Pottersville Information Dump

As they'll inevitably do, the Republican Party and Tea Baggers cover themselves in glory and other not so suitable substitutes. Submitted for your perusal, approval, disapproval, etc:

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Professional scumbag and insurance salesman (pardon the tautology) Art Jones, running for Congress out of Illinois' 3rd CD, became the latest in a series of wingnuts to claim "the Holocaust never happened." As if that wasn't enough, Artie was also quoted as saying,

As far as I’m concerned, the Holocaust is nothing more than an international extortion racket by the Jews. It’s the blackest lie in history. Millions of dollars are being made by Jews telling this tale of woe and misfortune in books, movies, plays and TV. The more survivors, the more lies that are told.

Now, there's a Republican you can be proud to have in Congress, a man who doesn't pander to the Jewish, sane and historically-informed demographic!

(Sidebar: He also openly hosts "family-friendly" Neo Nazi events, thereby making him even more pathetic than his fellow Nazi-loving Midwest Republican Tony Zirkle.)

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Speaking of anti-semites, the Mormon cult (and it is a cult) has long proved the most viciously Dominionist and intrusive force in all Christendom. They pumped millions of dollars and many man hours into ramming Prop H8 onto the CA ballot and getting it passed. They planned on baptizing Elie Weisel and already baptized the late Simon Weinsenthal's own parents.

But earlier this month, ex Mormon Helen Radkey found baptismal records in the Dominican proving the LDS had actually baptized Ann Frank (it was all a "mistake", they claimed). It's difficult to understand this creepy religious necrophilia unless you look at it from a Dominionist POV. The Mormons obviously feel as if the Jews cannot be trusted with their own souls and need to be put on the straight path even if it has to happen posthumously.

Think Ann Coulter and her assertions years ago that all Jews were merely "unperfected Christians" and you have the real mindset of Christians, so-called Christians and faux Christians such as the ones in Romney's cult that merely tolerate Jews and patiently awaiting the conversion of the 440,000 projected survivors after Armageddon.

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Looks like Obama and his vile, brown-shirted Commie/Socialists are the last ones whose hands we have to worry about touching our Medicare and Medicaid. Because a Dallas-area doctor named Jacques Roy was recently arrested and charged with bilking Medicare and Medicaid. Yeah, he's a Republican and, yeah, he's also a Tea Bagger but what's really interesting about this particular instance of right wing hypocrisy is the amount of loot we're talking about: Over a third of a billion dollars. Yes, Dr. Roy is being charged with bilking the evil federal government for almost $375,000,000. So, what's worse, peeps? Obama's mad power grab and Socialization of our private health care system or one man's own mad grab for over a third of a billion taxpayer dollars?

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As if Christopaths weren't a big enough problem in Michigan, there's now the threat of Muslims who want to turn Michigan into Michiganistan (or Mich-Mich-Michi-Michiganistan-stan, if you're Herman Cain). Pay no attention to the fact that Muslims only make up 3% of Michigan's population. Pay no attention to the fact that these Christopaths have their own brand of Sharia law that's at least as noxious and backward-looking as the Muslims' sharia.

There's a reason why Rick Santorum doesn't want your kids to go to college. Facts, as John Adams said, are stubborn things.

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Newscorps' News International was rife with corruption, you say?

The Used

Usually, one needs to find themselves at the end of a long life, typically a nursing home, to get to where I've been prematurely sentenced since age 50.

Usually, one has to find themselves at that metaphorical rail yard at the end of the train line to discover what utter irrelevance truly is. That's when you get so old and feeble that no one depends on you to do anything, not even to not drool or even to shit your Depends. I've worked in two nursing homes. I know what the fuck I'm talking about.

I'm not talking about the necessity of managed health care for the elderly, even though it could use a paradigm shift on many fronts. I'm talking about superannuated irrelevance. I'm talking about the premature pasturization of those still young enough to contribute something to the world.

This is what I and many of us have had to live with as we're treated by the empowered as if we were as disposable as used Kleenexes. We're told we don't deserve a chance to contribute to society, to make our own way in the world because we're not good enough or smart enough or talented enough or connected enough. Many of us have been put to pasture and made completely irrelevant not because of a glut of talent or jobs but just the opposite.

I suppose it's inevitable to find oneself at the end of the life to be justifiably irrelevant. Mental and physical faculties decline and one can no longer keep up with an increasingly frenetic, rapidly-paced world. But what of us younger ones?

When I was a kid of 20-21 and full of myself, I thought I was some undiscovered, disrespected prodigy, the very stereotype of the starving young poet toiling away in a garret (In fact, for a brief time in the spring of 1979, I did live in a garret in historic downtown Concord, a place very conducive to poetry).

Of course, at the time, when I was pestering older poets with letters trying to get them to read my half-assed work, I didn't realize at the time I was still 5-6 years from writing anything that would be publishable. I wouldn't break into print with "little" magazines until January 1985 and virtually all that I wrote before 1984 wasn't worth the paper it was written on.

My first forays into novels about 15 years after I moved out of that garret were hardly any better. Here's the funny thing: My first completed effort, a sci fi, time travel novel, got me an agent in no time flat. Obviously, it didn't sell but it still got in the hands of the biggest and brightest editors out there at the time.

Now that I'm 1000% better as a novelist, I find it impossible to get even the cursory interest of agents who were barely out of diapers when I wrote my first novel. I get form rejection letters from the flunkies of the agents I was told to address in particular. No one wants to read beyond chapter one. That contest to which I'd submitted American Zen? I just found out two days ago it didn't even make the first cut (1000 semi-finalists).

I don't get any more respect from employers and scumbag, predatory temp agencies and people in general. I do not want handouts. I simply want the chance to contribute to the economy, to my country, my world. To show what I can do even if it's merely in a factory making $9-10 an hour. But those who have power over my life, all our lives, continually tell me I'm simply not worth that middling chance and risk they'd take.

I am disposable, a used up human being not one person thought worthy of salvaging and many of us can honestly say the same. I cannot even give it away. This is not a world as much as a massive crime scene filled with innumerable evidences of offenses against humanity, the environment, the economy, the job market. Most of the 99% are casualties.

And we're told, "Sorry, not hiring," "Not interested." "Not taking on new talent." "Make out this and maybe you'll get a preliminary interview." "You're not good enough, experienced enough, talented enough, employed enough."

