Throwing Stones

What a mess. What a total, complete, unadulterated, absolute MESS. It's hard to come up with anything more descriptive to say about the debacle that is the Republican temper-tantrum, i.e. the current government shutdown, which officially began at midnight. (I keep thinking of the Grateful Dead song that is the title of this post.) Of course, we talked about it at length on Occupy the Microphone today.

The puzzling thing, to me, is that Republicans don't seem to mind being perceived as the party that prefers the American people stay unhealthy and uninsured. "Anything to keep people from having health care!" is how most of the GOP congressional representatives sounded, proudly venting on various news shows late last night. It's worth it to STOP OBAMACARE! Do they know how they sound? Or is their own re-election the primary factor in their decision? Robert at Blue Heron Blast sums up a lot of my thinking:

The problem is that the House Republicans have all gerrymandered themselves into safe seats in safe districts. Any flak they will receive will be from their right in the primaries. Although I am sure that many are concerned with the health of the nation, at least I hope so, the overriding motive has to be getting re-elected. So there is really no hope for common ground.

The optics of this debacle are pretty clear. A CNN/ORC poll found that Republicans in Congress would shoulder more of the blame for a shutdown. Forty-six percent of Americans said that Republicans on Capitol Hill would be mostly responsible for a shutdown, versus 36 percent who would blame Obama and 13 percent who would blame both.

So 25% of Americans polled will blame you more than the other guy and you don't care, because it will play so well for the folks in your district and frankly, what else matters? Bravo!

I went to the outfitting store to get some straps to hitch my borrowed monopod to my camera pack this morning. The vacation to the National Parks between Wyoming and Montana that are scheduled to be closed at midnight tonight barring an unforeseen stroke of sanity barreling down on the beltway, which you should certainly not hold your breath for.

I will make do, lots of nice state parks I am looking at in the area, there are worse prison sentences than spending a week on a bar stool in Jackson Hole. But it sucks. And it even sucks worse for the man helping me in the store, who is in the naval reserve and ferries Navy Seals around on missions. He is now on no pay as are many of the private contractors who aid our defense effort. Awful thing we are doing to them, not to mention furloughing 800,000 civil servants and leaving millions without pay. Oh, I forgot, we hate the government and the people who work for them.

Yes. The party that loves war, does not want to pay their soldiers. Irony!

And such a depressing, demoralizing spectacle.

~*~

While waiting for Republicans to come to their wacked-out senses (might be awhile), we can work on getting us some gay marriage rights, and thus, continue to drive (some of them!) crazy.* From the Advocate, here is a great piece by Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, whom I was fortunate to meet during our local Campaign for Southern Equality demonstration in January.

Op-ed: How Resistance Will Change the South:

Growing numbers of people across the South are finding the courage to stand up to such laws by taking public action. Since the We Do Campaign launched two years ago, I have stood with more than 80 LGBT couples as they have requested — and been denied — marriage licenses in their hometowns across the South, from small rural towns in Mississippi to cities like Charlotte, N.C. To watch LGBT people stand at the marriage license counter, many with their children at their side, is to witness courage firsthand. In the face of a legal system that denies our humanity and tells us we have no right to even approach this counter, these families are expressing powerful truths: We are human, we are equal, this is our home, and we have a fundamental right to marry.

As we continue to grow the We Do Campaign, we are now actively seeking a public official in the South who will stand up with us and issue a marriage license to a same-sex couple as an act of conscience. Marriage license offices in New Mexico and Pennsylvania have recently started doing this, and in years past it has happened in California and New York as well. In Pennsylvania, Montgomery County Register of Wills Bruce Hanes has said of his choice, “I firmly believe that I’m on the right side of history.”

Can this happen in the South? We have contacted marriage license offices in more than 600 counties to pose this question. There may be a Bruce Hanes somewhere in our region. Or it may well be that the power of these discriminatory laws is so great that even those public officials who support marriage equality — and they exist — feel that the risk of acting on this belief is too great.

It's an interesting strategy, and I will be watching carefully to see how it goes.


