'Hell No' To Obama on Everything!

John Cory sees the outrage that is fomenting by the GOP Tea Party against President Obama is merely a cover up for reality.  Cory accurately says, "Maybe it's just me, but getting lectures on morality from the Catholic Church is like getting cooking lessons from cannibals. The broth smells so good until you realize that you are the prime ingredient." John Cory knows, "What It's All About."

Can we stop the nonsense about contraception and morality and call this crap what it is? Politics.

Attack Obama.

This has nothing to do with a war on religion or religious freedom. This is all about attacking, blocking, and otherwise hindering President Obama from accomplishing anything that could be interpreted as successful or popular with the people. This is politics, and politics trumps God in this country. Mitch McConnell made it perfectly clear when he said that the priority of the GOP was "for President Obama to be a one-term president." Everything else is just tinsel.

These people are shills for their own self-interests and political gain. It's all a scam, a game of Three-card Monte on the corner of Church Street and Pennsylvania Avenue run by Bible-thumping Bunco artists looking to fleece the voting public.

Maybe it's just me, but getting lectures on morality from the Catholic Church is like getting cooking lessons from cannibals. The broth smells so good until you realize that you are the prime ingredient.

Let's be honest, all these voices howling about "freedom of religion" are the same shrill voices that denounce mosques in America. These are the same folks who claim that the religion of a billion people in this world is not a "religion" at all, and see nothing wrong with allowing one group of citizens to vote on whether or not the other citizens should be allowed to build a house of worship in their city. Religious freedom? Really?

These are the Grand Poobahs of Piety and their sanctimonious Sisters of the Smelling Salts running hither and yon as they flap their lips and arms to draw nearer, not to heaven, but to the holy wallet of Our Lady of Campaign Cash in order to vanquish that heathen radical liberal centrist Obama.

This is shadow theatre - sleight of hand and misdirection - with a twofer value. While the holier-than-thou players shout and jump for Jesus onstage, the real show is backstage. Attack Obama and put women in their place. Is God great, or what!

These heroic hypocrites battle big government and valiantly strive to shrink it down to a size that will fit in your bedroom, or more importantly, in a woman's uterus or other lady parts. Of course, they fight equally hard (forgive me) to free penises everywhere in order to preserve a true manly America. Viva Viagra!

The right-wing Christian conservative movement has been courted and embraced by the GOP. United, they move forward to weaken the Violence Against Women Act, push state laws to loosen domestic abuse and defund Planned Parenthood. And, on a subtle and chilling note, consider how Ron Paul recently responded to Piers Morgan when questioned about rape and medical treatment to prevent pregnancy. Paul said: "No. If it's an honest rape, that individual should go immediately to the emergency room ..." And no, Piers Morgan never asked Ron Paul to define what he meant by "honest rape," or what constitutes an "honest rape."

Most Americans have more common sense than the holy trinity of politicians, pundits, and priests. Just look at what happened recently with the Ellen DeGeneres fiasco. If you saw Ellen defend herself on her show, it was a moment of class and humor and humanity. The audience roared approval. Damn those suburban lesbian housewives! Damn tolerance and equality!

JC Penney refused to buckle to the One Million Moms (not really one million), and publicly stated that Ellen shared their values and their employee's values and they looked forward to a successful partnership with Ellen. Fans inundated the One Million Moms with indignation and disgust, so much so that apparently that hateful group has now taken down its Facebook page and skulked off to dark coven meetings in search of their souls. (One Million Moms is not the same as or affiliated with Million Moms Challenge, which is a worldwide health-oriented endeavor to help moms around the world.)

Damn the free-market!

And what about Obama? He announced a compromise on this contraception brouhaha as of Friday. How's that working out? Everybody feel better? Didn't think so.

It doesn't matter what President Obama tries, concedes, or compromises on any issue. The hucksters of hypocrisy will turn out to cast stones because that's what they do. They think that the spelling of G-O-D and G-O-P is divine intervention and not merely the separation by ten letters of the alphabet. It is a heavenly omen that designates them as the only and righteous descendents of power over our world. No one else is ever allowed to touch the throne.

