Republicans Must Learn: What Goes Around Comes Around

Wally has seen his share of elections and with each cycle they seem to get worse.  And now that we have a black president, things have really gone over the top.  And instead of working together towards common goals, a few politicians have turned things into “us vs. them” and boiling everything down to simple black and white.  Only problem is, according to Wally, “that old fashioned politics don’t work no more.”

Ever since Nixon’s successful use of evangelicals in his presidential campaigns, Republicans have catered to them and their issues, such as abortion, contraception and gay marriage, which often swept them into office.  As a matter of fact, Wally remembers how Republicans worked hard to get abortion and gay related issues on the ballot most every election.  If nothing else, it brought the evangelicals, along with some other very angry people, out to the polls and they were usually single issue Republican voters.

In 1988, the George H.W. Bush campaign discovered that racism, if subtle enough, was another way of getting very angry people to the polls and Willie Horton became the face of the Bush Campaign. Between the evangelicals and xenophobes, the Republicans had grabbed most all of the voting public, and Wally was highly pissed about it.  On the other hand, and he knew neither how nor why, but they were practicing bad medicine and bad medicine will eventually guarantee a bad outcome.

And with the exception of a glorious eight years which ended with a significant budget surplus and economic growth, things pretty much sucked.  But Clinton was an exception to the rule and Wally saw the second Bush elected.  This time, however, the Republicans added a new paradigm with their image, “compassionate conservatism,” which itself, became an oxymoron.  But few, including Wally, could actually have defined compassionate conservatism, until George W. Bush’s response in Hurricane Katrina of 2005.

It was with heavy heart that Wally lived through the Bush era, but a financial meltdown brought a new Kind of president to Washington.  What will this new kind of president be like, people asked?  “Just like the old kind,” Wally loved to say.

But things are changing.  Even the evangelicals are now insisting, “God don’t make no trash,” and are seeing gays as actual children of God.  “And besides,” sez Wally, “Jesus loves them.”  And as many evangelicals come to accept things like global climate change and gay and lesbian marriage, they are leaving the GOP and shrinking its base even more.  No longer can local, state or federal elections be won by simply putting gay marriage on the ballot.

Even President Obama, of late, has been acting like a new kind of president and a lot less like the old kind.  And although Wally wishes he would do more to even out the economic inequality situation, Wally is starting to hope again.  And it seems like the bad medicine of divisiveness and negativity practiced by the GOP for the past forty years, is coming back around and biting them in the butt.  And the pox is now upon their own house.

And what was once hidden is now being revealed and Wally wonders what else will come to light before the November Elections.  “If the past year or two is any indication, we’re all in for a very revealing, but ugly ride,” Wally is rumored to have told the GOP fund raiser who phoned him.  "After all, what goes around, comes around and God still don’t like ugly.”  But Wally still can’t understand how his name and number got on a GOP fund raising list in the first damn place.

  

Television Has News and Views but No Real Clues

Wally is said to have spent most of his weekend finishing up the last few episodes of Star Trek's Next Generation.  Was a time when he'd get up and watch Meet the Press on Sunday morning, but in Wally's mind, David Gregory is no Tim Russert.  While Russert used to confront bullshit when it appeared, Gregory seems to encourage it.   Worse yet, the post Russert version of Meet the Press is more like the Milk Toast Review Show.  “Dude’s always beating a dead horse,” Wally is fond of saying.  “Who gives a shit what folks like Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and William Kristol have to say about the Middle East?  Everyone already knows that those neocons don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground.”   According to Wally’s worldview, if those assholes weren’t always being given a platform from which to spew their bullshit, the rest of us would be a lot better off. 

But although he actually missed the real-time bust because he was watching Melisa-Harris Perry, there was a major confrontation on Meet the Press last Sunday.  Problem was, David Gregory got busted.  Chris Gunness, a spokesperson for the UN Relief and Works Agency did the takedown.  Seems as if Israel had released a video showing, what they alleged to be, Hamas rockets being fired from a UN school.  The allegations later turned out to be false, but Wally found a clip of the bust and posted it to his twitter account the following Monday.  “This is really worth watching,” he wrote.

