A half-dozen Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested an undocumented transgender woman at an El Paso courthouse last week just after she had received a restraining order against the man who had beaten her. Here's whole truth: the woman has a record for crimes like stealing mail and allegedly assault, and she's been deported a half dozen times. That shouldn't matter, but you'll hear about it when this case is discussed, so let's not hide anything.
Here's the wholer truth: Her criminal record was described as "non-violent" by El Paso County Attorney Jo Anne Bernal, and there were no outstanding state court warrants for the woman's arrest.
Here's the wholest truth: The woman had reported three incidents of domestic abuse, each worse than the previous one. "This is a woman who had suffered serious abuse," Bernal told the local press. "This was a victim of horrible domestic violence," said the judge who had just given the woman a protective order against her ex-boyfriend. She suffered one more abuse at his hands because it was her ex, himself in custody for another crime, who likely tipped off ICE about the immigration status of the woman he was beating. She was living at the Center Against Sexual and Family Violence, which provides emergency shelter for individuals and families.
Of the myriad fuckeries that the Trump administration has engaged in, the arrest and deportation of undocumented immigrants with minor or no criminal records or even with DACA protections is the most insidious because it is presented as doing good while, quite plainly and quite intentionally, tearing apart families and sending people with no ties to their country of origin back to often terrible lives. And the case of this woman in El Paso, whose name is listed only as IEG on the order, is particularly insidious because not only does it serve no purpose, but it does real and actual harm.
Because what the fuck does this accomplish? IEG is just one more immigrant to be added to a total that Donald Trump can proclaim as a demonstration of strength as he bumblefucks through a hopefully brief presidency. He'll say they're only deporting the worst criminals or some such bullshit. But it's such a lie. See, as Bernal and Judge Yahara Lisa Gutierrez have said, what this arrest does is drive undocumented domestic violence sufferers away from seeking protections.
In fact, to take this further, any undocumented immigrant who is a victim of violence now can assume that going to the police or to a court would result in deportation, so they must suffer in silence. To go even further, this goes for children of undocumented parents, too. They can assume that if Dad is beating the shit out of them, Mom will be sent back to Mexico if they turn Dad in. To go even further, you can say that it's open season on undocumented immigrants because they likely won't report crimes. And to go just a little further, undocumented immigrants can tell you to go fuck yourself if they see a crime where you're the victim because helping you, even by getting a cop, can result in their arrest and deportation. And fuck testifying in court.
The price of Trump's crackdown on undocumented people in the United States is going to be more crime and, frighteningly, more unreported violence. Trump is saying that he doesn't give a shit about anything other than raising his numbers of deportations, consequences be damned. Fuck women, fuck families, fuck crime, fuck all the blood that will be spilled because of it.
When the next backwards ass, Trump-loving, Christian fuck asks me, "What would Jesus do?" I'll answer, "Jesus would rip Trump's tiny dick off and feed it to pigs." And when that Christian fuck wonders what happened to turning the other cheek, I'd tell him, "At this point, even Jesus would say, 'I've only got so many cheeks, motherfucker, and they're all used up.'"
2/13/2017
Photos of Trump That Assure Us That We're All Gonna Die
That right there is the motherfucking president of the motherfucked United States of America, seated and grinning while grim pandemonium goes on around him. And he's at a dinner at his golf resort in Florida, where he spent the weekend golfing. The dinner is for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan, who also golfed with the president, who happens to be a persimmon-topped wrecking ball named Donald Trump.
At dinner, the president and the PM were enjoying a salad. More precisely, they were enjoying "Mr. Trump's Wedge Salad," which is a chunk of iceberg lettuce coated in blue cheese dressing, bacon, and more blue cheese. Essentially, it's just edible plastic conveying cheese and bacon and cream to your bloodstream. Then, oh, the inconveniences of being president, North Korea tested an intermediate-range ballistic missile that landed in the Sea of Japan. It's kind of a big fucking deal because, see, North Korea has nukes and a mad leader with no checks on his madness, and Japan would be right in the crosshairs of any attack. Goddamnit, what about the main course?
So everyone leapt into action to find out more and figure out how to respond to a direct provocation. That's the flurry of activity you see up there. It's not, by the way, an effort to move the conversation to a more secure location. Oh, no, that'd interrupt dinner, and there was some goddamned meat on the way. Thus, in the middle of the dining area at a big golf club with tons of people watching, everyone with Trump and Abe started to read classified documents and talk about classified information. Even more fucked up was that the room was dimly lit so they used their goddamn cell phone flashlights to read the, let's say it again, classified information. Their phones. Pointed at the documents. Their easily-hackable phones. In the room where everything was being discussed. In front of dozens of civilians, many of whom were snapping photos of the events. As long as you paid your expensive dues, you could be there in that room. So, really, who the hell knows what agents of foreign governments could have been present?
This isn't about the level of transparency or whatever else you wanna make it about. Like so many things with Republicans, it's about the hypocrisy. Hillary Clinton's private email server was supposed to essentially allow ISIS to enter the country freely and kill all our dogs and enslave our wives. But here are seemingly multiple violations of any kind of safety protocols when it comes to dealing with classified material.
And even more fucked up is the center of this photo. President Trump, sitting calmly, not involved in any of the uproar, smiling and leaning on his hand, not a care in the entire goddamned world, preening and showing off for people who pay to be in his club, even as an American ally was facing what it considered to be an existential threat. Imagine that. Imagine so not giving a fuck that you couldn't even be bothered to pretend like this was a serious enough situation to not pose like a serene but stupid frog, let alone just take the fuckin' meeting to a private room. Imagine if President Oba...you know what? Fuck it. At this point, it's obvious that Republicans are mud-encrusted piglets, gleefully suckling at Trump's multiple teats while he gorges himself on the slops and shits all over the pen.
Trump is so removed from reality that, after making some brief remarks, he sauntered over to a wedding reception in Mar-a-Lago's ballroom to congratulate the newlyweds. And he really did say, "They've been members of this club for a long time. They've paid me a fortune."
And everyone just laughed like it was the most normal thing in the world.
2/10/2017
Question to Trump Voters: Aren't You Just Embarrassed?
You know, I was halfway through writing a big piece that boiled down to "What if Donald Trump was a raging liberal who promised to do all the things I want? Would I be just ashamed to support him at this point?" I stopped because it was all so, so fucking obvious.
But I really want to know from Trump voters: Does any of this embarrass you? Any of the shit with Michael Flynn and Russia? Any of the ridiculous things Trump says, like threatening to "destroy the career" of a state legislator? Any of the ludicrous comments and promises he makes? His complete lack of understanding of the way the government actually functions? His complete lack of knowledge about the United States's relationships with other countries? The disastrous and unnecessary military mission in Yemen? The fact that he is literally doing the things he said he was going to do, like tearing families apart? The demonstrable lies? Does any of it make a dent with you?
I stopped, too, because I realized that it doesn't. And that reasoning with most Trump voters is like running a flea circus. You can fool people into thinking the fleas are doing tricks and acrobatics, but it's just fleas being fleas. Whatever frame you put on it, they're gonna do whatever the fuck they please.
Whenever we face the joke of a presidency we're forced to endure right now, we're not merely facing the pumpkinheaded doom goblin at the top. We're facing all of his supporters who are unmoved by any ethical lapse, any law broken at this point, even the Constitution itself. So we either have to write them off as a mad tribe that has taken over the temple and hope they orgy themselves to death or we have to reason with them, however terrible it might be to walk up to a group of convulsing idiots and ask them to listen to your insights you got from watching CNN.
The takeaway from the blog post was going to be that I'd like to think that I'd be embarrassed. I'd like to think that it would matter even if President Stumblefuck McBleedingheart was going to tax the wealthy more and rein in Wall Street and get rid of money in politics and spend shit-tons on infrastructure and alternate energies and make reversing climate change a top priority and attack poverty with education and jobs programs and on and on. If he was as dumbly evil and evilly dumb as Trump, I'd like to think I'd be able to say, "Yeah, but, holy fuckballs, man, can we just impeach him already?"
Shame is a powerful tool. We need to deploy it more and make Trump's ardent supporters feel like outcasts for denying reality.
But I really want to know from Trump voters: Does any of this embarrass you? Any of the shit with Michael Flynn and Russia? Any of the ridiculous things Trump says, like threatening to "destroy the career" of a state legislator? Any of the ludicrous comments and promises he makes? His complete lack of understanding of the way the government actually functions? His complete lack of knowledge about the United States's relationships with other countries? The disastrous and unnecessary military mission in Yemen? The fact that he is literally doing the things he said he was going to do, like tearing families apart? The demonstrable lies? Does any of it make a dent with you?
I stopped, too, because I realized that it doesn't. And that reasoning with most Trump voters is like running a flea circus. You can fool people into thinking the fleas are doing tricks and acrobatics, but it's just fleas being fleas. Whatever frame you put on it, they're gonna do whatever the fuck they please.
Whenever we face the joke of a presidency we're forced to endure right now, we're not merely facing the pumpkinheaded doom goblin at the top. We're facing all of his supporters who are unmoved by any ethical lapse, any law broken at this point, even the Constitution itself. So we either have to write them off as a mad tribe that has taken over the temple and hope they orgy themselves to death or we have to reason with them, however terrible it might be to walk up to a group of convulsing idiots and ask them to listen to your insights you got from watching CNN.
The takeaway from the blog post was going to be that I'd like to think that I'd be embarrassed. I'd like to think that it would matter even if President Stumblefuck McBleedingheart was going to tax the wealthy more and rein in Wall Street and get rid of money in politics and spend shit-tons on infrastructure and alternate energies and make reversing climate change a top priority and attack poverty with education and jobs programs and on and on. If he was as dumbly evil and evilly dumb as Trump, I'd like to think I'd be able to say, "Yeah, but, holy fuckballs, man, can we just impeach him already?"
Shame is a powerful tool. We need to deploy it more and make Trump's ardent supporters feel like outcasts for denying reality.
2/09/2017
One of the Stupidest Talking Points on the Right: Democrats Started the KKK
Yesterday, Texas Senator and a man who looks and sounds like the creepy neighbor who jacks off thinking about banging your mom, Ted Cruz, appeared on Fox "news" with burned-out bulb Bill Hemmer. They were talking about Senator Elizabeth Warren being shut down by Majority Leader Mitch "Neck Scrotum" McConnell for daring to call racist fucksack Jeff Sessions a racist fucksack by reading a letter from Coretta Scott King that said, in essence, "That Jeff Sessions is one racist sack of fuck."
Snarling with that look like he's smelling shit on his upper lip, Cruz exclaimed that Warren's attack was "slanderous" and that Democrats always call people "racist" when they don't agree with them. Then the Republican tossed out this: "The Democrats are the party of the Ku Klux Klan. You look at the most racist — you look at the Dixiecrats, they were Democrats who imposed segregation, imposed Jim Crow laws, who founded the Klan. The Klan was founded by a great many Democrats."
Many others have used this talking point to tar Democrats whenever a Republican or a racist conservative or a Nazi is losing an argument. Indeed, I regularly get idiot messages and bullshit memes about how Democrats supported slavery and Democrats started the KKK. But, you know, the facts are that it was more a regional thing than a party thing. Somehow, Republicans and racist conservatives and Nazis think that they can prove some nonsense about how liberalism is actually hate or some such shit. (And they always leave out the Compromise of 1877 that made all federal troops pull out of the South in return for Republican Rutherford...you know what? Google that shit.)
But even if Ted Cruz is right, so the fuck what? The Klan was started 150 years ago. There was always a split in northern and southern Democrats. By the time the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed, with Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater opposing it (and winning states in the south in the election), the Democratic Party had shifted pretty much completely, with the last vestiges of the racist side, the Dixiecrats, changing parties or dying out soon after. By the time we get to Reagan's election, and he campaigned on an explicitly racist platform, the then-called Reagan Democrats, the whites that had formerly voted Democratic, completed the transformation of the parties.
How the fuck is this talking point even valid? What does it succeed in doing? 50 years ago, the Democratic Party, for the most part, said a hearty "fuck you" to the white south that still to this day hoists its Confederate flags and celebrates a time when they could keep blacks separate, if not all the way back to when they were enslaved. And those motherfuckers are sure as shit ain't Democrats. (Yes, some Democrats are still conservatives who pander to the racist whites in their states or districts.)
Jesus, it's like Republicans and racist conservatives and Nazis (by the way, you know who kicked the actual Nazis' asses? A Democrat in a wheelchair) want to pretend that shit never changes. And if that was true, then they better talk to their president right now because does Trump realize that Russia wanted to wipe the United States off the map back in the 1960s? Oh, and 50 years ago, there was no fuckin' way some Cuban named "Cruz" would have been elected to the Senate from Texas. Oh, and Republicans 50 years ago were not all bugfuck insane. Hell, about half the Republicans in Congress voted for Medicare in 1965. How about bringing that shit up whenever Paul Ryan talks about gutting it like a snitch in the prison shower?
One last thing: There is another reason why Republicans and racist conservatives and Nazis want you to think that Democrats are the party of the KKK. They're saying none-too-subtly that non-white people are stupid because they support Democrats. See, Republicans can't be the racists, despite all the plainly racist policies they want because there is this one racist thing that they're not guilty of. It's a fuckin' low bar they've set for themselves and they barely crawl under it.
Oh, and let's not forget which party's candidate was literally endorsed by the KKK just last year, which, according to my math, is a fuck of a lot closer to now than 50 years ago.
Snarling with that look like he's smelling shit on his upper lip, Cruz exclaimed that Warren's attack was "slanderous" and that Democrats always call people "racist" when they don't agree with them. Then the Republican tossed out this: "The Democrats are the party of the Ku Klux Klan. You look at the most racist — you look at the Dixiecrats, they were Democrats who imposed segregation, imposed Jim Crow laws, who founded the Klan. The Klan was founded by a great many Democrats."
Many others have used this talking point to tar Democrats whenever a Republican or a racist conservative or a Nazi is losing an argument. Indeed, I regularly get idiot messages and bullshit memes about how Democrats supported slavery and Democrats started the KKK. But, you know, the facts are that it was more a regional thing than a party thing. Somehow, Republicans and racist conservatives and Nazis think that they can prove some nonsense about how liberalism is actually hate or some such shit. (And they always leave out the Compromise of 1877 that made all federal troops pull out of the South in return for Republican Rutherford...you know what? Google that shit.)
But even if Ted Cruz is right, so the fuck what? The Klan was started 150 years ago. There was always a split in northern and southern Democrats. By the time the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed, with Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater opposing it (and winning states in the south in the election), the Democratic Party had shifted pretty much completely, with the last vestiges of the racist side, the Dixiecrats, changing parties or dying out soon after. By the time we get to Reagan's election, and he campaigned on an explicitly racist platform, the then-called Reagan Democrats, the whites that had formerly voted Democratic, completed the transformation of the parties.
