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Comments Posted By choicelady

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Morning Blog

HOUSE hunting????? Girlfriend, next one – put wheels on it? Do tell!!! What’s up with this?

» Posted By choicelady On May 21, 2012 @ 5:31 pm

Great observation from Barbara! Back in 1981 Ellen Goodman wrote, “Why do the rich need incentives but the poor need desperation?” No one has ever answered.

I’d like someone to pin a dollar figure on the line you have to cross to move from being a dispensible commodity to an indispensible talent. Just so we know our worth.

We began to erode the value of work with the movement toward globalization, pinning blame on working people for being “greedy”. Look at any union home and tell me that’s “greed”? Most are modest dwellings to say the least. Occasionally, through skill and lots of overtime, some folks managed to buy a boat – their recreational focus – but again, the boats were not luxury craft but pretty basic.

Then, once we’d demonized self-sufficient working people, we moved right on to the poor, especially those in communities of color. I will always believe that the Iran Contra drug sales in the US were deliberate efforts to erode the hard work, focus, and drive or our inner cities and their people – our GOP version of the British “Opium Wars”. Once we’d done that, how easy was it to demonize Black people – and now immigrants.

Yup – everyone below that ‘magic line’ of value can be discarded. But until we know for sure what the line is, we all think we’re indispensible, highly valued for our whiteness, talent, education.

And man, are we wrong.

» Posted By choicelady On May 20, 2012 @ 9:00 am

He Doesn’t Wish He Could Be a Real Boy – Romnocchio!

Absolutely wonderful! I had just remarked last night that Mitt moves all of a piece. He doesn’t turn his head – he turns his whole body. It’s very odd to watch, especially with the sound off. He’s the most rigid person maybe ever. McCain was much the same but for injuries sustained as a POW. One could admire him for that; he’d gone through hell and come back again.

Mitt’s are injuries that come from being – what? Well, you’ve explained it. He’s a block of wood. This is a man whose entire being as a liar has turned him into a tree stump. He cannot relax and “be himself” because he already IS. How can you be a person when you’re rootbound from trying to keep track of the lies? His body language gives the game away – he’s holding himself in check with every fiber of his existence so he can keep track of what he’s saying where.

When I saw your photo of him with the nose, it did not, at first, strike me odd. And how odd is THAT? You’ve nailed the man’s entire existence as a wooden prevaricator who has not a scrap of human feeling. Not for him becoming a real boy. Too late for that. What lies ahead for him will be a life afraid of termites, root rot, forest fires, and woodpeckers. Mitt the Block of Wood. Wanting to be president and no clue how to be honorable enough to achieve it.

Romnocchio indeed. GREAT story, AdLib. Thanks for letting us understand what we are seeing!

» Posted By choicelady On April 4, 2012 @ 7:08 pm

Remarks by the President at the A.P. Luncheon

People are just the beans, bito.

The drumbeat about “market wages” is so nasty! Not one single person who runs a business can do so without employees. It is employees who make the wealth that gets sold to benefit the owner – who may or may not be “hands on” or “silent”. Capital cannot exist without labor. So if we have massive increases of wealth, then the people who MADE that wealth deserve increases in their portion of it. If people are just beans, just commodities to be used and discarded, then wealth will dry up. Furthermore – even if you were to invent robots to do everything, Walter Reuther noted that robots buy nothing. So that is the other side of the equation.

If we do not calculate the numbers and types of people who benefit from employment or who are harmed by cuts both private and public, then we reduce every single one of us to nothing but beans.

And that might make a few people rich, but it guarantees they will have massive instability. Ryan’s Path to Poverty Budget is moving us closer and closer to a Third World unstable nation. People do not accept being “beans” without resisting.

» Posted By choicelady On April 4, 2012 @ 7:18 pm

He is among the first – and even advocates for those in need don’t do this – to talk about the PEOPLE who will be cut, not just the dollars.

This is absolutely essential. We have to make clear to WHOM the cuts will occur.

I remember a wonderful story told by Mario Cuomo speaking of his mother who was railing against “all the people on welfare.” Cumono said, “Ma! During the Depression YOU were on relief!” And his mother said, “Well – RELIEF…”

When your ox is gored, you tend to sit up and take notice. PBO is making clear we are ALL going to get hurt, and it’s past time people paid attention.

