John Kelly's Mission Impossible: You Can't Fix Stupid

By Manifesto Joe

In a previous blog post, I made the mistake of overestimating Resident Donald Rump. I wrote that he isn't stupid in the classic sense.

I absolutely take it back. He is not only batshit crazy like Nixon, he lacks Nixon's intelligence. He's quite possibly dumber than Il Doofus (Bush 43), and that's saying plenty. We've had crazy presidents before, and we've had profoundly stupid ones. But I can't recall when we had one, before this year, who was BOTH.

Former General John Kelly, who was recently named to be Rump's chief of staff, told the story with his face as Rump once again made an ass of himself during a Tuesday press conference. John, you've got to face it -- you can't fix stupid, any more than one can fix crazy. Not only are there not enough psychotropic drugs in the world to fix Rump's psychosis, he has a brain smaller than my dog's. The more I see of him on TV, the more respect I have for my dog's intellect. When is the last shoe finally going to drop? What is it going to take?

There will be no fix other than impeachment. Some prominent Republicans probably already know this privately, but they've been slow to step up, condemn this fool and remove him from office. That's what will have to be done, and Robert Mueller and company are working on it. It's time for everyone, including the so-called Grand Old Party, to face it -- this resident is an embarrassment and a joke. I'm no fan of any of the Republican presidential contenders, but they certainly could have done better than this. Even a widely loathed jerk like Ted Cruz would be an improvement. Vice President Mike Pence looks like an empty suit, but that would be better than the sad sack of manure in the Oval Office now.

I sincerely hope Rump's not in the that "dump" the White House at this time next year.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

Rump: Couldn't The Republicans Come Up With Somebody Better Than This?

By Manifesto Joe

One thing I've learned in 60-plus years on this planet is that political ideology is not the measure of a person. As a veteran blogger, I've personally known right-wingers who are stand-up folks, and lefties who aren't worth their own shit. And trying to change someone's mind on politics is like trying to change their religion. It tends to be a cognitive thing that one learns from one's parents or other authority figures. Even when it contradicts one's life lessons, you see people cling to those beliefs.

I tend to avoid judging people by ideology, or by religion, because such beliefs are often not the barometer by which to judge. And as a student of history, I have seen that people with whom one disagrees can turn out to be great world leaders. Winston Churchill comes to mind. He was widely regarded in 1920s Britain as the Rush Limbaugh of his time, a right-wing pundit with no hope of liberal redemption. In the late 1930s he stepped up to the plate, and is now rightly regarded as a great statesman.

But Donald Trump?

No f-----g way.

I've tried very hard to give this man the benefit of the doubt, but there can be little doubt now. He's determined to elevate pond scum like Steve Bannon to exalted heights; and even after his campaign rhetoric about "draining the swamp," he's surrounded himself with bottom feeders like Rudy Guiliani and Newt Gingrich. His faux populism has proved to be just that -- bullshit to get Bubba to vote for him.

He may yet surprise me, but I sincerely doubt it. Yes, Hillary Clinton would likely have proved to be just more of the same. But this election's outcome could actually ruin the Republican Party, which is an institution America needs as a legitimate center-right destination.

The Republican Party had 16 other possibilities for their presidential nominee, and Rump (sorry, I keep calling him that) laid waste to each and every one of them in the GOP primaries. Couldn't a venerable institution like that have come up with someone better?

I sincerely hope he proves me wrong, but I doubt it. The "transition" already looks like a debacle. I fear that the American people have been conned by a master con artist. Stay tuned.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

Donald Trump's Big Gamble

By Manifesto Joe

The mogul of Atlantic City is doing some high-stakes gambling these days. And if he wins, the country is likely to lose -- BIG.

I didn't consider Donald (T)rump to be all that dangerous, even amid the comparisons to Hitler and such -- until last Thursday night. I thought of him in terms of a corrupt buffoon, akin to Silvio Berlusconi, the former Italian prime minister and media mogul. But after his dark acceptance of the Republican Party nomination for the presidency, I had second thoughts.

Trump has supporters who resemble Nazis in their pugnaciousness and not-so-subtle white supremacy, and he does nothing to discourage them. He actually said he doesn't know enough about the KKK to refute David Duke's endorsement of him. Describing himself as the "law-and-order" candidate, he's taking many pages out of the campaign playbook of the late Alabama Gov. George Wallace, and he's proving much more successful than Wallace was. He's put together a coalition of bigots, rednecks, gun nuts and other assorted psychos, and if he can get them to the polling places (some perhaps for the first time) in November, he could very well be elected president. After his convention speech, he was leading in the polls.

The Republican Party, the establishment of which seems a bit stunned by Trump's success, brought this on themselves. As far back as the Goldwater bid for the presidency in 1964, the GOP has catered to Southern bigots. Nixon extended the party's "Southern strategy" in 1968 and 1972, and by the time Reagan was the nominee in 1980, the South was solidly in the hands of the GOP. The Republicans have done all they could to court this type of voter -- working-class right-wingers who embrace a single issue, whether it be abortion, gun rights, or something else.

Now they've taken control of the party, like a Frankenstein monster, and the Republican Old Guard -- the economic royalists who used to call all the shots -- had no one on hand to back Donald Trump down.

If he ends up losing and destroying the Republican Party "coalition" of rednecks, the party moguls have no one to blame but themselves.

But what if he wins? Polls indicate that it's possible. And this fellow isn't merely stupid, like Il Doofus (Bush 43) appeared to be. This is a cunning megalomaniac with no apparent regard for the facts. Media observers pointed out that his bloviation on crime was false, with statistics showing that violent crime has declined since Obama became president. Yet he stands by everything, as usual.

One saving grace for the country may be his inexperience. As a political amateur, his mishandling of the GOP convention and of his own campaign may indicate that a Trump administration wouldn't go the distance. Politics is a contact sport not played well by amateurs, especially at the national and international levels.

But how much damage could he do in the meantime? As distasteful as I sometimes find Hillary Clinton, she's probably got my vote, because I don't care to find out how much damage Trump can do.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

From Joe's Vault, May 2011: Bin Laden Isn't Qualified To Be Dead Until Donald Trump Sees The Death Certificate

By Manifesto Joe

This May 2, 2011, blog post came to mind recently, as Republicans prepare to anoint birther-in-chief Donald Rump (er, Trump) as their presidential nominee. The question I would ask is: With so much horror happening in the world now, can the U.S. afford to have a neo-fascist buffoon like this man as president? Oh well, here goes, from over five years ago:


The problem is, how would we know that it wasn't a fake?

I guess that means that "The Donald" and all the rest of us will have to see the bullet-riddled body. But if the face has been shot to pieces, how would we know that Special Forces didn't just dredge up some 6-foot-4, skinny Arab for target practice? How would we know that Osama isn't actually still alive, scarfing hummus and falafel and advising that closet Muslim in the White House?

Well, by now I suspect you get the point of this sarcasm.

Any credit here for Obama?

