Bring It On!

Semper Fi

Our own heart, and not other men’s opinion, form our true honor.” — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Today is a big day for a few, proud people. To all the US Marines reading today, including our own USMC-Retired, Liberal Jarhead, thank you for all you do and have done. Thank you for your individual pursuits of personal improvement, and your willingness to forgo what is best for one in order to strive what is best for all. Thank you for being brave and jumping into situations that makes the rest of us quake, for taking your training and teaching it forward, for your idealism and your modesty. We are many, and we are proud of you.

Happy 233rd Birthday, USMC.

Posted in Military | 4 Comments »

Salem Witch Hunters — Down But Not Out

Continuing with the same analogy from my previous post (yes, it’s getting a little old now), the patient is slowly recovering after an 8-year infection that was almost fatal. Now it’s been discovered that there were several strains of bacteria that were wracking the body with these unspeakable symptoms. Four days ago a one-time massive superdose of antibiotics was administered, which killed all of the infections that had gone systemic.

But now, the most putrid and most resistant of these strains — bacterius biblehumpus — is already trying to worm its way out of the patient’s intestinal tract and get back into the bloodstream.

These powerful antibiotics will lose their effect if we over-use them. The patient needs to develop a much stronger natural immunity.

Even though Spanish Inquisition 2.0 got stomped and kidneypunched four days ago at the polls, the Grand Wizards are encouraged because gay marriage was banned by voters in three states — California, Arizona and Florida.

One of James Dobson’s pilotfish, Tom Minnery, said: “Conservative politicians lost. Traditional values succeeded. It ought to tell them to get a clue about the importance of marriage. We were frustrated that Sen. McCain would not speak out about marriage strongly and repeatedly.”

That’s right! Millions of voters were scared shitless of losing their jobs and their homes, and McCain had this wacky idea that they wanted to hear about the economy. God told him to concentrate exclusively on the Homosexual Agenda and those ignorant sluts who want Abortion-On-Demand™.

Like the flu, there’s no cure for bacterius biblehumpus. All we can do is try to control it.

Posted in 2008 elections, Religion | 1 Comment »

Obama Wins Omaha Nebraska’s Electoral Vote

It’s official, Barack Obama has won an electoral vote in Nebraska. This is the first time that any state has ever split its electoral votes.

It turns out that Maine and Nebraska are the only two states that award their electoral votes based on the vote in each congressional district and two overall state total votes — just like their representation in Washington.

Well, it took until today to determine who would win this electoral vote, because the voting was so close. However, today the provisional ballots were tallied and the winner was Barack Obama.

Check it Out

Posted in 2008 elections | 1 Comment »

Taking 10 Lbs. of Rancor Out of a 5 Lb. Bag

The campaign nearly as long as a Presidential term is over, concluded with photo op handshakes and obligatory speeches. But buried in those speeches and handshakes are some tells for what the next four years may bring.

Most observers offered positive reviews for McCain’s concession speech. He seemed gracious, calm, respectful, and sincere. And best of all, he never mentioned maverick once.

However, it made me wonder where this John McCain had been for the last year. When his supporters booed Obama’s name, he called for them to stop - unlike his failure to stop dozens of even more incendiary outbursts during the campaign. He spoke of his love for America and the great privilege it had been for him to run, but as he uttered the words I saw a man who seemed ashamed at what he and others had done in his name. The reckless divisiveness he showed to voters was manifested in the way he awkwardly hugged Sarah Plain - a running mate as divided from him as a pea in a totally different pod. Tentative hugs (and staff leaks) can sometimes reveal more than the most eloquent speech.

Oh, the Speechifying!
Obama’s speech was excellent as usual. Oh, how that man can speechify! His Martin Luther King cadence is scientifically designed to make hope sound more hopeful and faith more faithful. His calls for change actually make people believe that change not only will happen, but that it will happen explosively.But the true meat of what we’re in for lies between the lines of gracious acquiescence and high flying oratory. The boos and ill-temper of the losers are still just as poisonous as they were 3 days ago and the winners’ rebuke of them is equally strong. The unrealistic expectation that a single man can deal with the our train-wrecked country by sheer will power is still more theoretical than concrete.

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Posted in 2008 elections, Obama, Political, Politics | No Comments »

Bill Ayers speaks on the Presidential Election and history.

Yes my friends..that Bill Ayers. I do not demonize him, I salute him. I will stand up and applaud him and what he tried to accomplish when the Vietnam War was raging.

I will never consider him a terrorist…he is my freedom fighter, just as Cubans against Castro’s government are considered such.

In These Times is giving Mr. Ayers a soapbox, which I truly appreciate..and here are his words, some of which I will reprint here:

What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been
Looking back on a surreal campaign season
By Bill Ayers

Whew! What was all that mess? I’m still in a daze, sorting it all out, decompressing.