If Oprah can do it, why not Sarah?

 

It wasn’t all that long ago that Wally used to describe Sarah Palin as, “Hot!” But now, “She’s just plain crazy.”  But, he also concedes, “She might just be crazy like a fox.”  And although he’s never quite sure which kind of crazy she is, he no longer describes her as “Hot!”

But now, she’s gone and raised the ante and Wally can’t wait.  Like Oprah, Sarah Palin is starting her own television channel and since her announcement of her new channel, SarahPalinChannel.com, people have taken to twitter, eager to post their ideas for shows on her channel, #PalinTVShows. 

“But before you go a tweeting your bright ideas,” sez Wally, “you need to check this out…”

Israel’s Gaza Policy is Bad Karma

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/20/gaza-photos-israel-palestine-conflict-_n_5603933.html

Weird Wally admits that he is no expert on world affairs, but as far as he’s concerned, there is little difference between the Warsaw Ghetto and the Gaza Strip.  And although he knows next to nothing about the actual situation in Gaza, he does have an opinion.  Make the mistake of asking, he’ll gladly tell you about it.  Pretend to be deaf, and he’ll write it down.  He is, after all, retired and might have nothing else better to do that day.

Between television news and live internet streaming, Wally has been watching a lot of pain and suffering.  The 139 square mile Gaza Strip is home to 1.82 million people with most of the population confined to roughly 44 percent of the land because the Israeli military is saying that they now own the rest.  But that is been so for Palestinians for several decades; the government of one nation telling the citizens of another how to behave and who to vote for.

As a matter of fact, according to Wally, that’s the current situation in a nutshell.  Back in 2006, Israel was telling Palestinians how to vote.  And since Israel had designated Hamas as a terrorist organization, Israel made direct threats to Palestinians and told them not to vote for Hamas.  Naturally, the Palestinians did the exact opposite of what their long time enemy, and schoolyard bully, told them to do.

Israel, having an organized military and sophisticated weapons, threw up a blockade around Gaza which, in turn, pissed off the residents who fought back with rocks.  Hamas, meanwhile, had their own agenda and added their arsenal of out dated and unsophisticated weapons to the fray.

And the Palestinians are caught in the middle.  Because of the blockade, Israel determines what is and is not allowed into Gaza.  And there has been shortages of food medicine and electricity for several decades and life on the Strip has been hard.  But these days, life is even harder and basic necessities like water and sewage are simply not available.  Ever.

But it’s the terror that Israel is inflecting onto the people of Gaza that makes Wally cringe.  “Imagine what life must be like for the people who live there.  At any moment sudden death can come raining down from the sky and there is no safe place for you and your family to go.

“And what of the children who live in daily terror of Israel, a nation gone rogue and drunk with power?  Who is a terrorist is in the eye of the beholder, and a lot of those children will grow up seeing the nation of Israel as a terrorist nation and, ten years down the road, Israel will have to deal with that.”

When jokingly asked if he could be more direct in his statement about Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip, Wally is rumored to have said, “Looks like genocide to me.”

Updated Link and more on genocide

California Water

Although his abode is a total mess, Wally is determined to keep his promise and host a OCDs Anonymous meeting later this afternoon.  Yet, on Thursday morning 7/17/2014, he had done nothing toward his goal of becoming a Licensed Private Investigator in the State of Colorado.

But after reading an article by Tom Harper about how Nestle is taking hundreds of millions of gallons of water per year, out of California's water supply for its bottled water-bottling operation (Arrowhead and Nestle Pure Life), despite the three year drought, Wally couldn't seem get California water out of his mind. 

Having lived in Colorado for over thirty years, he realized that he shouldn’t really give-a-shit about California water.  But unlike most everything else in the United States, he also knew that this isn’t about California.  “It’s really about the water,” Wally said to some friends.  “Fucking H2O, and some asshole believes that it’s not a universal right, but his to sell to whomever can afford it.”

