If there is one thing that progressives and liberals have learned from Barrack Obama’s presidency that is disheartening to admit, it’s that the two party “establishment” is not going to produce a candidate for president that reflects the popular will of the country.  Whoever gets the nomination from either the Republican or Democrat party is a carefully selected, groomed, vetted, financed, corrupted, and made marketable representative of concentrated power and private wealth. We the citizens may chose, realistically for president, every four years, one of the top two corporate sponsored candidates.  There are significant differences, but this is only because we are given two bad choices, and a large number of voters feel like they are choosing between the lesser of two evils.  “Hold your nose and pull the lever” has become a common image as to how our average voter feels when going to the polls.

The underlying reason people feel this way is because people understand that despite all the rhetoric about “hope” and “change” and “freedom” that is marketed in the name brand candidates every four years, there will be little change for the good and not much hope for anything different.  It’s business as usual, once a candidate gets into office, especially true the closer the politician is to concentrated power at the top, such as the President.  The only thing that seems to change is the concentration of the nation’s wealth into the smallest, elite percentage of society. Literally,what has changed in the past three decades is the measure of just how much more rich the rich have gotten, through a massive concentration of the nation’s wealth into the hands of a tiny percentage of our populace.  With this concentration of wealth at the top, comes concentration of power.  Given that our wealth disparity in this country is the largest it’s been since before the start of the Great Depression, it’s no wonder voters feel powerless at the polls.

One of the clearest, and easiest to understand examples of how broken our democracy has become,  is the comparison of popular will with the reality of government policy.  It doesn’t matter that a majority of the general public, regardless of their level of understanding of economic policy, are against the so-called “free trade” deals, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that was passed under President Bill Clinton.  I remember seeing Bill Clinton on tv as the candidate for President saying something along the lines of how President Bush had promised to create jobs, but didn’t tell everybody that the jobs he would be creating would be overseas jobs.  He was criticizing the outsourcing of American jobs.  That was candidate Clinton.  President Clinton fought hard for and eventually won the passage of NAFTA , pushing through congress a trade deal that lead to exactly what Ross Perot had warned of at the time, a “giant sucking sound going south,” the sound of American manufacturing jobs moving to Mexico.  There were other consequences too, such as the destruction of Mexico’s small farming agriculture that was unable to compete with the newly flooded market of big U.S. industrial farms products that are subsidized by our government.

Candidate Barrack Obama was a vocal critic of NAFTA, pledging not to get us into any more trade agreement like it.  Now President Obama has tried to “fast track” a similar trade deal, the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) to expand exploitation of Asian countries with a new supply of sweat shops.  It doesn’t matter that the American public is against such trade deals.  So far Obama has been denied the “fast track” option by congress, which is a technical term for a congressional procedure of a strict up or down vote on the massive trade deal without allowing for debate or amendments.  It apparently doesn’t matter to President Obama that the public is still against the unfair “free trade” deals, as was candidate Obama.  It doesn’t matter that the U.S. steel workers unions are against the trade deals, as recent deals with China and South Korea have lead to huge job losses here.  It doesn’t matter that environmental groups and labor groups are against the trade deals.  The trans national corporations are for it, and they sponsor both the republicans and the democrats on important matters.

It doesn’t matter that economists and the large majority of the public recognize the financial industry and housing bubble to be the culprit of the Great Recession.  It doesn’t matter that candidate Obama recognized this either.  President Obama gave the heads of Wall Street and architects and cronies of the financial crisis the job of fixing the crisis.  It doesn’t even matter that President Obama pushed for more financial industry regulation, because by the time that legislation reached his desk for signing, it had largely been gutted of any teeth, thanks to the bribing of both political parties by the financial industry.

It doesn’t matter that the President, the majority in the Senate, and probably a majority in the House are in favor or raising the minimum wage.  Big business is against it, and their money speaks more loudly in congress even when it is in the minority.

Astonishingly, it doesn’t even seem to matter than a clear majority of Americans like Social Security and Medicare and would like to see them strengthened.  Mitt Romney and his running mate Paul Ryan were openly hostile to the programs, even pushing to want to convert Medicare into a voucher system for senior citizens.  Even though this is a hugely unpopular idea, this “choice” for the office of the President came extremely close in the election.

Knowing what we know, and knowing how rigged our political system is, why are we already assuming that Hillary Clinton will be the next President?  Why are much better Democrats afraid to put their name in the hat for 2016 until they find out whether or not Mrs. Clinton will run?

It appears that “change” and “hope” are now, truly cynical labels, and might as well be changed to “more of the same.”

My thoughts and feelings about Fox Propaganda News Channel are well known, from their inaccuracies, half-truths and lies to their deceptive, right wing ideology posing as “fair and balanced.”  This past week however, the Fox channel displayed a stunning disregard for the safety and welfare of federal agents, local law enforcement, and the wives and children of the 100 plus “protesters” gathering in Nevada to “defend” the “freedom” of scofflaw rancher Cliven Bundy.

Mr. Bundy is cattle rancher in Bunkerville, Nevada, who has been illegally grazing approximately 900 cattle on federal land for the past twenty years.  Ordinarily, cattle ranchers pay the owners of land to allow their livestock to graze there, whether it is to a private land owner, the state of Nevada, or the federal government.  Mr. Bundy, however, does not recognize the federal government, so therefore has decided that his cattle, that he raises for profit, can graze on federal land without paying for it.  He has been engaged in a longstanding legal battle with the Bureau of Land Mangement, and the courts have ruled repeatedly against him.  He owes the federal government in excess of one million dollars for back fees accumulating over the past 20 years, and refuses to pay, or remove his cattle.  Consequently, the BLM confiscated some 400 of his cattle on April 5, under court order.

And some how, thanks in no small part to the right wing radio talk show host and Fox pundit Sean Hannity, this rather cut and dry legal matter has been blown dangerously out of proportion, leading to a tense standoff of over 100 armed protesters, brought in from other states and localities – most if not any of them other ranchers.  Militia types, with a general hatred towards the federal government, itching for an outright gun battle with federal agents and law enforcement officials.  The situation careened towards a dangerous match point this past week, and the governor of Nevada, the Bureau of Land Management, and Nevada law enforcement decided to release the cattle in order to deescalate the situation.  Given numerous past tragedies,  including the infamous showdown of the Branch Davidian cult in Waco Texas that resulted in the violent deaths of 4 federal agents and six cult members in 1993.

My first reaction to the news as it was unfolding this past week was one of incredulity that the government would back down from a court order because a bunch of nut case militiamen were toting guns and taking the law into their own hands.  But, given that Tea Party leader Richard Mack was widely quoted as saying that “We were actually strategizing to put all the women up front,” and  “If they were going to start shooting, it’s going to be women that are going to be televised all across the world getting shot.”

So, it appears that cooler heads prevailed, reasoning, I assume, that the issue could be dealt with again at a later date when the spectacle of another Waco type of tragedy wasn’t in the works.  Reasonable enough.

What I was most shocked to learn, though, as the news about this came out, was the role and dangerous rhetoric of Sean Hannity and other conservative commentators that appeared to be literally instigating, irritating, and playing on the paranoia of the anti-government types that traveled to the ranch, guns and ammunition in hand, and women and children in tow to be used as human shields or pawns – admitted, as quoted, by Richard Mack.

Sean Hannity has interviewed Cliven Bundy numerous times this past week on Fox, propping him up as some sort of oppressed American who is standing up against a tyrannical federal government.  Mr. Hannity has aligned himself with Bundy and his armed “protesters” in the context of a potential shoot out with the government.  Mr. Hannity has gone so far to suggest to Mr. Bundy and his family that the federal government may come back to the ranch to kill Bundy and his followers.  It is stunning that a major network broadcaster would tread the thin line of inciting a riot or violence so closely, given the potential for disaster.

