Saturday, August 27, 2011

Who is Rick Perry? Time to get out all those Aggie jokes

 

Perry reminds us of George Bush (Dubya) which annoys the hell out of Karl Rover.
Josh Brolin could be Perry in a movie bio for Perry as well and the resemblance would be remarkable.

I recently discovered dogcanyon.org “politics, opinion and culture for Texas and beyond.” Well done folks. I recommend the following article.

Is Rick Perry Channeling Phil Gramm – - or Clayton Williams?  - BY JOE CUTBIRTH, dogcanyon.org

AUGUST 17, 2011

Comparisons with George W. Bush from pundits who want to sound like they know Texas politics were inevitable, but everyone in Texas knew they were never worth much. Bush is an Ivy Leaguer whose grandfather was a senator from Connecticut. Perry is a genuine Texas Aggie from genuinely small-town Texas.

If you want to understand Perry, you have to understand Texas A&M. The macho swagger of that school is really the essence of who Perry is. Perry comes from my part of Texas, and I’ve known him for 25 years. I covered the Texas House during his time as a state lawmaker, and in those days we all saw the Aggie mystique play out two distinct ways in two Texas political legends: Phil Gramm and Clayton Williams.

…Gramm, who recruited Perry to the GOP, was Perry’s economics professor. Always the opportunist, Gramm leaped last week at the chance to endorse Perry, who barely passed his class (principles of economics) with a D, according to those pesky college transcripts.

Perry learned more than supply-side economics from Gramm, who was about the toughest and meanest campaigner Texas had in his day. Gramm was an unabashed conservative whose strong suit was red meat for the base. He was known for ideas that could be outside even the conservative mainstream, and he never backed down.

The “unabashed conservative” - whose speeches and political positions were so strong and mean-spirited in his joining with the Gingrich reform of the welfare system – Gramm never to my awareness acknowledged his own childhood on welfare and his own college career and success paid for by aid and assistance programs. He just wanted to be seen as a bootstrap academic/politician who in reality owed the system a great deal for how he became what he became.

Who’s Clayton Williams?

Clayton Wheat "Claytie" Williams, Jr. (born October 8, 1931), a businessman from Midland, Texas, was the unsuccessful Republican gubernatorial nominee in 1990 against the Democratic State Treasurer Ann Richards even though Williams initially led in opinion polls by twenty points. –Wikipedia

dogcanyon.org:

Williams bragged that as an undergraduate at Texas A&M he frequented brothels, including the famous LaGrange Chicken Ranch. He urged Hispanics to support him because he met his wife at a Mexican restaurant. He refused to shake Richards’ hand after a rare joint appearance and quipped that Richards, a recovering alcoholic, “must be drinking again” when her campaign released a poll showing she was closing the gap. He even joked with reporters that Texans deal with bad weather the way they deal with rape: “If it’s inevitable, just relax and enjoy it.”

Williams was trying to ride the Texas cowboy mystique into the governor’s mansion, and he almost succeeded. No single gaffe or jaw-dropping revelation cost him the race. It was the synergy. Sometime in the fall of 1990, it all hit a tipping point, and things Williams had offered with that cowboy bravado began to turn on him.

By election day, a race that began as John Wayne vs. Lucille Ball ended as Barbara Stanwick vs. Gabby Hayes.

With his own God-talking-campaign strategy Perry seems to believe he can pull a repeat of the Bush tactic of asking believers to put God’s Born-Again Christian in the White House.

Hope the electorate is not again that foolish.

Saturday, August 20, 2011

Let’s be completely honest here … Jesus is NEVER the master and commander of any imperialist American military.


