Month: September 2010

Cracked

~ susie

Just got back from the chiro, and I can tell you this: This is not your father’s chiropractor. Very high tech – a massage table that works your back, a high-pressure hydrotherapy bed that feels amazing. (These were to loosen all the muscles before he worked on me.)

Then he cracked my neck and upper back and said, “Do you sit at a computer all day? Because that’s what your spine is like.”

Naturally, none of this is free — but relatively cheap, a lot cheaper than when I used to go. If you can kick a few bucks into the kitty to help cover this unexpected treatment cost, I’d appreciate it.

My pledge to the GOP

~ susie ~ 17 Comments

First of all, I pledge not to choke the living shit out of the next Republican who tries to feed me this line of horseshit. Because that would be “wrong.” (Actually, it would be good on so many other levels — but legally? Wrong.)

I happen to think Carl Jung was a genius, because if you want to know what a man’s really up to, listen to the accusations he makes against other people. “Rising joblessness, crushing debt, and a polarizing political environment are fraying the bonds among our people and blurring our sense of national purpose. Like free peoples of the past, our citizens refuse to accommodate a government that believes it can replace the will of the people with its own.”

Are you kidding me? You have the audacity to repeat this line of happy horseshit (or at least let some true-believer intern write it for you)?

It’s really difficult to talk to mentally ill people — and make no mistake, you guys are mentally ill. (So are the Democrats, but I beat them up all the time and right now, it’s your turn.)

You don’t give a shit about the “common good.” Show me the last thing the Republican party has done for it. You pledge to “honor the Constitution”? All you care about the Constitution is how easily you can twist it to support your political interests. Tell you what, let’s get Roberts and Scalia on live TV and let them explain the Citizens United decision to the American voters, taking live call-in questions.

Oh and yes, all y’all just loves you some Tenth Amendment — mostly because it’s so easy to distort. Yes, we know what “state’s rights” is code for. So do your hard-core supporters, who will vote for anyone who tells them they’ll stop scary black and brown people from exercising what they claim are “rights.”

And liberty? You have the nerve to talk about liberty? You not only want to forbid access to abortion for rape and incest victims, you’re backing candidates who want to make birth control illegal.

Fuck you, and fuck the elephant you rode in on. Even wifebeaters eventually learn an important truth: You have to sleep sometime. Sooner or later, the new “Third World” workers of the U.S. will slam a cast iron frying pan on your sleeping heads.

Because once you rig the game, and buy off the refs, well, people won’t care anymore about sportmanship.

Curse of the control freaks

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

Mike Lux has an interesting piece up at Open Left, where he talks about how effective it is when outside groups deliver your message — and how Obama discouraged big donors from supporting them:

Independent group messages have far more credibility and clout than those from party and candidate committees- even groups with generic-sounding names no one has heard of. Republican strategists like Rove got this early, and went about methodically organizing a network of corporate money to get involved in independent expenditure ads in swing races all over the country. But the Obama White House, sure of its fundraising ability and organizing genius, has consistently sent the signal to Democratic donors to not support outside efforts. They did it after they won the primary in 2008; they did it when they set up OFA to operate solely inside the DNC in 2009; they did it during the health care fight when they felt HCAN was being a little too independent in pushing for a public option, sending a clear signal to donors not to give to them at crucial times during the fight; they did it when ACORN had some bad publicity, very quickly making the decision to distance themselves and let them die even though no group has registered more voters or turned out more people in the last 10 years than ACORN.

I have been fighting this battle inside Democratic strategy circles for 15 years now, but the problem is worse with the current team at the White House. The folks running the Obama political operation have always believed they could control the message and the resources of the party better than anyone else, and that they didn’t need or want to empower outside progressive groups. Now embattled House and Senate candidates are paying the price, and it is a bitter price to have to pay. The groups that do have resources that are pro-Democratic- labor, MoveOn, Emily’s List, the trial lawyers- are doing their best to stem the tide. But corporate money in the post-Citizens United era is swamping us, and unlike in some cycles in the past (2004, 2006), wealthy progressive donors were sent signals not to engage, or just not cultivated at all, and the result is that we are being badly outspent.

One final note on all this: the irony of outside progressive groups being blamed for not doing enough to help the Democrats when the White House has been complaining about the “left of the left” and the “professional left” for many months- and de-motivating donors the whole time- should not be lost on anyone. You can’t attack progressives for being too strident and then wonder why they aren’t doing more and still have much credibility.

Sick Bastards

~ susie ~ 8 Comments

William Rivers Pitt gets it exactly right about Mike Huckabee and his “house already burned down” remarks:

All of them, every single one of them, are like a house that has already burned down, according to Mike Huckabee and the sick bastards who cheered his comments. All of them, every single one of them, are not worthy of health insurance because they had the misfortune of getting sick before they got insurance. All of them, every single one of them, therefore, are not worthy of health care in any real form, unless, of course, they are wealthy and able to afford the staggering cost of ill health in America.

All of them, in short, every single one of them, can basically just go die in Mike Huckabee’s world. They are not worthy of coverage, treatment or consideration. The five diseases I listed account for well over a third of the American population, and if Mike Huckabee or someone who agrees with him somehow becomes president someday, those millions of people should just dig their own graves and lie down in them.

Yeah, that’s why I’m not polite to these people. My wife has multiple sclerosis, and Mr. Huckabee this weekend compared her to a burned-down house. My wife is a vibrant, active woman who deals with a terrible, terrifying disease that costs upwards of $50,000 a year to treat. Thankfully, my wife was already insured through work when she was diagnosed, but there are many thousands of people out there with MS who have no insurance, or who won’t have insurance when they get diagnosed. If Huckabee has his way, people with pre-existing conditions will be treated as burned-down houses and essentially left to die.

To hear a man who gets treated like a legitimate voice in American politics basically consign my wife and millions of other Americans to suffering and death is to hear nothing more or less than flat-out hate speech from a presidential candidate. What Mike Huckabee suggested is tantamount to eugenics, to the extermination of “weaker” people simply because they are ill.

If this kind of talk isn’t enough to convince Republicans that the fringe of their party is to be avoided at all costs, then nothing in the world will. There have to be at least a few unwell Republicans in the country, right? There have to be some Republicans with heart trouble, cancer, diabetes, Parkinson’s or MS, right? If so, those people had better start digging that grave for themselves, especially if they are stupid enough to support Mike Huckabee or anyone else who agrees with him.

Be polite to these people if that’s your nature. It is not in mine, especially after the display this past weekend. These people are the sick ones, the ones with pre-existing conditions, and they should be barred from holding public office by the voters because of it. They are all sick bastards, and I have no interest in being nice about it. Do you know anyone with heart trouble, cancer, diabetes, Parkinson’s, MS, or some other illness like these? Maybe Alzheimer’s? If so, you shouldn’t be nice, either. Someday, it may be you on the wrong end of such a diagnosis, and if people like Huckabee and his ilk have their way, dig a grave and lie down in it. You’re a burned-down house, and your country has no use for you.