How Gay Obama Is Destroying America

From Free Press Houston via Joe.My.God.: anti-immigration protesters in Houston last week sound off about that homosexual boyfriend-killer Obama in league with the flood of gays, Chinese, Mexicans, and Muslim jihadists coming across the border to destroy America. A few pro-immigration protesters are also interviewed.




Why, even our embassies abroad fly the rainbow flag, and we have a bunch of queer ambassadors - isn't that terrible?! So God just might nuke America into oblivion any day now, says Houston pastor Rick Scarborough, for the evil, wicked, detestable sin of loving the gays:




Funny how all those liberty-loving, flag-waving, right-wing patriots, as soon as you take the whip and the rod out of their hands, they want to destroy "this great country" that they have always professed to love so dearly - isn't it? If they don't control it, they want to see it smashed to pieces, and then gloat over the smoldering ruins. A fine Christian attitude, ain't it boys?

Newsbites, 4/8/14

Mickey Rooney Dies at 93 - a comedic genius and a highly underrated performer.  The Los Angeles Times reports:

When such leading actors of his generation as Cary Grant and Anthony Quinn were asked who was the best actor in Hollywood, they both immediately named Rooney, Turner Classic Movies host Robert Osborne recalled while interviewing author Gore Vidal, who said the same.

"Tennessee Williams, who knew more about actors than anybody in our time … said, 'There's only one great actor in the United States and that is Mickey Rooney.... He can do anything. He sings, he dances, he can make you weep. He can play tragedy, he can play comedy,'" Vidal said in 2007 while introducing "A Midsummer Night's Dream," the 1935 film with a teenage Rooney as Puck.

May he rest in peace with Judy and all his other fabulous co-stars from 90 years of delighting audiences around the world.

LBJ's Daughters Say Daddy Would Have Supported Marriage Equality:

“I think my father felt very strongly that when there was bigotry anywhere, prejudice anywhere, all of us lose out,” said Luci Baines Johnson. “Because it’s just one more expression of hate.”

Added her sister, Lynda Bird Johnson Robb: “It’s hard to project what Daddy would have thought about that because that wasn’t an issue that had come upon the States at that time. But I know he really wanted everybody to be able to live up to the best that God gave them.”

I think he would too if he were still alive. Texans who aren't brainbound by religious fundamentalism have an instinct for fair play and root for the underdog. But oh my gosh, I remember Lynda and Luci as teenagers, watched their weddings on TV - and now here they are old women, immaculately dressed and groomed, but grandma age. Of course, I'm not far behind them, and getting pretty damn long in the tooth myself.

UVA Swimmers Embrace Their Gay Teammates - Okay, so which two do you think are the gay ones?


Louisiana Congressman Defends "Our Christian Way of Life" by Making Out with Staffer - Another lying, hypocritical sack of shit Tea Party Republican has been busted - on video - because he just can't keep his Traditional Family Values in his pants. But it's cool - he's asked the wife and five kids to forgive him, so that's just all right with God then.  He was elected just last November; here's a campaign ad of McAllister promising to do his duty to God and his country:



The betrayed husband of the woman McAllister was putting a lip lock on says:

I know his beliefs. When he ran one of his commercials, he said "I need your prayers," and I asked, "When did you get religious?" He said, "When I needed votes." He broke out the religious card and he's about the most non-religious person I know. He's apologized to everyone in the world except me. I’m just freaking devastated by the whole deal, man. I loved my wife so much. I cannot believe this. I cannot freaking believe it. I feel like I’m going to wake up here in a minute and this is all going to be a bad nightmare. It was just a kiss, that was all it was, but it embarrassed me and my family.

Westboro Protesters Chased Away by Mob in Oklahoma - Hundreds of local residents jeered and put to flight a group of Westboro Baptist Church protesters in Moore, Oklahoma, a suburb of Oklahoma City, on Sunday. The Westboro gang were there to praise God for sending a tornado that killed several children last year. KFOR in Oklahoma City reports:

Westboro’s permit to picket was for half an hour. They had been there a mere eight minutes when several people took matters into their own hands. Some Moore residents crossed the picket line to go after Westboro members. Dan Eccles said, “I was afraid of a riot really. I didn’t know how long Westboro would stay, which they were smart to leave.” Police were able to hold back the Moore residents while the Westboro bunch rushed to pack their signs in their cars and leave.

Dan Eccles said, “They shagged tail, got in them cars and was leaving in a hurry. Oh yeah, they was gone!” "I thought it was hilarious. I mean I really did. We sat there and laughed the whole time,” said Tina Johnson. “They were running, yeah.”

This week's New Yorker cover just makes me laugh out loud.  Brilliant.

The Best Medicine by Barry Blitt.

The Quality of Mercy - Regarding the flap over the resignation of Mozilla's CEO last week, Andrew Sullivan says:

The ability to work alongside or for people with whom we have a deep political disagreement is not a minor issue in a liberal society. It is a core foundation of toleration. We either develop the ability to tolerate those with whom we deeply disagree, or liberal society is basically impossible. Civil conversation becomes culture war; arguments and reason cede to emotion and anger. And let me reiterate: this principle of toleration has recently been attacked by many more on the far right than on the far left. I’m appalled, for example, at how great gay teachers have been fired by Catholic schools, even though it is within the right of the schools to do so. It’s awful that individuals are fired for being gay with no legal recourse all over the country. But if we rightly feel this way about gays in the workplace, why do we not feel the same about our opponents? And on what grounds can we celebrate the resignation of someone for his off-workplace political beliefs? Payback? Revenge? Some liberal principles, in my view, are worth defending whether they are assailed by left or right. . . .

A civil rights movement without toleration is not a civil rights movement; it is a cultural campaign to expunge and destroy its opponents. A moral movement without mercy is not moral; it is, when push comes to shove, cruel. For a decade and half, we have fought the battle for equal dignity for gay people with sincerity, openness, toleration and reason. It appears increasingly as if we will have to fight and fight again to prevent this precious and highly successful legacy from being hijacked by a righteous, absolutely certain, and often hateful mob. We are better than this. And we must not give in to it.