Author Chris Rodda has recent an excellent piece regarding America's Recent Military Tradition of Justifying Killing for Christ.
About a year ago, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) began an investigation into just how much money the DoD spends on promoting religion to military personnel and their families.
What prompted this interest in DoD spending on religion was finding out what the DoD was spending on certain individual events and programs, such as the $125 million spent on the Army's Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program and its controversial "Spiritual Fitness" test, a mandatory test that must be taken by all soldiers.
The Army insists that this test is not religious, but the countless complaints from soldiers who have failed this "fitness" test tell a different story. The experience of one group of soldiers who weren't "spiritual" enough for the Army can be read here. But the term "Spiritual Fitness is not limited to this one test. The military began using this term to describe a variety of initiatives and events towards the end of 2006, and this 'code phrase' for promoting religion was heavily in use by all branches of the military by 2007.
Truth be told honestly and with integrity: there is no such thing as a “spiritual fitness” for a war or combat initiated by any nation for other than immediate self defense. The rest is so much self-interested and imperialist blather by human beings who should know better.
There is only silliness in this runaway Evangelical Christian nonsense. No long term socially redeeming value and the self-infliction of notoriety, global distrust and enmity for a religious concept that has no basis in fact.
All of the performers for these Spiritual Fitness concerts so far (this concert series is ongoing) have been evangelical Christian artists. Not only is the music itself overtly Christian, but during the concerts there are light shows of large crosses beamed all over the stage, and the performers typically give their Christian testimony or read Bible verses between songs.
Or this absolutely arrogant assumption that Jesus is not robed, but dressed in camouflage and endorses the limited fundamentalist imaginations of the most removed segment of Christianity.
DoD Funded Evangelical Christian Youth Programs
Service members are not the only ones targeted by evangelical Christian programs paid for with DoD contracts. Military children are also heavily targeted, both here in the U.S. and on bases overseas. Evangelizing the children of service members is one of the largest areas of spending.
The biggest ministry contracted by the DoD to target children is Military Community Youth Ministries (MCYM), whose mission statement is "Celebrate life with military teens, Introduce them to the Life-Giver, Jesus Christ, And help them become more like Him." MCYM has received $12,346,333 in DoD contracts since 2000. One of MCYM's tactics? Stalking "unchurched" military children by following their schools buses.
Or this scheme of religious bribery:
"conversion by temptation," where the military ministries and the military itself tempt young soldiers and military children with fun or exciting things to lure them into participating in programs and events where they can be "saved." What young soldier would pass up a vacation at a resort with their spouse that they could never afford on their military salary?
Whatever this all is … it is not “Christian” in any sense that Christ was Christian.
Nor are we in any way citizens of the world’s greatest country … no so long as we think God will guide our bullets and missiles and protect our holy warriors.


Thursday, August 18, 2011

What kind of "people" is candidate Romney. He declares himself well here.


Got this from Joe Davenport and it seems to define the attitude corporate welfare Republicans have. This is a false notion that equates "corporations as people" with mom and pop and their kitchen budget. Seeing no difference between corporations and we the people who pay an the unequal share of income-to-taxes is an admission that this is not in any way a party of the people. It is self-serving and reflects a socially moral economic insanity.

Can we ever forget that corporations and the behavior of the wealthy are the principal cause of our current economic mess?

Can we ever forget that these corporate "people" came hat-in-hand to mom and pop's government which is supported more on a proportionate basis by mom and pop taxes than corporate "people" and asked us to bail them out?

Those folks are Romney folks as much as the socially conservative right wing are the folks of Bachmann and company.


ROMNEY: There’s various ways of [preserving Social Security and Medicare’s solvency]. One is we could raise taxes on people. That’s not the way . . .
AUDIENCE: Corporations! Corporations!
ROMNEY: Corporations are people, my friend.
AUDIENCE: No they’re not.
ROMNEY: Of course they are. Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to people. Where do you think it goes?
AUDIENCE: It goes into your pocket!
ROMNEY: Whose pockets? Whose pockets? People’s pockets. Human beings, my friend.

This from a guy who just criticized Obama for the S&P rating and whose home state while he was governor raised taxes to get a high S&P rating. Now he's saying the opposite ... which is what he needs to say so teapublicans will vote his way.

Let's be honest here. We are not hearing from one mom/pop kitchen budget guy to another.

That "my friend" condescending stuff only underlines the arrogant assumption from within a moneyed bubble that if things are economically good personally for the candidate then the rest of the citizens can't be so bad off that we should change the tax laws.

Sunday, August 7, 2011

Rambling Thoughts on Current Political Pretenders

Your favorite party is the only one that can produce an agenda and an "electable" candidate to preach that one true agenda.


Other parties are part of some nefarious conspiracy to destroy Your Favorite Party along with Your Beloved Country as You Know It.


Supporters of other parties are motivated by groupthink that consists of less drinkable bathwater than Your own Favorite Party's groupthink.


Supporters of other parties are operating in bad faith and only pretending to be liberals, progressives, conservatives or tea-snots.


Everyone knows that Your Favorite Party is number two on the corporate lobby buy-in-and-sell-out respect ladder. But also that your party is moving up to number one some day soon if enough of the farm is given away.