This is about power and greed and the hypocritical call of freedom to force others to live and think and do as instructed by those who have elected themselves as the Chosen. Obey without question. God only speaks to me, and those who fund my politics. You have freedom of choice - as long as you choose the right way.

The fear of true democracy, equality, tolerance and choice has never been so obvious as it is today. There is panic in the golden streets of DC.

Washington State just passed marriage equality. The California courts ruled Prop. 8 unconstitutional. More and more Americans don't believe that one group of citizens has the right to limit the unalienable rights of other citizens or to define them as less than. The military has overturned Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Churches are opening their doors to gay members and allowing marriages.

Women are slowly winning the battle for equal pay for equal work. They are uniting in the belief that they own their own bodies, not the state or the church or the man in the gray flannel suit. Women are finding ways to run for public office and to become part of the political process so they can have an equal say in how this country works.

Let's face it, women have power and should be feared. It was Ida Tarbell who exposed the unfair market practices of Standard Oil and helped force the Trust-Busting of President Roosevelt. Emma Goldman took on the causes of poverty and child labor and union issues. Suffragettes brought women the vote. Harriett Tubman, Rosa Parks, Betty Frieden, Germaine Greer and Gloria Steinem and Angela Davis and Billy Jean King and Oprah. >From 1900 to the present, women have moved American politics and culture and art. Woman Power is real.

And this sends a ripple of fear through the great patriarchal order of things. That is why these yahoos of masculinity and righteousness push so hard for the spiritual enslavement of women while pretending to be the protectors of the feminine citizen.

Power and politics. That's what all this mess is about.

I think America still has more good, more empathy and compassion and tolerance than these guys want us to know. Knowledge is a dangerous thing, my friend.

And there is nothing worse than someone with enough knowledge being able to point at the naked emperor in all his shortcomings and say: That guy is naked! And he's no emperor!

-PEACE-

 The true reality is power and politics. "That's what all this mess is about."

Mass Transit: the new Tea Party GOP Target...

The Tea Party GOP is waging a war against mass transit. Yes, mass transit.  Here is why!

In the week since House Republicans introduced their proposed transportation bill, one thing has become clear: it has virtually nothing to do with fiscal responsibility.

The Tea Party soared to power on the notion that it was the antidote to wasteful government spending. It’s now clear that reigniting the culture wars was a top priority, too. From guns to abortion, the extremist wing of the Republican party has fought to turn back the clock on many socially progressive ideals.

Mass transit is their newest target.

“Federal transportation and infrastructure policy has traditionally been an area of strong bipartisan agreement,” says Aaron Naparstek, a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and founder of Streetsblog.org. “Now, it seems, Republicans want to turn cities into a part of the culture wars. Now it’s abortion, gay marriage and subways.”

House Republicans seek to eliminate the Mass Transit Account from the federal Highway Trust Fund. The Mass Transit Account is where public transportation programs get their steady source of funding. Without it, transit would be devastated, and urban life as we know it could become untenable.

And there’s the rub. “The Tea Party leaders and the Republicans who pander to them do not care about cost-effectiveness in the slightest,” wrote blogger Alon Levy in a comment about the bill on The Transport Politic. “They dislike transit for purely cultural and ideological reasons.” To the Tea Party, transit smacks of the public sector, social engineering and alternative lifestyles.

How do we know this is a cultural battle and not an economic one? Because transit spending is far more fiscally fair than spending on roads and highways. Transit riders subsidize roads to a greater degree than drivers subsidize transit. And cities, which are the chief engines behind the American economy, rely on buses and trains to function. “The economic future for states hinges largely on the performance of their metropolitan economies,” determined a recent Brookings Institution study.

Tea Party leaders know all of this. But they also knew that defunding NPR wouldn’t help balance the budget, and they voted to do it anyway. They knew that by law no federal money can go toward abortion services, yet they voted to defund Planned Parenthood too. The Tea Party is superb at disguising cultural battles as the pursuit of responsible thrift. And mass transit exists at the vortex of many of their number-one ideological targets. It’s brilliant, when you think about it.

