Daddy, What Did YOU Do During The Republican War On America?

A wooden shack overlooking a serene lake with children playing on the porch.  The year is 2020.  The War is ten years gone by then.  My daughters Sherry Rose and Sara Dorri have found an oddly shaped leaf and are using it to play with their kitten.  I'm sitting at my workdesk at a window overlooking the porch and the lake, contently looking away from my third non-fiction work, a history of Jamaica in the 20th Century.  I'd been years working on it, so there's no rush to finish.  I hear tinkering from the kitchen: my Zoroastrian wife Jehanara whom I met during the War is stirring up her tea for the afternoon.
I sense movement nearby, and a cough.  I turn to face my oldest child, my son Joshua Abraham Lawrence Spurlock - named for Emperor of the United States Joshua Abraham Norton, General Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain of the 20th Maine, and Michael Spurlock who was the first ever to return a touchdown kickoff for the Tampa Bay Bucs - standing a few feet away, history textbook in hand.  It had to be something about his school homework.  "Got a question, son?"
"Yeah, dad, I do."  He's got his mother's eye color, as close to turquoise as you can get.  Pity he inherited my hair: that double crown on the back of his head is making it burst out in all the wrong directions.  "We're studying up on recent events, things in the news, and comparing them to, you know, stuff that happened years ago."
"Okay, what's the comparison you're working with then?"
"Well, I got an assignment on this guy here."  Josh holds up a printed sheet of a web article: some ex-politician up for a parole hearing and the outrage it's sparking on the Chrome Kos site sponsored by the latest winter blockbuster film Scott Pilgrim Vs. The Spiders From Mars.
I lean in to take a closer look.  "Oh, yeah.  Him.  You had questions about that guy?"
"Well, I started glancing through the school book, and I just noticed that well," Josh shrugged.  "that all this stuff that guy did, all the lying and staged outrage and the violence in the streets he stirred up, and well, this all happened just ten years ago."
"Before you were born, true enough."  I smiled and reached over to tap my son on the shoulder.  "I was like you at your age.  I was pretty much born after all the crazy stuff from the Sixties."
"Well, I was just kinda wondering, you know?"  Josh shrugged again.  "It's just... you were alive then, right?"
"Oh.  Yeah."  I nod with solemn and wistful intent.  "I was there."
"I was just wondering, though.  What did YOU do during the Republican War on America?"

--
Well I'm sitting here right now, in the year 2010, wondering just what I'll have to answer to my boy when the time comes, when he asks me that question: What did I do when the Republicans openly declared War on America?
Because that's pretty much what the Republican Party has done:

• The Republicans want to repeal the 17th Amendment and TAKE AWAY the voters right to directly elect Senators.  The Republicans want to give that power back to state legislatures that had proved less than 100 years ago to be too corrupt and too deadlocked to have such powers.
• The Republicans want to remove the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment, specifically the part about birth - being born in the United States or in designated territories such as overseas military bases - as the prime determinant of being an American citizen.  The Republicans want to go after what they call "anchor babies" as part of their War On Illegals, even though there's little evidence that anchor babies work as a loophole in our immigration system (it'd be far easier for illegals to marry an American and get a Green Card, for one): but by going after the Citizenship Clause the Republicans are also going after ANY legal citizen they'd want, and considering the list of peoples and groups that Republicans hate, that's pretty much EVERYONE who's not a Republican.
• The Republicans want to deny Muslims in this country from not only building a community center anywhere near the Ground Zero site of where the World Trade Towers stood, but are now openly going after any Muslim mosque being built ANYWHERE in the United States.  The Republicans want to go after what they fear are "extremist Muslims" but are in fact going after EVERY Muslim, even the political and socially moderate Muslims who AREN'T terrorists.  And this is pretty much part of their decades-long war to make the United States a God-Fearing Bible-Thumping Evangelical State.  The Republicans have honestly declared war on everyone else's right to Worship As They See Fit.
• The Republicans want to go after Blacks, and any organization associated with Blacks.  The Republicans also want to go after Hispanics, especially since you can't tell which Hispanic's an Illegal and which was born in East L.A.  And East L.A.'s not part of Republican America anywho, so why bother eh?  The Republicans also want to go after Homosexuals, because they're gaying up our military and our wedding rituals.  The Republicans also want to go after teachers, professors, anyone with a background in education.  The Republicans also want to go after anyone suggesting that we, you know, allow the Bush tax cuts to expire as scheduled in order to help fight the Republican-created deficit because ZOMG THAT'S SOCIALIST TALK.  The Republicans also want to go after jurors who don't perform to their liking.
• Pretty much, if you're not Caucasian and not making over $250,000 a year with membership to exclusive golf clubs, the Republicans are at war with you.

Welcome to the Republican Reality: where The Wingnuts On FOX News are agitating unrest claiming everyone else is destroying America while their Republican buddies in government are blocking financial aid, financial reforms, jobs bills, and God knows everything else we need to do to fix America that's clearly falling apart.

So... what am I doing during this Republican War On America?
For starters, I'm gonna do everything in my power to keep Republicans out of office.  I'm not voting for a single one at any level.  Period.  Even if there are sensible Republicans on the ballot who would otherwise be reasonable choices, not now.  Not for the next ten generations the way that party is behaving.  The whole party has to lose now just to slap some goddamn sense into them.
I'm also looking to put in volunteer hours with Crist's Senate campaign.  He's Independent now, so I'm not violating the No-Republicans rule I set earlier.  Need to call the campaign HQ about anything I can do in person: right now they're pretty much just asking for money, the one thing an unemployed guy like me can't really afford to do.
I'm also doing what I can to get Democrats to get out and vote this midterms.  THIS IS THE BIGGEST PROBLEM: Midterm elections are smaller in turnout numbers (because most people only care to vote for the Big One: The Presidency) and it all depends on the enthusiasms of the party bases.  Right now, the Republicans are all stirred up thanks to the Teabagger crowds: The Democrats are all sniping among each other to the point that their voters are all "why bother?"  Well, Democrats, here's WHY you should bother: THERE ARE MORE REGISTERED DEMOCRATS RIGHT NOW THAN REGISTERED REPUBLICANS, YOU IDIOTS.  Here in Florida alone there's 4 million plus Democrats and 3 million plus Republicans: you've got a 900,000 ballot head start on the GOP!  If every voter turned out, Democrats ought to win every non-gerrrymandered district at the state and federal level they can!  And for the Republicans to win, they'd need more than half of the 2 million Independent/Third Party voters, which is unlikely... even moreso with the Republicans going so far extreme Right on the charts that they have to be alienating too many moderate and centrist Indys.  Do you get that, Democrats?  All you have to do is hew along Center-Left policies, secure moderate Indy voters alongside your Left wingers, and YOU.  CAN.  STOP.  The DAMN REPUBLICANS.  From retaking Congress this midterms.
And why should you do everything in your powers to stop the Republicans, O foolish Dems?  Because I SWEAR to you on Day One of a GOP-led Congress: You will have the Republicans flat-out impeaching Obama, not even waiting the traditional few months or years of investigating him.  They'll just flat-out impeach using the flimsiest forged evidence of a "Kenyan Birth Certificate" they can find.  And it won't matter if they get the two-thirds vote necessary in the Senate to confirm the impeachment: they'll just refile again and again and again, anything to hamper harass and delay Obama's efforts to do his damn job.
And that's just the most obvious thing they'll do.  Having campaigned on so many other wingnut issues to win elections, the Republicans of 2011 are gonna have to live up to their promises: that means for Starters, a draconian illegal immigration bill designed to alienate every Hispanic demographic across the nation (even the Cubans, who normally align with the party that's most opposed to Castro).
That also means a sudden re-interest in overturning Roe v. Wade on the abortion front, something the Republicans refused to do when they had the chance back in 2001-2006, and never mind the fact that solid majorities of Americans don't even consider abortion a Top Ten priority anymore (gee, you'd think unemployment, a shaky economy, a shattering housing and mortgage industry, failing schools, and personal debt bankruptcies would be higher priorities).
And other thing: the Republican Congress will push for a hard tax cut budget that would actually make our deficits worse, but hell anything for a tax cut right?  Especially since the Republicans have pledged to kill Obama's HCR program.  And especially at a time when so many unemployed people are going to be on so many much-needed social programs threatened by Congress' threat of hatchet cuts to the budget to justify those tax cuts.  And if Obama threatens a veto of their budget?  The Republicans can shut down government altogether, like they did in 1995-1996.  Like THAT was fun for everyone involved back when the economy was actually WORKING...
That also means pursuing a Bomb Iran foreign policy platform that would only succeed in thrilling the neocons and pissing off 99 percent of the rest of the planet.  But hey, anything for our friends in Israel who think they've got a "Get Out Of Jail Free" Card that allows them to do whatever they want against their Middle East neighbors... and against their European Allies' interests...  Gee, a constant moving war in the Middle East!  Thanks, neocons!
Oh.  And about ten other things that ought to scare the CRAP out of Democrats enough to GET YOU IDIOTS TO THE GODDAMN VOTING BOOTHS this November.  WAKE. THE FUCK. UP, DEMS!
Sheesh.  This, future son of mine, is what I'm doing during the Republican War On America.  Trying to get everyone else to wake up to the fact there IS a war going on.  And the sane people are losing.

