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I was just reading this article about Bo, the new dog that Ted Kennedy gave to Malia and Sasha Obama. When I saw the picture, I had another one of those moments where my breath just caught up short and I thought, “Theyre black! Theyre black! Theyre BLACK!” and got all leaky around the eyeballs.

I wonder how long that terrible, fierce, angry joy at seeing a black First Family in the White House will continue to sneak up on me?

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Created by Recipe Star

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But you are really, really starting to piss me off and let me down.

Snap out of it. Fast. This country can’t afford and will not survive another Republican majority in charge in four years.

Op-Ed Columnist - Has a ‘Katrina Moment’ Arrived? - NYTimes.com

Op-Ed Columnist - Are We Home Alone? - NYTimes.com

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Benedict, Benedict, Benedict — you wacky pontiff. You don’t really get out much, do you?

Joseph Alois Ratzinger, better known to the mindless as Pope Benedict XVI and to the geekful as Pope Sidious, got his job largely as a sympathy fuck after years of faithful and ruthless service under JPII. “He’s almost 80, for fuck’s sake,” they said; “Give him the job and shut him up already. Do you really want to sit around and listen to him bitching until he’s dead?” In a way, I don’t blame them. The Catholic Church is not exactly short on time.

Benedict XVI is a shriveled-up, hate-mongering bastard who has no understanding of reality whatsoever. He has no idea how real people live in the real world and if he did he would have zero compassion for anyone anyway. He is a conservative’s conservative, going even further than JPII did in his totalitarian mind-set. He is flatly opposed to anything that would be of any real benefit to anyone, honestly, and if there really were a God, and that God was his boss, the first thing you’d have heard the day after they put him in the big chair was a resounding, heavenly YOU’RE FIRED! that would have made Donald Trump’s rug spin in sheer delight like a Three Stooges gag.

Benedict, flush with his successful reversal of Holocaust denier Bishop Richard Williamson’s excommunication and Benedict’s own subsequent denials of knowledge that the man had been excommunicated for being what to me is tantamount to a Nazi-sympathizing douchebag (yeah, okay, Benedict — you aren’t even bothering to try, are you), has deigned to grace the continent of Africa with the papal presence. It is his first visit.

Now, you would think that after the Williamson fiasco the papal handlers would have tried to coach him a bit on at least faking it enough to keep the fact that he’s a walking pile of raw sewage from being too glaringly obvious to the public at large, but no — the first thing Benedict did after his nifty red-leather-clad toes hit the dirt in this benighted land of woe, death, disease and war was to reiterate his edict against the usage of condoms.

Yes, in a country where HIV/AIDS has ravaged more people than anywhere else in the world, where the papal voice speaks with momentous authority, this man of God has seen fit to counsel these people against the usage of condoms because — and this is their rule — sex for any reason besides procreation is a sin.

Apparently urging people to engage in life-threatening activities without properly protecting themselves is not a sin, though. As long as you’re fucking to make babies, what? God will protect you from AIDS? Is this the message? If that’s the truth and God protects the righteous, then why, as another commentator pointed out, does Benedict go nowhere without an armed security detail? Surely God would protect the pope, his representative here on Earth, the one human being through whom he inflicts his holy will, from the dangerous madmen who would seek to cause him harm? Why don’t you ditch that crack armed detail, Ben, old boy? God will protect you!

No?

Yeah, I didn’t think so. But it’s perfectly acceptable for this monstrous hypocrite to condemn these people to horrible, prolonged death, though. That’s okay, because condoms are a sin, and if you do happen to die at least you’ll go to Heaven because you didn’t wear one of those filthy, God-flouting sperm catchers on the end of your willie. Got it? Me either.

I don’t know — maybe it’s just me, but why anyone with even the barest modicum of intelligence and self-respect would listen to anyone like that is simply beyond comprehension. These people need help. They are drowning in a sea of hopelessness. The spiritual leader of the Catholic faith chugs out to them in his golden tugboat and what does he throw them? An anchor. That’s kind of tantamount to the gentle shepherd protecting his flock by hiring a bunch of starving wolves to help him guard the perimeter.

How this man can live with himself stopped being a question I kept asking a long time ago. However he manages it, it’s clear that he manages well. What I still can’t get past, though, is why anyone listens to him in the first place — and not only listens but defends him. Why does this man hold any sense of real power or importance anymore? Why does his faith, or any other, continue to hold such sway over the human population of this planet? The small good they influence is so far outweighed by the havoc and devastation they wreak that it’s just mind-blowing to me that it can continue as long as it has.

