MidTerms 2010: The Deluge, The Delusions, And How To Invent The American Left

Posted on November 3, 2010 by Anthony
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Well…it was as bad as expected.

67 House seats and control of the House lost for the Dems…say hello to Speaker John Boehner.

6 Senate seats lost, but thanks to the overreach and the stupidity of some Tea Party/Republican nominees like Christine O’Donnell, Sharron Angle, and a few others, the Dems barely retain control of the Senate…at least, formally.

Some decent progressives gpt run….Grayson (FL), Conroy (OH), Perriello (VA), and Murphy (PA) in the House, Feingold (WI) in the Senate.

The Blue Dogs mostly got waxed but good:  41 lost their seats.

The Dems lost big in most states (California excepted): 8 governorships lost, total wipeouts in Wisconsin and North Corlina, where Repubs now control the governorships and both houses of their state legislatures.

Rubio beat Crist/Meek in FL; Toomey beat Seestak in PA; Lincoln lost in AR. President Obama’s old Senate seat flipped to Repub, too.

Alaska is still up in the air, though…and probably will be for days if not weeks.

But, all in all, a devastating night for Democrats, if not catastrophic. And, a disaster for progressives/liberals.

So….what happened??

Simply put: the Right showed up, the Left didn’t, and the Center broke late with the Right.

Mostly, it was the activism and big bucks of the Tea Party, reinforced with the anger and rage of the usual right-wing suspects that have been gunnning after Obama and the Democrats since time immortal, motivating their peeps to go out and vote.

And, just as mostly, it was the pitiful and shameful treatement of the thie own most fervent suppoeters by the Democrats, as well as the tepid efforts ad addressing their basic giievances and insulting and degrading treatment by the Democratss, that contributed to their demise.

When you promise to do one thing and don’t deliver, you desereve to get beat. When you promise radical “change” and then promptly don’t change a thing, and in fact simply replicate and even extend the very things you promise to change…well, then you deserve to get not only beat, but beat down.

And that, in a nutshell, is what happened to the Democrats yesterday.

You don’t promise to reverse 8 years of past Republican policy, then promptly give the perpetrators of that policy carte balance to sey your own policy.

You don’t promise progressive reform of health care, but then reject the most common sense progressive model (comprehensive universal single payer) in favor of a convoluted, confusing, and ultimately woefully inadequate “forced mandate” for people to be coerced to buy private insurance that falls short of even the most basic needs.

You don’t come to power promising to end your opponent’s endless wars, then promptly move to extend them and even increase funding commitments for said wars.

You don’t go into negotiations trying to make nice with an advesary who wants to basically kill you, who thinks that you are at your core illegitimate, unfit, and even an “alien” ruler contaminating “their” White House.

But most of all…you don’t take the very voters who put you in power and basically and continually take proverbial dumps on them by neglecting their core issues, and then expect them to totally love you for the crumbs of corn located within that mountain of crap….all because the other side has gone totally loony batshit mad and fascist.

Unfortunately, that has been the Democratic Party’s modus operandi for the past 40 years: use progressives and liberals as stepping stones to power, only to abandon them when they get power to serve their real masters (the corporate/industrial complex) and pander to virtually the same conservative/right-wing base as the Republicans.

It was the way for the presidency of Bill Clinton in 1992: fake Left with promises of lifting prohibitions ogainst gays in the military along with “managed care reform”; only to switch gears towards “welfare reform” and other means of punishing thei supporters after the Newt Gingrich-led Class of 1994 took over.

Very fortunately for Bubba and Hillary, the Repubs back then overextended themselves on impeachment, and the Clintons were able to react and respond.

Problem is, though, Clinton had a booming economy, a decent liberal base that stayed loyal in their masochistic way, and Newtie as an advesary.

The curent president may still have the Senate behind him, but his situation may be much worse…and so are the progressives.

For one thing, the lunatic fronge of the Grand Old Tea Party will be raking every leaf for anything they can use to smear Obama with. Already, there is talk of inventing some ground for impeachment (a purported deal with Seestak to have him drop out of the Pennsylvania Senate race and grease the weel for former GOP gadfly Arlen Specter; or some new invention of “Birtherism”, or the “selling” of Obama’s former Illinois Senate seat..or whatever they can invent). Their best interest os to simply obstruct and veto and block anything Prez O attempts, unless he completely surrenders to right-wing dogma..and even then their eternal hatred would probably win out.

Secondly…the usual forces of elite neo-reaction within the Democratic Party are already on the case, milking the Beltway media with the time-honored “Third Way”/Democratic Leadership Coucil meme that this election proves that liberalism is a dead ender and that the Dems must throw liberals and progressives under the bus (even more than they already have) and adopt to the new “center”, which translates into moving even further to the Right than ever while supposedly “isolating” the GOP to their Teabagger anchor.

Obviously, progrsives and liberals within the Democratic Party think otherwise…but with no power whatsoever to enact any means of resistance, and the cross of ridicule from the Dem establishment, it would be very difficult for them to overcome their disadvantages in the face of the Village Media consensus….not to mention the overwhelming power of the right-wing propaganda machine.

And then, there is the new factor of unaccountable campaign spending by the wealthy, librated thanks to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision throwing out campaign spending limits and allowing corporations and wealthy individuals a virtual free reign to buy themselves elections. Since wealthy folk tend to be way more conservative and even right-wing, you can probably figure for yourself the outcome.

Of course, having lots of cash doesn’t insure victory….ask Carly Fiona or Meg Whitman. But, when strategically used in “swing districts” where the Tea Party and the GOP Right (redundacy intended) are already locally strong and organized, the streams of cash spent on attack ads can be a difference maker.

Such is the climate we are now in. The issue is now: How should the Left respond??

I have my own opinions, of course.

Those who say that we should stay in the party and simply use “netroot” and local power to support “more and better Democrats”, in my view, are jsut shuffling chairs on the Titanic. The “netroots” have been found to have simply no power or even so much a pinprick of an impact on Democratic strategy or policy…in fact, most of the netroots’ favorites went down in flames when faced with the organized power of the Teabaggers and the dismissiveness and abandonment of the Democrats.

And considering the emerging consensus brewing among establishment Democrats and implicitly endorsed by Obama himself, the progressives will simply face an even more frosty reception, if not total abandonment and extention. The main goal of today’s Democrats are to remodel themselves to the center-right and pick off “moderate” conservative Republicans and White middle-class  “Reagan Democrats” as their new base, and liberals and progressives are simply cannon fodder. “Don’t fear the Left, for they have no place to go…and if they protest, let ‘em have President Palin” is the prevailing view of most elite Dems, and they are most protected by privilege and financial contributions from any accountability.

Meanwhile…the establishment Republicans will continue to mine the Tea Party/”Old” New Right themes and myopias — also fueled with a fresh plowing of anti-Black racism, homophobia, antifeminism, xenophobia, and White nationalism — as a crutch to mask their main campaign of rampant unregulation and removing any fetters or constraints on capital accumulation and exploitation of resources and people. The “free market”, “personal responsibility”, and “less government” themes are simply ruses to cover the ultimate assault on the very notion of using the power of the federal government to attack economic and social inequality; and insted usher in the authoritarian state that uses religion, advertising, and state control to freeze out dissenters.  Of course, the hard Right is also fond of using private militias and lone wolf assassins to target those they feel threaten their “way of life”, too….but as or right now, even mainstream right-wingers do go that far.  At least…not yet.

So…we have one conservative happy face party masquarading as “liberal” (the Democrats), and one absolutely fascist, kooky-eyed, mostly White nationalist party masquarading as “conservative” (the Repiblicans).  And, then there is the splintered Tea Party, who could potentially act as a spoiler role in both parties…indeed, there have been threats of Teabaggers going to an independent party if the Republicans don’t cater fully to their demands,  Some may even attempt to outflank the GOP as Democrats, especially in the South and rural Midwest.

There is a huge vaccum thus emerging on the Left, and one that traditional Democratic liberalsm simply isn’t capable of exploiting because they are so sold all in on the Democrats and Obama.

Now, there are the PUMA’s who say that only Hillary Clinton can save the day for the Democrats, and that the fault lies totally with Obama who, they say, bamboozled and grifted his way to the 2008 nomination to begin with. Problem with that illogic is, that assumes that Hillary is a true progressive, not the corporatist, DLC clone copy of her husband who was willing to play several race cards against Obama herself, while playing a “populist” in the process. And, it’s far more likely that Hillary will be recruited by Obama and the Democrats to rescue him from his debacles via a Obama-Clinton ticket in 2012, once they get Joe Biden out of the way, that is.  Then again, many of those PUMA’s most willing to promote Hillary are generally the same ones who also say that Sarah Palin and Christine O’Donnell and Sharron Angle are just “conservative feminists” who are victims of rampant “male liberal” sexism.

My sentiments, though, are much more with the more institutional critiques of Obama and the Democrats as merely one wing of the corporate system, and the belief that the Democrats are basically sold out as a tool of progressive change. My belief is the same I haave held for the past 25 years since I first abandoned the Democratic Party: that only an independent, popularly rooted, populist/democratic Left dedicated to challenging the roots of institutional as well as physical injustice and inequality will be capable of confronting both the Teabagger Right AND the Democraiic “Center”.

What kind of a program would that be, and how does it compare to other Left proposals theough the recent times?? That’ll have to wait until a future post. Stay close….

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2010 Midterm Election Preview (Or, How Only The Democrats Could Turn A “Supermajority” Into Mush….AGAIN)

Posted on November 1, 2010 by Anthony
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Well…it was nice while it lasted.

