The woman in the above picture appeared recently in a New York Times article titled “In Kentucky, Health Law Helps Voters But Saps Votes.”  It sums up with glaring clarity, two things that are particularly frustrating for for disenfranchised, cynical or apathetic voters:  1) a large number of people vote for the “image” or “brand” of a politician, seeming to completely ignore the fact that the politician they are supporting represents the opposite of what the voter believes or supports; and 2) politicians – especially democrats – are too big of cowards to stand up for what they believe, choosing to tell voters what they think the voter wants to hear, even if it is not the truth or what the politician believes.  The result is entrenched, dysfunctional government that continues to represent the interests of giant corporations and extreme wealth, while the general population continues to fight against each other, failing to see who really controls the levers of power and keeps the standard of living in the United States of America on a steady decline towards Third World style poverty.

With mid-term elections coming up, the mainstream U.S. media gives daily updates on projections of which of the two corporate owned parties will have control of the Senate and House after the November votes are counted.  The republicans already have control of the House of Representatives, and it doesn’t look like the democrats have much of a chance of retaking it.  This is in large part due to the extreme gerrymandering of voting districts in each state, a process in which  voting districts’ boundaries have been redrawn over and over to the careful calculations that guarantee for the most part, that the incumbent party maintains power.  Although both parties have played a role in this, the result is that in the House, republicans have more seats than the total number of voters suggest that they should, much like a presidential candidate can win the Electoral votes and presidency while losing the popular vote.  This distortion and disservice to democracy based on the simple principle of majority rule is passively accepted, with democrats grumbling and blaming the system while continuing to do nothing meaningful to change it.  It has also blown up in the republicans’ faces, who at first seemed to benefit from this newfound means of controlling the House without popular support:  the rise of the radical Tea Party, funded by billionaires across many states from Oligarchs like the Koch brothers.  In republican primaries now, especially across the South, once thought “safe” seats are being challenged by a new class of clowns that have no interests in governing, only obstructionism.  House Speaker John Boehner and recently defeated Eric Cantor have learned this lesson the hard way:  nothing can get done, compromise being nearly impossible thanks the new freshman class of Tea Baggers that retook the House from democrats at a terrible cost to everyone.

The Senate operates a little differently, with each state getting two senators, determined by a state wide popular vote instead of a gerrymandered illusion.  As a result, the democrats have had control of the Senate for sometime.  But what has that been worth?  Thanks to the democracy killing process known as the filibuster, in which 60 votes are required instead of 51 to pass legislation, very little has gotten done in this chamber either.  When Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, who is up for reelection, said publicly after Barack Obama was first elected president, that his number one priority as Senate Minority Leader would be to deny President Obama a second term, he was not exaggerating.  One would have thought at the time, with the world economy nearly collapsing thanks to the recklessness and corruption on Wall Street and in Washington, that his number one priority would have been to work with the newly elected president to solve the country’s problems.  But instead, Mr. McConnell and his minority in the Senate invoked a historical, record breaking number of filibusters to derail any legislation from passing.  If it were not for the democrats’ temporary “super majority” in the Senate in Obama’s first two years in office, nothing would have gotten passed, especially the Affordable Care Act.

Democrat Majority Leader Harry Reid, had more than one chance to use a procedural maneuver in the Senate to change the filibuster rule, but chose cowardice instead of leadership.  As I have said more than once over the past few years and in my blogs, I believe his cowardice was rooted in his and other Senate democrats number one priority, to maintain some level of power when they inevitably lose control of the Senate.  There were reports in the newspapers from time to time that Mr. Reid was so fed up with republican obstructionism, that he was on the verge of having the Senate change the fillibuster rule.  But, it was also reported, that when he almost grew a set of balls, there were enough neutered, career politician democrats in the Senate that were against the change.  Because they want to keep their near, do-nothing job with the right to obstruct and override majority rule, when they become the minority again.  In other words, they value their right to do nothing when in the minority, over their opportunity to do what is right when they are in the majority.

