Archive for May, 2015

I see everything.

I am omnipotent and omnipresent.

I am the arbiter.

I decide.

I am the way and the truth and the life.

Trust me.

Believe me or burn in hell.

I am a republican candidate for president of the United States of America.

A Christian nation.

Women are not the the equal of any man.  They do not deserve the same pay.  Their role is one of subservience.  Colored people are not the equal of white people. They can be shot with impunity.  Their role is one of subservience.  Poor people are poor for a reason.  Their role is one of subservience.  All of them are lazy, less intelligent and lack ambition.  All of them.  Women, colored and poor.

I hold these truths to be self evident.

The constitution is explicit.

It matters not whether their station in life is ordained by God or by circumstance.  Inferiority is not my cause or my problem. I am only here to lead the righteous to prosperity and the undeserving to prison or poverty.

All you need to know is that if you are poor but worthy, I promise you will get yours and you won’t have to pay taxes on it.  If you already have it, I will make sure you keep it and it will grow.  Good Christians should never have to pay taxes, everyone else should.  In the meantime, understand you are deserving of all that God grants you.  Feel free to practice judgement and dominion over all who are not righteous in the eyes of God.  You are just and divine in your endeavor to exercise your will and the rule of law over every godless liberal, socialist, feminist, homosexual, environmentalist, addicted, disadvantaged, minority, atheist, agnostic heathen that threatens your privilege and right as the chosen.

I am the agent of God.  My name is Mike Huckabee or Rick Santorum, Ben Carson or Ted Cruz.

I could be Scott Walker or Jeb Bush because whatever it takes.

I come in many forms and faces but my purpose never falters.

Do not allow yourself to be distracted by so called contemporary issues like perpetual war and egregious wealth.  Concern yourselves only with the most vital and timeless of matters.  There is a sustained attack on our way of life and our values.  Our culture and morality is under siege.  Our entitlement as white Christian males is being challenged.  This once great country has excreted an entire class of godless people who believe they deserve endless convenience store burritos, menthol cigarettes, Mountain Dew and free rent.  All prizes to be sure, but hordes of them want free education and health care too.

Imagine if these things were available to everybody.

They would eat unborn fetuses and receive two checks a month for it.

We are outnumbered.  Soon they will demand these things because they are the majority.  We alone deserve to enjoy all the spoils and deviance from the affairs of men. The time to enforce our message of divine superiority is at hand.

The hour is short.

The democrat liberal heathens want everything for nothing and a vote for me is a vote against feeding, clothing and educating them and most importantly, their children, who will only grow up to champion Satan.

Trust me.

Beware false prophets.

I am the way and the truth and the life.

Don’t be stupid.

Vote for me and buy my free book.

Drinks for my friends.

 

What I hate about Americans is our notion of what is presidential.

Tall, calm and graying at the temples.

Bill Clinton, Mitt Romney, Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan etc, all very presidential.

The cult of political celebrity.

Whatever.

Bernie Sanders is not presidential but I’d like to have a drink with him.

Bernie shows up on TV looking like he combed his hair with a sharp rock.  His suit is wrinkled and his tie is cheesy.  He sounds like a cab driver from Brooklyn and he has the on air presence of an assistant district attorney from south Boston.  His Achilles heel is AIPAC and all matters Israel and he’s got gun issues.

These things give me pause.

He’s not ideal.

But he is smart and completely unafraid.

No candidate is perfect.  None will ever be as far as I’m concerned.  None will ever be as far as you are either.  Look in the mirror.  That’s as close as you are ever going to get and you will never run for president.

He’s not a choice because of what we’ve learned to picture on our screens.  It’s the only test he doesn’t pass.  Otherwise, he’s been consistent from the day he walked on.  He’s a socialist.  Our republic is a failing model because of unchecked capitalism.  It survives only because of some modicum of socialism.

It’s why we don’t don’t actually enslave the migrant workers that clean our hotel rooms or why our salads aren’t $50 a pop.  Instead, the bigots bitch about them taking jobs none of us would ever consider and they get to go to the emergency room when it’s a matter of life and death.  It’s a better deal than most of them will ever admit.

Bernie Sanders is a socialist.  That very word is so polarizing it will probably prevent him from ever being elected.  Nevermind the socialist constructs in this country that we all take for granted everyday. Fire departments and libraries, medicare and social security.  For whatever reason Americans have been taught to fear that word so profoundly that we imagine it threatens our existence.

It’s sucks because it is why we aren’t a third world country.