Four years ago almost to this week, I was celebrating the Democrats retaking control of both houses of Congress.

Two years ago almost to the day, I was nearly in tears of joy when Barack Obama finished what should have been the final nail in the Republican Right coffin and smacked down John McCain for the US Presidency, and brought with him a near supermajority for the Dems in the House and Senate.

Those days were heady times for progressives. Finally, the dark ages of the Bush era were over.  Finally, we were going to see actual progressive policies brought forth to fruition without having to deal with Republican approval. The GOP was to be reduced to a regional party of the South and the isolated patches of the West, while new young voters and Latin@ and Blacks were going to reap the rewards of having one of their own finally occupy the White House.

Nuttin’ but GOOD TIMES ahead. Or..lassiez le ben temps roliez.

That was then.

Today, on Election Eve 2010, all those dreams and thoughts seem so distant.  So far away.

Instead, most progressives now feel total apprehension, fear, anxiety.

Why??  Because it is more than likely that by Wednesday morning, everything gained during those heady four year period will be shattered to bits by a virtural Categrry 5 political hurricane of epic proportions, fueled by resurgent right-wing rage and lots and lots of money.

Although there are still hopes of a late rally round, all signs and most polls are pointing to the Dems losing control of the House in a decisive rout, mostly by hard Right Republicans retaking mostly conservative Southern/Blue Dog Dem districts from other BD Dems who were able to prevail in 2008.

And, there is even the possiblilty of the Dems losing control of the Senate as well, or at the very least having their current 9 seat majority cut considerably down.

(Although a 50-50 tie does give the Dems nominal control in tie-breaking situations due to the vote of Vice President Biden as President of the Senate, it’s very likely that Joe Lieberman (I-CT) could play his usual game of maverick by agreeing to caucus with the Repubs, if not join the Repubs outright, thus giving them the functional majority.Currnetly, he caucuses with the Dems.)

So…how did we get from joyful victory to the edge of abyss so fast??

Most say that the difference is the activism of the Tea Party movement, those scruffy bunch of reactionaries still living the Reagan/Bush dream of zero taxes, unfettered capitalism, White fundamentalist Christian supremacy, and  dire hatred of having “that nigger” (read, President Barack Obama) occupying “their” White House. (No, wait…make that “that Marxist/Socialist/Kenyan Islamacist/God-hating nigger”.)

Of course, the recent Supreme Court decision doing away with any regulation of campaign financing didn’t hurt the “TeaKKKluxers” any, allowing wealthy institutional montebanks to flush millions and BILLIONS of dollars into the campaigns of local wingnutters, and transform them from mere individual kooks into legitimate candidates.

The kookiness of the Teabaggers have been duly documented: Christine O’Donnell’s (Deleware Sen) anti-masturbation/ex-witchery antics; Joe Miller (Alaska Sen) “abolish the minimum wage and unemployment benefits because they are unconstitutional and should be pased on to the states); Sharron Angle (Nevada Sen, running against current Sen Majority Leader Harry Reid) calling forclosing the borders from “illegal alien” Mexicans that supposedly rape and pillarage Whites…and even refered to a group of Latin@ protesting her ads as “looking Asian”; Ken Buck (Colorado Sen) opposing giving women the right to an abortion even if she is the victim of rape or incest because “I know several cousins who are products of rapes”); Rand (Son of Ron) Paul (Kentucky Sen) calling for abolishing the Civil Rights Act because he thinks that private businesses should be allowed to discriminate against Blacks (and others)….and even those examples pale when compared to the Teabagger-favored House candidates.

In normal times, they would be flushed out like so  much refuse.  Problem is, though…times just aren’t normal. Deep recessions tend to bring out the insane, and when the majority party — in this case, the Democrats — tend to be perceived to be doing nothing to ease the economic stresses that people are suffering from, then it’s not surprising that the Right has taken full advantage of the sitch by drowning people in scapegoating the usual suspects…and drowning politicos with cash.

“But, ‘Dog,” you say…”what about all the achevements that Prez O and the Dems have done in the past two years?? Surely they have done some good things..like health care reform?? Raising the minimum wage?? The stimulus package?? Reforming Wall Street from the meltdown of the Bush years?? And what about the intrasiegence of the Republicans in blocking everything Obama tries to do?? Shouldn’t Obama be cut some slack here??”

In my view…yes and no. Yes, because the Republicans have indeed been very much intrasiegent in using their minority powers — especially their filibuster powers in the Senate — to block key Democratic initiatives, and you could say that they left such a freakin’ mess of things the last 8 years prior to Obama taking power that it just couldn’t be overcome in just two years.

But here’s where the “no” comes in: Obama was put in office with a mandate by his supporters to openly challenge and put down the “conservative” mentality and policies that reigned during that past era…and in that count he and the Democrats have utterly failed miserably.

The principal reason is the truth that so many pro-Democrat liberals and progressives have never gotten into their heads until recently: The Democratic Party is NOT a liberal or progressive party, but merely the “moderate” wing of the corporate duopoly which seeks to maintain corporate power and a muted “free market” capitalism (albeit temperad by a few good government regulations and social welfare primers to ease the impacts). Their first instinct is not to the people who elect them, but to the people who finance them…and most of the latter are generally conservative by nature and not quite as willing to give up their power and money for the benefit of the working many.

The inevitable result is that so many progressive-leading initiatives and constituensies get thrown under the bus and dismissed and dissed time and time again under the prevailing Democrat theory that “Well, the liberals have nowhere else to go, so we can go center-right and pander to conservatives and persue “moderate” policies…and if the liberals protest, well, there’s always President Sarah Palin and the GOTP to scare ‘em back to ‘reality’.” Well…that, and the insanity of the assault on Prez O for merely being (half) Black, having a Muslim sounding middle name, and not being a neocon.

As for those achievements?? Well, it seems that most of them tend to come with certain caveats.

Take the big one, for example: health care reform.  It is certainly notable that Prez O was able to pass a reform bill against the full assault of Big Pharma, Big Insura, and the GOTP.  It is also notable that the fiinal bill mostly cateres to Big Pharma, Big Insura, and nearly the GOTP,,,by eschewing even the notion of universal health care (and the savings of a single payer universal plan) for the convoluted plan of a forced mandate to buy private insurance (or face huge fines and sanctions), sweetened by baubles of ending discrimination against “preexisting condition” coverage and including subsidies to ease the pain of said “forced mandate”. Sounds pretty good…excpet for the inevitablity that the future GOTP/Blue Dog conservative coalition will slash the subsidies in the name of either deficit reduction (the hawkish Dem preference) or “restoring individual responsibility”  (the favored phrase of the GOTP), allow Big Insura to simply wave off the restrictions to excluding preexisting condirions and rake in the cash as before..leaving the “forced mandate” with no protections and no liability. And that doesn’t even count the GOTP’s mission to simply abolish government-sponsored health care coverage altogether via Health Savings Accounts, vouchers replacing Medicare, and obliterating state regulation via “tort reform” and allowing Big Insura to cross state lines in offering coverage.

Or…let’s try Big Issue Deux: The Stimulus Package.  Almost every single respectable economist not owned by the GOTP or the old guard Wall Street establishment is in consensus that the “stim” was way too weak, not nearly enough, and did not put enough oomph into the economy to ease the recession-cum-depression. They would have prefered a far more interventionist and activist policy in which the government suspended its fear of deficits (Funny, but all those defecit hawks were kinda silent during Dubya’s reign when the deficit blew up due to endless wars and corporate/superwealthy tax cutting, you know.) and invoked the ghost of the WPA or the CCC from FDR.  Unfortunately, BHO is a DLC Democrat who believes in “Third Way” thinking, which means you negotiate with “moderate Republicans” like Olympia Snowe (MA Sen) or Judd Gregg (NH Sen) or conservative Democrats like Mary Landrieu (LA Sen) and Ben Nelson (NE Sen), and limit your expectations to what pleases the Wall Street bosses who fund your campaign (nearly $66 MILLION of Obama’s funding for the 2008 POTUS campaign came from Wall Street). Sorry, progresssives, but “reality” says go with the “center”, even though he still got NO support whatsoever from the Right.

But it is far more than the efforts of the Teabagger-led GOP or the woefully timid economic efforts of the Democrats that have lead us to the brink. The most significant reason why the Dems are at the edge of the political cliff is the full-on repudiation and outright abuse of the party’s supposedly most fervent “base’ of supporters. It seems that the Dems have always had a love-hate relationship with its more liberal popular voters — as in “love the votes, hate the policies”. As oposed to the Repubs, who basically welcomed the Teabaggers wth open arms and open pocketbooks, the Dems tend to take their most progressive voters at arms’ length, as appendages that they can use when they are in a fix, but need to be cut off otherwise in order to look more “moderate” and “bipartisan” for the “Village Idiot” Beltway media.

The examples are legion: Obama’s crawfishing on GLBT issues, including his two-faced acts on the Defense of Marriage Act and the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy of purging homosexuals from our military (saying that you are against these policies would mean a bit more if your Justice Department wouldn’d be fighting to retain same policies!!); the haranging of progressive critics of Obama by his key aides as just the mere rantings of “the professional Left” who just don’t get how lucky they are to have him rather than McCain or Palin; the Dems’ repudiation of single payer and “public option”-based health care reform; and especially Obama’s contiuation and even expansion of Bush area policies regarding civil liberties and detainment of “terrorist” suspects. Altogether, while Prez O remains a formidable speaker who can still raise the roof, he does seem to channeling Reagan in his coltural conservatism more than LBJ or FDR in their liberalism…and I suspect that a much more conservative Congress will simply accelerate the trend.

