Wish I’d Said That Thursday

Tags

Humor

Got this idea sorta from Joey over at Joey’s house and because I’m generally lazy and this seems like a lazy way to blog, and because, I’m feelin’ pretty good cuz it’s Thursday and no longer that hellishly busy Wednesday, we are startin’ this “wish I’d said that Thursdays”.

Basically, when you run across something deliciously good and wish you had said it, remember it (or copy it down somewhere on your intertubes and come leave it as a comment here.

So here is kinda just like the wastepaper basket for collecting all the trash that swims around your head. So get rid of it HERE. <—–.

Got that?

So, to start you off, here’s one or two:

Yesterday, tea party darlin’ Chris McDann’l got his nuclear-bright future as the Very Most Reagany-Pure Senator from Jesusland slapped out of his Neoconfederate paws. ( Driftglass )

95% of all new created wealth now goes to the top 1% but Rand Paul, Ted Cruz & Jeb Bush all have plans to get it up to 96.
— @JohnFugelsang

“If Republicans are going to act like Democrats, what’s the use in getting all gung-ho about getting other Republicans in there?”
— Sarah Palin, in an interview on Fox News.

How long before this court decides the Twitter block button is unconstitutional because it prevents conservatives from yelling at women? (From LOLGOP on Twitter)

SCOTUS rules that anti-choice picketers must be allowed within spitting distance of people trying to enter a family planning clinic. Buffer zone cannot exceed average distance a non-professional watermelon spitter can spew.  (me)

Mensa just started a dating site because asking for IQ Scores on first dates wasn’t really working (Slate, Twitter)

The Real Paleo Diet: 50,000-Year-Old Feces Show What Neanderthals Ate http://slate.me/1nLcN2a (Slate, Twitter)

Gen JC Xtian patriot ‏@JC_Christian 1m

.@JosephFarah do you think you’ll ever break out the old leathers & nipple chains and do a reunion concert with the other Village People? (Joseph Farah is chief hater at World Net Daily Christianist hate rag) (Twitter)

K, that should be enough to get you started….

Come on now gang, I want some good ones or “no soup for you!”

 

He Would Turn Me In a New Direction

Tags

Autobiography, mentors

Mentoring.

We hear it a lot today. The need to help young boys and girls who perhaps have challenging lives, to strive for the heights. We are asked to inspire, direct, counsel, set an example.

Mentors are wonderful in their willingness to offer of their time and talent.

Yet, if we delve a bit deeper, we realize that many of the people who affected our lives most deeply and most clearly, had no particular intend to do so, and the interaction may well have been brief.

So it was with me.

I grew up in a factory town called Flint. A grimy hard nut of a town where at one time Buick and Chevrolet ruled. The UAW was also powerful, so much so that the local county prosecutor had a standing order to UAW members that their complaints would be personally attended to. (Of course how their complaints were actually processed was quite another thing.)

My parents worked in “the shop”, (as we called it) my dad as a journeyman mechanic, my mother sat the line at AC Spark Plug. My uncle worked there too. All my neighbors, or at least most it seemed, also built cars or parts that went in them. We had a good life, wages and benefits were good, we lived well for working class folks, we had vacations at Houghton Lake where our family had three cabins all told.

Nobody’s parents in our neighborhood (at least as far as I knew) were college educated. My dad had not finished high school. But they all were good citizens who paid their taxes, read the news, argued about politics, mowed lawns, went fishing and deer hunting, and dreamed–always dreamed that their kids would go to college and not have to work in the shops. Not that it was so bad there, but it was a soul suffering routine, it was work for a paycheck. It paid the bills. It was not the life my parents wanted for me.

Nobody in my family (aunts, uncles, cousins) have ever gone to college. I was thought to be the first.

I had early on been selected to jump ahead in math, and I did okay until Algebra II where I began to struggle. Fearful, since this was the first “mental” obstacle” I’d come up against, I quickly ended my math endeavors and science too for good measure. I settled into “office” classes, learning typing and shorthand and bookkeeping, along with the general fare.

Our school was a county one, peopled mostly with kids like me, working class kids. Our education was good so we thought, but it was basic. There were no sports beyond the ordinary, no serious experiences with anthropology, archaeology, or philosophy.Things like that were not going to help us kids who were, most thought, destined for mid-level white-collar fare. We would be perhaps teachers or police officers, office managers, bookkeepers. A very few of us might become lawyers or doctors. Beyond that, well, we had no clue since astrophysicist was not in the vocabulary nor a topic one heard in the hallways of Hamady. Gasp, I’d never even heard the term paleontology before college, which turned into one my most favorite “hobbies”.

