So Sorry!

While I cannot claim to speak for the Democratic Party, as a Democrat I feel compelled to apologize to the American people. I am sorry as all hell that we Democrats are unable to find a Marvel superhero to insert the stick of dynamite needed to blow Kyrsten Sinema's head out of her special interest owned ass, and/or to insert the stick of dynamite needed to blow Joe Manchin's head out of his Koch bros owned ass. News flash for voters: it is not Joe Biden or the Democratic Party that is failing to protect voting rights from the attacks of the American Fascist Party (AKA the Republican Party). There are two Senators registered as Democrats (Sinema and Manchin) who have joined Republican senators in refusing to protect voter rights. All of the senators refusing to pass the voter rights acts are indicative of a systemic problem, i.e. the influence money and special interests have on politicians of both parties.

Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are either lying when they say they support the voter rights bills or they are both idiots! If you believe in the right to vote (the most fundamental right in any democracy) you will do what is necessary to protect that right; it is that simple! But both Manchin and Synema say that traditional senate rules, in this case the filibuster, are more important than protecting the right to vote. I think the absurdity of saying that the filibuster is more important than the right to vote is self evident. Without the right to vote we no longer have a democracy! Furthermore, the filibuster rule in its present form has only been around since 1975. So the rule was changed fairly recently, and not for the better. One only has to look at how Moscow Mitch used to filibuster to clog up the system like a malignant bowel obstruction during the Obama administration to realize how destructive the filibuster is in its present form!

Wake up America! Big pharma wants the filibuster to prevent the passage of any act that would allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices, and other special interests want to keep the filibuster in order to thwart laws and acts designed to protect consumers and/or make big companies pay their fair share of taxes. Manchin, Synema and the Republicans are choosing the rule of money over democracy and the rule of the people. The only way you are going to protect the right to vote and take back your country is to work like hell to defeat the Republicans and the few Democrats who choose money over country! Needless to say I do not feel sorry for the voters punishing Blanch Lincoln because of her opposition to public option, and what she did was not nearly as bad as what Manchin and Synema are doing. The big tent is a fine thing. We should tolerate differences when it comes to policies and legislation, but there can be no compromise or tolerance for any undermining our democracy! Anyone who will not protect the right to vote has no business being in our government.

GOP War On Poverty

The Republicans hate poverty so much that they are trying to kill everyone who is impoverished. They particularly want to kill the impoverished who are female and/or a racial or ethnic minority (meaning not a white Anglo-Saxon male). Those privileged, white Anglo-Saxon male, Republicans implore members of their party to deny science, refuse to get vaccinated, and refuse to take any other reasonable precautions to prevent the spread of Covid. “It's a matter of personal freedom,” the Republican demagogues howl. It is very likely that they who are foolish enough exercise their “freedom” as defined by the Republican Party will be rewarded with Darwins. And how does this fit into the GOP war on poverty?  Well, the people most likely to die from this stupidity are the ones with modest incomes who live in red states that have turned down the medicaid expansion in the ACA. A group of Senate Republicans even threatened to delay action on a spending bill needed to avert a lapse in federal funding unless that bill also bars enforcement of the Biden administration’s vaccine-and-testing mandate for large employers. Those Republicans will choose profits over lives anytime as long as the lives being sacrificed are not the lives of the privileged few.

And now we come to the Republican Party's war on poor women. I know, Roe v. Wade protects all women, but in regard to overturning Roe v. Wade the women who are not poor are just collateral damage as far as the Republicans are concerned. A very blunt interpretation of what the reactionary supreme court injustices said during the oral arguments in the Mississippi abortion case (Dobbs v. Jackson) is that the damage to women who are well off is rarely fatal anyway! After all, women of means can afford to go to states that do not believe that the GOP's big, intrusive government should try to control a woman's body and/or her reproductive system. Those injustices are promoting a pre civil war view of the union. They are arguing that at least in this instance the primacy of federal law as established by the fourteenth amendment is no longer needed because the ability to travel means people can always opt to go to enlightened states that still protect the rights of individuals (assuming that the people who want to exercise that option have the means to do so). From the comments and questions of the reactionary injustices, it is apparent that they are about to render a decision that will overturn Roe v Wade regardless of the fact that many of those injustices told the senate confirmation committee that the right to an abortion is ”settled law.” Overturning Roe v. Wade and destroying the right to choose should be the final straw for everyone, but there is more, so much more.

Our democratic form of government is at grave risk, and that is no exaggeration. As if the attempted coup de'tat of January 6 and all the voter suppression laws were not enough, we have a plethora of other dangers arising from the Republican Party -- most of which are personified by Moscow Mitch McConnell, who has broken the senate and made it necessary to do away with the filibuster if we want to preserve the right to vote or pass any meaningful legislation. It was also Moscow Mitch who packed, politicized, and delegitimized the supreme court, making it vital to expand the court in order to restore its balance and its integrity and thereby prevent the reactionaries from taking us back to a dreadful past idealized by the privileged few. Now is the time for everyone to declare an all out election war on the misogynistic and fascist Republican party! As we used to say in the nineteen sixties, “if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem!” We must defend ourselves from the Republican Party's attacks on science, on democracy, on women, on the impoverished, and on immigrants. We cannot save our democracy and restore that great engine of prosperity (the middle class) unless Democrats are given large majorities in both houses of congress.