Thursday, January 21, 2010

Fools and Frauds


Is there fundamentally a difference between the mainstream media (left or right), the paparazzi and the scandal sheets with headlines such as "Woman gives birth to 20 pound alien gorilla,"? Maybe, but I don’t think so. For instance, look at the last several weeks before The Earthquake in Haiti. What has been one of the major stories obsessing our so-called free and unfettered press - why Tiger Woods and his penis, of course. We have followed, identified and cataloged his various mistresses, acquaintances and one night stands. We have speculated endlessly about the effect of his catastrophic infidelity on his extraordinarily important career in medicine? no - law? oh no - education? hell no - in golf. To say that we are a nation gone gaga over the trivial and prone to elevate mediocrity to the level of the legendary is to grossly underestimate our group psychosis. However, the Tiger Woods business during a fight for health care reform, an attempt to clean up Wall Street and to curb double digit unemployment, not to mention the need for some hard hitting commentary on the Democrat’s determination to toss Ted Kennedy’s seat to Republicans, is insipid and embarrassing.
The same geniuses that orchestrated the Tiger Wood’s fetish are now, in the wake of the Massachusetts’ defeat, determined to convince the American people that the Democrats are no longer in power in the Senate. This is ludicrous, lurid crap. The Democrats have 59 Senators and the Republicans 41. It is not higher math to figure out who has the majority.
Now, the only thing that has been harped on more than Tiger Woods’ penis is the Senatorial lunacy known as the Super Majority of 60 Votes. Each has been over exposed - no pun intended. The Democrats don’t need 60 votes to pass a bill. They need 60 votes to prevent a filibuster. The filibuster is basically a gimmick to wear out the other party. That is to say, the Republicans can stand up for five or six or eight days and read the phone book or The Complete Edgar Allen Poe or The Life and Times of Glenn Beck, if there is such a publication, anything to delay a vote. In the last year Mitch McConnell and his tribe of conservatives have used the filibuster like a pair of well worn running shoes to halt the Obama agenda. The filibuster was never designed to be used this way, and it needs to be terminated as a legislative option. It is a damn waste of time, and one of the reasons why nothing is ever done.
Extortionists like Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson used the threat of voting with the Republicans to filibuster in order to get what they wanted out of the White House during the Senate health care negotiations. With God in their mouth and blackmail on their minds Lieberman cost the American people the Medicare Expansion that would have covered millions of people 55 and over, while Nelson held A Woman’s Right to Choose for ransom until he was given a great deal of money for his state. Sickening! I don’t understand why Obama didn’t trot over to the Secretary of State’s Office, borrow Hillary Clinton’s balls, come back to the Senate and say the following: "You want to have a filibuster. Come on down. You can filibuster in one room, and I will explain the health care bill in the other. We will all be on CNN." Not even the Republicans can run off at the mouth forever. Sooner or later they need to shut up. Put them on T.V. wasting the taxpayers time and money and my guess will be sooner.

Why would members of the Senate go out of their way to destroy with a filibuster something such as health care reform that we need so badly? Because they are being paid to protect someone else’s interests.

I have said before that the media does the American people no good by ignoring the influence pedaling on Capitol Hill. Just today the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision that a hundred years worth of laws and restrictions on corporate political contributions are to be set aside. Justice Kennedy, writing for the majority - Justices Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, Alito - held basically that money is a form of free speech. In a country where money talks and everything else walks, that’s a good one, Mr. Justice. It is interesting to note that Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican Minority Leader, filed the opening law suit in the process that ended with today’s decision. If you have any doubt that your government is for sale, now more than ever, think again. If you think this serves you well, remember you don’t have enough money to matter.

I believe it is time for a third political party. I believe that it is time to tell the McConnells and the Obamas that most politicians of both parties are alike in our estimation. Their first priority is to promote themselves. Their second is to rub the tit that yields the money. They wouldn’t know the truth if it ran over them with a truck, and they are not to be trusted with the welfare of the Republic.
I believe it is time to boycott the arrogant, salacious, condescending mainstream media. There is plenty of good reading and watching online whether you are a liberal or a conservative, a Democrat or a Republican.
 
