Giving Thanks

Well…I know it’s been a while, but, frankly, the events of the last few days (weeks? months? coupla years?) have really gotten to me.  So, rather than jump aboard any and everybody else’s Knee-Jerk Express, I decided to make like a Thanksgiving turkey and stew in my own juices for a bit.  I’m still ruminating on a few things, but, hey, it’s this blog’s second Thanksgiving, and I’m in a reflective enough mood to share.  Pre-festivity libations will do that to ya.  However, Thanksgiving is a day of…uh…(burp!)…(hic!) ’scuse me!…giving thanks.  Anyway,  being the first holiday after the debacle of the Culmination of the Kool Aid Predestination Indoctrination of ‘08, Thanksgiving will always have special meaning for me.  So, with all that in mind, here’s my list of thanks I can’t wait to give away.  Mind you, this is not my pre-Christmas wish list; that’s a whole ‘nother kettle of snark.

Number one:  I would like to thank Barack Obama for being the uber qualified Spokesmodel-in-Chief, (and nothing more) that I always thought he was.  I’d like to thank him for that, but I can’t.  That sucketh too much for thanks.  Even though he has proven himself to be far more qualified as a TelePrompTer reading vacationing front man and party host than his predecessor, that bar was set low enough for Munchkin babies to limbo under, so that ain’t saying much.  Since I hate to be wrong, I am proud of the fact that I had him pegged all along, and said so every chance I got, so it’s not my fault the country screwed itself in the ass by (s)electing him.  Unfortunately, it’s not the first time the country has exercised its right to vote as an act of contortionary masturbation, and probably won’t be the last.

Girl Talk ‘n Coffee

In Hollywood, it’s “let’s do lunch!”  In girl talk, it’s, “let’s get together for coffee!”  Either way, it means, “yeah, sure, when hell freezes over.”

If such meetings are ever forced to come to pass, they are usually filled with air kisses, strained smiles, polite, inconsequential small talk, and furtive glances at timepieces.  They are generally ended by pre-arranged cell phone calls received by one, or both of the attending parties, declaring some state of emergency foretelling impending global doom that only the callee can potentially rectify.  At least, that’s what their lunch partner is supposed to deduce from the overheard end of the conversation.  What is probably being said by the the caller is likely more along the lines of, “is the bitch still there?”

In two separate Sunday morning news show interviews, ABC’s “This Week,” with George Snuffleupagus, and NBC’s “Meet The Press,” with David Gregory, which, in the interest of full disclosure, I didn’t watch, since Sunday morning news shows tend to give me wicked gas and make my eyes bleed, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton obviously handled herself admirably enough, without providing sufficient controversial fodder to feed the ravenous appetites of subsequent Sunday news network rehashes of their morning shows, that the hosts felt compelled by their producers to goad and provoke her by dangling “Sarah said” red meat in front of her face.  In the political equivalent of “when she said you looked well rested now that your face has filled out, wasn’t she calling you fat?” Clinton was asked about statements made by Sarah Palin on the campaign trail, and in her book, “Going Rogue,” (subtitled “By Quitting My Job and Writing This Book.”)  In a fashion typical of one skilled in the social graces, Clinton replied with what amounts to, “Well, now that I’m not constantly on the go, I have put on a few welcome pounds.  I was too skinny before.  I’m glad people are noticing.”  At least, that’s the way The Christian Science Monitor sees it:

What If She Said “No”?

Imagine if every American woman woke up one day soon, resolved to make it known to anyone who asked, that unless a comprehensive healthcare reform bill was voted into law that ensured medical coverage to every other American in the country, without restriction, or infringement on any woman’s reproductive rights, any politician, male or female, on either side of the aisle, who did not work toward that goal, who compromised in favor of corporate interests, or, who was percieved to be working against the interests of American women and their families for any reason, would be voted against in their next election.

That’s it.  No organizing, bra burning, torch-carrying, letter-writing; nuttin’.  Just millions of women making up their minds, “no healthcare; no vote.”  In fact, if you cave yield to expediency, sell out your constituents, talk out of both sides of your mouth while stuffing corporate cash in both front pockets, or, worse, actively work against passage of a law guaranteeing access to comprehensive medical care to all Americans, or attempt to block such passage in any way, we’re voting you out.  No matter who you are.  What side you’re on.  Who you’re running against.  In fact, if 2 of you major party sellout scum, male or female, are running against each other, we will vote for whoever the third option is, regardless of political affiliation, corporate backing, policy position, or qualifications.  If no viable third party candidate presents him- or herself, we will actively seek to find one, and ensure that his or her name is placed on the ballot, whether that person has any political experience, or desire to run for office.  If we have to recruit our next door neighbor, our child’s cafeteria lady, a bus driver, garbage collector, Wal-Mart or 7-11 clerk, bag lady, or one of those crazy aunts or uncles who remind us of Joe Biden that live in the basement/attic that every family has and none of us talk about, we will put their names in contention, and vote for them.

Wouldn’t it be lover-ly if, with nothing more than a simple whisper campaign,  where she told 2 people, and she told 2 people, and so on, and so on, and so on…we could make every politician in office at every level aware of our resolve?  And, not only them; all those activist/union/religious leaders who want our dues/tithes so they can suck up to power and sell out our interests, have to be told that the same goes for them, too.  You don’t actively advocate on our behalf, ya gotta go.   Let them know that this is no idle threat, if they fuck us over, they lose their job.   Period.  End of story.

Timid Feminism = Timidism

While there is much in the news to discuss, much of it inter-connected; and I have certainly spent the better part of the week collecting news articles, videos and links in preparation for a post addressing said issues, instead of spending time and energy fanning the “blame Islam flames,” I’m much more strongly compelled to lash out against what I see as the undue timidity of so-called feminist women in the face of coordinated attack, especially when confronted with forces lead by other women.

Lord knows I am not alone in my outrage about the all-too-predictable capitulation to the Right by our Mighty Morphin’ Majority Democrats for no Earthly apparent reason.  Women everywhere are bitchin’ and  moanin’ about the seemingly calculated attempts at the  Stepfordization of American females.  While I see this as the inevitable result of the efforts of that faction of the country’s politics now being fronted by the insidious Bachmann Palin Overdrive, the eager surrender of females on the Left, either because of faith in the illusion of the myth of political expediency, or due to belief in fantasies of sisterhood, unattainable even in legend and fairy tale, as being necessary for success, the end result is the same; when women buy into the “helpless second, weaker, yet, inherently evil sex” patriarchal theory as their self-identity starting position, women lose.

Leaders lead.  They stake a position, articulate it, and invite others to join.  Whether anybody takes them up on their offer or not, they proceed according to their plan.  You cannot lead by consensus, or by whining about who doesn’t see things your way, thereby blaming them for your condition.   Constantly complaining about other women who don’t support your vision, and how much you wish they would for everybody’s sake, is a masochistically masturbatory waste of time.  If only “she” would think like “me,” “we” could do x, y, z, is a crackhead’s pipe dream.  To take it a step further and fantasize that Utopian Nirvana can only be reached by aligning oneself with “her” anyway, regardless of the width of the gulf between your points of view, simply on the strength of shared anatomical features, is a crackhead’s delirium.

Democrats’ Stale Lunch

There’s a saying that any Grand Jury in the country worth its salt could indict a ham sandwich.  The theory is that grand juries are tools of the District Attorney, designed to do his/her bidding and rubber stamp whatever they want, just for formality’s sake.  Whether that is true or not, that’s the perception.  In the 2008 pretendidential election, Barack Obama benefited from a similar perception; that the Democratic party could have elected a ham sandwich.

And, they did.

Unquestionably, Obie is now the Democrats’ stale lunch, stinking up the whole place after smoldering in their lunchbox for a whole year, not counting the previous months they spent rejecting the obviously more nutritious meat and potatoes in front of them in favor of the McHam Sandwich they gleefully and greedily invented with intent to market.  Now that they’re being forced by Fate-as-a-cruel-parent to eat the spoiled porky lunch they had a fit to have, they’re smacking their own fool foreheads, crying and whining and moaning and dreaming about the V-8 they coulda had, and how they coulda been contend-uhs, like a bunch of washed-up, three-year old Marlon Brandos reduced to reprising his glory days in a cheesy vegetable juice commercial.  No better for ‘em; they did it to themselves.

Sadly, the bigger problem is they did it to the rest of us, too, with the majority of their party members playing rubber-stamp grand jury to their D.A.  Even sadder is that the way they did it was so fucking obvious and simple.

First, play up on the “any Democrat beats Bush” inevitability thing, then, establish Hillary Clinton as the inevitable Democrat, before exploiting the already publicly accepted right-wing meme of Hillary as Dragon Lady.  Rile up the country’s latent misogyny and present your guy as not only “not her,” but, a guy to boot.   Throw in a little, “I’m black, so voting for me will make you feel good,” and Bob’s your uncle.  Voila!  You’ve just nominated a ham sandwich, and set him up to win big.

It was really that simple.

Starring Barry O As Mr. Lucky

To hear the media tell it, Barack Obama is the luckiest guy in the world.  Of course, they never come out and say that; no, they use words like “compelling” and “destined,” to describe the improbable rise of a guy who seems to have not much but skin tone and personality going for him.  Obviously, for a large segment of those lonely individuals around the country and the world, otherwise destined to the isolation of today’s solitary online…life, that is more than enough.

Consequently, today marks the day before the Most Historic of Historic Days when legions of normally Negro-averse people, male and female, inspired by a common Mandingo love fantasy fever of acceptable blackness, along with their formerly scary brethren and sistren of color, hoisted the object of their inexplicable affection upon their collective metaphorical shoulders and propelled him forward with a mighty thrust to the near-pinnacle (the Nobel Peace, Brother Prize being the top) of his destination to Plantation Overseer, the Presidency of the United States.  The occasion is being duly marked with the release of HBO’s documentary, By The People, an inside look at the meteoric rise of Barack Obama for no apparent reason.  Talk about failing upwards.

Now, if said documentary were but a Spinal Tap-esque, “what if?” spoof, it would hold far more interest and potentially intrinsic value.  However, after reading more articles and reviews about the thing I have no intention of watching without anesthesia, than any human being not also being waterboarded for war crimes in conjunction should ever have to endure, I’m convinced that the parties involved are all deadly serious about their Holy Mission.  I’m also left to scratch my head in puzzlement as to what it is about this guy, what has he done, who did he fuck to inspire such irrational devotion, and is there You Tube-ready film available I can post online since I’m sure most of us would like to study such awe-inspiring technique so that we, too, might exploit it similarly to our benefit.  I mean, according to published reports that usually hail his mighty mind, he seems not to actually know dick about shit, and, according to most Americans, many of whom probably wouldn’t vote for him again, ain’t got a clue about a plan to fix nothin’:

The survey suggests that the president’s approval rating remains over 50 percent even though most Americans disapprove of how Obama is handling the economy, health care, Afghanistan, Iraq, unemployment, illegal immigration and the federal budget deficit.

And yet…through some quirk of fate, wave after wave of wealthy, influential movers and shakers just happen to cross his path, bearing alms, pledging to drink his bathwater in return for possession of his dirty drawers, and have done so since the beginning of his political career.  What up wit’ dat, huh?

Somebody Better Call Pat And Vanna

Quick!  Somebody get  Pat and Vanna on the phone, stat!  The Obamaniacs desperately need to buy a clue!

Answer:  Clueless in the White House.

Question:  What is the constant state of the Obama administration, Alex?

Alex:  You are correct.  Pick again.

Though many of us have known all along that Barry and the Bus Drivers never had any idea what the hell they were doing, a quick perusal of the weekend news round-up proves that despite Obie’s delusion that he was actually, at least navigating his “historic” course to the Nobel Prize, if not driving his custom, tricked out, re-built, rented GM Fishbowl, and owed his current position to his own aptitude and the acumen of his pit crew, nothing could be further from the truth.  No, a careful reading of the “tidbits” contained in David Plouffe!-There-He Goes!’s upcoming tell-nothing-cuz-he-don’t-know-shit “expose” of the behind the scenes machinations of the Axelrovians, Audacity To Win, proves that whoever is responsible for the front man status of the Spokesmodel-in-Chief, it ain’t none o’ these clowns.

According to CNN, reporting on excerpts of the book now running in Time Magazine, Obombo was seriously considering nominating Hillary Clinton as vice-president, unbeknownst to Double David, both of whom were absolutely horrified about the prospect, horrified, I tellya! and thus, majorly relieved when Obie came to the conclusion, all by his lonesome, mind you, that he was too shy about exposing his potentially shriveled-looking, at least one short huevos in a political threesome with Billary to ask his Dream Girl out.

Obama Is Not A Disappointment

Barack Obama’s performance as Pretendident In Name Only has not disappointed me in the least.  I never expected him to do jackshit in the first place.  I never expected the American people to put up with his obvious bullshit and lack of “eptitude” for this long just because they’re scared of of all things black, especially people, though, either.

I can hear the chorus of mental denials, now.  “We are not a-scared of no black people!  Pish tosh!” you think loudly.  “Big bags o’ bullshit,” I think, and write, back.  Every black American is familiar with that unacknowledged fear.  We wear it every day like a second skin as our second nature public mask.  From the wide-eyed, furtive glances meant to be discrete from car-to-car in everyday traffic, to the stiffened backs of people in stores, banks, gas stations, lines of any sort for any reason, to the proximity within which kids are kept whenever the big, scary black person approaches to say, “hi!” we black people have become just as comfortable with keeping our distance without thinking about it, as non-black people are un-comfortable in our presence.  We are used to being, perpetually, the Ultimate Stranger.  “Hurry, give them what they want, maybe they’ll leave!”

Some white people, tired of the discomfort of constant fear, but too cowardly to admit it and confront it head-on, lash out at the problem as the cause.  To them, the problem is racism against them, by exploitative shifty, clever black bullies.  The theory goes, “you know you scare me witless, so you take advantage of me by calling me a racist and asking me to stop!” shouted most often from behind the metaphorical couch with bug-eyed terror by people trying to sound tough with their hair standing on end.

Smoke ‘N’ Mirrors

If “universal healthcare” coverage is your goal, all ya gotta do, is require everybody to buy it.  If you can get away with that nifty little piece of in-your-face ledgerdomain, the rest is gravy.  Public option, schmublic option, if ya gotta buy it, what difference does it make who ya gotta buy it from?  Once everybody ponies up, healthcare coverage is universal.

Yah, baby!

There Ain’t No Kumbayah

When you live on what is arguably the most well-endowed National Plantation of the coalition represented by the Global Boys’ Club of Powers That Be That Rules The World, simmering rage and frustration is simply a naturally integral part of your shared human condition, regardless of position in the pecking order, or place on the illusionary Ladder of Success.  And, while the Mistuh Chollies that sit on the board would prefer that their minions join hands and sing gospelized versions of a Kumbayah/I’d Like To Teach The World To Sing mash-up medley 24/7, that’s only because the cacophony resulting from protracted intervals of caterwauling, kvetching, bitching, and moaning has a tendency to obscure the sound of ice tinkling in cut glass tumblers of single malt Scotch and birds chirping on their private  golf course.

I’ve been thinking about the rage of oppression, where it comes from, and how it manifests itself in our society, a lot lately.  From the decades-long, seemingly concerted assault on minority culture in the media, through the deliberate use of stereotypes as weapons against positive perception, (i.e., blaxploitation, minstrelcoms, gangsta rap, etc.) to the current political pretzel-twisting contortions and hoop-jumping divide-and-conquer race and gender maneuvers disguised as honest efforts to promote the common good that charlatans posing as public servants are executing as corporate marionettes, to the exploitation of working people at all income levels, legal and il-, the country, if not the world, seems to me, to be a veritable cauldron of simmering rage, deliberately assembled, stoked and stirred.

The scope of this issue, as well as my personal limitations, preclude me from composing a cohesive, comprehensive treatise on this subject, so, I’ll just present my disjointed thoughts, open the floor for discussion and debate, and offer myself up as whipping girl.  But, it seems to me, given America’s unique melting gumbo pot/tossed salad composition, the peculiar experiment that she is positions her as potentially holding the key to our shared global futures.  If people as  diverse as those who make up our nation can find a way to peacefully co-exist and prosper equally, as a single human race, there is indeed hope for the world.  If not, we get the powder keg we sit on now, times infinity.

Same Old, Different Day

Gee whiz, now that I’m (mostly) semi-recovered, there’s not jack squat in the news worth  thinking, or talking, much less writing about.  First, the so-called “illness.”  Frankly, I think I was just exhausted.   For at least two years, I’ve been pretty much exclusively resting by naps.  3 or 4 hours of sleep per night with intermittent catnaps during the day wreaks havoc on an OBB (Old Broad’s Bod) after awhile.  It’s not that a full night’s rest is undesirable, or unfeasible, I’ve got the time, after all, it’s just that, for a lot of reasons, it’s been out of the question.  The OBB most often simply refused to comply with my orders.  Settling in for a long summer’s nap with the best of intentions has much more often than not, been interrupted by my traitorous eyes’ insistence upon flying open of their own volition whenever they damned well felt like it, and refusing to close back and transport me to Dreamland’s bliss like I told them to.  What’s a woman to do?

So recently, when the OBB screamed, “Crash!” in my head, I did so.  It wasn’t the direct order, per se, it was the implied “or else” that got my attention.  The ominous feeling of general malaise that accompanied the mindscream was alarming enough for me to force myself under the covers (alone, alas) and stay there until my body acquiesced to its own demands for restful healing.  Thankfully, I’m feeling much better, now.

Monitoring the shenanigans of the Obama Camp Runamok lo, these many past months hasn’t exactly lent itself to R&R, either.  Like being forced at bazooka-point to ride shotgun in Marty McFly’s DeLorean after it’s been commandeered by the Ringling Brothers for use as a clown car thrill ride attraction at Six Flags Over Purgatory, I’ve most often found myself screaming, “what the holy fuck?!?” as I tried to hang on desperately between alternating bouts of wide-eyed terror and maniacal delirium disguised as amusement while being flung around hairpin turns by BozoBama the Driver.  Neither state tends to lend itself to the dreamless slumber of REM sleep, as I’m sure you can imagine, and as my prior writing from that mindspace reflects.

Whadda Buncha Maroons!

Hey, gang, still not quite up to the weather, (get it? “under the weather,” not “up to the weather?” never mind, any joke you have to explain is not much of a joke, and anybody who tells it anyway knew that it was more about not  “wanting it,” than “getting it,” and that it sucked big, hairy weenies all along.   Toldja I didn’t feel good.  Waaahhhh!)

Anyway, I’ve been half-watching The Great Fox vs. Obot War in the news with a good deal of merriment, though.  What the fuck does the Baranold McBamold clown school of an administration hope to accomplish with this buffoonish declaration of pre-emptive war against the buffoonish rightwing poor excuse for a news organization?  Do they, (clueless Obots) really believe that “”no relevance equals “no pow-ah, Cap’n?”

Ha, ha, ha!  Oh, how the privates packages must have shrunken en masse once the Obacrats and Demobots who perpetrated this fraud upon the Republic realized that merely serving up Hillary Clinton’s head on a platter as red meat didn’t cause the Fox News hounds to eat their fill, lick their lips, then roll over and play dead at the feet of the Baracus T. Firefly, Coronated Unworthy.  Ha, ha, ha!  The Keystone Kops Meet the Marx Brothers panic that must have ensued in the halls of Obuck U.’s Chicago Loop think tank, (modeled on Ray Kroc’s Hamburger U.) once the realization that they had no second act sunk in around the KoolAid Kooler, must have been priceless enough for its own MasterCard commercial.

Whadda buncha maroons!

Hath it not dawned upon their collective tiny minds that having been rebuffed by His Arrogance, the Mighty Forces of Ailes will now train their sights, and  focus their well-honed Vast Rightwing Conspiracy-esque Attacks of Slings and Arrows, upon the equally bogus and journalistically bereft, Obotified Farces of Ails, aka, MSNBC?  Did they, (clueless Obots) really think they (the Dark Side) would stop there?  Ha, ha, ha!

Ignore It And Maybe It Will Go Away

When I was a small child, I used to try to get my mother’s attention at times when she didn’t feel like being bothered.  Sometimes this would happen when she had company over, and she would often continue her conversations with her invited guests as if I wasn’t there, or worse, as if the Ranger scolding Yogi about the way he mistreated Boo-Boo just wasn’t all that important.  Can you imagine?  First of all, how dare she divine what I wanted without being told, assess the merits of my unspoken request for sympathy and understanding, and then dismiss me and my concerns out of hand – in advance!  The nerve of that woman!  I always loved the ladies and gents she called “her company,” though, because they would undoubtedly take my side with a smile, (smirk) and ask my unfeeling maternal parent why she insisted upon carrying on as if her earnest, darling oldest child was a mere figment of their collective imaginations.  Mama would then invariably lean toward her obviously barren inquisitor(s) and utter the first line of the survival book, “Invaluable Sayings and Truisms of Motherhood; Official Handbook and Study Guide,” issued in hospitals and home delivery rooms worldwide since the dawn of time, “if you ignore them, maybe they’ll go away.”

Of course, the follow-up paragraph in that indispensable tome explains that such advice is only to be applied to those teeth-achingly annoying, yet essentially trivial situations like the one I described; the rest of the time we kids were to be treated as precious little joy bundles shining blinding light beacons upon our parents’ previously pitiful lives for them to bask in in front of their friends, enemies and acquaintances whenever we weren’t around to spoil the illusion.  However, neither the trials and tribulations of Wilma and Fred, nor the earth-shattering news that once Chatty Cathy’s hair got pulled out because all the stinky plastic heifer would say when you pulled her string was, “runmmmnlwwerrugh” you just could not get it back in the little holes, were ever sufficient to grant us special audience with the Queen at such times. 

Where’s Kanye West When You Need Him?

It seems like the sheer number of people who, like me, just can’t seem to wrap their heads around this Obama/Peace Prize thing, is starting to get under the formerly esteemed Nobel folks’ skin and majorly piss them off.   Duh.  And, they’re surprised because…?  The Associated Press is reporting that, in an “unprecedented move,” the jury what voted for to put the Pretendident in the company of greatness, is speaking out in justification of their mind-blowing decision.  And, in the real spirit of their phony “unprecedented” honesty, let me be the first to go on record as saying, methinks the Nobel Publisher’s Clearinghouse Peace Prize jury is full of shit:

To those who say a Nobel is too much too soon in Obama’s young presidency, “We simply disagree … He got the prize for what he has done,” committee chairman Thorbjorn Jagland told The Associated Press by telephone from Strasbourg, France, where he was attending meetings of the Council of Europe.

Jagland singled out Obama’s efforts to heal the divide between the West and the Muslim world and scale down a Bush-era proposal for an anti-missile shield in Europe.

“All these things have contributed to — I wouldn’t say a safer world — but a world with less tension,” he said.

Oh, wipe my ass and call me “Whitney,” why doncha, huh?  Gee whiz.  First of all, Obama may have received “the prize” of prizes for his platitudinous Cairo speech, among tedious others, but that’s not why he was nominated for it.  According to the Nobel folks’ website, the nomination had to come in February, after less than two months in office, about two months before his April-in-Prague call for nuclear weapons reduction, and almost exactly two months before his June Sermon on the Nile shoutout to the Muslim world.  So, what, these Nobel guys are prescient, too?  Or, did they get a timeline, or blueprint of his proposed agenda by carrier pigeon flown paper airplane the day after he and the Chief Justice channeled their inner Moe and Curly and flubbed, then dubbed his acceptance speech?

Sex-Starved Women

Okay, so, I’m just cruisin’ the ‘net, rather aimlessly, looking for something to write about besides Baracus Hubris Maximus’ (Hail, Ceasar!) fluctuating degrees of suckitude, and who pointed out what about that to whom when.  In that regard, I came across a Politico piece asserting that Think Progress, the blog arm of the Center for American Progress, (the George Soros-funded Clinton-era think tank that guided Urkelbama’s transition from presidential candidate to candidational pretendident) is pretty much solely responsible for outing Freedom Works as the Republican party’s AstroTurf crew.  According to Politico, since April, Think Progress, and Think Progress alone, has been beating that particular political drum in the wilderness.   Bullshit.  When I began taking PUMA shit for calling out Armey’s Army and their TEA Party shenanigans, Think Progress was just one of many quoted sources, and remains so.  Though TP deserves some credit for staying on the story, a whole bunch of folks besides them, or me, have been issuing that particular clarion call, many without the backing and resources TP enjoys.

Be that as it may, while browsing an ABC News article about a website called SideTaker.com for couples who can’t resolve arguments by themselves and don’t trust their friends and relative’s advice so they’d rather let strangers decide, I came across one from January, 2008, about a book written by Michele Weiner Davis, entitled, “The Sex-Starved Wife,” that really pointed up the fact that Obama Obsession has caused a lot of us to miss some pretty important stuff.  I mean really, while we’ve been stressing about lack of female representation in the political arena, and the attendant misogyny and sexism that ensures that said condition will likely prevail throughout all our lifetimes, across all social strata, and in every facet of every society unless something approaching a global Lysistrata Alert goes out and is heeded; the news that women, if they’re married, that is, often want to “do it” more than their big, studly, Viagra-fueled, breadwinning Lord and Masters do, has gone completely under the friggin’ radar.

Embracing Race

Wow!  What a welcome back.  To all my friends, old and new, some since Day One, or damned near, thank you.  It’s nice to be loved, and I felt all the affection directed towards me through your kind words, admonishments and threats.  All I can say, besides “thank you,” and backatcha big time, is, message received.  If ever I have to take another break, I’ll be sure to give fair warning.  And, until then, I promise to do my very best to reward your faith in me.

However, in going through the comments left in my absence, I noticed that a bit of a contretemps erupted from a discussion without debate about that most volatile of subjects; race.  Ah, yes. Race. R-a-c-e.  Such a small, deceptively innocent looking, ordinary, yet dangerous word defining a loaded subject.  What is it about that little bitty word, “race,” that gets all our underwear twisted into such inextricable knots?

We all know that any discussion about the merits, or lack of same, of Pretendident Baracus Whosayin’ YoMama’s selection/election/coronation debacle is fraught with racial pitfalls.  If one makes the obvious, inescapable observation that a rather sub-ordinary presidential candidate was awarded unwarranted “brownie” (ha ha) points leading to his acceptance into the rarefied atmosphere of the Upper Echelon of Society, simply on the basis of the novelty of his skin color, coupled with his willingness to go to heroic lengths to divorce himself of the inherent baggage of said skin tone as much as is humanly possible, one is predictably dismissed as a disgruntled, belligerent, racist haterator, regardless of one’s own skin color, or the merits of one’s argument.  Insidiously, such dismissive responses are not based on visceral offense to baseless insult, but calculated club-wielding counter-punches designed to beat political opponents into submission.

You Go Away For One Minute…

Okay, first of all, mea culpa, I’m sorry, I was wrong, forgive me.  Going away without warning was inexcusable, and I know I should have checked in and let everybody know what was up.  But, to be honest, I’ve learned over the past couple of weeks that there’s no way possible to predict when and how “crash and burnout” will occur.  It just does.  At least, it did to me.

I love this blog.  I started it for the noblest of reasons, in my opinion, to add my voice to the cacophony of outrage about the way the Democratic Party orchestrated its last sham of a primary/caucus presidential nomination process, albeit, to no avail.  While I don’t regret a second, and, as I said, loved every minute of it, after more than a year of doing more work,  research, and writing than I’ve ever done before in my life, for love, or money, about a subject I have no background or expertise in, and frankly, had little to no interest in until recently, I fucking hit the wall.  Of course, like most burnouts, there was a precipitating event of sorts, and, like I imagine in most  cases, mine had nothing to do with the subject at hand.  Nobody pissed me off, or did anything wrong by any stretch of anybody’s imagination.  This was all on me.  My actions, my fault.  Everybody who supports this blog is wonderful, and, I missed you terribly, but to tell you the truth, it all of a sudden got to the point that I had simply had enough.

Barack Obama had become unbearably boring to me, which I find unforgivable.  I can tolerate insufferable, offensive, repulsive, perplexing, etc.  But when a making fun of a guy who has nothing but manufactured persona to offer by AstroTurf gets boring, it reeaaaaalllly sucks.

Barack Obama Bores Me

Barack Obama bores me.  But, then, he always has.  The only remotely interesting thing about him is watching his fans slowly come around to the realization that pretending not to be as boring as he is, is pretty much the only thing he’s really good at.  Yes, the befuddlement slowly dawning on their faces as they grapple with the fact that they’ve been majorly duped, is indeed a joy and wonder to behold.  How they could ever have fallen for such rudimentary trickery never seems to cross their minds, however.

Let’s face it, the tactics used by the Obama Noise Machine (Come On, Shake Your Body, Baby, Do That Obie) were pretty simplistic.  It wasn’t really a whisper campaign, it was more like a calculated Come To Obie series of moments.  Instead of, “Pssst!  Have you heard about the new guy?” the professional and amateur Obacolytes of Axelfraud proselytized from the street corners and rooftops and basements of their parent’s house, “Obama is coming!  Prepare, ye sinners!”  “Where will you be when the Obamessiah arrives?!”

Yea, how the unworthy quaked.  Verily, they did onto him.   And thus, the excitement about the rapture of excitement built.  How could it not?  Who could ignore the magical allure of a black man who, unlike his brethren, actually liked white people?  Lived among them?  Born of them?  Had the people ever laid eyes upon such an extraordinary man before?  A real, honest to Goodness black man, with a black wife and everything, who was One of Them?  No wonder the masses found the idea of him irresistible.

No matter that in reality he was a pretty ordinary guy.  Average in all things, at best.  He was black, but, not quite black enough to frighten the children.  After all, the blood of most of the people flowed through his veins.   And so, like Sally Field at the Oscars, the people exalted him, crying, “He likes us!  He really, really likes us!”  “And he likes us, too, ya know?”

Poor Post Racial America

Poor America.

It’s so disillusioned now that the myth of post-raciality has been exposed as a complete crock of a sham scam.  I mean, if you can’t believe in a Clean, Articulate Black Guy and the White People Who Vouch For Him when they  promise that voting for him will prove once and for all that it’s possible to be racism-free without actually knowing any black people, what can you believe?  Who can you trust?

Gee whiz.

I mean, it’s not like you’ve never met any real African Americans, right?  Of course you know black people, everybody cool knows Somebody Black.  This is America, ya know?  And, Somebody Black gets around.  There’s the guy who installed the new sustainable Malaysian bamboo floors in your open concept great room after you overpaid for your mini McMansion-lite in the new sub-division 6 months before the housing bubble went kerblooey and you still had a job.  His assistant, the one who pulled up the old standard carpet that came with the model you bought, but not the one they sold you, he was black.  Real nice fella.  And, weren’t all your possessions exactly where they were supposed to be when he left?  Then, there’s that lady at the school board meeting who patiently explained that she was not allowed to put anything dangerous in the secret recipe for Mystery Meat, after little Annie Andrews put Billy Bratt in a hospital his parents can’t pay for when she conked him upside the head with a 2 week old brick sandwich of it that she had kept wrapped in tinfoil at the bottom of the deep freezer in the basement for just such a purpose after he called her Big Foot on the school bus.  She was nice, too. The Lunch Lady, not Annie.  She’s a cow like her Mom, Mrs. Sasquatch.  How could you be racist if you let black people feed your precious kids, and, even liked them better than some of your abominable neighbors?

Today ACORN, Tomorrow Your World?

I’ve been watching the gleeful celebration of the death of ACORN around the PUMAsphere with sadness and dismay.  It’s not because I’m an ACORN advocate, far from it.  I actually know very little about the group, and, to be honest, most of what I’ve heard hasn’t been good.  It’s because I’ve realized that I’m a pretty liberal Democrat at heart, and a liberal institution is under vicious right wing attack, primarily for being a liberal institution:

Republicans have long seen the group — which offers housing and other services, including voter registration, to the poor — as a shady operation devoted to electing liberals and siphoning off taxpayer money.

[edit]

O’Keefe, however, said that he and Giles’ work was done independently and dismisses claims that the videos were paid for by conservative organizations. O’Keefe said he did receive advice from a conservative columnist.

After O’Keefe had filmed the first two videos — in Washington and Baltimore — a conservative friend urged him to share his project with Andrew Breitbart, a conservative Internet entrepreneur who had plans to launch an anti-liberal site called BigGovernment.com. Breitbart said he was skeptical after a June phone call with O’Keefe.

But when he saw the video in Los Angeles in July, Breitbart said, he gasped.

Breitbart, who had written a column for The Washington Times, advised O’Keefe to roll out the videos one by one, rather than at once.

“When I saw these videos, I couldn’t help thinking, this is the Abu Ghraib of the Great Society,” said Breitbart, who put the videos on BigGovernment.com. “Everybody that is a conservative news junkie thinks that ACORN is the most important institution for us to uncover to the American public.”

Spokesmodel-In-Chief Struggles To Be Clear

As Pretendident Bah!Rock Whosayin’ YoMama prepares to assault the nation’s airwaves attempting to do the job he was selected to do, sell crappy government programs and policies to the easily duped for corporate clients with a smile, he faces a dilemma amid a firestorm, both of his own making, for precisely the same reason.  You see, Alfred E. Urkelbama is deathly afraid that if the wrong people realize he’s black, he’s toast.  So, like a drunk who thinks he’s invisible trying to navigate multi-lane traffic from the highway divider, The First Brother tries to straddle racial lines as if he actually is only black to those who really want to believe he is.  Otherwise, so as not to offend those who need no other reason to hate him, his family, his parents, policies, laundry, tone of voice, the space he takes up, air he breathes, and everyone who knows, likes, approves of, or tolerates his very existence, he pretends to be post-racial, transcendent, translucent, transparent, neither black nor white, fish nor fowl, colorless, odorless, indistinct, non-threatening, and, for all intents and purposes, epidermally clear.

Unfortunately, not only have the easily duped and hard-to-sell alike realized long ago that he is indeed black, (since he has been forced to let the cat out of the bag occasionally to impress and/or reassure the segment of the dupable population that otherwise would have taken one look at his tissue-thin resume for the real job he was elected, and is now pretending, to do, and avoided him like the plague) everybody else has too, and, are currently either scratching their heads as they stare at his stumblebumbling shenanigans with confused Nipper puppy looks on their faces, or being driven to bouts of resentment, uncontrollable anger, and near-hysterical rage at being played for fools by him and his merry bunch of inept bunglers who make the Keystone Kops and Three Stooges look like Hepburn, Tracy and Poitier doing Shakespeare’s Guesseth Who Cometh To Dinner.

Serving ACORN As A Party Favor

Everybody hates ACORN, the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now.  To those on the right, ACORN almost literally represents everything they hate about the left.  Even Politico is now dropping its pretense of neutrality to gleefully report the organizations current troubles, sporting a “Come and get us, suckers!” headline today.  For PUMAs, ACORN is the thuggish voter intimidation arm of the Obama Primary Express.  For both, ACORN is, in many ways, responsible for at least some of the housing market crash.

I dunno, I’ve never been quite sure ACORN is the Satan spawn-filled abomination it has been made out to be.  Swept up in anti-Obama hysteria like many people upset with the way and how of Obama’s securing of the Democratic nomination for president, I’ve leveled my share of invective at the group’s shenanigans on his behalf.  However, I can’t help but wonder if they, like everyone else who helped Obama get elected and is now under the proverbial bus, weren’t courted, embraced, deployed, used like a tissue, then discarded just as casually as all the rest.  As far as the right wing is concerned, I remember them going after the group in ‘04, and every election year before that, too, in the same way, for the same reasons they are now.

We Be Black, Ha, Ha, Ha!

We be black.  We was black befo’ Obama got elected, and we still black, nah.  Summa y’all don’t like dat, an’ it piss y’all off.  Y’all be trippin’.  Y’all suck.  Chill.

Don’t nobody care what y’all think, no way.   Y’all the ones always be tryin’ to keep a brotha down.  That’s whack.  Fuck dat.  Fuck y’all.  – Black America

I often try to illustrate the not-so-hidden racism rampant in our society by comparing it to the similarly hidden-in-plain-sight sexism we live under, hoping that women will at least consider that many of the “race card” claims being pooh-poohed on a regular basis do actually have some basis in fact.  Unfortunately, far too many women, themselves victimized by insidious institutionalized bigotry, obvious to them at every turn, no matter how small, slight, or insignificant such behavior might be considered by perpetrators of said sexism, simply cannot see the same sort of racial bias right in front of their eyes.  Though they are not only adept at recognizing overt discrimination directed towards them, but quite skilled at ferreting out intended sexism no matter how cleverly couched, even correctly identifying incidences where deliberate bigotry is intentionally dressed in politically correct clothes in order to escape detection, no such leeway is accorded those who empathize with those of us who suffer racially.

I Hate Everything Today

I hate everything today.

Kanye’s  now predictable antics.

Serena’s meltdown.

Creepy couples.

Obama speeches.

Politics.

Lies.

About race.

From anybody.

And polls.

Intolerance.

All kinds.

Against anybody.

About anything.

Freedom Works

TEA Parties

Stories about TEA Parties.

Like this one.

And this one.

This one.

Male And Female Made He Them

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. Genesis 1:27, King James Version

Such a seemingly innocuous passage, known to all, but filled with mystery rarely fully considered.  God created “man” in the singular, male and female.  Are we to read “mankind,” or “humanity” for “man?”  Were “male and female” alternately created, some of each, or all at once, each possessing characteristics of both?  If “male and female” refer to God’s image, why is He referred to as “Him?”

And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.  Genesis 2:7, King James Version

Of course, some will say only men were created in God’s image; “male and female created He them” refers to women being created separately as “lesser than,” and not in His image.  But, is that really the case?  Did the first humans created by God, both in the image of God, possess qualities of both genders, in what we currently call “intersex,” previously known as “hermaphroditism?”  Is that the reason for a second Biblical creation narrative where gender-specific humans were created separately?  Whether true or not, why do some Christians consider such questions regarding sexuality, gender identity, and God, to be blasphemous?

Scratch a Christian about “gender” and the conversation immediately becomes “what the Bible says about sex.”  I literally Googled “gender Christian values” and the very first hit was all about what Corinthians says about sex.  Never mind that “Corinthians” is just a long letter written by Paul to some people he couldn’t visit, or, that Paul was a Christian persecutor who admitted to being the lookout at the first Christian martyrdom, who most likely never knew Jesus in His lifetime, and who only “converted” after being “blinded by the Light” when out walking one day.  He also claimed willingness to do whatever necessary to accomplish his goals, and some say, somehow managed to usurp Jesus’ chosen successor, Peter, as the foundation of the Christian Church.  Just sayin’.

Talking Loud, Saying Nothing

Pretendident Baracus Hubris Maximus, (Hail Caesar!) Spokesmodel-in-Chief, says nothing better than practically anybody living or dead (especially the latter) could ever possibly have potentially dreamed to.  Which is not surprising, since he is most often reading carefully crafted sweet nothings designed to bamboozle the eye patch panties off of even the most resolutely celibate lobbyist among us, without even spreading his or her tightly crossed legs.  These rather ineptly recited, poor man’s Barry White-esque, “ooooh, baby, baby, oooooh,” entreaties against common sense and self interest are no less annoying for their much less than baritone, faux streetwise, preachery delivery and improbable success, than they are for their air of frantic backseat fumbling during an ill-considered mercy date with the president of the A/V Club.

However, I suppose if one is sufficiently lonely, desperate, and/or imaginative, one can project enough pseudo-suavery onto his twerpy waffling to satisfy one’s own fantasies of a personal, God-delivered, just your size, slipper in hand Prince Charming to melt one’s own Candy Pants.  But, for me, no amount of supplemental digital manipulation can adequately whet my libidinous political appetites, so to speak; on the contrary, repeated exposure to his inartful seduction renders my pleasure points dry as the Sahara.

Just Add Scotch

Formulating meaningful health care reform is a lot easier when you’re tanked.  To the proverbial gills.  I know it really helps to be schnockered when it comes to understanding and accepting it.  Then, the plan that the Spawn of Mr. Magoo and Thurston Howell, III, (Baucus, Backus, potato, patootie) is pushing makes perfect sense:

Sen. Max Thurston Magoo, III:  Okay, in a perfect world for me and the Companies What Luv Me, health insurance rates would keep going up.

Drunken Masses: Oooookkaaaaayyyy!