How the fuck is this talking point even valid? What does it succeed in doing? 50 years ago, the Democratic Party, for the most part, said a hearty "fuck you" to the white south that still to this day hoists its Confederate flags and celebrates a time when they could keep blacks separate, if not all the way back to when they were enslaved. And those motherfuckers are sure as shit ain't Democrats. (Yes, some Democrats are still conservatives who pander to the racist whites in their states or districts.)
Jesus, it's like Republicans and racist conservatives and Nazis (by the way, you know who kicked the actual Nazis' asses? A Democrat in a wheelchair) want to pretend that shit never changes. And if that was true, then they better talk to their president right now because does Trump realize that Russia wanted to wipe the United States off the map back in the 1960s? Oh, and 50 years ago, there was no fuckin' way some Cuban named "Cruz" would have been elected to the Senate from Texas. Oh, and Republicans 50 years ago were not all bugfuck insane. Hell, about half the Republicans in Congress voted for Medicare in 1965. How about bringing that shit up whenever Paul Ryan talks about gutting it like a snitch in the prison shower?
One last thing: There is another reason why Republicans and racist conservatives and Nazis want you to think that Democrats are the party of the KKK. They're saying none-too-subtly that non-white people are stupid because they support Democrats. See, Republicans can't be the racists, despite all the plainly racist policies they want because there is this one racist thing that they're not guilty of. It's a fuckin' low bar they've set for themselves and they barely crawl under it.
Oh, and let's not forget which party's candidate was literally endorsed by the KKK just last year, which, according to my math, is a fuck of a lot closer to now than 50 years ago.
2/07/2017
Trump's Willing Victims: The Poor, Dumb Bastards of the White Working Class
I know we're all supposed to be freaking the fuck out over Donald Trump's mad desire for as much Putin dick as he can take. And I know we're suppsoed to be fact-checking the shit out of the administration's magical list of "terrorist attacks" that the horror-loving media supposedly didn't cover adequately, which can only mean "left out a call for a lynch mob," since the list contains some of the major events of the last couple of years. But there's an article that's stuck in my craw, something that is especially enraging in this time of an open spigot of anger.
Over at CNN's website, there's a piece titled "Trump gives America's 'poorest white town' hope." It's about Beattyville, Kentucky, a town that's on the ass end of nowhere in Appalachia and a place that used to rely on coal mining until that dried up sometime in the George W. Bush administration (and, no, it wasn't mean ol' white-hating, tree-huggin' Obama that did it). And these dirt poor fuckers, addicted to opioids, racist up to their tits, and utterly reliant on the government for welfare, health care, and most of the jobs in the area, believe that Donald motherfuckin' Trump is gonna be their savior.
The whole article is a look at how liberal policies, you know, shit that was done by Democrats, have pretty much been the only things keeping the townspeople alive and how goddamned deluded they are to that fact. For instance, "Beattyville residents want jobs, especially ones that pay more than the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. They think if anyone can bring jobs back, it's Trump." It's so blindingly stupid and counter to everything that Trump and Republicans talk about. You know what's one way to make sure that you don't get a minimum wage of $7.25 an hour? You raise the goddamned minimum wage, you know, like most Democrats want.
On and on the article goes. We learn that "57% of households receive food stamps and 58% get disability payments from Social Security." And since hope is something that knows no rationality, "'I hope [Trump] don't take the benefits away, but at the same time, I think that once more jobs come in a lot of people won't need the benefits,' says [25 year-old Amber] Hayes, who currently receives about $500 a month from government assistance. She's also on Obamacare."
What do you say to Amber? Do you tell her that believing that Trump will create more jobs is as much a fantasy as Hillary Clinton's murders? Do you say that, if the Affordable Care Act is repealed, she's fucked, as she is if Paul Ryan's budget, with cuts to government assistance programs, gets passed?
They believe that Trump is some kind of demi-god who will magically create jobs and make their lives better. "'I believe he wants to take care of us, the little people,' says [a] gas station manager. 'I think he's going to quit giving money to all these other countries and take care of America. I truly do.'" No, you dumb shit, he's gonna give the money to himself, his family, and his friends. If a few coins drop on the floor for you to scrounge for, well, there you go.
And who knows how to change their minds. The death of coal mining jobs has also meant the death of any hope for union involvement. So all they've got is prejudice, talk radio, and alienation. And drugs. You can't forget the drugs. Goddamn, Mitch McConnell told Beattyville residents to their faces that bringing jobs to eastern Kentucky was "not my job" and they still voted for him.
Essentially, the people of Beattyville are refugees living in our country. They are utterly dependent on the government. They have been abused and abandoned by the forces of capitalism. And they exist in an area of deep poverty and crime. The kindest thing we could do for them as a nation is buy their houses and land and relocate them to somewhere where there are some fucking jobs. Because you're not gonna shit out a new industry that'll make Beattyville boom, unless there is big time investment in tourism (truth be told, it's in a goddamn beautiful area).
Coal is done, as I've said, as everyone who isn't a fucking maniac president has said, including the coal companies. It's either been lapped by natural gas or automation has taken over for the miners.
But for the poor who voted for Trump, you are going to be punched in the face repeatedly by your own fists. And you'll come running to Democrats to help you, and we will, 'cause that's who the hell we are, and then you'll run right back to the racist pricks because that's just who the fuck you are: ungrateful, uneducated bastards who have been brainwashed so thoroughly that you don't realize who is stabbing you and who is trying to get your wounds healed, willing victims asking, "Please, may I have another" as the knife is twisted in your gut.
Over at CNN's website, there's a piece titled "Trump gives America's 'poorest white town' hope." It's about Beattyville, Kentucky, a town that's on the ass end of nowhere in Appalachia and a place that used to rely on coal mining until that dried up sometime in the George W. Bush administration (and, no, it wasn't mean ol' white-hating, tree-huggin' Obama that did it). And these dirt poor fuckers, addicted to opioids, racist up to their tits, and utterly reliant on the government for welfare, health care, and most of the jobs in the area, believe that Donald motherfuckin' Trump is gonna be their savior.
The whole article is a look at how liberal policies, you know, shit that was done by Democrats, have pretty much been the only things keeping the townspeople alive and how goddamned deluded they are to that fact. For instance, "Beattyville residents want jobs, especially ones that pay more than the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. They think if anyone can bring jobs back, it's Trump." It's so blindingly stupid and counter to everything that Trump and Republicans talk about. You know what's one way to make sure that you don't get a minimum wage of $7.25 an hour? You raise the goddamned minimum wage, you know, like most Democrats want.
On and on the article goes. We learn that "57% of households receive food stamps and 58% get disability payments from Social Security." And since hope is something that knows no rationality, "'I hope [Trump] don't take the benefits away, but at the same time, I think that once more jobs come in a lot of people won't need the benefits,' says [25 year-old Amber] Hayes, who currently receives about $500 a month from government assistance. She's also on Obamacare."
What do you say to Amber? Do you tell her that believing that Trump will create more jobs is as much a fantasy as Hillary Clinton's murders? Do you say that, if the Affordable Care Act is repealed, she's fucked, as she is if Paul Ryan's budget, with cuts to government assistance programs, gets passed?
They believe that Trump is some kind of demi-god who will magically create jobs and make their lives better. "'I believe he wants to take care of us, the little people,' says [a] gas station manager. 'I think he's going to quit giving money to all these other countries and take care of America. I truly do.'" No, you dumb shit, he's gonna give the money to himself, his family, and his friends. If a few coins drop on the floor for you to scrounge for, well, there you go.
And who knows how to change their minds. The death of coal mining jobs has also meant the death of any hope for union involvement. So all they've got is prejudice, talk radio, and alienation. And drugs. You can't forget the drugs. Goddamn, Mitch McConnell told Beattyville residents to their faces that bringing jobs to eastern Kentucky was "not my job" and they still voted for him.
Essentially, the people of Beattyville are refugees living in our country. They are utterly dependent on the government. They have been abused and abandoned by the forces of capitalism. And they exist in an area of deep poverty and crime. The kindest thing we could do for them as a nation is buy their houses and land and relocate them to somewhere where there are some fucking jobs. Because you're not gonna shit out a new industry that'll make Beattyville boom, unless there is big time investment in tourism (truth be told, it's in a goddamn beautiful area).
Coal is done, as I've said, as everyone who isn't a fucking maniac president has said, including the coal companies. It's either been lapped by natural gas or automation has taken over for the miners.
But for the poor who voted for Trump, you are going to be punched in the face repeatedly by your own fists. And you'll come running to Democrats to help you, and we will, 'cause that's who the hell we are, and then you'll run right back to the racist pricks because that's just who the fuck you are: ungrateful, uneducated bastards who have been brainwashed so thoroughly that you don't realize who is stabbing you and who is trying to get your wounds healed, willing victims asking, "Please, may I have another" as the knife is twisted in your gut.
2/03/2017
The Red Trunk Project: A Small, Good Thing That Could Become a Huge, Life-Changing One
Hey, teachers and parents out there in the rudiverse:
You're tired of hate and lies of our leaders, especially about people from other countries. You need just a little something to grasp onto, something that is innately good, that only the most churlish and ignorant would have a problem with. So how about something for your kids that'll make 'em grow up to think of themselves as citizens of the world?
When my pal Kevin first told me about his idea for the Red Trunk Project nearly two years ago, it sounded awesome. It's one of those things that's so simple but gives you that profound sense of rightness almost immediately.
Here's how it goes: School kids in another country, like, say, Hanoi, Vietnam, working with a team of educators and researchers and videographers, fill a red trunk, you know, like the kind people used to use to travel on ships and stagecoaches, with all kinds of stuff that represents the kids' daily lives and their culture. While on the site where the kids are filling the trunk, the team from the organization is making videos, creating a book, and interviewing those involved. All of that becomes part of what goes into the trunk.
Now, here's the cool part: The trunk is brought back and the materials are translated into a bunch of different languages. This just ain't for American kids. The idea here is that children in a class in another country, say, in Argentina, get the trunk from Vietnam. And kids in Vietnam might get one from the United States. And kids in the United States might get one from Ethiopia. And on and on it goes.
So kids get to hold and work with the actual material items that children across the globe encounter or use on a regular basis. I mean, c'mon, if you were 8 years old and you opened up a trunk filled with stuff from the Australian outback, your little mind would explode. There's a huge difference between looking at something on a screen and holding it in your hands.
The creators of the Red Trunk Project have come up with lesson plans and ideas for how to integrate this into classrooms. In fact, they've got a pretty comprehensive approach to using the trunks, including things like Skyping with the kids who put the trunk together.
Check out the videos (that sexy Jon Hamm is even in one of 'em). Check out the website. And donate to help it grow (tax-deductible, people).
There's your little piece of hope in a seemingly hopeless time. If a whole bunch of children in our schools learn that children around the world play and go to school and have families and are real people and not abstract images on the news, then maybe there's a chance to knock down a wall or two. We gotta start somewhere.
And, besides, as I told Kevin when my little kid brain took over, "It just sounds like a blast."
You're tired of hate and lies of our leaders, especially about people from other countries. You need just a little something to grasp onto, something that is innately good, that only the most churlish and ignorant would have a problem with. So how about something for your kids that'll make 'em grow up to think of themselves as citizens of the world?
When my pal Kevin first told me about his idea for the Red Trunk Project nearly two years ago, it sounded awesome. It's one of those things that's so simple but gives you that profound sense of rightness almost immediately.
Here's how it goes: School kids in another country, like, say, Hanoi, Vietnam, working with a team of educators and researchers and videographers, fill a red trunk, you know, like the kind people used to use to travel on ships and stagecoaches, with all kinds of stuff that represents the kids' daily lives and their culture. While on the site where the kids are filling the trunk, the team from the organization is making videos, creating a book, and interviewing those involved. All of that becomes part of what goes into the trunk.
Now, here's the cool part: The trunk is brought back and the materials are translated into a bunch of different languages. This just ain't for American kids. The idea here is that children in a class in another country, say, in Argentina, get the trunk from Vietnam. And kids in Vietnam might get one from the United States. And kids in the United States might get one from Ethiopia. And on and on it goes.
So kids get to hold and work with the actual material items that children across the globe encounter or use on a regular basis. I mean, c'mon, if you were 8 years old and you opened up a trunk filled with stuff from the Australian outback, your little mind would explode. There's a huge difference between looking at something on a screen and holding it in your hands.
The creators of the Red Trunk Project have come up with lesson plans and ideas for how to integrate this into classrooms. In fact, they've got a pretty comprehensive approach to using the trunks, including things like Skyping with the kids who put the trunk together.
Check out the videos (that sexy Jon Hamm is even in one of 'em). Check out the website. And donate to help it grow (tax-deductible, people).
There's your little piece of hope in a seemingly hopeless time. If a whole bunch of children in our schools learn that children around the world play and go to school and have families and are real people and not abstract images on the news, then maybe there's a chance to knock down a wall or two. We gotta start somewhere.
And, besides, as I told Kevin when my little kid brain took over, "It just sounds like a blast."
2/02/2017
Democrats Should Resist, But Everything That Happens Is on Republicans
Let's get rid of one part of this in short order: Democrats in Congress should be resisting Trump every step of the way. That includes pushing hearings to crisis levels of antagonism, voting against every unqualified candidate, and, of course, filibustering his Supreme Court picks. It shouldn't even be up for discussion. They will lose and lose, but Democratic House and Senate members would be fundamentally misreading their marching, chanting, raging voters if they fail. As for the fear that Republicans in the Senate will get rid of the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations, you can be sure that the moment that Democrats do refuse to allow a vote on whatever right-wing nutzoid Trump tries to shove down America's throat, skeevy powermonger Mitch McConnell is gonna change the rules with his disturbing semi-grin that's a middle finger to his opponents. It's a question of when, not "if" on the filibuster.
Democrats can spin this easily. They could say they won't vote on things until the Muslim ban is halted. They could say that they won't vote for Trump's Supreme Court picks because a majority of Americans don't think he should be able to do so. They could stand up for the judiciary as Trump keeps ignoring court orders.
Democratic voters are already fighting. They are mightily insulted and want active rejection of all things Trump. These are flames that should be fanned by Democrats in Congress until Republicans start to feel the residual heat and are afraid of getting burned.
That's because, on some level, many Republicans realize that they own this presidency and its actions. Oh, sure, sure, they're fine going along with a great deal of dirt that Trump does. Except for the pathetic, neutered goat bleatings of John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and a handful of others, Republicans are either conspicuously silent or hee-hawing in support of the Muslim ban, and they're drooling at the prospect of getting Scalia II on the court. But we're now just two weeks into the Trump administration (insert your own retching sound), and we've got a Benghazi and multiple foreign crises. There's only so long that you can keep your head in the sand until you just suffocate.
Actually, it's unfair to compare the disastrous raid on al-Qaeda in Yemen to Benghazi. What happened at the consulate in Libya was an unexpected event. The Yemen raid was an American plan that had been rejected by the Obama administration and then approved by Trump despite the lack of intelligence that might have prevented all the deaths that occurred, including a Navy SEAL and several children. In other words, Trump's first military test was a clusterfuck of fail. And not a single hearing has been scheduled nor have you heard a peep from Republicans.
