Oy Vey.

With regard to religion, I'm sort of an agnostic who has a liking for the metaphors of neo-Paganism. However, I was born Jewish to two Jewish parents, and my husband was born to a Jewish mother who fled Nazi Germany in 1938. And for the Nazis and modern anti-Semites, that's enough for them. And in the case of modern anti-Semites, they are now emboldened by the current political climate to be quite open about their anti-Semitism. Just ask the Dobritch family about what is going on in the Indian River School District in Delaware. They are suing the school district because of a pattern of incorporating Christian prayer and bible study in the schools. And now they are paying the price for asserting their right to freedom of religion.

There is a tendency in America called Dominionism. Dominionists want to basically gut the Constitution and elevate the Christian Bible as the Law of the Land. Most believe that this can be put into place gradually, by statute. And some will say this process is already taking place.

Although most Dominionists make a lot of noise publically about supporting Jews and "praying for the Peace of Jerusalem," in private, the Dominionists are no friends of the Jews.

The god of Judaism is the devil. The Jew will not be recognized by God as one of His chosen people until he abandons his demonic religion and returns to the faith of his fathers--the faith which embraces Jesus Christ and His Gospel.
-- David Chilton, from "The Days of Vengeance: An Exposition of the Book of Revelation"

Even those who depart from Dominionism's religious tenets, which in their most orthodox form believe that the events of Revelation will happen only after a nation that is ruled under their belief system appears on the Earth, and instead believes in a "pre-Tribulation" rapture ala "Left Behind," only love the Jews for the place they have in the Book of Revelation. They trumpet their Judaeophilia only because according to their view of the End Times 144,000 converted Jews will wander the Earth as evangelists during the "Tribulation." Once these 144,000 "Jewish Billy Grahams," as they were referred to in the influential book "The Late Great Planet Earth," have had the "seal of God sealed in their foreheads" it's back to "turn or burn" for the Jews.

Dominionism hasn't taken over...yet. However, the plight of the Dobritch family, who have felt the need to move to another part of Delaware because of the backlash over the lawsuit against the school district, is chilling to say the least. Another family who joined the suit are referred to only as "The Doe Family" because of their fears of suffering the same fate as the Dobritches. And who would blame them? According to an article in the local "Delaware Wave" newspaper, Mona Dobritch, the mother, was threatened thusly:

"You just might disappear like Madalyn Murray O'Hair."

If you remember, in 1995 Ms. O'Hair disappeared. Her dismembered body was found in 2001 in a shallow grave on a Texas ranch. This is scary stuff. Read the links. Anti-Semitism is alive and well in America today.

Another Ms. Geek Angelides commercial

OK, Phil, find a good Flash artist and run with this:

Angelides commercial #2: "Running up the Credit Card"

Big headed caricature of Arnold Schwarzenegger, walking down the street. He's got a super-sized credit card in his hand, with the distinctive outline of the State of California on it.

Announcer
Let's look at Arnold Schwarzenegger's record on the budget. In 2004, when Arnold was first faced with the task of balancing the California budget, what did he do?

Big head Arnold walks into a bank on 2004 Main St. He goes to the teller and gives her the credit card.

Arnold
CHARGE IT!

Arnold walks out of the bank on 2004 Main St., crosses the street, and walks into another bank on 2005 Main St.

Announcer
And what did he do in 2005? He borrowed money, added to California's bonded indebtedness, but did nothing to address the structural deficit.

Arnold
CHARGE IT!

Arnold walks out of the bank and crosses the street again, at 2006 Main St. There's yet another bank there.

Announcer
And now it's 2006. What did Arnold do with the budget this time? He applied some of the windfall to pay back the money he borrowed from K-12 students, and won't raise Community College, Cal State or University of California fees. But has he done anything with the structural deficit?

You hear Arnold's voice in the bank, off screen..."CHARGE IT!"

Announcer
Arnold Schwarzenegger is up to his same old tricks, tricks he learned from his friend George W. Bush, who inherited a surplus from Bill Clinton and spent it down while at the same time giving tax cuts to the richest 1% of Americans.

Phil Angelides, wants to get real and put California back on a "Pay as you go" track with the budget. Fill loopholes that allow the rich to pay less California State taxes as a percentage of income proportionally than working Californians. Reassess property owned by big corporations and make sure they pay their fair share again. Protect our working families from bearing the brunt of the tax code, and preserve safeguards against property taxes going out of control for our families.