What is ridiculous, aside from the potential loss of human life, is the argument that Hannity and his cronies have been making, that his is about “freedom.” from an “out of control federal government.”  This is factually about a cowboy hat wearing freeloader who has used the convenient excuse of himself not recognizing the federal government as justification for not paying for the land his cattle graze on, like all other cattle ranchers and law abiding citizens do.  It is not about a “tyrannical” big bad government coming onto Mr. Bundy’s land to oppress him.  Mr. Hannity cannot be that stupid.  He knows what this is about in simple terms, yet he has chosen to exploit this situation to inflame the extreme anti-government militia types into a spectacle that can then be morphed to fit the conservative narrative that the Government is the Big Bad, Freedom Taking Wolf, going after the little guy.

What is ironic and transparently hypocritical, is how conservatives, who often characterize poor people on food stamps, medicaid, medicare, or unemployment as “takers” and deadbeats, are characterizing this owner of a ranch and 900 cattle who refuses to pay the government for 20 years of freeloading on federal land, as some sort of victim, and defender of freedom.  Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who often makes a very articulate and legitimate argument on various issues, only to be followed by a complete jack-ass of a statement or statements, managed to join the fray of those in the clear wrong on this one.  Mr. Paul told Fox “This is a real, I think, intellectual and constitutional and legal debate, “but it shouldn’t be about violence of arms, and I hope that the government will not be there in full arms and provoke a showdown and something terrible will happen. I hope that doesn’t happen.”

So a hundred nut jobs descend on Nevada to the rallying call of Sean Hannity and others, arms in hand, with one of their leaders openly saying that they were putting the women and children up front in case of a shoot out, and Rand Paul somehow interprets this as him worrying that  the federal government would show up armed and “provoking” – the government who ultimately decided to postpone enforcement of the court order against Mr. Bundy in order to spare the innocent wives and children of the idiots who were there hoping for an apocalyptic showdown, as well as the lives of those federal and Nevada employees who were doing their job.  The ABC news website quotes a Utah resident named Yonna Winget as saying “It’s not about cows, it’s about freedom.”

Well, you can quote me as saying “it’s not about freedom, it’s about bullshit.”

The other irony and hypocrisy is the complete contradiction of interpretations that Fox and conservatives display as they characterize this situation as the Big Government hassling a poor rancher, a Big Government with unchecked power that is oppressing freedom and acting “tyrannical.” while at the same time supporting whole heatedly what will amount to the federal government claiming “eminent domain” on behalf of the Canadian trans-national corporation that wants to build the Keystone Pipeline to transport their dirty tar sands oil from Canada across private lands and our nation’s largest qualifier.   You see, when conservatives and bullshit artists like Sean Hannity refer to the tyranny of Big Government, they aren’t talking about the government serving the needs of the super rich corporations and private wealth and putting those needs above the citizenry.  If the federal government is needed to override the citizens and state government’s will where the TransCanada Corporation wants to build a for-profit pipeline transporting the dirtiest and most dangerous form of crude oil to the international markets, even though it will mean seizing private land under the dubious legal authority of “imminent domain” . . . well, they fully support that.  As John Boehner has said of that, “it’s not complicated.”

Yet they pretend this relatively simple case of a scofflaw, refusing to pay his bills for 20 years cattle rancher, is a bigger fight over “freedom.”  Mr. Hannity had told the gun toters that he would be out there to join them.  I sure hope so, because if anyone deserves to take responsibility if shooting breaks out, it’s the loudmouth instigator and liar from Fox Propaganda News.  Maybe with a little luck he’ll take Bill O’Reilly with him.  But I wouldn’t bet on it.  After all, it’s not about cows, it’s about bullshit.

This fall we face a greatly anticipated mid-term election cycle in which control for the Senate and House are both possibly in play, with potentially dire consequences.  We’ve already seen how broken our democracy is with President Obama being obstructed by congress more than any president in modern times, and we’ve seen repeatedly how having a majority of votes in the Senate and a majority of votes in the House don’t mean the majority or will of the people will prevail.  Thanks to the un-democratic fillibuster abuse in the Senate, abused by republicans an unprecedented number of times has led to grid lock, and essential rule by minority.  And we’ve seen how a small faction of radical right wing zealots in the republican house majority has pressured the desperate Speaker of the House, John Boehner, into not bringing to the floor for a vote, legislation passed in the Senate and with enough bi-partisan support in the House to pass – more rule by minority, in practice. All of this un-democratic practice undermines peoples’ faith in the very principles of what most understand to at least be a core principal in a democracy – rule by a majority.  That’s why we have contests known as elections, in theory a process that selects a lawmaker or president to represent the majority of voters, and to serve the needs of all of society.

It is easy to let such a dysfunctional system discourage us from voting, and to wonder why it even matters who’s in control of the Senate or House, if the majority seldom get their way.  To this all I can say is that this is all the more reason that we should exercise our right to vote.  We do know change is possible, as past historical victories have proven, from laws that banned the horrible practice of child labor, to women’s rights, Civil Rights, Social Security, Medicare, the minimum wage, protection for unions, the end of wars. .  .   the list is extensive.  But in reality, it seems to me that political struggle and change only occur at a point when it is impossible for those in power to oppress popular opinion and demands.  And when the change comes, those in power only yield enough to keep the riots or revolution at bay.  So it often amounts to almost enough, always too late.

And we’ve gotten in a point in this country where the gains of this past century are under constant attack from the tiniest percent of the 1 percenters.  It is painfully obvious now that the Wall Street and financial services bankers that periodically wreck the economy, do so with near immunity.  It is laughable to ask why not one of them is in prison for nearly bringing down the world economy, and ruining millions of American families lives through job losses and foreclosures, because we already know the answer: they’re not going to jail, they’re getting appointed to key positions in the White House (regardless of who is President) and getting bonuses.  Everyone knows that the old cliche of “the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer” is currently our official economic policy on steroids.

But what is shocking is that those in power have become so brazen, perhaps emboldened by our general complacency, that they can now profess and advocate positions that are a blatant, full on assault against the working class, the poor, the elderly, the young, and the sick and vulnerable.  Our past President George W. Bush was openly calling for Social Security to be privatized so that it one of our country’s most successful social program of all could be handed over to his criminal buddies in the financial industry to gamble with the future retirement security of most of the country.  That would have worked out great, huh?  And in the last presidential election, Paul Ryan, the Vice President running mate of Mitt Romney, was openly advocated for the dismantling of Medicare, to hand over health of our seniors to the private insurance companies who at the time were making huge profits by denying healthcare.  And remarkably, despite ObamaCare and the future of Medicare being made an explicit campaign issue which President Obama won his re-election on, Mr. Ryan offers yet another budget (which the House passed this week) with the same terrible ideas and priorities in place.  Despite millions of more Americans now gaining healthcare coverage, many for the first time, and despite all of us with private health insurance now enjoying more legal protections than ever before, the republicans are still chanting “repeal ObamaCare.”

We now have an oligarchy of rich elite  that through their careful structuring and legal shenanigans that have now elevated their corporations to being people too, and their money to bribe politicians now being recognized by a divided Supreme Court as “free speech” – and this oligarchy hedges their bets with both political parties,  Neither of the two major political parties is without widespread corruption.  BUT, and this is a big but, the current republican party, through some fiat of hate mongering, racism, class warfare against the poor, and gigantic propaganda machine, have embraced the needs of the super rich and the corporations to absurd new levels.  Their positions are not popular, yet their party remains only a few seats away from all out power, not just the de-facto party of being a ruler by minority through obstruction that they are at the moment.