» Posted By choicelady On April 3, 2012 @ 8:55 pm

Is This Democracy – ALEC?

19th – doing taxes excuses you from any and all other issues! No one can deal with that and be expected to be sane.

Good luck!

» Posted By choicelady On April 5, 2012 @ 7:16 am

Hi 19th- Don’t belileve we’ve met. Welcome to the Planet!

My one caveat about ousting Blue Dogs is that, at least here in CA, we have found them very workable. It definitely requires a full court press from constituents, no doubt about that, but it CAN be done. During the health care debate, coalitions of more liberal/progressive people descended on district offices showing support for the plan, and every single Blue Dog wound up voting for it.

Blue Dogs do represent their constituents. There are parts of the nation that are just more conservative than we bi-coastal types, but there is nothing intrinsically wrong with that. What we more liberal people have to do is be present on small and large issues with those Blue Dogs and find ways to build relationships that matter to them.

The one thing that offsets the power of money is the power of votes. Unless AdLib’s HORRIFYING (joke) scenario April 1 were ever to come true where corporations could vote, that might be true, but at the moment the power of the vote is actually EQUAL to or surpasses the power of money. Well organized voices around issues can change all but the most craven Blue Dog. (I’m thinking Ben Nelson probably would never be anyone other than, well, Ben Nelson.) We in the liberal/progressive arena do not raise our voices often or well enough on most issues. We must.

Keeping a Blue Dog with whom we can work is critical to keeping power in each house of Congress (or states). That is what the radical right has done – we are not exempt from that. We cannot expel Blue Dogs just because we find them annoyingly too conservative especially if the opposition is worse – and it IS worse. In 2012 particularly, the regaining of both houses is CRITICAL to our survival as a democracy and nation of all people, not just the few. Targeting Blue Dogs now – especially if we’ve NOT done our homework in getting to talk with them well – is absolutely dangerous.

We cannot be “too good” to negotiate with those whose capacity to keep us moving forward simply by their presence in the party and thus the (we hope) majority. We cannot be “too good” to vote for them.

I am a lobbyist for a large non-profit that does social justice advocacy, so this advice comes from YEARS of experience. I’ll take a Blue Dog over any GOP any day of the week. It’s important.

» Posted By choicelady On April 5, 2012 @ 7:15 am

GOP to Pass Voting Rights Act for Corporations

Yeah, AdLib – that’s kind of a one-time joke, right?

What a loss. All that bacon. Gone.

» Posted By choicelady On April 2, 2012 @ 7:44 pm

The infamous Hunt brothers already proposed that back in the 1970s. Who knows when THAT will raise its ugly head again?
One benefit might be the idiot rich would have to open the books, PAY taxes on their wealth in order to demand their 25 billion votes. Not sure it would help, but it MIGHT keep them from voting. After all – Chevron paid no taxes. Does this not indicate they can’t vote at ALL? Zero value?

Hah – maybe they will see the unintended consequences of offshoring your wealth at the Caymans and bring it back?

But until that ugly day – one person, one vote does well for us all.

» Posted By choicelady On April 2, 2012 @ 2:10 pm

I would hope that wholesale civil war would break out in the Board Rooms of America as the top level execs fight to the death to BE the ficitious person.

NEVER forget that Nelson Bunker Hunt and his brother, William Herbert Hunt (those cute little 1970s silver scammers) proposed that everyone get as many votes as they have dollars in the bank. Think what the megacorporations – fictitious persons – could do with that! One person, one vote is sooooo socialist in their eyes!

» Posted By choicelady On April 1, 2012 @ 6:29 pm

I have been getting such things all day – so I actually HOPED LIKE HELL this was another one!

Thanks for a beautifully written send up – scarily possible, and eerily accurate. I could “hear” those things being said by the Right!

Thank you SO much for ending our anguish at the end though. It just MIGHT have been true!

» Posted By choicelady On April 1, 2012 @ 6:28 pm

The Religious Right Assault on America – Your Bedroom

PERFECT!!!!!