Although the water is part of California’s water supply, the rights were purchased from the Cabazon Water District for $3 Million around ten years ago.  The Morongo Band of Mission Indians, a sovereign nation and new owners of the rights, in turn, entered into a contract with the Perrier Group, which is owned by Nestle, to bottle their Arrowhead Water at the $26M plant.  And despite the long and severe drought, there may be little that anyone can do about it.

And since air and water are the two most important resources for survival, it only makes sense to privatize them for profit.  Eventually, someone may figure out a way to privatize the very air we breathe, but until then, corporations are either buying up, or just plain stealing all the water. 

Wally suspects that privatization of water is one of the best kept secrets of the multinational corporations, and he is seeing it manifest in third world countries.  But Wally also knows that those third world countries are merely an experiment for what is coming next.  “Before you know it,” Wally is now telling friends, “privatized water will be in your neighborhood.”

Meanwhile, Wally still has two cases of Arrowhead stacked in his tiny apartment.  He says he’ll stop drinking that brand when the cases are empty.  “But I don’t know what I’ll do when I’m done,” he said to a checkout clerk at a nearby Whole Foods.  “Denver water tastes like piss.”

Mitt Me Again, Mr. Romney

Weird Wally is telling anyone who’ll listen about waking up this morning in a cold sweat.   “I had a dream,” he insists.  “And it was horrible!  Mitt Romney was on all over my television trashing Obama, bad mouthing Hillary and, worse yet, beating her in the polls.

“The last election was bad enough, but another one with Mitt Romney as leading man is enough to make me puke.”  When he first learned of the possibility in a Washington Post article back in April, Wally said that he'd actually cringed.  “There’s something offensive about a top one percenter pretending that tax cuts for the wealthy and less regulation of their corporations, which are people, are good things for me.” 

But Wally also says, it’s getting more and more obvious that Romney will be the Republican candidate in 2016.  And Wally isn’t so sure that Hillary will actually be the leading lady.  “It’s quite possible that she may come to her senses,” Wally is rumored to have said on several occasions.

Besides being in the top one percent herself, Hillary will have to put a lot of distance between her and Obama.  “He’s a good president,” Wally wrote in a Reddit post, “but he didn’t see a lot of shit coming his way, and what little he did, seems to have gotten by him.  And Hillary shouldn't have to deal with it.”

If nothing else, Hillary is a fighter and Wally likes that about her.  Many times, he remembers having sighed in frustration when Obama, once again, caved to the other side.  “What part of ‘No’ don’t you understand, Mr. President?” he'd often ask.

Romney vs. Hillary would be nice enough, with Hillary the most likely winner.  She’s a take no enemies kind of politician, but has a lot of baggage.  But Romney vs. Warren, now that, Wally readily admits, “Is something I could get into.”

And although highly unlikely, if Hillary does come to her senses and decides not to rum, Wally says he is comforted by the fact that Elizabeth Warren is waiting in the wings.   But in Wally’s very weird minds’ eye, he is already affixing a “Clinton/Warren in 2016,” sticker to the bumper of his 94 pickup.  

The Private Prison Inmate Blues

Weird Wally felt the change coming for several years and had managed to fight it until early one Sunday morning when he turned on MSNBC’s, Melissa Harris-Perry.   Having worked as an adult probation officer in both New York and Arizona, the last thing Wally wanted to think about were prisons and the people who went there.  But that’s what Miss Meliss was talking about that morning and she caught his attention.  Things had changed since he’d been part of the system and ideas like rehabilitation and humane treatment have totally left the field.  Both motive and mission, as Wally now saw it, could best be described in a single word, profit.  Once the responsibility of governments, prisons are fast becoming privatized and part of a growing “prison industry,” accountable to no one.

And the more he thought about it, the more Wally realized  that he was actually starting to give a shit about the situation and it mattered not, what kind of people go there.   When citizens allow their governments to outsource responsibility for people in its custody, it is bound to say something about the citizens themselves.  Wally did not want to be that kind of citizen.

“It’s not right to just turn over people’s lives to a for profit entity, ”Wally said to a friend.  “The corporation owns you, body and soul, to do with you as they want.  That is just fucking wrong!”

