Steve Doocy_Asshat Of The Week

There are a whole gaggle of asshats to pick from this week, but we’re gonna start with Steve Douchy Doocy for claiming that President Obama openly and directly mocked Mitt Romney by saying, “Unlike some people, I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth.”.   In all honesty, the statement qualifies Doocy for my little list not so much because of the inaccuracy of its content but because of the blatant hypocrisy and dishonesty of the person making it, which we’ll get to in a moment.

As for Mr. Obama’s statement itself, OK, this might… by a fairly simple exercise of imagination… be construed as some kind of a direct personal attack on Mittens.  I myself actually believe that Mr. Obama had Mr. Romney in mind when he said it.  I know damned well that’s what I thought (and I applaud Mr. Obama for daring to say what most of us are thinking) when I heard it and would have been thinking had I been the one saying it.  But even so it’s a very mild one in addition to being the absolute truth and even if it is a direct slap, so what?  It’s true.  Mitt Romney was born rich, Mr. Obama wasn’t.  It’s as simple as that and right wingers need to get over it.

Mitt Romney WAS born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He has had his way paid and the skids greased for him in everything he’s ever done. He dodged the draft (even while openly denouncing draft protestors) and even when it came to his missionary service for his church, he managed to do the whole thing ensconced in a luxurious mansion in France. He’s never had to lift a finger to do a day’s work in his life and his sole accomplishment in that life has been to make even more money by devastating the quality of life for millions of other Americans. It’s just what people born with silver spoons do and why we have a one percent slapping the rest of us around.

The REAL problem with Mr. Doocy’s “reporting” though is not the pearl clutching and histrionics he wraps around the notion that POTUS would dare to call Mr. Romney out on the disconnect that might be the most glaring defect in his qualifications to lead ALL of the people, but the fact that the president didn’t exactly say what Mr. Doocy claims he said.

If Mr. Doocy considers himself a journalist and if he’s had any kind of training as a journalist, he knows damned well that when you offer a direct quote from someone you DON’T add your own self serving words to theirs.  By attributing words to the president that the president didn’t actually say, Steve Doocy flat assed lied. (Not to be unexpected from an employee of a “news” organization that has a SCOTUS issued LICENSE to lie,)

Mr. Doocy inserted the first three words of the statement he attributes to POTUS into that statement himself before using it to demonize the President.  Mr. Doocy didn’t think that the presidents actual words were a strong enough indicator of Mr. Obama’s “disdain for Americans” so he inserted a few of this own to make it more personal.

Mr. Obama never said “Unlike some people…”, he simply said “I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth.”.  It’s an old saying… I’ve been hearing it (and using it on occasion) all my life and it WAS an old saying even before I was born having actually appeared as early as 1719 which… believe it or not… predates me by a few years.   According to Wiki:

   The English language expression silver spoon is synonymous with wealth, especially inherited wealth; someone born into a wealthy family is said to have “been born with a silver spoon in his mouth”. As an adjective, “silver-spoon” describes someone who has a prosperous background or is of a well-to-do family environment.

I’m sorry Republican friends, but if that description doesn’t fit Mitt Romney, you’re going to have to clue me in on how he managed his rise from an obscure peasant like me, born to poor working class parents like mine, to a position of prominence in the one percent and a net worth of a quarter billion dollars through hard work and the sweat of his brow because from everything I’ve been able to find out about the man he’s never been anything but a corporate hatchet man, a tax dodger and and a professional candidate for president.

As for the Fox news hack… Mr. Doocy is just doing what right wing screechers and hacks do best.  Talking someone’s words and either redacting or embellishing them, creating a false narrative which is then hammered on by every other talking head in the organization and, in this case , picked up and hammered on further by people who ought to know better.  (Looking at you, Washington Post)  Such is the sorry state of “journalism in America today.

Steve Doocy, we salute you. Grandpa’s Asshat of the Week.

 

Stupid Quote Of The Week

New feature. Sometimes there will be more than one a week, a situation that it’s impossible to avoid as long as the Uber right remains in control of the Republican party but we hope to always have at least one. Here’s today’s:

“Believe me….I’ve suffered economic hardships. When Mitt was in grad school at Harvard, it was ‘touch and go’….. We were living on the edge, no income, chipping away at our stocks to make ends meet…. no entertaining…”

Sounds to me like Mitt might have “spent too much time at Harvard“. Now where did I hear that exact same thing about someone else a week or so back?

Seriously Annie… “Chipping away at your stocks”? “No entertaining”? Mitt was the son of a flipping multimillionaire for chrissake. I’m pretty sure you had a safety net… something that few of the rest of us have any longer, largely due to your Mitt… and something that he is just foaming at the mouth to take away from the ones that still do.

