Tag Archives: Barack Obama

This President Works Harder Than the Last One Did

To all the people, most especially the GOP folks who criticize President Barack Obama even when he does things they traditionally support:

George W. Bush was the slacker.

I’m a little tired of the “Japan is in ruins and Libya is awash in blood and the president is giving parties, golfing, playing basketball and doing his March Madness picks?!”

Really?

Where were your complaints when Bush, in the midst of two Middle Eastern wars and a battle against terrorism (and against our civil rights), spent more time vacationing than any other president ever?

Got news for you…as much work as being U.S. President is, you can’t spend every minute of every day doing nothing but the job, or you will quite literally die. (Of course, that’s what most Republicans probably want…as long as Biden dies at the same time)

Parties are something presidents must do for a variety of reasons, many of them diplomatic. As for the golfing and basketball, exercise is good. And March Madness picks don’t take that long.

So, in a nutshell: Shut the fuck up.

Two Years of Hell to Pay?

…maybe even more years than that.

I think this bit of commentary is telling, not simply because of the horrific outcomes it predicts (which are entirely likely), but because even I…a person who is left-leaning and largely votes Democratic…didn’t know some of this stuff (like, oh, the fact the budget deficit that the Republicans were bitching about was actually less than George W. Bush’s budget deficit).

As has become usual, the Democrats manage to get stuff done for the American people, and fail to effectively tell them they did it. Instead, they let the right-wing set the media agenda and stir the American populace into a frenzy over GOP and Tea Party fantasies that have little to do with reality.

After two years of being in the minority and managing to grind much of the political process to a slow crawl, now the GOP is set to bring it to a dead halt in a mission of destruction. And right now, they have the support of many working-class/middle-class/poor Americans who haven’t yet clued into the fact that the only thing they’ve accomplished in the mid-term elections is to make everything worse.

Beginning with their own well-being, their own future, their own livelihoods.

We’re so screwed. I hope Bob Cesca is wrong in that commentary I linked to above. I really do. But after two years of saying “no” to President Obama even on issues the GOP supported in the recent past, does anyone with any kind of critical thinking believe they are going to be level-headed NOW?

A looming zombie apocalypse a la “The Walking Dead” would almost be a relief at this point, given the specter of an America with a bunch of ass-hats holding the majority in the House and wreaking havoc simply because they hate the President…and for no good reason.

And if the GOP manages to turn our slow economic recovery into a decline by trying to bring back the policies that caused the economic meltdown in the first place, who do you think they’ll blame?

Yeah, the black guy. And all those “socialists” and “fascists” (aka, just about anyone who’s a Democrat)

God help us all.

For Hate’s Sake

If you haven’t heard about the Shirley Sherrod debacle, you might want to leave now, because I’m only going to give it a cursory overview before I get into the meat of this relatively short post (Miz Pink just went on a race thing the other day here, so why not me, too, eh?)

So, conservative asshole (or assholes), mess with video from a presentation that USDA official Shirley Sherrod made, in an attempt to make her look like a black racist who had perhaps been screwing over white farmers. Conservative dickhead Andrew “I don’t care if it’s true as long as it gets me hits” Briebart puts up the video. Fox News has a field day with it. Many others in the media, wanting to show they aren’t liberal elitists, jump all over Sherrod, too. The USDA reacts hastily and makes her quit.

In the span of a day, give or take, a woman is torn to pieces metaphorically. Then comes CNN with massive coverage showing that the tapes were doctored to make Sherrod look bad, when in fact white farmers and many other people have been quite happy with Sherrod’s work at the USDA.

Now, the head of the USDA is apologizing, and the White House is trying to make good and polish its image after what seems to be yet another attempt by the administration to show that it won’t play favorites with blacks, and will in fact throw them under the bus (as the saying goes).

Here’s what I’m not going to do:

Cuss out Andrew Briebart (he’s a dick and apparently cannot cease being so any more than Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck can. No one should have trusted anything that he touches, and the media should be ashamed for being led down the primrose path by him)

Blame Barack Obama (or anyone else in the White House. There is no reason to believe that Sherrod’s situation and firing would have gotten that high on the food chain. Obama and his core staff had bigger fish on the grill at that point with unemployment benefits and financial reform)

Here’s what I am going to do:

Shake my head, mutter and swear about how easily duped the mainstream media is these days.

Lament that people can get fired lickety-split these days over a controversy or rumors without anyone bothering to investigate whether there’s any basis to it all.

And finally, I’m going to ask, “Why?”

Why did someone think it was necessary to murder Sherrod’s reputation? Why paint her as evil and as some racist black woman in power? Why? Why doctor a video to target her?

