Sometimes I feel like Jurgis Rudkus…

Anyone who has lived in Kansas for long knows all about Pat Roberts. This guy was a neo-con before the word was invented. He is being challenged by a former lobbyist named Jim Slattery and according to a new Rasmussen poll, Roberts might be in trouble.

Before March, the Unites States Senate election in Kansas was a shoe-in for Republican incumbent Pat Roberts. At that point there was no viable Democratic candidate in the race and the state has not elected a Democratic senator since 1932. However, the decision by Democratic Congressmen Jim Slattery to run for office has made the race potentially more interesting.

The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Kansas voters found Roberts leading Slattery 52% to 40%.

The incumbent leads Slattery by twenty-one points among male voters, but just six percent among women.

The Democratic challenger leads Roberts by three points among unaffiliated voters.Roberts earns the vote from 82% of Republicans while Slattery attracts 75% of Democrats.

From an ideological perspective, the candidates are tied at 46% among moderate voters.

Roberts is viewed favorably by 60% of Kansas voters and unfavorably by 34%. Slattery’s numbers are 46% favorable, 38% unfavorable, and 17% of voters are not sure.

Now I’m not sure either. For the most part, I despise lobbyists as a species. I realize that there are some good lobbyists out there, just like there are some legitimate uses for leeches in the medical field. I really want to hear more about what sort of lobbying he was up to. Looking on the website of the firm that he used to lobby for, (don’t have the link right now) he used to be a telecom lobbyist among other things. There are telecom lobbyists that have a lot to answer for (net neutrality, analog air-wave auctions, etc.) and I want to hear his answers, but for now, here’s the new ad that the KDP has launched against Roberts. Hopefully, we can send him to the special hell that is reserved for dickheads that used to be important politicians.

Bread, peace and freedom.

My buddy donuthater turned me on to the Phil Ochs version of this song. I found an updated version a few days later by Evan Greer. Evan is a member of a group that calls themselves Riot Folk. Here is the full version of the song, or watch the live version below (song is incomplete on the video).

Bread, peace and freedom.

First thing, I haven’t been very diligent in getting protest songs up the past few weeks, I know it isn’t Friday, but I couldn’t resist once I saw this video.

I love me some folk music, and I think it’s still the most effective genre for protest songs due to the fact that it’s musical, the words rhyme and you can understand them all. However, since I was in Jr. High, my favorite band has been Nine Inch Nails. Several weeks ago (after admittedly not paying much attention to what Trent Reznor had been up to for a while) I heard the song “Capital G”. With the starting line, “I pushed the button and elected him to office and/he pushed the button and he dropped the bomb” it’s pretty simple to see who is being talked about. I found this video on YouTube and just wanted to share.

Bread, peace, and freedom.

This really only applies to activists in Kansas right now, but the Democratic Party has a great new tool that will be going nationwide at some point. Here is the text that is in the email if you use the “Invite a friend” option.

I’ve decided to help Democrats win in 2008 by contacting 25 voters in my neighborhood this year.  As a Neighborhood Volunteer, I’ve signed on to be part of a massive nationwide mobilization of volunteers to elect Democrats at all levels of government.  Democratic candidates need people like us to reach out to our friends, family and neighbors to talk about their plans for the economy, health care and our foreign policy.
 
This election is so important.  I urge you to join me, and the Democratic team, by signing up to be a Neighborhood Volunteer in your neighborhood:

http://www.democrats.org/votercontact

The Neighborhood Volunteer website gives us everything we need to conduct voter contact: lists of voters in our neighborhoods, flyers to pass out and information about what is happening in the 2008 campaign. 
 
The website is easy enough to use that you can get started in your neighborhood TODAY.  Most importantly, the program is extremely convenient.  You can talk to your neighbors whenever you have the time.  Will you join me to bring change to our community and our country?

Thanks!

When you sign up, the system creates a walk list of voters in your neighborhood with a brief questionnaire and a map that shows you where the houses are. Talk is good, but it’s also pretty cheap. If you want to change things, if you want to get the power out of the hands of the corporations that have stolen it and back into the hands of We the people like it’s supposed to be, this is a good start. I know I was surprised at how many democrats are living in my neighborhood. We can talk the talk, let’s walk the walk.

Bread, peace, and freedom!

Update: I have only contacted 5 of the 25 that I got to start and I’m already in first place for voter contact in our district. Let’s get off our asses people!

I’ve come to the conclusion that we don’t know what we’re doing anymore    -Lewis Black

So I was talking to my father-in-law the other day and floated a joke by him that I’ve been getting good laugh-milage on for a few days. It’s a context-specific variation on “the only way that Hillary Clinton is going to get the Dem nomination at this point is if Barack Obama sprouts fangs and eats a baby on live TV.” His precise response is lost in the fog of incredulity, but it was something to the effect that he actually thinks that this senario (fangs and baby-eating) might actually happen.

WTF???