Driving To Kuwait

It is, of course, a big event when the last official US troops of the Second Iraq War drive out late at night down a long dusty road to the light up ahead.

It is also a matter of course that the United States HASN'T left Iraq altogether.  50,000 non-combat troops and support personnel remain in Iraq to assist in the transition to a self-governed state.  By no means is American commitment to Iraq over.

And the damage done by this Second Iraq War - thousands of Iraqi civilians tortured and killed, hundreds of American and Allied troops killed and wounded, thousands more scarred by war - won't fully be tallied for another decade.  If we're lucky.

The best we can hope is that with the United States officially ending their combat mission in Iraq, that some calm and common sense will pass among the Muslim and Arab peoples and reduce the Anti-American sentiments that allow Al Qaeda and their terrorist ilk to thrive.

If only we could bring some calm and common sense to the American shores and stop this goddamn crazy shit from consuming our time and efforts at home.  Damn it all...

Before it gets too late, yet again a Woodstock anniversary

Seriously.  Somebody was high when they invited Sha Na Na:



They played right before Jimi Hendrix too.

OT: just ordered new business cards

Wanted to add the CompTIA (r) A+ Certified logo, also to update to the new email address to be more... professional.

Now... HIRE ME!

When Conservatives Attack: Their Amendment Ideas and How They Can Destroy America

One of the advantages of writing a barely-read blog is I get to go all out and toss some crazy amendment ideas into the global blogging forum: Hey, here' an idea for an Amendment, No More Lying!  Let's pass an amendment stating the President Is NOT Above The Law!  Wheeee, so much fun to be had.

But then the "professional" political hacks decide to get into the Crazy Amendment Idea arena, and it doesn't seem so fun anymore.

The media is all atwitter at the moment about Sarah Palin eye-rolling at a teacher, sorry, the media is all atwitter at the moment about Robert Gibbs dissing tree-hugging hippie leftists, whoops, the media is all atwitter about more of the Republican Party leadership coming out in favor of amending or outright repealing the 14th Amendment of the United States.

In particular, the Far Right wing of the GOP wants to get rid of the definition of citizenship.  Their public reason for doing so?  Getting rid of "anchor babies," the children that are born in our borders to pregnant illegal immigrants who then get to stay in order to raise said anchor babies as a means of circumventing the legalization process.  (Even though there is little evidence that "anchor babies" work as a tactic for illegals, and there's little evidence of a health care crisis because of it.) The right wingnuts got to this solution as yet another step in their ongoing war against Illegals in the United States, a complex and anger-fueled debate that has gone a long way toward driving Hispanic voters (the ones most directly affected by the anti-Immigrant outrage) into the arms of the Democratic Party.

There are a ton of problems with the current wingnut thinking on doing away with the Citizenship provisions of the 14th.  First: amending anything in the Constitution is a huge, mind-boggling and near-impossible attempt.  It takes two-thirds votes in both Houses of Congress and then two-thirds of all states (current 38 states) to amend (the other process - using national conventions - is so fraught with peril that it's only been used once to pass the 21st Amendment to repeal Prohibition and overturn the 18th Amendment).  In some respects, it's rather harmless to have the Far Right latch onto the amendment process as a means of winning their argument as it's next to impossible to achieve: what it DOES do, however, is build up the frustration of the Far Right to where they can and will lash out in other ways...

The second problem?  If they actually do make a serious attempt at removing the Citizenship Clause...

See, one of the ongoing issues with the crazed Far Right Wingnut crowd is how... emphatic they are about going after those they oppose.  Anyone who makes the Republican Party looks bad gets personally demolished by the next FOX Not-News cycle.  Anyone questioning the efforts of Republicans to lower taxes for the super-rich and deregulate every industry to the point that nothing will be safe or reliable will get demonized as SOCIALIST ZOMG.  And above all, the best way they can dismiss, ignore or invalidate anyone that wants to debate them?  All they have to do is point a finger and accuse their opponents of being "Un-American."

What could happen then in a world where Citizenship is not an automatic given based on birth but instead vulnerable to the whims and interests of whichever political party is in charge of Congress, the White House, and the Courts?  Nowadays the Republicans can call you "Un-American" and that would be just another insult.  If the 14th Amendment were gone... A Republican With Authority can call you "Un-American" and mean it... which would also mean no rights under the law, no protection from immediate arrest, no Habeus, no home, no life...  This is the true danger of what the Republicans are proposing to do by getting rid of the 14th Amendment.  They claim it'll be to get rid of unwanted Illegals... but also consider that the Republicans have no love of Muslims right now, and not much love for Blacks, and very little love for Liberals... and so on, and more, and also...  Repeal the 14th Amendment and NO ONE would be safe from the charge of being "Un-American."

Like I mentioned earlier, there's actual little threat to what the Republicans are trying to do against the 14th Amendment: the rules are stacked too well against any amending purge.  And even if they do get far enough to make even a half-hearted attempt?  The reaction from EVERY conceivable minority group - Blacks, Hispanics (especially the legals, the ones born here even five or six generations worth of family ties to this country would be threatened by this), Chinese and Japanese and other Asians, Indians and Pakistanis and Afghans and Egyptians and Algerians and Muslims, even Jews and Catholics and Hindus and Buddhists - will rise up to stop it (Native American tribes are protected under other laws, but even they could be affected by this).  And that's not even including the Euro-descended Caucasian Moderates and Liberals who will rise up as they too could get purged from the citizenship rolls just for the way they vote and think.  The only real scary thought is that the Republicans in power now are willing to even consider this...

After nearly a week of the crazy talk over getting rid of the 14th, saner heads are getting their say on the matter, most eloquently done via this Washington Monthly article:

Several former Bush administration officials, who, for all of their faults, weren't necessarily wrong about immigration policy, believe their party is making a big mistake.

[I]n recent days, former aides to both Vice President Dick Cheney and President George W. Bush, who pushed for comprehensive immigration reform, have condemned the calls by top Republicans to end birthright citizenship.
Cesar Conda, who served as domestic policy adviser to Cheney, has called such proposals "offensive." Mark McKinnon, who served as media adviser in Bush's two presidential campaigns, said Republicans risk losing their "rightful claim" to the 14th Amendment if they continue to "demagogue" the issue.
"The 14th Amendment is a great legacy of the Republican party. It is a shame and an embarrassment that the GOP now wants to amend it for starkly political reasons," McKinnon told POLITICO. "Initially Republicans rallied around the amendment to welcome more citizens to this country. Now it is being used to drive people away."

Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson, Bush's former chief speechwriter, added on ABC over the weekend, "That is the wisdom of the authors of the 14th Amendment: They essentially wanted to take this very difficult issue -- citizenship -- outside of the political realm. They wanted to take an objective standard, birth, instead of a subjective standard, which is the majorities at the time. I think that's a much better way to deal with an issue like this."

And that, sad to say, is coming from former Republicans leaders who have little in the way of directly affecting internal and external party dynamics.  But here lies the real serious problem: The current Republican leadership - made up by the likes of Palin, Gingrich, the House and Senate leaderships, primary challengers across the nation- is crazy.  And their interpretation of what the Constitution should read has been ill-informed, poorly thought out, and doomed with unintended consequences that would make things worse.

The 14th Amendment isn't the only part of the Constitution under attack by the Republicans.  They've been after the 17th Amendment - the direct election of US Senators - as well.  The wingnuts, obsessed with the idea of States' Rights, got it into their collective head that repealing the 17th Amendment will give more power back to the states.  Biggest problem with that?  It completely takes away a right now given to the individual voters themselves, which violates the Far Right's tenet of "giving the people more freedoms".  Which pretty much highlights how little the Far Right truly values an individual's rights.  The next biggest problem is that there's a very good reason the 17th Amendment passed: by the turn of the 20th Century the state legislatures in charge of placing Senators had become so corrupted by the practice that charges of bribery were rife, and some states got bogged down in the selection process to where one or BOTH Senate seats were vacant for years at a time (Delaware had NO sitting Senators between 1903 to 1905).  The Far Right's belief that repealing the 17th Amendment is a good idea merely demonstrates their ignorance of American political history, and their disdain for the rights of voters...  (oh, and one other thing the Far Right Republicans might want to consider: Democrats currently control 28 state legislatures outright compared to 8 Republican-held.  And more states are leaning Democratic day by day.  Letting the Democratically-controlled states to choose their Senators could well give the Democrats a 68-seat majority.  Say good-bye to the filibuster and cloture tricks.  NOW do you think that's a good idea...?)