Barack Obama seemed downright presidential Sunday night while announcing this big score of scores. But will he get any credit? If you watch Fox "News" during the next week, I'll bet that Il Doofus gets much more credit than Obama will. And Bush 43 couldn't get this guy for over seven years -- in fact, Bush diverted U.S. attention away from bin Laden and the Afghanistan-Pakistan region with his rogue-nation invasion of Iraq. That cost this country countless billions, some of which should have been focused on a terrorist network that actually attacked us. And according to some estimates, it cost over a million Iraqi lives.

I hope that the American people have sense enough to know that this day should have come much sooner, and likely would have, if the country's priorities hadn't been grotesquely and viciously distorted by ruthless, self-serving people.

This post is going to strike some people as irreverent and brutal. Sometimes honesty has an unfortunate way of sounding like that.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

From Joe's Vault, April 2011: Tax Time Again

By Manifesto Joe

In the five years since this post first appeared, I've gotten in trouble with the IRS. Looks like I may end up getting an attorney before this is over. Conservatives may laugh, but hey -- if not for your moronic Iraq War, and your giving zillionaires and big corporations a tax pass, perhaps I wouldn't owe so much.

BTW, I didn't post for a few months, but I've been busy with a little thing called life. One week ago I got out of the hospital after surgery and am recovering at home. I finally have a lot of time on my hands, so I'm back on the blog trail.

Without further ado, this is from April 15, 2011:


The Republicans just don't get it, and it looks like they won't in the foreseeable future. With 40 cents of every federal dollar spent now being borrowed, they want to give yet more tax bonanzas to the rich while essentially abolishing Medicare and Medicaid.

This isn't what Americans voted for in 2008. A lower percentage of them, those who bothered to vote in 2010, voted for such folly whether they knew it or not.

The numbers cry out for a tax hike on the wealthy.

When one talks to earners at the upper-middle level, they are quick to point out the marginal rate of 35%, arguing that with progressive tax brackets, many of them end up paying more than lower earners as a percentage. (That's what comes of a steady mental diet of Fox News. That stuff rots brains.)

Yet such people seem to get amnesia when one points out that just 10 or so years ago, when the marginal rate was 39.6%, the U.S. was running a surplus. This was no accident. Even with the modest Clinton tax hike on the rich that barely passed in 1993, we didn't have the structural deficit we have now.

And the Mainstream Media are quick to obfuscate, talking to selected economists who keep telling the victims that raising taxes on the rich won't be enough. And who owns the MSM? Giant corporations -- and how much income tax do they pay?

Two-thirds of corporations pay no income tax

That's not news -- the first of the stories broke in 2008. Here's a link to one of them.

Although it's not news, many people don't seem to "get it," so it bears repeating, and repeating some more. Most of these "legal persons" are getting a free ride. They use the infrastructure (such as it is now), and have vast resources to fleece ordinary, unsuspecting victims out of many billions, yet they pay nothing.

In case you thought I was joking, here's a link to a more recent story about this, courtesy of Alternet.

In their 1990 book America: What Went Wrong?, investigative journalists Donald Barlett and James Steele cited IRS statistics that show that, in 1959, corporations accounted for 39% of federal tax revenue. By 1989, that was down to 17%. And it's probably gotten worse since then.

Here's a brief roll call of Corporate America's tax slackers:

General Electric -- Last month, The New York Times reported that, in addition to paying no federal income taxes this year, GE, the largest U.S. corporation, is to get a tax credit of $3.2 billion. GE made $14.1 billion in profits in 2010, $5.1 billion of which came from its U.S. operations. The story was conspicuously absent from NBC News, part-owned by General Electric.

Goldman Sachs -- Bloomberg News, in December 2008, reported that Goldman Sachs Group Inc., which got $10 billion and debt guarantees from the U.S. government in October, expects to pay $14 million in taxes worldwide for 2008 compared with $6 billion in 2007. The company’s effective income tax rate dropped to 1 percent from 34.1 percent, Goldman Sachs said. The firm reported a $2.3 billion profit for the year after paying $10.9 billion in employee compensation and benefits. U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, a Texas Democrat who serves on the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, said steps by Goldman Sachs and other banks shifting income to countries with lower taxes is cause for concern. "This problem is larger than Goldman Sachs," Doggett said. "With the right hand out begging for bailout money, the left is hiding it offshore."

ExxonMobil -- In March 2010, Forbes magazine reported that the oil giant, "which last year reported a record $45.2 billion profit, paid the most taxes of any corporation, but none of it went to the IRS":

Exxon tries to limit the tax pain with the help of 20 wholly owned subsidiaries domiciled in the Bahamas, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands that (legally) shelter the cash flow from operations in the likes of Angola, Azerbaijan and Abu Dhabi. No wonder that of $15 billion in income taxes last year, Exxon paid none of it to Uncle Sam, and has tens of billions in earnings permanently reinvested overseas.

Mother Jones magazine noted that, despite benefiting from corporate welfare in the U.S., Exxon complains about paying high taxes, claiming that it threatens energy innovation research. It was noted at the Wonk Room that big corporations' tax shelter practices similar to Exxon’s shift a $100 billion annual tax burden onto U.S. taxpayers.

This list could grow to tedious proportions. You should get the picture by now.

Let's start sharing some sacrifice

Nobody likes to pay taxes. I owed the IRS far more than I expected to this year, and will probably be until fall paying it all off. But when some common slob like me is paying Uncle Sam more, year after year, than GE is, then there must be something dreadfully wrong with this system.

But alas, our Republican brethren still don't get it. They are promoting the idea of still more tax bonanzas for the wealthy. And, although a corporation enjoys the status of a "legal person" in our psychopathic system, two-thirds of them pay nothing, and even get refunds and billions in corporate welfare on top of that.

The latest news on this was from The Associated Press. It's not just corporations that are the problem. About 45% of U.S. households will pay no income tax at all, thanks to all the breaks that people, especially the super-rich, are getting.

It should be clear, if one looks at the numbers honestly, that our structural deficit has much more to do with what needs to be raised than with what needs to be cut.

Yet, the Republicans persist in their policies of the past 30-plus years, to defecate all over ordinary people while cutting sweet deals for their rich campaign contributors. And the Democrats haven't been very much better. Even President Barack "Change you can believe in" Obama hasn't been nearly candid enough on this issue.

So, what is to be done? Giant corporations and the super-rich clearly have politicians by the balls and have been gaming the system accordingly for the past 30-plus years. What can an ordinary person do?

(1) Stop believing the MSM. They obfuscate, and sometimes outright lie. And that shouldn't be surprising, given that they are generally owned by the very corporations that have been getting a free ride.

(2) Vote in the primaries. This is where people can get real Democrats, not just more corporate lackeys, to be candidates in the general election. The one positive that came out of the 2010 midterm debacle was that now, the Democrats left in Congress are more progressive on these kinds of issues. Ironically, it was largely the "Blue Dogs" and Democrats-in-name-only who went down in defeat to Tea Party challengers.

