Friday, November 11, 2016

Not My Vice President Either.

Saw this online today, and it accurately summarizes exactly why I hope Mike Pence is eaten by a school of piranha......

“Pence is no Uncle Joe.His record as governor indicates that he is willing to completely undermine the core values of a free country in order to impose his own vision of theocratic control.
While Donald Trump is a bumbling political idiot, Mike Pence is actively against the people and possibilities that we need to help America to have a strong future. His career has been built on hateful exclusion, not intelligent inclusion.
Here are some things that every voter should know about Mike Pence:
- Science and invention helped build America, but Mike Pence is 100% anti-science. He chooses not to accept the preponderance of evidence that supports anthropomorphic climate change, and he thinks schools should be required to teach Christian “creationism” mythology alongside evolution in science classrooms.
Mike Pence is anti-environment. As governor, he has vetoed every piece of environmental regulation that has crossed his desk. He doesn’t want the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases, and he does want to open up pretty much every part of our country to oil and coal companies. No more wildlands under Pence. He is one of those irresponsible extremists who think that God gave us the world so we could just use it up, and when it is all used up the second coming will occur. There is no Biblical basis for this belief.
- Females make up more than half of the American population, but Mike Pence is anti-woman. He has said the Disney movie “Mulan,” which was based on a centuries old Chinese poem, was the work of a “mischievous liberal” trying to groom young children to accept women in combat. “Despite her delicate features and voice, Disney expects us to believe that Mulan’s ingenuity and courage were enough to carry her to military success on an equal basis,” he wrote on his radio show’s website.
He obsessively pursues a personal vendetta to take Title X funding away from Planned Parenthood because Planned Parenthood provides abortion services. Title X money CANNOT be used for abortions. Abortions are paid for by the recipient or through private, tagged donations. Taking away Title X will not impact abortion services, but it would leave thousands of women without access to cancer screenings or birth control. 
- Speaking of birth control, Mike Pence once again revealed his historical ignorance in saying that condoms are “modern” and “liberal.” He thinks all women should be pregnant unless they can’t afford a baby, in which case they should abstain from sex, even if they are married. That’s right: sex is only for procreation in PenceWorld. If you can’t afford the diapers, then hubby should be sleeping on the couch.
Mike Pence is also anti-gay, to the point of denial. He doesn’t want the government to pay for cancer screenings, but he does want the government to pay for abusive “conversion therapy” programs that systematically undermine the victim’s self-esteem, and then indoctrinate them into robotic gender-appropriate behaviors. He has signed into law a bill that allows discrimination against LGTBQ customers based on religious belief.
- As governor of Indiana, Mike Pence was personally responsible for an outbreak of AIDS when he refused to allow clean needle exchanges for drug addicts. Instead, he asked people to pray for the addicts.
Mike Pence is racist. He thinks there is “too much talk” about institutional racism in law enforcement because “police officers are human beings.” His solution is unity through “faith.” The Indiana governor has tried to prevent Syrian refugees from settling in his state because the “pose a threat to safety of residents.” Pence argued that his policy was based on fear, not race, so it wasn’t discriminatory. A Federal Appeals Court dismissed his racist arguments on October 3, 2016.
A Federal Court also had to block his bizarre anti-abortion law that required burial or cremation for fetuses, whether miscarried or aborted, no matter how far along the pregnancy had progressed. 
Mike Pence is pro-birth, but not pro-life. He once funneled $3.5M dollars from Temporary Assistance to Needy Families into programs that counsel against abortion. He wants those women to have those babies, but he doesn’t care if the kids starve or live on the streets afterward.
Mike Pence has refused to comply with federal guidelines aimed at reducing prison rape.
When you add it all together, you can see that the most dangerous part of the Trump-Pence ticket is …that calculating quiet man who will be leading the charge from behind. Mike Pence is basically against anyone who is not white, conservative, Christian, and male.
When Mike Pence was a young lawyer on the rise, he challenged a longtime Democratic congressman for a seat in a Republican-leaning Indiana district. He seemed to have it in the bag until voters were stunned to learn that he had been using political donations to pay personal expenses including the mortgage on his house, his credit card bill, groceries, golf tournament fees, and car payments for his wife.”

Thursday, November 10, 2016

The Men Who Were Not There

In case you didn’t know, I was born in 1978, and I came up during the 1980s. As far back as I can remember, even as a child, I watched the news. Every day, after Transformers ended and the local news began, and than ABC News, with Peter Jennings. Every evening. Watching the news was something grown-ups did, and I wanted to know what was going on, even if I didn’t (couldn’t) understand it all at the time.