Sen. Max Thurston Magoo, III:  And, you’d have to buy it.

Drunken Masses:  Allreeeety-root toot toot!

Sen. Max Thurston Magoo, III:  We’d fine you up the ass if you “opted out.”

Drunken Masses:  Nooooo, problemo, Duuuuuude!

Sen. Max Thurston Magoo, III:  You’d still have huge deductibles…

Drunken Masses:  Sweeeeeeet!!!

Sen. Max Thurston Magoo, III: AND I WOULD BE KING OF THE WORRRRLLLLLDDDDD!!!!

Drunken Masses:  Go, Maxie!  It’s your birthday!  Parrrrtaaaayyy!  Wooo! Wooot!…

Not Another Speech!!!!

What political rocket scientist developed the theory that gaping political wounds can be healed by repeated laying on of words?  Exactly how many butt-numbing, head swiveling, TelePrompTer-read, yah da-dah da-dah da-dah daaahhh-paced regurgitations of speeches past, comprised of precisely how many empty words, are required to actually produce tangible results?  Is there no limit to the number of excruciatingly boring repetitions of the same soup warmed over pre-empting our favorite television shows we are expected to endure?  How many episodes of Andy Griffith Meets The Brady Bunch On Gilligan’s Island are we supposed to watch instead of the Pretendident Formerly Known As Present?

Are these “experts” really unaware that a given speaker’s effectiveness is diminished in inverse proportion to the number of times a helpless audience is subjected to him?  Have they not yet been informed that entire villages of small countries have recently been known to abandon their homes and possessions in screaming terror when even a hint of the specter of the possibility that he might be considering maybe delivering another preachifying diatribe in prime time in any way enters their consciousness?

We’re All Commies

Never having studied political science, and having been a kid who started first grade in 1960, the only thing I know for sure about Communism and Communists, is that Communism is ba-a-aa-aaaddd, and, it’s their fault I know how to hide under a desk in case of nuclear attack.  In light of the fact that White House “czar,” Van Jones, was forced to resign for admitting to being a dirty Republican-(read: “real American”)hating, foul mouthed, race-baiting Commie, and, that I no longer have access to one of those nifty little bolted, bomb repelling desks, I figured some research might be in order.  What I found is that, with surprisingly little effort, we might all fit the description, one way or another.

Seems ironic that on the American holiday celebrating the proletariat, on the eve of the release of an avowed left-winger’s anti-capitalism film, in an era where the media continues to push the myth that the majority of the country is in favor of a bipartisan, single party-like approach to government, that we would be discussing one man’s “Communism.”  How many Americans really even know what “Communism” is?  According to some sources, feminists are Communists, i.e., “feminazi.”  As far as some folks are concerned, anybody on the left side of the political aisle qualifies as a “Communist,” or, at the very least, a “Socialist,” which is basically a “Communist,” as yet not fully radicalized.  From Wikipedia:

Leading The Follower

Bah!Rock Whoosayin’ YoMama’s pretendidentin’ style is the exact opposite of Follow the Leader.  Rather than setting off on a bold course and expecting everybody to either walk by his side or follow along behind him, our Celebritician in Chief is far more apt to send everybody out in different directions and then try to follow all of them simultaneously.  Then, he and the AxelRocket Science Crew would stand around with one finger of one hand up their butts, and a finger of the other up their nose, wishing they could scratch their heads ar the same time, while looking around lost and confused about how come they’re lost and confused, seriously clueless about where everybody went, and how they ended up right where they started, in the middle of nowhere, all alone.

Like the one kid in every crowd who’s so smart he’s stupid, people delight in inviting ObiWan to play and letting him be “It,” as long as he agrees to close his eyes and count to a million.  Like Charlie Brown and Lucy with the football, Everybody’s 3rd Cousin Clem never seems to tire of finding himself facing a tree at midnight, halfway through the count, hours after everyone else has not only gone home, but finished dinner and homework, gone to bed, and been deep in REM sleep for at least an hour, convinced that one of these days he’s gonna find everybody before daylight.

The Fog Slowly Lifts

Okay, so it’s a lazy pre-holiday Saturday and I’m sitting around drinking beer and surfing the ‘net.  One of these things is a regular habit with me, blogging snockered is not.  But, reading all the hand-wringing, head scratching, “gee, you think maybe we screwed up?” type posts from A (for Van Jones’ Republicans)-listers of the Obotia-sphere compels me to comment.

Hahahahahahahahahaha…hahahahahahahaha…hah!

(Insert raspberry sound FX here)

Oh, man, reading these “experts” bewilderment is deliciously rich.  They just can’t wrap their Ivy League caliber minds around the fact that they spread ‘em wide for Pretendident Pet Rock in spite of the fact that the Bitter Knitters told ‘em, and told ‘em, then ran around ‘em in circles, got in their faces, and told ‘em again.  We wrote it out for them, we rented billboards, we set it to music, we shouted from the rafters, and we spelled it out in sign language, and they steadfastly ignored us because we were just stupid Old Ladies and the Clueless Who Loved Us.

Hahahahahahaha….!!!

Titter, titter, guffaw, snort, chuckle, hardy fuckin’ har har.

David (Smartypants) Sirota is contorting himself into geometric shapes trying to extricate his head from his ass without getting his fingers dirty, and Myiq2xu over at the Confluence called him on it good.

Jumping The Gun

Seems to me, if the Anti-Obots were smart, they would have saved their protests against the ObaMessiah’s planned mass indoctrination of America’s school children into Obacunism until after he actually gave the originally planned Obagandizing speech.  By jumping the gun, they gave him ample time to alter his subliminal messaging into the pure Pablum children are sure to see it as, anyway.

Does anybody really believe that kids listen at forced assemblies?  When did they stop trying to use these events as feel-copping, note and drug exchanges, or hair-pulling, fidget fests and naptimes?  Have things really changed that much since I was in 5th grade?  Did aliens land and invade our classrooms, transforming our children into polite, attention-paying, sponge-like automatons, eager to become politically active and aware?  Even making them write about the best way to help the president is unlikely to produce more than, “I think we should take out the garbage and recycle like Mom says, and try to be better people, blah, blah, blah…”

Nope, the Obaphobes shudda waited.  Left to his own devices, the Obacorator was sure to spew some juicy, “get in their faces”-type tidbits interspersed throughout his head-swiveling, TelePrompTer read drivel delivered by rote of the type we’ve come to know, and love, that they cudda used to make him look deviously silly.  All this advance hubbub accomplished was to serve notice for Obie to be on his best behavior when he takes to You Tube to bore the nation’s school children to tears.

Bipartisan Batshittery’s Backlash

Let’s be honest.  The real reason Sarah Palin, now a private citizen not running for anything, at least, not officially, and some of her arguably batshit crazy galpals, engender so much support throughout the largely female PUMAsphere is not merely because they’re women, but, because the equally batshit ‘Bama ‘Bots of Loony Left Cheetosphere and “liberal” Lame Scream Media insist upon bashing them because they’re women.   Policy differences do not suffice for these rabid misogynists and the women who love them, for some reason, they are pathologically compelled to impugn female politicians’ worthiness as women.

Case in point, many of these “progressives” are in a dither of delirious delight about Vanity Fair’s upcoming Palin hit piece by Levi Johnston.  “Ooooh, he said she’s a lousy parent!”  “According to the unassailable Mr. Johnston, she doesn’t even cook, can you believe that shit?”  Johnston claims he was one of the the only two people screwing in her house, just like we thought!”  “She lied!”

Batshittery In The Obama Haterz Klub On Bachmann Palin Overdrive

Yesterday, I once again tried to warn my sisters and brothers of the PUMAshpere against allowing our mutual dislike of Pretendident Bah!Rock Whosayin’ Yo’Mama to lull us into a false sense of camaraderie and solidarity with political factions whose intense, visceral hatred of every principle most of us hold dear borders on the psychotic.  Again, I tried to point out that political strategists seeking a political toehold in a bleak political landscape would hitch their political wagons to their female politicians and encourage them to use their feminine wiles to seduce segments of society quickly becoming un-infatuated with their blushing virgin presidential bride by bringing tasty housewarming pastries to the neighborhood meet n’ greets.  Of course, bitter knitting haggish victims of prior bad marriages would be easy pickin’s, if they could be persuaded to suspend their natural skepticism of wily snake-like interlopers in favor of common disgust and disillusionment caused by their own experiences with wayward spouses (spice?).

Feminism, Fanaticism, FrootLoopery, and Fantasy

They say there’s a thin line between love and hate, and, that may, or may not, be true.  However, whether or not there is indeed one, I believe that the line between sanity and sheer batshit crazy FrootLoopery is real, and much, much, thinner.

Let’s face it, at first blush, people who are totally Looney Tunes are nearly indistinguishable from normal people, or even from the only mildly deranged.  They pretty much function okay on a day-to-day basis, their madness only revealed through sustained exposure.  In fact, since the difference between lunacy and passion is “notmuch,” a case could be made that most of us with strong opinions cross the line on a semi-regular basis.  It’s only after hearing a given person’s argument over a period of time that one realizes that said person’s passion about something that seems to us to be rather trivial and inconsequential, leads them to become more than a little unhinged on their regular commute home to LaLa Land.

Dueling AstroTurf Express

When the “Only Obots AstroTurf” deniers of the clearly rightwing AstroTurfing of the TEA Parties/Recess Rally/Townhall Ruckus/Hot Air Mess With The KoolAid Krowd’s Heads campaign first started calling me everything but a child of God because I said, “uh…PUMAs?  Ya might not maybe wanna get involved, ya think?…I was pissed the fuck off pretty upset.  Now that the whole sordid mess is in warp speed gear from both sides, and is so out in the open that when the ShameScream Media asks for quotes from either/or both faction’s lamebrain trust that nobody even thinks about pretending to be fauxraged, I’m simply amused.  Ha!

Double ha!

Pretendident Bah!Rock Whosayin’ Yomama’s Our House Now, Baby’s officially sanctioned fake grassroots-laying arm, Obagandizing For America, is taking their Obama’s Witnesses show on the road to counter the GOopers’ RNC sanctioned-on-the-downlow Malkin/Beck/Hannity promoted FreedomWorks “We Got Healthcare, Screw Your Granny” bus tour.  Quoting spokesfolks from the DNC, RNC, FreedomWorks, Health Care For America Now, and Americans For Prosperity, the Washington Post reports:

Crystal Blue Persuasion

Whew!  After months of bare knuckle, knock down, drag out, down and dirty, street-style political virtual cyber fighting, I’m exhausted!  Man, some of you guys are soooo stubborn!  It’s all a peace loving mellow chick like me can do to woman up and hold the fort against all the wee-wee’d up forces against reason and common sense on both sides of the aisle!  Gee whiz, I need a break!  You?

Well, I’m giving us a time-out today, anyway.  I mean, really.  I’m no ultra-conservative religious evangelical, and I’m sure not anybody’s tree hugging hippie pacifist, but I do think we should take a moment now and then to think about all that’s gloriously holy and reverent in Nature’s chaotic beauty.  I’m convinced that if left to Her own devices, She would reclaim Her Earth in an explosion of random awesomeness, the likes of which we cannot even expand our puny minds wide enough to wrap our tiny little pinheads around.  Animals would scamper with abandon amid riotous growths of foliage patterned by Her whim, for purposes of Her design, to proliferate and nourish the next in line of Her inspired food chain.  Storms would rage, oceans would roll, fires would burn in their time, according to Her hand, without interference from humans, with the result being whatever it was to be, sure to be as glorious to behold as it would be terrifying.

My PUMApology Of Sorts

Okay, where to begin?  First of all, I admit to being one of the most vocal opponents to Republican AstroTurfing of TEA Parties, townhalls and Recess Rallies against any and all things Democratic under the guise of being anti- anything Obama.  And, exposes like this Think Progress one that I came across courtesy of Edge of Forever at Not Your Sweetie, only reinforce my findings and strengthen my resolve to rail against the sneaky, fake grassroots public support tactics of the Rigid Right as vehemently and vociferously as I bitch about the same kind of Axelrovian Obaganda shenanigans from the obnoxious KoolAid ‘n’ Hopium Nation.

Be that as it may, there’s something to be said on behalf of those offended PUMAs who take exception to being labeled as merely being unduly manipulated tools of the evil right wing.  Though there is no doubt that many PUMA sites have been overly influenced by deliberate GoOPer infiltration, there’s more to the story than has as yet met the eye.

Look On The Bright Side

Gooooood morrrrnnninnnn,’ PUMAsphere!  Time to rise and shine!  Put on a happy face and get your bright-eyed, bushy tail in gear!   It’s a brand new day!  Okay, so it’s closer to the crack of noon, but, so what?  It’s gotta be daybreak somewhere.  Sheeeesh!  Lighten up, willya?  Good.  Now, take a deep breath.  Ummmm ummmm!   There ya go!  Again…that’s good.  Can’t you feel it?  Smell it?  That new day smell?  Sure you can!  Huh, can’t ya, huh?

I know, I know.  I hear a lot of you grumbling like Fred Flintstone after Wilma told him he couldn’t go bowling…”riggafraggamuckastuckfuckoff, Cinie.”  Yeah, yeah, yeah.  Kwitcherbitchin, will ya?  Things could be much worse, ya know.

An Era Ends

For those of us who came of age during a time when a visit to anyone’s home featured a photographic display of our era’s modern day Kennedy-King-Kennedy Trinity above, or on, a mantle, a piano, or whatever served as a particular household’s substitute shrine, with the news of the passing of Senator Edward Kennedy, also comes the realization that that era has now officially come to an end.

Political achievement, personal accomplishment, and legacy aside, Teddy Kennedy was the last living vestige of our shared American youth, as iconic as Woodstock and Warhol, as American as apple pie, as close to royalty as national identity will allow.  Like Hugh Hefner, Kennedy was a remaining embodiment of our youthful exuberance, excess and dreams, one of the few permitted by fate to grow old as we, ourselves, age.

He Didn’t Have To Die

The news that the Los Angeles Coroner’s Office is soon to release it’s findings labeling the death of Michael Jackson as a homicide is hardly surprising, only confirming what anybody with half a brain could figure out in their sleep from the beginning.  And, while some dismiss any news relative to Jackson as unwelcome sensationalist trivia, I find it all incredibly sad.

That Jackson had become a self-exploited, P.T. Barnum-style, crotch-grabbing caricature of himself more than half of his life ago is undeniable.  Yet, though easy to demonize as a child molesting weirdo, the jury in the court of public opinion is pretty conclusive on the weirdo part, while the jury in the court of law found the legal evidence insufficient to judge him a pedophile.  Be that as it may, for me, there’s more than enough available information to determine that, more than anything else, he was a troubled to the point of tortured man.

Buried in the stories of the coroner’s report is the news that at his death, he was suffering from an enlarged prostate, and his insomniac body was covered in bed sores, said to have been the result of his depression following his trial.   Whether his inability to sleep is evidence of his own feelings of guilt is up to more learned minds than mine to forensically psychoanalyze.  However, the fact that he could neither find peaceful rest, nor rouse himself to function productively, is something I find heart-wrenching.

Triangulating The Chicago Way: Starring Rahm AxelBama

If you ask the wrong questions, you’re sure to get the wrong answers.  Such is the case for pundits questioning Pretendident Barack Obama’s lack of a cohesive, comprehensive, and comprehensible approach to what is quickly degenerating into a bad parody of a failed burlesque review, the Health Care Insurance Reform Follies.

“Is He Weak?” asks WaPo’s Jim Hoagland of Bamboozlebub.  Answer:  Duh.  “What Went Wrong?” on the road to meaningful health care reform, laments Salon’s Thomas Shaller.  Answer: You and your tingly-legged shills and fluffers in the Mainstream and Outer Cheetosphere Media let David ORahmba con you into helping them con America into electing an inexperienced West Wing actor as president, that’s what, Tommy.

I’ve always found it interesting that there were organized Republicans For Obama before there was an official Obama for President.  However, being born into the Chicago Machine of the Illinois Combine, I can really say that such a thing doesn’t really surprise me in the least.

Everybody of color in Chicago is born a Democrat; so are like, 95% of the white people.  In fact, if you count the Republicans, you could say that everybody in Chicago is born Democratic.  Everybody in Chicago is also born knowing that there are ways to get things done; things that have nothing to do with campaign promises, ethics, or who’s in charge.   If you’re willing and able to pay, somebody knows somebody who will be available to play.

Well, At Least He’s Not The AntiChrist

Pretendident and Spokesmodel-In-Chief, Baracus Hubris Maximus (Hail, Caesar!) is a lot of things to a lot of people.  To some, he is a lying, cheating, thieving pseudo-politician so inexperienced and unqualified as to be undeserving of even that name, who lied and cheated to beat the band on his way to stealing the highest office in the land from the rightful inheritress of the Bushegas, the periodically clawed Woman Known to Him as ” Entitled Brush-off Bitch “.  Can I get a “what-what!“?

To others, admittedly a rapidly diminishing number of KoolAid-annointed Hopians, the Celebritician is the ObaMessiah, sent by a Loving God to save the world from prejudice, poverty and guilt.  To these soon-to-be-lonely-and-disillusioned Truly Bamboozled, he can do no wrong, due to his propensity for, and proficiency at, divinely inspired 11th Dimensional Plutonian Chess.

Another significant faction sees him as the Godfather, a mild-mannered, conciliatory community organizer cum college professor cum dedicated public servant by day, and, a ruthless gun-at-knife-fight-wielding check collector by night, determined to serve his constituency the Chicago Way, by any means necessary, often dispensing his minions to lay political horse’s heads in his emenies’ beds during canoli runs.

Happy AstroTurfing ObamaCare Day!

Today is AstroTurfing ObamaCare Day, didja know?  If you’re not a right wing anti-socialized medicine groupie, you probably didn’t.  If you’re just a regular old anti-socialized medicine groupie, you might just think it’s Protest Obama’s Non-Existent Health Care Plan Day, ‘cuz…well, that’s what you’re supposed to think.  Only the clued in are aware that “ObamaCare” is a Gooper dog-whistle.

In case you forgot it was coming up, or your neighborhood Fuck Health Care Reform Group neglected to send you your own personal hndy dandy “Get Out The “No” email in a timely fashion, Fox News printed a helpful announcement to remind you to do your part to further the cause of the side of your choice in The Great Dueling AstroTurf War:

If Democratic lawmakers thought all the furor over President Obama’s health care plan expressed this month at town hall meetings was dying down, they might be in for a surprise Saturday.

That’s when citizens are planning anti-”Obamacare” rallies across the country Saturday in all 435 congressional districts.

And their message is clear: We will not stand for socialized, government-controlled health care.

The same groups who made the “tax tea parties” possible in April are behind this weekend’s movement. American Liberty Alliance, FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity are working with The Sam Adams Alliance, among others, to stage the rallies.

Screwed

The reason that we, as a nation, are as embroiled in this ridiculous debate about “access to affordable health care,” as opposed to “government guaranteed access to comprehensive health care” for all its citizens, is because the politicians, press, pundits and PR firms paid to punk the public are very, very good at what they do.  If they were not so adept at re-framing and complexifying simple issues, otherwise intelligent people, unduly influenced by these influence peddler-backed influence pushers, might use their collective common sense to ask different questions than the ones currently being debated, and demand that our country’s best and brightest make proper use of their good old Yankee ingenuity to come up with some practical solutions.

Why are we even talking about a “public option?”  Why not a “private option” to a guaranteed government single payer health care program?  There’s your competition right there.  Make the insurance industry compete between themselves for the privilege of providing coverage over and above basic, yet comprehensive services, in order to justify their obscene profits.

Just A Loose Coalition

I’ve written about the AstroTurfing activities of the ObamaNation and the TEA Partiers so often that I’ve started having nightmares about angry blindfolded protesters dressed as Native Americans dumping cases of Snapple on the floor of the Houston Astrodome for no other apparent reason than it’s fun to do on television.  And, while the evidence of well-funded propagandists on both sides ginning up the outrage of ordinary citizens for sinister corporo-political purposes is overwhelming, for some reason, nobody wants to cop to the truth that their side is doing it, too.

Those all-too-willing to jump on the Evil AstroTurfing Obot Train to Townhalls, will routinely recoil in horror and indignantly swear up and down that they would never, ever, ever, Heaven and all things Holy forbid, AstroTurf anything themselves, if any but the demonstrably institutionalized were to actually have the temerity to even suggest such a thing.  “Oh no,” they cry, “nobody’s paying or manipulating me!  I’m really well and truly pissed!”  Yet, according to these same people, the only reason Barack Whosayin’ Yomama is Pretendident now is because Soros-backed David Axelrove channeled Jim Jones and turned a large portion of America into a KoolAid addicted, liberal/progressive/socialist Jonestown, solely due to the machinations of paid Nutroots bloggers and their commenters, ACORN, MoveOn and anybody with a union card.  And, their private corporate pseudo news organization, MSNBO.

Protest! That’s How They Getcha!

Everybody’s protesting something about healthcare reform, nowadays.  Everybody’s got some kind of complaint, or another, about the subject, though it seems that each individual is pissed off about something entirely different.  When everybody shows up with their own personal gripe, it’s often difficult for the guys and gals they’re yelling at to hear themselves think, much less see just exactly what it is most folks are upset about.  The fact that there’s nothing in Congress even close to being enacted into law at this point, only adds to the confusion.

When the meetings to hold hearings to make plans to discuss proposals first began, people in favor of a Single Payer program, who already had their own handy, dandy House bill, John Conyers’ Medicare for All, HR 676, all tied up and ready to go, weren’t even given a seat at the negotiators’ table.  Groups that took exception to that raised a ruckus.  And rightly so.  Though they were technically (okay, not so technically) protesters, what they were protesting was being denied the right to advocate their position.  That’s the key.  They weren’t just barging into meetings just to hear themselves yell for the hell of it.  They had demands.

The folks attending townhall meetings for the purpose of protest are, for the most part, not advocating anything.  They’re not always really protesting anything, either, cuz it’s hard to protest what doesn’t exist, effectively.  It’s just so gosh-darned easy to be mad.

Death Panel “Dropped!”

Considering the fact that the current health care debate is being driven by certifiable wackadoodles on both sides, running circles around each other, wild-eyed, and yelling like their hair is on fire and they have bottle rockets up their asses, in a determined, Olympic-caliber competitive effort to see which group of psychopaths can garner more camera time, it’s quite a testament to the equanimity of the majority of Americans that we haven’t all taken to the streets in gleeful abandon, tearing our hair and rending our garments, screaming incomprehensibly to the top of our lungs, surrendering our sense of decorum as well as our mental facilities for the sake of potentially acquiring our 15 minutes of fame via concentrated bouts of mindless ranting.

Perhaps the fact that so many Americans are so woefully under-educated by our long-failing Public School System that our dutiful media can be corporate-ly directed to manipulate the conventional wisdom of the Sheeple by not-so-skillfully employing the most basic tricks of pseudo-journalistic misdirection, with every expectation of success, and little fear of reprisal, has a little sumpin’ sumpin’ ta do wit’ it.  How else to explain the most recent spate of “Death Panel Dropped!” headlines screaming from every orifice of the MainScream Media and Bloviasphere?

Way Too Much Ado About Nothing

http://blog.nrf.com/2009/07/24/nrf-board-max-baucus-and-the-future-of-health-care-reform/

There is no health care plan.  There is currently no single health care bill.

Let me repeat.

There is no health care plan.  There is currently no single health care bill.

So, you may well ask, what’s all the yelling about?  Good question.  Simple answer?  That’s the plan.

The way I understand it, there are are two bills headed out of committee onto the floor of the House, where Congressmen/women will yell at each other politely before they vote one of them down, and pass the other.  The one that makes sense, HR 676, John Conyers’ perennially introduced and perennially rejected  Medicare For All, single payer bill, is going down in flames, straight to the dumpster, do not pass “Go,” be sure to tip your waitress on the way out, Elvis has left the building, g’night Gracie.  That’s the plan.  The other one, HR 3200, the one I call the ‘kitchen sink” bill, that they stuffed everything imaginable that anybody’s constituents might possibly raise hell about being, or not being, in, just in case somebody actually took the time to read it, will pass, then go on to the Senate, where it will be ignored; tossed straight into the dumpster, not pass “Go,” blah, blah, blah, you get the idea.  That’s the plan.  After the “esteemed colleagues” from their respective Bumfucks, in both the Senate and the House, get done calling each other “asshole” as nicely as possible for the cameras, on their respective floors, they will all vote for the grocery list given to them during their recess between sham townhall shootout shoutdowns, by the health care corporations that financed the PR campaigns that persuaded the Sheeple, (deluded into thinking the “esteemed assholes” would work for them) to elect them.  That’s the plan The Man built.

Barack Obama Really Does Want To Kill Your Grandmother

Okay, it’s time to start looking for the truth in some of these outlandish myths regarding health, “you say care, I say insurance,”  reform.  If the kinds of spurious claims being spouted by “concerned” citizens, “real” Americans about a plan that doesn’t yet exist, in true bipartisan democracy-at-work fashion, are allowed to stand uncountered, why, we could find ourselves  looking at a debacle the likes of which we haven’t seen since…well…the last time we saw a health care/insurance reform debacle.  (Sorry, Hillary, I had no choice but to bring that up).

First off, I think it’s safe to say that Baracus Hubris Maximus, (Hail, Ceasar!) as alluded to by Facebook/Twitter-happy former Alaska governor, Sarah Palin, really does want to kill your grandmother.  Let’s face it, when it comes to family, the guy’s got issues.  The man dreams of a father who practically made a career of abandoning women like his mother, and the children he sired with them, in order to travel around the world to find new women to knock up and leave.  Who wouldn’t be irreparably scarred by that?  Add pee-stained shorts clad hugging episodes with his scotch-soaked “Pop” (Grandpa?  Frank Marshall Davis?) on the brink of manhood to the mix, and, it’s no wonder he spends holidays railing about how badly lazy-assed, irresponsible, black boy-fathers suck.

Why Is Single Payer Off The Table?

If you don’t ask the right questions, you’re never going to get a sensible answer.  So, how come it seems nobody’s asking, why is single payer off the table?  Could it be that the game has been rigged from Day One to keep that particular option from ever being seriously considered? Some of us really want to know.

If that is the case, the natural follow-up question is, why?  Why would our elected officials, the media, and everybody else simultaneously stick their fingers in their ears and go “lalalalalalalala” when it comes to the question of “government run health care?”  Could it be something as simple as, if the American public was to be offered a “single payer, Medicare for all, everybody in, nobody out” solution, they would jump on it, forcing the party in control of Congress and the White House, and the other one, too, to implement it, or face the wrath of the voters next time up?  What would that do to their personal bottom lines?

According to a Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) article highlighted by Allegre yesterday, the fact that many pharmaceutical companies share board members with a lot of corporate media might have a little sumpin’ sumpin’ to do with it:

Manufacturing Real Outrage

The current news reporting about the Dueling AstroTufing going on regarding health care reform, or the lack of it, aka, “health insurance reform,” is just as disingenuous as the motivations of the instigators on both sides.  While I don’t think anyone seriously discounts the obvious truth of the notion that “conservative” factions, at the behest of anti-health care reform lobbyists,  ginned up dissent and directed it, and the resultant anger, at primarily Democratic Congresspeople, (persons? critters?) holding town hall meetings during their summer recess, those uncomfortable with the idea of being manipulated by forces of the GOP defiantly claim that their “anger is real.”  Duh.  It is possible to be both, ya know?

Those “innocent” manipulators of the real fauxrage now standing back with their hands in their pockets, hunching their shoulders while trying to whistle and maintain a “who me” expression at the same time, even have a name for the game:  The Recess Plan, complete with Rocking the Townhall memo, confirmed by its author.  I’m pretty sure they don’t mean playing hopscotch in the schoolyard after milk breaks, even though any school-aged child is familiar with the tactics suggested.

AstroTurfing Works

The insidious danger of AstroTurfing as a political/public relations/advertising/marketing/propaganda tool lies in its seductive, yet simplistic beauty.  Once successfully planted, it has the power to take root and behave as if organic.  Artificially created out of whole cloth, if blanketed and aggressively enough tended and cultivated, it becomes sod-like and grows like wildfire.  Were this not true, Barack Obama would not be president today.

There is simply no other justification for Obamania.  Let’s face it, when our currently embattled, yet once almost universally beloved, Pretendident initially threw his hat in the ring, there was no groundswell of support.  If not for the determined efforts of his personal news network, MSNBO, and its tingly-legged staff of on-air “talent,” and partners, like Slate, the Washington Post, and The Root, (launched in January, 2008 by Henry Louis Gates) along with the repossessed former Republicans-turned-”progressive” (“reprogressives?” “fauxgressives?” lying, bought-and-paid-for Axelrovian shills?) Obama cheerleading denizens of the virtual, Sheeple-thought control compound of Sullivan’s HuffCheetoville, Outer Blogistan, Barack Obama would have been the mildly interesting also-ran his resume and accomplishments justify.  Yet, when combined with a few other timely elements of former newsman and then-current political PR hack, David Axelrod’s Machiavellian AstroTurf campaign, this 98th-ranked, inexperienced junior Senator, (D-Illinois Combine) suddenly became the darling of a racially repressed nation supposedly starved to that point for representation by a semi-competent black TelePrompter reader.

Snarkasm

Snarkasm is two steps beyond sarcasm, one giant leap over snark.  It’s the level of incredulous disdain a resourceful writer must create when simple humorous derision just won’t do.  It’s snark plus sarcasm squared on steroids, or, the equivalent of saying, “Did you make this yourself?” when being fed a big, steaming pile of horseshit on an heirloom silver platter.

In politics, when every news story reported elicits a response of “what the fuck?” or “do they really think we’re stupid?” or, the increasingly more likely compound, “what the fuck, do they really think we’re stupid?” if not its inverse, “do they really think we’re stupid?  what the fuck?” the simple act of reading the news for entertainment, or, just for the hell of it, qualifies as snarkasm.

When the CEOs of two big corporations that own shit like money losing MySpace, Fox News, NBC, and the Pretendident make a pact, reported in the news, to get their on-air “talent” to stop fighting each other about how they make the money to pay said “talent” to fight over stuff, publishing it like people are gonna be outraged has gotta be snarkasm.  C’mon, does anybody really believe that knowing that these guys who buy and sell Pretendidents on their lunch break tell their minions what to report is really gonna bother anybody?  Doesn’t everybody know they’ve been buddy-buddy since they founded Hulu?

1-2-3, What’re We Fighting For?

Lately I’ve been wondering just what the PUMA movement stands for.  Are we a coalition of former Hillary Clinton supporters dedicated to holding the Democratic party accountable in an attempt to make them live up to their own principles, or, are we a pissed off group of anti-Obots sworn to oppose any and all things associated with anything and anyone He Who Cheated touches?  If we are the former, count me in; the latter, I’m out.

I am not of the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” school of thought.  Sometimes, the enemy of my enemy is my enemy too, only moreso.  That is certainly the case for me when it comes to Democrats vs. Republicans.  Just because the Democrats pissed me off royally with their thuggish, undemocratic tactics and policies, that doesn’t make me want to run out and embrace thuggish, undemocratic Republican ones.

Tea Party/Recess Plan AstroTurf designed to kill health care and all other forms of liberal/progressive reform is not attractive to me just because Obots promote Alinsky-style, “get in their face” HuffCheeto-esque tactics cut from the same cloth to pretend to promote it.  Both suck, and are only tools to contain and confuse the real issues both sides would prefer that everybody ignore.  Neither side wants to alienate the special interests dedicated to preventing real reform at any and all costs, and thus, would rather engage the voters in charades designed to obfuscate the issues by disingenuously stirring their emotions.   “Pay no attention to all the men and women behind the curtain, and we can keep screwing you to our hearts’ content,” seems to be the motto of both factions.

Dueling AstroTurf III

In an earlier series of posts about Dueling AstroTurfing, Parts I and II,Obaganda, GE/MSNBO/FOX News, etc., among others, I have examined the phenomenon of main- and minor-stream media spin, collusion, distortion and all the other neat little Sheeple Mind Control tricks in their their seemingly bottomless greasy little Felix the Cat goody bags, and their role in using them to advance various corporo-political agendas.  And, while they never take a break, (this is American politics we’re talking here) the information dissemination forces of darkness, evil and insane profit, and their assorted nefarious blogospherian satellites, are at it again with a vengeance.

First up, after a week or so of speculation that Pretendident Baracko Bama deliberately, and disingenuously, amped up the volume on the country’s historic racial discord by shooting his mouth off at his snoozefest of an interminable press conference on health insurance reform about the “stupidity” of the Cambridge police in arresting his “good friend,” Professor Henry Louis (Skip) Gates for being Uppity While Black, in order to deflect attention from the “fact” that his “plan?” was tanking, seems that the Forces of Axelrovian Disinformation have thrown the wolves new meat.  Sarah Palin.  Ah, Sarah.  Remember her?  Well, obviously somebody does, and since the GOP’s Alaskan Answer had, for reasons known only to her, stopped chattering via Twitter and Facebook, somebody (wink, wink) decided to give her hungry fans and foes sumpin’ ta talk about.

Dreams And Nightmares

I’m beginning to believe there hasn’t been a single legitimate charge of racism by any black people or person since Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech.  At least, not according to what I read in the blogosphere.  Of course, some will admit that, “well, sure, racism exists, but I’ve never said or done anything that a black or minority person could find offensive or objectionable,” right before they launch into an offensive, objectionable tirade.

The government’s non-response to the needs of the citizens of New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina compared to Rita?  Not racist.  White police officers shooting and killing black men across the country?  Not racist, either.  And, of course, Officer James Crowley’s treatment of Professor Henry Louis Gates was certainly not racist, even his black brother policemen say so.  Besides, he even gave a black man CPR once.  And, another Boston brother officer, commenting on the arrest by email, who uses the phrase “banana eating jungle monkey” can’t be considered racist, since he didn’t call Professor Gates one, he said he was acting like one.

If the president, who we don’t like anyway, had just kept his mouth shut, none of this would have happened.  What’s he gonna fix with a beer?  And, why didn’t he invite the woman that called it in?  You know, the one that Gates said he hoped would do the same thing in a similar situation, even though her attorney said Gates asked Crowley if he was going to believe a white woman over a black man, remember?

Using the word “nigger” is not racist if you’re a well-liked politician who was only repeating a joke previously told to you verbatim.  Politicians should be able to say “nigger” all they want to, after all, niggers call each other that all the time.

Nothing said or done to or regarding Barack Obama can be construed as racist by definition, since we don’t like him.  And, the Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have forfeited their rights to claim racism in any sense, ever, since they have both been known to overreact on occasion.  Besides, now that we’ve got our black president, we no longer have the right to bitch about anything racial.

The Power Of Her Sex

The subject of female sexuality fascinates me, not just erotically, but, primarily as it relates to the study of it, feminism and our collective quest, as women, for equality.  The lack of control over our bodies is the bedrock of patriarchal domination; so how come we don’t make more of the common sense leap that the cornerstone of liberation is the reclamation of feminine sexual power?

Women all over the PUMAsphere have explored many of the questions relative to women and power, misogyny and sexism, patriarchy and control.  But, all too often, we tend to skip right over the bottom line and start fussing over the line by line entries.  The individual slights, insults, incidences of unspeakable violence and horror, and all other shameful examples of attempts to dominate and control women, though righteously deserving attention, scrutiny, outrage, and outcry, also have the capacity to consume us all to the point of losing sight of the proverbial forest for the trees.  The truth is, global patriarchal domination throughout the span of generations, is merely a thinly veiled attempt to attain social relevance where there genetically is none.

Let’s face it, if women did not allow men the illusion of control to the extent that we are all too often forced to do, the vast majority of men would face the specter of complete irrelevance.  When it comes to sex, the woman chooses the time, the place, and the partner, when it comes to childbearing and rearing, women are perfectly capable of doing so alone, or, in concert with other women in a communal, lioness pride-like, Amazonian matriarchal environment.  To procreate, only small numbers of adult males would be required, and to ensure Darwinian genetic diversity, who could, and should be replaced seasonally, perhaps in a male lion-like, Gladiator-esque fight to the finish for mating rights.  Have such societies ever existed?  Who the hell knows?  As long as archaeology is primarily a Western male construct we’re unlikely to find out, but, my imagination can fully wrap around the idea.

On Obama And Race

I do not like Barack Obama.  I never have. To me, he has always been overrated and unimpressive, much more hype than substance.  I have never given him points for trying to “rise above” race by running away from all things black for the sake of protecting the sensibilities of the all-important whites.  I believe his “hands-off-unless-critical-of-the-black-community-in-order-to-score-points-with-the-white” stance is much more damaging to the self-image of young black people than any possible benefit of the symbolism of electing a “black” man to the highest office in the land can ever possibly offset.  Like Jesse Jackson, I agree that “talking down to black people” is an offense worthy of castration.  If electing a black man president comes with such a high price tag, in my opinion, it’s simply not worth it for the sake of appearances.

That being said, Barack Obama is no more responsible for racism than Hillary Clinton or Sarah Palin are for sexism.  These individuals may have served as unwilling lightning rods that briefly illuminated ugly realities in flashes of blindingly harsh light, but none of them caused the ugly landscapes they inhabit to come to be.  We were a nation awash with racism and sexism before anybody knew any of their names, and we continue to be after their unfair and unflattering treatment has been exposed.

That’s not to say that certain behavior has never exacerbated the situation.  Some have claimed that Hillary Clinton’s tears, and/or “perceived whining” have made bad matters worse, however, as far as I’m concerned, those are merely more blatant examples of the double standard imposed upon women, sometimes even by women.  If she doesn’t cry or complain, she’s a cold heartless bitch who’s so wrapped up in herself she doesn’t care about anyone or anything else, or worse, it’s not sexism; if she does, she’s a manipulative and exploitative faker, because we all know that not-so deep down, and all the way through, she’s really a cold, heartless bitch who’s so wrapped up in herself she doesn’t care about anyone or anything else, and the sexism still didn’t happen.

Wimpitude In/Suckitude Out

I’ve been saying for months that we are not going to get any substantive health care reform in this country any time soon, no matter what the Pretendident, his cronies in the press, Congress, or anybody else says he’s working really, really, no, really super hard to try to do.  He, and they, are damned liars, as a quick perusal of the headlines will easily show.  “Dems Alone Can’t Deliver Obama Health Care Win” screams the AP’s.  “Why the fuck not?” scream I.  He’s got solid majorities in both Houses, and, the most powerful, effective Speaker of the House in history running point and gleefully playing Wicked Attack Witch From the West for him, according to Politico.  Her ostrich-sized eggs more than make up for Senate Majority Leader Harry (Casper Milquetoast) Reid’s lack of anything comparable to them, so, why can’t the most popular, articulate, persuasive black Pretendident of Any Color schmooze the Sheeple and their representatives into a real Democratic health care plan, instead of bending over and grabbing his ankles to accept whatever the overly influential Republicans want to shove?

There are a couple of glaringly obvious reasons why.  One, he’s lying through his teeth.  Waffles Obama does not want real health care reform.  If he did, he wouldn’t be talking health insurance reform.  You can’t “reform” the problem.  That’s like “reforming” a tumor.  He wants digitized medical records.  Period.  Everything else is smoke.   The reasons for this are myriad, but simple.  Digital medical records by 2014 have been the government’s goal for years, and, those companies and corporations desperate to implement it, paid dearly for him to deliver for them, and others don’t want to be left behind.  I’ve speculated many times about the Republican support Obama has always enjoyed, maybe it’s partially because the use, and misuse of said records represents a veritable gold mine for all interested parties, including multiple government agencies.  And, maybe that’s why he seems so willing to cave.  That’s probably it in a nutshell.

In Search Of Your Loch Ness Monster

Okay.  There’s no delicate way to broach this particular subject, so, I guess I’ll just jump right in, so to speak.  Forgive me in advance if your sensibilities are offended by frank talk of intimate subjects, I’ll try my best to be gentle with you.  Ladies, Sisters, Girlfriends, you know who you are and how you like to be addressed; but, did you know that there’s an area of your body so woefully under-explored, both scientifically and recreationally, that there’s still no medical consensus as to whether or not the damned thing actually exists?

Yup, we’re talking G-spot, here.

They have got to be kidding me.

