Sad but true

This is a Bush/Cheney era FAA training kit.

Gift ideas

My friend Southern Female Lawyer has some gift basket ideas for the conservatives in your life. I cut most of the conservatives out of my life after my heart attack. I didn't need the stress of dealing with them and their failed political philosophy.

On this July 4th holiday, never forget those who served their country

And never forget those who cut and ran when the going got tough:Sarah Palin, quitter.

This is the end

If you have not heard of the two judges in Pennsylvania who were found guilty of taking bribes to send juvenile offenders to privatized juvenile prisons then please click here to read all about it. Go on, I'll wait while you go read it.

Oh, you're back. Wow, that was quick! You're a fast reader, actually it's one of the reasons why I like you so much.

Now, tell me, after reading that story were you surprised at all? I sure as hell wasn't, however I was shocked. I'm shocked that it doesn't happen more often. What those corrupt judges did is the logical end of the privatizing of our government. A private jail or juvenile facility makes no money if it sits empty, so why not bribe a judge to send a few hundred kids your way? There's no need to let a little thing like due process of law get in the way of a company's Gawd given right to make a profit is there? Heck, that jail was just sitting there costing the taxpayers money before, now it's full up and making some lucky stiff a few bucks, and that's the American way isn't it?

Ever since St. Reagan held our country hostage while his buddies plundered our treasury there has been a head long rush to privatize the essential services that our government provides. His toady Bush the elder continued it. So did Bill "I never met a corporation I didn't like" Clinton. And Bush the younger nearly perfected it in his years as governor of Texas and while he was flailing about as our President. They were all part of the sickness known as "the free market."

Someone got the bright idea that profit should be made off of government services and if the government was going to do it then we should let private industry take over that function of the government. So we basically auctioned off bits and pieces of our federal, state, and local governments over the past thirty years. The proponents of privatization say that the private sector can do things more efficiently than the government can. They say that not only can private industry do it better, they can do it and make a profit at it. However there two problems with that theory.

First of all private industry can't do the job of governing better than the government. The motive for profit will color every decision that's made. Tough decisions that should be made in the public interest and with the public's best interest at heart will come in a distant second to the need to make money at any cost. The need to make profit will trump the need to do what's best for all of us every time.

Secondly, the profit made in the privatization does not go back to the community or to the government. It goes instead to the bank accounts of the people who work for the companies who now do the job of our government. And the result of that is that your community suffers, as does mine. If your local government contracts with a private company to do the firefighting in your area the company is not likely to invest in top of the line fire trucks because they are not cost effective, so they buy less effective fire trucks so that they can maximize their profits. The sole purpose that private fire fighting company is in business for is to make money. But the sole purpose of a government funded fire station is to fight fires and to benefit your neighborhood. There's no profit motive and so they can focus on getting the best equipment and not have to worry about the bottom line.

The logical end of privatizing our government is that our government ends up being a government for the corporations that's run by the corporations and if you can't afford to help them make a profit then you don't get any of the benefits. As I said before, a private jail makes no money if it is empty therefore people must be arrested and imprisoned in it. A private fire fighting company makes no money by helping to prevent fires, so sooner or later they'll resort to starting them. If a private company is in charge of deciding who gets food stamps then they'll make damn sure that hardly anyone gets them because they'll no doubt be paid a bonus for trimming the fat off the food stamp rolls.

Our current system of health care is privatized. And how that's working out for us? Well, millions of Americans can't afford the expensive insurance that's out there and the ones that can afford it find out that their health care is rationed and controlled tightly by insurance companies who want to make a profit no matter what, even if it means denying life saving procedures to people who need them.

The privatizing of our government has been nothing short of a fiasco that has made our communities less safe and on the whole poorer while it makes the bank accounts of the corporations fatter and fatter. Hopefully now that America has rejected conservative politics it will also reject the privatization of our government as well.

Do it

For 8 years the foxes guarded the hen houses in Washington DC. The Bush/Cheney administration put their buds in big business in charge at the top of the Departments of the Interior, Labor, Justice, the EPA, and the FDA and as a result the rights of workers were gutted in favor of making sure big business made more profits and paid less taxes, our environment was raped and plundered, the Justice department became a place where the laws were only enforced if they benefited rich white people, and inspection and regulation of our nation's food and drug supply was ignored. Because of all that people died, are still dying (peanut butter sandwich anyone?), and our country and planet are in deep peril.


