To do it again, we start by occupying the voting booth,
and we occupy the voting booth with GOTV.
Because all wealth comes from labor
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This blog is written by a group of liberal patriots who aren't quite as pissed off as they were a couple of years ago, but aren't taking anything for granted, either. We share a fierce dedication to the Constitution - the only words ever put to paper worth dying for, and we'll argue it's finer liberal points with anyone.
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Empirical data shows that our one remaining vice has a strong virtue We admit it. We are caffiends.Coffee is our last vice. We drink it all day every day, and when our doctors told us to cut back on how much coffee we drink we told them to fuck off, they had already taken every other god-damned thing we ever enjoyed away from us, they weren't going to take coffee, too. The next time the little weasles mention it, we're going to point them to this long-term (14 year) longitudinal study conducted by the National Cancer Institute and published in the current New England Journal of Medicine that showed people who drank 6 or more cups of coffee a day were less likely to die during the study period than any other cohort.
A Medal of Honor awarded, 42 years after it was earned by a 22-year-old soldier from Pennsylvania who gave his own life saving the lives of other soldiers in his unit. The paperwork was submitted in 1970, following the battle that claimed the life of Leslie Sabo, but it was lost in a file until 1999 when a reporter found the paperwork while doing research in the National Archives. Thirteen years later, the oversight was corrected and his widow has his medal.
Stop being hysterical and histrionic. You're obviously upset because your hormones are out of balance. There's no war on women, you're imagining things. Just because the House wants to weaken the Violence Against Women Act and strip Native American women, undocumented immigrants, immigrant women married to abusive Americans who want to leave their abusers and transgendered women of it's protections doesn't mean a thing...
Cue the cries of "activist judge!" U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest has stayed the indefinite detention provision of the National Defense Authorization Act, finding it in violation of the First Amendment. Her stay accompanies the signing statement of the President, which stated that it doesn't apply to Americans.
Count us in that number. Polling shows that 74% of us want the feds to stop busting medical marijuana dispensaries. Presumably the one-in-four who oppost it are dealers who don't want their cash cows sent to the rendering plant.
If we were related to this asshole, we would disown him. A 350-pound Wisconsin man who was cut off after 12 pieces of fish at an all-you-can-eat buffet and given eight more pieces to take with him (for a total of 20 pieces of fish) was so pissed off that he not only called the cops, but he is now protesting outside the restaurant once a week, accusing them of false advertising.
We've got a pretty good idea how this went down...a parent was upset over some ridiculous policy that her child's school has that her kid got in trouble for. She went to the office to complain and voices were raised. The "resource officer" (an off-duty cop with a subprime mortgage or hefty child support to the first wife, or both) got involved. He told the woman to calm down and lower her voice, and she stormed off. He felt disrespected and followed her, probably telling her to "get back here" and do as he said and respect his authoritah. She didn't, and outside the school he tased her. Twice.
O'Keefe's track record remains perfect -- as in every single one of his expose videos have been exposed to be faked; heavily edited, and fabricated...In his latest he supposedly catches two individuals in the act of voter fraud, voting while not citizens. Except both of them have beren naturalized, one of them decades ago. So how long will it take for the M$M to stop giving this little fucker the benefit of the doubt and realize his credibility is as dead as Breitbart who spawned him?
Finally, the most evil motherfucker of the whole Bosnian genocide goes on trial. "The trial of General Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb army chief accused of orchestrating war crimes and a campaign of genocide, has begun at a special UN court at The Hague in the Netherlands. Prosecutors at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia made their opening statements against Mladic on Wednesday almost a year after his arrest in Serbia and subsequent deportation after years on the run."
Keep the price down, and there will no longer be any excuse for not getting tested. "Over-the-counter HIV tests that would allow people to check in the privacy of their homes if they have the virus have moved a step closer in the US. A panel of experts said the OraQuick In-Home HIV Test was safe and effective and its potential to prevent infections outweighed the risk of false results. The Food and Drug Administration will decide this year whether to approve it. The 20-minute test is 93% accurate for positive results and 99.8% for negative, the manufacturer said. HIV affects nearly 1.2m people in the US, with 50,000 new cases each year."
For four years, the obscenely rich parasites have been threatening that if they were made to pay a single red cent back to the country that handed them their fortunes, they would take their job-creatin'killing awesomeness somewhere they'd be appreciated.