How can it be that 60 years after a German doctor, Ernst Grafenberg,  identified the source of vaginal orgasm and ejaculation, that the medical community can’t agree upon the location, or even the existence, of a pleasure point every Lesbian can find with her eyes closed and her hands tied behind her back?  Well, at least one hand, but, that’s not the point.  The point is, why is the study of the mechanics of women’s sexual pleasure so lacking?

What brought the subject to my attention was a Salon post I ran across from a link on BuzzTracker yesterday, commenting on a segment of The View from last year, according to IMDB with plastic surgeons Drs. Linda Li and David Matlock (Dr. 90210.)  Why somebody posted a link yesterday to an article about a year old segment is a puzzlement, but, since I’m not a regular View watcher, it was the first I had heard of it.  The ABC video of the piece is dated 7/24/09, so either it was a rerun, or at least two other sites haven’t updated their calenders, and Elizabeth Hasselbeck is going to have to count her pregnancy in elephant months, but, who cares?  Again, not the point:

Welcome To The Twi-White Zone

Imagine, if you will, you’re a white person, recently promoted to a once-in-a-lifetime dream job, and transferred to a new, unfamiliar town.  Once settling into your luxurious corporate digs, suppose you decide to take a stroll through town to kinda get the lay of the land, so to speak.  As you leave the downtown area, you soon find yourself in a very pleasant, quiet neighborhood full of tree-lined streets and cul-de-sacs, well-maintained, stately upper middle class homes and trendy late-model cars.  As you enjoy the beauty and serenity of your surroundings, say you begin to notice that passing cars often slow down imperceptibly as you walk by, that blinds and curtains behind large picture and bay windows often shift, and wooden doors seem to crack a notch in your wake.

Would it bother you when you finally noticed that passing pedestrians, all of whom smiled and or nodded in greeting, even when they didn’t verbally address you with a friendly “hi,” or wave at you from their now up to speed automobiles, were black?  When you realized that even the service people you’d encountered since arriving in town, like the guy who drove you from the airport, and the person who carried your luggage to the car, and the doorman who greeted you at your new condo, were all black, too, would you begin to question your own perceptions and prejudices?

What if, feeling more than a bit conspicuous, you passed an incongruously located upscale Mom-and-Pop convenience store, tucked away in a small shady enclave of boutique small businesses?  Would it unnerve you when the proprietor smiled in greeting and said you must be the new manager/executive officer/director at the big plant/company/corporate headquarters downtown, and welcomed you by name as he/she tracked you through the store?  Would you be relieved, or a little creeped out by that sort of intimate greeting from a stranger and his patrons, all of whom are now offering welcomes and tidbits of personal information they know about you and people you know in common?

The Big Sleep

I was all set to deliver another snark-filled response to last night’s Really Big, Important Health Care Speech by the Greatest Black Pretendident Ev-ah this morning, but, as they say, my best laid plans aft aglae’d.  I mean, I was sitting here at the computer, sober, fingers limber, ready to go, so I started the You Tube video of the 55 minute event, and promptly fell asleep.  Twice.  Once it dawned on me that my body and subconscious mind were trying desperately to tell me something, I decided to read the transcript.  And, it happened again.

Not only is his voice and manner soporific, how many times must I read, or listen to, the man say the same damned things over, and over, as if sheer repetition imbues empty, platitudinous verbiage dubiously linked with an overabundance of incomprehensible jabberwocky, with reason, wisdom, and/or plain old Yankee common-fucking sense?  My God, man, say something, or stop talking!

But, nooooooo!  “If you’ve got a plan, and you like your plan, you can keep it!”  C’mon.  Are people really burning up the White House phone lines pleading with the government not to take their good, groovy health care plan away?  “Health insurance reform…”  When did that happen?  What happened to heath care reform?  I guess when your spinmeisters were raised on Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, that’s what happens when you send a half-truth through the spin cycle; you get another half-truth just like it, only different.  How is making everybody buy insurance “reforming” the insurance industry?  Unless he means “re-forming,” as in, deconstructing and rebuilding in their favor, I must be missing something.

Have Gun, Will Travel

For the life of me, I can’t figure out why a Democratic president with a Democratic Congress is having so much trouble getting anything democratic done.  And, as the Democrat’s Spokesmodel-in-Chief prepares to take to the airwaves to once again attempt to explain to the nation that bought into his “hope and change” bullshit and provided the illusion of democratic process in his election, why his inability to do more than give all their money away to the Wall Street Mafia that was actually responsible for putting him in office, is anybody’s fault but his own, yet another major fail looms on the horizon.

We all know that the Pretendident’s hands-off approach to his non-plan for not significantly reforming the health care industry is headed straight for the crapper, thanks, in no small part, to the foot-dragging GOP.  The guy who doesn’t seem to have the stones to commit to his once-stated preference for single payer, opting instead to speechify to the public and Congress on behalf of doing something to nullify the naysayers who want nothing done, (or, something like that, I really can’t tell what he believes his function is in not getting anything accomplished) is losing support for his foot-stomping, “give me any old kind paper plan I can sell to the clueless as long as it makes me look good, waaaaaahhhhhhh” approach to pretending to reform the country’s health care delivery system by leaps and bounds.  The insured, and uninsured alike, are beginning to rip their Hopium-laced KoolAid IV drips from their arms with an ever-increasing vengeance.  When callers to Al Sharpton’s radio show start breaking ranks, you know the guy who was put in office by the right-wing voters who deferred to the image-starved, and thus, easily placated, black voters, and stayed home, is in big, big trouble.  And, the advice Sharpton gave his callers holds true for all the slowly awakening Obots, black, white and every color in between; kwitcherbitchin’, y’all voted for him, and he ain’t changed.  Neither has Al, for that matter.

If She Ran…

Okay, let’s tackle this Sarah Palin support question that’s been bugging me for days now, head on.  I have to admit, I find the rabid “all women must be on board the Palin train” position to be unsettling.  It insults and upsets me as a woman, as if, unless I agree with it, my opinions as a woman are less valuable than that of other women who do.  What about those of us who abhor sexism/misogyny in all forms against any woman, but refuse to support women as candidates whose positions we can’t accept?  Can’t we be in the club, too?

To be clear, as far as I’m concerned, when women/feminists, left and right, agree to support any and all women candidates for political office, from Palin to Pelosi, equally and unequivocally, I will gladly jump aboard the bandwagon.  Unless, and until, that happens however, I will continue to reject the pro-Palin propaganda.

My feelings are that, based on the things she has said she stands for, she’ll never get my vote.  Until she specifically states that she would not undermine women’s reproductive rights, advocates for handgun control, supports Affirmative Action, and LGBT equality, she will continue to be unattractive as a potential candidate for any office to me.  But, that’s my position.  However, I am interested in how you feel.  In light of that, I offer two very non-scientific polls, the first of which concerns Sarah Palin for President.  Please vote, and, if you are so inclined, leave a comment explaining why, or, why not.  No holds barred, let ‘er rip.

Yippeee!! The Pretendident’s Going On TV Some More!

Obama's EarPrompTer?

Oh, goody!  The Obamessiah and his minions, or, Barry and the Obacolytes, as I like to call them, have decided, in their infinite wisdom, that the way to combat falling poll numbers and the Screamin’ Blue (Dog) Meanies opposed to his sweeping ambiguous health care suggestion plan, is to take his case to the people via yet more interminable TelePrompTer-read sermons speeches in public, on television and You Tube, on Facebook, MySpace, and Obamaweb, by e-mail, and yes, even Twitter!  Oh, joy!  Is your breath bated?  Are your loins girded?  Legs a-tingle?  I know mine are…not.

Frankly, as far as I’m concerned, a day without Barack is like a day without having cod liver oil-laced grapefruit juice squirted into my eyeball socket with a syringe.   I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, but, something about the stage-managed, over-produced “events” featuring the head-swiveling, boy-stood-on-the-burning-deck, frat boy written, less-than-inspiring, recitation of whiny-assed, often contradictory platitudes leaves me cold.  Far too often, I find myself half-listening, staring at the mole on the side of his nose with a scowl on my face and my mind wandering to contemplation of more pleasant activities like, listening to chalk, fingernails, or Styrofoam  screech, or breaking in new 6-inch, 2 sizes too small platform stiletto boots with severely pointed steel reinforced toes.  The idea of being the lone adult human passenger on a sold out flight to Antarctica with barking puppies, crying babies, novice pre-school aged bagpipe and didgeridoo players, and cats in heat occupying alternate remaining seats provides a more enjoyable diversionary daydream.

Is This “The Guy?”

For months now, (since at least September of last year) I’ve been making the case that if there’s indeed a mastermind behind a scheme to get Barack Obama into the Oval Office in order to advance a corporate, Wall Street-friendly agenda, it’s none of the usual suspects whose names are always thrown into the mix whenever these things are discussed, like Henry Paulson, but this guy, JP Morgan Chase CEO, Jamie Dimon.  A profile of the bankster in today’s New York Times, while inaccurate on a few points, imo, does nothing to disabuse anyone of conviction resultant from such speculation.  In fact, the piece, in detailing the New York Federal Reserve Board of Directors‘ member, who was selected along with Pepsico’s Indra Nooyi, another Obama campaign economic advisor, and his cozy relationship with the White House, especially with Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, could be seen as express validation of such a claim.

Thanks primarily to Matt Taibbi and his recent Rolling Stone article about Goldman Sachs, The Great American Bubble Machine, especially in light of the company’s latest profit report, Hank Paulson’s name has been prominent in the news.  Everybody from Paul Krugman to Seeking Alpha to Congress has weighed in on the meaning, effect, genesis and reality of said profits in light of their new status as a bank holding company, the company’s bailout, and their relationship of the architect of the TARP program that provided it, Paulson.

However, the fact that JP Morgan has also benefited every step of the bailout/extortion way is inescapable, while the reality of Jamie Dimon’s relationship with Obama usually flies under the radar.  As does the fact that where Obama, Dimon and Paulson are concerned, all roads lead to Chicago.

We all know that Paulson is from Barrington, Illinois and served as Goldman’s Midwestern Investment Division chief in Chicago before becoming the company’s CEO.  A Republican, who once served as an intern to Richard Nixon, Paulson has nonetheless been accused by fellow Chicagoan, Robert Novak and Nina Easton of being a Republican in Name Only (RINO) whose appointments were to serve as groundwork for his wife’s college friend, Hillary Clinton’s cabinet, despite the fact that Paulson’s political donations were primarily in support of his party.   However, if Paulson was trying to pave the way for anybody, it was Barack Obama, not Hillary Clinton.

Post-Racial, My Ass

In a speech akin to that of a black slave driver addressing a congregation of his subjects about the injustice of their enslavement at a prayer meeting, while entreating them to overcome the inequities they face by simply being better slaves, Pretendident Barack Obama adopted his now-familiar Reverend Brother Daddy persona and verbally bitch-slapped his most loyal supporters for not rising above the similar backgrounds they share with him, as he did.  Presenting the keynote speech at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s centennial anniversary dinner, and, once again reducing the major challenges confronting the African American community to bad parenting,  he yet again exhorted black people to turn off their XBoxes and make their children do their homework, as if that alone will make their schools, circumstances, and lives better.

While admitting to systemic inequities, he nonetheless falsely equated the right-wing meme of “personal responsibility” with the justification for the abdication of government obligation to ensure equal access and opportunity to a segment of society to whom those basic rights have long been, and continue to be, denied.  This is all too familiar territory for the man, who, like many of the children of his mythical, stereotypical Ray-Ray and Pookie, (who he exhorts to get up off the couch and stop watching Sports Center and feeding their kids Popeye’s fried chicken for breakfast) was raised in a “non-nuclear” family most of his life.  However, instead of stressing that the family dynamic is far less important than the opportunities to provide that caregivers have to offer their charges, he insists upon promoting the “dysfunctional” black family as the root cause of the majority of black people’s ills.  Let’s face it, he was primarily raised by grandparents, just like many African American, and other “disadvantaged” children “abandoned” by their fathers, yet, unlike those inner-city and impoverished youngsters, his family was able to give him access to world travel and private  school education, options unavailable to the families he now so fondly assails.  Additionally, though when living in two-parent households, the parents in question were never both his, he, for some inexplicable reason, continues to recite the fairy tale that two-parent families are the only, or best path to black success.

She Believes She Can Fly

Fifteen year old Kimberly Anyadike took off from Compton Woodley Airport in a single engine Cessna on June 29, 2009, and landed there July 11, becoming the youngest African American female to fly cross country solo.  Her adult safety pilot was 87 year old Levi Thornhill, a Tuskegee Airmen pilot during World War II, a fact which Kimberly says made the accomplishment all the more special:

Anyadike said she didn’t want to make the trip to set a record or become some kind of celebrity. “I wanted to inspire other kids to really believe in themselves,” she said. She also wanted to honor the Tuskegee Airmen, the U.S. Army Air Corps’ all-black combat unit who served during World War II.

“They left such a great legacy. I had big shoes to fill,” she said. “All they wanted to do was to be patriots for this country. They were told no, that they were stupid, that they didn’t have cognitive development to fly planes. They didn’t listen. They just did what they wanted to do.”

So did Kimberly.  The courageous young woman who learned to fly planes and helicopters as a student in the Compton-based Tomorrow’s Aeronautical Museum after school program for “disadvantaged” and “at-risk” youth, told the museum’s founder, Robin Petgrave of her cross-country dream not long after enrolling in the program.  Warned by Petgrave that such an undertaking could be daunting, Anyadike reportedly replied, “Put it on.  I got big shoulders.”

Indeed she does.  During her record-breaking trip, Kimberly met about 50 of the legendary Tuskegee Airmen and had them autograph the museum-owned Cessna so that they could “fly with us forever.”  Before embarking on her solo journey, Kimberly explained her motives:

“I’m extremely excited because I’ll be paying tribute to the great Tuskegee Airmen,” said Anyadike, an Inglewood resident. “They were told that they didn’t have the cognitive development to be able to fly a plane, and they proved everyone wrong. They didn’t lose a single bomber in battle.”

Why Not Sotomayor?

Ever heard the expression, “stop the world I want to get off?”  Suffice it to say that if the world were ever to stop for me, I wouldn’t be disembarking, I’d be tossing looney toon butt wiping twits left and right into the stratosphere with gleeful abandon.  Maybe then, the rest of us could return to some degree of something that in some way at least resembles something approaching normalcy and reason.

Over at The Widdershins, in  the comment section of the post, “Hillary Clinton: Ready To lead On Day One” which examined the differences and similarities between the media treatment of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin, by “Be Mindful,” commenter “La-t-da” was moved to ask this question near the middle of the thread:

Where is all the Sarah rah rah fest coming from? Aren’t there some liberal women out there that we can be rah rahing about?

I responded that yes, there is an ostensibly liberal woman we could be rah rahing about: Sonia Sotomayor, which touched off a pretty spirited discussion.  I pointed out that just the day before, the Associated Press had run an article, which was reprinted many places, including Salon, noting that women’s groups were, by and large, taking a “wait and see” approach to giving full support to the newest Supreme Court nominee.  Yet, throughout the PUMAsphere, and elsewhere, support has been given much more freely to the soon-to-be-former governor of Alaska, sometimes becoming full-throated, energetic, and downright passionate.  Christianity Today pointed out that when David Letterman made his insulting “slutty flight attendant with the daughter that should be knocked up during a baseball game” jokes, women’s groups rushed to her defense.  The groups named in the article range from the conservative “anti-feminist” Concerned Women for America, to that bastion of feminism, the National Organization For Women, though they seem to be unaware of the vigorous campaign launched by PUMA Pac, participated in by women all over the PUMAsphere and GretaWire.  Those combined efforts forced the unrepentant talk show host to issue a series of “apologies.”

AstroTurfing AntiFeminism: The Myth Of Feminist Self-Destruction

One need only assess the sorry state of modern feminism today to realize the movement is in pretty total disarray.  From the schism between so-called second and third wavers exemplified by the shenanigans associated with the latest National Organization for Women’s election, to the current elevation of Sarah Palin, and to an extent, Michelle Obama, to the status of poster girl for modern womanhood, to the suggestion that Barack Obama somehow exemplifies modern feminism, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out something is very, very wrong with this picture.  The question is, what?

Let me once again be very clear, I have never considered myself to be a feminist.  I have never taken a Women’s Studies course, or really paid much attention to the movement at all.   At least, not until recently.  Lately though, I’ve been doing my own brand of research in an attempt to try to get a handle on just what the heck is going on, especially as it relates to the PUMAsphere.  Because as things stand now, whatever’s happening is something I don’t quite like.

So, in my meager efforts to scratch the surface of the vast subject that is feminism, imagine my surprise to find that there is an equal and opposite counter-movement called “anti-feminism.”  Now, I was aware that there have always been factions opposed to the concept of gender equality on a variety of bases, but the idea that their efforts rose to the level of  separate, and equal,  movement was a bit disconcerting.  I suppose it would be akin to finding out that their was an acknowledged, coordinated, and accepted anti-Civil Rights, white supremacist movement that openly advocated the defeat of all minority gains.  I imagine if such a coalition exists, it is relatively underground, if not in their efforts, at least in their advertising.

The End Of Men?

Researchers, specifically, sperm biologists, (who knew there was such a field?) claim that eliminating human males from the reproductive process is not their goal.  In fact, quite the opposite is the case.  In attempting to create viable human sperm outside the testicles from embryonic stem cells, they insist they’re trying to help infertile men produce children who are genetically their own.  However, without letting one’s imagination run too wild, it’s possible to envision a new Amazonian master race capable of reproduction without the assistance of men.  Especially if some intrepid scientist were to resume research into developing sperm from XX chromosomes, previous attempts at which were unsuccessful, and prevail.  Of course, attempting such a thing would be unethical, probably immoral, and currently illegal.

However, British scientists are claiming success at creating quasi-sperm from stem cells in spite of the current restrictions in place:

A team of British scientists claimed Wednesday to have created human sperm using embryonic stem cells, in a medical first that they say will lead to a better understanding of fertility.

Researchers led by Professor Karim Nayernia at Newcastle University and the NorthEast England Stem Cell Institute (NESCI) developed a new technique that allows the creation of human sperm in the laboratory.

They stressed that the sperm, developed from stem cells with XY chromosomes (male), would not be used for fertility treatment, as this is prohibited by law and in any case is not their main interest.

“This is an important development as it will allow researchers to study in detail how sperm forms and lead to a better understanding of infertility in men — why it happens and what is causing it,” said Nayernia.

“This understanding could help us develop new ways to help couples suffering infertility so they can have a child which is genetically their own.”

Dang That Sarah To Heck!

So, Sarah Palin managed to knock weeklong news reports about Michael Jackson’s death, reminiscent of Saturday Night Live’s running gag about Generalissimo Franco, and the usual compelling Obamessiah stories ranging from his upcoming slap-in-the-face trip to Africa to his predilection for proper name pronunciation, right off the front pages on what’s usually a slow news dump day by announcing her resignation as Alaska’s governor, out of the clear blue.  And, to tell you the truth, it pissed me off.

After spending most of yesterday researching and composing what I consider to be a rather interesting, and certainly lengthy, post, I finally managed to publish the damned thing, only to find myself scooped by Palin’s news.  What’s up with that, Sarah P.?

Dang that woman!

I mean, really!  And, to make bad matters worse, it forces me to admit something sure to put me at odds with my fellow PUMAs.  I really don’t care.

Now, I know that to march in lockstep with my anti-Obite sisters and brothers, I should be up in arms over this latest development, but I’m not.  Frankly, I don’t even understand the overabundance of SarahLove I see daily in the PUMAsphere.  She’s okay and all, and, I certainly respect her pluck in the face of the manufactured adversity she’s had to endure since Day One from the right and left, whether such controversies and attacks were personal or political in nature, but…well, that’s about it.  I’m not all emotionally invested like some of my colleagues seem to be about it, though.

Frankly, I find the “support Palin because she’s a woman” stance so many advocate so passionately to be puzzling, and, to tell you the truth, a little hypocritical.  The same factions who so adamantly denounced African American support for Obama based solely on skin color, seem all too willing to devote themselves to Palin simply on the basis of gender.  I didn’t buy that crap when it was pushed on me about “voting for the brother,” and I won’t buy it on feminist grounds regarding Palin.  Seems to me there’s a difference between a willingness to defend any woman against sexist attacks and misogyny, and full-fledged political support for someone whose policies you can’t endorse.

Did Feminism Kill Macho?

On June 20, the National Organization for Women elected a new board in what has been characterized in some circles as something of a coup d’etat.   Calling it a coup is something of a mischaracterization however, since the old board was out anyway, with the former president, Kim Gandy, stepping down due to term limits.  Yet, the victors were successful in labeling their opponents as “more of the same” and continuation of the status quo, due to Gandy’s support for the slate, and endorsement of its candidate for president, Latifa Lyles, who served under Gandy as Membership VP.  The incoming slate, headed by Terry O’Neill, former VP of membership before said office became something of a black woman’s glass ceiling, has promised to take the floundering organization in a new direction by returning it to its roots.  Stay with me, now, it gets better.

On June 22, Foreign Policy posted an article entitled, The Death of Macho, discussed this morning on CNN’s AMfix, which posits that the testosterone-fueled patriarchy has so screwed the world, especially economically, that they have basically engineered their own demise as a power structure. Which means women are now poised to take the lead by stepping into the void and dutifully, and competently, and, as should be expected, clean up the boyz’ mess, thereby saving the world while effectively emasculating John Wayne.  Or, something like that.  Of course, the article’s author, Reihan Salam, doesn’t credit feminism for the demise of machismo, he blames the recession, which he terms a “he-cession,” due to its devastating effects on male employment opportunities.

However, though unspoken, one cannot escape the specter of the effects of feminism in all this, and, Salam does not, even though, he truly doesn’t seem to recognize his error:

The era of male dominance is coming to an end.

Seriously.

For years, the world has been witnessing a quiet but monumental shift of power from men to women. Today, the Great Recession has turned what was an evolutionary shift into a revolutionary one. The consequence will be not only a mortal blow to the macho men’s club called finance capitalism that got the world into the current economic catastrophe; it will be a collective crisis for millions and millions of working men around the globe.

Wingnut Or Moonbat?

“I know what you are, but what am I?”

That’s how I felt after noticing that my blog had been linked by another blog, Elle Est Belle La Siene La Siene Elle Est Belle, which means….fuck if I know, I’m one of those foreign language illiterates Pretendident Baracus Whosayin’ Yomama looks down his nose at.  Anyway, the title of the post in question is, Wingnut With Moonbat Tendencies: The Political Blogger’s Bait And Switch.  Near as I can figure, the “not preeminent blogger,” (her words, at least I assume she’s a “her,” I may not speak French, but I can figure out that much from the name of the blog) thinks I’m a “wingnut” who can’t decide what I really want to be when I grow up.  And while that may, or may not be true, (I haven’t decided what I want to be when, and if, I do ever have to grow up) the example she uses to laugh at me is funnier than her amusement at my expense.  At least, I think it is.

Seems Elle La Belle thinks my post Sotomayor Gay?  Who Cares? is Limbaugh-esque in title, but Obot progressive in text.  Or, something like that.  Now, I can see where that might be funny, if the author of the critical post had a clue about whatever the hell she’s talking about, but in this case, it’s just, well…okay, it’s funny, albeit for drastically different reasons than those she supposes to be true.  Whatever.  Here’s her “logic:”

All because über-ultra-conservative wingnuts (I prefer the unadulterated wingnut to the hyphenated form. O, get up off the floor and be quiet) — all because they have me stuttering when I write, laughing when I read.

They do things like write a fairly cogent post about, say, Sonia Sotomayor — in the guise of — oh, I don’t know — a post about Obama’s inability to speak without use of the teleprompter. Follow along now, it makes perverted sense! Then The Dickwad — oops, I mean The Wingnut — directs traffic in the comment section, where perversion goes to be brought to fruition. Now… my example is of a Two-Stepper but to really make nice with The Evolutionary Bilge, you should go in search of a nicely done Three(or Four)-Stepper, usually constructed with an intermediary entry that serves to narrow the topic focus. In this instance, I could see a post about The Supreme Court reversing one of Sotomayor’s rulings… and wouldn’t it be absolutely Faustian were that to turn out to be something about discrimination “against whites”? Mwa-ha-ha!

And The Wheels On The Bus Go…

So, ya wanna talk noncommittal commitment?  When it comes to not quite making empty promises but sounding like you might be about to, nobody pulls the wool over the eyes of the Sheeple in a soundbite like Pretendident Wishy Washy Waffler.  I mean, I believe in giving credit where credit is due, so, I have no problem unequivocally declaring Baracko Bama, King of Jabberwockilicious Doublespeak.  Take, for example, this doozy of an example of talking loud and saying nothing.  At yesterday’s stage-managed Kiss Up to the Pissed Off Gay Community Meeting on the Downlow, which may, or may not have been exclusively attended by real LGBT activists, since an unspecified number of them were flown in from Chicago, and they were all ushered in and out through the back door, the Spokemodel-In-Chief had this to say:

“I suspect that by the time this administration is over, I think you guys will have pretty good feelings about the Obama administration,” the president said.

Oh, be still my heart.  He “suspects” his administration might could maybe perhaps do some unspecified thing that he thinks could probably make us guys less pissed to the point of pretty goodness.  Oh, joy.  And, since I’m sure you guys want proof, beyond the fact that the camera loving Homo Helper, (toot do do dooooo!) protector, defender and promoter of gay rights, did not appear with said protectees on TV, that he actually papered the room with seat-fillers, and snuck the 300 people in attendance in and out so he could lie to them in private, here’s two snippets, one from the Chicago Sun-Times article linked to above…

President Obama and first lady Michelle welcomed gay activists to the White House on Monday, with a contingent from Chicago flying in to mark LGBT pride month.

Invited guests from Chicago (not spouses or partners who came with) included Debra Shore of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago, Michael Bauer, Fred Eychaner, Vernita Gray, Mary Morten, Miriam Redleaf, Catherine Renna, Laura Ricketts and Jane Saks.

Sex, Sex, Sex

Americans are preoccupied with sex.  And not in a good way.  We don’t celebrate our sexuality, more often we question it, pretend to try to hide it, exploit it, deny it, use it as a weapon, or, blame it on somebody else.  We are never horny, “somebody else” holds the power to unleash our passions, not us.  It’s never our fault we’re turned on by whatever turns us on; if it wasn’t for that guy, girl, melody, scent, whatever, hell, we’d never get sexually excited at all.  So, how come every commercial, every movie, every song, every news story, somehow, no matter what it claims to be about, comes back to sex?  And, just how often are we skillfully manipulated against our interests because of our collective immaturity?

The news stories about Michael Jackson’s passing invariably mention child molestation.  Why?  The man has 3 children, even if they’re the products of artificial insemination, he had to indulge in some sort of sexual activity to achieve fatherhood, even if they attached a milking machine to his member.  He was acquitted of all molestation charges brought against him that weren’t settled, not all of which were really the result of outrage and anger on behalf of the aggrieved parents, but by the determination of the state to convince those parents to file after Michael claimed to see no problem with allowing kids to share his bed.  Where are all the shotgun-wielding dads?  The screaming, hysterical moms frantically dialing 9-1-1?  Who would want to protect the image of a pervert who was actually molesting their kid?  But no, for some reason, we’re more comfortable with the image of him as a pedophile than of a lonely, confused guy with a porn addiction, something that came out (so to speak) at trial.  Even the parents testifying against him said they took their kids back to the ranch after they became suspicious, and the guy who claimed to witness abuse didn’t freak out and so much as yell at him to stop.  Can you really imagine such a thing?  The only way it makes sense is if he really was a rather androgynous, sexually confused weirdo who saw nothing wrong with sleeping with kids as long as you don’t touch them.  Otherwise, our attitude about his behavior says much more about us than it does about him.  After all, he was a song and dance man who kids, and their parents, still love.  And, where there’s smoke, there’s not always fire.  Sometimes all you find is a prop guy with dry ice and a fan.

What’s Good For The Gander

Now, I don’t know a lot about local Detroit politics, and, what I know about Chicago and Illinois politics is based upon voluminous reading and distant memory.  But, that being said, in my very humble opinion, if Rod Blagojevich had to resign or be impeached because he had been arrested, but not indicted until much later, Monica Conyers certainly must go, too.  Fair is fair.  However, according to the Detroit Free Press, just because  United States Congressman John’s wife has plead guilty of accepting a bribe, she doesn’t have to resign her seat as President Pro Tem of the City Council unless she feels like it.  And, based on what little I know about the feisty Mrs. Conyers, she’s probably not likely to feel like it any time soon.

Seems the woman who collaborated with her husband to circumvent Michigan’s very practical rules against voting for people who aren’t on the ballot, by promoting a “Vote Uncommitted For Obama” campaign during last year’s Democratic primaries, didn’t consult her husband at all when she played “Let’s Make A Deal” with somebody from Synagro Technologies two times in front of McDonald’s and a rec center in exchange for her vote.  Though she has admitted to the charges, the powers that be, such as they are, in Detroit are not calling for her head en masse, like their Illinois state-level counterparts did for Cabbage Patch Weeble Blagojevich’s full, supple scalp.  In fact, one of the only people who seem to be screaming for her to resign is the former President Pro Tem, then, interim Mayor, (after Kwame Kilpatrick got busted) and now, current Council President, Ken Cockrel, Jr., and, that’s just because he’s still mad she called him “Shrek” on the Council floor last year.  Monica is probably still ticked about the whole thing too, since she got cussed out by an 8th grader on TV for doing it.  Anyway, Cockrel’s stepmother, Councilwoman Sheila, and Councilman Kwame Kenyatta are also lined up to put a foot up Conyers’ behind and send her flying to the curb and under the bus, as the entire Illinois legislature did to Blago, but, former Pistons’ guard, Mayor Dave Bing, is trying to walk back his earlier condemnation based on the fact that the Divine Ms. M got around being indicted by pleading guilty.  Besides, he’s busy.  No, I’m not making this up:

Michael

The news of Michael Jackson’s death has made me sadder than I would have thought it would, had I ever allowed myself to consider such a thing.  Which I didn’t.  Who did?  When you thought Michael Jackson, you never thought “dead,” you thought, “weird.”  Because, let’s be honest, that’s what Michael was, what Michael seemed to most enjoy being, what we liked about him best.

Michael made a career out of being everybody’s crazy old elderberry wine-drinking aunt with a favorite window seat, or that scary/lovable uncle who liberated Auschwitz and now lives in the basement/attic, who the kids are taught not to ask him about “you-know-what,” whatever “it” is, to his face.  Totally whackadoodle, but family.

Even after allegations arose of him being a child abuser, parents continued to allow him access to their children; introducing them to his music, taking them to his concerts, applauding their clumsy efforts to imitate his dance steps.  Some even took their kids to his home and dropped them off, even knowing that he saw nothing wrong with them sharing his bed.

Perhaps because of his endearing, soft spoken nature, we were comfortable with the idea that he was an innocent soul, exploited and victimized for our benefit, robbed of his childhood and so determined to perpetuate it into infinity and beyond.  In order to bring his talent to us, he had been abused, so we allowed ourselves to think, making us equally determined to protect and indulge his illusion of innocence.  Of course a poor guy like that would sleep in a bariactic chamber and tote a chimpanzee around, wearing one glove, high-water pants, sparkly socks and ill-fitting jackets with loud colored bow ties, when he wasn’t adorned in fake medal festooned toy soldier outfits with his greasy hair and plastic face.

Pretendidential Perfection

Okay, it’s official.  Pretendident Backtrack Whosayin’ Yomama is perfect, and we, the mere mortals he deigns to pontificate to from on high, are unworthy of even the privilege of smelling his dirty underwear, kissing his funky feet, or wearing his pearl necklace, if one was to be proffered, unlike his Chief Obacolyte and Waterboy, Press Secretary and high school soccer star, Robert, son of Tom Arnold and Mr. Peepers, Gibbs.  That last piece of invaluably crucial info comes to us courtesy of the circle-jerking fratboy fluffers over at MSNBO, whom I so foolishly tried to cut some slack yesterday, empathetic as I was about their being butt fucked and passed over in favor of Oval Office conduit, George Snuffleupagus’ network, ABC, for the Panderer-In-Chief’s Prescription for America Talk/Variety Show and Cheerleading Competition Extravaganza.  Silly-assed me.

However, it’s thanks to the buttsniffers at rightwing-lite Politico (hey, its all about the blog hits, you don’t gotta like the guy) that we know the ObaMessiah walks among us, divinely incarnate, on a mission from God, ala the Blues Brothers.  In a post second only to that San Francisco guy’s O Holy Lightworker column from last year, the wanktards at Politico spend a few hundred wasted words lamenting the fact that That One So Perfect’s only flaw is that he’s so fucking gloriously flawless:

Let’s be honest: Barack Obama is better than you are.

He’s a better father — taking breaks from running the world to cheer on his daughters at soccer and basketball games.

He’s a better husband — zipping his wife off for dinner in New York and Paris.

He’s got a better diet — nibbling on vegetables from his homegrown garden to keep his love handles in check.

And he’s got a terrific jump shot.

You? Not so much.

Demand Single Payer

“If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.” Violence from the other side can win the public to your side because the public sympathizes with the underdog. (Unions used this tactic. Peaceful [albeit loud] demonstrations during the heyday of unions in the early to mid-20th Century incurred management’s wrath, often in the form of violence that eventually brought public sympathy to their side.)

Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals, Number 10

After a week of reading and writing about the horrors of the Twitter Revolution, both in terms of the human tragedy, and (mainly) the specter of external agitation, I was all set to explore the madness of HBO’s new series, Hung, about a guy with nothing going for himself but a big weenie, and this Salon piece about how the economic downturn is causing American women to resort to the fall back asset they were born with, (as opposed to typing and shorthand) prostitution.

Then I read this.

Don’t have health insurance? Don’t want to pay for it? Too bad.

It’s looking like President Barack Obama and the Democratic-controlled Congress are going to require you to pick up the bill.

In Washington-speak, it’s called an individual mandate — or a requirement that people who don’t already have health insurance to purchase it, much like most states require drivers to have automobile insurance.

What The Fuck?

Obama, Barack Obama

So, is Pretendident Big Daddy Baracko Whosayin’ Yomama channeling his inner James Bond, or what?  Due to his tendency to play his personal information cards ridiculously close to his vest, speculation has naturally arisen in many diverse camps that he may be some sort of stealth undercover agent of one of the government’s various alphabet soup covert organizations.  Dunno about that, but in light of the latest Twitter Revolution’s possible origins, I found an MSNBO article about his desire to turn America’s college campuses into recruitment arms of the CIA pretty interesting.  Imagine my surprise, nay, shock, shock, I tellya, to find that said article found yesterday is no longer available there today.  Not.

That’s not to say the piece was deliberately, or even permanently “disappeared.”  To the contrary, MSNBO’s sister source, the Washington Post still has the article up.  But, ya do gotta wonder why it’s no longer available on the Celebritician’s favorite network.  In fact, why was it up there in the first place?

But, let’s back up a minute.  The protests in Iran, originally supposed to be in response to allegations of voter fraud by opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, have been characterized as a women, youth and student-led revolt.  With the Iranian government’s crackdown on news reports, it’s pretty easy to see how the anonymous, unverifiable tweets, photos and emails could be manipulated by outside agents infiltrating college campuses specifically for that purpose.  That doesn’t mean that the concerns of the protesters are illegitimate, or that the violence and confrontations are staged, however it could be that the hornet’s nest has been deliberately poked with a stick by entities with an agenda of their own.  That’s what makes this little story so compellingly interesting:

Daddy Dearest Duz Dinner

Pretendident Baracko Bama donned dinner jacket and deigned to dine with the Lesser Minions of the Lamestream Media on the eve of the Eve of his Destruction, Fucked Up Father’s Day.  Of course, according to Barack Oedipal, all fathers are fucked up, except him, and those willing to be “fathered” by him.  Thus, every freakin’ year, men have to be preached to about their shortcomings as parents by the man who sits at the right hand of the father he invented as a child, then re-invented as an adult, who he continues to mold, shape and reconfigure into an entity worthy of being worshiped by him.  I’m not a guy and it pisses me off.  Who the hell are you, O Father Where Art Thou, to be ragging on manhood as if children were raising themselves under the inadequate supervision of incompetent, unqualified minor beings, i.e., girlz, until you came along in full Mighty Mouse mode to save the friggin’ day?  I hate to break it to you, Little Orphan Barry, nobody gives a flying flip about the  abandonment issues inflicted upon you by the paternal parental unit you only know in your dreams.  It ain’t our fault you’re black.

You’re not very funny, either Barko.  Besides the fact that you have to snicker at your own “jokes” to cue a friendly audience as to when it’s okay to laugh, you committed a couple of other comedic sins, on top of the bad “jokes” during your “performance” at the Radio and Television Correspondents Association dinner last night.

Bitter Knitters, Spinning Wheels, And Pretzel Logic

I am not a bandwagoneer.  It takes a lot to get me to go along with anything, or anyone, at any time.  Given the way perceptions can be radically shifted by agents employing fairly subtle techniques, I have a hard time accepting things that are reported as “prevailing wisdom,” or “common knowledge,” or anything suggesting that whatever being discussed is something “everybody knows.”  Everybody knows shit.  Nobody knows squat.  However you want to say it, unless you’re under the age of 17 and trying to cajole a parent into granting permission for something you want, but know good and well you shouldn’t have, “everybody knows” has no place in anybody’s vocabulary.  Everybody knows that.

When I hear people compare the current power struggle in Iran to last year’s Democratic party primary shenanigans here in the United States, and cast the Iranian dissidents in the role of PUMAs, i.e., disgruntled voters outraged about voter fraud, I can only scratch my head.  Trying to cast Mir Hossein Mousavi into the Hillary Clinton part is way too big a stretch for me.  Although in the primaries and caucuses, the “establishment” was felt to be unfairly supporting Obama, especially in the case of Michigan and Florida, and it was Obama who bussed shitloads of people to out of state caucuses and gangstered them, not Clinton, and it was Obama who bought off the superdelegates, and strong armed any number of people in order to circumvent a true floor vote at the convention, it was Obama’s camp that threatened to riot in the streets, and, who spread their message through the social media.  It was Obama who captured the malleable passions of the latest gullible campus bound Pepsi Generation, and conscripted them into an online army.

Obamboozlogandizing AstroTurf: 101

Obamboozlogandizing AstroTurf is the art of of spreading deodorized bullshit, aka, hopium laced KoolAid, to Sheeple, by preaching sanitized nonsense via the media and internet.  The goal is to hoodwink said Sheeple, by any means necessary, into believing that whatever claptrap being offered is the fulfillment of an as yet unarticulated dream, satisfying a wish, or need, they may or may not have any idea they had, while doing the opposite, without getting one’s hands dirty.

Of course, this technique is not exactly novel; it is simply an amalgamation of many Sheeple herding tactics from history, gathered under one umbrella, and wielded by Baracko and the Obacolytes.   Credit for the biggest block upon which this house of cards, smoke, and mirrors is built goes to Screamin’ Howie Dean, who, but for the shortsightedness of web cowboy Joe Trippi, might well be into his second term right now.  You see, Dean Trippi’s shared Achilles heel was their inability to appreciate the vital necessity of The TelePrompTer for pretenditicians seeking higher office.  Had Dr. Creeple People had a  Trusty TelePrompTer of his very own, chances are the Edvard Munch impression he did would never have happened; and, if it had, he could simply have read a heartfelt, fratboy written, cliche-filled, hackneyed speech by rote  the next day and been forgiven by all the teary-eyed bleeding hearts impressed with his Meetup fund raising innovation.

Back In The Saddle Again

After taking a couple of days off to deal with the dreaded Real Life Stuff (RLS) I’ve learned a few interesting things.  One of the few things that make sense to me lately is this painting of Pretendident Black Whosayin Yomama being eaten by a Hell Burger, done by Dan Lacey, the guy who likes to paint portraits of famous people, mainly politicians, with pancakes on their heads.   The main lesson I’ve learned however, is that even with all the stuff consuming the news and the PUMAsphere, such as, the Twitter Revolution, the Obama/DOMA/DADT brouhaha, his firing of Inspector General Gerald Walpin, and the Letterman not funny “slutty Palin family” rape joke fiasco/apology, (Go PUMA!) it’s pretty easy to function fairly fully without being overly concerned with any of it.  Seeing as how I’ve been immersed in the political process pimping of the Obacrats for he past two years, the realization that the success of Obathugging is dependent upon the triumph of reality over stagecraft is an epiphany.

