I try to avoid posting anything politico on here, because I want it to be a sanctuary for only aesthetically (take Bunny (+ Vanessa Williams) above) and ideologically beautiful things, but right now this is too urgent, so here it is...
Leave it to the theatrical genius of our time (the mighty Lady Bunny) to lead the so so so so so urgently essential charge against the Satanic Republican ticket and all their catastrophic, inevitable and inoperable damage to the environment (last chance to do anything to stop global warming – and you know damned well that McCain/Palin sure as fuck won't do ANYTHING to promote renewable energy or force any corporations to go green because THEY'RE OWNED BY THE OIL COMPANIES), the economy (I don't know about you but I haven't had any steady work IN A YEAR and hundreds of thousands of others are in the same sinking lot), immigration (laws THAT NEED TO BE CORRECTED NOW), real public transit and rail systems for those of us who don't want to keep making global warming worse with gas-guzzling and polluting cars, trucks, and SUVs that are the CAUSE OF THE NEED FOR OIL IN THE FIRST PLACE, health care (YES, WE NEED SOCIALIZED MEDICINE), GLBT equality (same sex marriage laws or not, they can still fuck us over big time), and yes, abortion rights (the last thing this world needs right now is more backward Republicans (and sure as hell Palins), or obviously children forced to be born from rape and/or incest – and frankly I don't know how any breeders OR gays and lesbians can be so selfish, irresponsible, and just plain MORONIC to bring any new children into the world right now at all when nobody has any idea if the world's going to implode in OUR lifetime, let alone THEIRS), and I could go on and on and on. As everyone knows I just want to get the hell out of this backward country, and have since I was 5, but I CAN'T BECAUSE I CAN'T GET ANY WORK, LARGELY BECAUSE I CAN'T AND WON'T DRIVE. And even if I did get to Spain, or Veracruz, or Kyoto, or Montevideo, they'll take the rest of the world with 'em. Now I'll get off my soapbox and lead it to the girl who should be running things...
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From Lady Bunny...
A HEARTY THANKS TO THE LADIES OF THE VIEW! FOR GRILLING MCCAIN HARDER THAN ANY OF THE ANCHORS' MAJOR NETWORKS NEWS CHANNELS
I'm so glad that Joy Behar called him on his LIES, using the word LIES. Politicians and news anchors always say that so and so was "misleading", or "stretching the truth" – they can't quite seem to come out, as Joy did, and say LIES, which they are! If McCain can't stand up to a coffee klatch, how on earth is the turd running with national defense as his strong suit? The fact is, there is no explanation for his lies except that he's a scuzz running a nasty campaign which counts on American's being so stupid that his misleading ads will work. And he promised early on in his campaign that he was too honorable to use any negative ads.
Barbara and Joy were in a delicious attack mode, as if this man was so plainly wrong that he didn't even deserve much respect, earning mine in the process. Whoopi just hung back with an attitude of "Honey, I already know this thing is the devil" and thankfully Sherri Shepherd, who thinks the earth is flat, kept her stupid mouth shut. A very fun watch. Sure wish our newscasters could be as hard-hitting as these gals! Enjoy!
LIPSTICK ON A NIGHTMARE
Wow! Here I've been searching high and low for ways to discredit Sarah Palin, the Republican's new golden girl. And there are plenty of them to unearth. But Arianna Huffington is dead right – a creepy Alaskan religious nut/hunting freak with a pregnant unwed daughter isn't the issue we should be focusing on. The fundamentalists are going to back Palin no matter what because she's so anti-abortion that she doesn't even approve of abortions for rape and incest victims. As Randi Rhodes put it, if you were raped in Wasilla, Alaska at the time of Sarah's tenure as mayor, you'd call in to report a rape and would probably be asked for your name, location, description of attack number and your CREDIT CARD NUMBER, so that you could pay for your own rape kit, which gathers and analyzes the forensic evidence needed to convict your attacker.