*I acknowledge there are SOME Republicans who are in favor of legalizing gay marriage, foremost among them Cindy and Meghan McCain.

Blow the horn and tap the tambourine

Annie posted a long statement from John Perry Barlow on her blog, which is just fabulous:

Ten years ago when I was a fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard's Kennedy School, I was on a panel with Senator Ted Kennedy and my tragically late sidekick John Kennedy, Jr. The focus of our discussion was determining when the Internet would likely have the pivotal role in shaping a presidential campaign that television had assumed in the 1960 election of their brother and father. Oddly, for a couple of guys who were deeply suspicious of Cyberspace, they both thought this would happen much sooner than I did, possibly as early as 2000. I said it would be a decade at least. It has now been a decade. And this will now be that election.

Among the many lines of division at contest here - between the 50's and the 60's, between football and frisbee, between a high regard for education and a contempt for it, between weed and whiskey, between Monotheism and Pantheism, between love and fear, between greed and responsibility - is the contest between the highly cybergenic Obama and the apoplectic old race-bating, fraudulently heroic, tail-hook gunning, womanizing, pathologically gambling, unindicted Keating 5 co-conspirator who is literally treasonous enough to possibly entrust the American republic during its darkest hour to a woman who has great legs and cheekbones, combined SAT scores lower than either one of mine, and who, with her "First Dude" were helping lead, until recently, the Alaskan Independence Party, a powerful pro-secession movement. (Imagine Lincoln choosing Jefferson Davis as his first running mate and you get the idea.)

McCain, that disgraceful curdle-brain, that grimacing little tantrum of spoiled Naval nepotism whose greatest military accomplishment (if you don't count crashing three multi-million jets while on joyrides, and contributing to a deck fire that almost sank the Forrestal) was in getting shot down and breaking under torture, spent the first part of the debate whining about Obama's low blows and then informed the women and children of America that his opponent had promoted an Illinois law that now legally requires doctors to refuse medical treatment to any child who somehow survives an abortion attempt. Given the abortion methods I'm familiar with, I'm inclined to think such a child would also survive the flame-throwers they'd be using against him toward the end of the movie.

But among his other qualifications for being a 21st Century President , Senator McCain remains proud that, like both Bushes before him, he is computer-illiterate and that he makes his wife Cindy deal with all that.

I thought George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had made me ashamed to be a Republican. But McCain and Palin have pretty well completed the job.

However, since God is merciful, McCain probably doesn't know what I'm talking about. He's watching the campaign on television where he's presented with an edit of reality that is far less damning to him and his campaign than the one I've been watching on the Internet. John McCain is blessed indeed to be spared the online version of himself.

On the Internet, he would see the "people's edits" immediately, like the YouTube condensation of all 3143 of his eye-blinks during last night's debate into a thirty second segment, or the highlighting of his reference to Obama's "eloquence" in a fashion that left no doubt that this was his painfully polite euphemism for the vile effluent one can squeeze out of an fast-talking sack of lying shit when he talks about the "health" - a word McCain enclosed in finger quotes - of the baby murdering "mother", who is unable to accept that a child is the natural punishment for her coozing around in fornication, which is pretty much all these black Muslim terrorist baby mamas do, if you know what I mean.

If he watched the much more elaborate coverage of the campaign on the Internet, even McCain would have to be in awe of the fact that Senator Obama has shown almost superhuman dignity, humor (as opposed to sarcasm), and that quality that Hemingway defined as courage, "grace under pressure" even while being carpet-bombed, first by the Clintons and now the McCain/Palin Golem, with six months of sucker punches, lies, trivialities, the guilt of distant or even non-existent associations (often involving black people behaving ungracefully), and now, finally, the direct incitement of murderous intent in crowds spiked with many people who are insane with racial hatred, well-armed, and trained by their government in the accurate use of long-range weapons.

He would have seen the look of enlightened acceptance on Obama's face tonight when McCain fiercely declared his pride in the people who attended his rallies, including, presumably, the ones who shout "kill him" and "off with his head." As he pronounced his appreciation for these unmasked Klansmen, someone like me who doesn't have an abused wife he can use as a computer interface could, with a slight enhancement of certain frequencies, make clearly audible the dry, cold wind that was whistling through McCain's dentures.