In other words, people who’ve been paying attention, regardless of party affiliation or anything else, are fully aware of the gamesmanship of the Pretendident’s Obacolytes, and, either fully embrace and support them as necessary and novel, or, reject them as…well, what they are.  Cheating.  Whether you accept or reject those tactics and/or the man on whose behalf they were employed, depends on your principles, and not so much on your politics.  Some Democrats are fully on board, hands out, ready to roll, others are reluctantly riding along, and still others are disgusted that a man who has never won a fairly contested political race in his life is now pretending to represent them, their interests, and their values on TV.  Read the ‘Prompter, yadda, yadda, turn head, blah, blah, blah.  Republicans are similarly affected, with larger numbers in some camps, lesser ones in others.

Muddied Waters

Where’s the outrage from the left?  Gays?  Women? Uninsured people?  That’s the question being asked by Barack’s Bewildered and everybody else nowadays.  That, and, “what the hell happened?”  The Sheeple are finally starting to “wake up and get it,” and they don’t like it.  Not one little bit.

Hahahahahahaha ha ha!!!!!

That’s what they get for electing a guy just because he’s brown.

The outrage is where it’s always been, right here in the PUMAsphere.  Yep, us angry old bitter knitters have been righteously indignant for so long it’s almost starting to get old.  The only thing that’s fresh is the wind-twisting of the Under The Bussers.”  Those finger-pointing, childish, raspberry blowing Nyah Nanna Na Na Crowd are now experiencing the difficulty of trying to navigate their own self constructed labyrinth in shoes on the other foot.  Now, the David Letterman jokes don’t seem as funny as they did when Bill Maher was telling them about Hillary Clinton.  Where were these people when Jon Favreau was groping Hillary Clinton’s cardboard tit?  Predictably defending Obie’s frat boy brain for just being a boy, that’s where.  Boys will be what they are, after all.  So, what’s the diff now that the “boy” has gray hair?

Pretendidential Sneakitude

I’ve heard the leadership style of Pretendident Black Whosayin Yomama referred to as “11th Dimensional Chess on Pluto.”  I call it, “wimpitude.”  For those hopium hooked Kool Aid addicts impressed with the Waffler’s habit of saying one strangely enticing, yet ultimately, incomprehensible thing and doing another, polar opposite, incomprehensible one, the Celebritician’s “hardball with clean hands” approach seems Solomonaic.  To rational people, his TelePrompTer read doublespeak is infuriating.  And, it pisses people off, too.

Basically, Obama’s style is to try to get his goals accomplished without revealing what they are, by getting other people to do the dirty work.  He imagines himself Godfather-like; “send Clemenza out to get Paulie and the cannoli, but make sure nothing comes back to me but dessert.”  Thus, his interminable, ubiquitous speeches sound like wire tapped phone calls between the Capo and his henchmen, “tell the guy to do the thing, but, if it gets done, he didn’t go it, and we never had this conversation, capice?”

My God’s Bigger Than Your God

It’s after 3:00 a.m. and I’m sitting here trying to write the post I had been composing in my head all day.  I had great little news bits to work with, too; Salon’s helpful refutation of anti-Obama right wingnut talking points through the use of interchangeable left wingnut pro-Obama-sanctioned talking points, the American press’ defense of Baracko Bama in the face of the European press’ slam against their visiting meal-ticket and love object ’s trademark rude aloofness, Hillary Clinton’s “I’m Secretary of State ‘cuz he begged me,” Obama rah-rah, and other tasty little juicy morsels upon which to chew.  I was so looking forward to giving verbal raspberries to the Sheeple Mind controllers for theior hysterical, “He Went!” “He Came Back!” over-the-top non news reporting.  And, man, I was really going to enjoy ripping PUMA-bashing AOL blogger Tommy Christopher for lying about being fired for his part in exposing the ugly Playboy invitation to rape article they put up and snatched down in just enough time for it to go viral, when in fact, according to his boss, Melinda Henneberger, Mr. Christopher was relieved of his duties along with his co-workers when the company decided to go in a new direction and hire real journalists.

However, after perusing the news and the PUMAsphere, one particular discussion about turmoil resulting from religious conflict really started to stick in my craw, wherever that is.  They omitted craw location in the human anatomy in my high school biology classes, but then, I’m from Chicago.  Anyway, the holier-than-thou, “my God can lick your God” attitude inherent in a lot of the posts and commentary available on the web, really started to piss me off.

Where Is The Muslim World Carmen Sandiego?

Ever since The First Most Freakishly Awesome Half Black/Half Amazing Historically Historic Son Of A Kenyan Goatherder To Be Elected President Of The United States Considering Its Complicated Racial History Evah, Barackallah Whosayin ObaMessiah, (The Man Who Would Be God If We Didn’t Already Have One)  gave his Latest Most Critically Important Speech On Something Really Important Evah, this time about The Muslim World vs. Normal People, in Cairo last Thursday, I’ve been a little obsessed with the media’s reaction to it.  Some over- and under-paid media pundits in print and onscreen think it was just ooey gooey goodness personified, while other over- and under-paid Sheeple Mind Movers claim it was pretty good…but.  A few heretofore unknown analysts with advanced degrees, called up from the minors of academia and/or the outer offices of basement office holders in politics to provide “balance,” said the speech sucked dirty toilet water and totally missed the point.  They, along with the “C-list” independent bloggers of the right wing and PUMAsphere, (who currently exist only to be mocked by the co-opted, corporate and/or political PAC backed, or corporate and/or political PAC backed wannabe, “A” and “B” listers of the mainstream media and the too-stupid-to-realize-they’re-under-the-bus blogosphere, privy to e-mails, press releases, occasional lunches and other Obacrat ass kissing opportunities) seem to be the only humans on the planet, besides the Taliban, unmoved to heights of ecstasy by the most recent example of the Obasmic oratory of ObiWan-NaBeKing, EP.

The (C)Ombination of Church And State

While most of the media is still waxing rhapsodic about Barackallah’s (He Who Thinks He’s God) Kumbay’all speech in Cairo, Egypt, Thursday, the meaning, the purpose, the effect, the sheer scope and breadth of the magnificence of his grandiloquence is being touted, beheld, and celebrated with awe and wonder.   Yet, no one seems to be asking the question uppermost in my mind: why’d he do it?

Yes, I know he claims to want to open the door to peace, yada yada, waaah, waaah.  And, I know he knows that one measly little speech will not solve the problems emanating from the Middle East that are now facing the world.  By all estimations, it’s gonna take at least six, maybe more, depending on approval ratings.  But, he didn’t address the Middle East, or terrorists, or a particular nation’s particular problems.  In fact, he pretty clearly stated that that wasn’t his job.  His job, as he sees it, is to address and protect Islam.  From his speech, A New Beginning:

So I have known Islam on three continents before coming to the region where it was first revealed. That experience guides my conviction that partnership between America and Islam must be based on what Islam is, not what it isn’t. And I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear. (emphasis mine)

Sermon On The Nile

And I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.

-Barack Obama, Cairo

While the media, mainstream, mid-stream, and off the deep end included, is still stuck in it’s traditional, preliminary “suck up to the Pretendident” mode in their coverage of his “suck up to Islam” speech, we’re still at least a couple of days, if not weeks, from anything approaching objective journalistic analysis.  Since I never pretend to bother with such restrictive standards in the first place, being equally inordinately fond of my own opinion as the best (and, worst) of them, I figured I might as well jump into the fray with my pontifications on the ObaMessiah’s Sermon On The Nile.

Rather than start out with his shout out to the brotherhood, which of course could not have been a shout out to the brotherhood since Obrother is not a Muslim, but a committed, never verifiably baptized Christian who’s been to church maybe once since he kicked his pastor of nearly 20 years, (whom he had embraced after the Catholics and Jews he fronted for as a community organizer encouraged him to join some kind, any kind, of church, in order to better pimp the poor) to the curb in return for unearned delegates at the Rules and Bylaws Committee meeting nearly a year ago, I’d like to start with the latest episode in the now characteristically Obambivalent  assault on womanhood he likes to engage in.   In any classic example of Obambivalence, the ObaMassah puts forth a  seemingly even-handed nudge to the position he favors, cleverly disguised as a condemnation of it.  Or vice versa.

The World’s Gone Mad

*UPDATE: Here’s the transcript of Baracus Hubris Maximus (Hail Caesar!)’s
“A New Beginning, ” speech to the Muslim world, for those, like me, who just can’t bear to watch him read it to us.

As I write this, an American Pretendident, Barack Hussein Obama, is in the Middle East about to tell people who hate his country, but love them some him, that he’s not a Muslim, but he feels their pain, from personal experience, while his Jewish Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, stands at his side embodying everything they hate about his country.  Seems he wants to kiss and make up for all the bad stuff George Bush has single-handedly been doing in the region since, oh, I dunno, the Iranian hostage crisis.  I think he’s also planning to try to make the Muslim world, or at least, the Arab part of it, understand that even though he’s gonna keep bombing the shit out of some of them, he really, really wants to be their friend.  That’s because he’s from Chicago, and there are a lot of Muslims there, in fact, there are so many Muslims in this country period, that you could call us one big ol’ Muslim country.

Oh, So NOW He’s A Muslim?

You know, I don’t care if the ObaMessiah worships at the altar of the Great and Powerful Ozbama, (which I’m pretty sure, he does) but I do care that he, and the self-god he prays to, are both bald-faced liars.  Jake Tapper, of ABC News, like me, wonders what the fuck is up with all the “his Muslim background” shit, now that he’s the Pretendident, safely ensconced in the overheated Oval Office cum Hothouse?  Unlike me, they can’t say it that way, so, just as a favor to Jake, I will.

What the fuck is up with all the “my Muslim background” shit now that you’re president, huh, B Hussein O?  How come all of a sudden it’s okay to use your middle name-o?  Did the school you went to in Indonesia have another miraculous transformation and go from being Muslim, to non-denominational, to Catholic, and back to Muslim, like your smearing smearers claimed it was in the first place?  When you’re standing in front of your full-length mirror, nude, flexing, and admiring the beauty and perfection of your own self creation as you make the Muslim call to prayer, which religion have you abandoned in favor of your own Obamianity?  Obamish?  Obamim?  Whatever.  From ABC:

During a conference call in preparation for President Obama’s trip to Cairo, Egypt, where he will address the Muslim world, deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications Denis McDonough said “the President himself experienced Islam on three continents before he was able to — or before he’s been able to visit, really, the heart of the Islamic world — you know, growing up in Indonesia, having a Muslim father — obviously Muslim Americans (are) a key part of Illinois and Chicago.”

Lying Liars Indeed Lie

I don’t know if Al Franken is the originator of the “lying liars lie” line, in fact, I don’t know much about Franken at all, except, I never thought he was very funny.  I’m not much of an SNL fan, but, I do seem to recall that the Franken years were among the show’s suckiest.  And, I don’t know anything at all about him as a politician, and that’s just fine with me.  Minnesota’s not my home state.  But, all that aside, the “lying liars” sentiment he used as a title of one of his books is spot on when it comes to politics, and journalism, today.

Enumerating all the “lying liars” examples in my mind today might take a while, and take us all over the map, so bear with me, ‘kay?  I guess I’ll start with Salon’s Glenn Greenwald’s vendetta against Jeffrey Rosen over Rosen’s NPR “hit piece” on Sonia Sotomayor.  Seems Greenwald has a butt bug about Rosen’s report that some people think the Supreme Court nominee is kinda bitchy on the bench.  Greenwald says, yeah, she’s tough, but, so’re a lot of judges, and, if a lawyer’s prepared, he or she has a better chance of escaping unscathed from Sotomayor’s wrath.  So far, so drama-less.  The episode takes on a bitch-fest quality of its own, though, when Greenwald takes exception to Rosen’s use of anonymous sources, in fact, it’s at that point that the whole thing proceeds to the Twilight Zone.  For Glenn to get his panties in a twist over Rosen’s use of unattributable quotes is almost, nay, definitely, laughable.

Happy Birthday, PUMA?

Happy birthday PUMA!????

Somehow, that doesn’t sound right.  Look right.  Feel right.  When I think of what happened a year ago today, what it meant, and where it’s lead us, I’m not happy at all.  In fact, the more I think about it, the pisseder I get.

I could rehash the events that lead up to today’s festivities, but, not only is it more cathartic to just visit PUMA sites and use the search features to find the gut wrenching words written in real time, but itemizing and chronicling the step-by-step process by which we came to be feels more like the stupid torch carrying ceremony on Survivor, or, the let’s-stop-the-party-and-show-you-who-died part of the Oscars.

The truth is, as I see it, none of us wants to be here.  If we had our druthers, there’d be no PUMA.  And, truthfully, there might not be a Clinton in the White House, either.  Whoever had won fairly, by the rules, with even a modicum of integrity, honor, and dignity, would probably have been fine, and not sparked the kind of explosive rage that the piss-in-your-face hijacking the Rules and Bylaws Committee of the Democratic Party had to engage in to prop up it’s shallow sham of an unworthy, unqualified, incompetent, “B” actor wannabe with the way cool money machine, did.

The Case Against Gay Marriage

Gay people should not be allowed to marry each other.  That goes without saying.  They cannot breed, and the things they do in their bedrooms, and in public restrooms, and under gaudy mirror balls on sweaty dance floors, are unnatural, and, just plain icky.  Therefore, they should be forced to marry straight people or be banished to the fringes of society.  If not, and they are allowed to marry each other, and worse,  adopt, or otherwise have and raise children, they will soon infect our society with their depravity, and open the door to those who wish to marry children, animals, multiple partners, and even whole families.

Everybody knows this.  God’s Holy Rule Book and Instruction Manual for Humans is very clear on this.  Why, on its very first pages it clearly states that God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve, or Adametta and Stephanie.  There is no ambiguity whatsoever in that story.  One must consciously, and deliberately, reject God’s word to argue otherwise.  Got it?

Surprise! It’s Sotomayor?

Okay, I was wrong.  I thought Pretendident Waffles would choose a moderate, centrist, Christian, (Roe threatening?) black woman to the Supreme Court to replace retiring Justice David Souter.  He didn’t.  He chose a moderate, centrist, Catholic, (Roe threatening?) Puerto Rican woman.

In a way, the announcement is kind of anticlimactic; Sotomayor was, being a moderate, centrist, Catholic (Roe threatening?) Puerto Rican woman, at the top of the short list from Day One.  The knocks against her, both left and right, mainly, that she’s a moderate, centrist, Catholic, (Roe threatening?) ballsy, Constitutionally challenged, less-than-100W bulb, have been on the radar for weeks.

Excuses, Excuses

There seems to be a movement afoot to send women back to the kitchen, happy, barefoot and maybe, unwillingly pregnant.  Now, I could be seeing bogeymen in the bushes, so to speak, but, this “women need permission to make decisions, men don’t”  developing theme bears watching.  Between the Barackulator’s backtracking on selecting a woman to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter, (which really doesn’t count as backtracking since he’s only responded to that trial balloon floated in the Omedia by advocates, like the Wimpy Wishy Washer he is) and “Michelle’s Got The Whole World in Her Bare Arms” articles all over the place, one can be forgiven for seeing a typical Axelrovian AstroTurf campaign in the making.   Add the feminist-endorsed-by-their-silence, “FOCA is not a legislative priority, because women usually do the right thing when they talk to their Daddies” happy crappy recently uttered by the Face of Feminism, and, I think it’s past time to worry.

“Duh”mb And “Duh”mber

Sometimes it’s hard to imagine that so many people entrusted to run our country are as dumb as they are.  Sometimes it’s harder to imagine that the people entrusted to bring us information about the dumb shit the dummies in charge do in our collective name are even dumber than the dummies they’re reporting on.  But, if reading the news reports of the past week can be trusted at all to contain any smidgen of a hint of a scintilla of anything resembling truth, we are being governed by a plethora of Keystone Kop wannabes, and we know that because Spanky and Our Gang, Jr. told us so.

Let’s face it, ya gotta be at least a little stupid to get punked by White House Press Secretary and Tom Arnold/Wally Cox love child look-a-like, Robert Gibbsmeabreak.  But, according to Fox News, that’s exactly what happened to the White House press corps Friday.  Told ya they were all stupid.  The whole lot of ‘em.  In fact, not even I could believe they were that dumb, and kinda figured maybe the humorless drones over a Fox were having their idea of fun and yanking everybody’s chain with a belated April Fool’s Day-type prank, but, no, other sources like the Christian Science Monitor, and the Talking Points Memo press conference transcript, also confirmed that the sorry attempt at humor did indeed happen:

I Am…Poetry

Okay, I’m on record as saying that I’m not a big poetry fan.  But, it’s not often that poetry moves me to tears.  Yet, when I saw a CNN filler story, pretty much lifted whole from WROC-TV, about nine and ten year olds in Rochester New York, who were assigned to write “I am…” poetry about themselves, I found myself blubbering like a baby with a heart breaking and melting at the same time.  The simple elegance and eloquence exhibited by these young people would soften the heart of the grinchiest Grinch, and make generous the heart of a Scrooge.  If people like Jo(k)e Biden really want to know from  “articulate,” the potery of these children would be a good place for them to look.

Football PUMA, Nasty Pancakes, Rush Limb-awe

Looks like we got us a PUMA in the NFL, y’all.  Fox News is reporting that Pittsburgh Steeler James Harrison is standing firm behind his, “I won’t dance, don’t ask me” decision not to join his teammates on their upcoming “You just won the Superbowl, what are you going to do now?” trip to ObamaLand.  Harrison, unlike all those critics he has incurred against him who are delighting in questioning the Defensive Player of the Year’s motives, intelligence, and sanity, doesn’t see the invite as any kind of big deal, and said so, according to ESPN:

“I don’t feel the need to go, actually,” Harrison told Pittsburgh station WTAE-TV. “I don’t feel like it’s that big a deal to me.”

Harrison doesn’t believe the invitation is all that special, saying if the Steelers hadn’t beaten the Cardinals 27-23 with a last-minute rally, “He [Obama] would have invited Arizona.”

Barack Attack

Hellllllp meeeeee!  Barack Obama is stalking me!  Every day, every single flipping day, there he is, inserting himself, unwelcomed, into my consciousness like a hellish evil spirit rapist of the soul.  Turning up time after time, and time again, like a bad rash, mugging for the camera while sanctimoniously pontificating, ad nauseum, about NOTHING!   Absolutely nothing!  Every single fucking day, sometimes two, three or even more times a day, on and on, and on some more, for what?  Why?  Why, dear Lord, is this man stalking me through my TV?

I’m beginning to think my television set is possessed.  No kidding, it must be.  No one else could be suffering the kind of incessant interruptions that I’m experiencing, or the sale of replacement TV’s alone would be enough by itself to correct our current economic woes and save or create gazillions of jobs in China.  No matter which infotainment show masquerading as a legitimate news source, on whichever corporate disinformation channel I happen to be watching, sooner or later, what must be a computer-generated OBobblehead pops up and starts sputtering complete nonsense about totally-unrelated-to-anything stuff.

Media Admits Fluffing Obama

http://chrismatthewsleg.wordpress.com/

Okay, I’ve found two sources, neither exactly “mainstream,” though one, Slate magazine, with its MSNBC/Washington Post connections comes close, that rather cavalierly admit that, like Chris Matthews, fluffing Barack Obama at all costs is deemed by a lot of the media to be a top priority.  While anybody awake and sober knows this to be true, since, nobody is denying it, seeing it in black and white is unnerving.

The Slate piece, regarding those recent allegations that the New York Times deliberately killed a potentially “game changing” ACORN/Obama story last October, because it might derail the woefully under-qualified Celebritician’s campaign chances, asserts that even if the allegations that Obama was illegally involved with “impermissible political activity by Acorn,” were true, the Times reporter was justified in not publishing it because of the paper’s, and both the original story’s reporter’s, and the Slate article’s author’s, political beliefs.  Stunning.

Slate’s Mickey Klaus says that he disagrees with a friend, code-named, “Max,” who claims that any “red blooded,” responsible journalist today would, and should, have been ecstatic to break such an explosive story, especially one that “brought down a presidential nominee,” and that the writer’s paper and colleagues would have been “high-five” proud to publish that potentially Pulitzer quality article.  According to Klaus, that kind of thinking is just so yesterday:

More Tale Of The TARP

News of the release of documents detailing the shenanigans of the particular parties involved in perpetrating the 700 billion dollar fraud bank bailout, or Troubled Asset Relief Program, came out last week and didn’t really get the attention it was due, what with the Pretendident-as-Solomon’s first “Split the Fetus” tour stop at Notre Dame, and his fingernail clinging, bus undercarriage-headed Speaker of the House, Nasty Pancake’s, more-serious-because-chicks-have-a higher-standard, CIA never lies, and all going on.  The Freedom of Information documents obtained by Judicial Watch show that TARP, (or, as I’m sure it is known in certain circle jerks, the Rape of They, The Sheeple, those willing, clueless, hopium-addicted, changeling co-conspirators, who managed to both bend over and grab all of our collective ankles, while forcing everybody’s, theirs included, hands up in a “reach for the sky” surrender gesture at the same time, by electing the Chicago Robbin’ Hood whose vig to the Merry Band of Banksters who he fronted for was due) is  the cross-party, cross-administration, shady scummy scam we’ve all known it to be all along.  From Politico:

Good Girls Never

pornography: generally, that which is designed to stimulate sexual desire.

erotica: generally, softcore porn, i.e., nude couples riding white horses through a field of heather in slow motion until the film dissolves into rough, loving sex in a hay-filled barn.

obscenity:generally, porn that pisses you off, and/or disgusts you, i.e., pedophilia, degradation, bondage, submission, etc., or, for some people, all of the above, and everything in this post.

Women do not like sex.  We do not enjoy displaying our bodies, we are only comfortable engaging in sexual activity when we are alone, in the dark, or, so in love that we would be willing to reluctantly submit to our partner’s debased requests.  We absolutely hate the idea of watching other people have sex, and would never, if left to our own devices, agree to have sex in public,  be filmed, photographed, or sculpted nude, or performing sexually for the pleasure of others.  Why, to even think about doing such things would be positively…icky, unwomanly, and blow big chunks.  And, it scares us mute.

I Just Don’t Care Today

Today’s post is late going up because after following the news religiously for more than two years, and intensely religiously for the last few months, I’ve had it.  I just don’t care today.  Tomorrow is another day, yet, unlike Scarlet, I’m not so sure it holds redemption for our recent past.  And, frankly my dear, I don’t really give a good, hot damn.

There’s no one breaking point, no single straw that can be called last.  The whole mishegas that is our current American political landscape is so pervasively depressing that to say the whole thing sucks is not only an understatement, it is an Herculean exercise in restraint.  Pissy, turd-filled cesspool of bilgewater is more like it.

So, Nasty Pancakes is a bald-faced liar.  What else is new?  Why do her lies make her an undouched twat, while the nation’s Commander-in-Chief ’s lies don’t seem to make him a smegmated dickhole?  They’re both acting like little kids who fervently believe that simply wiping the evidentiary crumbs from their chocolate-smeared mouths will convince Mommy that the whole bag of magically delicious Keebler cookies they swiped were indeed eaten by the tree-dwelling little elves that made them.  At least the kids have the excuse of being children; grown folks calling government agencies liars, as if that doesn’t make them stupid for listening to, and believing anything said liars tell them, or claiming that the impossibility of further inflaming people who would blow themselves up in order to kill somebody who might have once met somebody who’s heard of somebody who knows you, is justification for anything they do, have no excuse for such irrational, illogical behavior at all.  “Don’t let the serial killer see you making finger circles around your ears, or rolling your eyes while you load your gun and set the house alarm, or he might get mad,” only makes sense if your head is so far up your own ass you can kiss your tonsils every time you sneeze.

Supreme Court Diversity? Who Cares?

If former Constitutional law “professor,” Our Mr. Obama, is feeling pressure to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice, David Souter, with a homosexual, woman, or person of color, it’s sure not coming from the public.  At least not according to a Gallup poll reported in the L.A. Times, May 13.  Seems when asked if the Neophyte-in-Chief should appoint a woman to the court, a full 64% of respondents yawned and hunched their shoulders:

“There is simply no large groundswell,” reports Frank Newport, editor in chief of the Gallup Poll, in a survey released this morning by the independent polling institute.

Nearly two-thirds — 64% — of Americans surveyed say it “doesn’t matter” to them if the president appoints a woman, according to the results of a Gallup poll conducted last week.

The Great Bamboozled Masses are even less concerned with whether the next justice is black or Hispanic:

Slightly more of those surveyed — 68% — said it doesn’t matter whether Obama names a Hispanic justice. And even more — 74% — said it doesn’t matter whether the first African American president appoints a black justice.

On the question of whether the next appointee should be gay or Lesbian, the Gallup poll is noticeably silent.  And, though advocates are actively lobbying for such a move, most agree that given the Wishy Washy Waffler’s record, that’s not likely to happen any time soon.  While various reports claim the short list is either down to 6 names, or it’s not, and that Baracus Hubris Maximus (Hail, Caesar!) will either name his nominee soon, or he won’t, the most interesting name being bandied about by far is…Bill Clinton?

I want some of what they’re smoking.

Fauxbama Has Left The Building

Okay, President Bam-Bam Bamboozle hasn’t exactly left the building, but he has somehow morphed into this strange, zombie-like reincarnation of an Elvis clone, complete with legions of impersonators who look and sound nothing like him, and only qualify as “impersonators” because they say so.  That, and, they wear clothes like the ones he usually dons.  That’s it.  Obelvis Pressein Fauxbama.  Uh-uh-huh.

Now, I thought we, as a nation, had jumped the shark back around the time of the over-the-top, once-in-a-lifetime, you saw it here first, step right up, come one come all, sold out in ten minutes Inaugurationapalooza, when Omygod was being featured on the cover of a special-edition Spiderman comic book cuz, ya know, he always liked Spidey as a kid in Blue Hawaii, and well, people who read the chronicles of Peter Parker love them some Obestillmyheart, right back at him, cuz he’s…brown? I dunno, but it moves product, and, that’s the American Way.

We nuked the fridge when ObaMassah ducked into a phone booth to have his picture taken changing into his “my hero,” Ms. Magazine-as-Polly Purebred, face of feminism persona.  Somehow, the twisted irony of a man whose actions make him more resemble the Denzel Washington, Training Day, “King Kong ain’t got nuttin’ on me!” character than a tan Gloria Steinhem with a dick penis, being celebrated as Prince Charming rescuing Cinderella the Riveter as she stumbles on her broken heel on the way to the ball after work, managed to both sail over the top and slide under the radar of ridiculousness at the same time.  Fridge effectively nuked.

Gossip Ain’t News

Human beings love to gossip.  Let’s face it, we’re as social as we are nosy.  And judgmental.  And scared, and superstitious.  So, speculating about our fellow beings’ foibles in the company of others satisfies our appetite for sticking our noses where they don’t belong while we condemn them for whatever transgressions they’ve been accused of, and invokes the magic of the Great Gossip Spirits to keep those troubles from our doorsteps simply by virtue of our casting aspersions aloud.  All at the same time.  Pretty neat trick, huh?

I’m sure the compulsion to gossip has been with us as long as there has been more than one of us.  When the first human said, “ugh!” to the guy or girl standing next to him/her, some sanctimonious snit off to the side with his/her homeys probably said, “humph!” and they all rolled their eyes in a “get a load of her, who does he think he is” type manner.  Human nature.

Throughout the ages people have shared stories of other people’s sordid, reckless, outlandish, or, unconventional behavior and feigned outrage, though the obvious delight they take in being titillated and entertained at others’ expense is pretty hard to miss.  “Nooooo!  Really?  Ummm hmmm, I knew it!” are the kind of comments you make when discussing troubles befallen someone else is just plain fun.  When the people and problems under discussion are disturbing to us, we are more likely to respond with, “Oh, my God!  No!  When?  Where?  Is he/she okay?  Can I help?”  than, “Well that’s what she gets!  No better for him!”

Some people love telling gossip, some love collecting, filing and sharing it, and others just love to dig it up.  We’re not just talking bored housewives here, either.  First of all, I’m not sure there is any such animal any more, in fact, I’m not sure there ever was.  Be that as it may, we have whole industries revolving around the collection and dissemination of gossip, rumor, and innuendo, and, we probably always have.  And, notice I’m not being gender specific here.  Men love to gossip just as much as women, if not more.  They’re the ones who turn it into profit making businesses.

It’s The Medical Records, Stupid

Forget single payer.  Not Gonna Happen.  The Obamacans say it’s off the table, and I believe ‘em.  Just like I believed their duly selected Spokesmodel-In-Chief, Barack Hussein Walker Obushma, when he said, back when he was just the Inevitable Candidate, that  he wasn’t opposed to all wars, just dumb ones, and that blowing shit up in Afghanistan and Pakistan was a pretty freaking radically brilliant idea, as far as he was concerned.  “Anti-war, my left tit,” said I back then, and, sure as shootin’, turns out my faith in the Black Sheep of the Bush Family was not misplaced.  His FISA vote and his subsequent, “look forward without anger, why change things when they work for me” philosophy regarding Bush-era transgressions doesn’t surprise me a whit, either.

I have always been struck by the cozy, lovey-dovey relationship Georgie’s Ba’ Bruh has always seemed to have with “Obamacans.”  When I first heard of Republicans for Obama, I was like, “what’s up with that, huh?”  Why would a group of Republicans get together in 2006 to encourage the “most liberal Senator in the history of…liberals and Senators” to run for President after the guy had only been voting against their interests on a national basis for a couple years or so?  Sure, coulda been just another Axelrove AstroTurfing campaign, but, if it was, why weren’t real Republicans yelling their heads off about it?   Rush Limbaugh and Dick Cheney are not exactly shy about slamming one of their own for being too buddy-buddy with the other side.  Why did all the black Republicans endorse this “most liberal Senator, blah, blah, blah, either explicitly, or tacitly?  Why did so many registered Republicans switch party affiliation to vote for a community organizer, (a phrase they utter with all the dripping sarcasm, venom and contempt a mother uses to describe her law school-grad son, the “rap singer”’s career choice) in the primaries and caucuses, then neglect to switch back, swelling the ranks of Independents while depleting their former party’s numbers so significantly it’s now a shell of itself?  In fact, didn’t the guy Al Franken called a “big, fat, idiot,” encourage that?  Operation Chaos, anyone?  Why didn’t the sleazy Obama ploy plea for Republicans to become Democrats for a Day cause the “liberal media” and the “progressive blogospherians” who supported him with a blind fury to turn their backs on, and wash their hands of, him?  How come the Barackamedian’s biggest laugh on his Rock Star Tour campaign trail come from his oft-related response of “Thank you, why are we whispering?” to Republicans’ hushed confessions of “I voted for you”?

Michelle Obama’s Arms?

Michelle Obama’s arms?!?!  Michelle Obama’s arms!?!? Who gives a flying flip about Michelle Obama’s arms?  What the hell is the big deal?  She’s got arms.  So what?  Most people do.  In fact, most people come with two.  They usually have hands attached.  I assume hers do, too.  Again, so freakin’ what?!?!

I have seen Michelle Obama’s arms.  Maybe it’s just me, but, I don’t remember being overly impressed.  It’s not like they’ve got cash registers growing out the top of them or anything.  Honestly, (and I’m not being snarky here, at least not in this sentence, I make no promises about the rest of this post, though) I’m just not that into the First Lady’s arms.  To tell you the truth, I think this national media preoccupation with her arms is sad.  She’s the First Flippin’ Lady, for goodness sakes, she’s a freaking lawyer, for cryin’ out loud, and she reads from a TelePrompTer much better than her husband.  So, why are people so fixated on her perfectly ordinary arms?  When you have the World’s Greatest AstroTurf Machine at your disposal to do your bidding, you should be able to expect they’d find more to celebrate about you than the fact that you’ve got two freakin’ arms, just like everybody else.

I hate to go there, but, is this a black thing?  Are some white people so unfamiliar with the humanity of blacks that they would be amazed we have regular arms, with hands and opposable thumbs and everything?  What?  What?!?! What on God’s green earth would make any “responsible journalist,” or even hack writer,  or, second grader, for that matter, compose a paean to Obama’s Baby Mama’s arms?

Today is Mother’s Day. Today we should celebrate Michelle Obama’s arms as the arms of a mother.

Oh, fork me up the ass with a spoonula.  This is the kind of drivel Clinton-hating hypocrite Sally Quinn wrote far too many lines of in today’s Washington Post.  “Michelle Obama’s got arms!  Two of  ‘em!  They’re brown!  That makes her a great mom, feminist and First Lady!  Doo-dah, doo-dah!”

Puh-leeze.  Big crap ball of doo doo.

This is a woman who has the courage to say “I am mom in chief” and make her children and her family — unapologetically — her No. 1 priority. She is able to do this because she is so intelligent and accomplished that she doesn’t have to prove anything to anyone. She is healthy enough to be able to say, this is who I am, these are my values and my priorities.

Happy Mothers Day

Double Standard Two Step (NSFW?)

The unofficial dance of the feminist movement, the Double Standard Two Step, should become official.  It’s pretty much the only dance we’ve got, (I say we as a woman, not a feminist, I’m just not much of a joiner) unless you count the Plain Jane Wallflower we seem to love so much.  The dances are simple, in the DSTS, you take one step forward, two steps back, and alternate leads as much as the guy you’re dancing with will let you.  The PJW is much easier, in that one, you just take a seat and wait for somebody else to do the dancing.  Contrary to popular belief, the PJW can be oodles of fun, that’s why so many women eagerly engage in it; the opportunity to snark and bitch about the stumbling, tripping, more popular women getting their corns stepped on, is just waaay too compelling for a lot of women to pass up.  The “Plain Jane” self-designation also takes one out of competition and releases pent-up pressure women might not even know they have, so, understandably, the PJW is the far more popular feminist dance between the two.

Now, let me say that I believe that the first step to equality is to believe oneself to be equal.  If all you’re doing is bitching about rights and freedoms you don’t have because other people won’t give them to you, and that you don’t even really believe you deserve, you’re not only doomed to fail, but will undoubtedly piss a lot of people off in the process.  A person who doesn’t believe herself to be already free will remain a slave no matter how many shackles are removed, locks are opened, or walls and fences torn down.  They’re not going anywhere because, in their minds, they’ve got nowhere to go.

Get Off The Pot

I just watched a fascinating (yawn) “debate” on CNN’s flagship program of journalistic integrity, (tee hee) AC 360, starring that latter day Walter Cronkite-wannabe, Anderson Cooper, (man, I just can’t figure out why that guy doesn’t have a Pulitzer Prize, or, at least a “Pull it, surprise!” by now) about whether marijuana should be legalized as California’s RINO Governor Ahh-nold Schwartzenegger suggests.  The combatants (debatants?) were two guys chosen for stereotype, whose names I purposely did not catch; there was a liberal elite, youngish, kinda cute, bespectacled Harvard professor “pro-” guy, and a middle-aged, FBI desk jockey-type “con-” guy.  As you might expect, the “con-” cop-type guy just wouldn’t shut up about gateway drugs, violence, bogus crime statistics, and Cheech and Chong movies, and the hottie prof kept calling him a stupid liar in terms that likely went over the cop guy’s (and, probably Cooper’s, too.  AC180, perhaps?) head.

Now, before we go further, let me admit that, in my day, I have smoked my share of recreational Mary Jaweeny.  In fact, I have probably smoked your share, your family’s, friends’, neighbors’, pets’, most of the people you used to like but can’t stand now, and the seating capacity of Yankee Stadium’s share, too.  However, about 10 years ago, I grew weary of drooling on my jeans and Army jacket while chewing untold numbers of Snickers bars and Twinkies slowly, as I giggled sexily (or, so I thought) in a lazy, laidback manner, at Gilligan’s thwarted efforts to get off an island likely a few miles from the tropic port where he, the Skipper and 5 passengers set off from on their fateful trip, and, quit.  Too many nights of tearful paranoid bargaining with the Lord to “please, oh God, pleeeeease, Dear Sweet Jesus, let me come down and don’t take me now” in return for never, ever again consuming one two twenty tokes too many of particularly sticky, sparkly, aromatic bud also contributed to my ultimate decision, but, I digress.

The Myth Of Affordable Health Care

There are many reasons I didn’t want Barack Obama to win the Democratic nomination for president last year, other than the fact that he’s a lying, cheating, race-baiting, race-traitorous, unqualified, inexperienced, corporate shill, whose only reason for running was to be a front man for the Money Mafia.   However, the main reason is that it was patently clear from the beginning that if he were to be elected, the closest we would get to comprehensive health care reform would be a long-winded, TelePrompTer read, apologetic, “what a good boy am I,”  insurance company-favoring, less-than-nothing, “compromise was the very best we could do” speech about why we won’t get it.  There was only one candidate in the entire field who was likely to fight for true health care for all, and that’s exactly why she’s not president right now.

So, now that the Mystical Magical Lyin’ King has been firmly ensconced in the Oval Office, we’re supposed to sit through this stage-managed, dramatic production of a serio-comic farce that’s currently running in Congress where the insurance industry assumes the role of its own regulators once again, and pretend that we’re fooled into believing that something benefiting us will eventually come out of it.  One doesn’t have to be a rocket scientist, brain surgeon, or second grader to realize that America will get no closer to “affordable” healthcare for all, or, even most, of its citizens, than I will get to Pluto on a bicycle in my lifetime.  What we will get is lip service, bullshit, lies and theater.

An example of all of the above rolled into one juicy hopium doobie is this bit of happy crappy reported by CQ Politics yesterday.   During the way-off Broadway production of Health Care Follies running in Congress starring the Senate Finance Committee and Big Insurance as themselves, Karen Ignagni,  president and CEO of America’s Health Insurance Plans, (AHIP) as the Beaver, put on a big, “We see the light! Let us fix ourselves!” show, designed to fool the gullible into believing that the outcome of this charade is not a foregone conclusion, and a government run option, far from single payer, mind you, is actually on the table.  Don’t believe me?  Read the script:

Mormons Posthumously Baptize Obama’s Mother

You can’t baptize dead people.  Can you?  I mean, really.   We’re talking dead, long dead, embalmed, cremated, buried, what-ev-er, a long time ago.  Ten, fifteen years ago.  You can’t baptize people like that.  Can you?  Why would you want to?

Anyway, that’s what John Aravosis of AMERICAblog says the Mormon church did to Barack Obama’s mother last year.  Politico’s Ben Smith, Political Punch’s Jake Tapper and Wonkette’s…Wonk also carry the bizarre, troubling, kinda spookily incomprehensible story. From Tapper:

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints confirmed Tuesday afternoon that someone improperly, posthumously baptized the late mother of President Obama into the Mormon faith.

Last June 4 — the day after then-Sen. Obama secured enough delegates to win the Democratic presidential nominee — someone had the president’s mother Stanley Ann Dunham, who died in 1995 of cancer, baptized.

On June 11, she received the endowment.

The White House had no comment.

Now, I don’t know a whole lot about Mormons, their beliefs, practices and rituals, other than they seem fanatic about keeping genealogy records, but, Aravosis claims they have a habit of baptizing dead people:

So we know that the Mormons do in fact have President Obama’s mother in their public database. We know that the Mormons have a policy of baptizing into the Mormon faith, without consent, every single person who dies on the planet. And we have a non-public document that mirrors the public documents to a T, and which says that the Mormons baptized President Obama’s mother on June 4, 2008 – in the middle of the presidential race.

FCC, Fox TV, The First Amendment, And Janet Jackson’s Tit

In light of last week’s Supreme Court ruling against Fox TV and in favor of the Federal Communications Committee, in the case FCC vs. Fox Television Stations, Janet Jackson’s tit is back in the news.  It seems that the Court upheld George Carlin’s “7 dirty words” argument that there are just some words you’re not allowed to say on television, even if uttered spontaneously.   Previous FCC policy held that “fleeting expletives” were no big deal.  From Fox News, April 28:

The Supreme Court ruled narrowly Tuesday in favor of a government policy that threatens broadcasters with fines over the use of even a single curse word on live television, yet stopped short of deciding whether the policy violates the Constitution.