(3) Vote in the general elections. As frustrating as DINOs can be, and as agonizingly placating as Obama has been, we're better off with them than we are now, with right-wing Republican ideologues writing the agenda. President Clinton, Republicrat though he often was, presided over the last balanced federal budget, and that was largely because he demanded that the rich pay at least a modestly higher percentage of their hefty incomes in taxes. And back then, there was little talk of privatizing Medicare.

(4) General strike. In contemporary America, it will be very hard to float this idea. But if most of the work force in this country were willing to "sick out" just one day, and a few spokespeople made clear to the powers that be that this was an organized protest, it might perk up some ears.

This country is far from broke. The trick is going to be getting the rich slackers who have the bucks to fork some of them over. There are people out there who have it -- but they aren't going to let go of any of it without a fight.

Just pay your taxes today, chumps. Serious training starts tomorrow.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

Republican Party Deserves Trump

By Manifesto Joe

It's hard for me to spell his name with the "T." "Rump" is more descriptive.

For nearly 50 years, the Republican Party has leaned on a "Southern strategy," as it was called during Richard Nixon's successful run for the presidency in 1968. That year the choice for rednecks was between Tricky Dick and George Wallace, and a good many chose the latter. But the strategy was articulated, and it had been there already. Recall that Barry Goldwater had his main electoral success in the Deep South, where he won five states in an otherwise disastrous try for the presidency in 1964. The reason was his overt appeal to segregationists with his opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

All through the 1970s, '80s, '90s, and onward, the basic thrust of the Republican Party was to lend as much legitimacy as possible to ignorant xenophobes. And so it should come as no surprise to Republicans that the front-runner for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination is such a person, and a proven liar at that.

It has been no secret in politics that the Republican Party has been systematically and relentlessly pulled toward the right for decades. Voices of liberalism or even moderation -- former Sens. Jacob Javits, Clifford Case, Edward Brooke, Jim Jeffords and others -- were eliminated from the party, one by one. By 1976, even a stolid tory like Jerry Ford was regarded as a moderate. The current second-place hopeful after Trump, Ted Cruz, won election to the U.S. Senate in Texas by portraying sitting Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst as a liberal!

Yeah, Dewhurst is about as liberal as Paul von Hindenburg was in comparison to Hitler.

There's no mistaking where Cruz stands on the issues. His Ivy League professors described him as "brilliant," but that may mean that he's simply that much more dangerous. His difference with Rump, er, Trump, is less on policy than on the fact that Trump is in the way of something that Ted Cruz wants. Cruz, however "brilliant," is still an extreme right-winger, and the fact that he's the party's main alternative to Trump speaks volumes about what's happened to the Republican Party.

True, Rump, er, Trump isn't a "genuine" conservative. There's a lot of angry "populism" there; it's been accurately pointed out that he has borrowed his campaign playbook largely from that of George Wallace decades ago, and that the type of "voter" he appeals to is similar. In other words he appeals to ignorant, xenophobic rednecks who don't care how many lies he tells, those who revel in his bigotry, racism, misogyny and bellicose foolishness, and those who are just more likely to punch perceived foes out as one hears more and more comparisons to the 1934 Nuremberg Rallies.

The remaining question in the 2016 contest appears to be whether Rump, er, Trump, can win on the first ballot at the GOP convention. If he can't, he'll tear the Republican Party apart, and these assholes will ultimately have no one to blame but themselves.

I think it was P.T. Barnum who said something to the effect that nobody ever lost a dime underestimating the intelligence of the American people. A conservative friend of mine once advised that I knock on some doors and ask political questions. I would venture that about 70% of the time, I would get somebody too stupid to have bothered with. And I'd have to make sure I didn't knock on the door while "Wheel of Fortune" was on, so as not to disturb the highlight of their day.

These are the people who, in the absence of Rump, er Trump, would be unlikely to even vote. With Trump in the "race," they will turn out. Let's just hope that we're not being coaxed into Nazi-style salutes before it's over.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

Trump Just Saying What A Lot Of Republicans Really Think

by Manifesto Joe

I don't find it surprising at all that billionaire Donald Trump has pulled out in front of the Republican Klown Kar, with 24% in one recent poll. He's just saying what a lot of Republicans privately think, but seldom say out loud for fear of sounding like ignorant bigots and xenophobes (which, of course, many are).

Trump, whose singular business acumen includes four company bankruptcies, claims that as president he would know how to make America great again. Looking at him I think the trick is to be born rich.

With the recent trip to Laredo, Texas, and the "Hispanics love me" rhetoric, he seems to have taken a page from the playbook of onetime pro wrestler Kinji Shibuya, who made a handsome living playing burly Japanese bad-guy bullies in our homegrown American Theater for the Unwashed. He used "illegal" karate chops in the ring, and such.

"The Mexican people, they love me!" Kinji would exclaim when he would take his rasslin' show to San Antonio back in the 1960s. Hispanics in the auditorium, meanwhile, would be booing loudly and splattering Kinji with beer as he held forth for the cameras. "I eat beans and tortillas every day!" he would bellow.

I suspect that the Donald has been to a Taco Bell drive-thru in his limo, so perhaps that qualifies him as having a unique understanding of Hispanics in America.

Meanwhile, GOP presidential hopeful Ted Cruz seems to be trying to out-Donald the Donald himself. Calling Mitch McConnell a liar certainly isn't going to get him anywhere in the Senate hierarchy, so the junior Texas U.S. senator appears to be trying to steal the headlines away from Trump.

The Republican Klown Kar seems to grow more crowded each day, but Trump now appears to be the leader in the polls. With all the money and power to be found on that side of the aisle, I suspect that such folks have the means to derail the Donald before he even gets close to the GOP nomination, and I suspect that the Republican establishment will knock off Cruz as well.

But for several more months, it should make for a wonderful show.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

On Jade Helm 15, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott Panders To Right-Wing Kooks

By Manifesto Joe

I suppose it should come as no surprise, but Texas' new governor, Greg Abbott, is a politician made up of as much pond scum as his predecessor, Rick "El Pendejo" Perry. Abbott's reaction to Jade Helm 15, the military exercise planned for Texas and other parts of the Southwest, is ample evidence of that.

Abbott put out an announcement that he will have the state National Guard keep an eye on the Jade Helm exercise, an apparent response to kook right-wing Internet rumors that the purpose of the exercise is to take over Texas.

Abbott was supposed to have been a politician made up of better stuff, at least ethically, than El Pendejo. His Democratic opponent last year, former state Sen. Wendy Davis, is a politician who has been haunted by ethics questions, and remains so. Skeptical Democrats were told that Abbott, then state attorney general, was made of better stuff as a person, whether we agreed with him ideologically or not.

Tell me another one. Abbott's reaction to the right-wing mania about Jade Helm 15 appears to be a way for him to hang on to the votes of the Kook Right, yet have an escape valve to disavow them if push comes to shove among the state's "moderate" or mainstream Republicans.

