Yay! A Site Appears on the 'Net Like Cool Water in the Desert: Republican Offenders

This is absolutely great! As some of you know, I have tied to compile links to sites and reports listing the many, many scandals of the republican right. Most of you are already aware of our old favorite, Armchairsubversive, which one of the most important sites on the 'net. But lately I have discovered a new site devoted to keeping track of all the rightwing depravity, hypocrisy, contempt for society, and sneering disregard for the rule of law that we have come to expect from the GOP (Grotesque Old Perverts).

The site is called (drumroll & fanfare, please) REPUBLICAN OFFENDERS, and it is absoluetly brilliant. It achieves the work that I have been lazily doing (okay, I've only been saving a folder of links), but on a grand and glorious scale that fits the importance of subject matter.

And why, some ask, do I consider this to be so important? Let's address that first. Many are convinced that all politicians are corrupt, and that the big two parties are equally guilty of transgression. Fair enough; I used to hold the same opinion. But since I began blogging in Oct 2004, my opinion has changed. I have done enough research online to be convinced (and I mean convinced, not swayed by passion or duped by unbalanced data) that the Republican party is far, far more corrupt than the Democratic party. When it comes down to the lesser of two evils, as it inevitably does for me every election, the Democrats win hands down.

This is largely due to the Republicans' constantly proclaiming themselves to be morally superior to all others (especially democrats). They insist that they are God's chosen political party and that they do no wrong, they are the source and protectors of "family vaues" and all things good and righteous, they are the only practitioners of sexual morality and socioeconomic fairness, and want nothing more than to spread freedom and democracy and to all, with the added bonus of leading all to heaven as they are the only ones who know where it is and how to get there.

HYPOCRITES! LIARS!

The reason Republicans are about 10,000 times worse than Democrats on the corruption scale is their hypocrisy. They lie cheat and steal without remorse, they commit the most disgusting acts of depravity, but worst of all, they do all that while piously proclaiming their moral & spiritual superiority. If they would just own up to their actions; if just one Republican pedophile or whoremonger or whatever would admit (especially after being proven guilty) what they did and accept responsibility like an adult and apologize for their actions, then I could accept them as, like I said, responsible adults who erred and are willing to accept the consequences of their actions.

Instead, the scenario is usually more like this: A rightwng Republican (male in this case) spends his entire career condemning homsexuality as an unpardonable sin, and telling his voters to support him because he'll protect them from the Democrats' "gay agenda". Soon we discover that same rightwing Republican has been enthusiastically taking it up the poop chute from his harem of young gay male prostitutes for years. He'll sob and beg forgiveness and his followers forgive him, because their God embraces concealed repressed sexual deviance and hey, a little distraction helps conceal the action going on in their own pews, ya know?

If the guy had been a true liberal, he could have accepted his sexual preference and formed a healthy relationship with a consenting adult and perhaps even participated in legislation to allow them to form a legal monogomous union. Instead, he chooses the conservative approach: repress his sexuality out of guilt, shame, and fear for his reputation among his equally hypocritical but judgemental peers, until that repression expresses itself through twisted perversion and drug-addled back-alley boner buffing as often as he can for as long as he can get away with it.

The massive hypocrisy of the political "right" is what makes their corruption far worse than anything the left is guilty of. As long as they maintain their "holier than thou" platform, we will be there to point out how very wrong they are.

Please, please visit the following links of you haven't already:

Armchairsubversive

Republican Offenders (possibly my new favorite site...)

Republican Sex Scandals Dwarf Those of Democrats

In the interest of balance, here are rightwingers' lists of Democrat scandals. I leave it to you to decide which carries more weight in light of Republicans' claim of moral superiority versus progressive liberals' more realistic claim that we are all human and must take responsibility for our actions.

Democrat Scandals

Sex Scandal Lineup (mixed left & right)

Top 10 Democrat Sex Scandals

Rightwing Regret

Okay, so this weekend we had a little get-together with inlaws... specifically my wife's sister, brother, and his wife. I like 'em all and we all get along fine... and they're all republicans, of two different types.

My brother-in-law and his wife are the sort of suburban vote-against-their-own-interest republicans - the kind who condemn liberalism while spending their lives cashing in on liberal democrat policies. I mean, he works for the City, great salary and tons of benefits at taxpayer expense (and has used them a lot to the extent that they have saved his life and those of his children), bought his home through HUD, pro-union, etc., yet voted for Bush/Cheney right down the line. Whatever - like I said, I like them, and ignorance is a forgivable sin.