At this point, I must pause and ask any other digeratum who zoomed into the Senator's forehead pulse at such moments: Who do you want answering the phone at 3:00 am in the White House: someone with unassailable poise and courage or someone whose rage-readiness and blood pressure make him a fine candidate to pop a valve, thus creating the scenario in which the more blink-resistant President Palin returns the call at 3:45 am?

Who do you want salvaging the economy, someone who believes that if the government is going to recover what Bush's and McCain's cronies looted from the public treasury, the very rich will have to pay some taxes, or someone who believes that we can spend extravagantly on war, greed, weapon systems we don't need, and subsidies for our friends, while taxing only the middle class and the poor?

Read the whole thing!

Outrageous, honest and wonderful, as anyone who has written the lyrics to several of the most poetic Grateful Dead songs would HAVE to be.

Thanks to Annie for the great missive!

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Listening to: Grateful Dead - Cassidy
via FoxyTunes

I like this one better!

Courtesy of the Huffington Post:

Here is some excellent commentary from Alas, on the original New Yorker cover that inspired this comic response. (I won't be running the original cover here, except in this version.)

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Listening to: The Black Crowes - Sometimes Salvation
via FoxyTunes

Michelle Obama attacked by ex-Vicodin addict!

Left: John and Cindy McCain.


If you are following the foofaraw over Michelle Obama's harmless remarks, you'll notice that it's mostly a bunch of (surprise!) privileged white guys doing the finger-pointing. USA TODAY reports:

Michelle Obama is getting some attention across the spectrum today for a remark she made yesterday at a rally in Milwaukee. "For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country, and not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change," she said.

As pointed out numerous times, she said "really" proud, not that she wasn't AT ALL proud or that she disliked or was dissatisfied with her country.

The Boston Globe's Political Intelligence blog, headlined their post Pride in the name of Self-love (excuse me? When did she say she loved herself, in that quote?) with Sasha Issenberg commenting:

So what did Michelle Obama think of the United States before her husband decided he wanted to run the place?

Couldn't be any worse than what a lot of us have been thinking for decades. And at Slate (which is supposedly liberal, but I keep waiting for evidence) Mickey Kaus titled his post Is that an S-Chip on Your Shoulder or Are You Just Glad to See Me?:

If Michelle Obama's default position is set to "Aggrieved," it also suggests something personal, no? Maybe, like many strong wives, she wonders why her husband is the one on the top of the family ticket--which might also explain her strange occasional habit of belittling him in public ("snore-y and stinky" ). Beats me. For whatever reason, she sure seems to have a non-trivial chip on her shoulder and it's not a winning quality.

Chip on her shoulder? (BUZZER SOUNDS!!)

Someone hasn't read Nezua's definition of Wite-Magik Attaks, particularly in this case, The Drowning Maestro:

A Wite-Magik Attak that pretends to be utterly concerned with the brown person's tone. It matters not that the brown person might be speaking passionately of hurts they have suffered their entire life, hurts they suffer as they speak, starving children, raped women or murdered millions. The person hurling the Wite-Magik Attak fixates upon the TONE of the complaint or insight. Because what really bothers them is that a brown person has the nerve to speak with such self-confidence and passion. This, in fact, scares them. If it weren't such a demeaning move when you have something you feel is important to say, this Attak would be downright comical. Just picture a conductor waving his wand as he plummets to the bottom of a darkening sea.

• ARROGANT mexican
• SHRILL woman
• UPPITY negro
• WRONG SIDE OF THE BED
• CRYBABY
• CONFRONTATIONAL
• CHIP ON YOUR SHOULDER
• LEADING FROM YOUR CHIN
• MEAN

NOTE: This Attak often comes with a carrot. In other words, what is really desired is for the brown person to admit the desired hierarchy, to get "back in place." To achieve this, the power-holding person will often criticize the tone of the desired subjugate while making it clear that a withheld reward might come their way if they submit to the invisible pecking order being violated.

