Well, duh...she has a VAGINA

Never has the Republican party demonstrated how out of touch they are than with the choice of Sarah Palin as their "replacement" to lure disgruntled Hillary voters. Let me put this in terms that even a moron like Palin, who comes from the land of salmon, bears, crab, and big old exploding mountains can understand: if you're going after crab, don't use cotton candy as bait.

This offensive piece of fluff offered forth by McCain clearly demonstrates that he does not have the judgment to be President. In what deluded remaining functioning brain cell in that disturbed mind does an anti-choice, Creationist spouting, environment destroying, big oil-drenched gun-toting extreme wingnut equal Hillary Clinton? I'm stretching here, I really am and the only similarity I can think of is that she has a vagina.

So let me see if I have this right. John McCain and the Republican party see all women as interchangeable, kind of like that old joke, told mostly by old Republican sexist asshats, that we all look the same if you turn out the lights.

No wonder they want to take away a woman's right to choose, refuse to pay us what we're worth, and portray any woman with a spine as a bitch. All I have to say to that is: darlings, I'm not the only uppity bitch that's going to vote against you in November. You just about assured that a lot of your little bitches will be voting for my candidate instead of yours.

Take THAT to your next dickfest. And don't get too close to the crabpots while you're doing it because those crab just can't tell the difference between a worm and what you use to make your dumbass decisions.



Technorati Tags: Sarah Palin, Hillary Clinton, anti-Republican, John McCain, GOP, vice president

Well, duh...she has a VAGINA

Me, Politics, and the Hope Ghost

In 1968 I was seventeen years old in Las Vegas. My best friend, my strange and romantic and poetic buddy who didn't have a mean gene in his entire body, died in Vietnam. As a quiet and horribly shy kid whose family spoke with funny accents, he was my only friend those first few years in the desert. His family was neither Mormon nor Catholic. That made him an outcast just like me in a community that demanded you be one or the other for acceptance. Or you could be rich. Money erased all social taboos, but we were both from dirt poor families.

We ate our sack lunches together every day on the far corner of the playground, away from everyone else. We couldn't afford school lunches and often we could only afford one lunch between us. We shared the meager contents of our bags with each other. We bonded over stale bread and supper leftovers. Without him, without his acceptance, I don't know if I would have survived those early years. He gave me life and war took him from me.

It devastated me even though I was a child of war. I knew that's what war did. It took away those you loved. I was raised by people who survived horrors most Americans will never be able to wrap their minds around. No matter how whole their bodies were, their minds, their ability to feel, their ability to love, their ability to live a normal life was taken from them by war.

But before he died, we shared politics and peace. We and a small handful of social misfits like ourselves, formed a club in school that worked for civil rights, for equality, for world peace. The other students saw us as odd and quirky and mostly avoided us.

And then the unthinkable happened. Dr. King was assassinated. In the midst of our grief a small change started to occur. During the assembly where the entire school came together to mourn, students who previously avoided us now welcomed us and started to come to our meetings. Something woke in them. Something became important that had previously lain dormant inside them.

In May of 1968 we signed up to work on Robert Kennedy's campaign. We watched him that June evening with the pride, the hope, the power of our dream starting to take shape. And then as quickly as the moment came, it went with his assassination.

Life became this awful series of shocks to our hearts and spirits. It didn't seem that things could possibly get worst, but they did. Almost a week later David was drafted, and by September he was dead.

I was young and I was angry. That is why I didn't just bury myself away and run away from the wounds of the past few months. I was raised by survivors and I wasn't going to let war defeat me either.

I don't remember how I went to my first anti-war demonstration. I suspect it had to do with David because part of that first day was camping out with a group of students on the steps of the federal building in Las Vegas. We read the names of those killed in Vietnam up to that point. It was already a long list and it took us all night to read the names with people coming up and offering to read for a while. I remember a nun came and they still dressed in black robes. She read for half hour and then left without saying anything to anyone. About 3 am, a police car pulled up and we thought we were going to be arrested, but instead he got out of his car and offered to read a few names. He had lost his son in Vietnam six months before. It was that kind of night.

It was also the kind of night when cab drivers spit at us, when people with engraged, red faces and bulging veins screamed insults at us, called us Communists, traitors, appeasers. I found my voice that night when I learned I had to read loud enough to be heard over the insults.

Those years shaped and defined me as a pacifist. I have spent my entire life since then writing about peace, making art about peace, being part of organizations and groups that worked for peace and the victims of war. In all those years I never lost hope, never gave up my dream that one day the world would know peace and reject war.