In six separate opinions totalling 69 pages, the justices signaled serious concerns about the constitutionality of the Federal Communications Commission’s “fleeting expletives” policy, but called on a federal appeals court to weigh whether it violates First Amendment guarantees of free speech.

Whaddaya Mean Obama Ain’t Funny?

What’s up with the creepatoids employed in what passes for the journalism field nowadays, that they have their collective heads so far up the Creamy Chocolate Dream Date/Geek In A Spokesmodel’s Empty Suit’s ass that they couldn’t see the light of a sunny day after Lasik surgery with a Klieg light and a Guide Dog?  Does David Axelrod slip them a nice piece of change from a Wall Street bankster-provided slush fund under the table on a regular basis to just run Favreau-penned fluff ‘n puff pieces under their byline?  What?  Maybe it’s just me, but when I see more than one, “The Pretendident’s Too Cool To Laugh At” piece online, I have to ask myself, “Self, what’s up with that shit?”

The way I see it, if today’s “late night comics” can’t find anything about Mush Mouth Swivel Head to poke fun at, then they’re either, a) lousy comics, b) getting some of that Axelrove slush fund dosh, c) blind, or d) lousy comics.  I vote for a) and d).  He’s a comedian’s dream.  Are you kidding me?  “57 states?”  “Above my pay grade?”  “My Muslim faith?”  “Uh, ummm, ya know, uhh, I, I, uh’ve been very clear…uhhh, uh, uh, uh?”  “Here’s some old movies that won’t work on your system, anyway, blind guy?”  “Oh, King Abdullah! It’s an honor to smell your crotch?” “I bowl like a retard?”

Throwing Supreme Court Darts

The “media” is rife with speculation about who President Of The (Not Quite, Darnit) World, Baracus Hubris Maximus (Hail, Ceasar!) will choose to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter.  They might as well throw darts.  They haven’t got a clue because they refuse to consider the “X-factor” elephant in the room, Obama’s wishy-washiness.  Let’s face it, when it comes to decisions, Obama is not just a waffler, he’s more like a waffle scent; he goes whichever way the wind blows.  Given that, he tends to take the path of least resistance, straight down the middle.

So, what’s the middle?  In this case, it’s likely to be a female minority who can be packaged as “centrist.”  So, what’s “centrist?”  Somebody who walks the line between pro-life/choice.  Let’s face it, that’s the wedge that will decide the issue.  That’s where the “empathy” Obama, and everybody else, keeps talking about, comes in.  That’s why I think his likely pick will be a Christian black woman.  Her “Christian values” will make her somewhat (okay, relatively) conservative, but her gender will give her “empathy.”  Or, vice-versa.

Good Thing I’m Not A Civil Rights Activist

Good thing I’m not a Civil Rights activist, because, if I was, I’d probably be majorly pissed right now.  I mean, if I had worked my ass off trying to get a guy elected who I thought would, and should, have my best interests at heart, and he turned around and dissed me, yet again, on TV, in front of God and everybody, I’d be pretty ticked off.  The fact that my hopes would have been raised by the answer he gave to the question he got right before he gave the answer that broke my heart, would only make the “you’ll take what I give you, and like it” attitude he exuded toward me all the more intolerable.  As a Civil Rights activist, knowing full well that when it comes to government redress, all resources are finite, any consideration given to any other marginalized, disenfranchised, under-represented, “special interest group” would be considered by me to be a threat of gargantuan dimensions.  Therefore, hearing my Happy Hopey Homey Hero give a verbal smackdown to the Chicks of Choice would give me a huge hope boner, knowing that a chance for my issues to be addressed had been preserved undiluted.  I’d also be pretty sure that any fallout resulting from the perception of favored treatment at their expense could be successfully “spun,” just like it always has been, with the old stand-by, “a victory for any of us is a victory for all…blah, blah, blah.”

Good Thing I’m Not A Feminist

http://feministsforobama.org/

It’s a good thing I’m not a feminist, because, if I was, I’d probably be majorly pissed right now.  I mean, if I had worked my ass off to get a guy elected because he promised to promote my agenda, and then he turned around and dissed me on TV, in front of God and everybody, I’d be pretty ticked off.  That’s kinda like sleeping with a guy after an amazing first date when all he talked about was love, marriage, picket fences, and you, only to see him the next day with another woman, and he says, “hey, howya doin’?” as he and she walk past, hand in hand.   Talk about molded.

What do you do when Prince Charming the SuperHero turns back into a frog after you’ve stuck your tongue down his throat?  How do you show your broken face in public?  I guess we’ll see when Obama’s Cinderellas, who’ve convinced themselves, sans any evidence, that he was to be the president of their dreams, pick themselves up off the floor where they landed after he suddenly, and inexplicably, kicked the wind out of them and left them writhing and gasping for breath with a karate kick to the gut, without warning.  What’s up with that, huh?

The 100 Day WORM

This is the  Spokesmodel-in-Chief’s 100 Day Ain’t I Great? speech before his third Fuck It, Why Not? press conference.   His subliminal thoughts are italicized.  The regular type represents his WORM (What Obama Really Meant).

Hey, ‘Bots, how’s it hangin’?  Before I get into what you all came for, talking about me, what I’ve done, and how cool I look doing it, ’cause, let’s face it, if it wasn’t about me…okay, and, to a much lesser extent, you, and how much you love me, none of us would be here, right?  We need each other, you and me.  You need to love me, ’cause I’m black and cute, and this is the only way most of y’all can love a cute black man in public and still have friends, and, to be honest, for once, heh, heh, I need you to love me, no matter how much it costs you.  ‘Cause, it ain’t really about you, it’s all about me.  Always.  See,…Huh?  I’m on?  Well, let’s do the damned thing, then.

The Unity Pony Is Dead Long Live The Unity Pony

As we begin this high holy day of celebration marking the meaningless 100 day anniversary of the presidency of the Greatest Copper Colored Incompetent Creep Ever To Emerge From A White Woman’s Womb, with all the attendant hooplah we’ve come to expect from the self-congratulatory Obama public relations and marketing team, perhaps this is a good time to examine how his corporate sponsored Obacracy has usurped the Democratic party by expelling its base, and decimated the Republicans by co-opting their center.  Far from being “bipartisan,” post-partisan,” or “non-partisan,” the “fuck partisan” Money Mobsters’ power play of installing their  bought-and-paid-for errand boy under cover of being a “Democrat of all trades,” willing to welcome “hope’n'change” addicted, easily bribed Republican politicians under the ever-expanding Democratic Obacratic tent, the resultant near filibuster proof, majority party has the potential to become damned near omnipotent, if the myth of unity holds, and the AstroTurfed “reality” remains viable.

Let’s Cut Through The Crap

Cutting through the crap is not as easy as it should be nowadays, not because it has suddenly become perfumed chocolate, but because so many people get paid so much to tell you it is.  Pay no attention to the stench, either your eyes are going because you’re old, or you’re too young to know crap when you see it.  The fact that neither proposition could ever possibly be true is irrelevant, that’s the premise everything in the media is predicated upon, so, sadly that is their, and our, basis for “truth.”  It’s still bullshit, though.

American University professor Richard Benedetto makes that very clear in his Politico piece today; giving the media a failing grade for it’s fawning fluffing of the Polebritician currently holding the office of the president hostage:

Last week, I asked my journalism and political science students at American University to grade the news media covering the Obama administration for the first 100 days. The consensus fell between a C+ and a B-.

Make Nancy Pelosi Cry

Some days there are just so many good stories to pursue in the news that you just don’t know where to start.  Today is not one of those days.  Yes, many stupid things happened yesterday that can be laid at the feet of the Obministration We Love To Hate, but the one that stands out, really stands out.  Seems President Arugula Barry Waffles’ brain, Speaker of the House, Nasty Pancakes, is whining about the overwhelming number of faxes she’s received in support of putting the option of single payer health care on the table.  After 1Payer.net’s email campaign reportedly flooded Nasty P.’s office, her suckophants tried to sound the all-clear.  Don’t let ‘m off the hook.  They’re the ones who issued the Dirty Harry-esque, ” you feelin’ lucky, punk, make my day” challenge, daring the 59% of us in favor of true health care reform to “make them” put the option on the table, so, I say let’s come back at them with our own Die Hard-style, “yippee ki-yay, motherf*ckers,” response.  Fax, email, call, and/or write all of ‘em.  There are three options available on the 1Payer.net site, with links to easy form emails as well as Nasty’s office email address, AmericanVoices@mail.house.gov.   And, pay no attention to her predictable claim that your faxes don’t count if you’re not in her district.  She’s the freaking Speaker of the Freaking House, a pitiful Freddie Prinze,” ees not my yob, mahn,” impression just doesn’t cut it.  Eeet ees your fluckin’ yob, Bighead.

ObamaPress Checks Brains At The Door

Obviously, to report on President Waffles Arugula Obama, the man whose spinal X-ray must closely resemble a photo of cooked spaghetti and whose greatest talent is spewing doublespeak from both sides of his mouth while swiveling his head from side to side as he reads hackneyed cliches written by teenage perverts at least three times more a week than a normal human can bear to watch, one must check one’s brains, and dignity, at the door and focus on the prospect of a regular paycheck.  Unfortunately the same willingness to divorce oneself from reality, minus the paycheck thing, is required to read the drivel generated by the journalistic sellouts.

Last week, we were subjected to a Politico article celebrating the Celebritician’s “hipness.”   To summarize, “he clueless, but he cool:”

This much is clear: Whether dealing with the Wall Street mess, shifting troops from Iraq to Afghanistan or fumbling to fill his Cabinet, Obama leans heavily on personal panache to push political policies. Truth be told, his style is rooted in something elusive and hard to define. Pure and simple, it’s hip.

“Being hip is being able to navigate your environment and others’ environments,” like the way Obama traverses racial boundaries, said John Leland, author of the definitive book “Hip: The History.”

“Obama has this awareness that other presidents haven’t had. He’s white, and he’s black. He’s an elitist, and he’s regular folk. He’s not pinned down to a perspective.”

Today, the Associated Press regales us with fairy tales of the calming influence of the sober confidence No Drama Obama exudes.  To summarize, “he clueless, but he cocky.”

“I feel surprisingly comfortable in the job,” the nation’s 44th president said a mere two weeks after taking the helm.

“The challenges are big,” a sober Obama added, underscoring the foreign and domestic problems he inherited Jan. 20. “But one thing that I’m absolutely convinced about is that you want to be president when you’ve got big problems. If things are going too smoothly, then this is just another nice home office.”

Single Payer This Way

According to Joseph Cannon at Cannonfire via Corrente, who got it from somewhere, but is directing everybody to 1Payer.net, it seems single payer health care is off the table because Nancy Pelosi is convinced that we, the people, don’t want it.  From Corrente:

It appears that Congressional leaders are being deliberately dismissive of single-payer to the point of ludicrous statements. It’s like they have put their fingers in their ears and are yelling “I can’t hear you, I can’t hear you.” Here they are in all their Congressional member glory:

Baucus a few days ago: “Everything BUT single payer is on the table. Single payer is off the table.”

Pelosi: “In our caucus, over and over again, we hear single payer, single payer, single payer. Well, it’s not going to be a single payer.”

Pelosi’s aide: “Where are the phone calls, e-mails and faxes in support of single-payer? Speaker Pelosi has been in favor of single-payer for a long time. Now make us do it.”

If you do want single payer health care, which Physicians for a National Health Program supports, or you just want to make a liar of Nasty P., send faxes til the cows come home.  Then, send another one twenty.  It’s quick, easy, painless, and crucially important.  Don’t let Barry Waffles and Nasty Pancakes screw this up without a fight.   As Cannon points out, if the Obacrats are gonna cram this thing through no matter what the Republicans want, make ‘em go all the freaking way.  This chance might not come again.   Let’s just do this.  Please.

Also, please read this comment that Alessandro Machi of Daily PUMA left on my Dueling AstroTurf II thread about the egregious behavior of the credit card industry and how it impacts all of us.  It’s important, too, in my humble opinion.

The credit card thing. Bravo to those who avoided it in the first place. However, there are legitimate reasons people go into debt. Business investments and medical emergencies are two common reasons, paying for children’s education is another one, so is losing a job and using the cards to get by.

Dueling AstroTurf, Part II

A pretty strong case could be made that everything political that we read or see via the mainstream media, including the corporatized segment of the blogosphere, is AstroTurf.  Though the original term refers to the unethical public relations practice of creating the appearance of grassroots activity on behalf of corporations and politicians where none exists, given that it is ultimately a marketing tool designed to create buzz in order to persuade the gullible against their interests and in favor of the corporate/political entity that paid for it, I’m pretty confident in saying we’re currently being AstroTurfed to death.  By everybody.

Most of us are aware of the Obacracy’s use of the Axelrovian AstroTurf Army throughout the corporate media and blogosphere, from the leg-tingling sycophancy of MSNBO and it’s little sister former Big Three networks, to the shameless fluffing of the dying dinosaurs of the American press, to the ridiculous cheerleading of the Rah Rah Rally Boyz and Bots of the BoBama Blogosphere.  The influence of General Electric through it’s ownership of NBC and its relationship with MSNBC, Newsweek,  The Washington Post, New York Times, Slate Magazine, The Root, and others is pretty well known.  What hasn’t been fully sussed out yet is the relationship between General Electric, Exelon, (the big AstroTurfed Obama supporting Illinois energy company and owner of Commonwealth Edison run by William Ayers’ dad, Thomas before his death) and the Obama administration.  This site, USCAP, (United States Climate Action Program) shows there most likely is one, though, without further inquiry, it’s difficult to know exactly how strong or tenuous it is.   It is also common knowledge that Obama supports cap and trade regulations and has for some time.  Green Biz tells us that GE has been promoting it for a long time, too.

Racist? You Tell Me

So, I’m cruising the internet, got the top down, chillin’, no sweat, no worries, mon, right?  And, I come across this interesting website.  Cool beans, huh?  Actually, what I just wrote is a bald faced lie.  I was on another PUMA site, in the middle of yet another “what is racism since Obama fudged the lines to get elected?” mini-war, when I went surfing for perspective.  Okay, not really.  I was looking for backup, but, hey, I can cop out with the best of ‘em.  I didn’t get very far in my perspective/backup search before I came across blackpeopleloveus.com, the website of Sally and Johnny.  After reading the testimonials and letters, and just about everything else over there, I decided I’d share it with you guys and see what you think.  In a while, I’ll tell you what I think.  Deal?

Waffling Hypocrisy

I don’t believe there’s ever a justification for war.  War is stupid.  As a means of conflict resolution, or oxymoronically, “maintaining the peace,” I’m sure it can seem effective.  I mean, nothing will shut an annoying opponent up quicker than dropping a super megatonic bomb on his head mid-sentence.  Unfortunately, any of his friends, neighbors, relatives, etc. who manage to survive the fallout, are subject to major pissitude in the aftermath, and likely to wish grievous bodily harm upon the person of bombnation, and all whom he knoweth and love, in perpetuity.  Who needs the hassle?

That being said, I understand the almost irresistible compulsion to reciprocate when one is attacked.  Some stranger smacks you upside the head on line at the Piggly Wiggly, you’re not really gonna care what twisted his knickers into a knot so tight as to cause him to clock you with a can of baked beans in the first place.  You’re likely to take the bottle of bleach you’re carrying and try to catch the guy in the face at the height of the roundhouse arc of your swing at his head.  Never mind that the impact might cause the plastic bottle to crack, or the top to come off and spray you and any innocent bystander in the vicinity, who the fuck does this guy think he is?  More importantly, who does he think you are, some major wuss?  Now, in moments of clarity upon reflection, you might regret contributing to the situation in such a way as to cause it to escalate.  However, when you’re standing there in line, bleeding and covered with bleach, your most fervent wish might be for store security to shoot your assailant in the ass with a bazooka, right before the butcher runs what’s left of him through the meat grinder and packages him up as butt burger dog food.  The reality would probably be however, that cooler heads, fearful of being bleach and bean blindsided themselves, would prevail, and you and Twisted Knickers would both end up in the prison infirmary.

In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks upon the World Trade Center, Americans were scared.  We were also a little bewildered, and mightily pissed.  All perfectly understandable.  We had been clocked, and many of us wanted to strike back, not just to get revenge, but to alleviate the feeling of impotence, powerlessness.  But, who would we strike, where could our rage be focused, what country would take the credit or blame so we could bomb the shit out of them back?

No Matter What Side You’re On, This Will Break Your Heart

Over 110,000 human beings have been killed in Iraq since 2003, according to the Associated Press.  That’s just Iraqi citizens.  The article’s headline reads that 87,215 Iraqis have been killed, but that’s since 2005.  I’m speechless.  I mean, you know war comes with a cost of human life, and, I’m sure that the justifiers on whatever side of the straw man arguments they love to come up with will be able to provide similarly distressing numbers of casualties of other wars, on other sides of whatever conflict they choose, if not greater ones, but that just doesn’t matter to me right now.  Over 110,000 human beings are dead.

Iraq’s government has recorded 87,215 of its citizens killed since 2005 in violence ranging from catastrophic bombings to execution-style slayings, according to government statistics obtained by The Associated Press that break open one of the most closely guarded secrets of the war.

Combined with tallies based on hospital sources and media reports since the beginning of the war and an in-depth review of available evidence by The Associated Press, the figures show that more than 110,600 Iraqis have died in violence since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

The number is a minimum count of violent deaths. The official who provided the data to the AP, on condition of anonymity because of its sensitivity, estimated the actual number of deaths at 10 to 20 percent higher because of thousands who are still missing and civilians who were buried in the chaos of war without official records.

Oh, No! Not ANOTHER News Conference!

President (Can’t I Just BE My) Waffles Obama is going to subject us to yet another boring Reading of the TelePrompTers From On High on his unremarkable 100th day of equivocating, even though his spawn of Tom Arnold Press Secretary, Robert Gibbs claims the day has no special significance.  Yep, typical ObaLogic.  None.

“It’s an arbitrary day in which presidents are measured. We get that. We’re playing along,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Thursday.

Gibbs said Obama and almost everyone in the White House agrees with “a huge majority” of the American people “that the 100th day is not a ton different than the 99th, the 101st or the 123rd.”

Politico, the Blog Up The President’s Butt, is reporting that the public is by and large, waiting for this upcoming speech with bated breath according to some poll they found.

The rate of one news conference a month seems to sit well with the public, which likes to see Obama on TV, according to an Associated Press-GfK poll released this week.

More than half of the public, or 59 percent, say the president is on television about the right amount of time. Just 28 percent say he’s on too much, and only 10 percent would like to see him on the tube more often.

Fox Reporter Crashes GE Shareholder’s Meeting

According to Gateway Pundit, all hell broke loose at GE’s (parent company of MSNBC) shareholder’s meeting yesterday.  They claim investors, enraged over MSNBO’s “leftward shift” raised all kinds of hell about it and “attacked CEO Jeff Immelt over the embarrassing and offensive programs on MSNBC.”  Quoting Reuters, they say (their bold):

“The crowd was very upset with MSNBC because of its leftward tilt,” one attendee said. “Some former employees said they were embarrassed by it.”

One specific complaint about MSNBC concerned Keith Olbermann’s interview of actress Janeane Garofalo, who likened conservatives to racists and spoke of “the limbic brain inside a right-winger.”

“They were upset that Olbermann didn’t bother to challenge her,” one GE shareholder said.

The Reuters report (also carried in the Hollywood Reporter) headline, “Drama At GE Shareholder’s Meeting” was a little different from GP’s “Angry Crowd Slams Olbermann and MSNBC at Shareholder’s Meeting.”  The opening lines were a little different, too; GP’s “GE shareholders are sick and tired of the Leftists and they’re not going to take it anymore!” vs. Reuters/HWP:

One More Thing

So many people seem to have their panties in a twist today, and I’m not sure everybody’s upset about the same thing.  So be it.  My point was, is, and always will be, that no matter who you embrace or engage, the core “Democrats in exile” principle espoused on the PUMA flagship site, The Confluence, where PUMA was born, should always remain undiluted.  When it seems that that basic, simple statement of philosophy is in danger of being lost in the wilderness, I’m gonna holler.  Some may get mad.  Yeah, and?  People get mad a lot.  Especially when they care about stuff.  But, to my mind, it’s one thing to invite people over to your house to talk about stuff, and a whole ‘nother thing to let them clean out your cupboards, rearrange the furniture, change the channel on the TV, and adjust the heat.

We have always had to deal with the danger of being written off as a ratfucking operation.  We are not, nor have we ever been.  But, when we seem to be embracing people who don’t share our values, or worse, rushing out to align ourselves with movements based upon values counter to our own, without making it perfectly clear exactly what our values are, and that we expect others to accept us for them, or move along, we place ourselves at undue risk.  That has nothing to do with setting an agenda, planning, and outlining goals.  We don’t need to know exactly where we’re going to know exactly who we are.

I Don’t Freakin’ Wanna Sing Kumbayah

Let me start this post by saying that I’m sure Republicans are fine people.  Most of them are surely good, patriotic Americans, and have kids and pets.  I have no problem with them.  However, I must also make crystal clear that I am not one.  (Republican that is.  I am a good, patriotic American).  Nor, do I want to be one when I grow up, or at any other time in the rest of my life.  I have no problem making this declaration online, and would gladly do so in public, to any Republican’s face, if they asked.  If they tried to convince me that I should consider joining up with them, I would listen politely, then firmly respond, “thanks, but, no thanks.”

Such a straight up encounter would not bother me at all.  What does bother me is people trying to pretend to be something they’re not, in order to manipulate, or worse, try to trick me into coming over to their side.  That insults my intelligence, and pisses me off.  I cannot embrace Republican ideology, though I have nothing against anybody who does.  I’m just not a Republican.

About That Good Deeds and Punishment Thing

So, a few days ago, I finally decide to look into this Tea Party movement I had heard so much about, and I find out Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks, a known AstroTurfing machine, is in cahoots with some guy from Conservative Revolution, Michelle Malkin and Glenn Reynolds to promote these things as “grassroots” and make them viral.  Then, I look up “How To Organize A Tea Party Protest, which is Conservative Revolution/FreedomWorks‘ site that even lists the site owner’s (Brendan Steinhauser) email address, bsteinhauser@freedomworks.org, and Tax Day Tea Party dot com, take a look around there, find references to Don’tGo Movement, and Smart Girl Politics, along with the above-named cast of characters, and I figure, hey, PUMAs might not want to be associated with an obvious rightwing Astroturf campaign.

Silly me.

Dueling AstroTurf

Tea Parties are as surely a Republican-based AstroTurf operation as is Obamania a Democratic one.  And, just as Axelrove’s AstroTurf Army is sponsored by a faction of the Democratic Party, so is the Tea Party representative of a Republican faction.  There is no need, or likelihood, of an officially sanctioned, top down ordered dictate, fake grassroots can be planted without the permission of the leadership and later incorporated into the larger philosophy.  Thus, those who want to lay the blame at the feet of the party higher-ups just might be missing the point, as well as giving the opposition cover.

Heeeeerrre’s Blago!

Dee duh duh duuuuhhh duh, dee duh duhduhduhduh!

That’s the old Tonight Show theme song, in case you can’t read music.  And, it just seems appropriate that impeached, embattled, beleaguered, poor, misunderstood, curiously coiffed, former Illinois Governor Rod (Cabbage Patch Weeble) Blagojevich should inherit it, primarily because…well…okay, just because I say so.  Now, there, I said it, and I’m glad.  I like Blagojevich.  Said that too.  Still glad.  So what if he’s corrupt and incompetent?  He couldn’t possibly be any more incompetent and corrupt than the rest of the Chicago Political Mob, or the Illinois Combine, the party transcending gangs of thieves that have ruled the den of iniquity that the city and state have always embodied, unless he cloned himself exponentially into infinity.  They’re all a bunch of shleppy schmooey Keystone Kops, running around in suits and ties and clown shoes, playing at being tough guys, ripping off the public on the citizen’s dime with their permission.  So, one of ‘em’s got squirrel hair and a potty mouth?  So what?  I like him.  So, there.

Return Of The Glimmers

No wonder the Greatest Pretendident Who Never Was can’t see the forest for the trees; too many glimmers.  Seems when Mr. Starry Eyes does that voodoo that he do so well, reading rehashed canned speeches between photo-ops, he relishes the anticipated dizziness resulting from spewing so much spin while swiveling his head back and forth from TelePrompTer to TelePrompTer, in much the same way a little kid likes twirling in a circle really fast.  Wheeeeee!  What a rush!  Forget glimmers, what about these cool, psychedelic lights, dude?

Only someone seeking an altered stated (or, already in one) could look at the data and see what he sees.  Across the country, contractors are so desperate to win stimulus-sponsored government  contracts that they’re lowballing (probably, just telling the truth for once, but still) bids waaay below anticipated levels (about 15%).  Which, of course, leaves them vulnerable to cost cutting practices regarding staffing and materials that could ultimately affect quality, but, hey, it leaves even more money in the stimulus budget to fund even more potentially substandard projects.  Yay!

Save Gas, Kill Yourself

Last week, I had a bit of fun skewering General Motors for releasing news about their hybrid, scooter-in-a-box, the Deathtrap On Wheels, produced in tandem with adult scooter maker, Segway, which they euphemistically refer to as PUMA.  Now, as you might expect, I took offense to the fact that they appropriated our acronym, which in our case means, of course, Fuck Off And Die, DNC.  Upon reflection however, I realized that the GM/Segway traffic toy’s name also stands for Fuck Off And Die, so I can kinda see why they did it.

GM, tanking like yesterday’s recycled bean dinner down the TyDeeBowl man’s domain, was trying to appease company commandeer, President Exelon, in a vain attempt to show that they were fully aware that the company’s misfortunes were indeed due to the fact that they had previously neglected to embrace the new fuel-efficient, small vehicle technology the Energy Company Shill-in-Chief claimed was demanded by the public.  Naturally, both factions have to agree to pretend that the American public is so stupid that it will never dawn on them that the reason GM is broke is because the rest of the car buying public is, too.  Kind of an obvious “chicken and egg” situation, not requiring an advanced degree to figure out, you’d think.  It would also probably help GM’s bottom line if their cars could be manufactured in a way that makes them less prone to spontaneously combust.

Gordbama: You Say “Compulsory,” I Say “Mandatory”

The Gruesome Twosome now being referred to in the British press as “Gordbama,” ala “Brangelina,” (which will never fly here, no way the Holy O takes second billing lying down, uh-uh) seem united in their determination to compel their citizens to work for the government.  While the Presilebrity prefers to remain quiet, (and thus, blameless, for He Who Bears No Blame is his real middle name, and job description) and let Congress carry the ball as they “explore the feasibility” of “mandatory service,” Gordy’s writing op-eds in tabloids pushing his pile.

Writing in the News of the World, and referenced elsewhere in the British press, Brown calls for 50 hours of “compulsory” service for all young people, to be completed by the age of 19, as a companion to his already mandated “citizenship classes.” One of Browns’ stated goals, however, according to the Daily Mail, is to use forced charity as an attempt to combat juvenile crime.  Kinda like sentencing kids to community service whether they screw up or not, ‘cuz you know they’re gonna.  Judging from the comments section responses to Brown’s original missive, which include phrases such as “cold day in hell,” “hell will freeze over,” “stupid,” and, “bloody fool,” it doesn’t seem like people in Britain are embracing the idea with open arms (something that’s impossible to do, anyway, when you think about it.)

Glimmers Of Hopium

Soooo, the bestest, most groovalicious, hippest hipster of a Pretendident to ev-ah don a pair of RayBans and hightail it to Hawaii on vacation, says he sees “glimmers of hope” in our economic forecast?  No shit?  Duh-uh-uh-uh-uhuh-uhhhh.  A guy who gets to give billions upon billions of dollars of other peoples’ money to his buddies as payback, should be seeing bright, blinding fucking horizons of brilliant white light and rainbows, gloriously shining down upon herds of albino unicorns leaping and frolicking across pristine fields of blooming white poppies, if you ask me.   Hell, the man just got back from an otherwise wasted, Rock Star Feel Good European Tour in time to fly in a pizza chef from St. Louis for a pizza party celebrating pissing in the faces of his hometown, world famous pizzerias, and get a free dog on his way to church for the first time in a year.  Must suck to be him, huh?

Awizona State Huht Da Pwesident’s Feewings

Awwww, dose mean ol’ Awizona State Univuhsity people huht Widdle Bawwy’s feewings, and now his fwiends are weawy, weawy, ma-aaaaadddddd.

Looks like the Arizona State guys who issue invitations to speak at the commencement are not the same Arizona State guys who offer honorary degrees.  The commencement people are just tickled pink (or brown, or cocoa, or deep, rich, creamy chocolate mocha, or whatever color people in Arizona get tickled in all that sun) that our nations Petulant President has accepted their offer to speak at the graduation, even though, they obviously didn’t get the memo that throwing in an honorary degree was a condition of acceptance.  But, the honorary degree people say, “do something noteworthy and get back to us.”  Now, the HuffPo Whores Horde and the Mainstream Media Mob are ganging up on them for being (whisper softly with a little “r”) racist, (shhhhhh!) as well as (louder) just plain old stupid pooh-pooh heads.  I mean, c’mon, give the man his props.  He says he went to Columbia and Harvard, didn’t he, and, he is the freakin’ president, ya dips, so…well…c’mmmmooonnnn, a’ready!  Sheesh!

Snarky Dawn Teo, HuffPo:

Writing two best-sellers? Not outstanding. Developing one of the largest grassroots organizations in the world? Nothing special. Becoming the first African American President of the United States? Good, but nothing to write home about.

My PUMA Rant

This is a rant.

It seems that every day that the Pretendident manages to successfully navigate through without sticking his foot in his mouth, or his finger in the eye of someone, or a group of someones, worthy of PUMA respect, the resultant paucity of headlines causes the diligent bloggers of the PUMAsphere to turn introspective and compulsively begin to contemplate the future and direction of our nascent movement via our navels.  Thus, we begin to see a spate of “Where Do We Go From Here?” What Have We Accomplished So Far?” blog posts, chronicling our genesis and calling for “focus.”

Why?

Where do we go from here?  For now, we go where Barack Obama leads us.  Not like the Lapdogs of Cheetoville, or the Sheeple of Sleepy Hollow, or the lazy, compliant Mainstream Media Mafia, all of whom have proven far too susceptible to the mindfucking and astroturfing of his devious, duplicitous minions to be trusted; but, like bloodhounds, or, what we are, PUMAs, who have caught the scent of prey and refuse to be diverted from our mission.

Barack Obama did not win fairly by being a superior candidate, he won by manipulating the media’s message, using whatever means necessary.  PUMA was born to counter that by those who not only saw through his PuppetMaster’s manipulation, but were fucking outraged by it.  We were not all of a color, religion, gender, political party or single mind, and though most of us supported Hillary Clinton in the primaries, our rejection of her rival was only minimally influenced by her.   We always rejected Obama because of Obama.

Okay, Where’s The Freakin’ Dog?

Enough, is e-flippin’-nuff, where’s the gosh darned dog President Perfect promised his daughters, huh?  He’s been putting it off long enough.  What could be more important than keeping a promise to your kids?  Especially when you’re the Freakin’ Waters-Parting, Lightbringing, Mystical Magical Obamessiah, Politidol, Celebritician, Hero of the Entire Fluckin’ World and All-Around Good Guy? Haven’t those poor children suffered enough?

I’m not the only one who wants to know, either.  Mary Ann Akers of the Washington Post has been sleuthing around the White House looking for answers, and the FLOTUS’ official doublespeaker told her…get this…wait for it, it’s a doozy…the frackin’ EASTER BUNNY is bringing it!  The Easter Bunny?  Are you kidding me?  And, guess who the “Easter Bunny” is?

According to a very, very loosely sourced report by WBBM News Radio in Chicago, the Obamas have already chosen a Portuguese water dog and the future first pup has even visited the White House for a meet-and-greet session. The news station says the dog “may be a gift, perhaps from Senator Ted Kennedy and his family.”

Of course, the “Easter Bunny’s” people disavow any knowledge of any such “gift,” and the Humane Society and Animal Rescue League swear nobody from On High has contacted them about any kinda First Family dog, either.  Man, oh, man, that just bites.

I don’t know about you, but this just frosts my cookies.  And I hate frosted cookies.  Any guy who would lie to his kids over and over again, and let everybody know it, to boot, deserves to be impeached immediately.  And you can tell him I said so.

This Is NOT A Bow

For those  uninitiated into the Holy Order of Obamites, (and thus not likely to disappear in the coming Obacalypse) and uninformed as to the ways of The One, who might be confused and believe that the above is a picture of the The Chosen with his butt in the air bowing (genuflecting) before Saudi King Abdullah, let me enlighten you.  The Obamessiah can do no wrong, therefore, if you object to such a depiction, the problem obviously lies with you, and your lying eyes.  I know this because the Simon Peter of Obasciples, (the followers of He Who Is Blameless, not to be confused with Obacicles, a hopium flavored, frozen ersatz fruit juice-on-a-stick treat) David of Astroturf, hath decreed it so, and sent forth Obacolytes to evangelize thusly:

“It wasn’t a bow. He grasped his hand with two hands, and he’s taller than King Abdullah,” said an Obama aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

So, it is spaketh, so shall it be.  Only non-believers and infidels, such as Arabic newspaper columnists, would interpret the Obamessiah’s gesture incorrectly:

“Obama wished to demonstrate his respect and appreciation of the personality of King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz, who has made one of the most important calls in the modern era, namely the call for inter-faith and inter-cultural dialogue to defuse the hatred, conflict and wars,” wrote the columnist, Muhammah Diyab.

Don’t get it twisted, blaspheming heathen dogs.

About That “Surprise!” Iraq Visit

How come all the digital cameras in the soldiers hands look like this?

And, not like, say, this?

Are the little silver jobbies the only ones available on that base?  And, how come the “surprise” Iraq photo-op visit is being portrayed as “inspirational” and a “spontaneous outpouring of affection” or some result of Obama’s popularity with the troops, but the fact that they only got 600 of the hoped for 1,500 soldiers to turn out, (a fact I read on the Wall Street Journal site last night, but can now only be found here) and, he’s the guy who promised to send them home is only mentioned waaaay at the bottom of some of the gazillion articles about it?

Just askin’.

*NOTE:  In my research on this subject last night, I came across this quote re: the hoped for number of troops from Politico, filed it, then forgot it.  Just checked my notes and re-found it, though, so, here it is:

Now PUMA’s Sort Of A Car

That’s the new GM/Segway prototype vehicle, the PUMA or, Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility…thingy.  Whatever this hybrid vehicle eventually grows up to be, if anything, it’s battery operated and zips along at 35 mph.  Obviously, this is part of almost-bankrupt General Motor’s attempt to “green up” and be part of Team Obama’s overarching and presently over-reaching program to drag reluctant Americans kicking and screaming away from our love of gas guzzling mini-tanks capable of doing righteous battle with buses and trucks on city streets in comfort.  For those loath to sacrifice safety for ecology, the PUMA, a sort of windshield covered Hoveround, is supposed to be able to sense danger, Will Robinson, and…magically disappear, or something.  Popular Mechanics explains it this way:

The collision avoidance tech is probably the most speculative aspect of the P.U.M.A. project. GM has long been working on vehicle-to-vehicle communications technology that should allow vehicles to communicate with each other using short-to-medium-range wireless transponders that use GPS and vehicle on-board telemetry data to avoid collisions. The idea is that if two vehicles can exchange speed, direction and position data, then one of them could make a decision to brake in an emergency situation to avoid an accident—even if that meant overriding the driver.

The Barackian?

No, it’s not “The Barackian.”  It’s worse.  Much, much worse.  See, a Chicago-based comic book company, Devil’s Due Publishing, is promoting 2 soon-to-be-released offerings featuring the Spokesmodel-in-Chief, Just Barely President Baracus Hubris Maximus (Hail Ceasar!) as a loin cloth wearing superhero, “Barack the Barbarian.”  Okay…stop laughing!  I mean it…this is serious, now.  Nooooo, I am not kidding, and it seems this is not a belated April Fool’s Day joke.  At least, not according to NBC New York,  the New York Post, Breitbart, the Chicago Tribune, and, Devil’s Due’s own website:

Thursday, 02 April 2009 It’s no joke! You may have read about it on Newsarama, MTV’s Splash Page Blog , and io9. DDP is here to tell you that it’s true. DDP is readying two new titles for June 2009 featuring U.S. President Barack Obama. Check ‘em out!

DRAFTED: 100 DAYS: (1-Shot 48 Page Special) Devil’s Due’s original Sci-Fi hit returns with this double-sized one-shot featuring the President who could have been.  Mark Powers offers a poignant look at a man the world never got to see achieve his true greatness when a race from beyond the stars drafted our planet into intergalactic war.  See how he struggles, just as every other man, woman and child on Earth does in this truly inspiring story.  As can be expected from Powers, there’s one other difference about our hero in this story in that due to an injury… he is MUTE.

Hallelujah, Now He’s Your Daddy, Too

On the day when the president’s Mainstream Media Mafia made it their business to “out” those traitorous black people in their ranks with the temerity to question their appointed, and white folks-endorsed, black leader, Just Barely President and Celebritician, Baracus Hubris Maximus (Hail, Ceasar!) they follow up with the announcement of the rounding out of his “inherited-from Bush” (wink) faith based Morality Police Squad.

Let’s start with those race-traitors who refuse to kneel at the altar of the Obamessiah.  According to the Washington Post, the incomprehensible notion that black people would, should and/or might hold their historically elected Brother President accountable, is an unfathomable new development in the evolution of the previously monolithic voting bloc’s reality:

As the nation’s first black president settles into the office, a division is deepening between two groups of African Americans: those who want to continue to praise Obama and his historic ascendancy, and those who want to examine him more critically now that the election is over.

Ascendancy?  Brother, please.  Notice that they deliberately conflate black reporters with the larger African American community.  They don’t quote any “average black folks,” just those who make their living influencing public opinion.  Totally bogus, disingenuous and deceptive, y’all, poll results  regarding the “media criticism vs. community love” question notwithstanding:

Obama’s Czech Speech

This is the original, pre-Fabreau-ized, pre-Axelrod-approved draft of President Black Obama’s “give up da nukes” speech in Prague, Czech Republic today, written by Just Barely President, Baracus Hubris Maximus, (Hail, Ceasar!) as imagined by me.

Hey, yo, y’all, whazzup?  I’ma be rappin’ atcha for a few, so chill.  First, let me do my obligatory JFK thing, and tell you how glad I am to be the man who brought Michelle Obama to Prague.  She hates being cooped up in the White House (I think it’s a color thing) and she can beat me up, so I didn’t have much choice; besides, the real Jackie Kennedy wasn’t available.  Ha, ha.  Being from Chicago, I know a lot of Czech people, the town’s full of people whose names I can’t pronounce, and, y’all like to travel back and forth, like the guy whose statue is behind me…what’s his name…the one who drew 80,000 more people when he spoke in my home town in 1918 than I did here today?  It’s hard for me to think (read) when my ego shrinks, but, wait a minute, don’t tell me…Tomas Masaryk, that’s it!   I’m not pissed, though.  Hell, some of my best friends are Czech, like Tony Rezko.  Wait a minute, he’s Syrian, my bad.  But, since he’s in jail, he’s not the same Tony Rezko I knew, and I’m pretty sure he was Czech back when I did know him.  Maybe I’m thinking Blagojevich, he claims he’s Serbian, but, I can’t pronounce his name either, and, since he’s also going to jail soon, he probably used to be Czech back in the day, too.  Besides, Czech, Slovak, Serb, Syrian, what’s the diff?

From The Depths Of The Department Of “Duh!”

Boy, oh, boy, reading the news can destroy lickety-split any sense of confidence unintentional proximity to residual whiffs of Hopium might inspire.  Not that I’ve been so influenced, but I can certainly sympathize with the unfortunate souls who might have been unduly charmed by the relentless barrage of happy-hopeyness from the Changelings of Obamedia, only to have any semblence of Obamaptomism dashed by actually reading past the Headlines of Hype.  Take, for example, today’s Wall Street Journal piece by Fox Business News’ Stuart Varney, who seems bewildered, nay, dare I say it, shocked, that the recent reluctance of the Obministration to accept repayment of TARP funds by banksters not exactly in league with the Big Bank Mafia means that (horrors!) the ObaHoods want to control the banks!  Duh?!  I mean, really, Stu, I’m no London economist, and I saw that weeks ago!  Sheesh, you don’t need fancy degrees to tell you that if you want to control things, first ya gotta grab hold of the banks!  Like I said, duuuuuh!

