Dear Michael Schwartz,

Congratulations on being the chief assclown at this year's increasingly inaccurately named "Values Voters Summit." As you can imagine, that's something of a crowded field.

However, when you decided that looking at naked images of the adult female body could turn an 11 year old boy into a gay man, I think you left open a window into your own soul.

When an 11 year old boy unearths his father's Pr0n collection, his first thought isn't "Am I gay?" His first thoughts are more than likely to be "score!" or "wow, what big knockers" or, if he's more sophisticated, "those can't possibly be real."

Unless, of course, said 11-year-old boy was gay to start with. Got something else to tell us about yourself, Michael?

Of Bimbos, Nipple Slips, and US Americans

Like every other asshole in America, I have an opinion on Carrie Prejean, and hapless Katie Rees, and it's an ugly one.

Frankly, I had no problem with Carrie Prejean's answer to Perez Hilton's question. She's entitled to her opinion, just like any other religious right Neanderthal. She's also entitled to lose the contest if the judges don't like her answer.

I have no problem with her nude shots (and judging by TMZ, there ARE nude shots). It's the 21st Century. Just about everybody's doing it, including people we'd probably prefer to never see naked. It does make her a bit of a hypocrite, if I remember my summer before high school reading of the bible (a reading which did more than anything to help me realize that the various sects of Christianity were nucking futs to base an organized religion on it), but ultimately that's between her and her invisible sky being.

The line of departure was when she decided to go Full Metal Anita Bryant (minus the talent, plus the silicone funbags) and hold her self up as the latest spokesmodel of hate.

Consider, by comparison, poor hapless Miss Nevada, Katie Rees. Yes, her photos are racier, by a good factor or two. But unlike Miss Prejean's actions, Katie Rees's photographs don't actually hurt anybody. Her actions will not prevent a loving, committed gay or lesbian couple from seeing their significant other in a hospital, or create a situation where the family takes their daughter's or son's money, leaving their long-term lover high and dry in a nasty probate dispute. Miss Prejean did that.

Yet Miss Prejean, silicone funbags and lousy work habits (has she attended one contractual event in her role as Miss California?) gets to keep her job, Miss Rees is out of luck.

Let's not pretend that beauty pageants are any great thing. As a heterosexual male, I like looking at scantily clad beautiful women as much as anybody. Beauty pageants are nothing but soft core porn for people with nothing but basic cable (minus the topless shots; those, apparently come two weeks after the contest, if this year is any guide). The talent competitions are laughable, and the pretense that a 19 year old girl/woman, chosen almost exclusively on her looks in as little clothing as one can show on TV without bringing down the wrath of the FCC, can offer up anything in the way of deep thinking about world peace, civil rights, the economy or anything else is a farce.

If anything good comes out of this at all, it's that we just keep getting closer to the day when these dog and pony bikini shows wink out of existence. It's a day I look forward to, frankly.

Points at Which It's Safe to Stop Reading.

From a blogger currently featured on the front page of Arizona's Shittiest Website^TM:

I may be my mother’s dumbest daughter

Oh, but wait, there's more...

I may be my mother’s dumbest daughter, but when I heard that the big 3 automaker CEO’s went to Congress to ask for money to bail out their automobile companies in private jet planes, I laughed my a** off.

Hmm. Actually, that just made me shake my head.

If just one of those executives, say the one from GM, put a generator in an SUV and had it follow him in a Chevy Volt all the way to Washington, they would have written him a blank check on the spot.

Of course, an SUV with a generator would kind of make the Chevy Volt irrelevant...wait a second. I was giving this incoherent sentence thought, instead of realizing that this is Jamielynne's dadaist way of prove she is her mother's stupidest daughter...but I digress. Continue on, oh Missouri born airhead.

The same skewed thinking has put this country in our present position; paying millions of dollars to people who bankrupted their business, funding corporate foreign junkets for incompetent corporate executives, and enabling people without jobs, credit, or savings to get mortgages they can’t afford

Shorter JamieLynne McDumbfuck (Take Your Pick):

I have no fucking clue about economics.
or
All of those folks who bankrupted their businesses were probably Democrats anyway.
or
All of those people who borrowed money in the Bush years to buy a house were lazy (insert derogatory term for minority of your choice here), welfare queens.

If I wanted the government to ignore years of bad business decisions and give me the cash to bail out my company the last thing I would do is demonstrate that I don’t have the brains to put on a good show.

