So He Gets A Second Term

After losing the popular vote in each of his first two Presidential bids (one a win over Hillary Clinton via Electoral College, the other a loss to Joe Biden), Donald Trump won against Kamala Harris in a crushing manner despite polls having them at a dead heat tie for four months and appearances of empty Trump rallies versus a general public look in cities that inspired confidence for the Harris camp. What happened? We know Trump was going to want to cheat and steal his way to victory, from stacking the Supreme Court in his favour, preemptively filing countless frivolous lawsuits contesting results, to Tweeting about possible fraud in philadelphia the day of, to his admitting to having a "little secret" with House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson: It sure feels like the election was stolen...

Canadian Elections 2015: The Fix Is In

In years past, I would have followed the 78-day campaign on an almost daily basis, commented on it, shared my ideas, work towards change. Good change. Decent change. So many ''progressive'' website clamoring for change, working towards ousting Stephen Harper from his position as Prime Minister, and The Man obviously seeing His opportunity to take the power back... and leave the common man out in the cold again.

This is what LeadNow had to show people where the main five parties stood on key issues:

Even through this simplistic graph, you can tell the so-called Liberals are still the closest to the Conservatives on what they stand and promises they're making- and that's pre-election, when their motto is usually ''run on the left, govern on the right''.

The Liberals also usually have the press on their side, because half of their campaign money comes from the media, from Power Corporation (La Presse) to the big Ontario papers to the CBC. Their leader, Justin Trudeau, voted with Harper (despite his and his party's votes not actually counting because, as a majority, the Cons could get all their projects in anyway) a stunning 73% of the time. Which means they agree on 73% of issues at heart, and not for the least:

- C51 is a law that allows the government to spy on its people without warrants (and makes the Patriot Act look tame in comparison)
- the TPP stands to make us lose potentially all our jobs to overseas markets while sending all our (dirty) oil away, while ending regulations in many sectors of industry and farming
- they want to continue to push Canada away from peace-keeping military missions and instead send soldiers to actual war
- they give their friends cozy jobs and pensions and cut down on legislation in the sectors they tell them not to have any

Essentially, it's ''meet the new guy, same as the last guy''.

The other party thought to have a ghost of a chance at the beginning of the process was the New Democratic Party, who had formed the official opposition these past four years. Well, the NDP as a whole didn't do much at all. Ruth Ellen Brosseau took every opportunity to stand up and voice her opinion at the Chamber, despite it being for naught, and leader Thomas Mulcair tried to act as the voice of reason, every day, on TV, taking light stabs at both Harper and Trudeau. Hélène Laverdière did a nice job in the streets of downtown Montréal, but her impact in Ottawa was even more limited than Brosseau's. None of their other MPs had been ready to take on their job, and they all crashed and burned early in the campaign. They were a disaster waiting to happen, and it did.

While we're on the topic of ''same as the old guy'', I'd like to point out Mulcair's previous political record. On the provincial scene, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he'd been the lawyer for activist group Alliance Québec, nutjobs who compared the francophone provincial government to the Nazi regime on an almost daily basis.

Later, he became the environmental minister in Jean Charest's Liberal government (yep, he's of that school as well, and Charest was a former Conservative party leader at the federal level...), and while he can be praised for stepping down from his position in protest when the government tried to sell a protected mountain to condo entrepreneurs, he also oversaw the dumping of raw sewage by the city of Longueuil into the St. Lawrence river, an issue that came reflected in this election with Montreal having to do the same for a week while it underwent emergency repairs to its infrastructures.

Among the rest, two stand out the most. The Bloc Québécois once had an impact, and formed the official opposition a lifetime ago, in the 1990s. Unfortunately, they used to be the party that was most to the left and have now become a coalition of all sorts for people hoping for Québec to secede from Canada at pretty much all costs, including the one that comes with abandoning your social-democratic roots and moving towards the right on the wrong issues.

Look at that graph again, you'll notice they're still on the right side of most issues; but the xenophobic element that is a small minority of what they need to get their message across has become too loud a voice to ignore (à la Tea Party for the Republicans in the U.S. circa 2008), not realizing they need to include people of all creeds and origins and walks of life to make their dream of starting anew on a land where all are equal a reality. So, honestly, at this point, fuck them.