So…what are the prospects for the political world post-tomorrow??  And how in the hell can progressives get through thie eye of this hurricane that seems to be only getting worse and not ending?? My thoughts and proposals forthcoming in Part 2.  Stay close…

Oh…and just to remind you about how loony the TeaKKKluxers really are, here’s Keith Olbermann on one of his truly spectacular Special Comment rants.

Countdown with Keith Olbermann (MSNBC): 10/31/10 Special Comment on the risks of the Tea Party-led GOP taking control of Congress on Election Day Tuesday (via Countdown’s/KO’s official blog….includes written transcript)

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Whackjobs To The (Far) Right of Me, Cowards In The Middle…How The Left Can Get Unstuck

Posted on September 28, 2010 by Anthony
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I could start by giving you a long essay on the current political malaise, which consists of the race to the absolute bottom between the Grand Old Teabagger Party (GOTP, formerly known as Republican, whose most recent representation seems to have formed their opinions based on a combination of 1920′s Harding economics, 1870′s racial relations, and 1400′s social policies), and the Neoliberal Protoplasm Party (formerly aka the Democrats, whom have managed one more time the wonderful ability of pissing off and alienating their biggest followers by throwing all their principles under the bus for the corporate agenda).

But, rather than bore you with that, I’ll just quote to you a comment I just posted to Peter Daou’s blog entry regarding President Obama and the Dem’s latest tussle with their critics from the “professional Left”. Seems that Robert Gibbs, Prez O’s press secretary and Rahm Emanuel (wannabe next mayor of Chicago) wasn’t going rogue when they mouthed off about how some liberal journalists and activists weren’t being deferential enough of the President’s “successes”. The actual post brought out the usual wingnut trolls disguised as “moderates” who opined the usual saw story that Obama’s troubles were the result of him leaving the safe anchor of “the center” and engaging in “far left” policies, and that hopefully the thought of a Republican landslide would force him back into the usual DLC/Blue Dog acceptable mantle. (Of course, some take an even more “foreward” view that the Dems should go even further rightward….I’ll get to that myth in the future.)

Anyways, it prompted me to write this comment, which encapsulates my personal view of “screw ‘em both” perfectly…or so I hope. It’s in moderation right now, and Peter Daou is more of an established liberal Dem and an Obama supporter, so maybe it will be a bit too radical for their taste…..but it’s still worth a good try.

Isn’t it amazing how any conversation on the ills and problems of a Democratic adminstration always seems to bring out two sets of trolls:

(1) The old fashioned “we knew Obama was a evil leftist socialist all along, and now the public is getting back to good old fashioned ‘moderate conservatism’” card, mostly done by the usual wingnuts pushing for a return of the Reagan/Bush/DeLay regime of supply-side economics. faith-based fundamentalism, and cheap-labor, low wage explotation;

and, (2) the PUMA “Hillary [Clinton] was RIGHT!!!!” boosters who forget that before Obama came along, Hillary was the Chosen One for the corporate DLC neoliberal crowd.

As a long time Left Independent (currently registered tenatively with the Green Party for now) who has seen the direction of BOTH parties to different flavors of right wing for the past 20 years, I have a slightly different perspective on this.

The main issue is not the aggrieved sensablilties of Greenwald, Hamsher, or other principled “progressives” over the typical DLC-style smack delivered on then, Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, and the rest of the so-called “professional Left”; that is merely the outside circus.

Rather, the REAL issue is that the Democratic Party has all but abandoned, in the name of pursuing corporate money and retaining their place as the alleged “liberal” wing of the corporate state, even the chimera of attempting to represent the true needs and concerns of the majority of working class and un/underemployed Americans.

The fact that the Republicans have consolidated themselves even further rightward into the land of psychotic lunacy ruled by Limbaugh, Beck, Bachmann, Angle, and O’Donnell, financed by the usual reactionary montebanks of the Koch Brothers, Steve Forbes, and Karl Rove, and now seek to achieve power by hysterical attacks on Obama and the Dems as enablers of “alien forces” (meaning everyone not White, male, fundamentalist Christian, and super wealthy, or those who want to be such)….that only provides a decent cover for the fact that the Dem establishment has pretty much decided that the Left is expendable and that their true “base” is those “moderate conservatives” being exiled out of the GOP by the Teabagger/New Right/Limbaugh offensive.

Hence, the only choice that Obama, Emanuel, and Gibbs give to “progressives”: Just “stop whining” and get with the DLC/Blue Dog program, because if you don’t, you’ll get Palin as President, and it will be all on your heads, not ours.

That may help keep some liberals scared enough to stay in the Dem fold…but it won’t in any way stop the momentum of the Right, since even with Obama in charge of the White House and even if the Dems do manage to retain control of both houses of Congress, there are more than enough Blue Dogs and New Dixiecrats that could align with the GOTP to get their favored agendas passed.

What we are seeing is the typical result of what happens when Democrats use the Left to get elected, and then shunt them aside and throw them under the bus for the ususal neoliberal corporate policies..and then expect “the liberal base” to make up and kiss them at the ballot box in the next cycle. It was like this with Jmmy Carter in 1976, and with Bill Clinton in 1992…and look at what the result was then.

Maybe, one day, the Left (as in principled liberals and progressives and folks to their left) will take the hints that the Dems aren’t really into them, and organize on their own with their own institutions (including a real progressive/Left party), and on their own terms. That would be far more fruitful than complaining about how President Obama has so severely “dissed” them.

Anthony

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The Rumors Of My Death Are Highly Exaggerated

Posted on September 28, 2010 by Anthony
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Yes, Clones, I’m still alive….just had to resolve some personal things, and of course a bust-balls work schedule.

I’m about to unleash some major bombs on the usual suspects…just stay close.

That is all….for now. :-)

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Why Nina Hartley Is Still THE Goddess….And Shelley Lubben Will Forever Remain Her Bitch

Posted on August 6, 2010 by Anthony
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For anyone who thought that the fire in Nina Hartley’s perfectly toned belly had gone out after 26 years of doing porn and sex entertainment/sex education…well, I can only say, ‘May the Goddess help you.”

For those who think that the likes of Shelley Lubben can out think, out wit, and/or outlast Nina in a fair fight….well, even the Goddess and God can’t help you on that one.

Last week, Nina gave the keynote address of the 2010 Sex Worker Conference in Las Vegas, hosted by the sex worker-backed Desiree Alliance.  Considering that it was nearly 20 years to the day that she was arrested for performing a live sex scene in that very city, she had a lot to say about defending both porn and sex work and defending sex workers from both the political authorities and the social commisars who would put her and her allies/associates down for selling sex on their terms.

And…a few verbal nukes launched at Gail Dines doesn’t hurt, either.

The original speech was first posted to YouTube by sawbuckfilms; they have granted me permission to repost it here…for which I am thankful and grateful. Because of its original length, I broke it down into six segments.

Enjoy, please.

Adult superstar legend/progressive sex educator Nina Hartley giving the Keynote Address at the Desiree Alliance 2010 Sex Worker Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada (via YouTube, h/t to sawbuckfilms for posting the original)

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Our Porn, Ourselves Facebook Ban Update: PornHarms Taunts…And How #Proporn Can Fight Back

Posted on July 29, 2010 by Anthony
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Since we reported yesterday about Facebook pulling the Our Porn, Ourselves page without warning,some developments have ensued.

First off, the opposing main antiporn organization PornHarms.org has been publically high-fiving themselves over the banishment of OPO, with resounding hosananas and Hallelujahs to FB for laying waste to a group of over 3,000 people. At her personal Posterous page, as an addedum to her original post, Violet added these screenshots from PornHarms’s Twitter and Facebook pages displaying their smack-running habits.

You will notice the trend here: according to the Porn Harms folk, the mere existence of a discussion page where adult women get together and defend their constitutional right to access, view, and consume adult sexually explicit media for their own personal pleasure….would allow CHILDREN access to porn.

Never mind that there was no porn or even no nudity (hell, not even bare cleavage or midriff), or any explicit dirty sex talk; never mind that Violet took great steps to banish anyone attempting to exploit the page for the usual porn spam; and never even mind that any linkage that did take place went solely to either discussion sites or to blogs with clear adult disclaimers and restirctions. Merely breaching the subject of women liking porn and resisting the Dines/Lubben/Trueman monopoly was more than enough to warrant this blatant act of censorship.

Of course, going after their critics with a nuclear bomb mentality has been the essence of the antiporn folks for forever, and it’s no surprise that they would seek to maintain their monopoly on the porn debate…mostly because allowing intellegent, sexy women a forum to defend themselves from countless slander would make PornHarms look like the right-wing sex-hating bigots they really are. (Yes, I said it…sex-hating bigots. Please send all complaints to HostGator.com or WordPress.org, or sue me directly.)

But…what does that say for Facebook, who seems to have gotten infected with the MySpace bug of policing thought of late??

After all, Facebook has several, if not hundreds, of pages dedicated to porn performers, and host a well of other pages and groups that tend ot promote sexual expression indirectly (such as Nina Hartley’s SexWise group). If FB is going to become now the newest arm of the Online Puritan Police, then why not be consistent and banish ALL of these pages, not just OPO?? I mean, it’s not as if “children” can’t simply google “Nina Hartley” and locate plenty of her video clips…or that Amazon.com’s link to her Nina Hartley’s Guide to Great Sex book isn’t easily accessible, too….right???

