SNOOKERED AGAIN


President Obama continues to amaze me. As everyone around him is moaning and groaning about the latest deal with the Republicans, the devils in the details are beginning to emerge. Once again, he has given up nothing and gotten something in return. As in the deal to extend unemployment benefits caught the Republicans off guard and the President got what he wanted. This time around, his scam of the Tea Party is dazzling in its simplicity and points to the fact that Tea Baggers know nothing about the workings of government and business.

This time around, with all the hoopla and cavorting about by the Tea Baggers & Republicans (they were so busy preening for the press that they didn't even notice President Obama picking them clean), The President really let them have it. And for all the braying on the left, it is telling that Rush Limbaugh is saying the Republicans got fleeced. Obama took those idiot Tea Baggers to school & he ain't done yet.

What did the President give up? Not a thing. Sure, he said everything was on the table but only in contrast to the Republicans', "Everything's off the table, but tax cuts." Are there any cuts to Medicare? Any cuts to Social Security? Medicaid? No. In fact, they are off the table in any future discussion on the deficit. They have been sequestered and won't be touched. So, he gave up nothing. What did he get? A guarantee that this won't happen again before the election.

He also, got it so that if the Republicans continue the Bush tax cuts that that will be considered spending & they'll have to off-set that spending with cuts that can not include the Big Three. Let's watch the Republicans cut Big Pharma, the Pentagon, Homeland Security, etc. Yeah, right. Wall Street is already crawling up their asses because of the debit ceiling debacle.
So, the Republicans choice will be to fuck themselves or fuck their natural allies in the defense industry, Big Pharma, security corporations, not to mention just about every other corporation in the country.

Amazing. Obama turned Republicans against their natural allies because that's the only place cuts are allowed. So, Republicans will have to either agree to revenue enhancement or fuck themselves by demanding cuts. Boehner has already been told that Wall Street will bury the Republican party if they don't cut this stupid shit out. But how does he get 87 Tea Baggers who know absolutely nothing about government, history or service in line to act like rational politicians, which some Republicans are capable of. (AH, remember the days of Evert Dirkson, Charles Percy, liberal Republicans in the party of Lincoln?)

So, Boehner is impotent. The Republicans have been out foxed by the Tea Baggers and the party is in disarray. It's obvious that Mitch McConnell is going to be hard pressed to do his job, "making sure President Obama is a one term president." Actually, his job is serving the people of Kentucky and the people of the United States. His own stated job description is awfully close to sedition, if you ask me. At any rate, by the time the election rolls around Mitch, Boehner, et al will be licking so many self-inflicted wounds, they won't have time to inflict any elsewhere.

KNOWING GOD


Recently, US Army General William Boykin asserted that he believed "God had a hand in things: "God led me into the Delta Force. .... I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God .... Ladies and gentlemen, put your armor on and get into battle. God bless you. ..." Gen. Boykin, of course, is an extreme example. Even so, it's not a recent phenomenon, but he is an example of those who believe they know what God wants, what God thinks, what God wants us to do, to think, who God wants us to hate, and so on (never mind that his God is the same God as the enemy he's talking about).

It is not so much the claim itself that bothers me but rather the diminishing of God . God is beyond definition and most especially beyond the puny conjectures of human beings. I understand the political and social uses of "knowing what God wants" and "God spoke to me" but I do not understand "true believers" making the claim as they have nothing to gain but the repudiation of their faith.

If God is omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient and anything else God wants to be, it seems to me no mere human could ever figure out what's on God's mind, let alone God's wishes and desires, without direct communication from God. Which brings us to the second claim and most unprovable assertion. Taking folks who have claimed to have heard directly from or have spoken directly with God at his or her word, begs the question as to why God has left so many folks with so many different interpretations, instructions, experiences. It also begs the question as to whether or not it is really God speaking to these folks. Could be the Devil for all anyone knows.

A lot has been blamed on and accredited to God, more so to other gods, in varying degrees. But again, "how to do we know?" The answer is always, of course, "faith." But our faith is puny small, not up to the task of imagining an unknowable but omnipresent God. Make no mistake, I am not arguing that God does not exist (after all, it takes as much "faith" to deny God's existence as it does to argue that God does exist). I am arguing that NO ONE can claim to KNOW God or KNOW what God wants or wants us to do. It's ludicrous. Read the Old Testament and you'll see how many times humans fucked up in their relations with God.