This is the point at which somebody needs to stage an intervention, and make JamieLynne step away from the keyboard until she swears never to write about economics again.

It is all well and good to say let the companies die in total ignorance of the economic consequences, without realizing that they won't die in isolation, and it won't be just the Rust Belt that suffers.

If GM, Ford, and Chrysler die, that amounts to 2 million jobs. Not only do the three automakers die, but so do whole industries that support them with steel, glass, plastics, parts, tires, radios, etc. So do aftermarket suppliers. And the dealers.

This is on top of an already shaky economy, where the Dow has already fallen as far on a percentage basis as during the Great Depression, and when the economy is already shedding jobs faster than one can keep track.

But, of course, like the conservative anti-intellectual JamieLynne whatsherface is, she's much more eager to do the thing that feels good to her little priviledged, nasty, me-first in the name of our Lord self, instead of actually devoting some serious thought to the problem, and how to create a solution that does the least to hurt the broader economy, which is, of course, the only reason an honest person would consider bailing out any company in a country in the first place.

If JamieLynne isn't her mother's dumbest daughter, it certainly isn't for lack of effort

A Parable for 2008

Once upon a time there was a horse, who along with a man, shared a dangerous enemy, a wolf.

Seeking a solution to the danger, the horse approached the man with a deal. "You may put a bridle and saddle on me if you will help me by hunting and killing a wolf." To the man, aware of the dangers of the wolf, this seemed like a good offer, and so the man agreed.

After saddling the horse, the man mounted it, armed with sword and bow. After a short hunt, the man on horseback caught and quickly slew the wolf.

Happy at being freed of the menace of the wolf, the horse said. "Thank you for your help in slaying the wolf. You may now remove my bridle and saddle."

"Remove your bridle and saddle?", the man laughed. "The hell you say. Giddy up, Dobbin." The man then spurred the horse on to return homeward.

What to do about the southern United States, that states that once formed the Confederacy, the states that invented the term of Southern Democrats, has been a vexing problem for this country for 232 years. The text of the Declaration of Independence was altered to appease the region, as Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner himself, was asked to delete a reference to the slave trade in order to avoid offending southern sensibilities by Benjamin Franklin and John Adams.

The Constitution, as originally written, of course, attempted to deal with the North's population preponderance in the union (and by definition, in the House of Representatives) by counting slaves as 3/5 of a citizen for census reasons.

The country of course, ultimate fighting a long and bloody civil war over the issue. But the problem didn't stop there. The Democrats came back to power briefly in the late 19th Century by appealing once again, to Southern Democrats. Eventually, of course, the Republican party defeated that coalition, and might have continued to, were it not for the Great Depression, and the utterly ineffective Hoover response to it.

FDR came to power in 1932, buoyed by an uneasy coalition of the working urban poor, the fundamentalist South, and impoverished farmers. It was a coalition that enabled FDR to win four terms, with Truman riding it into the Presidency upon FDR's death.

Ultimately, however, the country, and the Democratic Party could no longer ignore the elephant in the room, the country's original sin of racism. Changes in the 1948 Democratic platform, while modest, led to southern Democrats putting up their own champion, Strom Thurmond, and FDR's old Democratic coalition, while limping to reelection in 1948, came apart in the 1950's.

JFK's magic won election in 1960, and there was even a faint echo of FDR's coalition in Johnson's landslide against Goldwater. However, the passage of the 1965 Civil Rights Act destroyed the 100+ year old alignment of the Democratic Party with conservative, fundamentalist (and by extension racist and chauvinist) majorities in the South. By 1968, Nixon was openly courting these voters across the country, and would ensure Republican success, at least in Presidential elections, for the next 40 years.

So how does this relate to the parable above? For 40 years, the real base of the GOP, the CEOs, the hereditary rich, white power structure that has been the real base of the GOP since the 1850's, despairing of ever becoming a majority party again, cast about for an ally that could provide them with the manpower, the numbers, to win elections again.

Looking about for such a group, they fell upon the religious right. It was a convenient marriage. The religious right had no love for women's rights, the rights of minorities, labor unions, gays and lesbians, or any of the other groups which gravitated toward the Democratic Party in the 1960's and 1970's.