• "We'd admit about your point if you presented it nicer."
• "I have this work I was going to throw your way, is there a problem?"
• "People would listen to your complaint if you weren't so loud."
• "If you want people to care about this, you should learn to be smoother."

Yup, I'd say Mickey Kaus' comment certainly qualifies.

Predictably, conservatives at National Review, as well as Pat Buchanan at MSNBC last evening, ripped Michelle a new one. Nepotism-beneficiary John Podhoretz* dutifully and obediently lines up and mindlessly parrots the neocon views he learned from daddy and mummy, writing in daddy's periodical COMMENTARY:

[The] pseudo-messianic nature of the Obama candidacy is very much a part of the way the Obamas themselves are feeling about it these days.

And how does asswipe Podhoretz know how they are feeling???? (Or is it just that neocons know EVERYTHING???)

The most celebrated response, of course, came not from a finger-pointing white man, but from the ex-Vicodin addict wife of the probable Republican nominee for president, Cindy McCain, who made news trashing Michelle by stating she is proud of her country.



Apparently, not back in the early 90s, when she was stealing drugs from her "relief" organization (yes, we all need relief sometimes, don't we Cindy?) the American Voluntary Medical Team. You call that PRIDE, girlfriend? I call it GETTING HIGH. Did she stop to wonder what the pain-ridden folks in deprived countries might think about the fact that drugs originally intended for THEM were instead filched by a rich Senator's wife? That is hardly an American-pride moment, ma'am.

As the Arizona Republic reported, during McCain's previous presidential run:

Cindy blamed two back surgeries and the Keating Five scandal - a blend of physical and emotional pain - for hooking her on drugs.

Things started to unravel when a Drug Enforcement Administration audit found irregularities in the charity's records, prompting an investigation, Cindy told the reporters.

In 1992, as the Keating affair surfaced again during McCain's run for a second Senate term, Cindy's parents confronted her about her drug use.

What had been clear to Cindy's parents was lost on McCain, who said he had not noticed his wife's addiction.

Was she proud of her country, while all of this was going on? Did she even know what country she was IN?

Before anyone says I am "mean" for picking on Cindy, rest assured, I know from drug addiction, and that's exactly why I write this. Cindy, sit down and shut the fuck up. Barack Obama is too nice to say anything about your thieving addict ways, but Michele just might. People in glass houses... etc etc etc.

Then again, if the women go at it, it might be fun. Is that why the media is harping on this stuff? The guys want the girls to fight? Figures.

*HUMOROUS ASIDE: The late paleoconservative writer Samuel Francis referred to William Kristol and John Podhoretz as "the neocons' unemployable offspring"--which I thought was funny, as well as accurate. Do these fortunate sons have minds of their own, or only spout what their All-Powerful Daddies tell them to? In any event, it's usually best to ignore them, except when you MUST mention their constant yammering, as in a story like this.

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Listening to: Jimi Hendrix Experience - Third Stone from the Sun
via FoxyTunes

Republican primary eve roundup

Left: Huckabee rocks out at Clemson University. Standing next to him (blue shirt) is former South Carolina governor David Beasley.

Strange bedfellows doesn't even begin to describe it. Lt. Governor Andre Bauer, whose exploits have been written about before on this blog, has endorsed Arkansas Governor and nice-guy Baptist preacher Mike Huckabee for president. One might compare this to Keith Richards endorsing Jerry Falwell, something like that. The Greenville News is on hand with the suitably cryptic references:

Republican Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer on Thursday endorsed former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee for the GOP presidential nomination.

Bauer, who will campaign with Huckabee today, said he made a late selection of Huckabee after comparing the contenders and determining he has "the character, integrity, and proven leadership to ensure our greatest days are yet to come."

Reflecting on his own political close shaves, Bauer said he admires Huckabee's history of winning against long odds.

"Nobody knows better than I do that it's the people, not the polls, which determines the winner on election day," Bauer said.

Long odds, huh? Is that what they are calling it now?