Race. Hate.

That’s it. Someone was racist enough and hateful enough to try to ruin a black woman who apparently has done a  lot of good (much of that good for white farmers and white poor people), just because she was black and, probably, because it might help make our black president look worse.

It’s not enough to just blame black folks for crimes they don’t commit or play up isolated incidents in their past to make them look militant or extreme. It’s not enough to jail them for crimes at higher rates and deny them not only their freedom but take away their future right to vote when white folks go free for the same crimes routinely.

No, none of that is enough.

Now, it’s necessary just to flat-out make shit up about a black person just because. Not even someone who’s at the top in power. Just a key official in a certain region doing her job. But because she’s black, it’s OK to make her look like a villain. With outright lies. Doctored video. Out of context comments.

*sigh*

Obama, Christian Love & Teabag Insanity

First, as a fairly liberal/progressive Democrat, let me say one thing to everyone out there who’s losing his or her frickin’ sanity over President Barack Obama, healthcare reform, or anything else related to Democrats:

Shut up and deal with it.

I’m not saying you can’t disagree or debate, but enough with threatening to kill the sitting president, claiming that he’s instituting Socialism, and all that other bullshit.

Since I became a relatively politically aware human being, and as the son of a devout anti-abortion, Catholic, Union-card carrying electrician (who also votes Democrat like me), I have had to suffer through the depredations of Ronald Reagan, Bush #1 and Bush #2 (I was too young during the Ford and Carter years to really grasp enough politics to care).

That’s 20 damn years I’ve suffered Republicans. The best years for our nation economically happened under Clinton, who could have stood to be a little less moderate at times and a little more left leaning, but at least he mostly got things right in terms of being a human and treating the citizenry who weren’t rich with some kind of compassion.

That’s 20 years of Republican rule I’ve lived under, and 8 years of Democratic rule. It’s time for you right-wing, conservative, war-mongering, wealth-chasing, poor-bashing, bigoted asses who pine for the days of Ronnie and Dubya to sit down and take a long, deep breath.

You’ve had plenty of time, and mostly, all you’ve done is cut the legs out from under the poor and working class, cut loose the mentally ill on the public, raped the school system, sent American jobs overseas, and rewarded corporations for screwing over their employees.

You’ve had 20 years of my politically aware life. You owe me at least another 7 years, if not 11, to make up for it before you get your shot again.

I didn’t scream at Reagan or either Bush. I didn’t threaten them. I bided my time and suffered and sweated, and now it’s my damned time.

Get it?

The nation doesn’t belong to Republicans. It belongs to Americans. But too many Americans handed it over like it was the GOP’s playground alone.

Take a rest, calm down, and tend to your homes, and let the sitting administration do its job, just like I let three of the last four do theirs to my detriment.

Second thing I want to say:

When did we lose (or rather, YOU lose, and I’m still speaking to the rapid GOP supporters, especially those whom they most screw over…the working class Republicans, who must be the most masochistic group of people on Earth) the ability to have polite discourse? When did it become appropriate to call for militias to take D.C. back for the people? Or to put a bullet in Obama’s head? Had any Democrat, liberal or other left-leaning group or individual done that during the GOP administrations, you’d be calling for their blood and calling them un-American and unpatriotic.

Be patriotic, and respect your damn president. At least half the nation disagrees with you right now, probably more than that, and you need to sit your asses down until you can debate sensibly.

Especially you Bible thumpers (and I love me some Jesus too, mind you). Even if you think Obama is persecuting you, Jesus told us to love those who persecute us, and he never advocated armed rebellion against sitting governments. Nor did he call for killing anyone. Jesus would be ashamed of every damn Teabag Party/teabagger out there.

That is all.

Squandering the Presidency

While I might not be quite as hard on Barack Obama as this writer was, I substantially agree (sad to say.)

Click here to see what I’m talking about: “How to Squander the Presidency in One Year”

Even sadder to say, my biggest quibble with the article is that the writer compares Obama to Conan O’Brien.

Conan, for his part, didn’t ruin anything, and is entitled to at least a year, and perhaps several. As Jay Leno was allowed several years to find his range and pull in the big numbers. TV and the presidency aren’t the same. O’Brien was a victim of executive impatience and market whims. Obama is, however, shaping up to be a huge failure (aside from breaking the color barrier in the Oval Office) if he doesn’t do something. The presidency is a place for boldness and conviction. Not patience and waffling. Four years go by real fast.

Obama. Do something. Something very right. Something very, very soon.