One doesn't win the votes of Texas Republicans, at least not enough of them to win statewide nominations, without the support of the tea party and other Kook Right elements. Ask former Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, who lost races to both Ted Cruz for U.S. Senate and Dan Patrick for re-election as lieutenant governor. No sane person is going to mistake Dewhurst for a liberal. Yet that is what Cruz and Patrick, both tea party faves, painted him as. And with electoral success. Cruz is now at work enraging the Republican establishment in the Beltway, and he is running for president. Patrick is busy selling a Religious Right agenda while presiding over the Texas Senate. Dewhurst is out of office, still enjoying his multimillions.

Abbott, we were often told, was going to be different. But how is he holding the state's crazed Republican Party together? In part, by not flat-out telling the tea partiers and others on the Kook Right what raving lunatics they are -- for example, over their demented rumors about Jade Helm.

None of this should come as a surprise. When one reads the state platform of the Texas Republican Party, they advocate just about every extreme right-wing cause, perhaps stopping just short of unleashing Chiang Kai-shek's musty remains on mainland China. This is one of the craziest Republican organizations in the U.S., and that's saying plenty.

Abbott is just one more Texas Republican politician, and a typically ugly one at that. Go ahead and group him in with Cruz, Patrick, and crazed Congressman Louie Gohmert, while we're at it. He's swimming in their water, for sure.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

Republicans Aren't Interested In Governing -- Look At The Iran Letter

By Manifesto Joe

The letter to Iran was signed by 47 Republican senators. Several, I think it was seven, had the good sense to refrain from signing it. But the letter was an attempt to undercut the foreign policy of a sitting president, sent as Secretary of State John Kerry was negotiating with Iran over curbs on nuclear weapons.

The 47 GOP senators sent this letter to a nation that has been a longtime U.S. adversary. They were obviously motivated by their contempt for President Barack Obama.

If this traitorous action doesn't demonstrate that the Republican Party of today isn't interested in governing, only in power -- I don't know what could be. It shows an abysmal lack of knowledge about the constitutional powers of the presidency, a president whom members of this group have described as "lawless." And yet these ludicrous hypocrites took it upon themselves to anticipate, and even create, foreign policy after Obama leaves office. They are beneath contempt.

This should demonstrate that the vast majority of the Republican Party's high officeholders are unfit for high office. The Democrats don't seem to have any vastly superior alternatives on hand, but it is unimaginable that 47 Democratic senators would have done anything like this during the lame duck presidency of Il Doofus.

The Republicans are unfit for office, and the American people should let them know this, in no uncertain terms, in November 2016.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

Health Care Villainy: There's Nothing This "GOP" Scum Won't Do

By Manifesto Joe

It's not news by now that the Obama administration made a huge logistical mistake in the rollout of the new health care law. But the Republicans want you to pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. "Obamacare" is indeed a half-assed solution to the health care crisis, but the "GOP" has nothing, I repeat, absolutely nothing, to offer as an alternative. They simply want to go back to the way things were, and still are, with people getting turned down for "pre-existing conditions" and insurance companies stealing hard-earned money from healthy people with all those subpar policies.

But in California, often the country's "social leader," the "GOP" has found an even slimier way to sabotage health care reform. They have put up a fake website discouraging people from getting insurance. Here's a link to a Daily Kos story that gives the details.

There is absolutely nothing that this scum won't do. They are desperate for an issue. After the failure of things like the Benghazi attack, this is what these slimeballs have seized upon. Their villainy seems to know no low point.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

The Real Problem Right-Wingers Have With 'Obamacare:' It Requires Insurers To Insure

By Manifesto Joe

It's obvious that President Obama made a big political -- I repeat, political -- mistake in selling his health care plan. And he should never have put any trust in computer geeks -- such people nowadays hold the Earth hostage to their "expertise," while in reality they are often among the most titanic fools on the planet. (Not only do their initial programs sometimes not work, they are forever changing programs that worked fine as they were. It seems that they never heard the old wisdom that if it works, DON'T FIX IT!)

But the Mainstream Media are failing to tell the entire story, which is, of course, nothing unusual. Obviously Fox News gives a distorted picture; that's their job as a right-wing propaganda instrument. But the MSM aren't doing a good job on this issue, either.

This isn't the case with everyone, but many of the plans that commercial "insurers" are canceling are "junk" insurance, policies that offer very limited "coverage" and would leave the "insured" in incredible binds if they actually needed things like hospitalization and such. The reason such "plans" are being canceled is that they don't meet the minimum standards that the Affordable Care Act set forth.

I got to see the flip side of this issue very recently, having been unemployed for 27 weeks. (Oh, and I still haven't been paid for the last week of that, and never will be -- thanks so much, Texas Workforce Commission.) I went with the expensive COBRA plan I was left with after being laid off, but went looking for cheaper alternatives to COBRA, in case I was jobless longer than I was.

In the first place, it was very hard to find anyone who would "insure" me at a reasonable price. I have asthma and allergies, and I take meds for high blood pressure. I was 56 at the time, too. If you're not absolutely healthy, you are usually rejected just for pre-existing conditions such as those. And they don't like older people, either.

The companies that would write me a "policy" were willing to write me junk. I was accepted by one company, then found out much to my horror that they didn't even offer a prescription drug plan to a customer who was willing to pay them over $400 a month. What they had was a discount "plan" that one can obtain cheaply at any retail pharmacy like Walgreens. And they wanted "mo' money" for that? I refused to pay these greedy scumbags one penny and canceled with them post haste.

Anyway, I wasn't making much headway at finding alternatives to COBRA, until I finally landed a job with benefits. Unlike many Americans, I was somewhat lucky.

But I got a good look at what's out there for people who buy their own health "insurance" a la carte, and it's dismal. It's either too expensive, or it doesn't cover jack shit.

For more details, here's a link to a story in Mother Jones magazine that presents more of the real picture.

The bottom line is that the insurance companies have been ripping Americans off for many decades. "Obamacare," minus the public option, was only a partial solution to the problem. It never was anything else. It was simply what Obama could manage to get through a Congress that is partially owned by the greedy, ruthless insurance companies.

WHAT HAPPENS IF THE REPUBLICANS SUCCEED?

It's pretty obvious, from all the political hay that they're making, is that the downtrodden Republican Party, ever desperate these days for an issue, is playing this up for all they can. It's their goal to derail the Affordable Care Act. In my own state, Gov. Rick "El Pendejo" Perry is absolutely refusing to cooperate with this law's implementation.

There are other sinister things going on, like Koch brothers-financed booths on college campuses, passing out free beer in trying to persuade young people not to buy health insurance, but rather just risk getting sick.

If "Obamacare" is derailed, then what? Well, it looks like we'll go back to the way things have been for decades. You know -- up to 50 million Americans uninsured, up to 30 million more underinsured, people with pre-existing conditions denied coverage, insurance companies getting obscenely rich while putting out little or nothing in return, people who do have health insurance paying higher premiums and higher taxes to cover the cost of uninsured people with their visits to ERs and charity hospitals. You know -- the very conditions that led to the passage of the half-ass "Obamacare" program in the first place.

I'm not an optimist. But what this all may mean is that, perhaps within a decade, Americans will at last get what they should have gotten long ago: Medicare-E (Medicare for Everybody). A single-payer system is the only solution to this travesty. But of course, what that means is that some people will simply have to die off, so that less brainwashed voters can force this to become law.

