Source: NPR via Ars Technica

I spent five hours on the phone last night calling voters in Ohio to organize and work against the passage of SB 5 which would strip public service employees of their rights collective bargaining. Tucked into SB 5 is this language:

Sec. 3101.01 of S.B. 5: … A marriage may only be entered into by one man and one woman. Any marriage between persons of the same sex is against the strong public policy of this state. Any marriage between persons of the same sex shall have no legal force or effect in this state and, if attempted to be entered into in this state, is void ab initio and shall not be recognized by this state. The recognition or extension by the state of the specific statutory benefits of a legal marriage to non-marital relationships between persons of the same sex or different sexes is against the strong public policy of this state. Any public act, record or judicial proceeding of this state, as defined in section 9.82 of the Revised Code, that extends the specific statutory benefits of legal marriage to non-marital relationships between persons of the same sex or different sexes is void.

Inside Walker’s Wisconsin “Budget Repair Bill” is language that would, advocates say, “… hand Governor Walker and his administration broad powers to rewrite the state’s public health programs, including BadgerCare and even SeniorCare, with virtually no public input.

Under the bill, proposed changes to the programs would need to be reviewed only by the Legislature’s Republican-controlled budget committee, a significant shortcut compared to the normal legislative process and public vetting required.
Walker’s Department of Health Services could unilaterally change state laws dealing with the programs, which affect more than a million state residents from infants to the elderly and include a spectrum of BadgerCare plans, FamilyCare, and SeniorCare.

Last weekend several public health advocates were reeling at the magnitude and the speed of the proposed changes and at what they signify for the state’s BadgerCare system, which only a year ago was touted nationally as a model for how to increase health coverage for the poor and middle class.”

Read more at:   http://host.madison.com/ct/news/local/health_med_fit/vital_signs/article_979fd798-385c-11e0-b233-001cc4c03286.html

These budget battles being pushed by the GOP across the Mid-West are thinly veiled assaults on public sector unions, women, gays, and the poor. Get ready for the coming battles.

Filling in for that other vast repository of intellect, Sean Hannity, the other night, Carlson asserted, “as a Christian,” that Michael Vick should have been executed for his crimes related to the dog fighting ring he operated in Virginia.

I’m an animal lover. I’ve had dogs and cats for almost all of my live and I know the gut wrenching sorrow for the loss that inevitably comes when they pass on. I have no apologies for Vick or his actions which caused him to be convicted and incarcerated. He broke the law, lied about it and was punished. He paid his societal debt and now has the opportunity to move on with his life.

Living in the “Inner city” of early 1990′s Washington, DC, (though I currently live in the same house I would no longer describe it as “inner city”), I was unfortunately able to experience first hand the “culture” of dogfighting.

Pit bulls (a generic term, to be sure), seemed to be the breed of choice of many of the young and not so young folks in the ‘hood. My next door neighbor, Mike, was a young cop whose pet was a rescued pit bull named Joshua, the most mild mannered good natured dog you’d ever want to meet. However, I was always very wary around the dog – the reputation of the breed notwithstanding.
One afternoon my neighbor and I were sitting on his steps with Joshua when a guy with a pit walked up and engaged in conversation. After a short while he asked, “Do you want let these guys go at it for a bit?” My neighbor said, “No, I don’t fight my dog.” The guy asked, “Why not?”

“Because I love my dog.”

That was it. The guy walked away clearly confused.

In early 2003 my wife took our dog out for his morning “constitutional” but within a couple of minutes I heard this horrible screaming and yelping outside. I immediately ran out to see a woman hustling away around the corner while my wife and dog (a dachshund) were sprawled, battered, bruised and bleeding on the sidewalk.

My wife, who only had superficial injuries, and I took our punctured and bleeding pet to the vet and then stopped at the local precinct to report the attack and file a complaint. However, the police were not interested in taking our complaint and wanted to know why we hadn’t called the police earlier. I raised some noise but the culprit was never apprehended. It turns out the woman saw my wife walking the dog and loosed her dog off its leash and the dog responded according to its training and conditioning. It attacked.