Are all republican politicians bad people?  No.  Some have redeemable qualities, interesting perspectives, decent ideas.  But many are just flat out wrong on policies and values, and cold hearted, greedy liars and deceivers.  They serve their true God of the love of money, and do whatever it takes to make sure that the wealth that is created in our society flows straight up to the top 1 percent, while the rest of us suffer decades of stagnant or declining wages and the loss of benefits, while facing more job insecurity than ever before.  These truly bad people know they can’t win on their policies, so they have begun a massive, nation wide voter suppression effort that is absolutely cynical and shameless.  Any excuse to make it harder for the average person to vote, the working class, the poor, the minorities, or the elderly, is being exploited to change the voting laws, state by state, to suppress anyone who might vote for a democrat or any other candidate that comes along as a champion for the majority and not just the 1 percent.

And what are the democrats doing at the moment to combat this?  Well, the so-called moderate democrats, usually from southern states, almost always from red states, are running with their tails between their legs, trying to sound as republican like as possible.  This is a proven losing strategy in the past, and will prove so again if they don’t wake up and grow a spine.  These wet mops are not embracing and spreading the truth about the new Affordable Care Act.  They are saying things like “we’ve got to fix ObamaCare.”  Granted, ObamaCare could be al ot better, there could be a public option or a single payer system, but that didn’t happen to begin with because of such cowardly democrats and corruption.  These democrats should be embracing the successes that they have gotten under President Obama, such as the heath care law, not half-ass saying, yeah I voted for it, but it sucks, I’ll try to be more like my republican opponent.  They should also be shouting about what the country has been denied because of the republican obstructionists, which brought us the government shutdown, among other things.

If a democrat in a red or southern state can’t articulate how it’s better for everyone now that health insurance companies can no longer deny anyone coverage because of a pre-existing condition, they should stay out of politics and public service.  They should not call themselves a democrat, let alone a public servant.  Any democrat, or any republican for that matter, should be able to profess with confidence, support for any number of popular measures, such as healthcare for all, raising the minimum wage above a poverty line, feeding the poor, reinstating federal emergency unemployment benefits, defending Social Security and Medicare.  These are no brainers and supported by an easy majority of voters, no matter what state.  But instead, what is sometimes called “blue dog democrats” or “Reagan democrats” or “moderate democrats,.” is now becoming synonymous with “yellow belly coward.”  It is time for these worthless, spineless, caring only for their job politicians to get out of the way for real progressives with solid values to take their place.

We are long overdue a new political party that will stand up for the majority of us instead of the vested interests of the super minority.  It is time the democrats quit calling themselves democrats if they won’t do that.  It is time for all of us to go to the polls and remember what is at stake this time.  We’ve had 6 years of near stalled government because of the obstructionism of the republican party and the weakness of the democratic party.  But just imagine how bad things would be if the party of George W. Bush and Paul Ryan could get their hands on the Social Security and Medicare.  Just imagine telling millions of newly covered Americans that their access to healthcare has been repealed.  Just imagine not ever raising the minimum wage to above the poverty level.

This is our future and right now I’m very discouraged at the lack of courage being displayed by these timid democrats.  The truth is on your side, popular opinion is on your side, and if you aren’t on our side and willing to stand up, be counted, and grow a spine, you deserve losing your job forever.  Unfortunately for the rest of us, we will end up suffering because of it.

A

Conservatives joined the left wing this week and demanded Obamacare be replaced by a single payer system, shutting down the unneeded and vulture system of paying for healthcare known as private insurance.  Jesus Christ sent a video down from Heaven endorsing Hobby Lobby as the official spokesperson for Christianity, and called on the Supreme Court to agree that Hobby Lobby could deny it’s employees healthcare coverage because the coverage covered abortion pills.  The Supreme Court re-instated all of the former campaign finance laws, banning big money donations to candidates, and called on congress to create a system of publicly financed campaigns.  And Secretary of State John Kerry told Israel that the occupation, torture, and brutalization of Palestine must stop now if Israel is to get one more dime of America foreign aid.

Nah, April Fools!

With the open enrollment period for people to enroll in private health insurance through the federal and state insurance marketplaces created by the Affordable Care Act ending earlier this week, the writhing, anger, and denial from conservative opponents filled the airways.  Fox Propaganda, Rush Limbaugh, and the usual suspects pulled out all the stops.  Of particular focus from many of their programs and pundits, was the denial of the number of people the government says enrolled in ObamaCare, 7.1 million people.  This Peanut Gallery was of course all too happy to accept the government figures when the federal healthcare exchange first opened last year to disastrous technical problems, and citing the number of signups at only slightly over 100 thousand.  House of Clowns Speaker John Boehner lamented that the new healthcare law was just too complicated to fix, that the website was a lost cause and that we should just forget it.  Most all conservatives cheered with glee at the problems of the roll out, predicting the complete failure of the new law.  Now, with a rebound of people enrolling to reach government projections during the first round hitting 7.1 million, opponents are going so far as to call the figure a lie.  Fox Propaganda pundits and republican politicians of course are sharing the same bullet points for their propaganda, trying to discredit this number.  And why is that?

Because the politicians that oppose ObamaCare desperately want it to fail now, because they favor the old system that maximized profit for the health insurance companies that we still allow to act as the payment system for our county’s healthcare.  They do not care that it is the most expensive healthcare system in the world, with the U.S. spending more than 2 and a half times more than other developed nations, for a total of 17.6 percent of GDP as of 2012. ( http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/health-costs-how-the-us-compares-with-other-countries/ ) They do not care that the results of the U.S. healthcare system  lags behind all of the other developed nations in a number of measurable areas, from infant mortality rate to life expectancy.  The politicians themselves have the best government insurance (what they call socialism for the rest of us) that tax payer money can provide.  The biggest threat that conservatives averted during the whole healthcare debate was the creation of a single payer system, or Medicare for all, that would have done away with the vulture system of private health insurance.  The Obama Administration and other week kneed democrats – not all, there were noble fighters for the cause for single payer – in the end compromised with a system that is based on an original conservatives’ model that keeps the private insurance companies in the business of distributing payments to doctors and hospitals and pharmaceuticals, a model first tested in Massachusetts that is known as RomneyCare.

So we still have a watered down system, archaic compared to other wealthy nations that use the reasonable approach of taxes paying for the healthcare services of all it’s citizens.  We still allow our pharmaceutical companies to rape our public with state protected monopoly pricing, and still do not allow the federal government to negotiate pricing on drugs for senior citizens on Medicare –  Americans still pay more for American produced drugs than other countries, such as Canada, who’s governments do negotiate cheaper prices with the American pharmaceutical companies.  We kept all that in place, thanks to heavy lobbying in the form of legalized bribery known as “campaign contributions” from the insurance and pharmaceutical companies.  But we changed the law to make it more fair and more affordable, and with the goal of universal coverage.  It isn’t perfect by far, there is lots of room for improvement, but let’s highlight some of the basics benefits.

You can no longer be turned down by an insurance company for pre-existing conditions.  Before ObamaCare, the misfortune of having a child with diabetes meant a lifetime of insecurity because of an inability to secure health insurance.  There are now no lifetime caps on spending by your insurance company, should you come down with a devastating illness such as cancer.  Young adults can now stay on their parents plan to age 26.  Women’s services are expanded.  Preventative care with no out-of-pocket expenses.  Emergency care, hospitalization, medications, new born care, etc., are now covered.  The list of new benefits and protections guaranteed for everyone is extensive (  http://www.aarp.org/health/health-insurance/info-08-2013/affordable-care-act-health-benefits.html ) .