But my sister-in-law is more of a social conservative. Fundamentalist Christian, "pro-life" (I call it pro-birth), and pro-Bush. She believes what she's told by the right, and is so averse to conflict that, driven to practice avoidance as a coping mechanism, she would not be able to face the truth about the horrors that have been been committed in her name by the Bush/Cheney regime. I like her, too.

But here is the interesting part: at the end of the day, after the others had gone home and the sister-in-law lingered, the conversation got around to current quality of life. The price of groceries, etc. And my sister-in-law expressed great concern about how bad things are... "Why?" she would ask, "why are these food prices so high? What's going on!?" And so on, about gas prices, healthcare, etc. She's a nurse, by the way, and says the hospital she works for is losing money, etc. (and you know how much they charge).

It was really sad. I should have felt vindicated; that here was a "loyal Bushie" who is now reaping the bitter harvest of her support for the republican administration and it's eight years of insane and destructive policies, which have affected many different aspects of her life. I tried to explain to her that the food is expensive because the fuel used to produce it and transport it is so expensive, among other things. I tried to explain that a single payer healthcare system would be an improvement over the profit-first exploitation-medicince practiced in this country. I tried to explain that the "happiness level" in countries where people pay taxes to receive basic needs in return, such as healthcare and education, is higher than it is in America, where the corporate plutocracy is striving to revert to a Dickensian industrial age where the "middle class" no longer exists.

I explained my philosophy that the whole purpose of forming societies is so that the group can contribute to the common good; so that basic needs can be met by all. These include clean water, healthcare, and education. Those three things should be available, for free, to all, paid for by fair taxation.

To my surprise, she enthusiastically agreed. This Bush supporting, war supporting, anti-choice, fundamentalist, agreed with a philosophy of full-blown progressive liberalism. Of course, she didn't realize that's what she was agreeing to - if she did, it would be too much of a shock for her (and I mean that literally, not just as a figure of speech).

I imagine the conversation we had has been going on all over the country. Bush/Cheney supporters are suddenly confronted with the fruits of their actions. Whether they were innocent victims, "values voters" who were duped by the rhetoric, or foxophiles who knew what they were doing, some of them may now be realizing that their actions just may have been the cause of immense difficulty for millions of people all over the world (not to mention the agonizing death and maiming of so many others).

I know one, at least, who is shocked by the price-per-pound of bananas... one who may realize, too little too late, that she helped set the price herself.

Wow... constantly amazed, again.

Yes, amazingly, Randi Rhodes is outta there at Air America radio. And good for her, I say. The state of progressive radio in this country is pretty anemic, and in the Sacramento CA area, the capitol city of the so-called leftest state in the west, it is absolutely non-existant. Really - anyone who can find a lefty radio station around there, please let me know. And Air America, once the great hope of progressive radio, has done more harm than good to our cause.

Not too long ago, they booted one of my heroes, Mike Malloy. Why? Who knows. Maybe they have a death wish, or maybe they are rightwing wolves in sheeps clothing. Either way, the decision sucked. They were on thin ice, damnit.

Then, recently, they suspended Randi Rhodes for calling Hillary Clinton and Geraldine Ferraro "fucking whores" at a live gig that, as far as I know, was not an Air America event. Air America suspended her - so much for free fucking speech. It's okay for Dick Cheney to tell a senator to "go fuck himself" on the floor of the senate, but it's not okay for Randi Rhodes to swear at a live gig. Ooo, swearing... how fucking sinful. What would Air America do if a stand up comic like Lenny Bruce or George Carlin was guesting on one of their shows? Censor them?

Well, she definitely has the last laugh now! She landed at the same radio home that landed Mike Malloy! Woo Hoo! She's now at Nova M radio, who run KPHX 1480 in Phoenix, of all places. I say that because as some know, I am from AZ and lived in Phoenix, including the early/mid 80's when talk radio as we know it was in its infancy and growing into the monster it would soon become. Talk radio in Phoenix started out with a healthy mix of right & left opinion, enthusiastic but not as hateful as it is now. Soon, however, Phoenix followed the national trend and became overwhelmed by rightwing radio. But now... Wow!