Promises, promises. But now at least one of them has actually carried through on the threat.
A lot of folks have torn into Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin for renouncing his US citizenship last week in order to avoid his tax bill from the company's IPO, which is really about as high up the Wall Street scumbag scale as you can get considering he's A) turning his back on the country that made this possible and B) stiffing the American taxpayer for about half a billion. Ilyse Hogue at The Nation:
Saverin exemplifies the spoiled 1 percenter who erodes the fabric of the country that afforded such opportunity by not paying back the investment America made in him. His decisions are a slap in the face of every person who recognizes that, to be a place that can facilitate the birth of new innovations like Facebook, the United States needs resources. Doubt that? Remember what government funded the research that created the Internet and the web? Harvard University, where the Facebook plot was hatched, took in almost $700 million in federal grant support for tuition and research last year alone. But Saverin's decision is even more insulting to the millions of his less wealthy fellow immigrants who work hard to gain the privilege of giving back to the country that affords them opportunity to pursue their dreams in relative safety. Not to mention the DREAMers who offer to fight and possibly die for the country that they yearn to make their own.
But no, Eduardo just got himself printed on the One Douchebag bill...on both sides. When I say the problem in this country is "I got mine, screw you peons" this is exactly what I mean.
Good luck to him somewhere else. I can't wait for the argument from the right that actually making Saverin pay any taxes at all is what drove him away from America, so we should just exempt rich people from everything: taxes, laws, death. Otherwise they'll go somewhere else, you know.
May this be the beginning of a flood of the motherfuckers out of the country for good.
By @TomBales1
Going to deviate a tad from my usual political rantings today, although there are definitely political overtones to this post in that it attempts to give one of my worm's eye views of a situation that, at least in general, is common in regard to the way the big energy companies do business in this country today due to the right wing and their never ending screams for eliminating any vestige of regulation by our government.
Today I want to say a few hundred words about my own personal experiences with Chesapeake Energy Corporation and the manner in which they apparently screw the people they lease from. First a disclaimer:
Had I known or understood when I leased part of my mineral rights on some Oklahoma property to this company, what I know and understand about this company today, I would never have done business with them. I'm not offering any excuses other than it was only my ignorance that prompted me to accept their offer, especially since my interests are almost microscopic the financial rewards are hardly in the blinding range.
So while you can rightly say that I might be complicit or an enabler of some sort in some of Chesapeake's operations there was no intent on my part to have any such role in the day to day actions of this company, especially in their use of practices that can only be described as the oil/gas industry's version of mountaintop removal mining. I find the practice of fracking just as reprehensible as any of you do and even though there has been no evidence so far that they are using the practice on the properties in which I have an interest, if it were in any way possible, I'd break that lease in a moment.
But I'm not here to talk about fracking today. This is the real subject of the post: If it makes anyone feel better, Chesapeake has never produced a single one of the monthly royalty checks they promised in order to secure those rights. And if it makes anyone else feel even better, when offers started coming in for a lease on another piece of property we had an interest in in the same area, having already started to read about the practice of fracking and it's impact on the environment and the manner in which Chesapeake was treating it's neighbors, we went with a different company, Rockford Energy Partners, who at least sent regular, if small ($150 per mo range) monthly checks until a few weeks ago when Chesapeake bought either the company or the contract and those royalties immediately stopped also.
I have no way of knowing how many other owners became Chesapeake... investors? contributors?... willingly or not. It's one of the things that I would definitely like to know and a list of other small owners like myself is one of the things I'm going to ask them for if they ever deign to acknowledge my existence. It would be interesting to know how many have had the same experience with the company.
It would also be interesting to know if the companies that swindle small holders out of their rights/shares go around buying up rights for a dime on the dollar from folks who don't know they're actually worth something, and then leasing the resulting large blocs to companies like Chesapeake have also had THEIR royalties shut down.
As it stands right now, all that has happened is that control of my rights to a share in the oil, gas and or minerals on those two properties has been secured,,, directly and/or deviously... by Chesapeake Energy and that all royalty checks and/or any other communications from them have been stopped dead in their tracks. Lacking any information whatever from them since they have refused to answer phone calls, emails or any other attempts at communication, I find it hard to believe that they'd simply shut down operations on both properties without compelling reasons and... as an owner... I'm entitled to know what those reasons are and how they affect my rights.