And that's not all.  After 8 years of ignoring the matter during the Bush Spend-For-All Tenure, the Republican Party is trotting out their old warhorse issue of The Balanced Budget Amendment!  ...which begs the question why didn't they push this Amendment idea more back in oh 2000 or 2003 or 2004 or 2006 when they had the chance, but noooooo guess we can't ask them that.

The problems with supporting a Balanced Budget?  None, if you're serious about it, and the Republicans ARE NOT.  Their Budget Amendment idea would require a two-third super-majority in both House and Senate to raise taxes without a similar requirement for lowering taxes.  Thing is, we've got a perfect example of that in California: and any sane observer of the budgeting mess that state has gone through the last 30 years will tell you that transplanting that to the FEDERAL level is a swell idea!  /sarcasm off

There are more sensible methods of balancing budgets, but they include raising taxes at some point to you know ACTUALLY PAY FOR THINGS.  By knee-capping the ability of Congress to adjust the tax rates (going up as well as going down!) all this Balanced Budget amendment would do is kill whatever is left of FDR's New Deal: the forcible cutting back or eliminating basically every social safety net and government oversight our nation NEEDED TO CREATE to compensate for the damage that GREED and corporate incompetence caused from the 1870s to the Great Depression.

These are the Amendments that the Far Right Wingnuts want to pass:

• Eliminate the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment (and get rid of everybody the wingnuts don't like)
• Eliminate the Voters' right to directly elect their US Senators (and have the state legislatures become even more corrupt than they are now)
• Eliminate the Federal Government's ability to raise taxes when there is no other way to maintain funding for things like oh the military, health care, social services, commerce and transportation, state funding for state-level services like roads, schools and child care (and basically end the United States as we know it)

And people want to vote these Republican psychopaths back into power?

(Slight Edit for grammar)

Job-Related Topic: updating emails

I've had it with all these resume reviewers telling me witty@wittylibrarian.com isn't professional enough.  Damn you and your dull colorless patterns!  Fine.  FINE!  I can now be reached at P.Warten@gmail.com.  Only serious human resource officers need apply.

Very OT: The font of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce

Just in case people want to make their own "Mad Men" fan blog.  The font used for office signage at SCDP is Akzidenz-Grotesk.  Not Helvetica or Arial.

It's be nice if HTML can handle True Type fonts.

You have been informed.

Also, Breitbart Delendus Est.

OT: No-Hitter

Just wanted to mention that my twin brother had tickets to Monday night's game between the Rays and the visiting Detroit Tigers.

Huge No-Hitter game.  First one in Rays history!

Congrats to Garza on the historic victory!

At what point will the Middle Class wake up and realize the Rich are killing them?

Via Balloon-Juice, an article posted on Yahoo! Finance by Michael Snyder:

...The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer at a staggering rate. Once upon a time, the United States had the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world, but now that is changing at a blinding pace.
So why are we witnessing such fundamental changes? Well, the globalism and "free trade" that our politicians and business leaders insisted would be so good for us have had some rather nasty side effects. It turns out that they didn't tell us that the "global economy" would mean that middle class American workers would eventually have to directly compete for jobs with people on the other side of the world where there is no minimum wage and very few regulations. The big global corporations have greatly benefited by exploiting third world labor pools over the last several decades, but middle class American workers have increasingly found things to be very tough.
Here are the statistics to prove it:
•    83 percent of all U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1 percent of the people.
•    61 percent of Americans "always or usually" live paycheck to paycheck, which was up from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.
•    66 percent of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans.
•    36 percent of Americans say that they don't contribute anything to retirement savings.
•    A staggering 43 percent of Americans have less than $10,000 saved up for retirement.
•    24 percent of American workers say that they have postponed their planned retirement age in the past year.
•    Over 1.4 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009, which represented a 32 percent increase over 2008.
•    Only the top 5 percent of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.
•    For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together.
•    In 1950, the ratio of the average executive's paycheck to the average worker's paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 to 500 to one.
•    As of 2007, the bottom 80 percent of American households held about 7% of the liquid financial assets.
•    The bottom 50 percent of income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth.
•    Average Wall Street bonuses for 2009 were up 17 percent when compared with 2008.
•    In the United States, the average federal worker now earns 60% MORE than the average worker in the private sector (NOTE: this tells me the private sector is worth dick when it comes to solving our nation's employment crisis).
•    The top 1 percent of U.S. households own nearly twice as much of America's corporate wealth as they did just 15 years ago.
•    In America today, the average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks (NOTE: I'm way over average at 82... maybe 85 weeks).
•    More than 40 percent of Americans who actually are employed are now working in service jobs, which are often very low paying.
•    For the first time in U.S. history, more than 40 million Americans are on food stamps, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that number will go up to 43 million Americans in 2011.
•    This is what American workers now must compete against: in China a garment worker makes approximately 86 cents an hour and in Cambodia a garment worker makes approximately 22 cents an hour.
•    Approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010 - the highest rate in 20 years.
•    Despite the financial crisis, the number of millionaires in the United States rose a whopping 16 percent to 7.8 million in 2009.
•    The top 10 percent of Americans now earn around 50 percent of our national income.


...The reality is that no matter how smart, how strong, how educated or how hard working American workers are, they just cannot compete with people who are desperate to put in 10 to 12 hour days at less than a dollar an hour on the other side of the world. After all, what corporation in their right mind is going to pay an American worker 10 times more (plus benefits) to do the same job?...
...So corporations are moving operations out of the U.S. at breathtaking speed. Since the U.S. government does not penalize them for doing so, there really is no incentive for them to stay.What has developed is a situation where the people at the top are doing quite well, while most Americans are finding it increasingly difficult to make it. There are now about six unemployed Americans for every new job opening in the United States, and the number of "chronically unemployed" is absolutely soaring. There simply are not nearly enough jobs for everyone.
Many of those who are able to get jobs are finding that they are making less money than they used to. In fact, an increasingly large percentage of Americans are working at low wage retail and service jobs.  But you can't raise a family on what you make flipping burgers at McDonald's or on what you bring in from greeting customers down at the local Wal-Mart.
The truth is that the middle class in America is dying -- and once it is gone it will be incredibly difficult to rebuild.

Snyder only points out half the problem: that middle-class quality American jobs are leaving and never coming back.  The other half of the problem is the income inequality: barely 1 to 5 percent of the entire American population is seeing any wage improvements and boost to standards of living, with the lower 95 percent (!) of the population stuck in a growing pool of debt and inability to pay for the good things in life... good things like a family home, food on the table, a car with working headlights and only one flat tire, you know those sort of things.  And that is caused by the fact there are no caps on CEO wages and bonuses: every structure of management shifts the money upward with very little sign of the companies' profits getting spread out among all employees.  That jump of CEO earnings being 500 times more than their workers' average earnings?  That can't be entirely explained away by cheaper overseas labor: part of it is from those cushy Golden Parachute packages that CEOs get for getting hired by the board to come in and shred everything until the company goes bankrupt.  No incentive to perform well, every incentive to squeeze as much money out of the company as quick as possible to the very few at top who would benefit...

There's a lot of things wrong in our country: the jobless crisis and CEO greed are at the top of the list.  And sad to say, there's nothing Congress wants to do about any of it.

This is where I normally say "we're fucked."  But also Breitbart Delendus Est.  Just because his noise and bullshit are distracting all Americans from the Truth: it's NOT about race, it IS about poverty.

Breitbart Delendus Est

What Andrew Breitbart did wrong:

1) He either edited - or received it already edited - a video of Shirley Sherrod at an NAACP convention discussing her evolving beliefs on race, in which Sherrod admitted that 24 years ago as a state-level agricultural employee in Georgia she wasn't helping a White farming family as much as she would for a Black family.  The video clip that Breitbart shows on his website (I refuse to link to him) ends rather abruptly, suggesting there was more to what she said.  And there was...