Even the Bible, the "Word of God" is interpreted and written by human beings. Human beings have been known to spin the Bible to their own needs. They have lied, deceived, bribed, tortured and murdered in the name of their God. It absolves human behavior, much like Flip Wilson's "the Devil made me do it." Only it's spun into "God commanded me to save my fellow Americans from the ravages of the liberal left, the gays & lesbians, the fornicators and ex cederetas (sic)." Hell, even if the nefarious shit isn't true and their writings have no political agenda, they still fall short by way of defining God in human terms.

In fact, we do the same to the "lesser" beings in our lives. We assume that our pets have human-like emotions and we interpret their actions accordingly. But not even dogs have the self-awareness to react to stimuli they way we do. We admonish them as we would children and praise them the same way but they are not human children. Dog is Dog and God is God.

I pray to an unfathomable, unknowable, all-powerful God. (Notice I do not refer to God as Him or Her, because, Duh! Who knows.) I may ask God for something but I never "expect" it to happen. God did not kill any of my math teachers on the day before an exam. Not one girl in high school did the things that I prayed she would do when out on a date. I have yet to win the Pulitzer Prize. The reply, of course, is that God would never stoop to answering such prayers, let alone answer them in the positive. But that's precisely my point. Why do we pray to God expecting answers and why do we think we've gotten those answers in the language of our own previously held beliefs. Because we are small and we can not accept the fact that God may not be the father figure that folks have made God to be. We are nothing and know nothing in the presence of God.

The Summer of Hate & Stupidity

As the summer winds down, I am reminded of the Margaret Cho joke about the American South: "They say, it's not the heat it's the humidity. Well," she says, "it's not the hate, it's the stupidity." (And you might throw heredity into the mix, as well.) However, this summer everywhere in America, it's been about hate AND stupidity. From the Tea Party to Dr. Laura, from Rush to Hannity, all they do is spew hate. And now, they are getting stupid about it. Why? Because their intentions are so clear that they have to flounder around in unknown territory (apologies, called out on lies, etc, as well as, spouting some crap they think is middle of the road to as not seem as wacky as they really are).

It has been a summer of subtraction. The media is reporting on smaller and smaller groups to give them the vocal platform the media deems they deserve. A guy has a parish of less than 50 like minded folks and when they decide to burn the Islamic Holy Book AND the media gives him all this attention? Give us all a break. Twenty thousand attend a rally in Detroit for fair wages & fair trade policies and I'll bet the house you didn't read about it. Something like 90% of the media in this country is owned by six companies. Excuse me but the air waves legally belong the people. Thank Clinton for selling off a lot of small, family owned radio stations to big corps, so that the news we get in this country is dictated by six companies. Thank him for NAFTA while you're at it.

Before Ronnie, Georgie I, Slick Willie & Georgie II, banks were not allowed to have more than one branch with the allotment of a drive-up within 25 yards of the bank. That meant that every bank in this country was owned & operated by small business people. Same with radio & TV stations. If you owned one, that was it. It was especially a no-no to own more than one media outlet in the same city, say a radio station & a newspaper. We talk a lot about responsibility in this country but I want to know where corporate and governmental responsibility went & how to we rescue it and get it back.

The answers are fairly easy but it means reverting to a way of life that doesn't exist anymore. God knows, President Obama wants none of that going back stuff and for the most part, he is right. But there are some things that we ran right passed without even noticing. These are two. Hate and stupidity.

What does that have to do with the far right? Everything. Their hatred of the common folk and the commons that we own filters through everything they do. Any new programs from the Repubs (they go to the pub over and over again)? Any answers from them except not to let the Bush tax cuts expire? Actually, yes. The Koch (pronounced coke) brothers, owners of the second largest corporation in the US (gas, oil and mining) are funding all kinds of right wing activities, from the Tea Party to think tanks (Cato Institute, Americans for Prosperity among others), from lobbying congressmen to lying about hard science in their publications, from stealth attacks on individuals to the exaltation of idiots. Yeah, while good folks are trying to get something done to make this country a great place for us all to live in, these people are dropping millions and billions of dollars to fund right wing agendas that want to exclude any and all who are not filthy rich, white, Christian, far right republican or libertarian. (They are often hypocrites when it comes to social issues) . Their father founded the John Birch Society, need I say more? All the money in the world and this family spends it to keep others from having. Hell, if they'd taken the money they have funded numerous right wing institutions and publications with and divided that figure up among all Americans, we could probably eliminate a lot of the social programs they despise. Shit, we'd all be fairly wealthy.

