There's something happening here, what it is ain't exactly clear, cont'd

So here we are, another week gone by. This weekend I have done nothing but sit on the couch. I have done laundry (clothes still in the dryer so it may not count as being completed.) and played on facebook and read a little bit on these wonderful tubes we have. I am enjoying today with the Panthers having a bye. It's a good Sunday. So let's recap the last few days, shall we?

So I'm on facebook and see this post.  And I realize, 2012 is either going to suck or it will be vindicating. If the GOP power grab for theocracy and plutocracy, these United States will be done. Only 230 some years....poof! in 30 short ones.
Then I see this quote

The end of democracy and the defeat of the American Revolution will occur when government falls into the hands of lending institutions and moneyed incorporations. -Thomas Jefferson, 1816

and it is really creepy to think that and then see that quote. Freaky I say.

Then there's Tom Brokaw. I know I'm in the minority but I have always been annoyed with him. And that voice? fuck, I cannot take that. I just realized that he was the first David Gregory, except better looking. (which really isn't a compliment) So it's always nice for me when someone smacks him down. It's a rare and beautiful sight. So please, enjoy these two wonderful posts. Here  and here. 
I need to add Charles Pierce to the side over there. Also too, if you're liberal, and let's face it, if you're here, you are. You should also check out politicsusa.com
I need to add them too.

Let's see what else have I been reading? I love Chez's Tebow take.
And the CBS article is pretty good too, though I don't agree with the way when everyone talks about him they have to say, "now he's a good kid and I like him" or some variation. Just because some idiot religious fanatic equates what you think of Tebow with what you think of their Jesus. Fuck that. I don't like any of them, Tebow or his fans.

To read the post this quote comes from, click here.

In a recent interview, a top Ohio Republican defended this in a curiously belligerent way, one that may reverberate in the race’s final days: He claimed lawmakers don’t need to take a pay cut in the spirit of shared sacrifice, because “I earn my pay,” adding: “Republicans earn their money.”

And if you're not reading Steve Benen daily, you are missing one of the best.

I found out that Stephen and Tabitha King never let me down.
I also learned, again, that international media is usually better than American corporate media. here we have The Guardian talking about ALEC. Have you heard about ALEC? Another one of those shadowy, right-wing organizations destroying our democracy. Only Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O'Donnell have even mentioned them. Keith Olbermann might have, but since he went on his firebagger rant, I don't watch him anymore. That's not to say that when the Murdoch empire is burned to the ground by the arrogance and incompetence that is Murdoch, I will watch him again. No one enjoys taking down Murdoch than Keith. And me. :)
Also, if you don't read al-Jazeera English, you should. Nothing but actual journalism about world events. It's refreshing actually. For instance, did you know Pakistan arrested people for assassinating Bhutto? You didn't? Huh....that corporate media. Read it here.

If the state of the current crop of nutjobs who want to be president are bumming you out, you could do what Rachel Maddow and Eugene Robinson are doing, enjoying the performance art that is Herman Cain. Me? I've been freaking about it until I watched Rachel and Gene, then I saw this and it made it better.

So that's what's going on around here. I will leave you this week with one of my favorite things. I love the Hubble Telescope. It's some of the best money we've ever spent. Check out what's it's showing us.

So what's going on around you? Did you move your money yesterday? I didn't, I'm waiting until the beginning of the year. Lots of changes, hopefully, coming financially for me and I want to start the year off clean. Have you been to an Occupy event? I'd love to hear about your stories.

There's something happening here, what it is ain't exactly clear.....

Since my last post, Occupy gatherings have garnered national and international media attention. For some silly reason, the corporate media can't seem to read the signs people are holding and can't figure out what we, the 99%, want.
Dahlia Lithwick wrote a good article on this very phenomenon. You can read it here.

Think, for just a moment, about the irony. We are the most media-saturated 24-hour-cable-soaked culture in the world, and yet around the country, on Facebook and at protests, people are holding up cardboard signs, the way protesters in ancient Sumeria might have done when demonstrating against a rise in the price of figs. And why is that? Because they very wisely don’t trust television cameras and microphones to get it right anymore. Because a media constructed around the illusion of false equivalencies, screaming pundits, and manufactured crises fails to capture who we are and what we value.

