Thanks for the 3 AM Phone Call Hillary

Well, thanks to Clinton’s famously stupid 3 AM phone call ad John McCain gets to save a bunch of money on the labor of creative types and production costs and the work of tots paid once eons ago. Ready made ad to clomp right into. McCain for Pres at 3AM answering the phone. Jesus, didn’t we just see this? Yes, this is the third go round for this photo file ad. Poor kids only got paid once and their innocent little faces have been whored around for free for at least a decade. There should be a law against politicians stealing babies they haven’t paid for in the service for a candidate they won’t vote for. And then to have their little pretend to be sleeping faces used in the service of some bitches Birth of a Nation, KKK, scare the bejesus out of us ‘cause of the boogie man hiding in the bushes bullshit. What the hell? Doesn’t anybody have any ethics anymore?

Ick! Harold Ickes is Whispering

Where do the Clinton’s get these guys? Harold Ickes is a weaselly looking man, who is whispering in the ears of any greatly connected democrat he can corner. Oh god the thought of that just made me shudder and mouth-puke a little. Sending in the thugs to stir the tiny amount of crap they have on Obama—his pastor said bad things about America, and he can’t bowl for shit, man. That’s it??? Well, let’s all take a bowling lesson, and spend some time in a predominantly black church in America (hell, go to the grocery store and you might hear a little grousing about what is being done in the name of America that shames us all, right now). Go anywhere this Sunday and talk about what makes us proud to be Americans.

And as for the Clinton’s and the company they keep? Well, less said the better, or I really might lose my cookies. But she is bleeding super-duper-delegates, slowly but inexorably. Now Ickes is looking for a fix. Shudder.

The Myth Of Manliness

A few years ago a man was hiking and camping in (I think) the canyon-lands of Southern Utah. He found himself pinned by his own perilous machismo. His arm or hand trapped under a rock too large for him to move. The reason this story got big headlines, was his cutting off of his trapped limb to free himself. I remember at the time thinking that his “heroism” should really have been called “stupidity,” and the story would have been about what not to do in the wilderness, instead of deifying this reckless man. Mostly male reporters and pundits told this story with slavish admiration for such a manly man. I feel far more sympathy for the wolves and coyotes who gnaw off their legs to free themselves from traps set by cattlemen and ranchers on mostly forest service lands leased out for chicken feed. But that’s another story.

I have, over the past couple of years, heard Tucker Carlson whine on TV about his fear that we, the America people, would see ourselves as “unmanly” if we leave Iraq before we’ve finished “the job.” And the first thing out of my mouth as I sit there listening to him say this crap, is “Jesus Christ Tucker, are you so insecure in your manhood, your manliness that you would continue this stupid slaughter just to protect your notion of yourself as virile? “ Tucker, your fear and loathing of the feminine is showing. Wouldn’t we be better served in the world, and in our own eyes, if we were seen as smart and careful with our awesome might, not just reckless and blundering as we have been in our nearly eight years of macho politics and policy, led by the “manly” “cowboy” “from Texas?” I put those last three in quotations because they are inventions, designed to make a rich boy from Connecticut, sent to the best schools money buy can buy, (and who claims to be proud of his gentleman’s C’s or B’s and his inability to speak the English language with anything amounting to grace or intelligence), who was reckless and foolish in youth, avoided real military service during The Vietnam War, a man who never succeeded at anything without the connections his family and his class provided to keep him from being a total embarrassment to them and their peers, steal an election and put him in office as the PRESIDENT OF THESE UNITED STATES! !?? Where the hell is the manliness in any of that. That looks like cronies making sure cronies get richer and stay that way.

Tucker, I’m not picking on you. I just happen to prefer MSNBC over CNN, but other than Keith Olbermann, you have all become unwatchable. Chris Matthews can’t ask a question of one of his guests or panelists without interrupting or talking over the guest and answering the question himself. He is so damned rude and dismissive of anyone who doesn’t share his own prejudices that he has become a joke. I got so sick of having him describe our only female candidate running for President as “strident” and her laugh as a “cackle” that I had to stop watching him. Do either of those things have anything to do with her fitness to be President? Are we really that shallow? His manliness is showing a little too much, and it’s embarrassing to look at. Ditto Lou Dobbs on CNN with his rabid hatred of “illegal immigrants.” Is Lou Dobbs descended from Native Americans? I am. And I look at all you white guys as Illegal Immigrants. A pox on all your immigrant ancestors and their manliness behind a gun, spreading “Democracy” and calling it Manifest Destiny (just a code word for pillage and plunder, as far as I can see) in their quest to rape the world of all it’s gifts. Take your manliness and shove it.