In addition, government subsidies for purchasing health insurance is provided for those who cannot afford it, based on their income.  One thing that is great about the federal heath exchange and under reported is that the government makes that subsidy payment directly to the insurance provider for you if you qualify – you pay your share each month and the government pays the rest. The formula for  Medicaid qualification was expanded to 138 percent of the federal poverty level, with the federal government picking up 100 percent of the state’s cost of the expansion for the first three years.  Sadly, only about half of the states chose Medicaid expansion, even though the Congressional Budget Office’s estimates the cost of expansion to be 2.8 percent through 2022, a number which itself may be too high of an estimate, as it does not take into account the presumed savings through having less uninsured people showing up at emergency rooms, etc. ( http://www.aafp.org/dam/AAFP/documents/advocacy/coverage/aca/ES-MedicaidExpansion.pdf )  Presidential hopeful, Governor Bobby Jindal, of the very poor and red state of Louisiana, was one of many republican governors to reject expansion of Medicaid for the poor citizens of his state.  Because of republican ideology and illogical opposition to the new healthcare law, millions of poor, uninsured Americans, living in the poorest states, will still be denied access to affordable healthcare in the near future.

All of this begs the question to those still cheering for ObamaCare’s failure, to those expressing anger and outrage at the prospects of insuring millions of more Americans than before:  What in God’s name is wrong with you people?

And speaking of God, the company Hobby Lobby, recently made news by taking to the Supreme Court it’s argument that it should be exempted from having to provide healthcare coverage to it’s employees because it is a “Christian company” that objects morally to what it calls abortion medication being covered, mainly contraception for women.  More recently than their appeal to the Supreme Court under the guise of its “Christian values” is the news report fist published by Mother Jones magazine that revealed that Hobby Lobby, a for-profit corporation seeking religious exemption from the law, has it’s 401(k) plans invested in mutual funds that include producers of contraceptive medication, contraceptive devices, and even in the company Teva Pharmaceuticals that makes the Plan B pill – the so-called, morning after abortion pill.  Hypocrisy, as pointed out many times before on my blogs, is a specialty of the Christian right in this country, and the republican party in general.

Speaking of the Supreme Court, we don t yet know how they will rule on Hobby Lobby, but they did hand us another split decision of 5 to 4, with the conservative wing ruling yet again against campaign finance laws.  The Court had already opened the flood gates to the most expensive election cycles in the world, with it’s split ruling in 2010 of the case Citizens United that said corporations could not be barred from political contributions to candidates because these contributions constituted political “free speech.”  Technically, Citizens United still doesn’t allow direct donations, but virtual donations in the form of the so-called new Super PACs.  This Wednesday the Supreme Court continued it’s eroding of campaign finance laws, this time striking down a law that had been on the books since 1976, the cap on donation amounts that individuals can contribute to federal candidates in any given two year election cycle.  Again, “fee speech” is cited as the reasoning.  Apparently, only the uber wealthy, such as the billionaire Koch Brothers, will be able to afford the “free speech” that politicians listen too.  How donating millions of dollars to a candidate for public office for political, self serving favor, is not bribery, but free speech instead, is beyond comprehension and common sense.  The only silver lining I see in this ruling is that it may re-funnel some of the Super PAC money more directly to the candidates, instead of their proxies, but the result remains the same.  The politicians ultimately get elected by raising money from big money corporations, such as health insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, Wall Street banks, oil companies, military industrial production companies, and trans-national importers and exporters.  And then they vote against the most basic agreed upon wishes of the American public, in favor of their corporate sponsors.  This is the essence of corruption, and the means in which the majority of us are subjugated to the rules of the tiny, super wealthy minorities.

And last but not least, the predictable and consistent outcome of the ongoing, farcical pretending of negotiations for peace between Israel and Palestine.  Secretary of State John Kerry was supposedly dedicated to a comprehensive peace deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians, chalking up numerous visits to the troubled region his first few months in his new position.  Now, with the April 29th deadline for this latest round of “negotiations” coming to a head with talks breaking down as usual, Mr. Kerry was quoted in the New York Times as saying ““There are limits to the amount of time and effort that the United States can spend if the parties themselves are unwilling to take constructive steps in order to be able to move forward.”  The latest breakdown in the talks is being blamed on Israel’s refusal of releasing another round of Palestinian prisoners that they had promised to release, and on the Palestinian’s voting to join 15 various international treaties which would involve the Palestinians being recognized as a legitimate state.  But the bottom line in this is clear to anyone with knowledge of the basic history of Israel and it’s United States sponsor with regards to the brutal and immoral occupation of Palestine.  As long as the United States continues to sponsor Israel with it’s 4 billion dollars a year in direct aid, much of it military hardware, and to protect it from the reach of international law and norms by being the usual sole supporter of Israel’s crimes, recognized by the United Nations and most nations on earth to be crimes, there will be no peace deal with the Palestinians.  Israel continues building it’s illegal settlements on Palestinian territory; continues to tear apart what’s left of Palestinian cohesion through the building of it’s “security” walls; continues its embargo of food and humanitarian aid; continues it’s theft of water; continues to kidnap young Palestinian men, throwing them in secret Israeli prisons where they are tortured and held for years sometimes without any charges or notifications of their whereabouts to family members; Israel does all of this with the support of it’s sponsor, the United States.  And as long as this continues, it’s a farce for Mr. Kerry to pretend to place the blame evenly on the Palestinians and the Israelis. There was never any serious consideration of a final peace deal between the two sides, just a phony exercise of good intentions while the destruction of Palestine marches forward, backed up with U.S. tanks, war planes and bombs.

I made a bet with a friend a few weeks back that Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey would not get the republican nomination for president in 2016 because of the unfolding scandal of political revenge, dubbed “Bridgegate.” With all that has unfolded since then, including accusations made by the mayor of Hoboken of withholding federal Hurricane Sandy relief money to leverage political favor to developers, AND, with this week’s release of a New Jersey tax payer funded 1 million dollar public relations scam put out by Christie’s chosen lawyers, I would like to make my prediction officially public:  Governor Chris Christie’s political aspirations to be President of the United States will never be realized, and his remaining future as governor of New Jersey in his second term is in real jeopardy.

A quick recap:  Last September 9th, a Christie appointed friend at the Port Authority, David Wildstein, ordered the closing of two of three access lanes on our country’s busiest bridge, the George Washington, that connects New Jersey to Manhattan.  The closing of the lanes resulted in a massive traffic jam that gridlocked the town of Fort Lee, New Jersey, particularly hard.  This went on for four days, and accusations emerged that this was some sort of act of political revenge against Fort Lee’s mayor, Democrat Mark Sokolich, for not endorsing Governor Christie for re-election – the Christie campaign aggressively sought democratic endorsements to bolster his image as a bi-partisan politician for his future 2016 presidential bid.  Governor Christie responded to these accusations with mockery at a press conference, joking that he had actually worked the cones himself, suggesting that such accusations were the ridiculous fantasies of political enemies.  This is against the backdrop of increasing reports, including in the New York Times, of Christie’s petty revenge and bullying tactics in political circles. To make a long story short, it turns out the traffic jam was deliberately caused by David Wildstein and Governor Christie’s then deputy chief of staff, Bridgette Kelly, as revealed in now made public emails of the investigation.  Kelly and Wildstein were caught red-handed, and the fallout began.  Governor Christie fired Bridgette Kelly (Wildstein had already resigned) and held a bizarre, extra long press conference in which he denied having any knowledge of the affair, even though it was carried out by his innermost circle.

In the aftermath that followed, both a bipartisan state legislature investigation and a federal investigation have been enacted.  Piling on to this scandal, even more serious accusations were soon leveled by the mayor of Hoboken, New Jersey, Dawn Zimmer, that Governor Christie’s lieutenant governor, Kim Guadagno, told her in a private conversation that federal relief money from Hurricane Sandy would be released to Hoboken as soon as the mayor agreed to a real estate development deal that the Christie wanted.  Hoboken was one of the hardest hit communities in New Jersey from the hurricane.  Of course the governor’s office denied this, and now federal investigators are looking into that claim as well.  Subsequent reporting in the press showing where Sandy relief money has gone paints a disturbing picture of communities with very little damage receiving large chunks of relief money for special, private real estate development, while communities such as Hoboken, who actually suffered severe damage, receiving very little in comparison.