But it isn’t just prisons, he knew.  Juveniles, mentally ill, immigrants awaiting deportation, all come under the prison privatization scheme.  And corporations are eager to take charge, for a profit, of those which the rest of society would rather ignore.  And if you are a corporation working with such a segment of society, your main job, as you might see it, is to keep them out of sight as much as possible.  “And out of sight,” Wally told himself, “is out of mind.”

And that, he knew, was the secret sauce for a profitable private prison.  Charge as much as you can get away with and provide little or nothing in return.  For certain, do without rehabilitation and mental health counseling.   Medical and food and nutrition expenses must be kept to a minimum and, by the way, why not contract the inmates out to local businesses and construction companies?

Both Juveniles and adults are less safe than ever in these privatized for profit institutions and male rape, violence, killing and suicides have increased.   And because of the corruptness of the private prison system, the court system is also effected.  Nothing of the criminal justice system can remain untarnished.  

 

Of late though, there is a small amount of good news on the horizon.   Some corporations are divesting from the private prison industry, nearly $60 Million so far.  But that is only a drop in the bucket.  Meanwhile Wall Street remains bullish on the industry and thinks it still has a lot of room to grow.   Wally, on the other hand, believes that “we the people,” are better than to allow private prisons to continue.  And although he won’t bet any money on the outcome, Wally says he’s remaining hopeful.

You Are What You Eat, a late braking link regarding prison food!

Sue Obama! Impeach Obama! And Why God Don't Like Ugly

“I’m sick and tired of hearing about it,” Weird Wally announced at an open meeting of Political Bloggers Anonymous, earlier this morning.  “First, John Boehner is going to Sue Obama then, the House is going to impeach him.  And if the Republicans take the Senate, remove him from office.  Haven’t they figured out yet that God don’t like ugly?”

Just after the 2012 election, Wally thought the petty Republican behavior and hatefulness would just go away.  What he’d forgotten was that the Senate Minority Leader had announced to a group of his colleagues on the very night of Obama’s First Inauguration, that their main goal should be to deny him a second term.

“And it just gets worse from there,” Wally said in an email to a fellow blogger.  “It’s like reading a Harry Potter novel where all kinds of voices and illusions are conjured up in order to distract and confuse.”

Wally sensed that the chaos creating magicians were getting too full of themselves and continued their dark magic, unaware of a new kind of light shining upon them.  It was not that this new light was invisible to them, they just were too busy looking backward to pay any kind of attention to what was right in front of them. 

But many spells worked and people seemed blind to them.   The Benghazi and Immigration spells of distraction, among other things, continues to piss on the president’s approval rating,  And even as thousands of desperate, unaccompanied children fleeing death and tyranny arrive hungry at our boarders, Wally is amazed at how successfully the chaos magicians cast spells of confusion amongst the people.  And many citizens gather to toss verbal rocks and abuse upon the children as they arrive.

A lot of these spell casting politicians aren’t for real and even Wally knows what they’re up to.  They run for office with no intention of ever wining.  After saying stupid things and appealing to our most base instincts, they lose elections, but end up making hundreds of thousands of dollars giving speeches, writing books and consulting for think tanks. 

There’s money to be made if you’re on the “right” side of the political divide.  Republican billionaires, like the Koch Brothers, are spending billions trying to tell us that tax cuts for them are a good thing for the rest of us.  They like to call themselves, “job creators,” but Wally knows better.

And although Wally is not a religious kind of guy, he considers himself a person of faith.  And he has absolute faith in the Basic Law of Karma:  What goes around, comes around.  Wally also knows that God don’t like ugly.

That is why, perhaps, he hasn’t give-up.   But even with the chaos yelling and screaming all around him, he knows that chaos cannot succeed.   Chaos has a lot of red meat to toss to its minions, but people like Weird Wally are also feeding off of that same red meat and getting energized.  Maybe enough of us will get out and vote come November and we can keep some Republicans from taking the Senate.  If not, we’ll still have a president who can frustrate and forestall their agenda for another two years.  And although Wally admires and respects President Obama, he doesn’t want to be him.