2) Rather than present the whole of Sherrod's speech or dig any deeper, Breitbart immediately presents the video clip on his website.  To describe the video clip, Breitbart claims "...Sherrod describes how she racially discriminates against a white farmer. She describes how she is torn over how much she will choose to help him. And, she admits that she doesn't do everything she can for him, because he is white. Eventually, her basic humanity informs that this white man is poor and needs help. But she decides that he should get help from "one of his own kind". She refers him to a white lawyer. Sherrod's racist tale is received by the NAACP audience with nodding approval and murmurs of recognition and agreement."  Breitbart essentially claims Sherrod is a racist, which can be a defaming and possibly libelous thing to write.

3) Breitbart fails to conduct any pre-posting research or any discernible follow-up, for example doing any work to find the white farming family that Sherrod supposedly discriminated (it's up to other reporters and media outlets to find the Spooners).  If he did any research like that, he doesn't demonstrate it on his website on his own initiative.  For example when other news outlets uncover the full video clip of Sherrod's speech, only then does Breitbart link it on his site.

And why did Breitbart do wrong?

Because Sherrod had more to her tale, and Breitbart avoided or ignored it.

If Breitbart had done his research, or found a full video of Sherrod's speech, he'd have heard the rest of it where Sherrod gains insight, rejects her hardened attitudes towards whites, goes out of her way to work harder to save that White family's farm, and ends up befriending them.  In other words, Sherrod proves she's not a racist (to wit, "It's not about Black or White, it's about being poor"), and openly called on others to think the same.

Linkage to Glenn Greenwald about why Sherrod is the heroine of the month.  Additional linkage to Greenwald letters where he thinks (FINALLY I might add.  I say this because I'd emailed him earlier about OTHER times that innocent people got slimed by FOX News and their ilk) that Sherrod has an actionable case against Breitbart and FOX News.

Personally, as a Journalism college graduate (Bachelors, University of Florida) I sincerely believed Breitbart committed an act of libel.  He posted with malicious intent (calling Sherrod a racist), he posted using incorrect and deceitful materials (the edited video clip), he posted without having done any deeper research into the matter (the thing I would have done: find the white farmers who would have been discriminated against and getting their side of the story.  It's called The Human Element and it gets your readers/viewers' attention a lot quicker).  Worse of all: Breitbart cannot claim a defense against libel because Breitbart WAS NOT TELLING THE TRUTH (he commits Lie By Omission by either editing Sherrod's tale or using an edit given to him.  Given Breitbart's track record, I have every reason to believe he made the edit, and you're going to have to prove me otherwise).

I hope to God Sherrod's talking to a lawyer about going after Breitbart and FOX News (who took Breitbart's story and ran with it).  It has been too damn long that any news media outlet has been held accountable like this.  It has been especially a long time for FOX News to answer for their many journalistic sins.

And until he does go away, either by explusion from an embarrassed conservative media corps or by lawsuit, this is all I have to say about Breitbart from now on.

Breitbart Delendus Est.

The Martyrdom of Shirley Sherrod

This needs to be said.

Racism has been in the news lately.  The NAACP came out and accused the nationwide Tea Party movement of tactically supporting racism at their rallies.  The Tea Partiers and their Republican defenders promptly rose up to accuse the NAACP of "reverse-racism" (or Black-on-White) themselves... and then had to kick one of their "leaders" Mike Williams out for responding with a blatantly offensive "letter to Lincoln" that not even openly-proud racists could ignore.

Next thing we know, along comes Andrew Breitbart - responsible for hiring twentysomething idiots to pretend being pimps and prostitutes, videotaping ACORN employees, and then selectively edit said videos to make it look as though ACORN was helping pimps with their prostitution efforts - and he puts up a video on his website of a current USDA employee named Shirley Sherrod speaking at a meeting on racism.  A Black woman, Sherrod discussed how after years of helping poor Black farmers she was once confronted with having to help her first White farmer, and she admitted that in the beginning she didn't help that White family as well as she had helped Black farmers.

AHA!  So the saying goes, Breitbart has evidence at long last of reverse racism in action!  This video quickly made its way to FOX News, who quickly pounced and broadcasted it nationally.  The snowball became an avalanche, the NAACP jumping into making a statement denouncing Sherrod's racism against Whites.  Somewhere along the chain of command from the USDA up to the Secretary of Agriculture (and maybe Obama's White House) someone came up with the yellow-belly idea of forcing Sherrod into resigning before the matter could be fully investigated.

Because when the matter WAS fully investigated, it turns out that Breitbart had - yet again - used a selectively edited video of Sherrod's speech.   A full video shows Sherrod continuing her story about Her First White Farmer by pointing out she realized she needed to move beyond her own racist attitudes, and Sherrod HELPED that White Farmer find a lawyer, and made every effort to make sure that White Farmer kept his farm.  Even more, the White family she helped came out and publicly supported Sherrod's efforts helping them, and they were grateful for her help and that "she treated us good."  No one - not Breitbart, not FOX, not the Department of Agriculture or the NAACP or anyone else - made any effort to find out more information, to get more evidence and eyewitnesses, to do ANYTHING to see if Sherrod was just another target of Breitbart's selective editing.

This is what I posted on Ace of Spades website, where Ace was cheering Breitbart on for having punk'd the Obama administration into hastily firing innocent people:

I seem to recall Dan Rather making a hasty and poorly researched report into George W. Bush's service record with the Texas National Guard.  When Rather's team got caught with various holes in their reporting, Rather got forced out the door in disgrace.

Breitbart creates a hasty and poorly researched report into a woman's internal conflict with her own racism THAT SHE OVERCOMES by the by.  When Breitbart got caught pushing a selectively edited videotape, and failed to either hunt down the white farmers who DID get help from Sherrod or look for other witnesses to Sherrod's speech to verify if any other interesting statements were said by her... YOU (Ace) want to give Breitbart a MEDAL?!

I'm sorry, but Breitbart f-cked up here as badly as Vilsack did.  There needs to be accountability in the media and for this Breitbart needs to go.  Get kicked out the door just like Rather was.

Everyone EXCEPT Sherrod and those farmers she helped were in the wrong here.  Whoever gave Breitbart that edited video... Breitbart for failing basic rules of reporting (get more than one source!  verify!  interview as many people as you can!)... FOX News for quickly jumping on Breitbart's story without doing THEIR own research... The NAACP for jumping too quickly themselves and attacking her, in an effort to position themselves after recently attacking the Tea Party for racism... Vilsack, the Obama Administration and probably Obama himself for jumping the gun and forcing an innocent woman out of her job...

SO far the NAACP is the only one to have openly apologized, I haven't seen anybody else who screwed up to do so.  Obama needs to apologize directly to Sherrod and re-instate her.  Vilsack needs to apologize and offer his resignation to Obama (Obama can refuse it with a harsh reminder to Vilsack to watch his steps... or accept it and find a replacement).  FOX News and any other news outfit that jumped on this story need to apologize for their rush to judgment and take good-faith efforts to fact-check their stories and hold people accountable something they haven't been doing for years (like I keep saying, it looks like the last one who was held accountable was Rather, and that was 5-6 years ago).

And Breitbart needs to go.  No f-cking awards for him.

I swear to God we have no honest journalism anymore.  We have no sensible leadership that recognizes when we're getting bum-rushed by idiots with agendas re-enacting the whole "Boy Who Cried Wolf" crap, how many times you gonna believe Breitbart after the stunts he's pulled?  And people are suffering because of it.

Time To Rally The Unemployed

I'm sick of job-hunting and not finding anything.

I'm sick of placing my resume out there and getting only 2 bites in 2 years.

Above all, I'm sick of those bastard politicians in the Beltway who can't wrap their goddamn heads around the fact that THERE ARE NO GOOD JOBS OUT THERE, THAT NO ONES CREATING MORE JOBS TO FILL, AND WE NEED FINANCIAL AID TO KEEP FOOD ON THE TABLES AND A ROOF OVER OUR HEADS.

These politicians even want to punish the unemployed for being, you know, losers who can't find a job.  They think we're just lazy.  They think we're Welfare Queens.  They think we're preferring a $250 a week benefit payout over a $40,000 a year full-time job.

Time to organize.  Time to send all the unemployed to Washington DC and clog the streets.  Time to walk up to the White House with everyone in a line to drop off our resumes and remind Obama that GODDAMMIT WE NEED WORK!  Time to walk into Congress and... whadda ya mean, they're not gonna let us take the tour?!  Sigh.

Need to speak to NoJobSurvivor.com.  Or MoveOn.  Somebody to get something signed up for August or September.  Set a date, I swear to God we can get 27 million in the streets screaming for jobs.

