WHAT HAPPENED, INDEED.....

I had no idea when I first started posting a few years ago what was ahead for our country. What was ahead was to be so dark that my imagination failed.  Our country has been swamped by hatred and bigotry unleashed by a man without a moral compass... heck, forget the compass, he has no morals whatsoever.  

Donald Trump started his "career" in politics by questioning if our first Black president was born in the United States. My thoughts were, "No one would pay attention to him." Wrong.

He next popped up on my radar by saying in 2015 that he was running for President of these United States. "What a joke!" I thought. Wrong.

After he was elected it soon became clear that he was going to be the wrecking ball for the far-right conservative movement... nothing was sacred.... nothing too low.... nothing for the country... the ends justify the means.... his base loved it. I thought, "The good people in the GOP would sit on him." Wrong. Some did try, but they had to leave the party to try.

As I write this today, I am faced with the realization that the GOP, after 4 years of tearing down the foundation of the government in an attempt to discard "by and for the people" are continuing to be "by and for Trump" and the GOP. Period.

Trump, his enablers and minions went so far as to foment an insurrection by attacking the U.S. Capitol, threatening lawmakers and the Vice President in a bid for power trying to nullify the Presidential election.  Now, since this failed, the GOP is now manipulating State laws by low-handed legal maneuvers and propaganda, supporting the big lie that Trump won the election... all applauded by Vladimir Putin and Russia who have Trump and evidently much of the GOP in their pocket. Don't doubt it.

By taking the country back decades, to the "good old days;" by promoting the suppression and persecution of Blacks and "others;" by passing arcane voting laws; by chipping away at the rights of women, LGBTQ  and anything else the GOP deems as threatening their white-supremacy and fringe-religious prejudices; the GOP has exposed the rancid underbelly of the country. I was living in la-la land. I had no idea.

This rant will do nothing to change this headlong rush to autocracy.  I don't have the answers. Will those who are misled or uncaring start to see what is going on? Will they understand the consequences, what it means to live under a dictator? Do they understand that their rights will be trampled, their lives altered and not for the good?

We must do more than hope so. Speak out, vote, support those trying to preserve our democracy. I live in hope that some day we can say.... "The democracy survived, but look at what almost happened to our country."

 

 

Gov. Branstad Knows Best

If you happen to be a poor woman living in Iowa and on Iowa's form of Medicaid, you'll have to get permission from Governor Terry Branstad if you choose to lawfully end your pregnancy, as reported in The Des Moines Register today.

A provision of the newly signed state-sponsored Iowa Health and Wellness Plan gives Brandstad the "final say on whether to pay for abortion services provided under the program."

He admitted it was a political compromise.... read far-right demand.... but that "he was comfortable with the new responsibility."

Here is how he explains this indignity.... Branstad, who is a member of the Catholic faith, said "he would seek advice from medical experts when required to make a determination on whether state dollars would be spent on an abortion."

So poor women of Iowa, it's obvious Branstad thinks you're not only poor, but morally inferior and stupid, and thus incapable making a decision on this personal, very personal, health care right.

Where is the ACLU when we need them?  Isn't this an abridgment of not only the First and Fourth Amendments of the U. S. Constitution, but it also nullifies the intent of Roe vs Wade to protect a woman's reproductive rights.

It's nice that Branstad is comfortable with his ultimate veto power over this most personal of decisions, but the women of Iowa should be up-in-arms at the idea of another old white far-right male imposing his anti-choice religious views on them, by Iowa law no less.

This also places Iowa in the unique position of being the only one of the 50 states to suffer this daddy-knows-best embarrassment.   

Obama Warms to Warming...

At last Obama seems poised to enact measures to address global warming.  According to the New York Times, he is preparing regulations for carbon dioxide emissions of power plants.... electric power plants being the biggest polluters responsible for nearly 40 per cent of our country's greenhouse gas emissions.  A major step in the right direction.

Expect to hear weeping and wailing from the power industry, as well as scare tactics from in-their-pocket politicians.

The Ayatollah Would Approve!

Since when does U.S. citizenship hinge on church membership? Margaret Doughty must wonder "what happened to her country" .....the one she's lived in for 30 years.  The Huffington Post fills us in.

Cain: GOP's Latest Showman

This opinion piece, appearing in this morning's Des Moines Register, rips the veneer off of the GOP's public face. A must read.....

Written by HARRY BROD

HARRY BROD is professor of philosophy and humanities at the University of Northern Iowa. Contact: harry.brod@uni.edu

With the most recent poll showing Herman Cain leading in Iowa by a margin of 10 points over his closest rival, it's time to take a longer look at the Cain candidacy, a longer view that looks back to the former candidate whose mantle all Republican contenders now claim, Ronald Reagan.