I think they refer to Bauer's well-publicized freakout in 2003, wherein he ran amok in downtown Columbia, running red lights with abandon and clocking 60 miles-an-hour in a 35 miles-per-hour zone. After stopping Bauer, a police officer found it necessary to hold the Lt. Governor of South Carolina at gunpoint! Bauer has had numerous other wacked-out driving incidents, fueling speculations by irresponsible bloggers such as your humble narrator.

And yes, they re-elected his sorry ass. Those are the "long odds" he is winking at. Does Huckabee have a clue?

Probably not, he is pretending to be a Clemson fan whilst partying with Chuck Norris and Ric Flair. Bauer is small potatoes!

Huckabee brings road show to Clemson
Friday, January 18, 2008
By Anna Simon, CLEMSON BUREAU

CLEMSON -- Tiger cheers and live music rocked the Jervey Athletic Center gym at Clemson University, while a crowd of about 2,200 waited more than an hour Thursday for GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee.

It was the biggest turnout of the campaign so far, Huckabee headliner Chuck Norris told the crowd that overflowed the bleachers and filled much of the gym floor.

It was akin to a giant pep rally and was covered by scores of local and national reporters.

Ric Flair, a popular martial artist and World Wrestling Entertainment figure, pumped up support for the GOP presidential candidate as the former Arkansas governor came onstage and joined the band, Mae West, on the bass guitar.

Introduced by former South Carolina Gov. David Beasley, Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer and state GOP Chairman Mike Campbell, Huckabee joshed about Beasley's past as a student on the Clemson campus before launching into more serious business.

"The decisions I'm going to make as the next president will have some effect on people my age, but not nearly as much effect as they will on people your age," said Huckabee, who is 52.

Good to know!

He is hitting the fundie circuit hard. Wednesday, Huckabee gave a rousing speech at local Southern Baptist college, North Greenville University.

Meanwhile, Ron Paul notably DID NOT get the star treatment over at Bob Jones University, as the antiwar, free-the-weed candidate. They are NOT readily forgiving that shit over there! My spies tell me a core group of libertarian Calvinists (and God Bless em) showed up, but mostly, not a real hospitable place for Dr Paul:

Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul paid a visit to Bob Jones University late Thursday afternoon, speaking to a group packed into a small classroom.

Outside, more than a hundred people tiptoed through the snow and stuck their heads through windows to listen to and take photos of the Texas congressman and physician as he made a stump speech and took questions from those who managed to find a way inside.

Apparently, most people didn't even realize he was there. But they couldn't keep his appearance a complete secret in the cell phone age. Our trusty Greenville News reports from the campus of BJU:

Paul, who opposed authorization to invade Iraq, told the audience that calls not to withdraw from Iraq are the same made in 1968 during Vietnam, after which 30,000 more American troops were killed.

Paul said the people who express fear for America's safety in the event of a withdrawal "are the same people who said it would be a cakewalk" to invade the country.

Paul said he opposed plans to build American bases in Iraq.

He also said America's war on drugs has cost the country countless amounts of money in pursuit of a failed cause. And he said that despite marijuana being illegal, it is just as accessible as alcohol.

Can you think of another politician who would actually go into the heart of BJU and say this stuff?


Left: Greenville News photo of John McCain with Bobby Harrell (center), the speaker of the South Carolina House, and Senator Lindsey Graham (right), campaigning yesterday in downtown Greenville.



Senator John McCain, whom I project as the winner, has been all over the state in the past few days. In fact, like The Flash, he almost appears to be in two places at once. As they used to say about Reagan, he is a TIRELESS CAMPAIGNER, and any concerns about his age seem pretty silly, just watching him hustle all over the place like that.

The news about McCain has been the nasty smears against him by various shadowy forces, one calling themselves Vietnam Veterans Against McCain. During his last run for the presidency, I personally received two such anti-McCain robocalls. (Now that I have the marvel of BellSouth's Privacy Detector, I don't get bizarre pre-campaign calls, but I do still get polled.) The New York Times reports:

Vietnam Veterans Against McCain [have] sent out a crude flier accusing the candidate of selling out fellow P.O.W.’s to save himself.