The perspective that moved that woman to commit such a heinous act may be endemic in the dog fighting culture… a culture that Vick evidently embraced during his formative years.
Unlike the characters in Jack London’s “White Fang” Vick was brought to justice for his actions. He went to prison, forfeited a tremendous sum of money and lost two years of his athletic prime; a fitting and proper sentence. However, after paying his debt to society why should a person like Carlson with an undeserved platform for influence be clamoring for more punishment including preventing him from making a living in his chosen profession and calling for his execution?

I believe in second chances and Vick seems bent on embracing his opportunity. This is not a position I come to recently, I wrote an article supporting second chances for offenders nearly ten years ago. It doesn’t matter if that person regains the right to vote, gain employment or qualify for the Pro Bowl.

I knew the answer but I didn’t start this blog to be another partisan ranter, I started to help my writing chops as I entered grad school for Public Communication. I should have graduated by now but I still haven’t submitted a thesis for as I tell people, “life got in the way.” In September 2008, my mother-in-law’s health declined so rapidly we took her out of her assisted living facility. We thought it best she pass away among family. Her doctors told us she had at most three months so we gathered the children and grandchildren home to say good bye to grandma… she passed February 1, 2010.

But it was right about August ’09 that I truly began to feel totally burnt out. By that time the health care reform debate was in full froth and ugliness ruled the day. My thesis would not be ready by the end of my studies and I would not be able to submit it until December.

What got in my way wasn’t “life” so much as “lack of passion.” When I gave up my anger I believe I lost my passion for writing.

What was fueling my anger? The right-wing of the nation’s politics. Don’t get me wrong, the far-left fringe drive me nuts, too! The knuckleheads in Black Bloc always take the spotlight off the protest and turn it on to themselves.

What really irks me is the fact that the nation seems ot have lost sight of what all this is supposed to be mean. Listening to my Dad and his buds while I was growing up taught me a very valuable lesson. These men had actually lived the majority of their lives under the specter of racism and Jim Crow and nearly all were WWII veterans. To a man they were patriots. They had taken the worse this nation could dish out to them and in return they gave their blood and bodies to save the country and the world and to demonstrate their respect for self and love of country.

They voted in elections, paid their taxes and wondered what else white folks wanted from them. The answer to that question didn’t matter, these black, negro and colored men considered themselves above all to be Americans.

So where are the American patriots today? The Tea Party? Oh yeah, what do they stand for? Give me mine and the hell with everyone else. Forget racism that’s much too narrow a strait to sail through. No, today’s American doesn’t give a damn unless one question is answered first above all else; “What’s in it for me?”

“He promised us everything, saying he would turn the country around, and he did nothing the first year,” Peggy says. “He piddled around when he had 60 votes. He could have pushed through the health care bill but spent months haggling on it because he wanted to bring some Republicans on board. He was trying too hard to compromise when he didn’t need the Republicans and they were never going to like him. Any idiot could see that.”

Yep, that is some fantastic logic. Because he campaigned on changing the culture and getting elected representatives to work together, Independents are p.o.’d that he didn’t grind the GOP into the dust, the way the GOP would have done if roles were reversed. So because he tried to live up to his campaign ideals he must be neutered for not playing business as usual. Meanwhile the GOP are calling him the cruelest dictator since Pol Pot.

During the 2008 campaign, my Mom said to me, “If Obama walked on water they would accuse him of destroying the recreational boating industry!”

I’ve been officially unemployed since 2006, when the company I worked for was bought out by another who promptly moved the HQ and operations to Texas. Since then I have cobbled together different free-lance gigs, utilized my tour guide license to put together a “transportainment” business, (limousine rides combined with capital city tours), provided end of days hospice care for my mother-in-law, rented out her house and I went to grad school. Unfortunately none of these endeavors yielded healthcare coverage.