An Open Letter to the Tea Party People

Dear Tea Party Person,

I haven’t a clue as to who you are nor what you are like.   Everything I know about you people comes to me second or third hand.  The few tea partiers I do know, I go out of my way to avoid.  Besides having little in common, I see you as racist, angry and hateful, narrow minded, xenophobic and, quite possibly, mentally or emotionally ill.   But how did you come to be like that?  Better yet, how is it that I have come to see you as I do?  Might we both be influenced by xenophobia and similar mental health and emotional issues?

But like I already said, what little I do know of you may be flawed.  Mostly, I know you by clips I see on television news and it’s usually of very angry people saying very ugly things about our president or, crowds of people wearing costumes from the 1700s, who insist on taking “our country back” from the rest of us.

And your politicians are just as ugly as the bullies in Murrieta, California, verbally abusing a few busses full of women and children.  Your Tea Party Conservatives vote for less regulation on Wall Street and are in favor of decreasing government’s ability to protect the environment.  And while you call yourselves “freedom loving,” you elect people who want to take away other people’s right to vote.  So, when you call yourselves freedom loving, does that extend to the “others?”  People who, for instance, might be less like you and more like me?  What about a woman’s right to determine how she lives her life?  Should gays and lesbians have the same freedoms as everyone else?  Does religious freedom give corporations the right to come between doctors and patients when it comes to determining what kind of medication and procedures their employees are allowed to access?

Yet, even when the hate and venom spews from the mouths of those elected officials and religious leaders, it’s hard to believe that you and I can be so different and intolerant.  And while I consider myself open minded, I am as guilty of avoiding and stereotyping you as much as you are of avoiding and stereotyping me.

On the other hand, I believe that we probably agree on more than a few things.  For starts, neither of us trusts Wall Street and big banking and we’re also suspicious of big corporations.   But your Tea Party politicians want to deregulate both banks and Wall Street.   Worse yet, they are fine with corporations being people and have no problems with the ruination of our environment in search of energy and profit.  How is it that you continue to elect people who want to lower taxes for the top one percent at your expense?  They pay less, while we pay more and you continue to vote for them, and against your own best interest.  Makes no sense to me.

So, how about we plan a picnic in the park next weekend.  It might be fun.  We could exchange iPods and listen to each other’s music.  Bring burgers, hotdogs and potato salad.  Bring the kids and board games.  If near a lake, bring swimming stuff.  Maybe we can even have a conversation, ask and answer a few questions.  It could be informative!  It could be fun!

A picnic in the park.  Let’s make it a plan.  But whatever we decide, please leave your guns at home.

Sincerely,

Wally

A Friday Fit for the 4th

It’s July 4, 2014 and in celebration, Weird Wally ate half of a hotdog.  “I’ll eat half of another one next June 19^th,” he is rumored to have said while attending a July 4^th, hotdog eating contest. “Because independence for me wouldn’t have happened until almost a hundred years later on, Juneteenth, in 1865.”   Later that day, he confided to a close friend that the only reason he brought the subject up was because Chris Rock hadmanaged to piss off so many white people back in 2012 with a simple tweet about it, that Wally thought it was worth an encore.

But it was neither freedom nor independence that excited Wally.  What he was really excited about was Colorado Senate Bill 14-133.  If he’d read the bill right, he qualified to become a Licensed Private Investigator, in the State of Colorado.  Close to seventy, Wally is considering a second career, “This is really cool,” he told friends.  “It’s a new mid-life crises, and I’m going to be the Denver, Colorado, version of Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlings.  Besides, I’m too old for Mc Donald’s.”

Finally, after leaving the July 4^th hotdog eating and fireworks festivities, and while riding the 15-RTD bus home, Wally wondered about what he’d like to investigate if, in fact, he ever became a PI.  “The Federal Reserve,” whispered a very strange looking man sitting next to him.  “I can read your mind and you should investigate the Federal Reserve,” he said.

And before Wally was able to recover, the man had jumped up and said, “This is my stop,” and leaped off the bus just after wishing Wally a “Very Happy July 4^th.”

And remember, Weird Wally Sez:  The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, but it is stranger than we can imagine.