So I opted, because I thought I was a math failure and therefore not “serious” college material, for a junior college education in office management. Since I had taken so many classes in high school, I slid into second year classes in my first, leaving me “free” electives in my second year. I chose as one of them, introduction to political science.

Wow, I sat mesmerized in that class. I was soaking up the stuff faster than a cat with a milk fetish.

Our instructor had had each of us fill out a card at the start indicating what our junior college program was. A few days later, he confronted me in the hall.  In a gruff but entirely friendly manner, he said,

“Ms McCameron, what the hell are you doing in my class?”

I gulped, stammering that I had some electives to use up, and gee wiz I sure loved learning about politics and gosh, if only I’d known, I might have applied to go to a four-year school, but now it was too late. . . .

“See me during office hours when you get a chance and we’ll talk.” he said, and off he went, and off I went, wondering what the hell that was and would be about.

Well, I went to his office, and I found out that damn, I could transfer to another school, and a lot of my credits might well apply, and my last semester could be chock full of stuff that would surely transfer. And he told me, that I had all the “right stuff” from whatever he had gleaned from my answers on quizzes and participating in class.

So, I did. I applied to a couple of places, but I truly only wanted to go to one, Michigan State University!

And they were happy to have me, and I transferred as a full junior.

And that was the beginning.

I got my bachelors in political science. By then the education bug has firmly lodged in my head, and since having such a degree was pretty worthless, I applied to law school, and lo and behold, they wanted me too.

I lot has happened since then. I grew bored with law, nearly became a nun, returned to school again this time in hot pursuit of a degree in theology or biblical studies, fell in love, yada yada.

But that teacher, oh that teacher, I am convinced changed my life. I was too unsophisticated to even know that you could transfer college credits. I would have likely ended up working in some insurance company office as the office manager, married some insurance salesman (no offense), had kids, and stayed within 50 miles of Flint.

Now, all that might be fine, it might grand for others. It would have not been for me. I had dreams that were bigger than Flint, bigger in the end, than Michigan.   And I’m pretty sure that instructor had a very lot to do with starting it all off.

And I wish I knew where he was, so I could thank him. Our lives crossed but for a moment in time, but he had no idea how big a difference he made in my life. Thanks Mr. M. It’s turned out better than I could ever have believed.

Convincing Those Who are Oblivious

Tags

brain research, conservatives, liberals, psychology, public issues, sociology

I spend a lot of time thinking.

I write a lot about the things I’m thinking about.

People who think like me, read what I write, and they think it’s pretty okay.

People who don’t think like me, don’t read me, but if they did, they wouldn’t agree with me.

Which is curious, since much of what I think about and write about is pretty well substantiated by actual things called facts.

It would seem evident that my facts should trump your fact-less opinion. But it doesn’t. Because you dismiss my facts. You don’t even waste the time to think about them, you simple use your magic eraser and voilà they are gone.

My husband, the great thinker, The Contrarian, reminds me that people are on a continuum. People are not neatly packed into the left or right or middle. It’s all bleeding all over the place. But we are dealing with averages after all.

“Recent converging studies are showing that liberals tend to have a larger and/or more active anterior cingulate cortex, or ACC—useful in detecting and judging conflict and error—and conservatives are more likely to have an enlarged amygdala, where the development and storage of emotional memories takes place.  More than one study has shown these same results, . . . .”

This has been known for some time. It ends up suggesting that these truisms are mostly true for liberals:

Liberals, according to this model, would be likely to engage in more flexible thinking, working through alternate possibilities before committing to a choice. Even after committing, if alternate contradicting data comes along, they would be more likely to consider it.

On the other hand, conservatives respond rather differently:

“. . .[W]hen faced with an ambiguous situation, conservatives would tend to process the information initially with a strong emotional response. This would make them less likely to lean towards change, and more likely to prefer stability. Stability means more predictability, which means more expected outcomes, and less of a trigger for anxiety.”

You see the dilemma?

Liberals continue to pepper conservatives with facts, and conservatives respond with concerns about values and things that affect them personally. They give you anecdotal information that they see as equally valuable in how they should respond.