I’ve been married three times and when I wasn’t married I usually had a lover. I can speak with some experience about men and their strength. Let’s take illness and the way we cope with it as an example. Every man I lived with and/or loved has taken ill at one time or another. Their illnesses have, for the most part, been minor—colds and flues. But my last husband had serious illnesses throughout our relationship. But in all the relationships there is a common thread when it comes to nurturance. When my loved one is sick, I provide the comfort and care. I get the pail for my love to puke in and put it beside the bed for him. I get the cool damp cloth to soothe his fevered brow. If he needs and wants bathing, I run the bath, wash his back and shampoo his hair and whatever else needs washing. I provide the clean bed clothes. I change the sheets that I washed. I fix the broth or chicken soup. I serve it to him in bed. I do these things out of love and simple human kindness. But God forbid that I get sick and need care and comfort. If I’m sick enough to need that pail beside my bed, you can bet your ass I’m the one who gets it. I have never been nurtured by a man. Not one.

This is not to say I haven’t been treated with kindness or generosity by a man. There’s a difference. I have observed that, in illness and pain, women are far manlier than men. Women take care of themselves, and their family members, and their friends. Women seem to see themselves vitally, profoundly connected to a larger world outside themselves in a caring, careful way. Men seem to see the world as an extension of their egos. Are they manly enough to control it, shape it to fit their image of themselves? Conquest and acquisition seem to be the male model for manliness. Capitalism is the perfect model of a manly economic system. It is brutal, has little regard for any value other than the acquisition of wealth, and it requires an underclass to do the work. It also relies on Family Values (code words for unpaid labor by women, and control of women’s bodies). Capitalism would come to a screeching halt if we gave a monetary value to the slave-labor of women in families. And now that it takes two or three incomes for the working poor to survive in this brutal system, most of these women (so cherished by the right-wing fundamentalist white males who have been our ruling class) now get to work for nothing at home, and for minimum wages in the work place, usually without health care, unless their husbands are lucky enough to have some kind of benefits package that covers family members. That is, if their husbands have not abandoned them and moved on to their trophy-wife phase. Think of the fine example set by Rudy. Think Newt. Think Fred (Law and Order) Thompson. Think McCain. These are manly men. Yeah, right.

Smokin'

I’m sick of all the pious bullshit I have to take everyday from almost everyone because I smoke. I’m sick of the righteous, zealous indignation of non-smokers who know I’m addicted to a dangerous legal substance (that was pushed on me from every corner of my society since birth to fifty) yet still expect me to STOP! because they think I should. Why not the same kind of fascistic attack on the civil rights of drinkers? No drinking in public places. No drinking in the presence of children. No drinking in your own apartment! Thank God I own a house. I hate cell phone users who talk on the phone non-stop when they are out to lunch with a friend or sweetheart. Should we prohibit this noxious behavior because it offends me?

I was born in 1944. My dad was fighting in France when I was born in Paris, Texas in the hospital on the Army Base there. I’ll bet the doctor who delivered me was smoking while he whacked me on the bottom. My mother was smoking in her hospital room while she fed me from a bottle while her perfect breasts pained her no end as her milk began to dry up. It was the thing to do in 1944.

We moved to Salt Lake City before I was three and the years went on. I survived in our turbulent family, and just before it split into it’s sad little parts, my mother taught me to smoke. I was remarkably good at it. Granted, smoke is always better fresh than second hand. I learned to French inhale in short order and was amazing her friends at cocktail parties. I could do plenty in the smoking department. It’s the only thing I was ever praised for. Well, at least the most normal thing I was praised for.

I was five when our family flew into it’s individual pieces. I got sent to Sherman, Texas to live with my mother’s brother and his wife. They were childless and happy to have me, so made no objections to my smoking. Everybody smoked everywhere, anyway. And it was kind of cute. I was well cared for at my aunt and uncles. Taught things, too. Like, how to shampoo my own hair, roll a pin curl, scrub my ankles with soap and water. My mother never showed me anything except how to smoke and she groused about all the work I was for her. When she came to visit me on my birthday, she called me a prissy little thing. Said I looked like a poodle. Then when she whirled me around playing airplane with me, my sweaty hands slipped out of hers and I went flying into the backyard table and broke two ribs. We smoked a cigarette together and then she left.