Welcome to the 4th of July here in the United States (Updated)

From Digby:

What a beautiful message of unity on our Independence Day it is to tell close to 20 million citizens that they are on their own in the worst job market since the Great Depression purely to make a cheap political point. It would make King George proud to see his aristocratic heirs flexing their muscles two centuries later in the country that once proudly proclaimed that it didn't have a class system.

Also wik.  And this:


(UPDATE: 7/5/2014) tis a pity but YouTube links go bad all the time.  I'll try to bring ya a replacement one:

Coping

Let's see.  There's a massive ecological disaster out in my Gulf that threatens to ruin the environment of the American Southeast for the next ten generations.  There's already substantial evidence that British Petroleum and Transocean and Halliburton cut corners and ignored both Federal and internal security regulations, and yet there are still those in political office (cough, mostly Republicans although I will concur that a few Democrats are in Big Oil's pocket) sucking up and making the criminals out to be the victims in all this.

There's high unemployment across the nation, but especially here in Florida, with few good wage job openings in sight.  Businesses are not inclined to hire on more people because the economy is still too shaky: banks aren't lending out much to small or start-up businesses for the same reason.  There's evidence that massive unemployment is both destructive to the economy and to our society: yet nothing is being done by our government to alleviate it...

Unemployment benefits / jobs bill have been held up - AGAIN - by an obstructionist Republican-controlled Senate, yes the Republicans are in the minority with 40 seated but thanks to Filibustering and Cloture rules that 40 can shut down any legislation brought to the floor.

And why are the Republicans holding up that legislation?  Because now - after the entire 2000-2008 era of Republicans' out-of-control spending and deficit creation ("Deficits Don't Matter," says Republican leader Dick Cheney) - because NOW the Republicans are all "Oh NO don't let the Democrats spend any money OH NOES let's be austere and RESPONSIBLE with YOUR, we mean OUR spending!"  Now when we NEED a Keynesian approach to getting our nation out of this DEPRESSION (we're still at 10 percent unemployment!  THIS.  IS.  NOT.  GOOD.) the Republicans are still stuck in Hooverist denial.  Like that worked the last time!

And it's as though the Republican leadership has no fucking clue just how bad it is out here in the World of Few Jobs.  Right now there's five job-seekers to each job opening: in good economic times it's supposed to be two job-seekers to each job (there were times jobs had to be re-opened to get more applicants interested to fulfill a three-candidate requirement!).  That's the official number: I swear to God it feels like there's ten or twenty job-seekers per opening.  They think we're all Welfare Queens all over again.  NO WE'RE NOT.  We're college-educated former workers (and some are even Republicans of long-standing although not anymore) who got screwed over by a One-Two (Home Ownership/Mortgage Collapse and the Stock Market/Banking Disaster) Economic Punch that's still not resolved.  Jobs are out there, Ms. Angle?  The jobs in question are entry-level low-wage jobs that won't pay our mortgages or kids' schooling.  Wal-Mart Greeter is not what I call a career.  The jobs are also over in Texas or Washington State or Montana and because of the real estate/mortgage fiasco we can't sell our homes and move to them.  Either way, we Job-Seekers ARE FUCKING SCREWED.

I still have a few benefits available at the local unemployment - sorry, Career Center - office, especially a Vocational Rehab service that can treat my ongoing psychological problem with depression.  Of course, as with any bureaucracy the paperwork is TAKING TOO DAMN LONG.  Sorry.

So here I sit.  Unemployed.  Sending more resumes out today to see about getting someone to interview me.  At least I got the A+ Certification to try for a Tech Support career track now.  But even that looks easier said than done.

Meanwhile the Republicans are pretty much killing us with oil-poisoned waters and no financial aid for 27-30 million unemployed Americans, and for some Godforsaken reason there's legitimate talk that these GOP bastards can retake the Congress in the November midterms.  WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING TO MY COUNTRY?!

Iran: It's Been A Year

The elections that began the whole brouhaha that ought to lead to Iranian democracy happened last year.

As I've written then and is relevant now:

Now, it's 2009. Ayatollah Khamenei basically calls a questionable election result too early and too eagerly for Ahmadinejad. Even though enough Iranians know among themselves there's no way Ahmad could have won all those provinces so handily, even with widespread reports of ballot box tampering and fraud. Now acting like a bullying teenager caught in a weak lie, Khamenei is threatening violence on anyone who dares question him, and starts acting in a very Shah-like manner with violent arrests, use of acid sprays, the works. Thing is, for all of Khamenei's rhetoric against the Brits, and the Americans, and Zionists and 'foreign interlopers', the Iranian people know that's not really true. There's no evidence the Brits or the Russians or the Americans tampered with the election. It wasn't BBC or Fox News rushing to proclaim Ahmadinejad the winner "by divine will" inside of an hour after the polls closed. This time, the Iranians have no one to blame but their own leaders. And that's why I think the protests are going to continue, because Khamenei is now the target of blame. The violence will get worse, which is the pity of it all, but it's not gonna stop until he's gone. 

Keep the good fight going.  Freedom for my peeps.

And make this guy proud.

It's his anniversary too.

Counting the Lies

"The most outrageous lies that can be invented will find believers if a man only tells them with all his might" - Mark Twain

There was another quote - "A lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes" - but the attribution there isn't really to Mark Twain.  So there.

Spotted this on Hullabaloo, with Digby referring it from another blogger at Oz and Ends:

...To keep on top of urban myths of all kinds, I subscribe to the Snopes.com update list, and I noticed a pattern there that I thought deserved to be examined more arithmetically. It struck me I was seeing a lot more rumors about President Obama, and a lot more false rumors, than I remembered from earlier years. So I ran the numbers, as of this week. After eight years in the White House (with Snopes.com around all that time), George W. Bush has been the subject of 47 internet rumors. After less than two years in office, Barack Obama has been the subject of 87, or nearly twice as many.  Even more telling is the relative accuracy of those stories. For Bush, 20 rumors, or 43%, are true. Only 17, or 36%, are false. The remainder are of mixed veracity (4), undetermined (4), or unclassifiable (2).  In contrast, for Obama only 8 of the 87 rumors, or 9%, are true, and a whopping 59, or 68%, are whoppers. There are 16 of mixed veracity and 3 undetermined...
...This evidence accumulated over ten years shows a shameful but undeniable fact of American politics: our right wing now contains a lot more liars, and a lot more folks who spread lies out of gullibility or wishfulness, than our left wing...

This shouldn't be much of a shock.  And it's not much of a shock because it's been pretty obvious the last 10, scratch that the last 20 years the media has NOT been held accountable for poor journalism.  Almost no fact-checking.  And worst of all, clearly no desire to punish those they KEEP INVITING ONTO THEIR TALK SHOWS AND EDITORIAL PAGES when evidence has shown again and again those 'commentators' are really LIARS.

Because no one - not the talking heads in the media (and I am pointing the finger at you Rush and Glen and the rest of your buddies), not the politicians, not the business leaders, not anyone - gets held accountable for their slander and defamation and bullsh-t.

The First Amendment SHOULD NOT and DOES NOT defend the right to lie.  Lies destroy and distort.  Lies prevent people from being properly informed and educated.  Lies keep us from doing our jobs as best we could because without informed instruction we're going to screw up.  Lies kill.

We need to get back to punishing liars again.  We need to see more defamation and slander and libel cases in the courts.  We need a new law that directly holds elected officials and government workers at all levels whenever they attempt to make any distorted statement or outright lie.  The rest should attend to itself.

The Underlying Meaning of Last Night's Primaries

I was going to say a lot of deep philosophical musings about the anti-incumbent and polarized intraparty strife that defined last night's primaries in Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Arkansas...

But then the mama duck across the street hatched her eggs this morning!  DUCKIES!!!

Ooooooo they so cute!

I Read The News Today (5/13/10) Hoo Boy

And though the holes were rather small /
I had to count them all /
Now they know how many holes it takes /
To fill Ruth Eckard Hall /
I'd Love To Turn Your iPad On........

