The Life of Pi which we saw over the weekend appeals to those who are plagued by the larger questions of life and its difficulty. It is a HUGELY profound film BUT one has to enjoy that type of intellectual challenge to take the time to analyze, walk through its weeds and see the depths of its thought.
Reading what others say about it online is helpful to understand the depth and varying opinion about it. Some things about its essence were not clear to me. The more I thought about and discussed it with others who have seen it the more I can appreciate its brilliance. Ang Lee won the Oscar for best director. I surely can see why.
I think to get the film's maximum experience one should see it, if possible, in a theater with 3D disposable glasses the theater hands out or view it in IMAX. Viewing it with 3D glasses makes it a stunning visual experience as one sees, for an example, birds flying in the most vivid color directly in front of you as if one could touch them. 3D makes Pi amazing.
It is about man, animals, the universal creation and every living thing's challenge to survive within it. One sees life's diversity, gorgeous complexity but continuously asks why we as sentient understanding beings are left to forge though it seemingly alone with the constant companion of suffering and death running along side.
I believe the major thrust of the film is contained in the Biblical story Job. It is about man's yearning to understand and give meaning to the vicissitudes of life without losing faith in a God in the face of life's table of tragedy spread out before us. It is man's quest to find the meaning in life to give it purpose and help us when we are weaker than what life visits upon us.
The protagonist a young Indian boy named Pi Patel is constantly thinking about the same things and even becomes a Hindu, a Christian, a devotee of Islam and even Kabbala Judaism in his quest to seek personal answers and peace.
The film is available On Demand on TV BUT without the 3D glasses one does not gets, the visually awestriking experience. I may see it again on TV so I can re-see the thoughtfulness behind the movie albeit not in as visually appealing form.
I give this film a thumbs-up IF and ONLY IF those aforementioned things usurp your consciousness as they do mine and if you are prepared to think hard about what the film is offering. To some it may seem like a children's movie but I suggest it is far from that. It could be seen by children but they would not have the sophistication, ability to question life and the experiences of it that only an adult could possess. Want a slice of Pi? I hope your answer is yes!
Monday, March 18, 2013
Sunday, March 17, 2013
What we are up against
On the March 14, 2013 edition of Larry O'Donnell's "The Last Word" he quoted a South Carolina state senator Kris Crawford. Crawford said as follows when he was talking about S. Carolina accepting the president's Affordable Healthcare Act and I quote:
"The politics are going to overwhelm the policy [the Affordable Health Care Act.] It is good politics to oppose the black guy in the White House right now, especially for the Republican Party!"
That says it all and shows one the impetus behind most of the Republican obstructionism in Congress and why the president has to pull teeth to get anything passed. It also affirms what I have been saying for years.
I received criticism from a conservative former friend of mine. He said that I was completely wrong telling me that racism is not at the heart of the Republican opposition but that it is the policy that is at the force behind it.
I say, as Rachel Maddow would say, BULLPUCKY!
THIS IS EXACTLY WHY WE MUST NOT ONLY ELECT ED MARKEY THE BEST MASSACHUSETTS DEMOCRATIC SENATORIAL CANDIDATE FOR OUR PROGRESSIVE CAUSE BUT IT IS ALSO WHY WE MUST SOUNDLY OBLITERATE RACIST REPUBLICANS IN 2016.
WE MUST TAKE BACK THE HOUSE, KEEP THE SENATE AND TRY AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE TO TAKE BACK STATE LEGISLATURES. THIS SOUNDS LIKE A TALL ORDER AND THAT MAY BE SO BUT IT MUST BE DONE IF THE PRESIDENT IN HIS FINAL TERM CAN PERFECT THE CHANGE THAT WE KNOW IS NEEDED NOT ONLY FOR HIS LEGACY BUT FOR THE COUNTRY'S MIDDLE CLASS TO SURVIVE. JUSTICE MUST PREVAIL!
Friday, March 15, 2013
Rachel Maddow the Magnificant
I cannot get over Rachel Maddow's show last evening meticulously explaining how the Newtown shooting took place killing so many many children/teachers and why the shooter's high capacity magazine clip made it so much easier for him to perpetrate his madness.
I had tears streaming down my face and can only hope Rachel does what she does as long as humanly possible. A friend of mine and I were incredulous as to how good she truly is.
I loved not only her segment on Newtown but Senator Boxer's retort to the buffoon Republican senator Cruz concerning gun control legislation they were debating. Cruz went to Harvard? What was the admissions officer there doing downing a fifth of gin when he interviewed that malevolent huckster passing himself off as intelligent?
I hope tonight, too, she could illuminate the Republican South Carolina senator who is on record and quoted as saying in South Carolina that it "behooves Republicans to vote against anything the African American president is for."