Coupla days ago, Newsweek ran an article claiming that Obama’s telephone buddy, Warren Buffet was the real architect of certain aspects of the bailout, not his Doogie Howser-esque Boy Wonder, Turbo Tax Timmy Geithner, tax cheat (TTTG,tc).  Holy cannoli, Batman!  Who coulda figured that one out, huh?!  Double-dog duh-uh-uh-uh-uuuuhhhh!  In September, I wrote about Obama’ Bailout Buddies and, the second name mentioned besides Goldman Sachs’ own Treasury Secretary, and Obama telephone pal, Henry Paulson was, you guessed it, you super smart PUMAlicious devil, you, Warren Buffet.   Ta dahhhh!  Gee whiz, when even I can see this stuff, what’s taking the smartest guys in the media so long to see the handwriting on the mirror that’s right in front of the nose on their faces?  Riddle me that one, Batman, whydoncha?

The Illogic Of ObamaLove

Ever since that time between the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries over a year ago, when Barack Obama wrested the support of the black community from Hillary Clinton, without making promises or concessions, I’ve been trying to imagine what could account for the continued support of a man more likely to scold, belittle or stereotype a group of people (when he can be so bothered as to even acknowledge them) than to embrace or champion them.  What is it that inspires such irrational devotion from people who’ve been repeatedly characterized as lazy, shiftless ne’er-do-wells, unworthy of special attention by the object of their affection, lest any perceived association with them taint his relationship with others whose support he deems more valuable and desirable?  A man whose every contact with black people includes spouting right wing talking points while he admonishes his mythical Cousin Pookie and Brother Ray-Ray to get their lazy Popeye’s Chicken-eating, Sports Center-watching asses up off the couch and get a job so their trifling, baby-popping, Welfare Queen Women can stop gaming the system long enough to make their stupid children a proper breakfast and help them with their homework, is no “brother” of mine, and in no way inspires me to vote for him.  As hard-fought battles and hard won victories threaten to be repealed simply because he is the color he is, I expect him to be outspoken on my side, but, he’s not.  He’s on the side of the guy who wants to take public school education out of the control of school boards and turn it over to clueless city government, instead of giving them the resources they need to succeed.  Screw him.

The Obamas’ Oopsies

Soooo, the “hug heard ’round the world” was apparently no big deal.  Even though, by all accounts, hugging the Queen of England is a diplomatic no-no, it’s okey-dokey if Queenie grabs hold first.  All those same accounts claim that that’s exactly what happened, so all you Obie haters kwitcherbitchin,’ ‘kay?  Buuuuuutttt, the photos (which we all know can be shown to lie, like this one) show clearly that Ol’ Lizzie tired of the embrace a bit before Mrs. Obamessiah.

Ohhhhhhh, whatever.  But, that ain’t the Big One, ‘Lizabeth.  This is the one that’s got the right wing blogosphere afire, referencing each other, and,  ettiquette and protocol sources galore:

Yup, that’s the President of the United States, Barack Hussein (I Am Not A Muslim) Obama’s big ol’ butt in the air, as he bows (actually, genuflects) before Saudi King Abdullah, which is something even Saudi King Abdullah usually frowns upon.  I wonder how the ObamaTurfers are gonna spin this, since something tells me the Limbaugh League ain’t gonna let go of this one easily.

It’s Official, Blago’s Indicted

Rod Blagojevich, (Cabbage Patch Weeble) you’ve just been indicted for engaging in a “wide-ranging scheme to deprive the people of Illinois of honest government,” what are you going to do now?  Says Rod, “fuck it, I’m going to Disney Land!”  Okay, so he didn’t exactly say that, in fact, even though some folks say he has permanent residence in LaLa land ‘cuz of his hair, (no, I’m not exaggerating) he isn’t going to Disney Land, according to reports he was already at Disney World when the indictment came down.  From the Chicagoist:

Former governor Rod Blagojevich, brother Rob, fundraiser Christopher Kelly, lobbyist Lon Monk, former Blago Chief-of-Staff John Harris, and William Cellini have all been indicted on corruption charges this afternoon. Blago’s attorney, Sheldon Sorosky, told the Sun-Times, “We’re saddened but not surprised at the indictment. Rod Blagojevich strongly asserts that he is innocent and we would ask the people of Illinois to wait and listen to all the facts of the case before they make their decision.”

Let the games begin.

Barack Obama: Does Anybody Know Just What He’s Doing?

Obama's EarPrompTer?

As we proceed merrily along from opening credits to first act of this Baracky Horror Picture Show we’re living in, it seems everybody is asking themselves the same thing; “what the hell is this guy doing?”  As you go from article to column to blog post, from pundit to talking head to know-it-all, the only thing consistent between them is their common “grab smoke in your fist” attempts to define the undefinable that is Barack Obama.  With his disdain of labels unless he’s protesting that he’s not a socialist or Muslim, or professing to being a “New Democrat” Christian willing to kick his pastor under the bus to further either cause, nobody knows for sure whose side this guy is on.

Is This An April Fool’s Day Joke?

By now, we all know that Just Barely President, Baracus Hubris Maximus (Hail, Ceasar!) and his wife and left tackle for the Chicago Bears, Michelle, (okay, that was mean, but she’s not exactly graceful, ya know?) gifted the Queen of England, Elizabeth II, with a loaded iPod and a Richard Rogers songbook, while she gave him a signed photo of herself and her husband.  There’s enough confirmation from enough various sources to be able to take on faith that this exchange of tacky gifts indeed occurred.  The only question remaining is, does NRO’s Jonah Goldberg have a sense of humor?   This is his whole posted report, reprinted and referenced all over the internet:

Diplomatic jaws dropped across the continent yesterday when it was revealed that U.S. President Barack Obama had, once again, fumbled a routine protocal of international statecraft: finding the right gift for a foreign leader or head of state. In a private ceremony with Queen Elizabeth, Her Royal Highness bequeathed to the Obamas one of the earliest known copies of William Shakespeare’s Henry V. She also presented him with the framed orginal sheet music of John Newton’s “Amazing Grace.” To the Obama daughters, the Queen gave a dollhouse-sized replica of Windsor Castle with a functioning train station in the year of the compound. They also received a prize Shetland pony. Mrs. Obama was given a ruby ring commissioned and worn by Queen Victoria.

Obama Good and Bad

This is a good thing:

This is a bad thing:

Don’t get it twisted.

The Real Double Standard

Many people are wondering if the difference in the way Wall Street and Motown are being treated represents a double standard, and, while that may, or may not, be a debate worth having, it’s not the question uppermost in my mind.  The double standard that concerns me is the one employed by Just Barely President Baracus Hubris Maximus (Hail Ceasar!) and his minions in his Obministration to further his clear-cut, sweeping agenda.  That double standard is the lie under the obscurity that characterizes every utterance from the Obamessiah’s lips.  Hope and change = restructure and redefine.  Inherited a mess = a chance to do things my way.  Everything said and done by this administration is a perverse manipulation of reality wielded as a bludgeon against those resistant to its plans.

Alan Colmes Needs To Chill

“Leave my president alone!”

That’s what Alan Colmes says.  Just leave the Obamessiah alone while he does whatever the hell he wants to do, says the Man Nobody Listens To.  Colmes is just too too miffed at all those people who have an opinion about the Baraculator.  The commenters on his blog post say you can almost see him stomping his widdle foot as he writes that, gosh darnit to heck, the poor Urkelbama hasn’t even figured out where the bathrooms are, fuhgoodnesssake!

I have a great idea. Leave the guy alone. Yes, LEAVE OBAMA ALONE. I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t hold our government officials accountable, but how about giving the new chief time to find out where the men’s room is in the White House?

Angie Harmon A PUMA?

Is Angie Harmon, formerly of Law and Order and Women’s Murder Club, a left-leaning, undeclared, closet PUMA, or just another plain old Republican?  Don’t know for sure where her political compass points, but she certainly has no love for Just Barely President, Baracus Hubris Maximus (Hail Ceasar!) that’s fer derned sher.  According to Fox News, Harmon is more than willing to go on record as not being predisposed to climb atop the Unity Pony of ObamaNation, but she’s good and damned sick of being called “racist” because of it:

“Here’s my problem with this, I’m just going to come out and say it. If I have anything to say against Obama it’s not because I’m a racist, it’s because I don’t like what he’s doing as President and anybody should be able to feel that way, but what I find now is that if you say anything against him you’re called a racist,” Harmon told Tarts at Thursday’s Los Angeles launch of the new eyelash-growing formula, Latisse. “But it has nothing to do with it, I don’t care what color he is. I’m just not crazy about what he’s doing and I heard all about this, and he’s gonna do that and change and change, so okay … I’m still dressing for a recession over here buddy and we’ve got unemployment at an all-time high and that was his number one thing and that’s the thing I really don’t appreciate. If I’m going to disagree with my President, that doesn’t make me a racist. If I was to disagree with W, that doesn’t make me racist. It has nothing to do with it, it is ridiculous.”

Uncle Barack Wants Your Company

The “dirty little secret” regarding the firing of General Motors’ CEO Richard Wagoner by the Obama administration is not that it represents an alarming degree of government intervention into private business, former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson fired AIG’s CEO of three months, Robert Willumstad, and brought in his Midwestern Goldman Sachs board member buddy, Edward Liddy, (who resigned his seat on Goldman’s board a couple weeks later) when he loaned the company 85 billion pre-TARP dollars in return for 79.5% of  it, after all.  In fact, the “dirty little secret” is not even a “secret” at all.  You see, what nobody wants to admit, is that none of this crap makes any difference at all.

People simply can’t afford new cars, and everybody knows it.  The Big 3 could be making the bestest, most beautifullest, fuel efficient air-powered chariots in the world and, like the housing market, they would struggle.  Nobody’s accusing the construction industry of building crappy houses and causing the real estate collapse.  Nope, the government is diverting your attention from the fact that they’re still funneling the money consumers might use to buy shit that would stimulate the economy to the banksters who screwed up the economy in the first place.  All while they take over everything else, of course.

And, Then There’s Blago

On the day when the Superman of Spokesmodel-in-Chief’s Boy Wonder,  Treasury Secretary, Turbo Tax Timmy Geithner, tax cheat (TTTG,tc) was all over television promoting his plan to fundamentally change the American financial structure…

“But we’re going to emerge stronger from this. When we get through this, people are going to care less about what they make, more about what they do. What they achieve is what they make. And that will help make this country stronger.”

…by pumping even more cash into the banksters’ coffers than the 565 billion dollars already spent of the 700 billion allocated TARP funds, you’d think that money and Afghanistan were all that the Obamanians had to worry about.

Yet, with all that, and the other potential crises looming on the Obama horizon, like the auto industry collapse, no “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” repeal forthcoming, and G20 to name another three, the upcoming April 7 date for indicting, or filing an extension to file charges against the Cabbage Patch Weeble, Rod Blagojevich, lurks menacingly in the background for the Pretendident.  NBC Chicago says the indictment could come down sometime next week.  While the Obministration might well be content to just let sleeping dogs lie, in about a week, one way or another, something’s gonna give.

Who Knows Where The Nose Goes When The Door’s Closed?

In recent days the Teflon TelePrompTer Reader of Transparency has interestingly met with at least two disparate, yet influential, groups behind closed doors.  Given his proclivity for saying one thing publicly and another in private, ala NAFTA-gate, one naturally asks oneself, why?

On Friday, Just Barely President Baracus Hubris Maximus, (Hail Ceasar!) the man McClatchy claims sets a “new standard for managing the news,”  met with CEO’s of some of the nation’s largest banks, the same banksters who’ve received humongous amounts of TARP funds, and many of whose employees donated millions to help him get elected.  Funny that, huh?  While various reports suggest that the meeting was “encouraging” and “upbeat,” how the hell do we know whether said reports are actually reflective of the events as they happened, or are merely variations of an agreed-upon story for publication?  News article after news article reads like entries in a gossip rag, full of “this guy said…” that guy reported…” the President stressed…” second-hand impressions of what supposedly transpired.  However, given the rather incestuous nature of the Wall Street/White House relationship, I’m just as inclined to believe that Obankster was given his marching orders, rather than the other way around.  In fact, Reuters, in sort of a financial week in review roundup offers a few interesting tidbits that make you wonder just what it was that the Reverse Robin Hoods actually discussed, like this:

Giggles, Gimmicks And Gaffes

As I watch the ill-prepared Pretendident try to advance his fauxgressive, pseudo-centrist, Republican-lite brand of quasi-liberal mishmosh of an ill-conceived agenda further along on the nightmare road to his own personal Jonestown that he seems so hellbent on guiding us, I can’t help but be furious at the KoolAid addicted juveniles who gleefully and cluelessly helped whoever tapped the hologram of an illusion that masquerades as the reality that is supposed to be Obama, to be the president that finally drives the country into the ground.

What the hell were you thinking?

Did you really believe that a guy who can’t remember where he is, or how many states there are, or whether he’s a Muslim or not, much less his own 4 year old, twice-daily repeated stump speech without a TelePrompTer, could actually guide this country to peace and prosperity?  A man barely in the Senate long enough to figure out where his office, let alone the bathroom  was, is suddenly going to be able and savvy enough to, what, wave a magic wand, kiss the nation’s boo-boos and make them all better?  Is that what you thought while you watched his “what she said,” “I agree with you, John,” debate performances?  Really?  No shit?

Obama’s Mojo Working

Reading an Associated Press article with the headline “Americans Say Too Early To Judge Obama Performance“  it is clear that the particular brand of Obandini Davids Axelrod and Plouffe have been using to fertilize their Astroturf is working spectacularly.  The statements of people interviewed read as if Obamatrons were regurgitating pre-programmed responses implanted into their memory banks in anticipation of just such an occasion, the sort that PUMA bloggers and their readers encounter from paid Obots on a daily basis.   As we all know, sympathy for him from even those who didn’t support him enough to vote for him, followed by familiar, yet personalized, variations on the talking point themes of the day, is standard Obot procedure:

I Thought I Was Kidding!

When I christened our Junior President-in-Training, Just Barely President, Baracus Hubris Maximus (Hail, Ceasar!) I called myself poking fun of his narcissism as well as the willingness of the addle-brained KoolAid Kidz to feed it.  Little did I know that my mocking would fall so flat in light of the truth of my words and the sentiment they expose.  From the Associated Press:

Obama the Great?

President Barack Obama was compared favorably to Alexander the Great on Wednesday during a White House reception honoring Greek Independence Day, with the leader of the Greek Orthodox Church in America saying the president should follow the example of the ancient military conqueror to help solve some of Greece’s problems.

Obama took the adulation in stride, making a self-deprecating joke about Michelle being the boss at home no matter what others call him, but that wasn’t the end of the ObaLove:

Debating the Undebatable

Just Barely President, Baracus Hubris Maximus, (Hail Ceasar!) forced the networks to give him a hunk of their prime time last night because…well, he really, really wanted to go on TV again.  It wasn’t like he had anything earth-shattering, or even new, to share with the nation; he just must have felt, just like the rest of us did, that his last few giggly, insulting television appearances sucked, so he needed to hijack American Idol time to try to re-convince America that he was indeed worthy of their American Idol, West Wing-esque devotion to his Spokesmodel-In-Chief-iness.   Whatever; Obi in HD is getting old.

Who’s Zoomin’ Who?

On a day when Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary, Turbo Tax Timmy Geithner, tax cheat (TTTG,tc) appear before Congress seeking unprecedented power to further loot manipulate regulate the financial industry, including non-banking entities like AIG, the company whose bonuses they’ve been called on the carpet to address, perusal of the day’s news stories, blog posts, and opinion pieces reveals more questions than answers.  Is this the bizarre Obministration Hokey Pokey Bamboozle One Step Forward, Two Steps Back Cha-Cha-Cha it appears to be, or are the Obanomic efforts of the government so far truly on behalf of the people?

Brazile Says “Ignorant,” “Punch-Drunk” Obama Doing Great!

Donna Brazile, who claims her life is going to crap since her “Mama Factor” was elected, nonetheless says when it comes to bashing the Baby Prez on Training Wheels, everybody should just shut the hell up and keep sucking.  Okay, she didn’t say that; that’s the punchline to an awful joke, but I thought that, given what she did say, it was a pretty apt interpretation.  The Object of Donna’s Desire has been having a pretty rough go of it, lately, and DB is just sick of it, sick I tellya, and hates all the haters hating.

Donna’s mama would be proud that her baby girl is so kind-hearted and forgiving, considering all that her KoolAid-fueled infatuation has cost her.  But, Does Donna blame Oboyfriend?  Did Juliet blame Romeo?  Cleopatra blame Antony?  The chick on Dancing With The Stars blame The Batchelor?  Noooooo!  Whatareyounuts?

Over the last two months, I have seen my hours cut back, a newspaper column canceled, clients unable to renew their contracts with my firm, and others needing to renegotiate my modest fees. Business is drying up, and despite all my frantic maneuvers to move my little retirement funds out of harm’s way, my 401(k) is disappearing faster than the snow from the recent storm. I don’t want to see this president fail, and I suggest that to do so is a partisan luxury none of us can afford.

Ding! Dong! Obot Calling!

Have you had the thrill of an Obamaniac, clipboard in hand, goofy, KoolAid addled, Hoover vac salesman smile plastered across their too-eager, hopey-changey face, happily dingdonging your doorbell like a days-gone-by Avon Lady or modern-day teenage religious missionary, earnestly selling rainbows and half-price Unity pony rides?  No?  Me neither.  Luckily for the Obots, I’m sure my name is number one atop the Don’t Even Bother Do Not Call list.  Unlike millions of my fellow Americans, determined to remain huddled behind furniture with their families, cowering in fear as they shush the children and wait for the crazed ObArmy members in their neighborhood charged with getting in their faces to collect signatures for their Dear Leader, Just Barely President Baracus Hubris Maximus (Hail! Ceasar!) to get tired and leave, I would welcome the opportunity to put my own counter-program to their Operation Pledge Project Canvass, Operation Get The Hell Off My Porch, in effect.

If you have a life and haven’t heard of the latest wrinkle in the Spokesmodel-in-Chief’s Perpetual Campaign, the gist is that ordinary citizens, besotted with the Obamessiah, are supposed to bug ordinary citizens who aren’t until the unbesotted give up their signatures and email addresses, anything, to make the Obot just please shut up already and go away:

What Dodd Did (And Probably Didn’t Do)

The whole “who put the “out” in the stimulus bill?” kerfluffle has had me flummoxed since it came to light.  Why all the confusion?  Either Christopher Dodd is a one-man crime spree, ( ‘cuz finagling with a bill after it’s been voted on should be a crime, if it isn’t) or he meddled with the wording during some crack in time before it was voted on, (in which case somebody should have noticed) or, he didn’t do nothing.  I vote for the last one.

Chris Dodd was not on the House Senate committee that changed the language of the executive compensation amendment to the stimulus bill.  I’ve posted the relevant portion of the February 8, 2009 version of the Senate bill here, and the final version here.  The segment containing the February 11, 2009 cutoff date affecting AIG’s retention bonuses is not in the Senate version; however, the bill does contain the Wyden-Snowe amendment calling for a 35% tax, and a provision that executives be paid no more than the president of the United States.   As near as I can tell, this is the bill that was voted on, and passed by the Senate, Tuesday, February 10, 2009.  In fact, in Dodd’s mea culpa, he refers to the “Senate approved” language.

Underestimate Obama At Everybody’s Risk

While conspiracy theorists and other befuddled Americans are searching for hidden agendas to justify, or at least, explain, the media-driven election of an inexperienced junior Senator who can’t form complete sentences without the use of a TelePrompTer, they’re missing the all-too obvious agenda staring them dead in the face.  Whoever funded and formulated Barack Obama’s meteoric rise from obscurity to omnipresence is bound and determined to totally revamp the country’s policies, programs, and policy-making procedures, as we’ve known them.   This is not cosmetic surgery we’re talking here; a little nip here, a tuck there.  This is fundamental, foundational, systemic change, according to their dictates.  If you’re not on board with every element of the sweeping  “change” they have in mind, well, that’s just too damned bad.

The Press-ident and his backers want the economy to fail.  That’s the only way his policies to this point make any sense at all.  He has said he wants the population angry, outraged, even, so that he can push his agenda through under his budget umbrella.  The economic system we live under must collapse, so that a new one can be put in place.  With it, healthcare, education, housing, energy and other core elements of out national foundation will experience profound systemic “change.”

Psssst! They’re All Lying!!!

When it comes to Barack’s Bailout Bonanza Brouhaha, everybody responsible for the current “outrage” about the debacle is lying their head off through their perfectly capped teeth.  Case in point, The Dodd Amendment supposedly “snuck” into the stimulus bill that allegedly restricted the bonuses to be paid executives employed by companies receiving government handouts.  First, the amendment was there, then it wasn’t.  Dodd said he didn’t change it, then he said he did. The exact sequence of events seems deliberately fuzzy.  What, exactly did Dodd do, and when did he do it?

By February 4, Obama had angrily shaken his finger at “shameful” Wall Street executive excess and had issued new rules regarding their future compensation that even he, via MSNBO, admitted were “symbolic.”

The limits would not apply retroactively to any bank that received money from the first half of the $700 bailout allocated by Congress. For example, the restriction would not apply to such firms as American International Group Inc., Bank of America Corp., and Citigroup Inc., that already have received such help.

But Obama touted the broad symbolism of his action.

February 10, the International Herald Tribune noted that the toothless language was all Geithner’s:

Who’s Shuckin’ ‘n’ Jivin’ Now?

While there are many tangled webs to unravel in the current Obama Drama Bailout Brouhaha, one man seems to have had a pretty clear eye on the situation all along.  New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, the Clintonite once accused of demeaning Barack Obama with the use of the phrase “shuck and jive” in a sentence only marginally related to Sir Nose in the Air, has been yelling and screaming about the unfair Wall Street bonuses since at least October.  And, everybody knew it.

During the primaries Hillary Clinton supporting Cuomo, during a radio interview, said:

“It’s not a TV crazed race. Frankly you can’t buy your way into it,” Cuomo said, according to Albany Times Union reporter Rick Karlin. He then added, “You can’t shuck and jive at a press conference. All those moves you can make with the press don’t work when you’re in someone’s living room.”

No Strings Attached Means No Strings Attached

Watching CNN this morning and listening to talking head after talking head egging on commentator after commentator responding to outraged viewer after outraged viewer, I’m struck by the ease with which my fellow Americans can be manipulated into gleefully relinquishing their common sense.   Of course, this tsunami of indignation is just the latest episode of Barack’s Blameless Bailout Brouhaha, part whatever of the ongoing ObaDrama.

You see, first, the Candidate Once Known As Inevitable, in the immediate wake of the Lehman Brothers collapse that served as a catalyst to the current crisis, stood back and let his then-opponent commit to a position, only to assess, evaluate, formulate, mock and dismiss it, thereby gaining Sheeple points without actually countering, or even addressing it.  Once his then-opponent was on the ropes, The American Idol boldly, yet, appropriately shyly, stepped into the fray, marketing himself as the voice of reason, willing to listen and adjudicate between the warring factions negotiating the wisdom of propping up crippled companies on a government crutch.  While that maneuver gained the Chicago Calculator even more Sheeple points, public resistance to idea of pouring government money down incompetently run, failing companies’ drains, threatened to upset the Ocean Parter’s best laid plans.   The Preppie Prevaricator then, feigning reluctance, went before Congress to plead the case for the bankers, for the good of the people, introducing his now-famous, and oft-used, “crisis to a catastrophe” line.

The Sheeple went wild.  ObiWanNaBePresident had saved the day.  Of course, having been in daily contact with the architects of the frequently renamed “don’t call it a bailout, it’s a recovery plan, TARP rescue,” then- Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson and his Boy Wonder, then-Chairman of the New York Federal Reserve and Obama’s mama’s boss’ kid, Turbo Tax Timmy Geithner, tax cheat, (TTTG,tc) the Obamessiah knew full well that the “bank bailout” would be divided between the two banksters and would soon stretch to include the world’s biggest government owned insurance company, too.

Fundamental, Foundational “Change”

Larry, Moe, and Curly

Somebody needs to get Vice-President Jo(k)e Biden a TelePrompTer so he too, like the Obamessiah he serves, can read White House-sanctioned policy positions without fear of inconveniently telling the truth.  Because it seems clear that the virtual muzzle they’ve applied to him is not always going to work, and ya gotta let the guy out sometime, if only to attempt to justify his phony baloney position.   Since he hasn’t changed, you have to wonder at the wisdom of a crew that chose Jo(k)e (Generated Crisis) Biden in the first place.  It’s not like they didn’t know who he was when they picked him.  They can’t possibly be surprised that a guy infamous for his ability to speak clearly with his foot in his mouth, shows no sign of sticking to the Obministration’s script, even when ostensibly cheerleading for it.

As the disenchantment with his boss grows amidst the increasing suspicion, long held by PUMAs and others for whom his ineptitude and unreadiness has always been clear, that President Alfred E. (What, me work?) Urkelbama is a puppet for unknown string pullers hellbent upon radically redesigning the country for their own benefit, Biden unwittingly goes and lets the cat out the bag.  Speaking at a Democratic National Committee event for supporters, Politico reports that Biden, in stark contrast to the Obministration’s latest McCainian “the economy is only so crappy” official position, had a lot to say.  First, the crappy economy setup:

Why Obama?

I’ll be the first to admit that I did not come into this blogging business as the most politically astute or learned person on the planet.  The idea that I might be is so far from the possibility of reality that the words I just typed hardly belong in the same sentence.  I know that.  However, watching my hopes for the election of a candidate I thought to be most qualified to “inherit” (I’m beginning  to hate that word) the responsibility of guiding the county back on track be bashed, dashed, crashed and gleefully shattered to smithereens by disparate entities on the left and right, seemingly demented in their zeal, has given me an opportunity to learn and grow politically in a way unlikely to have been appreciated before, had it presented itself.  And frankly, I’m sick of it.

All. Of. It.

Each news story, op-ed column, Google search, blog post and talking head garbage spew disguised as informed opinion has added another tidbit of information, often counter to the point the happy yakker thought he/she was making, to the tapestry of my understanding of our nation’s political reality.  It’s enough to make you puke.

What’s In A Name?

Wanna hear something strange?  The President I love to hate, Alfred E. Urkelbama (What, me do that?) and I actually have a lot in common.  We’re both nominally “black,” (though, I didn’t grow up in Hawaii, I don’t have a white parent, and I don’t try to mute or exploit my blackness at other black people’s expense  for personal gain, but other than that…) and, like him, I don’t like labels.  Okay, so that doesn’t exactly qualify as “a lot” in common, but it is more than I thought, and “a lot” more than I really want to admit.  I really don’t like the guy, okay?

Other than a recent declaration that President Black Obama considered himself a “New Democrat,” assumedly aligning his political ideology with a faction of the same Democratic Leadership Council he once defiantly, uncategorically, denied, Oblahblah has consistently resisted being pigeon-holed.  This is understandable, given his early primary and caucus appeals to Republicans to crossover and support, vote for, and donate to him.  I mean, what do you call a guy who does that?  “Opportunist” if you’re kind, “traitor” if you’re not?

I’m not.

It also makes sense that he would reject the label, “liberal,” even if his philosophy leaned that way, (which, I’m not hardly sure of) since Republicans have made that term synonymous with “rabid Democratic champion of the shiftless and unworthy.”  Who, besides Jesus, would want to be thought of like that, huh?

Not As Bad As Who Thinks?

President Black (Waffles) Obama made an astonishing statement during his “rah-rah the economy, ain’t I great?” speech to the Business Roundtable yesterday.  The man who warned that catastrophe was at the door just weeks ago, when he was trying to scare the country into letting him have his way with our money, suddenly sees the sunshine.  Saying that he was waaay too optimistic by nature to buy into any of his critics’ “Malthusian, woe, Chicken Little, the earth is falling” stuff, the President Known as Alfred E. Urkel made a whiplash-inducing turn from his earlier momentary stint as Nostradamus.  From the Associated Press:

“A smidgen of good news and suddenly everything is doing great. A little bit of bad news and ‘Ooohh, we’re down on the dumps,’” he said. “And I am obviously an object of this constantly varying assessment.”

Obama disagreed with the choices.

“I don’t think things are ever as good as they say, or ever as bad as they say,” he added. “Things two years ago were not as good as we thought because there were a lot of underlying weaknesses in the economy. They’re not as bad as we think they are now.”

He’s kidding, right?  This is the same guy who told a buncha House Democrats a month ago to pass his stimulus bill or else:

“If we do not move swiftly to sign the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act into law, an economy that is already in crisis will be faced with catastrophe,” Obama said.

So, I guess by his new logic, the “crisis” was really just a “situation” that might have blossomed into an “inconvenience” if Congress hadn’t hurried up and passed a 787 billion dollar bill that nobody was sure would work, and nobody had time to read, lickety split, just for the hell of it, I suppose.

Welcome To ObamaLand

Change.

Such a small, innocent, innocuous, deliberately vague word.

Our nation is being dramatically redesigned from the ground up, right under our noses, without our permission, and nobody’s really paying attention.  Oh, sure, some parties are crying foul about having their toes stepped on, or their special interests assaulted, but that’s part of the plan.  As long as folks are preoccupied with trivial details, they pay no attention whatsoever to the Big Picture.  And, while, the housing crisis, foreclosures, unemployment, Nancy Pelosi’s travel abuses, etc. are important, in the Grand Scheme of Things, all those things are trivialities.

Our country is being redesigned from the ground up.  Treasury Secretary and Barack Obama’s mom’s boss’ kid, Turbo Tax Timmy Geithner, tax cheat, (TTTG, tc) told Charlie Rose that “capitalism will be different.”  When?  Now. Talking about the inadequacy of the  regulatory framework relative to the financial system’s structure, TTTG,tc had this to say, according to Politico:

Asked if that meant in order to boost the economy out of recession there’ll changes to capitalism, Geithner said bluntly: “I think capitalism will be different, and the financial distribution will be dramatically different. It’s already dramatically different.”

Did you catch that?  Read it again.  Go ‘head, I’ll wait.   dooby doo dooo…hmmm da dum… hmmm, da da da (fingers drumming) …okay, ya done?  Good, let’s continue.

Our financial system has already been restructured, financial redistribution is dramatically different.

Change.

Obama Doesn’t Deserve A Honeymoon

Alfred E. Urkel, the man who pulled out all the stops, even questionable ones he invented, to become President of the United States with a resume barely as long as a fleeting memory, and whose primary qualification for the job was the ability to read ghostwritten speeches from a TelePrompTer about how his inexperience was so “transformative” that he embodied “change” itself, which allowed true believers (Obots) to project their “hopes” of what they wanted him to be upon the “blank screen” he pretended to be, was advertised as being ready to rule on Day One, capable of single-handedly multi-tasking all the daunting problems any incoming president would face into submission, pronto.  Yes, he could.  Then was their time for shining lights, after all.

Now, at this time, halfway through his first hundred days, critics on both sides of the aisle are questioning his ability to handle the potentially “catastrophic” economic challenges before him and finding him lacking, while his true believers, aka Obacrats, are whining about the honeymoon due him as novice president not being acknowledged, supposedly making such judgments patently unfair.

Well, boo hoo.

The Historic Greatest First Black President Ever doesn’t get a honeymoon.  The Man Who Would Be Lincoln was supposed to be so generously endowed with so much power, grace, elegance, intellect and just plain awesomeness resulting from inheriting the legacy of everything good that every president before him possessed and accomplished, that fixing what ailed the world was going to be a piece of cake consumed between workouts and vacations.  Any guy who can make oceans rise at a moment’s notice, should be able to fix the economy before his first arugula and waffle breakfast after inauguration.  So, if panels of economists on CBS News’ Early Show…

Obama Defines Obama

“Ich bein ein New Democrat.”  “I am a New Democrat.”  That’s what President Black Obama said at a meeting of New Democrats.  Of course, unlike John Kennedy in Berlin, he didn’t say it in German, though, had he been at a gathering of chicken dippers, he probably would have amended his declaration to profess his unambiguous affiliation with…chicken dippers, whatever they are.  Thus, the self-proclaimed “blank screen” that is the Obamessiah assumes a Paulian characterization for himself.  From the New Testament, 1 Corinthians 9:20-22:

²⁰And unto the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might gain the Jews; to them that are under the law, as under the law, that I might gain them that are under the law;

²¹To them that are without law, as without law, (being not without law to God, but under the law to Christ,) that I might gain them that are without law.

²²To the weak became I as weak, that I might gain the weak: I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some.

Politico reports the surprising declaration with the appropriate sense of awe it deserves, given the Artful Dodger’s previous reluctance to be as labeled, be it as liberal, Socialist, centrist, whatever:

President Barack Obama firmly resists ideological labels, but at the end of a private meeting with a group of moderate Democrats Tuesday afternoon he offered a statement of solidarity.

“I am a New Democrat,” he told the New Democrat Coalition, according to two sources at the White House session.

The Education Plans Of The President Of Plans To Make Plans

Once again President Black Obama, Dear Leader Whose Magnificence Is A Wondrous Joy To Behold, Praise Teh ObiOne, has assumed his usual squinty-eyed, nose-in-the-air position between two TelePrompTers, to read aloud yet another directive to a bunch of people to figure out a way to spend the money he set aside for them to try to fix a problem he has vaguely outlined.  As he has done with health care and the financial crisis, the Man Who Would Be King If Everybody Would Just See The Light has wagged his finger disapprovingly at the nation’s educators, and told them that if they don’t hurry up and make some plans to “get better,” he was gonna dock their pay.  Stupid teachers, don’t they know who they’re fucking with?  From Bloomberg:

Obama gave a broad outline of his proposals, saying improvements in the public education system will lead to a more skilled workforce that is needed to compete with overseas rivals as the global economy contracts. He reiterated the goal he set in his Feb. 24 address to Congress that by 2020, the U.S. should have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.

No No Child Left Behind for The ObiDazzler, uh-uh, waaaay too specific, dude.  Nope, just tell the teachers that the country’s economic future is in their hands…

The economic crisis is “unlike anything we’ve seen in our time,” Obama told the group. Still, he said, the government can’t afford to put off investments in schooling. “Education is no longer just a pathway to opportunity and success, it is a prerequisite,” he said.

Obama Opposed Prop 8 On The Downlow

Suddenly, long after such a revelation could do anyone any good, a pointless fight has broken out over a letter from then-Senator Barack Obama that has “re-surfaced” stating his “unequivocal” support for defeating the deliberately mis-articulated Proposition 8, the California initiative banning gay marriage.  While no one wants to admit it, asking people to vote for Prop 8 if they were against gay marriage, and vice-versa, was purposefully misleading.  Be that as it may, we now have “proof” of Barack Obama’s unwavering solidarity with his LGBT brothers and sisters.

A website called Towleroad, among many others, is reporting a brouhaha developing in the gay community about the letter from Obama to the Alice B. Toklas Club LGBT Dramatic Club, details of which (the brouhaha, not the letter) were recently reported in the Bay Area Reporter.  “No on 8″ campaign manager Steve Smith, at a blame-assigning, “where do we go from here?” strategy session, was asked about the mistakes made by the marriage equality forces, one of which being the non-use of the Obama non-endorsement letter:

Smith also acknowledged that the campaign should have used then-presidential candidate Barack Obama’s stated opposition to Prop 8. Instead, little use was made of Obama’s opposition in a letter last June to the Alice B. Toklas LGBT Democratic Club, and right before Election Day the Yes on 8 campaign sent out a mailer featuring Obama’s image and quotes that he is opposed to same-sex marriage.

“That was a close call,” Smith said. “Maybe we should have.”

Hear Ye! Here Ye! Pssssst, You, Too!

Join me and a few of my friends at City Tavern, a new website named for the place in Philadelphia where the Founding Fathers used to get together to chew the fat and drink on the cheap without women. At least, that’s what this menu suggests they did. Of course, they went on to launch that whole Continental Congress/Revolution reaction to the price of booze going up, or, whatever, but we’re going to be responding to all the current Intolerable Acts of governments against their citizens.   Anyway, we won’t be drinking, and we encourage the participation of women and all other human life forms, given the fact that that “all men are created equal” thing is soooo yesterday.

Our Founding Father, Shtuey, explains our mission this way:

Here at City Tavern we will be wrestling with the issues pertinent to the human rights struggle, around the world, and at home.  Regardless of gender, sexual orientation, color, economic standing, religion, nationality, or age, we are all born with the same rights, and the same need to have those rights protected.

So, join us, and if you want a snort, it’s strictly BYOB.  We can’t match these prices, after all:

Revenge Of The Maltese ObaDrama Could Happen To You

What’s the difference between American International Group (AIG) and any other garden variety extortionist?  Not much.  In fact, your average “gimme $1,000, or I tell your wife about the weekend with the monkey,” slimeball could take a lesson from these guys.  According to Bloomberg, not only is AIG resorting to “pony up, or else you’ll be sorry” threats to keep the government on the hook, they’re warning their marks to keep it on the downlow:

American International Group Inc. appealed for its fourth U.S. rescue by telling regulators the company’s collapse could cripple money-market funds, force European banks to raise capital, cause competing life insurers to fail and wipe out the taxpayers’ stake in the firm.

AIG needed immediate help from the Federal Reserve and Treasury to prevent a “catastrophic” collapse that would be worse for markets than the demise last year of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., according to a 21-page draft AIG presentation dated Feb. 26, labeled as “strictly confidential” and circulated among federal and state regulators.

Obama Kicks Holder To The Curb, Kinda

President Black Obama, the man who only discusses the issue of race directly when it comes to distancing himself from criticism regarding his church attendance, or chastising black people for being irresponsible to curry favor with racially insecure whites,  kicked his Attorney General, Eric Holder to the curb for calling America “a nation of cowards” when it comes to the subject.  From the New York Times:

“I think it’s fair to say that if I had been advising my attorney general, we would have used different language,” Mr. Obama said in a mild rebuke from America’s first black president to its first black attorney general.

More diversionary, race-baiting, media hype, anyone?  It bears mentioning that Obama did not disagree with the content of Holder’s statement, only the language.

“We’re oftentimes uncomfortable with talking about race until there’s some sort of racial flare-up or conflict,” he said, adding, “We could probably be more constructive in facing up to sort of the painful legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and discrimination.”

Pin The Tail On Obama

Amidst the sturm und drang that is the nascent Obama administration, pundits, analysts, talking heads, blogger boyz and other professional bullshitters are running amok, racing each other to see who can be first to bang his/her head into a brick wall trying to figure out just where the Spokesmodel-in-Chief is coming from, and exactly where he might think he’s going.  Needless to say, none of them seem to have a freaking clue.  Is he too tired, over his head, fiendishly Machiavellian, liberal, centrist, Socialist, Marxist, fascist, or, just,  as Mickey Mouse allegedly said to the divorce court judge about Minnie, fucking Goofy?

The New York Times, in an interview aboard Air Force One, tried valiantly to pin the Teflon TelePrompTer Reader down about his overall philosophy of governance, to little avail:

Q. The first six weeks have given people a glimpse of your spending priorities. Are you a socialist as some people have suggested?

A. You know, let’s take a look at the budget – the answer would be no.

Q. Is there anything wrong with saying yes?

25 Down, 3,499,975 To Go

Every time Barack Obama or one of his suckophant Obacolytes utters a variation of their current favorite responsibility-ducking theme, “we inherited this mess,” they sound stupider than they did the last time one of them said it, usually no more than five minutes earlier.   How do you “inherit” something you fought for tooth and nail, down and dirty, lying, scheming, cheating, plotting, manipulating, bribing, and kicking friends, family and loved ones, including your own grandmother, your pastor, and anybody else foolish enough to get in your way, under the bus to get?   That’s like a cat burglar trying to declare bankruptcy because the loot he “inherited” from the upstairs safe in his last haul was a lot less than he thought he would get.