To those of you who STILL think we have too much regulation of the oil and gas industries, I hope you enjoy the $6-7 gas prices they're shooting for because that's how they punish you for questioning $4-5 gas prices and our Congress... you know, those junkies and pimps and whores we pay to keep these kinds of things from happening... is nothing if not complicit in it.
I am of "Exodus" generation: we who read Leon Uris' book as teenagers in the '70s and fell like a ton of bricks for the heroic story of Israel's founding. We loved and defended Uris' Israel unconditionally, which is why the Socialist Utopia's recent sharp right turn to savage and brutal colonialism cuts so deeply.
Most of the people who gathered in protest at the Robert F. Stephens Courthouse Plaza in downtown Lexington on Tuesday had not even been born 64 years ago, when Israel became an independent state.
Still, they said they long for the return of the land to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who were forced to leave or flee in the wake of the declaration.
The rally, attended by more than 50 people, was one of many held throughout the world Tuesday, which has become known as Nakba Day, or "Catastrophe Day," for Palestinian supporters.
I still have very little sympathy for the hard-liners demanding full "right of return," but I do know that today, Israel's brutal Occupation is handing Palestinians the moral high ground.
Those in the market for conspiracy theories might be pleased by the mainstream media reaction to Peter Beinart's The Crisis of Zionism. Not only has the book been widely attacked but so too have its author's motives for writing it. Beinart's book is essentially a call for American Jews to challenge the professional Jewish establishment that has failed to stand up for the liberal values of the community it professes to represent and acts instead as an apologist for Israel's rightward, anti-democratic drift toward permanent occupation. With an impressive uniformity of opinion, Beinart's reviewers have by and large ignored the details of his critique. Jewish liberals, centrists, neocons and far-right chauvinists all apparently agree that Beinart has written the wrong book. Instead of focusing his attention on the shortcomings of Israeli and American Jewish institutions, he should be complaining about Palestinian rejectionism and suicide-bombing (as might be expected of former protégés of Marty Peretz), as it is obviously their behavior, rather than any action that Israel may have been forced to take in self-defense, that lies at the root of the conflict.
Even were one to grant the substance of the anti-Beinart attacks, one would still be left with Lenin's age-old question: What is to be done? Where are the alternatives to an all-out effort - risks and all - to end the occupation? While some of the reviewers profess distaste for the policies of the Israeli government, none propose a solution that involves anything much more than Palestinian surrender. And since that is not going to happen - indeed the political weakness of Palestinian "moderates" is often cited as yet another roadblock to a sustainable peace agreement-then what we are left with is the passive acceptance of Israel's slow-motion destruction of its democracy coupled with an apparently endless (and brutal) military occupation.
As is always the case when Israel is criticized, discussion in that country has been far more open and self-confident in its press than in our own. Writing in the invaluable +972 webzine, Mairav Zonszein observes, "Beinart's writing does not shed new light on the situation, but the fact that he is making such waves reflects just how hard it is for American Jews to figure out their identity vis-à-vis Israel-and how, after 64 years trying to figure it out, it continues to be the mainstay of American Jewish discourse." Her colleague Noam Sheizaf writes, "The panic with which the 'Crisis of Zionism' was met had nothing to do with the book's not-so-new political message...but rather from the thought that Beinart does represent something real, that the Jewish establishment is indeed failing, not in terms of political effectiveness, but on a much deeper level that has to do with the moral values and the self-perception of the people it claims to represent."
SNIP
American Jews could play a useful role in aiding our Israeli cousins to see that they are destroying what was noble and admirable in the creation of a democratic and egalitarian Jewish homeland over fears that are in some significant respects (albeit not entirely) driven by psychological rather than real-world factors. But as the ferocious reaction to Beinart's book, coupled with the nonreaction to the PRIME project, demonstrates, the opposite is unfortunately going to be the case. As Sheizaf observes, the project of "Jewish establishment and members of the Jewish media-the manufacturers of ideology" is to do whatever is necessary "to relieve the pain of their community by blurring the existence of a problem. It is an ungrateful task, which will last as long as the occupation does."
So again, the alternative? Kiddushin 39b in the Babylonian Talmud tells us, "And wherever the potential for harm is ever present we do not rely on miracles." Yet that is exactly what the American Jewish establishment and its media apologists do when it comes to the preservation of a Jewish and democratic Israel. And therein lies the true "crisis" of Zionism.