A couple of commentators over at Violet’s Posterous blog have noted the contrarian view that it is Facebook’s space to do as it pleases, and perhaps it was more of an algorithm slipup that prompted the pulling, rather than the protests of PornHarms. Well, it is their space, and they did have rules and a TOS…but if you bend yourself backwards to follow them to the letter, and you still get banished, that’s a BIG problem.

But, by far the most frustrating thing about this is that while OPO tried to be as open a forum as humanly possible, the Porn Harms page, in comparison, was as closed and restricted as usual, with membership firewalled and commenting moderated to filter out any view other than the “official” party line. And, they probably contained just as many links to their propaganda (which, BTW, includes images far more graphic and explicit than anything linked by OPO…remember The Price of Pleasure pilfering scenes from porn vids and fracturing them out of context to sell their position??). So..why isn’t FB challenging THEM for “obscenity”??

So..what does this mean for sex-positive discussion online and social media?? Simply put, it is a shot across the bow that the other side is more than willing and able to use whatever means necessary, fair or unfair, to monopolize the debate and eliminate their critics. Like the Teabaggers, the antiporn folk don’t respect the notion of civilized and equal debate, and they respect #proporn’s existence even less…they simply seek to dominate and destroy. There is NO acceptable middle ground for negotiation with them; only our total destruction will do.

Even worse, it seems that their viewpoint is slowly becoming the default view for most dominant social media sites, whose dependency on advertisers and political power gravitates them to accept the dominant cultural biases against sexual expression as well as the neoliberal/neoconservative/Far Right paradigm/political spectrum of acceptable debate. They can far too easily supress oppositional debate using the old “Think of the CHILDREN!! You’re a SLUT!!!! You’re a TOOL OF THE PATRIARCHY!!!!! You’re pushing SEX to CHILDREN!!! PEDOPHILE!!!!!!!!1111ONETHOUSANDONEHUNDREDELEVEN11!!!!!!” memes to intimidate social media into throttling free expression of sexual issues. The fear of the boycott or federal intervention to impose the usual restrictions only help to reinforce such sexual policing online as well.

The best solution for those of us who are #sexpositive and #proporn remains to be vigilant of the antiporn censorship attempts and organize to protect our free speech spaces, and to use our own power to counteract the myths, the smears, and the outright lies they promote. Forming and aggressively defending our own independent free spaces, as well as challenging online sites like Facebook to maintain their stated beliefs and mission of open and free discusion in the face of such efforts is wipe sexual communities off the face of the earth and online, is a minimal requirement as well.

Above everything else, though, those of us who are #sexpositive and #proporn absolutely need to come out of our scared closets and openly, aggressively, and enthusiastically defend our right to be thoughtful, normal, and capable sexual beings, and resist to the fullest the attemps by the likes of PornHarms to reduce our lives, our professions, and our basic beings, to mere objects to be stepped on, crushed, and thrown aside for their “glory”. There are still more of US than there are of them, and if we unite and (pardon the pun) come together against this nonsense, we will prevail in the end.

Or, to put in in the form of a memo to Porn Harms:

We’re still here. We’re not going anywhere. And, in the end, we will WIN.  Deal with it, folks.

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This Is Open Source Sex Solidarity: In Defense Of Violet Blue (Sex Blogger) Against Facebook Axing Her “Our Porn, Ourselves” FB Page

Posted on July 27, 2010 by Anthony
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Well…it seems that some people just don’t like the fact that women are stepping up and opposing antiporn “feminist” philosophy and activism.

Either that, or Facebook happens to be on Gail Dines’ payroll.

Tonight, I stumbled on this quite disturbing and, to be frank, damn angering news from sex blogger Violet Blue posted to her Posterous blog this evening.  Seems that Facebook decided that the Our Porn, Ourselves page they hosted was a little too hot for their sensibilities, so they just removed it. Gone. Finito. Burnt. Zipped.  Nuked. Without even any appeal of explanation other than some note about “violating their Terms of Service”. (The OPO blog, on the other hand, is still active..at least for now. Thankfully, WordPress and Automatic don’t eat fruit from the tree of lunacy.)

First, here’s the notice that now appears in place of the OPO page at Facebook:

And now, here is what Violet wrote in response (including the text of an email she sent to the Facebook staff in protest):

My letter to Facebook about removing the Our Porn, Ourselves page #proporn

I just got an email from Facebook telling me that the Our Porn, Ourselves page was removed for a terms of use violation. They did not say what the alleged violation was. Take this as a win for the anti-porn trolls that had been harassing members, reporting photos that were not in violation, and were likely reporting the page for non-existent violations. (Some may remember a few weeks ago when I asked on Twitter how I could stop these people from harassing us).

I was very careful to police the page nearly hourly to keep the content strictly within Facebook’s terms, as I knew the page was under scrutiny from anti-porn zealots (and I had been witnessing their underhanded tactics on the page to harass users since its inception). I immediately blocked anyone who tried to post pornographic content. I believe the page was an example of exemplary conduct in order to have a safe place in which women (and men) could talk about pornography in a socio-cultural context. I purposely wanted a work-safe, non-offensive destination for these discussions and to build women’s community. This is our porn for women manifesto, and was in the Facebook “info” box.
I had built an intelligent community of over 3,000 members, mostly women. They have deleted a giant community. All talking about what it means for women to “take back the right to look” at explicit imagery.
Facebook has given me no options for recourse: no evidence, no trial, just judgment and sentence. Like when they ‘accidentally’ removed the Ban BP Oil page (800,000 members) and then restored it, removed the gay author page for ‘Band Fags’ which had been up for two years, or when they removed Robert Scoble completely.

As I wait for Facebook’s response, here is the letter I just sent them:

Hello,

I’m Violet Blue: bestselling and award-winning author, and educator who speaks from UCSF and UC Berkley (Boalt) to Google Inc. Tech Talks on my field of expertise — exactly what this Facebook group page was about.

My page did not violate any of the reasons stated for deletion. It was under constant attack by people who disagreed with our point of view, and constantly reported our posts and images, even though we were very careful not to violate your Terms. May I find out why the page was removed? It is my utmost priority to follow and uphold Facebook community rules and standards. With national media attention to the page, questions will be raised and I hope to be able to furnish answers. Especially with a higher minded page of over 3000 members seeking community and discussion around a topic that did not target any group, threaten anyone, or link/depict/suggest inappropriate content. In fact, I policed the posts hourly for spam and attacks on our members, of which there were many. We never posted obscenity in links or images, though innocent user photos seemed to be increasingly mysteriously removed.

I feel that our page was targeted, and that we did nothing to violate the community standards of Facebook, which we sought to uphold. Any help to find out why this has happened would be deeply appreciated. I do not want to be talking to press about this in the next few days and be left guessing. We sought a safe place to discuss sex culture in media, and that is all.

I sincerely hope we can resolve this. Salon and Examiner wrote about our page as a signifier of community organization around women’s empowerment, calling it a new movement for women’s rights. I could tell we were under attack by those who violently opposed our discussions and representation as a community intersection for enriched discussions about important women’s rights issues. This development is confusing and saddening.

This fostering of group community around female empowerment and the page topic stems from my work as a talkshow guest (Oprah), international conference speaker, and columnist for various national and international magazines and publications (Oprah Magazine, Forbes.com, MacLife, etc) and media pundit (Wall Street Journal, MSNBC, Esquire, Redbook, Wired, etc).

Please help me understand what I can tell media outlets asking about this, and the over 3K member we had in the page group.

Sincere thanks,
Violet Blue

Of course, Facebook has a long earned reputation of jerking around with adult performers and sex-positive/sexually oriented pages; I could take a whole week to recite the number of Facebook pages built by adult performers who have been deleted or otherwise censored for no reason whatsoever, since none of the sites contained any nudity or even softcore sexual content whatsoever.

This has all the makings of a classical cave in to antiporn forces who simply lobbied FB to eliminate opposition to their campaign.

Whatever differences I may have with Violet Blue (and I do have many), and whatever I may have felt about the objectives of her site, this is still an outrageous act of sexual and political censorship by Facebook. I stand in total solidarity with her and all those who were members of OPO, and I will join in solidarity in any action against Facebook in protest of their capitulation.

In the meantime, I’ll see how FB responds to Violet’s letter of protest..if they do respond, that is.

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Lies, Damn Lies, Goddess Damn Lies….And Anti-Porn “Facts”: The XXXChruch/HeartSupport Edition

Posted on July 26, 2010 by Anthony
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Isn’t it interesting how antiporn activists are so outward with knowing “THE FACTS”???

Never mind that their “facts” turn out to be nothing but cooked-up propaganda and mashed-up statistics slanted to their own agenda…but boy, do they know about THE FACTS.

Shelley Lubben is one of the better examples of someone claiming to be so deeply knowlegable of THE FACTS about porn, so much so that her Pink Cross Foundation webpage and her personal website is practically littered with the standard: PORNOGRAPHY KILLS. PORNOGRAPHY DESTROYS.  GET THE FACTS.

Now, never mind that most of those “FACTS” about how porn led to so many performers deaths are woefully off, since she claims deaths by anything from tragic traffic accidents to cancer to unrelated suicides from drug abuse to be blamed on porn.

And, never mind that perhaps Sister Shelley might not be the best to claim expertise on such matters, having openly said herself that she “contributed” to the epidemic of herpes” by being an active prostitute engaging in unprotected sex with clients (but, of course, that was when The DEVIL had a hold of her, before Jesus SAVED her!!!).

But…for this once, I’m going to let Shelley off the hook for now, especially since Julie Meadows has more than enough of the hammer of truth to smack her down for the rest of the year.

Naaaaah.  Today, I’m focusing my wrath on another antiporn organization that, similarly to Lubben and the PFC, is attempting to make waves in converting former porn starlets to their religious Right agenda.