Yeah, they're now ignoring the unemployed as literary agencies now ignore the unpublished, thereby directly insinuating themselves right into the heart of the problem without once realizing that irony. Far from being the solution to the problem, they have become the very problem itself.

And they remain unmindful of that collateral damage. Not their problem, not their concern. There's money to be made and we can't just give away the chance to enrich us to just anybody.

But this is why I write, why I blog, why I write novels and wrote poetry. I cannot reach people any other way. My generation and perhaps the one that came after it, are perhaps the first ones that found themselves in the position of not being able to make the world a better place than how we found it. I tried and I failed because those with power cannot be trusted to do anything except enrich itself and to retain that power even at the expense of lives and livings and homes and dreams.

I was wrong in my callow youth about my poetry. It really wasn't worth the paper it was written on. But I was barely out of my teens and barely had a critical faculty. At 53, I'm now in a position to state with some authority that I know how to write, if nothing else. I know how to reach people and I know how to put a damned good story together regardless of what the fucking idiots in the publishing business think.

I know I could be a damned good asset to a company and make a good account of myself and get promoted as with my next-to-last job. I refuse to believe that I am disposable, worthless, when I'm at the height of my powers as a writer. I refuse to believe that I will never work again for anybody because my hands, back and mind are as strong as ever.

Do not let anyone ever tell you you are worthless and expendable. You are unique and therefore precious to the universe, from the nucleus in every red blood cell out to the pores in your dermis. You are a human being and you have worth, Goddamnit. Do not ever let any employer, temp agency, literary agency, publisher or anyone fool you into believing otherwise.

Caption Contest

Riddle: What did Mitt Romney say at Ford Field? Answer: "Hello-lo-lo-lo-lo..."

This is about all the time I got, since I have to squeeze in news reading, keeping up on Twitter, job hunting, Facebook stuff and blogging right now is at the bottom of my list of priorities despite my itching to jump back into the fray.

So this is to let ya'll know we're still kicking and have just signed up for DSL and we ought to be online again at home in a week. We also, after having to wait three years, just got a house phone, because you can't get DSL through NetZero without a landline. This means our bills just increased by about $35-40 a month and still need a little help. So anything you could do would be immensely appreciated.

Down for the Count?

Beginning roughly 4-5 days ago, Verizon wireless customers all over the country began complaining on message boards that their wifi connections went down. This seems to be a regular thing, if my research is any indication. Last night our own connection went down a few minutes before midnight and we're not getting any indication it'll come back anytime soon. And all the other connections in our neighborhood are security enabled (WPA, WPE).

So this will be it for a while (Mrs. JP and I are at a local internet cafe but we can't stay here all day), despite the fact there's a lot to write about.

I will say that because I've recently been stalked and wrongfully reported for (gasp!) trying to make friends on Facebook without actually "knowing" them, I was put on a seven day suspension from sending out more friend requests. The problem with that is the clock never started to tick and it's been seven days for the last five days in a row. Appeals to their "customer service" dept. resulted in one roboreply and nothing after that. Many of my FB friends have been complaining this has recently been happening to them and their friends. One friend in Hungary reported his friend was banned for seven days for three straight months and counting.

So last night just a couple of hours before we lost our connection, I set up a new Facebook page and started from scratch (I permanently deleted the old one today while I had the chance). So if you're on FB and you haven't already received an invite from me, please consider going there and befriending me. So far, I've been able to rebuild 45% of or so my original friend list.

Since we're hanging by a thread, we can't justify getting a paying account for internet, not that that's any guarantee of service, if my research into Verizon's chronic problems keeping their customers online are any indication. If you haven't donated in a while or ever and are able to, please also consider making a donation through the Paypal link at the upper right corner. Obviously, we'll have no more email once we go home so any communiques will go unanswered until tomorrow not because of apathy or ingratitude but a sheer inability to respond.

Hopefully, this will prove to be a very temporary glitch and our network will be back online but if not, please be patient. We also cannot afford to spend money on overpriced coffee to justify using the closest unsecured network.

I love and miss you guys already.

Bedtime for Babeau

Paul Babeau and his illegal Mexican lover Jose in happier, more closeted and self-loathing times.

It's hard to see where Paul Babeau expects us to see the separation. While admitting that he's gay, he's also trying to get us to believe that at the same time, there was no truth to the allegations that there was anything going on between him and the man who'd outed him (I guess Republicans still haven't gotten used to the concept of photography anymore than they have video and audiotape) at the risk of deportation.

So, while there's been a tempest of interest in what amounts to a local, pathetic scandal involving another self-loathing Republican gay man coming out only after he'd been outed then threw his lover under the wheels of the bus, it's notable that Fox "News" has hardly mentioned it at all. That's understandable. After essentially making themselves the Clenis Network back in 1998, Fox is loath to even report in a fair and balanced manner on someone who's a frequent contributor as a "border expert". It doesn't even matter that Babeau was, until recently, Mitt Romney's campaign co-chair in Arizona and running for Congress out of Arizona's 4th district.

His political career is as good as dead in the water and, unflagging support from John McCain or not, he'll be lucky if he can get elected dog catcher let alone re-elected as Sheriff let alone elected to Congress.

Of course, the real crime here isn't whether Babeau is gay or not or even whether he was sleeping with a Mexican immigrant. The real crime is him trying to game the system by threatening Jose through his lawyer with deportation if he breathed a word of the truth that would hurt Babeau's political career. It revealed the self-loathing, ruthlessly ambitious side of many Republicans who are Republicans first and human beings second.

It reveals once again the bias of the right wing media that was busy turning Andrew Breitbart into a folk hero over the Anthony Weiner scandal yet strenuously turning a blind eye to one of their contributors and giving us, instead, updates and live feeds on Whitney Houston's funeral. Luckily, this is Idiocracy: The Prequel, the United States, indisputably the stupidest fucking nation ever in all of galactic history.

There will always be a fresh supply of useful idiots, Darwin Award nominees and dead celebrities whose sole reason for being will be to distract and divert us from what's really important. And, as smalltime and tawdry as Babeau's scandal is, one that achieved national relevance only because of his official ties to the Romney campaign, Fox "News" couldn't even rouse themselves to mention it, much less report on it.