The neo-con wingnuts and freakazoids who foam at the mouth about "defending Israel" at all costs are Israel's true enemies; a true ally would demand it return to its founding values.
This kid is nine or ten kinds of awesome, at least. A nine year old boy from Topeka, Kansas saw the Phelps freaks as he was walking around the Washburn U campus with his Mom last Saturday. He was appropriately horrified by what he saw and went home and made his own sign that read simply " GOD HATES NO ONE" and went back to where he saw them and stood across the street in a silent but powerful counterprotest. Our hat's are off to young Josef Miles, and to his Mom, for doing such an awesome job of raising a child like him.
We've been saying this for years...Allow farmers to grow hemp, already. Just growing hemp would revitalize several industries by virtue of making a superior American-grown product available to them for use in their manufacturing processes. Soap manufacturers are just one of the job creators (the real ones, not that parasitic rich douchebags that republicans are always going on about) who would benefit.
The Sister Sarah Prototype is going for broke in her race against two other right-wing extremists for the republican nomination to challenge Claire McCaskill for Harry Truman's Senate seat, going on record that she is proud of the inclusion of Rush Limbaugh in the Hall of Famous Missourians. Claire is in a tight race and Karl Rove seems to have a personal vendeta against her and is pouring money into attack ads against her, but she still outperforms every last one of the opponents she's blessed with in head-to-head matchups.
Holy fucking hell religious freaks -- for the last god-damn time, "religious liberty" means that you are free to practice your religion as you see fit, so long as you aren't infringing on the rights of others to pursue their own prefered path. It does **not** mean that you are free to force your views on anyone else, let alone everyone else.
How the hell are private prisons even legal? It's antithetical to every ideal we hold dear as Americans to have a business model that relies on incarcerating as many people as possible in order to make money for stockholders. It's not just un-American, it's sick.
Bob Kerry is blessed with a crazy opponent. More than a few Nebraskans are put off that their former Governor and Senator never bothered to come home after leaving the Senate over a decade ago, until he decided to run for his old seat again, that is. Fortunately, more people are likely to be terrified by Fischer than put off by Kerry.
This is a level of derangement that borders on criminal malfeasance. Guess how Fox News spins a story about OSHA issuing common-sense guidelines for working outside in the summer and avoiding heat stroke -- stay hydrated, work in the shade as much as possible and rest when you feel the need -- as an attack on people who work outside. We're not making this up. They are so desperate to criticize this President that they will mock sound health advice and put their viewers in peril in order to do so.
Send this gut-check to your crazy uncle. By every quantifiable metric -- taxes, economic growth, spending, deficits, jobs -- we are better off today than we were four years ago.
Let's hope the FBI is far less respectful toward Wall Street criminals than the SEC is. "The FBI has opened a probe into trading losses at the biggest US bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, stepping up the pressure on the bank after the US Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Reserve said they were also looking into the bets that led to the losses."
Every election is another defeat for austerity. "Greece will hold a new election after politicians failed to form a government, nine days following an inconclusive vote, prolonging a political crisis that pushes it closer to bankruptcy and exit from the euro."
And finally...
If you're not reading Latin American writers today, you're not reading. "The Mexican author Carlos Fuentes has died, aged 83. Fuentes was one of the most prolific Latin American writers known equally for his fiction and his essays on politics and culture. His most famous works were The Death of Artemio Cruz and The Old Gringo. He was associated with the Latin American Boom - a literary movement made up of mainly young authors whose politically critical works broke with established traditions. He died in a hospital in Mexico City. Hospital sources did not comment on his cause of death. Mr Fuentes wrote a wealth of novels, plays and essays and regularly commented on political events in Spanish newspaper El Pais. Born in Panama in 1928, he did not move to Mexico until he was 16. The son of a diplomat, Mr Fuentes spent much of his childhood moving around the Western Hemisphere. He said it was this which allowed him to view Latin America from a distance, giving him a critical edge."
Anyone who's ever voted knows that the Beltway analpundits' claim that Americans want "bipartisanship" is bullshit. Americans want My Side to Win. We vote for winners - candidates who will give us what we want, not fence-straddlers who won't take a stand.