And you might not, ever. You might not hear them say how utterly absurd it is that Trump is treating the president of Mexico like he's a gardener who cut a shrub at Mar-a-Lago too short. You might not hear them even whisper that agitating China is just dumb. You might not hear them wonder why the hell Trump is pissing on our relationship with Australia, one of our most reliable allies in the world. You might hear them cheering on another useless war, this time with Iran, because that'd just fulfill a dream they've had since 1979. You will hear them crapping themselves over any threat that's Muslimish while clamming up over domestic terrorists like white supremacists and Breitbart's staff.
Still, we know that not only are Republicans cowards, but they're liars and hypocrites who would dance on the corpses of dead children rather than admit their ideology has failed. They'd rather learn to breathe sand than lift their heads and walk upright because they're gonna get to kick sick people off health insurance, discriminate against LGBT Americans, and force women into back alley abortions, the trifecta of quotidian cruelty they're begging to inflict.
So how do we get through to them? Because, see, we don't have two years to wait for the congressional midterms. Hell, all we need is one terrorist event in the United States, and Trump will declare martial law because he's too dumb and deranged to know any other way to handle it.
Two plans: the first is already happening. Inundate the offices and phone lines, especially of GOP representatives. Make their lives miserable with people registering how angry they are. The reps, even in gerrymandered districts, are more vulnerable than most senators. We gotta get people running against them. Put these assholes out on the curb. And make the rest beg for mercy.
And our activism has to target people who voted for Trump. Yeah, I know, I know, they're loathsome racists or racist-adjacent. But there are a hell of a lot of them who are regretting their votes - the wayward Bernie voters, the "take him seriously, but not literally" idiots, and the ones who realized that maybe getting into a war with Mexico is a little worse than Hillary's emails.
Mostly, it all depends on the constant action of Democrats and non-aligned progressives. Make sure Republicans know that they will be held to account for what they do, not just Democrats. This is on the GOP. Make them pay.
Democrats can spin this easily. They could say they won't vote on things until the Muslim ban is halted. They could say that they won't vote for Trump's Supreme Court picks because a majority of Americans don't think he should be able to do so. They could stand up for the judiciary as Trump keeps ignoring court orders.
Democratic voters are already fighting. They are mightily insulted and want active rejection of all things Trump. These are flames that should be fanned by Democrats in Congress until Republicans start to feel the residual heat and are afraid of getting burned.
That's because, on some level, many Republicans realize that they own this presidency and its actions. Oh, sure, sure, they're fine going along with a great deal of dirt that Trump does. Except for the pathetic, neutered goat bleatings of John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and a handful of others, Republicans are either conspicuously silent or hee-hawing in support of the Muslim ban, and they're drooling at the prospect of getting Scalia II on the court. But we're now just two weeks into the Trump administration (insert your own retching sound), and we've got a Benghazi and multiple foreign crises. There's only so long that you can keep your head in the sand until you just suffocate.
Actually, it's unfair to compare the disastrous raid on al-Qaeda in Yemen to Benghazi. What happened at the consulate in Libya was an unexpected event. The Yemen raid was an American plan that had been rejected by the Obama administration and then approved by Trump despite the lack of intelligence that might have prevented all the deaths that occurred, including a Navy SEAL and several children. In other words, Trump's first military test was a clusterfuck of fail. And not a single hearing has been scheduled nor have you heard a peep from Republicans.
And you might not, ever. You might not hear them say how utterly absurd it is that Trump is treating the president of Mexico like he's a gardener who cut a shrub at Mar-a-Lago too short. You might not hear them even whisper that agitating China is just dumb. You might not hear them wonder why the hell Trump is pissing on our relationship with Australia, one of our most reliable allies in the world. You might hear them cheering on another useless war, this time with Iran, because that'd just fulfill a dream they've had since 1979. You will hear them crapping themselves over any threat that's Muslimish while clamming up over domestic terrorists like white supremacists and Breitbart's staff.
Still, we know that not only are Republicans cowards, but they're liars and hypocrites who would dance on the corpses of dead children rather than admit their ideology has failed. They'd rather learn to breathe sand than lift their heads and walk upright because they're gonna get to kick sick people off health insurance, discriminate against LGBT Americans, and force women into back alley abortions, the trifecta of quotidian cruelty they're begging to inflict.
So how do we get through to them? Because, see, we don't have two years to wait for the congressional midterms. Hell, all we need is one terrorist event in the United States, and Trump will declare martial law because he's too dumb and deranged to know any other way to handle it.
Two plans: the first is already happening. Inundate the offices and phone lines, especially of GOP representatives. Make their lives miserable with people registering how angry they are. The reps, even in gerrymandered districts, are more vulnerable than most senators. We gotta get people running against them. Put these assholes out on the curb. And make the rest beg for mercy.
And our activism has to target people who voted for Trump. Yeah, I know, I know, they're loathsome racists or racist-adjacent. But there are a hell of a lot of them who are regretting their votes - the wayward Bernie voters, the "take him seriously, but not literally" idiots, and the ones who realized that maybe getting into a war with Mexico is a little worse than Hillary's emails.
Mostly, it all depends on the constant action of Democrats and non-aligned progressives. Make sure Republicans know that they will be held to account for what they do, not just Democrats. This is on the GOP. Make them pay.
1/31/2017
Trump Breaks All Contracts, Including Those Made by the United States
How is any of this a surprise, all this that's going on now, all that Trump is doing, all this tearing families apart and shipping refugees back to places where they may be killed and dicking around with the lives of children and sick people and the elderly and fucking with different countries, like everything is just a prisoner to whatever the dementia-fucked synapses in Trump's brain can acknowledge while Steve Bannon, with his whiskey breath and scabby face and semen-sticky hands, whispers into his ear, "This, this, this"? How could anyone not have known that, so very quickly, we'd be where we are now, with the country as close to genuine upheaval as it's been since the late 1960s? Once Trump was elected, we were going to get here as soon as his stubby fingers could scrawl signatures on the documents.
We're in this place, this America, right now because of something that Trump has done his entire life. The man couldn't give a fuck about a legitimate contract unless it's with someone who can crush him. Trump has fucked over the little guy repeatedly. Ask the Trump University plaintiffs. Ask any of the dozens of contractors and small business owners who worked for him. Trump and his lackeys more or less ripped up the agreements they made, daring people who couldn't afford it to take them to court. Shit, right now, contractors on his DC hotel, which Trump owns in violation of its lease, have filed liens against it because Trump's organization hasn't paid them.
Unless you have deep pockets and a shitload of time, Trump will fuck you like an obese, deranged weasel on a raccoon corpse in the middle of the road. Trump goes after the defenseless. He is a sixth-grade bully who thinks he's tough because he can make the second graders cry. Except now he gets to do it to people by the tens of thousands. And if he's not stopped, he will get braver and braver until he's putting liberals on a raft in the ocean to send us to Cuba while his idiot hordes hoot and holler in approval, Paul Ryan cowers, and John McCain and Lindsey Graham put out a statement about how that's just not right, all while people drown.
For, indeed, what has been the through-line in Trump's first week or so of fuckery? It's been that agreements don't matter. For instance, whatever you think of NAFTA, Trump's cavalier attitude towards a legitimate treaty has gotta make allies nervous as hell. But luckily it's only Mexico and those people are all rapists and drug lords anyways.
Immigrants and refugees who jumped through every hoop and did everything they had to were denied entry to the United States. People holding onto green cards were not allowed back in. Visas were canceled. These are contracts, too. The people who made them with this country based their lives on the idea that the contract would be honored. They gave up their homes and sold their businesses and spent all their savings to get here. They started school or arranged medical care. None of it mattered. Donald Trump told the world that we can renege on our agreements without any cause.
(Side note: Fuck you if you think that Trump's order makes us safer. Fuck you if you're such a coward that you can say, as cretinous little excrement smear Sean Spicer did today, that a 5-year old could be a terrorist. The only way Trump's ban or pause or whatever goddamn lie word they want to use instead of ban makes any goddamn sense is if he stops all immigration, from every country, because of some fundamental flaw in our vetting process. Except that would mean white people would have problems and his merry band of Nazi ass-lickers couldn't allow that to happen. So the whole thing is a lie, just a plate of racism bullshit coated with a security sauce.)
Why should any country trust us right now? Why would anyone invest in this country if there is a chance that, on a whim and a tweet, the goddamned president could wreck a company's stock and ban its employees?
On the left, our humanitarian sense of decency is offended. On the right, Jesus, I guess you fuckers don't believe in capitalism anymore. If we can't unify over this ban, an insult to our national identity, which sure as fuck ain't white and European and never fucking was, then we may as well just break apart now. Why not? The Constitution is just a contract that Trump will ignore.
We're in this place, this America, right now because of something that Trump has done his entire life. The man couldn't give a fuck about a legitimate contract unless it's with someone who can crush him. Trump has fucked over the little guy repeatedly. Ask the Trump University plaintiffs. Ask any of the dozens of contractors and small business owners who worked for him. Trump and his lackeys more or less ripped up the agreements they made, daring people who couldn't afford it to take them to court. Shit, right now, contractors on his DC hotel, which Trump owns in violation of its lease, have filed liens against it because Trump's organization hasn't paid them.
Unless you have deep pockets and a shitload of time, Trump will fuck you like an obese, deranged weasel on a raccoon corpse in the middle of the road. Trump goes after the defenseless. He is a sixth-grade bully who thinks he's tough because he can make the second graders cry. Except now he gets to do it to people by the tens of thousands. And if he's not stopped, he will get braver and braver until he's putting liberals on a raft in the ocean to send us to Cuba while his idiot hordes hoot and holler in approval, Paul Ryan cowers, and John McCain and Lindsey Graham put out a statement about how that's just not right, all while people drown.
For, indeed, what has been the through-line in Trump's first week or so of fuckery? It's been that agreements don't matter. For instance, whatever you think of NAFTA, Trump's cavalier attitude towards a legitimate treaty has gotta make allies nervous as hell. But luckily it's only Mexico and those people are all rapists and drug lords anyways.
Immigrants and refugees who jumped through every hoop and did everything they had to were denied entry to the United States. People holding onto green cards were not allowed back in. Visas were canceled. These are contracts, too. The people who made them with this country based their lives on the idea that the contract would be honored. They gave up their homes and sold their businesses and spent all their savings to get here. They started school or arranged medical care. None of it mattered. Donald Trump told the world that we can renege on our agreements without any cause.
(Side note: Fuck you if you think that Trump's order makes us safer. Fuck you if you're such a coward that you can say, as cretinous little excrement smear Sean Spicer did today, that a 5-year old could be a terrorist. The only way Trump's ban or pause or whatever goddamn lie word they want to use instead of ban makes any goddamn sense is if he stops all immigration, from every country, because of some fundamental flaw in our vetting process. Except that would mean white people would have problems and his merry band of Nazi ass-lickers couldn't allow that to happen. So the whole thing is a lie, just a plate of racism bullshit coated with a security sauce.)
Why should any country trust us right now? Why would anyone invest in this country if there is a chance that, on a whim and a tweet, the goddamned president could wreck a company's stock and ban its employees?
On the left, our humanitarian sense of decency is offended. On the right, Jesus, I guess you fuckers don't believe in capitalism anymore. If we can't unify over this ban, an insult to our national identity, which sure as fuck ain't white and European and never fucking was, then we may as well just break apart now. Why not? The Constitution is just a contract that Trump will ignore.
1/25/2017
Note to Donald Trump: Be a Man
Hey, Donald Trump, President Trump, whatever the fuck you wanna be called,
I don't like you and I'm pretty sure you wouldn't like me, if you knew who I was. See, I want you to fail so spectacularly that you are tempted to resign or take your own life on live TV and video streaming. Anyone who has ever had to deal with a pissy elderly relative knows exactly what you are: a belligerent shithead bullying your way through your episodes of dementia. You're just rich enough to be taken seriously with your mad ranting. And I don't give a fuck how much you suffer because of your mental decline. It won't be enough.
So I'm probably pretty goddamn low on the list of people who should be giving you advice, but here we are. You're the president and I'm one of your subjects...I mean, citizens, and you've talked about returning power to me, among everyone else. Maybe read this on your phone when you're sitting on the shitter, getting ready to pinch out a tight, angry, painful fiber-deprived loaf, before screaming out something idiotic for one of your ass-wipers to tweet.
Let me put this in the gendered language you love because it's so not politically correct:
Be a man.
'Cause right now, you're acting like a little, needy bitch, like a particularly well-pampered Pekingese that demands more petting and more treats. Be a man. A real man. One who doesn't require to be told endlessly that he's the best, the greatest, the biggest. One who isn't compelled to ask for affirmation from people who couldn't give less of a shit about things like the size of your inauguration crowd. I know it goes against your very being and how you've lived your entire stupid life. But give it a try.
You claim that you weren't making fun of reporter Serge Kovaleski's disability, that you were mocking him for "groveling." But you're the one who's groveling now. You're begging for everyone around you to buy into your lies and you despise it when reality intrudes on your well-wrought fantasy world. No matter how long you've done it, it makes you a pussy, a big, wet pussy just throbbing to get fingered and fucked, like all those that you claim you've grabbed, you walking virus.
A real man would have said, "Yeah, fine, I mocked the guy. I apologize and will try to do better." But someone in your life at some point, whether it was your despicable, racist father or your disgusting, verminous surrogate father, Roy Cohn, told you that men don't ever say they're sorry. Those people are wrong and dead. A real man mocks someone, admits it, and then either offers regret or says, "Come and get me."
After winning the election, all you could do was whine and lie. You didn't win the popular vote because of 3-5 million "illegal immigrants" fraudulently voting, as if anyone would go to the trouble of arranging the biggest fraud in history just to jack up the percentages in California. The media lied, you said, and you had an enormous crowd for your inauguration, even though photographs and anyone there who wasn't blind knew the truth. And you're "angry" about the size of the Women's March.
Jesus, look at how pathetic your bio is on the White House website: "Mr. Trump won the election on November 8 of 2016 in the largest electoral college landslide for a Republican in 28 years. He won over 2,600 counties nationwide, the most since President Reagan in 1984. Additionally, he won over 62 million votes in the popular vote, the highest all-time for a Republican nominee. He also won 306 electoral votes, the most for a Republican since George H.W. Bush in 1988. " Put aside the lie that your lower-third ranked winning percentage of the Electoral College is a mighty victory. Instead, look at that last line. There's been one Republican president since George H.W. Bush. So all you're saying is that you had a bigger electoral margin of victory than George W. Bush. You beat one guy out of dozens who beat you. And you're bragging about it? That's just sad and desperate, like "Look at the rabbits, Lennie" sad and desperate.