Case in point. I know a person who is conservative and a fundamentalist. She is opposed to the ACA because it stems from President Obama, and pretty much is in agreement with all the known Tea Party positions regarding, abortion, gay marriage, guns, and so forth. I’ve never seen her seriously out of alignment with them on any issue.

At one point in her life, her health situation became serious enough that she applied for Medicaid. She was denied as “not eligible”. She self-reported that a “neighbor” couple got Medicaid however. She then went on to explain that God saw fit to have her denied because obviously He had other plans for her.

Let’s try to reconcile this. First, this woman has quoted her pastor as approving statements that call the American poor “akin to the rabble of Rome”. Her remark about her neighbors getting their Medicaid seemed offered as an example of  people who got what they didn’t deserve at least as much as she did. Yet, her application for Medicaid doesn’t define her as a “taker,” because of course she felt that in her situation, she “deserved” it.

However, when Medicaid denied her, that would mean she was not deserving, and thus one of those who was trying to get what she didn’t deserve, thus a taker. Since she cannot see herself as a taker, she is a qualified applicant denied what she deserved by a loving God who had other plans for her.

That’s the way you twist the world to fit your beliefs. People who get government assistance are still takers because they are not deserving, while good people like herself are denied. God has a plan and someday she will understand.

The example is instructive. It will do no good for me to  give her facts about how well Obamacare is actually doing now. She will not be impressed with knowing that in several states, competition between carriers has actually doubled, making it likely that premiums will come down even more in ensuing years. Eight million plus new insured will not do the trick either, since they are like her neighbor, people who shouldn’t get it, and could get their own if they would only get a job.

She might, on the other hand, be persuaded that it’s the Christian thing to do, that a healthier country means that everyone will benefit in myriad ways. Playing to her sense of Christian charity should work. But alas it does not to the fundamentalist. Jesus did in fact make it most clear that we were “our brother’s keeper” and he again and again emphasized to his disciples that here brother meant the truly marginalized. His examples of the marginalized he considered “brothers” were people of other nationalities,  victims of disease, women, those in employment to the oppressors, and sexually active persons.

Some how Jesus’ teachings about carrying for the prisoner, the sick, the hungry, the unclothed, got mixed up. I would take another post to untease the tangle of Pauline and pseudo-Pauline doctrine that is both misunderstood and mis-applied to these teachings to get where we are today with the evangelical right, namely that government should not proffer  programs for the needy, instead, they, the evangelicals should, so they can weed out all those who are not deserving, i.e., the lazy, the takers, the rabble, reserving charity for the “truly needy” which is essentially someone who has suddenly through no fault of their own, “fallen on hard times”, from which, if given just a little help for a short while, they will recover and once again be productive citizens.

That leaves us with appealing to self-interest and values, but here too we run into trouble. Let’s take the issues of food stamps and a living wage as examples. Regularly we are told that food stamps are misused by uncounted numbers of people who are “too lazy” to work. (Facts are to the contrary of course, but facts don’t matter.)  These people are taking advantage of “us” through taxes when they could just as well get a job.  But on the other hand, conservatives are essentially against any minimum wage, arguing that it impinges on an employers right to pay what he/she deems appropriate, and that such a law interferes with free markets. These are values conservatives hold dear: working and free markets.

However, if you wish people to work, but allow business owners to play unfair low wages, doesn’t that put us into the food stamp business? Logic says that if you want people to work you need to pay them enough to care for themselves and their families. So you should support a requirement of a fair living wage.

But again, logic is not the point. Conservatives can and do hold opinions on things that are in considerable conflict. Remember, it is liberals who have to reconcile conflicting beliefs, not conservatives.

While it is easy to say that the way to change the mind of a conservative is to forget facts and give them arguments that appeal to their self-interest and values, such is not always possible as we can see, or at least it requires a great deal more finesse than one would think.

It would seem then, that the answer lies in education. Only by teaching our youngsters that the mind has a way of creating reality to suit its own comfort zone, can we set about the business of giving them the tools that will allow them to avoid the pitfalls of their own predilections.

In this no doubt liberals also have something to learn. The focus  in this essay has been on explaining why liberals can’t change the minds of conservatives with facts. But they too have positive points to contribute. In a stable compromising world,  we could do what we have mostly always done, bring out the best in each other.