And Jim Burroway over at Box Turtle Bulletin concurs:

Mozilla describes itself as “an open source project governed as a meritocracy.” Eich had been with Mozilla since the very beginning and developed the ubiquitous Javascript that powers much of the web today. If meritocracy means anything at any company, it should certainly mean something to the company’s most visible job at the very top. But Eich was caught in an impossible quagmire that had nothing to do with merit. In the name of tolerance, he learned that we don’t have to tolerate his opinions, opinions which he kept private and away from the workplace.

Which means that everyone who has had to endure corporate diversity training now has the same lesson lodged in their heads. Until now, they had been told that they can do whatever they want and believe whatever they want outside the workplace, but when they crossed the company’s threshold, they had to treat their fellow workers with dignity and respect, and to respect and encourage diversity in the workforce. They’ve now learned that it was all a lie. We do care about what they do outside of work and we can demand their ouster if we don’t like it. Eich learned that lesson the hard way and resigned yesterday. I can’t think of a better way to encourage even more cynicism toward company diversity programs than that.

In a highly interesting development in this affair, Mother Jones reports that OKCupid's CEO, Sam Yagen, contributed $500 to an antigay congressman's campaign back in 2004.  OKCupid announced last week that it would block all users with Mozilla's Firefox browser from OKCupid's site while Eich remained at the head of that company. Yagen has now apologized for his thoughtcrime, saying he had no clue about the candidate's antigay views.

And Joe Jervis disagrees with Sullivan but says:

Demands for ideological purity are killing the Republican Party and are no less a danger for the LGBT rights movement. . . . My larger point is that there is room for people for have different ideas about how to get to the same place. Every social movement in history has been torn by infighting and ours is definitely no exception. So yes, call out our own and call them out strongly when you think they are wrong about tactics. We can do that without the same vitriol we direct at our actual enemies.

The Tea Party Religion

Mike Ashmore of Hooks, Texas, a Marine Corps veteran, waves a Confederate flag in front of the White House during an anti-Obama demonstration on Sunday, October 13, 2013.  As a native Southerner, your Head Trucker understands the gesture, but pities the poor boy for not having figured out yet what is so very wrong about what he's doing.

Well, all the world is heaving a sigh of relief as it appears that the shutdown/debt limit crisis is nearing an end tonight. But don't think the war is over. It's merely this coup attempt that has failed; others will follow. It's no good thinking that in twenty years, when all the grumpy, white-haired old Uncle Joes and Aunt Marthas have died off that sweetness and light and sanity will return to American politics - because there are plenty of young'uns coming right along behind them, with a gleam in the eye and a fire in the belly, to carry on the fight to defeat the Great Satan - America.

Andrew Sullivan nails it in this excerpt:

Dishheads know I believe that you cannot understand the current GOP without also grasping how bewildered so many people are by the dizzying onset of modernity. The 21st Century has brought Islamist war to America, the worst recession since the 1930s, a debt-ridden federal government, a majority-minority future, gay marriage, universal healthcare and legal weed. If you were still seething from the eruption of the 1960s, and thought that Reagan had ended all that, then the resilience of a pluralistic, multi-racial, fast-miscegenating, post-gay America, whose president looks like the future, not the past, you would indeed, at this point, be in a world-class, meshugganah, cultural panic.

When you add in the fact that the American dream stopped working for most working-class folks at some point in the mid 1970s, and when you see the national debt soaring from the Reagan years onward, made much worse by the Bush-Cheney years, and then exploded by the recession Bush bequeathed, you have a combustible mixture. It’s very easy to lump all this together into a paranoid fantasy of an American apocalypse that must somehow be stopped at all cost. In trying to understand the far-right mindset – which accounts for around a quarter of the country – I think you have to zoom out and see all of this in context.

Many of us found in Barack Obama a very post-ideological president, a pragmatist, a Christian, and a traditional family man, and naively believed that he could both repair the enormous damage done by the Bush-Cheney administration and simultaneously reach out to the red states as well. I refuse to say the failure is his. Because he tried. For years, he was lambasted by the left for being far too accommodating, far too reasonable, aloof, not scrappy enough, weak … you know the drill by now. In fact, he was just trying to bring as much of the country along as he could in tackling the huge recession and massive debt he inherited at one and the same time, and in unwinding the 9/11 emergency, and in ending two wars and the morally and legally crippling legacy of torture (about which the GOP is simply in rigid denial).

Obama got zero votes from House Republicans for a desperately needed stimulus in his first weeks in office. So I cannot believe he could have maintained any sort of detente with the Republican right, dominated by the legacy of Palin, rather than McCain. But the healthcare reform clearly ended any sort of possibility of coexistence – and the cold civil war took off again. The first black president could, perhaps, clean up some of the mess of his predecessor, but as soon as he moved on an actual substantive change that he wanted and campaigned on, he was deemed illegitimate. Even though that change was, by any standards, a moderate one, catering to private interests, such as drug and insurance companies; even though it had no public option; even though its outline was the same as the GOP’s 2012 nominee’s in Massachusetts, this inching toward a more liberal America was the casus belli. It still is – which is why it looms so large for the Republican right in ways that can easily befuddle the rest of us.

But it is emphatically not the real reason for the revolt. It is the symptom, not the cause. My rule of thumb is pretty simple: whenever you hear a quote about Obamacare, it’s more illuminating to remove the “care” part. And Obama is a symbol of change people cannot understand, are frightened by, and seek refuge from.