Or a theocracy or plutocracy.

All of the above

Can Bernie beat Hillary?

It’s unlikely.

Hillary’s support is broad but shallow.  She’s hawkish and corporate cozy.  Her path is trickier than most estimate.  She’s got baggage and skeletons and a lot of Americans think she’s a bitch.

She is vulnerable.

She has the amps but maybe not the volts.

Bernie has voltage.  A long history of consistent values, beliefs and actions that amount to a rare integrity.  It’s formidable.  His support is deep.  But he needs amperage.  Broader support.  Crucial and hard to come by.  Wattage.

He is not presidential and that might just be the best reason to vote for him.

He is the best person to run for president in my lifetime.

Thom Hartmann says Bernie is not kidding.  He’s not here to pull Clinton to the left.  He’s in it to win it.  I hope he’s right.  He probably won’t get the nomination and what pisses me me off is he won’t get taken seriously by the media.  We deserve him.  This man says every single thing I crave to hear on every issue that every other politician has avoided for the entire time I’ve been paying attention.

He goes right at it.

Fuck big banks, fuck big pharma, fuck big energy, fuck the military industrial complex.  Fuck everything that fucks with most of us every fucking day.  Goddamn I love that.  He is a no bullshit, unapologetic liberal.  He is a socialist.  We need socialism because capitalism is running amok.  Capitalism is why an education costs as much as a house.  Capitalism is why a $1 bag of saline costs $700 in a hospital.  Capitalism is why I pay $1.30 more a gallon for gas in California than the rest of the country despite oil being less than $50 a barrel.  The minimum wage used to be a living wage and capitalism is why it is now not enough sustain an individual.  Capitalism is why, despite all of this, corporations are far richer than they have ever been while worker productivity is at an all time high and wages are stagnant.

Capitalism is why they are no longer embarrassed to buy and sell our elected representatives on television.

Bernie Sanders has been talking about this shit his entire life.

What more do you want?

He has my vote.

Then I’ll vote for Hillary in the general because the GOP offers nothing but filthy idiots.

Drinks for my friends.

 

Twenty two viable republican candidates for president of the United States.

Not necessarily legitimate.

Not necessarily credible.

Not necessarily sane or reasonable.

Of course not.

But viable.

Sure.

So what is this?

On one hand, it is a sure sign that the entire conservative movement is fracturing and imploding and courting extinction and flirting with obsolescence and otherwise devolving into a parody or a cartoon or a malodorous stain on American history etc.

I confess, republicans keep me partisan.

On the other hand, maybe it’s on purpose.

Could be there’s a reason.

The earlier a republican candidate declares is in direct but inverse proportion to how seriously that candidate will be taken.  So far we have Ben Carson, Marco Rubio, Mike Huckabee, Carly Fiorina, Rand Paul and Ted Cruz.  Now that’s a clown car.  Holy crap.  Take a minute and picture them.  What this group has in common is a remarkable facility for chucking red meat directly onto the grill at every teabilly picnic, wake and campground.  Lowest common denominator politics.  Each one of them is some amount of greedy, cynical and stupid.  None of them will get the nomination but the base will be foaming and frothing with pitchforks and torches before they run out of money.

It’s people like you what causes unrest.

The same can be said for the rest of the field that has yet to declare.  They serve at the pleasure of the elite whether they know it or not.  The smarter ones understand it for the transaction.  The smarter ones who occupy the greedy and cynical end of the curve anticipate the bargain and never intended being elected in the first place.  If they actually aspired to give a mad fuck, they would run for an office they actually have a chance of winning.

It can be a lucrative business, running for president.

Higher speaking fees and bigger book advances.

Swimming pools.

Movie Stars.

The stupid ones anchoring the other end of the curve, the Donald and the Ricks Perry and Santorum, will be branding.  With little more than hubris and the presence of mind of a goldfish in hand, they’ll come out even bigger assholes than before.  They serve a purpose and will sustain some level of relevance and aggrandizement for themselves.

Some surrogates romance the base even after the primary.

They can’t help it.

They have a chip on their shoulder and pack a grudge for a long time despite having the attention span of pigeons.

It is the convenience afforded whatever candidate is left standing.  The one who will have already been anointed by way of money and judicial fuckery.  No need to labor the onus of  firehosing us with all the hateful shit.  He’ll be standing on the shoulders of them that came before him.

He can be cryptic about that near takeover of Texas by Obama’s federal Kenyan jihadis.  He can be family values.  He can be as populist as he needs to be.  He can lie about everything else.