What is most important to remember, is that no individual can be utterly pigeon-holed by this analysis. We change over time as well. We do have free will, and the ability to overcome our own negative tendencies. These are generalities across a spectrum. Genetic predispositions are just that, predispositions, over come again and again by serious study, and life experiences. We would do well to remember that.

(Do read the link–it gives a lot more detail and links to further study)

Eric, My Dude, Wha’ Happened to Ya?

Tags

Eric Cantor, GOP, John McCain, men with no brains, stupid party, teabaggers, when old men need to lie down

Frank Luntz really got one thing right. “The GOP is lousy when it comes to doing polling.”

By all accounts, Eric was blindsided by his rather convincing loss to a third-rate “economist” called Brat. He dinna see it cummin’ as they say.

As all politicians do, they manage to put on a thin smile as they stumble to the podium to admit their loss and congratulate the nobody who was somehow good enough.

The punditry is all awash in ‘splainin’ how this happened.

Some say it was his flirt with immigration reform. Other’s his watering down of a bill that would have but a stop to insider trading by congress people, who are as you know, so danged overworked and unpaid that it’s only fair that they should be able to do what nobody else can do without going to jail.

Some say Eric was just a total shit, arrogant and dismissive, failing to act, ya know, like one of his constituents, on those “hanging out  in the district” times. He was in a word, (words actually) full to the brim with the sweet smell of his own poo.

He will likely be replaced by an even more odious (ideologically speaking) commodity, the Brat guy. Who is some sort of economist, but apparently not much of one, who when asked what his position was on minimum wage increases, said he hadn’t had time to work out a “fully crafted statement” on that yet, or some such bullshit. What freakin’ economist doesn’t have a thought on a subject that, ya know, DEALS WITH ECONOMICS?

But I guess one shouldn’t wonder since his economic philosophy seems to be “Brat believes in free-markets as run by some curious amalgam of Presbyterian theology and Ayn Rand’s economic sociopathy.” If that don’t make your head spin I don’t know what will. The atheist Rand married to a dude who claims that his win was a “miracle from God”. I can’t wait to see how it pulls that off.

It is however, most comforting to know that there are plenty of GOP tenderfeet waiting in the wings for their chance on the national stage.

As well as some old has beens who are still trying to be relevant to something that passes for significance in this political world.

Enter one John S. McCain. A meme last week on Facebook asked commentors to sum up Johnny in three words. My favorites were “still not relevant”, “still not President”, and “Sarah Palin, seriously?”. Fresh off his flopping like a dead flounder all over the Bergdahl mess, he ‘s moved on to utter more stale bullshit to an increasingly deaf audience.

You may not have heard, but Iraq is being overrun at the moment with Al Qaida–you know–the crazies who came into Iraq when George W, following orders from Cheney and Rummy, decided to invade it, because they wanted to? That war. The war that we sorta fought to a tie, which gave us our escape window? And we escaped. And like everyone on the planet knew that chaos (or more chaos I should say) would ensue until the damn country became a bloodbath? And a few hundred people have died in that country every month, but Syria was worse, so we didn’t notice? Until the deaths started being several hundred a week? Now ya remember?

Yeah, well, now Johnny, setting aside his blatant memory loss, has declared that we won that war, (more specifically George did after following John’s instructions), and now Obama has gone and lost it, and his entire group of foreign security advisors should be fired, and replaced by the old crew from George’s tenure, and hell, while you’re at it, let George take over, cuz God we all felt so much better and more secure when he was at the button. Such is the way John sees things, or forgets things.

Meet Jeff Miller, (R-FL).

Look carefully since Jeff, is a zombie. Not walking dead, but walking brain-dead. He is shown holding on to his head, for it would float off to the ceiling if he didn’t. It’s full of nothing but helium.

Florida, as you may know, if one of those areas of the country that will soon lose half its sovereign soil when the oceans rise due to climate change. It is of some minor concern to its residents not all of whom are ready to trade their land based homes for boats.

So in their brilliance, they, in part at least, elect this fool.

Jeff, make no bones about it, is a fool, in CAPITAL LETTERS.

Frank has that wonderful ability to hold lots of facts in his empty brain that are in utter conflict.

First, Frank says that scientists are not agreed about who is causing this particular climate change. That’s not true, of course, for they are, to a degree of more than 97%; the rest being dismissed as owned and paid for by Koch brother enterprises and others in the fossil fuel industry.