That desperate need for certainty and security is what I focused on in my book about all this, The Conservative Soul. What the understandably beleaguered citizens of this new modern order want is a pristine variety of America that feels like the one they grew up in. They want truths that ring without any timbre of doubt. They want root-and-branch reform – to the days of the American Revolution. And they want all of this as a pre-packaged ideology, preferably aligned with re-written American history, and reiterated as a theater of comfort and nostalgia. They want their presidents white and their budget balanced now. That balancing it now would tip the whole world into a second depression sounds like elite cant to them; that America is, as a matter of fact, a coffee-colored country – and stronger for it – does not remove their desire for it not to be so; indeed it intensifies their futile effort to stop immigration reform. And given the apocalyptic nature of their view of what is going on, it is only natural that they would seek a totalist, radical, revolutionary halt to all of it, even if it creates economic chaos, even if it destroys millions of jobs, even though it keeps millions in immigration limbo, even if it means an unprecedented default on the debt.

This is a religion – but a particularly modern, extreme and unthinking fundamentalist religion. And such a form of religion is the antithesis of the mainline Protestantism that once dominated the Republican party as well, to a lesser extent, the Democratic party.

Columnist Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune on the meaning of the Confederate flag today:




Dr. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite of the Chicago Theological Seminary writes in the Washington Post:

Our politics is a cosmic war, a theologically fueled conflict where our politics itself is seen as the battleground between good and evil. That is the larger frame that can contain both a confederate flag and Islamophobia. At a related demonstration in Washington, D.C. yesterday, Freedom Watch founder Larry Klayman said, “I call upon all of you to wage a second American nonviolent revolution, to use civil disobedience, and to demand that this president leave town, to get up, to put the Koran down, to get up off his knees, and to figuratively come out with his hands up.”

Klayman carefully added terms such as “nonviolent” and “figuratively” and yet declared our politics as war. The subtext, conveyed in language such as “come out with his hands up,” for example, is very aggressive. If we do not understand that the political and religious right-wing sees American politics as a cosmic war, we might think that there will be a political resolution achieved when the government shutdown is ended, and the debt ceiling raised.

Don’t relax. This has just been a skirmish. The war continues. It will, I believe, even accelerate. Yes, there will be a political “deal” to most likely get a continuing resolution on the budget until early 2014 and raise the debt ceiling, but the war will go on. There will very likely be another government shutdown in early 2014 and another threatened default on our debt. This will occur not for any policy reasons, but because the Tea Party caucus is fighting Satan; they are engaged in a cosmic war with evil in American politics.

The theology of the shutdown is “Christian dominionism” as Morgan Guyton has so well demonstrated. Christian dominionism is the idea that the nation should be governed by Christians according to a conservative understanding of biblical law.

As Guyton showed in his article, Senator Ted Cruz, an architect of the government shutdown, has theological roots in Christian dominionism through the work of his father, Rafael Cruz, a pastor with a Texas charismatic ministry. At an Iowa Family Leadership Summit this summer, the elder Cruz preached, “When you hear this attack on religion, it’s not really an attack on religion. The fundamental basis is this. Socialism requires that government becomes your God.” This explains “homosexual marriage” as it is designed to destroy your “loyalty to the family.” What has to happen is that “kings” will fight “war” to gain “spoils” and establish dominion over the country. . . .

Government shutdowns, threatened debt default, racism, homophobia and Islamophobia can seem like discrete political struggles for democracy, good governance, and equal rights. Progressives and moderates make a huge mistake when they do not see the connections extremists make among them. It is crucial to see that to the extreme right-wing that is hijacking our political process right now, these are not discrete issues but part of a cosmic war on Satan played out in our American political life.

It is my belief that theological struggles need to be engaged as theological struggles and not allowed to mask themselves as ‘politics by other means.’ We are in a struggle not only for the future of our democracy, but also for a Christianity centered on the life and work of Jesus of Nazareth who taught us to pray for “daily bread” on “earth,” not just in heaven, not on some imagined cosmic war fought for political gain.

That will not be over this week. In fact, it is just beginning again.

Oh and one more thing - don't any of you Yankee boys go a-pointing fingers with dirty hands attached. Here's the New Yorker's map of where the Republican "suicide caucus" lives - the red dots indicates districts of those 80 representatives who signed an August letter to John Boehner demanding that he defund Obamacare or shut down the government - and half of them are outside of the South:

Click to enlarge.

Which only goes to show that prejudice, ignorance, hatred, and fanaticism know no boundaries.


Update, 10:20 p.m.: The shutdown is over. Until January. The temporary budget and debt ceiling bill passed the Senate 81-18, and the House by 285-144, including 85 Republicans voting for passage and 198 Democrats. No Democrats voted against the bill, but two Dems abstained - I wonder who they were.

And as a coda to this bizarre episode, while the vote was being tabulated tonight, a House stenographer grabbed the microphone in front of the Speaker's chair and began ranting something about people mocking God and praise Jesus! 

Jesus.

Flag Desecration?

The good citizens of Mufreesboro, Tennessee, or some of them at least, are all het up over the display of a rainbow-striped flag at Middle Tennessee State University there. WTVF in Nashville reports:

NewsChannel5.com | Nashville News, Weather


Jesus mercy - we're still having this kind of argument in 2013.

I'd be willing to bet any amount of money, however, that those same upstanding patriots who are all hot and bothered over the rainbow would swear that the following is not a desecration of the American flag:

Demonstrators at the so-called Tax Day Revolt in Washington, D.C., in 2010, carrying 13-star American flags with a  prominent "II" in the middle of the circle, signifying a call for a "Second American Revolution" to overthrow the government of the United States - using the sacred right to own as many damn guns as you please, and as big as you please, enshrined in the Second Amendment.

Update, 10/8: The rainbow flag was stolen from the MTSU library display on Sunday, but campus cops tracked down the thief - a student - and returned the flag to the MT Lambda group on Tuesday.

It's Not Just a Political Fight - It's a Consitutional Crisis

Tea Partiers at the Capitol, 2011

Jonathan Chait writes a chillingly perceptive analysis of the constitutional crisis at the heart of the shutdown impasse - excerpt from New York Magazine:

Traditionally, when American politics encountered the problem of divided government— when, say, Nixon and Eisenhower encountered Democratic Congresses, or Bill Clinton a Republican one—one of two things happened. Either both sides found enough incentives to work together despite their differences, or there was what we used to recognize as the only alternative: gridlock. Gridlock is what most of us expected after the last election produced a Democratic president and Republican House. Washington would drudge on; it would be hard to get anything done, but also hard to undo anything. Days after the election, John Boehner, no doubt anticipating things would carry on as always, said, “Obamacare is the law of the land.”