Sorry ma’am, your whining about the bad old days (especially since you never had any) just doesn’t make it to any part of my soul that gives a damn.

 

One Of These Days Maybe

Hope to get back to regular blogging by May 1st. Still anemic and extremely weak plus some totally new health issues have popped up so there’s going to be another huge battery of tests to go through plus I’m still worn out from the last round. And of course, I still have upcoming surgery to finish up the heart repairs too. It’s not easy getting old in today’s dollar driven America.

To the few who are kind enough to stop in once in a while, I hope to be back with you more or less full time soon. Thanks for checking.

Tom

 

We Need A Consumer Strike.

If you’re one of those people whose interest in things political extends beyond getting the uppity black dude out of your White House you may know that yesterday, Coca Cola has pulled its financial support from ALEC, an extreme right wing political group formed to promote voter suppression and intimidation efforts across the country.

America’s largest beverage company elected to end it’s support of and participation in the efforts of ALEC to disenfranchise poor and minority voters, claiming that it had only taken part in those efforts because it thought the organization was fighting “discriminatory food and beverage taxes”.  A press release from Coke stated that the company dos not take sides on “issues that have no direct bearing on our business. We have a long-standing policy of only taking positions on issues that impact our Company and industry”.

Yeah, right.  We don’t need to go there right now but the important thing is that Coca Cola appears to have carefully weighed the consequences of supporting any group or organization that is openly attempting to suppress the rights of 99% of the population against it’s need to sell products to that same 99% and decided that it would be more profitable to take the high road, at least this time.

What you may not know yet is that this morning, it was announced that the country’s second largest beverage company, PepsiCo, had also ended its relationship with ALEC.   In fact, Pepsi had ended that relationship in January but for whatever reason had decided to withhold the information until today.  Obviously, there is speculation in Punditdom that Pepsi’s action and the fact that it was about to become public played a major role in Coke’s decision but Coke isn’t about to say so and we’ll never really know. ::wink::

What this tells us though, is that as Americans we still have a weapon to use in this war.  Remember when we thought all we had was our votes and the plutarchy responded by making our votes all but meaningless by buying up BOTH of the major parties and passing laws like the ones being promoted by ALEC?  They didn’t disarm us by any means.  You have a weapon they fear far more than they fear any consequences of which little cooky cutter twit they conjure up as a “choice”.  And that weapon is your wallet.

Neither Pepsi nor Coke give a hair on a rat’s ass about your voting rights and whether you vote or not.  Hell, read Coke’s weaselly little “explanation” for moving away from ALEC on the bench.  All Coke and Pepsi care about is the same thing any other ginormous corporation cares about… maximizing return on their investments and they’ve looked at the demographics and realize that not only are there a lot more poor not rich and/or minority people out there than there are the other kind, they are the ones most likely to buy the products the two companies sell.

So, this isn’t going to win Coke and Pepsi any rewards for citizenship, let alone altruism.  The people running those companies are no different than the bloodsuckers running the rest of the Wall Street house of cards.  It just happens that it’s in their best financial interests to appear to be “on your side” right now.  But what it does… or should do… is tell you that you don’t have to take this crap if you don’t want to.  Along with the successful campaigns against entrenched professional rectal orifices like Glenn Beck and more recently, Rush Limbaugh, it does prove that there is still something that the oligarchy fears… the American consumer.  In a country whose very foundations are rooted in the bedrock of consumerism, pissing off the consumer is definitely something they need avoid… at least for a while.

So here’s the deal;  Quite simply,  stop buying their crap.  Yeah, yeah, there are things you have to have and necessities you can’t do without yadayada but if every one of us got up one morning and said to ourselves, “You know, I’m not buying any more extraneous bullshit!”, and then stuck to it… for just a month or even a week… we’d send a damned message that even Limbaugh couldn’t ignore.  Who knows what might happen?  One thing’s for damned certain though… until and unless we try something, we’re going to continue to be flipping well and truly boned and that’s a feeling I don’t really care to have.

For those looking for a little more info on ALEC itself, the following, sourced from a report by the Center for American Progress sums it up neatly:

ALEC charges corporations such as Koch Industries Inc., Wal-Mart Stores Inc., and The Coca-Cola Co. a fee and gives them access to members of state legislatures. Under ALEC’s auspices, legislators, corporate representatives, and ALEC officials work together to draft model legislation. As ALEC spokesperson Michael Bowman told NPR, this system is especially effective because “you have legislators who will ask questions much more freely at our meetings because they are not under the eyes of the press, the eyes of the voters.”