In terms of colorful loonies, McCain/McSame/McBush made a masterful choice. Not perturbed by her abortion stance? The bitch advocates shooting wolves from helicopters. Speaking in her own Pentecostal church, she called the war a plan from God. But wait, isn't God's son the Prince of Peace? And whatever happened to Peace on Earth , Goodwill towards men and commandment #6 THOU SHALT NOT KILL? To claim that the baseless war in Iraq is God's plan is putting lip-stick on jihad, the muslim term for religious war. Admittedly, in the back of our minds, there is a scary thought that since McCain would be the oldest president ever if elected, another of those skin cancer lesions might pop up and kill him, leaving us with scary-ass Moose Thing from Alaska, whose recent interviews shows she knows nothing about foreign policy. The fool is even talking about starting a war with Russia!?! With what military?
But Palin has undeniably unified the Republican base in a way that McCain never could. The man was everyone's last choice as presidential nominee. Giuliani was the early fav, but thankfully that psycho burnt out quickly. Then the focus shifted to Huckabee, the preacher with a bible in one hand and a gun in the other. He quickly petered out, too. That left Mitt Romney, the plastic Mormon Reagan wannabe who spent like $200 per vote in one state that he lost before bowing out, and Fred Thompson, who just wasn't "presidential" enough and considered too lazy to get anything done by his own party. So McCain got the nomination by default. He was everyone's last choice as nominee. Old, cantankerous and prone to gaffes, he seemed a clear loser against his democratic rival, a younger, dynamic speaker who was rousing the nation (or at least the unprejudiced half of the nation) with his calls for change. Funny how McCain noticed how well Obama's change message was working--and stole it! McCain has to make every attempt to distance himself from George W. Bush, the least popular president in history, who shares McCain's party affiliation. Bush isn't even to be seen campaigning with McCain, and although McCain voted in line with Bush 90% of the time, he has the nerve to call himself a maverick!
Another debunking of McCain occurred during the RNC. McCain admitted that his captors in Vietnam broke him. He was captured, tortured, held for years and he finally gave in, providing his captors with military information and appearing in 30 propaganda videos! Honey, I'd do the same if I were tortured, But a war hero would have held out against the enemy! So McCain was a prisoner of war, which is no pleasant holiday, but he is no war hero. And if you really wanna go there, McCain's family connections got him promoted to pilot more quickly than his skills would recommend, which could be why he was shot down in the first place--he wasn't the best pilot! Even if he was, several torturous years in captivity doesn't mean that he has a clue what to do in a different war, decades later, when he's practically senile. And this bastard has even consistently voted against veterans rights! If you want to look for a foreign policy leader, look at how Bush has been quietly implementing the changes which OBAMA has recommended: drawing down troops in Iraq and sending more to combat the worsening situation in Afghanistan. Barack has also advocated diplomacy before war with even rogue nations and now Bush is talking with the one of the original points on the axis of evil, North Korea! Bush is implementing Obama's policy suggestions.
But for some reason, Americans have the uncanny ability to mindlessly bleat "SUPPORT THE TROOPS", even as their interest in the war diminishes. We're tired of it. Idiots, you're paying for it! News from Iraq has faded further and further from the headlines and from the top stories on TV. Why? Because many Americans only get involved in politics when gas prices go up and they can't afford to drive to their next door neighbor's house--because their cup-holder and cigarettes are in there--in a gas-guzzling SUV as cheaply as they used to. To me, if the economy is your main issue as a christian nation, perhaps you should consider that your righteous christian butts are all accomplices to mass murder, paying millions everyday to occupy Iraq with Iraqi deaths estimated between 655,000 and one million. Little memory refresher: these are deaths of citizens of a country which never attacked us. But even if you are a card-carrying atheist, it's easy to understand that if we are spending hundreds of millions per day at war, then that's not going to help out our record deficit. Well now, there was a little good news on the recession front. That tax rebate! Woo hoo! That diddly-squat wouldn't even pay two months of my insurance bill! (One article found that Americans spent most of their rebates on porn!) Don't trust anyone who is giving away money--that's a guaranteed smokescreen. How about getting the hell out of Iraq and distributing some of those trillions we've wasted to broken Americans being forced from their homes due to the mortgage fiasco? Instead, McCain is committed to "staying the course", even if it takes 100 years. With the war costing a fortune and a presidential candidate committed to extending it indefinitely, we're in great shape economically. AND MCCAIN HAS ADMITTED THAT HE KNOWS LITTLE ABOUT THE ECONOMY! Here's his quote from the Boston Globe:"The issue of economics is not something I've understood as well as I should. I've got Greenspan's book". So the old fart admits that he can't resurrect the nation from recession, the country's #1 issue. But I'll vote for him anyway because I don't trust a black man who makes sense?