Now you're gonna have some great investigation into your delusion that there was fraud in the election (at least in the states that didn't vote for you, right?). And while, yes, your band of merry assholes can't wait to get them some of those sweet, sweet restrictions on voting rights, you know that you're doing this only because you want to prove some fucking worthless point. If one vote in California turns out to be cast fraudulently, even if it was just an error, you will cackle and dance like you just found gold in the Sierra Madres, you dumb fuck.
The PC pundits will tell you to act like a grown-up. But you and me, we don't play like that. We tell it like it is. So be a man. Get over this popularity shit.
And don't worry. We can still talk about how much of a cunt you are.
I don't like you and I'm pretty sure you wouldn't like me, if you knew who I was. See, I want you to fail so spectacularly that you are tempted to resign or take your own life on live TV and video streaming. Anyone who has ever had to deal with a pissy elderly relative knows exactly what you are: a belligerent shithead bullying your way through your episodes of dementia. You're just rich enough to be taken seriously with your mad ranting. And I don't give a fuck how much you suffer because of your mental decline. It won't be enough.
So I'm probably pretty goddamn low on the list of people who should be giving you advice, but here we are. You're the president and I'm one of your subjects...I mean, citizens, and you've talked about returning power to me, among everyone else. Maybe read this on your phone when you're sitting on the shitter, getting ready to pinch out a tight, angry, painful fiber-deprived loaf, before screaming out something idiotic for one of your ass-wipers to tweet.
Let me put this in the gendered language you love because it's so not politically correct:
Be a man.
'Cause right now, you're acting like a little, needy bitch, like a particularly well-pampered Pekingese that demands more petting and more treats. Be a man. A real man. One who doesn't require to be told endlessly that he's the best, the greatest, the biggest. One who isn't compelled to ask for affirmation from people who couldn't give less of a shit about things like the size of your inauguration crowd. I know it goes against your very being and how you've lived your entire stupid life. But give it a try.
You claim that you weren't making fun of reporter Serge Kovaleski's disability, that you were mocking him for "groveling." But you're the one who's groveling now. You're begging for everyone around you to buy into your lies and you despise it when reality intrudes on your well-wrought fantasy world. No matter how long you've done it, it makes you a pussy, a big, wet pussy just throbbing to get fingered and fucked, like all those that you claim you've grabbed, you walking virus.
A real man would have said, "Yeah, fine, I mocked the guy. I apologize and will try to do better." But someone in your life at some point, whether it was your despicable, racist father or your disgusting, verminous surrogate father, Roy Cohn, told you that men don't ever say they're sorry. Those people are wrong and dead. A real man mocks someone, admits it, and then either offers regret or says, "Come and get me."
After winning the election, all you could do was whine and lie. You didn't win the popular vote because of 3-5 million "illegal immigrants" fraudulently voting, as if anyone would go to the trouble of arranging the biggest fraud in history just to jack up the percentages in California. The media lied, you said, and you had an enormous crowd for your inauguration, even though photographs and anyone there who wasn't blind knew the truth. And you're "angry" about the size of the Women's March.
Jesus, look at how pathetic your bio is on the White House website: "Mr. Trump won the election on November 8 of 2016 in the largest electoral college landslide for a Republican in 28 years. He won over 2,600 counties nationwide, the most since President Reagan in 1984. Additionally, he won over 62 million votes in the popular vote, the highest all-time for a Republican nominee. He also won 306 electoral votes, the most for a Republican since George H.W. Bush in 1988. " Put aside the lie that your lower-third ranked winning percentage of the Electoral College is a mighty victory. Instead, look at that last line. There's been one Republican president since George H.W. Bush. So all you're saying is that you had a bigger electoral margin of victory than George W. Bush. You beat one guy out of dozens who beat you. And you're bragging about it? That's just sad and desperate, like "Look at the rabbits, Lennie" sad and desperate.
Now you're gonna have some great investigation into your delusion that there was fraud in the election (at least in the states that didn't vote for you, right?). And while, yes, your band of merry assholes can't wait to get them some of those sweet, sweet restrictions on voting rights, you know that you're doing this only because you want to prove some fucking worthless point. If one vote in California turns out to be cast fraudulently, even if it was just an error, you will cackle and dance like you just found gold in the Sierra Madres, you dumb fuck.
The PC pundits will tell you to act like a grown-up. But you and me, we don't play like that. We tell it like it is. So be a man. Get over this popularity shit.
And don't worry. We can still talk about how much of a cunt you are.
1/23/2017
Pictures from a Protest
I went to the Women's March in New York City on Saturday at my assigned time. The organizers had asked people to sign up and then show up at a time that matched the first letter of their last names. But when we arrived, around 1 p.m., it was obvious that things were overwhelming the well-laid plans. Essentially, the route was full, and it had already squeezed further back than it was originally supposed to be, up 2nd Avenue. Marchers were taking over streets that weren't on the route, which was supposed to go from 48th Street, down 2nd to 42nd, and up 5th Avenue to 56th Street and Trump Tower. We were standing for over an hour before we finally started slowly moving forward. A couple of hours later, when we hit 42nd Street, this was the view:
Yeah, we figured out pretty damn quickly that this had blown up from something big to something enormous. Most importantly, it was something bigger than any Tea Party day of protests had ever been, and look how that movement got to punch liberty in the face and hold it hostage. It was ostensibly a march to highlight women's issues, and the organizers tried to say that it wasn't necessarily anti-Trump, but that memo clearly didn't fly:
Women and men across the racial, age, gender identity, and ability spectrum were there. Sometimes they became leaders, as this little girl, Sophia, did while sitting on her older brother's shoulders. That feminist warrior raged loud and proud throughout the whole march:
And there were lots of uteruses and ovaries and vaginas on the posters, often with angry faces, lady parts ready to kick some ass.
Things were remarkably focused on feminist issues - reproductive rights, workplace rights, and more. I saw none of the usual "Free Mumia" or "Free Palestine" kinds of signs, righteous sentiments to be sure, but those dilute the message of the day, and that message was crystal clear. Donald Trump and his government need to keep their grabbing hands off all the pussies. And other things, as a certain princess reminded us.
By the time we made it to Trump Tower, the parade was over. It had been stopped from going right up to the doors of the ugly symbol of the ugly soul who has polluted the nation. Instead, the lingering protesters were made to chant across the street.
Lining 56th Street, in front of the barricades, a sign graveyard had developed, with marchers leaving behind their placards and posters in an orderly line right near the tower.
The signs were everywhere, plastered onto light posts, propped up in the subways, stabbed onto gates. Midtown Manhattan was awash in anger at this pretender, this fraud that, goddamnit, we knew well enough to try to tell the rest of the country, "Are you mad?" But no one listened to us, the city that knows him best. Even more insulting, no one listened to the women who were raising alarm bells and waving their hands.
As for what comes now, well, there will be the inevitable backlash on the left. There is already one from some women of color who feel as if their issues were whitewashed, a not-unfair charge (says this white male with a full acknowledgement of his privilege). But it's also unfair to attack people for marching now or for the first time. When someone allies with you, you should educate them in your cause, not ask, "Well, where the fuck were you all this other time?"
We must stay unified while they seek to divide us. We will obviously get under Trump's incredibly thin skin. Next up may be a massive protest on his tax returns. Whatever it is, the energy of this past Saturday has to be fanned until election day 2018, when we can attempt to take back at least one house of Congress, which is seeming to be the only way to slow down this runaway, screaming train on fire.
Women put their bodies on the line this weekend, along with men who believe those bodies have agency. It's up to everyone to use their bodies and their voices, not just here, but in the actual bodied world to become roadblocks and a massive threat to those who would tell us all that the nation doesn't belong to us anymore.
Yeah, we figured out pretty damn quickly that this had blown up from something big to something enormous. Most importantly, it was something bigger than any Tea Party day of protests had ever been, and look how that movement got to punch liberty in the face and hold it hostage. It was ostensibly a march to highlight women's issues, and the organizers tried to say that it wasn't necessarily anti-Trump, but that memo clearly didn't fly:
Women and men across the racial, age, gender identity, and ability spectrum were there. Sometimes they became leaders, as this little girl, Sophia, did while sitting on her older brother's shoulders. That feminist warrior raged loud and proud throughout the whole march:
And there were lots of uteruses and ovaries and vaginas on the posters, often with angry faces, lady parts ready to kick some ass.
Things were remarkably focused on feminist issues - reproductive rights, workplace rights, and more. I saw none of the usual "Free Mumia" or "Free Palestine" kinds of signs, righteous sentiments to be sure, but those dilute the message of the day, and that message was crystal clear. Donald Trump and his government need to keep their grabbing hands off all the pussies. And other things, as a certain princess reminded us.
By the time we made it to Trump Tower, the parade was over. It had been stopped from going right up to the doors of the ugly symbol of the ugly soul who has polluted the nation. Instead, the lingering protesters were made to chant across the street.
Lining 56th Street, in front of the barricades, a sign graveyard had developed, with marchers leaving behind their placards and posters in an orderly line right near the tower.
The signs were everywhere, plastered onto light posts, propped up in the subways, stabbed onto gates. Midtown Manhattan was awash in anger at this pretender, this fraud that, goddamnit, we knew well enough to try to tell the rest of the country, "Are you mad?" But no one listened to us, the city that knows him best. Even more insulting, no one listened to the women who were raising alarm bells and waving their hands.
As for what comes now, well, there will be the inevitable backlash on the left. There is already one from some women of color who feel as if their issues were whitewashed, a not-unfair charge (says this white male with a full acknowledgement of his privilege). But it's also unfair to attack people for marching now or for the first time. When someone allies with you, you should educate them in your cause, not ask, "Well, where the fuck were you all this other time?"
We must stay unified while they seek to divide us. We will obviously get under Trump's incredibly thin skin. Next up may be a massive protest on his tax returns. Whatever it is, the energy of this past Saturday has to be fanned until election day 2018, when we can attempt to take back at least one house of Congress, which is seeming to be the only way to slow down this runaway, screaming train on fire.
Women put their bodies on the line this weekend, along with men who believe those bodies have agency. It's up to everyone to use their bodies and their voices, not just here, but in the actual bodied world to become roadblocks and a massive threat to those who would tell us all that the nation doesn't belong to us anymore.
1/20/2017
Inauguration Day, 2017: This Is Some Bullshit Right Here
I didn't watch the Inauguration of a sentient yam, Donald Trump, as president of the United States (vomits in mouth a little). I don't need to watch bonobos jacking off to know that it's strange and loud with fluids being hurled at the end. But I did read Trump's address, and it was a warmed-over stump speech, filled with the kinds of baffling, weird, and apocalyptic rhetoric that propelled him to become head chalk eraser clapper at the special school.
For instance, what the fuck does this mean: "You came by the tens of millions to become part of a historic movement the likes of which the world has never seen before"? Trump's said that repeatedly, and it's not just a lie (Civil rights movement? The French Revolution? The Russian Revolution? The goddamn Protestant Reformation?), it's utterly meaningless. Every election is a historic movement. It's just part and parcel of Trump's nonsensical marketing of himself: every fucking thing his dick gets hard about is the greatest thing ever.
And, again, as I've said I don't know how many times, what fucking country is he talking about? Trump said, "Politicians prospered – but the jobs left, and the factories closed." You mean those millions of jobs that people got during the Obama administration? Those not only didn't leave; they came back or were created.
Then Trump got to the shit whose stench really gets him horny: "Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential." Putting aside the truly creepy "beautiful students," Trump probably doesn't realize that the way to get people out of this hellscape is to provide money for inner cities and for poverty programs, none of which Trump supports. And I'm sure a few teachers would like to find out how much of that cash has gone to Betsy DeVos. Oh, but he promises, "This American carnage stops right here and stops right now."
You heard that everyone? No more carnage, you scamps. You can stop killing each other because President Trump (vomits in mouth a little) has declared that it has ended. Even better, Trump promises, "We will reinforce old alliances and form new ones – and unite the civilized world against Radical Islamic Terrorism, which we will eradicate completely from the face of the Earth." How the fuck is that measured? It's not a virus. You can't make a belief system go extinct, no matter how many people you kill. Again and again, Trump makes unrealistic promises and, I guess, we're supposed to just say, "Well, he doesn't really mean that literally."
And when the hell did he write this speech? "We stand at the birth of a new millennium, ready to unlock the mysteries of space, to free the Earth from the miseries of disease, and to harness the energies, industries and technologies of tomorrow," as if the millennium isn't already 17 years old. The birth happened, man. And, Jesus fuck, who is it that wants to gut the programs that look into diseases and alternative energies?
Like most of what we heard from Trump, it was bullshit. Trump didn't ask us to do anything other than believe in him. He offered a dark vision of what the nation is, full of "carnage" and "blood" and "tombstones" and "rust," the kind of thing you would think you see when you walk out of a gold-plated condo and into the rest of the nation. A shit speech by a shit human. It's the kind of speech made by someone who has no idea what he's doing and no idea what he can do, someone with so little interest in the reality of the United States that he'd rather keep propagating a fantasy, as long as enough people are willing to live his delusions.
The only good thing about today is that we can finally move past the dread of a Trump presidency to discovering what exactly we're going to be up against in the coming years. This sad day has come, sadly attended, and now we can finally start counting down the days until this detour into stupidity and self-destruction ends.
Oh, and, hey, we don't have any ambassadors right now around the world. There are very few people actually working in the executive branch. And the president is in violation of the Constitution he swore to uphold. The best we can hope for at this point is that Trump is so out of his depth that he can't get it together to hurt the country too much before, perhaps, the 2018 midterms fuck his world up.
For instance, what the fuck does this mean: "You came by the tens of millions to become part of a historic movement the likes of which the world has never seen before"? Trump's said that repeatedly, and it's not just a lie (Civil rights movement? The French Revolution? The Russian Revolution? The goddamn Protestant Reformation?), it's utterly meaningless. Every election is a historic movement. It's just part and parcel of Trump's nonsensical marketing of himself: every fucking thing his dick gets hard about is the greatest thing ever.
And, again, as I've said I don't know how many times, what fucking country is he talking about? Trump said, "Politicians prospered – but the jobs left, and the factories closed." You mean those millions of jobs that people got during the Obama administration? Those not only didn't leave; they came back or were created.
Then Trump got to the shit whose stench really gets him horny: "Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential." Putting aside the truly creepy "beautiful students," Trump probably doesn't realize that the way to get people out of this hellscape is to provide money for inner cities and for poverty programs, none of which Trump supports. And I'm sure a few teachers would like to find out how much of that cash has gone to Betsy DeVos. Oh, but he promises, "This American carnage stops right here and stops right now."
You heard that everyone? No more carnage, you scamps. You can stop killing each other because President Trump (vomits in mouth a little) has declared that it has ended. Even better, Trump promises, "We will reinforce old alliances and form new ones – and unite the civilized world against Radical Islamic Terrorism, which we will eradicate completely from the face of the Earth." How the fuck is that measured? It's not a virus. You can't make a belief system go extinct, no matter how many people you kill. Again and again, Trump makes unrealistic promises and, I guess, we're supposed to just say, "Well, he doesn't really mean that literally."
