We're Still in Kansas, Toto

The violent storm system that brought tornadoes to the Midwest and South this week reminded me (1) How grateful that I no longer live in Tornado Alley, and (2) The destructive twister that hit Dorothy’s family in The Wizard of Oz is likely to descend upon us Nov. 2 in the form of some brutal windbags being elected to the halls of Congress.

It looks all too likely that Teabagger Sharron Angle will defeat Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in Nevada. If she were running for a House seat, I wouldn’t fret, as it would take less than a year for her backers to have buyers’ remorse and kick her butt out. However, as a U.S. Senator she'd have six years to inflict real damage on the entire country.

Angle would abolish the Department of Education, privatize Medicare, and “transition out” Social Security because it is "welfare. " (Nevermind that we Boomers have paid into the system for 40 years.) And just ask our kids whether they would like to be responsible for our well-being in our dotage if we weren’t able to collect it, as their children will be for them if Angle has her way.

She wants the U.S. to withdraw from the United Nations. She does not believe that the U.S. Constitution mandates the separation of church and state.

And then there are her anti-immigrant rants and television advertising spots that reveal her as a racist to the core.

If she prevails, Sharron Angle will become the ugly elected face of Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

Rand Paul is ahead in the Kentucky Senate race, despite the despicable scene witnessed this week when his Brownshirts stomped on the head of a woman who showed up outside his event to peacefully draw attention to his allegiance to the Corporatocracy.

In the Alaska race for U.S. Senate, the Palin-backed Joe Miller resorted to using hired guns to handcuff a reporter who wanted to question him about his dubious (and illegal) electioneering activities while holding public office. He has since confessed his guilt to the original charges, although he issued no apology to the editor of the Alaska Dispatch who had the temerity to raise the issue.

Thankfully, Miller has plunged in the polls. Sen. Lisa Murkowski has a shot of winning back her seat as a write-in, if Alaskans only know how to spell her name. But with the dumbing down of education that has taken place over the last 30 years, it is doubtful that Sarah Palin’s fellow citizens can master that task.

Mercifully, Christine O’Donnell in Delaware has exposed herself as so utterly ignorant that even the dumbest of the dumb can’t bring themselves to vote for her, so her Democratic opponent Chris Coons is well ahead in that race. Score one for the realists.

But back to Kansas, and what’s wrong with it. As author Thomas Frank pointed out in his book, "What's The Matter With Kansas?," these are good people who for some strange reason, keep voting against their own self interest. And they are about to do it once again on Nov. 2.

The cyclone is on its way. God help us all.

Virtual Virtues

I used to be terrified to enter a virtual world populated by what I perceived to be as pervs, peepers and perps. If I were single and looking for a date, and thank God I’m not, why on earth would I go online to find one? I considered it Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places.

And then, over the past several years, I had an epiphany when I learned that many of my close friends, my hairdresser, and even my family have successfully found friendship, love, and marriage via the internet.

Come to think of it, the online world is probably a better venue for discovering genuine human being-ness than a bar full of drunks and ne’er-do-wells, or a church full of self-righteous hypocrites who are keeping their demons in check by quoting the Bible while buggering little boys in the vestry on a Tuesday afternoon.

So I guess you could call me a convert to the wonders of the virtual marketplace. I still have reservations about privacy issues on Facebook, and Google’s intrusion into our neighborhoods and homes with its Wi Spy invasion while billing itself as the company that promulgates the mantra, “Don’t Be Evil,” so trust us.

So play Frontierville (as I do) and hook up with your old high school classmates online (as I do) but keep a watchful eye out for the potential for Facebook to sell you out to the highest bidder, as Mark Zuckerberg has done time and again.

And never take your eye off Google, whose tentacles are reaching into the smallest crevices of our lives and shaping our existence in ways unimaginable to the least sophisticated among us. Beware the Octopus.

So my advice for all of us who are addicted to the wonders of the internet is, go forth, engage, indulge, and enjoy. But do practice safe text.

A Meeting of the Minds

Well, at long last, a rabid right-wing acquaintance of mine sent me one of those emails churned out by the Tea Party noise machine that I can actually get on board with.

You may have seen it too. It’s entitled “My Twenty People,” and it offers a prescription for fixing what’s wrong with Congress.

“You're part of my 20 people,” it says. “Hoping you will send this on to your 20 so we get this out before November. If each person contacts a minimum of twenty people then it will only take three days for most people (in the U.S. ) to receive the message. Maybe it is time. "


Congressional Reform Act of 2010

.

Term Limits.



12 years only, one of the possible options below:



Two Six-year Senate terms

Six Two-year House terms

One Six-year Senate term and three Two-Year House terms

No Tenure / No Pension.



A Congressman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they are out of office.

Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security.



All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system, and Congress participates with the American people.

Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do.



Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise.

Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.



Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.



Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.



All contracts with past and present Congressmen are void effective 1/1/11.

“The American people did not make this contract with Congressmen. Congressmen made all these contracts for themselves. Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, serve your term(s), then go home and back to work. "

Well maybe it IS time for some fundamental changes in the way our self-serving Congress operates. At the very least, if there were term limits they wouldn’t be constantly running for office and forced to be whores for the big money elite. (Note to Meg Whitman: “Whore” is synonymous with “sell-out”, so don’t get all self-righteous on me.)

