The National Rotten-to-the-Core Association

The NRA (National Rife Association) is a curse upon our nation. Touting the Second Amendment as an excuse to possess weaponry that should be reserved for the armed forces is a ruse. Our nation’s Founders, the creators of the Second Amendment to the US Constitution, did NOT envision a nation composed of AK47 assault rifles, extra magazine bullet clips meant solely for murdering in cold blood dozens of innocents. Our Founders would CRINGE at that dastardly organization's lack of basic humanity.

Even police officers are against such lethal weaponry because they face it threatening their lives every day. Who knows how many sick minds like the Aurora, Colorado murderer there are in our country of 350 million. If his gun had not jammed even more would be dead today. How many less would be dead if he did not possess at all enough weaponry to start a war?

People who support the NRA and owners of all manner of war-making weaponry will never EVER make war against our government. It is a FIGMENT of their sick imagination if they think they need that kind of weaponry the purpose of which is only to serve an overthrow of the government. The NRA and the gun manufacturers are determined to oppose rational gun law prohibitions because of one thing – money. Follow the money and you will know why we do not have sane gun restrictions in this country. Like most everything Congress is bought by NRA money while a six year old dies and her mother lies in critical condition paralyzed from the neck down because of someone who should NEVER have had any gun at all.

There should be an ALL OUT BAN on war making weaponry and STRICT national regulation on gun shows that can sell their lethal wares to anyone no questions asked. Thousands in this country are felled by deranged individuals who get their hands on guns that should NOT be in their hands at all.

Aurora, Colorado and so many other gun mayhems in this nation MUST have meaning. The despicable NRA organization must be curtailed by NOT contributing money to it and by the power of an opposition unafraid to tell their representatives to fight AGAINST it. The NRA is NOT invincible; not now after the heart-breaking loss of life at the hands of a psychopath who should NEVER have been able to wage war against innocents who merely wanted to watch a movie! I await the day of the NRA’s diminished capacity. NOTHING it does and nothing those who advocate for it adds to the safety and security of our nation!

Spread the Word--The Accomplishments of a President

Scroll down for the list: 

The election of Mitt Romney simply CANNOT and must not happen.  The president has done much and has suffered the onslaughts not only of criticism which all presidents suffer but also severe, mean, cruel and dastardly racism.  It cannot be denied even though the party of the disloyal opposition surely does try to cover it up.  DO NOT BE DUPED.  

Electing the president is more important now than ever before.  Would YOU want to have Willard charlatan flip flopper in chief selecting maybe three members of the Supreme Court taking an already right wingnut bought court and congress to Herculean heights?  

DO NOT SIT BACK.  Pretend this is 2008 and the George Bush legacy has ruined a nation because Bush's sickening influence is STILL with us.  The moron Bush, Cheney, et al never sleep and our president inherited their pile of dung.  NEVER GIVE UP and do not falter but most of all failure is NOT an option.  Send this to all your friends and put it up on Facebook as well.  Heck pass it out at the supermarket ... anywhere and everywhere we must NOT let the Republican voter suppression illegality work.  

Re-elect the president and elect the superb Elizabeth Warren to the US Senate!!

The Obama Administration has accomplished incredible work in its first term, and part of our work is to make sure our supporters are able to talk about these accomplishments. Below is a list of some of the greatest hits from the first term that you should work to incorporate into your conversations about the President.There are many more - recently accomplished.

Some may be blind to these accomplishments because "It is by a black guy in the White House". Those people may have a right to their opinion but not to the facts.

Obama Administration Accomplishments

·         The President ended combat operations in Iraq, removing nearly 100,000 troops.

·         The President repealed Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, giving gay men and women the ability to serve openly in the military.

·         President Obama lifted a ban on federal funding for stem cell research.

·         President Obama nominated and the Senate confirmed two female justices for the U.S. Supreme Court: Sonya Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

·         President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Act into law, guaranteeing fair/equal pay for women (equal pay for equal work).

·         The Senate ratified the START Treaty, which was the most important arms control agreement in almost two decades.

·         American seniors received $250 checks to help them pay for the high cost of prescription drugs in order to help close the donut hole under the Affordable Care Act.

·         Under the Affordable Care Act, young people can now stay on their parent’s insurance until the age of 26.

·         President Obama re-authorized and expanded the State Children’s Health Insurance Program for more than 4 million low-income children.

·         President Obama put an end to taxpayer-financed bailouts with the Wall Street Reform law.

·         Under the Affordable Care Act, Americans with pre-existing conditions can no longer be denied health insurance coverage.  

·         President Obama put consumer protections in place against hidden fees and penalties under the Credit Card Act.

·         The President enacted the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility act (SAFRA) which increased Federal Pell grants and loans for students.

·         Through the Small Business Jobs Act, the Obama administration more than doubled the amount that small businesses can borrow through the SBA’s most popular loan programs.                                                  

I Worry--Making Sense of Aurora

I tried to make sense of a thing that makes no sense. 14 (or more) innocent human beings tried to see a hyped-to-make-a-billion-buck uber violent Batman film “Dark Knight Rises,” the savagery of which is now so embedded in our culture in a very ordinary way. They were gunned down trying to merely watch a film. How can we explain this? We as a nation are not strangers to the violent ways of man.