Six months later, just before Christmas she came and got me and we rode the train to Salt Lake smoking all the way. There was even a special car on the train called the smoking car. That didn’t mean you couldn’t smoke everywhere else. We smoked in the dinning car. We smoked in the toilet, we smoked everywhere. Everyone did.

She married into a well-to-do family, and everybody in that family smoked. My new grandfather was one of Salt Lake City’s most prominent physicians. Chief of Staff at St. Marks and Holy Cross Hospitals. He was a general practitioner and surgeon. He smoked. Everywhere, all the time. While he was examining you in the office a smoke dangled from his fleshy lips. He probably smoked in the operating room.

In every car we rode in everyone smoked summer and winter. Every time we ate, someone had a cigarette going at the table. We smoked at the movies.

Now I’m 63 and remarkably healthy. I have high blood pressure. Everyone In my family did. No one died of cancer. All the men died of heart attack and all the women in my mother’s family died of vascular dementia. I took care of my mother once she couldn’t care for herself anymore. She was incontinent, didn’t recognize anyone, not even herself. She quit smoking in her fifties. She died in her early eighties when her brain stopped sending the signal to her mouth to chew or swallow. She died on Christmas morning, two days after her birthday.

My doctor, who sees me seldom (because of my relative good health), never fails to lecture me about the dangers of smoking. He listens to my lungs and shakes his head, unable to look anything but disappointed that they are clear. No, cancer doesn’t scare me.

A Man We'll Call Ted

I know a man. Let’s say his name is Ted. And he works for a big multi-national conglomerate like Microsoft, or IBM. Let’s say his salary is a nice simple number like $300,000.00 , plus bonuses, stock options, commissions, and a great retirement and benefits package. He owns his own home, and it was paid for twenty years ago. He drives a nice conservative, understated little silver sports car. According to Ted, he’s played the Market since he was in his teens, at an average annual rate of overall return on investment at 22%. But he hates to spend money that won’t have a tangible, predictable, advantageous (preferably monetary) rate of exchange. He is both so cheap and fussy, he takes his laundry to a Laundromat and irons his own shirts, which despite the fact that they are clean and well pressed are hopelessly outdated.

He wants what he fantasizes the love of a good, pretty woman with long hair, of child bearing age, will bring to his cold, emotionally impoverished and affection starved life. He’ll never get what he craves, because he places no value on those very things that will transform his life--the labor and love of a good, pretty woman with long hair, of child bearing age. And Ted, while we’re talking here, take a look in the mirror. You may be a nanosecond under fifty, but you’re bald and gray and wrinkled, honey. If I were you, I’d be using a good (and therefore expensive) exfollient daily and consulting with a good plastic surgeon for those dark bags under your eyes, and that incipient double chin. And as long as you’ve undergone the risk of general anesthesia, why not get the small pot-belly and that spare tire you call “love handles” liposuctioned. He needs an image consultant, and if I were Ted, I’d pay a top notch interior decorator to make the college-guy-apartment-style house of his into something inviting.

So Ted, please, pull your bloated wallet from your sagging back pocket and stop asking your good, pretty, women-friends with short-hair, who are over child-bearing age, and have too much to do already, to re-decorate your fucking house for free. Grow up fellows. Get a clue. If you aren’t as pretty as the women you want to date, offer something else of equal value. This is capitalism! This is America! Why the hell shouldn’t she prosper? Buy her a car! Set her up in an condo! Buy her big-carat diamonds set in platinum. This isn’t Rumania, and it isn’t 1950 for Christ sake.

Aging Barbies Take On Capitalism

Beauty is to certain women what money is to certain men. One can never have enough. You know who you are. If you’ve spent more on cosmetic surgeries and Botox injections over the last five years than you did for your college education, I’m talking about you.