What's the Opposite of Lavender?

Impossible to say, since black and white are the only two colors that are polar opposites on the light spectrum. But if we had to choose a color that's the perfect analogue of lavender, the more or less official color of the gay rights revolution, I'd nominate black.

Because, while white is, paradoxically, all colors, black is the complete absence of color and doesn't even qualify as one. Black also perfectly describes metaphorically the fist-like little hearts of scumbags like New Jersey Governor Chris Christie for making good on his threat to veto the marriage equality bill passed in the New Jersey Senate late Thursday night.

Democratic leaders in the New Jersey legislature have vowed to have the necessary votes to overturn Christie's veto and one cannot overstress the importance of doing so. It's been a very exciting week for those of us in the LGBT community: The NJ legislature passing a marriage equality bill (or gay marriage bill, if you're feeling a little more adventurous) comes on the heels of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals' 2-1 ruling that California's Proposition 8 was unconstitutional. It's important to parse the distinction between the 9th Circuit striking down the unconstitutionality of overturning existing state law and them saying that opposing gay marriage is in itself unconstitutional (which they did not).

Still the 9th Circuit Court's ruling for not the first time revealed the pettiness and lawlessness behind the homophobic mindset that created Prop H8 and has kept this useless referendum on the books for over three years. Said Judge Stephen Reinhardt in his majority opinion,

Proposition 8 serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior to those of opposite-sex couples.

For now, I'll gloss over his failure to include us bisexuals in his ruling and just cut to the chase: That it's simply wrong to impose your notions of morality at the expense of the dignity of your fellow human beings.

As I said last night in my jeremiad to GOProud, the hateful organization that discriminates against liberals as everyone but liberals discriminates against them, the only thing distinguishing the LGBT community from everyone else is with whom we choose to sleep. And with whom we fall in love. Falling in love, as virtually any human being will tell you, is as involuntary as our sexual identities.

It's the love part that freaks out right wingers and homophobes so much they cannot even bring themselves to address it. This is why they confine their arguments to gay sex, something guaranteed to give their fellow homophobes the dry heaves. They faithfully trot out Leviticus, a book in the Bible that was plainly written by deeply disturbed people, as if it's the law we ought to be observing and enforcing including the capital punishment part.

It's the narrowing of their argument to anal sex, swallowing semen, one woman going down on another woman and AIDS that produces a visceral reaction in others who are simply incapable of believing that sexual orientation is something you're born with. Love? Well, that's much, much harder to invalidate. We may not have experience in gay sex and many of you may even feel it's repugnant. But most of us, if we're lucky, know what true love feels like.

So, automatically defeated on that front, they narrow their arguments as they seek to criminalize homosexuality, even going as far as to import their hateful homophobia to other countries with the express purpose of imposing the death penalty.

And as if discriminating against their fellow humans isn't bad enough, the GOP is taking more than baby steps toward genocide by decriminalizing anti-gay bullying and even physical violence. When the Michigan Senate voted on an anti-bullying bill, House Republicans had already succeeded in inserting an amendment that neatly defanged the legislation and even subverted its entire reason for being. Michigan Republicans made it legal for one student to bully, beat and even kill a gay, lesbian or bisexual student as long as they whip out the Religion/Morality card.

Essentially, it turned Matt's Safe School Law into a 007 license for homophobes to beat gay students with absolute impunity. Even more despicably, this was hailed as a "compromise" with Republicans, despite it offering no real protections for LBGT youth who since time immemorial have been specially singled out for persecution.

This genocidal movement against LGBT youth is multi-faceted. Right wingers like Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council screamed until they were blue in the face over President Obama making Kevin Jennings the head of the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools. Jennings achieved notoriety in right wing circles by founding the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, which caters to straight students as well as LGBT youth. Mr. Jennings' responsibilities as President Obama's Safe Schools Czar also includes curbing drug abuse.

When you see and hear the furor arising from Mr. Jennings' appointment by our president (think about that, too, GOProud, next time you try to spit venom at liberals and Democrats who allegedly hate gays), you shouldn't need to take even half a step back in the interests of perspective, objectivity and context to see how hateful it is for anyone to stand in the way of making our public schools safer for our greatest asset and resource: Our youth. Our very future.

Religious freedom, to people like Perkins and other evangelical homophobes, essentially boils down to getting their way every time and not being disagreed with even at the expense of endangering our LGBT youth and indemnifying their abusers and killers.

If they're willing to disrespect our nation's LGBT youth, then no one with an ounce of compassion and grey matter should feel beholden to respect their homophobia whether or not it's clutching a cross. The First Amendment curtails the government's attempts to establish a national religion and mandates that it respect all faiths. It does not obligate individuals to do the same.

I do not respect a religion that is not all-inclusive and seeks to destroy a portion of humankind that has been around since the earliest days of prehistory and will be around as long as our species endures. And while my passion for certain issues waxes and wanes, what will never diminish and what will the last thing for which I stop fighting, is gay rights for my people.

And if you evangelical nut jobs out there want to scream discrimination, I have but four words for you: "How does it feel?"

If You Have Children...

...get them away from the computer. Because what follows is so incredibly no more suitable for young, innocent eyes than it's work safe. Because JP just got over his seemingly years-long, terminal case of outrage fatigue when he read the tweet from GOProud above on Twitter. So put the kiddies to bed, take a handful of Valiums, put on some heavily-smoked glasses, grab your crosses or rosary beads and don't read what you're about to with a full mouth. Because this is going to be the filthiest, angriest post that I've ever written, a post that will make the Rude Pundit recoil in horror and say, "Jesus Christ, dude, that was rude and in bad taste! For shame, for shame! Hiss!"

No doubt since you've seen the lead picture, you know what the thrust of this post will concern. It's about GOProud, the conservative gay rights organization who decided at their soiree today in between privately making fun of the busboy uniforms and hotel decor, that we and not the right they try to represent are the enemy, the "we" being "teh Left."

This tweet was put out at 1:08 PM, just hours before Chris Christie (R-Hindenberg) vetoed the gay marriage bill passed in the NJ Senate late last night. Yet, despite Christie doing this, these stupid fucks have decided that WE'RE the bad guys here.

Really, guys? REALLY????