However, unlike Shelley Lubben, Craig Gross and his own website XXXChurch.com tends to take on a far less confrontational approach.  They are far more of a “good cop” to the Lubbenite smash-mouth “bad cop” approach; Gross appears friendly and magnamanous, appearing at porn conventions not to preach down performers a la Lubben, but simply to spread their message that there is a dark side of porn, and their agency is there to help those who might need it.

Certainly, this is a far, far less hostile approach that XXXChurch takes…which is why they have even garnered support from plenty of people within the porn industry as an acceptable and decent advesary who isn’t a wild censor like Lubben or Gail Dines or Pat Trueman.

That’s all fine and good…but underneath all of the friendliness and the amicable smiles of the XXXChurch, it seems like they have the same fundamental agenda that Lubben does…and the same fleeting carelessness with “THE FACTS”.

Want some proof of that? Well, once again, we turn to Julie, who has been sticking to the case like Colombo of late.

In doing followup research on the mythology of “sex addiction”, she discovered a page of the XXXChurch.com website which included some “factoids” on how much porn had decimated society and enabled “sex addiction”. That page included a link to another page hosted by something called HeartSupport.com, which featured this lovely graphic (which Julie grabbed and reproduced at her blog):

[Click on image for a larger view]

The claim here, of course, is that porn has created a whole nation of “sex addicts” who are so obsessed with seeing T & A (and D & P) that they are destroying their and other people’s lives, and that only through compassionate Christian “treatment” will they and the world get any better. Notice how close this gets to Mary Ann Layden’s theory of “sexual obesity” (and there’s more on her whackiness too..but that’s for another post), without crossing that line into full-on censorship advocacy.

Nevertheless, all of those “FACTS” can be easily disposed of. Julie has done an excellent job at her place of debunking the more obvious fallacies and BS at her space, so I will simply go off what she has done.

Let us begin at the beginning, shall we??

4.7 million Americans visit porn sites in excess of 11 hours per week.

Sounds mighty sinister, doesn’t it??  Sure it does…until you realize that 11 hours a week still corresponds to less than 1.7 hours a day. I know some commutes to/from work that are longer than that. So, where does that leave the rest of the day…other than the 8 hours of sleep and we give 8 hours for work and two hours for commute, that still leaves us with 4.3 hours of downtime.

And…4.7 million Americans viewing porn?? Out of a nation of well over 300 MILLION??? Gee, that’s some epidemic!!

Here’s a similar nugget that Julie discovered from her research:

“40 million Americans regularly visit porn sites.”

OK…do you mean 40 mil in a year??  In a month?? And how does that jive with that earlier stat of 4.7 million visiting porn sites a week??

And, what’s to say that most of those most likely to visit porn sites might be the very ones most critical of porn?? Remember that study that concluded that the most proific area for downloading porn online happened to be….Utah?? Where some of the most fervent advocates for censorship of porn are located?? I know…facts are stupid things.

Onward to the next factoid, please:

24 million Americans are classified as sex addicts.

Of course, they don’t back up this FACT with any sources…like, who exactly is doing the classifying of so many people as “sex addicts”, or what that has to do if anything with consumption of porn.

It also ignores the basic fact, as Julie mentions, that not even the American Psychiactric Association, which should know about such things, has been moved to label “sex addiction” as an official disorder worthy of inclusion in their vaunted Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders:

“The American Psychiatric Association publishes and periodically updates the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), a widely recognized compendium of acknowledged mental disorders and their diagnostic criteria. The most recent version of that manual, DSM-IV-TR, was published in 2000 and does not recognize sexual addiction as a diagnosis.[7] Although some authors had expressed that excluding sexual addiction from the DSM represents a problem,[8] the proposed diagnosis was rejected for consideration for inclusion in the DSM-5.[9] Darrel Regier, vice-chair of the DSM-5 task force, said that “[A]lthough ‘hypersexuality‘ is a proposed new addition…[the phenomenon] was not at the point where we were ready to call it an addiction.”

Obviously, there are those who do believe that sexual compulsion is indeed worthy of inclusion as an “addiction” worthy of treatment.

“The National Council on Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity estimates that 6 to 8 percent of Americans – or 18 million to 24 million people – are sex addicts. And 70 percent of sex addicts report having a problem with online sexual behavior.”

That’s from a quote from an article on “sexual addiction” found at SFGate.com, via Julie’s article. Funny thing, though…when I Googled “National Council on Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity”, one of the first links I found was to the website for a group called the Society for the Advancement of Sexual Health, which included this page that included this factoid:

A conservative estimate of those who could meet the criteria for sexual addiction and compulsivity is that of about 3 – 5% of the United States population. This is most likely a very conservative estimate, since these numbers are based on individuals who seek treatment.

They also link to the very controversial “sexual addiction” test invented by Dr. Patrick Carnes, who is considered to be one of the experts on “sex addiction”.  Problem is, that test has been waylaided from pillar to post for its base conservative assumptions and not-so-veiled biases against common sexual practices.  See Dr. Marty Klein and Greta Christina for some trenchant critique of Carnes’ illogic as well as the test itself.

Nexxxxxxt….

260 million pornographic pages on the internet

I suppose that that’s supposed to ellicit a response like that popular Best Buy commercial currently running: “WOW!!!!! That’s a lot of porn!!!!” Yeah, 260 million is a very big number.   When compared to the over 63 BILLION pages that current ly exist total on the Internet, though, it doesn’t look so big in scale. Actually, it amounts to a ratio of 0.02% of porn pages to all Internet pages….kinda like comparing the power of our sun to that of the entilr Milky Way galaxy.

Oh…and such stats don’t tell us either how many of those porn pages are self-made, or the range of explicity (Playboy nudes?? Topless photos?? Homemade sex tapes?? Homegrown websites??), or where these sites are located.

Finally there is this:

Sex addiction can often lead to: illegal activity and sex complications

First off…”illegal activity”???  Yeah…watching porn — and remember, Clones, that to these folks, too much of an interest in porn is the equivalent of “sex addiction” — most definitely leads to such “illegal behavior” as engaging in sex with the wrong people at the wrong place at the wrong time. Now, what constitutes “illegal behavior” might just depend on who you ask, though. If we are to believe the words of, say, Mary Ann Layden, any form of sexual activity outside of the boundaries of reproduction within Christian-sanctioned marriage would be considered to be “compulsive” and “addictive”, and thusly illegal. After all, we just can’t have impressionable children learning how to touch their genitals and nipples, for that may offend God and make him mad enough to cause more earthquakes or throw another lightning bolt like He did with Sodom and Gommorah. Let us not also forget that until recently, even consensual sex between people of the same gender, as well as people of different races (especially if one of the races happened to be Black) were also considered illegal, too. I don’t quite think that HeartSupport had that in mind when they wrote this, but that’s basically where the logic inevitably leads.

And as for “sex complications”: well…for most people, the only complication that they suffer from after watching most porn is how to clean the sheets. Not saying that for those who do become compulsive enough on sex imagery that it starts disaffecting them, there isn’t issues…but let’s not mistake them for the overewhelming majority of folk who use porn wisely without freaking out.

All this leads me to this question for The Reverend Cross and all of his allies:  Why don’t you reveal all this when you are out at porn conventions pretending to be all nice and moderate (at least, as compared to The Reverend Shelley Lubben)?? I can respect you not being an overt censor, but still…using the sime “facts” as Shelley Lubben and Gail Dines de to downgrade porn and selling the same fundie Christian solution of faked up “treatment” for “porn addiction” doesn’t quite click with your rep as being non-partisan and partial.

Hiding the fact of the Dirty Girls Ministries doing silent conversions behind the scenes doesn’t help your cause with me, either.

This isn’t at all to deny Craig Gross his earned freedom of speech to spread his ministry to whomever might be receptive to his message.  This is only to reveal that if you are going to present yourself as a factual source, it would make sense to rely on actual factual sources for your information. And, it would behoove those of us who defend sexual expression and sexual media to read between the lines and do your research before you blindly accept the logic of your adversary. That smile in your face could be hiding a knife headed towards your back. The Lubbens are easy to spot and avoid…the Grosses are a bit harder.

Trust, but verify. Good enough for Reagan; should be good enough for sex+/porn defenders.

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Why Shirley Sherrod Is My New Hero, Andrew Breitbart A Certified Wingnut A**hole, And The Dimocrats Remain…Well, Chickensh*t Dimocrats

Posted on July 21, 2010 by Anthony
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[Updated below...scroll to bottom.]

This story is as consistent as rain on a summer day, and just as tiring.

The Right seeks to smear an organization that successfully calls them out on their bullshit by fabricating a controversy through a twisted comment or a doctored video.

The accused party suffers direct damage because the lamestream media (and yes, that will be the first and only time I will ever agree with Half-Guv Sarah the Fabricator) fails to do their homework and actually look behind the chicanery…and because the Dimocrats (aka, the Democratic Party) puts public image and not wanting to alienate their corporate money flows over actually defending the people who put them in office.

The progressive/”far Left”/”dirty effing hippie” media actually do their jobs and reveal the scam, but not before the damage has already been done, because the MSM would much rather follow the money and take the words of DLC gasbags and right-wing shysters like Glenn Beck and Boss Limbaugh. Then, when they (the MSM) are revealed to have been punked, they respond with the usual whining about how they are just strapped by their sources.

But at least, the media has an excuse.  The Dimocrats, on the other hand, simply don’t even care.