The Green Party may seem like the party who has Canadians' interests most at heart, but they'll be lucky to get five people elected. Why? Because although their leader, Elizabeth May, is absolutely delightful with her Maritime charm and honest-to-goodness good values that would make her the best grandma in the world, they don't have a platform, just pipe dreams.

GREEN! TREES! NO FOSSIL FUELS! PEACE AND HARMONY! - it's all fine and dandy, but no plans on foreign policy. No plans on defense - not even abolishing it. No plans on getting the economy back on its feet after Harper took a tar sands-sized shit all over it and deregulated the banks.

Which leaves us with a grand total of zero good candidates.

The lesser evil would still be Mulcair, because he's such a careerist that he'd have to listen to the will of the people when they protested his bullshit.

But no. The fix is in. The media have been on it since the very first week, shoving our ''choice'' down our throat: it's Baby Justin, or Evil Harper. Even though they're the exact same fucking right-wing sell-out puppet 73% of the time (that's not entirely true: Harper actually believes he's doing the right thing; Trudeau gets to that conclusion by thinking it's the ''lesser evil'').

They told us on TV, they told us on their front pages. They bought ads online and on billboards.

They gave us a face we didn't mind looking at, they gave us a name that still rings in English-speaking Canada. They even gave us Brian Mulroney's - a former Conservative Prime Minister - fucking endorsement.

And Canadians ate it up, all that chocolate-flavoured soft-serve bullshit dripping on their fucking chins.

And now I know why I've never felt entirely at home in that stupid, insane fucking country. Why I supported independence when it made sense. Why I moved to NYC. Why I always feel so damn alone.

The fix is in. It'll be a landslide. And it'll fuck us good.

Thief-In-Chief

The more things change...

Ladies and gentlemen, the new mayor of Montréal, Denis Coderre, whose team incorporated all the leftovers from the previous deposed administration, on the grounds of corruption. They all jumped on his bandwagon because no one else would take their soiled asses, and who better to forgive (and help hide) than a man who was once associated with his own corrupt political party, on the federal (national) level...

Oh, the company we keep. Birds of a feather flock together - as do the tainted and easily corrupted.

Worse still, Michel Bissonnet received 72% of the vote to remain as burrough mayor of St-Leonard, despite his name being mentioned in thousands of court documents and hearings as part of a vast web of corruption, most notably in the construction industry but also illegal campaign financing.

And look at Coderre's wink-and-smile, he knows the fix is in and has been from the start:

Kind of makes you wish you could have voted for Peter Griffin instead...

Of course, everyone knew it was going to happen, and two-thirds of the city are almost happy that Coderre won with ''merely'' 32% of the vote, when polls were giving him a larger lead, perhaps even a majority. And that's why I almost made the following song my Video Of The Week yesterday (it's Catatonia's I Am The Mob):



And there is even more defeat in defeat: Luc Ferrandez was re-elected as burrough mayor for the Plateau - with a higher percentage than the first time around - which means the War On Noise (i.e. making downtown Montréal into a quiet suburb-like environment for condo dwellers while shutting down music venues and art galleries and fucking with every other remaining businesses' permit statuses in the heart of the city's cultural center) is still on.

Humans really are stupid creatures.

At least it'll be entertaining. With the Party that gave us 3 deposed mayors in less than 6 months still in power, office pools have already started about how high-up the first arrest will go, and what type of corruption it'll entail (electoral fraud, City contract assignment, over-charging for services to take a higher commission fee, no-bid contract at double the street price, etc). Kinda makes you wish all your mayor was doing wrong was smoking crack.

Oh, Anthony Weiner!

One-time budding stand-up comic Anthony Weiner turned to politics at a relatively young age, first as New York City councilman, then the House OF Representatives, until he was caught in a sexting scandal, where he tweeted and texted pictures of his naked self and/or erect penis (covered or not) to several women. The ''star'' of the scandal was this picture, which made the rounds for months:

Anthony's weiner

He formally resigned from Congress of June 21, 2011, and entered rehab.

He warned us upon his return to the limelight - as he officially entered the NYC mayoral race a month ago - that new pictures could eventually come out, but that he is now ''rehabilitated'' from his ''sex addiction''.

But pictures have surfaced, and they seem more recent than we were led to believe, though the only timeline Weiner admits is ''some did occur after my resignation''. Here's what he said:

I said that other texts and photos were likely to come out and today they have... I want to again say that I am very sorry to anyone who was on the receiving end of these messages and the disruption this has caused.