Did we veto a gay marriage bill in NJ today? Are we the ones that ram-rodded Prop H8 onto the ballot in contravention of California state law since it passed neither chamber in the legislature in Sacramento and take away your right to marry in CA and pour million of dollars into that effort then fight like rabid pit bulls every step of the way when one court after another said Prop H8 was unconstitutional?

Do we block anti-bullying legislation such as the GOP in Michigan? Do we shrug our shoulders at gay teen suicide as in Michele Bachmann's district? Do we defend those who literally and figuratively bash gay people? Do we try to convert you by praying away the gay? Did we ban you from CPAC this month and did one of our Senators threaten to boycott it if you weren't disinvited? Do we still blame you for the AIDS epidemic? Did we send right wing evangelicals to Uganda to help make homosexuality punishable by death (I guess it was those long-haired, left wing evangelicals who deny evolution and that the earth is round)?

How does the evil Left oppress your people and deny you the chance to enjoy the same liberties and protections as the rest of the country? You stupid fucks, you deserve the Republicans that you help elect into office if you insist on looking at us as if WE'RE the enemy and your conservative superheroes will suddenly wake up one day and let you sit at the grown-up table.

Listen up, you dumb fucks: The right wing nut jobs whose side you take hates you even more than it hates Mitt Romney. They hate you more than Barack Obama, who at least repealed Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

When the right tries to claim that our people are seeking "special rights" and "special protections", it brings two facts to light: #1, your insistence on being treated equally and without prejudice only looks special because the Republican Party and its countless surrogates in the snake-fucking, Bible-humping evangelical zombies and its various sympathizers all over the Deep South including the KKK and the John Birch Society (and other left wing racist zealots) have singled you out for special persecution. And #2, they're also saying while denying you your "special protections" and "special rights" that you as gainfully employed, tax-paying citizens are less than American or even less than human.

When the Far Right tries to claim that you're out to destroy traditional marriage, they're positioning themselves to blame the LGBT community, my community since I'm a militant bisexual, whenever some Ted Haggard or Eddie Long gets caught in bed with a male hooker or a barely-legal male parishioner. And when they're finally forced to admit that they're gay, they don't simply say, "OK, I'm out. Surprise!" No these right wing nut bags you keep defending say, "The Devil made me suck those cocks and suck out the sweet, sweeeeeeeet semen out of that rent boy's round, firm and fully-packed phallus."

Then they go to counseling and pronounce they've prayed the gay away as if homosexuality is some kind of disease on a par with, well, AIDS.

So before you go spray-painting your elephants pink, you ignorant morons, take a close look and stop being driven by the same ideological bigotry that's constantly aimed at you from all corners of the nation except the Left. We are the ones who will fight to the death for your right to bed, love and marry whomever you want. We don't care about your right wing politics when gay rights is concerned. Why do you constantly snipe at us for ours?

The right wing wants to legislate themselves into your bedrooms. And, think about it: aside from whom you sleep with, what distinguishes you from the straight community? You get up in the morning, go to work, pay your bills, your taxes, go to the vet, eat out and pursue dreams just like ordinary people. You don't go to your gay jobs, gay park your cars, pay gay taxes. When the right wing nut bags whom you keep trying to embrace tell you you cannot marry within your gender, they're also telling you your love for your fellow man or woman isn't valid, that it's shameful and disgusting and they keep quoting Leviticus.

But, unlike the right wing you keep embracing and placing in positions of power (then wonder why they keep abrogating your God-given, inalienable rights as fellow human beings), we are not obsessed with sex and who you fuck up the ass and whose cocks you suck and whether or not you swallow or spit. We liberals tend to look beyond those extremely personal issues and get right to the nitty gritty: That gay marriage has everything to do with love and freedom of choice and not sex.

We are not the enemy, you dumb assholes. We're not the ones who blame lesbians for Hurricane Katrina and 9/11. We're not the ones carrying signs saying "God Hates Fags" (Praise be to those corporation-loving, right wing activists aka Anonynmous for taking down their website) and protest the funerals of our war dead and public figures. We're not the ones who beat Matthew Shepard and Allen Schindler to bloody pulps.

Your enemy is not the ACLU or Dennis Kucinich or Alan Grayson or Michael Moore or George Soros or George Clooney or Janeane Garofalo or Alec Baldwin or any other Bogey Man your fevered, bigoted fucking minds reflexively vomit out at will. We are on your side. We are not the enemy. And we liberals will defend to the death your right to marry whomever you want, espouse whatever political opinion you want and to vote for whomever you want.

And if you can't accept that after all these decades, then you deserve the spiteful, homophobic vermin you keep electing into power.

Maddow: Where's Waldo (County)?

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari Goldstein.)

or I Am Lego.

Oh, the poor Republican Party.

It must be a lot like being the last man on earth in a post-Apocalyptic America, an Apocalypse brought about by themselves. Then they finally meet another human being, in this case another man. He's the only thing they can stick their dick into because all else that's left is the occasional two-headed dog or cow. They hate the taste of that other man's semen and plunging into that brown honeypot but he's the only game in town. So bravely they sally forth, forced against nature to love the other man. And our Last Man on Earth, our Omega Man will do anything to keep the only other man on earth alive at all costs.

That's sort of what it's like for the Republican party and their Establishment candidate of choice Mitt Romney, a Lego man who resonates with the rest of the country about as well as you can expect a polymer-based product to. They're so desperate to get that dark guy out of office that they're even willing to eat their own and deny Republican voters the chance to have their votes counted. Specifically, the Maine GOP disappeared the votes of three whole counties and will not even return calls from MSNBC to explain why.

Washington, Kennebec and Waldo counties are those in question.

If you're wondering why the vote totals were even lower than expected in the Maine caucus last week, there's a good starting point. As stated when all the votes that were fit to be counted were counted on caucus night, it was determined that out of Maine's 243,000 registered Republican voters, only 5600 of them turned out to vote. That's roughly 5% of the registered Republicans in the state of Maine who voted for Romney and even if Washington, Kennebec and Waldo counties were allowed to participate, it's unlikely those votes would've pushed up the turnout to much above 6%.

But that's not the story. What is the story is that Romney was declared the winner of Maine (one of the two exceptions to the winner-take-all delegates rule) with 39% of the vote seemingly without the help of Washington, Kennebec and Waldo counties. Ron Paul, as we all know, came in a close 2nd with 36% of the vote and one of his senior campaign aides, Doug Wead, is saying that Paul actually got the lion's share of Maine's delegates.