Last summer, there were plenty of centrists who expressed genuine excitement about a project called Americans Elect, which its backers perceived as a vehicle towards bipartisan governing. Thomas Friedman, last summer, devoted a column to singing Americans Elect's praises, saying its organizers are "really serious, and they have thought out this process well."
As it turns out, that wasn't quite right.
Americans Elect, the deep-pocketed nonprofit group that set out to nominate a centrist third-party presidential ticket, admitted early Tuesday that its ballyhooed online nominating process had failed.
The group had qualified for the general election ballot in 27 states, and had generated concern among Democrats and Republicans alike that it could wreak havoc on a close election between President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.
But just after a midnight deadline Monday, the group acknowledged that its complicated online nominating process had failed to generate sufficient interest to push any of the candidates who had declared an interest in its nomination over the threshold in its rules.
I never fully understood the appeal of this enterprise. Voters were supposed to gravitate towards Americans Elect out of a desire to see a presidential campaign committed to centrist, compromise-focused policymaking. Americans Elect did not, however, have a candidate. Or a platform. Or a policy agenda. Or even vague positions on any issue. It had money, a slot on 27 state ballots, and the admiration of some moderate-minded newspaper columnists, but nothing else.
Oh how cute! The Blue Dogs are starting to realize that their brand might be getting a little tarnished, so they're remaking themselves. Behold: The
"Blue Dog Research Forum" is now...Center Forward.
They have the following quote prominently displayed on their site:
America is neither right nor left. Republican nor Democrat. Red nor blue. The solutions that will move us forward come from where they always have - the center.
Most political agendas engage in a level of historical revisionism, but this one takes some serious chutzpah. The level of blind mythmaking in this comically inaccurate statement is breathtaking.
It was radical revolutionaries who helped birth this nation and free it from the British crown. It was centrists who urged on the disastrous compromises on slavery prior to the Civil War, including and especially the Compromise of 1850. It was Centrists who encouraged Lincoln to simply allow the South to secede. It was Lincoln who took the radical step of insisting on fighting the war and emancipating the slaves.
Social Security and the New Deal were not centrist legislation, nor was much of anything FDR did centrist. The one major "centrist" move FDR made to appease the Blue Dogs of his day was the attempt to close the deficit in 1937, and it was a disaster.
It was radicals who earned women the right to vote, radicals like Rosa Parks who helped end Jim Crow and segregation, radicals who earned 18-year-olds the right to vote, and radicals who pushed through Medicare. And today, it is radicals who have fought and clawed their way to allow LGBT Americans to live relatively openly and share in most of the same civil rights as their fellow straight Americans.
On the conservative side of the aisle, it was not the Eisenhower and Rockefeller Republicans who were responsible for the movement that begat Ronald Reagan, but rather the insurgent and radical conservatives of the Goldwater stripe. As a progressive, I view the Reagan ascendancy as a very negative thing, but insofar as any of the Reagan mythology is to be believed, it wasn't centrists who created him, but conservative revolutionaries.
On the Affordable Care Act, it was centrists like Baucus and Nelson who delayed and stalled the passage of the bill, demanding bribes in exchange for their votes and attempting futilely to earn the support of even of a few Republicans even as the nature of the bill shifted further and further to the right.
In fact, centrists have almost never helped create the solutions that have moved us forward in our nation's history. They have either been irrelevant, or actively harmful. There is nothing honorable or noble about the centrist position in American politics, partly because the system is intrinsically so resistant to change and easily corruptible that radicals are the only ones who are ever able to move things in any direction except in favor of moneyed interests.
Which leads us to the first issue listed in the Center Forward Solution Center: opposition to greater taxes on the wealthy.
Politicians often cite the fact that Warren Buffet's secretary pays a lower effective tax rate than he does as Exhibit A on why the tax code is unfair. But as our economy claws its way back from a recession does it make sense to target one particular group of taxpayers with a tax increase? In this series, we examine opinions from the center left and right on how we can make our tax code fairer without impeding economic growth.
Hmmmm...I wonder where the center of American public opinion is on this question. Oh, right:
Americans favor raising taxes on the wealthy to pay for President Barack Obama's proposed jobs plan by a margin of two-to-one, a new Gallup poll Wednesday says.
Sixty-six percent of respondents said that they backed increasing income taxes on individuals earning over $200,000 and families earning at least $250,000, while only 32 percent were opposed.
