“Faith Hill”
Greetings and salutations from the sand, sun and surf of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and the great island of Nantucket! Great to be with you on this Tuesday morning, the fifteenth day of February, 2011, a very windy day here in Osterville, as the howling northeasterly gale forces blew into town overnight, making one very grateful that one is indoors, warm and safe, as ALL human beings should be in such a rich and diverse nation such as the United States of America. However, that is not always the case, as outlined in President Obama’s recent Federal Budget of 2012. Let us dissect the giant blue book value shall we? In all fairness to the President, he is working with only 15 percent of the budget, discretionary spending if you will, therefore, not touching the political third rails of defense spending, roughly 700 billion dollars, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. What was left on the table were some pathetic cuts that only stoke the TRUTH to what the GOP really has in mind for “The American People”, a phrase that is used more than the word “thank you” at a Mississippi BBQ. Whenever I hear that phrase uttered by a member of the GOP, I ask myself, “who are these American people they speak of?” It’s like a bad version of the late, great Phil Hartman’s character, (SNL fame), “The unfrozen caveman lawyer”, who said statements like, “your words are foreign to me, I’m just a caveman, I know nothing of your world, your poverty, your sickness, your destitution, again, I’m just a caveman…” In this recently submitted Federal “budget”, social programs such as student aid for millions of underprivileged children, in the form of Pell Grants, will be slashed, heating oil programs for the poor will be cut, investments in badly needed infrastructure projects will be dissolved, as well as countless other important social programs that amount to a hill of beans, compared to the enormity of the say, the defense budget, will be eliminated–programs that are proven to help those in the greatest NEED in this nation, a nation that is seeing the middle class disappear before our very eyes. The republican party is truly a JOKE and transparent as hell, if you take a closer look at who they are in bed with and who they REALLY speak for. For it is not the 98 percent of the “American People”, they speak to the 2 percent who already received their huge tax breaks for the fiscal year of 2011, as well as the corporations that they hold so dear to their hearts, you know, the ones that offer them jobs as lobbyists when the American people throw them out of office. Take for example, the funding for the SEC, the securities exchange commission, who has been devoid of any teeth for a decade now. The GOP will attempt to defund this regulatory commission to the point where they will have no real authority to regulate the derivatives market that was the big bad wolf in the housing market collapse that eventually led to a world wide economic melt down. Further, the regulatory commissions on say, the environment, something WE all should get behind, will be defunded as well, allowing companies such as Halliburton and KOCH Industries to continue to rape and pillage our lands, poisoning our fresh drinking water, contaminating the air and ultimately causing sickness and death to our fellow American citizens–all in the name of the Almighty dollar. It is disgraceful and un American. Lawrence O’Donnell, of “The Last Word, with Lawrence O’Donnell”, airing every week night at 8 p.m. and midnight, only on MSNBC, added another home run to his mantle last night when his famous “re-writes” took on narcissist Bill O’Reilly, of FOX NEWS and his shameful interview with the President of the United States prior to Superbowl XXXXV. In the rewrite, Lawrence noted that Bill said, on his show recently, that MSNBC is “un-American”. Really Billo? Can I call you Billo or just clown? I, like Lawrence, am Irish, for the most part, and although I did not grow up on the mean streets of Boston’s south side, or, on the avenues of East Boston, I have had my licks in that fair city. I have met Irish tough guys, and worked, for a short spell, with “southies” in South Boston, demoing three story tenements, as I could not find any other work, and let me tell you this, those guys are TOUGH. You, “Mr. Billo the clown”, are no Irish tough guy. You are a bully, yes, but tough guy? NO. You,“Billo the clown”, as Keith Olbermann so rightly coined you years ago, could not survive one night in the cold, dark streets of Boston, with nothing, hell, you could not survive your show without your makeup girl and a shot of Jameson’s. Take away your fat salary, your house, your producer, that snake Jesse Watters, your alcohol, your “colleagues” and your LIES, and what do you have? A fat, out of shape “faux Irish tough guy” who bullies people, as you most likely did in junior high school, into “thinking” along the same illogical, insane and irresponsible lines that your puppet masters wish you to–moreover, could not wipe his bottom without permission from his even crazier boss Roger Ailes. FOX NEWS IS an arm of the GOP, and acts, very shrewdly, as a propaganda machine that, as one FOX NEWS insider put it, “makes stuff up as they go along.” Not really all that surprising to those of us who work in the real world of journalism, where we expose frauds like Bill O’Reilly, Dave and Charles Koch, and bp’s former chairman Tony, “gone sailin’” Hayward everyday. Perhaps that is why Anne Coulter, or “Coultergeist”, as Mr. Olbermann so brilliantly put it, again, years ago, said this at the recent CPAC, “conservative political action conference”, the other night, “I think we should throw more journalists in jail…” That is the ultimate goal of the republican party, eternally joined at the hip with their corporate masters, the real subversive power that is ruining this country, the “men behind the curtain”, whose ultimate goal, once again, is to dumb down the “American people” with