Defunding transit is how you smack down urbanites, environmentalists, and people of color, all in one fell swoop. It’s how you telegraph a disdain for all things European. It’s how you show solidarity with swing-state suburbanites who don’t understand why their taxes are going toward subways they don’t even use. And it’s how you subtly reassure your base that you’re not concerned about the very poor.

Republicans haven’t pretended to care about cities for decades. In January, none of the candidates showed up to the annual Conference of Mayors. (Two of them didn’t even RSVP.) And even just a month ago, you could argue, as this web site did, that “today cities are more ignored than attacked” by Republicans. But the calculus just changed. The transportation bill sends an aggressive message: “Tea Party to Cities: Drop Dead.”

It doesn’t matter to the Tea Party that Ronald Reagan, in 1982, created the Mass Transit Account that Republicans now want to kill. Reagan was no friend to cities. But even he earned a respectable share of the vote in New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. Things hadn’t yet gotten so personal.

That era is over. Over the past couple decades, the GOP has found that bashing “elites” can translate into victory at the polls. And by “elites” they don’t mean folks with Chevy Tahoes and McMansions in the exurbs. 

They mean urbanites, no matter what their net worth. When they tar Nancy Pelosi as a San Francisco liberal, or Barack Obama as a Chicago politician, they’re not just referencing those cities’ stereotypes. 

They’re referencing the stereotypes of city culture itself: full of swindlers and gays and blacks and other suspect types. Calling Obama the “food stamp president” conjures up images of housing projects. Sarah Palin calling small-town folks “real America” states unequivocally that urbanites aren’t real Americans. The offensiveness of that statement still boggles the mind.

The Tea Party plan to decimate transit is no less explicit a statement. “House Republicans are, essentially, declaring war on cities in the federal transportation bill,” tweeted Naparstek. It’s not just that they know they can’t expect many votes from urban dwellers — that at least would be political calculus. It’s that they despise cities in general. They see “smart growth” principles as a U.N. plot, gun control as fascist, and funding for transit not just as wasteful, but un-American. Don’t like it? Get a car like the rest of us.

The House transportation bill will not become law, but that doesn’t make it benign. Like the debt ceiling battle, it could become a political bargaining chip, or reframe the national debate: Maybe cities are getting more than their fair share? Are we overspending on transit? Why should I help fund some far-away bus system? It plants these questions in voters’ minds.

This is why transit advocates are apoplectic, and why Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood (a former Republican congressman) called it “the worst transportation bill I’ve ever seen in 35 years of public service.” If conservatives have truly decided that transit is next on their culture war hit list, anyone who believes in the importance of cities had better start firing back right now.

 The year to fight back is 2012!

The Conservative Misconception of Socialism

Today, for the Tea Party Republicans the new 'red scare' in society is the concept of Socialism. Conservatives have created a negative niche by equating 'Liberalism' with 'Socialism.' In order to educate the conservative side of the political scale, Nurse Pam does an excellent job "Explaining Socialism to a Republican."

I was talking recently with a new friend who I’m just getting to know. She tends to be somewhat conservative, while I lean more toward the progressive side.

When our conversation drifted to politics, somehow the dreaded word “socialism” came up. My friend seemed totally shocked when I said “All socialism isn’t bad”. She became very serious and replied “So you want to take money away from the rich and give to the poor?” I smiled and said “No, not at all. Why do you think socialism mean taking money from the rich and giving to the poor?

“Well it is, isn’t it?” was her reply.

I explained to her that I rather liked something called Democratic Socialism, just as Senator Bernie Sanders, talk show host Thom Hartman, and many other people do. Democratic Socialism consists of a democratic form of government with a mix of socialism and capitalism. I proceeded to explain to her the actual meaning terms “democracy” and “socialism”.

Democracy is a form of government in which all citizens take part. It is government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Socialism is where we all put our resources together and work for the common good of us all and not just for our own benefit. In this sense, we are sharing the wealth within society.