An even greater majority thought that taxes should be raised on corporations, with 70 percent of respondents favoring hiking taxes on corporations by eliminating tax deductions and 26 percent were opposed.
Centrism, ladies and gentlemen. It has little to with what the American people want or need, or with the solutions that make sense and have worked in the past. It has everything to do with what the narrow band of people who happen to fall in between the modern Democratic and Republicans political parties happen to think Americans deserve. And it's just an amazing coincidence that it happens to align with the interests of the nation's most well-off.
Centrism Kills. Stay away from politicians who praise it.
By @TomBales1
Dammit, another day has come and almost gone and I'm still sitting here contemplating the cookie crumbs lodged in my keyboard and trying to come up with something to blog about. Those of you who have not chosen to subject yourself to the daily almost universal rejection engendered in maintaining a blog are probably wondering what the big deal is and why, with the RW becoming more raucous, hateful, childish and reckless on a daily basis, there wouldn't be a myriad of subjects upon which to pontificate and you'd be right.
The PROBLEM is that by the time I get around to actually putting my fingers on the home row, everything there is to be said about the day's happenings has already been said. For example(s), whatever the terms I would choose to couch it in, it would still boil down to:
1. Romney is still a liar. I know, hardly a big news flash, right? The reason for pointing out all of Mitt's lies and flips and flops is to establish exactly that fact; that he is a serial liar and not to be trusted in a position of power, especially the most powerful position in the world. But we established that weeks ago and I seriously doubt that there is not a thinking adult and probably few children under the age of ten who don't already know that about Mittens, even among his supporters who know it but are OK with it. This makes anything I could add today redundant... or superfluous. Either of those words would do really but since I like using words that... "confuse"... certain types, I'll keep 'em both and count it a double.
2. Romney is still an elitist asshole. Yeah yeah, each of those two words beggars a paragraph of it's own and Mittens has no problem epitomizing either but we do have space limitations here and it's hard to be an elitist without being an asshole so I'm offering a twofer. Just remember, while you don't always have to be an elitist to be an asshole you pretty much have to be an asshole to be an elitist. There are many other ways to be an asshole and I'm sure Mitt has many if not most of them covered so again, I would be remiss in once again restating the obvious.
3. Romney is owned outright by the 1%. Now... I had to think about that one a bit because technically he isn't actually OWNED by the 1% but is indeed a major player IN the 1%. If you were to run a survey to decide which elitist prick most epitomized the out and out soulless depravity of the 1% you would probably find Mitt's picture cut and pasted between Dave and Chuck in any group portrait of the Koch Brothers at the top of your list. Mitt may not have their money but he's certainly got that certain something that allows him to rationalize away any consideration for other people as long as he's making a buck and that's exactly what it takes to be a preppy frat boy Republican pres. Just ask W.
4. Rush Limbaugh is still fat. Sorry, that just sorta slipped in there but now that it's out, it is actually a true fact just as it is that Rush is still a lot of things, none of them conducive to being granted membership in the human race. One thing certain... if the world does end 12/21/12, the last thing we'll see go spinning off into space is El Puerco, still ensconced at his EIB Golden Microphone and still squawking about the destruction of the earth being a non-event and just some vast left wing plot made up by the Liberals to discredit him in his truth telling.
Hell, I'm not even going to mention his being "honored" by the Missouri legislature, supposedly in the name of the citizens of the state, only a very select few of whom got to attend because BG has already done a masterful takedown on that subject.
There are dozens of other examples... hell, Boner and McConnell are walking bullseyes and Paul Ryan is still scrabbling around underneath his little barrel to see how low he can go but... it's what they DO. It's what they ALWAYS do. There's nothing new under the sun about any of these people or the people who run the corporations they are owned by.
So sorry folks, I just seem to have run out of ideas for things to say that aren't... let me see now, I need a word or two to piss of the rednecks some more... periphrastic and/or supererogatory. (That should keep 'em busy for a while). I'll try harder folks, I promise. The few of you who still bother to come to my humble little page deserve better.
So Rush Limbaugh is now in the Hall of Famous Missourians, right alongside Harry S Truman, Walt Disney, Mark Twain and General Jack Pershing, but there was something different about this induction.
General Pershing didn't make it into the hall until 1995, 47 years after he died and 75 years after he whipped together a two-million-man army and brought World War I to an end within seven months of taking over as the commander of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) after four years of one of the bloodiest wars in history.