I’m now coming to the conclusion that issues don’t matter any more. The constitution was written during the Age of Reason, I guess that since the drunk cowboy in the oval office is wiping his ass with that document, this can officially be called “The Age of Bullshit”. Some examples:

As the icecaps melt and the glaciers disappear and 60% of the world’s population are looking at the distinct possibility of having their living room turning into the pool they always wanted, we are, in the US, still having a conversation about whether global warming is real, if humans are causing it, and whether it will be a good or bad thing. This is like sitting in your living room and having a drawn-out, point-by-point debate on the subject of fire, whether it exists and has it been a net harmful or helpful thing WHILE YOUR FUCKING HOUSE IS BURNING DOWN!!!!!

In Kansas, the governor and legislature are fighting over whether to put up a coal-fired power plant or build windmills in western Kansas. In Sweden, they have a power plant that uses the heat generated by the treatment of raw sewage to generate electricity. So, in Kansas, in 2008, we are debating the merits of using coal or wind (one thing that Kansas has plenty of) to generate power while the swedes are TURNING SHIT INTO ELECTRICITY!!!!!

Barack Obama was raised primarily by a single mom and his grandparents. He just recently finished paying off his student loans. Hillary Clinton still has the silver spoon that was in her mouth when she was born and has spent the last 20 years in a bubble made of money and power and she is actually getting away with calling Obama an elitist.

I’m going to finish this before my blood pressure gets into the red zone. I end with another Lewis Black quote paraphrase because I don’t have the exact quote here. He was talking about Hurricane Katrina in his Red, White, and Screwed special when he said:

There has to come a point where democrats and republicans look at a piece of footage and say “This is reality”. You can’t watch a video of a kitten getting run over by a Land Rover and say, “I think the cat was trying to commit suicide. I’m going to need at least 3 days to find the note it left.”

If you have never heard of POAC, you should really click here or, better yet, here.

Post-Buckley NRO continues its descent towards unbridled wingnut hilarity as author attempts to prove liberals “hate joy” by quoting noted political philoshoper A.C. Slater from “Saved By the Bell.” Seriously 4-23
http://tinyurl.com/3luggq

Not much time to write an actual post, but everyone should watch this video. Viewer Discretion Advised.

Bread, peace and freedom.

Ani DiFranco — \’Tis of Thee Couldn’t find a video of this song. I saw Ani live in Lawrence in 1999 and she performed this song, prefacing it with the words “This is a song about the war on drugs and how it has turned into a war on poor people”. The drug war is a waste of time and money, especially when you consider that jail will screw up your life worse than a whole trash bag full of cocaine. Normally, I let people search for song lyrics on their own if they want to, but this song is worth quoting in it’s entirety.

they caught the last poor man
on a poor man’s vacation
they cuffed him and confiscated his stuff
they dragged his black ass down to the station
and said, ok, the streets are safe now
all your pretty white children can come out and see spot run
and they came out of their houses
and they looked around
but they didn’t see no one

my country ’tis of thee
to take swings at each other on the talkshow tv
why don’t you just go ahead and turn off the sun
cuz we’ll never live long enough
to undo everything they’ve done to you
undo everything they’ve done to you

above 96th street
they’re handing out smallpox blankets so people don’t freeze
the old dogs have got a new trick
it’s called criminalize the symptoms
while you spread the disease
and i hold on hard to something
between my teeth when i’m sleeping
i wake up and my jaw aches
and the earth is full of earthquakes

my country ’tis of thee
to take shots at each other on the prime time tv
why don’t you just go ahead and turn off the sun
cuz we’ll never live long enough
to undo everything they’ve done to you
undo everything they’ve done to you

they caught the last poor man
flying away in a shiny red cape
they took him down to the station
and they said, boy, you should’ve known better
than to try to escape
i ran away with the circus
cuz there’s still some honest work left for bearded ladies
but it’s not the same going town to town
since they put everyone in jail
except the cleavers and the bradys

my country ’tis of thee
to take swings at each other on the talkshow tv
why don’t you just go ahead and turn off the sun
cuz we’ll never live long enough
to undo everything they’ve done to you
undo everything they’ve done to you

Damn right. Bread, peace and freedom.

Just got mine done last night. My wife loves this day. She loves seeing how much we are getting back like we just won the lottery. It is pretty nice getting that goverment check, especially if you make the kind of money that Bill Gates does.

 
The Bush tax cuts provide extremely wealthy families with vast benefits. The richest one
percent of families will get an average tax cut of $92,000 in 2010, including cuts in income and estate taxes. The average income for families in the top one percent will be $1.6 million in 2010, and yet, the President and his allies in Congress have showered the most generous tax cuts on these fortunate families (Citizens for Tax Justice: pdf document)

So why aren’t we breaking out the torches and pitchforks? It’s the big lie. The big lie goes something like this: The government is stealing your money and giving it away to other people and you know how to spend your money better.

