah: Zion. Hence Zion National Park. Secondly, they for the most part remained in Europe during the great migration to the New World, which God had created and then let wither except for the early Jewish migrations thousands of years before Columbus. And as soon as they got here they started fighting each other with horses and chariots and whatnot, none of which have ever shown up in the archeological diggings, and then Jesus comes to visit and everything is fine for a while and then they start fighting again and pretty soon they are all dead except for the Indians who got to stick around but had their skin turned dark as a punishment. But it'll all be okay in the end since those who convert to Mormonism will become a "white and delightsome people".

I am not making this up.

So the Jews who remained in Europe somehow lost their "Jewness" and never got it back, which was okay since the Jews who first settled the Western Hemisphere couldn't keep theirs either, and now it's the Mormons who are God's Elect.

Anyway long story short, I suspect that Beck's Mormonism has more than a little to do with his Anti-Semitism, especially illustrated in his idolatrous worship of fellow Mormon (and pro-Nazi Anti-Semite) W. Cleon Skousen and his blueprint for Christian theocracy, The Five Thousand Year Leap.

I half expect to see The Protocols of the Elders of Zion on the required reading at Beck's so-called "university".

Book of the Month: All Quiet on the Western Front

Since World War I, billed as the "war to end all wars" ended at 11:11 AM on the morning of November 11, 1918, I think it appropriate that my book of the month for this month is Erich Maria Remarque's remarkable anti-war classic, All Quiet on the Western Front.

Maybe you read it in school, maybe you read it, like I did, for "fun", maybe you saw only the movie on late-night television.

But to any veteran -- or anyone who knows a veteran or lives with a veteran -- this book captures wartime and the changes the soldier goes through, from initial patriotic jingoism to final despair like no other.

You owe it to yourself to read this book. Again. Or for the first time. Those who read my previous book selection, The Sorrow of War, will know why I, among so many others called it "The All Quiet on the Western Front of the Vietnam War".

Veterans Day

And I can't think of a better way to mark this solemn holiday than to present to you Patricia Haynes' Beatitudes for Veterans Day:

Blessed is the veteran of World War I, who spent his life exposing the horrors of war for those who fight in it and the willful deceit of those who declare it and seek stature from it. In his first anti-war novel, Erich Maria Remarque wrote "I see how peoples are set against each other...foolishly, innocently, obediently slaying each other ...While they [the promoters and boosters of war] continued to talk and write, we saw the wounded and dying...The wrong people do the fighting." All Quiet on the Western Front was banned in Nazi Germany.
Blessed are the children of veterans who break the code of silence on the war that never ends: Living with the "attendant nightmares" of their veteran fathers and being "the objects of their war-ridden rage and war-honed violence." War Is Not Over When It's Over chronicles, through interviews and photos, the spill over of brutal violence against girls and women in five war-ruined countries. The author Ann Jones' own life was "darkened by war." Her thrice-decorated WWI-veteran father turned his war-fed anger and violence on her and her mother.

There is a lot more to this guest column at Buzzflash, so be sure to read the whole thing, and give some thoughts this day to the veterans you know, and especially the veterans in your own family. They may have gone through hell and back and survived it, and won't tell you about it because they want to protect you.

Grabbing the Youth Vote, Where Instant Gratification Takes Too Long

My good friend Debby, who has made an appearance in this blog before, sent me an email she got from a "Youth Voter" after she sent him a link to a valuable website, whatthefuckhasobamadonesofar.com:

Yes I have seen that. There are a lot of good things I didn't know or had forgotten about.
Doesn't mention the fact that the 26 year old extension deal doesn't apply to most everybody, that those who don't qualify for Obamacare are forced to buy private insurance, or that he campaigned as anti-war, yet sent 60,000 troops to Afghanistan. Doesn't mention him extending portions of the Patriot Act or his dedication to the War on Terror and support for Zionism and Palestinian ghettos in Israel. Hasn't done fuckall regarding NAFTA or the WTO, which from what I remember, he said he opposed. In fact, he's supported NAFTA much to the dismay of Mexican labor who had hoped he would remove the US from the organization. And for all this talk of oh, look he has appointed a record number of gays to office, there is little talk of him appointing Monsanto's puppet Tom Vilsack as Secretary of Agriculture.
I am tired of compromising. I am tired of corporate backed political parties. I am tired of vague and false promises of change.
I am really starting to understand why reformists and revolutionaries, historically speaking, do not get along even when they have the same or similar goals.

Naturally she sent it to me for informational purposes, but got back some comments:

Jeez, Mister Picky. I supposed if I gave him $100,000 in $100 bills, he'd whine, "You got any smaller denominations? Hundreds are kind of hard to break..."
Actually, I knew two years ago that we'd probably have a problem with "young voters" this time around, since their expectations were raised kind of high -- hell, too high -- by the Obama campaign. And we as Dems didn't seem to realize that, nor did the administration. It's a question of "message" and the failure to get it out. I'd never even heard of What The Fuck Has Obama Done So Far before, and it's a little late now to get that message out. The Dems needed to come out shooting and play smashmouth football ( I know I'm mixing my metaphors but still...) instead of pussyfooting around and still acting like the victim. We needed to expose the Rethugs for what they are and kick them to the side of the road and into the dustbin of history.
One of my granddaughters (age 18) told me that her friends "hate" Obama because he said he was going make marijuana legal and didn't do it(!).
Naturally I wised her up on that score and told her to wise up her friends as well, but the misinformation is out there and some of it we don't even know about since it flies under the radar much of the time.
But when you are young, you know all the answers and you think you just can't wait for incremental change to occur, let alone try to help it along. It's that odd mindset that is emblematic of youth: On the one hand you think you will live forever, while at the same time you think that instant gratification takes too long...
BTW I think that most of his criticisms are spot on. I know that I wanted an FDR and instead got a Bill Clinton, which will now be much more obvious after the election because Obama will think he'll have to move even more to the "center" -- where he already was, so in effect his move will be more to the right.
I've said for a long time that the Dems ought to mirror what the Rethugs do, which was to run from the center and govern from the Right. Dems should switch that, run from the center and govern from the Left. Obama I think wanted to do that, but he made some major errors in choosing his advisors, e.g., Rahm Emmanuel. Rahm Emmanuel? Really? Come on, Barack...

Well, there you have it. It's time for the Democrats to be real Democrats. I note that the vast majority of so-called "Blue Dog" Democrats lost their seats. And why not? If I'm going to vote for Republican "principles" and actions, I'll vote for a Republican, not for Republican-Lite, which is what the Blue Dogs in essence were.

A Fucking Outrage: An Open Letter to Phil Griffin

MSNBC announced today that Keith Olbermann has been suspended from the network for, get this, making three contributions to Democratic candidates. Never mind that Joe Scarborough on the same network made contributions to Republicans, never mind that the network's parent company, GE, made over $2 million in contributions to Republicans, never mind that ... well, I could go on, but fuck that. Read the story and you'll know the facts.

Here's the text of the email that I sent to Phil Griffin (phil.griffin@nbcuni.com), the head of MSNBC News:

Dear Mr. Griffin:
Your actions in suspending Keith Olbermann for political contributions are reprehensible and without precedent. By your curious double standard, it's perfectly okay for Joe Scarborough to have made contributions to Republican candidates but not for Keith Olbermann to make contributions to Democratic candidates.
Curious and disturbing.
As of this moment onward I will no longer watch MSNBC until Keith Olbermann is reinstated.
Period.
Have you no shame, sir? At long last have you no sense of shame?

I urge everyone to do the same. And someone needs to publish a list of MSNBC advertisers so we can send letters to them as well.

This is a fucking outrage, and it shall not stand.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Okay, I have to say something about yesterday's election:

The Good: The Teabagger gains were not what they could have been. Harry Reid won re-election, and The Wicked Witch of the East got a farmhouse dropped on her.

The Bad: John Boner and the Rethugs gained control of the House, so you can watch for some outlandish legislative moves, such as a doomed-to-failure-from-the-get-go attempt to impeach Obama ("crime" to be named later) and the gutting of the Farm Bill.

The Ugly: Washington's Third District, where I live, has gone Rethug and we will have a Teabagger-in-disguise "representing" us in DC; AND the race between longtime senator and friend-to-veterans Patty Murray and real-estate-developer/land-raping-deer-slayer Dino Rossi has gone into overtime and will have a mandatory recount.

Finally, I'm exhausted (the hangover from last night's victory party/wake might have something to do with that...) from all of the phone banking and going door-to-door to try to shake ballots out of reluctant voters, so I'm going to take a few days off from posting.

We all need to lick our wounds, but more importantly, we need to regroup and reload.

The 2012 Presidential Election Campaign starts today, and we have a lot of work to do in just two years; I am sure that my new congressional rep is going to get sick and tired of me and other like-minded liberals flooding her with requests, comments, rants and raves in the next 729 days. If you live in a Rethug-represented district, I advise you to do the same. Keep 'em on their toes, and never let them forget that they were elected to represent us as well as their Rethug buddies/corporate overlords/capitalist pig media barons.

See you next week, and thanks again for reading.

-- The F Man

It's Election Day!

So get off your ass and go

On the Lighter Side

Sometimes you gotta stop and smell the flowers -- worn by the clown. Here's a funny one that's currently making the rounds:

The light turned yellow, just in front of him. He did the right thing, stopping at the crosswalk,even though he could have beaten the red light by accelerating through the intersection.
The tailgating woman was furious and honked her horn, screaming in frustration, as she missed her chance to get through the intersection, dropping her cell phone and makeup.
As she was still in mid-rant, she heard a tap on her window and looked up into the face of a very serious police officer. The officer ordered her to exit her car with her hands up..
He took her to the police station where she was searched, fingerprinted, photographed, and placed in a holding cell.
After a couple of hours, a policeman approached the cell and opened the door. She was escorted back to the booking desk where the arresting officer was waiting with her personal effects.
He said, "I'm very sorry for this mistake. You see, I pulled up behind your car while you were blowing your horn, flipping off the guy in front of you and cussing a blue streak at him. I noticed the 'What Would Jesus Do' bumper sticker, the 'Choose Life' license plate holder, the 'Follow Me to Sunday-School' bumper sticker, and the chrome-plated Christian fish emblem on the trunk, so naturally....I assumed you had stolen the car."
Priceless

[HT to Cousin Darlene for this joke]