Pass the Vitamin C.

For the past few years, I have gone about my business, hanging out with my kids and, now, my grandchildren, taking care of our elders (they moved in as the kids moved out), going to work, teaching and writing. And every day, I participate in the never-ending effort to build a powerful and irresistible movement for peace and social justice.

In years past, I would now and then—often unpredictably—appear in the newspapers or on TV, sometimes with a reference to Fugitive Days, my 2001 memoir of the exhilarating and difficult years of resistance against the American war in Vietnam. It was a time when the world was in flames, revolution was in the air, and the serial assassinations of black leaders disrupted our utopian dreams.

These media episodes of fleeting notoriety always led to some extravagant and fantastic assertions about what I did, what I might have said and what I probably believe now.

It was always a bit surreal. Then came this political season.

During the primary, the blogosphere was full of chatter about my relationship with President-elect Barack Obama. We had served together on the board of the Woods Foundation and knew one another as neighbors in Chicago’s Hyde Park. In 1996, at a coffee gathering that my wife, Bernardine Dohrn, and I held for him, I made a donation to his campaign for the Illinois State Senate.

Obama’s political rivals and enemies thought they saw an opportunity to deepen a dishonest perception that he is somehow un-American, alien, linked to radical ideas, a closet terrorist who sympathizes with extremism—and they pounced.

Sen. Hillary Clinton’s (D-N.Y.) campaign provided the script, which included guilt by association, demonization of people Obama knew (or might have known), creepy questions about his background and dark hints about hidden secrets yet to be uncovered.

On March 13, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), apparently in an attempt to reassure the “base,” sat down for an interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News. McCain was not yet aware of the narrative Hannity had been spinning for months, and so Hannity filled him in: Ayers is an unrepentant “terrorist,” he explained, “On 9/11, of all days, he had an article where he bragged about bombing our Pentagon, bombing the Capitol and bombing New York City police headquarters. … He said, ‘I regret not doing more.’ “

McCain couldn’t believe it.

Neither could I.

On the campaign trail, McCain immediately got on message. I became a prop, a cartoon character created to be pummeled.

When Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin got hold of it, the attack went viral. At a now-famous Oct. 4 rally, she said Obama was “pallin’ around with terrorists.” (I pictured us sharing a milkshake with two straws.)

The crowd began chanting, “Kill him!” “Kill him!” It was downhill from there.

My voicemail filled up with hate messages. They were mostly from men, all venting and sweating and breathing heavily. A few threats: “Watch out!” and “You deserve to be shot.” And some e-mails, like this one I got from satan@hell.com: “I’m coming to get you and when I do, I’ll water-board you.”

The police lieutenant who came to copy down those threats deadpanned that he hoped the guy who was going to shoot me got there before the guy who was going to water-board me, since it would be most foul to be tortured and then shot. (We have been pals ever since he was first assigned to investigate threats made against me in 1987, after I was hired as an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.)

The good news was that every time McCain or Palin mentioned my name, they lost a point or two in the polls. The cartoon invented to hurt Obama was now poking holes in the rapidly sinking McCain-Palin ship.

There is much more to his article and his thoughts…I suggest you check it out m’dear reader..its worth your time in my humble yet vocal pov.

Tags: Bill Ayers, In These Times, Bill Ayers speaks

Posted in 2008 elections | No Comments »

We Will Name Him Sparkles

In case you missed last nights episode of South Park, you can watch it here. I wonder if they had an alternate version made or did they have enough confidence that Obama was definitely going to win? I’m sure there is a conspiracy theorist out there right now trying to connect the dots.

Posted in Politics | 4 Comments »

Obama Releases a Flickr Set From Election Night

You can find more here.

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Your Prescription or Your Foot — You Choose

Sorry for the format but it’s an e-mail I fired off to John at AMERICAblog in response to this story and I’m not in the mood to reformat it.

Hey John,

Just got done reading your article about what happened with your health care coverage and I’ve got a story for you.

I was in a severe motorcycle accident back in July and my foot was nearly ripped off. Personally, I thought I’d be back to work in a few weeks but my doctors knew otherwise. I was in the hospital for approximately a month and released only to be readmitted when I contracted MRSA, a fatal and deadly infection often caught in hospitals. I spent an additional two weeks in the hospital because of this. The MRSA infection is another whole story I would love to tell you about, it’s the dirty little secret of the health care industry that costs us millions every year and according to the CDC killed more people than AIDS did last year in the United States. Look it up, it is scary. Anyway, I ate the cost for this little infection or at least my insurance company did because it’s very hard to prove who is at fault for the infection.