Phil Angelides. A real plan for preserving the California Dream.

Weird calculations...

Weird calculations...

Rush Limbaugh + Viagra + trip to the Dominican Republic = ????

What exactly was the Big Bloviating One doing with that Viagra on his Dominican Republic holiday?

Wired: Dominican Republic, where 'pimps' run free

Rush...as in Head Rush...

Rush Limbaugh. Busted again.

"What this says to me is that too many whites are getting away with drug use. Too many whites are getting away with drug sales. Too many whites are getting away with trafficking in this stuff. The answer to this disparity is not to start letting people out of jail because we're not putting others in jail who are breaking the law. The answer is to go out and find the ones who are getting away with it, convict them and send them up the river, too.

"...We are becoming too tolerant as a society, folks, especially of crime, in too many parts of the country.... This country certainly appears to be tolerant, forgive and forget. I mean, you know as well as I do, you go out and commit the worst murder in the world and you just say you're sorry, people go, 'Oh, OK. A little contrition.'... People say, 'I feel better. He said he's sorry for it.' We're becoming too tolerant, folks."

--Rush Limbaugh TV show (10/5/95)

A different way of looking at "Cut & Run"

The GOP CUTs taxes to the wealthiest 1% of the population, and RUNs up the National Debt.

The GOP CUT funding for FEMA, and RUNs from its responsibilities to the Gulf Coast States.

The GOP CUT benefits for our brave soldiers, and is RUNning away from its commitments to them when they come back maimed.

In Vietnam, we didn't CUT our losses until the body count RAN into the tens of thousands. Do we want to make that same mistake again?

Apparently the GOP are not CUT from the same cloth as we common Americans, because when duty, in the form of military service, called them, they RAN. The strongest voices for "staying the course" never did a day's service in the military.

Is this a post into thin air?

This blog has been disappearing and reappearing like Brigadoon. I don't know what's going on. I'm upset.

2500...not just a number

It's prolly already up beyond 2500 by now, but I thought I should just stop. And think. And try not to explode from the anger I feel.

Let me remind y'all of the question Cindy Sheehan asked about the death of Casey:

What noble cause?
Why are we in Iraq?
Why are we killing?
Why are we dying?

2500.

And John Snow-job had the nerve to say "it's just a number."

No it isn't. It's American lives snuffed out for no good reason.

Phil to Arnold: Who's backward now?

Does Phil Angelides read this blog, or MsGeek.Org?

Anyway, here's Angelides' response to Ah-nuld's first ad using Westly's (inaccurate!) attacks. Very good. Hit him again, Phil!

'The Farm' landowner to South Central LA...

...I got mine, fuck you.

http://www.nbc4.tv/news/9360966/detail.html

Well, he didn't say that exactly, but the quotes he gave to our local NBC affiliate KNBC 4 Burbank/Los Angeles say just about as much.

"I'm not real happy with this group. Even if they raised $100 million this group could not buy this property. It's not about money. I don't like their cause. I don't like their conduct. So, there's no price that I would sell it to them for.

"Where does this kind of 'you owe me' mentality end? How good is that for America? What they should have said to the taxpayers of LA and to me is, 'This is a gracious country. Thank you for letting us have our garden here, but we realize our time is up. We've had our 14 years.'

"The gardeners don't make the rules. They don't violate court orders at their will, promise to get off the land and not get off, demand that they be given the land for free. There's an end to this type of thing.

"I feel that the gardeners have been on the land for 14 years, almost 15 years for free. After 15 years, you say thank you,"
-- Landowner Ralph Horowitz

It pisses me off that this guy has a Jewish surname, because this kind of perpetuates a stereotype that Blacks in South Central have of Jews since the Watts Riots of 1965. Latinos don't have as much anti-Semitic baggage but I'm sure there is some in that community. This will only make matters worse.

There was an 11th hour offer by the Annenberg Foundation made to Horowitz of his asking price, not a penny less. And as you can see from his sneering reply, he didn't consider it for a second.