Of course I have known, talked about and written of the blatant racism that is working against absolutely everything this president wants and we KNOW it is behind so much of the rancid Republican opposition. They need to be exposed and use this quote as MSNBC did for the infamous 47% audio tape said by Romney at a $50,000 a plate dinner recorded by the event's bartender, Scott Prouty. It quite possibly sank the Romney campaign exposing him as the uncaring empty suit he was.
Ed's Schultz's interview of Scott Prouty was GENIUS. I urge all who have not heard it to Google it and listen to Ed Schultz and to Rachel Maddow's show last evening as well. I link them both below.
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/26315908
http://tv.msnbc.com/shows/the-ed-show/
Pope on a Rope
The Catholic Church is in trouble. We who have witnessed the unconscionable pedophile sickness infesting the Vatican and its Catholic Church throughout the western world like the emperor of all maladies[1] cancer, know that this is so. Its corruption sexual and otherwise is eating it alive as we witness church after church shutting its doors, emptying its pews and seeing many shunning the priesthood like a building marked “Typhus Keep Out.” I suggest the Catholic Church is on the ropes. In its esteemed wisdom it has chosen a 76 year old Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio of Argentina as its new pope since for the first time in 700 years the previous Pope Benedict resigned.
I believe Pope Benedict did not give up his papacy because he merely was too age-related tired to continue. He could not continue because the reality of the allegations against him and his Church are so stunning and so disastrous that if Benedict dares travel outside of the Vatican state I have read he allegedly will face arrest. It does not take imagination to think what those charges are since Pope Benedict’s butler spilled the beans. Allegedly, only two men will know what the Vatican intrigue has been and that is the resigned Pope Benedict and Francis, the new Pope. Traditionally, the Church’s crimes have surrounded money, power or sex. In this case it may be all three. We do not yet know. We may never know the truth behind the flurry of Vatican activity to elect this new pope quickly.
I am fond of the fact that the new pope is a Jesuit placing a value on intellect. I like his formerly being a chemist, a man of science. I support his stand on the poor. BUT his utterly false statement about gays saying they are induced by Satan in an attempt to subvert God's law, opposing even gay adoption, heterosexual contraception, married priests, women in positions Church power and more is the ridiculous apex of the Medieval hypocrisy of a church saturated with homosexual male priests some of whom molest children by the hundreds and maybe thousands.
Not only has he made grievous statements against consenting adult homosexuals who dare ask the right to marry like everyone else but he tried in vain to overpower Argentina ’s president Cristina Elisabet Fernández de Kirchner who won marriage equality for everyone in her nation. Cardinal Bergoglio (now Pope Francis) and his Church were singularly and calculatedly active in their laser-like focused quest to win the argument against the Argentinean president’s effort to make gay marriage law. In Argentina , this very Catholic nation, Cardinal Bergoglio and his Church lost!
I would never think the Church would be pro choice on the issue of abortion but I might think a Jesuit and a man of science would at least soften his position on the reality of the sexual diversity of homo sapiens (man) while making it crystal clear that pedophile priests will never now be let off the hook for their crimes against humanity.
His ascension to the papacy does NOT obviate the fact that this unisex institution has many adult NON-abusive homosexuals within it and as reflected in its history probably always will. Either he turns his back on his heretofore ignorant medieval hypocritical religious dogma interfering in the political realm – something which Christ himself eschewed – or he will keep the Church in the stagnated quicksand of its own making.
Yes, the Pope and his Church are on the ropes in the west. Only he has the ability to win the fight by making the Church attractive to the poor, the dispossessed, those on the margins of society and to homosexuals who are an oppressed minority variant within the sexual diversity of man. Surely he can see, as the scientist he was, the truth in this fact and bring the Church into the 21st century. I am neither anti-Catholic nor anti-papacy but I am anti ALL religious institutions inserting their right-wing extremist anti-humanist views into the political affairs of nation states.
Pope Francis can repair this rope and allow the Church to bounce back into the ring or he can use it to ultimately hang itself relegating it, ultimately, to the thumbs down legacy of western history’s verdict. How he modernizes the Church is his choice and his alone. The problems he and his Church face are immense, systemic and profound. The rope is in his hands to do with as he wishes.
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
An email to my ideological compatriots
I wrote the following below to Ed Markey campaign for Senate people with whom I sometimes join for Markey campaign events. I decided to send it out to my group. Many of you live in Mass. and many if not most know people in Massachusetts. If you do feel free to spread this on. You can watch Elizabeth Warren, too, by Googling Larry O'Donnell's "Last Word." It is a short segment but one can see how fabulous Elizabeth Warren is and Ed Markey, who WILL win, follows in her ideological footsteps. I said:
The soon to be Senator Ed Markey will EXCELLENTLY complete the marriage of TWO INCREDIBLE senators from Massachusetts.