My wife has multiple sclerosis. ‘Nuff said about my personal reasons for supporting Obama.

So yeah, I voted for Obama. Volunteered, raised money and went door to door to help get out the vote. I too was disappointed with the way the health-care reform action took place, but as a student of history I knew FDR had to scrap universal health-care in order to get the New Deal implemented. I also knew that one of the chief criticisms of FDR was that he tried to “pack the supreme court.” In mentioning that fact about FDR no one ever explains why. Every thing FDR rammed through Congress to help the American people was determined to be “unconstitutional” by the ideologically conservative SCOTUS of the time. FDR made the threat to fundamentally alter the court and they laid off killing his programs. However, those actions had the effect of “putting the brakes” on the economic recovery of the mid 1930s. Depending on one’s point of view, FDR’s programs were saved by the advent of WWII.

Last summer a GOP memo authored by Alex Castellanos and others declared the GOP’s strategy to combat Obama would be to “tap the breaks” to slow down his “socialist” agenda. In other words, every initiative no matter how big or small was to be met by the Republicans with a resounding “Hell no!”

How does one “change the culture” of Washington if the partners in that endeavor essentially stick their fingers in their ears and say, “Lalalalalalala!” to everything?

Many of us on the left wondered why he didn’t just use his majority to power through his agenda? Why waste so much time trying to get the GOP to come along and try and save the nation’s standing in the world?  My question was, “How would not seeking partnership to solve the country’s ills change the culture of DC?”

Simply put, the President was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t.

So he put the effort and energy into pushing the first major changes to the nation’s healthcare system since Medicare. Folks should remember that the effort to pass Medicare in the 60s was met with EXACTLY the same response from the GOP as the 2009 effort.

Screams of “socialism, socialized medicine, government takeover, creeping totalitarianism” met the Democrats. In 2009, Republican senators declared that stopping healthcare would be Obama’s “Waterloo.”  Where is the “bi-partisanship” in that?

The much vilified “stimulus bill” was fought tooth and nail and in an effort to accommodate the detractors on the right side of the aisle was watered-down. Now economists agree the stimulus wasn’t big enough. Ya think?

We now hear from the right that Obama “promised less than 8% unemployment” by now. So why is the entity that did everything it could to prevent an initiative in the first place now screaming that the President hasn’t done enough?

This nation is getting ready to reward the party that dug us into this hole and then resisted any and all efforts to get out of the hole with the opportunity to finish the job started by Ronald Reagan and nearly completed by President W. And that is the total inversion of the idea of American Exceptionalism, subversion of the American Dream and the total looting of the US Treasury. Over the last thirty years there has been a redistribution of the nation’s wealth UPWARD, and yet the Right continues to scream about Class Warfare. The Class War is over folks and the Ultra Rich have won.

These are the folks who constantly decry the role of government and insist that government is the problem and not the solution to anything as per the orthodoxy of Ronald Reagan. Yet it was the US Government that defeated the Axis in global conflict, re-built the economies of Europe and Japan and placed astronauts on the moon, so why is it that Government is the worst hobble to the US? Because the less government the less PROTECTION for the American people.

The nation knew in 2008 that we deserved better and voted accordingly and now thanks to superior PR tactics and corporate conglomerate media assistance, The GOP once again proves the old canard usually attributed to H.L. Mencken that Americans get the government they deserve. I don’t know if Mencken actually said that, I do know he said, “I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.” The GOP agrees.

They create a mess, the Dems clean it up and the country gives power back to the GOP and as Reagan famously said, “There you go again!”

I think Reagan’s buddy and one of my favorite song stylists ever, put it best. Click here to check out Sinatra.

Nearly one quarter of the American people believe President Obama is Muslim and the Main Stream Media are tearing the collective shirts and wondering how this could this happen? How could such an idea take root?