Frank chooses to side with the paid-for deniers, and of course reminds us that “the climate is always changing”, as indeed it is. The planet we call home has, over billions of years, undergone plenty of change, most of it taking millions of years to build up. No doubt Frank doesn’t believe this because he must stay on the good side of the funny-gelicals who don’t believe the earth is more than 6,000 +/= a few hundred years old. But, for purposes of this argument I guess he believes that climates change over time.

His proof? Oh the dinosaurs. How in the heck could the dinosaurs have been axed if climate change wasn’t a “natural thing”. After all, he says, man wasn’t there (oh no screams Ken Ham–he’s an atheist!), and they weren’t driving around cars and such.

So the fact that the dinosaurs disappeared means that climate change isn’t man made. (Get the ropes and pinions, that jump across that chasm of logic is mighty wide!)

What Jeff doesn’t have a clue about is that the climate was rolling merrily along in old dinosaur land, when a comet or asteroid hit the planet and threw up so much dust and dirt, that the climate changed massively in a very short time (hint, hint like today’s human activities), and produced an unlivable situation for the dinos quickly. (purists note that this is the Alvarez theory to which I generally adhere or the catastrophic extraterrestrial theory. There are other serious theories which we aren’t going to get into here, suffice it that it has no effect on the argument.)

In other words, there is climate change which is normal and then there is that which is abnormal. What is happening to the earth today is abnormal, proceeding much too rapidly, and is demonstrably man-made.

The point is, there is no connection between the dinosaurs and the reality of man-made climate change. Never was, never will be.

And so we end, “Your week in GOP shenanigans and really stupid stuff.”

 

The Shaming of the GOP

Tags

Bergdahl, GOP, hypocrisy, tea party

I mean ya gotta hand it to the GOP and their corp of clowns. I swear the term chutzpah must have been invented just for them.

Given all the back-walking going on within the GOP ranks on this issue of Sgt. Bergdahl, it still remains stunning the degree to which folks like Fox Noise continue to look down their noses at the drooling sycophants that pass as the usual Fox viewer.

Case in point, is one Ollie North, criminal/traitor extraordinaire who was recently on Newsmax to give us the benefit of his wisdom on the negotiated release of Sgt. Bergdahl from the hands of the Taliban.

You remember Ollie. He participated along with candidate Ronald Reagan, in a secret deal with Iran (terrorists) to sell them missiles and then turn that money over to the Contras in Nicaragua (more terrorists). In return Iran was supposed to turn over  hostages, but not until the election was over, so Carter couldn’t get the benefit of it. This was not only negotiating with terrorists, it was downright treason.

Yet, Fox figured Ollie was a good choice to weigh in on the matter of the Bergdahl release. I mean seriously!

From there we move to Johnny McCain who just cannot to this day live with the fact that he is not the President.

Back in February of this year, Johnny suggested that he could probably get behind a trade of Taliban Gitmo detainees in exchange for Sgt. Bergdahl, though he would “have to see the details”. This seems in line with the information that this negotiation has been in the works since 2011, and that the appropriate members of Congress were informed of both the negotiations, AND the subjects of any exchange.

John was enraged when this was pointed out to him. He sputtered, accused journalists of “lying” and then abruptly changed his tune, and suggested that it was a done deal, and we should move on. Then the next day, he was back on the bandwagon, screaming for “his head”.

Joined at the hip, Kelly Ayotte just on Memorial Day was calling on citizens to “remember Sgt. Bergdahl in their thoughts and prayers” and declaring that she was pushing the military to do everything possible to return him to his family. Of course now she’s singing a different tune.

Ayotte, is of course, no different from Lindsey Butchmeup Graham, who get their marching orders from Johnny, came to lately McCain, and both can be forgiven their turnabouts, since it’s all just too confusing to them in the first place. Lindsey of course is facing a primary next week, and so he’s desperately trying to remind everyone in his state that he has a mighty big job in just zipping up his trousers over that massive load of junk he’s carrying.

Their story is not singular as it were. A host of those who were congratulating America on having brought back a prisoner, quickly scrubbed their congratulations from their Twitter feeds when advised that the GOP was tacking once again. At least six Republicans have done so, advised by party leaders apparently that things “had changed”.