Let's face it -- the United States is the last, I repeat the very last, developed country on Earth that doesn't have a national health care system. We wouldn't have to do it the way everybody else has done it. Doctors and other providers don't have to become employees of a national service, the way it is in more "socialized" systems. In America, we can style it our own way.

But "free market" arguments don't wash on most points, and certainly not where health care is concerned. If I have a catastrophic illness, I'm not going to be in a position of shopping around for the best prices on doctors, hospitals, ambulances, etc., like some Arab trader. I'm going with whomever can take my case ASAP, with money as no object. (But of course, it's certainly the object, and the objective, of "providers" and "insurers." And they take everything that isn't nailed down.)

Perhaps you have noticed that among all the other developed countries on Earth, none, not one, of them seeks to emulate the American health care system. Interviews in those countries indicate that their people generally think Americans are just plain fucking crazy to have tolerated this shit for decade after decade.

I understand that one of the sticking points of "Obamacare" is that it requires coverage for mental health ailments. I hate to say such hurtful things, but in the case of many Americans, that strikes me as a pretty good idea.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

Shutdown Postmortem: Republicans Seem Determined To Again Be A Long-Term Minority Party

By Manifesto Joe

I'm not going to predict the demise of the Republican Party, although a number of other bloggers have been daring enough to venture such predictions. I don't think that's good historical perspective. Such people underestimate the lure of reactionary politics, and the irrationality of humans. They also underestimate the vast talent of prehistoric vermin, like cockroaches, to reinvent themselves and survive.

To wit: If you had told me in 1978, when it seemed like half the damned country was smoking pot, that possession of even small amounts thereof would still be a federal crime and illegal in 48 states 35 years later, I would have, at the time, called you a fool. At the tender age of 22, it was I who was foolish. I did not anticipate a period of socioeconomic reaction that would last for decades in the U.S.

But here's a bit of history: From 1930 until 1994, the Republican Party had control of the U.S. House of Representatives for exactly 4 out of 64 years. We had GOP presidents, some of them "moderates," during that time, but even Reagan had to deal with Tip O'Neill as speaker of the House and was often forced to compromise.

The Republicans staged a dramatic comeback in 1994, but it seems like they've been doing their best to blow it ever since. With this latest "shutdown" of the federal government, plus other miscalculations, I suspect they may have finally sealed their fate. They may have condemned themselves to another three generations of being just a shrill minority party.

History doesn't repeat itself, but it sometimes has an uncanny way of rhyming. The last time the Republicans did this to themselves, it was over a simple but monumental thing known as the Great Depression. That was such a trauma for my parents' generation, it was still defining Americans decades later. Enough people of that age group had to die off for the electorate to finally show permanent change.

This time, we had a Great Recession, with effects not as bad. But they've been bad enough, especially for the young. Those born in the late years of Generation X, and then the "Millennials," have taken it on the chops pretty hard over the past several years. Their unemployment and underemployment rates remain high, and going to college often means taking on debt of such magnitude that it can only end in bankruptcy. From what the polls show among young voters, most of them aren't blaming the Democrats for this.

Add to that the changing demographics of the country. Much of America has become, or is becoming, majority Hispanic. Being a native South Texan, I'm familiar with that culture, and there is a strong streak of social conservatism there. But the Republicans have clearly blown their opportunity to make related inroads. Their basic xenophobia had compelled them to take hard lines against illegal immigration, and even the Hispanics I know who are of strictly legal status take serious personal offense at such attitudes. Their overwhelming majority of votes cast for Obama in 2012 was not so much an endorsement of Obama as a statement of "We know who our friends AREN'T."

Then add to that the increasing involvement of women in politics. I admit to feeling very conflicted on the abortion issue, but I sure as hell am never going to be faced with the possibility of having one. And quite a few women are more than a bit pissed off that some lawmakers suffering from testosterone poisoning are presuming to tell them that can't be a legal option.

Then add to that the anvil-headed attitudes about gays and lesbians that one typically finds among Republicans. Even Chris Christie, New Jersey's obese governor, is under the gun about that, for simply saying that he's not going to fight a court ruling that says gays should be able to legally marry in that state. He was fighting gay marriage at first and vetoed a piece of state legislation. Now the hard-liners in his party are maligning him for simply acquiescing to the courts.

One group I never understood was the "Log Cabin Republicans." Oh, I can understand, if a gay person also happens to be a trust-fund baby, why paying taxes is distasteful. But why would one want to support a political party in which a majority considers you the worst kind of pond scum, the kind of people your parents warned you about?

What the federal "shutdown" revealed is who is really calling the shots in the Republican Party. It certainly isn't the old-line politicians, the "economic royalists," as I once heard them described. It's a radical, reactionary element that the Old Guard made a Faustian bargain with a couple of generations ago. It's the Nixonian "Southern strategy" come to life as the party's worst nightmare. When someone as manifestly foolish as Texas U.S. Rep. Louie ("Congressman Gomer") Gohmert is someone who's actually listened to, you know that political party is in trouble. The Tea Party and its politicians are not marginal -- they are flexing muscle and busy kicking "RINOs" out of the Republican Party as fast as they can.

The political reality of all this will become apparent to some Republicans in years to come. It's been said by several people that nobody ever lost a dime underestimating the intelligence of the American public. But you can't go around pissing off one large group of people upon another, and then expect to consistently win elections.

The Republican Party won't fade and smolder into the ashheap of history -- at least I am loath to predict that. White Southerners rapidly switched parties starting in the 1960s, and are likely to remain as they are even as they see life examples, time after time, that the GOP doesn't represent their genuine best interests. People often don't make rational decisions about politics.

But when you step on enough toes, you make enemies. After their remarkable comeback in 1994, the Republicans have spent the past 19 years doing tap dances all over sensitive feet. It may be too early to tell -- but they may be condemning themselves to another three generations of minority bellowing. Stay tuned.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

Too Bad There Can't Be A Mental Health Test For Voting -- Many In GOP Couldn't Vote

By Manifesto Joe

I honestly don't take much pleasure in demonizing conservatives. In an intended democratic republic such as this one, the system needs liberals for vision, conservatives for grounding. In history we have seen examples of both sides producing great statespeople.

Why, then, do contemporary American "conservatives" act like such psychos?

I suppose that one could argue that it's their turn. Within my lifetime, I can recall cases of delusional left-wing behavior. Jane Fonda's infamous antics in Hanoi around 1972 come immediately to mind. But that era ended quickly. By the end of the 1970s, Jane was very much back at work as an actress and had been very much replaced in the public eye by the likes of Phyllis Schlafly. And in thirtysomething years, we've gotten no break from the likes of that.

I remember the Jim Crow South using devices such as skewed literacy tests to disenfranchise potential black voters. For similar reasons, we'll never see a mental health test for voting, not even a fair one, because clearly the group that would suffer most from such a barrier would be Republicans.