When the shit originally hit the fan, Governor Christie said he had ordered an internal investigation into his administration to find out who knew what.  This week, the public learned the details of that internal “investigation.”

The internal “investigation” was conducted by the law firm Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, who charged $650 an hour for their services, for a total bill of 1 million, that was billed to the tax-payers of New Jersey.  The law firm has close ties to the Christie administration, both political, and having done work for it in the past.  Also, one of the firm’s senior partners, Debra Wong Yang, is reportedly close friends with Governor Christie.  And, surprise! The law firm released what they call a “comprehensive and exhaustive”  report that clears Governor Christie of any wrong doing.  The law firm boasts that it conducted over 70 interviews related to the case, and does this with a straight face, admitting that they did NOT interview the four key players most directly involved: Bridgette Kelly, David Wildstein, Bill Stepien, and Mayor Dawn Zimnmer.

The law firm’s lead lawyer, Randy M. Mastro, defended the “findings” of his law firm’s “investigation” with a narrative that says that poor Governor Christie was blindsided by his staff and new nothing of it.  It concludes that almost all the blame lies with Wildstein and Kelly, and goes so far as to speculate that the motive of what they characterize as a “lane re-alignment” incident is Bridgette Kelly’s disappointment at being dumped in a romantic relationship by Christie’s campaign manager at the time, Bill Stepien.  Even though neither of these people were interviewed by the law firm, they have concluded that the wrath of a scorned woman is to blame.  This is interesting, given that the revenge was taken out on the town and mayor of Fort Lee, not Bill Stepien.  As for Mayor Zimmer’s accusations that are still being investigated by federal prosecutors, they are dismissed as completely false, without providing clear evidence as to why, and even though she of course was not interviewed either by Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher.

The million dollar report, conducted by close friends of Governor Christie, and paid for by the citizens of New Jersey, is less than a thinly veiled preview of Governor Christie’s future defense.  It is an absolute farce, and a terribly executed public relations stunt that is guaranteed to blow up in Mr. Christie’s face and make his huge mess even more of a mess before it is over.  We already know that his close staff deliberately closed lanes on the George Washington Bridge to punish the town of Fort Lee, stranding millions of commuters in the process for a long, four day period.  We also know that Sandy relief money has not been directed to the communities most devastated, especially Hoboken who got shafted the most.  The mayor of Hoboken appears to be a very credible witness who we will hear from again once the real investigations draw to a conclusion.  The real legal process and investigations being conducted will take longer than the sham report of a publicly funded investigation/opening defense arguments of Governor Christie’s cronies, but by the time they are complete, Governor Christie will have been completely discredited, if not impeached or prosecuted.  I only hope that the public will become as informed and as outraged as I am at the newest scandal from the governor, which is the transfer of tax-payer funds into the pockets of his lawyer friends, attempting to cover up the Christie administration’s crimes.

The following is a link to a detailed timeline for the Bridgegate scandal:

http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Timeline-George-Washington-Bridge-Scandal-Chris-Christie-Fort-Lee-Bridgegate-239431091.html

Well, it’s apparently official now:  just as most of us suspected, Speaker of the House of Clowns, John Boehner, is going to shit on the long term unemployed in this country by not bringing the Senate bill to re-institute emergency federal unemployment benefits to the House floor for a vote.  It’s not that the bill would not pass in the House if it is brought to a vote; most Democrats would support it and enough Republicans would support it to for it to pass.  But Mr. Boehner, forever a despicable, undeserving of his post, selfish, greedy, asshole scumbag, is more concerned about pissing off the crazy tea baggers in his caucus, and thus jeopardizing his position as Speaker, which he clearly holds more dear than the American families suffering under our anemic economy.

There are currently 2 million Americans that lost their long term unemployment benefits.  Traditionally, when the unemployment rate in this country is as high as it is now, and the economy as weak, extension of long term benefits was a bi-partisan affair.  Not anymore.  Not only has our current Republican congress been shamefully unwilling to work with the President Obama on almost anything, including supporting programs they previously supported before Mr. Obama became the president – the new flock of Republicans and conservatives (tea baggers especially) display a callousness and contempt for the poor and unfortunate that I  do not recall seeing in politics in my lifetime.  Even more disturbing, I hear these prejudices and suspicions of the poor and unemployed voiced with more frequency in the general public than in previous years.  It’s as if properly directed anger at the financial institutions that caused the Great Recession has been skillfully re-directed towards the most vulnerable victims.  A friend and colleague of mine recently observed on Facebook that getting the poor to turn on each other and engage in infighting was one of the best ideas the rich have come up with.  I couldn’t agree more.  Divide and conquer is the oligarchy way.

The smiling asshole in the above picture is Richard B. Berman, a professional business propagandist who heads his for profit advertising firm, Berman and Company, as well as the “nonprofit” Employment Policies Institute, which as been engaged in a recent full throttle campaign to derail passage of a minimum wage increase in Congress.

As I’ve said before, conservative propagandists are masters at naming advocacy think tanks and legislation the opposite of what they are, and giving them harmless or even noble sounding names that do not reflect their true intentions.  The so-called nonprofit Employment Policies Institute is a legal entity with no employees to speak of, that shares the same address as Mr. Berman’s advertising firm.  The Employment Policies Institute accepts donations from groups like the restaurant industry, who openly lobby to not raise the minimum wage, and who have who a special, legal, sub-minimum wage that they can apply to their tipped employees to allow them to pay their employees even less.  Mr. Berman, acting as the director of this “nonprofit” entity with no employees, then pays his for profit advertising firm for it’s services, which involve industry massaged and funded “research” and the advertisement of their “findings.”  Not surprisingly, the Employment Policies Institute has concluded that raising the minimum wage will hurt employment.  And, like magic, “poof!” the nonprofit “donations” turn into profit from the hands of the director of the “institute” into the hands of the same man, the owner of Berman and Company.

The EPI has recently taken out ads in newspapers such as The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times (the source of the information in this blog), including an attack ad against the left leaning Economic Policy Institute for it’s recent letter to the White House and Congress that had over 600 signatures from legitimate economists, including 7 Nobel laureates, all urging that the minimum wage be raised to $10.10 an hour by 2016. Here is the letter: ( http://www.epi.org/minimum-wage-statement/ )  There is an abundance of studies in recent years on the effects of raising the minimum wage, in part thanks to individual states that have raised it on their own, providing real world evidence.  And the majority of economic studies say that raising the minimum wage is good for the workers and the economy. The Employment Policies Institute then took out a full page ad in The New York Times that singled out 8 of the economists out of the 600, using quotes taken out of context to basically use the typical battle cry of the filthy rich to quell us peasants from wanting better wage and benefits by portraying them as socialist, Marxists, communists, etc.  Those eight economists that were singled out wrote a response to The Times.  ( http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/14/opinion/economists-hit-back-in-the-minimum-wage-wars.html?action=click&contentCollection=Asia%20Pacific&region=Footer&module=Recommendation&src=recg&pgtype=article )

Mr. Berman’s ad agency also placed a large photograph of Representative Nancy Pellosi, a Democrat advocate for raising the minimum wage, in the Metro Station in Washington that read: “Teens Who Can’t Find a Job Should Blame Her.”

I think we should all post giant pictures of the smiling asshole above, Richard B. Berman, with a caption that reads: “Tired of Your Shit Pay?  Thank this Asshole and Others Like Him.”