The idea has become so pervasive because the conservative noise machine is once again being aided and abetted by the so-called Main Stream Media. Fox News and the cadre of right wing bloggers and pundits report lies and rumors as if they are facts and then the “major” news organizations give credence to the lies and fabrications by simply repeating them as if they carry equal weight with the truth.

What makes this another “Batshit Crazy” moment for America is that just two years ago the same segment of the electorate that think Obama is Muslim were upset because they swore he was a disciple of a black Baptist preacher who was seen on a seemingly endless loop tape screaming, “God damn America!” So what is he?

A Christian follower of a preacher who teaches “Black Liberation theology,” or a Muslim sleeper terrorist raised in Indonesian madrassas?

If you can’t stand him or the fact that he’s the black man in the white house then he can be anything you want him to be… except the duly elected President of the United States.

All the folks who were screaming “I want my country back!” last August during the “Summer of Tea Party Madness” overlook the fact Obama defeated John McCain by nearly 9 million votes. These are also the same folks who jeered “Sore Loserman!” when Al Gore won the popular vote but lost the contested recount in court. The Supreme Court, that is, who by the way, realized their decision in Bush v. Gore was so far out on a judicial limb, they declared the case could not be used for precedent in the future.

What this whole “Obama is a Muslim” thing is the continuing and effective effort to delegitimize the Obama presidency. The Right Wing blogosphere and the Conservative Talk Radio Corps., are constantly battering their followers with assertions that Obama is: racist, anti-American, inept, elitist, and my newest favorite, stupid.

What’s that, you say?  The guy graduates Columbia U and Harvard Law and yet he is stupid? He was President of the Harvard Law Review and he is stupid? You ask that question and the answer you get is he and his wife, Michelle, are the beneficiaries of affirmative action. They may have graduated from prestigious schools, rapidly found success in business, academia and politics… but not on their merits.

This is the America that will gather with Glenn Beck at the National Mall on August 28, 2010, (the 47th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s seminal, “I Have a Dream” speech) to denounce and attempt to derail the agenda of the President of the United States whose very being is the essence of King’s sentiments from that day in 1963. They will protest a black man who is the embodiment of the “American Dream” touched on by Dr. King when said:

“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

The 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Justice, is rightfully considered one of the watershed moments in American History… so how come black folks and others of good conscience aren’t calling on the “americans” who will descend on the mall to call off the event or “hold it someplace else?”

Because in spite of EVERYTHING, we believe in the social experiment that is the United States of America.

I just wish the folks who are protesting the construction of a community/worship center two city blocks away from the World Trade Center site would believe in the idea of America, too.

But then again, if these good, hardworking real Americans weren’t batshit crazy…

disclaimer: Normally I would post the links to my examples but the hell with that! Those guys have enough of an audience. I don’t have to introduce them to mine… even if it is only friends and family!

When WWII broke out in December 1941, FDR succumbed to “popular opinion”and Japanese residents of the west coast were rounded up and placed in internment camps for the duration of the war. Of the over 120,000 people of Japanese descent who were interred, more than two-thirds of them were Nisei or native born Americans.

Post-WWII Americans really lost their minds and fell prey to another Red Scare and no one in the nation was safe, except maybe J. Edgar Hoover. Sen. Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin, led the charge to root out the communist evil-doers who had infiltrated and infected every segment of American society from Hollywood to the US military. After a while the nation realized the guy they were blindly following with their torches and pitchforks was lying out his ass and was most likely batshit crazy.

And so it went for the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty first… and we haven’t touched on Jim Crow, race riots, or Freedom Fries!

Have we forgotten how we lost our minds during the anthrax scare? The venerable socialite, Sally Quinn, wrote in the Washington Post of her efforts to secure gas masks for her family and servant staff. Then in February 2003, a government official counseled the nation to prepare an emergency home kit that would include materials to seal a room in your home and “shelter in place” in case of  biological, chemical or radiological attack. Once again, Americans went batshit crazy!