The people who have come to the aid of The Farm are an honor roll of progressive celebrities:

Joan Baez
Daryl Hannah (Special shouts out to her for being there at the end!)
Leonardo DiCaprio
Ed Harris
Mariel Hemingway
Danny Glover
Flea
Anthony Kiedis
Tom Morello (Audioslave, Rage Against The Machine)
Roseanna Arquette
Michelle Shocked
Laura Dern
Ben Harper
Willie Nelson
Christine Chavez (Granddaughter of Cesar Chavez)
Martin Sheen
Christine Lahti
Cheech Marin

The battle has been lost. But the war may yet be won. There is a court challenge in the works. But Horowitz has been tried in the court of public opinion, and has rightly lost. This was uncalled for, especially in light of the Annenberg Foundation offer. Fuck you too, pal.

Moving Backward vs. Kicking It Down The Road

I don't know why the new Schwarzenegger commercials piss me off so much. But they do. I guess we have Steve Westly to thank for giving Ah-nuld his first campaign meme. "$10 Billion In New Taxes." Never mind that every time Schwarzenegger has "balanced" a budget, he's either used accounting chicanery or borrowed money to do it. Never mind that he cared about the fiscal stability of California enough to impose a $90 Million special election on the state to attempt an end run around the legislature. We could have used that $90 Million in so many ways for so many other worthy things. But it was squandered.

In a lot of respects Schwarzenegger's stewardship of the public purse in California is a small-scale version of George W. Bush's stellar "borrow and binge" economics. Not only does Bush spend like a drunken sailor on a 3-day bender, he hands out tax cuts to his rich buddies like so much Halloween candy.

All throughout the Clinton Administration, there was a budget philosophy called "PayGo." It was short for "Pay as you go." To be fair, PayGo was established at the end of the Bush The Elder administration, but by a Democratic Congress. The concept was simple. If you want to put a new program into practice, find the funds for it. It was simple but effective. By the last three years of the Clinton Administration, the federal budget was running a surplus. Let me repeat that so it will sink in. We ran a surplus.

Then came Dubya, 9/11 (which maybe we could have avoided and maybe we couldn't have) and the completely unnecessary War in Iraq. (The war in Afghanistan was indeed necessary, however, thanks to Osama Bin'Laden's "special relationship" with the Taliban government of Afghanistan.)

Usually when we go to war, we ask folks to make certain sacrifices: cut down on consumption of necessary commodities, buy war bonds, have Meatless Tuesdays...if you weren't taught about what this was all about, watch a couple of wartime Warner Bros. cartoons and you'll get a dose of the humor going around with regard to what it was like on the Homefront during World War II. But the Dubya way you go to war asks for zero sacrifice, especially when it comes to what he calls "the haves and the have mores...my base."

During a time when the expense of the Iraqi and Afghani wars are costing us dearly, he gives welfare to his rich buddies in fat tax cuts, and welfare to Big Pharma with Medicare Part D (for disaster). And what is happening? The deficits are racking up. The New York City Debt Clock, which was decommissioned during the Clinton administration, will become obsolete in two years if the current deficits continue to accelerate as they have.

And what is the attitude in the Dubya administration with regard to all this?

"You know, Paul, Reagan proved deficits don't matter."
-- Vice President Dick "Darth" Cheney to former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill, 2002

Deficits don't matter to Dubya, to Cheney, and they don't matter to Gov. Schwarzenegger either. Deficits? What deficits? Let's kick 'em down the road a piece with more bonded indebtedness and more cooking the books.

Former State Controller Phil Angelides is basically blowing the whistle on Schwarzenegger's cowardly way of handling the public purse. Yeah, he might have to figure out a way to raise revenues to get the budget honestly into balance like it's supposed to be. However, Angelides failed in framing the debate correctly, and he needs to correct that ASAP.

Here's how you do it. Phil, you are welcome to use this. For free.

"Unlike the current Governor, who has used creative accounting and bonds to paper over the deficit, I want to get back to the Democratic idea of Pay-as-you-go spending. Rather than the Bush-esque coward's way out, where you borrow and spend with California's credit card, you find revenue to match spending like we have to when we balance a business' books or a household's budget. Bill Clinton did it: when he left office there was a budget surplus. Let's close the tax loopholes and make businesses pay their fair share of property tax. Let's stop the free rides for the richest Californians. It's time to face our economic situation instead of kicking it down the road for our children and grandchildren to deal with."

That's how you counter the "Moving Backward" ads. Time to tap your rich developer buddy to craft an ad to respond.

AWOL again...

'Nuff said...