This was the early 1980s. I was watching the news on a crappy little six or eight inch black and white TV that my grandfather used to have in the garage. I was maybe six myself- 1984 or thereabouts. Like I said, I didn’t understand everything I saw back then, didn’t realize some things until just recently.

I watched AIDS first hit.

It was….it was a fucking apocalypse.

I didn’t know what gay people were back then, except they marched in protest a whole hell of a lot, and they were dying in droves. And that nobody, except the gay people themselves, through organizations like ACT UP (and others whose names I once knew but forgot sometime in the intervening 30 years), was doing anything about it. At that point, all I knew about Ronald Reagan was he was the President. To a six year old, President was an almost mythic title- the heroic god-king of our nation. And he seemed like he couldn’t do anything to stop AIDS. Neither could C. Everrett Coop, the impressively bearded, majestic and baritone Surgeon-General who appeared at the President’s side in every press conference about AIDS. Holy crap, thought my six or seven year old self, if these two badasses couldn’t do anything to help, AIDS must have been really, cataclysmically, bad.

That’s what a kid thought, watching the news.

I didn’t realize until much later that Reagan and Coop weren’t doing anything to stop AIDS because they didn’t want to stop it. Back then, AIDS was thought of purely as a disease of young, gay men- and young gay men, whether in 1984 or 2016 never vote Republican. As senile as that rat-bastard was, Reagan was smart enough to realize that every gay man his practiced, intentional inaction buried circa 1985 was a liberal Democrat vote tossed into the coffin. Not just votes for that election season, or the next…. Assuming all those gay dudes who died in their 20s would have otherwise lived to be 70 or so, that’s 40 or 50 years worth of liberal Democrat votes moldering in a grave.

Hey, what would have happened if they all lived? In 1988 or 1990, when this lost generation hit their 30s, would they have started having kids of their own? Kids who would grow up elibible to vote for the first time in the 2008 Presidential elections, kids who grew up with a gay father (s) and would be reflectively hostile to the Republican platform of homophobia, which hasn’t changed all that much between 1984 and today? How would the theoretical children of this lost generation of voted in all the elections afterward?

That’s ten or twelve Presidential elections already pre-advantaged to Republican interests. That’s before decades of gerrymandering and organized voter suppression efforts. That’s a 10 foot headstart in a hundred meter sprint- in every hundred meter sprint you’ll have to run for more than four decades.

That’s the only reason the aging and monstrous Tea Partiers and Trump voters have such loud voices these days. By their intentional inaction, by their lazy, convenient genocide 30 years ago, they murdered the voices on the other side that would have spoken against them today. An entire potential generation of left-leaning queer activists, removed from history, one at a time. And back in the 80s, Reagan and Coop knew that every month they delayed putting out an effective counterstrategy, every week they sprinkled platitudes rather than government research funds on the problem, there were more enemy dead being shoveled into the ground.

It was the coldest and most sociopathic kind of brilliant. Hannibal Lecter brilliance, Dr. Doom brilliance. Karl Rove brilliance.

And it worked.

Remember back in 2000, when Bush the Lesser “won” Florida? He “won” by about 600 votes. Six hundred votes. Do you think that more than 600 gay men died in Florida between the years of 1983 (or so) and 2000? How many of those guys would of willingly voted for Bush the Lesser, you imagine?

So ask yourself something else: why did Trump win last night? There’s a lot of reasons being speculated about by left- and right-wing media and pundits, a lot of blame to go around. But I think Trump’s victory came down to one thing and one thing only: to the men who weren’t there at the polls. To the men I saw die on that 6 inch, black and white TV three decades ago.


CHRIS

Monday, November 7, 2016

Blue State Texas

Vote tomorrow.

Especially if you live in Texas.

We almost turned Texas into a blue state two years ago when Wendy Davis ran for Governor. Even taking into account the handicap posed to Democrat politicians by decades of Republican gerrymandering and voter suppression, we almost turned Texas blue. It was a close race, and even though Greg Abbott (who BTW, is an utter and complete piece of shit) won a hotly contested election, he was business as usual as far as Republican candidates go. Abbott didn't, with the opening speech of his Presidential campaign, manage to slur roughly 60% of the population of Texas as rapists and murderers.

So vote tomorrow if you're a Texan Democrat. Notice I do not suggest voting tomorrow if you're a Texas Republican.... unless you pull your head out your ass, do what little you can to salvage the respectability of your party and cast a reluctant vote for Clinton.

CHRIS