You know, you can believe what you want to believe. I’ll defend your right to believe it, even if I think you’re a weak-minded asshole. It’s not my business to tell you what to think, even if I spend my time telling you why I think you’re wrong to think it.

I draw the line, though, when what you think becomes harmful or dangerous to other people. I have to admit here think that I think the pope going to Africa and telling people not to wear condoms because it’s a sin is one of the worst moral transgressions I’ve ever heard of for someone speaking in any capacity, much less the pope doing it in the name of God. People are not going to stop fucking because the pope told them it’s a sin, but they’ll find it very easy to fuck without a condom because there are probably only six condoms on the entire continent of Africa anyway, and four of them are used already.

There are more than 22 million people in Africa who are infected with HIV. There are more than a million and a half deaths from HIV/AIDS every year in Africa. There are more than 11 million children in Africa who have been orphaned because of this disease. This disease which is easily spread through unprotected sex — such as sex without condoms. Condoms have been proven to greatly reduce the spread of HIV/AIDS. And this happy jackass wanders off to Cameroon and makes a papal declaration of death in the name of his pointy gold hat and the big cheese in the sky.

People are going to listen to him. They are going to use him as an excuse to negate the education and advice of the health and relief organizations who have been tirelessly working in their country to try to stop and stem and reverse this campaign of monstrous, fatal stupidity on behalf of the Catholic church and the Bush administration, among others. Man, many Africans will listen to the pope before they listen to the health worker who cautions them earnestly because they foolishly, blindly, stupidly believe that the pope speaks for God, and that God speaks through the pope. And they will get sick and they will die and their children will continue to be orphaned by the millions.

I wonder what Benedict would do if those 11 million children showed up on his doorstep, many of them ravaged by HIV/AIDS themselves, holding up their wooden bowls in their rotting fingers and asking for more gruel. He’d probably ignore the corpses before his door until they were forcibly pointed out to him and then act surprised that they’re there and claim no prior knowledge. Hey, it worked for the Nazi, right?

He won’t do it, but Benedict needs to issue an immediate apology and reversal of his edict. But more importantly, people need to fucking snap out of this shit already and come to their senses and stop giving this man and this organization its power. It’s time to grow up and put your little invisible security blanket away and join the real world and do more than pray for once in your fucking life. This man is a poisonous asshole, and if you listen to him and believe that he should have any power or authority of any kind, if you support the same faith - remember, he’s the boss - then so are you. You can’t be half-Catholic. If you recognize the pope, you’re every bit as much of a hate-mongering tool as he is. That’s really all there is to it.

If Benedict is uninterested in helping humanity, then he needs to STFU and go back to his insular little world and write more sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic tracts until he’s dead. But for real just desserts I’d like to see him contract a rousing case of AIDS himself and live to see himself waste away little by little until there’s nothing left of him but his hatred and his bones and his yellow, scaly skin. Maybe then he’d find out what it would be like to be on the other side of his fuckery for once in his miserable, selfish life.

Hey, a girl can dream, cant she? After all — it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

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This is my response to Tara Wall’s commentary, posted on CNN. I’ve also cut and pasted her commentary below my response, for posterity (hit “wait, I can explain” at the bottom of the post to read it). CNN’s links break and die. CNN also doesnt always post responses, so that’s why I’m posting mine here.

I’m TIRED of this shit. It’s a new fucking day. These people need to shut the fuck up, get on board, or get out of the way. No more.

My response begins below:

Commentary: Bush will be vindicated - CNN.com

Clearly, your definitions of “safe” are wildly different from the accepted definitions of the word. As a nation, we are many things because of George W. Bush - almost none of them good - but “safe” is not one of them and never has been.

To even try to compare Clinton’s “moral failings” to the egregious offenses Bush and his administration have committed against this country and the American people is simply more of the same partisan blind rhetoric that the GOP perpetuates, and you are yourself seemingly still blind to the fact that it got your party shellacked in this past election.

Clinton was nearly a decade ago, and yet the Evil Clinton Monster is the only thing you still have to throw in the faces of anyone who tells the truth about George W. Bush. You can’t come up with anything different because there is simply nothing tangible, no reasonable, factual argument you can make in Bush’s defense, and so you fall back on old reliable - only nobody believed it then, and nobody’s believing it now, either.

