Up for Sale

Raymond Chandler’s famous detective, Phillip Marlowe, once said of a small town he visited on a case, “… It’s probably no crookeder than Los Angeles.  But you can only buy a piece of a big city. You buy a small town like this all complete, with the original box and tissue paper.”  The same can be said of big countries and small states.  That is exactly what is going on in the Senate right now. 

Under the Graham-Cassidy bill large sums of money would be transferred from Blue states that opted for the Medicaid expansion to Red states that didn’t. Senator Cassidy has been sniveling for sometime about the “unfairness” of states like California and New York receiving more funding under the ACA’s Medicare expansion then Louisiana and Nevada. It seems to escape the notice of Cassidy that the Red states in question had as much opportunity to accept the expansion as Blue states. They refused. The funds transferred to the Red states would, in theory, provide a much reduced version of healthcare benefits to the citizens.  The distribution of the money would be left up to the states.

There are many names for this kind of thing.  Bribery would be one, cajoling Red states Senators to vote yes on this abomination of a bill. That is what is in the works with Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.  It has worked with Dean Heller of Nevada.  Another word could be a chisel, meaning a cheat or a con.  Many people, your author included, believe that the cuts in ACA funding will eventual end up in the pockets of the wealthy by way of tax cuts be they in Red states or Blue. 

Raymond Chandler’s idea of crooked is as good as any.  Crooks ferment corruption. He was an expert on corruption, studying it in the Los Angeles of the 1930’s. It was a dark theme running through his stories.  Phillip Marlowe was driven and isolated by a need to battle corruption endlessly.  So, “crooked” works.  The whole damn thing known as Graham-Cassidy is crooked; not because they have lied about it, they have; not because they lie for a living, they do; but because it is not about health care or public policy or serving their constituents. No, it is about scoring a win for their donors and the man in the White House.

Consider the cynicism, the selfishness, the crudity and cruelty that it takes to throw millions of Americans off of the ACA and risk their lives, limbs and solvency to put a win on the political scoreboard. Think about what it means to have such people running the country. And think about the fact that if after all of this nightmare is said and done, whether this bill passes or not, if we haven’t been shaken out of our apathy than we deserve exactly what we get.

Chris Carter said, through his character Fox Mulder, “Liars don’t fear the truth if there are enough liars.” However, that was 15 years ago.  It was before social media replaced the 4^th Estate as the glaring light that intrudes into dark chambers and deep holes to expose the secrets of those who prefer to work without light. It was before people like Rachel Maddow and NPR started obtaining any bill under consideration with a few key strokes or through carefully cultivated sources and exposing them to the light.  So, while liars don’t fear the truth if there are enough liars, they certainly must fear the truth when there is more light than liars.

Remember

Once upon a time there was a little boy named Neville.  He wanted to grow up to be a Capitalist. So, he worked and he studied and one day he was allowed to join the mighty Free Market of a great Metropolis.

Soon Neville began to see the relationship between the wealth he was accruing and power. Liking power he joined the government of the Metropolis. As time went on Neville became increasingly good at the science of money and power; and one day an ill wind blew a crisis to his Metropolis. Given his acumen and skill in the ways of Capitalism the people called Neville to help Head the Ship of State. He steered it beautifully out of the storm of catastrophe and back into the sunlight of budding prosperity.

Sadly when he became the Captain of that Ship, history turned against Neville. His life changed as the sun went out and the moon shed a cold light on his Metropolis. He met a Devil named Adolf and soon was all at sea. Bringing the skills of a great Capitalist to the table, Neville tried to make a deal with the Devil; but the Devil don't deal. Devil wants it all.

Remember little Neville the next time someone tells you that only a business guy can run a country. More importantly remember a bulldog-looking man, chewing on a cigar, drinking brandy and selecting his words like beautiful blooms for a magnificent bouquet. That would be Neville’s successor, Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill a historian, biographer, professional solider and statesman who led England out of WWII and may not have been able to balance his damn checkbook.

Violence Gets Us Nothing

Counter protesters turning violent against the police in Seattle. Violence gets us nothing. A man taught us peace once ---- REMEMBER.

The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral,
begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy.
Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it.
Through violence you may murder the liar,
but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth.
Through violence you may murder the hater,
but you do not murder hate.
In fact, violence merely increases hate.
So it goes.
Returning violence for violence multiplies violence,
adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness:
only light can do that.
Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Colorado Secretary of State, Republican Wayne Williams, to Cooperate with Trump. Surprised?