We need the success of his election as we did Elizabeth Warren. These are two shining stars from Massachusetts that make me SO proud to be from our state!
NEVER GIVE UP and NEVER GIVE IN TO REPUBLICAN MEAN SPIRITED AND HATEFUL TYRANNY!
ONWARD and ALWAYS FORWARD
Monday, March 11, 2013
Winning the Hearts of Other Men -- the Leadership of Hugo Chavez
Why does everything have to be all good or all bad? Humans will never attain perfection. Hugo Chavez knew how to tap into an entire class of people -- the poor and the powerless. He made the powerless feel powerful and that their interests would be recognized and served by him. If he did it through strong-armed techniques and perpetrating the longest hatred of some so be it. As long as the need to eat and the need to see a doctor when sick were met then he was elevated by many to idolatry status. I think Chavez did that for the vast numbers of poor in a poor but very oil rich nation. He rewarded himself, of course, handsomely for it.
I love George Orwell's "Animal Farm" and William Golding's "Lord of the Flies." Both knew the impossibility of purity and all-good leadership. One system falls and another system often worse than or as bad as the one before fills a vacuum to take its place. Mostly, man has an almost innate desire to be led. As long as he does power will emerge to fill a void in peoples' hearts by tapping into what they want most -- protection, healthcare, a full stomach and a job. The leader who sees so presciently what man most needs will invariably fall short but often take advantage of this ever-present need for leadership nonetheless.
All institutions, whether in the form of government or in the form of religion like the Vatican, see a universal need of humans for help and hope for the hopeless. They tap into it, gain a reputation for caring about the least and while they are at it grab power and the great security of wealth it brings for themselves. So what if they are a bit corrupt -- just a bit? The millions will look the other way not because they have to but because they need to.
It does NOT take a genius to figure out what people want. Both religion and government always do and manage to put one over on the follower masses multiple times. As Bob Dylan said “You do not have to be a weatherman to see which way the wind is blowing.”
My motto: Question EVERYTHING and know that most leadership does things NOT out of the goodness of their heart but out of their singular need to win the hearts of other men. It is the give and take constant in man’s evolutionary struggle to survive.
The Jury is Out (If you listen to or watch nothing else listen to Glenn Greenwald's speech before the Oregon ACLU)
If you listen to or watch nothing else in your life listen to Glenn Greenwald's speech before the Oregon ACLU. I post it here or below. It is pure mastery of the definition and application of civil liberties. Just what do civil liberties mean, what are they, are they abridged in our nation and if so why?
Glenn Greenwald is utterly brilliant in his analysis. If nothing else it causes one to think about the issue especially as it applies in our world today.
I will admit that as much as I think this man a national treasure I am hesitant to agree with him on his thought universally and am more cautious than he because, well, frankly I rather enjoy breathing.
Are we less safe now than we have ever been in our history because of our clearly Constitutionally questionable actions and alleged legal memos supporting them or are we safer? Hamlet stated it best: "To Be or NOT to be THAT is the question.
In our time I believe we are existentially at risk not only from those without but most especially from those within. Where do YOU fall on this important issue? For me the jury is out.
HARUUMPH!
I haven't been writing much as I am in a this-is-a-too-bleak-universe-which will-all-end anyway frame of mind. Not good. But the article below on Fukushima shows how the money corruption of EVERYTHING influences it all. If man cannot use his evolutionary mega intelligent mind to make sure the stupids do not inherit the earth denying climate change, evolution and the scientific truth of it all than we are all doomed.
With nations just itching to push the nuclear button too well my mood is less than positive.
Also watching a science lecturer on PBS Brian Cox who does a series "The Wonders of the Universe" does not paint a pretty picture of it all but nonetheless is FASCINATING. He is brilliant! I highly recommend it even though some realities are dark.
All I have to say is HARUUMPH!
P.S. Below is a generally progressive site called OpedNews but I did notice that they had a couple of ads that are anything but progressive. I have an email into them asking why. If you see something like "Obama, don't Tax us" or something for Rand Paul -- naturally PAHLEESE ignore if you choose to read the article which is very good as are others on the site.
Thursday, March 07, 2013
Eminence Grise Indeed!
My writing guru and the love of my written word life is NYT preeminent editorialist, Maureen Dowd. I wish I could express my thoughts as well as she. She uses the English language like Mozart or Beethoven composed music -- creatively expressive and with passion. I love how she combines sometimes obscure but definitionally perfect words sewing great works of literature into the formulation of a sentence crafting her artistic prose.
If you have not already read it, I am pasting below for your enjoyment, yesterday's NYT editorial by her entitled "Repent, Dick Cheney." She weaves Shakespeare's Iago into her work and calls Dick Cheney the éminence grise. I confess I had to right-click look up "éminence grise" where it is defined as "a powerful decision-maker or advisor who operates "behind the scenes" or in a non-public or unofficial capacity." Yes, that surely explains Richard Bruce Cheney.