Back to my insurance. OK, I have been out of work for a little over three months now and thank god my company has a short term disability plan that payed for my insurance for the last three months. Unfortunately, I found out the hard way at the beginning of this week that after three months they drop my coverage and I have to pick it up under COBRA. I never got the notice and was actually informed by my pharmacist that I had been dropped. I went to pick up an antibiotic that I am taking to fight the infection, which if I do not take I will more than likely lose my foot, and my pharmacist told me the prescription would cost me $700.00!!!!! Needless to say, I cannot afford $700.00 so I bought three pills and went home to enroll in COBRA. The COBRA represenatative told me that I will have to pay for the prescription out of pocket and then I can get reimbursed at a later date, oh and by the way, I first have to send them $800.00 (for myself and my wife) now to activate the coverage and another $800.00 at the end of the month to continue the coverage.

My wife called my doctor in tears because we do not have that type of money lying around and we have literally been given a choice to pay for coverage and possibly lose my foot or pay for the prescription and possibly lose my coverage. I MIGHT LOSE MY FUCKING FOOT AND I’M FORCED TO DECIDE WHICH IS MORE IMPORTANT, MY FOOT OR MY COVERAGE. My wife called my doctor and luckily for us my doctor loaded me up with samples she had lying around of the antibiotic she prescribed me so that we could go ahead and pay our premium.

It sucks, it completely fucking sucks. And you’re right, this is the type of thing the Republicans campaigned for. They don’t want people to be covered, that’s something that must be earned otherwise it’s socialism. I have been working since I was 15 years old and have never been seriously ill but somehow at 37 years old and after only three months of being sick I am staring down the barrel of no health coverage? It’s bullshit!!!!

On a side note, let everyone know that enrolling in COBRA is no walk in the park. The COBRA payment laws have not been updated since 1985. This means that they only accept check or money order. This must be mailed to them and your covergae begins only after your check has cleared. Also, you can register by phone or computer, if you register by phone there is a code thing you have to enter when filling out your name, the system was down so I did not have the pleasure of trying to navigate it. So I went to register on-line only to find out that you must have Internet Explorer to use their web site. That ruled me out considering I hate Internet Explorer and I own a MAC. So I went on my old PC and downloaded IE 7 only to have it crash my computer. I finally got a hold of a COBRA rep that let me send them an e-mail that supposedly lets me enroll. Like Obama said, no one should have to go through any of this when they are sick. I can do ALL my banking on-line, pay bills, go shopping but I cannot make a payment to COBRA because the laws have not been updated since 1985. 1985. 1985. 1985. 20 years. Unbelievable.

Anyway, I thought I would share, I know I’m not the only one going through this but our stories need to be told. It’s not until you’re faced with the situtation that you learn about this shit and it sucks. Maybe if these stories were told more often and out loud people will get scared enough to do something instead of sitting around saying it will never happen to them.

Posted in Politics | 4 Comments »

Evil Weasels

This NY Times editorial describes how Bush administration official John Yoo attempted, in an elaborate 81-page memo, to provide a paid-in-advance Get Out of Jail Free card for Bushies to engage in wholesale kidnapping, false imprisonment, deprivation of due process, torture, and murder in violation of domestic and international law, treaties negotiated by previous administrations and the Congress, the mores of America and other societies, and minimal standards of human decency.  They anticipated that one day there might be an uncovering of their actions and a reckoning as part of a return to the rule of law.

One of the tests that President-elect Obama and his administration will face before our people and the rest of the civilized world is whether they exercise due diligence in investigating, reporting, and prosecuting this criminal behavior.  It is a fatuous and immoral rationalization to say, as Cheney did, that the so-called Global War On Terror makes it necessary for us to take to “the dark side” (no one just gave him the nickname Darth Cheney, he damned well earned it.)  History shows that it is possible to defeat evil without becoming evil ourselves.  It is also a bankrupt argument for offenders to whine that they were just following orders - we ourselves argued vehemently that this was not a valid defense at the Nuremberg trials after World War II.  It’s ineffective as well as wrong; when we do these things, we lose our moral standing in the world and make more enemies faster than we can kill or capture them.

And ultimately, if we become evil with the intent of defeating evil, it wins.  If we make the world a place where the choice is merely one between monsters, we’ve lost our souls and we’ve lost the fight.  There are fates worse than death, and one of them is to throw away our values and virtues and become indistinguishable from those we are fighting.  Of course, along with the ability to rationalize their own most vicious and sadistic impulses, it’s a hallmark of fanatics that they look at those who mirror them and are blind to awareness that they’re condemning their own reflections.

Anyone who makes excuses for this is morally retarded. It’s predictable that neocons will sneer that people who say otherwise are ignorant, unpatriotic, or lacking in courage.  The truth is that those neocons are the ones who are ignorant - they are far likelier to be the chickenhawks who dodged risk as young men and know very little of war themselves, whose ideology is equally untainted by practical experience, and whose version of patriotism involves spitting on the Constitution, the law, the Congress, and the rights of their fellow citizens - in short, their loyalty is not to the country at all, it’s to their own clique at the expense of the country.