Call or write the Colorado Secretary of State who has just decided to hand over our voter information to Trump's Commission on "Voter Fraud." Wayne Williams is and always has been a Republican sycophant. Call or write this monster and tell him he needs to be removed from office. He will submit the information on July 14, 2017. We in Colorado have the option of withdrawing our registration or making it confidential. Brad and I will be going on Monday to sign the affidavit in Adams County and make our registration material confidential. What follows are two pertinent articles and relevant contact information. 

administration@sos.state.co.us
elections@sos.state.co.us
303-894-2200

Colorado will send voter data to Trump’s election fraud commission on July 14

Hundreds withdraw Colorado voter registrations in response to compliance with commission request

The Liberal

What does it mean to be a committed Liberal, to stand unflinchingly on the Left? It has been a very long time since the mantel of the great Liberal Cause has been anything other than an election year soundbite/slogan or a party/policy embarrassment. As Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn lead the Left out of the wilderness, it is worth considering the nature and mission of Liberalism in a world that would just as soon accept a strong man in exchange for a meager tax cut and the promise of obsolete jobs returning to comfort those who can't or won't join the 21st Century.

In this world lies are truth, and truth has been banished to the edge of consciousness and covered over with self-interest and hubris. The world of ideas is rotting, buried below a compost of hate, cruelty and scapegoating that will nourish an American crop of malignant nationalism, international isolationism and the pernicious further deterioration of our institutions.

Today the perspicacity, principles and plans of FDR, JFK, RFK and Teddy Kennedy have never seemed more remote and lost to us in time. Still in all, there lives among us the last great liberal president. The guy who was too good a man to be president - that says a hell of a lot more about the office than it does about the man - one James Earl Carter, age 92, still runs around building houses for the homeless. He lives Liberalism and will until the day he dies. That will be a very sad day indeed for those of us who are committed Liberals and stand unflinchingly on the Left.

For the love of ......................

The media is running around pulling its hair out because Trump has said he will testify under oath. For the love of the Holy Goddess, the bastard is a serial liar. He said his wife would give a press conference; he said he would produce proof that Obama spied on him; he said he would give money to the vets; he said he would build a wall and he said he would drain the swamp instead of stocking it with alligators. I tell ya, America is no longer a nation it is a fucking circus.

Honorable Men

That the Russians interfered in our elections goes without saying; that an American or Americans aided and abetted this interference is a damn good bet. Fundamentally, the primary injury in this situation is to the American people. In a secondary and tertiary way respectively, harm was done to the institution of Democracy – empty save for the people it serves – and to the army of self satisfied, bloated officials who live off the largess of those same American people. 

Four of these creatures sat today before a morally sick and ethically anemic Republican chaired Intelligence Committee refusing to tell the people who cloth, feed and make them necessary the extent of one aspect of that injury. To wit: did the president who benefited from the aforementioned interference, and may well have headed an organization responsible for aiding and abetting accordingly, obstruct justice by trying to defend one of his scabs widely regarded as being much too close to the originally mentioned Russians?

Who are these “honorable” men who would deepen the wounding of America with words like “classified” as they refuse in an arbitrary and capricious way to speak to their employers while admitting they may well lack legal justification for their refusal? Who are these oh-so-honorable men who have forgotten who provides their livelihood and gives them their power and privilege? Like Mark Antony I question whether these men can spell the word honorable, much less understand how their honor should serve their country.

To the Middle East with No Cloths On

To paraphrase an old canard: we the unwilling, led by the unknowing, are accepting the impossible from the despicable.  We have been tolerating so much for so long and so blindly, that we are now absolutely acquiescing to almost anything. Donald Trump is a hulking, angry, scowling old man who firmly believes that everyone is for sale because he always has been; and who stomps around the Middle East like some belligerent potentate sucking up royal treatment as if it is his due.

In the process of isolating a new enemy, for he must always have one, he is playing the Sunnis off of the Shiites, Iran off of Saudi Arabia and Israel.  He dances with men and swords while his wife rides backward, behind him, on a golf cart.  All the while, he stumbles through a speech to the Muslim world weakly claiming to object to the oppression of women in a country that practices gender apartheid with at least two leaders of nations that carry out genocide in his audience. 

Donald Trump is a braggart, an unsophisticated pretender to the knowledge and savvy of a world leader.  He is a perpetual infant swaddled in money and raise on conceit and self interest. He won the election because the Democrats ran a candidate with more baggage then Amtrak and more enemies then Congress. He won because a goodly number of the American electorate sat on their asses and whined while a fair percentage more voted for people who couldn’t possibly win – in some cases weren’t running or living.