The latest brohaha over now former USDA bueraucrat Shirley Sherrod and her public high-tech virtual lynching — first by right-wing “blogger” Andrew Breitbart by doctoring a speech she gave on March 27th to a local NAACP meeting, and then by her bosses at the Department of Agriculture, who ordered her to resign — has brought into full focus this procedure where progressive individuals are targeted and smeared to serve the agendas of both the Right and the Center.

In Mrs. Sherrod’s case, the trigger was the fractured and highly doctored clip  that Breitbart released to his BigGovernment.com blog, which implied that she was indeed hostile to a White farmer who sought her help 20 years ago to save their family farm. Problem was…the full video revealed the exact opposite of whay Breitbart was implying, and when reinforced by the testimony of the actual farmers she sought and successfully helped, it was the affect of a nuke exploding all over Breitbart’s face.

Here is the video in its entirety, released to YouTube by the NAACP:

March 27, 2010 speech by USDA bureaucrat Shirley Sherrod to the Washington, DC, NAACP Freedom Fund Banquet (via YouTube from naacpvideos)

The watchdog group Media Matters also provided a transcript of the speech, which I have added below. They emphasized through bolding the portion taken by Breitbart for his smearjob, the rest is from the original.

[11:50] SHERROD: I made the commitment on the night of my father’s death at the age of 17 that I would not leave the South, that I would stay in the South and devote my life to working for change. And I’ve been true to that commitment all of these 45 years.

[...]

[16:34] SHERROD: God is good. I can tell you that. When I made that commitment, I was making that commitment to black people — and to black people only. But you know God will show you things and he’ll put things in your path so that you realize that the struggle is really about poor people –

AUDIENCE: All right. All right.

SHERROD: — you know. The first time I was faced with having to help a white farmer save his farm. He took a long time talking but he was trying to show me he was superior to me — I knew what he was doing.

AUDIENCE: All right.

SHERROD: But he had to come to me for help. What he didn’t know, while he was taking all that time trying to show me he was superior to me, was I was trying to decide just how much I was going to give him. I was struggling with the fact that so many black people have lost their farmland, and here I was faced with having to help a white person save their land. So, I didn’t give him the full force of what I could do. I did enough so that when he — I assumed that the Department of Agriculture had sent him to me; either that or the Georgia Department of Agriculture — and he needed to go back and report that I did try to help him. So I took him to a white lawyer that we had — that had attended some of the training that we had provided ’cause Chapter 12 bankruptcy had just been enacted for the family farmer, so I figured if I’d take him to one of them, that his own kind would take care of him.

That’s when it was revealed to me that y’all, it’s about poor versus those who have, and not so much about white — it is about white and black, but it’s not — you know, it opened my eyes, ’cause I took him to one of his own and I put him in his hands, and said, OK, I’ve done my job. But, during that time, we would have these injunctions against the Department of Agriculture and — so, they couldn’t foreclose on him. And I want you to know that the county supervisor had done something to him that I have not seen yet that they’ve done to any other farmer, black or white. And what they did to him caused him to not be able to file Chapter 12 bankruptcy.

So, everything was going along fine — I’m thinking he’s being taken care of by the white lawyer, then they lift the injunction against USDA in May of ’87 for two weeks and he was one of 13 farmers in Georgia who received a foreclosure notice. He called me. I said, well, go on and make an appointment at the lawyer. Let me know when it is and I’ll meet you there.

So we met at the lawyer’s office on the day they had given him. And this lawyer sat there — he had been paying this lawyer, y’all. That’s what got me. He had been paying the lawyer since November, and this was May. And the lawyer sat there and looked at him and said, “Well, y’all are getting old. Why don’t you just let the farm go?” I could not believe he said that, so I said to the lawyer — I told him, I can’t believe you said that. I said: It’s obvious to me that he cannot file a Chapter 12 bankruptcy to stop this foreclose, you have to file an 11. And the lawyer said to me, I’ll do whatever you say — whatever you think — that’s the way he put it. But he’s paying him. He wasn’t paying me any money. You know, so he said — the lawyer said he would work on it.

And then, about seven days before that man would have been sold at the courthouse steps, the farmer called me and said the lawyer wasn’t doing anything. And that’s when I spent time there in my office calling everybody I could think so to try to see — help me find the lawyer who would handle this. And finally, I remembered that I had gone to see one just 40 miles away in Americus with the black farmers. So, I –

[VIDEO CUT*]

SHERROD: Well, working with him made me see that it’s really about those who have versus those who don’t.

AUDIENCE: That’s right.

SHERROD: You know, and they could be black, and they could be white, they could be Hispanic. And it made me realize then that I needed to work to help poor people — those who don’t have access the way others have.

I want to just share something with you and I think it helps to — you know, when I learned this, I’m like, oh, my goodness. You know, back in the late 17th and 18th century, black — there were black indentured servants and white indentured servants, and they all would work for seven years and get their freedom. And they didn’t see any difference in each other — nobody worried about skin color. They married each other. You know, these were poor whites and poor blacks in the same boat, except they were slaves, but they were both slaves and both had their opportunity to work out on the slavery.

But then they started looking at the injustices that they faced and started then trying — you know, the people with money — you know, they started — the poor whites and poor blacks — they — you know, they married each other. They lived together. They were just like we would be. And they started looking at what was happening to them and decided we need to do something about it — you know, about this. Well, the people with money, the elite, decided, hey, we need to do something here to divide them.

So that’s when they made black people servants for life. That’s when the put laws in place forbidding them to marry each other. That’s when they created the racism that we know of today. They did it to keep us divided. And they — it started working so well, they said, gosh, looks like we’ve come up on something here that can last generations — and here we are. Over 400 years later, and it’s still working. What we have to do is get that out of our heads. There is no difference between us.

The only difference is that the folks with money want to stay in power and whether it’s health care or whatever it is, they’ll do what they need to do to keep that power.

[APPLAUSE]

[...]

[25:03] SHERROD: I couldn’t say 45 years ago, I couldn’t stand here and say what I’m saying — what I will say to you tonight. Like I told, God helped me to see that its not just about black people, it’s about poor people. And I’ve come a long way. I knew that I couldn’t live with hate, you know. As my mother has said to so many, if we had tried to live with hate in our hearts, we’d probably be dead now.

But I’ve come to realize that we have to work together and — you know, it’s sad that we don’t have a room full of white and blacks here tonight ’cause we have to overcome the divisions that we have. We have to get to the point as Tony [sic] Morrison said race exists but it doesn’t matter. We have to work just as hard — I know it’s — you know, that division is still here, but our communities are not going to thrive — you know, our children won’t have the communities that they need to be able to stay in and live in and have a good life if we can’t figure this out, you all. White people, black people, Hispanic people, we all have to do our part to make our communities a safe place, a healthy place, a good environment.

Yeah…she’s an evil anti-White racist, all right.

Sounds like a woman who has learned to overcome her racial fears and actually help people in need.

Problem for her was, she got caught in the crossfire of the current battle between the NAACP and the Tea Party. The former had just pased a resolution at their national convention calling out the latter for their more overt appeals to racism; and I guess that Breitbart and his right-wing goons were itching to find something to fight back with.

Even worse of problem for her, though, was that she had bosses — such as Agriculture Secretary Bob Vilsack (former Iowa governor and well known DLC corporate clone — who tend to jump the right-wing bait when it coomes to pandering to their nonsense of painting the Obama adminstration as a bunch of evil radical Black illegals. Such was the same case with Rev. Jeramiah Wright and Bill Ayers during the 2008 Presidential campaign, and with the ACORN smear job of Breitbart and his colleague Pimp Daddy James O’Keefe last year.

Apparently, the mere threat of Glenn Beck going on the TV to rip Prez O is enough for the admin to rush to judgment and sack good people in the name of political expedency.

And what’s even worse about Vilsack’s action is that it plays to the coommon theme that Obama is more than willing to coddle those who most hate him, while throwing the very people who supported him most under the bus when it suits his purposes. Problem is, it simply makes him hated even more….by everyone. Only the likelihood of a GOBP/Right sweep in the midterms is keeping the Dems afloat in Congress..but this may be the final nail in the coffin for that if people on the Left conclude that this seals the notion of Obama being a corporatist DLC clone who will always attack his “base”…probably not understanding the fundamental fact that for the Dimocrats, the Left and liberals never were their “base” to begin with.

Plus, nothing Prez O does will ever assuage the hatred of the Right for him or for poor/working class folk, anyway…they will still see him as an illegal Kenyan raised in a Indonesian madrassa and funded by George Soros and Hugo Chavez to impose his inner Marxist/Socialist/Shariaist on innocent pure White Americans.

That’s secondary, though, to Shirley Sherrod’s morality tale of how to actually help people while helping yourself.  This woman deserves better than this. Like, say, a Green Party nomination to become State Agriculture  Secretary??

Just one more reason why I say:  Fuck the Dimocrats.

And…it does pain me to say this, because even if I didn’t vote for him I did have some hope…but if Prez O doesn’t show some balls and rehire Mrs. Sherrod promptly and gives Vilsack the same walking papers he gave Stan McChrystal, then…screw him, too.

I’ll let Rachel get the last word on this debacle.  Who’s next, indeed??

The Rachel Maddow Show (MSNBC): 7-20-10 opening segment on the deliberate high-tech smear that cost USDA official Shirley Sherrod her job, and the complicity of the Obama Administration in abetting right-wing media assaults (via YouTube from StartLoving3)

Update: Well…the repercussions for all continue.