Okay, enough with the silliness, here's some updating I need to highlight:

• The Republican Party has selected Tampa to host their 2012 Presidential National Convention of Eternal Peril.  That noise you just heard was my dad spinning his wheels out of the driveway heading off to the Convention Center to wait in line for tickets.
• There's a small and insignificant oil spill going on in the Gulf of Mexico, if by small and insignificant you mean an ecological disaster that will doom most of the gulf shoreline for generations (also worth mentioning are the 15 missing and presumed dead platform workers), justifying every DFH that complained that off-shore drilling was too risky and hazardous to the environment.  The odds of the Far Right, already deep inside the pockets of the Oil corporations, insisting we need to drill MORE to compensate for all the billions of gallons lost to sea... and shorelines... and rivers... ahem, well the odds are so obvious that there's no need to bet on it.  How this oil spill could affect Florida isn't fully known yet, but the way things are going the spill can reach the Panhandle and affect both the beach tourist trade and the local fishing communities.
• With Crist fleeing the state's Republican Party, seeing how the wingnuts have driven him out, mention needs to be made of how Utah's state convention voted out a standing incumbent Senator Bob Bennett; of how Maine's state convention passed a party platform that highlighted every teabagger concept and conspiracy fears; of how John McCain is sucking up on anti-immigration efforts in Arizona in an obvious attempt to beat back a wingnut primary challenge; of how the GOP keynote speakers at every gathering are going after people in their own party; I mean, Lindsey Graham isn't conservative enough?!  Keep watching the Republican Party, and all you see is a purity purge that has to be SHRINKING voter support, right?  Except for some goddamn reason, pollsters still think the Republicans have a good shot at reclaiming Congress this autumn.  What... The... Hell?
• Oh, and my book Last of the Grapefruit Wars is now on Kindle, Nook, and eReader.  Buy my book!  Buy my book!...

A Librarian-Writer-Pirate-Wannabe Looks Back at 40

And on this 40th birthday I can say only one thing:

Where the hell can I find a cute single woman - Age 25-35 with brunette hair, doesn't smoke, likes football and comic books, with knowledge of either A) European History B) American Politics or C) Paranormal (UFO and Ghosts) Studies - so I can date her and finally lose my goddamn virginity?!

Happy Cinco De Mayo

Greets to all who read this blog... um wherever you are.  It's Cinco De Mayo!

And on this day if you find any non-Hispanic Arizonians celebrating at a Tijuana Flats today, you have my permission to punch them repeatedly.

Florida Political Snapshot April 2010

As of right now, Crist is making a public speech tomorrow: while the content isn't fully known, the speculation is that Crist is going to run for the Senate as an No Party guy.

So what does this all mean in Florida?

Things to consider:
1) Crist is going to have the lead if only temporary, mostly because of his name recognition and the fact that non-Party Independent voters and party Moderates who had more love for Crist will have his back.  But Crist is jumping into this election without the full backing or support of a Party: like it or not, political parties have the machinery to fund and push campaigns.  Crist is going in without any major financial backers and almost no campaign workers with connections and experience.  He's not going to bring a lot of state-level Republicans with him, and he's not going to get a lot of state-level Democrats who smell blood in the water.
2) Rubio doesn't have an easy run now that Crist is out of the GOP primary.  The primary was easy because Rubio could pander to the Far Right for about four more months and not get into any trouble.  Now that there's no primary, there's no reason to pander to the crazy base: NOW Rubio has to pander to the whole state of voters, meaning he's got to suck up to Moderates and Indys who make up the Undecided voters that everyone needs to, you know, ACTUALLY WIN.  And there's ANOTHER problem on top of that: Rubio has NO CREDIBILITY selling himself as a Centrist or reasonable candidate.  Everybody, and I mean EVERYONE, knows that Rubio drove Crist out of the GOP primary because Rubio was in the Far Right's pocket.  I can't imagine any Moderate or Independent voter getting convinced that Rubio is MORE moderate than the obviously-moderate Crist.  And on top of that, all it will take is one misstep in trying to pose as a Moderate for Rubio to anger up the Far Right.  Rubio's got no margin for error and no chance to play to the whole voter spectrum.
3) The Democratic challenger, Meek, still has a tough road ahead of him.  While the voting registers show a 700,000 increase in Democratic voters that could give Meek an edge, Crist is going to take away a lot of the Moderate and Independent voters the Democrats could have counted out if there had been a contested GOP primary.  A bloody GOP fight would have coated Rubio as a Far Right wingnut well enough to allow Meek to convince the 33-35 percent of the middle-of-the-road crowd to lean Dem.  Now?  That 33-35 percent is with Crist, who has a bigger profile, a slightly better resume, and a track record of being open-minded (stopping voter record purges, being pro-Obama and pro-stimulus) to where even Democrats might think a vote for Crist will still serve their party well.

So for right now, the three-way race is up for grabs.  Meek has the growing numbers, Rubio has the money, Crist has the marquee name.

The wild-card in all this.  The credit card / tax dodge scandal.  While Crist is not in the clear as some of his buddies are under investigation, Rubio himself is under investigation too.  The good news for Crist is that he's jumping the GOP ship before they get torpedoed by the federal investigations into the state-wide party: Rubio does NOT have the luxury to avoid this issue.  Oh, I'm sure the Republicans are going to mudsling on Crist that he's in it deep, but they can't explain away Rubio's name being in the mix: bringing up the credit card scandal is going to hurt Rubio as well as Crist.  Strange days indeed.

Welcome to Florida!

By The Time I Flee Arizona

If I had the money, a secure job at good wages, I'd travel more often.  I'd love to see the world.  I've been D.C., New York City, Chicago, New Orleans, flown out to San Diego and San Francisco, driven through the East Coast and through Kentucky and Tennessee and even Indiana (if there is any other place flatter than the Everglades, it's western Indiana).  I hope some day to hit the road and drive through as much of the United States as I can, between here and Las Vegas and back again, the long way around.
I'd love to visit Arizona.  But not now.
I'd love to swing through Tombstone, home of the OK Corral, to indulge my interests in the American West history.  But not now.
I'd love to see the Grand Canyon in its entirety.  But not now.
And if I do drive to Las Vegas, I'm asking the AAA trip-tik people to draw out the routes that take me around Arizona.
The immigration bill the Arizona government just signed into law is insane.  It requires the state's law enforcement - state, county, local - to approach any person who could very well be minding his/her own business and not even actively breaking any laws and essentially say "papers please."  A cop can approach anyone and ask for some proof of residence - driver's license, state-issued ID for non-drivers, tribal ID (for the huge Native American population), and/or other form of government-issued ID (green card) - and if you don't have it they can drag you off for being an illegal resident.
What's more interesting is that private citizens can sue their law enforcement agencies to compel the cops to go hunting for possible illegals.  Basically any racist in your neighborhood can call up the cops, accuse you of being an illegal, and if you don't have your papers on you the cop is going to be forced by that racist bastard to drag you off.
It's racial profiling.  It's WWH (Walking While Hispanic), the immoral equivalent of DWB (Driving While Black).
Anyone remember those old Vagrancy laws that cropped up with those Black Codes the southern states issued during and after Reconstruction?  This is those Black Codes all over again, only this time for Hispanics.  They'll be asking for your birth certificates next.  Oh, wait: THEY DO!
Here's a question: what's going to stop a cop, or a racist bastard harassing that cop to arrest you, from thinking your ID is fake?  Not a damn thing until you can get a lawyer to argue your case, by then your whole week, hell your whole life, may be screwed.
Here's another question: do you know how many Hispanics physically fit the Hispanic stereotype?  There's blond pale-skinned Mexicans you know.  And do you know how many Irish illegals there are in Arizona?  Do we have to chase after them as well?  If you gots red hair and a penchant for wearing green, you might be in trouble in Bisbee...
Question Three: what about people who are legally vacationing who just happen to leave their passport back at the hotel?  How many Spaniards and southern French and Italians and Greeks and Turks and Maori and Samoans going to get pulled over for looking like they might be from Costa Rica or the Yucatan?  I worry for the Pacific Islander players on the Arizona Cardinals team now...
Question Four: WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE IN ARIZONA?
This law may create hassles for the 460,000 illegals currently hiding in your state, but it's also creating hassles for the 1,500,000 LEGAL Hispanics residing in Arizona.  Millions of Hispanics whose generational ties to Arizona stretch back to before the Mexican-American War of the 1840s.  We're talking about families that have been there LONGER THAN MOST WHITES LIVING THERE NOW.  By what right do you idiots have of making those millions of Hispanics get treated like second-class citizens IN THEIR OWN NEIGHBORHOODS?
They're saying now the cops are going to harass obvious-looking Caucasians now, just so they can avoid accusations of racial profiling.  So do any of you white boys volunteer to get pulled over for doing nothing wrong but living in a racist-driven state?  I doubt it.  I'm pretty sure you guys keep leaving your wallets at home just like the rest of us.
There is a problem with illegal immigration in this nation.  But creating laws that harass and punish the innocent IS NOT HOW YOU FIX IT.  You go after the ones who ARE breaking the law: you go after the employers and businesses who hire these illegals and shut them down.  You go after the human traffickers who are scamming the illegals who are forced to bribe and sell themselves like slaves just so they can enter a country that believe it or not is still safer and healthier than whatever hellhole they're fleeing from.  You wanna stop people from fleeing Central and South America?  Provide more foreign aid to help those nations build themselves up into safer, stronger communities.  Oh wait, America's not supposed to be nice to other nations, are we?
I can't wait for this law to get overturned for the rampant violations of the Constitution it creates.
I can't wait to see the number of Hispanics that hadn't dropped out of the Republican Party the last time they pulled this sh-t (the 2006 midterm cycle when Dubya - it's ironic that the Bush family actually has solid ties to the Hispanic community and yet their own party keeps doing this - tried to push an Immigration reform bill through Congress) now drop out of the GOP.  They don't have to sign up Democrat, but I guarantee the percentage of Hispanics in the GOP is going to be the same as the percentage of Blacks (about 2-5 percent).
I hope smarter heads prevail and we DO get serious immigration reform: stronger enforcement against the businesses who hire illegals, better crackdowns on the human trafficking, better foreign aid programs.
Next up: wondering what the heck's gonna happen to Crist AND Rubio...