This latest sensibility assault, as much of our tragic history, will, in due time, fade from memory but we will be left yet again with a PTSD of our collective souls. Violence, all violence, I believe is written in our species’ DNA leaving us with a startle reflex like an emergency wakeup call when a mother hears her infant cry out in the dark of night. Our memories are held hostage to man’s inhumanity to man in Aurora, Colorado, Columbine, VA Tech, and in Oklahoma City.
 

Our memories are also held hostage at a School Book Depository in Texas, and, indeed, at our country’s worst tragedy, all that was 9/11. Our historical knowledge is filled with such incidences of unthinkable violence in a Lincoln’s assassination, a Pearl Harbor where the souls of innocents float freely into the ocean’s deep. How many innocents die in the flower of youth and in the vulnerability of old age? Do we remember Gettysburg, Little Big Horn, the Alamo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Omaha Beach, Dresden, Fallujah, Tora Bora? Do we remember Khe Sanh, or Dien Bien Phu or the fall of Saigon? Do we remember Korean War battles of Pork Chop Hill and the Battle of Inchon? This, ALL of it, contributes to, as Hannah Arendt so famously said, the banality of evil.

I worry ALL the time. I worry about everyone close to me, I worry about war, I worry about climate change, I worry about the economy and how hard everyone will be hit by the banksters of Wall Street who have no conscience. I worry our nation has become alien to all the innocence I used to know so many years ago and all I loved.

A vile NRA makes their Second Amendment case for a civilian to legally possess an AK47 or an extended magazine of bullets so he can kill innocents with ease. I am sure our Founders would have cringed. The dialogue now waxes mean. The media provokes and encourages it because the media is about one thing – money. The commercial options now are few as the few own it all and will keep it no matter who they must kill, destroy or buy. The culture has become crude and the knowledge base of many limited.

We are an extraordinarily exceptional nation indeed – extraordinarily violent, extraordinarily superficial and extraordinarily profane. We have been taught to want to make a buck no matter whose body we must step over to make it with no care for those who cannot make it at all. I worry that the genie has been let out of the bottle and that its guardian of conscience can no longer protect its gate.

The Aurora, Colorado massacre may be the work of one deranged individual but collectively we must, through our history, all share some of the blame. We must retrieve that which is about goodness, caring and love. We must realize the violent primitive reptilian brain stem if not controlled could kill us like a cancer invading a body stripped of its natural defenses. We are, in fact, humane too, we are loving, and many give up their own lives so others may live. I worry, though, that this part of us is being erased by the all pervasive culture of violence and cruelty we know well so that what is left is that which emerged from the Age of Dinosaurs – unmatched cruelty in a quest for one thing – survival. I worry that our existential challenges will not be met and the planet will return to its own infancy, where life was savage and, ultimately, where human beings did not exist at all.

The Majority Best

Mitt Romney has to be one of the worst Republican candidates I have ever witnessed that party nominate for the highest office in the land to represent the entirety of the American people.

No surprise I am not Republican BUT in decades of watching politics the opposition for me harbored, at times, some redeeming qualities even a Richard Nixon reflected. Nixon made history reaching out to a heretofore closed China. He mixed with protesters to find out reasons behind their anger; Ford, a decent man, was a calm leader in a nation that needed calming; and Reagan reflected the aura of a kinder, gentler and nationally proud man exuding a fatherly connectedness to a nation that needed to feel better about itself. 

Mitt Romney may LOOK presidential but he is NOT presidential giving veracity to the cliché beauty is, alas, only skin deep.  How does Mr. Romney look within and feel good about what he sees? This unprincipled man will do anything even overturn all the principles he honed from his father and those he has always held in his political past life.  Mitt Romney overthrows all Mitt has ever been. 

Romney not only appears uncomfortable in his own skin but reflects through political mouthpieces those values which are the most hateful, the most derisive and the ugliest taking marching orders from a Rush Limbaugh one of the most alienating, hate spewing right-wing extremist commentators in US media history.

 

Charles Blow, the great New York Times African-American columnist, said it best on MSNBC’s Larry O’Donnell when he – paraphrasing – said a bomb goes off in white brains of those in the Republican Party who would support any white, male, candidate of the heretofore ruling class to reverse what they cannot in their deepest cerebral racist synapses believe is the present and, in their minds, the unlawful un-American occupier of the White House.  Romney is merely a vacuous vessel through which the Republican Party can achieve what Mitch McConnell, Minority Leader of the Senate, said was its goal – to defeat Barack Obama.

 

The empty-suited man Romney will say anything, pay any price, sell his soul to any devil if it will mean having the seal of President of the United States behind the podium from which he would speak.  

 

Shame on the Republican Party that it would exude these ugly principles and stain itself nominating an unprincipled man to get its racist way.  Shame on the unprincipled man Romney for revolting against that which he always believed to reflect the worst part that is America instead of its majority best.