There was a time when Republicans, in large part, were the necessary grounding for a democratic republic in the U.S. That was back when the party had a fair number of "moderates" in it, and they usually determined who the actual nominated candidates were. Now, genuine conservatives like Richard Lugar of Indiana can't even be seen in a photo with a Democrat without having a far less qualified Tea Party challenger knock them off in the GOP primary.

The latest evidence that the Republican Party has been effectively taken over by kooks comes from Louisiana (no big surprise there). When they polled rank-and-file Republican voters there, 29 percent said Barack Obama was to blame for the poor federal response to damage from Hurricane Katrina. That's right, 29 percent.

If you don't believe me, here's a link to a news story on the subject.

I shouldn't have to point out that Katrina ravaged New Orleans and surrounding areas back in 2005, when Obama was an obscure first-year member of the U.S. Senate. Il Doofus (Bush 43) was president then.

This, mind you, represents more than 2 out of 7 Republicans in Louisiana. The only pleas for saying a thing like this would be (1) ignorance, (2) mental illness, or (3) both. I'm inclined to think (3) is the answer.

It's taken the American people a long time, but after the last election it appears that just over 50 percent understand that Republicans are no longer responsible conservatives, but are instead under the spell of the lunatic right wing. These pathetic escapees from straitjackets are so desperate to blame a Democrat for anything, they are in large part blaming Obama for something that happened over three years before he took office. It would be like blaming the Vietnam War on Jimmy Carter, and not even the kooks of 1980 were rabid enough to try that.

The basic problem: America now has, for its two-party system, one group of right-wing crazies, and a group of centrists (Democrats) who are themselves so beholden to rich campaign contributors and giant corporations that they can't be depended on to enact genuine reform or to supply any real vision. We have a radical right and a marshmallow center, and that's just about it. With that kind of refuse to govern us, I don't think it will be long before we can kiss our "democratic republic" goodbye and say hello to raging anarchy.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

I Understand The Strategy, But Obama May Be Making Worst Mistake Of His Career

By Manifesto Joe

I've taken a lot of time to weigh the pros and cons of President Obama's proposal for a "chained CPI" to bring about cuts in Social Security, etc. I've read a piece in defense of it, from the Democratic perspective. And, of course, it's not hard to find plenty of excoriations from the left.

I've decided that my sentiments are more with the left. I can appreciate that Obama is a practitioner of "real politics," but he's already tried that with the Republicans for over four years. They've made clear that they're not interested in actually governing.

Obama now stands on the verge of his worst mistake -- not just of his presidency, but of his entire political career. He is about to alienate his core constituency in one more desperate bid to "compromise."

Social Security is indeed a different program than the one created during the New Deal in 1935. Participation isn't voluntary, and demands on the system are far greater. But it has mostly done what it was intended to do. The poverty rate among elderly Americans was once around 50%. Thanks to a compulsory pension system, it's now down to about 10%.

I understand why Obama is trying, one last time I hope, to compromise here. He hasn't been able to get Republicans who still control the U.S. House to sit down at the table and give something up on their "no new taxes" (i.e., no new taxes on big corporations and the super-rich) pledges. New revenue is clearly needed, and two-thirds of big corporations are paying no federal income taxes. In addition, super-billionaire Warren Buffett has acknowledged that he pays a lower percentage of his income in federal personal income tax than does his secretary. And he's far from alone among the richest elite.

Something clearly has to give. But Obama is giving first, as usual. As former Labor Secretary Robert Reich phrased it, "The president throws things on the table before the Republicans have even sat down for dinner."

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi has strong misgivings about the president's strategy. The general feeling among Democrats was expressed well by U.S. Rep. Rush Holt of New Jersey: "If he's trying to do it to show he is forthcoming as a negotiator, then why doesn't he wait until he gets to the negotiating table? There's a lot of talk about the fact that politically this is not a winner. Our brand is the party that brought you Social Security."

In America, this is the day of the locust. I spent 27 weeks unemployed just recently, and for a long time was falling through the cracks. Oh, there are plenty of part-time, temporary and contract jobs, if you want them. Having a lot of medical ailments, I don't have the option of taking jobs that don't offer health insurance. And Social Security is a cornerstone of my someday retirement. It's not an option for me, and I've been paying into the system since I was a teenager.

And the same big corporations that are offering these feces-paying jobs with no benefits are the ones getting by paying little or nothing in corporate income tax. Oh, the rates are comparatively high -- for those who don't have tax attorneys good enough to get them out of paying. It just came out that Facebook not only isn't paying any income tax for 2012, on profits of $1 billion, they may actually get a refund worth nearly $430 million.

I've understood why Obama has done much of what he's done in a game of political hardball with Republicans. But as many times as he's felt their spikes, it's time to start digging his in and saying no. Otherwise, he unwisely risks his core Democratic constituency, and it should be clear by now that nothing's going to get done anyway. The Republicans, who are interested only in power, not in governing, are already trying to score political points by turning up their noses at this idea.

The president needs to abandon the idea of the "chained" Consumer Price Index now, while he still can. Then he should take his case directly to the American people. It's been estimated that U.S. senior citizens could lose as much as $112 billion over 10 years if this idea floats. If they know the facts, they'll certainly say no.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

A Republican Split? Don't Hold Your Breath

By Manifesto Joe

There's been much ado in the MSM lately about change in the Republican Party. Last month, Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, became the first major Republican politician to come out in favor of gay marriage, and said his son is gay. On immigration overhauls, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has endorsed a path to citizenship for legal immigrants, and his son, the very Latino-looking George P. Bush, is launching a statewide political career in Texas and appears to be making some inroads with Hispanic voters in this state. U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida, touted as another GOP rising star, has specific ideas for immigration overhauls that sound strikingly like what the Obama administration proposes.

These developments are anathema to the GOP's hard-core Tea Party types, who generally projectile-vomit at the mention of gay marriage and are often hard-line opponents of even legal immigration. Their reaction to these changes has primarily been bilious disgust.

This has some unsympathetic observers speculating that the Republican Party is about to break into two factions: (1) the economic royalists it has always represented, but those whose "social" views are moderate, and (2) the die-hard right wing.

Don't hold your breath. The Republicans have fought all these battles before. Phyllis Schlafly's 1964 screed A Choice Not an Echo illustrates how old this battle is. In those days, it was mainly being fought over economic issues (Barry Goldwater referred to the Eisenhower administration as "the dimestore New Deal") and general sanity about avoiding nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Gay marriage and immigration have merely taken the place of those Cold War and New Deal issues.

The Kool-Aid that both factions have drunk, and with gusto, is supply-side economics. That's different from the GOP infighting that was going on 50 years ago. They are very, very united on that crucial point, and that's the glue that will hold them together no matter what.

Dwight Eisenhower, a conservative in the more pragmatic sense of the word, realized the value of New Deal economic reforms such as Social Security and unemployment insurance. He at least privately regarded these changes as more or less permanent. Now, even the alleged "reform" faction of the Republican Party seems united on gutting Social Security and perhaps even considers benefits for the jobless to be wasteful welfare that just makes the unemployed into paunchy bums.