Instead, to the slowly unfolding horror of the Obama administration and even some segments of the Republican Party, the GOP decided that the alternative to finding common ground with the president did not have to be mere gridlock. It could force the president to enact its agenda. In January, Boehner told his colleagues he’d abandon all policy negotiations with the White House. Later that spring, House Republicans extended the freeze-out to the Democratic-­majority Senate, which has since issued (as of press time) eighteen futile pleas for budget negotiations. Their plan has been to carry out their agenda by using what they call “leverage” or “forcing events” to threaten economic and social harm and thereby extract concessions from President Obama without needing to make any policy concessions in return. Paul Ryan offered the most candid admission of his party’s determined use of non-electoral power: “The reason this debt-limit fight is different is we don’t have an election around the corner where we feel we are going to win and fix it ourselves,” he said at the end of September. “We are stuck with this government another three years.”

Last Tuesday, House Republicans shut down the federal government, demanding that Obama abolish his health-care reform in a tactically reckless gamble that most of the party feared but could not prevent. More surreal, perhaps, were the conditions they issued in exchange for lifting the debt ceiling later this month. Lifting the debt ceiling, a vestigial ritual in which Congress votes to approve payment of the debts it has already incurred, is almost a symbolic event, except that not doing it would wreak unpredictable and possibly enormous worldwide economic havoc. (Obama’s Treasury Department has compared the impact of a debt breach to the failure of Lehman Brothers.) The hostage letter House Republicans released brimmed with megalomaniacal ambition. If he wanted to avoid economic ruin, Republicans said, Obama would submit to a delay of health-care reform, plus tax-rate cuts, enactment of offshore drilling, approval of the Keystone pipeline, deregulation of Wall Street, and Medicare cuts, to name but a few demands. Republicans hardly pretended to believe Obama would accede to the entire list (a set of demands that amounted to the retroactive election of Mitt Romney), but the hubris was startling in and of itself.

The debt ceiling turns out to be unexploded ordnance lying around the American form of government. Only custom or moral compunction stops the opposition party from using it to nullify the president’s powers, or, for that matter, the president from using it to nullify Congress’s. (Obama could, theoretically, threaten to veto a debt ceiling hike unless Congress attaches it to the creation of single-payer health insurance.) To weaponize the debt ceiling, you must be willing to inflict harm on millions of innocent people. It is a shockingly powerful self-destruct button built into our very system of government, but only useful for the most ideologically hardened or borderline sociopathic. But it turns out to be the perfect tool for the contemporary GOP: a party large enough to control a chamber of Congress yet too small to win the presidency, and infused with a dangerous, millenarian combination of overheated Randian paranoia and fully justified fear of adverse demographic trends. The only thing that limits the debt ceiling’s potency at the moment is the widespread suspicion that Boehner is too old school, too lacking in the Leninist will to power that fires his newer co-partisans, to actually carry out his threat. (He has suggested as much to some colleagues in private.) Boehner himself is thus the one weak link in the House Republicans’ ability to carry out a kind of rolling coup against the Obama administration. Unfortunately, Boehner’s control of his chamber is tenuous enough that, like the ailing monarch of a crumbling regime, it’s impossible to strike an agreement with him in full security it will be carried out.

In this context, it's also very informative to read the report just issued by Democracy Corps, entitled "Inside the GOP: Report on focus groups with Evangelical, Tea Party, and moderate Republicans." Read a short summary here, or the full report (pdf, 1.2 mb) here. Excerpts [edited by your Head Trucker to eliminate obvious typos]:

Unifying all Republicans is their revulsion toward big government. That revulsion involves three distinct strands of thinking – two of which take the Republican Party into realms of preoccupation that threaten to marginalize the party.

The first strand is big programs, spending, and regulations that undermine business. That is pretty straightforward and is hardly surprising. That is probably the dominant strand among the moderates who long for a fiscally conservative and focused Republican Party. . . . The second strand is a concern with intrusive government that invades their privacy, diminishes their rights and freedoms, and threatens the Constitution. Those worries are dominant among the Tea Party, though not exclusively. . . .

And the third is the most important and elicits the most passions among Evangelicals and Tea Party Republicans – that big government is meant to create rights and dependency and electoral support from mostly minorities who will reward the Democratic Party with their votes.

The Democratic Party [in their view] exists to create programs and dependency – the food stamp hammock, entitlements, the 47 percent. And on the horizon—comprehensive immigration reform and Obamacare. Citizenship for 12 million illegals and tens of millions getting free health care is the end of the road. These participants are very conscious of being white and valuing communities that are more likeminded; they freely describe these programs as meant to benefit minorities. This is about a Democratic Party expanding dependency among African Americans and Latinos, with electoral intent. . . .

Obamacare is the final blow. When Evangelicals talk about what is wrong in the country, Obamacare is first on their list and they see it as the embodiment of what is wrong in both the economy and American politics. In fact, when asked what she talks about most, one woman in Colorado replied, “Obamacare, hands down, around our house.” In Roanoke, it was the first thing mentioned when asked “what’s the hot topic in your world?” . . .

Evangelicals are a third of the Republican base; they are the biggest and most intense group: four-in-five are “strong” Republicans and straight ticket voters. Over three quarters are married and well over 90 percent are white. Their demographics – white, married, religious, and older – sets up a feeling that they are losing. They talk about how the dominant politics and cultures have encroached on their small towns, schools, and churches. What troubles them when they talk with friends, family, and fellow believers is Obamacare, guns, government encroachment, gay marriage, and “culture rot.” . . .

It used to be different, as illustrated by several men in Roanoke when describing their own towns.

