Phew, that felt good to get off my chest

Thanks, Garrison Keillor

I think he covered just about everything except for the gun nuts.

No, it's not just as easy

I see my conservative, gun-loving friends are up in arms about Bob Costas interrupting their fucking football to preach about gun violence.  Now, I haven't seen or heard one word of what Costas had to say -- and in general I'm of a mind that I don't want politics mixed with my sports or my rock concerts, etc -- but I will still applaud him for having the balls to try to interject some sanity into this situation, albeit likely falling on deaf ears.
What really burns my ass is the assertion that Belcher could have as easily killed his girlfriend and himself if he didn't have a gun.  Bullshit!  You can make a snap, rash, out-of-your-mind decision to kill someone and if you have a gun handy, you can execute that thought without a chance to take it back.  A bullet is much more sudden and deadly than your other options.  (and by the way, I'm not going to expound on the thought that guns don't kill people, just like nuclear weapons don't kill people -- leave that for another day)  With a gun, especially the semi-automatic favorites of today, you can kill someone with the second or third bullet fired less than a second after the first...no time for it to sink in what you've done before it's too late.
If all you have at your disposal is a knife or your bare hands, for instance, it's a whole lot more personal and difficult to fully and completely carry out your momentary insane instinct to kill someone.  You have to thrust that knife into their body from a very close distance and likely will have to repeat the act of stabbing.  And strangling someone is even more up close and personal and time consuming.  All the time these options take is time you might come to your senses and stop; and then instead of remorsefully killing yourself for what you've done, your remorse might actually help you save that person's life, to say nothing of your own.
So just color me disappointed, but not the least bit surprised, that the people who most need to hear an opposing opinion on this matter heard nothing but a dog whistle warning about taking away their god-damn guns.  They're selfish and always will be...they'd rather have their guns that ever contemplate what a safer world it would be for everyone, not just them and their loved ones, if their were a whole lot less of them out there (even though I realize we're long beyond the point of return)
Just to prove the point (although some people are allergic to logic) I'll give you two scenarios:  Scenario one, two people are together and neither of them has a gun.  Scenario two, two people are together and at least one of them has a gun.  In which scenario is someone much more likely to die?  And if both people have guns, you're much more likely to die than you are safer.  And don't give me that shit about people being able to make mature decisions.

Tebow and Maher

This is in response to an article in the Washington Post that was posted by a friend on Facebook in support of Tebow and my comment trying to explain how a moderate atheist feels about this issue.  So I'll paste in the bulk of that comment and then add another thought to help illuminate my point.

I read the first page and I don't think she gets it either. Maher is to be ignored. I find him funny sometimes but even when he says something that needs to be said that others won't, he says it in such a way to have nothing but a negative impact. I think Tebow's a genuinely good kid and his praising for me, as an atheist, is not over the top. I have no trouble ignoring it. The issue is that an atheist DOES NOT have the equal right to do something similar. Can you imagine someone as famous as him saying at the end of a win "I don't believe in God?" And what it is about praising that atheists have trouble with is the idea of doing it only when there's success involved and the idea that a higher power would have any involvement in choosing sides in a football game. So while I don't agree with all the anger and venom from "my side" on this issue, I can understand it. Just being that angry and nasty does nothing but make people think less of you and make them not willing to listen or care about you or what you think. 

 Let's look at it another way.  Let's suppose the famous athlete who's proselytizing is a fine, upstanding young black man who faces Mecca each time he scores a touchdown and praises Allah when interviewed.  I can assure you those folks coming to the rescue of Tim Tebow would not be coming to this gentleman's defense nor, I believe, would the likes of Bill Maher be making over-the-top critical comments of him.
I obviously feel that Tim Tebow has every right to express his views and I don't feel in this instance that he's trying to judge me or mine or is overtly on a recruiting mission; I just don't feel like everyone is afforded in reality the same rights he's expressing.
Can't we all just get along?  Maybe not.

Disgusting, ugly Americans

By now I'm sure most of you, even if you're not Nascar fans, have heard that an audible portion of the crowd at Miami/Homestead Speedway booed Michelle Obama and Dr. Jill Biden yesterday.