But the last eight years knocked something down in me. I fought but it was from despair instead of hope. I often felt as if an overwhelming evil had taken over America and was spreading outward. I began to understand how tyranny grew, how it fed on the dispirited souls of people too beaten down to object anymore. I understood how the Nazis happened, how the Fascists happened, how petty dictators hung on to their ill-gotten dictatorships.

That dull sense of merely existing instead of fighting back is finally starting to melt. No matter what people think of Obama, the important thing to understand is that he is a symbol of a change that is already taking place. We created him, our mass consciousness, our despair, our frustration with a world growing more cruel and more mean and more intolerant, created him from our own dreams. He is us and so is Hillary and so is Biden and so is everyone who was in that stadium tonight and who watched on television screens all around the world.

I don't know what will come of it all but I do know that for the first time in eight years that feeling of oppression is starting to lift. And because of my experience with war, with death, with survival, I know that's all it takes sometime, for someone to lift the edge of the fog and show us the way forward. Tonight I finally see the glint of daylight on the horizon and like millions of people around the world, I am daring once again to dream of a better world.



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Me, Politics, and the Hope Ghost

Barack Obama, Because America deserves better!

Thanks Hillary and thanks Bill for your graciousness and inspiration and reminding us all what's really important now--electing a President who will make us America again.

Technorati Tags: Barack Obama for President, Democratic Party, Anti-Republican, Anti-GOP

Barack Obama, Because America deserves better!

Del Martin

For those of you who somehow missed hearing or reading about Del Martin, here's a synopsis of her remarkable life.

"Del Martin, a lesbian rights pioneer who took part in one of California's first same-sex weddings, died today in San Francisco after a long period of declining health. She was 87." read more

This amazing woman and her partner Phyllis had a very large impact on my life. It started with my grandmother's sister who was a Lesbian in Italy. She was born somewhere before the turn of the century in Yugoslavia. I can't imagine how difficult it was to have anything like a normal life in that part of the world at that time. And yet she did, and lived with her partner until death parted them. I know that my grandmother didn't really know until she was at least in her 70's and 80's and even then it was something impossible for her to wrap her brain around. It was easier for my mother to understand and accept. Recently, one of my cousins is trying to track down the her partner's family because through our grandmothers, we are connected and that needs to be acknowledged, their love and commitment for each other needs to be acknowledged.

It was for my grandmother and also one of my cousins that I am grateful for Del Martin's responsibility for getting the American Psychiatric Association to stop classifying homosexuality as a mental illness.

I also owe her for being one of the fortunate few who broke the chain of domestic violence in our relationships. My mother was often severely beaten and abused. Del Martin's work to publicize domestic violence opened the door to women like me being able to walk away from a relationship that had the potential for violence. Through her I knew I deserved better than the hell my mother endured. And through her courage in speaking out to all women in similar situation I was able to break that chain.

As one of the many people who attended far too many memorial services in the 80's for friends who died of AIDS, I saw my share of life partners denied those precious final moments at the bedside of those they loved before they passed away. Del Martin's work to change this horrible tragedy allowed life partners to share in all aspects of their loved one's lives and deaths. It allowed them to marry in California and the day it became legal to do so, she and Phyllis married as did many of my friends who live in the Bay area.

So thank you Del Martin from this straight woman who owes you so much. You will be sorely missed, but what you leave behind will continue to heal and inspire people for generations to come.Technorati Tags: Del Martin, Gay Marriage, Lesbian, Domestic Violence, Equality

Del Martin

Skateboards and Shoes at Zazzle!

I've been having fun designing shoes and now skateboards at Zazzle! Check out these two efforts. There will be a lot more soon as I come up with some more designs that are specially designed for them. These are some of my favorites from existing products. I especially love the shoes. Just click on them to go to my shop where you'll find more stuff like this. It sure changes my day to have new stuff to play with.

Technorati Tags: zazzle, skateboards, shoes, new products

Skateboards and Shoes at Zazzle!

Getting Used For Your Love

We've been hearing a lot about Hillary's Pumas lately and will hear even more because they are an easy target to exploit as are most people who are inflexibly attached to anything. As someone who originally supported Hillary and was driven away by the nasty politics she engaged in, it wasn't that big a step to go from one Democrat to another. I know what's at stake here and I'll vote for any Democrat to rid the country of the parasitical Republicans who care only about lining their own pockets at the expense of people like me and you.