I have a problem with the fact that not one single woman I know is really secure that she looks all right. And I plan to make the case that it’s because of gluttonously rich men, and the culture created by their wild, unchecked, gluttonous greed and their need to objectify women and turn them into commodities, that keeps my friends, and women everywhere, insecure in their very skins--not good enough on a cellular level. I think it’s time for us to make those really big bucks, capitalizing on the potbellies, saggy man-boobs, lap flaps, wattles and jowls, baldness, crotch rot, stinky feet, pee stains, flaky, dry, itching skin, actinic keratosis, weak chins, beady eyes, bad teeth, bad breath, terrible wardrobe and all the other plagues of carbuncles and adult on-set acne that men are prone to after a certain age, after the testosterone levels start to drop off, and the prostate starts to swell and those pesky seminal vesicles start plugging up. After they’ve reached that famous sexual peak--right around twenty or so, when mommy stops buying their clothes, they should be just the right age to start to capitalize on their most secret fears and insecurities. I’m sure we can come up with a few they haven’t even imagined yet.

I’ve spent my entire working life, some forty years, in the fashion/beauty/entertainment industry. In the late-sixties I suffered a brief crisis of conscience and got a job in an inner-city community center as an organizer of programs for disadvantaged (a euphemism for minority) girls and women. Before I organized any programs, I thought I ought to get to know the women who used the center, and find out what programs they wanted organized. After a month of meetings and polling, the vote was in. They wanted beauty pageants and fashion shows. They wanted modeling classes and lessons on how to apply cosmetics. They wanted classes and seminars on how to make the most of the way they looked. Their whole lives were focused on how they looked. It was what I was running from, and all they wanted. It woke me up to the real power of advertising. I had to think long and hard about that one. And even I had to admit, that for most of them, the only way they were going to escape the poverty that surrounded and invaded their lives, was to look acceptable, or better yet, good, to (mostly male) white folks who shared the white, male values and appalling lack of taste of the predominant culture that did the hiring. It meant the difference between getting out and up or getting left behind.

I’ve heard the most beautiful women agonize about some imagined imperfection in their appearance that will make them forever second rate, a virtual failure, not good enough. I can feel you assuming that I’m talking about some air-head bimbette. But, I assure you, that I am not. In my group of fashion-model friends who, for the most part, represent the advertised ideal; there are, out of eight women, two Ph.Ds., one MBA, one Masters in Social Work, a successful advertising executive, and the other three are all college graduates successfully working in creative fields. We appeared in the very ads that made the rest of you realize you were too fat, and you had no taste. Despite the fact that we had been given enormous power because we were perceived as beautiful, we didn't really believe we were. And beauty is a double edged sword, much like great wealth. You never know whether someone who professes to adore you, can see past your obvious assets.

Beauty is like money, and then again it isn’t. It can come and it can go. But you can’t horde it like Midas. There is not enough collagen or Botox in the world to hold back the social and professional black hole that reaching the age of fifty, for a woman, sends you to forever. Who knows how much you’ll need as you get older, and what happens to the Botox when it’s been injected between your eyebrows every six months for twenty years? Apparently for certain men, say, someone like The Donald, there isn’t enough money. For Ivana and Marla I’d bet the money is only a means to an end. Enough trips to their favorite Paris couturiers and cosmetic surgeons to keep them desirable long enough to marry the next tub-of-lard in a bad toupee with more money than The Donald. I long for the day when Ivana and Marla don’t give a rat’s ass how they look, and are famous and recognized for their brilliant and visionary investing strategy in new male potency products. I want to hear that they have endowed a new department of research at Johns Hopkins devoted to elongating the bones of men who have been born with the unfortunate affliction of diminished height, or DH.

I know far too many professionally successful women who fall in love with seemingly appropriate men, and within the space of a year they are still working a full time job, still juggling a shared custody arrangement with their ex-husbands, still keeping their own homes livable and attractive, while also playing pretend corporate wife to the new boyfriend. Pretty soon he starts complaining because she forgot to pick-up his cleaning on her way from day-care to work. Nine out of ten of these women require antidepressants, psycho-therapy and/or other medication.

Viagra, and it’s many siblings, gives me hope that equality of capitalist opportunity is about to arrive. We have located the very mother lode, the throbbing, needy heart of male insecurities, and it is just the beginning. Any new product, drug, or procedure that will give a man a bigger, harder dick will sell at any price. Start investing, girlfriends. The future’s looking bright.