The GOP willingly co-opted the Religious Right, offering them the bridle and saddle. The trouble is, new members of coalitions, and particularly energized members, expect results. When the relatively moderate, pro-business GOP of the 1960's and 70's didn't deliver for them on abortion, or rolling back civil rights, or the rights of women in the workplace, they decided to take over. They mounted the horse. They began to run for office, and fund raise. And they began to win, first in primaries, and then more frequently, in general elections.

By the 1990's and the first decade of this century, the GOP had become an organ of the religious right (as well as the neocons, but that is a subject for another post).

Now, the pro-business right didn't really mind wearing the saddle, because the Religious Right was doing a tremendous job at slaying the Democratic wolf. Eventually, of course, the saddle began to chafe. Then in 2006, the wolf took a good bite out of the man and horse. Finally, this year, 2008, the wolf gravely wounded both.

So now, the pro-business right has found a new enemy, the very people they once courted. They realize that nobody in the 60-70% of the country that isn't a fundamentalist, a CEO, or a neocon finds their party unappealing. And it's not as though the business interests can really become Democrats. The scales have fallen from their eyes, and they realize that the kooks have taken over their party.

They don't like it, and they will do something about it. The result, what we're seeing in editorials, and in the pushback against Sarah Palin, is likely to be civil war, and a long time in exile as a minority party.

Who will win this fight in the GOP? It's hard to see anybody winning but Democrats in the short-term. In the long term? I suspect the rich base that owns the GOP will regain control of much of their party back. And the fundamentalists will crawl back under the rocks, much as they did after the demise of Huey Long in the 1930s.

And then, perhaps, the political process in the country will grow healthy again. Or not. Either way, it will be interesting, it will be bloody, and it will translate into a lot of lost elections for the GOP. Stay tuned.

If the United States ever needs an enema...

...Oklahoma would be the perfect orifice to do it through.

Sadly, I'm all too familiar with rural Oklahoma. Many of my relatives lived there, live there, or were born there. My mom moved back there for retirement, mainly because it's cheaper...something about not paying people living wages.

Hideous Republican Chud of the Week

Look, it's one thing to not be happy with how another adult votes (though how you judge them based on that says as much about YOU as it does them). It's another thing to treat children like you're Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS. Nice values, you hideous Republican toad.

Like it or not, November 5, these are still going to be your neighbors. You're going to have to live with that. Those neighbors, even the decent Republicans in the neighborhood, are going to remember this. The next time you might need a favor from one of them, they'll remember how you treated their daughter or son like garbage. It will suck to be you then.

Maybe you'll have car problems, or lock yourself out of the house, or need somebody to watch the house a bit while on vacation. You never know when it will happen. But you didn't think about that, did you, you nasty little troglodyte. I hope they remind you of this forever more. Heck, some day, 10 years from now, you might need one of these kids to mow your lawn. Good luck with that one.

Maybe, 10 years from now, you'll sit there wondering why it's always your front door that gets egged, or your trees that get TP'ed. Then again, self-awareness doesn't appear to be your bag, so I doubt it.

McCain Feeling Heat

Apparently, the McCain shipwreck, er, campaign's internal polling numbers must be inline with Dr. Merrill's poll numbers, as this looks like an act of desperation in a state that really shouldn't be in doubt this late.

John McCain and the Republican National Committee are now running robocalls attacking Obama as weak on terrorism -- in McCain's home state of Arizona, according to multiple readers from the state.

The call signals genuine worry about McCain's home state at a time when several polls show the race to be much closer than expected there.

McCain's robocall, which was played to us over the phone by Mary Joe Bartel, a retiree who lives south of Tucson, attacks Obama as unprepared to defend the country from terrorism, singling out Joe Biden's recent remarks about the likelihood of Obama being tested by an international crisis early in his first term.

Go to Josh Marshall's link above to see the text, and hear the audio of the robocalls if you really have a penchant for self-abuse.

The bottom line is this is an utter disaster for McCain. He's already being outspent in battleground states. He's having to fight to defend states that Bush won handily four years ago. And now he's got to play defense on a state that should absolutely have been in the safe column.

Even if he wins Arizona, the fact that the race will finish close has to give a lot of hope to Bob Lord, Ann Kirkpatrick, Harry Mitchell, Gabrielle Giffords, and a ton of lower ticket Democrats that they won't have to count on quite as many cross ticket voters to vote for individual Democrats.