But when a guy goes by the nickname Carlos Danger, isn't he kind of asking for it? Slate seems to think so, and they've established a possible timeline of his activities...

The Dirty, on the other hand, got a hold of a bunch of texts he exchanged with one woman in particular, of which I'll just re-post this one (check it out here for the rest):

And yet he won't back out of the race... then again, he didn't want to resign in 2011, but the Democratic Party forced him to...

More on this story as it, uh, unfolds develops.

Politics As Usual

Her hair makes it seem like she's stuck in the 1980s; her mind-set is more 1780. Her name is Dayleen Van Ryswyk and she was just dropped by the British Columbia NDP party for being a bigot an idiot a racist ''a true independent voice'', from a CBC news story:

Some of Van Ryswyk's comments took aim at First Nations:

"It’s not the status cards, it’s the fact that we have been paying out of the nose for generations for something that isn't our doing," reads one post on Castanet, an Okanagan area website. "If their ancestors sold out too cheap it’s not my fault and I shouldn’t have to be paying for any mistake or whatever you want to call it from my hard-earned money."

The posts also took aim at the French-Canadian community:

"Seems the only group of people universally hated around the world other than the Americans are the French and French-Canadians. The bigots are the French and not us," the blog reads.

"I’m getting so sick of having French stuffed down my throat. This isn’t Québec. It’s western Canada. We speak English here. Why are we forced to have it at our western Canadian-hosted Olympics?"

Well, because at the heart of Canada's language policy is that the country has TWO official languages, and one of them - French - was the language that pretty much populated Canada in the first place, as most people in then-Lower Canada were of French descent, and that's how things rolled. Over time, Canada's population did go from 65% French-Canadian to the present-day 25-30%, but as long as the Constitution isn't changed (wait, Québec isn't even in it, is it? Ha!), both languages have to be represented in international events - particularly in regards to the Olympics, as the IOC's official language itself is French.

If that's how she feels about minorities, it kind of makes you wonder why she even applied to run under the NDP - a party resolutely on the Left - banner, rather than the Conservative one...

And about ''paying through the nose'' for aboriginals for ''something that isn't your doing'', well, lady, the fact that you have a roof over your head and a Canadian passport, and you're enjoying the perks of running for office, means you are taking advantage of the British invading the continent and slaughtering the people who were already there, well, common decency - as well as International Law - dictates you take care of survivors of the attempted genocide. It's, literally, the least you can fucking do.

Romitt Wouldn't Concede To Votebama

Almost 1AM. That's how late Mitt Romney held onto his illusions this morning, refusing to concede his defeat. It had been more than an hour since most media outlets had given Ohio to President Barack Obama, and almost two hours since Jon Stewart had declared Obama winner of the elections.

For a while, Romney led the popular vote but trailed the electoral College by a landslide; things went back to normal around midnight, with the President maintaining a fair advantage of electoral votes, but also winning the actual vote count, avoiding a repeat of (what History remembers of) the 2000 election.

In a predictable yet ironic twist, we now find ourselves exactly where we were before: same President and VP, the House to Republicans, the Senate to Democrats. However, perhaps the House will actually stop cock-blocking Obama now that their strategy of ''our job is to avoid a second Obama term'' has failed massively, and maybe they can ratify a few of his plans to get Americans back on the job market, which they were saying was their priority, although their actions proved otherwise.

Now that that's done, here's a cat being coy about trying to suffocate a child (or just being stubborn):

Why Registering With One Party Makes No Sense To Me

In the United States, elections are pretty much a two-party system in which electors usually side with either Party, for better or worse, for most of their lives. As such, they are offered to register which party affiliation they favour, and lists are made available to those who may need it. In some cases, an opponent will use unfair tactics to suppress his opponents' voters, such as this instance where Arizona Republican candidate Jeff Flake (yep, he was that flaky, can't make that shit up) used robocalls to send Democrat voters in the wrong voting place.

In Canada - and particularly in Québec - we have a multiple-party system, which enables most citizens to actually vote for the candidate they feel will best represent them; the party with the most winners is in power, and usually the balance of power is held by more than one opposition party, resulting in the country not veering too far from the center, and where compromise and negotiations usually prevail over dictatorial tactics.