 

The Greatest Depression

LIBOR (London Interbank Offered Rate) is a hugely important interest rate banks set for lending money to each other. It controls most everything in the stream of commerce. Its interest rate is worth TRILLIONS upon TRILLIONS. Surprise, it too has been rigged! From LIBOR to Lehman, Sandusky to Penn State, to Paterno, before he died, negotiating a better contract during the child sex scandal, from Wall Street fraud to the Church pedophile gargantuan cover-up to a presidential candidate seeking the highest office this nation can bestow refusing to make public his finances adding to the suspicion that he is hiding something big. Suspicions are raised as one can only believe Mitt Romney does not want the people who could elect him to see what most of us suspect anyway – greed gone wild, tax havens, massive outsourcing of jobs, Bermuda and Swiss bank accounts in order to evade paying to the country he says he loves the taxes that the middle class must pay. The imagination soars at the hypocrisy and injustice of it all. The president is right.  Romney is NOT the solution to the problem.  He IS the problem.

The culture of greed is so bad that one wants to throw one’s hands up and ask why we, the innocent, have been so betrayed? Many are suffering. Economies everywhere are tanking. The havoc these men of Wall Street greed holding hands with a bought government have wreaked upon us forces out a blood curdling and mind numbing scream.

How many state pensions have been eradicated by these peddlers of Wall Street swill? How many investments people worked so hard to accumulate over a lifetime have vanished? How many countries, cities and towns are bankrupt with few fire or police to protect the people and few teachers to teach that which generations must know to survive? And who is jailed and held to account for this malevolent perfidious fraud? No one save Bernie Madoff for his own personal scheme.

How many pages of analysis will be written in history, how many academic explanations will there be? Who can calculate the world wide suffering of humanity at the hands of so few corrupt economic titans? The great George Carlin said it all in his "American Dream" monologue as I have iterated often. Remembering, he said, "The owners of this country own you. They want it ALL and they will get it. They are coming for it all, he said, because the game is rigged, it's a BIG club and, he said, you ain't in it." Youtube his “American Dream” monologue to see how prescient this man was. (Warning again some language can be rough.)

I weep for, as Chris Hayes titled his new book, the "Twilight of the Elites." The institutions we thought protected us have failed us and erased our hope. What do we do now and to whom do we turn? Many, too many, have no jobs, no home, no future, nothing. I am sad and no one is holding anyone to account for the Greatest Depression of them all, the emotional malady which we the people feel every day.

I Take It Back

I decided that I will take back what I said about Romneybot being finished.  Clearly tomorrow is another day as Scarlet O'Hara said in the racist Gone with the Wind. Yes, tomorrow IS another day and the American public INCLUDING some Democrats have remained notable for instantly forgetting something egregious like lying to attain the presidency. 

If the media does not pound the Romnybot story into submission every hour of every day through to the election in November and voters forget the lies that Romney has spun because his one goal is to be elected president than we as a nation will get the government we deserve -- corrupt, inhumane and corporatist.  We are already in part those things BUT many others who vote are not and want good, humane and truthful government.

If what Romney has said and about which he has lied, what Romney has done and what Romney clearly is does not sink his candidacy then we TRULY are a nation that gets the government it deserves.

Do NOT let these issues go.  Learn about what Mitt Romney is and what his latest lies are.  Tell the media, tell your senator, tell your congressman, tell your family and tell your friends the truth before we get a nightmare presidency yet again, a George Bush on steroids.

The Re-election of the president is mandatory and the election of Elizabeth Warren to the US Senate is more important now than ever before!

Romney is Toast!!

Romney is TOAST!!! He wants both ends and in the middle.  See the article entitled "Mitt Romney's Own 2002 Testimony Undermines Bain Departure Claim" here and below.  He's DONE.  His interview on CNN said NOTHING absolutely NOTHING and the other alleged media interviews will say nothing too.  He may have even committed perjury time will tell. On the one hand when it is convenient he says he had no involvement with Bain after 1999.  But when he ran for governor of Mass and needed to establish residency he said he had business involvements though a company (Lifelike Co.) heavily tied to Bain.  So which is it, Mr. Romney?  He wants his cake and eat it too but he CANNOT have it.  Running for president is a different ball game altogether and he will learn his lesson about that one.

He said on CNN that he will only give 2010/11 taxes. OH SURE that should help -- NOT!  The guy has LOTS to hide and this latest story of signatures on documents AFTER he was SUPPOSED to have left Bain put the icing on the cake.  It's the smoking gun about policy the very policy on which he is running and says he is qualified for the presidency.  

Mitt give it up.  McCain did not choose you for VP because even HE saw your tax returns. YOU ARE A LOSER!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/12/mitt-romney-bain-departure_n_1669006.html

The Bain of Romney’s Existence – Mr. Romney, Splain Bain!

Romney, in Ricky Ricardo fashion, STILL has some splainin to do. The Boston Globe maintains in its front page article yesterday here and below (important to read) that Romney, according to SEC documents, stayed longer at Bain than he has said he did. From what I have read and the infinite discussions I have listened to this is probably WHY Willard Mitt Romney does NOT want to release his taxes for more than one year and WHY he is hiding what he did at Bain, the enumeration of the companies in which he invested and when. It is even alleged he ran Stericycle during that time (a company which disposed of aborted fetuses.) The rightwingnuts should simply LOVE that!

Some understanding of what Bain Capital (Romney’s Company and source of his wealth) did and why running Bain in addition to his running of the Olympics in Salt Lake City makes him qualified to be president. He says his work at Bain makes him qualified to create jobs and lead the country out of the swamp of Depression it has been in since 2007.