Make no mistake. McCain has no coattails, and may even be a drag on his party here on election night.

UPDATE: Raw Story has more, including local reaction from Don Bivens, State Democratic Party Chairman.

Bivens says they are asking the DNC & Obama for some reasons to help turn up the volume to 11. Rumor has it Barack has more money than he can use between now and November 4. It'd be nice to see some of the money, and maybe a campaign stop from one of the surrogates (I'm assuming Barack will have higher priorities between now and November 4). Nothing would say schadenfreude quite like McCain losing Arizona...particularly since he may have another statewide race against a tough candidate in two years.

Election Night Blogging, Have Notebook, Will Travel

FYI. For reasons I'm still trying to fathom, KPNX TV, Channel 12 News-Phoenix, Arizona, is seeking yours truly to blog for their site from 8 PM to 11 PM.

While I suspect there's a strong possibility that the big race everybody's interested in may very well be settled more or less by that time, it will be a good time to be there.

In 2004, and 2006, Arizona results were just beginning to trickle in at 8 PM, and there is a lot of drama locally, with all of the ballot propositions, Shadegg vs. Lord in CD 3, and Ann Kirkpatrick's run for Renzi's old seat in CD 1 and Harry Mitchell's and Gabrielle Giffords defenses of their seats.

Then there's the other big questions of the night. Can Democrats flip the House and/or Senate in the State Capitol.

Finally, a question I never thought I'd be asking six days out. Can John McCain avoid the embarrassment of losing his home state?

Update: I should have mentioned this will of course, be on Tuesday, November 4, 2008, from 8 PM to 11 PM. Unless you all know of another upcoming election night I'm not aware of.

Poll Pr0n (Bruce Merrill/ASU)

From the press release:

TEMPE, Ariz. ––Republican John McCain leads Democrat Barack Obama by two points (46 percent to 44 percent) in Arizona, a margin that makes the race too close to call, according to a new Cronkite/Eight Poll. The poll of 1,019 registered voters in Arizona was conducted Oct. 23-26 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. According to poll director Dr. Bruce Merrill, “The race in Arizona is very close. Supporters of both candidates are highly committed to their candidates, with 94 percent of Obama’s supporters and 93 percent of McCain’s supporters indicating that they are firmly committed and won’t change their mind before Election Day. In addition, the undecided vote is very low, which means that there are few people remaining to be persuaded during the last week of the campaign. Obama has been closing the gap by attracting independents and women to his campaign. McCain does well among conservative Democrats and evangelicals. Still, a week is a long time in a political campaign and anything can happen. Who wins will be determined by which candidate gets their supporters out to the polls on Election Day.”

The statewide poll also found that a majority (62 percent) of all registered voters believes that Obama will win the presidency next Tuesday, while 20 percent think McCain will win. Thirty-eight percent of the Republicans in the state and 34 percent of those supporting McCain believe the Illinois senator will win. The poll also found that, by a two-to-one margin (46 percent to 22 percent), voters believe that McCain is running a more negative campaign than Obama.

This has been accomplished without campaigning on Obama's part, or locally targeted advertising (national cable advertising has been showing here).

I personally believe, at this moment in time, that McCain has the edge, but there's still a week to go, and it is nothing short of shocking that this race is this close in Arizona.

Whatever direction this one falls a week from today, one thing is sure. The game is changing in Arizona. It's not the GOP haven it was just a few years ago. Frankly, that's a lot more important than whether or not Barack pulls off an upset in Arizona next week.

Boo-Frickin-Hoo

Looks like a whole boatload of Republican trust fund babies might have to get real jobs in a couple of weeks:

A glance at the Republican job bank page on Texas Rep. John R. Carter’s website paints the whole, bleak picture with what it doesn’t show: real jobs.

..

It’s only going to get worse after the election, when a flood of GOP résumés will hit the streets, the result of retiring GOP lawmakers, election losers and an outgoing Republican administration.

Indeed, trying to find a job in a Republican congressional office is already beginning to approximate a rigged game of “Press Your Luck.” And finding comparable employment at the typical next-stop political shops off Capitol Hill has become increasingly gloomy for GOP-ers, as well.

..

“It’s a double-whammy,” said Brad Traverse, whose staffing website, www.bradtraverse.com, is a popular destination for job seekers on the Hill. “You have more firms who are both looking for Democrats and eliminating the Republican lobbyist positions. And from what I’ve heard talking to people is there’s a kind of a dearth of good, qualified Democrats to take some of these lobbying jobs.”