War Stories

Like John McCain, Hillary is remembering her War. And just as her war is turning into a senior moment or worse, we have the first McCain for President ad. So there’s McCain, looking youthful and handsome, like a matinee idol an old black and white movie—it could be World War II, the romantic hero in the film has a raged smoke dangling from his lips, reclined, smudged and dirty faced, his is the face of the young warrior hero, handsome, captured, tragic, tortured, and still giving rank and serial number. He looks nothing like the old walnut jowled, pal of the lobbyist, foe of the lobbyist, Maverick, courting the worst of the Christian right wing, hugging George Bush, Washington insider with nothing much going for him except longevity and that same fierce desire to survive we see in the eyes of the handsome young soldier.

And to our mortification, we have Hillary Clinton, on several occasions and over a significant period of time, retelling a war story, scripted, and yet off the cuff. The details so eerily similar, it is as if we are watching an actress rehearse her role. Getting the gestures and cadence down, changing the rhythm to find just the perfect timing, to make us feel the danger, see her bravery, realize she really does have the right stuff to be our War Time President. Thing is, we don’t want a war time president. We want a leader with good judgement who can get us out of this mess, not keep us in it forever. That’s John McCain’s essential problem, too. That and the fact that he is wooden before the camera and will not do terribly well in debate with either Hillary or Barack. That either one would make him seem feeble and befuddled by comparison. But on this one issue, in this particular point in our history we can't afford to loose this election. It’s too important. too important for anyone’s personal political ambition to override the will of the people. It is time to let our votes count. It's time to engage our real opponent and Hillary has her priorities wrong. It is time for her to rise above her own desire to make history. It's my sincere belief that unless she withdraws from the primary contest and wholeheartedly supports Barack Obama, we can kiss our children’s future good bye. She cannot run against McCain after the news footage that gives the lie to her “memory” of an actual event in the not that distant past. Is it early onset Alzheimer‘s? Tired once, maybe……. But this story was told at least three different times and covered by the press. So was the arrival in Bosnia. It was a lie. And now she is sending in the big money muscle to strong arm Nancy Pelosi, making veiled threats. It sickens me, because I, who have no talent or experience and certainly have no desire to do so, have just written John McCain’s first ad of the General Election. If Hillary steals the nomination, a monkey could write it.

Bordello In A Gold Rush

I just heard David Brooks say on NPR that the democrats are starting to look like they can’t manage a bordello in a gold-rush. This sound bite came minutes after I got another letter from Howard Dean telling me how desperate the DNC is for money to help us run against John McCain. The gall!

Sometimes It’s hard to be a democrat.

Yet Again, A Letter to Howard Dean

Dear Howard Dean
Perhaps you have not received my last several letters to you. Allow me to reiterate my position on making contributions to the DNC. I am not pleased that you are allowing the Clinton’s to strong-arm super-delegates along with the Speaker of the House. I know that the Clintons are powerful and have some powerful people— those all important big donors—backing then. But we, the little people, are giving what little money we have available to us to the candidate of our choice. Until you , the Chairman of the DNC, do something to end this nasty primary season, we will continue to give to the candidate of our choice, and the DNC can go to hell. It is this absence of leadership that has soured my support for the organization of which you are Chairman. Please act like a leader. In the meantime, stop asking me for money.

Tort Reform (sic)

Well it passed, quickly and quietly. Now juries are prohibited from awarding punitive damages if the local chemical company poisons your little town and gives everyone cancer. This legislation was pushed by the Bush administration and sponsored by my senator Orin Hatch. Senator Hatch you’ll be hearing from me. So will every democrat who voted for this vile legislation. Sadly this includes Senator Obama, and Senator Feinstein. Oh god, won’t someone say it isn’t so? Clinton was not listed. Perhaps this is another vote she choose to avoid. If only Obama had skipped this vote. Usually I’m in favor of everyone showing up to vote, but this one breaks my heart. What are they thinking? The only ones helped by this legislation are corporations—the insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the tobacco industry, the chemical industry, and on and on and on. Once again the fat cats screw the working class.