The short answer to this idiocy is that taxes are the cost of living in a civil society. The long answer is that you drive on roads, use water out of the tap, use safe, dependable electricity, cross bridges on the highway, and play with your kids in the public park. These things cost money to build and maintain. When you have to pay that bill (or have that money withheld from your paycheck like most of us) you are paying for your use of those services. I love Thom Hartmann’s analogy. Let’s say you walk into a convenience store. You see that they have candy bars for a dollar. You have an extra dollar in your pocket and are hungry so you grab a candy bar. Unfortunately, in line in front of you is one of these folks that like to show up in the middle of lunch hour and buy $50 worth of scratch tickets and the line is taking forever, so you crack open the candy bar and start munching.

At the point you open the wrapper, the dollar in your pocket is no longer yours. You didn’t sign a contract, but that dollar now belongs to the store. Imagine going to the cash register with the half-eaten Snickers in your hand and then accusing the clerk of theft when they try to ring up the candy bar. If you have a minute, check out A Day in the Life of Joe Middle-Class Republican.

The Bushies (and John McCain is on that list) also like to say that if these irresponsible tax breaks are not  made permanent, middle class Americans will pay an average of $1,800 more in taxes. True enough as far as that goes. But that’s like saying that if Bill Gates was to walk into a homeless shelter where two nuns are feeding 14 homeless guys, they have an average income of $10 million a year. It’s true, but doesn’t change the fact that it’s 14 dudes who have nothing but the shirts on their backs, two nuns who have taken a vow of poverty, and Bill Gates.

There is a class war going on with our tax policy. I think it’s about time we started participating in our side of it.

Bread, peace, and freedom.

Friday, George W. Bush admitted to OK’ing talks on torture between high level cabinet officials. You read that right, the President of the United States admitted to war crimes. And the talking heads on Sunday couldn’t get enough. They couldn’t stop talking about the inherent stupidity, political tone-deafness and near criminality of the remarks of… Barack Obama.

“You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them,” Obama said. “And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

This is elitist??? I saw these comments and the furor over them on Saturday while watching TV with my wife. As soon as Obama’s remarks were stated, she raised her hand in the air and said, “I know I’m bitter.” However, the Clinton and McCain campaigns can’t seem to wrap their heads around this line of thinking, so I’m going to try to spell it out for anyone who is still confused. Let’s start with a definition.

 elitist - a person who is or who believes himself or herself to be a member of an elite group

So what Clinton and McCain are saying is that, based on nothing more than the words he uttered in this case, that Barack Obama believes himself to be a member of an elite group? What group is this? Non-bitter Moonbats of America?

Obama may have made a poor choice of words as many are saying (an idea with which I vehemently disagree), but that doesn’t make those words any less true. I look around at Great Bend, KS and I see a town that is hanging on against all odds. One of the local manufacturing plants shut down a few years ago and no one has any illusion about it opening back up. All of the politicians look at those of us out here in flyover country and say, “I’m going to bring the jobs back” and they never come back. They say, “I’m going to make sure your family has health care” and every day you see cans on the counter tops of restaurants and convenience stores admonishing you to drop your change into the can so a little kid can get the chemotherapy that they need to stay alive. They say, “I’m going to make sure that you have a place to live” and then do nothing to stop the snake-oil salesmen who bring their easy credit terms and screw you out of your home.

This country has turned into a nightmare for most of the people in it. Politicians don’t care about how we are doing, what sort of towns we live in, what our kids eat and drink, or what sorts of jobs we work to try to make ends meet. They take the anger from this and redirect it at the things that aren’t like us, be they gays, guns or the idea that the government is going to close down your local church and make your kids start singing “Darwin is Great” before the start of the day. Easy things at which to be angry, sure, but intellectually dishonest as well. And most of us are starting to realise this. Bitter? Bet your ass we are.

So let McCain and Hillary keep filling the airwaves with nonsense about how “elitist” Barack Obama is. It does an absolutely fabulous job of making the two of them look foolish and out of touch.

Bread, peace, and freedom.

Afterthought: Just read a great post from Crooks and Liars. I must admit at one point on Sunday, I was watching Fox’s idiotic contribution to public discourse on the public airwaves they call Fox News Sunday. I wondered if Bill Kristol was going to chime in on this controversy with one of his patented “dumbest thing ever uttered” quotes and thought he let me down. Turns out he was saving it up.

I haven’t read much Karl Marx since the early 1980s, when I taught political philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. Still, it didn’t take me long this weekend to find my copy of “The Marx-Engels Reader,” edited by Robert C. Tucker — a book that was assigned in thousands of college courses in the 1970s and 80s, and that now must lie, unopened and un-remarked upon, on an awful lot of rec-room bookshelves.

My occasion for spending a little time once again with the old Communist was Barack Obama’s now-famous comment at an April 6 San Francisco fund-raiser….

Talk about a non sequitur. Andrew Sullivan at theAtlantic.com has more time than me to tear apart this nonsense.

Bread, Peace and Freedom