A friend asked me today what it would cost to just give everyone in the US a million dollars (overtime). Of course, I said about 330 million dollars. We both fell out laughing at what an absurdly low figure that is when compared to other government programs. So, listen up Koch Brothers. Give us each a mil each & you can get on with you gas & oil biz & not have to worry about Social Security and Medicare. 'K? But no. They and their ilk would rather spend more telling us what shits we are for being unemployed and how great they are at creating jobs and they would do much better at running Social Security and Medicare. Hello, anyone really listening. All my problems with Medicare come from the PRIVATE company I have to get to cover what Medicare doesn't.

There is a balance. There should be and there will be. The pendulum has swung way to far to the right and rich and they seem to have found a way to stop the pendulum from swinging away from them. Somehow, they have suspended the physical forces of nature and they have that pendulum suspended forever, it seems, on their upswing. Guess what. They can't hold on that long.

The Summer of Hate and Stupidity is finally about ourselves and how we react to this onslaught. What do we tell our children about the way we acted during the Summer of Hate and Stupidity? Of course, we all had to go to work to support a family that used to take half that income. Look, it is easy to see the way the middle class is being fucked over by the corporate Repubs. Even easier to see how the poor get shafted even more. Of course, you have to look.

WHO WOULDA THUNK?

In Teddy Roosevelt's day, during his presidency, he being a conservative Republican was called "a communist agitator."1 Of course, he wasn''t. But "conservative Republican" meant something else back then. It had nothing to do with orange complexions, corporate ass-sucking, destroying the middle-class, refusing to enforce the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, ignoring alternative energy sources, giving tax breaks to the filthy & not so filthy rich, weighing tariffs & tax incentives in favor of the big corporations.

No, Teddy Roosevelt was a true conservative, as was Abraham Lincoln. They both understood that labor creates capital, not the other way around. Corporations are sitting on so much cash (trillions of dollars) that they have the mistaken belief that they create labor. For now, they are. They are taking their capital to India, China, Taiwan & any other nation willing to ignore labor laws or have none to begin with. But whose labor gave them the riches to do that? Soon, the laborers in China, Taiwan, etc., will rebel. It may be a while. After all, a doubling of wages now & then will probably keep the peeps quite for a while. Of course, doubling thirty-eight cents an hour should be no problem for the Big fat Corps. They could do it for years & not feel so much as an itch on their economic ass.

There is a bill now before congress that would require American corporations to disclose the salary & benefits of the lowest paid employee & the salary & benefits of the highest paid (CEO) employee. Guess who is putting a lot of lobbying money into stopping this bill. That's right. Big Insurance, Big Oil, Big Tobacco, Big Health Care & many more. The NRA & the US Chamber of Commerce have already donated over a hundred million dollars to the Republican cause. & the best we can do is elect corporate democrats??

President Obama needs to purge (not in a Stalinesque sort of way) his cabinet. Rahm should be gone. See ya later, Tim. Cat Giet your tongue. Paluson, too. It won't happen, though. The President seeks to govern (& appease) everyone. Can't, won't happen. What's especially funny to me is that the Republicans have someone, as they did in Clinton, someone they can work with. They won't. & just like Clinton, President Obama will try to gain their favor like a little girl begging for the life of her kitten. They will fuck him. If they win either the House or the Senate, look for Republican instigated investigations into everything the Obama administration has done. Look for them to not just say no but watch them tie up government processes with phony procedures (more so than they all ready have). It's disgusting.

They will take power again after this election & they will fuck us again. & our short term memory will be how long?


1.Roosevelt's speech to the State of Kansas, concerning John Brown, Lincoln & the state of labor & property (capital). Fifty years after slavery ended, "labor" still had a special meaning. The American worker finds him or herself in dire predicaments even if not rising to the horror of slavery. Wages have not gone up in thirty years, not since Reagan. Profits for big corporations have soared. They've taken over the airwaves (owned by the public), they've sent our jobs overseas, they are getting ready to take your Social Security & your Medicare (thanks Tea partiers).