First, some facts: Bain is NOT a company that created jobs. In fact it mainly did the opposite. It was a company that took over failing companies, stripped them of their assets, fired thousands of workers leaving them with no job, no health insurance or as Ricky Ricardo would say NADA (NOTHING.) Bain often shipped those jobs overseas to countries like say you know CHINA something Romney says he loathes and for which he blames the president. He, so far, has never specifically explained how he would STOP companies from shipping jobs overseas and create new jobs here.

Romney LIES ALL the time. He did not save other companies that were floundering and create jobs but rather destroyed companies by divesting them of assets, firing workers and shipping jobs overseas while he took MEGGA profits from companies he created then. He did not rescue companies he killed them significantly and regular Americans who lost those jobs paid the hefty price.

Second: There is now a discrepancy of when Romney SAYS he gave up his position at Bain allegedly in 1999 but his SEC filings are alleged to say that he was the sole owner and 100% controller of Bain through 2002 (the year he ran for governor of Massachusetts.) If he had control of Bain through 2002 then everything that Bain did by emasculating companies, firing workers, shipping jobs overseas and even investing in other companies had to have Romney fingerprints on it.

In defense Romney says, and Bain Capital partners back him up, that his role as sole owner of Bain was simply a figurehead role and that he gave up control to a group who were responsible for conducting the business affairs of Bain while Romney was off to Utah in 1999 saving the Olympics.

Does it strike you as odd that the uber controller that Romney was alleged to have been would keep his name on SEC filings as sole owner and controller of Bain Capital and then have others run that company with no input from him as a "figurehead?" Yes, it strikes me as odd too.

Furthermore, his running of the Olympics has never been fully discussed. It has been alleged that his taking over the Olympics had significant conflict of interest issues. It is suggested that he created jobs during the Olympics using companies that had direct connection to Bain. He must have made significant money from that as well if that allegation is true.

These allegations offer other rationales as to WHY Romney will NOT release his tax information for more than one year. His taxes from 1999 through 2002 are suspect because he may have done exactly what he says he would not do as president.

Mr. Romney, fess up. SPLAIN. What is the true source of your wealth during those so called "shadow years" of figurehead control of Bain. Until the American electorate sees copies of Romney's tax returns especially from the crucial years of 1999 through 2002 and even after 2003 and beyond we will NEVER know the ugly (or beautiful) truth behind his business activities, the sole reason he says he should be president.

I link an article written by David Bernstein in "Talking Politics" here and below summarizing why the “shadow years” at Bain are important and why Mitt Romney if he wants the top job as president of the United States MUST splain Bain!

Re-Electing the President and Elizabeth Warren for US Senate is more important now than ever before!

http://blog.thephoenix.com/BLOGS/talkingpolitics/archive/2012/07/12/the-bain-shadow-years-loom-larger.aspx


http://www.boston.com/news/politics/articles/2012/07/12/government_documents_indicate_mitt_romney_continued_at_bain_after_date_when_he_says_he_left/?page=2

The Wanna Be King’s Speech -- Romney’s Failure Before and Insult to the NAACP:

Appealing to the Republican white racist base Romney insulted the entire NAACP. Mitt Romney had the unmitigated gall to stand before the oldest African American organization dedicated for hundreds of years to securing equal rights for people of color in a nation that wanted only the color white to rule and spew views he understood they would reject.

Willard Mitt Romney knew exactly what he was doing speaking before the NAACP to disparage the Affordable Healthcare Act using the demeaning name of “Obamacare” promising to repeal it. He used the first African American president’s signature legislation and weaponized it to disparage that which he knew nearly every member of the audience loved and supported. God forbid this empty robotic unprincipled man is elected president because he first could fire up his racist white extremist base to nominate him for a job he is unqualified to hold.

Romney is very much about his racist base and, indeed, never could be nominated by the Republican Party without it. We know he will pay any price, bear any burden, court anyone he needs, and flip flop on every single principle he has held to have the symbolic title of president appear on a seal behind which he will, if elected, speak.

Romney is the most dastardly despicable man who will do anything to win no matter whose toes he must step on to secure the office. He is dastardly and despicable because he knows better. He was the most moderate candidate for governor of Massachusetts in 2002 and in the 1994 candidacy for the Senate against Teddy Kennedy but now, vying for the presidency and needing a white, old so called conservative base to win calls himself “severely conservative.” Who does this hateful man think he is fooling?

He spoke in front of the NAACP with a hope that what he said would engender cat calls and boos from an audience whom he knows would never support his views. He did this to reinforce his white racist base and compete with the mantra of a Rick Santorum; hell Mitt Romney could compete with a Klansman. This man whose principled Republican father walked with civil rights workers and refused to compromise his beliefs but, seemingly, the father’s ever-so-moral actions did not rub off on the son.

The son will do anything needed to secure the nomination of the now Republican Party of extreme. Whether he can peddle his tripe to the rest of the nation he WILL need to be elected is another matter. I believe Mitt Romney’s fate was sealed the minute he stepped in front of the platform to speak to the NAACP and threw insult after insult to a most respectful audience. The majority in this country are over our Civil War national nightmare.