No one other than Maureen Dowd can create her unique symphony of sentiment by her brilliant use of words and in so doing makes me wonder “Now, why didn’t I think of it that way?!”
“Repent, Dick Cheney"
“Dick Cheney certainly gives certainty a black eye.
In a documentary soon to appear on Showtime, “The World According to Dick Cheney,” America’s most powerful and destructive vice president woos history by growling yet again that he was right and everyone else was wrong.
R. J. Cutler, who has done documentaries on the Clinton campaign war room and Anna Wintour’s Vogue war paint room, now chronicles Cheney’s war boom.
“If I had to do it over again,” the 72-year-old says chillingly of his reign of error, “I’d do it over in a minute.”
Cheney, who came from a family of Wyoming Democrats, says his conservative bent was strengthened watching the anti-Vietnam war protests at the University of Wisconsin, where he was pursuing a doctorate and dodging the draft.
“I can remember the mime troupe meeting there and the guys that ran around in white sheets with the entrails of pigs, dripping blood,” he said. Maybe if he’d paid more attention to the actual war, conducted with a phony casus belli in a country where we did not understand the culture, he wouldn’t have propelled America into two more Vietnams.
The documentary doesn’t get to the dark heart of the matter about the man with the new heart.
Did he change, after the shock to his body of so many heart procedures and the shock to his mind of 9/11? Or was he the same person, patiently playing the courtier, once code-named “Backseat” by the Secret Service, until he found the perfect oblivious front man who would allow him to unleash his harebrained, dictatorial impulses?
Talking to Cutler in his deep headmaster’s monotone, Cheney dispenses with the fig leaf of “we.” He no longer feigns deference to W., whom he now disdains for favoring Condi over him in the second term, and for not pardoning “Cheney’s Cheney,” Scooter Libby.
“I had a job to do,” he said.
Continuing: “I got on the telephone with the president, who was in Florida, and told him not to be at one location where we could both be taken out.” Cheney kept W. flying aimlessly in the air on 9/11 while he and Lynne left on a helicopter for a secure undisclosed location, leaving Washington in a bleak, scared silence, with no one reassuring the nation in those first terrifying hours.
“I gave the instructions that we’d authorize our pilots to take it out,” he says, referring to the jet headed to Washington that crashed in a Pennsylvania field. He adds: “After I’d given the order, it was pretty quiet. Everybody had heard it, and it was obviously a significant moment.”
This guy makes Al Haig look like a shrinking violet.
When they testified together before the 9/11 Commission, W. and Cheney kept up a pretense that in a previous call, the president had authorized the vice president to give a shoot-down order if needed. But the commission found “no documentary evidence for this call.”
In his memoir, W. described feeling “blindsided” again and again. In this film, the blindsider is the éminence grise who was supposed to shore up the untested president. The documentary reveals the Iago lengths that Cheney went to in order to manipulate the unprepared junior Bush. Vice had learned turf fighting from a maniacal master of the art, his mentor Donald Rumsfeld.
When he was supposed to be vetting vice presidential candidates, Cheney was actually demanding so much material from them that there was always something to pick on. He filled W.’s head with stories about conflicts between presidents and vice presidents sparked by the vice president’s ambition, while protesting that he himself did not want the job.
In an unorthodox move, he ran the transition, hiring all his people, including Bush senior’s nemesis, Rummy, and sloughing off the Friends of George; then he gave himself an all-access pass.
He was always goosing up W.’s insecurities so he could take advantage of them. To make his crazy and appallingly costly detour from Osama to Saddam, and cherry-pick his fake case for invading Iraq, he played on W.’s fear of being lampooned as a wimp, as his father had been.
But after Vice kept W. out of the loop on the Justice Department’s rebellion against Cheney’s illegal warrantless domestic spying program, the relationship was ruptured. It was too late to rein in the feverish vice president, except to tell him he couldn’t bomb a nuclear plant in the Syrian desert.
“Condi was on the wrong side of all those issues,” Cheney rumbled to Cutler.
Cheney still hearts water boarding. “Are you going to trade the lives of a number of people because you want to preserve your honor?” he asked, his voice dripping with contempt. “I don’t lie awake at night thinking, gee, what are they going to say about me?” he sums up.
They’re going to say you were a misguided power monger who, in a paranoid spasm, led this nation into an unthinkable calamity. Sleep on that.
Tuesday, March 05, 2013
The Distribution of wealth--one of the best explanations I have seen
This is one of the BEST videos I have ever seen on the distribution of wealth in this nation. AMAZING does not begin to describe it. Sickening is a better word! I urge all to click on it here or below. It is fascinating!