This gets us to the important point of, what does it matter, who is in control?  Well, we can start with the very narrow field of the new healthcare law.  Obama Care, as it is generally called in the public domain, or The Affordable Health Care Act, has been the whipping board of Obama critics since it’s conception.  Well, it’s actual conception began with the republican idea of keeping our dysfunctional, ineffective, super-expensive health care system in the hands of the private health insurance companies.   The republican conception that was eventually adopted by the Obama administration, began as Romney Care in Massachusetts.  Most Americans favored a single payer system like all other industrialized, wealthy countries in the world enjoy, where everyone is covered universally.  Many liberals and progressives, myself included, were furious that Obama’s team immediately abandoned any thoughts of pursuing such a permanent solution to our healthcare crisis, but in the end, most of us thought, the new system is better than the old one, even though the same vulture insurance companies are still profiting from acting as a go-between for patients and doctors, and still causing the massive, costly, confusing pile of paperwork.  But, there are now new consumer protections, such as not allowing insurance companies to deny coverage based on pre-existing conditions, no lifetime caps, etc.  The benefits are numerous and life changing for millions.  Despite the trouble plagued rollout of the national health exchange, millions of Americans have now gotten more affordable coverage, thanks to more competition among insurers, and subsidies from the federal government to help middle and lower income people afford private insurance.  The law also helped expand Medicaid by expanding the poverty line qualifying people for it. Unfortunately for millions of Americans still living in republican controlled states, many governors have declined the expansion of Medicaid for their state, even though Washington has offered to pay for the cost of new patients for the first three years, and 90 percent until 2020.  Out of spite for President Obama, many lower income people, still too poor to afford private insurance, but not poor enough according to their governors or state legislators, many of these people will suffer and die.

That people will tolerate this is shameful. That voters will continue to vote for it, even if it is themselves that need health care, is baffling and infuriating.

Take Robin Evans, a 49 year old Kentucky resident in the New York Times article, who reportedly works at an EBay warehouse making 9 dollars an hour, who recently got Medicaid in Kentucky after going uninsured with multiple health issues for many years.  Fortunately for Mrs. Evans, Kentucky has a democratic governor, and even though she is quoted in the article as saying that she is “tickled to death” to have Medicaid finally, she will not be voting for democrats.  Her brilliant reasoning:   “Born and raised Republican,” she said of herself. “I ain’t planning on changing now.”

Here is a link to the article in which the intellectual giant is quoted from:

 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/17/us/politics/kentucky-elections-obama-health-care-act.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpSumSmallMediaHigh&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

With stunning ignorance or bigotry, or whatever would motivate such a dumbass  redneck like Mrs. Evans, pictured above, to still vote for Kentucky’s Senator Mitch McConnell, who has campaigned over and over about wanting to get rid of ObamaCare, is enough to make you want to bang your head into a fencepost you can’t win an argument with.

But surely most people like Robin Evans can be reasoned with.  More maddening, however, is many democrats, especially in red and Southern states, are too big of cowards or too pathetic to even muster a fight with the truth on their side.  Mr. McConnell’s female opponent, Alison Grimes, who once seemed to have a decent chance of defeating him, is running away from ObamaCare, and instead airing television commercials of her shooting a gun, while proudly proclaiming that she is not Obama, and loves the coal industry.  The motto for worthless democrats like her seems to be “if you can’t beat them, and are too scared to debate ideas, then imitate them.”  Since the airing of her manly shooting of a gun, a pissing match war of meaningless words and gestures has resulted in Mrs. Grimes challenging Mr. McConnell to a contest at a shooting range.  To think that she will be able to persuade voters that she is more macho and as big of a supporter of no gun laws as Mitch McConnell, instead of making the easy, uncomplicated argument that ObamaCare is good for Kentucky, with thousands of examples, proves that she is unfit to call herself a democrat, unfit to lead, unfit for office, and has absolutely no chance of unseating Mitch McConnell.