Getting His Peace of the Pie

There are two things I want to say right off the bat about President Barack Obama’s receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Congratulations.

And: Why?

I’m confused.

It’s not that I don’t think Obama deserves scads of recognition for his intelligence, his Zen-like calm in the face of the madness around him, his lovely family, breaking the color barrier in the presidency, coming up from humble roots to achieve great success, and so much more.

The man’s done a lot in a relatively short time, and I have great respect for him and I want him to succeed.

But a Nobel Peace Prize?

I think the Nobel folks stretched it a bit to say that he has ushered in a new atmosphere conducive to peace. I mean, he’s less than a year into his term, we’re about to up the number of troops in Afghanistan, and there are people right here in the United States who aren’t afraid to make it known in public demonstrations that they want him dead.

Peace?

Of all the things with which to honor our president, to give him the Nobel Peace Prize right now seems ludicrous.

For one thing, it feels like the time that Al Pacino got the Oscar for “Scent of  Woman,” in which he chewed up scenery like a puppy with a new slipper. It was some of his weakest work, and yet he got one of those nice Academy Award statuettes because had always lost out on his many great roles in past Oscar ceremonies. Except with the Nobel Peace Prize, I feel like it’s the world giving the United States an award for finally electing a black man. Almost like they said to themselves, “Gee, we’ve been awfully hard on the United States for a long time, but they have done some good things…very good things…among the bad, and they did an outstanding job in World War II, so let’s give them some recognition by giving their besieged president the peace prize.”

For another thing, did the Nobel Prize people even think about what this means for Obama? Sure, they’ve ensured that he’ll make even more money now on his post-presidential lecture circuit. But now, with a Nobel Peace Prize, he has to deliver some peace, damn it…serious peace…or he will be dragged over the coals by people in this country. Now he has to live up the award he’s been given. The man has enough on his plate trying to right our economy and get something resembling healthcare reform without having a peace prize standard of achievement hanging over his head as well.

I like Obama a lot. I want him to succeed.

I don’t like that he got a Nobel Peace Prize.

I’m still scratching my head.

And groaning.

Health Care Deform by Miz Pink

So, I’m just wondering, as Barack Obama seems to get a little wimpy on the health care reform thang…and as all those folks who aren’t rich talk about socialized medicine being the final step toward a socialist dictatorship…how many of those yahoos that are mouthing off right now either have relatives who get Medicare or are bitter old twits on Medicare themselves?

And I wonder, what if the President just yanked Medicare away and told all those folks that they or their relatives would have to pay out of pocket now?

I figure they’d either be begging to have their “socialized medicine” back or they would be carrying even more guns around to shoot the Prez for taking away their “right” to healthcare in old age.

Either way, it would kinda prove the point wouldn’t it?

The government has been running Medicare for a long time. It ain’t perfect but it’s done a lot for the elderly to get care. It’s a system with flaws but one that works. So why is it so hard to think that getting the government involved in everyone’s health is such an evil idea?

Oh yeah…because they’re ignorant boobs who do whatever ole Rush or Glen or Annie “Get your guns” Coulter tell ’em to do…why use logic or have an idea of your own in your head when you can just follow the right-wing rulebook straight to the end of your life.

Don’t worry though. Without health care reform, you can all die in your 40s or 50s like your grand-daddies did so it wont be  a LONG life.

Pity that the rest of us who know better will be dying just as early.

Screw you.

Respect the Office by Miz Pink

So, okay…let me see if I got this straight.

Not only did we just have a guy who showed up at a New Hampshire town hall meeting of the president packing a serious looking open-carry rig with a 9mm pistol but now if I understand right we had some chick outside another Obama related event with a sign saying something about kill President Obama, kill his wife, and kill his kids.

What the &#$@!

Look I know there are plenty ‘o crazies in the world. Plenty of people who think violence is cool and think Death Wish was a warm and fuzzy movie.

But these were probably the same people insisting we respect a president who didn’t know what he was doing at all (yes, the Shrub known as George), and they have the balls to come armed to the current president’s events and/or encourage violence not only toward him but also his family. These are the same people, I’m guessing, who thump their Bibles and push out their chests when they talk about the moral high ground of the U.S. and the need to post the Ten Commandments and make marriage follow biblical rules and herd up all the homos to re-educated ’em.

Aside from the crazy factor, what I see here is a huge disrespect to President Obama. The notion that you can treat the man this way when he’s president and the notion that you wouldn’t immediately haul these people away from questioning and possible jailing boggles my mind because that’s what would have happened with the idiot guy in office.