And when the hell did he write this speech? "We stand at the birth of a new millennium, ready to unlock the mysteries of space, to free the Earth from the miseries of disease, and to harness the energies, industries and technologies of tomorrow," as if the millennium isn't already 17 years old. The birth happened, man. And, Jesus fuck, who is it that wants to gut the programs that look into diseases and alternative energies?
Like most of what we heard from Trump, it was bullshit. Trump didn't ask us to do anything other than believe in him. He offered a dark vision of what the nation is, full of "carnage" and "blood" and "tombstones" and "rust," the kind of thing you would think you see when you walk out of a gold-plated condo and into the rest of the nation. A shit speech by a shit human. It's the kind of speech made by someone who has no idea what he's doing and no idea what he can do, someone with so little interest in the reality of the United States that he'd rather keep propagating a fantasy, as long as enough people are willing to live his delusions.
The only good thing about today is that we can finally move past the dread of a Trump presidency to discovering what exactly we're going to be up against in the coming years. This sad day has come, sadly attended, and now we can finally start counting down the days until this detour into stupidity and self-destruction ends.
Oh, and, hey, we don't have any ambassadors right now around the world. There are very few people actually working in the executive branch. And the president is in violation of the Constitution he swore to uphold. The best we can hope for at this point is that Trump is so out of his depth that he can't get it together to hurt the country too much before, perhaps, the 2018 midterms fuck his world up.
1/19/2017
The Future Failed Presidency of Barack Obama
On this, the last good day this country will see for a long time, I don't want to write a tribute to the accomplishments of President Barack Obama. I don't want to list all the shit that he got done, much of it despite unrelenting and unprecedented fuckery by the Republicans. I don't even want to complain about the things I disagreed with, like the drone war and mass surveillance. Because almost all of it will be wiped away by the Trump administration, as a good many of those accomplishments are going to be undone or cut to nothing. It's not that Obama failed now. It's that his presidency will be a failure in the future because it's going to be tossed in the trashbin by the same motherfuckers and nutzoids who tried to stop him in the first place. They are waiting like slavering dogs for tomorrow to come because then they will savage everything in their path.
You can point to lots of reasons for the future failure of Obama's presidency. The laughably bad messaging of the White House and the cowardice of the Democrats in not proudly proclaiming success in things like health care are big ass contributors. Indeed, you could say that Donald Trump is the diametric opposite of Obama: all message and no policy. At the end of the day, though, the American people are fucking idiots who want to be told what to think. Obama seemed to believe that, say, a Kentucky resident who got health insurance through the Affordable Care Act would be able to connect two and two and see that Democrats enabled her to get those moles checked and for her to the melanoma taken care of before it spread. But fucking idiots don't make those connections because they're fucking idiots.
Americans like their world Manichean. They like to pick heroes and villains. They want to know which team to root for. They don't like gray areas. They don't want to point out that both teams played a good game. Obama believed that Americans were smarter and better than they actually are, even as every election except his in 2012 proved that they aren't. This was Obama's fatal flaw: the belief in the better angels of our nature, a phrase he used several times throughout his presidency. We don't have better angels, Mr. President. There are no angels. There are only humans, and, god, we are fucked up.
Because of that belief, Obama couldn't see that his 2008 election wasn't just about hope and change. It was about destroying an old order. I've said this many times in the last eight years, and I'll say it again: Obama's greatest failure was in not taking out our domestic enemies right after he was elected. The Justice Department should have gone after the torture-approving members of the Bush administration and the bankers and financial con men who dicked over the economy. The message would have been loud and clear: there is some shit we won't eat. Instead, Obama let Republicans know that working together was his priority, and those sons and daughters of bitches exploited that every chance they could, constantly saying that because Obama wouldn't give in to their every whim, he was the one refusing compromise, undermining and outright lying about what he was doing.
Now, you might say that it would have "set the wrong tone" or some such bullshit if Obama's DOJ had gone after the criminals of the Bush years. But you are forgetting what the country was like in 2008. We were fuckin' done with the GOP. The election showed that, just as it had in 2006. And we wanted them punished for what they had done to the nation, to our sense of ourselves, to our economy, to our American soul. In one sense, electing the first black president with a filibuster-proof Congress was that revenge, but it wasn't enough. We wanted those bastards to suffer. However, like Gerald Ford pardoning Richard Nixon, Obama gave them a pass so he could move on with hoping and changing. But you can't rebuild your house if you leave the termites alone. Those little dicks will gnaw it to its foundation no matter how nicely you decorate the rooms.
By not punishing Republicans, by not making their message toxic, Obama left the door open for them, and they bulldozed their way through almost immediately, with the rise of the Tea Party and the disastrous 2010 midterms.
And that gets to the last thing I want to say on this last good day: We fucked it up. We, the American voters. No, not you, in particular, you who went out and voted Democratic in 2010 and 2014, you who pay attention to who is running and what it means. But, in general, we all have to own the future failure of the Obama presidency. The voter turnout in 2010 was disastrously low in some groups who supported Obama, especially young voters.
Yes, turnout was on a par with other midterms, as was 2014. But that's the goddamned problem. It's one of those things that is so fucking frustrating about these last 8 years. It was as if most of the country acted like a plumber who replaced one giant pipe and decided, "Fuck it. The job's done" without replacing any of the pipes that go in and out of that giant one. This shit takes effort. And we got so pissy about things that we didn't make the effort. You can argue that you weren't inspired, that Obama fucked up by not getting his election volunteers to become an activist army of sorts, you can say that Obama dropped the ball on a few things. But, ultimately, voters have no one but themselves to blame.
That imaginary Kentucky Obamacare recipient? She's responsible for her own stupid. As we all are.
There are lots of things this didn't get into: The racism that was an intrinsic part of Obama's opposition. The media's complicity with the GOP. The standards that Democrats are held to that don't seem to matter when a Republican is in power. The genuinely good things that will be sustained as we head into Trump's America, like marriage equality. The dignity and humanity that Obama and his family imparted in their relationships with each other. The genuinely surprising lack of scandals.
Christ, I'm gonna miss having a cool, competent, smart president who actually gave a shit about the country.
But nearly everything else we can celebrate about Obama's terms in office is about to go out the window. That is on him and that is on us.
You can point to lots of reasons for the future failure of Obama's presidency. The laughably bad messaging of the White House and the cowardice of the Democrats in not proudly proclaiming success in things like health care are big ass contributors. Indeed, you could say that Donald Trump is the diametric opposite of Obama: all message and no policy. At the end of the day, though, the American people are fucking idiots who want to be told what to think. Obama seemed to believe that, say, a Kentucky resident who got health insurance through the Affordable Care Act would be able to connect two and two and see that Democrats enabled her to get those moles checked and for her to the melanoma taken care of before it spread. But fucking idiots don't make those connections because they're fucking idiots.
Americans like their world Manichean. They like to pick heroes and villains. They want to know which team to root for. They don't like gray areas. They don't want to point out that both teams played a good game. Obama believed that Americans were smarter and better than they actually are, even as every election except his in 2012 proved that they aren't. This was Obama's fatal flaw: the belief in the better angels of our nature, a phrase he used several times throughout his presidency. We don't have better angels, Mr. President. There are no angels. There are only humans, and, god, we are fucked up.
Because of that belief, Obama couldn't see that his 2008 election wasn't just about hope and change. It was about destroying an old order. I've said this many times in the last eight years, and I'll say it again: Obama's greatest failure was in not taking out our domestic enemies right after he was elected. The Justice Department should have gone after the torture-approving members of the Bush administration and the bankers and financial con men who dicked over the economy. The message would have been loud and clear: there is some shit we won't eat. Instead, Obama let Republicans know that working together was his priority, and those sons and daughters of bitches exploited that every chance they could, constantly saying that because Obama wouldn't give in to their every whim, he was the one refusing compromise, undermining and outright lying about what he was doing.
Now, you might say that it would have "set the wrong tone" or some such bullshit if Obama's DOJ had gone after the criminals of the Bush years. But you are forgetting what the country was like in 2008. We were fuckin' done with the GOP. The election showed that, just as it had in 2006. And we wanted them punished for what they had done to the nation, to our sense of ourselves, to our economy, to our American soul. In one sense, electing the first black president with a filibuster-proof Congress was that revenge, but it wasn't enough. We wanted those bastards to suffer. However, like Gerald Ford pardoning Richard Nixon, Obama gave them a pass so he could move on with hoping and changing. But you can't rebuild your house if you leave the termites alone. Those little dicks will gnaw it to its foundation no matter how nicely you decorate the rooms.
By not punishing Republicans, by not making their message toxic, Obama left the door open for them, and they bulldozed their way through almost immediately, with the rise of the Tea Party and the disastrous 2010 midterms.
And that gets to the last thing I want to say on this last good day: We fucked it up. We, the American voters. No, not you, in particular, you who went out and voted Democratic in 2010 and 2014, you who pay attention to who is running and what it means. But, in general, we all have to own the future failure of the Obama presidency. The voter turnout in 2010 was disastrously low in some groups who supported Obama, especially young voters.
Yes, turnout was on a par with other midterms, as was 2014. But that's the goddamned problem. It's one of those things that is so fucking frustrating about these last 8 years. It was as if most of the country acted like a plumber who replaced one giant pipe and decided, "Fuck it. The job's done" without replacing any of the pipes that go in and out of that giant one. This shit takes effort. And we got so pissy about things that we didn't make the effort. You can argue that you weren't inspired, that Obama fucked up by not getting his election volunteers to become an activist army of sorts, you can say that Obama dropped the ball on a few things. But, ultimately, voters have no one but themselves to blame.
That imaginary Kentucky Obamacare recipient? She's responsible for her own stupid. As we all are.
There are lots of things this didn't get into: The racism that was an intrinsic part of Obama's opposition. The media's complicity with the GOP. The standards that Democrats are held to that don't seem to matter when a Republican is in power. The genuinely good things that will be sustained as we head into Trump's America, like marriage equality. The dignity and humanity that Obama and his family imparted in their relationships with each other. The genuinely surprising lack of scandals.
Christ, I'm gonna miss having a cool, competent, smart president who actually gave a shit about the country.
But nearly everything else we can celebrate about Obama's terms in office is about to go out the window. That is on him and that is on us.
1/16/2017
Martin Luther King Would and Did Fuck Trump's Shit Up (Housing Edition)
As we prepare for an open racist to ascend to the never more aptly-named White House, we need to remember, as this blog does every Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, that King wasn't a conservative, as Republicans and, weirdly, the Washington Post assert. No, King was a radical who made it his job to fuck up the nice little world that whites had constructed. So forget all that bullshit trying to make King into Fuzzy Marty, the Dream Hatchanimal, all ready to cuddle you with his non-violence. And, instead, let King's strength, power, and lack of fucks to give guide you as we head into the Trump era.
For instance, back in July 1966, a little over 50 years ago, King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference led a march and held a rally in support of the Chicago Freedom Movement, which asked that blacks and whites be treated equally when it came to housing in the city. (The play Raisin in the Sun was based in the housing discrimination endemic to the Windy City.) King had moved into a slum in January of 1966, where he lived several days a week, to shed light on the conditions there. He threatened to lead rent strikes if things weren't improved. "We don't have wall-to-wall carpeting to worry about," King said of his apartment. "But we have wall-to-wall rats and roaches."
On July 10, in the midst of a savage heat wave, King held a rally at Soldier Field, followed by a march to city hall to demand that blacks be allowed to rent and buy apartments in white neighborhoods. Only 30,000 of the expected 100,000 came out to see him in the nearly 100 degree temperature, but King gave a rousing and curiously little-quoted speech about the need for fairness in housing as being one more part of the road to a free and equal United States.
King started, "We are here today because we are tired. We are tired of being seared in the withering flames of injustice. We are tired of paying more for less. We are tired of living in rat-infested slums and in the Chicago Housing Authority's cement reservations. We are tired of having to pay a median rent of $97 a month in Lawndale for 4 rooms while whites in South Deering pay $73 a month for 5 rooms." People forget that King could be incredibly specific and localized in his demands, that he wasn't just seeking blanket "rights." No, he wanted definite wrongs corrected.
He continued further in the speech, "Let me say, here and now, that we are not going to tolerate moves that are now being made in subtle manners to intimidate, harass, and penalize Negro landlords who may own one or two buildings while ignoring the fact that slums are really perpetuated by the huge real estate agencies, mortgage and banking institutions, and city, state, and federal governments. This day we must decide that we will no longer use our dollars to perpetuate segregation and discrimination. We must make clear that we will withdraw our money en masse from any bank that not have a non-discriminatory lending policy. We must affirm that we will withdraw economic support from any company that will not provide on-the-job training, and employ an adequate number of Negroes, Puerto Ricans, and other ethnic minorities in higher paying jobs."
Does that sound fuckin' conservative? Does that sound like someone who is kissing the ass of tradition and power structures? How about this: "This day we must decide to give greater support to Negro-owned businesses which will aid in building our economic strength." He implored non-violence. He said that there were whites that supported the cause. But, ultimately, he said that non-whites shouldn't participate in an economic system that dicked them over.
Then King led people to city hall where, among other things, he demanded an end to police brutality in Chicago. We see how that turned out today. Back in 1966, he was mocked by the Chicago Tribune, which said that King's marches and sermons had become "tiresome" and "stale." A march in Marquette Park in August turned violent, with white onlookers hurling rocks and bottles at the marchers, and King was injured. He said later that he had never seen mobs of whites "as hateful" as he saw in Chicago, not even in Mississippi or Alabama.
King always believed that he had failed in Chicago, especially since Mayor Daley didn't abide by promises he made to King about open housing. But his assassination in 1968 was followed almost immediately by President Lyndon Johnson signing the Fair Housing Act, which prohibited housing discrimination based on race, religion, national origin, and sex. And this is where we get to Donald Trump.
Five years after King's death, in 1973, Trump Management was accused by the Justice Department of violating the civil rights of blacks and Puerto Ricans under the Fair Housing Act. Fred Trump and his son, Donald, were specifically named as defendants. And while the case was settled without an admission of guilt, well, c'mon, the evidence was pretty damning that Trump rental agents deliberately steered non-white clients away from all-white apartment buildings. Trump Management agreed not to discriminate and to advertise that all buildings were open to everyone.
So, remember, on this MLK Day, that when Trump attacks Rep. John Lewis, one of King's closest associates, the President-Elect is also going after the man and the group that fucked his shit up early in his career. That King continues to do so to this day speaks to how much he will always be far more powerful than Trump ever could hope to be.
For instance, back in July 1966, a little over 50 years ago, King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference led a march and held a rally in support of the Chicago Freedom Movement, which asked that blacks and whites be treated equally when it came to housing in the city. (The play Raisin in the Sun was based in the housing discrimination endemic to the Windy City.) King had moved into a slum in January of 1966, where he lived several days a week, to shed light on the conditions there. He threatened to lead rent strikes if things weren't improved. "We don't have wall-to-wall carpeting to worry about," King said of his apartment. "But we have wall-to-wall rats and roaches."