Whoever he is he’ll have the luxury of being able to focus on the important issues.

The really challenging shit.

Drinks for my friends

 

International trade deals are always notorious in the rear view mirror of globalization.  Bill Clinton’s legacy will forever be jaundiced by two things, a blow job and NAFTA.  That blow job didn’t usher in the atrophy of the American middle class.

So exactly why is the president deliberately trying to slip the TPP by us?

Barack Obama is telling us not to worry about it.

A gigantic red flag is whipping and cracking in fog.

It makes no sense.

“……… the TPP is a Trojan horse in a global race to the bottom.”  -Robert Reich

The proposed agreement is between the United States and 12 other nations.  Mostly Pacific Rim.  We’re talking about 40 percent of the world economy here.  It will impact nearly a billion people.  The largest most comprehensive trade deal in history.  Elected members of congress are only allowed to view the actual text in the Trade Representatives office without staff or experts.  They aren’t allowed to take copies with them or even take notes.

Officially, that’s all we know because officially, that’s all we’re allowed to know.

There is no mistaking that something wicked this way comes when the republicans agree with Obama so thoroughly that none of them want anyone to even know there’s a conversation.  There are over 600 multinational corporations acting as advisers or authors of this agreement for years, yet members of congress enjoy little more than severely restricted access to it and are actually forbidden to share any information about it all.

It would be illegal.

Bullshit.

The devil must certainly be in the details if neither side can disguise the tripping all over to hide them.

Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders Sherrod Brown, Ron Wyden and Alan Grayson are just about the only ones shouting from the rooftops about this.  That’s gotta tell you something.  That they are openly opposing Obama tells you the rest.

“It is ironic in a way that the government thinks it’s alright to have a record of every single call that an American makes, but not alright for an American citizen to know what sovereign powers the government is negotiating away.  Having seen what I’ve seen, I would characterize this as a gross abrogation of American sovereignty. And I would further characterize it as a punch in the face to the middle class of America. I think that’s fair to say from what I’ve seen so far. But I’m not allowed to tell you why!”  -Alan Grayson

We’re at the little kids table.

As of now, we have no way of knowing how this agreement will affect workers, human rights, the environment, financial regulations, food safety, pharmaceutical regulation, energy regulation, net neutrality or internet privacy, copyrights and intellectual property. Even more troubling, the president doesn’t want us to know.  He in fact wants it to be “fast tracked”.  Limited time, limited debate, no amendments or filibuster.

What’s the goddamn hurry?

Then there’s the ISDS (investor- state dispute settlement).  It’s an international tribunal of lawyers not subject to any nation’s laws that can potentially extract compensation arbitrarily according to “unjust expropriation”.  It’s complex to say the least but it is essentially a device for adjudicating all issues of sovereignty that will inevitably arise from such an outrageous prostitution of Joe Six Pack’s expectations.

“This isn’t a partisan issue. Conservatives who believe in U.S. sovereignty should be outraged that ISDS would shift power from American courts, whose authority is derived from our Constitution, to unaccountable international tribunals. Libertarians should be offended that ISDS effectively would offer a free taxpayer subsidy to countries with weak legal systems. And progressives should oppose ISDS because it would allow big multinationals to weaken labor and environmental rules.”  -Elizabeth Warren

How predictable that Hillary is big on it?

Makes you wonder what the hell is going on here doesn’t it?

I used to bristle when some intellectually lazy asshat dismissed American politics with the casual excuse that both parties are the same.  It’s true democrats can be counted to be on the right side of social and cultural imperatives like civil rights and all matters of equality.  Sure, democrats are golden.  But there are issues that supersede the cultural and social ones because they are the battery that stores them.  Perpetual war abroad, unchecked assault on our own village by our biggest corporate, energy and banking institutions for example.  This where democrats are not quite to the man, the same as republicans.  Pretty much the same.  Most of the bastards are sell outs.

Without this whole war thing and the insidious problem with greedy, power mad pricks and cunts, there would be so much money we could each open whatever kind of store we wanted.

Dear Mr President, I resent the notion you sponsor that we should just trust you.  We shouldn’t have to just trust you.  You should not be asking. You want for us to place full faith and trust in capitalism for a level of playing field to be disclosed later.

You have got be fucking kidding me.

NAFTA was a low blow just before the bell to the American middle class. The TPP could be the overhand right after the bell to the back of our head that has us waking up in our car.

Drinks for my friends