Matt Taibbi has a detailed, long but worth it article on the 'Texas Miracle' the corporate media thought (before he opened his mouth) would be the GOP 'saviour'. (And doesn't that beat everything? the baggers (fire and tea) like to think those who support our current President think of him as a 'saviour'....amazing projection skills.) Go read The Best Little Whore In Texas here.

Another bit of the glorious bagger legislating in my own little home state, there's this....the one bill where Governor Bev Purdue's veto didn't matter. The federal judiciary put a hold on the worst part of this entirely anti-woman legislation in their quest to live in my uterus. Shameful. It just amazes me that there are people out there who don't see the false claims during the health care debate about government getting in between you and your doctor, yet they want to make it legal to get between my doctor and my uterus. I swear, maybe there is something in the water, other than fluoridation. You can read about the NC legislation that gets all in my uterus without my consent here. And now that I feel oh so dirty, let's move on to more educational posts, shall we?

One of my Facebook friends writes for Mother Jones and The Washington Monthly. You can read his historical view of what the Founding Fathers would think about the Occupy movement here. And what is that you say? There is an inaccuracy? What?! Look in the comments and you will see what an actual journalist does when he realizes their is an inaccuracy. That's what you never see in corporate media.

My friend Chez had this quote from Jon Stewart about Pat Robertson calling out the field of GOP Presidential candidate. Seriously. Pat Robertson calling others too crazy....it really is a moment of surreal reality.

James Fallows thinks Herman Cain's new ad is the Best Ad Yet. Again, surreal reality.

How have we gotten to 2011? It really is amazing, scary, funny and lots of other adjectives I won't write. If you are the 1%, you aren't reading this so that makes you the 99%. Call your congresspeople, call your governors, call your friends and family....if you can, go to an Occupy event. You can find one where you are here.

So that's what I've been up to this week. The title of this post is an oldie but a goldie and seemingly more relevant than when it was released. How quaint the late 60's and early 70's seem today. So enjoy the video.....

Hello Again....

I am still here, quiet but here. It really doesn't feel like it's been almost 2 months since I posted anything, but I've been told the internet doesn't lie. (kinda like all GOP presidential candidates)

Let's see what's been going on in VeraLand. I hate my job, I hate my finances. Nothing changed there. Football is back!! My team has actually won a game, which is big news. We have a QB that has more talent than Jake Delhomme had in his pinky. the dick. Peyton Manning is out for the season, hopefully only this season, I've been scared to hear about his neck injury. I love him so.

The GOP candidates and their debate audiences are proving that their base are all redneck hicks who can't stop living in the 30's. And they want the rest of us to join them. I say Fuck No. And my state, where I've lived for 30 years, is putting same sex marriage on the primary ballot. It's already illegal in NC to marry a same sex partner, they want to enshrine it in the NC constitution to prove we are just as backward and mean and stupid as the rest of the south. sigh.

I've become addicted to those missing object games on Facebook. I hate the new Facebook changes. I don't like that they want to tell me what they think I will think are Top Stories. Fuck em. But what am I going to do? Stop Facebook? Too addicted and that's where all my friends are.

There are finally protests against Wall Street going on. Please look up Occupy Wall Street on the web and Facebook. This is important, especially with the cops doing what they do best to protect the bankers against us lowly people.

My health issues have been resolved, I hope. My thyroid is fine but my serotonin (?) levels were out of whack so I got some new meds for that. Yay for getting old and needing chemicals, legal ones even....jeepers.

The best thing? Pink Floyd is everywhere this week with their new releases of the catalog. Loving that. Jimmy Fallon had a Pink Floyd week with Nick Mason, Roger Waters and some great bands covering Floyd tunes. I highly encourage you to look it up. I'm too lazy and football is getting ready to come on.

Anyway, that's where I've been. What's going on where you are?

Another Must Read.....and bonus! a rant

One of the pages I follow on Facebook posted this earlier and I must say, it blew me away. Remember a while back, when I said that I don't think the Civil War ended? What I didn't do was say it nearly as well as Charles P. Pierce does in this article. 

