civil fairness

California’s Supreme Court’s decision on “gay marriage” is a no-brainer. It’s an issue of civil rights and fairness, plain and simple. The haters and fear-mongers confuse civil unions with religious ones, which are completely different. Personally, I think the state has no place in regulating adult sexuality, nor in defining who gets the economic benefits, which is very much what marriage is about in civil society, but as long as it does, then there must be equity.

Now the Right, led by such liars and hypocrites as Vito Fossella, Larry Craig, and a cascade of whore-mongering preachers, is going to use this legal decision to gin up fundamentalist votes in November. They are already gathering signatures for a state-wide referendum to overturn the CA Court’s decision.

The American taliban must be fought. Unenlightened heterosexuals are pretty clueless how fundamentalism is ultimately very much a threat to us, as well, for their agenda includes banning all birth control and making women nothing more than incubators.

Sinking feeling

Thomas Powers is none too optimistic on the continuing wars, regardless of who our next President is:

"At first, perhaps, all runs smoothly. Then things begin to happen. The situation on the first day has altered by the tenth. Some faction of Iraqis joins or drops out of the fight. A troublesome law is passed, or left standing. A helicopter goes down with casualties in two digits. The Green Zone is hit by a new wave of rockets or mortars from Sadr City in Baghdad. The US Army protests that the rockets or mortars were provided by Iran. The new president warns Iran to stay out of the fight. The government in Tehran dismisses the warning. This is already a long-established pattern. Why should we expect it to change? So it goes. At an unmarked moment somewhere between the third and the sixth month a sea change occurs: Bush's war becomes the new president's war, and getting out means failure, means defeat, means rising opposition at home, means no second term. It's not hard to see where this is going."

Powers also reminds us how Afganistan has been the ruin of Empires: the British, twice, the Russians, and now the US.

Veto Vito

Last week, Republican Congressman Vito Fossella, one of the Biggest Little Bushes in the region, was revealed as a drunkard, luckily pulled off the road before he maimed or killed someone. This week, he was revealed as an adulterer, fathering another mouth to feed by a woman not his wife. Next week, will it be complaints from alter boys?

The Staten Island/Brooklyn Congressman has yet to go down in flames, but there’s plenty of kindling. And I’m bringing the popcorn. How sweet it is! This, after all, is the sleazebag who charged his opponent in 2004, Frank Barbaro, with being a communist and a pedophile. I know, I was stuffing mailboxes in Bay Ridge (Barbaro handily won the Brooklyn side of the 13th CD) when I found one of Fossella’s glossy campaign fliers. Not a word about Vito’s good work as a tool of the Bush/Cheney agenda, needless to say; it was all about smearing his opponent with vague connections, associations, and lies. Classy work, Vito, you little shitball.

Disenfranchisement

The long struggle over justice at the ballot box took a huge hit from anti-democracy forces yesterday. The Supreme Court has declared an Indiana Republican effort to limit access to the polls constitutional. Bullshitting with a bogus fraud argument, the state GOP, well-aware of its minority appeal, sees limiting rural, poor, black, physically-handicapped, and elderly voters as one of the ways to maintain its power. (Some 12% of voting-age residents of Indiana don’t have driver’s license, btw, a serious number in an era of razor-thin margins.) Surprisingly, Stevens joined with Business Party man Roberts & the pallid Kennedy, while radical-reactionaries Scalia and Thomson (who don’t believe there is any right to vote) teamed up with Scalito, to say that this effort towards disenfranchisement was cool. Scalia, Thomas, & Scalito all wanted more, of course, in their effort to roll-back the 20th century. So Stevens, some say, strategically went this Plessy-way to keep the swinger Kennedy out of the clutches of the motherfuckerjudges, and allowing for future challenges to this appalling, partisan betrayal of democracy.

Pitiful

With Clinton’s 10% our long national nightmare continues.

The problem: she can’t win nationally because of the misogyny, and that other irrational hate, that of the lunatics. Plus, what a shitty President she'll make, as her stunningly immoral nuclear-weapons mongering the other day showed. Muy macho! Not to mention psychotic.

But her winning Pennsylvania’s working class/Catholic white ethnics means Obama probably can’t win them in the fall. The “Reagan democrats” will vote racially/culturally in lieu of the class battle that the Democrats have refused to wage for a generation (duh! for the simple reason that the party is ruled by the ruling class). It seems unlikely that Obama will reach for the necessary populism. And if not, Dr. Strangejaw, John McCain, a.k.a. Bush III, will be the next President.

To market, to market

Let the market decide!

The trouble with the market (hallowed be its name, amen, etc.) is that it’s people. Just like Soyent Green. An interesting NPR piece on thieving mortgage brokers. None of the interviewed did anything nasty, naturally, but they knew about all sorts of scams going on. There was just so much money in play, hardly anybody could say no to the lies, forgeries, cons, by the brokers, bankers, and other wankers.

Meanwhile, the same crowd that cheered on the frenzy is now wagging its finger at the suckers. Tom Tomorrow does it nicely here.

Enemies of the People

I. Little Dougie Feith, called by his critics the “undersecretary for defense fiascos,” the “Michael Brown of the Iraq disaster,” and the “dumbest fuck in the room” (I may be paraphrasing that general’s verdict) has a new book out. The son of a bitch should be in prison for war crimes and mass murder; instead he’s a “distinguished” faculty member at Georgetown and now the proud daddy of a book (wonder who the ghost was?) trying to shuck off his portion of guilt. But his real legacy continues to grow: 4333 "coalition" military killed; over 1000 mercenaries killed; tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of Iraqis killed.

II. Mark Penn was Clinton's chief strategist until yesterday. We've long known he was a corporte whore, working directly against the interests the Dems claim to support. His company's clients include union busting firms, mercenary companies like Blackwater, and the neo-liberal capos of foreign countries. There was a lot of bad blood between him and other Clintonistas, but only because he was doing such a crappy job of getting the nomination, not for his anti-populist, anti-working class, pro-neoliberal life's work. This is what you're voting for when you vote for Clinton.