And you can bet your bippy if they had to go out on the open market and buy health insurance like the rest of us do, they’d pass single-payer in a flash. Dick Cheney would be first in line to champion it. After all, we taxpayers have been funding his gold-plated health care since his first heart attack at 37. Without our benevolence, he would have been shut out of the insurance risk pool 30 years ago, and quite likely, be long dead by now.

Now just think of the money THAT could have saved us.

A Rap for our Times

You got the GOP and the Tea Party Crowd
They have crazy ideas and they’re nasty and loud
From the anti-masturbator who was once a witch
To the woman in Nevada who’s a first-class bitch

They’re all misguided, and obnoxious as well,
They all say they’re Christians, but they’re going to hell
For if Jesus is their Savior as the Bible preaches
He’d hate the rhetoric of these sons of beaches

Just look at Kentucky where if Rand has his way,
No Social Security for a rainy day!
Thunderstorms are coming so you better be ready
Who holds your mortgage? Is it Fannie or Freddie?

Nobody knows, and that’s the rub
It’s been sliced and diced for the Rich Man’s Club

Are you ready to rely on your 401K?
Instead of a pension, when you’re 80 and a day?

Hope you get your wish in two thousand ten
When you win the election but you chose the wrong men

BREAK...

The Truth About Obamacare

I’ve found a new poster child for the right wing/tea party patriots who claim they want to take back their country.

Let me introduce to you Mr. Cranky, a blast from my Midwestern past, who now lives in the OC and who apparently, from his Facebook posts, has “arrived” and therefore doesn’t give a crap about the rest of us. He is, however, intensely focused on his own gene pool.

To wit:

“ 4 hours at the hospital with granddaughter #1 getting some stitches after her forehead met a brick column when she tried to step over the dog. Glad for private insurance, no government help required. Plastic surgeon? You got it! Great attention? You got it! Red tape! Hell no! Colored bandaides? Yah betcha bootie baby! Obamacare? Stuff it where the sun don't shine!”

He does have a way with words, does he not?

Cranky, I’m delighted that your granddaughter got a colored band-aid, but if whoever provides her with health insurance loses his/her job, all bets are off. Hope it never happens to your family, but if or when it does, you’ll have my sympathy, even though you seem to lack any compassion for those of us who aren’t adequately covered through no fault of our own.

What’s striking in Cranky’s post is his lack of understanding about what he calls “Obamacare” . He thinks it’s Socialism.

Well Cranky, let’s just put that tired old canard to rest once and for all.

The reforms that were enacted are just some much-needed rules of the road that reign in private insurers who have been screwing us ALL. If you have a new grandbaby and she is born with diabetes, the insurance companies won’t be able to deny her coverage.

Any of your kids still under the age of 26 but unable to find work and therefore uninsured? Now they can remain on your obviously gold-plated policy.

Did you ever have a problem with alcohol and check into rehab to dry out? You may have been sober for 35 years, but it matters not to the health insurance industry, as that is their definition of a pre-existing condition. You would have been UNINSURABLE, until the new rules were put into place.

“Frankly,” as the degenerate Newt Gingrich would say, I wish we did have national health insurance like all the rest of the civilized industrial nations of the world.

It STILL wouldn’t be socialism, but at least we would be rid of the pariah of a blood-sucking industry that has no business being in business.

Descending Into Poverty

I friended an acquaintance from my Midwestern hometown past on Facebook some months ago, and his rants ever since have been a real eye-opener for me.

Mind you, from what I remember, this guy, (who has been dubbed as Mr. Cranky by my BFF Diantha), was as middle class as I was, though perhaps a notch above, since I’m pretty sure his dad was a veteran and mine wasn’t. And that made a huge difference in social and economic status the 50s and 60s, unless you were university professors like my in-laws.

My Dad was too young to enlist in WWII. By the time the Korean Conflict (how’s THAT for a war euphemism???) rolled around, a cyst on dad’s back kept him out of that one too.

So my family didn’t benefit from “Big Gov’ment” benefits like Cranky’s family did. No GI Bill for us, no cushy jobs at the Postal Service, no government-provided health care at the VA.

And since my father didn’t want to work the land like his German ancestors, we didn’t get those farm subsidies that continue to enrich the few at the expense of the many. Are you listening, Billy B?

Instead, Dad just went out there and worked in non-union jobs for rich guys that paid him too little, screwed him out of a decent pension in his old age, and convinced him that if he dared join a union, the company would fold and he would never work again.

Dad was duped.

As are too many of us in what used to be the Middle Class, but who are now sinking into the ranks of the working poor. If we can get work. Otherwise, we’re just poor.







4

We're Stupid, All Right

A flu bug impaired my body, my brain and my ability to crank out a meaningful post this week. But even on my best day, I could never compose as cogent a piece as one of my favorite writers, David Michael Green, whose commentary on what has brought America to its knees is nothing short of brilliant.

Be advised fellow liberals, Green is no Obama apologist. He lays out all the ways in which this administration has been spineless, and thus, ineffective, in its first two years. On the other hand, he sounds a clear warning on the folly of returning to power the very people responsible for wrecking the country over the last 30 years.

For you Tea Party types, I hope you will read the essay with an open mind. Perhaps then you'll understand who your real enemy is.

Read it here. And leave your comments. Let the discussion begin!