There's a direct line from Reagan to Cain, but it's not in terms of values or issues, where Reagan was much too moderate for the current crowd. I mean the line from Reagan the actor to Cain the motivational speaker, the line that underscores the increasing victory of style over substance.

Sincerity is everything in politics. If you can fake that you've got it made, goes the old saying. Renowned physician Oliver Sacks (the basis for Robin Williams' character in the movie "Awakenings") tells of patients with a condition that turns them into sort of human lie detectors - they spot insincerity, and find it hilarious. Sacks once walked by a room in which a group of such patients were laughing hysterically. Peeking in to see what was going on, he found them glued to the TV, watching a Reagan speech.

Reagan understood the importance of stagecraft. He was controversially the first president to return a military salute, a violation of military protocol. Not even five-star General Eisenhower did that as president. He respected that the privilege of saluting comes with the uniform, not from the title of commander-in-chief.

Cain's got a commanding stage presence, too, but he takes too much command. He reacts to interview questions thrown at him like a batter at home plate, swinging hard at pitches he likes but ignoring others, even those in the strike zone. One wonders if the swagger Republicans like will continue to be popular. Americans tend to want their chief as well as pizza executives to answer the questions they're asked.

Today the way to convince people you're doing or would do a good job as president is by appearing rather than being presidential. When he tried to actually function as head of our executive branch President Bill Clinton was criticized as a "policy wonk," and President Barack Obama tries hard to avoid that label. As far as I can tell, wonkiness is a charge that they're trying to do their job.

Or at least that they're trying to do the job the Constitution envisions for them. But the line from Reagan to Cain traces a different job description, emptying the job of real content and leaving it as a figurehead position, not so much chief executive as national spokes model.

There is indeed a policy agenda behind the Republican emptying out of the presidency, but it's not spoken out loud. The policy is privatization, meaning increasing corporatization of our lives, with the essential functions of once public institutions like schools, prisons and the military increasingly outsourced to private contractors, putting them outside the democratic process by which they could be controlled.

That's why the Republican Party is out to prevent government from functioning. Convince people that government is inherently dysfunctional, and corporations are there to fill in the gap. The less government does, the more unregulated and excess profit there is to be made.

For those puzzled by Cain's new ad featuring his campaign manager blowing his cigarette smoke into the camera while the song sings "I am America," it's Cain repaying his corporate sponsor. He got his political start as a Washington lobbyist for the National Restaurant Association and made his mark by turning it into a front organization for the tobacco industry by opposing regulations on smoking in restaurants, a move opposed by many restaurant owners who thought his actions were bad for small businesses.

The lines spoken by candidates in the Reagan-Cain line are written by someone else. These candidates are a mouthpiece for the corporate interests behind them, and their seemingly presidential style is just skillful corporate ventriloquism. I'll let you figure out what that makes them.

GOP's Spooky Candidates

As Halloween draws near, ones thoughts turn to things scary, even bizarro.

Like demons.

But for some evangelical Christians, demons stalk us year-round. They believe demons have taken hold of parts of our country, especially Washington, D.C.

O.K… I can live with the D.C. part.

As the recent AP release “Election-year goals of fringe Christian group questioned” points out, some Christian religious leaders, like Lou Engle the leader of The Call prayer marathons, has warned that the tornado that decimated Joplin, Missouri this year was evidence of God’s judgment on the country over…. wait for it…. abortion. Demons are punishing women over choice, so they leveled Joplin.

Say what?

And, Mike Bickle, founder of the International House of Prayer, views the acceptance of same-sex marriage as a sign of the end times. The end times, the favorite theme of the follow-my-nutty-ideas-or-you’ll-burn-in-hell pulpit thumpers (pass the plate).

But here is the creepiest part, these apocalyptic doomsayers were the organizers of GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry’s Houston prayer rally in August, a week before he announced his candidacy. The end of the world is an intense focus of many of the religious leaders involved in the rally.

Now that’s scary.

Actually, Perry should be holding prayer meetings about God’s judgment on Texas, as large parts of that parched state burn like the portal to hell-fires.

But, it isn’t just Perry, as Karl Giberson and Randall Stephens reveal in today’s New York Times editorial, “The Evangelical Rejection of Reason… The Republican presidential field has become a showcase of evangelical anti-intellectualism. Herman Cain, Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann deny that climate change is real and caused by humans.” Perry and Bachmann also dismiss evolution as an unproven theory.

Giberson and Stephens expose the anti-intellectual fundamentalist evangelicals who promote (and profit from) the idea that “their country has been overrun by a vast secular conspiracy.”

They point us to the earth-is-10,000-years-old leader, Ken Ham; the-founders-intended-America-to-be-a-Christian-nation, David Barton; and the really scary, gay-people-are-unnatural (and SpongeBob SquarePants promotes gayness), James C. Dobson. They left out the Rev. James Farwell who warned that Teletubby Tinky Winky might be gay. All of this would be funny…. if it wasn’t so relentlessly promoted.