The response in defense of Mrs. Sherrod has been encouraging and overwhelming…with everyone from Digby at Hullabaloo to Glenn Greenwald raking the Obama Admenistration over the coals for throwing her under the bus without factchecking the story or simply Googling her full video first. As per the usual, Glenzilla was right on the point when he wrote this this morning:

Contrary to the excuse being offered by those who did all of that, her actual message — that she was plagued by racial biases decades ago and overcame them with the recognition that it is poverty that unites people in need — was clearly evident even from the deceitfully edited Breitbart video.  This is part of what she said on that edited video:

That’s when it was revealed to me that it’s about poor versus those who have.  And not so much about white. It is about white and black, but you know — it opened my eyes.

But — just as happened with Octavia Nasr and so many before her, including the now-destroyed ACORN — the blinding, lying, depressingly common right-wing hysteria churned out by Brietbart/Fox meant that no nuances were permitted, no reason could breathe, and few people had the courage to defend Sherrod or even demand that she be allowed to speak before being thrown to the trash heap.

And that’s where the truly significant and rare courage of Sherrod becomes so consequential.  Unlike so many who are caught in similar right-wing/media smear storms and (understandably) back down, Sherrod refused to meekly slink away.  She conspicuously refused to apologize for things that merited no apology.  Rather than legitimize the accusations with defensive self-justifications, she put the blame squarely where it belonged:  on Brietbart, on the NAACP for condemning her without all the facts, and on the Obama administration for demanding her “resignation.”  And as a result of her refusal to allow these false smears to go unchallenged and the low-life smear artists to be rewarded, the true facts have emerged.  The actual culprits in this episode — basically everyone except her and the white couple who came forward to defend her — are clearly identified and exposed, with their credibility in tatters.  And it’s hard to imagine the administration’s not reversing itself and offering to re-hire her, thus being forced to reverse a serious injustice.

As much value as Sherrod’s NAACP speech has for everyone, her conduct in the face of this massive onslaught is even more instructive.  It ought to serve as a template for how people respond to all of these low-life, right-wing smear campaigns:  with unapologetic clarity and resolve about who the actual wrongdoers are.  To the extent the gross injustice of her firing is reversed and the slander to which she was subjected is nullified, it will only be because she stood up to the right-wing smear machine, the establishment media, and even the Executive Branch, which were all jointly operating — with different motives — to destroy her.  That isn’t easy to do, but this is obviously a woman with uncommon courage and principle — exactly what is required to stand up to and expose the group of thuggish bullies trying to smear her and the cowardly government officials willing to play along.  This will be an extremely valuable episode if her conduct inspires future targets of such smears to respond with similar defiance.

And by this afternoon, the light bulb finally went off over at the White House, and they belatedly stepped up and took accountability for their actions.  Robert Gibbs publically apologized to Sherrod on behalf of President Obama, and Ag Secretary Vilsack even went so far as to offer her her job back. Fair reversal….but not enough to quelch the stench of betrayal and abandonment. And…the stupidity of allowing this to happen in the first place.

For Breitbart’s part, he’s now claiming that he didn’t doctor the vid, but simply used what other “sources” gave him; and he only responded because he was baited by the NAACP’s resolution attacking the Tea Party as abetting racism. As if the racist placards and the “N-bombs” and “Obama in turbans” pics weren’t proof, Mr. Breitbart??

Oh…and you’d think that all this would pass Keith Olbermann by?? Yeah, right. He has temporarily suspended his vacation to promise a Special Comment on his Countdown program (Lawrence O’Donnell is filling in as regular host); when it is posted, I will definitely repost it here.

Update #2: Gee….that was fast.  Thanks a plenty, MSNBC.com and John Amato of Crooks and Liars…appreciate ‘ya.

Countdown with Keith Olbermann (MSNBC): 7/21/10 “Special Comment on the Shirley Sherrod affair and the complicity of both Right and Left (in different ways) in enabling and abetting this debacle (msnbc.com, via Crooks and Liars)

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Posted in Asshattery, Blogging While Black/Latin@, Chump Change, Current Events, F*ck The Dimocrats!!, Feel Your Inner Populist, Fighting The Good Fight, Love Me...I'm A Liberal...NOT!!!, Political Smackdown 2009-2010, The Conservative Bonehead Resistance, The Keith Olbermann Files, The Obama Nation -- Chump Change??, The Rachel Maddow Files | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

The Difference Between “Progressives” And “Liberals”…And How Independent Left Populist Socialists Would Kick Both Their Asses

Posted on July 14, 2010 by Anthony
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I thought that I’d get away from the “All Lubben, All Day” theme for a bit and focus on my other more political obsessions right about now.

There is now considerable angst ongoing now about the state of the port side of the political spectrum, with the fears running amok that President Obama and the Democrats have once again found a way to piss away the supermajority status they earned in 2008 to nothingness….such that there is a distinct threat that the Republicans, even with their Teabagger anchor firmly attached, may even be able to take back both houses of Congress.  This has created its own havoc amongst “progressives” and “liberals” alike, where each side is blaming the other ahead of the assumed deluge come midterm Election Day this November.

On the one hand, you have the liberal loyalists, the firm “yellow dog” Democrats and the Obama fans, who insist that people stick with Prez O and his agenda and not bail out, fearing that any dissention would aid and abet the Republicans to come back to power, with all the nightmarish scenarios of everything from Birther lawsuits to impeachment to repeal of health care reform (and having the likes of Steve King and  Michelle Bachmann in real positions of power). They are also the ones most likely to shun any thrid party effort as just awful “Naderism” that they blame for costing the Dems the presidency in 2000 and enabled the Bush regime that followed.

On the other hand, though, you have the movement “progressives”, who see things slightly different: they blame Obama himself for the state of the Dems’ meltdown, saying that he is simply too weak and accomodating to Republican policy and right-wing threats, if not a Trojan horse for the Right in the first place. They see Obama as fundamentally unqualified and inexperienced and simply not willing to export his political capital and oratorial skills to support progressive policies. Either that, or he’s simply as bought and sold to the corporate establishment as every other politician apparently is (save for Florida Congressman Alan Grayson, a darling of the “progressives” for his abiliy to smack down the GOP). A subset of this group are the PUMA’s, who apparently are still stuck in their fantasy world that now Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (then Obama’s main rival for the 2008 Presidency) would be the better and true “progressive candidate” merely because….well, her name is Hillary rather than Bill.

Now, if the Electoral Apocalypse does indeed take place and the GOBP (to use Keith Olbermann’s apt phrase) do manage to take control of both houses of Congress, I’m sure that this war of words will simply escalate, with both sides blaming each other for the meltdown and lodging their guns at each other rather than the threat of a Sarah Palin or Newt Gingrich Presidency in 2012.

That brings us to a unique post that was offered by one on the “progressive” side, which attempted to draw the line between the “progressives” and the “liberals” in such a way to favor the former.  Sam Smith, the proprietor of the website Progressive Review, is well known for his promotion of “progressive populism” as an antidote to what he sees as sellout corporate liberalism offered currently by the Democratic establishment. The post that he submitted to his site today, titled “The Difference Between Progressives and Liberals” (also reprinted this morn over at CounterPunch), lists what Smith sees as several reasons why Progressives are better than Liberals, and should be guiding the wheel of policy where the liberal Dems have failed.

That may be all fine and good…but as someone who believes that even “progressives” may not be radical enough or independent enough to address core issues of inequality, I find Smith’s logic to be a bit incomplete.

Therefoire, I will use his post as a jumping point for my own argument that a far more radical approach than even the “Progressivism” of Sam Smith is needed to break through the logjam of political inertia affecting the American Left.

No, Clones…I’m not going Castro or Chavez on you (though, considering Cuba’s superior health carre system and Venezuela’s success of redistributing income to its poorest citizens, they certainly merit more than a second look), but I will reveal my thoughts on what could possibly work when the Left decides to think outside the constraints of “the box”.

And so…here we go:

How To Tell The Difference Between A Progressive And A Liberal (Sam Smith, from Progressive Review, also reposted in CounterPunch)

Progressives, as liberals did before Reagan, emphasize doing the most for the most – which is how we got socio-economic programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and a minimum wage. Today’s liberals favor expanding health insurance company profits over expanding Medicare and strongly support Democratic presidents who undermine the very programs that earlier liberals created such as social welfare and Social Security.

Ummm….”the most for the most”, Mr. Smith??  Like, the most drafting young men to die in Vietnam and Southeast Asia?? The most…stifling social welfare programs to fuel the unending lusts of the Pentagon?? Raising the minimum wage to the heights of…well…barely enough to even reach the poverty level?? Standing aside while states passed “right-to-work” laws and busted unions left, right and center??

And what about this about “current liberals” versus “earlier liberals”?? I thought that it was just “liberals” who put themselves above the public? Not quite like the “progressives”, who would simply put White working class folks ahead of others..right??

Here’s a better idea, Mr. Smith…how about we have a consolidated social welfare/Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid system based on a guaranteed income program that eliminated much of the red tape and bureaucracy and got sufficient aid and assistance to the people in the greatest need?? Or…how about a greately expanded public sector jobs program with emphasis on education, health care, and fixing our crumbling infrastructure?? Would the “progressives” be as willing to support THAT..or would that fall too far into the category of “socialism” for you, Mr. Smith??

Progressives don’t act like prudes and prigs.

Really?? Considering that the likes of Gail Dines and other such antipornography feminists are the dominant voice on sexual expression policy and that advocates for a more open and egalitarian free speech policy are consistently tossed aside, I’d really beg to differ with that opinion. Has Progressive Review or CounterPunch ever written an editorial opposing antiporn “feminist” fascism of late?? (Outside of Nina Hartley refuting Chyng Sun five years ago and a couple of Susan Block essays in CP, that is??)