Of coure generically, male and female together, they are all GOD-zillas! Now if we can get a definition for just the males…I’m not coming up with one. Anybody?

» Posted By choicelady On April 1, 2012 @ 6:44 pm

But see, Sally – YOU have a sense of your own self and the limits to “fashion” that is appropriate for you!

I have yet to recover from seeing a short, 250-lb female protester outside a women’s clinic wearing a yellow-and-black striped tube top. No bra. It was like watching a mutant bumblebee – no one could look anywhere else waiting for the inevitable calamity that threatened.

I still have nightmares.

» Posted By choicelady On April 1, 2012 @ 6:43 pm

Although I dislike hot climates, I’d sure prefer the company!

I think I told this story before – it’s quite true – that during one incredibly hot and horrifically humid day outside a women’s clinic, one of the protesters sneered at me, “It’s going to be a lot hotter than this where YOU’RE going!” I replied, “Well, maybe – but I hear it’s a DRY heat.”

For some reason she stalked off…

» Posted By choicelady On April 1, 2012 @ 6:35 pm

WAsn’t that an amazing scene? Yikes!

» Posted By choicelady On April 1, 2012 @ 6:06 pm

She needs it for a neck job. So do I, but I’m not promising heaven or threatening hell to rob little old ladies for it.

» Posted By choicelady On April 1, 2012 @ 6:03 pm

Oh honey – I do NOT watch that stuff. Those folks come prowling around my house, and that is QUITE enough, thank you!

» Posted By choicelady On April 1, 2012 @ 6:02 pm

Good comeback! Protestants tend not to consider the “personal savior” part. In all my days as a kid in a self-selected Methodist church (my folks were tolerant Unitarians) and on through adulthood, NO one ever told me to take Jesus as my personal savior. Thank goodness. I always found that kind of repellant and grandiose. That’s why Protestants are “merely” Protestants but Dominionists are Christians. You hear someone tell you they’re Christian – that now is what they mean. Not Catholic, not Protestant, not Quaker, not EVEN Evangelical – “Christian” now in their eyes applies to ONLY Fundamentalists.

The slimy, creepy question about “not accepting Jesus as your personal savior” directed to Jews is revolting, and it’s only marginally less so directed at other Christians who do NOT think that’s the issue at all. Ann Coulter’s smarmy “Jews need to be perfected” comment is beyond disgusting – and she got her butt in a wringer saying this to what’s his name who is Jewish because Dominionists are supposed to be nice to Jews now, to get hold of Israel to fulfill prophecy. She almost blew it. Tsk tsk!

I’m sure, Cher, this comforts you after 2000 years of persecution? Now they have to be “nice” to you – even as they whisper behind your back that, too bad, Cher’s going to hell.

Honest to Pete, I never thought I’d live to see this day when every screaming bigotry possible lifted up its disgusting head, all under the rubric of “Christianity”. Yikes.

» Posted By choicelady On April 1, 2012 @ 6:01 pm

Yes – Dominionist Tart! I’ve mentioned that to more than one anti-abortion female protester showing up in lace-up leather bustiers. And I am NOT making that up!

The Mennonites, Amish, and other largely Germanic conservative Christian groups do tend to the plain living. I think they’re fine – they lead their lives in quiet without imposition on the rest of us. Where the hell would we be without the work the Mennonites do in starting economic cooperatives in desperately poor Third World nations? They put it on the line and live by their lights doing amazing good things. Not a problem. They are not Dominionists.

Those who are tend toward the flamboyent, the intensely sexual, the hyper-girlie. Remember Maybelle Morgan’s books on how to be sexy Christian housewives? It’s bizarre in the extreme. The amount of unrestrained boffing of one another (irrespective of gender) among the self righteous coupled with revelations of drug use, drinking, etc. simply boggle my mind. I heard all the FIRST HAND from their own lips. Frankly – I would not have believed it if someone had told me they were absolutely wanton in their personal behavior. All summed up in a snotty toss-off line one of them had:

“I’m born again. I can do anything I want.”

And there you have it. Well – YOU don’t have it. They do. You are damned to hell. Just thought you’d like to know.