Usually makes sense. While we're on the subject of taxes, even Obama is promising to cut taxes. People! WE NEED TO PAY MORE TAXES! That's how we get better public healthcare and education! Taxes provide a higher standard of living through better public services, like the ones which assist the elderly obtaining medicines they can't afford. Currently, some old folks are skipping their medicines because they are so broke that they must now choose between medicine and food. The grand old USA is becoming a 3rd world country! Higher taxes mean better-funded public services. Say $200 bucks is knocked off of your annual tax bill. Are you so short-sighted that you can't see that this isn't covering one month's astronomical insurance payment? I'm worried that as charismatic as he is, Obama is too much a gentleman to fight back as hard as he's getting it. Or maybe his advisors have cautioned him that "Look, guy. You've gotten 1/2 of the voters to accep a black guy with the middle name Hussein. But they will not accept an angry black man of any name. We're still too racist a country for that." But how can any message, angry or not, get through to a nation that is so childish and ADD that they boil what may be the most important election of their lifetimes to THIS [NY Post's Lipstick on a Pig/Obama Slams Pig Swill cover].
I'm livid over this manufactured "scandal". Not only does a pig in lipstick have nothing to do with an exit strategy from Iraq, global warming, the mortgage crisis, reforming healthcare, our school system or half a dozen other things in decline like levees and collapsing bridges, The Post didn't even ask me for a release before they used my photo for this cover! The noive! OINK! And check out the tiny little box in the upper left corner which says 9/11, we'll never forget. No, we won't ever forget the tragedy. We'll just let a pig in cosmetics eclipse your 7th anniversary! I saw that second bulding fall on 9/11 and here's a few things I'll never forget. 9/11 happened on George Bush's watch. He did not keep the people in my city safe. Hell, he didn't keep the Pentagon safe. Bush's dad was eating breakfast with Osama Bin Laden's father, an old Bush family business partner, when 9/11 occurred. All flights for Americans were shut down, but over a dozen Saudi's were allowed to fly home. Saudi Arabia being the country that most of the hijackers hailed from. Taking advantage of our shock, we allowed ourselves to be lead into a war with Iraq which had no weapons of mass destruction and posed no imminent threat. As a result, the whole word hates us and we are breeding generations upon generations of terrorists who can't wait to attack us. 7 years later, we are in still in that war. But how can it be a war if no one from that country attacked us? It's a military occupation, and it will last until we've drained every drop of oil from Iraq. We recently got a C as a grade on how safe we are from our biggest threat, a nuclear attack. This grade was from a bi-partisan investigatory committee called Partnership For A Secure America. Remember that the next time you are taking of your shoes and throwing away your hand cream at the airport. There is ludicrous talk of the surge succeeding. The "surge"? A surge is a quick pulse. We been surgin' now for over a year, and though Bush is reducing troop numbers in Iraq, the troop levels will still be higher than the pre-surge levels. Our military is wiped out. It's hard to recruit when the tours of duty have increased in length and the times at home have been cut short.