Hillary's Hit List

Hillary is mighty Nixonian these days. She lies about her “experience” and say’s she’s sleep deprived. On three or four occasions??? Scripted and over many months? Then Bill comes out today and says, “Come on, y’all. This isn’t tough, you haven’t been in a presidential race before. This is just a little dust up. If you can’t take a lil’ ol’ skirmish like this……” Charming Billy. God, I did fall hard for that man when I didn’t know him. Than sadly, I got to know him too well. Yes, the early Clinton years, those were the most prosperous time in my odd career as an aging barbie. I even had a stock portfolio. Those were the days, before Hillary messed it up with her opaque approach to single payer health care for all Americans. She is stubborn about letting us know what she’s really up to. She could have had help, it was offered, but no, Hillary knows best. Then when the vast right wing conspiracy was investigating every aspect of her life, she stonewalled releasing papers. It kept the fire raging to know what she was hiding and why. I got real tired of it. And after Monica, et al, things just seemed to trail off into pardons for Bill’s criminal friends, and packing.

I do not want any family to become a political dynasty. If your daddy was president, become a great governor and retire to write a book about your daddy. No more sons, or wives of former presidents. Instead, if you are so ambitious and inclined, become the Speaker of the House, and make sane laws, but do not run for president. We have an excellent example of the reason dynastic presidencies are a very bad idea currently occupying the White House.

Hillary is just the kind of stubborn fighter, the kind who holds a grudge and never forgets anything, (except her memories) who would keep a hit list. She has surrounded herself with questionable advisors, people I don’t ever want to have to see interviewed on the evening news again . I am so sick of Mark Penn, Howard Wolfson and Terry McAliffe.
Talk about Rovian. This trio is Rove tripled.

Now the big monied insiders, the real muscle within the Clinton machine is trying to strong-arm Nancy Pelosi. In a letter these Clinton insiders sent to the Speaker of the House, they issued a thinly veiled threat. Back Obama and lose our support. You will regret it, seems to be the real message of the letter. You will really really regret it. Is Pelosi about to be added to the Hillary hit list?

Reckless Abandon

I am in favor of legalizing prostitution. I think sex workers deserve respect and admiration. No, I am not being arch, ironic or sarcastic. I mean it. I believe women and men should have complete control of the commodity that is their bodies. I have been reminded, in a recent comment to a piece I wrote, that the political candidates are “marketed like perfume.” And lest we forget, it is usually women’s bodies that sell all the products, and it is men who make the big bucks off the product, legal or otherwise. So I’m looking forward to the day when women really do claim the power that is theirs to take.

In the meantime, we live in a country governed by laws and rules. We have agreed to live by these laws until we get to vote again to make the laws conform more to what we believe to be in the nation’s best interest. Until then, men who make the laws, vow to uphold the laws, enforce the laws, and then break those laws, should be held to the same standard that we hold the least lawbreaker among us. I break the law. You break the law. We all break the law now and then. But if you are ambitious enough to become an attorney who becomes a prosecutor and then an attorney general, and then a governor, or even a mayor, and you break the laws you punished in each of those positions after having vowed to uphold the laws, you should lose your office, and go to jail. If you purger yourself in front of a Grand Jury, it isn’t your hypocrisy, it’s your getting caught. It’s your recklessness. It’s a little like have a sibling who is a meth user. As long as she doesn’t steal from you to support her habit, obviously endanger her kids or yours, or get caught and go to jail, you can maintain the illusion that everything is fine in the family. But once her damaged kids are loosed upon you and your husband, and her trial has become a media circus that makes the carefully crafted fiction that is your life unravel before your eyes, well then, maybe you’ll decide it’s time to get real.

I have never known a man who was faithful. I do not claim to be representative of all women. I know my experience with men is not everywoman’s. But I think testosterone drives them to it. Odd that it is men who make the laws that are so intolerant of the very behavior that they are driven to engage in. There is much science to back up the claim that men are literally led around by their gonads. Helpless to the wants of their little-brain’s desires. It certainly was my experience with men. My observation of the husbands of friends and coworkers.

And it is mostly men who control the industries that continue to market women in the advertising and entertainment industries as objects. So completely has internet porn taken over the zeitgeist, that almost every image depicted of “woman,” is of a woman so far removed from the reality of the normal range possible for women, that she is almost a separate species, one we cannot join. And we, the consumers of this icon, are willing to carve ourselves up with the help of our plastic surgeons, so we can bear to even glimpse ourselves in the mirror for more than a second or two without a shudder. Too fat, too old, too ugly to keep your mate. And he is ever driven, and always will be, to mate wherever and whenever he can, even in the anonymous stalls of men’s rooms in airports. Which is fine, I guess, if you don’t take your six year old son into the airport stall with you when Larry Craig, or Pastor Haggard is trolling. So let’s free the men’s rooms and legalize prostitution for both men and women. But, if it wasn’t a crime would it still be as exciting?