Later that week I decided I wanted to spruce up my office with framed covers of the magazine that employed me at the time. On my lunch break I went to the Dollar Store to pick up some picture frames. While I was there I saw a couple of older gents and their spouses in line at the check out. They had rolls of plastic sheeting and duct tape… along with cashews and beer nuts. I asked, “Homeland Security got you spooked?”

“No! It’s those Ay-rabs who are just determined to destroy our freedom!”

“Well,” I said, “be safe.” As I carted my picture frames out to my car I thought, “They’re afraid of terrorist attack so they’re buying duct tape and plastic in the Dollar Store.”

Yep, we know how to do crazy.

So let’s head down to lower Manhattan where if you listen to the loudest pundits and talking heads you would believe that “radical islam” was erecting a ten story Mega Mosque on Ground Zero, the site of the destroyed World Trade Center. Part of the reason for this craziness over a property owner deciding to build according to zoning regulations and approval from the city authorities is the GOP and the Right wing need a wedge issue for the upcoming mid-term elections and the so-called Main Stream Media happily obliges by repeating their talking points (no matter how stupid – “death panels” anyone?) lending legitimacy to their fear mongering. In today’s Washington Post Michelle Boorstein examines the growing influence of conservative pundits on this issue and by way of her headline tacitly endorses their position by referring to the structure in question as the “Ground Zero Mosque.”

What the GOP has accomplished is something George W. Bush once decried, and that is the conflation of the 9/11 attackers, (predominantly Saudi arabs) and their radical form of Islam, with the totality of the Islamic world. Everyone who bows to the east at the appropriate intervals during the day is a potential suicide-bomber!

Naturally, Americans who tend to go totally batshit when faced with real or imagined threats are willing to go all in on the idea that building the house of worship two blocks away in a yet to be redeveloped area of lower Manhattan is somehow encroaching on the “hallowed ground” of the World Trade Center site. Some how I see the hallowed ground at the Ground Zero site to be  the boundaries of the great plaza itself, the immediate footprint of the World Trade Center. Otherwise is the strip joint across the street on “hallowed ground?”

Sarah Palin tweeted:    We all know that they have the right to do it, but should they? This is not above your pay grade.7:04 PM Aug 14th via web

Once again conservatives and their familiars have shown themselves to be hypocrites of the first order. Where was this outrage when Ronald Reagan, (SFX: heavenly choir “AAAAHHHHH!”), opened his campaign for President in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the very town where three young civil rights workers were abducted, murdered and buried in an earthen dam by the local police and the Ku Klux Klan?

One hundred years from now Americans are going to look back at this time and I wonder if they will think, “Those folks upheld the Constitution and demonstrated the qualities that symbolize the very essence of the great American experiment!” More than likely the folks in the future will think, “Those people were batshit crazy!”

Oh well, since I was last here I’ve read over twenty books (fiction and non, mostly non!) and posted a whole lotta mess on Facebook. Mostly tunes I like that I have culled from YouTube.

OK. I told myself I would write 120 words and I’m already past that without counting! So maybe I am indeed back to doing what I love most… well, not really! But I really love writing and telling stories and looking at current events from a slightly skewed perspective.

I loved those songs and I loved those times and I love being here. It’s been a long time.

I won’t be gone again any time soon. A lot has happened and I wanna talk about it with friends and strangers alike… another song from the 70s. “friends and strangers” by Ronnie Laws.

Folks, I am back in the land of the living even though this is basically a stream of consciousness cop-out (I said I was going to post tonight so I damn well better do) it is creative output for the first time in a long time.

This spring I am going to complete my thesis which would not have been as timely as I had claimed if completed in spring 2009. It may actually carry more weight now. Be that as it may, I will be posting here on an extremely regular basis while completing the paper.

That could be a real cool thing to do, or it could turn out to be pretty fucking dumb. Either way, that’s the way it is going to be.