Aren’t you aware of how this kind of thing makes you look when you do it? Dont you understand that the only way we will ever be functional and whole again is for us to come together and that youve GOT TO drop this nonsense and grow up and act like rational human beings so that we can repair the damage that George W. Bush and his cronies have done to this country? How can you be so selfish, so self-centered, so determinedly pigheaded, so flatly unwilling to accept the truth and work to better this country instead of perpetuating the downward spiral?

The failings of George W. Bush are multitudinous and while you may deny them, the facts are still there and unchanged in spite of you. Commentaries like this one make their authors sound like they’re both on drugs and functionally insane. This commentary is factually and ideologically wrong so often and on so many levels that I’d have to refute it on a line-by-line basis to counter them all with the actual facts that are in reality vastly different from the statements you have manufactured here.

George W. Bush did not keep America safe. He has made America more unsafe and gained us more enemies, perpetuated more terrorism and given birth to more terrorists the world over in the past eight years than we have ever had to deal with in our entire history as a nation. That is only one of his many, many failures, and they are all failures on an extraordinarily deep and profound level.

There are very few victories that Bush can claim that actually benefited the country as a whole. To state otherwise and pretend that you have an actual case to make with regards to a positive legacy for this man’s presidency, to try to claim that he was anything even approaching a good leader, a decent man, a “decider,” someone with compassion and who cared about this country, is merely sticking to typical party-line garbage.

The facts are staring us all in the face, and not just us - the world. Nobody believes you anymore, unless they are in the extreme minority of utter fools in this country who think that Bush did a good job. These same people also strongly support Sarah Palin. If that doesnt flat-out terrify you, then you do not have the mental capacity to either hold public office or to vote, to be honest.

George W. Bush has never done a good job of anything except making his corporate buddies more money. He has done this to the detriment of the entire rest of the world. The current economic situation in this country is a DIRECT RESULT of his policies and administration. The astronomical growth of terrorism worldwide is a direct result of his dramatically failed foreign policies. New Orleans is still a ruined shell of a city because of this man, years after the devastation. I could go on and on and on.

Your defense of his record is pathetic and borderline psychotic. You should be ashamed of yourself for vomiting forth such a commentary, and so should everyone who believes as you do or who refuses to see the truth about this man and his administration.

Civility? Dont make me laugh. This is a man who has said time and time again that he doesnt care about what people say or think; that the Constitution is just a goddamned piece of paper. His vice president, Dick Cheney, told Senator Patrick Leahy to go f*** himself while they were conversing on the Senate floor regarding the highly questionable and at the very least very unethical sole-source Halliburton contracts in Iraq. This, on the SAME DAY that th Senate passed the Defense of Decency Act.

Cheney shot a man in the face while under the influence of alcohol at a hunting outing and totally got away with it. The Bush administration has repeatedly stated that it is above and beyond the laws of this country.

Civility? Are you kidding me? Methinks you obtained the definition for that word from the same place you got your definition of the word safe.

What is the matter with you? What is the matter with the people who agree with you, who think the same way you do? What is WRONG with you? What is it going to take, how far do we have to fall, what level of devastation do we have to reach before you open your eyes and finally admit the truth?

I speak for many people when I state that the end of the Bush adminstration is one of the best things ever to happen to this country. Barack Obama is not made of gold. He is human and fallible like the rest of us. He has a tremendous burden that is about to be laid upon him, and I hope with all my heart that he has enough time and enough cooperation to at least stop our freefall and set this country back on its feet again.

I have no and never have had any illusions that President Obama will be able to keep every promise he made. Neither does he. Nobody should. But at least Barack Obama cares about what happens to this country and every person in it, and that is more than could have EVER been said about George W. Bush.

George W. Bush couldn’t care less about America or the American people. Never did, never will. Anyone who believes differently is either a fool or an oil company executive. It is because of his administration and his policies that we find ourselves today barely a half-step above a third-world country, and when you visit some areas of the United States, even if it’s not New Orleans, the first thought that comes to your mind is that some so-called third-world countries have it pretty sweet in comparison.

George W. Bush has not made this country safer and has not kept us safe. The best thing about the Obama presidency at this point in time is the fact that it’s finally, at long last, the end of the Bush presidency.

Good riddance to bad rubbish. And you, Ms. Wall, need to either wake up, open your eyes, and screw your head on straight or follow him and leave the rest of us alone as we try to repair the damage and hope that it’s not too late to do so.

Enough is enough.