So, once again, I come down on the side of having some expectation that if you hold any position that calls for you to take an oath to uphold the law, don’t get caught breaking it. If no one gets injured as you break the law, and you don’t get caught, I say it’s nobody's business but your own. In the meantime I’ll keep voting to change the laws to reflect our realities. And sex workers of both sexes should work in legal, safe, taxed and represented industries that they control. Sex Workers of the World, Unite!

Another Letter to Howard Dean

Dear Howard Dean,

You have sent me an email asking for money for the general election. Until you put a stop to the bloodletting that’s going on in this artificially prolonged primary season, I will continue to give the ten dollars a month I can squeeze out of my disability check to Senator Obama. It is in the interest of the democratic party that this trumped-up horse race—a great boon for the news pundits and the republicans—be brought to an end. Barack Obama has won twice as many states, has the lead in both pledged delegates and the popular vote, and he is gaining on Senator Clinton in the super- delegate support.

You are the party chairman. You are behaving like the democrats we are all so angry with in the Senate—unwilling to take a strong stand and work it like you mean it. I understand that the Clinton brand has cachet. I understand that it won’t make you popular with the Clintons to twist her arm to step aside. But it must be done. Otherwise you risk going into a general election with nothing in the coffers. Granted, I am a small donor, but there are millions like me, giving ten dollars at a time to Senator Obama. It is the reason he has raised so much money online. He has a very strong, grassroots, bottom-up organization. I know—I’m one of the many volunteers who helped him win Utah.

Please do your job, so we might have a chance of uniting the country to win the general election.

So..? I Made a Mistake.

It’s not the only one. I’m not going to list them here, I don’t have that much time. But this one is in the McCain category. Remember when he and probably Lindsey Graham among others went strolling through a market in Baghdad claiming it was perfectly safe, bla, bla, bla. While they were body armored up and covered by a battalion or so, on the ground and in the air. It was all BS, manufactured to sell the “Surge,” or escalation as I prefer, and believe to be more accurate. Hillary Clinton has said several times in scripted speeches that she had a dangerous, “under sniper fire” moment in Bosnia. “A trip too dangerous for the President.” She said it quite awhile ago and again recently on more than one setting and covered by the press. It has been You Tubed to death, I am sure. It will be used in ads against her if she gets nomination. It was not a misstatement, it was a lie. The kind of lie that makes me cringe. She is conflating all kinds of “experience.” And even though it has been proven to be a lie, unlike Bill, at least, she just shrugs and says, “So..? I misspoke, I’m human.” Does this response remind you of anyone?

Cheney Wants To Nuke Someone, Guess Who

As Cheney, McCain, Graham, and Lieberman leave the Middle East, the Saudi’s start trying to figure out how to protect themselves from nuclear fallout. Sounds to me like we’re getting ready to Nuke Iran and the pesky Al-Qaeda they are training and sending into Iraq. (See earlier post—-Yes, Iran Has No Al- Qaeda). Never men to be deterred by mere facts, it’s just a matter of repeating the lie over and over until enough of us believe it. Then it’s bombs away, and we’re off to the End of Days.

Lieberman is functioning as McCain’s handler—do I see a McCain/Lieberman ticket on the horizon? And if we continue spreading our excellent democracy (on the tip of a missile) in the Middle East, we’re going to need a Draft. This odd quartette is bent on spreading Wester Religious Freedom in the heart of the Muslim World. Stirring the hornets nest of “Radical Islamic Terrorism” to justify bombing the whole damn place back to the stone age. It will also reinforce the lie at the heart of the Iraq War, in part, because it’s going to make all Muslims hate us forever. “See, they do hate us, we were right all along!”

It will also give Reverend Wright and me something else to add to our long list of atrocities committed in the name of America.

“And it’s five, six, seven
Open up the pearly gates
Well, there ain’t no time to wonder why
WHOOPIE! We’re all gonna die….”

Special thanks to Stella for the lyrics to that excellent song of protest from the Vietnam War days, by Country Joe and the Fish.