Yesterday, in Columbus, Ohio, at a graduation for 25 police recruits curiously “laid off” when the city’s money just up and ran out, all of a sudden-like, right before they were scheduled to graduate, the newly re-instated recruits welcomed the new president to their graduation ceremony, and President Man, da da da daaaaaa! who single-handedly saved their jobs, (imagine that) made his case, reading from a TelePrompTer, as he tried not to break his arm patting himself on the back.  From Reuters:

Presidentin’ Is Hard

Though I make no claims of being a financial wizard, or a political maven, even I can see that all is not right on Wall Street, D.C. where the heart and soul of our country is on life support, currently being administered to by second graders who want to be doctors when they grow up.  And, I’m sophisticated enough to recognize that a lot of what I read about our dire national situation is presented in the media by people representing the political party so far out of favor they have to look to bloviating blowhards for advice, or worse, can be made to appear to need to do so.  I get that.  However, in spite of all that, the forces pretending to represent the white-hatted good guys in this classic Adventures in Administration movie, armed with their heralded sky-high approval ratings for their poor man’s Dark Gable leading man, simply can’t mount enough of a stampede to disguise the fact that the dustcloud that follows them like Charlie Brown’s pal Pigpen’s is not the result of riding hard and strong over the dusty trail, but merely the wispy smoke trails from their “throw ‘em off the path,” hastily built, diversionary cookfire.  In other words, they got nothing.

Stalwart bastion of the Obamedia protection service, Salon Magazine, has an article by former Clinton labor secretary and Obacolyte, Robert Reich, in which he pitifully attempts to pooh-pooh rightwing claims that the Obamessiah himself is responsible for our economic woes by trying to lay them at the feet of the finger-pointers:

When it turns out that people like Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, who took home $68 million in 1997, was the only Wall Streeter in a meeting last September at the New York Federal Reserve to discuss the initial AIG bailout with Tim Geithner, then New York Fed chair, among others, at the very time Goldman was AIG’s largest trading partner, a distinct scent of self-dealing begins to emanate. When it turns out that Citigroup got a bailout deal last October far more generous than that given to any other distressed bank, when a top Citi executive was advising the Treasury and Fed, the scent increases. Goldman’s past CEO was treasury secretary at that time, by the way, and another former Goldman CEO was a top Citi official and also a former treasury secretary. I am not suggesting anything so crude as corruption. But could it be, given these tangled webs, that — innocently, unintentionally, perhaps even subconsciously — the entire bailout effort was premised on saving these companies rather than protecting the public? Or that the distinction between the two was lost, and still is?

Yet, Reich gleefully and disingenuously, ignores the fact that the people he’s defending his ObaMaster against are the people who funded his campaign.  Not only that, the central figure in Reich’s little morality play, Turbo Tax Timmy Geithner, tax cheat, (TTTG,tc)  has a family history of sorts with Barry Sutoro, and is currently employed as the Blameless One’s lapdog and whipping boy.  To point out that he may have colluded with the banksters against the public in ripping off the country on the other team’s watch is…well…stupid.

Why would anyone purporting to defend the Obama administration draw attention to the man quickly becoming the public face of its incompetence?  Especially when the author can’t even make it through to the end of his own piece without acknowledging at least some of the complicity of the Obama Drama Troupe?

The Wall Street and Republican media attack machine doesn’t know exactly what to make of this. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, along with CNBC, alternates between attacking Obama for bailing out Wall Street and excusing Wall Street’s excesses. But then again, Obama doesn’t seem to know exactly what to make of it either. He seems to vacillate as well — one moment scorning Wall Street, the next moment justifying further bailouts. I do hope he takes a firmer hand, drawing a clearer distinction and making a clearer connection between clearing up these financial balance sheets and helping average people. Otherwise, the next populist uprising will be born in this moneyed quagmire. It is here — within the muck that was created by AIG, Citigroup, Fannie and Freddie, other giant financial institutions, now in combination with the U.S. Treasury and Fed — that the public is most confused, bears its most serious scars, and is potentially most burdened in future years, by decisions still made in secret.

Why Is Obama Partying?

Why is Barack Obama throwing parties like it’s 1999?

Maybe because his plans to ravage the Republican party by inflating Rush Limbaugh’s importance only to tear it down are working so well.  And make no mistake, these are Barack Obama’s plans.

Anybody who’s been paying the slightest bit of attention to ObamAntics the past couple years knows that calling out the press is one of his favorite past times.  He chided Don Imus and called for the schlock jock be fired for his “nappy headed ‘ho’s” characterization of the Rutger’s women’s basketball team.  From ABC News, April, 2007:

“I understand MSNBC has suspended Mr. Imus,” Obama told ABC News, “but I would also say that there’s nobody on my staff who would still be working for me if they made a comment like that about anybody of any ethnic group. And I would hope that NBC ends up having that same attitude.”

He reprimanded the Chicago Tribune’s John Kass in March of 2008, for not being properly deferential at any and all times, when Kass confronted The Never To Be Questioned One about his ties to ersatz realtor and convicted felon, Tony Rezko:

“I know that there are those, like John Kass, who would like me to decry Chicago politics more frequently.”
Just the corrupt parts, I said.
“I’ll leave that to his editorial commentary, but I think it’s fair to say that I have conducted myself in my public office with great care and high ethical standards,” he said.
Except for Rezko.

He kicked reporters off his campaign plane after their papers endorsed his rival, John McCain.  From the Washington Post, October 2008:

The Washington Times, which has had a reporter traveling with Barack Obama’s campaign for nearly two years, has been kicked off his press plane.

“The decision came just three days after the editorial page endorsed John McCain,” Times editor in chief John Solomon said this morning. “I hope a candidate who says he wants to unite the country isn’t using a litmus test for who can cover him.”

What’s more, the Obama operation has ejected reporters for the New York Post and Dallas Morning News, which have also endorsed McCain. And room was suddenly made for two magazines that have not been traveling with the Democratic nominee, Essence and Ebony.

He even got downright pissy with the White House press corps 2 days after he was inaugurated, for daring to ask him a question amidst all the bootlicking he had come down to the press room to get:

“Ahh, see,” he said, “I came down here to visit. See this is what happens. I can’t end up visiting with you guys and shaking hands if I’m going to get grilled every time I come down here.”

And while Politico and others have shown pretty conclusively that the current “Operation: Get Rush” campaign is coming straight from the West Wing via Rahm Emanuel playing field general to suckophants Paul Begala, James Carville and George Stephanopoulis, to lay the blame at the feet of Rahmbo is to miss the larger point.

Barack Obama himself launched the opening salvo in the Limbaugh-Obama war in January.  From the New York Post:

President Obama warned Republicans on Capitol Hill today that they need to quit listening to radio king Rush Limbaugh if they want to get along with Democrats and the new administration.

“You can’t just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done,” he told top GOP leaders, whom he had invited to the White House to discuss his nearly $1 trillion stimulus package.

Alinsky-izing Limbaugh

The mainstream blogosphere, as opposed to the grassroots blogosphere, like the PUMAsphere, is slowly waking up to the fact that the country is being community organized through Astroturf by those promoting the “surprisinly liberal” guy who ran his campaign for the president as the person who was going to change Washington, politics and the country from the ground up.  Duh.  I keep wondering just what the heck these previously clueless KoolAid drunks, now slowly emerging from their self-induced haze, were thinking for the past two years.  Were they freaking deaf, dumb and blind?  The President Formerly Known As Barry has been spouting Alinsky and using his “get in your face“  tactics to promote his clear agenda all along.  “Change the system” is pretty unambiguous.  Why nobody thought to pin him down on exactly what that “change” entailed is beyond me.

But, now that Obrother has let the “he is who he is” cat out the bag, “moderates” and “centrists” are wailing and gnashing their teeth to powder, while walking around zombie-like, crying about how they’ve been tricked. Reading their bitching is just as funny as it would be if all of a sudden they noticed he was black.  The funny thing is, not only have they not been tricked in the way they’re now complaining about, they’re completely unaware they’re being tricked into thinking they have been.

RULE 3: “Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy.” Look for ways to increase insecurity, anxiety and uncertainty. (This happens all the time. Watch how many organizations under attack are blind-sided by seemingly irrelevant arguments that they are then forced to address.)

edit

RULE 12: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. (This is cruel, but very effective. Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works.)

Rules 3 and 12 of Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” are but the two most relevant to what’s happening right now with the Rush=Republican theme being pushed like a snowball deliberately kicked along down a mountainside, with predictably similar results.  With the clarity hindsight affords, we can now see that at various other points in the Obama Drama that has enveloped our day-to-day existence  since 2004, other Alinsky rules have been implemented successfully.  In fact, “Astroturfing,” though not invented by David Axelrod, is almost synonymous with “community organizing,” since both involve exploiting poor, and otherwise innocent, people through trickery.

“Community organizing” is the “art” of building a power base in order to promote the interests of the base, as the organizers see fit.  In other words, “community organizing” is not designed to provide training to people who have already united in a common cause seeking the means to implement their agenda, “community organizers” most often must convince those they claim to want to help that their help is indeed needed.  Alinky’s rules were for radicals; agitators, rabble rousers, not victims.  In fact, a case can be made that Alinsky’s radical community organizers only seek to exploit, thereby further victimizing the people they profess to help.  From Wikipedia:

Grassroots organizing builds community groups from scratch, developing new leadership where none existed and organizing the unorganized. It is a values based process where people are brought together to act in the interest of their communities and the common good. Networks of community organizations that employ this method and support local organizing groups include National People’s Action and ACORN.

“Door knocking” grassroots organizations like ACORN organize poor and working-class members recruiting members one by one in the community. Because they go door-to-door, they are able to reach beyond established organizations and the “churched” to bring together a wide range of less privileged people. ACORN, tends to stress the importance of constant action in order to maintain the commitment of a less rooted group of participants.

The Hits Just Keep On Coming

Boy, if us bitter knitting, gun and Bible-clinging, dried-up old Hillary supporting PUMAs didn’t have enough to worry about, what with cardboard titty groping frat boy speechwriters and their ilk lying in wait to pour hopeychangey-flavored KoolAid on Cheetos and force feed them to us while we die on the streets in front of our foreclosed homes, without healthcare, clutching our worthless retirement fund statements in our gnarly old liver-spotted crone hands, now, we have to worry about nearsighted, Viagra-juiced old geezers catting around spreading HIV like bees spread pollen, whenever they’re lucky enough to find our dusty homeplates among the wrinkles by Braille.  So says Reuters:

Doctors are failing to diagnose HIV in older patients, who are exposed to greater risk of infection as erectile dysfunction drugs extend their sex lives, a study published by the World Health Organization said on Tuesday.

The report in the WHO Bulletin found that increasing numbers of sexually active people aged 50 and upwards — who are more likely to risk unprotected sex than younger people — are contracting the AIDS virus.

Doogie Howser-aged doctors, whose natural reaction to the thought of their older patients getting it on is usually, “Ewwwwyowww!” are killing us by neglecting to even consider that people with graying pubes might be engaging in one of the few activities their expierence has finally allowed them to be good at while they can still physically enjoy it, thus exposing us to even greater risk:

And although many people are having sex into their twilight years, HIV is still rarely considered as a cause of illness in older individuals. “Screening is less common for older adults, who are assumed not to be at risk,” the study found.

“HIV prevalence and incidence in the over-50-year-olds seem surprisingly high and the risk factors are totally unexplored,” the authors from the WHO and Minnesota’s St. Olaf College said.

Since us old folks ourselves are less likely to consider ourselves at risk, we’re more likely to do it like rabbits with anything breathing whose nakedness doesn’t totally barf us out, without taking precautions.  Thus, we make up 11% of HIV cases in the US, and have only a 4 year life expectancy from the time of diagnosis.  Of course, women pay the highest price for our twilight sexual freedom, because, while erectile dysfunction drugs allow us to sufficiently “raise our partners’ dead,” (ahem) to performance levels, our thinning membranes make us even more susceptible to contracting the AIDs virus:

Older women appear to be at higher risk of contracting HIV if they have sex without a condom because of thinning with age of the vaginal mucous membrane, which gives natural lubrication.

We just can’t freaking win.  Fuck it, I’m moving to Detroit, investing in the stock market, and taking up knitting.   At least in the Motor City, you can get a house for $7,500, and the guy they tell me y’all like to call President says the stock market might come around early enough before checkout time for me to be able to pay at least some of my medical bills.  The knitting?  Hell, ya gotta do something while you wait.

Barack Obama, Dog Whistler

Forget Dog Whisperer, according to Politico’s Nia-Malika Henderson, when it comes to calling your dogs, Barack Obama is a master Dog Whistler.  And, according to Nia-Malika Henderson, that’s a very good thing.  Of course, when Nia-Malika Henderson refers to “dog whistles,” she’s talking about those code words politicians use to connect subliminally with certain core portions of their constituency, sending crucial, non-politically correct messages over the heads of their targeted enemies.  Like, during the primaries, when Obama surrogate Jesse Jackson Jr. mocked Hillary Clinton’s tears in the wake of her New Hampshire victory that threatened to derail the O Train momentum that the O Team imagined was, until that moment, on track to to take him straight to the White House, express-style.  Forget the fact that it was only the second contest between the two, making them relatively even at that point, oh, no, Clinton obviously didn’t get the “Obama inevitability” memo, and even worse, and just as obvious, neither did the people who actually voted for her.  This had to be nipped in the bud, somehow, after all, Obama’s only victory at that point was a caucus, and some of us were already suspicious about his tactics regarding those.  So, JJJr. was sent out to “let the dogs out.”  Alex Koppleman, Salon:

“We saw something very clever in the last week of this campaign … We saw a sensitivity factor, something that Mrs. Clinton has not been able to do with voters that she tried in New Hampshire. Not in response to voters. Not in response to Katrina, not in response to other issues that have devastated the American people — the war in Iraq — we saw tears in response to her appearance. So her appearance brought her to tears, but not Hurricane Katrina.”

This was a very clever dog whistle, being designed, as it was, to get the attention of both racist and sexist Obama supporters.  The intention could not have been more clear had JJJr. come out and said, “Hey y’all, this white bitch is trying to play us with that woman shit.”  Of course, like Salon, Slate pooh-poohed the whole idea of sexist dog whistles, a form of dog whistling in reverse, when you think about it:

Barack Obama brought up Hillary Clinton’s period! “I understand that Senator Clinton periodically,” (See? He said it!) “when she’s feeling down, launches attacks as a way of trying to boost her appeal.” Clearly, he was saying his rival ought to look into hormone replacement therapy.

What, this sexism is too subtle for you? Not for pro-Clinton blogger Taylor Marsh, who accused Obama of “demeaning women,” or even straight-down-the-middle Andrea Mitchell, who said on MSNBC, “When you start describing a female candidate as being ‘down’ and ’striking back,’ I don’t know, that’s a little edgy, don’t you think?” Karen Stabiner, the author of well-received books about single-sex education and breast cancer, wrote that when she heard what Obama had said, “That was the moment when I, and other women of a certain age, all over the country, winced. The change candidate had embraced one of the oldest clichés in the book—that women are held hostage by emotion, that we can’t be trusted with the big decisions because, depending on our age, we’re either on the rag or having a hot flash.”

The Hopester’s Tax Hype-ocracy

During the contentious Democratic primaries, now President, then Senator Black (Selma Got Me Born) Obama and his Band of Merry Men bitched and moaned daily, hourly, minutely (is that a word? you get the idea) about his superior opponent’s “refusal” to release her tax returns.  From his unearned perch upon his high horse, he looked down his nose at every opportunity and demanded with all the righteous indignation he could pretend to muster, “Where’s your tax returns, huh?  Whadd’reya skeered of, Hillary?  Hiding something?”  When he wasn’t browbeating her directly, he was scratching his head and feigning innocence, “I don’t get it.  Why won’t she just let the American people know the truth?”  Jerk.

“I’ve released my tax returns,” Obama said today on his campaign plane, noting that Presidential candidates have a duty to be transparent and accountable.

He said, “The American people deserve to know where you get your income from.”

When Bill and Hillary Clinton did release their returns, Camp Obuhbuh, as well as the “objective” CDS-obsessed, drive-by media squads masquerading as “journalists,”  hired teams of forensic accountants to go through them line by line looking for any little uncrossed “t” or undotted “i,” and when they found one, that invariably turned out to be nothing, they crowed, “aha!” triumphantly anyway.  Which was, of course, good for at least two news cycles before the media whores were forced to mumble a retraction, clarification, but never apology, and reluctantly move on to the next non-”gotcha” moment in Sir Snob’s routinely self described “silly season.”

Now that he has Astroturfed his way to organizing the national community, the rules seem to have changed.  No longer is “tax return tag” such a fun game.  Nobody seems to have told him that the rules are different when one of your guys is “it.”  Suddenly, five-figure “mistakes” are no big deal.  And, just when he thought it was safe to go back in the water, after he went to bat for a tax cheat to handle nation’s money during what he calls a potential national financial “catastrophe,” and reluctantly accepted the withdrawal of two other tax cheats, then squeaked in one other, here comes another one.  That nose in the air must be plenty out of joint by now, doncha think?

Okay, We’re All Officially Stupid

This is not really a political post, except it is.  While reading the news online, I came across this innocent-looking little piece, with an innocent-sounding title, Kids Prefer Veggies With Cool Names.  Considering that self-explanatory title, the article that follows is predictable.  You want your little crumb crusher to eat his mashed zucchini, call it Rocket Fuel:

“Cool names can make for cool foods,” says lead author Brian Wansink of Cornell University. “Whether it be ‘power peas’ or ‘dinosaur broccoli trees,’ giving a food a fun name makes kids think it will be more fun to eat. And it seems to keep working – even the next day,” Wansink said.

That seems innocent enough, maybe a little intuitive; even obvious, right?  I mean, haven’t parents been doing stuff like this ever since Brussels sprouts were discovered ?  Where the theory gets disturbing is when the researchers applied the theory to adults:

Similar results have been found with adults. A restaurant study showed that when the Seafood Filet was changed to Succulent Italian Seafood Filet, sales increased 28 percent and taste rating increased by 12 percent. “Same food, but different expectations, and a different experience,” said Wansink, author of “Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think.”

Now, these guys were talking about food, but we’ve seen a lot of the same thing in politics, lately.  Remember, “don’t call it a bailout?”  How about, “it’s not really nationalization?”  It’s not surprising that anybody interested in “marketing” and “branding,” like people who sell arugula and the presidents who love it, would resort to manipulation to sell their product.  What’s disturbing is that it’s so damned easy.  You’d think more sophisticated and clever techniques would be required to sway public opinion away from their natural instincts.  At least, I’d like to think so.  After all, I may have to eat my vegetables, but I don’t have to like the ones Mom’s pushing today.  And I’d  also like to think that I have enough sense to know that I’m not going to like squash any better if you call it ice cream.  It would be even better if I could be sure I wasn’t the only one who felt this way.

Man, we are so screwed.

How We Got Where We’re Going

As we, the people, try to figure out exactly where President Black Obama might be going with his stimulus,  budgets, and bailouts, I thought it might be useful to revisit some earlier articles about him in an attempt to gain insight.  Given what we already know, and have seen with our own eyes, the observations and quoted statements written here likely provide a slightly different perspective than one might have gleaned from them when they first appeared in print.

The first series of quotes are from a September 2, 2006 New York Magazine 8 page love letter written by Jennifer Senior:

“To me, the issue is not are you centrist or are you liberal,” he says. “The issue to me is, Is what you’re proposing going to work? Can you build a working coalition to make the lives of people better? And if it can work, you should support it whether it’s centrist, conservative, or liberal.”

“I don’t want people to pretend I’m not black or that it’s somehow not relevant. But ultimately,” he says, “I’d want to be a really great president, you know? And then I’d worry about all the other stuff. Because there are a lot of mediocre or poor presidents.”

“One good test as to whether folks are doing interesting work is, Can they surprise me?” he tells me. “And increasingly, when I read Daily Kos, it doesn’t surprise me. It’s all just exactly what I would expect.”

The next series of snippets from an April 3, 2007 article by Christopher Drew and Mike McIntire, are not direct quotes from the then, Not Quite Obamessiah, But Almost, they reflect the authors’ investigation into his more mortal early attempts at fundraising:

Mr. Obama’s breakthrough in the 2004 Senate race was also made possible by a new wrinkle in the election laws. Faced with a self-financed opponent in the Democratic primary, Blair Hull, who pumped more than $28 million of his own money into the race, Mr. Obama was able to accept up to $12,000 from each donor, or six times the limit at that time.

As a result, nearly half of the more than $5 million that Mr. Obama raised in the primary came from just 300 donors. In a stroke of luck, he had just enough money to pay for a television advertising blitz in the final weeks as Mr. Hull’s campaign crumbled amid accusations that he had abused a former wife.

edit

When Mr. Obama decided to run for Congress in 2000 against the former Black Panther Bobby Rush, he used a $9,500 personal loan to help finance the campaign. When he lost, he found himself broke and fielding questions from the Federal Election Commission about his campaign finances. He later had to lend his campaign committee $11,100 more to cover refunds to donors who had inadvertently given too much.

It took him two years to repay his own loans, mostly with small checks from black executives who agreed to help him prepare for another run.

edit

Antoin Rezko, a Chicago businessman who was later involved in a land deal with the Obamas, gave $10,500.

Mr. Obama’s support also widened among Chicago’s business elite. Members of the Pritzker family, which founded the Hyatt Hotel chain, donated $40,000; Penny Pritzker is now the senator’s national finance chairwoman.

Mr. Crown, whose family’s investments include a major stake in the military contractor General Dynamics, said family members normally avoided taking sides in a primary, in part because it was not good for business. But with Mr. Obama, they made an exception, with 10 family members giving a total of $112,500.

edit

Mr. Obama also attracted major national Democratic donors, including George Soros and members of his family, who gave a total of $60,000.

In December, 2006, the Chicago Sun-Times reported on The President Formerly Known As Bonehead’s pay-to-play involvement with his de facto real estate partner and campaign donor, Tony Rezko:

In addition to a land deal, Sen. Barack Obama’s ties to indicted dealmaker Antoin “Tony” Rezko include an internship the senator provided the son of a contributor at the request of Rezko, an Obama spokesman confirmed Saturday.

John Aramanda served as an intern for Obama for about a month in 2005, said Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs. His father is Joseph Aramanda, a Rezko business associate who was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in a federal corruption case against Rezko. Aramanda has contributed $11,500 to Obama since 2000, Gibbs said.

“Mr. Rezko did provide a recommendation for John Aramanda,” Gibbs said. “I think that it’s fairly obvious that a few-week internship is not anything of benefit to Mr. Rezko or any of his businesses.”

The internship revelation comes after Obama acknowledged he erred in buying property from Rezko in January. The transaction took place when it was widely known Rezko was under investigation by the U.S. attorney’s office.

The Baltimore Sun ran a May, 2007 story about Obuyme’s holier-than-thou attitude about pork, pay-to-pay, payoffs and politics:

“My philosophy was that, if money was being distributed, then it would be inappropriate for me to not get my share for my district,” Obama, now one of the U.S. Senate Democrats’ leaders on ethics reform, said in an interview. “Did I think it was the best way to prioritize government spending? No.”

Ryan Lizza wrote a ten page investigation into Obama’s early community organizing days, clled, The Agitator, and examined how he came to be “faith-based:”

From Wright and others, Obama learned that part of his problem as an organizer was that he was trying to build a confederation of churches but wasn’t showing up in the pews on Sunday. When pastors asked him the inevitable questions about his own spiritual life, Obama would duck them uncomfortably. A Reverend Philips put the problem to him squarely when he learned that Obama didn’t attend services. “It might help your mission if you had a church home,” he told Obama. “It doesn’t matter where, really. What you’re asking from pastors requires us to set aside some of our more priestly concerns in favor of prophesy. That requires a good deal of faith on our part. It makes us want to know just where you’re getting yours from.”

After many lectures like this, Obama decided to take a second look at Wright’s church. Older pastors warned him that Trinity was for “Buppies”–black urban professionals–and didn’t have enough street cred. But Wright was a former Muslim and black nationalist who had studied at Howard and Chicago, and Trinity’s guiding principles–what the church calls the “Black Value System”–included a “Disavowal of the Pursuit of ‘Middleclassness.’”

The cross currents appealed to Obama. He came to believe that the church could not only compensate for the limitations of Alinsky-style organizing but could help answer the nagging identity problem he had come to Chicago to solve. “It was a powerful program, this cultural community,” he wrote, “one more pliant than simple nationalism, more sustaining than my own brand of organizing. “

In March of last year, China Daily (?!?) found it interesting that not all rich black people were putting their money where Obrother’s mouth was:

Barack Obama’s quest to become the first African-American president is being run without the financial support of much of the black corporate elite.

Less than one-third of the 191 black members of the boards of the largest 250 US companies have contributed to the Illinois senator’s campaign, according to Federal Election Commission records. The list of board members was compiled by Black Enterprise magazine.

As Americans try to wrap their heads around their hopey-changey KoolAid Dispenser-In-Chief’s sudden, “surprise” (not) rubber-burning lurch to the left, they might wanna pick their jaws up off the floor and read what Stanley Kurtz (yeah, yeah) had to say about Senator Stealth and the Gamaliel Foundation.  In fact, a look back at Sual Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals might be in order; he was the Father of Community Organizing, and the Obamessiah, like Jesus before him, is following in his father’s footsteps, right?  So, shouldn’t we all just put our differences aside and let his gentle hand guide us through our current turbulent waters?  The problems he’s inherited are inevitable, aren’t they?

Whose “change” is it, anyway?

Obama Speeches Like Sex

Is listening to Barack Obama read trite, repetitive speeches written by titty-groping frat boys from his ubiquitous Twin TelePrompTers a minimum of three times a day, like sex?  Apparently, Republican strategist Alex Castellanos thinks so, since that’s what he said:

I think, as a friend told me once, that — listening to Barack Obama give a speech is like sex. The worse there ever was, was excellent.

To be perfectly honest, I feel the same way.  Like bad sex, most of the time, the performance in no way lives up to the hype, there’s always the risk of dozing off in the middle of it, and I can’t wait to shower afterward.  On second thought, bad sex is better; it never lasts nearly as long as either good sex, or an Obama speech.

I feel for Mrs. Castellanos.

h/t: commenter Laree

GOP’s Obama-To-Be?

Who’s this kid?  Well, depending on who you talk to, he’s either the future of the Republican party, or a big ol’ hoax.  According to his website, (yep, his website), he’s Jonathan Krohn, a 13 year old home-schooled actor and author of a tome entitled, “Define Conservatism.”  Whoever he is, he managed to wrangle a speaking gig at CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, and according to reviews, blew the place away.  I dunno, seems kinda fishy to me, but then, so does Barack Obama.  At least the kid admits he’s an actor, though.  Maybe he can explain to the guys at Think Progress why folks who might be drawn to an event like CPAC, just might be committed to saying they want a popular Democratic president hellbent on blaming everything bad in the world on them and repudiating everything they’ve ever done,  to fall on his ass and fail spectacularly.  And mean it.

Just sayin’.

What, You Thought He Was Kidding?

For some reason, a lot of people seem surprised about the scope of change that President Baracus Hubris Maximus (Hail, Ceasar!) has attempted to bring about so early in his administration.  Those budget-mocking magpies, as well as some KoolAid drunk acolytes now screeching, “Whoa, wait a minute!” with stunned disbelief in their eyes in light of some of his more dramatic moves, would be a lot funnier if they weren’t so pathetic.  He told you so.  Over and over again.  Did you think he was kidding?  Or, were you lulled into acquiescence by his transparent sleight of hand, “bipartisan”  appeasements, obviously designed as diversionary tactics for the easily fooled?

If “grassroots” mandatory volunteerism is not for you, sorry, you just weren’t paying attention.  If health care “reform,” not real Universal Health Care, is not okay by your lights, again, you slept through his stump speeches.  If you thought he meant to end all wars, or even end the one in Iraq, you just weren’t listening.  He really means to change the way “Washington does business” according to his own “post partisan” vision of how Washington’s business should be done, not according to any past model with which any particular group or entity not affiliated with him is comfortable or familiar with.  And, he plans to do it by claiming that he has your blessing.

We’re talking Barackism, here, folks.  Part Socialism, part Capitalism, part government backed Corporatism, Barackism is an amalgam of ideologies shaped and molded in his image.  Fascism?  Call it what you like, there’s a  little something for everybody to love or hate.  Of course, to accomplish his ambitious goals of “mixed income housing,” military and charter school supplemented public education, faith-based community service to government, revamped industry, and corporate partnered central banking, among other radical programs that seem to be large parts of Obacracy, you have to throw the baby out with the bathwater and start the world anew.

This will probably piss a lot of people off.  Think he cares?  Not.  Dissent expressed merely represents obstacles to be worked around, not roadblocks likely to derail his plans.  Because in every instance where resentment is met, regardless from which quarter it comes, he can always say, “I told you so.”  He doesn’t think in terms of Republican and Democrat, you do.  Left, right, center, schmenter, he doesn’t care about those labels at all.  Progressive, conservative, these are merely conveniently self-applied designations allowing him to craft appropriate methods of pacification.

That’s why the undercarriage of his bus is so well populated with such diverse occupants.  All are expendable.  You’re either with him, or you’re subject to be run over. No one is guaranteed a seat merely because their self-interests are served by doing his bidding while riding his coattails.  Ask Howard Dean.  And Pepsi. (see below)

That’s why his campaign was so ruthless, he has a single-minded plan he is determined to execute by any means necessary.  Ask Alice Palmer, or Blair Hull.  Or Hillary Clinton.

Whether Obacracy is his idea alone, or more likely, an intricate game plan implemented by an as yet unidentified cabal for which he fronts, or, less likely, even assembled, is open to debate.  However, there is no question, at least in my mind, that the sweeping “change” program beginning to come into focus, is the same one he’s been touting between administering massive hopium doses all along.  Divert attention, hit ‘em where it hurts when they’re not looking, divide and conquer, push the envelope, exploit the system in place until you can change it, tell ‘em what they want to hear while you sugar coat the things they don’t, these are the all too familiar tactics laid out in the opening chapter of the Obacrat playbook. Whether he wrote the book or was hired to sell it, is of absolutely no importance; unless people wake up to what they signed on for when they voted for him, it’s the rule book we’re all going to have to live by for a while.  Might as well listen when he drops hints about what’s in it.

“Change” is not, nor can it ever be considered, a lie if you neglect to insist upon specifics.  Let’s face it, the ability to hide your agenda in plain sight while you play your cards close to the vest in order to trick sheeple into thinking things not in their best interests are the ones they want most in the world, and, their idea to boot, is a pretty frickin’ neat trick.

What If The Obama Dog Isn’t A Moose?

What if the Obama family dog isn’t a moose?  That’s what Michelle Obama wants to know.  What I’d like to know is, wtf does that mean?  Doesn’t the First Lady have multiple degrees?  Even if she did have to prove she was good enough to get into college, shouldn’t she have at least learned that a dog can never be a moose by the time she got out?  Okay, I’m being snitchy, (snarky bitchy) but, maybe Blackie O should think a bit more before she opens mouth and inserts foot.

The moose/dog question arises in an interview with People Magazine about the dog the President and his wife have been promising their poor, deprived children “for years” (according to Michelle herself).  And, the poor kids still aren’t going to get their pet until April Fool’s Day (the day the rest of us get our tax cuts, btw) at the earliest.  Mommie and Daddy Dearest haven’t yet even settled on a breed.

Though the Huxtables-in-Chief claim to have narrowed their potential choices for this so far mythical dog down to a decision between a Portuguese water dog and a Labradoodle, they’re already trying to name it.  I suggest Harvey, since so far it’s invisible, and a giant rabbit dog makes just as much sense as a moose dog, but the Addams Family has other (bad)  ideas:

“Oh, the names are really bad. I don’t even want to mention it, because there are names floating around and they’re bad,” Mrs. Obama says with a laugh. “You listen and you go – like, I think, Frank was one of them. Frank! Moose was another one of them. Moose. I said, well, what if the dog isn’t a moose? Moose. I’m like, no, come on, let’s work with the names a little bit.”

Them Obamas be so intelligent.  I told you she said a moose was a dog.  You thought I was just being mean, didn’t you?  That’ll teach you to doubt me.

I wouldn’t even be writing about the Obamas and their stupid non-dog if there was anything else in the news besides, The Speech That Saved The World And Cured Cancer.  Yeah, sure, there’s the Obama Wants A 634 Billion Dollar Down Payment On A 10 Year Unspecified Health Care Thingy, but, it’s unspecified so, what’s to talk about?  The 3 Trillion Dollar Budget That Ate the World, it’s supposed to come out of?  I’d rather talk about the pseudo dog.

I guess you’d have to expect the world to be all a-Twitter about a vague speech so powerful it could knock the “catastrophic” state of our economic “crisis” right off the front pages, even when no matter who says what, stocks are still down and people who keep getting laid off still can’t pay for their overpriced houses.  But that’s what happens when you give a State of the Union speech that’s not really a State of the Union speech and still honor the time tested tradition of schmoozing with the media before a State of the Union address, even if it isn’t one for real.

When this supposed time-honored tradition of having off the record, pre-speech gourmet spin-fests began exactly is anybody’s guess, though The Wahington Post claims that they date back to Clinton:

George W. Bush and Bill Clinton routinely had the anchors over for lunch on State of the Union day.

While all reports from “journalists” who attended, like George Stephanoupolis and Katie Couric agree that the purpose of these “just between us” gatherings is for the president to chew the fat informally and run his ideas up their flagpoles, the ground rules specify that the events can only be reported broadly, with no direct attribution allowed.  In other words, the president greases up his fluffers.

Such chatty get-togethers haven’t always been seen to be so acceptable, however.  At one time, any overture to the press by the president was met with skepticism and suspicion.  An April 12, 1989 Maureen Dowd column about the subject derisively questions George H. W. Bush’s motives for issuing such untrustworthy invitations.  But, then again, it is Maureen Dowd:

Some reporters say such private contacts give them additional insights. But many other journalists and media critics are skeptical, remembering the Camelot days when John F. Kennedy’s courtship of reporters seemed to turn many of them into cheerleaders, and the tense days when Lyndon B. Johnson tried to build support for the Vietnam war with intense, personal persuasion of the press corps.

In both cases, many journalists worried afterwards that they may have crossed the line from journalism to advocacy.

Ha, ha, ha!  Crossed the line?  Oh, MoDo, honey, that line has been completely erased by the Tickle Me President!  These guys, and gals, would sell their mothers into white slavery for a chance to lick this guy’s plate.  They can’t wait to write breathtaking exposes about his favorite movie and how his socks smell.  Rock stars can’t get as much tail as our Spokesmodel-in-Chief could get from any one of these “reporters” with just a wink and subtle head nod.

They’re not the only ones, either.  Even CNN’s ObaLover, Anderson Cooper, had to put aside his own desire to get him some ObaMan in order to ridicule those members of Congress who waited up to 12 hours to get an aisle seat for the Speechapalooza Tuesday night:

You wanna talk pathetic? How about a hotshot cable news yacker mocking a New York congressman for being excited about his President?

That’s the response of veteran Bronx Rep. Eliot Engel, who was ridiculed by CNN host Anderson Cooper on Tuesday night for staking out a choice aisle seat 12-1/2 hours in advance for President Obama’s address to Congress.

“It’s like waiting for, like, Madonna tickets or something. It was  … kind of pathetic,” Cooper snarked as legislators swarmed Obama after the speech for handshakes and autographs.

Brian Williams wrote about a September ‘07 George Bush lunch summons to the press which was markedly different in tone than the self-congratulatory love note he wrote about scoring a seat at the left hand of the ObaFather.  Wolf Blitzer’s take on his luncheon with W last year was pretty generic, even though the Houston Chronicle said there was a bomb threat at the White House that day.  The Weekly Standard said the man was psychotic.  But then, according to Fred Barnes whose version of an earlier SOTU luncheon with Bush in 2005 is recounted in his book “Who Gives A F*ck” (that’s not the real name, I just see no reason to promote Fred barnes’ book) Georgie Porgie wasn’t exactly happy to see them:

“Why do I have to go to this meeting?” Bush asks his communications director, Dan Bartlett. “It’s traditional,” Bartlett explains.

Nope, it seems this new Mutual Admiration Society Obama has going with his news hoochies is unique, and uniqely beneficial and powerful for all concerned.  He schmoozes, they swoon, everybody’s happy.  For the price of a lunch, or dinner for those whose pants he wants entree into, or an hour of face time with those ‘ho’s already in his clutches, and thus, obviously secure in their place in his heart, Obama merely has to ensure that the compliant members of his audience agree to do the Hokey Pokey every time he follows the “pause” direction in his script as he reads the words of the Cardboard Titty Groper aloud on TV, to ensure that the ObaLovers will do eveything in their power to see to it that his act always plays in Peoria.

Crisis, schmisis.

And you wonder why I’d rather write about the Mythical Moose Dog.

A Generated Crisis

“Gird your loins,” Biden told the crowd. “We’re gonna win with your help, God willing, we’re gonna win, but this is not gonna be an easy ride. This president, the next president, is gonna be left with the most significant task. It’s like cleaning the Augean stables, man. This is more than just, this is more than – think about it, literally, think about it – this is more than just a capital crisis, this is more than just markets. This is a systemic problem we have with this economy.” – Joe Biden, October 20, 2008

When now vice-president, then Senator Jo(k)e Biden (D-Mastercard) made his less than cryptic remarks about the possible scenarios facing his running mate should he be elected, his comments were largely passed off as yet another, “Oh, Uncle Joe’s found the brandy, again” moment and not really given the scrutiny they deserved.  However, in light of ensuing developments, perhaps we should take a closer look at Jo(k)e’s “off-the-cuff” campaign rhetoric.

The first part of Biden’s “mark my words” statement was generally seen to be in reference to foreign policy:

“Mark my words,” the Democratic vice presidential nominee warned at the second of his two Seattle fundraisers Sunday. “It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We’re about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don’t remember anything else I said. Watch, we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.”

“I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate,” Biden said to Emerald City supporters, mentioning the Middle East and Russia as possibilities. “And he’s gonna need help. And the kind of help he’s gonna need is, he’s gonna need you – not financially to help him – we’re gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it’s not gonna be apparent initially, it’s not gonna be apparent that we’re right.”

However, everything after “gird your loins” was clearly economic in nature.  Could a “generated economic crisis” have been what he was talking about all along?  The events I explored in an earlier post, “Inside The Wall Street Whisper Campaign” could certainly add kerosene-type fuel to the bottled acetylene torch Molotov cocktail of that kind of speculation.  The possibility that Obama’s scripted response to the global economic crisis we now face represents the validity of Biden’s now-prescient warning, and indicates that the first few weeks of their joint administration are rather smoothly proceeding according to plan, somehow doesn’t seem as far-fetched to me as one might reasonably expect.

Watching and reading the initially gushing, yet, now more tempered, media reviews of President Black Obama’s not really a State of the Union speech that they keep calling a State of the Union speech even though it was really just a Getting to Know You speech to the joint Congress that he’s supposedly been working with since he’s been president to pass the historic legislation he read to them about from a TelePrompTer, I get the feeling the rest of the country and I, or, in ObaSpeak, me and everybody else, are living in parallel universes.

It was a speech.

Period.

Not even a particularly well delivered one, either, and I don’t care how many people try to tell me otherwise.  Barack Obama is just not a dazzlingly brilliant speaker.  In fact, as I’ve said before, he’s not even that good.  His head-swiveling, squinty-eyed, nose-in-the-air, stumbling, boy-stood-on-the-burning-deck delivery is not only annoying, if it passes for anything more than mediocre, that only shows just how far we, as a nation have lowered our intellectual standards and expectations.  Frankly, the man sucks.

That’s why listening to “bubble-headed bleach blondes” and their multi-hued comrades in arms on what passes for “news” wax idiotic through endless cycles about not only the new President’s oratorical skill, but his verbal healing powers, is in itself, a Herculean exercise in restraint.  To listen to them tell it, merely forming words aloud imbues him with abilities, strengths and unlimited gifts not just far beyond those of mortal men, but those of a leader begotten of a beneficent God.

Forget “laying hands,” “open mouth” cure cancer.  “Clear debt.”  Debt, be gone.  It is spoken, so it is done. Whooosh!  I know I feel better.

Not.

If I remember correctly, on Monday, the world sucked.  Our banks were broke and only going through the motions of normal functioning.  They were on life support, even though they had already been pronounced dead.  Their rotting corpses were infecting global markets, and we were facing the end of the world as we know it.  Then, yesterday, Obie made a speech.  Now, all is right with the world, the sun has come out, the sky has opened up, a light is shining…you get the idea.  No wonder Oblahblah has such reverence for “just words.”