On July 10, in the midst of a savage heat wave, King held a rally at Soldier Field, followed by a march to city hall to demand that blacks be allowed to rent and buy apartments in white neighborhoods. Only 30,000 of the expected 100,000 came out to see him in the nearly 100 degree temperature, but King gave a rousing and curiously little-quoted speech about the need for fairness in housing as being one more part of the road to a free and equal United States.
King started, "We are here today because we are tired. We are tired of being seared in the withering flames of injustice. We are tired of paying more for less. We are tired of living in rat-infested slums and in the Chicago Housing Authority's cement reservations. We are tired of having to pay a median rent of $97 a month in Lawndale for 4 rooms while whites in South Deering pay $73 a month for 5 rooms." People forget that King could be incredibly specific and localized in his demands, that he wasn't just seeking blanket "rights." No, he wanted definite wrongs corrected.
He continued further in the speech, "Let me say, here and now, that we are not going to tolerate moves that are now being made in subtle manners to intimidate, harass, and penalize Negro landlords who may own one or two buildings while ignoring the fact that slums are really perpetuated by the huge real estate agencies, mortgage and banking institutions, and city, state, and federal governments. This day we must decide that we will no longer use our dollars to perpetuate segregation and discrimination. We must make clear that we will withdraw our money en masse from any bank that not have a non-discriminatory lending policy. We must affirm that we will withdraw economic support from any company that will not provide on-the-job training, and employ an adequate number of Negroes, Puerto Ricans, and other ethnic minorities in higher paying jobs."
Does that sound fuckin' conservative? Does that sound like someone who is kissing the ass of tradition and power structures? How about this: "This day we must decide to give greater support to Negro-owned businesses which will aid in building our economic strength." He implored non-violence. He said that there were whites that supported the cause. But, ultimately, he said that non-whites shouldn't participate in an economic system that dicked them over.
Then King led people to city hall where, among other things, he demanded an end to police brutality in Chicago. We see how that turned out today. Back in 1966, he was mocked by the Chicago Tribune, which said that King's marches and sermons had become "tiresome" and "stale." A march in Marquette Park in August turned violent, with white onlookers hurling rocks and bottles at the marchers, and King was injured. He said later that he had never seen mobs of whites "as hateful" as he saw in Chicago, not even in Mississippi or Alabama.
King always believed that he had failed in Chicago, especially since Mayor Daley didn't abide by promises he made to King about open housing. But his assassination in 1968 was followed almost immediately by President Lyndon Johnson signing the Fair Housing Act, which prohibited housing discrimination based on race, religion, national origin, and sex. And this is where we get to Donald Trump.
Five years after King's death, in 1973, Trump Management was accused by the Justice Department of violating the civil rights of blacks and Puerto Ricans under the Fair Housing Act. Fred Trump and his son, Donald, were specifically named as defendants. And while the case was settled without an admission of guilt, well, c'mon, the evidence was pretty damning that Trump rental agents deliberately steered non-white clients away from all-white apartment buildings. Trump Management agreed not to discriminate and to advertise that all buildings were open to everyone.
So, remember, on this MLK Day, that when Trump attacks Rep. John Lewis, one of King's closest associates, the President-Elect is also going after the man and the group that fucked his shit up early in his career. That King continues to do so to this day speaks to how much he will always be far more powerful than Trump ever could hope to be.
1/13/2017
Where the Fuck Are You, Democrats?
Something's up. You listen to anyone in the DC press, and they know that something big is either going down or about to blow up. In just the last day, we've had it revealed that Trump's incoming national security adviser Michael Flynn, a batshit insane actual leaker of classified material, had been in phone contact with Russia's ambassador to the U.S. just before President Obama ejected 35 Russians in response to the DNC hacking. And then today, House members had an intelligence briefing with FBI Director James Comey and others, and the Democrats left the meeting feeling angry and openly hostile about what they'd been told. This is not to mention President-Elect and lost Crayola color Donald Trump bugging the fuck out on Twitter this morning about Russia, the media, the intelligence community, and Hillary Clinton.
And, if you're like me, you sit here and wonder, "Where the fuck are the Democrats? Where is their messaging? Why aren't we at Def-Con Watergate?" You go to their website and there is nothing about it. Their public statements are all over the place.
If Democrats were any good at this game, they'd already have a strategy: Forget about the odious cabinet picks, forget about the business conflicts, forget all that other shit that people either don't care about or don't understand so they don't care about it. Instead, hammer Trump and the Republicans on the one goddamned thing that is easy to understand: Was Trump elected because of the Russians?
On every news show, in every appearance, in constant tweets and all over social media, demand, again and again, for an investigation into Russian hacks. Be as fucking hysterical and hyperbolic as needed. Go fucking nuts. When a Republican accuses Democrats of playing politics, respond with something like "Oh, so you're just fine with Russia electing the president of the United States?" And if they try to evade, push them to say "yes" or "no." Whose side are you on? Russia or the USA? And if you're on the side of the truth, then you should be demanding an independent investigation, no?
Trump's loathsome idiot hordes will choke on their own troll phlegm in rage, but they're just cult members now, all worshipping at the tiny dong of their wee-handed, big-assed godhead. Instead, Democrats, you'd be reaching independents and the small fraction of Republicans who still remember what it was like to have souls.
Fucking hell, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, this is the moment to show that the Democratic Party can have some unity of purpose and unity of rhetoric. It's a quick path to recovery from the election and to move beyond the cold comfort of having won the popular vote. Delegitimize and possibly banish this Trump bastard before his grubby paws grab the Bible by the pussy and he takes the oath of office. Any chance you get, you say, "I just want to know the truth" about the election. You believe in America and Americans.
You got it? Nonstop, unrelenting focus on Russia's influence on the election, on Trump, on Flynn, on the nation. The implication is "Choose your loyalty, motherfuckers." And, as I wrote a month ago, before the piss dossier came out, we are freaking the fuck out and need to know what the hell is the meaning of all of this. You should be dancing with Trump's innards right now.
'Cause, see, the mantra of the Democratic Party oughta be "When they go low, we plunge under the ground beneath them so that the earth swallows them."
And, if you're like me, you sit here and wonder, "Where the fuck are the Democrats? Where is their messaging? Why aren't we at Def-Con Watergate?" You go to their website and there is nothing about it. Their public statements are all over the place.
If Democrats were any good at this game, they'd already have a strategy: Forget about the odious cabinet picks, forget about the business conflicts, forget all that other shit that people either don't care about or don't understand so they don't care about it. Instead, hammer Trump and the Republicans on the one goddamned thing that is easy to understand: Was Trump elected because of the Russians?
On every news show, in every appearance, in constant tweets and all over social media, demand, again and again, for an investigation into Russian hacks. Be as fucking hysterical and hyperbolic as needed. Go fucking nuts. When a Republican accuses Democrats of playing politics, respond with something like "Oh, so you're just fine with Russia electing the president of the United States?" And if they try to evade, push them to say "yes" or "no." Whose side are you on? Russia or the USA? And if you're on the side of the truth, then you should be demanding an independent investigation, no?
Trump's loathsome idiot hordes will choke on their own troll phlegm in rage, but they're just cult members now, all worshipping at the tiny dong of their wee-handed, big-assed godhead. Instead, Democrats, you'd be reaching independents and the small fraction of Republicans who still remember what it was like to have souls.
Fucking hell, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, this is the moment to show that the Democratic Party can have some unity of purpose and unity of rhetoric. It's a quick path to recovery from the election and to move beyond the cold comfort of having won the popular vote. Delegitimize and possibly banish this Trump bastard before his grubby paws grab the Bible by the pussy and he takes the oath of office. Any chance you get, you say, "I just want to know the truth" about the election. You believe in America and Americans.
You got it? Nonstop, unrelenting focus on Russia's influence on the election, on Trump, on Flynn, on the nation. The implication is "Choose your loyalty, motherfuckers." And, as I wrote a month ago, before the piss dossier came out, we are freaking the fuck out and need to know what the hell is the meaning of all of this. You should be dancing with Trump's innards right now.
'Cause, see, the mantra of the Democratic Party oughta be "When they go low, we plunge under the ground beneath them so that the earth swallows them."
1/12/2017
Republicans Won't Save Your Life
In the middle of his farewell address on Tuesday, President Barack Obama offered some advice: "It’s up to all of us to make sure our government can help us meet the many challenges we still face. We have what we need to do so. We have everything we need to meet those challenges." And then he warned, "Democracy can buckle when we give in to fear. So, just as we, as citizens, must remain vigilant against external aggression, we must guard against a weakening of the values that make us who we are."
Implicit in these and other parts of the speech was an acknowledgement that we are, basically, fucked right now. Obama was preparing us for what's coming and telling us not to fall into despair or apathy. "But, surely, we are well and truly fucked now," he was saying without saying, even amidst all the optimistic words. "Oh, dear, sweet Jesus, we are fucked backwards and forwards and in every hole and in some holes we didn't even know we had and in new holes that they just made to fuck even more. Now what the fuck are you gonna do to stop getting fucked?"
And, by telling us, in essence, to save ourselves, Obama was also saying that there's no one who's gonna Spiderman in and catch us as we plummet off this bridge.
Right now, good liberals, I'm sure you're comforting yourself with all the articles and think-pieces assuring you that there's no clear path to repealing the Affordable Care Act: that its popular provisions (which would be nearly all of them) are too deeply embedded in the health care system; that to repeal without a comparable replacement would create uncertainty in the insurance market, leading to chaos; that one, two, five Republican senators are actually thinking about voting against their party and not supporting a repeal without an automatic replacement.
Yeah, all that got flushed down the shitter last night when the Republicans in the Senate, minus a Rand Paul, voted on a budget that will eventually allow them to repeal the ACA with a simple majority in a reconciliation bill with the House. In doing so, they defeated every Democratic amendment that attempted to keep provisions like preventing insurance companies from denying you coverage for preexisting conditions. The GOP doesn't fucking care what the outcome will be. They are driving this car into that blizzard, fuck the consequences and don't you dare tell them they can't.
So you pretty much just saw any attempt at moderation get stabbed in the chest. It might not be dead yet, but it's got a sucking chest wound and, chances are, won't be able to afford coverage to get it fixed.
These GOP motherfuckers don't give a damn who dies as long as they get to prove a point: Democrats shouldn't have allowed the poors to think they're people. They get uppity that way. They must be punished, and, luckily, too many of them were too dumb to understand that in November.
I'm sticking with what I said in December. You gotta peel senators away from the Republican Party. Promise them anything. Money, pussy, dick, committee chairs, whatever.
Because Republicans are gonna act like Republicans, and that means with dishonor and cowardice and malice towards all who are not them. And, despite President Obama appealing for us to work across differences, we have to fight back with even more malice.
Implicit in these and other parts of the speech was an acknowledgement that we are, basically, fucked right now. Obama was preparing us for what's coming and telling us not to fall into despair or apathy. "But, surely, we are well and truly fucked now," he was saying without saying, even amidst all the optimistic words. "Oh, dear, sweet Jesus, we are fucked backwards and forwards and in every hole and in some holes we didn't even know we had and in new holes that they just made to fuck even more. Now what the fuck are you gonna do to stop getting fucked?"
And, by telling us, in essence, to save ourselves, Obama was also saying that there's no one who's gonna Spiderman in and catch us as we plummet off this bridge.
Right now, good liberals, I'm sure you're comforting yourself with all the articles and think-pieces assuring you that there's no clear path to repealing the Affordable Care Act: that its popular provisions (which would be nearly all of them) are too deeply embedded in the health care system; that to repeal without a comparable replacement would create uncertainty in the insurance market, leading to chaos; that one, two, five Republican senators are actually thinking about voting against their party and not supporting a repeal without an automatic replacement.
Yeah, all that got flushed down the shitter last night when the Republicans in the Senate, minus a Rand Paul, voted on a budget that will eventually allow them to repeal the ACA with a simple majority in a reconciliation bill with the House. In doing so, they defeated every Democratic amendment that attempted to keep provisions like preventing insurance companies from denying you coverage for preexisting conditions. The GOP doesn't fucking care what the outcome will be. They are driving this car into that blizzard, fuck the consequences and don't you dare tell them they can't.
So you pretty much just saw any attempt at moderation get stabbed in the chest. It might not be dead yet, but it's got a sucking chest wound and, chances are, won't be able to afford coverage to get it fixed.
These GOP motherfuckers don't give a damn who dies as long as they get to prove a point: Democrats shouldn't have allowed the poors to think they're people. They get uppity that way. They must be punished, and, luckily, too many of them were too dumb to understand that in November.
I'm sticking with what I said in December. You gotta peel senators away from the Republican Party. Promise them anything. Money, pussy, dick, committee chairs, whatever.
Because Republicans are gonna act like Republicans, and that means with dishonor and cowardice and malice towards all who are not them. And, despite President Obama appealing for us to work across differences, we have to fight back with even more malice.
1/11/2017
Let's Just Pretend the Russian Dossier Is True Because Fuck That Trump Guy
If you were unfortunate enough, you got to watch or listen to the freak show this morning where President-Elect and human/gila monster hybrid Donald Trump sputtered and free-associated his way through what you might consider answers to the questions in a press conference. It was one of those embarrassing moments for the entire nation that we all better get used to. At some point, Trump is going to be at a gathering of world leaders and one of them is going to say, "What the fuck are you saying, you fucking brain damaged moron? Fuck, I thought Bush was dumb." And most of us in the United States will just look away, ashamed of Trump, like he's our boyfriend's racist grandpa who can't stop talking about what "the blacks" need to do.
What Trump said today doesn't matter because he's a filthy liar who traffics in the kind of hyperbole that'd make P.T. Barnum go "Whoa, there, man, calm that shit down." He's lying about the extent of his separation from his business. He forced his tax lawyer to lie about the emoluments clause of the Constitution. Essentially, he said, "You should be so fortunate to have me as president that I shouldn't have to do anything that every other modern president has done, but here's a couple of bones so you can shut the fuck up." Motherfucker, you ran for president. You asked for the office. Divest or get the fuck out. But he won't because truth and honesty don't matter.
What does matter is that he is so obviously deranged, so blatantly incapable of complex thought, that he more or less just repeated everything from his campaign, layering on extra degradation for members of the press that he didn't like. When Jim Acosta of CNN tried to insist on getting in a question because Trump kept attacking his network, I wanted him to keep going until Trump went into a full-blown Captain Queeg-like strawberry-seeking paranoid fit.
Meanwhile, so many questions surround the dossier prepared by a former UK spy as oppo research for some campaign (maybe JEB!'s). It's sopping wet with allegations of Russia trading DNC email releases through Wikileaks in return for Trump backing off criticism of the annexation of Crimea, as well as the desire for Trump to criticize NATO's expansion, both of which he did. There's the corruption, with the allegations of bribes and kickbacks in deals with China. Then there's all the hookers and golden showers and other possible blackmail material, most of which would fall on deaf ears like drops of urine running down Trump's manboobs. God, how the media are flagellating themselves and each other over the material, over whether it should have been released, how it hasn't been corroborated, no matter how reliable the sources are, what it means for future allegations and...