They were there as Grand Marshals, which in Nascar speak means you get to say "Gentlemen, start your engines."  The First and Second ladies were there to honor the troops and get out the word about their troop related causes, which is what First Ladies do.
Now, I know all about free speech and don't even try to sidetrack the discussion.  If you can picket a soldier's funeral, you can certainly boo the First Lady.  That doesn't mean that these "expressions" are not classless.  Since when do we as a country boo the First Lady?  Well, since Hilary Clinton was First Lady, that's when.  When the right boos the First Lady, it's a free speech issue; but if the left were to boo a First Lady, which I have never heard happen, then it would be unAmerican, unpatriotic, disrespectful.  Well, I submit to you that booing the First Lady is all of those things.

Now, let's be clear that I have nothing against Laura Bush.  I'm just using her as an example.  If it isn't alright to boo someone who negligently killed a young man in an auto accident as a teenager but wasn't punished due to her family's political influence, then it isn't alright to boo this First Lady just because she's a Democrat at best and, at worse, black.  Can't we in this country at least show enough class to not boo the First Lady?  President George W. Bush's policies, actions, lack of actions and words made the left in this country every bit as angry at him as the right is at President Obama but I never once heard his wife booed.  Why?  I can only mostly speak for myself but it's because we recognize who's The Decider and who isn't.  And honestly,  on the right there is no limit, no guideline, no civil restraint, no modulation.  Name five of the nastiest, most hateful political pundits you can think of, and they're all on the right and have enormous followings.

Lastly, I want to challenge Nascar to come out publicly and denounce this as unAmerican.  They won't because they'll claim to be apolitical but they're anything but apolitical.  If the same sanctioning body that shoves the American flag, the invocation and Pledge of Allegiance down your throat at every race doesn't come out and call this unpatriotic, they'll be showing you just exactly where they stand.  Again, these ladies were there to support the troops (supporting the troops, something the right claims to own exclusively) and yet they boo her.  As someone said to me, "They might as well have pissed on the flag" because booing her in this instance is booing her cause, the troops.

And an added note to the right, now that I've searched the net in an effort to see whether Nascar had condemned this and seen the internet exploding with a disgusting display of the right, in typical fashion, lying about how if it's fair to boo George Bush or Sarah Palin, it's fair to boo Michelle Obama.  Listen fucknucks, look at yourselves in the mirror and see what you've become -- how nasty, ugly, disgusting, trivial you are.  You'll say anything to defend your ugliness.  Booing someone who is running for public office is NOT the same thing.  And I won't even begin to address and certainly not give examples of some of the name calling directed at the First Lady that I saw on some very high profile right wing blogs.  Thank you for continuing to scratch a big ugly scar into what once was the most envied country on the planet.  You should be ashamed of yourselves but I know it's not in your DNA.  Good people have the capacity to look in the mirror and fairly judge their actions and feel remorse accordingly.  All I see from the right these days is a never-ending capacity for ugliness and hate in response to being called out.

UPDATE:  And now one of the ugliest Americans of them all has weighed in, saying the reason they booed the First Lady is because she's uppity and they don't like uppity.  That's not very well disguised, Rush.  I'm surprised you just didn't say the N word because that's exactly what you meant and exactly what your dittohead listeners heard.

This N That

Or That N This, if you insist on being disagreeable.

How is it that Congressman and Senators dramatically increase their wealth while being paid by us to be public servants?  One way is the Newt Gingrich way, selling your status for money when all that money buys you is potential influence.  Another way is through insider information on stocks.  Watch this 60 Minutes episode and become upset that it's not illegal, even if we all recognize it as very unethical.

If you didn't already feel they weren't working for our best interests, this ought to seal the deal.  The more outraged we get about this stuff, the more we publicly demand change with our voices and our votes.  Are you outraged yet?

While we still don't have a jobs bill, Congress found the time to decide that pizza is a vegetable.  Why would they do that, you ask?  Because they were lobbied to do so by the companies that make money from pizza being served in our kids' school, whether it's healthy for them or not.

Dorli Rainey is my hero.  Who's she?  She's the 84-year-old woman who was pepper sprayed at Occupy Seattle.  She was interviewed by Keith Olbermann, who asked her how she was doing.  Her reply is priceless, "I'm feeling great," she said. "I'm so energized. It's amazing what a little pepper spray will do for you."  Watch the complete interview below.