But fixing that stuff is not a priority with some in the Senate because they've got bigger fish to fry. They've got to stop the stimulus package because it might actually help people who don't give them any money for their re-election. They made damn sure the banks and Wall Street investment houses got bailed out and they did it willingly because they get a shit load of money from those people, but people who work in education, construction, retail, who write computer code, who get up before dawn and punch a time clock when they get to work don't give them a cent so our "esteemed" Senators, including the two douchebags who "represent" us folks in Tennessee, don't want to see them get any help. It's strictly pay for play with the cabal of Republicans in the Senate. If you give them money to get re-elected, they'll vote to give you bail out money, if you don't, then you're fucked. Witness them cutting spending on programs that will create jobs just as they scream about more tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. I'm still waiting on the last round of tax cuts on corporations to help me out.


But holding up the stimulus isn't the only thing the Republicans are doing, they're also holding up the nomination of Hilda Solis. She's been nominated to head the Department of Labor and since she's not a whore for big business, she is in fact a friend of organized labor, the Republicans are nervous and they want to derail her nomination. They can't seem to wrap their greedy bloated heads around the idea of a woman who is a friend of the working man heading up the Department of Labor. I'm sure they're frightened that she might actually do things that benefit the working people of this country while she's in charge. They're shaking their boots knowing that someone who wants to halt the slide that the American workers have been on since Reagan was President will be in charge for a change.


As I've said before, the Republicans in the House and Senate, and some Democrats as well, I'm looking at you Diane Feinstein and Jay Rockefeller and Chuck Schumer, drove us to this cliff that we find ourselves on. We sure as hell don't need to let them drive us off it so let's hope cooler heads prevail and that the stimulus package gets passed along and that they get off their asses and make Hilda Solis the head of the Department of Labor.

Hahahahahaha

Hahahahaha.

Excuse me I need to catch my breath because I'm laughing really hard. And loudly as well. Hahahahahahaha.

What's that? What's so funny? Well, it seems that all the ad revenue is drying up for the right wing group called Pajamas Media.

And they are blaming it on the left! Hahahahahahahaha. Seriously hahahahahahahahahahaha. And they also claim that the left wing blogs, like mine, stay afloat because of the largess of George Soros and Moveon.org. Hahahahahahahahaha, how funny and paranoid is that? I don't take ads because I don't blog to make money, I blog because I like to write and to make people think and laugh. I never met George Soros and I certainly never took a dime from him. Even though they do some good things, Moveon.org annoys the shit out of me and I don't take any orders from them. I'm an ad free totally independent blogger with ad free totally independent content.


The reason the ad revenue on the right wing blogs sponsored by Pajamas Media is dropping so much is because no one wants to read right wing blogs anymore. The right has failed to keep pace on the net, just as they failed in their efforts to impose their twisted brand of rule on the USA. There will never ever be a permanent Republican majority in Congress or on the net. People have seen through the lies of the right and Pajamas Media is failing because conservatism has failed. Rush and the boobs at FOX Noise can scream all they like but America has moved on.

Sunshine patriots

While flipping through the cable channels one night a few years ago I came upon Bill O'Reilly's show for a moment. He and Dennis Miller were bleating some nonsense designed to whip up the meth addicted rubes and the anti immigration nut jobs who polish their guns as soon as they get off work and get back to their trailers. I remember that Miller was saying something to the effect of, "We're in a war Cha Cha and we all damn well better support the President in this thing." Bill O screamed something and then Miller shot back, "Ya know what Billy? I'm supporting the President during war. I don't care if the President is George W. Bush or Hillary Clinton, I'm standing behind the President because I'm a good American like that." Then he made a reference to Kaiser Wilhelm, Polynesian fire dancers, and the Department of Agriculture. His reference, like most of his shtick, was inane and idiotic so I turned it. But that brief exchange stuck in my mind because I knew then that a Democrat was going to win the White House and I hoped that Dennis and his fellow travellers on the right would actually follow through on supporting a Democratic Party President during this time of "war."

Well, after a couple of days I see that they're not going to do what Miller said they should do. The fat drug addict Limbaugh says that he hopes Obama fails. I'm not sure what excuse Miller is going to give for not backing our new Commander in Chief and I doubt I'll ever know it because I don't watch Bill O's show.

And the little people who the big guns in conservative media say they speak for sure as hell aren't supporting our President in this time of war. Case in point, an old college acquaintance of mine. Long time readers of my blog will remember that I went to a small conservative Christian college. And the so called Reagan revolution was going on when I was in school. My college was conservative religiously and politically. If you had scratched some of those right wingers I went to college with you would have found Nazi's underneath.

Well I reconnected with a gal I went to college with on Facebook recently and after I put up a note on inauguration day that said I hoped Bush and Cheney would be tried for their war crimes she commented back that the Bush bashing should stop and that the faulty intelligence that led us to war was the fault of Bill Clinton, who according to her looked the other way in the hunt for Bin Laden, and not George W. Bush. I was amazed, but not surprised, that she was laying the fiasco known as the war of terror on Iraq at the feet of Bill Clinton.