You know what? Fuck it. Let's act like Republicans for a little while and just state everything as if it's true. In fact, even if it's proven to be 35 pages of utter fantasy, let's just keep saying it's true. Because, see, Trump made his political career, fuck, much of his entire career, on lies, and almost all Republicans didn't have the honor to say, "No, sorry, that's just something he's pulling out of his ass." The mainstream media had no problem doing story after story about whether or not Barack Obama was born in the United States, a lie that Trump fingered and humped like it was the American flag with a pussy. Facts are dead, as Reince Priebus and Newt Gingrich and other Trump surrogates told us. We create our own reality, real reality be damned. So fuck it all. Trump can say he won in a "landslide" (he didn't), he can say he didn't say things that he said on video or that he tweeted, he can push a voter fraud fable like it's beyond reproach, he can claim that inner cities are hellholes of crime, and he can say that his political opponents are doing, have done, or will do things that are not even in the realm of actual. And he just doesn't care if you tell him he's wrong or there are facts that contradict him. It doesn't matter.
And I haven't even gotten into the sea of Republican and nutzoid conservative lies over the decades that drowned Hillary Clinton, up to and including the email controversy and the completely bugfuck insane Pizzagate.
So fuck it. It's time for Democrats to have some fun. Let's not even allow the idea that the Russian dossier isn't true. Let's just go with that it's totally true. It's right there in writing. Page 27: Trump "paid bribes to further his interests" in doing business in St. Petersburg, where he "participated in sex parties. Or page 2: "The Kremlin had been feeding Trump and his team valuable intelligence on his opponents, including Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, for several years." Let's just repeat it over and over and demand investigations and more investigations if those don't turn up what we want and let's force the media to keep talking about it and make it the only talking points so that all we can think about with Trump is that he is a corrupt loser who watches hookers piss. It feels like it's true, so let's go with the truthiness instead of the truth. Why should we be left behind in the rush to jump off the cliff of reason?
Trump force-fed us his nonsense. He's still doing that now. Instead, make him choke on this dossier.
(Note: Of course, we won't do it. Because at the end of the day, we sadly still have some sense of devotion to facts. It is our tragic flaw as liberals.)
What Trump said today doesn't matter because he's a filthy liar who traffics in the kind of hyperbole that'd make P.T. Barnum go "Whoa, there, man, calm that shit down." He's lying about the extent of his separation from his business. He forced his tax lawyer to lie about the emoluments clause of the Constitution. Essentially, he said, "You should be so fortunate to have me as president that I shouldn't have to do anything that every other modern president has done, but here's a couple of bones so you can shut the fuck up." Motherfucker, you ran for president. You asked for the office. Divest or get the fuck out. But he won't because truth and honesty don't matter.
What does matter is that he is so obviously deranged, so blatantly incapable of complex thought, that he more or less just repeated everything from his campaign, layering on extra degradation for members of the press that he didn't like. When Jim Acosta of CNN tried to insist on getting in a question because Trump kept attacking his network, I wanted him to keep going until Trump went into a full-blown Captain Queeg-like strawberry-seeking paranoid fit.
Meanwhile, so many questions surround the dossier prepared by a former UK spy as oppo research for some campaign (maybe JEB!'s). It's sopping wet with allegations of Russia trading DNC email releases through Wikileaks in return for Trump backing off criticism of the annexation of Crimea, as well as the desire for Trump to criticize NATO's expansion, both of which he did. There's the corruption, with the allegations of bribes and kickbacks in deals with China. Then there's all the hookers and golden showers and other possible blackmail material, most of which would fall on deaf ears like drops of urine running down Trump's manboobs. God, how the media are flagellating themselves and each other over the material, over whether it should have been released, how it hasn't been corroborated, no matter how reliable the sources are, what it means for future allegations and...
You know what? Fuck it. Let's act like Republicans for a little while and just state everything as if it's true. In fact, even if it's proven to be 35 pages of utter fantasy, let's just keep saying it's true. Because, see, Trump made his political career, fuck, much of his entire career, on lies, and almost all Republicans didn't have the honor to say, "No, sorry, that's just something he's pulling out of his ass." The mainstream media had no problem doing story after story about whether or not Barack Obama was born in the United States, a lie that Trump fingered and humped like it was the American flag with a pussy. Facts are dead, as Reince Priebus and Newt Gingrich and other Trump surrogates told us. We create our own reality, real reality be damned. So fuck it all. Trump can say he won in a "landslide" (he didn't), he can say he didn't say things that he said on video or that he tweeted, he can push a voter fraud fable like it's beyond reproach, he can claim that inner cities are hellholes of crime, and he can say that his political opponents are doing, have done, or will do things that are not even in the realm of actual. And he just doesn't care if you tell him he's wrong or there are facts that contradict him. It doesn't matter.
And I haven't even gotten into the sea of Republican and nutzoid conservative lies over the decades that drowned Hillary Clinton, up to and including the email controversy and the completely bugfuck insane Pizzagate.
So fuck it. It's time for Democrats to have some fun. Let's not even allow the idea that the Russian dossier isn't true. Let's just go with that it's totally true. It's right there in writing. Page 27: Trump "paid bribes to further his interests" in doing business in St. Petersburg, where he "participated in sex parties. Or page 2: "The Kremlin had been feeding Trump and his team valuable intelligence on his opponents, including Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, for several years." Let's just repeat it over and over and demand investigations and more investigations if those don't turn up what we want and let's force the media to keep talking about it and make it the only talking points so that all we can think about with Trump is that he is a corrupt loser who watches hookers piss. It feels like it's true, so let's go with the truthiness instead of the truth. Why should we be left behind in the rush to jump off the cliff of reason?
Trump force-fed us his nonsense. He's still doing that now. Instead, make him choke on this dossier.
(Note: Of course, we won't do it. Because at the end of the day, we sadly still have some sense of devotion to facts. It is our tragic flaw as liberals.)
1/10/2017
Donald Trump Is a Liar and You're a Chump If You Listen to Him
Today, President-Elect and bloated basketball of buffoonery Donald Trump finally made some kind of statement about what he'd like to see happen with the Affordable Care Act. He wants it repealed and then quickly replaced - not at the same time, but "Long to me would be weeks...It won’t be repeal and then two years later go in with another plan." As the New York Times points out, essentially Trump is telling House Speaker Paul Ryan to suck his tiny bleached and bare balls. Ryan, who looks like he jacks off to tumor porn, wanted to take a couple of years after sowing immediate chaos into the health care system. Or so he says this week.
Either way, both Trump and Ryan are pretty much guaranteeing that once the ACA is repealed, it won't be replaced by anything that is close in comprehensive coverage because that's how shit goes. Remember the sequester? That was supposed to be a budget threat that would force Congress to come up with something before automatic funding cuts kicked in. Instead, they just said, "Ah, fuck it" and let it stand.
But, really, who the fuck cares what Trump has to say? Motherfucker is such a compulsive liar that he probably tells Barron that all the stylish 10 year-old boys wear suits like they're Richie Rich. Ask Senator Rand Paul. In one of those moments that really is like the apocryphal Neville Chamberlain/Hitler story, Paul tweeted just a couple of days ago that "I just spoke to [Trump] and he fully supports my plan to replace Obamacare the same day we repeal it."
And now, today, Trump pretty much just said that either he lied or Rand Paul lied. That'd be fuckin' hilarious if it wasn't so goddamn pathetic. Peace in our time, eh, Senator?
There is no promise Trump will not break, no opinion he will not reverse when convenient. Ask his contractors. Ask his ex-wives. On his ludicrous border wall, now he's saying Mexico will pay for it in the future but we'll pay for it now. Whatever the fuck that means. We're all still awaiting his revelations about the Russian hacking that he supposedly was going to tell us a week ago. When he holds his press conference tomorrow, it's gonna be a fucking farce of overstated promises, lies, and masturbation, so much masturbation.
So when you hear "Democratic" Senator Joe Manchin claim that "Today, I spoke with President-Elect Donald Trump and he assured me that he will help fight to secure a permanent health care solution for our retired miners, as guaranteed in the Miners Protection Act," you can pretty much be sure that the sick miners are fucked. Trump won't do shit for them unless there's an angle, like he can get wheezing black lung sufferers to gasp out song praising him before he signs any legislation. What a fucking credulous goon Manchin is.
Back to the Affordable Care Act, in that drama queen/Willie Loman way of his, Trump declared, "We have to get to business. Obamacare has been a catastrophic event." You got that? According to the incoming president, providing people with access to health insurance despite pre-existing conditions is akin to a meteor hitting the earth, a tsunami, or an ignorant madman becoming our leader. You know, the real catastrophes.
Either way, both Trump and Ryan are pretty much guaranteeing that once the ACA is repealed, it won't be replaced by anything that is close in comprehensive coverage because that's how shit goes. Remember the sequester? That was supposed to be a budget threat that would force Congress to come up with something before automatic funding cuts kicked in. Instead, they just said, "Ah, fuck it" and let it stand.
But, really, who the fuck cares what Trump has to say? Motherfucker is such a compulsive liar that he probably tells Barron that all the stylish 10 year-old boys wear suits like they're Richie Rich. Ask Senator Rand Paul. In one of those moments that really is like the apocryphal Neville Chamberlain/Hitler story, Paul tweeted just a couple of days ago that "I just spoke to [Trump] and he fully supports my plan to replace Obamacare the same day we repeal it."
And now, today, Trump pretty much just said that either he lied or Rand Paul lied. That'd be fuckin' hilarious if it wasn't so goddamn pathetic. Peace in our time, eh, Senator?
There is no promise Trump will not break, no opinion he will not reverse when convenient. Ask his contractors. Ask his ex-wives. On his ludicrous border wall, now he's saying Mexico will pay for it in the future but we'll pay for it now. Whatever the fuck that means. We're all still awaiting his revelations about the Russian hacking that he supposedly was going to tell us a week ago. When he holds his press conference tomorrow, it's gonna be a fucking farce of overstated promises, lies, and masturbation, so much masturbation.
So when you hear "Democratic" Senator Joe Manchin claim that "Today, I spoke with President-Elect Donald Trump and he assured me that he will help fight to secure a permanent health care solution for our retired miners, as guaranteed in the Miners Protection Act," you can pretty much be sure that the sick miners are fucked. Trump won't do shit for them unless there's an angle, like he can get wheezing black lung sufferers to gasp out song praising him before he signs any legislation. What a fucking credulous goon Manchin is.
Back to the Affordable Care Act, in that drama queen/Willie Loman way of his, Trump declared, "We have to get to business. Obamacare has been a catastrophic event." You got that? According to the incoming president, providing people with access to health insurance despite pre-existing conditions is akin to a meteor hitting the earth, a tsunami, or an ignorant madman becoming our leader. You know, the real catastrophes.
1/09/2017
Snowflakes: A Lesson in Responses to a Cartoon
If you write something even a little negative about future Fuehrer Donald Trump, you are generally barraged with responses calling you a "libtard." That's a hilarious combination of the words "liberal" and "retard." I've been guilty of doing that sort of thing, saying, "Fucktard" and "Guntard." I've stopped because it's just boring to make the same joke over and over, especially when lots of others are making that joke, too.
Also, if you say that something Trump said or did was cruel or wrong, you're gonna get a bunch of Trumptards...sorry, Trump voters saying that you're a "snowflake." That's an equally hilarious way of calling you weak and easily melted, like you can't take a jab or you're so politically-correct. Or whatever. I always thought snowflakes were all different and that was something to aspire to, but I guess not anymore. In fact, at one point, anti-abortion folks called babies born from frozen embryos that might have been destroyed "snowflake children." Times change. They do change.
But mainly, now, it's just a way to slam liberals for being too sensitive. Which leads us to a cartoon and the responses to it.
Dan Piraro has been doing the one-panel daily comic strip Bizarro for about 30 years now. It's mostly (but not always) apolitical and pretty funny stuff. And on December 26, an immensely busy travel day, Piraro published this one:
It's an airport attendant announcing, "We'd like to begin our pre-boarding process by inviting families with small children, and affluent white affluent white males to come aboard." Innocuous enough, right? Kind of an anodyne "Air travel sucks" joke, you know?
Oh, no. Not if you're constantly attuned to anything that might hint of bias against the privileged. Aggrieved Bizarro readers angrily responded to the strip and Piraro. "So, you just woke up and decided to insult folks you don’t know because of their skin color?? Pathetic!" wrote one. Another accused Piraro of voting for "Killary." He also got a goodly amount of hate mail, which is so quaint it's almost adorable. And although it's hard to be polite to people saying things like "Saw your comic strip dated 12/26/16. Your a RACIST using a Comic strip to to divide the country. You have to be a Democrat!! Sore LOSER!!!” Piraro answered some calmly and with good humor.
And you can bet that some of these mightily insulted scribblers, these whiny defenders of the most powerful group of people in the world, people who need no one to speak for them, will call women upset that a pussy-grabbing man got elected precious "snowflakes" who need to run to their "safe spaces."
This isn't just a "uh-uh, you're the snowflakes" tongue stuck out. It's about an inability to deal with oneself honestly.
That those angry at Piraro see no irony in that is what gives me no hope going forward. It's the same rank hypocrisy that can allow Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who sent a letter to Democrats in 2009 insisting that all nominees for the president's cabinet must go through ethics vetting, to insist that Trump's nominees be excluded from such inquiries. And the idiot hordes with no self-awareness will decline to see a problem here.
Also, if you say that something Trump said or did was cruel or wrong, you're gonna get a bunch of Trumptards...sorry, Trump voters saying that you're a "snowflake." That's an equally hilarious way of calling you weak and easily melted, like you can't take a jab or you're so politically-correct. Or whatever. I always thought snowflakes were all different and that was something to aspire to, but I guess not anymore. In fact, at one point, anti-abortion folks called babies born from frozen embryos that might have been destroyed "snowflake children." Times change. They do change.
But mainly, now, it's just a way to slam liberals for being too sensitive. Which leads us to a cartoon and the responses to it.
Dan Piraro has been doing the one-panel daily comic strip Bizarro for about 30 years now. It's mostly (but not always) apolitical and pretty funny stuff. And on December 26, an immensely busy travel day, Piraro published this one:
It's an airport attendant announcing, "We'd like to begin our pre-boarding process by inviting families with small children, and affluent white affluent white males to come aboard." Innocuous enough, right? Kind of an anodyne "Air travel sucks" joke, you know?
Oh, no. Not if you're constantly attuned to anything that might hint of bias against the privileged. Aggrieved Bizarro readers angrily responded to the strip and Piraro. "So, you just woke up and decided to insult folks you don’t know because of their skin color?? Pathetic!" wrote one. Another accused Piraro of voting for "Killary." He also got a goodly amount of hate mail, which is so quaint it's almost adorable. And although it's hard to be polite to people saying things like "Saw your comic strip dated 12/26/16. Your a RACIST using a Comic strip to to divide the country. You have to be a Democrat!! Sore LOSER!!!” Piraro answered some calmly and with good humor.