» Posted By choicelady On April 1, 2012 @ 5:51 pm

I’ll link here to you – it’s OK, I get email from him hourly. Maybe tweets are overkill? I just think it’s GREAT that you two are communicating!

There are moments in my life with MRFF where if a crisis has arisen, esp. in CA, it’s “all Mikey all the time”.

So I think I won’t encourage tweets! He has every email and phone number of mine – enough already! But if he says something cool you want to share – please do! He is a fascinating, exasperating, admirable and successful voice for First Amendment rights in America. Could not ask for better.

» Posted By choicelady On April 1, 2012 @ 2:54 pm

It was the synopsis of your comment to KT as abbreviated on the right hand side for recent comments. Just VERY funny!

“KT It is still going on. CL works with a guy, Mikey…The Religious Right Assault on America – Your Bedroom”

» Posted By choicelady On April 1, 2012 @ 2:50 pm

Paul O’Neill was Bush’s Secretary of the Treasury in 2001. The very first – VERY FIRST – Cabinet meeting after the inauguration in January 2001, Bush announced the US was going to war with Iraq. JANUARY! O’Neill recounted this shocking information in his autobiographical description of his 2 years with the Bush administration, “The Price of Loyalty”. That may explain why the Patriot Act and many other responses to 9/11 came so fast. They WERE on the ground already.

» Posted By choicelady On April 1, 2012 @ 2:42 pm

KQ – if they overturned Roe and ended abortion then shoved ALL the GLBT people back in the closet – what WOULD they do to mobilize the masses and raise money? I’m NOT joking – that is all that keeps them alive and rich. Think about the fact that we had almost NONE of this until 1973 when Roe passed. All the uptick of the Religious Right REALLY came to the fore after that. Add in GLBT civil rights work, and they just took off and made MANY multi-millionaires out of nobodies. If they “won” this fight – no one would give them money. They have nothing else to say.

» Posted By choicelady On April 1, 2012 @ 2:36 pm

Hey Sue – he doesn’t tweet ME! That’s pretty cool of you!

» Posted By choicelady On April 1, 2012 @ 2:33 pm

KT – my organization supports Mikey, and I have worked very closely with Mikey personally, so I have very clear answers: it never stops, it always changes.

Mikey has successfully challenged the military on MANY fronts and was the prime mover in getting the “Jesus rifles” (the sights with inscriptions) removed. He’s stopped Franklin Graham and a dozen extremists from being THE speaker (or speaking at all) at official events. MRFF has called out anti-Islamic and anti-everything practices and harassments that have even extended to racism, gay bashing, whatever. And he has stopped ALL of that and more.

And the Dominionists continue to come back with new ways of oozing into positions of authority. Because my organization helps MRFF, I’m personally under attack at home (got followed from my office) to the point that I have to have security lights and cameras outside. I’ve had all kinds of very scary things happen. Mikey and his family are threatened with death daily, but the actual assaults on his home have diminished.

So yes it’s better. No it’s not over. Maybe not EVER.

» Posted By choicelady On April 1, 2012 @ 2:32 pm

First – in the synopsis of your post, the opening lines were posted right above your article’s title. Making me do a double take about CL and Mikey juxtaposed over “in your bedroom”. Yikes! Can assure you – NOT! LOL!!!!

That said, a lot has improved since MRFF – and nothing has changed. Dominionists just keep finding new ways to infiltrate some event or impose some standard that, yes KT, violated the UCMJ which they think is hogwash.

One question I want to toss out to Dominionists anywhere: Suppose you CAN force people into your presence. Suppose they sit there, under your mandate. Suppose it’s because they fear reprisals.

What have you “won”? The victory is entirely political – you’re showing “hearts and minds won” for the TV and other media. But you have NOT won hearts and minds – in fact you have generated huge loathing and anger against you, your words, your goals, your beliefs.

So if it’s political, well maybe you’re onto something. Numbers count even if they’re phony. That puts you right up there with Sun John Il’s faux “mourners” and every dictator that coerced masses into pretending to support him. Numbers matter, yes. For POLITICS.