The full article about this worth reading.  It gives you a more clear view of how the sophisticated propaganda system in this country works for the rich and powerful.  My opinions on raising the minimum wage are well documented in past blogs, so I won’t rehash them all here.  But this story is a little gem showing the corruption of our political system, a system that produces two business chosen candidates to chose from for President every four years, with this last election offering  the multi-millionaire,  offshore hidden wealth, tax evading dirt bag, Mitt Romney, who proudly, with a smile and a straight face, said, “Corporations are people too, my friend.”  He was the other “choice” given voters in contrast to the supposedly liberal tyrant, President Obama.  This story displays the ingenuity of the American capitalist system, where a nonprofit group can take in millions of dollars in donations from wealthy heads of industry, for the purpose of bribing our politicians into serving their needs instead of the rest of the people in the country, the other 99.99 percent – and, in turn, make the head of that nonprofit group (and only employee) rich, through the “nonprofit donations” to pay for the propaganda that is then cited and echoed again and again in the pathetic mainstream media’s talking heads, and of course through the megaphones of the right wing ass-wipes at Fox Propaganda News Outlets and others.  Here is the full article to copy and paste into your browser:

( http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/10/us/politics/fight-over-minimum-wage-illustrates-web-of-industry-ties.html )

All of the geopolitical forces playing a part in the situation in Ukraine right now are a complex mix of economics and politics, and in our main stream media the coverage we get is a mix of propaganda and facts, and omission of facts.  But a general understanding is possible, if we are willing to take off our “go U.S.A.!” patriotic beer goggles and acknowledge some basic truths. This time that task is made easy by a couple of things.  First,  the hypocrisy of the United States foreign policy becomes so obvious at times with the ridiculous statements of our leaders that they cannot even escape television comedy or commentary from television pundits in the mainstream.  Secondly, Senate Republicans made an absolute mockery of their voters out there who proudly display bumper stickers supporting Republican candidates, along side the famous bumper sticker that proclaims: “Support the Troops.”  The Senate G.O.P. defeated, through a procedural trick similar to a fillibuster that required 60 votes for passage, a veteran’s benefits bill that would have significantly expanded services such as health care and education for our troops.

First, on the Ukraine and U.S. hypocrisy.  Secretary of State John Kerry last Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” said this, regarding Russia’s move into Crimea: ”You just don’t invade another country on phony pretext in order to assert your interests.”   On “Face the Nation” the same day, on the audacity of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s decision: “It is really a stunning, willful choice by President Putin to invade another country.”  Yes, truly shocking.  Nothing the United States would do.  Certainly not our former President of Peace, George W. Bush.

The United States, since World War II, has intervened in more than 70 countries world wide, bombed over 30 countries, tried to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders, among other atrocities, according to the historical records, and documented extensively by historian and U.S. foreign policy expert and critic William Blum.  I recommend you take the time to read some of the information on the author’s website if you are unfamiliar with the ugly truth of our government’s murderous empire building these past six decades, or as our leaders like to call it, “democracy building.”  Here is a link to his website:  http://williamblum.org/

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. and it’s allies in Western Europe have steadily attempted to spread their borders and influence eastward towards Russia, expanding N.A.T.O. and attempting to pick off countries that are former members of the Soviet Union.  Ukraine is now the latest country in this tug of war between the West and Russia.  The recently deposed President of Ukraine was democratically elected, but his troubles began when he decided to take a 15 billion dollar bailout from Russia over a trade deal offered with the European Union.  Pro-western forces in the country then began massive protests, met with apparent government violence, and now we have the current mess.  The eastern portion of Ukraine in Crimea, primarily Russian speaking, and home to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet naval base in Sevastopol, is considered an important strategic port for Russia, and it is appearing more likely now that Russia intends to keep it for themselves.  Russian parliament and Putin have already voted and expressed support for Crimea’s referendum, to be held on March 16th, to basically secede from Ukraine and rejoin Russia.  Of course, President Obama has said that this will not be legitimate, will violate the Ukraine constitution, and international law, etc.  Given the U.S.’s regular and consistent disregard for international law when it applies to us, this is falling on deaf Russian ears.

At home, President Obama is with his advisers, and working with his European counterparts, trying to figure out how to best squeeze Russian and pressure them to relent.  His options appear limited, as far as I can tell.  The U.S. does have many economic weapons at it’s disposal, as it’s economic warfare tactics have devastated less powerful countries over the years, such as former President Bill Clinton’s United Nations sanctions against Iraq that are estimated to have killed over 500 thousand civilians, through starvation and other effects of devastating trade embargoes. ( http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/27/magazine/were-sanctions-right.html ).  But Obama’s hands are more limited, as Western Europe does a lot of trade with Russia and depends on Russia as a large source of oil and gas.  These realities don’t stop the blabberings and outbursts from Senator Sore Loser John McCain, who has yet to find a conflict he doesn’t want to bomb.  Senator Lindsay Grahm, McCain’s partner in the bomb Iran crowd and cheerleader for hawkish, warmongering Israeli rehtoric, has said also blamed Obama’s “weakness” for Putin’s action.  According to these jackass blowhards, it’s lack of toughness on Obama’s part for not bombing Syria (although the congress wouldn’t support him on that nor the American people.)  Former Mayor of New York City, and record holder for answering the most republican primary questions with “911, I remember 911”, was on television admiring Putin’s leadership skills, on how quickly he decided to move into Crimea and get his rubber stamp parliament’s approval, and complaining that Obama always had to “think” about it and consult experts first.

But, when it comes to hypocrisy, what seems more offensive and most obvious to me, is how Republicans in congress and the White House, have the nerve to say “Support the Troops.”  The only thing these scumbags support are aggressive U.S. military action abroad.  They never want to pay for post war care for the troops once they come home.  An alarming rate of veterans end up on food stamps, suffering from mental and physical wounds, and seemingly disregarded as an unimportant part of a military budget.  The Obama Administration and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel’s recent recommendations to cuts in the military budget are met with cries of making us less safe, etc. because they cut down on the number of troops and phase out costly and unneeded military hardware.  Take away a congressman’s military hardware, especially if it is manufactured in his state or by his corporate sponsors, and you’ll hear pleas of no, but ask that Republican congressman to steer that budget money to support the troops that have served, and he is not interested.  In this way, the Republicans treat the troops the same as they do children:  before going off to war, they are all about support, just as the un-born fetus is revered, until the child is born and then abandoned by the Republicans, should they need food or healthcare.

Recently, on February 27, a veteran’s benefits bill, sponsored by Independent Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, was defeated by a vote of 56 to 41.  41 were against it, 56 for it.  Now that may sound like a typo error, how could the bill lose if it had the majority of senators voting for it?  The usual slime ball, Republican way of ruling by minority.  Like the fillibuster that requires a super majority of 60, the minority of Republicans in the Senate used a procedural maneuver to require 60 votes.  Only two Republicans joined the Democrats in voting to expand heath care, job training and education for veterans.  The minority of Republicans defeated the veterans bill.  Support the troops, yeah right.

From Senator Sander’s website:

“The cost of war does not end once the last shots are fired and the last battles are fought,” Sanders said.  “When members of the military lose arms, legs and eyesight fighting in wars that Congress authorized, we have a moral obligation to make sure that those Americans receive all of the benefits that they have earned and deserve.  When American soldiers die in combat, we have a moral obligation to make sure that the spouses and children they leave behind are taken care of and do not live in abject poverty.”  ( http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/senate-republicans-block-veterans-bill )

In other words, if you have a sticker of a ribbon on your car that reads “Support the Troops” and you vote Republican, you might as well take that sticker off your car and wipe your ass with it, because that’s what your minority of Republican Senators essentially did, and they go their way.  All they are interested in is war all the time.  They could care less about our people fighting them, or the millions of lives that are destroyed by war.

I’m getting really tired of ignorant bigots and haters in this country justifying their beliefs and feelings towards their fellow man as “religious freedom.”  This past week’s drama in Arizona, which culminated with Governor Jan Brewer’s veto of a two page anti-gay discrimination bill, is the latest in a string of anti-people bills, drawn up on state levels by gun toting, right wing Christian groups.