And you can bet that some of these mightily insulted scribblers, these whiny defenders of the most powerful group of people in the world, people who need no one to speak for them, will call women upset that a pussy-grabbing man got elected precious "snowflakes" who need to run to their "safe spaces."
This isn't just a "uh-uh, you're the snowflakes" tongue stuck out. It's about an inability to deal with oneself honestly.
That those angry at Piraro see no irony in that is what gives me no hope going forward. It's the same rank hypocrisy that can allow Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who sent a letter to Democrats in 2009 insisting that all nominees for the president's cabinet must go through ethics vetting, to insist that Trump's nominees be excluded from such inquiries. And the idiot hordes with no self-awareness will decline to see a problem here.
1/06/2017
Fuck You, Rural Elitists
Yesterday, an opinion piece in the New York Times started this way: "One recent morning, I sat near two young men at a coffee shop here whom I’ve known since they were little boys. Now about 18, they pushed away from the table, and one said: 'Let’s go to work. Let the liberals sleep in.' The other nodded." The writer, Robert Leonard, is a local news director at a radio station in Knoxville, Iowa, and he assured us that the young men are hard workers at tough jobs, like washing dishes and cleaning up at a restaurant, and, of course, farming. They are so goddamned salt of the earth because "They are conservative, believe in hard work, family, the military and cops, and they know that abortion and socialism are evil, that Jesus Christ is our savior, and that Donald J. Trump will be good for America."
And all I could think when I read it was "Fuck you, you elitist fucking assholes. Why is your judgmental ass more valid than mine?"
The piece is titled, "Why Rural America Voted for Trump," and it is another seemingly rational argument trying to show that one's neighbors or one's relatives or one's friends didn't vote for Trump because of "ignorance, racism, sexism, nationalism, Islamophobia," or other such things. No, it was that rural Americans have a different philosophy. They "think the liberal worldview creates unnecessary rules and regulations that cripple the economy and take away good jobs that may belong to them or their neighbor. Public school systems and colleges are liberal tools of indoctrination that go after what we love and value most — our children."
We're all supposed to nod our heads and respect these shitheels while they mock liberals and are ennobled by the rank nonsense of those who desperately want to justify the racism, etc. because otherwise they have to admit that they are surrounded by horrible, hateful fucks. But I won't do that precisely because I have more respect for these dumbass motherfuckers than any of the wannabe Jane Goodalls observing the ways of the chimps. How do I have more respect? Because I don't treat them like fucking children or a hidden Amazon tribe whose language is clicks and trills. We're talking about fucking grown-ups who make fucking grown-up decisions, and I'm gonna treat them like grown-ups. And their attitudes towards urban Americans are no less elitist than the dumbass motherfuckers on the coasts who lump everyone else into flyover country.
Here's the deal. There are a whole bunch of us city liberals who came from rural or southern or whatever areas. I've told this story a hundred goddamn times, but this pinheaded, Ivory Tower-humping leftist lived in a trailer park in Florida with a trucker father and a working mom. At 13, I started working unloading semis at warehouses after school. My family was on welfare, including food stamps, and when my father died, we were on Social Security to survive in the south, and we worked our asses off to get out of that hole. I know a shit-ton of other people who have a similar M.O. and now live in New York or L.A. and a shit-ton who continue to live in rural areas. So don't fucking preach to me about the goodness and grace of conservative rural people or the white working class.
And as for those good hard-workin' young men who love God and country? More than a few of 'em were hanging out in the gay bars of south Louisiana, far from New Orleans, trying to get their dicks sucked in the men's room. I guarantee you that Leonard's liberal-hating boys or ones like them are hoping for a little sinful time with another man.
It's all bullshit. The rest of Leonard's column is about how it seems like cities in red states are taken care of by their government, but not the rural parts of the state, where the roads need to be improved and there is a need for police and firefighters and EMTs: "To rural Americans, sometimes it seems our taxes mostly go to making city residents live better. We recognize that the truth is more complex, particularly when it comes to social programs, but it’s the perception that matters — certainly to the way most people vote."
And there you have the reason why liberals are called "elitist." We actually know that most of our taxes go to the Republican-run states. We aren't fucking hypocrites who condemn government, elect people who want to shrink government, and then are pissed off when the government doesn't offer enough services. We don't get our news from conspiracy theorists and liars. Are there excesses on the left? Of course. We're fuckin' human. But when one group is inclusive of all races and religions and genders and sexual orientations and more, while the other pines for a time when white Christians ran everything, it's pretty damn clear who the real elitists are.
What you're calling "elitism" is just simply not being ignorant. We don't have our heads shoved up Jesus's ass. And when the left gets angry because of how fucking dumb some of the shit coming out of rural and red mouths is, we're told we need to understand what they believe. No, we're just gonna say that stupid is stupid.
You can stop explaining the white working class rural conservative Christian farming folk, hot-takers and self-justifiers. Instead, why don't you explain liberalism to them? Why don't you explain that jobs are drying up and communities are dying not because of abortion and same-sex marriage but because of Republican economic policies that have favored the wealthy, most of whom live in cities, including a certain president-elect they voted for who took advantage of those very policies in order to stay rich? Ultimately, though, it won't matter. Because despite every fucking word to the contrary, the real problem is that those who voted for Trump are racist. They are sexist. They are Islamophobic. They are ignorant.
The whole thrust of these "let's learn about the yokels" articles is to imply that there are real Americans and there are coastal elites. Sorry, motherfuckers. We're all Americans. And if I have to suffer under your stupid, you have to hear about our smarts.
And all I could think when I read it was "Fuck you, you elitist fucking assholes. Why is your judgmental ass more valid than mine?"
The piece is titled, "Why Rural America Voted for Trump," and it is another seemingly rational argument trying to show that one's neighbors or one's relatives or one's friends didn't vote for Trump because of "ignorance, racism, sexism, nationalism, Islamophobia," or other such things. No, it was that rural Americans have a different philosophy. They "think the liberal worldview creates unnecessary rules and regulations that cripple the economy and take away good jobs that may belong to them or their neighbor. Public school systems and colleges are liberal tools of indoctrination that go after what we love and value most — our children."
We're all supposed to nod our heads and respect these shitheels while they mock liberals and are ennobled by the rank nonsense of those who desperately want to justify the racism, etc. because otherwise they have to admit that they are surrounded by horrible, hateful fucks. But I won't do that precisely because I have more respect for these dumbass motherfuckers than any of the wannabe Jane Goodalls observing the ways of the chimps. How do I have more respect? Because I don't treat them like fucking children or a hidden Amazon tribe whose language is clicks and trills. We're talking about fucking grown-ups who make fucking grown-up decisions, and I'm gonna treat them like grown-ups. And their attitudes towards urban Americans are no less elitist than the dumbass motherfuckers on the coasts who lump everyone else into flyover country.
Here's the deal. There are a whole bunch of us city liberals who came from rural or southern or whatever areas. I've told this story a hundred goddamn times, but this pinheaded, Ivory Tower-humping leftist lived in a trailer park in Florida with a trucker father and a working mom. At 13, I started working unloading semis at warehouses after school. My family was on welfare, including food stamps, and when my father died, we were on Social Security to survive in the south, and we worked our asses off to get out of that hole. I know a shit-ton of other people who have a similar M.O. and now live in New York or L.A. and a shit-ton who continue to live in rural areas. So don't fucking preach to me about the goodness and grace of conservative rural people or the white working class.
And as for those good hard-workin' young men who love God and country? More than a few of 'em were hanging out in the gay bars of south Louisiana, far from New Orleans, trying to get their dicks sucked in the men's room. I guarantee you that Leonard's liberal-hating boys or ones like them are hoping for a little sinful time with another man.
It's all bullshit. The rest of Leonard's column is about how it seems like cities in red states are taken care of by their government, but not the rural parts of the state, where the roads need to be improved and there is a need for police and firefighters and EMTs: "To rural Americans, sometimes it seems our taxes mostly go to making city residents live better. We recognize that the truth is more complex, particularly when it comes to social programs, but it’s the perception that matters — certainly to the way most people vote."
And there you have the reason why liberals are called "elitist." We actually know that most of our taxes go to the Republican-run states. We aren't fucking hypocrites who condemn government, elect people who want to shrink government, and then are pissed off when the government doesn't offer enough services. We don't get our news from conspiracy theorists and liars. Are there excesses on the left? Of course. We're fuckin' human. But when one group is inclusive of all races and religions and genders and sexual orientations and more, while the other pines for a time when white Christians ran everything, it's pretty damn clear who the real elitists are.
What you're calling "elitism" is just simply not being ignorant. We don't have our heads shoved up Jesus's ass. And when the left gets angry because of how fucking dumb some of the shit coming out of rural and red mouths is, we're told we need to understand what they believe. No, we're just gonna say that stupid is stupid.
You can stop explaining the white working class rural conservative Christian farming folk, hot-takers and self-justifiers. Instead, why don't you explain liberalism to them? Why don't you explain that jobs are drying up and communities are dying not because of abortion and same-sex marriage but because of Republican economic policies that have favored the wealthy, most of whom live in cities, including a certain president-elect they voted for who took advantage of those very policies in order to stay rich? Ultimately, though, it won't matter. Because despite every fucking word to the contrary, the real problem is that those who voted for Trump are racist. They are sexist. They are Islamophobic. They are ignorant.
The whole thrust of these "let's learn about the yokels" articles is to imply that there are real Americans and there are coastal elites. Sorry, motherfuckers. We're all Americans. And if I have to suffer under your stupid, you have to hear about our smarts.
1/04/2017
When It Comes to the Filibuster, No Hypocrisy Is Too Far for the GOP
Today, Senate Majority Leader and bespectacled squirrel nutsack Mitch McConnell went on the attack at the suggestion that Democrats would try to block any Donald Trump-nominated shit-tossers from the Supreme Court. "[T]he American people simply will not tolerate" such an action, said the man who made obstruction and filibuster the twin pillars of GOP fuckery for the last eight years and who continues to justify blocking President Obama's nominee, Merrick Garland, on a vague, made-up rule about when a president gets to decide who is on the court.
Not only that, but it was literally just two months ago that Republican senators were literally saying that they would not confirm any Supreme Court justice nominated by a presumptive President Hillary Clinton. Literally: "If Hillary becomes president, I am going to do everything I can do to make sure four years from now, we still got an opening on the Supreme Court," said terrible Senator Richard Burr, since reelected in the terrible state of North Carolina.
And the typical response from the festering dickholes on social media when someone on the left points out that Democrats are just doing something that Republicans either have done or have said they were totally gonna do? A whiny "Oh, you hated it when Republicans did it. Aren't you just hypocrites?" No, fucko, what's hypocritical is all of a sudden acting pissy when someone else does the exact same shit you did. Goddamn, it doesn't even fucking occur to these sphincter mites. If Republicans sacrificed their virgin children to Ba'al in order win elections and all of a sudden Democrats decided to get in on the unholy action, Mitch McConnell would be making a statement against using children in ancient blood rites while he was still holding a dripping knife.
In an interview yesterday, Senator Chuck Schumer said of the Democrats' elimination of the filibuster for cabinet picks in 2013 that he wishes "it hadn't happened." But that puts the blame for the rule change on Democrats when, clearly, it belongs with Republicans. In four years, Republicans had filibustered 30 Obama nominees for positions in the Executive Branch. That compares with 20 in all of the previous history of the United States. Instead of bemoaning the action the Democrats took so that President Obama could have a functioning cabinet, Schumer should be saying that the motherfuckers of the right wouldn't stop fucking mothers unless someone stepped in and smacked their hard-ons away.
The filibuster is about to become the Democrats' biggest ally and the GOP's greatest nemesis. They will screech and cry about how Democrats won't let the "historic mandate" that President Trump has be fulfilled. And Trump's idiot hordes will weep and rend garments, even as they die in the streets from lack of health care, demanding that their slobbering mad king be allowed to run riot. Democrats will have to gird their loins and hike up their pants to get ready for the shit storm that's coming their way for the crime of just trying to desperately prevent the whole country from sliding off the mountain on a hill into the wasteland below.
The greatest hypocrisy will come when the GOP votes to eliminate the filibuster completely. And then the reign of the shitheels and the bumblefucks can begin in earnest.
(Oh, and, by the way, Senator McConnell, if the American people gave two shits about who is blocking Supreme Court nominees, your ass would be on the street right now. It ain't a winner of an issue.)
Not only that, but it was literally just two months ago that Republican senators were literally saying that they would not confirm any Supreme Court justice nominated by a presumptive President Hillary Clinton. Literally: "If Hillary becomes president, I am going to do everything I can do to make sure four years from now, we still got an opening on the Supreme Court," said terrible Senator Richard Burr, since reelected in the terrible state of North Carolina.
And the typical response from the festering dickholes on social media when someone on the left points out that Democrats are just doing something that Republicans either have done or have said they were totally gonna do? A whiny "Oh, you hated it when Republicans did it. Aren't you just hypocrites?" No, fucko, what's hypocritical is all of a sudden acting pissy when someone else does the exact same shit you did. Goddamn, it doesn't even fucking occur to these sphincter mites. If Republicans sacrificed their virgin children to Ba'al in order win elections and all of a sudden Democrats decided to get in on the unholy action, Mitch McConnell would be making a statement against using children in ancient blood rites while he was still holding a dripping knife.
In an interview yesterday, Senator Chuck Schumer said of the Democrats' elimination of the filibuster for cabinet picks in 2013 that he wishes "it hadn't happened." But that puts the blame for the rule change on Democrats when, clearly, it belongs with Republicans. In four years, Republicans had filibustered 30 Obama nominees for positions in the Executive Branch. That compares with 20 in all of the previous history of the United States. Instead of bemoaning the action the Democrats took so that President Obama could have a functioning cabinet, Schumer should be saying that the motherfuckers of the right wouldn't stop fucking mothers unless someone stepped in and smacked their hard-ons away.
The filibuster is about to become the Democrats' biggest ally and the GOP's greatest nemesis. They will screech and cry about how Democrats won't let the "historic mandate" that President Trump has be fulfilled. And Trump's idiot hordes will weep and rend garments, even as they die in the streets from lack of health care, demanding that their slobbering mad king be allowed to run riot. Democrats will have to gird their loins and hike up their pants to get ready for the shit storm that's coming their way for the crime of just trying to desperately prevent the whole country from sliding off the mountain on a hill into the wasteland below.
The greatest hypocrisy will come when the GOP votes to eliminate the filibuster completely. And then the reign of the shitheels and the bumblefucks can begin in earnest.
(Oh, and, by the way, Senator McConnell, if the American people gave two shits about who is blocking Supreme Court nominees, your ass would be on the street right now. It ain't a winner of an issue.)
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