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(wait, I can explain…)

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As some of you may or may not know, I do not celebrate Thanksgiving. I commemorate the Indian National Day of Mourning, as begun by Wampsutta, an Aquinnah Wampanoag tribal elder, known also as Frank James, back in 1970 when he was invited to speak on the 350th anniversary of the annual Thanksgiving feast in Plymouth, Massachusetts.

Some folks continue to cry “BUZZKILL!” and “KILLJOY!” when they are reminded of what this day really represents. I dont care. What this day really represents is lies, thievery, rape, enslavement, and, finally, the widespread genocide of the peoples who called this country home for centuries before we ever got here. To this day they are outcasts on their own land, suffering more than any other people have suffered on this soil. This is the meaning of this day.

The settlers who came to Plymouth plotted against them on this day all those many years ago, to get the Indians out of their way so they could have the bounty of this land for themselves. They took all the Indians had to offer - gifts and hospitality without which they never would have survived - and in return for this kindness and generosity they butchered the Indians, men, women, and children, and enslaved the ones they did not slaughter. The Indians were rounded up and forcibly removed from the lands they had inhabited for generation upon generation and corralled into tiny areas which we, the usurpers, generously told them they could have as long as we didnt change our minds about wanting it. This land was often land that nobody else wanted or could use; useless for agriculture, often without water and with very poor hunting.

Today is the National Day of Mourning for the native peoples of this land, and while I hope that those of you who will be gathering with your family enjoy your day, I entreat you to spare a thought to the real meaning of this day. As you say your grace of thanks over your tables, remind those who are gathered of the people who have nothing to be thankful for, and at whose expense this day comes, and has come for nearly half a thousand years. They paid for your food and your football games and your gatherings and special shopping deals with their lands, their families, their blood, and their lives.

They still walk among us, these people. And they watch us on this day, and on Columbus Day, and they know that they will never be understood by the majority of people who grow impatient and frustrated and hostile when confronted by reminders such as these. I have chosen to stand with them and risk the annoyance of my fellow citizens, because I cannot do otherwise and still live with myself. I cannot partake of the celebratory meal without the stories and the history reverberating through my mind, causing the bile to rise and the food to stick in my throat.

Give thanks for what you have, and give thanks too that you have never had to pay for anything in your life the way they have had to pay for everything in your life.

So, happy Thanksgiving, folks. Enjoy your meals, your gatherings, and your holiday - and it is yours alone. It’s certainly not theirs, and it’s not mine, either.

Text of Wampsutta’s 1970 speech:

“I speak to you as a man — a Wampanoag Man. I am a proud man, proud of my ancestry, my accomplishments won by a strict parental direction (”You must succeed - your face is a different color in this small Cape Cod community!”). I am a product of poverty and discrimination from these two social and economic diseases. I, and my brothers and sisters, have painfully overcome, and to some extent we have earned the respect of our community. We are Indians first - but we are termed “good citizens.” Sometimes we are arrogant but only because society has pressured us to be so.

“It is with mixed emotion that I stand here to share my thoughts. This is a time of celebration for you - celebrating an anniversary of a beginning for the white man in America. A time of looking back, of reflection. It is with a heavy heart that I look back upon what happened to my People.

“Even before the Pilgrims landed it was common practice for explorers to capture Indians, take them to Europe and sell them as slaves for 220 shillings apiece. The Pilgrims had hardly explored the shores of Cape Cod for four days before they had robbed the graves of my ancestors and stolen their corn and beans. Mourt’s Relation describes a searching party of sixteen men. Mourt goes on to say that this party took as much of the Indians’ winter provisions as they were able to carry.

“Massasoit, the great Sachem of the Wampanoag, knew these facts, yet he and his People welcomed and befriended the settlers of the Plymouth Plantation. Perhaps he did this because his Tribe had been depleted by an epidemic. Or his knowledge of the harsh oncoming winter was the reason for his peaceful acceptance of these acts. This action by Massasoit was perhaps our biggest mistake. We, the Wampanoag, welcomed you, the white man, with open arms, little knowing that it was the beginning of the end; that before 50 years were to pass, the Wampanoag would no longer be a free people.

What happened in those short 50 years? What has happened in the last 300 years? History gives us facts and there were atrocities; there were broken promises - and most of these centered around land ownership. Among ourselves we understood that there were boundaries, but never before had we had to deal with fences and stone walls. But the white man had a need to prove his worth by the amount of land that he owned. Only ten years later, when the Puritans came, they treated the Wampanoag with even less kindness in converting the souls of the so-called “savages.” Although the Puritans were harsh to members of their own society, the Indian was pressed between stone slabs and hanged as quickly as any other “witch.”