The Country would be better off if parties were more accurately self-identified by their name and agenda - even if that meant more parties. We need at least a strong third party to keep the other two honest. Can't think of a better way to un-dummy the electorate than candidates who ask the voters to:
Vote the Conservative Ticket,
Vote the Liberal Ticket,
Vote the Labor Ticket,
Vote the Social Conservative Ticket,
Vote the Tea Party Ticket,
Vote the Neocon Ticket,
Vote the Imperial Ticket
Vote the Jingoist Ticket.


That way, if we then befuddled our way once again down to two parties, you might see two surviving parties with a genuine philosophical and political differentiation.
 
Or am I only wishful for a party that believes in blunt truth telling and direct confrontation of bull crap from blowhards and civic nitwits when they see it?


Oh, I'm hoping the presiding party will stop running around in policy and philosophical circles posing as stragedy and tactics, but those who bleat and bray in defense of the party faith continue to demonstrate the selective blindness that cost the Demos the midterms.
We don't need Demos trying to define leadership as primarily caution and timidity painted with statesmanlike wisdom.


Dubya’s dumbness perhaps overrides the one gigantic lesson learned from both his elections.
Except for the most obtuse Democrats who are still stuck in political middle school we can see plainly that voters tend to a leader who'll talk straight talk, speak directly to the people about his personal values and opinion and be a decider.


They of course expect a wise decider who looks for and accepts counsel.


Bush demonstrates the latter and his current disrepute demonstrates the former.


Although Dubya also has amply demonstrated his intellectual lack of depth and the weakness of his rigid and inflexible thinking, it was never those views and positions that got him inside the door to the oval office. It was the projection of his attitude as an American Patriot leader.


The electorate has demonstrated no proven dramatic wisdom recently when it has voted. It is not made up of a sophisticate majority dominated by folks who've read the political philosophizers. Although the electorate has been a good field for the practice for cunning Machiavellians.


We as an electorate vote more our gut than our reason … and we always will. Bush also demonstrated how to lose that gut support.


Demo's have not yet learned such and in fact have squandered that gut support since 2008.


The reason is partially demonstrated by Demo fears about discussing and sharing personal religious values - hoping that the voters are on the same page. But in fact that very reluctance suggests Demos are soft on all values and not just the judgmental kiddie-stuff like anti-gay, school prayer, allegiance pledges, creationism and wars on sacred holidays.


Demos as liberal progressives or progressive liberals behave as if they are dominated by an underlying assumption that the predominant inner and unspoken wisdom of a majority of citizens is some constant intellectual introspective pondering of civics.


American voters need arousal. They will follow the candidate who picks up the standard, waves it in our faces and says "FOLLOW ME!"


The friendly and reasonable candidate who hesitates is not fully prepared to lead effectively. 


Rather, the image is that of of an intelligent and thoughtful candidate who in reality wants to become moderator of a forum-based democracy where rational thought and slow deliberation toward consensus are the literal wheels of the national wagon.


We don't have that kind of democratic republic because it's so theoretical for a population that is too democratically unwieldy, too busy to pay sufficient attention.


The country doesn't want to be governed by consensus but by a leader who acts like Lincoln, fights like Washington but talks like John Wayne.


Demos have an able and competent leader who doesn’t mirror the consensus desire.


Reflublicans have only the cockeyed cowboys(cowgirls) of Calico County.

Why I Won't Stop Challenging Republicans

Prosecute the war on terror and suffer the war on common sense

When it comes down to the nitty gritty, we as attention-paying citizens or don't-give-a-damn citizens need to come out of the closet. We need to admit who or what we stand for and declare what philosophy and policies best reflect our concerns.

If we are most focused on American Idol, Nascar, the Oklahoma City Sonics and crime shows, let's just stay where we are, with asses super-glued to the couch.

If we are paying even slight attention to what is going on, listening even with half an ear to political slogans, television sound bytes and what passes for popular journalism in this country, let's make a real appraisal of who stands for what?


We have discredited Republicans driving there machine with one hand on the steering wheel and the other hanging out for lobby money.

Republicans have one foot pressing metal to the floor and the other nowhere near the brakes.

Why?

Because the party has only one single song to sing and the choir directors wear 3-cornered hats and tea bags.

American citizens need to practice a total deferral to the self-defined patriotism of the hysterical Reflublican party.

Republicans continue to insist that American citizens absolutely must trust their future to those few at the top of the power pole who want to replace the current benchwarmers.