But I do know two women who are so inflexible over Hillary not getting the nomination that they will put the future of their daughters in the hands of those who will take away their right to choose, who will almost guarantee they'll be sent to fight in some war for the next line of Cheneys, and who will let lobbyists and arms merchants dictate foreign policy. This is just plain selfish.

But setting that aside because after all, these are only two women and I believe, because they are intelligent women, they won't allow themselves to remain trapped in an abusive relationship. They'll probably end up voting Libertarian once common sense kicks in and they realize their emotions are being played by the McCrazies, or they will suck it up and vote for the perpetual candidate of the disaffected, Ralph Nader. That's their right and I honor it.

Having said that, I am one of those people who remembers what I read a few months ago about some of those primary votes for Hillary. Here's a typical article on the "phenomenon" read more. I remember how hatemongers like Rush Limbaugh encouraged his listeners to go vote for Hillary, not because he had any love or respect for her or them, but because the Republicans wanted to manipulate the primaries and get rid of what they considered a serious contender: Barack Obama.

And the Republicans are so desperate right now that they will grab hold of anything to exploit. Of course with their compliant whores in the media, they will exploit exploit exploit the passion these voters feel and turn it into slime like they do everything they touch. Those two women I mentioned will be magnified into a huge division within the Democratic party. They will be featured over and over again as something to fear, to use, to manipulate, to convince voters that the Democrats are fractured and can't agree on anything. They will do things like pile a bunch of closet Republicans (that GOP sure does love closets, don't they) into a hummer and claim they are Pumas. Check out this and tell me that any decent Hillary supporter would show up in something as blatantly symbolic of Republican excess than the hummer. It's a sad, pathetic attempt to manipulate a handful of Hillary supporters and it comes off as sad, pathetic and desperate: read more

While I would have loved a woman President, I'll settle for Obama because I truly do feel he represents me and my interests. Unlike the GOP meme that gets passed around to discredit him, he does stand for much of what I believe in. I went and read his website early on in the debate instead of listening to the bought and paid for media try and convince me he stood for nothing. Shame on those who didn't and still ask in that quasi-rhetorical meme zombie tone of voice: but what DOES he mean by change? Go read for yourself and quit letting the state run media tell you what to think and believe. Then you'll understand why more than anything America needs not just someone promising change but someone who is a symbol of that change. After eight years of Bush and his idiocy, I want someone who can talk to the entire world and not just a bunch of mindless GOP cheerleaders. That to me is a real leader.




Click on image to visit my political shop for progressive voters.Technorati Tags: Barack Obama, Pumas, Hillary Clinton, Election 2008, Democratic convention, mainstream media, anti-Republican

Getting Used For Your Love

Protecting us from the white lunatics within our borders

So it starts. Home-grown terrorists climb out of their shit pile of hatred with plans to assassinate Obama. Here's a link to one of the stories read more.

Maybe Homeland Security, with the help of their ignoble asshat co-conspirators--hate radio and propaganda TV, should start going after loony white guys instead of focusing so much attention away from them by making us scared shitless of Arabs, Mexicans, Blacks, Muslims...anyone who isn't a white Christian lunatic. Last I recall McVeigh, the creepfest who blew up the Federal Building, was a crazy white guy.

Really, it's time to focus more on what's already within our borders--white Christian lunatics who are easily manipulated by the likes of Faux news and Rush "let's stir up some drug-induced hate monkey" Limbaugh into committing the kind of crimes they claim only those with brown skin commit. Those guys are the real threat from within, not some poor Mexicans trying to feed their families, or some Muslims who came to America for a better life and ran into the most intolerant fucks this side of Saudi Arabia.

Better yet, maybe the so-called mainstream media should focus less on car chases, celebutards, missing spouses, runaway children and actually report the news so America will quit holding the title as the dumbest, most poorly educated idiots on the planet.

Here's an idea for news that won't leave anyone with more than a third grade education gasping in astonishment of the collective ignorance that passes for "information" these days:

1. Darfur
2. World Hunger
3. Global Warming
4. Government policy shaped by Arms Merchants
5. Greedy fucks who don't care about people but who are playing some perverse game of who can accumulate the most money in a lifetime. (cough cough Cheney cough cough)

The list is endless and nowhere near the top are there any blond bimbos, sex lives of the white and boring, rehab tales of the rich and famous, and television "personalities" who can't even read the script tossed in front of their blank stares without gagging on their own irrelevance.