It really needs to be spread far and wide to every one who really wants to hold us together long enough to repair the damage and the wounds of the last 150 years....hell, from the pilgrims forward truth be told.

With our corporate media rushing to blame Islamic terrorists for the recent horrible events in Norway  when it turns out he is a blond, blue-eyed Nazi-type nationalist, makes me remember all the right wing nationalist attacks on American soil that no one talks about with any semblance of rationality. It's all about who wins and who loses the media day and the ratings and the whining from the very people who encourage and support these same ideas for political gain and power and wealth. Greed basically. All these christo-facists who will reap the rewards by the people too dumb or lazy or apathetic  to really pay attention that the 'religion' they all espouse is nothing but a facade to keep or gain power and money. And here they are ready to plunge the entire fucking world back into the worst depression any of us have ever seen, worse than the Great Depression of my grandparents era, by using peoples faith.
That worldwide depression led to the rise of Hitler, a world war and a cold war. World War II may have brought the United States out of depression, but what did we get for it? A literally divided world between free people and not free people. For 50 years we lived like this. Many innocents suffered in the undeclared wars of the 50's and 60's into the 70's. Korea, Vietnam, Hungary, Germany, Romania, Czechoslavakia, Iran, Iraq (funny, that) and another fun trip back in time in Afghanistan and on and on and on.....
Then the Cold War ended. (I have to say that as a military brat, the youngest of 4 girls, during the 60's and 70's that my sisters had no idea what the Cold War was....I was and still am, astounded by that. For those of you who share my sisters ignorance, go here.)  
So what happened after that? We turned on each other. Funny thing about us humans, we have to have an enemy. I don't know why, but I wish evolution would hurry up, we'll never get to the 24th Century that Gene Roddenberry envisioned and I want. Anywho, the entire era of the Cold War, it was politically advantageous for republicans to win elections by painting the democrats as weak on foreign policy. The reason they could safely have that ground was because they would actually cross the line and do things that democrats wouldn't. But on the other hand, the dems with the Gulf of Tonkin, some dems would and could. Which may be the genesis of the 'both sides do it' meme that is so familiar today. Then Nixon came along and did what he did and got away with it which enabled people like Donald Rumsfeld, Roger Ailes and Dick Cheney to do what brings us to the United States electing a black man for President. Can you imagine? It wasn't supposed to be like that at all....they have to have been so disappointed when that happened. But then, they got together at a Koch Brothers event in Palm Springs or somewhere equally posh and thought up the wonderful world we live in now. Just writing that feels like a conspiracy theory and maybe that's by design? Because there wouldn't be people out there who would deliberately want to destroy the entire nation and economy on purpose....right?
Well, I don't really think so.....I think their motives were, and are, greed and power and money. I don't think they realized the economic situation in the country....and really, how could they? They live in a world that knows no limits, none. They don't live in the world that the rest of us do. Where people like me have to budget the $20.00 co-pay to see the doctor. They don't worry about people out there who have to wonder, should I pay the electric bill or put gas in the car? They didn't know that was there when they started I don't think. Maybe they thought it was like 1992 and all we needed was a little political wrangling to get them more. I don't know. What I think is that they didn't realize the economic situation or, and this is the important part, the level of fear that they had been fomenting for years with faux news and rush and all the others....they had control before, why would this be any different?
So here we are, on the brink of default. Yay for us.

My question then is this, what do they do now? They have made compromise of any sort impossible with their behavior during President Obama's tenure. So what happens? They give? The President gives? I honestly cannot believe they have put him in this position. And it won't matter who will 'win' this battle. The politicians win. The corporate media wins. The losers? Me, you, the entire world that isn't in the top 2%. And the people who have brought us here? Only 27-33% of the Grand Old Party of the United States of America. The people who have been shunned, rightly, by civil society. The people on the fringe. This time though, the corporations had media holdings to bring the people too dumb, lazy or apathetic a story they could accept and make themselves feel better.
That doesn't seem like a fair deal. At all.

That's it. Rant over. But go read Charles P. Pierce's article which brought us all here. :) You can read it here.

It's a disease.....

I titled this a disease because it is a virus that attacked us in the 80's and has now taken over. Politics has gone 'celeb-reality'. Our media have failed us by accepting and propagating this veneer. It's a disease because it can be cured. By us.