Here is a link to her tv ad, copy and paste to your browser for a good laugh and cry for the monumental stupidity of American politics:

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/09/alison-lundergan-grimes-shooting-ad-110954.html

So this is the best Democrats can do in red states?  If it is, and Americans are willing to hand the Senate back over to the Republicans, then we might as well go hunting with former Vice President Dick Cheney, and let him shoot us in the face.  It wouldn’t be much dumber than the recently insured Robin Evans saying that she wasn’t about to change her republican voting ways now, no matter how illogical and detrimental to her well being it is.

I can understand a voter not supporting either of the two corrupted political parties and choosing to vote for an independent or third party.  But to think there is no difference between the two pathetic parties is a dangerous position, for even though those differences may be small, as the new healthcare law demonstrates, it can be the difference between life and death.

At the risk of talking down to my audience that may disagree with me, I have to end this with a recent quote from Bill Maher:

“I understand why the richest 1% vote Republican, they deserve those votes. They represent the richest 1% perfectly. Anybody else who does, just corporate America’s useful idiots.”

 

 

On the eve of the September 11th terrorist attacks on United States soil 13 years ago, President Barack Obama addressed the nation in a prime time television speech to rally support for more open ended war.  He became the fourth consecutive U.S. president to announce plans to bomb Iraq, and made it clear that his administration now plans to expand this “war on terror” into Syria. It is also the one year anniversary in which Obama first addressed the nation about his plans to bomb Syria because of their alleged use of chemical weapons, though those plans were put on hold for various reasons. In the tradition of his predecessor, President George W. Bush, Mr. Obama framed this as protecting America from future terrorist attacks: in other words, more pre-emptive strikes.  His rhetoric was remarkably similar to the fear mongering of the former Bush administration, though toned down slightly from the bold face lies of America facing “a mushroom cloud” in the form of a nuclear attack.  But in essence, Obama was selling us a war in Syria, just as W. Bush sold us a war in Iraq, under the guise of protecting us from future attacks.

In the president’s own words last night, he acknowledged that currently, ISIL (or ISIS) does not have immediate plans to attack us:

“If left unchecked, these terrorists could pose a growing threat beyond that region, including to the United States. While we have not yet detected specific plotting against our homeland, ISIL leaders have threatened America and our allies.”

From these two cleverly contrived sentences, where Obama says ISIS “could” threaten the United States, and that “we have not yet detected. . .” planned attacks, the president stokes fears already being promoted in the U.S. mainstream press, that some American and European citizens have joined ISIS in Iraq and Syria already, and “could try to return to their home countries and carry out deadly attacks.”

So “if” we don’t go on the offensive, ISIS “could” attack us, though we haven’t “yet” any evidence of this.

Sounds like more pre-emptive, fearmongering “bullshit” to me.

On my blog last year on June 18th, I wrote an article titled “War All the Time: Syria, Here We Come” where I speculated and warned about U.S. plans to intervene more aggressively in the civil war in Syria.  By September 13 of last year, I called the Obama administration’s calling off of plans to bomb Assad, due to Syria’s agreement to disarm their chemical weapons stockpile a “pause in our march to war in Syria.”  My prediction is proving true. Turns out that was approximately a one year pause.  Last year, our need to bomb in Syria was framed as a “humanitarian” intervention because of the innocent civilians suffering there, after chemical weapons attacks allegedly launched by Assad’s regime (this has still not been proven, and there is more evidence now that suggests this was a lie).  This year, capitalizing on the widely broadcast brutality of the be-heading of two American journalists by ISIS in a video released by the group, the need to bomb Syria is now based on the supposed grave and future danger that ISIS will pose to the United States, “if left unchecked.”