Younger staffers may have an easier time matching their $30,000 to $50,000 salaries elsewhere, but senior chiefs of staff making six-figure incomes will find it quite difficult to replicate that pay as Republican operatives in a Democratic town during an economic downturn.

Look. I have no love for the Modern Republican party and even less for the bulk of its representatives in Washington. Hateful, spiteful, greedy, and intolerant is no way to go through life.

Now that they've fucked up two wars, a great American city, used the Bill of Rights as toilet paper, and trashed the economy in a way that only another Republican could achieve, I have no pity for them. Perhaps for their families, but none whatsoever for these clowns. Stew in it, folks.

Real Courage

As somebody who used to work in, and manage in call centers, I can tell you that this is just all kinds of awesome.

Some three dozen workers at a telemarketing call center in Indiana walked off the job rather than read an incendiary McCain campaign script attacking Barack Obama, according to two workers at the center and one of their parents.

Nina Williams, a stay-at-home mom in Lake County, Indiana, tells us that her daughter recently called her from her job at the center, upset that she had been asked to read a script attacking Obama for being "dangerously weak on crime," "coddling criminals," and for voting against "protecting children from danger."

Williams' daughter told her that up to 40 of her co-workers had refused to read the script, and had left the call center after supervisors told them that they would have to either read the call or leave, Williams says. The call center is called Americall, and it's located in Hobart, IN.

"They walked out," Williams says of her daughter and her co-workers, adding that they weren't fired but willingly sacrificed pay rather than read the lines. "They were told [by supervisors], `If you all leave, you're not gonna get paid for the rest of the day."

People working in call centers runs the gamut from college students, to former stay-at-home moms returning to the work force, to people working a second job, to people trying to build careers. Like most working people these days, it's not an easy conversation to explain that you're losing a day's pay.

I admire the courage of Ms. Williams, and all of the others for taking a stand, and calling bullshit. Sadly, some of them, once the spotlight is no longer on them, probably will lose their jobs over this. This isn't dressing up in a flightsuit, and pretending you're a hotshot pilot. This isn't being a chicken shit Republican Delegate and donning a band-aid with a purple heart on it.

This is real courage. It's rare. It's precious. And for a democratic (small d) government to survive, it is absolutely essential.

Prison Bars Are a Series of Tubes

Senator Ted Stevens guilty of 7 Counts of Lying on Senate Disclosure Forms

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens vowed to fight his Monday conviction on federal corruption charges, a verdict he attributed to "repeated instances of prosecutorial misconduct."

Sen. Ted Stevens leaves federal court Monday as the jury deliberated in his corruption trial.

"I will fight this unjust verdict with every ounce of energy I have," the 84-year-old Stevens, the Senate's longest-serving Republican, said in a written statement after the jury came back Monday afternoon. "I am innocent."

Stevens was convicted of seven counts of making false statements on Senate ethics forms to hide hundreds of thousands of dollars in gifts and work on his Alaska home from an oilfield contractor at the center of a corruption investigation in the state."

"This verdict is the result of the unconscionable manner in which the Justice Department lawyers conducted this trial," he said.

Actually, this verdict is the result of the unconscionable manner in which Ted Stevens abused the public trust, taking hundreds of thousands of dollars from a corrupt oil service company so they could in turn steal millions from taxpayers.

And I'm guessing Ted Stevens is innocent...of the Kennedy assassination.

This leaves Sarah Palin as about the only member of the Alaska Republican Party not to go to jail. Then again, Troopergate isn't over yet.

PS. Of course, this is excellent news for John McCain. How stupid of me not to realize it immediately.

Shorter Laurie Roberts's Entire Journalism Career

Is this an election or an SNL Skit?

• I have nothing serious to say, so I'll instead ramble uselessly about a Shadegg staffer buying a Democratic bumper sticker, then equate it with Woman of the People Sarah Palin's practical, middle class wardrobe for a moment.

or alternately:

• You mean they pay me to babble incoherently in a column for 1000 words? Hell, I do this at home all the time for free.
  

Shorter Alan Greenspan

Greenspan Admits Errors to Hostile House Panel

• Nobody could have predicted that basing monetary policy on the economic ramblings of a mediocre novelist (Ayn Rand) would end badly.