There happen to be people on the Left who happen to want to study the excesses and dangers of capitalism by actually analyzing….capitalism, not simply using capitalism as a crutch to condemn personal speech they don’t partacularly grok or like.  When the “progressives” start listening to these voices, maybe they might find their groove again.

Progressives don’t think the commerce clause of the Constitution should be used just because you feel like doing something, such as avoiding single payer health insurance. There is a huge difference between using the commerce clause to guarantee human rights and using it to subsidize health insurance companies.

Funny, though…some “progressives” have no such problem with using the “commerce clause” when it comes to stifling particular groups of people….like undocumented immigrants or lawful adult sex workers merely seeking better pay and employment. Or…does single payer health care only apply to “lawful citizens”??

Single payer is a good start; single payer as a foundation for a nationalized universal health care system like the British currently have, would be even better.

Progressives recognize the Green Party and its members as part of a broad coalition. Most liberals act as though Greens were a new kind of HIV.

Probably true…but where were the Progressives in 2008 when Cynthia McKinney was running at the head of the Green Party ticket?? Or, maybe the thought of two Black women at the head of a party ticket just too much??

And also….while the Greens certainly could be part of any independent Left ticket, some of their platform is way too problematic, due to their emphasis on “smallness” and on “localism” that may not be the best solution for national or even international issues of scale. “Tear down this freeway!!!” and “Build your own garden!!!: can only go so far in an interconnected country such as ours.

Progressives try to convince people with whom they disagree, not just scold them.

Oh, I see…so that means that Black folk should make nice with the Teabagger KKK who would sooner kill them?? Or, women should just shut the hell up if our “progressive” leaders decide that the antigay/antisexual expression/antiabortion/anticontraception leaders of the Roman Catholic Church (or some other “progressive” evangelical church group) should take center stage in their coalition because they offer lots of cash and “converts”?? Convincing peoplein the middle who realy can be sold is one thing; bipolarism is another thing entirely.

Progressive oppose the wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq; liberals like them as long as a Democratic president is running them.

I guess that makes Ron and Rand Paul progressives, then…right?? Wrong, Mr. Smith: Leftists oppose wars in general except as a last resort by people with no other option available to gain their freedom and autonomy against the worst oppression. In other words, we would oppose wars in Palestine/Israel, the Congo, and Northern Ireland, as well as those other countries…because war makes the Military-Industrial Complex grow at the expense of human needs.

Progressives oppose the war on drugs, America’s most masochistic and deadly battle since Vietnam. Liberals treat it with utter indifference.

The War on Drugs is pretty damn counterproductive…but you do know that hard drugs do have a way of injuring and killing people, do you, Mr. Smith?? And what about the even deadlier and even more counterproductive War on Sex???

Progressives believe what people do is more important than how politely they talk about it.

I can agree with that one…so, why are you still a Democrat after all they’ve done for you??  Or haven’t done??

Progressives don’t think you should have to go to grad school to have an important role in government.

Also one I can agree with…so, where’s the Left popular countermovement to the Teabaggers which would actually elect “progressives” to positions of power within government?? Oh, I forgot…that’s only for local folks.

Progressives respect state and local government; liberals often act like they’re a Republican plot. Progressives understand the importance of the devolution of power to the lowest practical level.

Ahhh…no.  Simply…HELL TO THE NO. What Mr. Smith misses here is that it was “devolution” to the states and the locales that allowd Jim Crow slavery and segregation to kick Black folks in the asses for nearly 100 years…and it was the full weight and power of the Federal government acting in progressive means and ends that helped those “local’ groups overcome the repression of state and local governments. Some levels of government can be placed closer to the people…but there still needs to be a federated, consolidated, amalgamated role of Big Government (tempered by egalitarian principles and democratic accountability, of course) to supersede any regional attempt at petty power plays. There is as much a need for nationalization as there is for localization.

Progressives worry about locked doors, liberals about glass ceilings, which is why liberals thought Obama’s election would create a post-racial society.Too many liberals are infatuated with symbolism such as electing a black president, while ignoring the real problems most minorities face in everything from the job market to dealing with the law.

Pardon my French here, but….EXCUSE FUCKIN’ ME?!?!?!? Electing the first President of color was no damn symbolism…especially for a country that has not managed to elect anyone other than a White male for the previous 232 years of its existence. That Obama hasn’t exactly been sterling as a progressive or a Democrat doesn’t negate the legacy of his victory one bit…it only proves how out of touch the Democrats and the corporate hacks that put him in the White House have been.  And besides….it would have been just as siginificant had it been Clarence Thomas elected.

And sure, us “minorities” (uhhh, Mr. Smith…non-Whites aren’t minor, and soon we collectively won’t even be a “minority”) are well aware without your help that we have issues that Prez O and the Dems are ignoring…but why are you ignoring US in favor of going after the conservative White working class voters?? Not saying that they aren’t hurting and in need of help like everyone else, but why should they get all the love while others get thrown under the bus?? How is that any different than what you accuse Obama of doing??

Even progressives who don’t own guns respect the right of others to do. Besides, why piss them off the way liberals have done, when they could be allies on a host of other issues, beginning with civil liberties.

Really?? Are you saying that the NRA could be an actual progressive ally?? The same NRA in the pocket of GOBP?? The same NRA that openly consolidates with Teabaggers to oppose even lukewarm Obama/Clinton/Bacus health care?? And since when did even most liberals ever back taking away guns from law abiding citizens not accused of any crime?? Sorry, but no sale here…we can carry our own weapons without the NRA’s help, thank you very much.

But then, progressives still defend civil liberties. Liberals seem to have forgotten about them and ignore Obama’s abuse of them.

As if Hillary would have been better??  Or Bubba Clinton??  How about Al Gore??? Yeah, right.

Progressives pursue issues; liberals support candidates.

Progressives don’t give up an issue just because the candidate they voted for is now in office and opposes it.

Aside from the basic fact that in order to pursue an issue you got to have a candidate there to pursue that issue….I can go with that one. Maybe we just need candidates who don’t compromise themselves to pass that issue….don’t we??

Liberals love Clinton and Obama while despising the Bushes who preceded them. They don’t seem to notice that our government continued to move to the right under both Democrats and that neither repealed any significant policies of their GOP predecessors.

That’s funny…I’ve seen quite a few PUMA progressives still brandishing their “Hillary in ’12, DAMMIT…because WE WERE RIGHT IN ’08!!!” stickers.

Progressives don’t think bailing out banks is an economic stimulus, but that helping to create jobs and stop foreclosures is.

Can’t disagree with that one…but how about the idea of simply nationalizing the banks and wiping out those deficient junk loans and foreclosures, and just letting people keep the homes they paid good money for?? And doing the same for forgiving government-supported student loans, too??

Progressives support local public schools and their teachers; liberals go along with the Bush-Obama attack on public education.

OK…so Obama and Duncan’s plans for public ed mimics Bush’s “No Child Left Behind”. What about actualy improving local public education by making it free from Head Start all the way through grad school, and basing it on need and competence rather than logrolling and senority??

Progressives are not afraid of criticizing Israel for its abusive treatment of Palestine. Liberals either support Israel’s criminal actions or are afraid of being called anti-Semites so don’t say anything.

The best of the lot here…but important to understand that it is the abuses and the underlying bigotry and racism of the philoso[hy of Zionism that we are attacking, not the right of Israeli Jews to the same basic rights of freedom and self rule that the Palestinian Arabs should also have. It doesn’t have to degenerate into becoming fans of Hezbollah or Hamas…or Irgun or Likud.

Progressives have new ideas; liberals come up with new compromises with the right.

I don’t know…many of the old idea — like democratic socialism and self-autonomy interspersed with collective solidarity — still remain quite valid for me.  And I don’t want compromise with the Center, either.

And the last word by Smith goes thusly:

Progressives believe that change is produced by broad coalitions brought together on specific issues, but not necessarily agreeing on all policy. Liberals believe change will come when everyone acts like they do.

Yes, consensus on the fundamentals combined with agreeing to disagree on the peripherals is important…but without a core commitment to the fundamentals, and without establishing a foundation of what those fundamental values are, no coalition worthy of its name will last.

The real issue that faces the Left (other than the lack of money, of course is) that there is no core central belief system and no core foundation of outreach that appeals to the issues of the majority of the working class and the unemployed…which still remains the majority of the country’s popuilation. That makes the latter far more suspectable to being divided against each other by both neolberals and neoconservatives who battle tooth and nail over the seats of power while the rest of us are reduced to spectators to this debacle.

The only way out of this is for the Left to rediscover the idea of democratic socialist populism: the belief that average people working together in solidarity and helping each other as equals can turn this thing around and restructure government to serve them under genuine progressive principles. That means nothing less than principled and total rejection of and rabid opposition to every inch of the Right’s core ideology, but it also means the ability to question and hold accountable its own leaders when they stray too far from progressive principles.

Say all you wish to say about the Right’s lunacy, but they sure do an excellent job of holding on to their biases and maintaining their discipline when in power…which is probably why they tend to come back like Freddy Kruger in far too many nightmares. If we tapped even half of their balls, we’d be in better shape than we are right now.

In other words, instead of arguing about why your house always gets pummled in hurricanes, why not just get the hell out and build a stronger, better house??

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Posted in Dimocrats for the Leisure Class, F*ck The Dimocrats!!, Feel Your Inner Populist, Love Me...I'm A Liberal...NOT!!!, Political Smackdown 2009-2010, The Obama Nation -- Chump Change?? | Tagged , , | 3 Comments