But wait. If you look at the town by town vote total (.pdf file), you'll note that Rachel Maddow and Doug Wead weren't being entirely factual. Certain towns in the counties in question did have their votes counted. For instance, we know that Frankfort cast seven votes, Montville 21, Northport 11 and so on. Yet in 20 of Waldo's 26 towns, no votes were tallied.

In Washington County only one town, Pembroke, had their votes counted at all with the rest of the county's towns and cities drawing goose eggs.

Kennebec, on the other hand, drew just 5 blanks, with as many as 40 votes (from Maine's capital, Augusta, which is still a pitiful turnout) being cast.

So I don't know what Maddow is talking about since in Kennebec County almost all towns were heard from. Yet the complete paucity of votes in 46 of Maine's towns and cities across three counties is still enough to raise warning bells that something is rotten in the state of Maine. What's going on?

Robbing Paul to Pay Willard
Well, part of the problem is that many of the people who were counting the votes on caucus night were Romney supporters. Since this was a GOP caucus and not an actual election, the Secretary of State's office essentially has no authority and the state GOP essentially gets to write its own rules, including installing supporters of one candidate or another to engage in a Three Stooges version of what a fair and free democratic election is.

Factoring in the margin of error, typically 3-5%, and the fact that Romney "won" by only 194 votes, the nearly 50 towns and cities that the state GOP decided didn't count, after all, could've conceivably have swung the victory to Paul, who did well in Maine in 2008. It's like Florida in 2000 or Ohio in 2004 all over again.

We're not getting any indication the Maine GOP plans on counting those votes, much less explaining to the MSM why 46 towns and cities were suddenly wiped off the electoral map. But the last thing the RNC and Romney campaign needs is another retroactive loss such as what we saw in Iowa.

It's been said before that Ron Paul is the Dennis Kucinich of his own party. Minus the racism and crackpot ideas, Paul is about as despised within his own party as Kucinich is despised by the Democratic establishment. Paul, in their eyes, is revolting not because of his racism but because he stands against Big Business and against American adventurism abroad (which would take a huge bite out of the profits of the war profiteers who heavily fund the Republican power elite).

And while the Democrats are not certainly not above hamstringing and undercutting worthy Progressive candidates (Kucinich and especially Paul Hackett in OH-02 spring most readily to mind), we've yet to see them eat their own en masse as we saw in the Maine Republican caucus. The Maine Republican Party had shown us last week that they're worthy of taking up the decaying mantle left vacant by the imploding Ohio GOP in terms of sheer corruption and have joined the hole-riddled GOP Big Top that's turned this entire presidential election into the neverending comedy of errors it's been from the start.

Most egregiously, it also shows the Maine Republican Party is willing to subvert the will and voice of the people by disappearing whole towns, cities and even counties because they insist on installing as their candidate a man whose poll numbers are plunging like the autumn 2008 Dow Jones, a man the people despise.

I never thought this reporter would ever take the side of a miserable little racist and Republican voters but fair is fair. Republicans are Americans, too, and deserve to have their voices heard. And Ron Paul, and registered Republican voters in the state of Maine, were simply mugged.

What Choo Talkin' About, Willard?

Watching Willard Romney's inevitable tanking in the polls and the GOP and Independent base's refusal to accept him no matter how much the MSM and Paul Singer try to fluff him up is like watching the last reel of Westworld. In that movie, a futuristic amusement park turns into a killing ground when the robots working there get a few wires crossed and begin slaughtering the guests.

And Willard's desperate lashing out and trying to establish conservative bona fides among an electorate hungering for red meat makes him the Yul Brynner of the 2012 GOP campaigns. As Santorum creeps from the rear and washes across America Romney's getting more and more desperate to prove that, Yes, by God, I can paint the walls with my fecal matter as good as my rivals. I'm a regular fucking Picasso! Look, people, I can paint a hammer and sickle!

There was a time when Willard had one thing going for him: He may have had all the charm of a leatheroid attache case but at least he didn't sound bugfuck insane and he could saturninely look down on the insanity going on below him like some polymer-based version of Obama.

Now he's putting on Yul's Magnificent Seven costume and taking potshots at the 9th Circuit's ruling that Prop H8 was unconstitutional. Ping! He's now wading hip-deep into the imaginary placental matter of the abortion battleground that's suddenly defined the GOP's entire platform. Bang, bang! "Yes, I will put Social Security on the craps tables of Wall Street and essentially privatize Medicare (which is what he did to MassHealth here in Massachusetts)."

And the very poor can go fuck themselves since safety nets and entitlement programs like the welfare state I want to abolish is taking care of them quite nicely. And the rich? They don't need any help. I still don't think they pay too little in taxes but we don't have to worry about them, any more, despite the fact that my own tax plan would make them even wealthier.


Now, despite the MSM's prognostication that, Well, Romney's still a shoo-in in his native Michigan is getting shot down in the crossfire, too, since recent polls prove that Richard "Benjamin" Santorum's headed him off at that pass, too.

And when you've lost Red States's Erick Erickson, a man who permanently has red meat between his teeth and has painted entire murals with his own fecal matter, then you have a problem.


The problem is not that Romney is too liberal for conservatives or too hard right for Independents. Low information voters still like consistency and Romney now looks like a soldier trying to drill on LSD, reversing himself and going around in circles.

Fox News at its Finest: Part XVI

(Mrs. JP and I still aren't out of the woods, yet, with a looming car repair bill and rent coming after the short month. Any Paypal donations would be immensely appreciated.)


"We're not racist. We just always prefer white candidates."


...because as we all know, history only counts when Democrats are in the Oval Office, especially if they're darker than the other 43 guys.


Newt Gingrich, thou art vindicated. The truth is that SNAP spending is slated to go down in 2013, but that's just liberal bias.


In other words, once upon a time, the President wasn't as nakedly corrupt as the Republican Party.


Irony, thy name is Roger Ailes.


Fox News isn't racist. In fact, they're completely color blind.


See? President Obama is a uniter!


Breaking: Human Genome Project reveals Barack Obama is Karl Marx's twin brother, Mein Herr!


And why is that, Congressman Torquemada? Probably for using his presidential prerogatives like the example below?