Follow My Publishing Foibles-How Many Rejections Before Publication

For my first book, I went the fairly new print-on-demand route. How is it different than traditional publishing? With print-on-demand, the publisher prints the book at the time an order is placed. Traditional publishers will do runs of say 500 to 5,000 for poetry, more for academic books, novels and, certainly more for best sellers or hope-to-be-best sellers. So, traditional publishers have an inventory that they must sell. Print-on-demand publishers, by definition, carry no inventory. Print-on demand also requires a bit more from the author but it is a virtually guaranteed way of getting published. Done right the author can even make money.

For my second book, which I feel is much better, tighter and more under control though I miss the wild abandonment of writing a first book, I decided to go the traditional publishing route. It was time to get serious. This meant a number of varied strategies had to be under taken. First, I had to downshift from the euphoria of writing and publishing that first book and quickly finishing another to the realities of promoting both books, in different ways. I quickly found that there are actually many traditional ways to publish. There are magazines and journals, reviews and anthologies, stapled and copied zines and slick shiny publications; all sizes, shapes, tastes and requirements. And nowadays, of course, there are a number of on-line publications that run the same gamut just mentioned. Though, they all follow the same basic formula.

I already had a copy of the 2010 Poet's Market and began at the letter A under the chapter titled, "Magazines and Journals." I sent out five packets of about five poems each before I realized I forgot to change some crucial information in the cover letter. That is, I asked the Alaskan Quarterly Review and four other magazines to "please consider publishing all or any of the enclosed poems in The American Poetry Review, the intended of my first letter. I do not think they were inclined to help my publishing career in quite that way. I sent a humorous follow-up apology but to no avail. At least with the Alaskan Quarterly Review, as they have the honor of the first publication to send me a rejection slip. It reads as follows,

Re: Your August Poetry Submission
We thank you for the opportunity to read your manuscript. Unfortunately, your work does not meet our needs at this time. Because we know how much effort went into this submission, we regret the use of this form. But the volume of manuscripts we receive makes a personal reply impossible.
The Editors Many Thanks

Not so bad really. The apology for the form letter was a nice touch, if ultimately meaningless. I'm sure I'll see the phrase "does not meet our needs at this time" quite a bit. Stay tuned for the next rejection. Form a pool & take bets on when I'll get my first acceptance letter. I'm sending out about five packets of 3 to 10 poems each about every other day to magazines and journals. Also, send to about five on-line publications every other day. & I send to chap book competitions, prizes & grants about every third day. There should be a mathematical formula for this. Where are the guys from Numb3rs?

IMPORTANT IN A BIG WAY

PLEASE GO TO savetheinternet.com. If you care about free speech, whether you are liberal, conservative, or libertarian or even a Tea Party member, you should be concerned. They are fucking with all of us in regards to our right to free speech. The website explains it much better than I can & so does Al Franken (D-MN) on the video found on the website. This is for real. It is another step in the direction of this country being governed by lies or governed by the truth.

We are beyond the point of whether it is a question or not. They are storming our fortresses, our homes, our studios & garages, our little outbacks, devoted to free speech. On the internet, in the news (paper & TV, especially cable entertainment-news shows on Fox), in the rumor mill, word of mouth, lies filter throughout our lives like the tape worms that go unnoticed, scurvy in our intestines until we do a cleanse and find them laughing at us as we flush the toilet to no avail.

With the help of the Supreme Court, this country is not so slowly being turned into a neo-feudalistic society. A very few rich folks that determine everything (this goes way back, people) for a whole lot of poor folks who do the work & the bidding of, you got it, the rich folks is what we are in for, if we don't do something. Most likely we won't do anything. Not until it gets obviously bad in just about everyone's eyes. (Like maybe TV reception is cut-off?) Then, we will see marches, protests & the like. THAT IS IF WE HAD AN ORGANIZING, GALVANIZING GROUP OF DEDICATED FOLKS THAT ARE WILLING TO LEAD. But alas, even Al Sharpton has mellowed.

As the rest of the world embraces the enviornment & spiritual changes that are sure to come, the United States in its present form is just as likely to reject all such changes. Why? Corporate control. It can't be said enough! Everybody stand-up! Everybody shout! Corporate Control! Gun Control? Corporate Control! Enviornmental control? Corporate Control! Pharmaceutical control? Corporate Control! Governmental Control? Corporate Control! Corporate Control? Corporate Control!!!! Everybody say, "Corporate Control."