Graphic images and videos of deplorable violence, such as the ISIS be-headings of journalists, move public opinion.  The continuous talk among American pundits and politicians about the brutality of ISIS, along with self-promoting videos by the group being posted on the internet, have no doubt moved American opinion more towards war. Recent polling from CNN, The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and other news organizations all show around 60 percent of Americans favoring airstrikes against ISIS.  The desire for justice and revenge is understandable, but it is cynically exploited by U.S. and world leaders all the time to rally one’s tribe, and dehumanize one’s foe.  Hillary Clinton is certainly aware of this, when in addition to blaming world opposition to Israel’s latest slaughter in Gaza on anti-Semitism, she complained that Hamas was inviting journalists into Gaza to view the carnage, and that it was “the old P.R. problem that Israel has.”

The majority of Americans don’t know much about the civil war in Syria, and the mainstream media goes out of its way to avoid providing too much detail or perspective.  The facts and details are readily available in the newspapers for people willing to look more deeply into the conflict, but most people get their news from television, where pundits dutifully promote the propaganda of our politicians, often times allowing their blatant lies to go unchallenged, and repeated over and over again as if they are facts. The most recent example I saw was last night on MSNBC’s coverage after the president’s speech, in which Senator Sore Loser, John McCain, again told Andrea Mitchell that part of ISIS’s gains in Iraq was because Obama had refused to leave a residual force in Iraq.  I’ve explained so many times now that I’ve lost count, how this is simply not true:  Bush negotiated the withdrawal before Obama took office; Obama wanted to leave a residual force but Iraq wouldn’t accept it.  This lie was uttered again by a supposedly credible official who almost became president instead of Obama.  McCain’s lie was unchallenged, again, as usual.  And of course, McCain failed to mention that the reason we needed to keep a military presence in Iraq to keep the peace was because we invaded Iraq in the first place, under W. Bush’s leadership, with a “yes” vote by McCain.  Hillary Clinton spews the same line of bullshit in her never ending quest to become president.  She too voted for the Iraq invasion, that left a power vacuum for Al Qaeda in Iraq, to fill.  Before the U.S. invasion of Iraq that was sold on the lies of “weapons of mass destruction,” there was no Al Qaeda in Iraq.  ISIS is now the group formally known as Al Qaeda in Iraq, as acknowledged by all.  But the warmongers’ narrative starts with “we shouldn’t have pulled out of Iraq (10 years later)” instead of the obvious “we shouldn’t have invaded Iraq in the first place.”

The Syrian civil war is a proxy war more than a civil war, with many allies and Western powers contributing to the horrific bloodshed by 3 years of arming numerous “opposition” groups, composed of many of the “terrorist” that we claim to fear.  Until recently, President Obama has appeared to want to keep the U.S. out of as much direct intervention in the war as possible, amid cries from McCain, Senator Lindsay Graham, and his former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, for more involvement, and more arming of the various groups attempting to overthrow Assad.  But his apparent reluctance aside, Obama did previously say that “Assad must go” when he was last contemplating bombing him.  This is the root of the civil war in Syria, the desire of Assad’s enemies, such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, the U.S., the U.K and other allies, to see his regime toppled.  What has resulted is a melting pot of Islamic extremist and foreign fighters, fueled with money, arms and training from Assad’s enemies, destroying the country of Syria and ruining hundreds of thousands of lives in the process.

Now, part of Obama’s strategy for the proclaimed goal of degrading and destroying ISIS, is more direct U.S.  engagement and support of the “Free Syrian Army.”  His previous concerns about not being able to differentiate who we might be arming to overthrow Assad have been set aside.  Now U.S. officials are claiming to have “vetted” the opposition groups that are fighting Assad.  And don’t worry, there will be no American combat troops, or “boots on the ground,” not counting of course the more than 1000 “advisors” on the ground already, with more to come.  We will just bomb and advise, and help train the failed Iraq security forces that we already trained once, and arm the Kurds who in previous years we were complicit in their slaughter from both Saddam Hussein and Turkey, and we will aid the now “vetted” opposition forces in Syria.