This letter, written in response to yet another of those pictures you see with the fine young American's face and a letter held up next to it explaining how hard they work and everyone else should shut up and do the same, is the best and most thorough and completely logical response I have yet seen.  It's perfect, except it's too long; but I guess it has to be to explain thoroughly what shouldn't have to be explained at all.  If you have not read this response, whether you're inclined to agree with the 99% or you think the whole thing is bullshit, I beg you to read the response that's linked at the beginning of this paragraph.  Here's a very small sample:  "Do you really want the bar set this high?  Do you really want to live in a society where just getting by requires a person to hold down two jobs and work 60 to 70 hours a week?  Is that your idea of the American Dream?"  I'm also starting to wonder about the veracity of these letters supporting the 1%.  I smell a PAC, maybe even a Super PAC.


Did you hear about the reporter and camera person for The Daily Caller (yes, the right wing rag that's been overly harsh and unfair and inaccurate about OWS) being knocked down by police at Occupy Wall Street?  Guess who came to their aide?  Yup, the very same protesters Michelle Fields had been demonizing.  Read the story here.

Semper Fi, Shamar Thomas

As a Marine, I couldn't be prouder.  Another honorable face of the Occupy Movement.

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Above is an excellent interview with Ellen Schultz regarding another way large corporations are ripping off the middle class.

The Clueless Generation article in The Daily Beast.  I disagree with his premise in part.  He states that the Baby Boomers had it so good that they don't understand the current plight of the middle class.  As someone who's at the end of the Baby Boomer Generation, I and many like me can attest to feeling affected all along the 30 year ride of policy changes that got us here -- rise in education costs, deregulation, runaway debt and a flattening of wages to name just a few.  This didn't happen overnight.

Opinion piece by former Labor Secretary Robert Reich addressing the seven biggest economic lies
I don't know how many times we've stated these exact statistics and truths but they haven't sunk in enough yet.  So we'll keep on pointing them out.



From this excellent Vanity Fair article on Elizabeth Warren:"In those speeches, sometimes using slides filled with numbers and graphs, she would, as she did at a speech in Manhattan in early June, outline the impact on middle-class Americans of rising health-care costs, burgeoning debt, and the depletion of not only their savings but also, with the rise in joblessness, their confidence. She spoke of “the Wild West” conditions deregulation had created, where banks could sell virtually any product they wanted, on any terms: mortgages they knew consumers could not pay off, credit cards whose rates they could raise at whim, products that came with a mind-boggling array of penalty fees, many of them not fully disclosed. But it was her final remarks that brought down the standing-room-only house in June. “We cannot run our country without a strong middle class. We cannot run a democracy without a strong middle class,” she said, her voice quavering slightly. “If we hollow out the middle class,” she said, “then the country we know is gone.”

Did you know that Warren was originally a Republican?  (You must read this Vanity Fair article)  But to quote the article again:
It was in 1979 that Warren had her Damascene conversion—the experience that would lead her to become the nation’s top authority on the economic pressures facing the American middle class, and trigger her passionate advocacy. In 1978, Congress had passed a law that made it easier for companies and individuals to declare bankruptcy. Warren decided to investigate the reasons why Americans were ending up in bankruptcy court. “I set out to prove they were all a bunch of cheaters,” she said in a 2007 interview. “I was going to expose these people who were taking advantage of the rest of us.” What she found, after conducting with two colleagues one of the most rigorous bankruptcy studies ever, shook her deeply. The vast majority of those in bankruptcy courts, she discovered, were from hardworking middle-class families, people who lost jobs or had “family breakups” or illnesses that wiped out their savings. “It changed my vision,” she said.

The only way we're going to change things for the better is to continue the momentum of the Occupy Movement by being angry and unafraid to stand up for the truth, and then to vote.  The moderates and the liberals outnumber the right in this country; and if we all show up at the polls, it doesn't matter how much they lie and how much they spend or who's on the dole.