These anti-intellectual scare-mongers want to take over our government…the Tea Party (useful dupes) is wrestling for control of the GOP, and intend to place the evangelical boogie-men’s hand-maiden, or man, in the White House.

Egads!

By the way, no Mormons, i.e., candidates Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman, need apply for evangelical political blessings... they're not real Christians.

“…when the faith of so many Americans becomes an occasion to embrace discredited, ridiculous and even dangerous ideas, we must not be afraid to speak out, even it it means criticizing fellow Christians.” Amen to that!!!

GOP's Anti-Patriotism

Sullivan Ballou was a major in the 2nd Rhode Island Volunteers during the Civil War. He wrote this letter to his wife in Smithfield, 14 July 1861 from Washington, D.C.:

Dear Sarah, The indications are very strong that we shall move in a few days, perhaps tomorrow. And lest I should not be able to write you again, I feel impelled to write a few lines that may fall under your eye when I am no more.

I have no misgivings about or lack of confidence in the cause in which I am engaged, and my courage does not halt or falter. I know how American civilization now leans on the triumph of the government and how great a debt we owe to those who went before us through the blood and suffering of the Revolution. And I am willing, perfectly willing, to lay down all my joys in this life to help maintain this government and to pay that debt.

Sarah, my love for you is deathless. It seems to bind me with mighty cables that nothing but Omnipotence can break. And yet my love of country comes over me like a strong wind and bears me irresistibly, with all these chains, to the battlefield.

Sullivan’s letter continues for many paragraphs as he expresses his undying love for his “dear Sarah," his hopes to see “our boys grown up to honorable manhood around us,” and how when his last breath escapes him, "it will whisper your name."

So how do our politicians today uphold this honorable, courageous recognition of the vital role our government plays in the lives of all of us. The recognition that civilization leans on the triumph of the government. The reverence for the great debt we owe to those who went before us? The burning inspiration that together our country can do great things, for and with each other?

Under this noble lens, it's hard to watch the current crop of GOP candidates elbow each other aside in their eagerness to curry favor with the anti-government, pro-corporate me-first Tea Party.

Presidential wanna-be Michelle Bachmann at a Tea Party rally called the current administration a "gangster government,” to great applause, and even claimed in a recent debate that citizens should pay no taxes at all.

The current GOP-majority House blocks job-creating measures intended to lift us out of the financial morass they are largely responsible for under the Bush/Cheney administration. Their constant drum beat is for tax breaks for corporations…. corporations they and the Supreme Court have labeled as “people” with the right to spend unlimited sums of money to buy elections. As GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney said this year at the Iowa State Fair, “Corporations are people, my friend.”

GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry calls the upcoming election a religious crusade to put God in charge of government. God is the cloak scroundels use to mask their raw lusting for the power of the presidency, however unqualified and self-serving. Bible-thumping rheotric designed to obscure their lack of patriotism.

Where are the GOP presidential candidates who will uphold Sullivan Ballou’s honorable, unselfish recognition of the vital role government plays in the lives of all of us?... and the great debt we owe to those who fought and died for this government? Their sacrifice wasn't for corporations.

Sullivan Ballou was mortally wounded at the first Battle of Bull Run a week after he wrote this letter. He was a true patriot… by definition a person who loves, supports, and defends his country and its interests with devotion. It says nothing about slash and burn devisive ideology against his government.

Grand Old Party, where are your Sullivan Ballous?

D.C. Under the Far-Right Heel

What would the country look like if the increasingly far-right Republican party had total sway over our government? They campaigned on jobs, jobs, jobs. How about a reality check.

Take for example Washington, D. C. Although the GOP-controlled U. S. House has been in power just a little over a month, they are busy negating the will of the D.C. taxpayers.

Today's article in the New York Times, "Even Less Representation", gives us a glimpse of what Republican control looks like:

"The district’s hard-won home rule came under assault from day one with a House rule scrapping the already pathetic power of its elected representative..... This overreach was rationalized by cynically redefining the city as just another part of the federal government.... now piling on with a proposal to overturn the district’s legalization of gay marriage duly enacted last year under home rule.

"Then came the Republicans’ broad assault on federal financing of abortions in the states, tailored to include a particularly insidious clause, barring the Washington district government from using even local taxes for legal abortions"

While we have watched transfixed in the last weeks as the Egyptians dramatically moved their country toward democracy, the far-right in our bastion of freedom are relentlessly trying to dismantle ours. To insert their religious beliefs into laws that mandate government intrusion into, and control over, our most basic freedoms.

If these rights come under the heel of federal and state control.... what other of our rights could be next? This is what is happening in our country. You can change this.... 2012. Vote.