Shame on you, Mitt Romney, you are the greatest insult not only to those at the NAACP but to those who stood with them when standing with them was the most dangerous thing one could do. Where were you, Mitt Romney, when your father proved his manhood by standing up for principle because it was the right thing to do? Perhaps you were assaulting a young man cutting off his hair trying to show everyone else and yourself how manly you were. You are a vacuous empty suit and the most unmanly of men, Mitt Romney. You have failed your father. You are not a wealthy winner but you are a poor man loser of no conviction who will try to win the presidency at any cost. Let us hope for the sake of the nation you fail at that as well.

The Killers of the Right to Life

The New York Times reported on strides being made through unraveling the genetic mysteries of the dreaded Alzheimer’s disease. I place the article here and its link below. A blogger expressed it well when he wrote of the tragedy that is the basis of the right wing assault on science and its desire to eliminate funding for most government programs that could serve the public good. Investigation into the cause of Alzheimer's, the topic of discussion in the NYT article, would be no exception if the wingnuts in the person of a Mitt Romney gain power. Government funding could and would be, in many cases, Inquisitionally guillotined.

A relative has, for ten years, been assaulted by this disease monstrosity. A strong woman once a children's music theater composer, writer of children's plays and puppet creator barely recognizes her own daughter now. It is spirit destroying both for the person who is unlucky enough to get the disease as well as for those who knew and loved her before its onslaught.

 Many right-wing bloviating ignoramuses (to use a George Will description of a certain Republican) in the person of the empty suit Romney could eliminate vital government- funded programs needed to investigate diseases such as Alzheimer's which eliminate the quality of life and slowly but surely kill its host. Those who care about fetuses but blindly court policies that would eradicate full term human beings are walking hypocrites and destroyers of the very life about which they claim to care so much.

We are staggered by the waste of our relative who could have spent many more years entertaining the children she did in her prior life. She is a different person now and not the one we knew. Her daughter's eyes are dry of the tears she has shed for her because hopelessness now rules the day.

Those who have the gift to understand science research keep using your gifts. We the people must NOT elect those whose policies would subvert government funding of the scientific research we need so much. If elected, those right wing extremists would create the new killing fields by eliminating the people’s partnership with government which strives to protect us all. We are, as John Kennedy said, all human and we are each of us mortal.

Vulgarities, American Culture and Dangerous Times

I am attaching here and below a wonderful article entitled "Whatever Happened to Shame" written by K.F. Stone from a web site I am regularly sent by him.  

K.F. Stone is kind, insightful, sincere and always refreshingly humane. His article about the dastardly lies and profanity hurled wily nily against our president of color should give us pause for thought. The lack of shame for these lies, which has become the decorative wallpaper of part of our nation, is profoundly disturbing.

The lies people even of stature, who should know better, perpetrate make me furious. If, however, they make me furious the right wing know-nothings and racist psychotics succeed in doing exactly what they want to do and that is to foment discord and hostility in the nation. I try to tamp down my anger but admit I do not always succeed nor do I know what the remedy for the vicious mendacious assault on the right against our president of color is. I have thought often about the vulgarities of our culture. It is curious to me that the so called "family values" advocates exude some of the most hateful, profane speech and perpetrate the ugliest deeds.

The late 60's, a time I admittedly loved, did usher in a new freedom which the so called "moral majority" was dedicated to oppose. It seems, though, the right has harvested a grain of filthy verbosity and made that part of their own repertoire the Sixties communication revolution advocates never expected. They baked their own right wing cake of poison with a concoctive mixture of blindingly twisted racist hate and spewed it upon our African American president caring nothing for the grandeur of the office of the presidency itself sometimes even alluding horrifically to a radical elimination of this president couched in Second Amendment fury. What to do? Maybe the answer is to spread articles like K.F. Stone's far and wide, hope it gains traction and sticks. I suspect those who most need to read and understand it will not.

Sometimes I think we on the left opened up the verbal floodgates of free expression and critical thinking unfortunately including in its flying carpet a profanity the squalid aspects of which were sewn into its tapestry. Now the genie, long out of the bottle, is spreading racist hate on the right the morality for which the left did not stand nor expect. Unfortunately we cannot put this flying carpeted genie back into the bottle and it seems all hell has sadly broken loose as times are now more dangerous than they have ever been!

It is why we need to re-elect the President and candidate for US Senate, Elizabeth Warren, now more than ever before!

http://kurtfstone.typepad.com/kurt_f_stone_speaks_/2012/07/what-ever-happened-to-shame.html#comments

Reflections on "The Tree of Life"

We rented the film "The Tree of Life" from HBO last week and STILL have not erased it because we love it so much. When so many films are cookie-cutter adaptations of ingredients that work to make oodles of bucks this film was unique and took chances most do not. Brad Pitt, I believe, is one of our country's national treasures. His excellence in film is matched by his excellence in life.

The film grapples with the eternal questions of man. I do not know if The Tree of Life solves what is for me unsolvable but at least it makes an attempt at differentiating the science surrounding the facts we know about the etiology of the earth with the yearning of man to still ask the eternal why of his suffering.

It is about the Biblical Book of Job in that it is about suffering in the face of the perfect creation of earth. It is about the majesty of the earth's construct and the less-than-perfect man within it. The cinematography is gorgeous and the sound magnificent using many classical works to emphasize the grandeur of life that simply is.