This all falls into place when one realizes that the rabble of the Tea People are making their anger heard throughout the faux news blogs that cater to the trailer brigade. Facebook pages, and the usual stories rebound around the likes of WorldNetDaily, Breitbart and Fox Noise, all attesting to the fact that Bergdahl was “probably a traitor”, “probably a deserter”, whose father “looks like a Muslim” and on and on. Impeachment echoes through the halls of crazy land.

None of this has anything to do with the decision of course, but in the usual fear of upsetting the grossly ignorant, GOP politicians run scared. The mill around the Capital, asking each other what to do, after all, elections are at stake, and NOTHING is as important.

The degree to which the GOP jumps when the fringe furrows it’s collective Neanderthal brow, is stunning. Just last week, the NRA after having declared that the crazies in Texas wandering around cheap food establishments with assault-type rifles and camouflage, should just go home, was met with an uproar from these thugs, and beat a hasty retreat, claiming “we made a terrible mistake”.

Such is the state of the GOP that they are drug around by the nose by a band of motley ill-educated morons who have basements full of canned goods, and lockers full of assault weapons, all ready for the coming revolution. However shaming this is to them personally doesn’t excuse the selling out of their soul in exchange for a greasy fingered vote.

The bottom line is quite simple. There are few facts that are known, other than the following.

1. Prisoner exchanges have always been part of a President’s duties, going back to George Washington.
2. Prisoner exchanges are done by most countries, including Israel with Palestine. In fact one of their more famous exchanges involved 1 Israel for over a THOUSAND Palestinians. Both sides call the other side terrorists.
3. This negotiation has been going on since 2011. There seems to be evidence that some Congressional leaders of the appropriate committees were aware of the negotiations, and the general parameters of those discussions.
4. Sgt. Bergdahl has been charged with no crime. And even if he were, that is no reason whatsoever by any military standard not to secure his release.
5. The exchanged Gitmo detainees were Taliban, not Al Qaeda. There is a serious difference.

This smacks, as so much of GOP opposition usually ends up being, as nothing more than, whatever the Black guy does, we hate it. Note that as usual, the GOP prior to this event, demanded the release of Sgt. Bergdahl, but as usual offered NO concrete terms of how that should be done. (See Syria, and the Ukraine for similar demands without specifics). So they demand action, refuse to specify what that action should be, and then when ANY action is taken, it’s the wrong action, and still there is no statement of what right action would look like.

This is a pattern of opposition. This is not governance, it is pure mean-spirited obstinate opposition. It is in truth a pandering to the fringe crazies which now seem to run the GOP. These people are satisfied with nothing other than venomous denial to everything this President presents. Of course they have no alternatives. Do you expect to get alternatives from seven-year olds?

Perhaps someday, normal men and women will pick themselves up from the mud, wash themselves off, and decide to reclaim the GOP as a party worthy of listening to. Not today however, not today.

 

What’s Up With That?

Tags

1st Amendment, dominionism, teabaggers, Ted Cruz

Never let it be said that a college education isn’t a good thing.  But it does not mean, gentle folks, that everyone that secures one comes out, well, . . . educated.

Some come out with better talents at manipulating the world they hope to rule one day.

Case in point is Canadian Ted Cruz, that stalwart Haaaavard educated douche from Texas whose daddy is still quite certain that President Obama was born in Kenya, which apparently is something less good than being born in either Canada or Cuba as the case may be.

It would be inappropriate to compare Ted to another well-known demagogue, so we won’t, but gosh Ted could give any of a host of world ogres a run for their money when it comes to using white-hot rhetoric in attempts to raise the blood of the great stupid hoards.

Truth? Not so much. Truth is not the providence of a demagogue; not that truth has no place at all in propagandizing. It does, but a minor part at best. Truth becomes the kernel which is then popped all out of its original proportions in order to reach the goal of making black white and thus creating the “new” rallying cry of the duped.

My very own Senator, Tom Udall recently introduced a constitutional amendment before the Senate which would try to put a stop the abuses that stem from Citizens United. As you recall, the SCOTUS held in that case that corporations were “people” for purposes of the 1st Amendment and that they could spend unlimited money denouncing or supporting various candidates for office.

This led to the creation of “super Pacs” which collected millions of dollars which were funneled to various campaigns supporting various candidates. The one run by Karl Rove controlled over $300 million dollars.