Again, Mr. Obama, we’ll be watching.  This is not something you can legitimately look away from or shirk confronting.  Restore America’s honor.

Posted in America, Civil Rights, General, George W. Bush, Gonzo's Grab Bag, Homeland Security, Legal News, Miscellaneous, Patriot, Police State, Right Wing Nut, Terrorism, Torture, War, cheney, human rights, security | 2 Comments »

The 2008 Wake - Waiting For The Sea To Change

Many elections are bittersweet. 2008 was no exception. While celebrating Obama’s historic election, California voters were dashing the dreams of LGBT children throughout the world. Today, they doubt voters will ever grant an LGBT candidate the same defining moment of acceptance.

When we’re young, life is immeasurable and expansive. As we leave the coddled confines of our childhood, it is the equivalent of the snail emerging from its protective shell to explore all that exists in the grand garden of life…eager and idealistic…hopeful to a fault in the absence of unforeseen obstacles and disappointments…unaware of the protective nature of the domicile we depart.

My journey began in 1976 as I graduated from The Abbey School. Two years prior to my graduation, I made a decision I recall announcing in our kitchen to my mom, “I won’t be the valedictorian of my class…that’s not what’s important to me…but I’m going to win the Sullivan Award”. I can’t even say exactly how she reacted though I believe it was part surprise and part puzzlement at such a specific pronouncement. Once she absorbed my statement, she observed that grades weren’t everything and, by and large, left it at that.

The Sullivan Award was given at graduation to the high school student who contributed the most to student life during their four years of attendance. While an esoteric achievement, it fully symbolized my sense of community and my unyielding belief in the promise of humanity. On a warm summer day in front of the towering monastery…as a member of the esteemed 50th graduating class…in the centennial year of Colorado’s statehood and the bicentennial year of this nations existence…I received the Sullivan Award…and all was well in my idyllic world. My dreams had come true.

In a few short months, while attending college, I cast my first vote for Jimmy Carter and life was my oyster. Much to my dismay, little else would measure up for many years to come. Aware of my homosexuality, but determined to suppress it, I decided to quit college after three years and return home to work with my dad and his brother.

On the surface, the decision had the appearance of a considered choice, but in retrospect, it was motivated by my fear that should I remain in college, the opportunities to pursue my orientation would overwhelm my hesitations and preclude the remainder of my smoldering dreams…not the least of which was the political arena and the fanciful notion that the presidency was within the realm of possibilities.

In hindsight, my actions had little to do with choice and everything to do with being a Catholic raised in a small community where the thought of being gay struck my psyche as nothing more than a perceived and fully unacceptable pathology…the kind that not only precludes one from social acceptability…but most certainly eliminates any fanciful ideas of the presidency.

Yes, the little boy of five (who vividly remembered every detail of the assassination of John Kennedy…including the faces of those he encountered as he entered Safeway with is father after having heard the news on the radio)…and the boy of 10 (who watched every speech and every primary in the candidacy of Robert Kennedy…including anxiously getting up early in the morning to see if he had finally been declared the winner of the California primary…only to realize he was dead)…and the teenage boy (who watched the Watergate hearings with an intensity reserved for a member of the prosecution…up to and including the moment when Richard Nixon…the antithesis of his idealism…finally boarded a helicopter and released the presidency from the egregious grip of corruption)…had by the age of 21 found himself feeling as if fate had stripped him of his dreams.

Four years later, following countless hours of contemplation and with the realization that I had now lived a lie for a quarter of a century…I met a man and fell in love. Soon after, I allowed myself to accept my sexuality, announced it to my family, and on the spur of the moment…on a summer afternoon…with my relationship with my family in ruins and all that remained of my seemingly shattered life hastily tossed in a pickup truck…I moved to Denver.

Ever the idealist, abundantly naïve, and convinced that acceptance…or at least some simulation thereof…would undoubtedly come by affiliating with other homosexuals…I jumped headfirst into being gay. Unfortunately, doing so while attaching oneself to a lover is apt to end up being little more than an act of misguided transference. Should one be unlucky enough to choose, in haste, the wrong partner or the wrong affiliations, the process of separating oneself and completing the task of attaining a sound and self-sufficient identity can appear to be an insurmountable struggle.

In retrospect, it’s terribly saddening that gays…during the coming out process…the moment they most need support…are often required to summon a strength they most likely lack in order to accept and understand the rejection they encounter from those they love. Toss in the abject scorn that much of society heaps upon homosexuals and you have a rather rancid recipe unlikely to bake an ebullient and unencumbered identity.

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Posted in 2008 elections, BIO, Barack, Civil Rights, GLBT, Gay and Lesbian Rights, LGBT, Obama, Race, Religion, human rights | 1 Comment »