Van Jones:


In a sign of how stupid the rightist sheep are, I've been following comments on the Van Jones resignation, and it is quite common for the nuts to call him "Van Johnson" and then spout off like self proclaimed experts on him, his life, and his political views.

As is often the case these days, some of them are calling him more than one of the following:

- A liberal

- A communist

- A fascist

- A progressive

In actuality, each of those is a category which is mutually exclusive to the other three, yet the rightists don't have a clue. I have to admit that even some people elsewhere on the political spectrum mix up liberals and progressives. Progressive is a broad political term in American discourse which encompasses people to the left of liberals and to the right of Marxists.

Van Johnson died last year, so he won't get a chance to take advantage from the publicity generated by the mistaken identity. He was pretty cute in his day. Jones would be cute too if he would just get rid of the pesky mustache.

One related note: rightist imbeciles are referring to presense of "Czars" in the Obama administration as "communism." If they had taken the trouble to read a European history book, they would know that the communists in the Soviet Union overthrew the Czar and killed every member of his family to make sure that Russian would never have a Czar again. If they want to use over the top rhetoric to butcher their points, they could at least call it "monarchism."

Oops!

 

"Ex Gay" ministries and conventions are notorious in the gay men's community for lots of sex going on between the "ex gay" men. However, I didn't know that there may be sexual harassment going on.

Truth Wins Out has put up a video on YouTube with former "ex gay" Patrick McAlvey who talks about the futile and painful nature of these ministries. Most queers already know about this part, but there are other aspects of them that McAlvey reveals that are disturbing in a whole new way.



Genocide for Jesus has the transcript of this former "ex gay" which is really disturbing. First, lets look at the desperate psychological situation that McAlvey was in.

Well I distanced myself from Mike sometime in early high school, and really had very minimal contact, he sent a couple letters, but I had very minimal contact until I was 19. And so when I was 19 I was kicked out of a missionary training school and forced to move back home with my family, and I was kicked out because of my attraction to men, and so in that time, I was sort of in a crisis mode and was very low, very depressed and just trying to make sense of my life and mostly of my attraction, so I contacted Mike again, and we started meeting regularly.

Look at the "therapy" McAlvey was exposed to.

That night he suggested we go over to his friend’s house so that we could do “holding therapy.” So we drove together to his friend’s house and had an hour where I was instructed to lay in his arms, chest to chest, and not talk, it was just an hour of silent holding and he told me to feel the strength of another man, smell the smell of another man, feel the security of another man’s arms. And it was supposed to replace, or fill a void that I had from some unmet childhood need.

I thought the holding therapy was very strange, and it made me uncomfortable, but I was willing to try anything, and trusted Mike.

The "holding therapy" part sounds really suspicious, to put it mildly. It gets worse.

As part of the therapy, he asked how large my penis was. He asked if I shaved my pubic hair. He asked about the type of underwear that I wore. On one occasion he asked me to take my shirt off and show him how many push-ups I could do, which I did not do, and he wanted me to describe my sexual fantasies to him, and the type of men I’m attracted to. And one time he asked me to rate my own attractiveness, on a scale of 1-10, with separate scores for my face, my hair, my body, and then an overall score. And then after I scored myself, he assigned scores for my attractiveness, each category, and I remember that my hair got the best score and my face got the worst score.

As part of the therapy, he had me come over to his house, and he rented the movie of the play Equus, and he had us watch it together, in his home. In the movie there was full frontal male nudity, and it made me rather uncomfortable to be watching it with him, but it was his idea, and afterwards he wanted to talk about some the dynamics of the play and then also how I felt about seeing the naked actor.

If not for the religious aspect of these "ex gay" ministries, I've long thought that they might have been prosecuted for fraud and practicing medicine without a license. Now, I wonder how many sexual harassment are just waiting to be filed.

Our society needs to stop treating religion as if it is above scrutiny. Religious groups should be held to the same legal standards as the rest of our society.

 

By the time you have read this, you probably know that Van Jones, one of the few members of the Obama administration worth a damn, has resigned. Let's look at what was used to bring him down.

First, he said once that Republicans are assholes. Let's think about this for a minute. It is a fact that the GOP is just as much of a racist, sexist, heterosexist, AIDSphobic, and Christian supremacist hate group as the Ku Klux Klan. The GOP also is an organized crime syndicate. The GOP has stolen presidential elections, started illegal wars, and looted the Treasury on behalf of wealthy donors, and that's just in the past ten years. Is it really that unreasonable to refer to people who belong to the Republican Party as assholes? It seems pretty generous to me.

As for the 911 criticisms, Jones didn't embrace the theories of people who question the official narrative. He called for an independent investigation, which every reasonable and patriotic person supports.

Is this grounds for a rightist jihad against him?

The reality is that the pundits and politicians behind this career lynching were financially dependent on Big Oil, Big Coal, and other corporations responsible for high CO2 emissions. The people behind the anti Jones crusade are completely corrupt and couldn't care less about the future of this country. All they care about is that their palms keep getting greased.