However, the joke is on us. The naked emperor is enthroned in the Oval Office with his court/cabinet of water moccasin to replace the alligators in the swamp he “drained”. In his idiocy he demonizes the press, leaks sensitive information to the Russians and runs around the world glaring at people to cover his clear and present ignorance on every subject save Donald Trump. Yes, the joke is on us; but I don’t hear anyone laughing.

Call to Action

Call your House and Senate member. Special Prosecutor or Commission now!!!! Before Trump can bury his dirt.

Congratulations Mr. Macron

Vive la France!

Public Service Announcement

President Obama will be speaking on Monday. I hope the press will be covering it; however, that will be dependent upon whether or not Trump is propagating falsehoods and/or patting himself on the back anywhere near a camera. In any case, it will be lovely to hear someone speak who has greater then nine words in his vocabulary and is capable of thinking in a way that doesn't betray the mind of a poorly educated teenager with the impulse control and knowledge of the world one expects from a newborn.

Welcome back Mr. President. We've missed ya.

From the Excellent Mind of David Frum

The real news in the Alger Hiss case is of course whether Whittaker Chambers had political reasons for unmasking him. 

Only the Republicans

Only the Republicans can find fault with millions of people having health insurance. Only the Republicans can fail to see the complicity of greedy insurance and pharmaceutical companies in the problems that plague the ACA. Only the Republicans can celebrate that greed so flagrantly by offering tax cuts to these corporations in this disgraceful mess they are offering up today. Question, why in hell are these malignant, spiteful, elitist, bloody-minded pseudo-aristocrats still in office? 

Barack Obama Releases Epic Statement on the 7th Anniversary of the Affordable Care Act

Stop Normalizing Trump!!!

If I hear one more person say that we can't take Trump literally only seriously, I will jump through the T.V. screen and rip their tongue out. We are suppose to be able to take the Leader of the Free World literally. If I wanted serious symbolic metaphor, I would read Jung on the Archetypes or Edgar Allan Poe's "The Mask of the Red Death," "The Sphinx," and the "Conqueror Worm." Jung was on a path of cosmic consciousness; Trump is barely awake. Poe was a genius creating art out of his nightmares; Trump is a nightmare.

Normalizing Trump is becoming the second great scandal of the modern media - helping get the swaggering schlemiel elected is the first.

Bend Over

The new Republican healthcare bill is odious on its face if you don't happen to be part of the one or two percent of people who wallow in wealth and get paid for the privilege. Within its bowels there is a $400 million dollar tax break for health insurance executives - you may remember Trump making a big show of meeting with these people some days ago at the White House.

"The proposed tax break, buried in cryptic language in the Republican plan, would allow health insurers to more fully deduct the value of their executives' compensation on their taxes. That compensation can be as high as tens of millions of dollars, in the case of CEOs of insurers."

The Republican Party has cheated the working man and woman for decades. They have taken our money, devalued our labor and blamed us when their excesses have sent the economy into free fall. This, however, this is criminal. Millions will lose their health insurance, while the parasites who prey on the health of the American people get richer. Resist!!!

Outrage over $400 million tax break for health insurance executives under GOP Obamacare replacement plan

Speaking Out on Twitter

The new Republican replacement bill for the ACA targets the usually suspects - the poor, the elderly and the sick. Paul Ryan and his Republican House Caucus are liars and cheats. I call on all my Christian friends to call out these twisted charlatans for what they are - Pharisees. Imitate your Christ and run them out of the government.

Speaking out on Twitter

Reality Imitates Fiction

"... Liars do not fear the truth if there are enough liars. ... the devil is just one man with a plan, but evil, true evil is a collaboration of men ..." Fox Mulder, X-Files Season 9, Episode 19 "The Truth"

Doing It All Over Again

Listening to a debate in the British Parliament today, and apparently the Kool-Aid is flowing across the Pond. The Conservatives are all for sucking up to Trump to get a trade deal. Even willing to, as one lovely Scotsman put it, "Pimp out the Queen." The Liberals objecting to Trumps racism, misogyny, cruelty, ignorance and general distastefulness also mention that he has refused to meet with Prince Charles. Charles is England's Al Gore on the issue of climate change.

As in this country the Conservatives spit out the word Liberal with the usual venom of a Party that defends self interest over the common good. Self righteous and self serving as they are, someone should remind them that Chamberlain was a Conservative. For as much as the stink of humanity learns from the past, one could say of history, as the Bard said of life, "it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

The Ceremony of Innocence is Drowned

Today in the news:  Trump tells Netanyahu that a one state or two state solution is okay with him; he tells our NATO allies that they will have to put more money toward their national defense or he is going to rethink our commitment; he prepares to put a billionaire crony in charge of “reviewing” our intelligence community – guy’s background is in business.  Through it all he changes his story about Flynn, again.  It seems that the man who lost his trust is now a wonderful man who has been badly abused by the media.  Who hasn’t in Trump’s world? 