But if it’s RELIGIOUS – not one single person who is dragooned into your presence counts for one single thing in the world of faith. NOTHING. If you believe, and you say you do, that “God reads what’s in your heart” then your faux followers, your coerced millions, mean nothing because they are not believers as you want them to be.

Dominionists, since you believe there is an anthropomorphic God in Heaven and that he judges – did it occur to you that it might well be YOU and your phony posturing that is raising up dis-satisfaction from God?

So gather coerced audiences and crowds at your peril. You may not be following “God’s will” but your own. Never a good thing by YOUR lights.

» Posted By choicelady On April 1, 2012 @ 2:26 pm

Kes – I think a huge change occurred in 1976 with the “I Found It” movement which kicked off the full court press of Dominionism via the Campus Crusade (part of the “Fellowship” or “The Family”.) It stopped requiring women to look dowdy. It stopped asking anyone to be anything – you were able to be born again and NOT have to be unworldly. Look at Tammy Faye Baker on to Palin, Bachman etc. You could be or do anything including indulging in homosexual activities, having abortions, etc. – because it was just a minor mis-step from which you could “repent”. You can be born again just once, but you can be “forgiven” endlessly. Women were meant to be sexy AND submissive, to be attractive to men (look at Newt’s rejection of wives one and two as too UNattractive) and even be in the public arena JUST SO you could disseminate the will of the men behind the scenes.

They don’t want modest and plain women – they want glam but want it to be for their husbands (or any guy of power who wants them – witness Herman Cain’s sense of sexual entitlement).

They actually have very little interest in the sex lives of their own kind – abortions are fairly commonplace given clinic evidence – but the one absolutely unforgiveable issue is to assert that being gay or having control over yourself as a woman is OK AS A CHRISTIAN PRINCIPLE. Thus the “pledge” NOM has made GOP candidates sign is not to hunt down gays but to hunt down those who ADVOCATE for gay rights and equality.

Gene Robinson’s “offense” is asserting equality sufficient to lead a large body of Christians. The Episcopal church sins in accepting that. Christians who support women’s right to choose abortion are damned because they affirm Christian principles behind that acceptance. That is the unforgiveable issue. Since almost every Protestant denomination affirms women’s moral agency over her own life, that is the unforgiveable sin.

In other words – it’s the affirmation of Christian equality, not the deeds, that drive Dominionists nuts.

BTW – if you want to make homophobes nuts, just ask them at what point they “decided” to be straight.

» Posted By choicelady On April 1, 2012 @ 12:04 pm

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s “Caskets R Us!”

AdLib – and you recycled! The Bacon Casket returneth!

I am particularly fond of the modest cherrywood Kleenex box for Boehner. It looks all cushy soft for his little dead body to reside in. And following on from most boxes, it can also be recycled, so once again – a ‘twofer’. Thank you! The story is a ‘threefer’: Creative, funny, AND environmentally correct.

» Posted By choicelady On March 30, 2012 @ 1:58 pm

Oh Sally – I did more than chuckle – I snorted, coughed, and burst out laughing to the point my husband left his part of the tax return to find out if was still alive!!! I assured him I was but also, after reading all this, that if NOT, I was not to be buried in a bacon casket or any of the above.

Thanks for yet another laugh visit. MADE my afternoon!

» Posted By choicelady On March 30, 2012 @ 1:55 pm

The Daily Planet, Vol. 218

Can’t reply above, so using this link.

YES! Repetition! Absolutely! Unless it’s beating your head against a brick wall.

As one trying to do messaging via the media, I fully understand the agony of repetition that ends in – nothing. The reason the campaign works is that it is in the control OF the campaign. press releases are subject to being ignored, altered, edited, fubarred.

We all decry how CNN at the more “responsible” end to Clear Channel and Fox at the other end will totally distort what gets said by liberals and progressives. That includes the White House and liberals in Congress. So repetition is not even heard. It’s distorted and mauled, ignored and shredded daily.

I think the WH must often feel as if they are doing the head banging on bricks. I know I do. You can’t fix stupid and, worse, you can’t command control over idiots determined to be so.

» Posted By choicelady On March 29, 2012 @ 2:35 pm