Live Free or Die

As we passed through New Hampshire today on the way from Maine to Essex Junction, I saw the great welcome sign that reads, “Welcome to New Hamphire: Live Free or Die”. This is a quote from a Revolutionary War New Hampshire resident and Continental Army General John Stark. For a reunion on a Vermont battlefield years after the war, the entire quote read, “Live Fee or Die: Death is not the worst of Evils”.

Compare and contrast with the prior administrations motto, “Be afraid of Dying. Damn the Constitution, full speed ahead!”

Anyway, the contrast was stunning and I can only be hopeful that the old American spirit will live to fight another day. Raise my chance of dying before reducing my liberties Mr. President. We were once the land of the free.

Liberal Media Bias. What’s the motive?

Okay, we all watch enough cop shows to know that without a motive, there’s no case. So why is it that the Right Wing Echo ChamberTM gets away with calling, oh, let’s say NBC biased to the left? What possible motive could General Electric, parent of NBC and paragon of all that’s free market capitalism, have to lean left? Did Jeffrey Immelt leave a commune to run the conglomerate? Before him, does anyone really think Jack Welch had a liberal bias? What possible fucking evidence is there for such a nitwit conclusion that apparently 20-25% of the nation has taken to heart? GE exists for one thing and one thing only. Profits. That and number one or two position in an industry, but no-fucking-where is there anything to motivate a liberal bias. To the contrary, one would expect the opposite.

Ever hear an interview with Ted Turner? Other than marrying (briefly) Jane Fonda, there isn’t a liberal bone in his body. Yes the Right gets away with calling CNN the “Clinton News Network”. Huh? No motive, no case.

As Steve Colbert so wondrously put it, “The truth has a known liberal bias.”

Democracy in Iran

Jeez, I was looking forward to a little loosening of the screws in Iran, when the incumbent pulls off a rigged election. Holy crap! It’s like the The Gang That Couldn’t Vote Straight. Okay, how’s this on the smell test- the Mousavi vote in his hometown was under 30%. I’mADinnerJacket got something like 85% in his. Things that make you go “huh?” Next somebody managed to hand count all them millions of ballots and declare a victor 2 hours after the polls close. How?

I knew a lot of Persians (as I believe most Iranians prefer to be called) in college, before and after the last revolution. Though they were mostly kids of Shah employees, they had great things to say about their country and it’s millennia of history. Iran is an educated and Western leaning enough country that has it’s young coming up connected to the world, and dying for a little freedom. Before 1979, though the Shah was a thug, Teheran was a center of scholarship and (some) Western ideals. It’s been 30 years since a revolution turned Iran into an Islamic Republic; maybe the next generation can turn it into a democratic one this time.

Mousavi is out of the same mold as the Dinner Jacket, but progress, especially women’s rights, could have a chance under him. The current leader is definitely a nut job, so this thing really needs to be corrected before Israel pulls a preemptive nuclear strike on Iran’s nuke sites. Holy crap! Can you imagine the violence that would be unleashed against not just Israel, but her enabler, the good old US of A?

It’s terrifying, but I can’t take my eyes off it.

Death by Conservatism

Sadly, we’ve seen two slayings recently for which the blame can be laid at the feet of the right wing punditry and the Republican Party. A security guard at the Holocaust Museum was gunned down by an 88-year-old White Supremacist. Last week, an abortion provider was shot at his church. Pro-life, indeed.

If you listen to the likes of Sean, Rush, et al., you’d pretty much have to take the job of killing abortion as a God given directive. If you really believe the guy killed 60,000 human beings rather than zygote clusters of cells, then it probably makes sense in your twisted little mind. As I’ve said, ad nauseum, if abortion is so damned un-Christian, why didn’t the Big Guy let us know? Abortion wasn’t invented in 1973 by Democrats, no matter what the fat man on the radio says.

The anti-Semitic basis for raiding a museum has a powerful basis in the Republican Party with a big ironic twist that most people miss. The Religious Right supports Israel only because it has a big role in “the end of days”. That’s when all the Jews get sent to hell and the “elect” ascend to heaven. Great. With friends like these, who needs enemies?