President Truman wasn't inducted until 1991, nineteen years after he passed away, and 40 years after he left the presidency, 70 years after he was a lead-from-the-front Captain in Pershing's victorious army, 55 years after he assured the next world war was won by reining in fraud and shoddy equipment by defense contractors with his Truman Committee and 46 years after he signed the treaty that brought that war to an end aboard the USS Missouri.
Walt Disney wasn't inducted until a quarter century after he passed, presumably when the generation he had delighted - and scared spitless in brief moments - were occupying seats in the General Assembly and saw fit to honor the icon from their childhood.
And Mark Twain had been dead for over 70 years when his bust was placed in the hall, over a hundred years after he first achieved a measure of fame and notoriety. Thomas Hart Benton was immortalized by the mural he painted in the capitol decades before his bust was installed in 1985.
Living inductees are not unheard of, Speaker Tilley didn't break precedent there. John Ashcroft is there, and he's still alive - but he was also Governor, Senator and Attorney General. Bob Barker is there, but he was inducted after he retired from public life and after years of doing all manner of things to make the world a better place, including putting up millions of dollars of his own money to fund a vessel to save whales.
Like Bob Barker, Walter Cronkite was inducted while still living, but after he retired from a long and illustrious career as America's most trusted newsman.
The big difference with Limbaugh and other living inductees, however, is that they were inducted in public ceremonies to great fanfare. They greeted the public that feted them. They were humble and decent and they made everyone in the state, regardless of how they lean politically, proud to be from the same place that produced such remarkable people who went out into the world and made their mark and never forgot where they came from and the values we learned growing up here.
Limbaugh's induction, however, was quite different. There was no fanfare, there was no public announcement. It was done in secret, behind locked doors, with invited guests only present for the unveiling. There would have been no press at the event if Limbaugh hadn't been spotted by some of the members of the press who have a daily presence in the capitol.
The way it was done is at least as scandalous as the fact it was done. Perhaps Steve Tilley isn't the sociopath we've come to take him for since he became Speaker and the rest of the Animal House rejects took over the House and started embarrassing the state on a semi-daily basis, whereas with the previous GOP majority, the one I call the Emery-Davis Era, the humiliation was spaced out a bit more. It used to just be bi-weekly.
The current majority in the Missouri General Assembly is the political equivalent of an alternative middle school for boys with severe behavior disorders. They are obsessed with lady parts and scared to death of being called "gay" - just like 12-year-old boys. They are obnoxious, obstreperous, in-your-face, mean-spirited, hateful, willfully ignorant, intolerant, psychologically foreclosed and, in general, just plain stupid. What is really frightening is to think that these chuckleheads are a reflection of the people they represent. My roots in rural Missouri go back eight generations, and while there is always a contrarian or two in every community, they were isolated cases, not the majority, and the rest of the folks there didn't send them to the General Assembly -- Not even in the Ozarks where they invented and hold the copyright on "contrarian."
I've thought about this overnight, and as infuriating as it is, it's far more pathetic. So instead of asking Governor Nixon to pull the bust, I have a different idea. Add to it. Engrave his remarks at the induction -- where he attacked about half of the state by calling us "deranged" (to the approving laughter and applause from the hand-picked crowd that could be counted on the play along). And engrave some of his greatest hits along with it. Add the backstory of his inclusion, making sure Steve Tilley's name is cast in bronze as part of the display. Make the GOP -- especially Steve Tilley -- own it. Let it stand as a monument to extremism and division and the hatred-as-a-virtue ethos that the current GOP majority in the Missouri General Assembly has come to embody.
Be so thorough that he is considered the first inductee into the Hall of Infamous Missourians. Just make sure to leave room to add to it, because he'll out-Rush himself soon enough and embarrass all the sane people left in the state, and we'll want to document that for all time, too.
Meanwhile, I have an idea for all the ladies out there who might want to protest this offense somehow, but not go to jail for vandalism: Save your empty blister-packs of birth control, and leave them on the pedestal that holds his bust. Make a pilgrimage to the capitol to make an anti-offering to the impotent demi-god of misogyny and impotent rage, and take a picture and put it on Facebook.
We can make our point without going to jail for defacing state property.
Because all wealth comes from labor
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