It’s a little bubble. So everybody – it’s like a Lake Wobegon. Everybody is above average. Everybody is happy. Everybody is white. Everybody is middle class, whether or not they really are. Everybody looks that way. Everybody goes to the same pool. Everybody goes – there’s one library, one post office. Very homogenous. (Evangelical man, Roanoke)

And the point of departure for being a politically incorrect minority is what’s happening with the acceptance of homosexuality and the gay agenda.

Giving gay and lesbian citizens the right to marry the person they love can seriously harm them, and seriously harm the children that they are raising. (Evangelical man, Roanoke)

They’ve taken what I consider a religious union between a man and a woman – pardon my French – and bastardized it. (Evangelical man, Roanoke)

They believe the dominant national culture promotes homosexuality and makes this “minority” culturally “normal.” There is a conspiracy to push “the gay agenda.”

You see, fellas? Once again, it's all OUR fault. Of course.

You guys who don't live in a deep red state as I do should go read the whole report. It really lays bare the thinking of all these millions of your fellow citizens who are cheering as the government of the United States crumbles - the quotes could have been taken from any of my neighbors here out here on the prairie. It's not that modern culture is without flaws or above criticism - your Head Trucker has voiced his criticisms any number of times here in the Blue Truck -  but they seriously want to turn the clock back to a lily-white, straight-arrow, Bible-thumping, one-size-fits-all 1950 - and they will, too, if only they can find a way.

Just read it.  Before you wake up one morning to find yourself trapped in Mayberry.  Without a laugh track.

The Rape of America

Your Head Trucker will make no comments here, leaving it up to you fellas to draw your own conclusions from these six items.

I. "Remember This Date," from the Senate Democrats Twitter account:

II.  Andrew Sullivan, "The Nullification Party," via David Mixner:

I’ve been trying to think of something original to say about the absurdity now transpiring in Washington, DC. I’ve said roughly what I think in short; and I defer to Fallows for an important dose of reality against the predictably moronic coverage of the Washington Post.

But there is something more here. How does one party that has lost two presidential elections and a Supreme Court case – as well as two Senate elections - think it has the right to shut down the entire government and destroy the full faith and credit of the United States Treasury to get its way on universal healthcare now? I see no quid pro quo even. Just pure blackmail, resting on understandable and predictable public concern whenever a major reform is enacted. But what has to be resisted is any idea that this is government or politics as usual. It is an attack on the governance and the constitutional order of the United States.

When ideologies become as calcified, as cocooned and as extremist as those galvanizing the GOP, the American system of government cannot work. But I fear this nullification of the last two elections is a deliberate attempt to ensure that the American system of government as we have known it cannot work. It cannot, must not work, in the mindset of these radicals, because they simply do not accept the legitimacy of a President and Congress of the opposing party. The GOP does not regard the president as merely wrong – but as illegitimate. Not misguided – illegitimate. This is not about ending Obamacare as such (although that is a preliminary scalp); it is about nullifying this presidency, the way the GOP attempted to nullify the last Democratic presidency by impeachment.

Except this time, of course, we cannot deny that race too is an added factor to the fathomless sense of entitlement felt among the GOP far right. You saw it in birtherism; in the Southern GOP’s constant outrageous claims of Obama’s alleged treason and alliance with Islamist enemies; in providing zero votes for a stimulus that was the only thing that prevented a global depression of far worse proportions; in the endless race-baiting from Fox News and the talk radio right. And in this racially-charged atmosphere, providing access to private healthcare insurance to the working poor is obviously the point of no return.

Even though the law is almost identical to that of their last presidential nominee’s in Massachusetts, the GOP is prepared to destroy both the American government and the global economy to stop it. They see it, it seems to me, as both some kind of profound attack on the Constitution (something even Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts viewed as a step too far) and, in some inchoate way, as a racial hand-out, however preposterous that is. And that is at the core of the recklessness behind this attack on the US – or at least my best attempt to understand something that has long since gone beyond reason. This is the point of no return – a black president doing something for black citizens (even though the vast majority of beneficiaries of Obamacare will be non-black).

I regard this development as one of the more insidious and anti-constitutional acts of racist vandalism against the American republic in my adult lifetime. Those who keep talking as if there are two sides to this, when there are not, are as much a part of the vandalism as Ted Cruz. Obama has played punctiliously by the constitutional rules – two elections, one court case – while the GOP has decided that the rules are for dummies and suckers, and throws over the board game as soon as it looks as if it is going to lose by the rules as they have always applied.

The president must therefore hold absolutely firm. This time, there can be no compromise because the GOP isn’t offering any. They’re offering the kind of constitutional surrender that would effectively end any routine operation of the American government. If we cave to their madness, we may unravel our system of government, something one might have thought conservatives would have opposed. Except these people are not conservatives. They’re vandals.

This time, the elephant must go down. And if possible, it must be so wounded it does not get up for a long time to come.

III. David Weigel, Slate, "Why Republicans Have No Problem Taking Us to the Brink":

The gerrymanders of 2011 added to their natural geographic advantage over urban/suburban Democrats and gave them a House they simply don’t think they can lose. In 2012 they proved it, winning 1.36 million fewer votes than Democratic candidates but keeping a 33-seat majority. According to the Cook Political Report, 205 of 435 House districts are solidly Republican, basically impossible to lose without an unexpected bribery or sexting scandal. Only 163 districts are solidly Democratic. If Democrats swept the table and won all the districts currently rated as tossups or “leaning” Republican, they’d win 213 seats, five short of a majority.

That was always the long-term Republican plan. In 2010, when voter anger was already guaranteeing a fantastic party comeback, groups like the Redistricting Majority Project (nicknamed REDMAP) told donors that “the party controlling that effort controls the drawing of the maps—shaping the political landscape for the next 10 years.”

IV. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D.-Mass.) blasts Republicans "who cannot cope with the reality of our democracy":



V.  Robinson Jeffers, "Shine, Perishing Republic," circa 1935:

While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire,

And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens,  

I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots to make earth.

Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence; and home to the mother.    

You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stubbornly long or suddenly

A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains: shine, perishing republic.    

But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thickening center; corruption

Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster’s feet there are left the mountains.    

And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant, insufferable master.

There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught—they say—God, when he walked on earth.

VI.  Rachel Maddow: "GOP Came to Power Seeking Government Shutdown."

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Millions Flee Obamacare

As everyone knows, Obamacare starts open enrollment today, and House Assholes Republicans were unable to force its postponement in last-minute voting overnight. Consequently, the Interstates are jammed all across America today as tearful, angry, bewildered Tea Partiers desperately seek an escape route. Staff humorist Andy Borowitz reports on the wild scenes playing out across the country in the New Yorker - a must read:

Millions Flee Obamacare

Meanwhile, all you liberal sheeple, as we are so graciously known by the demented lemmings on the Right, can go enroll in a low-cost health care plan at HealthCare.gov right now - no matter where you live in the country. Even if your state has officially rejected Obamacare and all that goes with it, you can still get coverage. Even if, like me, you live in Bumfuck, Texas.

Horrifying, isn't it?

Related news: In his inimitable way, Jon Stuart skewers and roasts the intransigent Republicans who have now forced the federal government to shut down, with about a million employees out of work immediately, with no pay, and at a cost to the economy of billions of dollars in suspended government services.

I can't get the episode to embed properly, but go watch it here.

I say kudos to the President and the Democratic leadership for having the balls to stand up to the sorry bastards. We saw in the debt-ceiling crisis of 2011 that playing Mr. Nice Guy just doesn't work with these thugs. The one-year Obamacare delay is just a ruse - they will keep postponing every year from now till Kingdom Come if they get away with it this time.

Oh but don't worry - all your Congresspeeps continue to get paid their $174,000 annual salaries right on schedule, of course. And enjoy full coverage of their platinum-plated government-sponsored health care plans - totally free of charge.

What's wrong with this fucking picture?

American Sadists

Poet and essayist Charles Simic in the New York Review of Books:

In the past, even the most venal among our politicians would now and then show that they have hearts. No more. Now that money rules politics more than ever before and those for whom private gain outweighs public good every time fill the coffers of both political parties, any mention of the plight of the sick, the homeless, and the old borders on political suicide. Polls show that most Americans do not quite share the callousness of our political class to the suffering of the less fortunate members of our society. But some do. We all remember, I hope, the cheers that went up in the audience during the GOP’s presidential debate last spring in Tampa when Ron Paul, the libertarian candidate and former doctor, stated that he would let an uninsured man lying in a coma die without lifting a finger. “That’s what freedom is all about, taking your own risk,” he said. “This whole idea that you have to compare and take care of everybody…” at which point, a few members of the audience shouted “Yeah,” cutting off the congressman in mid-sentence.

This is the new face of American sadism: the unconcealed burst of joy at the thought that pain is going to be inflicted on someone weak and helpless. Its viciousness, I believe, is symptomatic of the way our society is changing. Everything from the healthcare industry, payday loans, and for-profit prisons to the trading in so-called derivatives, privatization of public education, outsourcing of jobs, war profiteering, and hundreds of other ongoing rackets all have that same predatory quality. It’s as if this were not their own country, but some place they’ve invaded in order to loot its wealth and fleece its population without caring what happens to that population tomorrow. The only interest these profit-seekers have in us is as cheap labor, cannon fodder for wars, and suckers to be parted with our money. If we ever have a police state here, I’ve been thinking, it won’t be because we’ve become fascists overnight, but because rounding up people and locking them up will be seen as just another way to get rich. If the hell that Jonathan Edwards and other Puritan divines described in such gruesome and graphic detail is still up and running, I hope that’s where many of them are headed for.

See also the latest charts and current concerns at the Washington Post: "Obamacare's Five Biggest Challenges."

Memo: FDR to Obama

Or, how to get your mojo back, Mr. President. From the New Yorker:

In 1936, Franklin Roosevelt was faced with a vicious reëlection campaign. He was vilified for the New Deal reforms. The word “boondoggle” was popularized in the U.S. the year before to describe alleged abuses of the New Deal. Opposition politicians and critics compared F.D.R. to Lenin. The Depression was still on, and unemployment, which had dropped significantly, was still high, over fourteen per cent. (It would rise again in 1938.) What Roosevelt had going for himself was a real set of policies and the capacity to speak on their behalf—a willed capacity to state things plainly, forcefully, and effectively. Never more so than on September 29, 1936, at the New York Democratic State Convention, in Syracuse. Here is the most famous passage of the speech, which came in the thick of the national campaign:

Let me warn you and let me warn the nation against the smooth evasion which says, “Of course we believe all these things; we believe in social security; we believe in work for the unemployed; we believe in saving homes. Cross our hearts and hope to die, we believe in all these things; but we do not like the way the present Administration is doing them. Just turn them over to us. We will do all of them—we will do more of them, we will do them better; and, most important of all, the doing of them will not cost anybody anything.”

But, my friends, these evaders are banking too heavily on the shortness of our memories. No one will forget that they had their golden opportunity—twelve long years of it.

Remember, too, that the first essential of doing a job well is to want to see the job done. Make no mistake about this: The Republican leadership today is not against the way we have done the job. The Republican leadership is against the job’s being done.

The full speech is here, and it's well worth a read. Which will prove to you that today's politics are nearabouts identical to what was happening in the 1930's - same song, different verse.

And one more thing - Guys, nothing at all is ever guaranteed in politics. You should be planning NOW not only to cast your own vote, but to do what it takes to get your friends and family to vote too, either on Election Day, by early voting, or by mail. Make it a point to find out the wheres and whens for all that in your precinct, today.

You should be aware that the Republicans all around the country have been doubling down on voter ID laws, hoping to substantially suppress the Democratic vote. Remember that Bush won the entire country in 2000 by virtue of just a few hundred votes in Florida.