misinformation, paranoia and fear, coupled with the hate that is so transparent within their own hearts. Never before in this country’s history have we had such a great divide between not only the haves and have nots, but also the great divide between those in the KNOW and those in the dark caverns of the cave Plato described in his work, “The Republic”, where people lived in darkness, never venturing out into the LIGHT, all while thinking that the shadows were real, and that anyone who tried to tell them differently were “enemies” and should be treated as such. I am updating that ancient text, written long before the birth of Christ, but I believe that it could not be more applicable than it is right now in the good ‘ole US of A. Sticking it to the poor will not solve this nation’s ever growing problems, as we continue to act as this world’s police force, with no money to do so, ever building the “military industrial complex”, that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us about before President Kennedy was elected in 1960. As mother’s, daughters, sons, fathers, grandfathers and grandmothers, struggle to make ends meet–while living in a dumbed down America where the source of “news” is nothing more than a commercial for bp, Koch Industries or Goldman Sachs, with a little Walmart and McDonald’s thrown in for good measure, courtesy of FOX NEWS, therefore living in a world where the new text books hot off the presses from the Texas Board of Education have effectively “rewritten” our entire history–it is no wonder that a focus group in Iowa recently, headed by, who else, Mr. Frank Luntz, of word doctors.com and acting king of political spin spawned from the dark rooms of republican strategists just like him, concluded that they truly believe that our President is not a U.S. citizen. This is how far it has gone. The nation is split in two, on the one hand, you have fear mongering hostage takers, whose demand is a country where there is only one “state television station”, presumably FOX, more tax breaks for the wealthy, deep cuts to programs helping the nation’s ever growing poor, and the “rewriting” of this nation’s great history, where wing-nuts can take the immortal words of our greatest political satirist, Mr. Mark Twain, and replace his words with the word “slave”–on the other, you have men and women standing up for what is right and pointing out those who are WRONG. Appropriate in only one way, unbeknownst to them, most Americans who watch that load of horsesh$t propaganda are becoming a slave to the way they THINK, and therefore, are becoming true slaves to it’s intended mind controlling propaganda–chalk full of LIES, innuendo and sometimes violent, fear stoking rhetoric that creates a war within the country that we claim to all love so much. The Stockholm Syndrome is going full throttle now, as “leaders” such as Mitch, “the mouse”, McConnell (R-KY) and Speaker of the House, John, “billy bob”, Boehner, along with Eric, “you go girl”, Cantor, House majority “leader”, misinform the “American people”, take them hostage, in their thinking and pocketbook, effectively brainwashing them, while disallowing for any independent thought to arise, moreover, and in a much more seditious way, lead them into “feeling sorry” for the big banks, big coal, big insurance, big oil, big retailers, well pretty much any big “industry”, that gives NOTHING back to this country or it’s people, rather, enslaves them into a life of poverty and despair, while offering them 7 bucks an hour to perform a truly slave like job in a slave like working atmosphere, and telling them to not complain or they will lose that job and all of the “benefits” they glean from a position that has been demonstrably proven to take years from their lives. If this country were serious about solving it’s problems, the first thing we would do would be to tackle the unfair tax code, filled with corporate loop holes, designed, effectively, to allow companies like GE or Exxon Mobile to pay nothing in the way of Federal income taxes. We would also take a good hard look at the budget of an insane military spending spree that has gone on now for the past 50 years, not making the world any safer than it stands today. We would tax the rich FAIRLY, asking them to put out their fair share so that they may sleep better at night knowing that the food banks and the homeless shelters are being supported, as many of those people are in that predicament through no fault of their own. We would offer blanket health care coverage to the whole of society, in regards to real HEALTH CARE, as opposed to “heath insurance”, where most of the premiums go towards the companies bottom line and not to the delivery of said real health care, saving money and saving lives, as they do in every other, save Switzerland, progressive industrialized country in the world. We would tackle the monsters of industry that are creating a sewer out of our marshes, our rolling plains, our mountains and our bodies of water, punishing those who pollute to the point where they would lose their businesses should they continue to do so. We would take it upon ourselves as a nation to seriously tackle the educational gap between US and countries like China, India, the rest of Europe and soon to be Latin America. For, as we as a nation get dumber, the world is getting smarter, and if Egypt is any indication of what may happen here in the United States, the hostage takers would be wise to take warning, for your practices, devoid of any “corporate etiquette”, are now, and forever will be, on WATCH, for we live in a transparent world, where LIES are easily rebuked and the TRUTH is all that really matters in the end. So drink up Billo! You are not only not a tough guy, but are truly a JOKE and your bully mentality does not scare me one Iota, nor does it scare anyone with some muscle, half a brain and a strong CONSTITUTION. Have a nice day everybody and remember, don’t take any wooden nickels! PRESERVE THE WILDERNESS! Peace~M