Ah, the infamous 29th recess appointment of Richard Cordray. Forget the fact that at the same point in his "presidency", George W. Bush made 61. But Cordray was the president's 29th.


Captain Combover strikes again.


Neither did Bush's BBQ in 2005. You remember that one, the one for which he left Cindy Sheehan in the dust so he could attend yet another Republican fundraiser? So, besides betraying your racism yet again, your point is...?


It's a shame Michelle Obama wasn't eating fried chicken and watermelon. Fox could've kept humping that for 10 or 20 news cycles.


Fox News lifted some stock footage of riots in Athens, Greece, then tried to pass it off as riots in Moscow. It worked because your typical Fox "News" viewer is too stupid to know the difference between demotic Greek and the Cyrillic alphabet of Russian.


...or the English language's Roman alphabet, for that matter.


Fox confrims Osama was killed in his little house on the prairies of Pakistan.


Fox "News", the official news network of Hannibal Lecter.


All the news that's fit to be shit.


As usual, Fox's math is as fuzzy as its grasp on literacy...


...and the unmistakable hallmarks of racism...


...and geography. In Roger Ailes' worldview, Bulgaria got evicted and moved into the former Yugoslavia's old location in Europe.


Meanwhile, quakes in Indonesia were felt as far away as Anchorage, Alaska, which automatically makes Sarah Palin an expert on Asian exports.


And in New England, just for a lark, Vermont and New Hampshire have also decided to switch places.


Then, to bring the point home again...


...and Nevada switched places with Utah.

March Ain't So Hot Either, T.S.

By now, nearly three years after I put up my Paypal button, you've all had your fill of my bellyaching about my inability to find a job and begging for donations. As Obama says to shut us up, I get it. And I'm not gonna piss and moan about how scummy temp agencies are and how they're metastasized across what's left of the manufacturing landscape that hasn't been moved overseas. Every time I do so, I think that line from Gavin Rossdale and Bush in "Come Down": "When you beg, you just complain."

This is about survival. On top of getting hit almost all at once with annual excise taxes, a large gas bill and registration renewal, what was once a (pun unintended) pipe dream of making the rent in March is now an impossibility, especially with another exhaust job on the horizon (intermediary pipe, the most expensive part of the exhaust system) and after Mrs. JP's return to Florida to see family last month.

These are just some of the economic challenges facing us in the coming weeks. I've been forced into a situation in which I had to choose between a legal car and a roof over our heads. No one should have to make that choice (for the 5 1/2 years I was at my last job, I had to make a choice between food for my family & mandated health care and food won every week). But that's the reality of this right wing serfdom into which the United States has descended.

Many of us are in this position and many are even worse off than us. Momentarily, we have a roof over our heads, the gas is still on and, thank goodness, Mrs. JP and I suffer few physical ailments despite a complete lack of health coverage. Many of us are struggling against much greater adversity.

But as I've stated before, when the chips are down, eventually our concerns turn parochial. If I alone won that huge Powerball jackpot, you can rest assured many people would be happy and none of my loved ones would live in want or worry or fear of an uncertain future. But until that day comes, I'm obliged to at least try to get some much-needed money in the coffers for the day when Mrs. JP's unemployment ceases permanently (next April, perhaps).

So whatever you guys could do would be immensely appreciated.

Caption Contest

(Image courtesy Liberalease) This one kind of just writes itself. Still, I'd like to think my readers will risk redundancy for a challenge.

"We outnumber the stupid people."

If there was a Purple Heart for journalists, my first nominee would be Charles Pierce for taking for the team not one not two but many, many slings and arrows of outrageous wingnuttery in his ongoing coverage of CPAC. It's kind of the equivalent of sending a batter out there when the starting pitcher and the entire bullpen is gunning for him or a lone commando behind enemy lines. And the dispatches from the front lines at the Marriot Waldman Hotel in Washington (thereby giving a breather to the poor bastards at the Omni Hotel) read like something by Hannah Arendt from Nuremberg only with more laughs.

And in a way, CPAC, as always, is sort of like a trial, a trial for Romney, Santorum and Newt Gingrich who just keeps burying himself deeper and deeper into the campaign like a starving Alabama tick no matter many times Republican voters use alcohol and tweezers on him. It's like a kangaroo court for liberalism or any ersatz simulacrum condemned as liberalism. CPAC is always like an inverted Nuremberg, with the Party of Personal Responsibility playing the Nazi defendants. Imagine what Nuremberg would've been like if the Nazis had somehow taken control of the courtroom then condemned the Jews and the American military tribunal in absentia after bunkering themselves in. That's essentially what CPAC is: a gilded sub-Reichstag bunker with 5 star food and chandeliers. And endless entertainment.

In election years, it's also a parade for also-rans, the poor retarded kids at the year-end Special Olympics banquet who came in 8th in a field of 8 yet got an identical little plastic trophy as if that's just as good as the presidency that's getting smaller and smaller in their front windshield (I know I'm mixing metaphors but like the Republicans at CPAC, I haven't got the time to be coherent or metaphorically consistent).

The title of this post comes straight from Herman Cain, aka the Simple Pieman, who claims that not only do Republicans outnumber the stupid people (presumably liberals and others who refuse to vote Republican, you know, those who love having biology dictated to us, endless wars and tax cuts for the 1% at the same time our jobs are outsourced and UI benefits negotiated in favor of more tax cuts for the 1%), but Cain had to remind the attendees they had to "outsmart us." You know, the stupid people.

Herman, you see, knows exactly how many stupid people there are because, as he said, "Trust me, I counted 'em." Herman took the stage, nattily attired in his trademark piss-yellow tie cinched around a hair shirt while whining about why he got railroaded from what was already a Three Stooges version of a presidential campaign. We heard something we'd never heard before: He dropped out to spend more time with his family. You know, the wife and kids who'd applauded Cain from the back seat with alacrity every time he tried to pull a Newt, that is get a blow job in a car.

Onward, unChristian soldier:

Rick Perry then got up in this parade of Hasbeens. Obviously forgetting the 3rd Amendment, he skipped ahead to his old standby love doll the 10th and said that if we can't honor the 10th Amendment then we should just "strip it out of the Constitution."