By Tuesday evening, a group called Common Sense Issues, which supports Mike Huckabee, had begun making what it said were a million automated calls to households in South Carolina telling voters, according to one of the calls, that Mr. McCain “has voted to use unborn babies in medical research.” (The campaign of Mr. Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas, said it had no connection to the group and had asked it to stop the calls.)

Mr. McCain quickly fired back, but he has seen this movie before. In the 2000 South Carolina primary, one of the most notorious smear campaigns in recent American politics peddled distortions and lies about him, among them that Mr. McCain’s current wife, Cindy, was a drug addict and that the couple’s daughter Bridget, adopted from Mother Teresa’s orphanage in Bangladesh, was a black child Mr. McCain had fathered out of wedlock.

Whoa, hold the phone. Am I reading THE NEW YORK TIMES? Don't they have fact-checkers? The part about Cindy McCain is true. This is common knowledge in recovery communities.

Does the NYT know how to Google? It's all right there, in the Arizona Republic:

In August 1994, a group of Valley journalists received an unusual phone call from Jay Smith, McCain's political strategist.

They were offered an exclusive story in exchange for agreeing to certain terms. They would attend individual interview sessions Aug. 19 and sit on the story until Aug. 22. The five journalists - three print reporters, a television reporter and a radio reporter - agreed.

One by one, they went to the McCain home, where they heard an incredible story.

Cindy McCain, 40, told them that she had been a drug addict for three years. From 1989 to 1992, as the Keating Five made headlines, she was addicted to Percocet and Vicodin. Worse, she had stolen pills from the American Voluntary Medical Team, a relief organization that she founded to aid Third World countries.

"More than anything, I wanted to be able to face my children, for them to know I wasn't lying to them," she said at the time. "They're too young to fully understand right now, but someday they will."

Cindy blamed two back surgeries and the Keating Five scandal - a blend of physical and emotional pain - for hooking her on drugs.

Things started to unravel when a Drug Enforcement Administration audit found irregularities in the charity's records, prompting an investigation, Cindy told the reporters.

In 1992, as the Keating affair surfaced again during McCain's run for a second Senate term, Cindy's parents confronted her about her drug use.

What had been clear to Cindy's parents was lost on McCain, who said he had not noticed his wife's addiction.

"I was stunned," McCain said at the time. "Naturally, I felt enormous sadness for Cindy and a certain sense of guilt that I hadn't detected it. I feel very sorry for what she went through, but I'm very proud she was able to come out of it. For her, it was like the Keating affair had been for me, a searing experience, and we both came out stronger. I think it has strengthened our marriage and our overall relationship."

The late Phoenix Gazette political columnist John Kolbe helped break the story.

His Aug. 25, 1994, column was headlined and led with a powerful quote:

"I'm Cindy, and I'm an addict."

So, it's no fiction. Why are they saying it is? In any event, the Times assures us that this time, the McCain campaign is ready for the dirty tricks:

On Tuesday, within hours of the first reports of the veterans’ flier, Mr. McCain’s campaign held a conference call with reporters to denounce the mailing, which showed a cartoon of Mr. McCain in a prison cell. Writing on the wall behind him said “Elect Me, Elect Me, P.O.W. for President” and “An Enormous Crime, The P.O.W.’s I Helped Leave Behind.”

Orson Swindle, a former prisoner of war with Mr. McCain in Vietnam, also issued a statement on Tuesday calling the flier a “vicious” fraud. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” the statement said. “I know because I was there. The truth is, the North Vietnamese offered John McCain early release, and he refused.”

My opinion is that these dirty tricks have strengthened McCain's campaign and made him look like the good guy under attack by lowlifes, while also giving him a chance to remind everyone about his war record.

Making a cynic like me suspicious, all over again. Hm. Too many viewings of The Parallax View and both versions of The Manchurian Candidate I guess.

Stay tuned, sports fans.

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Listening to: The Smashing Pumpkins - Disarm
via FoxyTunes