Clearly, he is a coward and a fool; an extortionist; a liar and a bully too stupid to know that our intelligence community covert and dangerous as they are will eat his lunch. Mostly he is an embarrassment. 

Finally, you can’t make this shit up.  Neither Poe nor Coleridge every smoked enough opium; neither Asimov nor Carter ever stepped far enough out of the known world to imagine this monster on any level. We are fucked.

In Solidarity

This is why so many men and women continue to support Bernie. By contrast Pelosi proudly displays her hubris, bragging about being "a capitalist" which from out here in the real world, where people actually work for a living, often looks like legalized corruption. The Bible thumpers suck up to a man who worships himself and his wealth only, scream about the immorality of abortion for the sake of LIFE, support war and capitol punishment and deny help to children at risk - ours and everybody else's. Both are repulsive beside Sanders whose faith is in a world of hope born of charity. His vision is based upon the sense that we can't escape our common needs and dependence upon one another. His liturgy is solidarity.

Whether you like Bernie or not, and be clear I don't much give a damn, a reckoning with his decency, his honor and his integrity is unavoidable. Bernie Sanders has been the same guy, standing for the same values since he first appeared on camera being drug off a campus in cuffs.

While the proud, the haughty, the ignorant and the self destructive gaze at themselves in a cracked mirror, both political parties seem to be set on going the way of the Wigs. The Democrats betrayed their base long ago, and continue in denial of that fact. The Republicans have crawled in bed with, to borrow a phrase from another religion's book, the Anti-Christ whom they insisted is their rightly ordained savior and prophet.

It is time for a new paradigm, time to put people over profit. It is time for a leap in consciousness. It is time to stop blaming one another and time to start teaching and learning together for the resistance and in solidarity.

Bernie Sanders

Chaos

Rick Wilson is a very smart man. He is a Conservative. I don't dislike smart, sane Conservatives. I dislike Conservatism. To me it is another way of saying, "I am the center of the living universe." As a life long Socialist, committed to Social, Economic and Environmental Justice I reject the stagnation and selfishness of Conservatism.

Having said this and understanding that there are one or two things in this article with which I take strong issue, it is a must read. I don't say that often, but Wilson has expressed exactly the meaning and the potential of Trump's administration. The end won't be easy or pretty, but this egotistical hump's agenda is not sustainable. It WILL all come crashing down - I suspect sooner, rather than later. The people who voted for him will deny it; the people who didn't vote at all will swear they did; those who promoted and/or supported him will hide their heads in shame and run for cover.

Henceforth, I shall only refer to him as Chaos. I can't and won't bring myself to call him president. That office was vacated on January 20th.

President Chaos Collides With Reality

A Little Lady

Let us speak of a sweet spring evening over 4 decades ago, in a large hospital in a major U.S. city, say Denver, where the staff of the ER takes a  call from the EMS crew in the field that they are bringing in a female adolescent who is hemorrhaging – we will call her Little Lady.  Upon being received in the Emergency Bay it is immediately determined that she is unresponsive due to blood loss and cannot be stabilized nor her hemorrhaging stopped outside of the OR.  Accordingly, Little Lady is taken to surgery where she is found to have sustained a hole in the wall of her uterus and uterine artery.  An emergency, partial abdominal hysterectomy is performed – leaving her Fallopian tubes and ovaries intact – to save her life.  She is taken to the ICU post op where she remains unresponsive. Some days later it is determined that she is in, what we would call today, a persistent vegetative state.  Little Lady is transferred to a nursing home to live out her “life.”  Within the year she dies, covered with bed sores and still unable to respond to her grieving parents.

Little Lady’s back-story isn’t unusual for that time. It is simply this, she “falls” pregnant – pay attention to the language, it matters.  The sperm donor, for he can be called nothing else, refuses to take any responsibility. Why should he, no one can prove “it is his.”  So, our Little Lady goes with two friends, savings from her part-time job in hand, to a butcher working out of a garage in Downtown Denver who will help her “out of trouble.” The “doctor” must have known what he did when he punctured the uterine wall and artery.  He must have, because he took the time to pack her uterus and vagina with dirty oil rags before sending her home to bleed out.  He knew also that he would be gone before the door closed behind her; she wouldn’t fare well without medical attention; no one would look very hard for him and no one “could prove he killed her.”

When Little Lady arrives home, she goes to bed pleading a headache. Mom with the instincts of an excellent parent checks on her once or twice. The last time she finds her lying in a pool of blood that is soaking through the rags and onto her sheet.  You know the rest.