Make no mistake, Governor Brewer, does not deserve any credit for vetoing the anti-gay bill.  Mrs. Brewer is nothing more than an opportunistic bigot who has pretended the past few days to have to “study” her two page bill of discrimination, disguised as “religious freedom.” Thanks for doing the obvious, Governor,  but awarding you with doing the right thing is the equivalent of giving me a medal for not kicking a homeless man in the balls, after pretending it was a moral and legal struggle to reach that decision. Governor Brewer is a pathetic piece of shit, and she milked this supposed tough decision for all the media it was worth.

The proposed law would have given business owners the right to refuse to do business with people whom their religion viewed as sinners: specifically, the law was inspired by a florist who didn’t want to do business with a gay couple getting married.  In this supposedly civilized and advanced country that we live in, the laws governing business and employment have protections built in to prevent people from being discriminated against because of race, gender, and religion.  So a restaurant can’t refuse to serve a mixed race couple.  Black people don’t have to sit at the back of the bus.  You can’t refuse to hire someone because they’re a Jew, a Scientologist, an atheist, or a woman.  These common sense, basic laws have not always been met with open arms.  Because of a deeply segregated South, we had to have federal Civil RIghts laws, and we have federal agencies that oversee the enforcement of fair labor practice.

Somehow though, enough right wing Christian bigots still hold enough sway in pockets of the country to actually get elected officials  to sponsor unconstitutional bills that discriminate against the gay community.  Although there hasn’t yet been the federal legislative equivalent of the Civil Rights Act to address specifically the rights of sexual orientation, the principles that protect us from discrimination based on race, religion and gender are already deeply ingrained in our laws.  The number of states who have legalized gay marriage (17 and rising) reflect society’s emerging values and consciousness regarding same sex couples, and national polls show a majority of Americans now supporting gay marriage.  The tide has turned so much in the past decade, that a sitting U.S. President has now been able to say he favors legalizing gay marriage.  Candidate Obama, along with Candidate Kerry, were only comfortable supporting “Civil Unions” a few years ago.  President Obama now says his views have “evolved” which really means that our society has evolved to the point where we can actually call it marriage instead of just a civil union, without too much backlash.  Federal courts have increasingly ruled against states that have attempted to ban gay marriage as well, although the partisan Supreme Court has ducked the final decision to call it a constitutional right for same sex couples to marry.

With gays now allowed to serve openly in the military, and with mainstream society and entertainment embracing the gay and lesbian community with open arms, the homophobic minority is pushing back with every tactic it can dream up, from the religious groups in Utah that poured money into a California ballot initiative to ban gay marriage in the state, to states attempting to amend their constitutions to specifically ban it.  As with Arizona’s newest attempt to allow businesses to refuse service to gays, it is usually done with the ironic and inappropriate guise of “religious freedom.”

These hate mongering idiots have a warped sense of freedom; not understanding that their freedom ends when it intrudes or suppresses the freedom of another, they constantly seek to find legal ways to institutionalize their stone throwing, judgmental beliefs.  Not too long back, a jackass President George W. Bush gave lip service to the religious right with an empty threat of calling for a constitutional amendment to define marriage as between a man and a woman.  His genius reasoning for this stunning display of a U.S. President’s ignorance and dislike of gays?  Because all of the world’s major religions recognized it as between a man and a woman.  So the former leader and brainiac President Dipshit felt justified because of religious consensus.

The good and proper, ugly bitch of a governor, Jan Brewer, is an asshole overseeing a state that appears to have a lot of good people, and a small but unfortunate majority of tea bagging crazies. She signed into law the anti-immigration bill in Arizona in 2010 that caused so much controversy and the Obama administration to file a lawsuit against them to overturn it. It’s the law that allowed the police to ask for your papers or detain you if they had “reasonable” suspicion that you were an illegal immigrant. In other words, it attempted to institutionalize and legalize racial profiling all the time for any person not Mitt Romney white. What is happening now is an extension of that type of discrimination, this time inspired by their so-called good Christian folk’s hate or fear of gay people. The new law would have also allowed and lead to of course, discrimination against races – say a mixed couple that the Klan claims9 goes against the Bible – as well as, say a Muslim with a Turbine on his head. The governor knows this full well, as do three of the state senate republicans who have now expressed public remorse for their yes vote. Some of them are acting as if they were duped, which is bullshit, they’re not stupid, but to their credit, they did admit their fault publicly and thankfully before it was  too late. Governor Brewer needed political cover to do the right thing.  Predictably, Brewer vetoed the bill, but not before feigning it as a difficult decision.  Her veto was predicable, because the really ‘important people,’ the business class and heavyweights like Senator Sore Loser, John McCain, were putting the pressure on, as were a really large mobilized public opposition.

In 2009, about a dozen good Arizona folks attended a public protest outside their convention center in Phoenix where President Obama was giving a speech, openly wearing and displaying their firearms, apparently exercising their “freedom.”  The picture at the top of this blog is of one of the protesters sporting his AR-15 semi-automatic rifle.  Arizona law allows this “freedom,” and incredulously, gun nuts saw nothing wrong with heavily armed political protesters in public.  What is it about Arizona and other fanatical communities who apparently feel safer when their citizens walk around openly displaying their murder tools, even at a public protest where the propensity for confrontation is high?

It reminds me of the stupid sons-of-bitches in Murfreesboro, TN, who made national news back in 2012, for opposing the building a new Islamic Center and Mosque by a Muslim group that had been in the city for years.  I saw footage of some dumbass  redneck at a protest there challenging a college student who was supporting the Mosque, saying “do you believe in Sharia Law?  Do you want Sharia Law here?”  The funny thing is, these gun toting religious zealots have a good deal more in common with the Taliban than they do with true lovers of American freedom and liberty.  Fearing a religion based law such as Sharia Law, they attempt to impose their own brand of religious laws, based on their fearful and judgmental interpretation of Christianity.  Like the Taliban, they feel better when their beliefs are backed up with guns.  Freedom, to these tea baggers, means freedom for them to tell everyone else how to live their life, and freedom to discriminate in the business world and public against anyone of a different religion, race, or sexual orientation.

Former Vice President and shoot-a-friend-in-the-face, profit from war liar, Dick Cheney, famously said that we were “in the last throes of the insurgency” in Iraq, when we were clearly in the beginning.  Let’s hope that these bad jokes of laws of discrimination, like the one we just saw fail in Arizona, are the last throes of the insurgency of the American Taliban, the tea bagger, Christian conservatives, who are accepting a more inclusive, free American society, kicking and screaming, with an assault rifle strapped on their backs.

It is a remarkable feat of successful propaganda that educated Americans, living in the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world, trail behind most other populations in the world in their belief in the scientific evidence of the dangers of global warming.  What prompted me to look up some very interesting Pew Research Center polls on the matter, which I will address, was the number of people I have spoken with who seem angry or perturbed that the Obama Administration has yet to approve the construction of the Keystone Pipeline.  These were not the type of people who follow environmental issues, or energy issues in general; many were predictably Obama bashers, whom, as the President once said, “If I say fish live in the sea, they’d say, no they don’t.”  But what I find most disturbing is the overall American public’s lack of concern or understanding of the grave consequences of our continued use of fossil fuels and the devastating impact it is having on our climate.

During his State of the Union address, President Obama made it a point to say that climate change is real, regardless of the deniers, and that it is a scientific fact.  If the President were speaking to a group of Kentucky poisonous snake handlers, or a third world country of voodoo practitioners, the necessity of clarifying the fact that global warming is real and mostly caused by mankind’s unprecedented use of fossil fuels, it would be understandable.  In our country though, the business class, aided by right-wing media pundits, and “fair and balanced” other generic shit news peddlers, have succeeded in perpetuating the myth that man-made global warming is some type of controversial theory in which the jury is still out on.  The business elite and policy planners of the government know this to be a lie, but short term profit always trumps long term consequences among corporate leaders, and the policy planners are of course, corporate sponsored.  So they put out the propaganda that allows their current profit models to continue on course as they are, and to hell with the future inhabitants of the planet.