My Letter to Rachel Maddow
Before you read what I wrote to Rachel Maddow last night (slightly reworked) I will put the link to her segment here and below which includes some emotional issues about which I shed tears as well as an interview of the retired first woman Supreme Court Justice, Sandra Day O'Connor. You will be able to see how Rachel handled the interview of this supposedly rather moderate Supreme Court Justice appointed by Ronald Reagan. I LOVE Rachel Maddow but occasionally something on her show, well, gets my goat. The interview of Justice O'Connor by Rachel did just that.
Sandra Day O'Connor, the first woman justice appointed by Ronald Reagan who tipped the decision of Bush v. Gore in the 2000 presidential election between former VP Al Gore and George W. Bush handing George W. Bush the office of the presidency. He was clearly a man not fit to be president. His minions took over the reins of power and handed us a nation both economically, politically, internationally and racially a devastating legacy birthing an historically divided nation now coming perilously close to the civil war we see today.
I wrote the letter late last evening and was intent on simply getting my point across in a less than eloquent style which I hope, IF you read this, you will forgive. I wrote the following:
I cried knowing that the gay rights movement since 1971 has come such a long way -- a million miles as you said. Yes, I cried several times as you conducted a wonderful show yet again. You give credence to my view that you are the Edward R. Murrow of our time. In fact, I believe you are better than even he.
I cried too to at the Sandra Day O'Connor interview but they were tears of sadness. I rarely criticize you, Rachel, because I agree with nearly all you say. I love you as a news commentator more than I could ever say. You are the personification of excellence in broadcast news commentary.
I do, though, have a few words of disappointment for your interview of Justice O'Connor. I do realize that respect, of course, must be given to her by you for the mere fact that she retains the majestic aura we hold for most of our Supreme Court justices. I did though wish that someone would have held this woman's feet to the fire. Just who does she think she is kidding that justices are not political? Does she think we are idiots? Her decision anointing the MISFIT nincompoop George W. Bush into the presidency when IN FACT that damned 2000 election was stolen and will go down as a decision from hell much like Dred Scott or Plessy. That will be her historical legacy.
Shame on her for casting a MOST POLITICAL vote of her life and not treating the Florida vote of the 2000 election with the fairness it deserved. The Supreme Court is not political she says!? Really?
Does it keep her up at night, I would LOVE to know, when she realizes that she put into office one of the most lawless, disgustingly moronic and disastrous presidencies in our history? Does she think about the fact that SHE could have held in her hands a vote of fairness by making sure, as the Florida Supreme Court ordered, to count EVERY damn vote? If she did the election, of course, would have gone to Al Gore as academics in universities and respected news entities who have studied the Florida fiasco of that time have nearly unanimously said.
Al Gore probably would NOT have ignored warnings of an impending 9/11 attack and 3000 lives would have been saved. Al Gore NEVER EVER would have taken this nation to war under false pretenses killing HUNDREDS of thousands of innocents and five thousand of our own armed forces permanently disabling a towering MANY.
Yes, does this keep her up at night that she put an idiot into the presidency who had NO idea what he was doing, who destabilized an entire tinderbox Middle East region putting Iraq in the hands of Iran doing Iran a HUGE favor by anointing it hegemonic king of that region.
Yes, this is the Sandra Day O'Connor you accorded such respect when you questioned her instead of lambasting her for one of the WORST decisions in the history of this nation which took a nation to war that is UNENDING even unto this day. No, Al Gore never would have taken this nation to an illegal Iraq war. Al Gore NEVER would have tortured and importantly Al Gore would have realized global climate change and DONE something about it. Al Gore was brilliant!
But you let Sandra Day O'Connor off easy and now justices that have been put in place by the idiot Bush and other know-nothing "conservatives" will possibly overturn the most justice-laden decision ever, the 1965 Voting Right Act, and KILL equality in this nation for a long long time. Yes, as one of the mendacious conservative Republican Supreme Court justices said, Supreme Court decisions involving race tend to last a long long time.
Thank you, Justice O'Connor. Thank you for NOTHIN! I WISH you, Rachel, could have been brave enough like John Lewis was when he walked across in 1965 the Edmund Pettus Bridge which nearly killed him as he confronted on the other end a MURDEROUS mob.
You let this woman off the hook. She could have ensured the safety of this nation but instead decided POLITICALLY yes, POLITICALLY because she, in fact, was a Republican, appointed by a Republican who placed into the highest office in the land political hacks of her own Republican party. She probably was afraid her compatriots would be mad at her. I say SO WHAT! Bravery is doing things most could not do because it requires us to face danger squarely in the face. She was NOT brave enough to face the decision of her life with a fairness which would have enshrined her in history. She did the opposite because she could not face the ire of colleagues in the Republican Party and you, this time, were not brave enough to force her to confront that fact.
Shame on Justice O'Connor. I hold her in contempt and I wish you had too.