Mark Halperin is a dick. Not only a dick, but a stupid one who couldn't find his way out of a paper bag. Yet, he remains one of the far too many 'experts' who mislead and downright lie to us. For what? Money. Power. Greed. Call it what you like, I am going to call it a disease.

Greg Sargent nails it......

I care less about Halperin’s use of the word “dick” than I do about the argument he and Joe Scarborough were making — that Obama somehow stepped over some kind of line in aggressively calling out the GOP for refusing to allow any revenues in a debt ceiling deal. This notion that Obama’s tone was somehow over the top — when politics is supposed to be a rough clash of visions — is rooted in a deeply ingrained set of unwritten rules about what does and doesn’t constitute acceptable political discourse that really deserve more scrutiny. This set of rules has it that it should be treated as a matter of polite, legitimate disagreement when Michele Bachmann says deeply insane things about us not needing to raise the debt limit, but it should be seen as an enormously newsworthy gaffe when she commits a relatively minor error about regional trivia. This set of rules has it that it should be treated as a matter of polite, legitimate disagreement when Republicans continually claim that Dems cut $500 billion in Medicare in a way that will directly impact seniors, even though fact checkers have pronounced it misleading, but it should be seen as “demagoguery” when Dems argue that the Paul Ryan plan would end Medicare as we know it.

Go read it here.

I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue......

You ever wake up and all of a sudden you feel like your place in the world isn't where you thought it was? Maybe you even feel that you don't belong anywhere? I woke up like that today.

2009 and 2010 have been the worst years of my forty something years. I had hope that 2011 would be better, but I woke up this morning and realized it isn't.

2011 is sucking just like the last 2. I don't usually feel sorry for myself. I hate it as a matter of fact. Today, there just doesn't seem a way out of this funk.

Growing up, I never felt like I was in the right body. I always felt older than I was. Until I turned 35. 35 was the age I always felt growing up. It was a bitch at 13, I can tell you. Maybe that's just what being a 13 year old girl is like, I don't know. I thought when 35 felt right, that life would just go swimmingly. Ha! I never thought I would ever use that word "swimmingly"....anyhoo, it went all right for a while and then the calendar turned over to 2009.

I have never been a person who suffers from depression. Low self confidence, low self esteem, yes, but not depression. Today, all I have been able to think is maybe I do now. I have no idea. All I know is that today, I really don't give a damn. I feel like every one out there, friends included, don't really give a damn and why would they? I don't have an answer to that today. I really don't like this feeling at all.

How much fun am I today? None. I can usually talk myself out of the negative thoughts and the negative soundtrack that usually runs through my head. I can't today. I think the last 2 years are finally catching up with me. It sort of feels like I have been wandering through a fog all that time. Over that time, I thought, I should feel worse about this, but I didn't. I floated through. I don't like thinking that, it seems hollow and empty and I don't think I am that. Maybe I've just been paying too much attention to the bullshit that passes for our current society. I don't know. And today, I don't really care.

Maybe I'll wake up tomorrow and wonder what the fuck I was thinking today. I hope so, but I will be preparing for the day to be just like this one. woohoo.

sad, sad state of affairs....

My thoughts exactly......

He doesn't have to because we now live in a country where there is no penalty whatsoever for Conservatives who are grotesquely and serially wrong about matters of life and death. And so well-paid buffoons like Brooks have no incentive to learn the lessons of Iraq that other, less-privileged citizens have paid for with their lives. Instead, he and his ilk are left with their lives, fortunes and positions of power in American politics and media blissfully untouched, free to whitewash their failures over and over again, unmolested by the inconvenient realities of the pain and ruin they left in their wake.

read it here

must read....

via Balloon Juice

I have never wavered from my view, expressed among other places in Blindside in 1995, that thanks to the almost incredible, if unnoticed, speed with which Japan has been building its lead in advanced manufacturing, the United States has been losing economic position faster than any Big Power since the implosion of the Ottoman empire a century ago. Nothing indeed has shaken my conviction that already by 2000, the United States had become an economic Potemkin village — a largely hollowed-out hulk whose eroding competitiveness was overlooked at the time merely because so many commentators, not least the ten highly influential observers on this invitation list, were busy proclaiming the myth of Japan’s economic oblivion.

in honor of our 40th President.....