Of course when people hear that term, “Share the wealth” they start screaming, “OMG you want to rob from the rich and give it all to the poor!” But that is NOT what Democratic Socialism means.

To a Democratic Socialist, sharing the wealth means pooling tax money together to design social programs that benefit ALL citizens of that country, city, state, etc.

The fire and police departments are both excellent examples of Democratic Socialism in America. Rather than leaving each individual responsible for protecting their own home from fire, everyone pools their money together, through taxes, to maintain a fire and police department. It’s operated under a non-profit status, and yes, your tax dollars pay for putting out other people’s fires. It would almost seem absurd to think of some corporation profiting from putting out fires. But it’s more efficient and far less expensive to have government run fire departments funded by tax dollars.

Similarly, public education is another social program in the USA. It benefits all of us to have a taxpayer supported, publicly run education system. Unfortunately, in America, the public education system ends with high school. Most of Europe now provides low cost or free college education for their citizens. This is because their citizens understand that an educated society is a safer, more productive and more prosperous society. Living in such a society, everyone benefits from public education.

When an American graduates from college, they usually hold burdensome debt in the form of student loans that may take 10 to even 30 years to pay off. Instead of being able to start a business or invest in their career, the college graduate has to send off monthly payments for years on end.

On the other hand, a new college graduate from a European country begins without the burdensome debt that an American is forced to take on. The young man or woman is freer to start up businesses, take an economic risk on a new venture, or invest more money in the economy, instead of spending their money paying off student loans to for-profit financial institutions. Of course this does not benefit wealthy corporations, but it does greatly benefit everyone in that society.

EXAMPLE American style capitalistic program for college: If you pay (average) $20,000 annually for four years of college, that will total $80,000 + interest for student loans. The interest you would owe could easily total or exceed the $80,000 you originally borrowed, which means your degree could cost in excess of $100,000.

EXAMPLE European style social program for college: Your college classes are paid for through government taxes. When you graduate from that college and begin your career, you also start paying an extra tax for fellow citizens to attend college.

Question - You might be thinking how is that fair? If you’re no longer attending college, why would you want to help everyone else pay for their college degree?

Answer - Every working citizen pays a tax that is equivalent to say, $20 monthly. If you work for 40 years and then retire, you will have paid $9,600 into the Social college program. So you could say that your degree ends up costing only $9,600. When everyone pools their money together and the program is non-profit, the price goes down tremendously. This allows you to keep more of your hard earned cash!

Health care is another example: If your employer does not provide health insurance, you must purchase a policy independently. The cost will be thousands of dollars annually, in addition to deductible and co-pays.

In Holland, an individual will pay around $35 monthly, period. Everyone pays into the system and this helps reduce the price for everyone, so they get to keep more of their hard earned cash.

In the United States we are told and frequently reminded that anything run by the government is bad and that everything should be operated by for-profit companies. Of course, with for-profit entities the cost to the consumer is much higher because they have corporate executives who expect compensation packages of tens of millions of dollars and shareholders who expect to be paid dividends, and so on.

This (and more) pushes up the price of everything, with much more money going to the already rich and powerful, which in turn, leaves the middle class with less spending money and creates greater class separation.

This economic framework makes it much more difficult for average Joes to ”lift themselves up by their bootstraps” and raise themselves to a higher economic standing.

So next time you hear the word “socialism” and “spreading the wealth” in the same breath, understand that this is a serious misconception.

Social programs require tax money and your taxes may be higher. But as you can see everyone benefits because other costs go down and, in the long run, you get to keep more of your hard earned cash!

Democratic Socialism does NOT mean taking from the rich and giving to the poor. It works to benefit everyone so the rich can no longer take advantage of the poor and middle class.

There is a misconception spread by conservatives that lower taxes will lower individual costs. By spreading this misconception, the rich pay less tax, the middle class pay more while social services, that benefit everyone, get cut. The rich get richer while the poor and middle class have less money and less services. What is that called? It is called 'trickle down economy' and time and time again it has been proven not to work.