The Democrats have even more rifts under their tent than the Republicans have, especially now with a quasi-pragmatic centrist like Barack Obama as president. This faction, the pragmatic center, has pretty much controlled the Democratic Party since the McGovern debacle of 1972, but many on the far left remain idealists. Despite the failures of the past, they sincerely believe that "real Democrats," i.e. hard-core lefties, are what the party needs.

I'd be among the first to concede that Obama has been all-too-accommodating. He still doesn't seem to realize that the Republican concept of bipartisanship is to do everything entirely and absolutely THEIR way. But neither do the Democrats need their own version of Tea Party extremists.

The Democrats need to stay as united as possible, because they can't expect any less from the Republicans. The GOP is just doing what its rank-and-file thinks it needs to do to be electable, in reaction to losing the last two presidential races rather badly. They did the same thing starting with Alf Landon in 1936, when the moderate Republican governor of Kansas didn't flatly oppose some parts of the New Deal, he just said it was being poorly administered.

Landon lost badly, but the Republicans kept inching toward the perceived political center, until they finally came up with a winner with Eisenhower in 1952. They'll do that again, this time with gay marriage, immigration and similar "social" issues. The thing that will hold them together this time is that they all remain social Darwinists. They all agree that the poor should be punished for being that way.

Don't expect the GOP to deviate from the formula of the past. When they experience national defeats (the 1930s and '40s, and to a lesser extent now), they will move toward the center. When they start winning again, they'll move back to the far right (the 1980s and '90s, and briefly in 2010-11). They'll stay together -- and if the Democrats are to continue to win, the Democrats must, too.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

As 'Fiscal Cliff' Nears, Let's Review Republican Irresponsibility

By Manifesto Joe

While cleaning out some of my stuff, preparing to relocate for a new job, I came upon a 2003 publication from Citizens for Tax Justice that casts some interesting background on the so-called predicament in which the federal government now finds itself.

Want to guess which political party, when in executive power, did more spending paid for by borrowing?

This table shows Shares of Non-Social Security Federal Spending Paid for by Borrowing (Fiscal 1947 to 2003 projected)

Truman: none

Eisenhower: 3%

Kennedy-Johnson: 6%

Nixon-Ford: 14%

Carter: 13%

Reagan: 25%

Bush 1: 28%

Clinton: 6%

Bush 2, 2002: 23%

Bush 2, 2003: 33%

For decades, Republicans have stigmatized Democrats as the party of "tax and spend." This table raises the question: What happens when you spend, but don't tax?

At least the Democrats, when in power, have been willing and able to pay for their programs. Il Doofus (Bush 2) didn't bankrupt the country with his unpaid-for elective wars, but it wasn't for lack of trying.

Obama clearly inherited a fiscal mess and has tried to compromise, more than I and many others have been comfortable with, to enact a fix.

Meanwhile, Orange Julius & Co. seem to be doing the bidding of high rollers who don't have to be named. It's their way or the highway, no matter how the presidential election came out. Having held their "majority" in the House by gerrymandering, they apparently plan to obstruct every step of the way until November 2014, and will try to blame Obama for the mounting debt.

I don't have much faith in the intelligence of American voters. But I desperately hope they are smart enough to see through this ruse.

Meanwhile, about 2.1 million jobless Americans lost their emergency unemployment benefits yesterday. While the millionaires in Congress enjoy single-payer health care and count their pension money, many Americans will be looking at bankruptcy and perhaps homelessness.

I have little faith in the resourcefulness of humanity. But I try to believe in God, and I'm certainly not a universalist. I hope there is a Hell, and a special place in it for liars.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

Didn't Take Long For Republican Cry Babies To Befoul The Waters

By Manifesto Joe

Old Scout, the handle of a frequent commenter on my home blog, remarked about one of my recent post-election posts that I was being far, far too polite with right-wingers after Obama's re-election. Now I have to concede his point. There are just some people with whom you can't make nice.

I thought I would sincerely try to do that, to make nice at least up to a point, because I was taken aback after witnessing some of the obnoxious gloating that "conservatives" did after the highly questionable 2004 presidential election. But it was wasted effort, I must concede.

It didn't take the right wing any time at all to start talking about impeaching Obama, with robocalls to "save America." And, one "libertarian" Republican blogger told his readers that it's time for all like-minded people to tell every Democrat they know to "fuck off and die." When elections go their way, the U.S. is painted as an example for the world. When they don't, you start hearing about the U.S. electoral system being a corrupt joke, and suggestions of "revolution" (to wit, Donald Trump).

Restaurant chains weigh in

Boycotting restaurants because of their political/religious proselytizing is a bit difficult, because so many are right-wing. Most of the major hamburger chains are Republican-leaning and donate money to that party, so it's hard to get a burger and fries anywhere without being complicit. Even on the more healthful side, I used to get big salads for lunch at a mom-and-pop joint near my workplace in the early '90s -- until I saw a poster they put up near the men's room, depicting a movie poster of the Clinton administration, with Barney Frank cast as "the Rear Admiral." Haw, haw.

Now we have assorted chains announcing that they will cut hours, raise prices and even fire people to cut costs they associate with "Obamacare."

It's not hard to avoid Papa John's, because I never liked their pizza much, anyway. Pizza is one of those foods that's very hard to screw up, although it can be done and Papa John's almost succeeds. The most offensive part of this is that "Papa John" his own self, John Schnatter, is worth $350 million and held secret fundraisers for Romney on his mansion grounds. Can you say greed?

Domino's pizza is very little better than Papa John's, and I found out, years after I drove for that chain in a desperate period of my youth, that the head honcho is a reactionary psycho-Catholic.

It's not hard to avoid Chick-fil-A either, because their chicken sandwiches taste like cardboard enhanced with salt and grease. Their pronouncements about gay marriage came as no surprise to me, anyway. I won't miss Red Lobster, either, as I have allergies to some types of shellfish and their food usually sucks anyway.

It may be harder to completely boycott Applebee's. Although it's a franchise place with food quality varying widely, I know of one local place that makes a great top sirloin plate with steamed broccoli, and their spinach-and-artichoke dip is a winner, too. I'll miss them. Same goes for Olive Garden -- one local place makes wonderful eggplant parmigiana.

The main thing Denny's has going for it is affordability. When I was working my way through grad school and living largely on dry cereal and canned goods, the Grand Slam Breakfast was like a cheap staple, and about the only time I ever ate eggs (they were once thought to be bad for you). Now, some Denny's eateries plan to add a 5% "Obamacare" surcharge. I'll never eat at one of those places.

Pearls before swine

The point is that good manners and being gracious in victory are virtues that are absolutely wasted on some people.

Time has come for Obama to get his veto pen out, and stop making nice. His enemies clearly aren't going to change. Even Scumney is being a sore loser, blaming his defeat at the polls on Obama's "gifts" to women, minorities, and young people. It had to be government bribery, not differing ideology.

Time has come for all Democrats to start telling Orange Julius, Mitch for the Rich and all their supporters to "fuck off and die."