History can and does repeat itself. So be fucking sure to get yourself and your nearest and dearest to the polls. Don't think Romney can't win - it takes only your smug complacency to hand him the keys to the White House.

Click to enlarge.  Fanatical FDR-haters didn't accuse him of being a Muslim Communist - they swore he was a Jewish Communist!  (Roosevelt being orginally a German Jewish name, i.e., Rosenfelt - so they said.)  Take a look at this sick anti-semitic shit, and you'll understand that today's ignorant, raving-loon Tea Party is nothing new at all in American life. 

Voices of Sanity from around the World

The Right Reverend Alan Wilson, Bishop of Buckingham, on marriage equality, which the Cameron government has promised to bring to the United Kingdom, and which most of the hierarchy of the Church of England opposes:




From May 2010, an exchange between Michael D. Higgins (who was elected President of Ireland in 2011) and Tea Party-loving radio guy Michael Graham on an Irish radio station:




And from Down Under, Prime Minister Julia Gillard has some thoughts on the birther movement in this country:

Still a BFD

In the wake of Thursday's Supreme Court ruling that saved "Obamacare" from extinction, the Obama re-election campaign is now selling t-shirts that recall Vice-President Joe Biden's overheard remark at the signing of the law, back in 2010. A bit crude, perhaps, but for this profane day and time hardly outrageous, and very humorous:

Meanwhile, rightwingers have barely been able to catch their breath after the unexpected rescue of the healthcare law, sputtering and twitching and burbling incoherently.  A number of them, including the unhinged Glenn Beck, are openly suggesting that Chief Justice Roberts - once the idol of the rightwingers - is mentally ill, or morally deficient, or both, and thus his ruling has no validity whatsoever.  As witness this t-shirt Beck is offering to his tea-party minions:

So much for his patriotism and respect for our Constitutional system. But guys, you need to appreciate that it's not merely backwoods Baptists calling into question the validity of the ruling: all sorts of urbane, highly-educated, well-connected types are frothing at the mouth now, muttering about "constutional malpractice" and such. Go take a look at some of the opinion pieces at the Wall Street Journal site to get the flavor of the diehard rightwing views of the profiteering class.

On the other side of the fence, the New Yorker now has a collection of excellent articles and reactions to the Supreme Court's ruling. In particular, I like the article about the unsung hero in all this: the tough-as-nails Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whom no one can accuse of not having a sharp legal mind and respect for the Constitution.

As an aside - your Head Trucker may be just an ol' country boy stuck way to hell out in BFE, but it warms the cockles of his heart to see that a writer for a high-class mag like the New Yorker agrees exactly with something I told you boys on Thursday:

“This is a toe hold,” Hertzberg, looking further into the future, says. “In one way, the most important thing about this is that it establishes the idea, if not the reality, that health insurance and health care should be universal . . . . This is the beginning of what’s going to be a long struggle."

BTW, it's very telling, isn't it, that all of the women Justices voted to keep the law. As I heard someone say in a news clip the other day, maybe Nancy Pelosi, "Now, being a woman will no longer be a 'pre-existing condition.'" Check. If the Congress and the Supreme Court were more than fifty percent women, we would have had universal healthcare in this country a hundred years ago, I guaran-damn-tee you, boys.

There's nothing evil per se in being a wealthy, straight white man. There is something very wrong, however, with a world that is set up to cater to their wishes and wants alone. Slowly, slowly that old world is passing away, and a new world of true justice and equality for all is being born.

Though the drawn-out labor sure does work my nerves.

The Ugly Americans

Got no health insurance?  Then DIE, motherfucker.  That's the American way!

No, Not Really

Via Joe.My.God.:  New Hampshire teabaggers could care less about gay marriage.

Left or Right, What's the Difference?

Chris Whiteside of New Left Media gives attendees at last Saturday's Rally to Restore Sanity the same opportunity to explain themselves that he gave to attendees at Glenn Beck's Restoring Honor rally a few weeks ago.

And it's a sad, sad thing, either way you look.

VOTE, DAMN IT!

This guy is going to vote tomorrow - why aren't you?


You really want the assholes to be in charge of your life?  Get your ass up off the couch and VOTE, fucker. 

David Mixner:

No one has been more gravely disappointed and, at times livid, with the practically non-existent record of President Obama on LGBT equal rights. Over and over again I have held this administration's feet to the fire in an effort to force them to move forward in our struggle for freedom. As we all know by now, those pleas often have fallen on deaf ears. Our disappointment, anger and frustration is totally justified.

What is not justified is to allow those emotions to intrude on our ability to be intelligent voters this election day. We cannot and should not shoot ourselves in the collective foot because of the administration's actions.

Why is it important to vote? Let's get right down to it: If the House and Senate fall into Republican Tea Party hands on November 2nd, the LGBT community will be facing the most hostile United States Congress in our history. The election of these bonafide Teabagging wing-nuts could cause chaos, fear and intimidation in our political process. Their ascendancy to power would validate some truly dark and despicable forces operating in American politics. If we think it is hard to achieve equal rights now just try and do it in a Tea Party dominated Congress.

Mike Signorile:

In recent weeks I've heard some of you call in and say you're not voting, sitting this one out because you're unhappy with the White House or Congress. Others have said they'll vote for a lesser candidate, pretty much giving their vote to a Republican in a close election. But I have said on the show for quite a while now, no matter how angry you are at President Obama or disappointed with the Democratic leadership -- and I've been one of the biggest critics around -- it is imperative that you get out and vote for the Democrats and against the tea party-backed Republicans.

The Republican Party would like nothing better than to see the discontent in the Democratic base help them install truly the most extreme lot of candidates we have seen in many years. We've exposed the tea party as nothing more than a reconfiguration of all the religious zealots, moral crusaders, racists and bigots who've been around for years. Do not attempt to punish the President or the Democrats by punishing yourself. This country has been in a very precarious state for a long time, in which the political winds can usher in something radical and extreme very quickly. Bad economic times are always an opportunity for those who seek to do that. We have demanded and will demand full accountability by the Democrats and President -- who is not on the ballot until 2012 -- but don't do it by giving power to your enemies. As David Mixner says . . . vote as if your life depends on it, because it does.