WE'VE ALL PUT LIPSTICK ON ALL OF THE IMPORTANT CAMPAIGN ISSUES--AND WE'RE DISCUSSING THE LIPSTICK AND NOT THE ISSUES WHICH AFFECT OUR DAILY LIVES! And now I'll let Arianna Huffington bring it on home with her fantastic article which puts the whole Palin mess into perspective beautifully. I normally don't paste entire articles, but this is too important and there's not much time, folks. Quit bitching about the government and do something or you have no right to bitch. Contribute $. Forward emails. Challenge friends and neighbors. Blog it. Announce it in your shows. Hang up a sign or wear a button or t-shirt. In a democracy, the government is WE THE PEOPLE. Christ, have we ever failed ourselves by sitting back and whining. TIME FOR ACTION NOW! Or your ass will really be whining if McCain gets in.
[and passed on by Lady Bunny...]
SARAH PALIN: A TROJAN MOOSE CONCEALING FOUR MORE YEARS OF GEORGE BUSH
by Arianna Huffington
Did Sarah Palin wrongfully push to have her ex-brother-in law fired? Was she really against the "Bridge to Nowhere?" Did she really sell Alaska's plane on eBay, or just list it on eBay? Did she actually have any substantial duties commanding the Alaska National Guard?
The correct answer to all these questions is: who cares? Which isn't to say these aren't valid questions, or that Palin and the McCain camp aren't playing it fast, loose, and coy with each of them. The point is that Palin, and the circus she's brought to town, are simply a bountiful collection of small lies deliberately designed to distract the country from one big truth: the havoc that George Bush and the Republican Party have wrought, and that John McCain is committed to continuing.
Every second of this campaign not spent talking about the Republican Party's record, and John McCain's role in that record, is a victory for John McCain.
Her critics like to say that Palin hasn't accomplished anything. I disagree: in the space of ten days she's succeeded in distracting the entire country from the horrific Bush record – and McCain's complicity in it. My friends, that's accomplishment we can believe in. Just look at the problem John McCain faced. George Bush has a disastrous record, and the country knows it. John McCain – the current one, not the one who vanished eight years ago – has no major disagreements with George Bush (and I'm sorry, wanting to fire Donald Rumsfeld a bit sooner doesn't qualify) and wants to continue his incredibly unpopular policies for another four years. The solution? Enter Sarah Palin, a Trojan Moose carrying four more years of disaster.
And the plan has worked beautifully. Just look at what's being discussed just 57 days before the election. Is it the highest unemployment rate in five years? The bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? The suicide bombing yesterday in Iraq that killed six people and wounded 54 – in the same market where last month a bomb killed 28 people and wounded 72? That the political reconciliation that was supposedly the point of "the surge" is nowhere near happening? That Iraq's Shiite government is now rounding up the American-backed Sunni leaders of the Awakening? That the reason 8,000 soldiers may be leaving Iraq soon is so more can be deployed to Afghanistan where the Taliban is steadily retaking the country?
No. We're talking about whether Sarah Palin was or was not a good mayor, whether she was or was not a good mother, whether her skirts are too short and her zingers too sarcastic.
Contrary to what we're hearing 24/7 in the media, the next few weeks are not a test of Sarah Palin. The next few weeks are a test of Barack Obama.
He needs to dramatically redirect this election back to a discussion over the issues that really matter – the issues that will impact the future of this country. A presidential campaign is a battle and this is the time for Obama to show some commander-in-chief skills. I'm not talking about calling Palin out for lying about his record and demeaning community organizing. I'm talking about grabbing the political debate by the throat. The country is already angry about what's happened over the last seven-plus years – he shouldn't be afraid to give voice to that anger. Obama has spent years adopting a non-threatening persona; but he can't let his fear that appearing like an "angry Black man" (a stereotype not-too-subtly fueled by Fox News) will turn off swing voters keep him from channeling the disgust and outrage felt by so many voters –swing and otherwise. McCain's team, in an effort to distract, is going to keep doing what they're doing – diverting voters and the media with a tantalizing combination of personal trivia and small lies. It doesn't matter if they're caught in them – in fact, all the better. Because they know there is no way in hell they can win if this election is about the big truth of the Bush years.
McCain's real running mate is George Bush and the failed policies of the Republican Party. Even if they are dressed up in a skirt, lipstick, and Tina Fey glasses.