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

Civil Rights Ads: Liars, Damned Liars, And Republicans

By Manifesto Joe

Living in a state like Texas, which is considered safe for Scumney, we don't get to see these kinds of bullshit ads very much. I hear that the Republican Party is taking credit for getting the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed, and for Lincoln freeing the slaves.

I've got news for however many innocent Republicans remain out there: This is not your grandfather's GOP. (I'll steal a line from my bud Cletis Stump -- it is if your grandfather was Benito Mussolini.)

For one thing, the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is something that Republicans can disingenuously claim something about, because for the Republicans of the time, they did actually vote for the bill in higher percentage than Democrats did. But ...

That was back when there were a lot of "Dixiecrats" left in the Democratic Party. Led by the defection of Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-Segregation Forever, they moved to the Republican Party in droves after that. There were many reasons, but it was mainly that one of the few prominent Republican votes cast against the bill was by one Barry Goldwater of Arizona, who went on to be the Republican Party nominee for president that year.

It was a vote cast in "libertarian" protest. Goldwater, being half-Jewish (at a golf course he once asked, "can I just play 9 holes?"), had run into discrimination before. I get the impression that he was a very honest, albeit foolish, sort of guy, and sincerely believed that it just wasn't the place of the federal government to get that involved in ordinary human affairs.

But Goldwater went on to be the first Republican presidential candidate to carry the Deep South. A handful of states there, and Arizona, were all that he racked up in a devastating loss.

That was the beginning, though, of the Southern white migration to the Republican Party. Now, those states are generally lockups for them.

Of all people left in American politics, who still thinks that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a bad idea? Um, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky. Among a few others.

I could bring up the fact that it was President Harry Truman who desegregated the military by executive order, or that LBJ, upon signing the Civil Rights Act, lamented that the Democrats had just given the South away for at least a generation.

The main problem here is the Republican LIE factor, their bogus claim that they have somehow been a vanguard of civil rights in America, and trying to sell themselves to black voters in such a mendacious manner.

I don't think Abraham Lincoln would recognize the current Republican Party, or want to be associated with it in the least. Nor should anyone else.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

'Slick Willard' Isn't So Slick Anymore

By Manifesto Joe

After the past couple of weeks, I'll have to stop using the nickname of "Slick Willard" to refer to Mitt Scumney. He hasn't been slick at all, and some of the American people are getting a chance to see whom this really is.

I suppose his asinine behavior while visiting the Summer Olympic Games in London should have been enough foreshadowing of this. Like Obama's predecessor, this is a doofus, a son of privilege whose main talent seems to be for making a fool of himself.

He followed up on insults to America's closest ally with the Libya debacle, attacking alleged weakness in the Obama administration even before the victims' families had been notified. Even many top Republicans were aghast at that one.

Then there were the "47 percent" remarks, which appear to show Romney as the ignorant plutocrat he really is. The only "redistribution of wealth" that people like him object to is the kind that travels down the socioeconomic ladder. When it comes from the bottom up -- as it usually does -- it's called "smart business."

'Incompetent' was polite

Even prominent plutocrats are upset. Peggy Noonan, the onetime Reagan speechwriter who's now with The Wall Street Journal, said she was being polite when she called the Scumney campaign "incompetent." What she meant, she said, is that it is more like a "rolling calamity."

Here's a link to a story about Noonan's dismay.

Many polls are now showing Obama in the lead, reversing previous trends. One factor, I would say, is a closing of ranks among America's "center-left." Obama's lack of fight, at least for a long time while faced with Republican intractability, was disheartening to many. But the Republican Party has come so much under the spell of its kook element that the "center-left's" potential dissidents realize that Obama is the only person standing between us and utterly irresponsible right-wingers.

I worry, though, remembering an old adage that nobody ever lost a dime underestimating the intelligence of the American people. It has surprised even me, just a bit, how many people are still obsessing over where Obama was born when the U.S. is being faced with such a grave choice in November. The "birthers" always deny this, but I think the fact that there's an uppity n----r in the White House is what bothers them most. I would have thought that the Il Doofus (Bush 43) disaster would have spoiled the "Republican brand" for at least a generation, but the election of a black president seemed to make a lot of Il Doofus' damage invisible to many middle-class white people.

Scumney may still be able to make it close enough for the Republicans to steal it with their voter disenfranchisement strategy, and so forth. But at least the latest gaffes are giving people a chance to see whom he really is. As Massachusetts governor, he talked like a moderate, and even governed like one to a great extent. But recent missteps, plus his choice of Paul "Ayn" Ryan as his running mate, make clear that this is merely a privileged, opportunistic dork who's willing to tell anybody anything to have the office to which he obviously thinks he's entitled. The Republican right wing owns him now, and they also will do anything to grab power.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

Clint, God Is Not On The Republicans' Side -- He Hates Stupid People

By Manifesto Joe

Hard-core film buffs may recognize the title of this post as a paraphrase of a line that "Blondie" (Clint Eastwood) speaks to "Tucco" (Eli Wallach) in the quintessential spaghetti Western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1967).

As an actor, Clint was OK, but always a bit more archetype than character, sort of like John Wayne was to an older and less-hip audience. As a director, he blossomed into a world-class auteur, aided by the tutelage of cinematic masters like Sergio Leone and Don Siegel.

It was tragi-comic to see an 82-year-old Eastwood make a doddering fool of himself before a prime-time TV audience Thursday night at the Republican National Convention.

For one thing, I thought Clint had learned a few things about his "friends" on the right. His reaction to having right-wing critics like Michael Medved spray bladder juice all over his 2004 boxing masterpiece Million Dollar Baby was angry and defiant. The film seemed, in the view of right wingers, to support euthanasia. Clint seemed at the time to have distanced himself at least somewhat from the political right, with his obvious and apolitical question about any script: Is it a good story?

But he's always been a fiscal conservative, and was a Republican as mayor of Carmel, Calif. Old habits die hard.

Back to the post title -- God may not be on the Republicans' side, but from what one can tell, He, She or It often doesn't seem to be on ANYBODY'S side. The deity, presuming that one exists, doesn't usually intervene in human affairs. Jews and other victimized groups were not spared holocausts, and black people were not rescued from slavery, at least not for centuries.

Humans are mostly left to their own devices. They can do things to make the world a better place -- or they can make it a hell on Earth, which they quite regularly accomplish. It's often sad to watch, but that's what free will is all about.

God didn't even stop Il Doofus (Bush 43) from being president for eight long years, declining to step in as apparent election fraud was committed. He, She or It didn't stop 1.4 million Iraqis from being killed over official lies.

And, perish the thought, He, She or It may not prevent Slick Willard Scumney and Paul "Ayn" Ryan from being "elected" to the Nos. 1 and 2 offices in the land. Atheists and agnostics seem to expect the deity to intervene in human affairs, but that seldom happens. We can foolishly and avariciously screw things up just as much as we please -- I learned that from watching "Blondie" on the Big Screen when I was just a lad of 11. It's up to us.

He, She or It may hate stupid people -- but that's never stopped them before.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.