Above all, I believe that we can send a message to the nine wise men and women of the U.S. Supreme Court who serve for life and apparently have no interest in or fiduciary responsibility to the American people. We must show them that we will not allow money to run our government, because we won’t allow money to control our minds. Whenever there is a great deal of corporate cash on the table for a candidate or a cause, the game is rigged - this is a given. Until the elitists on the Supreme Court decide that only corporations can vote, we have the ultimate currency in the franchise. We sell it at our own risk.

Friday, January 8, 2010

The Big Lie



We have always had abortion on demand in this country. We do it in hospitals now instead of garages. De-legalize it or restrict access to it and we go back to the garage. That is the real choice in prochoice.

When I entered the hospital setting back in the late 60’s/early 70’s - long before many of the women who now take their reproductive rights for granted were fully formed ova - I had the appalling misfortune of watching a 13 year-old girl die from what a back alley abortionist had done to her immature womb. Her death was long and hard and cruel. Her parents kept asking, "Why didn’t she tell us?" "Why?" Perhaps it was the twin, cardinal virtues of the "good girl" back in the day, fear and shame. Perhaps it was a mistaken confidence that anyone who called themselves a doctor wouldn’t hurt you. Whatever it was it cost her life.

Today, decades after Roe v. Wade became established law, a handful of Conservative Democrats in the House and Senate along with their enablers in the leadership, Obama included, have decided to send women back to the alleys to exercise their reproductive options. The pathetic and sniveling excuses for health care reform legislation dribbling out of both chambers of Congress are fully informed with the idea of making a Woman’s Right to Choose irrelevant by drying up access to safe, therapeutic abortion. This tactic of supposedly enfranchising one group of people by disenfranchising another is called leverage in politics. It is called extortion in the real world. These narcissistic, self serving, seedy politicians - yes I include Obama - are engaged in misogyny of the most evil kind. Once again women are reminded that our minds and bodies are of secondary importance in the urine laced sandbox that is the affairs of men. We will follow the tenets of a bloody faith we may not accept and have children we can’t care for because the power grabbing of our politicians, including so-called feminists, Goddess help us all, is more important than the life and safety of generations of women.

Lest you take all the bible thumping and pre-born loving too seriously in a country that has been content to accept one of the highest infant mortality rates in the world and the denial of prenatal care to women having their second child on the grounds that pregnancy is a preexisting condition, all of this in the name of profit, let me tell you a little more about the bad old days before abortion was legal. If you think that the Obamas or Stupaks or Nelsons or Pelosis or Boxers or Reids, etc., are going to abide by the lousy laws they shove down the public’s throat - think again. We used to see the wealthy, the powerful, the well connected and the holier than thou slink into the hospital years ago. Their surgical procedure was listed as a DC. The procedure done was a DC with suction. Their diagnosis was recorded as abnormal uterine bleeding. The diagnosis in reality was a therapeutic abortion. The tissue removed was documented as uterine tissue. In reality the tissues evacuated were the productions of conception. We came to suspect that many of these people lied for a living and compulsively. They lied to constituents, themselves and probably to their god. One thing we knew for sure, they didn’t end up in alleys. This was elitism and class warfare of the most gruesome kind.

There is no doubt that there are many decent people who are prolife. Certainly, there are many committed prolife women. To them I respectfully say, abortions is an individual woman’s question. Her decision to terminate a pregnancy is between her, her Deity, her partner, and her doctor. This is not a societal concern. It is not a government issue, and above all it is not the province of any organized religion. A Pagan woman is not bound by the teachings of the Catholic Church. She has as much right to the protection of the Constitution and secular law as any other woman. Roe v Wade is the law of the land. Insisting that women be denied equal protection under the law because some religious coup d'état enjoys the ear of our legislators is obscene. The very idea of laws dictated by religious groups would have seemed insane to Thomas Jefferson, but then he didn’t lean on the Catholic Bishops to make laws in his time as Ben Nelson did during the debate over health care reform.

Obama promised us change. I had no idea that he intended to change the early 21st Century for the mid 20th Century with regard to women’s rights. Back then women routinely died because they couldn’t obtain a clinically safe abortion. I am afraid they will start dying again, and when they do the blood will be on Obama’s hands. After all he keeps telling us that the buck stops with him.