Sunday, March 03, 2013
Rising Once More, Unconquered--History of Polish Jews
For those of you on my list who are not Jewish but who are interested in some untold and unknown-to-many history of Polish Jewry you may be interested in this (scroll down to the video). Jewish culture need not only be memorialized by death but by the continuance of life as well. For those of you on my list who are Jewish most likely if you are Ashkenazi (Eastern European) heritage then this most definitely will apply to you.
My heritage is, of course, Ashkenazi -- one set of grandparents from the Jewish shetyl (village) in Russia of Shepatovka/Slavuta and the other set of grandparents from Poland -- Minsk/Guberna so this particular video has great interest to me as the emphasis of it is continuance of a vibrant Jewish life in Poland and it is testament to the ultimate failure of Hitler's fascist attempt to annihilate.
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Saturday, March 02, 2013
So You Will Know and So You Will Remember!
NYT ARTICLE HERE IF YOU WANT TO READ THE OTHER ARTICLES AND SEE THE MAPS, OR Linked BELOW. THE NUMBER OF JEWISH DEAD HAS REACHED THE 15 OR MORE MILLION MARK.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/sunday-review/the-holocaust-just-got-more-shocking.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/sunday-review/the-holocaust-just-got-more-shocking.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0
Intransigence and a Rat's Petootie
We are living in an era of the most obstructionist, intransigent, malevolent Republican opposition dedicated to the failure of our first African American president EVEN if it means putting the country last. The obstruction that is the most compelling piece of this Republican Party’s animus has been the most extreme possibly in the history of this nation. I am so disgusted, so angry, so sad and so fearful for the future of this country and its impending leap toward insanity that I must wail against it.
Like the Civil War era the Republican Party today with its Tea Party Republican base wants to severely fracture the nation. The stakes of descending into anarchy are REAL and those right wing extremists who would perpetrate it are well armed.
The threats of those outside of the country who want nothing more than to physically damage us are lying in wait. If the current so called Sequester of draconian spending cuts are allowed to occur without revision it will take DECADES to repair the nation IF it can be repaired at all. The annihilative ability of those who want to take this nation down both externally and internally is not the stuff of fiction!
You do not have to know how we got to this economic and social abyss to understand that the fault for it lay at the feet of the Republican Party. The Democratic Party, in Rooseveltian tradition, is the only Party capable of lifting this nation out of the economic sewer 30 years of nearly all Republican rule has created. A weak economy recently returning to a semblance of strength is threatened yet again by austerity and spending cuts the Republican Party is forcing down our throats. It has a sidecar of significant military cuts which compromise the security of the nation. Moreover, it provides example to other nations that the democracy we are selling to them is a false notion since we cannot keep our own house in order. The so-called Sequester will bring a very existential threat.
If you want to know the etiology of the never ending economic crises the Republican Party has inflicted on this president Google the Rachel Maddow show from last evening (Friday, March 1) who presents, in her usual infinitely brilliant and cogent style, an easy-to-understand rendition as how we got to where we are. Month after month of manufactured crises that the Republican Party has knowingly and deliberately thrown at the feet of this president to initially try to get him out of office. When they could not do that, they now in his second term are trying to wound and fatally besmirch his entire presidency EVEN if it means the near death experience of the country.
I ask you to send this to anyone you wish and tell them in 2014 to throw Republicans OUT of national and state legislatures the gerrymandered composition of which is responsible for the 2012 reduced Republican majority in the House. It is obvious if Republicans cannot win fair and square they will try to win through every dirty trick in their electoral playbook no matter how unjust as their voter suppression of minorities in swing states in the 2012 election proved.
I believe because this president is the first African American president that the Republican Party took special advantage of their own rabid right wing extremist base with its uber racist hue to lasso and hog tie its supporters so its elites can grab power any way they can. The success of the Republican Party could mean the end of a democratic nation as we knew it. Republicans are dividing it through the old rebel cause whoop of racist whites.
I stand for justice, I stand for humane policy, and I stand for equality. I stand with a relentlessly oppressed people who for centuries have had to endure the most humiliating and death wielding indignities at the hands of those whites who initially, centuries ago, brought the bondage of them to our shores. Racist sentiment, it seems, in this country never dies and to use the words of Sup. Ct. “conservative” justice Antonin Scalia, “race entitlement” NOT for blacks BUT FOR WHITES is systemically, and possibly forever, bound into the material fabric of this nation.
I ask you to support Democratic candidates throughout the nation and write those Republicans and their minions who are on the precipice of destroying hard fought for arcs of justice. Tell them that you will support any and all opposition to them because you care whether people live in a just nation or die at the hands of malevolence in an unjust one. Make no mistake, the true power of the intransigent Republican Party does not care whether we live or die and does not, certainly, give a rat's patootie about you!