Here is the national Republican Platform in a large nutshell:

We must fight the war on terror while remaining strictly stuck with the Republican Tax Cut Experiment which did not help Mr. Bush and has severely handicapped the much more qualified Obama.

If we want to vote Republican we are then left to hope for the best but continue to expect the worst and recognize that the burden of middle class taxes are going to continue paying for Reflublican financial and economic fantasies.

The Iraq spending spree and Reflublican saber rattling all the way to orgasm was not necessary. Trillions of dollars of debt generated by a Republican party that has always labeled Democrats as "taxers and spenders" is not something Leno and Maher can make jokes about.

Rather, the Republican Party's solution to all economic woes - as highlighted by that mental economic genius, John Boehner and his fool-de-camp Eric Cantor- is for Republicans to be the "tax-cutters and spenders" party.

We will prosecute the war on terror and suffer the war on common sense while an ungodly number of us go without access to adequate health care. That's one thing tens of millions of Americans could use ownership of.

Somehow I fail to see how this helps the troops, keeps terrorists at bay, or will make it easier when we invade  in order to secure whatever non-attention-paying Americans (apparently the largest voting block in the state and nation) will buy into as a security blanket worth supporting.

We will prosecute the war on terror while the Republicans - under the guise of "ownership society"- preside over corporate reductions and/or eliminations of pension funds.

We will prosecute the war on terror while Republicans who pretend that the extreme Christian Right represents the majority of American Christian voters.

The Republicans will continue to be willing to work hand in glove with the Christian Zionists to encourage Israel to widen it's borders in order to look like the Israel of prophesy. Otherwise, in the John Hagee playbook, Jesus and his Armageddon Asteroid cannot End the Times and leave all of us more liberal-minded Christians Behind.

Your Republican Party thinks more of these folks than the attention-paying voters who live and work all around us.

Republicans will continue our "war on terror" all the time camouflaging an absolute conviction on the part of failed foreign policy theorists that American might is the brave new world of the future ...

... that American might will facilitate our continued consumption of an inordinate share of energy reserves.

Why?

Because we can, that's why.

Republicans will forever deny any criminality on the part of their pseudo-religious political shill who did their bidding when they thought they would have the majority votes forever.

These things are what the Republicans are and will not admit.  They want to prosecute the war on terrorism and do it in terms of maintaining their own discredited and - when it comes to corporate welfare - dishonest domestic economic theories.

It does not matter what you and I think so long as they are in power. Only you and I can take this out of their hands. They will not change things unless we intervene.

So all you self-styled economic sophisticates who have bought into Republican capitalism worship keep your heads in the sand. If you cannot see just how many corporations in this country are only showing profits primarily through government intervention, bail-outs and contracts - you go ahead.

Reveal to the rest of us just how poorly you understand the less-government-more-free-enterprise ticket.

As we attempt to impose a fake American dominance on the world based on our failed national credit rating and economic extortion backed by big-stick-waving, go ahead and look the other way while your narrow morality authorizes a trashing of the American Dream.

Those of you who have been politically born again into the cult of a Republican Jesus, can keep insisting that Jesus would vote the same way

- and would go along with the deaths of civilian men, women and children in Iraq or anywhere else as "acceptable collateral damage."

The holes in your common sense and civic wisdom remain vast and empty.

Saturday, August 6, 2011

Out of patience with Junior High patriots who wouldn't recognize a "brown shirt" or a "storm trooper" even if they stumbled over one.

Tea Party Leader: Wisconsin Liberal Protesters Are Modern-Day Storm Troopers

You vote em in ... here's where they go to get trained as to how to slop up to the lobby money trough.

the corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council,

 

You would be surprised to read the roster of all the Congress folks who belong to ALEC. More surprised to see what they get out of it and what you lose.
Nothing of socially redeeming value in the ALEC.

 

Journalist Kicked out of ALEC Conference,

Who, us?

‎" … conservative white men are far more likely to deny the threat of climate change than other people."

 

Well the rest of you ain't so smart either ... like you non-whites who don't believe in the tooth fairy that we all know is real.

Reagan was never at a dumber level than when he parroted the economic drivel his money guys fed him.

Silly Voodoo Economics ... tax cuts for the rich ... instead of trickle-down economic growth and expansion ... we have downward-tsunami now of 30+ years of greedy and self-interested financial exploitation.
All that silly conservative economic rhetoric was the dumb preaching to the dumber ... who kept voting them back to the lobby trough for more loot.

Now THIS … is the way to tell a fairy tale!

Desperate for Diversions

 

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