But put a dude in office in a messed up economy that the right-wingers created and he’s got some functioning brain cells (though not enough cajones politically some days, I fear) and all of a sudden you can just treat him like some thug who waltzed up on your lawn.

Hmmmm….

Wonder why there’s so much more open, blatant disrespect of this guy…bald-faced hateful boldness…threats to his family including kids…rejections of his citizenship…notions that he must be sympathetic to or beholden to all sorts of Muslim folks…

Hmmmmm…

Well, we know it’s not because he’s BLACK, right?

After all, he got elected in a nation where only 12% of folks are Black. Couldn’t be that we have any racism anymore…

Yeah. Right. Suuuuuurre.

Typical Monkey Business

I saw the New York Post editorial cartoon the other day that had two cops over the bullet-ridden corpse of a chimp, with the dialogue: “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill” coming out of one officer’s mouth.

It offended me on so many levels with its utter lack of regard for taste or logic. At the same time, it didn’t surprise me one bit. I won’t go into that here, though. Other bloggers, both black and white, have done a good job of that already. Go to these places to get a flavor of that:

Raving Black Lunatic
Deus Ex Malcontent
Huffington Post
The Field Negro

What I want to get into in this post is the ridiculousness of those who would defend this cartoon and its treatment of the current adminstration and, by extension, the way they defend the most idiotic monetary policies of the Republicans.

First, there are many that have the notion that the cartoon is OK, because it’s a political cartoon, and George W. Bush was sometimes compared to a chimp in such cartoons. Oh, now it’s OK to suggest violence against a sitting president? Because these defenders are likely the same people who would have screamed for investigations, sanctions and maybe arrests if any Bush-Chimp item suggested for a moment that any kind of harm was due to the president (and they didn’t from anything I recall). That’s hypocrisy, and it makes arguments that there is nothing racist about the cartoon fall flat.

But second, and perhaps more intense for me, is the wider issue here about the stimulus package and the fact that there are plenty of poor, working class and middle class Republicans who would simply nod their heads at this cartoon and say, “Yeah, the stimulus package was just that bad.”

I’m frankly sick and damn tired of this. I understand that many Republicans in the middle class and below it don’t like the lack of moral and family values that they perceive all Democrats, and especially liberals, to possess. And you know what, while I disagree with that, I respect that viewpoint. If you think the moral, law-and-order, marriage/sex/homosexuality views of the Republicans are superior, and that is your priority in a politician, great.

But stop defending their economic policies. I’m tired of Republicans who aren’t rich, and are getting screwed as badly as us Democrats of modest means, saying that the Republicans have been on the right track with handling our money. They don’t say word one about throwing trillions in the direction of Iraq to pay for a war we started under the pretense of fighting global terror, and they don’t get all that mad about throwing $800 billion at the finance industry and letting them do whatever they want with it…but oh, try to repair our nation’s infrastucture or reduce teen pregnancies or generate actual direct jobs for the working class, and then you’ve gone too far!

Christian Republicans in particular need to get up off this bullcrap. Christianity has never been about amassing wealth and pushing down the working class. Much of what Jesus promoted was very socialist, actually, when you get right down to it. He wasn’t about power and prestige and money and he didn’t want us to be either.

So stop defending the party that has elevated greed and bailouts for the rich to an art form. If you like them better for their social and moral stances, then just stick to that. Stop lying to yourselves that they are better for your pocketbook, because all they want is your damn money. And you can say that the Democrats want the same thing, but at least they seem to try to spend in on our own damn country and trying to make people’s lives here a bit better, instead of throwing our weight around and lining the pockets of people who don’t need a leg up.

And if I haven’t made myself clear enough how I feel, here’s a little something from Deus Ex Malcontent. A post I made there. First, though, the context. Chez posted a quote from JP Morgan Chase spokesman Thomas Kelly, who was being very evasive in explaining how the company was using the $25 billion it got from the late-2008 bailout the Bush Administration managed to push through for the folks on Wall Street. It went like this:

“We’ve lent some of it. We’ve not lent some of it. We’ve not given any accounting of, ‘Here’s how we’re doing it. We have not disclosed that to the public. We’re declining to.”

In my comment to that post, I imagined what the head of JP Morgan might say if he had decided to come forward and be honest about things. It contained more than my usual amount of foul-mouthed behavior, so be warned:

You cuntbags want to know how we spent “your” motherfucking money?

I’ll tell you. I don’t need that weasel-flak Thomas Kelly to speak for me anymore.

For starters, everyone at JP Morgan Chase from executive vice president on up is now debt-fucking-free.

Oh, and I bought us a goddamn island in the South Pacific to relocate to if any of you decide to try that guillotine shit that’s been bandied about.