I loved the complexity of the relationships and the ambivalence of the mother toward the father, the grief they both endure and how they endure it. Pitt's relationship with his sons was profound, angry, loving, loathing and deep.

We keep playing and replying this film to see, hear, and watch the beauty of the anthropological formation of earth and those in it who crave answers to their suffering juxtaposed against the beauty that is existence. We are a division between earth's scientific creations and within it the etiology of man with his frailties.

One scene depicting early earth and the age of dinosaurs showed one dinosaur's victory over another. It keeps its talons on the subjugated beast wondering, it seems, whether to kill it or not. It does not. Was this some nascent element, albeit minuscule, of altruism compelling the victorious dinosaur not to eat his spoils as he, unexpectedly, lifts up his talons off the defeated one and walks away? Who knows? One can only speculate.

Who are we, where did we come from and most importantly why? We live with the grandeur of the earth's beauty and alternatively the suffering ugliness it sometimes visits upon us. We live in its uncomfortable harmony as the two are inexorably and inextricably linked yet a separate part of man's existence. This film attempts to reflect on the eternal questions that have plagued human existence since the beginning and probably will never be sufficiently answered even at the end of it all.

Mayberry RFD -- Free?

Andy Griffith died but his show lives on. I loved him and the town of Mayberry even though that south which it was about never existed. I loved the goodness of Mayberry, I loved things always turning out right in the end and I loved Griffith's wisdom ruling the day. I loved the cast – Andy’s innocent young son Opie, their motherly protective Aunt Bea and the brilliant humor of Barney's Don Knotts. He was a centerpiece of the show that ne’er-do-well sheriff’s deputy who could never seem to get things right but was lovable nonetheless. He was slender, petite and powerless with little self-esteem but wanted desperately to have so much of it. All the other characters inspired the warmth and caring of a community who supported each other -- the naïve Gomer Pyle, Goober and Amos the good-hearted drunk who put himself in the tank when he had a little too much juice. He never ended up with cirrhosis, he never killed anyone driving drunk, he never went to endless rehabs and he never ended up dead in a back alley of booze. Andy was a widower but the audience never had to encounter the gut wrenching emotions of a loved one’s death.

The fictional Mayberry RFD was a deeply southern town but, curiously, in Mayberry there was not ONE person of color in residence. Therefore, there was no racial animus of division. There were no cross burnings, no religious oppressive philosophy of hate because, indeed, there was no racism at all. None of the issues that saturated the historical south was a part of Mayberry RFD. There were no literacy tests, no Jim Crow laws, no separate schools, no separate bathrooms or separate drinking fountains -- one for white and one for “colored.”

Mayberry the good was American fiction. The town never existed but many of us wished, if only for a moment, it did because we so desire an era of civility, of goodness, of kindness and of people who care about one another. A part of me spurns the stupidity of that sit com and a part of me yearns for it!

A July 4th Symphony

On the day of the celebration of our nation's birth, I know most of you understand the imperatives of our national condition. If we thought we could breathe a sigh of relief because the President's Affordable Care Act was upheld by the most unlikely conservative justice on the Court, I submit our relief is misguided.

Instead of Republicans acquiescing to the realities of our system of government resigning themselves to its dictates, Republicans along with their misguided, often uneducated and sometimes ignorant Tea Bag allies are energized like never before to overturn it all. If Republicans are victorious in November, hold the House, turn the Senate red, and win the presidency their guns will then be turned not only on the Affordable Care Act but on Medicare and Social Security as well. They will take our ship of state reactionarily back to the late19th century age of robber barons and steer us yet again toward the iceberg of another Great Depression.

Republican dedication to the election of Willard Mitt Romney as president and turning the Congress all red is in emergency mode. NONE of us should revel in the complacency of an important health care victory because Republicans will commit any fraud, commit attempts at voter suppression, commit any treason to usurp power no matter how illegal, no matter how perfidious and no matter how immoral to make voting for Democrats as difficult as possible ensuring Republicans win by any means necessary.

Our survival, our nation's survival and in actuality our planet's survival will be held hostage to know nothings who are ignorant of their corporate masters and who listen 24/7 to the continuous lies of the greatest media corporatist liar of all time, Fox News. Our president is the ONLY one especially if aided by a Democratic Congress who could save our nation from this impending catastrophe.

The fires in the west are a metaphor for a nation that is burning with the fires of climate change. The fires, too, are burning with words of interposition and nullification as some Republican controlled states are threatening to refuse huge federal benefits the health care law will bestow. It is burning with lies about Wall Street fraud and its nexus to our great economic hardship. Most especially, it is burning with outrageous lies about our president -- impugning his stature, insulting his person and defiling the office of the presidency itself. Mitch McConnell, Republican Minority Leader said it best -- "The Republican Party is dedicated to one thing and that is making Barack Obama a one term president." He says this with pride, he says this with glee, and he says this with determination no matter how many it would hurt. Republicans are impervious to the suffering middle class and the poor of our nation.

The right wing is violent, it is racist, it is science denying and it is composed of religious fanatics who, if elected, WILL destroy the fabric of our country -- the heretofore most advanced nation in the western world. Evolution will see to it that those who deny science will die by nature's own hand.

The Republican symphony of doom, a funereal fugue of descending notes that plays a cacophony of sour sounds is ruining all that is sweet and melodious about our nation gleaned and hard fought for over centuries. They stand poised to ruin it all for generations to come.