Of course, we all agree (or at least most of us) that such behavior amounts to actually a very few people being able to buy elections for candidates who we must conclude feel rather beholden to their benefactors. Money has become “speech”. Indeed in the McCutcheon case, limits on the total amount an individual could spend on election campaigns were removed. All agree, that the average person, as a result has less and less a voice in these matters, being unable, even collectively to meet these staggering amounts of money, all designed to elect those who will be favorable to one’s desires.

One must remember that Citizens United involved a film, one made about Hillary Clinton, which was in all respects nothing more than a campaign tool used by the Right to smear Mrs. Clinton. That was the argument made, that the film was funded by corporate funds for one reason and one reason only, to affect the election against Mrs. Clinton.

Mr. Ted has used this one fact, that it was a film to make the grandiose argument that the Democratic party intends to vote to eliminate the 1st Amendment.

He argues because this was a film (which has nothing to do with the decision at all, but is merely the vehicle for the principle embedded within it), that the very next thing to happen will be that Democrats will decide that you can’t read this particular book, view that particular movie, or go to that particular play.

Watch the video, and listen to the audible gasp by his Family Values audience as he announces this draconian fairytale. He then goes on to tell the audience that government wishes the authority to “muzzle you” if it doesn’t like your speech.

Of course this is not true at all. It is directed solely at the concept that a corporation can be a person with a political agenda, free to spend millions to do exactly what Ted decries as the eventual outcome–muzzling you. In fact it’s to keep your voice valuable, that the amendment is offered.

This all becomes the more sweet when we recognize that indeed Cruz is arguing that corporations are people in his view, a concept he shares with Willard Romney, who found that people were not really happy with his refrain, “corporations are people too, my friends.”

Indeed the irony is delicious here.

Ted is a dominionist by religious flavor, another of those Christianist offshoots that create their own theories about “what the bible means”. Ted’s daddy is a preacher who preaches this stuff through his ministry Purifying Fire International.

This ideology calls on anointed “Christian” leaders to take over the state and make the goals and laws of the nation “biblical.” It seeks to reduce government to organizing little more than defense, internal security and the protection of property rights. It fuses with the Christian religion the iconography and language of American imperialism and nationalism, along with the cruelest aspects of corporate capitalism.

Note that the ideology calls for “anointed Christian leaders”. Well as you may have guessed, Ted is one of those “anointed“. And if you are at all unsure about that, you need but ask his daddy:

Rafael Cruz indicated that his son was among the evangelical Christians who are anointed as “kings” to take control of all sectors of society, an agenda commonly referred to as the “Seven Mountains” mandate, and “bring the spoils of war to the priests”, thus helping to bring about a prophesied “great transfer of wealth”, from the “wicked” to righteous gentile believers.

So what we have here folks, is a man who is lying and making ridiculous claims about the Democrats being Fahrenheit 451 Democrats, determined to gut the 1st Amendment right to free speech, while at the same time, declaring that he has every intention of gutting the separation of church and state, and the right to freedom of religion, from the very same Amendment!

It pays to know what both hands are doing.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that perhaps the son doesn’t follow his father’s beliefs. He does folks, he certainly does.

Now, I recognize that normal people get Ted Cruz. The see him for what he is, and I have little or no doubt that he will fail miserably in his attempt to gain the GOP presidential nomination. You simply cannot hide all this stuff. It’s too well attested to by video alone.

But the antics of Ted serve to continually stir the pot of the crazy element in this country and that is a dangerous element, and becoming more so. One has only to examine the insane “open carry” nuts in Texas who even looked crazy finally to the NRA. Of course the NRA backed down, and that is even more worrisome. There is a level of crazy in Amerika that is increasingly willing, or so it seems, to use violence to achieve their goals however they articulate them beyond, “we don’t wanna pay for that” and  “we don’t want them people around us”.

Most will mess their pants at the first shot fired. But I’m afraid all too many are just nuts enough to bunker down and begin a “war”, one that will take no prisoners, but will mow down anyone who appears to be “not one of them”.

To the degree that Cruz and his ilk continually rile these folks up with blatant propaganda lies, we must all be very afraid.

 

 

Undoing Christianist Drivel One Knot at a Time

Tags

Christianist, damnable lies, fundamentalism

It’s been a week of people pissin’ me off.