Schadenfreude IV: The Quickening

I am busy studying one more time (AAAAAA) for the CompTIA A+ Essentials exam.  Fourth time's the charm?


But today couldn't pass without this as a point of interest.  Via the St. Pete Times and Miami Herald, I offer up this for the moment.

Federal law enforcement agencies have launched a criminal investigation into the use of American Express cards issued by the Republican Party of Florida to elected officials and staff, according to sources familiar with the inquiry.
The U.S. Attorney's Office in Tallahassee, the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service are all involved in the inquiry, which grew out of the state investigation into former House Speaker Ray Sansom. He was indicted on criminal charges that he stashed $6 million in the state budget for an airplane hangar for a friend and campaign donor.
In the federal case, Sansom and others could be charged with making false statements on their tax returns and tax evasion stemming from hundreds of thousands dollars in charges on party credit cards.
A spokeswoman for the Republican Party of Florida, Katie Betta, said she could not confirm the investigation nor make any comments. Coming in a high-stakes election year, the investigation could expose the inner-workings of a party that has dominated state government and raked in millions of dollars from lobbyists and special interests.
Meanwhile, in a separate inquiry, the IRS is also looking at the tax records of at least three former party credit card holders — former Florida House Speaker Marco Rubio (Crist is smiling over this one), ex-state party chairman Jim Greer (Crist isn't smiling so much about this one) and ex-party executive director Delmar Johnson — to determine whether they misused their party credit cards for personal expenses, according to a source familiar with the preliminary inquiry.
Political parties, which are tax exempt, are allowed to spend money only on political activities, such as fundraising, running campaigns and registering voters. While it's commonplace for party officials and politicians to wine and dine donors, the Florida party allowed credit card holders to rack up hundreds of thousands of dollars in charges with little oversight.
The IRS opened the so-called "primary'' investigation into Rubio, the leading Republican candidate for Florida's open U.S. Senate seat, and the two former state GOP officials to see if there's enough evidence to support a full-fledged criminal inquiry, according to a source familiar with the IRS examination... (more)

This has gone national, as the GOP's open war against Crist for his hugging of Obama was well-known and as Rubio's rise was considered part of the Great Teabagger Uprising.  I shall comment further hopefully by Friday when I have time.  For now, ask yourselves these three questions:
1) Why did these politicos use the party's AmEx cards when they were perfectly capable of paying for these things out of their own pockets?  They are, after all, well-paid elected officials or else employed with salaries and benefits somewhere in the private sector...
2) How much has actually been billed to the state's GOP via these credit cards?  What other purchases were going on that WEREN'T related to party needs?
3) Who was going to pay for all of this?
4) Why is the Spanish Inquisition standing there amongst their weapons?  Wait... I wasn't expecting the Spanish Inquisition...!

And Crist Gets Kicked from the GOP Reindeer Games in 5... 4... 3...

And the fandom rejoiced: Crist vetoes the SB 6 "Death To Tenure" bill the Republican-led state legislature tried to force onto the state of Florida.

The way things stand, the lege doesn't have the vote to override the veto, so the bill is dead.  Now all that happens is that the state (and national) Republican party leadership is going to go after Crist's head on a platter.

Some background is needed.  The state Republicans - and the national level crowd - never really had a lot of love for workers' unions.  Especially teachers' unions.  And the Republicans really don't have a lot of love overall for education in this nation - facts tend to lean too, ah, liberal for them - so any chance they can get to screw around with education is a good thing for them.

The SB 6 was the result of the previous Florida governor Jeb "I'm the Smart One" Bush's push via his 'education foundation' to screw with our state.  The final bill's result - gutting tenure, switching to an annual employment contract rather than a long-term contract, eliminating raises based on experience and advanced degrees (NOTE: My mom worked as a Florida teacher since 1978-79, and in the 1990s worked on a doctorate so she could get a teacher's raise for it.  The bill would have killed that kind of teacher improvement), and tying teacher evaluations to students' testing scores - would have been the crown jewel of the ex-governor's push to punish the Florida teachers' union no wait that's right, there's been an open war between Jeb and the teachers for a good long while (what happa, Jeb, did a Phys Ed teacher give you a C for lousy volleyball play?).

Public response to the bill was overwhelming.  Nearly everyone who wasn't a Republican state official HATED it.  Crist had gotten over 100,000 messages with over 58,000 opened by this point and nearly all of them begging him to veto the thing.  Because Crist is out campaigning for the US Senate primary, he ran into a sizable portion of Republican voters... who all told him they had relatives working as teachers or were themselves teachers who were going to get screwed over by the bill.

Let's be fair about this: Crist was all for the anti-tenure bill... until the people spoke in such numbers that he had to pause and step back.  And like I said about him earlier, Crist may be crazy but he's not stupid.  And he's also not entirely beholden anymore to a political party that's all but dumped on him.

I earlier thought Crist had a good chance in his Senate campaign because I figured a majority of Republican voters in this state would wise up and realize that a Republican who played well to Democratic and Independent crowds (like Crist) come November was a better choice than a Far Right Winger like Rubio.  Well, color me the naive optimist.  Crist is getting his ass handed to him in the primary polls by about 27 points, with Rubio up like 62 to 35 percent of the pre-polled votes.  Rubio is also getting all the national love with the likes of Palin, The Club for Greed, and Rudy Giuliani campaigning for him (Jeb hasn't openly supported either candidate but it's an open secret Jeb doesn't like Crist much.  Jeb definitely hates him now for the veto... ).  Apparently the Far Right Wingnuts are in full control of the state party.  And now the paradox I warned about - that an extremist party can win a primary but suffer in the general election - is close to playing out.

Crist is paying now because he openly supported President Obama's economic stimulus package back in 2009.  Mind you, that stimulus was something EVERY state needed (almost every state is struggling to this day with severe budget shortfalls), but because of the GOP's ambitions and obstructionist mood nearly every Republican leader denounced it even as they gleefully took the money.  The Republicans didn't want to give Obama any bipartisan political cover at all.  Crist didn't read the memo: he greeted Obama as the President toured the nation promoting the stimulus, and essentially gave Obama the cover he needed.  The GOP hasn't forgiven Crist at all, even though he played it true.

But for all the hatred that Crist generates within his own party, he plays well as an overall candidate when you include the Democrats and Independent voters into the mix.  Especially now that he vetoed this thing, he's gotten in good with a large voting bloc (teachers and their families).  In short, there's been a lot of buzz about Crist running as an Independent ticket (or even switching to the Democrats' side of the primary).

Polling is showing Crist does well if he drops out of the GOP and runs as an Indy.  In a three-way race, Crist tops out at 32 percent, Rubio at 30 and likely Democratic candidate Rep. Kendrick Meek at 24.  And the polling was before the veto was signed: if the outrage against the bill is any indicator Crist's popularity statewide will go up.

Historically, a contested-three-way race doesn't help an Independent: the entrenched party system makes sure of that.  The few Independents who do win (such as Joe "It's All For Me" Lieberman) overtake an existing candidate (Lieberman essentially stole all the support from the established GOP candidate Schlesinger) or else happen to run where one party has no challenger in place (still making it a de facto two-party race).  Crist will be fighting a tough race as an Indy as long as both Rubio and Meek stay in the fight: the Democrats might like what Crist did just now for the teachers' unions, but politics is politics and they'll vote Meek just so there's an actual Dem in the Senate.