But I won't hold my breath that anything will change anytime soon. Hate is big business in America. It's the fuel that drives our politics, defines our consciousness, and makes us no better than schoolyard bullies with a vocabulary no bigger than fuck you well fuck you too you fucking fuck. And for that we need a media filled with cocaine blonds and insipid necktied young Fascists making us all very afraid and suspicious of each other so the bastards in charge can rob us blind. Nice legacy to leave the grandchildren, eh?

Protecting us from the white lunatics within our borders

Flies On The Wall #49

Flies On The Wall #49

War's Legacy

There was a time in my life when I didn't know my family was normal...for the circumstances that created us. I thought the insanity lying just under the skin was some genetic affliction I was doomed to inherit eventually, like gray hair or wrinkles or conversations with dead people.

I spent a lot of time examining myself on the inside the way others examine themselves on the outside for telltale signs of disease. Was my alienation increasing? Or did I simply enjoy my own company more than that of others? Was my desire for silence becoming pathological or had I simply reached a point where the noise of cars, sirens, people yelling instead of talking, and constant blaring television sets interfered with the songs of birds, the soft music of the wind and rustling trees and leaves beyond my ability to accept it as something beyond my control?

It was a long list I compared myself against daily. It was a list I drew from the behavior of the people that raised me, people so destroyed by war that the word "normal" was almost an insult, a way of accusing them of having been through hell unscathed. They would never be normal. But I didn't realize that until I tried to measure myself against who they were and ended up realizing that war spans generations and infects the children of the children of the children. I had no more chance of being normal than they had.

A while back my sister brought me a CD of my mother talking about her war experiences. She's a stranger to me, a woman who never really was able to maintain any kind of closeness with her children and drove them from her with an almost mindful deliberateness. I listened to her accented voice with the kind of vague memory one has of having heard that voice before but not really being able to place it. The stories she told were the stories of most survivors of the Nazis, the Fascists, the groups of believers of one ism or another who insisted you believe or die. Listening to her talk was listening to how many ways one can cheat death and still call yourself human. I think the human part got left aside at some point and she never really missed it because it was weak, it was threatening and it almost got her killed too many times.

For women like my mother who left her humanity somewhere between the insulting existence imposed on her by Hitler and Mussolini and coming to America with a child and a new husband who lied about his age to enlist after Pearl Harbor and upon liberating the first death camps, thought at first that they were leper colonies because even though he had killed and seen death and suffered from war, the extent of other people's inhumanity still hadn't sunk in...until he saw the living dead.

These two people should never have had children. They had nothing left to give them. But society wanted them to procreate, to replace the dead and dying, to bring life into an existence where death was all they knew. Nothing took into account that whatever humanity they had before the war became a shallow shell of existence that left nothing for others. We were raised to survive and nothing more.

I accept that now. I have survived so in that sense I have filled the role set out for me. But at the same time it doesn't even begin to explain who I am, why I hate war so much, why I devote so much time to trying to make war become something that exists only in History books and not in the fragile spirits of another generation.

And in that I find my precious normality, the hatred of war that is passed on inadvertently to the children of war's survivors. It's not intentional. It's not something my parents set out to do. They didn't say to me ever to go forward and work for peace. But by being who they were, by losing what they lost, they made it an obligation that took seed in me and continues to grow. It is normal for me to promote peace as a healthy concept within all our reach and war as something that we've grown too much to ever accept as normal again.

War's Legacy

Flies On The Wall #48

Flies On The Wall #48

Hypocrisy, another word for Republicans

There's nothing more pathetic than watching John McCain thump his sunken chest in the hope of making it sound like a war drum over the conflict between Russia and Georgia. Leaving aside this:

"McCain's campaign strategist Randy Scheunemann was a lobbyist for Georgia until recently, and remained part of Orion Strategies until May 15. OS had signed a $2 mn. deal to provide "strategic advice" to the Georgian government." read more

It is also pathetic that he talks about invading sovereign nations being wrong somehow when other countries do it, but okay when America does it and invents lies to justify it.

"President Bush committed an impeachable offense by ordering the CIA to to manufacture a false pretense for the Iraq war in the form of a backdated, handwritten document linking Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, an explosive new book claims." read more

What are they going to make the poor stooge do next? Justify torture? Oh, wait a minute. He already has.

"It's a mighty fine line to walk. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) opposes torture. But when the Senate held a vote yesterday that would effectively prevent the CIA from employing torture by restricting interrogation techniques to those under the Army Field Manual, he voted against it." read more

And in a very telling sign that the Republican party is completely devoid of any kind of platform that would appeal to anyone but the more extreme wingnuts that makes up their base, the Swiftboat Losers are back. Way to say we ain't got nothing to offer the American people so we're just going to fling shit.