All Obama is asking for is congressional blessing – which he claims he doesn’t need, just wants, and more money from U.S. taxpayers to fund this new conflict which he, his administration officials, and others say will last years – not months.  And of course he wants the backing of America’s citizens, whom ” our endless blessings bestow an enduring burden” because ” we stand for freedom, for justice, for dignity.”  To make us feel good about the bombing campaign already begun again in Iraq, that was framed partly as a humanitarian mission to save refugees trapped on a mountain top in Iraq from ISIS advances, Mr. Obama told us: ” here’s what one of them said: “We owe our American friends our lives. Our children will always remember that there was someone who felt our struggle and made a long journey to protect innocent people.”

Of course, that “long journey” was made over a decade ago when the U.S. first invaded Iraq.  You may also recall that the United States bombed Libya three years ago for the “humanitarian purposes” of protecting innocent civilians from being “slaughtered” by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces.  This humanitarian mission in which we helped our allies conduct, of course led to the desired result:  the once friendly dictator Qaddafi was overthrown.  Specifically, Qaddafi was murdered in the streets by an angry mob, and that act of graphic violence was also captured on video and broadcast widely on the internet, and hailed as a victory for Libyans, thanks to benevolent help from the U.S. and other Western allies like France and Britain.   Just two days ago, the New York Times reported on the wonderful new life Libyans are enjoying, with a third of its population, almost 2 million people, seeking refuge in Tunisia from the horrific violence now unleashed since our humanitarian intervention. Details of that success surely merit as much attention as Obama’s quote from the grateful Iraqis saved from the mountaintop by us, so here is a link to that article that you may copy and paste to your browser:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/10/world/africa/libya-refugees-tunisia-tripoli.html?mabReward=RI%3A7&module=WelcomeBackModal&contentCollection=Middle%20East&region=FixedCenter&action=click&src=recg&pgtype=article

It will be interesting to see how congress decides to act on President Obama’s request for support for more years, blood and treasure to be spent to “protect” us from this new terrorist group that supposedly makes Al Qaeda look like choir boys.  The republican leadership in both the Senate and House seem reluctant to want to even call a vote.  Senator Fish Face, Mitch McConnell and the Weeper of the House, John Boehner, have both offered nothing but criticism of Obama’s handling of it so far, but offering no specific ideas of their own, and no promise of a vote for congress to do what was once considered its constitutional duty – since the Constitution actually says it is their duty and power – to declare war.  They’d much rather play Monday morning quarterback than stake a position on the eve of mid-term elections.  Of course, McCain and Graham can be counted on as a “yes” vote.  Hillary Clinton is already saying we should have gone to war sooner.  Democrat Senator Dianne Feinstein of California was recently on “Meet the Press” on August 31, joining in on blaming Obama for ISIS, saying “I think I’ve learned one thing about this president, and that is he’s very cautious. Maybe in this instance, too cautious.”  Apparently, less cautious leadership like hers is what’s needed – after all, she was decisive when she voted “yes” for the Iraq War, just as Hillary Clinton, and all the other current warmongers did.  Former Vice President, Darth Vader (sometimes called by his maiden name of Dick Cheney) met with G.O.P. leaders Tuesday, a day before Obama’s national address, to criticise and blame the current mess on Obama.  It’s simply amazing that so many of the assholes who voted for the Iraq War, both republicans and democrats (Hillary and Feinstein) are blaming  the current crises in Iraq and Syria on the Obama administration and offering their advice of “war! war!” as if we should listen to them again.

The question is, will Americans buy into the propaganda being offered by the current president, again, to start a pre-emptive war to protect us from terrorism?  Not enough Americans were sold on bombing Syria last year for humanitarian purposes, so this year Obama is selling the tried and true currency of fear.  Don’t buy into it.  Its just more of the same old bullshit lies about our true motivations for war, dressed up by the lofty words of a better spoken president.