Keith Olbermann kicks ass and names names:

The [objective is] to elect a group of unqualified, unstable individuals who will do what they are told in exchange for money and power, and march this nation as far backward as they can get: backward to Jim Crow, or backward to the breadlines of the 1930's, or backward to hanging union organizers, or backward to the trusts and the robber barons. Result? The Tea Party. Vote backward, vote Tea Party.

And if you are somehow indifferent to what is planned for next Tuesday, it is nothing short of an attempted use of democracy to end this democracy. To buy America wholesale and pave over the freedoms and the care we take of one another, which have combined to make us the envy of the world. You do not think your freedom is at stake next Tuesday?

Think again.  And if you city boys don't know how to use a gun, you'd fucking well better VOTE tomorrow, goddammit.



You do know what he means, don't you?



"A Gaping, Unstanched Wound in the Planet"

NASA satellite imagery confirms the slick reached the edge of the Loop Current of the Gulf Stream a week ago, May 18; this is the latest satellite view I've been able to find today.

Oil-coated egret on Grand Isle, Louisiana, May 20.

Photo by U.S. Coast Guard.

Sullivan:

I have to say I have struggled with how to blog about this. In many ways, it seems to me to be the biggest story of the year, a gaping, unstanched wound in the planet, emitting death. And yet the prospect of going without drilling seems remote, the possibility of any political will to jump-start alternatives with the impact we need seems just as elusive, and the helplessness of government and industry to stop this nightmare is the most obvious fact (I just assume that BP is doing all it can as of now): all of it makes this story as huge as it is simply despair-inducing.

If we cannot stop this, what else can we not stop?

Your Head Trucker does not believe the government needs to own and run everything; and certainly no one planned for this disaster to happen.  The free-market capitalists at BP are working day and night to stop the spill, to be sure - but to protect the environment, or to save their own butts?  Oh and no volunteers, please:  we will handle everything with our own contractors, so get the fuck away from the coast!

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But wait!  It's un-American to criticize BP!  So says dipshit libertarian teabagger Rand Paul:
 

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The President takes note of the long-standing "cozy relationship" between the oil industry and the government in his weekly video address:
 

 
Transcript and info on the new commission here.  The White House overview of the federal response is here. 
 
What I Say:  I don't believe any of these commentators have yet foreseen the full, longterm ramifications of the oil spill on the environment or on the economy of this nation and all the others that surround the Gulf, and beyond.  Having lived on the Gulf Coast, my intuition tells me that much worse is to come, which will make the Exxon Valdez spill look like a dropped teacup.  This is not Obama's Katrina; it's Katrina and 9/11 and Pearl Harbor all rolled into one and multiplied times ten.  It's the Hiroshima of the Gulf of Mexico, boys.
 
Your Head Trucker predicts that Obama's response to this single event will be the make-or-break issue of his Presidency, all else aside.  I don't know how he can or should meet all the challenges involved in this horror, but I feel certain that if he does not meet them all effectively - and is not seen to meet them effectively by the public - well fellas, just call him one-term-Jimmy and prepare yourselves for another twenty years of god-fearing, business-loving, flag-waving Republican rule, count on it.
 
In fact, I wouldn't doubt that before year's end, the head-up-their-ass Republicans will be claiming that Obama engineered the oil spill as an excuse to take over the oil industry and extend his Communist domination of the government.  Which of course is a fulfillment of Bible prophecy.  Remember, you heard it here first. 

God help us all.

Exempt Private Businesses from Civil Rights Laws?

Hecklers pour sugar, condiments, and water over sit-in protesters at a lunch counter in Jackson, Mississippi, 1963.  Notice that the protesters are practicing nonviolent resistance, as Dr. King advocated.

Jeezus.  People who didn't pass high school American History really should not be allowed to run for public office.  Notice how this fuckweasel consistently avoids answering Rachel's direct questions about his real view on segregation:

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What I Say:  Boys, I was there in the segregated South, and when I close my eyes I can see it all again just plain as day.  Hotels, movie theaters, restaurants, cafes, railroad stations, bus stations, gas stations, barrooms - all those private businesses were strictly segregated, often with separate restrooms for "Colored" and "White" and separate entrances - or, as in the case of hotels and motels, including the major chains like Holiday Inn and Howard Johnson's, simply did not take any black customers at all. 

I well recall that every place that served food - even down to the corner hot-dog stand or ice-cream parlor - had a sign prominently displayed behind the counter: 

We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to Anyone. 

As a kid, waiting to be served or to pay for my hamburger, I often studied that sign and pondered what it meant.  Now I know:  "We Don't Serve Blacks" is the translation.

True, it was all required by law; but that law was the express will of the vast, overwhelming majority of white citizens of the South, too.  Even if the segregation laws had all been rescinded, I promise you that all those businesses would have kept the signs and policies in place - as a "business necessity," because white people, like my own family, I am sad to say, simply would not have patronized them otherwise - unless there was a positive law forbidding private businesses from discriminating, which is part of what the Civil Rights Act achieved.

And that is the America that dumbshit racist assholes like Rand Paul want to take us back to.  No thank you.  Here's a couple of clips to give you a little hint of what life was like under the segregation regime - imposed not arbitrarily by "big government," but directly at the hands of the white majority:

"There's a Communist in the White House": Tea Party Tax Day

Tragedy and comedy, all at the same time.  Away with the federal government - but keep my Social Security because that's not government.  And lower taxes for the rich, who shouldn't have to pay more than anybody else. 

Cover your keyboard before viewing.



Note that most of these people at this particular protest are not Southerners.  I can tell.

And BTW, who the fuck is this Lord Monckton, and what the hell business does he have sticking his British nose into our politics?


Honk to Culture Choc.