The understanding that Little Lady would have survived today because her abortion would have been safe and clean, doesn’t seem to resonate with the Ryans, McConnells, their idiot president or the arrogant bastard he drug out of Colorado Conservatism to nominate for the Supreme Court.   They would never have the guts to admit what really lies behind their phony Christianity and lame moral superiority, although Trump came close.  They would never say, what I surmise they believe that Little Lady deserved what she got.  She had sex without permission of their miserable moral order.  She got “knocked up” all on her own.  The boy isn’t culpably; boys will be boys.  Remember that all boys want to marry a virgin, even if they don’t mind screwing the asses off of 266 before they find one.  The 266 deserve what they get – butchers, dirty hands, piss filled alleys, oil rags, coat hangers and knitting needles. 

Are we going to stand for this shit again? Can any of us look at a girl or woman in our lives and not say, HELL NO? We must rally around a woman’s right to exercise her health care options in a safe and clean environment.  This filthy, stinking patriarchy, its perverted misogynistic God and hatred of women must not condemn another Little Lady to death.  We must rally around our sisters’ rights as we have rallied around our LGBTQ brothers and sister and our Muslim brothers and sisters.  We must fight.  It is a matter of life and death.  Abortion isn’t going away. Safe abortion is at risk of being taken away.

Resist!

Enough is Enough

I have been following the marches across the country and the world on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.  I am hearing a lot of carping, sniping and sniveling from the Clinton and Sanders camps. This wasn't just media foolishness, as I thought initially, designed to distract from the importance of the marches.  It was the real thing.

As I said to a friend of mine in a message on Twitter, Jesus Aloysius Horatio Christ, pull up your big kid pants, grow a set of whatever you need and stop whining.  The nomination is over.  I didn't like the way it ended.  I didn't think it was fair, but it is OVER. The election is over.  I was stunned, shocked and angry; but this I know, Bernie's people didn't defeat Clinton.  A corrupt DNC; a negligent media; the FBI; I think the Russians and that anemic putz who runs Wikileaks had a piece of it; the bloody Republican voter suppression humps in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and the lazy lizards belonging to the 45% who didn't get off their asses and vote defeated Clinton.  It's left us in a nightmare; it's horrible, but it's OVER.

In the first hour of Trump's administration he hurt millions of people. He increased mortgage interest rates and began to undermine the ACA. He'll work in the dark, in the closet, under the table and behind the bookcase, but he is working for the rich and their corporate interest wherever he is working. He is in office for one reason, to make money for himself and his cronies.

Clinton, the nomination and the election are yesterday. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, as the Bard said, is the issue. Donald J. Trump - liar, conman, cheat extraordinaire with the vocabulary skills of a dyslexic goldfish and all the charm and class of a gang of kids rolling a drunk - is our problem now. We must not be divided to be conquered; we must not be diverted and Gaslighted. We must not let the media or its pet huckster throw sawdust in our eyes so we can't see what is going on in front of us.

We weren't all on the streets today, but we are all focused, ready to work just the same. Let's shovel the bullshit into the ashcan, dry our tears, bandage our wounds and get to work forming common cause. It is worth as much as our survival.

For Remembrance Sake

Mario Como said,"We campaign in poetry and govern in prose." True enough - although our poetry is rapidly becoming pornography.  Como's theory is true except for Joe Biden.  He campaigns, governs, walks and lives in poetry.  Biden is American poetry - sharp, sweet and subtle; roundly wise and humorous; gracious and open; simply stated and clear of mind.

A little while ago President Obama gave his Vice President the President's Medal of Honor with distinction.  Like a true poet, Biden wept, spoke in terms of lavish praise and deep humility.  His profound and rich Irish soul reached out to everyone in the room; especially to the man who was honoring him.  That was today.

In not to many tomorrows we will leave the Age of Obama and enter the Season of the Infantile. Biden's poetry will be replaced by zealotry, witless sycophancy, and duplicity masquerading as loyalty out of pure self interest. Dark clouds are gathering all around this America that has for too long pandered to the lowest common denominator; traded the common good for the merely trite and traded its dignity and civility for practiced stupidity and proudly held bigotry.

Other countries have weathered this storm in long ago yesterdays. Italy, Spain and Germany paid a terrible price for this indulgence in the simpleminded comfort of mob rule and scapegoating. I suspect we will too.

Nonetheless at this moment we have Joe Biden's poetry. Let us celebrate this day, mark it for remembrance sake. We will need good things to look back upon as today fades into tomorrow and becomes yesterday.