Hypocrisy, another word for Republicans

Bush Cronyism, the shameful legacy

Many years from now when historians look back on the Bush years, one of the issues thoroughly analyzed and discussed will be the nepotism, cronyism, and lobbyist dollars that permeated all levels of his administration and defined its policies.

The major topic will be the path of lies and deception two Texas oilmen paved with greed and bigotry in order to take the country to war for oil. They had help from old friends like Ken Lay and Enron:

"Curtis Hébert Jr., Washington's top electricity regulator, said he had barely settled into his new job this year when he had an unsettling telephone conversation with Kenneth L. Lay, the head of the nation's largest electricity trader, the Enron Corporation.

Mr. Hébert, chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, said that Mr. Lay, a close friend of President Bush's, offered him a deal: If he changed his views on electricity deregulation, Enron would continue to support him in his new job." read more

Historians will describe how Bush and his Texas Mafia buddies used the prejudices of the dumbest and most poorly educated Americans to support their personal enrichment program. One of the ways was using cold war tactics of fear and bigotry to polarize the country. And to further insult the poor stooges who lined up to choke down those free hot dogs at pro-war rallies, they borrowed these tactics from the Russians.

"During the 1990s, Russian energy companies were notorious for cooking their books, defrauding their shareholders — and using political connections to cover shadowy deals. So, readers of Russian newspapers were not at all surprised over recent stories about an energy giant that was misbehaving in this manner. What was unusual was that the company in question was Enron — as quintessentially American as the Texan heartland where it is based." read more

But the story will also be about the dangers of allowing greedy asshats to define public policy based on their own self-interests . It will be about the incompetence of people owed favors and put in charge of agencies they knew nothing about. It will be about the lack of compassion that comes with a job that one considers payback and not a responsibility to uphold. The examples of this are endless and the words Hurricane Katrina, Iraq, Enron will forever stain the Bush presidency. Here's an interesting list of Bush Mafia appointees: Bush Cronyism

But the victims of these cruel policies based on nepotism and greed will not receive the same attention because they are powerless to object loud enough to be heard. They will join the list of sad statistics buried under the weight of so much evil that history measures it by the group instead of by the individual.

And if there's one thing the Bush Mafia excels at, it is beating down the victims of its policies. They do this in many ways, but mostly by turning away and ignoring problems they create but don't care enough about to feel any guilt whatsoever. When Barbara Bush, the matriarch who birthed this cruel and incompetent litter of psychopaths, commented that she didn't want to pollute her beautiful mind with thoughts of all the dead killed by her sadistic son, she spoke for all of them, for their policies, for their incompetence and cruelty.

from her Wikipedia page:

"On March 18, 2003, two days before the beginning of the war on Iraq, ABC's Good Morning America asked her about her family's television viewing habits; she replied:

I watch none. He [former President Bush] sits and listens and I read books, because I know perfectly well that, don't take offense, that 90 percent of what I hear on television is supposition, when we're talking about the news. And he's not, not as understanding of my pettiness about that. But why should we hear about body bags and deaths, and how many, what day it's gonna happen, and how many this or that or what do you suppose? Or, I mean, it's not relevant. So, why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that, and watch him suffer.^[8]

While visiting a Houston relief center for people displaced by Hurricane Katrina, Bush told the radio program "Marketplace,

"Almost everyone I've talked to says, 'We're gonna move to Houston.' What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas... Everybody is so overwhelmed by the hospitality, and so many of the people in the arenas here, you know, were underprivileged anyway. This is working very well for them".^[9][10]

In 2006, it was revealed that Barbara Bush donated an undisclosed amount of money to the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund on the condition the charity do business with an educational software company owned by her son Neil Bush.^[11]"

Hurricane Katrina will be remembered as the first American city lost by a sitting President, and also for how FEMA came to define the type of inept payback cronyism the Texas Mafia brought to the White House. This first link, The Truth About FEMA is a blog post by a woman on one of the mailing lists I'm on, Child-Free By Choice. It describes her attempt to get help from FEMA after flooding destroyed her home. She's still waiting.

As I was reading it I found myself wondering if FEMA personnel were just incompetent, or if they simply didn't care enough about people to hold positions helping disaster victims. This blog entry, FEMA sucks major butt, by someone who went through the certification process, shows it may be a combination of the two: they're incompetent and they don't care, which is why they were chosen for the job in the first place.