In the meantime, politicians in both major parties are doing way too little to fight global warming. People whose property will be flooded by rising oceans should have the legal right to sue the people who went after Van Jones and all the others who have blocked stronger action on global warming.

 

From the Left 9/4/09:

The Catholic church is up to it’s old queer-hating tricks again. This time, Washington, DC Archbishop Donald W. Wuerl has increased the church’s involvement in opposition to marriage equality in the nation’s capital.

Wuerl addressed 300 Catholic priests in the area, reminding them in a letter about the church’s antigay marriage stance. He also gave interviews to several news sources to further vocalize the church’s view in the debate.

Wuerl has joined forces with Baptists, mainly African-American preachers, in pressuring D.C. officials to allow public voting on the legalization of same-sex marriage.

It turns out there is a major news story developing on the Catholic Clergy exporting Irish child molesters to Catholic residential institutions here in the US. I don't know if the corporate media will pick this one up, but I do predict that Catholic clergy here in the US will engage in nasty political meddling to keep the cameras and reporters elsewhere.

Can you imagine the day when Catholic clerics devote the time and effort they are illegitimately using for interference in politics to taking strong action to rid their church of child molesting priests?

It's a nice thought, but I can't either.

 

If you aren't aware of the reasons why Whole Foods richly deserves to be boycotted, please refer to my previous post on the subject.

Michael Pollan may seem like this warm and fuzzy progressive type, especially in radio interviews for his book, In Defense of Food. However, there is a sinister and classist side to him that is just bubbling to the surface. Writing in newmajority, an extreme right blog run by militant fundamentalist, former Bush regime official David Frum, Pollan opposed the Whole Foods boycott, putting corporate profits ahead of the needs of Americans to have real healthcare.

By opposing the Whole Foods Boycott, Pollan is telling middle class and poor Americans to shut up and die!

Pollan's unconscionable behavior is sadly typical of far too many in the alternative foods movement who see health as a commodity you buy with expensive foods and who lecture people who can't afford to pay the price. The classism within the alternative foods and medicine movement always has been a problem, but Pollan is taking things to extremes by defending a union busting corporation whose CEO attacks government health insurance and brags about cutting his employees' healthcare benefits.

Even Pollan's claims about supporting farmers are dead wrong. Whole Foods is notorious for screwing over local, small, organic farmers in favor of big organic agribusiness that steals land from indigenous peoples thousands of miles away and promotes global warming by shipping produce thousands of miles.

Now, I'm boycotting Pollan's books and radio appearances in addition to Whole Foods. I am sick and tired of being screwed over by classist, elitist snobs like Pollan who are more loyal to evil corporations like Whole Foods than they are to the middle class and poor.

Good News:
The Whole Foods Boycott is growing in support in spite of this attack by a corporate shill on an extreme right blog. The Boycott Whole Foods Facebook group now has over 33,000 members. The Whole Foods Boycott now has a website, which I'm adding to my right navigation menu.

Excellent News:
The CtW Investment Group wants Mackey out as Whole Foods CEO. Let's hope other investors in Whole Foods follow.

Related Blog Posting:
We Know the Lies has an interesting posting showing the similarities between Wal-Mart and Whole Paycheck. It's a valid and interesting angle on the story that hadn't occured to me.

 

The corporate media love misogyny for many of the same reasons they have racism and sexism. If people can be divided along lines created by prejudice, they have much less energy left to stand up for their economic interests. The owners and advertisers of the corporate media definitely don't want the middle class and the poor informed and energized.

The easiest way to use sexism to get poorly educated people agitated and distracted from their interests is to repeat the militant fundamentalists' lies about abortion. No reasonable person with an IQ over 60 sincerely believes that fetuses and embryos have human lives. That is as outlandish as saying 2 + 2 = 643. However, misogyny can make people incredibly irrational, especially when it is whipped up by religious fervor.

The great American hero Dr. Tiller was killed by this insanity. Don't think that the corporate media didn't play a role. Tiller was personally demonized by the far right babblers. However, even the supposedly mainstream newscasts slant the abortion issue to the anti choice side, treating their "pro life" spin as if it were fact, never mind the fact that every major anti abortion organization opposes life saving AIDS education and condom distribution programs.

Rachel Maddow recently did an excellent job of exposing the violent and harassing nature of the Christian Right's jihad against the basic human right of women to have abortions. (Hat Tip to Blog for Choice)

Discussing the cold, hard facts of the Christian Taliban's misogynistic efforts against abortion is very important. Discussing abortion in human terms with personal stories is of tremendous value too. Words for Choice is a dramatic production which explores the views of doctors and women who have performed or had abortions, and the vicious they face from militant, Christian fundamentalists.

I have seen the anti choice clinic harassers, and I have seen the Iranian fundamentalists who took the US Embassy hostage years ago. They had the same religious fervor and bloodlust in their eyes. People need to take it seriously.