Onward to re-elect the president and the brilliant candidate from Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren to US Senate.

Romney Has Some Splainin to Do

First a caveat:  On the issue of abortion, I am pro choice.  The issue is not even relevant to me directly BUT it is of maximum importance that women remain 100% free to make decisions about their own bodies free from the interference of big government; the same big scary government, I might add, the rightwingnuts say they loathe.  Obviously, they think government interference telling women what they can and cannot do with their own bodies is simply divine.  

Mitt Romney running on and embedded in a Republican Party that is firmly anti-choice so much so one could never hold a position with that Party if they hold a pro choice policy position.  It is one of their many tyrannical litmus tests for admission and is the magnetic force which attracts those who step on their own economic toes to sign up Republican even though that Party has nothing to offer them.

When candidates for office, especially the highest office of the presidency claims to be anti abortion and then attaches himself to a company that disposes of aborted fetal waste to make MILLIONS from that company it is the duty of the opposition to call his hypocrisy out.

I attach the following quote from Mother Jones Magazine a source of credibility.  One would think, as the Cuban accented Ricky Ricardo of "I Love Lucy" fame would say, "He's got some splainin to do!"  I quote:

Earlier this year, Mitt Romney nearly landed in a politically perilous controversy when the Huffington Post reported that in 1999 the GOP presidential candidate had been part of an investment group that invested $75 million in Stericycle, a medical-waste disposal firm that has been attacked by anti-abortion groups for disposing aborted fetuses collected from family planning clinics. Coming during the heat of the GOP primaries, as Romney tried to sell South Carolina Republicans on his pro-life bona fides, the revelation had the potential to damage the candidate's reputation among values voters already suspicious of his shifting position on abortion.

But Bain Capital, the private equity firm Romney founded, tamped down the controversy. The company said Romney left the firm in February 1999 to run the troubled 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City and likely had nothing to with the deal. The matter never became a campaign issue. But documents filed by Bain and Stericycle with the Securities and Exchange Commission—and obtained by Mother Jones—list Romney as an active participant in the investment. And this deal helped Stericycle, a company with a poor safety record, grow, while yielding tens of millions of dollars in profits for Romney and his partners. The documents—one of which was signed by Romney—also contradict the official account of Romney's exit from Bain.

Yes, Mr. Romney please SPLAIN we would all love to hear what you have to say.  Splainin is a rare commodity Romneyland where lies, skirting the truth, and contradiction rule the day!

TEMPLE ISRAEL OF HOLLYWOOD--What is means to be a Jew!

This YouTube speaks to me and, perhaps, gives rationale to my passion. For those who know me I am not religious BUT my heart is the heart of a Jew. This small documentary chronicles the Jewish lives of Hollywood. My story is their story without the glitz and monumental success!

I have in my latter years devoted myself to humanitarian causes and political thought. If I stand on the shoulders of some of these giants illuminated in the short documentary I am thankful for those shoulders. I am thankful that I came from an ethnic group often maligned but, against all odds, wondrous in achievement. My Jewish heart beats as theirs did, dedicated to humanitarian philosophy, political thought and good deeds. It is a rendition that says what I know to be true as Rabbi Hillel said centuries ago: "If I am not for myself who will be for me?" "If I am only for myself what am I?" "And if not now when?"

Click here or below for the short story.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDp_KZvyXNo&feature=em-share_video_user

Heart of Hollywood 2012

Three Things about the Affordable Care Act You Should Know

When Republicans LIE, and they do ALL the time, about the Affordable Care Act or what they love to call disparagingly "Obamacare" the truth was told by the MIT health care expert who helped Romney write for Massachusetts essentially the same bill. All you need to know basically are the following FACTS about Obamacare or more properly called the Affordable Care Act:

1. INSURANCE COMPANIES CANNOT DISCRIMINATE AGAINST THOSE WITH PREEXISTING CONDITIONS OR CANCEL INSURANCE WHEN THE TREATMENT GOES ABOVE THEIR PREDETERMINED AMOUNT;

2. THE INDIVIDUAL MANDATE WHICH IS SOMETHING CONSERVATIVE THINK TANKS WANTED AS POLICY will make the expense of it go down over time. Call it a tax, call it chicken soup, who cares the "tax" is minimal. If one cannot afford it one will NOT have to pay it. There is no penalty for not paying it. It accounts for a mere 1% of those who pay the tax in Mass. or will have to pay it nationally;

3. There will be subsidies to make insurance affordable if one cannot afford it i.e. exchanges.

THAT'S IT! That's paring down Affordable Care Act benefits to understandable levels.

Would I have preferred single payer -- of course but our obstructionist bought out by big money Congress -- mostly Republicans but some blue dog Democrats too -- would not hear of it.  I am happy with what we as progressives could get and think, like Medicare and fine wine, it will ultimately improve with age.

Onward to Re-Elect the President and Elizabeth Warren to the US Senate from Mass.!

The Enemy of the People -- Re-fighting the Civil War

If you watched the evening news then you know how imperative it is to work for the re-election of our president and for all Democrats throughout the nation. Give when you can, do as much as you are able and mobilize like we have never mobilized before. The nation is on fire and it is burning. The president with a hostile Congress will never be able to put the fire out because the insipid science deniers will not let him.