Then there's the kind of cronyism that demands only payback for political contributions and favors without regard for the effects such incompetence will have on real human beings. For example, FEMA knew the trailers they bought from some well-connected crony were harmful. But holding someone accountable meant taking back an owed political favor, so people had to get sick instead.

"The Federal Emergency Management Agency since early 2006 has suppressed warnings from its own field workers about health problems experienced by hurricane victims living in government-provided trailers with levels of a toxic chemical 75 times the recommended maximum for U.S. workers, congressional lawmakers said yesterday." read more

This kind of cruelty and incompetence is what happens when political favors determine appointments. It removes the objectivity of political appointees in favor of paying back lobbyists, large donors, and friends of the family who may hold twisted and pathological ideals that have to be ignored, like Barbara's disdain for body bags.

For example, what kind of fascist mentality created this situation where victims of a natural disaster are treated like inmates in a prison camp?

"I'm extremely depressed to report that things seem to only be getting sadder concerning the people so devastatingly affected by Katrina last week. Two car loads of us headed over to Falls Creek, a youth camp for Southern Baptist churches in Oklahoma that agreed to have its facilities used to house Louisiana refugees. I'm afraid the camp is not going to be used as the kind people of the churches who own the cabins believe it was going to be used.

Jesse Jackson was right when he said "refugees" was not the appropriate word for the poor souls dislocated due to Katrina. But he was wrong about why it is not appropriate. It's not appropriate because they are detainees, not refugees. " read more


Or forced to live in situations that if they occurred in a third world county, the paid media propagandists would be all over it decrying the inhumanity of it all.

"Dozens of families evacuated from a FEMA trailer park that had been plagued by sewage leaks and power outages were in temporary homes Monday, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency said it had requested work permits to dismantle the site this week." read more

Situations like this will only get worse with the rapid privatization of government services. Few people realize that once you privatize something, the oversight and rules are weakened and discarded. Here's an example of what happened with the privatization of the food stamp program.

"Area residents used to waiting up to one hour to talk to someone at a call center to receive Medicaid or food stamps, had to wait 90 minutes before addressing a legislative commission Thursday in Kokomo.


The legislative study commission conducted the first state hearing on problems since the Indiana Family and Social Services Administration signed a contract with a private company to handle eligibility for the two programs." read more

And of course, once these privatized crony companies realize the profit that can be made without actually helping people, it only spreads.

"A move in Congress to limit the role of private firms in doling out food stamps is dead for now, allowing Texas to move forward with its privatization plans.

U.S. House and Senate negotiators voted late last week against including a privatization ban in a $300 billion farm bill that lawmakers hope to finish this week. The ban would have prevented states from allowing employees of private companies to interact with people who are applying for food stamps or to decide someone's eligibility for the program." read more

Whenever you combine money, politics, and favors, what gets lost is compassion, caring, and an insight into the bigger picture that is America.

"Over 7.5 Million People Denied Medical Care by Health Plans Since Bush Took Office." read more

And the cruelty begins to take on absurd proportions when laws are passed to avoid helping the victims of these policies, such as the cities who are voting "do not feed the homeless" laws.

"Las Vegas criminalized giving food to even a single transient in any city park.

In August, the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit challenging the Las Vegas ban, saying it violated constitutional protections of free speech, right to assembly and right to practice one's religion. A federal court in Nevada has prohibited the city from enforcing the ordinance until a final ruling is issued.

Advocates for the homeless feared it wouldn't be long before other cities passed similar laws.

Already, the cities of Dallas, Fort Myers, Fla., Gainesville, Fla., Wilmington, N.C., and Atlanta have laws restricting or outright prohibiting the feeding of the homeless. In Fairfax County, Va., homemade meals and meals made in church kitchens may not be distributed to the homeless unless first approved by the county. " read more

Excuse me, but hungry people are not creatures in a zoo you fucking morons!

And if you think you're immune from these kind of policies based on paying back political favors, all I can say to you is don't get too attached to water because it's the next thing on the greedy bastard's auction block.

"If adequate water for drinking and sanitation is essential for life, shouldn't we consider water a human right? Not everyone thinks so. In February, the United Nations Human Rights Council missed a critical opportunity to recognize a human right to water. As a result of lobbying by the United States and Canada, the council derailed a European-backed declaration, accepting instead a weaker resolution that actually protects a corporation's right to sell water." read more

And for the most ideologically motivated of Bush appointees who think it's okay to spy on it's own citizens, I have this message for you:

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Bush Cronyism, the shameful legacy