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
The impending Sup. Ct. Travesty -- the overturning of Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act
I cannot believe that those DESPICABLE conservative sick justices on the Sup. Ct. and what that JERK Scalia said. He called the 1965 Voting Rights Act -- "racial ENTITLEMENT." He is a SLOB and Thomas who benefited from all the liberal actions that made life better for African Americans and others is already on record as saying it is unconstitutional!!!! He gives new meaning to the name Uncle Tom. Roberts too said something like "things have changed in the south" with what the RepublicRAT Party of racist bullshit [sorry, I'm angry] has done during the 2012 elections and with what they pulled to have the Sup Ct of conservative five MORONS overturn that law is a travesty.
I remember well the days and the deaths of the civil rights activists Goodman, Cheney and Schwerner. We fought hard and walked with our African brothers and sisters to erase discrimination from the face of this country.
What seems to be coming down will be one of the most DISGUSTING DASTARDLY decisions this rancid court will make IF they deem the Act unconstitutional It appears although I do not know for sure that they will turn the clock backward and do just that.
Jesse Jackson said it does not matter what they do as we will FIGHT discrimination as we always did in the days of civil rights action. This should NOT be over with a bad decision. African Americans and those who stand with them should DEMAND that their right to vote be protected.
I HOPE African Americans and we who support everyone's quest for equality let the Sup. Ct. know in no uncertain terms and by any means legally necessary that declaring the 1965 Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional when many congresses have reinstated it and so much blood has been spilled over it is UNACCEPTABLE!
Republican leadership MUST be thrown out in the 2014 elections in both the state and the federal legislatures and return this nation to a fair and democratic nation that we can be proud of again. ENOUGH IS ENOUGH! Oh yes, by the way, if you are from Mass. elect Ed Markey as our next senator from Massachusetts.
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
To Serve Man -- Sequester the Republican Party
Our nation changed November, 2010. The Congress passed the president’s landmark health care legislation and the Republican Party took over the argument infiltrating town halls, stirring up the white rage of racial animus and feigning economic reasons for it. Those Republican economic policies favor the top 2% but those that formed the new Tea Party Republicans did not and do not, still, understand. This rage won them in 2010 the House majority. Although recently the 2012 re-election of the president brought more Democrats to the table in the Senate keeping the majority and even collectively winning more votes than the Republican Party in the House, gerrymandering districts in the House allowed this Republican Party and its vicious minions to continue to control and obstruct it. Imagine, the Democrats control two bodies of a three tiered government and the nation STILL catapults from economic crises to economic crises like a skier tumbling down a hill.
Republicans, through the Frankenstein Tea Party they created, fed racist hatred already embedded in too many of the white body politic against our first African American president. I believed they perceived it was time to mount a previously thought insurmountable task of defeating this president. The Tea Party rose up with their ugly signs spewing the angry rhetoric of race hatred, a sentiment which lies deep in the American sinew and like an inoperable cancer it could kill a country. Republicans cannot now defeat the president electorally, of course, but they can defeat his historical legacy and they think when economic conditions return this nation to recession through Republican obstructionism it will in 2014 allow them to take it all no matter the cost to the nation. Cancer, the emperor of all maladies, (the title of Siddhartha Mukherjee’s great book) could and WILL kill Republicans too.
Tea Baggers want austerity to end our deficit. They want the nation to cut its spending on some of the most important functions that government provides and ones which the majority of people love such as airport security, clean water, clean air, roads, bridges, education, homeland security, and medical research to name a very few. They think like a household one does not spend more money when one is in debt. They do not know whether through their own ignorance or because of their persuasive masters’ mendacious arguments that their own lives, their children's lives, and generations after them, IF they exist, will depend on these programs too and that a country is NOT like a household.
IMPORTANTLY a nation does NOT thrive under austerity. It dies. It thrives when the nation creates jobs sometimes through government and its stimulus when needed. We need only to look at Greece, Italy and much of Europe to see why austerity in a depressed economy makes that economy worse. Many will succumb, including the families of Tea Bag Republicans, to the poverty and decay that austerity cuts will bring.
This is a tragedy because it does NOT have to happen. When sequester cuts happen, if Congressional agreement does not evolve, they will NOT be for the faint (yes that is the correct word) of heart. The Tea Baggers do NOT realize it is they who WILL suffer as they are NOT a part of the economic top 2%. Those in the middle class and those who are poor will, of course, suffer the most. Austerity, in truth, helps no one. Republican Speaker Boehner knows it but cannot seize control of the know-nothing part of his Republican Party that thinks a postage stamp size for government is a good idea. Politics is after all about power and Boehner does NOT want to lose it even at the expense of the nation.