You could have knocked me over with a feather when I realized that Phoenix has become home to some badass progressive talk radio, far more than Sacramento has to offer. Is that sad or what!? Geez! And as icing on the cake, they also have Stephanie Miller and Rachel Maddow, more of my favorites... I swear, I am not a paid endorser. But this is a dream team for me.

Anyway, I am hoping Randi and Mike Malloy and all are met with huge sucess in the southwest. Rock on, truthseekers.

Shopping Day, Part 2

Okay, so after we're done grocery shopping, coming out of the store, there's a guy with a little table there with stacks of forms in clipboards.

"Sign a petition?" he asks.

"What is it for?" we reply.

He had several petitions for people to sign, and briefly explained each one. They were related to various local issues - redistricting, methamphetamine-related crime, etc. But one of them was to enact a law to define marriage as being only between a man and a woman. Yawn. We said what Amy Winehouse said when they tried to make her go to rehab.

Now, as progressive bloggers, we see this tired old chestnut dredged up over and over again. And each time, I ask myself, what are conservatives afraid of? And they are afraid. I mean, whenever they address the subject of 'gay marriage' they always use the language of fear: the "Defense of Marriage Act," and so on, always constructing their rhetoric and catchphrases in the language of defense in the face of imminent danger. They don't just proclaim a preference for heterosexual marriage, they proclaim it is under attack and threatened with extinction.

My suspicion is that they are not afraid, but they are aware that fear is the best tool to motivate the public, and so they use it to achieve their ends. But as for the people who are so concerned about gay marriage that they are willing to go to great expense to try to eradicate it, are more likely to be motivated by a reaction to their own repressed sexual identity issues. So, these reactionaries feel that if gay marriage gains acceptance, they will not be able to resist the feelings they labor so hard to suppress. It's their own marriages they're worried about, not ours.

Ironically, one of the reasons they cite as justification for their cause is their belief that the "homosexual lifestyle" involves a lot of promiscuity. Their solution to that is to enact legislation designed to prevent gays from forming monogomous relationships. So, they promote monogamy by denying people the right to be monogomous. Brilliant.

I think that any mentally competant adult who is legally able to enter into a contract agreement has the same right to enter into a civil marriage contract. If they want to hold different values for religious marriage, that's fine. If their church won't recognize their marriage, that's a separate matter from the legal contract that is civil marriage, which is the right of every consenting adult couple, despite the righty-tighties' rhetorical fear-mongering.

Still, as I have in past posts and other blogs' comment sections, I ask the same longstanding question and challenge any right-winger to answer: What are they afraid of? Why do they feel threatened? From what does heterosexual marriage need to be "defended"?

Shopping Day, Part 1

Well, Sunday was grocery shopping day for my wife and I, so why not share the mundanities of that activity in what was once a highly-charged political blog? After all, politics seems to have "trickled down" to the grocery store lately, for many of us. So, to begin, here is a nice little shopping list from an article at Organic Consumers dot org:

QUICK FACTS OF THE WEEK: A NATION BUILT ON UNSUSTAINABILITY - FUEL, FOOD, AND DEBT

With trucking diesel fuel prices now over $4 per gallon in many locations, food prices are reaching an all time high, since the average grocery store item has traveled 1500-3500 miles.

Over the past year, alone, consumers have been forced to pay significantly more for staples like eggs (25 percent), milk (17 percent), cheese (15 percent), bread (12 percent), and rice (13 percent). This is partially due to increased costs of transportation and partially due to massive amounts of cropland being converted to biofuel production. As a result, consumers are paying more for their food and paying $15 billion in increased taxes per year for biofuel subsidies.

Fuel prices have nearly doubled the expenses of commuters over the last year. Recent polls show a strong majority of U.S. citizens are in favor of allocating a larger portion of the federal budget for mass transportation.

In contrast, the amount of federal money earmarked for mass transit projects (example: rail and bus) has been reduced by nearly 70% since the Bush Administration took over in 2001.

A record number of consumers are using credit cards to pay for increased fuel costs. Although the recession has negatively impacted employment, the New York Times reports one of the few booming occupations in the current job market is as a Debt Collector.

Since 2001, the top five oil companies have increased their annual profits by an average of 500%.

Thank goodness I have a liberal supply of stored fat to get me through the lean times. Between that and not being able to afford gas, I'll soon be a lean, mean, coupon-clipping machine.