Hopefully, you do understand that ALEC is doing nothing less than selling access to YOUR state legislators… access that I’d bet a dollar to a dessicated kangaroo scrotum that you yourself don’t have and never will have because you can’t afford it chump.

And that’s America’s current version of democracy in action.  I can only hope for one of two things for your sake… either that you’re happy with that or that you have the balls to stand on your hind legs and do something about it.

 

The Vulture Whores In Congress

By @TomBales1
Sourced from an article by Andrea Saybrook and Alex Blumberg @ NPR:  Take The Money And Run For Office.

We imagine lobbyists stalking the halls of Congress, trying to influence lawmakers with cash. But often, it’s the other way around: Members of Congress stalk lobbyists, looking for contributions.

“Most Americans would be shocked — not surprised, shocked — if they knew how much time a U.S. Senator spends raising money,” Sen. Dick Durbin told us.

There are special call centers across the street from the Capitol where Senators and Congressmen sit, often for hours a day, calling potential donors to ask for money.

Whoa!  Hours a day, stalking lobbyists?  That’s what we pay these clowns for?  We pay these people big bucks to spend hours a day sucking up to people for more bucks?

I don’t know about the rest of you but as far as I’m concerned, it’s just about damned time we started treating the junkies and pimps and whores in our congress as exactly what they are… our EMPLOYEES.  We PAY these people to go to Washington and do a JOB for US.  And when you consider not only their salaries but all the bennies and perks that go with the job, we pay them pretty goddamned WELL for that job.  Like any other employer, we have the right to expect an honest days’ work for an honest day’s pay out of ’em, but the simple fact is that they have other ideas about that.  As far as THEY are concerned, they’re in Washington to get as rich as possible as fast as possible and the idea that they actually WORK for someone else never enters their pointy little heads.

If these people were held to the same standards of accountability and prformance that private sector employees or even rank and file government employees are… ESPECIALLY in this day and age… most of them would be fired before they ever had time to become vested in that obscenely bloated pension plan they created for themselves or even make a permanent dent in the seat cushions in that fancy limousine that hauls their all but useless asses to the golf course 3-4 times a week for the kind of meetings described in the cited article.

Instead, we find ourselves in the totally bassackward position of having our employees taking their pay and bennies from us, then telling us basically to %$#@ off while they serve an altogether different set of masters in ways that are very seldom in our best interests and indeed are most often detrimental to those interests.

These people only have two functions in DC as far as they’re concerned… making themselves rich and serving the plutarchy and of course, more often than not those two dovetail so seamlessly you couldn’t slide a razor blade between them.  Oh, once in a while something may come up that requires huge amounts of their attention and energy… like making sure the black dude’s presidency is a total failure even if they have to bring the rest of us down to do it… but even that is simply an extension of the other two and in the normal course of events, the first two are sufficient.

Nowhere in their worldview is there any room for the concept that since they’re taking OUR money… supposedly for working for us… they should be doing a little something for US once in a while.  Not this bunch.

What does the money buy? What are corporations and special interests getting in return for the billions of dollars they spend lobbying each year?

If you’re cynical, you think money buys votes, and Washington is owned. Money drives everything. {And I’m nothing if not cynical_TB}

Lobbyists and politicians usually tell you the opposite. The money has no effect. After all, they say, donations come from both sides. Exporters vs. importers. Bankers vs. Realtors. Businesses vs. unions. The money cancels itself out.

Rep. Barney Frank says both of those positions were caricatures.

“People say, ‘Oh, it doesn’t have any effect on me,'” he says. “Well if that were the case, we’d be the only human beings in the history of the world who on a regular basis took significant amounts of money from perfect strangers and made sure that it had no effect on our behavior.”

I think one of the things that chaps my ass the most is the contention by these insultingly arrogant bastards that all that damned money changing hands has no effect on anything.  If that were so, all that money wouldn’t BE changing hands.  People don’t spend money if they know damned well there’s nothing in it for them (unless they’re taxpayers spending money on congressional pay and benefits}.

If the 99% could manage to dredge up a halfway viable set of balls between them, not a single one of these assclowns in office today would be there after their next election cycle.  Not a one.  Not one Democrat, not one Republican… nobody.  The only way we’re going to put this country back together again is to can the entire lot of ’em and start all over from scratch with a few new rules in place to make damned sure that never again can any man or woman make themselves millionaires under the table through public service of any kind.

Of course we all know it will never happen.  It will never happen because we’re too goddamned lazy to make it happen and we’re going to continue right on down the road we’re on to it’s inevitable dead end, at which point we’ll simply make like lemmings and throw ourselves over the cliff.  And maybe… if we’re too venal, too self absorbed, too blind and ignorant to even want to know what’s going on around us… maybe that’s all we deserve.