The massive greed of Wall Street led to the Great Recession and the spending on trumped up non-funded wars led to the deficit about which the Republicans say they care so much. George Bush put two wars on a Chinese credit card and THAT is responsible for a large part of our deficit about which deficit the Republican Party waxes insane.
The massive greed of Wall Street led to the Great Recession and the spending on trumped up non-funded wars led to the deficit about which the Republicans say they care so much. George Bush put two wars on a Chinese credit card and THAT is responsible for a large part of our deficit about which deficit the Republican Party waxes insane.
As a remedy Republicans want spending cuts to those programs necessary for this nation to function. NOW IS NOT THE TIME FOR AUSTERITY. Those who have created this monster within the Republican Party do not realize the monster will eat them too. The “Twilight Zone” episode "To Serve Man" is exactly what the Republican Party is advocating except the man that they will truly serve on a platter is themselves, taking this nation yet again into an economic quicksand that will swallow all of us if we let them!
Write or contact those in the Republican Party who would do this to us and let them know if the sequester cuts go through they will get is their own sequester when they are thrown out of office in 2014. It will be a savored just reward for an anything-but-just party!
Monday, February 25, 2013
Out Out Damn Spot -- Reworked
MSNBC headline from Britain: "Britain's top Catholic cleric resigns amid allegations of inappropriate behavior."
Here or following is the link: http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/02/25/17086012-britains-top-catholic-cleric-resigns-amid-allegations-of-inappropriate-behavior?lite
My intent is NOT to be critical of one religion over another but to be critical of ALL orthodoxy within the major organized religions. The singularly male controlled hierarchical nature of orthodox religion is obvious. Where one blots women out of positions of power and relegates that institution to solely male control one often gets monumentally sick often violent sexual and anomic social behavior. In the face of SO much loathsome news about the Vatican's corrupt opaque essence it cried out to me for a response about it and I wrote:
Pope Benedict XVI is too tired and old so he must resign, he says. It is the first resignation of a pope in 700 years. I suspect there is more to this resignation than that. Why does this even matter to me? Mostly, it does not as it surely has no influence in my life but in a way it does because this institution directs its clergy in hypocritical fashion from the pulpit in our country and around the world to advocate for political issues that suppress and most importantly oppress human beings by spending money in elections against policy it does not like. It has influence on voters.
Charles Dickens could not have given the Austrian born Pope Benedict XVI a better name – the former Cardinal Ratzinger. There is, it seems to me, a poetic malevolence to this name. He had a childhood in the Nazi Youth and I believe continued to hold some of the ideological and anti-Semitic views with which he was infused at a young age. It was evidenced by certain tolerances by him of priests who would be a part of a right wing extremist Catholic sect called Opus Dei and conduct in Latin the inclusion of centuries old anti-Semitic passages in the mass which had been long erased from its liturgy. He was forced to apologize to the Jewish people more than once.
As an adult in the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, he was in control of the hidden sex scandals and other corruptions which saturated the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, aka the Inquisition, a morphed Middle Ages papal institution he once led. The church has tortured and slaughtered in its history many Jews and others it considered heretics. Now while it does not physically slaughter it emotionally still does. It stands silent in the face of a great sin and crimes against humanity by the cover-up of the massive sexual abuse of children by hundreds of its priests around the world. The Pope himself was named in a lawsuit suing the church for its alleged decades-long and ugly cover-up of priest pedophiles.
Many popes, including this present one, ignored these crimes. The church tried to keep this evidence behind its walls through its silence while it moved those accused priests around the world like pawns on a checkerboard and did nothing except when forced to do a little for its victims of this dastardly abuse. This corrupt and disordered celibate institution will probably conduct business as usual, select a new pope and its great perversion of justice will go on. Since we are not living in the Middle Ages resignation of this pope will make no difference to most but the church in its infinite odious wisdom will continue to advocate for policies against women and advocate against, in mind numbing hypocrisy, all forms of gay rights even though the institution of the church contains many adult homosexual priests who are NOT pedophiles. It did nothing about the true crimes it perpetrated and would still be doing nothing, hiding in the dark to this day if not for the press blowing the scandal sky high to see the light of day.
I suspect there is more behind this pope's resignation as the Vatileaks whistle blower, the Pope's butler, revealed in documents he released. The documents showed a church saturated with scandal from pedophile sins to the theft of millions by some of the Vatican hierarchy. We may never know the true extent of all of this perversion of justice and illegality even though the church could finally, now, have an opportunity to remake itself, ultimately reopen churches to their faithful and in so doing fill its coffers with the gold it lost. I am sure, however, it will not remake much.
I submit Pope Benedict and the Church he led will surely take advantage of his age in its explanation of his resignation but I suspect he is resigning because of something much more heinous. The pope has soaked his hands in blood by his own acquiescence to his Church’s abuse of children. Where this will lead I have no idea but this damn spot, like Lady Macbeth's, cannot be washed out.
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