After forcing myself to read the transcript of this miraculous speech that I couldn’t sit through to its conclusion, due to the fact that, between the constant  jumping up and down of the elderly in the audience, cruelly insisted upon by the ObaTurfers insistent upon making “good TV,” and the excruciating drone of the vapid Spokesmodel-in-Chief, I was not only having trouble keeping my dinner down, I was getting dizzy and genuinely afraid for my mental health when I realized something.  This “outside looking in” feeling I have, while at the same time being “in it, but not of it,” is akin to being the only one at a Creeple People on Mars Meet the Three Stooges cartoon movie marathon who was sitting outside on the porch when the bong went around.  Under those circumstances, folks get pissed off at people who point out how stupid the whole situation, including the movie, is, too.  And, they tend to get downright nasty if you refuse the bong that would bring you their level of “clarity” and “enjoyment” the next time around.  They never even seem to appreciate it when you point out that your leaving the room doesn’t make the movie any better.

I’m sorry, but there’s not enough KoolAid flavored Boone’s Farm and hopium smoking in the world to make me believe that “just words” can solve a “generated crisis” of “cleaning the Augean stables” proportions overnight.  Unless the “generated crisis” itself was only “just words” from the beginning, the Creeple People are still on Mars this morning, and we all need a deep bong hit to make it funny.

Fraudulently generated cheerleading of an inartfully articulated bogus rah-rah response to a possibly “generated crisis” so at odds with reality, is what we’ve been trained by the media and the Obama administration to expect and accept as sufficient.

And that’s a truly frightening wonder to behold.

We may not “be quitters,” but Obama and Co. should really cut it out.

*NOTE: I got the Biden (D-Mastercard) idea thing from Chicago Tribune’s John Kass.  He does that kinda thing alla time.

Breaking Down “The Speech”

The following is what President Black Obama said tonight in his State of the Union speech that wasn’t a State of the Union speech to Congress.  Okay, it’s not exactly what he said, but, it’s what it amounted to.

Hey, y’all, thanks for letting me interrupt your regularly scheduled programming.  First of all, you don’t need me to tell you your life sucks.  And, any idiot could figure out that the reason your life sucks is because the economy’s in the crapper.  But, hey, you’re not the only one, the whole country sucks, and, on top of that, it’s broke, so get over yourself, everything’s going to work out.  Eventually.  It always does, whether we do anything constructive or not.  I, for one, am banking on that.  (ha, ha, banking, ha…ahem) I mean, things look really, really bad right now, and they are, but c’mon, I didn’t do it, so don’t blame me.  The air is dirty enough to kill you, duh, we use a lot of oil, what do you expect?  You can’t afford to go to the doctor, anyway.  Your kids can’t afford to go to better schools than the ones we provide, but, no biggie, there aren’t any jobs to prepare them for, so what’s the point?  And, since the last people in charge before I got here spent your money even more stupidly than you did yourselves, are you really surprised the shit is hitting the fan, now?

Somebody’s got to do something to fix stuff, that’s for sure.  Since I don’t really have a clue, I asked Congress to come up with a plan.  They said this American Recovery and Reinvestment Act thing is the best they could do.  Again, not my fault.

Basically, they passed the buck to the “private sector” y’all seem so fond of.  Humph, if it was up to me, I’d just put everybody on my payroll, but I’m told that’s not the way we do things here.  What-ev-er.  I guess y’all got some kinda “thing” for middle men.  So, anyway, what we’re going to do is, give some of them a buncha money to hire some of y’all to build stuff, and do stuff, and we’re gonna pay for it by cutting your taxes.  Neat, huh?  That oughta work.  You should start seeing your cut on April Fool’s Day.  On top of that, we’re gonna give everybody a $2,300 dollars tuition break out of the $10,000+ a year it takes to send your stupid kids to college, so they can compete for the menial jobs that are gonna be left when all is said and done.  Everybody else will get unemployment.  We’re gonna give you health coverage, too, sooner or later.  Somehow.

I know summa y’all are prolly going, “Say, what?  What’s up with that?”  I know, I know, (singsong) you’ve heard it all before.  But listen, this time I mean it.  Think I’m kidding? Ask Jo(k)e.  Biden.  Hell-o-o?  The vice-president?  Yeah, him.  He’s gonna be in charge of watching folks spend the money I’m giving them, ’cause, well, frankly, nobody knows what else to do with him, and mayors and governors steal.  Jo(k)e should know, so who better to show ‘em how?  And, if he screws up…don’t laugh…c’mon, be nice…like I was saying, if he, or anybody else, screws up, just go to my website and you can let me know just how they did it.  Hell, the way y’all love me, if they’re too stupid  not to make it obvious enough to piss you off, they deserve to be…written about on a website.

Now, this is just the beginning, ’cause, speaking of Jo(k)e, the credit system in this country sucks weenies.  Now, I know you know, guys like Jo(k)e and me have been robbing the credit system blind forever, just like the folks who paid our way here paid us to, but, never fear, we promise to keep printing money and giving it to them now that we’re in charge.  So, even though the credit rates are higher than I used to get in college, (wooooo hooooo) it’s okay, we got your back.  After all, as long as we can keep moving numbers from one column to another, everything’s cool.  Let’s be honest, though, the only reason we’re in this mess is ’cause y’all fuc screwed up and paid too much for houses you knew weren’t worth that much just ’cause my bosses made it easy for you to, so there’s only so much bitchin’ I’m gonna listen to from you.  Now that you can’t pay for all the stuff you bought, my buddies really don’t want to give up any more to the likes of you.  Can you blame them?  They only have so much, and, until they get all of it, I can tell you, they ain’t gonna just give much of it away, you know.  Hell, they don’t even trust each other, know what I mean?  Sheet.  They’re only doing this much  ’cause I co-signed for y’all.  So, I promise to keep giving them enough for them to loan you even more money, so you can buy even more overpriced stuff you still really can’t afford, and let them keep what they already stole have.  They earned it.  And, that’s just the way the system rolls, dig?  Again, don’t blame me, I’m just the messenger.

But, don’t trip, like I just told you, we’re gonna watch ‘em.  They won’t be able to use the extra money they get from us for fun stuff, anymore, like planes and drapes, only I can do that…(I can?  All right, sweeeet!  Glad I read that part.  God, I love this job!)  Anyway, like I said earlier, none of this is my fault.  The last Dillinger Gang before ours was the one that first came up with the Rip Off the People for the Banks Plan that I voted for, not me, okay?  In fact, I was pissed, too. (I was?  Oh, yeah.)  Damned straight, I was, just as pissed as you!  (tee hee…ahem)  Where was I?

Oh, yeah, right.  I’m pissed.  But hey, let’s let bygones be bygones, ‘cuz after all, we’re all on the same side.  Not you, silly, me and that last Dillinger Ga…(huh?  Oh, ooops.)  All right, listen, you American people, I’m talking to you now, as if I actually feel your pain.  SoI’mnotgonnahelpthesemeanoldgreedybanksterbuddiesofminenomoreIpromise.

(How was that?  You’re damned right, I am good.)  So, anyway, voters, citizens, y’all, whatever, don’t freak, I’m gonna hook you up.  Me and the Congress and our financial backers are gonna continue to work together to keep right on screwing you, but from now on, I promise to bring the grease.  Hell, we’ll even get you drunk first, how’s that?  After all, if you get drunk enough, and we screw you right, you might even buy us a car.  So, now, I’m gonna make a show of asking Congress to represent.  Hey, homies, y’all in?  (Just nod and play along, will ya?  Sheesh, I’m on TV, here.)

Okey dokey, then, that’s just about it.  I’m just gonna repeat the same thing I just said two or three more times using different words until everybody at home nods off, that’s how we know they’re really under.  We don’t have to worry about that with the people here, they’re already hypnotized, at least the ones who aren’t brainwashed or paid off, and besides, they’re all sitting on cattle prods.  If they weren’t, they’d be dropping off like flies since most of ‘em are really, really old, plus it looks cool when they jump up every time David pulls the master switch.   Even though Nancy always jumps up and tells them to do that for me whenever I make the drinks flow for her at dinner, while one of my boyz plants a buzzer in her Ben-wa balls, know what I mean, David knows, that if the fluffers we pay see the seat fillers in da Haouuuuse keep jumping up and down on cue, and clapping whenever I take a breath, they’ll be able to Astroturf with something that will pass for credibility.  Hell, we all know that y’all at home ain’t really listening, anyway, you’re  just watching ‘cuz you think I’m cute.  So do I.

So, yadda, yadda, yadda, dadda, dee da da, blahblahblah, hmmmhmmhmmhmmhmmmmm, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.  Dooo doo doo, lala laaaaa, boom shacka lacka lacka, chicka aw aw, awwwnnnn, nanna na na, nanna na na, hey, hey, hey, rah, rah, sis boombah,… Alllll righty, then, I guess it’s time for the “hopey, changey, future is now, now is the time, we can make it if we try, yeah, yeah, yeah” part .  So, hopey, changey, future is now, now is the time, we can make it if we try, yeah, yeah, yeah.  Thank you, and good night!  Be seated!  Please, no, be seated!  Really, you’re too much!  No kidding, you really are!  Awww, thanks!  I do mean it! No, you’re the best!  Good night!  Thanks for comin’!  Gotta go!  Luv ya!  I mean it!  I do!  You really are the best!  Yes, you are!  You’re too kind!  Thank you!  Kisses!  Toodles!

Obie has left the building.

More Speech Than I Could Stand

Okay, I just tried to watch as much of The Greatest Speech Since The Last Greatest Speech Ever Delivered By A Teflon TelePrompTer Reader Propped Up By Bought-And-Paid-For Media Fluffers, as any mere human being could reasonably be expected to submit to voluntarily, but long before I fully tired of watching well-dressed, drunk-looking senior citizens acting like Jack-in-the-boxes doing the macarena, my sister started screaming, “Turn it off!, Turn it off! For the sake of all that is good and holy, would you pleeeeeease turn it off, and make the madness stop!?!” so I missed a lot of it.

I’ll go read it for myself, instead of watching him read it while Congress does calisthenics and claps on cue.  Check back later for more in-depth analysis.

Meanwhile, enjoy the video.

His First Term?

Just Barely President, Baracus Hubris Maximus (hail Ceasar!) has been prattling on about “his first term” since he threw his size 10-gallon hat into the ring, like he knows something the rest of us don’t.  Like the rest of his West Wing “reality,” this is yet another transparent bit of scripted brainwashing propaganda in the Theater of the Obsurd.  However, though he no doubt truly, truly believes this one, the possibility that he might have some sort of insider knowledge on this point is more than a little freaking scary creepy.

Yesterday, while vowing to halve the deficit he inherited, yet saying zippo, nada, nuttin’ about the deficit he’s creating, he promised with his fingers crossed to get the job done by the end of “his first term,” something which he has already hinted would ensure him a second.  But, as with all things Obama, one must ask oneself, is there more to this than that?  This is an especially valuable point to consider, given that before the end of “his first term,” we’re all going to be spending a lot of time mumbling to ourselves anyway.  Might as well have something worthwhile to discuss.

Like his handlers’ now familiar other rather adept feats of legerdemain, such as the tried and true, clever use of favorable polling results ahead of entry into particularly tricky territory, in  proven-to-be largely successful attempts to pave the way for the increased possibility of public acceptance of whatever balderdash is read from left to right off his his Traveling TelePrompTer To Go, “my first term” has the hypnotic effect of “you are getting sleepy.”

Of course, in advance of his sure-to-be-historic first non State of the Union address tomorrow, we have already been treated to the requisite number of “he’s the shit” polls in the last few days, one even going so far as to assure us that he is more heroic, and thus, logically, more powerful, than Jesus.  Since, for Christians, Jesus trumps Moses, we can take comfort in the blind faith that the Obamessiah will lead us to the Promised Land of Financial Security by throwing out the Money Changers.  See how that works?  And, while all this is going on, we are being properly greased and trussed to receive the news that Our Dear Leader will reluctantly have to bite the bullet and nationalize the already nationalized entire financial sector.  Before “his first term” really even starts.

It is indeed comforting to know that we have a Father Figure who will do what’s best for us, even if that means increasing our (the taxpayer’s) risk while fattening the pockets of the beleaguered banksters.  Which is exactly what he’s about to tell us he’s about to do.  But you see, that’s how he’s going to “remake” the country, and bring about the “change” he’s been promising to achieve before the end of “his first term.”  First, see, he’s gotta get control of the banks, then, all industry, then, put us all to work on chain gangs building roads and railroads, then force us to “volunteer,” then turn over the school system to the military.  After that, by the time the government is in charge of everything else, fixing health care is a piece of cake.  Quite ambitious for the four years he’s got until the end of “his first term,” huh?

Now, if this is your idea of liberal/progressive heaven, the Wall Street Journal’s Matt Miller says, in what I assume is not snark, “Shhhhhh! Shut the hell up and let the man do his thing before you blow it!”  Of course, being an Obot fluent in ObaSpeak, he didn’t use those exact words, per se:

President Barack Obama is taking a beating from liberal critics who think his attempt to court Republican support is a political failure and a policy disaster. Yet this assault on Mr. Obama’s bipartisan instinct is misguided and, ironically, threatens to undermine liberal goals.

snip

Mr. Obama’s stimulus plan, which aims first to mitigate the collapse in aggregate demand in the economy, nonetheless lays down important markers toward this agenda, even if (or perhaps because) the details didn’t please partisans on either side. By marrying major new public investments with major new tax cuts, Mr. Obama is signaling that public activism and private incentives both matter profoundly. This yin-and-yang approach was strikingly on display at the bipartisan “fiscal responsibility summit,” which Mr. Obama convened at the White House yesterday. Before members of Congress and other guests, the president insisted on the need to restore long-term fiscal discipline (including entitlement reform) even as the nation runs up historic deficits to battle the recession in the next few years. The president’s professed reluctance to “nationalize” ailing banks — which has left space for an extraordinarily swift outside consensus to emerge (led by surprising voices like Alan Greenspan’s and Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham’s) that temporary bank takeovers may be necessary — shows similar instincts. (emphasis mine)

See, Obie’s just playin’.  He’s finagling the Republicans with fake out overtures of bipartisanship so they can publicly reject him, then, pretending he doesn’t want stuff he really does want, because he knows whatever he says he doesn’t like, they’re gonna promote.  Clever, huh?  That way, he gets his way and if it tanks, it’s not his fault.  If it doesn’t, he’s a hero. (hail Ceasar!)  Either way, he gets his second term.

But, first, he’s gotta get the banks.

Now, you may say, “oh, come on! Are you really trying to tell me you think this guy is that friggin’ Machiavellian?”  To which I would respond, “you must be an Obot.”  Everybody else is well aware that similarly scuzzy, deceitful, underhanded manipulations are the reason he’s president now.   Step away from the KoolAid, and prepare to serve.  First though, I should warn you, you, too are going to have to assume the position sooner or later.  Once you have a firm grasp on your ankles, maybe you’ll begin to really see The Light.

What “Is” Is

When Baracus Ceaser Obamacus incessantly cried, “Change!” from the rooftops via TelePrompTer in stump speech after stump speech written by the Cardboard Titty Groper at the behest of the Astroturfing PuppetMaster acting on behalf of the banksters bankrolling the hopium-fueled ObamaLove Train steamrolling into the White House, who knew he really meant restructuring the global financial landscape, huh?

The inventors of the soon-to-be patented (I’m sure) ObaSpeak have mastered the art of diversion through obfuscation that lesser politicians and wordsmiths have been practicing inartfully for millennia.  Thus, bailouts are not bailouts, and “nationalization” is not quite, exactly “nationalization,” per se.

I guess when you’re determined to “redistribute the wealth” on the downlow, you have to figure out a way to freak people out without freaking them totally out.  And, if you can come up with a way to trick them into thinking it’s their idea, so much the better.  That’s probably why the number of women in high places in the administration will always continue to be limited by design, we invented the “oh,honey, how clever,” ploy and can see right though it.  That’s why when it comes to the current global financial system restructuring going on right under the world’s nose, I sweetly call “bullshit, dear.”

I’m no economist, but I know screwing when I see it, even when I don’t know the people, or can’t identify the species of the animals involved.  And, oh, baby, oh, there’s some serious money screwing going on.

Before the banksters got together and financed the junior senator from Illinois’ meteoric rise to the top of the political trash heap, the world’s financial landscape looked very different.  Yet, in just a couple short years, the financial structure as we’ve known it has “collapsed,” almost in a curious tandem reverse/parallel tango with the seemingly unqualified and inexperienced young political phenom’s ascent.  Funny, that.

Now that there are no more large investment banks, as far as I know, news reports last year trumpeted the conversion to commercial banks of Goldman Sachs’ and JP Morgan Chase’s status as that of the last two, and the government has played favorites with which struggling banks and financial institutions to prop up, we now enter the “not really nationalizing, except we own ‘em” phase of the Bwah Ha Ha Plan.

How do we know that this is a Democratic UniParty plot, and not just a cleanup of the Bush administration mess?  Why, Harry Reid told us.  Not exactly in those words, per se; that’s not the way of ObamaCanCratSpeak.  From Politico:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said he supports efforts of the federal government to dramatically expand its stake in Citigroup, but wants people to back off from the dramatic rhetoric.

“It’s not nationalization, it’s protecting the taxpayers’ interests,” Reid (D-Nev.) told MSNBC’s Morning Joe program on Monday.

“In the bailout, the TARP, that we made sure the American taxpayer had a way of getting paid back for their investments,” Reid said. “That’s what this is all about and it’s the right way to go.”

In other, normal American words, “yeah, we already own a lot of Wall Street, but, you’re getting a cut, eventually, so ixnay on the ationalization-nay, will ya?”  He forgot to mention that the 8 – 13 dollar cut you’re currently slated to get, just might be in Ameros in the near future.   Dollars will very soon be worthless, anyway, so kwitcherbitchin’.  Remember, TARP is bipartisan.

The Politico piece goes on to claim that Republicans are upset about, shhhh, nationalization, shhhh, but, didn’t that cross-party blog pioneer/ObaFluffer, Huff ‘n’ Puff, among every other news outlet on the planet, report last week that Lindsay Graham made the Sunday news show rounds planting the “we politicians can do it better” seeds in the Astroturf bs?  And, isn’t he just the cutest little Barney Frank alter ego across the aisle, hmmmmm?

Now even the Soros backed Center for American Politics‘ hatchet blog, Think Progress, is trumpeting the “if not nationalization, what?” drumbeat.  Even Republicans are beginning to see the futility of resistance. That the growing chorus of cacophony is reaching eardrum-splitting noise levels is probably just the inevitable response to the legitimate crisis of confidence currently devaluing the global economy, right?  I mean, we gotta do something, don’t we?

Sure.

So while the Spokesmodel-in-Chief dons his most comfortable Professor Man costume and publicly breaks up his lackeys into study groups, the better to memorize their approved talking points asssigned them by the Astroturfing, bankster-employed, stage manager/prducer who had them written and distributed, those who chose to remain clueless can take comfort in the fact that worldwide screwing of this magnetude has never before been attempted, so is likely not happening now.  It’s okay.  The thrill of telling you, “I toldja so,” will be just as sweet as it will be for other, less tinfoil- friendly PUMAs when the shit fully hits the fan and splatters us all.

Inside the Wall Street Whisper Campaign

As I watched last week’s PBS special about the financial crisis, “Inside the Meltdown,” one of the many things I was struck by was the lengths to which the producers went to establish the consensus of opinion regarding Wall Street’s inordinate sensitivity and susceptibility to rumor, gossip, and innuendo.  That such a vast, powerful, integral industry run by people presumed to be America’s “best and brightest” could allow decisions affecting the rise and fall of entire global conglomerates comprising the world’s economic foundation to be based on nothing more than “he said, she said” tales told out of school, or worse, possibly deliberately planted, malicious seeds of doubt, seems hard to fathom.  Yet, the possibility of such an eventuality was demonstrated in great detail in the documentary, and, with just a modicum of imagination, one might easily consider that a few well timed “revelations,” true or not, might well take down an entire financial empire, if not industry.  A little research might lead one to believe that such a thing is not only possible, it just might have happened.

In March of 2008, at the time Bear Stearns tanked and was  sold to JP Morgan Chase at 2 dollars a share, only to have the price bumped up to ten dollars a share after the government intervened, even that price was only considered to be approximately ten percent of its market value.  According to many sources, such intervention was rather suspect, for a lot of reasons, especially considering that the firm was not insolvent, though nobody would loan them money because of rumors that they were.  In other words, it was not a lack capital that undid the company, but a lack of confidence.  Vanity Fair encapsulated the cause of Bear Stearns’ death this way in the opening paragraph of its August ‘08 “autopsy:”

On Monday, March 10, the rumor started: Bear Stearns was having liquidity problems. In fact, the maverick investment bank had around $18 billion in cash reserves. But soon the speculation created its own reality, and the race was on to keep Bear’s crisis from ravaging Wall Street. With the blow-by-blow from insiders, Bryan Burrough follows the players-Bear’s stunned executives, trigger-happy reporters at CNBC, a nervous Fed, a shadowy group of short-sellers-in what some believe was the greatest financial scandal in history.

So, why did the corporation’s protestations to the contrary fall on industry-wide deaf ears?  The company had experienced difficulties the previous year with 2 of its subprime mortgage hedge funds,  High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Fund, and High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Enhanced Leverage Fund, and was facing lawsuits from Barclays and other angry investors, as a result.  Additionally, two of its former managers, Matthew Tannin and Ralph Cioffi, were eventually arrested in June of ‘08 for taking their own money out of the funds while propping them up with corporate bailout money and lying to investors about it.  But, that was after the company died and was consumed.

According to CNN Money, Fortune, CFO Sam Molinaro asserted that by February, ‘08, Stearns’ troubles were behind them:

Bear had survived one liquidity challenge, in the summer of 2007, when two of its hedge funds cratered after the subprime mortgage collapse. The firm had labored to repair its balance sheet and improve its financing. “Our capital position is strong,” said Bear’s CFO, Sam Molinaro, at an investors’ conference in February. “Balance-sheet liquidity has continued to improve throughout the course of the year. We spent an awful lot of time trying to reduce our higher-risk asset categories.”

So, could Bear Stearns have weathered the storm?  Then Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s old company didn’t think so.  On March 11, an email sent by Goldman Sach’s derivatives group to its hedge fund clients, saying they would no longer back them on Bear Stearns deals, was the nail in the company’s coffin.

While I am not prepared to suggest that there was a direct “cause and effect” relative to the currently discussed events, I do think it’s helpful to bear in mind that the financial “crisis” evolved against the backdrop of the presidential campaign.  Would Bear have “collapsed” had the results of Super Tuesday been different?  Who knows?  It is something to think about, though.

On March 28, the Chicago Tribune and Reuters, among others reported that rumors that the company was claiming were “totally unfounded,” were swirling about Lehman Brothers, too.  By August 25, on the day the Democratic National convention started, The Deal.com was reporting that the rumors had become a full-fledged storm amid suggestions of a hostile takeover by Korea Development Bank and intra-company planned coup against CEO Richard Fuld.

On September 15, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy after the government, presumably weary of going to bat for “failing” Wall Street companies, like Bear, having bailed out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac the week before, refused to intervene this time.  Interestingly, one of Lehman’s holdings, Neuberger Berman, headed by then President, George W. Bush’s second cousin, George Herbert Walker IV, was exempted from the bankruptcy filing:

Neuberger Berman LLC and Lehman Brothers Asset Management will continue to conduct business as usual and will not be subject to the bankruptcy case of the parent company, and its portfolio management, research and operating functions remain intact. In addition, fully paid securities of customers of Neuberger Berman are segregated from the assets of Lehman Brothers and aren’t subject to the claims of Lehman Brothers Holdings’ creditors, Lehman said.

According to Wikipedia, and corroborated here, on September 13, Turbo Tax Timmy Geithner, tax cheat (TTTG, tc,) then President of the New York Federal Reserve, now Secretary of the Treasury, convened a meeting about Lehman’s future that Lehman wasn’t invited to, after Lehman suffered substantial losses starting September 9:

An official from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York said participants include Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Timothy Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox. The New York Fed official asked not to be named due to the sensitivity of the talks.

Participants in today’s discussions at the offices of the New York Fed also include executives from Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and Merrill Lynch. Representatives for Lehman Brothers were not present during the discussions.

Lehman claimed to be in negotiations for sale with Barclays and Bank of America, both of whom backed out.  Bank of America bought Merill Lynch on September 14, instead.  Barclays bought Lehman’s North American investment-banking and trading divisions along with its New York headquarters building, the next day, after Lehman was, for all intents and purposes, dead.

After the fact, in October, former CEO Richard Fuld said in prepared testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, that rumor-mongering was a big part of the problem that brought Lehman down. However, Fuld’s first contention was that the Federal Reserve’s refusal to allow Lehman an exemption to become a bank holding company, or commercial bank, was a body blow to the company.   On September 22, a week after Lehman filed bankruptcy, The Fed allowed Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase, “the last two major investment banks” to switch.  According to the New York Times, this was a major big deal. The Washington Post reported at the time that the Fed had approved the conversion with “unusual haste.”

On September 27, the New York Times* reported that one of the members at the meeting that decided Lehman’s fate was Lloyd C. Blankfeld of Goldman Sachs, Henry Paulson’s old firm.  At that meeting, the state of A.I.G., Goldman Sach’s largest trading partner, was discussed.  As we know now, the government bailed out A.I.G., yet let Lehman die.  Naked Capitalism asserts that the Goldman Sachs/Paulson relationship might have been more than a factor.  In October, Bloomberg claimed that Lehman’s collapse was the fault of JP Morgan Chase, purchasers of Bear Stearns.

It bears remembering that in the midst of this Lehman Brothers/A.I.G./Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac financial upheaval, Barack Obama and John McCain were involved in a pitched battle for the presidency.  It is also worth noting that Obama was reported at the time to have been in daily contact with Henry Paulson, Treasury Secretary and former head of Goldman Sachs, one of Obama’s largest campaign donors.  FYI, Paulson was raised in Barrington, Illinois, outside of Chicago, was also head of Goldman’s Midwestern Division, headquartered there.  Worthy of equal or better note, Obama’s campaign economic team included William Daley, Mayor Richard Daley’s brother, and Midwest Chairman of JP Morgan Chase, as well as its CEO and New York Fed Board of Directors member, Jamie Dimon, who parlayed his turnaround of Bank One, after being dumped by his mentor, Sandy Weill of Citigroup, into the JP Morgan gig.  Oh, gosh, did I forget to mention Bank One is in Chicago?  My bad.  One other noteworthy Obama advisor at that time was Turbo Tax Timmy Geithner, tax cheat (TTTG, tc).  I have done a series of posts chronicling Jamie Dimon’s involvement in the Obamenon, I humbly advise readers to check them out, here, here, here, and here,to name just a few posts, not so much for my opinions, but for the links to information they provide.

By November, when Obama secured the presidency, Paulson’s TARP had distributed about half of the allotted funds to “troubled” banks, more than half of it to the country’s largest, including Goldman and JP Morgan.  According to reports, most of which came to light after Obama was inaugurated, the banksters were forced to accept the funds the Treasury was giving away, whether they wanted to or not, yet were later called on the carpet to explain how they spent them.  At the hearing in the House, they, like their counterparts in the beleaguered auto industry, were castigated for frivolous financial excess, even though, not all of them requested government funds.  As president, Obama had by that point, already railed against the ” shameful” bankers, and issued a “salary cap,” generally considered to be window dressing, since it only applied to those financial institutions receiving future government assistance from the second half of TARP, not the ones funded in the first bailout.  TTTG, tc was said to have prevailed against other Obama administration advisers, namely David Axelrod, in the president’s ultimate soft bailout stance.

The TARP program, or Paulson Plan, is not universally loved by bankers, some say it’s a sneaky attempt at nationalization, or in the words of Elizabeth Warren, Chair of the TARP Congressional Oversight Panel, “subsidization.”   The Brookings Institute called for more Congressional oversight in December, calling the plan “frayed” and “rushed into law.”  At any rate, the relatively ineffective, previous admonition is now a moot point, having been trumped by the new, stricter “salary cap” guidelines supposedly snuck into the president’s “stimulus plan” by Chris Dodd when nobody was looking.

The new rules require all banks recieving government assistence to be subject to the new, stricter salary cap rules.  That means, even banks forced into the bailout program are now under government supervision.  And, though Obama has made, “the discussion’s not over” noises, as Politico pointed out, it’s not credible that the administration was blindsided:

The tougher rules that passed in Congress were no last-minute surprise. Dodd talked them up in a February 5 press release, and in another released on Thursday, just hours before the bill was filed. The rules were debated in the Senate.

Okay, I know this is a long post, and to be honest, I’ve only scratched the surface of the mountains of information and questions that arise from it, here.  But, for a series of rumors to be the catalyst for events that end up in the “nationalization” and/or “subsidization” of the nation’s banks, at the expense of the global economy, is a mindboggling thing to consider, even if it’s ultimately untrue, or unprovable, if it is.

As I’ve said before, it’s reminiscent of a John Grisham novel, The Appeal, to be exact, so maybe my skepticism is born of an overactive imagination.  But all things considered, the more pertinent question is, what if it’s not?

*The New York Times printed a correction clarifying the dates and participants of 2 separate meetings re: Lehman/A.I.G.:

Because of an editing error, an article on Sunday about the financial problems of American International Group referred incorrectly to the timing and participants at meetings at the New York Federal Reserve between Saturday, Sept. 13, and Monday, Sept. 15. Although there were indeed meetings that weekend, there was also a separate meeting on Monday to discuss financial aid for A.I.G. Lloyd C. Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, was the only Wall Street chief executive who attended the Monday meeting, not the only chief executive who attended weekend meetings. Also, Henry M. Paulson Jr., the Treasury secretary, did not lead or attend the Monday meeting. (Both Mr. Blankfein and Mr. Paulson did attend the weekend meetings.)

From The Ground Up

Looks like Obama the Candidate was really serious about “change.”  As we all know, “change” was the buzzword of the 2008 campaign season, promoted constantly, incessantly, annoyingly by Barack Obama, and picked up on by all of his opponents in self defense.  But, while everybody else was just spouting campaign rhetoric; after all, whenever one administration replaces another, you’re going to get “change,” Obama seems to have been serious as a heart attack without health insurance about it.

Conventional wisdom and common sense would indicate to even the densest among us that in order to achieve the “true change” Obama promised to bring to the “old ways of Washington” in his determination to “remake the country,” the country in question, as in any renovation, would need to be torn down to the studs.  And, it appears Obama is well on his way to completing Phase One.  At least, according to George Soros.  Reuters reports that Soros, speaking at a Columbia University dinner, echoed the sentiments of the speaker before him, Paul Volcker, head of the president’s new Economic Advisory Board, when he said the world as we know it is well on its way to irrevocable destruction, economically speaking:

Renowned investor George Soros said on Friday the world financial system has effectively disintegrated, adding that there is yet no prospect of a near-term resolution to the crisis.

Soros said the turbulence is actually more severe than during the Great Depression, comparing the current situation to the demise of the Soviet Union.

He said the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in September marked a turning point in the functioning of the market system.

“We witnessed the collapse of the financial system,” Soros said at a Columbia University dinner. “It was placed on life support, and it’s still on life support. There’s no sign that we are anywhere near a bottom.”

Hmmm…isn’t that what Rep. Paul Kanjorski said, and all the Obots went, “Pfssshh, yeah, right“?  And, if I’m following all this correctly, doesn’t this mean that the economic event that lead to Paulson’s TARP (don’t call it a) bailout and propelled a curiously over-funded Obama from a hotly contested, tied competition into the White House virtually unopposed, is also the catalyst of global financial ruin?  What say the Obots, now?

Well, they can’t say Obama leads by example.  Or, maybe he does, since people not paying bills, for one reason or another, is a big part of the mess we’re in.  Obama doesn’t seem to want to pay his bills, either, at least not the one to his adopted home city for the Bashapalooza they threw for him on Election Night.  The Chicago Sun Times has the details:

Chicago has yet to recoup the $1.74 million cost of President Obama’s victory celebration in Grant Park — despite a burgeoning $50.5 million budget shortfall that threatens more layoffs and union concessions.

“The Democratic National Committee has not yet paid us,” Peter Scales, a spokesman for the city’s Office of Budget and Management, said Thursday after questions from the Chicago Sun-Times. “We’re reaching out to them this week.”

I guess South Side Slick expects the city to just hang on for the stimulus money since there’s probably pork aplenty to cover.  And, now that the Illinois legislature has done its part in kicking Rod Blagojevich to the curb, the state qualifies for its share.  There’s probably a bonus for breaking harmless little Roland Burris‘ heart by stomping on his dreams and jackbooting him out of the Senate job he dearly wanted, foolishly embraced and would be out of in a minute anyway.  One way or another, Chicago will be paid; either they’re headed under the bus, or somebody will “deliver an envelope,” if you get my drift.  Obama takes care of his own, it’s the Chicago Way.

Of course, the Obama Way means nobody has to pay their bills; he’s hellbent on seeing to it that everybody at least has a house, regardless of whether they can afford it, or not.  He unveiled his big, stock market tanking housing plan to help out the lender-seduced buyers who jumped off the deep end into houses that now have them underwater, and financially back up those lenders for going along with the program with government money, if they feel like it, unless they’re Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.  Since that’s the only way the greedy lenders can get the up front bailout money and back end insurance, I have a feeling they’ll probably play along.

For those pretty much destitute-from-the-jump folks just given over-priced houses by lenders, basically for free, just to get the right numbers on the paper those bankers were going to turn right around and sell for even more worthless computer bits and bytes signifying nothing, even though everybody knew they’d never be able to pay it back, Obie has sicced ACORN on the problem on the QT.  All those folks have to do is make like Wild West expansioneers and just squat on their homestead, since Obie’s got their back with the bailed out bankers, no matter what.  Besides, the original mortgage has probably been through so many grubby banksters’ hands, the guys trying to foreclose probably couldn’t produce the necessary paperwork if they wanted to.  If the system gamers get cold feet, or the banker on the low end not hip to the deal tries to lock them out, a quick call to Obie’s ACORN enforcers will bring the strongarm crew to help you gain access to your now completely free house.  Of course, like all Dons, Obie’s three steps removed, especially since he got Rep. Marcy Kaptur to sell the plan to the clueless for him.

Don’t be fooled by the “hold bank executives feet to the fire” rah-rah coming from the administration, either.   The whole “salary cap” thing is bogus all around, being nothing but re-election theater as it is.  Team Obama and his money man, Turbo Tax Timmy Geithner, tax cheat (TTTG,tc) tried to quietly tiptoe out of the whole TARP-related “take my money, play buy my rules” dramatic ploy, but Congress realized they need votes too, so they snuck it back into the stimulus bill.  And, even though it sounds like “Ooooooh, we showed those bad bankers,” anybody who believes there isn’t enough wiggle room in the provisions to drive a fleet of private jets, and Daschle limos through, is a hopium head, and deserves the no grease screwing a-comin’.

Same for anybody who really believes Obie’s gonna close Gitmo; I’ll believe it when I see it, since the Obama patented “clear myself ahead of time” review panel he commisioned, this time through the Pentagon instead of White House counsel like the brush-Blago-off-the-shoulders one, says everything at Gitmo is Geneva convention compliant and thus, hunky dory.  So, why close it?  Look for him to rescind his exec order sometime in the coming year, on the sly, like he’s extending those Bush policies.  Shhhhhh.

So, while Obacrats raise Democratic in-fighting to a new art form, using definitions of “what is is” as a time tested, media approved bludgeoning tool against their brethren-on-the-outs in the case of David (Caroline wasn’t my first choice) Paterson and Roland (but I didn’t give him any money) Burris, the Teflon TelePrompTer Reader can continue happily fronting for the banksters, robbing the world blind, fighting wars, and tearing the country to the ground, so he can remake it in his own image with a clean slate.  Like he, and his wife, told you he would.

All the while, remaining more popular than Jesus in the process.  Like Dee Dee Myers told us he was.

And, the wheels on…oh, hell, you know the rest.

Playing President

Barack Obama is a mild-mannered college professor playing at being a politician pretending to know what the hell he’s talking about when he reads other people’s ideas written up by the Cardboard Titty Groper from a TelePrompTer, or, Heaven forbid, note cards.  As such, he has yet to settle on a comfortable persona, or alter-ego, if you will.   Is he an affable, perpetual campaigner, selling “hopey change” to the hard of listening?  Is he a Dark Darth Vader of Doom with a “sky is falling” Chicken Little complex?  Could he be SuperO!, sent to us from a planet far, far, far away, in another galaxy, by a benevolent father determined to save our people as his meet their end?  Or, is he a stern, yet compassionate EveryDad, kindly dispensing “tough love” to his cherished, yet clueless adolescent children?  Whatever role he’s playing, he seems to have forgotten that in our system of government, he’s technically, no better than any other citizen.

“My fellow Americans.”

Most presidents use this phrase to address their fellow citizens, but, to the best of my knowledge, Barack Obama usually does not.  One suspects that the reason for this is that even he knows enough to realize that “My loyal subjects,” what he wants to call us, is inappropriate.  Therefore, he tends to call us the political equivalent of “you guys,” which is, “everybody,” as in, “Good evening, everybody,” or “Everybody be seated.”

Whatever.  The Obamessiah has donned just about all of his myriad personalities over the past few weeks since the inauguration; first as the Play President, getting his picture taken sitting behind his big, shiny new desk in his shirtsleeves, pretending to talk on the phone so it would look like he was actually doing Important Stuff.  When that proved to be insufficient to inspire the proper degree of deference and awe necessary to force Congress to do his bidding, he and his PuppetMasters decided it was time to dust off the Lovable Candidate suit, pack up the Traveling TelePrompTer and and hit the road giving away houses door to door like Oprah doing Ed McMahon.  When it looked like even that might not work, he commandeered the airwaves as Doctor Destructo, scaring the shit out of “his fellow Americans,” and other little children with his “catastrophic” proclamations portending imminent doom and devastation if he didn’t get his way with his stimulus plan, only to be met with the fate he said he was trying to avoid when he did.

Earlier today, Obantos channeled his inner Huxtable and scolded his headstrong older mayoral sons and daughters working in the family business, charged with dispensing their allowance to their younger siblings fairly.  Like Cliff to lovable screw-up Theo, Papa Prez laid down the law; “do it right, or answer to me.”  Like Theo, the kiddie mayors grabbed the cash, said, “uh-huh, luv ya, Pops,” and hit the door quick before he changed his mind and snatched it back in order to issue more conditions they fully plan to ignore.  Again, like Cliff, the Acting President smiled indulgently, knowing they’d be back for more as soon as they ran through what he’d given them, just as well as they knew he had held some back for just that purpose.

He has also, on occasion, been thrust into the role of hapless, bumbling Mr. Peepers does Dagwood, such as when his best laid cabinet plans gang aft aglaed.  Having three candidates for one position withdraw from consideration, as he has had with Secretary of Commerce (Pritzker, Richardson, and Gregg) could make anybody look stupid, even if his Secretary of Treasury wasn’t a tax cheat the world had no confidence in.   And, if he was the only one.

As he theorizes and strategizes hypothetical responses to focus group directives, marking time giving pep talks in front of crowds and television cameras, tap dancing as fast as he can in an attempt to divert attention from his un-preparedness and ineptitude, his Traveling Light and Magic Show still enjoys good ratings.  However, in spite of his uncanny quick-change talent and clever scriptwriters eerily in touch with their target audience through age, internet and Starbucks, he would do well to remember that there is not enough Mocha Choca Latte bars and customers to keep a bad show on the air once the novelty wears off for the fickle “fellow Americans” he serves.

Especially if they think it’s his fault they’re broke.

So, keep dancing, Mr. President, so far, your fancy footwork has been enough to dazzle the gullible with your particular brand of Obandini.  Tomorrow, a better show might come along.

Or, your fans’ real parents might make ‘em get a job.

Forget The Doom and Gloom, I Want My Freakin’ Pony

Traveling around the internet from one bad news story to another, I have to admit, I’m really sick of waking up to all the doom and gloom.  I feel like “The Wiz’s Evilene, played by Big “