If you watched the evening news then you saw that there is absolutely NO loyal opposition left. The Republican Party is now energized, it seems, more than it has been since the 2010 elections. The Republican Party has become the enemy of the people and the enemy all of us who want humanitarian policy and the recognition of sound science. They are the enemy of truth, they are the enemy of science, they are the enemy of a suffering American population to whom the passage and constitutionality of the Affordable Health Care Act is life saving but if allowed they will repeal it even in the face of their own Chief Justice's affirmative decision upholding it. They are the enemy of a president whose skin color makes them see fire and want him removed with every fiber of their being.

We MUST fight fire with the fire of our OWN enthusiasm, never forgetting for one moment if God forbid Republicans take the presidency, the House again and the Senate as well, we are done as a nation. They will return, because they simply are not intelligent enough to realize it, our nation to the clutches of the 1% wealthiest who do not care about them and most certainly do not care about us, the elderly, the disabled and the poor to whom health care is NOT a luxury but a necessity and should be a right.

We have in the past week, achieved many victories BUT do NOT allow that to lull us into a sense of complacency. We MUST fight, we must never give in, we must never falter and we must never fail. We, as Democrats, as human beings with empathy for those whom life's good fortune has forgotten, must work until the last hour of the last minute of the last second until the polls close all over the nation in November. A defeat for the president is UNTHINKABLE!

The opposition is energized like never before because they simply cannot endure a black president and a black family residing in the White House. This is 2012 but it may as well be 1860. Our president is the Lincoln of our time. Win this election for the president as if you were re-fighting the Civil War because in many ways you are!


Onward to re-elect the president

A Flip-Flopping-Flounder Candidate and Party

The president is so far and above the best candidate, has proven his mettle, done some VERY good things of which progressives should take note, that to elect a man who has flip flopped more than a fished-out-of-the-water flounder, cannot connect to much of the American electorate and even to many in his own Party is out of the question. I heard a winger say he was moving to Canada if the president, because of the health care passage, was re-elected. I might remind that person Canada has nationalized health care!

The Republican Party is impossible for even an economic moderate to support. It was not always but has become a vicious, mean-spirited, uncompromising and extreme right wing Party. Moreover, and worst of all, its aura is racist and its composition nearly all white. Not only would I never vote Republican I would be ashamed to register as one.

When Nixon was president, because I needed a summer job, a nice Republican student I knew helped me secure one with the Republican State Committee of Mass. I was NOT Republican. I was a civil rights advocate, war protester and true left of center Democrat BUT needing a summer job prevailed. Even though I agreed with them on nothing they were some of the nicest people individually with whom I worked and had the pleasure to get to know. It was a wonderful experience and I grew to love many of the state committee workers there.

Today, not only would I NEVER consider working for a Republican organization even in a summer job I could not even TALK to any on policy or truthfully have any as close friends. The political milieu between us is that toxic, angry and sad! I am hoping rather than health care being the President's Waterloo, as the cerebrally challenged Republican South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint said, that the vote in November will be the last gasp of a Party of white which bears no resemblance to the lovely people I once knew so many years ago and that November will be a big win for Democrats!

President Obama/Elizabeth Warren for Senate Needed Now More than Ever Before

I was elated as I am sure many of you were by the decision handed down yesterday by SCOTUS. In reality we know, I think, the decision hung by a thread and in the end who could know calling the mandate a "tax" instead of arguing it vis a vie the Constitution's commerce clause was the magic bullet for Chief Justice Roberts to red rover to our side. I have thanked him more than once across the blogs.

In reality the word tax in this nation is like saying Kryptonite to Superman. A negative aura was cast on that word practically from the country's founding BUT we all know taxes are eminently necessary for our nation to function to protect its people.

I am convinced effective taxation comes from electing good, ethical, honest, smart legislators and government workers appointed by them to avoid the rip off and con game that has reached Herculean heights especially by the odious decision of Citizens United. I went to a Bill Moyers blog and found the following:

Robert Kaiser, Associate Editor of the Washington Post, explains that as long as Washington is a center of money and power, it will tempt some people. He illustrates his point with the story that titled his book:

I went to [lobbyist Bob] Strauss, and I said, "Explain to me why the lobbying business has boomed so, in the years that you've been in it, 35 years." And he thought about it for a minute, and he said, "You know, there's just so damn much money … ."

It is why we need at least two or even three of the conservative justices responsible for the malignant decision of Citizens United turning Washington into the golden calf on steroids for the 1% supplanted by this Democratic president who works for the 99%. We hope these justices will be replaced when and if he is elected to his second term. It is WHY it is imperative for the reelection of the president to occur. Without that this nation will be taken down a path of oligarchic bought government – regulatorily anarchistic, unbridled and unrestrained in its reach to the goutian 1% whose appetite for all the money including yours and mine is impossible to satisfy. If we do not see these justices replaced we will not see in our time and in our children's time a nation we, as progressives, thought we knew.

I enclose a link here or below to some thoughts I developed about so called “originalist” justices after the decision was handed down.

Onward as the re-election of the president and the election of Elizabeth Warren for Senate is needed now seemingly more than ever before!

http://www.natalierosen.blogspot.com/2012/06/constitutional-essence-of-healthy.html