How bad can it get?

So, I was driving up to Camden to visit a friend who’d had a stroke (get better Bill) with Rick from lowernine.org, and as we do, we spent most of the drive vilifying, excoriating and bloviating about whatever a couple of liberal bigmouths go on about. Usually, I’m the pessimist in the room when it comes to the economy, but two years of living for the most part in New Orleans’ lower ninth ward have convinced him we’re headed for Mad Max, rather than the The Grapes of Wrath that I’m expecting. The Lower Ninth Ward looks like a disaster scene after all these years. So few homes repaired, no retail, no public transportation, no nothing. Could we see a lot more of this, only man created everywhere else? Rick certainly thinks so.

Back here in the Green Zone, I keep reading horrible statistics, but see and hear very little about people getting all medieval on someone’s ass. I would have thought by now there’d be militias or tent cities or stockbroker massacres or something, but so far it’s all quiet on the Eastern Front.

Listening to the Assclown Twins, Sean and Rush, you’d think our current Commander in Chief was Karl Marx. Remember Dick Cheney’s famous “deficits don’t matter”? Well somehow, under President Obama, they are the greatest threat since “islamofacism”, to use one of the most historically ignorant terms ever invented.

Anyway, it’s really sounding like the Right Wing Pundrity is just asking some screw loose possessing nut to take a shot at POTUS. Great. The only good news is the Repubs would end up without 10 seats in the Senate and 50 in the House given the backlash. And for Dog’s sake, who wants Joe Biden for President?

Enough of this random post.

Sotomayor and the RightWingHateMachineTM

This should a rich vein to mine through the summer. I really thought for a minute there that the lowest they could sink would be to call someone second in here class at Princeton “stooped”. Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard on Bill Bennett’s radio show actually tried to imply that she got into Princeton through Affirmative Action, so her degree means nothing. Number 2 at Princeton? Is anyone swallowing this except a few blowhards and the ignorant poor white trash that needs an explanation that fits their worldview and tells them why some Puerto Rican is doing better than them. Could it be the lack of education? Nope. Obviously dropping out of high school and knocking up your girlfriend was a great career move, but “liberal elites” are trying to give away your richly deserved seat on the Supreme Court to some spic in an act of reverse racism. Such injustice.

Speaking as a rich, white, middle aged American Neo-Socialist the GOP does NOT have my sympathies, but we really need a two party system. G. Gordon Liddy (a convicted felon) actually said on his radio show “What if she’s menstruating during an important conference?” Whiskey Tango Foxtrot!!! I hadn’t heard that one since the 70’s!

So if you insult and piss off the slightly more than half of the US electorate who vote (women) and the fastest growing minority (Latino) while actively telling Republican moderates to get the hell out (Susan Collins & Olympia Snowe) while you’re cling to a tenuous 40 seats in the Senate, you’re probably not going to ascend to the majority anytime soon.

Further Disabling Republicans

So, the Republicans were basically plotting strategies to derail anyone at all that President Obama might want to nominate to the SCOTUS. It is SO obvious that when Judge Sotomayor was announced as the candidate that the party’s PR machine just wanted to blastmail the base, “Dumb Spic Bitch!” Of course, they are still trying to figure out how to use their (racist) base, and not look like complete assclowns to the emerging generations that have no time for that happy horseshit. Honest to Dog, the leaked talking memos from the Rethuglicans and Talibangelists had at their core the idea that Sonia Sotomayor was somehow intellectually not up to the task.

Rove repeated it, “I’m not really certain how intellectually strong she would be.” So did Fox News, “not the smartest.” Um, do these people have any idea how freaking bright you have to be to graduate second in your class at Princeton? Karl Rove doesn’t even have a college degree! Rush Limbaugh dropped out of High School. She edited the Law Review at Yale. And she did all this growing up as a poor Puerto Rican immigrant in the Bronx who spoke no English till age nine. Not intellectually strong coming from a dropout. Nice move, Karl.

Think GWB would have made it to Yale and Harvard with that pedigree and his intellect? I think not. They just want to play the race card so badly, and they can’t figure out to do it and not lose a couple of generations of voters.