Not that my personal life has been that way. No, thankfully, it’s been rather grand, with the kitchen redo going splendidly and my beloved and I agreeing on most every sub-step of that adventure. Who woulda guessed we would agree on faucets!

But oh, the lame-minded Christianists have been pushing my button once again, but given their IQ limitations, what could one expect.

I also garnered another bit of info that stands to reason given their lacking abilities as well.

So let’s get to setting some records straight.

Facebook memes are funny things as I’ve stated before. Some are quite accurate, but a whole lot tend to seem superficially so but fail in the deeper contemplation.

Sometimes, they are blatant lies from start to finish.

A Christianist “friend” of mine on Facebook (you know the term I trust–one who proclaims Jesus as their one and only but uses the bible and their faith to justify hating who they already hate/fear/are jealous of, etc. [Facebook “friend” being a loose term at best for people who read your shit and whose stuff you are subjected to as is the case here]), posted a meme that on its face was silly, stupid, untrue, hateful, and most UnChristian-like in every single respect.

The pastor of this “friend” allegedly  quoted from some other dude, something to this effect: (I have to paraphrase because the said Christianist when confronted with actual facts, deleted the entire meme from her wall rather than allow any of her “friends” to see actual facts.)

“Rome had a lot of “rabble” who were taken care of by the Roman government. But instead of being satisfied, they just demanded more and more, until finally Rome was bankrupt and then this rabble sacked the city, which was, as we all know, the end of Rome. America too has it’s “rabble”, which was corrected identified as the 47% by that paragon of goodness (my hyperbole) Mr. Romney, who was utterly vilified for stating what turned out to be the truth. Now we are saddled with a government (Obama of course) which has allowed/created a (1) housing crisis (2) runaway debt through over spending (3) a huge deficit (4) Obamacare and (4) insufficient sun on Sunday! (okay I added that). But the rabble won’t stop demanding and of course the inference is clear–so will go the way of America just like Rome.”

Oh where to begin.

First of all, pretty much all that Rome did for the citizens of Rome was provide bread to those who were starving, along with olive oil and wine. The only other thing provided was entertainment in the guise of the circuses. Rome was not sacked by its urban poor, although surely there were uprisings from time to time but these were not threatening to Rome’s existence.

Rome fell through a series of invasions by outsiders called “barbarians” (some of whom were no doubt the very ancestors of idiots like the above who don’t know history at all). Does the name Visigoth mean anything to you? How about the Vandals?

So it is utterly false to claim that the “rabble” destroyed Rome because they weren’t given what they wanted.

What was this “rabble” of Rome? They were in fact urban poor, citizens of the state but with no land, and no ability to make a living. Sort of like people in the US who have lost their jobs when their company chose to build a cheap factory overseas and employ cheap labor. Sort of like people who are trying to raise families on non-living wages. Sort of like small business owners and farmers pushed out of a living by mega corporations who undercut them in prices so deeply that they can’t compete. Sort of like that.

But more than that, they WERE THE FREAKING PEOPLE JESUS CALLED US ALL TO CARE FOR.

The Christianist now calls the poor, the 47% or rabble.

And then we go to Obama.

Now under no circumstances that remotely relate to truth is Obama responsible for the housing melt-down. That happened as we all recall under the watch of wonder boy, George. Now we know that the demise of Glass-Steagall had much to do with that, and Democrats bear their responsibility in that as well, but please, it cannot be laid at the feet of Obama.

Obama did not “run up massive deficits” either, but has paid them down and kept spending to levels not seen since Eisenhower. It was boy George who did that, but beginning and running two wars and a drug prescription law on a credit card.

Now I pointed all these pesky facts out in my comments. And of course, what happened is that the meme was deleted. Not with an “oh thanks for the information, my bad” but just deleted. I might have ignored this had I not found a similar in tone meme (the left is “intolerant of ideas” –the ideas being my bigoted thoughts about transgendered people “deciding to be girls so they can use women’s locker rooms”) that had not been deleted but deleted to remove the comments I made, and then reposted. This one also was applauded by the woman’s “pastor” as good Christian truth.

In perusing the wall, I noted a remark made that suggested why this woman gets so much wrong: “I do my best never to watch the news.”

I’m tired of people who use religion to hide behind all the while twisting it into grotesque shapes to fit their sick fears and hatreds. They are not Christians at all.

Next up, what’s happening in Demagography today!