“And so down through the years there is record after record of Indian lands taken and, in token, reservations set up for him upon which to live. The Indian, having been stripped of his power, could only stand by and watch while the white man took his land and used it for his personal gain. This the Indian could not understand; for to him, land was survival, to farm, to hunt, to be enjoyed. It was not to be abused. We see incident after incident, where the white man sought to tame the “savage” and convert him to the Christian ways of life. The early Pilgrim settlers led the Indian to believe that if he did not behave, they would dig up the ground and unleash the great epidemic again.

“The white man used the Indian’s nautical skills and abilities. They let him be only a seaman — but never a captain. Time and time again, in the white man’s society, we Indians have been termed “low man on the totem pole.”

“Has the Wampanoag really disappeared? There is still an aura of mystery. We know there was an epidemic that took many Indian lives - some Wampanoags moved west and joined the Cherokee and Cheyenne. They were forced to move. Some even went north to Canada! Many Wampanoag put aside their Indian heritage and accepted the white man’s way for their own survival. There are some Wampanoag who do not wish it known they are Indian for social or economic reasons.

“What happened to those Wampanoags who chose to remain and live among the early settlers? What kind of existence did they live as “civilized” people? True, living was not as complex as life today, but they dealt with the confusion and the change. Honesty, trust, concern, pride, and politics wove themselves in and out of their [the Wampanoags’] daily living. Hence, he was termed crafty, cunning, rapacious, and dirty.

“History wants us to believe that the Indian was a savage, illiterate, uncivilized animal. A history that was written by an organized, disciplined people, to expose us as an unorganized and undisciplined entity. Two distinctly different cultures met. One thought they must control life; the other believed life was to be enjoyed, because nature decreed it. Let us remember, the Indian is and was just as human as the white man. The Indian feels pain, gets hurt, and becomes defensive, has dreams, bears tragedy and failure, suffers from loneliness, needs to cry as well as laugh. He, too, is often misunderstood.

“The white man in the presence of the Indian is still mystified by his uncanny ability to make him feel uncomfortable. This may be the image the white man has created of the Indian; his “savageness” has boomeranged and isn’t a mystery; it is fear; fear of the Indian’s temperament!

“High on a hill, overlooking the famed Plymouth Rock, stands the statue of our great Sachem, Massasoit. Massasoit has stood there many years in silence. We the descendants of this great Sachem have been a silent people. The necessity of making a living in this materialistic society of the white man caused us to be silent. Today, I and many of my people are choosing to face the truth. We ARE Indians!

“Although time has drained our culture, and our language is almost extinct, we the Wampanoags still walk the lands of Massachusetts. We may be fragmented, we may be confused. Many years have passed since we have been a people together. Our lands were invaded. We fought as hard to keep our land as you the whites did to take our land away from us. We were conquered, we became the American prisoners of war in many cases, and wards of the United States Government, until only recently.

“Our spirit refuses to die. Yesterday we walked the woodland paths and sandy trails. Today we must walk the macadam highways and roads. We are uniting We’re standing not in our wigwams but in your concrete tent. We stand tall and proud, and before too many moons pass we’ll right the wrongs we have allowed to happen to us.

“We forfeited our country. Our lands have fallen into the hands of the aggressor. We have allowed the white man to keep us on our knees. What has happened cannot be changed, but today we must work towards a more humane America, a more Indian America, where men and nature once again are important; where the Indian values of honor, truth, and brotherhood prevail.

“You the white man are celebrating an anniversary. We the Wampanoags will help you celebrate in the concept of a beginning. It was the beginning of a new life for the Pilgrims. Now, 350 years later it is a beginning of a new determination for the original American: the American Indian.

“There are some factors concerning the Wampanoags and other Indians across this vast nation. We now have 350 years of experience living amongst the white man. We can now speak his language. We can now think as a white man thinks. We can now compete with him for the top jobs. We’re being heard; we are now being listened to. The important point is that along with these necessities of everyday living, we still have the spirit, we still have the unique culture, we still have the will and, most important of all, the determination to remain as Indians. We are determined, and our presence here this evening is living testimony that this is only the beginning of the American Indian, particularly the Wampanoag, to regain the position in this country that is rightfully ours.”

http://www.nativevillage.org/Inspiration-/Thanksgiving%20The%20National%20Day%20of%20Mourning.htm

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