My good friend Vikkitikkitavi proceeded to educate my poor misinformed old college acquaintance. When confronted with the facts, which are always pesky problematic things to a conservative, my college acquaintance became shriller in her defense of her position and her man George W. Bush. I jumped in and tried to mollify and educate the poor girl but alas she was having none of it. In some of her early comments she said that the inauguration showed that America was a great democracy and that she was proud Obama had just been sworn in but a few comments later she said something to the effect of, "Ya'll should be happy, you got your President and change is a comin'!" I wanted to remind her that we all got a new President and that while I may not agree with everything he says or does, he is the President of all the people of this country and he's going to work for all the people, not just church going, gun owning, easily manipulated intellectually bankrupt hicks like her and her family. But as I was writing up a stinging reply to her last comment I remembered that trying to educate a misguided conservative is as big a waste of time as trying to teach a pig to sing is. Pigs can't sing no matter how hard you try to make them and conservatives never learn no matter how many facts you put in front of them.

So it's like I thought it was going to be, Dennis Miller, Bill O, Sean Hannity, Mike Malkin, Mann Coulter, and Laura C. from King College have no intention of supporting our new President in a time of war, even though they insisted that we support the idiot who took us to Iraq based on faulty intelligence that he had fabricated to support his case for war. The folks on the right are patriots when one of theirs is leading the country but when a Democrat is in charge they can't be bothered to support him.

Hey dumb ass...

...don't break your arm patting yourself on the back. You are nothing short of shameless and you'll go down in history as the worst President we ever had inflicted on us. I know you think that if you keep telling us that you did a great job that maybe it will sink in and we'll actually start to believe you. But it's never going to happen...ever. And here's why:

• You took a surplus and you turned it into a trillion dollar deficit.
• You did not keep us safe. Those planes that hit the Twin Towers, you were warned about them and you did nothing to stop them.
• You lied to us about why we had to go to war.
• You refused to listen to the military professionals who tried to tell you how to fight the wars we should not have been fighting because you thought you and your staff of yes men knew better.
• You approved torture and you are guilty of war crimes.
• You're lack of regulation and accountability has led to the economic meltdown and thousands of deaths.
• You refuse to believe that you did anything wrong when in fact your whole Presidency was a case study of what not to do while President.
• You took more vacations than any other President while most Americans had to give up theirs.
• You ate organic food while in the White House while most of us had to eat genetically modified food slathered with pesticides.

If you had a shred of decency in you then you'd just shut the fuck up and you'd slink away with your tail between your legs. I can't wait for the grown ups to take charge the second you are out of office. It's going to take years to undo the mess you made you delusional bastard, now please just go the hell away.

It's almost over

In just a few days the lying thieving murdering chickenhawks will be out of office and this oucntry can finally begin to undo all the damage they caused us. It'll be like a super special late Christmas present to all of us. And it'll be a super special late Christmas miracle if they are both slapped in handcuffs and led off to the world court in The Hague.

Hubris will get you every time

Outside of their intellectually bankrupt ideas, the reason why Republicans are losing so much ground is two fold:

The first part of why they are on the down swing is because years ago they got in bed with the religious right and since then people have seen that people like Pat Robertson, John Hagee, and the Farting Preacher are full of shit.

The second reason is they are on the way out is because people like Michelle Bachman and Marsha Blackburn actually believe the bile they hear spewed on right wing hate radio. When you believe your press clippings and the crap they say about you on the Rush Hannity Hate Hour then you're done for.

I'm happy they are on the way out but I'm also afraid the right wing, both religious and radio talking heads, are going to get meaner and nastier in the coming months and years that they are out of power. One can only hope that the Republican party breaks into to two factions with the Jeebus lovin' reactionaries on one side and the corporate lap dogs on the other.

Let's give credit where credit is due

I've noticed on some of the more angrier right wing blogs, and I'm sad to say on a few progressive blogs as well, that people are claiming that if the economy wasn't tanking that McCain and Obama would be in a dead heat or that McCain would be winning.
To steal a phrase from a grumpy old fart, my friends, that theory is bullshit. If the economy wasn't tanking the hatred of the endless war in Iraq would be more of an issue, the lack of health care for all Americans would be a bigger issue, the reckless frat boy foreign policy of Bush Jr. would be a bigger issue, the ever widening gap between the haves and the have nots would be a bigger issue, as would the privatization of essential governmental services and the insidious and ever growing influence of corporations in our lives. People have finally learned that you can't let men and women who say they hate government run government.

People have had it with conservatives, the Bush crime family, and with the sanctimonious morally bankrupt religious prigs that the Republican party has become. American politics runs in cycles, take an objective look at the history of our political system and you'll see it, and the cycle of deregulation at all costs, and of conservative Republican rule has come to an end.

And because these two greedy bloodthirsty war criminals are in charge of the Republican party, their reign ends with a whimper, not with a bang.