Apparently we're just a country full of lazy whiners

If this were being used to applaud someone who's overcoming a rigged system, that would be one thing; but it's being used to tell people who are speaking up against a rigged and unfair system that they're just a bunch of lazy whiners. The fact that any child in this country (the country that was established for and by the people) has to go to these extremes just to break even is not something IMHO to be applauded. It serves to continue to enable those who take our money in tax breaks, bailouts, etc, and reward us with crappy, low-paying jobs
If we, the 99%, had that attitude about things, then the Wall Street banks would not have gotten their bailouts and the system would've crashed. Then anybody who was hurt from that crash through no fault of their own , it would've been their fault because they're just lazy losers? There are good elements in that piece but overall it's basically calling everybody who complains about unfairness is a lazy whiner. Bullshit.
What about the people who worked hard, saved their money, invested wisely, didn't go into debt but yet lost their retirements in the crash?  That was their fault too?  
So the young mother of two who decides to leave her abusive husband, she should stop her whining and stay?  If she leaves and can't find a job that will pay enough for her to put a roof over their heads and food in their bellies, that's her fault because she's just lazy and looking for a freebie?  It has nothing to do with the fact that the median income in this country has hardly risen in 30 years while the cost of everything necessary to survive has gone up at a much higher rate?  It has nothing to do with the fact that the biggest corporations in this country are paying less taxes than ever before, are making much larger profits than ever before and yet not creating new jobs with the tax breaks we're giving them?  It has nothing to do with the fact that Wall Street owns the Government of the United States, the government that's supposed to be "by and for the people."
Did you know that now corporations can spend money on elections just as if they were people?  But if you're a corporation, you can hide behind your corporate status and not be held libel for the decisions made by the people who make up that corporation.
As William Buster says in this interview with Charlie Rose, (sorry, there's no embed but I highly recommend you watch) "Occupy Wall Street has been depicted as anti-business.  We're not.  We're not anti-business, we're not anti-banks, we're not anti-government...we're anti-corruption and we're anti-systemic corruption."
I always get a kick out of the right always using personal attacks on the messenger without even trying to understand the message...whatever garbage Fox News puts in front of them, they swallow.  They use things like the note above to try and divide us.  If you want to know what class warfare is, that's as good an example as I can imagine.
This quote from the Vanity Fair article on Elizabeth Warren (that I'll do a post on shortly)  may sum it all up as well as any, “There’s been such a sense that there’s one set of rules for trillion-dollar financial institutions and a different set for all the rest of us. It’s so pervasive that it’s not even hidden.”

Because that matters most of all, Mr. President

Mr. President, in case you didn't realize, there's a big difference between the loyalty of the left versus the loyalty of the right.  On the left, while we may be very patient and gracious with the benefit of the doubt, we will call you out when we disagree and the bar of expectation is higher.  One category where the bar is higher is regarding your word, especially your word that your administration would bring back things like truth, justice, honor and principle to the Presidency.
So here's how it works with us:  If you're upholding those standards that we most believe in and cherish, then we'll be patient when it might appear you've made a mistake in judgment or calculation because we believe your heart's in the right place and your decisions are based on the greater good.  We'll even cut you a huss or three if you were simply wrong, again provided that we believe that you see the world the way we do and your word is good and you're upholding the standards we believe in.
But when more than a few chips start to fall in the wrong direction, when we start to wonder just how good your word is, then we'll turn on you too.
We're not happy about how you and your administration have handled the mess in the Gulf.  All things considered, we'd just voice our displeasure but still be on your side because you did all the other things that you said you would do that were most important to us.  Well guess what, our patience is wearing thin.
Our friend, Jon Stewart, who's always funny and nearly always right, does a very good job of laying out why we're getting fed up in this hysterical piece from last night.  He lays it out much more succinctly and certainly is more entertaining doing it than I could ever be.

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On the tarmac?

I've been working a lot of hours and haven't had time to stay in touch with the world as much as I'd like or am used to; but when I first heard about this incident with the woman having a "fit" on that flight from London to Dulles, I knew it was an over-reaction. This is a 59-year-old woman, and no one on that flight can tell she's having a panic attack and is not a threat? Sure, terrorists can come in any shape and size, but what did she do that made people think she was a threat? Doesn't there have to be some reasonable presumption of a realistic threat before hundreds of people are inconvenienced? Hell, they weren't just inconvenienced...this person comes undone and everyone else on the plane becomes a suspect.
Even though I'd be very frustrated and probably angry if I'd been on that flight and it was diverted, I'd give them the benefit of being overcautious for our benefit. But if you make me a suspect because of someone else's actions, there'll be hell to pay. You've already searched my person far more than I'd appreciate, searched all my belongings as well, and then you're going to do it again on the tarmac of the airport after you've taken everyone off the plane? I have a very strong suspension that had I been on that flight and had that happen to me, this woman who's at the center of the situation wouldn't have been the only one arrested for throwing a fit that day!

terrorist airplane Logan Airport