We’ve got 90% of the members of both house of Congress on our dicks full-time, now, too. Lifetime thralldom from a congressman or senator doesn’t come cheap.

As for me personally? Shit, I’ll tell you how I spent “your” money…

…I’ve been using $100 bills as rolling paper for the finest weed you can buy in this solar system.

…I’ve been washing the taste of that pot out of my mouth with Perrier-Jouet champagne. I’ve been drinking it like water. Oh, that didn’t sting enough? How about the fucking champagne flute I’ve been guzzling it out of, which I had laser-carved from a single fucking perfect diamond the size of your shin.

…I also rented out the goddamn Four Seasons Hotel ballroom and hired a hooker from every conceivable racial background to do a mass fucking lap dance just for moi. And before they left, I let them head out with as many $100 bills as they could stuff in their cunnies.

And that’s just this fucking week. Just want ’til you hear what I do with “your” money for New Year’s.

Suck on that, bitches.

Cordially,
James L. Dimon, President, Chairman and CEO, JP Morgan Chase & Co.

My more right-leaning brethren, the current stimulus package, while it may not solve much, isn’t your enemy. It’s actually the closest thing we’ve seen to a step in the right direction for a long time. So, if you’re going to defend the cartoon I mentioned at the start, or if you’re going to support the Republicans, stop doing so on the basis of fiscal policy.

Unless you’re rich.

Two-fer (Late)Tuesday: WTF?

Gonna just toss the two of us into one post today…tonight…whatever. 😉

Deacon Blue

My WTF moment recently has got to be the one-two punch of the GOP steadfastly trying to deep-six President Obama’s plans just to be pissy, along with the folks on the other side who insist that the president should just screw over the GOP like the Repulicans screwed over the Democrats and the entire nation for the previous eight years.

First, as for the GOP douchebags:  Just because y’all have your nice congressional pensions to fall back on and wonderful healthcare coverage is no reason to try to make Obama fail just because you desperately want and need him to so that you can get the White House back soon. The country is hurting. Your constituents are hurting. You protecting your ideological interests and your contributors who are still rich is not the priority here. Trying somehow to fix the country is. Your economic policies for eight years sucked. They tanked our economy. They didn’t work. Trickle-down economic theory is a lie. Tax breaks for the well-to-do don’t stimulate the economy. Encouraging Americans to consume more doesn’t help the economy. You failed. Be grown men (and women) and deal with that. Get on board with fixing shit, or get the fuck out of the country. I mean that sincerely.

As for the lefties and even more moderate Democrat types who are feeling their oats and want to just beat on the Republicans: Grow the hell up. This is not a schoolyard. Returning the pain isn’t going to solve anything. It doesn’t matter if the GOP doesn’t want to work with you nicely. That’s no reason to try to rip them all new assholes. Haven’t you noticed what eye-for-eye strategies have done in the Middle East? What now, 7,000 years of animosity between Arabs and Jews? Be willing to rise above the fray. Defend yourselves if and when you need to, but stop calling for revenge tactics. They don’t pay long-term dividends that any of us want to collect on.

Miz Pink

WTF? What the fudge? Oh what a topic! I’m melting, I’m melting…

Okay my WTF thang right now is that octuplet chick. Six kids already, one or two of whom have serious issues. Unemployed. Unmarried. Living with mom. On the dole. Getting plastic surgery to look like Angelina Jolie. Spending her sustantial savings on said surgery and on getting 8 embryos implanted in her when she already has 6 kids she can’t afford to raise. Getting a publicist. Acting like this is normal.

Woman needs some mental healthcare counseling clearly. Needed it before she went to add 8 more kids to her brood. The fertility doc needs some investigating and removal of his license AFAIC.

When God said be fruitful and multiply, it was to Adam and Eve, NOT to the whole lot of us. Sure, in Pslams it talks about a quiverful of kids being a blessing and stuff, but that doesn’t mean we just push out kids we can’t take care of. We’re not supposed to be baby factories, us women.

Back in the old days, you needed plenty of warm bodies to hunt or work the fields or whatever. People died younger. There was a lot more room to expand becasue we didn’t have 6 bazillion or 8 catillion or however the heck many folks we have on the planet now.

In this economy going for a huge family and expecting society to foot your bill for you. That’s not godly. Thats bad judgement and bad stewardship and bad parenting. The original 6 get to suffer more thanks to a decision to have 8 more that was a decision born out of mental illness and poor judgement and wasn’t shot down by the people and professionals around her who should have nipped this in the butt to begin with.