Michele Bachmann, while hubby Marcus was leering at busboys and parking valets in their smart little red vests, got up, her gaffe factory now fully automated and churning out hilarious Stengle-isms on all three shifts. Apparently, she has a problem with Mr. Obama feeling the need early in his presidency to go on a worldwide apology tour while screaming that "we will not apologize!" Which is the same thing as saying that not only does she still favor Bush, but that we should not apologize for murdering and torturing Iraqis and using extraordinary rendition and send them to places like her beloved Egypt to be tortured by proxy.

Yeah, that Egypt, old foe of her other BFF the Israelis. Obama's unfit to be president because apparently he had a problem with climbing into bed with the comatose Ariel Sharon and blowing him while AIPAC stood around at bedside and cheered. It doesn't matter that Obama is in reality doing what he does best and stands around saturninely clucking his tongue and looking the other way while Israel makes good use of our $3 billion a year by loading nukes on their bombers to use on Iran this year.

But if you want reality and the truth, going to CPAC makes about as much sense as going to a whorehouse to learn about abstinence and virtue.

Willard's Not So Excellent Adventure

So last night there was a three state primary, essentially a three state killing spree of the second inevitable nomination of Willard Romney, a man who more resembles a Stepford born-and-bred game show host than an actual president. Santorum's foamy surge across three completely different states was, or should be, a wakeup call to the Romney campaign: The more you talk, the more you're hated.

And while the Santorum/Savonarola ticket was busy strapping Mitt Romney to the roof of Ricky Retardo's tour bus, several things were made apparent. I give you Charles Pierce, the Jonathan Swift of Esquire:

Willard didn't win a single county in Missouri. He finished 30-odd points behind where he finished in Colorado in 2008. He finished third in Minnesota.

Now, would Santorum have gone three for three last night if there was even one delegate on the line? Hard to say but when one looks at those bruising facts, you have to wonder. Plus, Romney's horse race with Obama in the most recent polls is looking a lot less like a photo finish and more like a Secretariat race with Obama as Secretariat. Up until a week ago, Romney was virtually neck and neck with the President: Now in some polls (ABC/Reuters, IPSOS/WaPo and, surprisingly, Rasmussen), Romney is down by 7 or more points.

The eventual Republican nominee, as many of us know, needs 1144 delegates to win his party's nomination. As of right now, with many of the primaries and caucuses behind us, Mitt Romney still has just 107 or less than 10% of what he needs. Gingrich has 32 and Santorum's quietly squirreled away 45. (Ron Paul, who actually finished second ahead of Romney in Minnesota last night, has 9.)

In just his second and thus far last primary victory four days ago, Romney won by grabbing just over 50% of the vote and the self-congratulatory press was crowing about how they were right all along and how badly Gingrich got crushed like an overused Dixie cup. Conveniently glossed over was that his 50% win still totaled just 16,486 votes cast for him in all of Nevada, which is a little over half of the people that voted for Christine O'Donnell in tiny Delaware's GOP Senate primary in 2010.

It's hard to imagine, while we munch popcorn and jeeringly wave giant red, white and blue foam fingers at the fiery wreckage of a second Willard presidential run, why Romney is still in the race. Time and again in all but two contests and despite buying political endorsements from local Republicans, the states are telling Romney, "We don't like you!" Like Gingrich, about the only thing Willard has going for him are a couple of billionaire scumbags bankrolling his campaign.

Say what you want about Republicans and the mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging Goobers who vote for them: The earthy Sarah Palin has charm and charisma and connected with blue collar conservatives and evangelicals. George W. Bush had connected with the same people for the same reasons. Facts and erudition be damned but charm and charisma, some semblance of humanity, is still needed no matter how rich a man is or how many billionaires shovel post-Citizen's United money at their feet.

Willard Romney, who likely smells like a bank vault right after a delivery from the mint, is like something out of a political Issac Asimov novel, a poor robot trying to muscle in on territory best suited for humans but, no matter how remarkably life-like he is, never quite wins over the meat bags who still crave something human.

The News at a Furtive Glance

For a Tuesday, it's been a pretty eventful news day. So, culled from all over the intertubes box comes these news items straight into Pottersville Central.

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Perhaps the biggest, and most welcome, news item today is the resignation of right wing evangelical hack Karen Handel, or as I prefer to call her, Messiah's Handel. Political Insider's Jim Galloway makes a superb over-the-shoulder catch by noting, "Note that Handel says she is declining the offer of a severance package from Komen — which might have required her to keep silent."

So, it looks as if money isn't the only thing on the minds of Republican reptiles. Sometimes the Almighty trumps even the Almighty Dollar. No doubt on some absurdly trafficked Twitter or Facebook account, we'll be hearing endless bitching about how Handel, who was too shrill and right wing for even Georgia goobernatorial voters, was railroaded and hounded out of Komen because of godless, heathen liberals. Which she was. Next stop, Fox Ne... Oh, wait. She already beat me to it.

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A few hours ago, the AP and other major media outlets reported that the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down Proposition H8 as "unconstitutional". As an open bisexual and lifelong liberal, this makes me happy but you know there's one more stop after the 9th and you also know these wingnuts who are trying to ban gay marriage in California will not hit the brakes, ever. I don't imagine the right wing SCOTUS will have the stomach to get involved in something that amounts to a state's rights issue but you never know: They may unpleasantly surprise you.

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I'm sad to report the passing of Janice Voss, a veteran of five shuttle missions, last night of cancer at the too-young age of 55. Human knowledge is immeasurably richer because of Voss and her courageous work in outer space. Says Space.com:

Voss launched on her first and final missions aboard the shuttle Endeavour. As a member of the STS-57 crew in June 1993, she helped conduct biomedical and material science experiments in the first commercially-developed Spacehab module, a pressurized laboratory mounted in the orbiter's payload bay that more than doubled the work area for astronaut-tended activities.

In February 2000 Voss again launched on Endeavour, this time for NASA's Shuttle Radar Topography Mission. After deploying a nearly 200-foot (60-meter) mast, Voss and her crewmates worked around the clock in two shifts to map more than 47 million square-miles (122 million square-kilometers) of the Earth's land surface.

Sympathies go out to her family and whoever else loved her.