Crist's problem is that he's got a time limit: if he doesn't drop out before the last week of April and enlist as an Independent candidate, he'll miss that deadline.  The primary itself is in AUGUST: that meager lead Rubio has could well explode before then and Crist will get pummeled and humiliated worse than Mondale was in 1984.  If he drops out, though, he'll be called 'opportunistic' and 'traitor' and Lord knows everything else by the GOP... but it's not like he's being treated politely right now anyway.  What will happen is that he will lose the backing of an existing political machine and be left alone without a base of support.  Switching to the Democratic party is another option, but Meek isn't dropping out for what I know...

Part of me actually wants the Republican Party to openly dismiss / kick Crist out of the party: makes it easier for everyone involved.  It'll definitely make the GOP look petty and demonstrate their decades-long push to drive moderates out of the party.

In truth, though: Crist needs to drop out of the GOP and run as an Independent.  His political career in the Republican Party is done, finished.  The party's open support for Rubio was too obvious a clue: their coming outrage over his vetoing Jeb Bush's pet project even more so.  If Crist wants to remain in politics, he's going to have to go it alone for now.  On his terms.

It sucks that the political system is like this now.  But the damn Purity Party led by the RINO hunting Club for Greed has made it this way.

Fly, Crist, fly away you're free!

Drunken Teenagers with Their Parents' Credit Cards

This entry's title - Drunken Teenagers with their parents' credit cards - is a phrase I've been using to describe the fiscal destructiveness of the modern Republican Party.  How they spent and spent for two massive unfinished wars, a Medicare 'reform' that was in truth a payout to the Pharmaceutical companies, and constant bumping up of our debt limit put our nation into such a huge hole that China could own us without firing a shot.  I'm not the only one who noticed, and even some who are right-of-center noticed as well.

So I dare compare the Republican Party - fiscally irresponsible, spend-crazy, adding debt like there's no bill due - to drunken teens using their parents' credit cards to rack up more debt and buy crazy sh-t to satisfy their indulgences.  But I was just being figurative.

Well, here in Florida the Republicans just went and made it literal.

The local papers - so far the St. Pete Times and Orlando Sentinel leading the way - are pursuing reports of how a minor staffer with the state's GOP organization racked up over $1 MILLION on a party-issued credit card.  Expenditures of shopping sprees across the globe.  Travel tickets everywhere.  TOYS!  Further reports are examining how other leaders in the party - including current senatorial frontrunner Rubio - racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in spending as well.

Obviously, that staffer with the million-dollar credit debt didn't spend all that on herself or her family: evidence points to higher-ranking members of the state party - our old favorite Sansom gets a name-drop - using her card as a convenient means of side-stepping their expenditure reports.  Problem is, that credit card statement still has to go somewhere, and the papers found out.  And how the Republicans have to go into "Explain It Away" mode because while people expect the Republicans to live extravagantly they don't much like it when 12 percent of the state is STILL OUT OF WORK AND STRUGGLING FROM DAY TO DAY.

At least two questions come quickly to mind:

• Who's gonna pay all these credit card bills when they come due? (obvious answer: the deep-pocket campaign fundraisers who pretty much use this as a form of legalized bribery)
• Why are these GOP leaders spending so much of other people's money when all of them - Rubio, Sansom, even Crist had questionable spending sprees of his own - are fully employed at good wages and could well afford these things out of their OWN pocket?

I'm not sure the Republicans are gonna like the way this story is gonna play out, especially as it's coming on the heels of reports on how their National party organization the RNC went and spent money on questionable items as well... including a memorable stop at an expensive (yet tastefully refined) lesbian bondage club.

This seriously needs more play on the national stage.  This is more than just a Florida scandal: this is endemic of how the Republican leadership really behaves with people's finances.  This is a perfect example of how the Republicans are truly FISCALLY IRRESPONSIBLE: they spend other people's money - in some cases flat-out embezzle - to fulfill their personal needs and then have other people pay their bills.

So anyways, this isn't even the major news story in Florida right now.  Everyone's up in arms about the Florida legislature's attempt to destroy our state's educational system, with a bill SB6 sitting on Crist's desk awaiting a possible veto.  This has major ramifications: if it passes you can kiss all the good teachers goodbye (as the bill ends tenure and forces teachers onto an annual contract, no one is gonna want to work without job security).  If Crist vetoes it, he guarantees the Far Right wingnuts (who hate the Democratic-heavy teachers' unions) running the primary between him and Rubio will make him pay for it (and it's not like he's won them over anyway).  So a good number of political commentators are convinced if he vetoes it Crist is going to have to run as an Indy... so there's that drama going on today.

The third major story in the state today?  It's about a monkey!  There's an escaped rhesus macaque who's been free for over a year moving all over the bay area, and the locals keep an eye out for him. Watch the video.

A question to Erick Erickson

Far Right commentator Erick Erickson (why he gets hired with CNN while honest journalism grads like me stay unemployed, I'll never understand) made recent comments about the It's-That-Time-of-The-Decade federal Census:

ERICKSON: This is crazy. What gives the Commerce Department the right to ask me how often I flush my toilet? Or about going to work? I’m not filling out this form. I dare them to try and come throw me in jail. I dare them to. Pull out my wife’s shotgun and see how that little ACS twerp likes being scared at the door. They’re not going on my property. They can’t do that. They don’t have the legal right, and yet they’re trying.

Seeing as how the Commerce Dept. is going to hire me later this month to work part-time as a Census Enumerator, I have a personal question and request for Mr. Erickson:

If it turns out I have to be the little (6-foot-1-inch tall, 300 lb) ACS twerp (I think of myself more as a smartass, actually) knocking at your door, can I go ahead and make arrangements with you to have you shoot me in a non-lethal location?  Say, with me standing in Yeehaw Junction FL and you standing in the Colorado Supermax for taking shots at a federal employee?

I know, I sound like a smartass over here, but seriously these Far Right wingnuts are totally going off the cliff here.  They're all getting paranoid and talking smack about a perfectly legal government function that's been done every decade since this nation was formed under the aegis of the Constitution.  They're all working themselves up into a froth all because this year for some godforsaken reason they're convinced that ZOMG OBAMA ZOMBIE SOCIALISTS ARE GONNA USE THE CENSUS TO EAT OUR BRAINS.

I figure part of the reason the wingnuts are acting up is that in their zeal to hate the federal government they're picking on what have been normal nearly every-day functions of the government.  They rant about service at the DMV (those are state-level functions, and they're actually pretty good in most states).  They rant about the Postal Service (again, the USPS does okay but its problems are that they are losing money as letter-writing gets replaced by emailing and faxing).  They rant about the massive waste and fraud in the national defense budget.   They rant about ANYTHING having to do with the federal government because because because.  Because any effective government program makes their "Government is BAD" meme look foolish or worse a pack of lies.

But this year this term of office, the Far Right are - as I mentioned earlier - going completely over the cliffs.  And a lot of that has to do with their paranoid hatred of Obama.  His being in the White House amps everything up to 11.  Considering they honestly don't HAVE anything on Obama the way they did with Clinton (the previous "questionable" Democrat who dared interrupt the Glorious GOP Revolution that began under Reagan), it just somehow makes it worse because they have to fabricate outrage over everything that doesn't deserve it.

I'm serious here.  Where were these paranoid freaks back in the last census ten years ago?  Was Michelle Bachmann ranting against the Census when she was in the Minnesota State Senate in 2000?  We've had roughly 21 different Census takings over 220 years this nation has existed.  How many complaints were there about the 1990 Census?  My dad was working as an Enumerator back then, did he do anything wrong with your statistics, Mr. Erickson?

Now I admit there was a slight problem with the Census in 1980, but that was quietly resolved with a side order of fava beans and a nice Chianti.  After that, of course...

There was a Census back in 1860: I guarantee you it had nothing to do with the following Civil War (which was fought over slaves no wait States' Rights to be total jerkasses no wait the future peanut industry).  There was a Census after the Civil War ended in 1870: did the Southern states complain about how they were counting people (well, maybe in South Carolina...)?  And there was nothing wrong about the Census back then either: hell, the Census in 1870 was epic because a census taker in San Francisco officially labeled Joshua Norton with the career of Emperor on his tally sheet (click link, scroll 2/3 of the way down, under the pg. 81 spreadsheet).  That was totally awesome!  I can't wait to enumerate, I wonder how many Emperors I'll run into when I do.

Oh, and Mr. Erickson?  I'm really not afraid of you, so I *will* knock on your door if I have to.  And I have to, it'll be my job.  And you'll HAVE to answer the very legal requirements of the Census, per the US Code Title 13, Sections 141, 193, and 221.  Come at me with your wife's skirt shotgun and I'll just list it as a dependent.