Should Philandering Matter In Politics?

I vote yes on this one. It is an indication of character. I know people, mostly men I have to admit, who have convinced their mates to engage in “open” marriages. I have always wondered why these people decided to get married in the first place. If you want to screw around, why not stay single? What’s in it for the women? I suppose if your husband is stinking rich, and you enter into a marriage with an iron-clad prenuptial agreement that he will pay you for giving him the illusion of respectability that marriage confers in certain types of professions, then that’s your business—business being the operative word. But if you are a politician, get your wild oats days firmly in your past before you ask us to trust you.

If you will lie to your wife, you will certainly lie to me. If you cheat your family, squander the kids college fund to pay for high priced hookers, you will lie to me and foolishly spend my tax dollars. It goes to character. It goes to accountability. If you believe the rules don’t apply to you because you’re so damn special, become a hedge-fund manager.

Hillary Clinton, Friend of the Little Guy??!!!??

There is this myth, reinforced each day in the news world, that Hillary Clinton is a friend of the working class, the blue-collar, Joe six-pack kind of guy. Since when? The only way she can keep this myth going is to dodge the tax return issue.

What Hillary learned during her bungled attempt to give us single payer universal health care for all Americans, was not to mess with the insurance lobby. So now her health care plan is not a single payer plan, but, like the new prescription plan, medicare part D, is run by the insurance companies to the detriment of the taxpayers and the people getting the help. I am one of the people benefiting from the plan, but that is because my income is below the poverty limit and puts me in a special category. Most retirees don’t get that good a deal. Hillary Clinton is so well plugged into the big business loop she will never find her way out. She is connected up the wazzoo.
So where did this reputation for feeling the pain of the little guy get started? It is one of the many faces of the new and improved brand that is the Clinton myth, created for this particular time and just for Pennsylvania’s poor under-educated working class. It is being patched together out of thin air for the most cynical of reasons.

John's Excellent Adventure

Oh never mind that his trip around the world spreading misinformation and lies is being paid for by us, the impoverished taxpayers. It’s the photo opps, stupid. John is looking Presnitential. Isn’t that all we need in a Presnit? The fake war hero status, the ignorance on the economy, the total lack of knowledge of the Middle East, the nasty temper, the decrepitude, the fact that he just might keel-over at any moment, dead of old age, that makes him so exciting? How badly can we ruin this country before the slumbering populous wakes from the dream that it’s all just peachy?

One, Two, Three, Four...

I’m old enough to remember the rallying cries of the sixties, and they are making a comeback. I heard today on CNN, demonstrators in Washington chanting “One, two, three, four. We don’t want your oil war! “ Lacks something of the passion I remember as the original was “One, two, three, four. We don’t want your fucking war!” But to quote another inspirational line, “It doesn’t take a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” Ah yes, “The times they are a changin’.”

Yes, Iran Has No Al-Qaeda

Probably no bananas either. And the women are forced to wear traditional Islamic dress, not the burka, but the head scarf and a long dark coat or robe thingy. No makeup, no nail polish. Not encouraged to do much of anything but make her family’s life a “paradise.” But the lights are on, the water’s running, bombs are not going off in the cafes or markets. It is not impossible for a woman to get an education and they are not prohibited form working, just strongly discouraged. Is Iran training Al-Qaeda or even supporting Al-Qaeda elsewhere? It’s highly improbably, most unlikely, and not in Iran’s self interest.

John McCain’s “misstatement” or as I’d call it, “oft told lie”, shows one of two problems. He is either senile, stupid and arrogant like Bush the Younger, or he is a propagandist like Bush the Younger, et al. It is a Rovian tactic to repeat the lie over and over in various settings with much press coverage, until it has been heard so often by the populous that it is perceived as truth.

A good read on the shifts in the culture of Iran is the wonderful book “Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir.” This excellent book was written by Azar Nafisi, and published in 2003. It give us a very good look at the hostilities between Iran and Iraq, told by a female academic teaching at one of the universities in Tehran. Set in the 1980’s, after the revolution that put the Islamists in control in Iran, with the strongman, thuggish Saddam Hussein, a nasty Sunni neighbor, looking for trouble and getting it. Iran is pretty much the only Shia country in the neighborhood.

John, old boy, take a history class, read a book, get an advisor, someone who knows his ass from a hole in the ground.