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There was a football game on last Sunday. Another mediocre team won. Whatever. The team, the Giants, is occupying Wall Street and their ticker tape parade was today. Says Reeves Wiedeman of the New Yorker:

Commerce was still in full effect on Wall Street this morning, but mostly in the form of T-shirts, which people were putting on over their coats as they walked past confused European tourists heading in the opposite direction, and toward Broadway for the team’s Super Bowl victory parade.

I stationed myself across the street from Zuccotti Park, and I hate to break it to Occupy, but they never got a crowd like this. The message was clear, and unified, and it seems that our nation’s priorities have not been shifted all that much: we’d still rather cheer for millionaire athletes than for our own benefit.

Pretty surprising aside from a sportswriter. If he really ate his Wheaties this morning, he could've also added how absurd it is that we can arrange in mere hours ticker tape parades for world champion teams but not for veterans of a war that had lasted for nearly nine years.

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Maybe Rupert already learned from the FBI Director's cell phone but for the rest of us, we're now hearing that the FBI is ramping up its investigation of Rupert Murdoch's empire for possibly breaking the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977 (thank you, President Carter). Where, O where will poor little Rupert get the money to pay the fine to the DOJ to make it all go away?

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Less than a year and a half ago, Barack Obama was railing about the SCOTUS's Citizen's United ruling and even pissed and moaned about its effects during his State of the Union Address weeks later (making Sam Alito mouth the words, "Not true."). Well, that didn't last long.

Because it seems the cash-strapped "campaigner in chief" is now calling for SuperPAC donations, meaning he's essentially given up on public financing. It's our fault, I guess, for not being enterprising enough to have billions at our disposal to fund what's shaping up to be the first billion dollar presidential campaign. If only we weren't so damned lazy.

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Oh, and Karl Rove is "offended" about Clint Eastwood's "Halftime in America" Chrysler ad that was aired during the Super Bowl. Seems he didn't have nearly as a big a problem with another truck commercial ad set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland because he knows that's what America will look like after his man Romney's first day in office.

See you in the funny pages.

Caption Contest

Newt makes it easier for voters to vote for him against Romney.

Let's Sack the Sandbagging Obama

(I'm bloodlessly and painlessly beating my head against a brick wall which is some poor, deluded bastard on Facebook who still insists that Obama is the only alternative and perhaps the greatest thing since sliced bread. He keeps screaming about right wing death squads and concentration camps and has actually accused me, if you can believe this, of being an unwitting tool of the Koch brothers. He keeps accusing me of being too hard on poor Obama and insisting on ideological purity. I think I'm a little more politically pragmatic than that. Even Kennedy and FDR weren't perfect. But to say that there's potential for a shitload of improvement in the Obama administration is the understatement of the century. What follows below is my last contribution to the thread. Keep in mind, also, that this list of indictments is far from exhaustive.)

OK, I'm only going to contribute to this thread one more time then I'm out of here. Obviously, in your hoarse bloviating about right wing death squads and detention and concentration camps, you're completely losing sight of what I'm saying. #1, I am not an unwitting tool of the Koch brothers. If more people like me were concerned about what they were trying to pull through SuperPACs and ALEC, they'd have a much bigger headache than they think they do. Obviously, I am diametrically opposed to what those bloated world-eating fucksticks are doing to our nation and our world. #2, I am not insisting on ideological purity. I'm well aware that FDR was not perfect and overreached on occasion (Manzanar, certain unconstitutional parts of the New Deal struck down by the Supreme Court, etc.). Yet when you compare FDR's record with Obama's, that still leaves enough room for improvement to march the entire DoD and its contractor Doppelgangers through. I do not know why you keep insisting that Obama is the answer to the alternative when it's screamingly obvious to me that Obama IS the alternative, he IS the dreaded Bush 3rd term. He kept us in Iraq for 3 more years for no apparent reason, is keeping us in Afghanistan and even did his own little surge and there's no end in sight. His last two Chiefs of Staff are bloated refugees from Wall Street and his first one was a nasty little ambitious dick-twisting prick who helped cut that $80b Medicare drug reimbursement deal. Goldman Sachs and other banksters are allowed to rotate in and out, with them getting jobs in Treasury so they can soften up regulations for their buddies back home and to get even richer when they slide back into their old offices. His economic recovery team was rotten with some of the biggest fuckups from Clinton's administration (Summers, Rubin, et al). His jobs czar is Jeff Immeldt, a job-killing, tax-dodging creep who's also coincidentally the CEO of GE. Every significant promise Obama ever made on the campaign trail 4 years ago was broken: Getting us out of Iraq and Afghanistan in a timely fashion. Releasing the torture photos and videos. Closing Gitmo. Getting a public option to a health care reform bill on the table. Going after the tax-free status of corporations HQ'd overseas and outsourcing US jobs. None of these things ever materialized. What has he done instead? Took the public option off the table. Gave himself the latitude to designate us as terrorists, including detention and prosecution behind closed doors. Gave himself the power to assassinate US citizens w/o due process. Kept Gitmo open. It took him 3 years to get rid of DADT. DOMA still in place. USA PATRIOT Act still in place. NAFTA still in place. Homeland Security still in place. Kyoto Protocol: Still unsigned by us and he has made no move to lower greenhouse gases (if Copenhagen was any indication). Continued extraordinary rendition. Surged in Afghanistan. Without consulting Congress, needlessly invaded Libya while standing behind a cardboard cutout of Great Britain and NATO. Violated the terms of the SOFA agreement by simply redrawing the city lines in Baghdad. Murdering thousands of innocent civilians with unmanned drone strikes in central Asia and the Middle East. Undermined unions. Sniped at his base for criticizing his policies. Kowtowing to AIPAC and to the Israelis. Froze pay for federal workers for two years while simultaneously giving more tax breaks to the least deserving. Bailed out the auto industry without first setting preconditions. Signed into law a watery "regulatory" bill in Dodd-Frank. Signed into law a laughingstock of a health care reform bill designed solely to keep the HMOs on the playing field and forcing us to buy insurance at prices they get to arbitrarily set.

Listen up: We didn't elect Obama to sandbag until 2013 before we get to see the good stuff. We elected him to do the good stuff NOW and with few minor exceptions, he simply has not done that. There is no change whatsoever and the only hope to be had is from deluded idiots like you who insist on looking at Obama through navy blue-tinted glasses. Obama is the worst president on record. We can do better. Much better.