The wonderful entire post is here.

But there are so many good parts that I am just going to post it in its entirety. And Bonus! you don't have to click. (but you should...see what's up over there, he is way more interesting and much more colorful.)

I give you how the Reagan years and how they actually were. (for those of you who didn't live through it, you need to know because the corporate and right wing media outlets and propaganda machines don't want you to know. You really should google some papers during those years.)

6/06/2004

Dead President:
This is not going to be one of the many "let’s-be-kind-to-the-dead-Alzheimer’s-ridden-wrinkled-guy" panegyrics the "liberal" media has been trotting out for the last day and a half. This is not an attempt to find a silver lining in the ruination, the waste lain by the presidency of Reagan. We will not be saying that "Reagan loved dogs." No, this is nothing like that. This is going to be a "rip that saggy-necked cocksucker out of his coffin and skullfuck him until his eyes roll out into the street" kind of thing.

Ronald Reagan was the worst kind of evil, the kind that wears the mask of goodness and morality. He was like the affable grandfather who loved molesting his grandkids. Oh, how Grandpa smiled when he fondled us. Damn, how we didn't mind the finger-fuckings, how we didn’t care how many psychic scars Grandpa left us with as long as Grandpa smiled at us, said he loved us, and gave us candy to keep us quiet. But, Jesus Christ, how we must live with those barely repressed wounds, the damage that afflicts every step we take.

This country, this world will never get over the destruction wrought by this man. Practically every awful thing going on in this country can be traced, in one way or another, to Reagan. Soldiers are dying in Iraq right now because of this man, because of his insane support for dictators, for turning a blind eye to genocide and madness. A decade behind in AIDS research? The power of the religious right in making public policy? The war on feminism? We're just scratchin' the surface of the repeated rapings of this country by Reagan's re-defining conservatism to the right, which dragged the rest of the nation, the rest of the political spectrum with it. He made liberal a dirty word. He opened the regulatory books for industries to rewrite them in their image. He presided over the other greatest intelligence failure, when we "missed" the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union. And we're not even talkin' yet about Iran-Contra, the second part of the Republican trifecta of massive abuse of power (Watergate being first, and the Iraq war being third). Reagan was a goddamned cancer, but he could sell it, like an old time preacher, with a twinkle in his eye and a promise of greater days tomorrow; he was like a suave Greek pimp who will sell you a syphilitic Turkish whore - sure, you'll get your rocks off, but, oh, how you'll pay, motherfucker, oh, how you'll pay.

Let’s focus in on one thing: poverty. Reagan shifted the conversation on poverty, as he did with so many things, away from economics and the vicissitudes of capitalism and towards a 19th century notion of morality. The poor were, in Reagan’s view, more easily tempted into immorality. They were "welfare queens" who exploited the good-heartedness of the government and the populace in general. Indeed, the whole debate about welfare never escaped from Reagan's enormous racist lie of the welfare queen because it was a story that comforted so many middle class white people, allowed them to abandon any pretense of wanting to correct past wrongs.

Let's narrow even further, to one bill. In his first budget, the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981, Reagan stripped away the ability of the working poor to transition off welfare, taking 100% of their income out of their welfare payments. Previously, the standard had been the 30 and a third rule – subtract the first $30 and 1/3 of income in order to wean the working poor off the government teat. The OBRA cut food stamps, Medicaid, and child care. It reduced or eliminated spending on prenatal, maternal, and child health care, school lunch programs, and day care, as well as eliminating Aid to Families with Dependent Children for some families. Sixty percent of cuts in federal entitlements were on programs to poor: AFDC was cut by $1 billion, Medicaid by $500 million, and food stamps by $700 million, erasing 875,000 people from the food stamp program. Because of these cuts, a working poor family of three had less income than one who stayed on AFDC. Much of this was directed at women, where Reagan sought to roll back the feminist movement through governmental tough love. "There you go, bitches, wallow in the filth of my philosophy," he was saying.