The Pew Research Center polls, which I looked up, paint a pretty clear and pretty pathetic picture of the success of this propaganda campaign. It shows that among most publics of the world, when asked whether or not they think climate change is a serious threat to their country,  a fewer percentage of Americans believed it was than any of the other groups surveyed.  Americans citing climate change as a major threat was 40 percent; all other groups were above 50 percent except for the Middle East, who still ranked above us at 42 percent.  The polls break down the belief system within the U.S. population as well, and not surprisingly, it shows that the more conservative an American is, or republican or tea bagger, the more likely they are to not attribute climate change to human activity.  Of course, this is the most crucial point of the propaganda system, because as long as Americans mistakenly believe that there is “debate” about the cause, then action and policy change become difficult or impossible, and things remain the same.  Copy and paste this link for the Pew polls: http://www.pewresearch.org/key-data-points/climate-change-key-data-points-from-pew-research/

The confusion among Americans, who should theoretically be better educated than their Middle East counterparts, appears to be the belief that there is debate among scientists, that the cause of climate change is still some controversial theory that has yet to be proven or agreed upon.  I saw the joke of a congresswoman from Tennessee, Marsha Blackburn, argue on “Meet the Press” last week that there was not agreement among scientist of the causes.  It’s hard to know if she is just an idiot, or a liar, it could be either one.  Tea baggers who are not idiots are liars, and some of the idiots are also liars, so it’s hard to be sure with her.  Ass-wipe Sean Hannity, of the Fox Propaganda Network, is another one that is hard to tell if he is lying or just a dumb-ass, or both.  When we were recently going through a bitter cold front in New York City, he of course observed that the freezing weather outside his studio meant that global warming was  a “hoax.”  His word.  I was just trying to figure out if him saying that as the truth was a hoax or not.  Like I said, the business elite know the truth, but it goes against their goals of profit over people, so they have jack-asses like Hannity preach misinformation, and scumbags like Congresswoman Blackburn to make sure policy change doesn’t happen.

As I was cursing at the tv during last week’s “Meet the Press” episode as Blackburn was making her ignorant/lying statements, David Greggor also pointed out to her that there is consensus in the scientific community that today’s global warming is impacted by mankind activity.   As far as I’ve been able to ascertain, that consensus in the scientific community is 97 percent at least, and if the credibility of the other 3 percent were to be scrutinized, my guess is most of them are barely what we’d call scientist.  I’ve always joked that these “scientists” that deny climate change are probably undergraduates from Jerry Falwell University or some other religious school, the kind that still deny the existence of evolution and believe that world is only 6000 years old, and that dinosaurs walked around with Adam and Eve.  And there are those “scientists” and “biologists” who believe this.  But to cite these anomalies of idiots as “debate” in the scientific community is a stretch by any imagination.  And it is exactly this stretch of imagination that has our population so ignorant or confused on the realty of our race to ruin the planet.

In fact, the debate among scientist now is about how quickly the earth will continue to warm, and how disastrous the effects of the warming will be.  As of right now, it appears that scientists have been too optimistic about the time frame and consequences.  Evidence so far suggests that global warming is happening quicker than was first predicted, and having more devastating consequences, sooner, than was predicted a couple of decades ago.

Secretary of State, John Kerry, made headlines this past week in a speech in Indonesia in which he compared the danger of climate change to weapons of mass destruction.  He supposedly has a stellar record as an environmentalist politician, but I only heard that in the media and haven’t had time to examine his actual record, but let’s assume he is.  The State Department has to weigh in the most on the Keystone Pipeline, as it crosses our international border with Canada, and President Obama is waiting, among all of the other input of public commentary due in the next month, on Mr. Kerry’s recommendation before approving or not approving the pipeline.  Is Mr. Kerry’s strong words on global warming, and the media’s trumpeting of him as a champion of the environment, merely a ruse to give credibility to the approval of the pipeline, should Obama approve it?  Or is it a hint to Big Oil to not get their hopes up, should Obama not approve it?

I’d like to think it’s the Obama Administration’s way of giving an early warning to Big Oil and all the big profit business that goes along with it that he is leaning towards not allowing the Keystone Pipeline to be built.  But given Mr. Obama’s frequent bragging about America’s increased domestic oil production since he took office (which is accurate) and his optimism that thanks to natural gas, America will be energy independent for the next century, I have reason for doubt.   This new found celebration about our future energy independence – “independence” being misunderstood by the public’s conventional thinking of what that means, as oil and the U.S. will remain part of the global market and we will still be in the Middle East and elsewhere digging for more – seems to be based almost entirely on our current system of fossil fuel use, and our ability to extract more.  Very little is spoken about achieving this abundant century of energy through transitioning to alternative sources of energy.  Aside from talking about better fuel standards, most all of this optimism cites America’s natural gas and fracking to extract it, continued coal use, and better drilling techniques.  The tar sands of Canada, where the most dirty and dangerous form of crude oil lies, is one such example of our so called improved extraction techniques.  The main purpose of the Keystone Pipeline is to transport this dirty fuel, although it will transport some other sources of crude.

So I get calls or emails or Facebook posts from my political opponents yelling for the pipeline.  It’s been a republican mantra and answer to not passing a jobs bill,  to get Obama to approve the Keystone Pipeline. They’ve even tried to extort it from the President over the debt ceiling.  “Drill, baby, drill!” was a Sarah Palin rallying cry during her failed V.P. run, though I suspect half of the one toothed rednecks and snake handlers in her crowd were more moved by a woman of her looks saying “drill, baby, drill!” than they were by actual thoughts on energy production.  The problem, in these mind numbing nit-wit’s mind, is that we just need to drill more.  Scrape the tar sands, drill baby drill.  This faulty belief is understandable, if they first believe that there is no global warming taking place because of our use of fossil fuel.

There are some legitimate arguments about the safety of transporting crude oil through pipelines as opposed to transportation by rail.  Recently, the increases use of our rail system to transport oil and other fuel has led to a spike and new record of accidents that have resulted in devastating explosions and leaks of dangerous material in various communities in our country.  However, pipelines also break, and have led to environmental disasters as well.   The bottom line, and fundamental question, is if we want to invest and sacrifice more to exploit the ever harder to extract fossil fuels such as the oil in the tar sands of Canada, or if we will pull our collective head out of our asses and realize that man-made global warming is real, is a genuine threat to our survival on the planet, and that we must immediately make drastic changes to the way we will manage our energy in the future.  Bragging about a century of energy independence because we have figured out how to extract more dirty fossil fuels is a recipe for environmental disaster, which is already happening.  Building this pipeline will not bring down the price of gas that people pay at the pump for gas.  It will raise the profits of the Big Oil, Big Business, and the Big Banks that service them.  It will also postpone and suck resources away from making the necessary transition to alternative fuels.  This will in turn ruin the planet, and imperil the chance for humankind’s survival in the future.  And as long as the successful spreading of lies and misinformation continue, it appears we are running, not walking, down this path.  And in the end, it will matter little who was lying to deny climate change and it’s causes, and who was just a moron and tool of the liars.  What matters now is that people realize the undeniable truth about global warming and it’s causes and consequences.

This is a link to a most excellent video report from the online version of “The Nation” and I highly recommend you take the time to watch it.  It is extremely informative, and engaging to watch, and I strongly urge everyone watch it, regardless of what side of the fence you are on at the moment on climate change and energy production:

 http://www.thenation.com/video/157441/peak-oil-and-changing-climate

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