RANT-We've lost courtsey, are we losing the truth?

We’ve already lost the skirmish on the battlefield of Courtesy. Congressional representatives call the President a liar from the floor of Congress while the President is speaking. Dr Laura goes on a racist rant that makes Rush and Beck look like amateurs. Radio talk show hosts and cable “entertainment-news” show commentators call the President everything from a Socialist to a Stalinist, from a raving liberal to a fascist, from Mao to Hitler. Tea Party members shout down politicians at town hall meetings, some backing up their rhetoric with a piece strapped to the hip; a rifle in one hand and a misspelled home-made sign in the other.

The next battle is most likely already lost and could mean a lost cultural and economic war. The battle already raging in the jungles of the media is the fight for Truth. This skirmish has its roots in a court case that took place in Florida a few years ago. Two Fox News investigative journalists did an expose of Monsanto and hormones in milk. Their bosses made them edit the piece 22 times, until the report was a complete lie. The reporters balked, lost their jobs and sued Fox. The first trial ended in their favor with the jury awarding a very hefty settlement. The ruling was overturned on appeal with the court saying that Fox news had no obligation to tell the truth and that the reporters were insubordinate for not going along with the lie. It stands that way today.

Now, the combination of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling and the Senate’s refusal to pass a disclosure requirement for money donated to political candidates threatens the truth of our democracy. Corporations like Fox (which is half-owned by a Saudi Arabian gajallionaire oil thug who believes in a Taliban-like Sharia law) can now dump as much money as they want to into any political campaign they feel like and they don’t have to disclose how much money or which campaign they gave the money. Corporations can lie, they can give as much as they want to any political candidate and campaign that they want. People get in trouble, sometimes lots of trouble, for lying and people do have to disclose how much and to whom they’ve given political money. In fact, people have limits on the political money the can give and if they go over those limits, they go to jail. Somehow, this does not pass the smell test, like the blind man in the fish market.

The lies about President Obama would be funny, except that so many people believe them. According to a recent poll, one fifth of the country believes he is a Muslim. The researchers did not ask how the interviewees felt about Muslims or the President. And that’s beside the point. The point is that 20% of the country believes the lies (or at least this one) that are put out by right wing groups, organizations, think tanks, and media outlets. Lies that began before his election. Not regular lies but hateful lies. And I bet more than 20% of Americans believe some of the other lies of Fox News et al.

It began, in the mainstream media, with the Birther movement. He wasn’t born here. Where’s his birth certificate? A friend of mine sends me anti-Obama screeds from time to time, usually from some ersatz website or manically paranoid blog. The President has been called everything from a sodomite to a power grabbing racist, from a doped-out party-goer to a fascist corporate-loving anti-Christ. Obviously, not much there to be taken seriously but some folks do.

My favorite new lie is the one about a mosque being built at Ground Zero. For one it is not a mosque. It is a community center based on the example of YM & YWCAs. It does have a place to pray but so do YMCAs & YWCAs. Further more, it is not at Ground Zero, it's a few blocks away. AND, there is already a mosque at Ground Zero built soon after 9/11. What? Did they slip it in and disguise it with a hologram? How did that get past us? IT HAPPENED DURING THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION. And just like a lot of the problems we face and argue about germinated during Regan and grew like a honey suckle vine through Bush, Clinton, Bush and entangled this country in all its lies. Sonny Bush, relegated to putting the nearly final nails in the American coffin, as always, just couldn't get the job done. So, there are still battles these folks want to engage in.

Fox News (that hurts to write) continues to be caught in it's lies, small to large, innocuous to inflammatory. The most recent stand out being the flap over Ms. Sherrod of the Ag department. Sure, everything on the video is true but it was edited and manipulated to the point of presenting the exact opposite point of view than the one she was actually conveying. But where are the lies rooted and why do people believe them? I believe the lies are rooted in hate, both the telling and the believing of the lies. Maybe the lying Tea Partiers and bloated talk show hosts are just getting extra media attention, which may be amplifying the hatred; but still it seems particularly vile and I believe reinforced by the media. And, of course, hatred is usually rooted in ignorance. It's one thing to be vile and truthful, quite another to be vile and lying. One is merely rude; the other extremely rude, insanely propagandized and dangerously intrusive. But I won't say something as rude as, "Goebbels woulda been proud." My mama raised a gentleman.