Here’s the evil part: this was done to offset huge tax cuts. Here’s the extra evil part: the tough love didn’t work. More people ended up on welfare (not cruelly disappeared from the welfare rolls as under Clinton’s welfare "reform"). The cuts for fiscal 1982, which totaled $35.2 billion, also affected disability benefits, subsidized housing, unemployment insurance, student loans, Pell grants, impacted areas aid, medical education, sewer grants, postal subsidies, trade adjustment assistance, small business loans, mass transit systems, highway funds, and more. Much of the spending was shifted to the states, as if that was somehow a greater good. The end result was to put a stake in the heart of the War on Poverty, effectively negating the role of the poor in national politics, who couldn't mobilize if they had to work two or three jobs in order to put food on the table, shifting so much of the social concerns of the government to the middle class. Welfare rolls grew while unemployment fell. And the seeds of the distance between rich and poor were sowed, and their vines bear fruit each year after.

Remember: this is one bill. One action. At the beginning of his presidency. With nearly eight years to go. Eight years where he smiled at us, regaling us with "common people" stories that comforted us amid the inferno.

Did he know what he was doing? Was Reagan a puppet? Of course he was, and by the end of his presidency, when he had descended into Woodrow Wilson-like levels of uselessness, he was merely a wax dummy. But if one surrounds oneself with cruel and evil people, if one listens to their counsel and signs off on their ideology, then, puppet or not, one is part and parcel of the evil that they do. He dumbed down the Presidency by making his ignorance into an asset; without him, there would be no George W. Bush for we could not begin to think that so slouching a human would be the person we say represents us all. Reagan made us think that this is what the presidency is: a summation of men (and women) and their ideology, not a man unto himself.

The final fuckin' joke is that because Reagan got to disappear into the clouds of his diseased brain, functioning only as a conveyer between tubes that fed him and tubes that removed his piss (with the shit-ridden diaper thrown in for good effect), he never had to see what he had done. He never got to look down from that shining city on a hill, the bullshit chimera of a nation that would never exist, and see the shards of the shattered country he left behind.

Or maybe, gasping his last, the Alzheimer's clouds parted and Reagan had a moment of clarity, a moment when he at last grasped the enormity of his blithe cruelty; maybe he understood the stunning, horrible, Christ-forsaken abandonment of the poor, the weak, the beaten down, the tossing aside of every "ideal" of uplifting the people in his maniacal pursuits of putting down the lid on the piss-stained toilet of Soviet communism and of tearing the condom off the cock of capitalism so that it infects us all with "free trade." When Lee Atwater, mentor to Karl Rove and one of the gurus of Reagan and then Bush I's campaigns, was dying of brain cancer, he had such an epiphany about the world he helped to create. He called the umitigated greed of the Reagan/Bush era a "spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul." Would that we all get such Kurtzian moments of realizing the horror.

Reagan's dead. Fuck him. Fuck Nancy. Fuck the 1980s. Fuck all the tributes that are going on for the next week while his putrid corpse criss-crosses the nation he helped desiccate. Christ, put that fucker in a hole and let's get on with it, with the neverending work of righting the legion of wrongs he did to us all, a legacy rife with its Rumsfelds, Cheneys, and Bushes.

And when Reagan’s finally quivering in the cold, cold ground, waiting for demons to tear his soul into bite-sized pieces so he can feel thousands of hells at once, the Rude Pundit will dance, dance, dance, grotesquely, madly, on the still shifting dirt of his grave.

The Rude Pundit

Everything we are facing today, who we are as a people come from St Ronnie. The worst thing? Allowing the wall of separation between the government and religion to become blurred. It allowed the self righteous,the theocratic, and I don't want to be mean, and the fanatical to the point of madness that I don't understand which makes me fear for our way of life. The one true fear this country should be concentrating on and trying to fix is being perpetuated by one party in our two party system. They think murdering Doctors who perform abortion, in any and all cases, is what god wants. How do we deal with such fanaticism? And where did this start? It started with Nixon's paranoia and then St Ronnie just knew he could sell it to the American people. And he did. whatever force there is out there, fate...destiny.....god....the randomness of the universe.....please let us find a way off this path before we all go off a cliff.