 

In a previous posting, I mentioned that almost 1400 mercenaries had been killed in Iraq. There's another underreported story mentioned in the same Swift Economics article I referenced previously.

In 2007, CBS News investigated suicide among U.S. military veterans and determined that in 2005 alone, 6256 committed suicide! (15) The war has now been going for almost six and half years; if that number were held constant, (something we cannot assume), the total would now be over 40,000. Overall, the investigation showed the suicide rate for veterans, adjusted for age and gender, (young men are the most likely to commit suicide), was about twice as high as for non-veterans. A study by the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health corroborated these findings. (16)

It is important to recognize that these studies involved all military veterans, not just those of Iraq and Afghanistan. Furthermore, correlation does not equal causation. Other factors, such as gun availability, may be involved. Needless to say, given the high rates of PTSD among veterans and the despicably poor care veterans have received at military hospitals, such as Walter Reed, it is highly probable that many of these suicides can trace their way back to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Even if only one in five of the 40,000 military suicides mentioned (as of 2007) were the result of the Iraq War, that would be 8,000, far more than the 4,337 count of US troops killed in Iraq as of 8/30/09.

Government officials and corporate media enablers don't just omit many of the financial costs of the Iraq War, they are lowballing the human costs of this illegal conflict that violates this nation's values.

What have Bush, the Congress, and Obama done to our country?

 

From a 9/2/09 email from the Tasini for Senate Campaign in New York:

I just had a meeting with some very brave and energized citizens who are trying to save their communities in the Finger Lakes region in New York from something called “hydrofracking.”

Sounds obscene, doesn’t it?

Well, it is: hydrofracking is a process in which water is injected at high pressure to break up rocks and release gas for commercial exploitation.

Did you know that hydrofracking uses 2 to 9 million gallons of water EACH TIME a “frack” is done and that the process injects 140,000 pounds of toxic substances into our groundwater and leaves communities with air and water pollution?

Did you know that the oil and gas corporate interests are pushing to create 40,000 ponds to hold the waste from hydrofracking all across New York, which means that the health of tens of thousands of New Yorkers will be at risk, for the sake of Big Oil and Big Gas profits?

Did you know that Dick Cheney pushed through, with bi-partisan support, an exemption that allows hydrofracking to happen without any of the protections of our clean water laws? And that our state politicians, in league with corporate special interests, took away the rights of local communities to regulate hydrofracking?

I wonder how many other parts of the country will have their water contaminated with deadly chemicals when they get "fracked." Being downstream from Upstate, I will be one of the "lucky" people who will get to shower in this toxic water and drink from it if I can't find an uncontaminated source of bottled water.

WBAI had a show on this kind of environmental degradation. I hope more people learn about it.

Jonathon Tasini is a liberal Democrat who is running a primary challenge to far right "Democrat" Kristen Gillibrand, who is part of the same Republican political machine as indicted former NY Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno. Tasini got 17% of the vote in his 2006 primary campaign against Hillary Clinton, despite being enormously outspent by Ms. Clinton and despite Ms. Clinton's huge name recognition.

 

Here's the text:

You have betrayed middle class and poor Americans already by not supporting single payer healthcare. Now, you want to betray us completely by dropping the public option in your healthcare (actually wealthcare) plan.

You really hate anyone who isn't rich enough to write big checks.

The main reason why you are losing so much support in your poll numbers is that liberals and progressives are thoroughly disgusted with your policies. Turning even farther to the nutty, GOP/Clinton right will only cost you more support.

This administration is as politically inept as it is corrupted by corporate interests.

You can contact the White House with your own message.

 

Gail Collins, in her latest New York Times Op-Ed piece, decided to trash Levi Johnston for daring to stand up to Sarah Palin by telling the truth about the former GOP Vice Presidential candidate after the abusive behavior he has experienced from Palin for some time now.

I won't dignify the trashy, snarky, tone of Ms. Collins' rant by repeating what she said. You can follow the link above if you want to read her reprehensible and unprofessional nonsense. Instead, I'll focus on the social implications. Siding with a wealthy and powerful Republican like Sarah Palin against a middle class teenager without power or connections should raise alarm bells. Considering how terrible Sarah Palin has been to Johnston and to her own daughter, using them as props for her doomed and bizarre political ambitions and acting like they have no minds or rights of their own, Collins' defense of Palin is even more disturbing.

To the Palins and the Collins of the world, middle class Americans should just happily go along with whatever the rich want, however badly they treat us. We are little more than peasants in this world view.

Sadly, Collins editorial equivalent of a middle finger to the middle class is nothing terrible shocking or unusual coming from the New York Times. That paper wages class warfare against the middle class and the poor every day. I find it ironic when the far right complains about "class warfare," as if the only people practicing it are populist liberals. The overwhelming majority of class warfare is by the rich people the far right is shilling for.

Gail Collins may not be to the extreme right, but she shares their agenda of defending wealth, privilege, and power. In that, she is the epitome of the mainstream conservative New York Times. Liberal media bias my ass.

 

This is one of the simplest and clearest explanations of the issue I've seen.