Except, of course, with Stephen Harper, who merged first two, then three parties to form a bigger one who would stand a chance to grab power if they took electoral positions away from the main cities (Montréal, Toronto and Vancouver) and added more in rural regions in the West. Which they did. And it worked. And now he's muting all opposition parties and even his own Parliament to become, all told, a King.

But Kings die and/or get their heads chopped off, so while he's redefining Canada as a war-waging country in the service of England, lowering our tolerance level for gays and women, and reducing the percentage of French-speaking neighbourhoods through targeted immigration in effect hiding what could become ethnic cleansing, his time will be limited by Nature, and his wrongs will be reverted. Over decades, sure, as Americans are learning (there is no way a Barack Obama can repair the damage a George W. Bush has inflicted in the same amount of time; it takes a second to destroy a house by launching a missile in it, hours to do it by fire, yet weeks or months to rebuild a new one).

Anyhow, the point is this: your opinions may change over time, or maybe they won't. But those of your elected officials can, too: just look at how many times John Kerry changed his mind, John McCain too, and that's saying nothing of Mitt Romney doing so in the same fucking day, let alone throughout the years.

Registering with a Party paints you in a corner, and opens you up to the malfeasance of bad people, which there seems to be a shitload more of every day. Not only are you better off keeping some cards up your sleeve and keeping your hand secret (I've started playing poker again, yes), but it's also best to keep an open mind and see if there isn't a better option out there.

Chris Christie's Boss

Now that the photo ops have given way to relief efforts by out-of-energy first responders that are no longer photogenic enough to be on the evening news, politicians have gone back to giving speeches on podiums with as many people behind them as there were in front.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie talked about the issues - housing for the homeless, talking to Bruce Springsteen:

New York News | NYC Breaking News

I know firsthand that in times of crisis, sometimes a small break with things or people you love - or both - rejuvenates you more and better than a full night's sleep, but I just think these things are taken care of in private, not for the press; I also think the mood shifted a little too quickly, that now that Christie knows he's a hero (and a shoe-in for the 2014 nomination unless he fucks up in a major way), he has less to do, and is content with ''leading''. I hope I'm wrong, but I rarely am.

Chris Christie: When Republicans Do Their Jobs Instead Of Merely Obstructing The System

This was Day 3 of the fallout from Hurricane Sandy, in what, for the Mitt Romney camp, has now become Hurricane Chris Christie. Indeed, Romney's opponent for the Republican nomination has been praising President Barack Obama for three days straight in regards to his help in providing relief for New Jersey, where Christie serves as governor.

Quotes such as these abound:

It's really important to have the President of the United States here.

In the meantime, Romney has to live up to his past statements about wanting to dismantle FEMA (the federal relief-effort program) and replacing it with State-run programs instead or, as he would prefer, the private sector (i.e. companies such as Halliburton), who would no doubt overcharge and leave many poor people hanging.

The problem with that line of thinking is trusting the ''humanity'' of corporations to do good, when all they are mandated to care about is their bottom line; an additional one would be to take the risk that not all states view prevention funds as an investment rather than an expenditure, and would likely kick it to the curb; or one state would provide better relief than its neighbour and compensation problems would inevitably occur for folks living at one state's border, particularly if they work in the other one.

Another question I asked myself was: now that Christie, a huge Obama critic and obstructor, has seen what The President can do when you work with him rather than against - he is, after all, the President who has tried the hardest to negotiate with his adversaries in a half century - will it incite other Republican superstars to tone down their rhetoric or - gasp! - start working for the American people?

Time will tell, but I'm liking this development.

Biden His Time

Here's how Joe Biden reacted to Paul Ryan's lies, half-truths, and nonsense...



As for the debate itself, the guy (Biden) may be a serial gaffer, but he has a way of being able to express his convictions and explain them plainly that is, mostly, impressive. Sure, the media love a politician who talks so much he'll massacre the language and invent unclear metaphors (à la George W. Bush and Jean Chrétien), but the ideas behind the sentences still make sense most of the time.

I can see Democrats wishing there were two more VP debates rather than Obama-Romney duels...

Debatable

Many people have declared Mitt Romney the clear winner of Wednesday's debate, and many progressives were disappointed at Barack Obama for not having attacked Romney on any topic - be it the ''47%'' debacle, his constant flip-flopping and outright lies, the rampant mischievousness of the Republican camp in general, health care, the economy and economics and general, as well as numbers in general. The New Yorker even released its next cover, referring back to the Republican Convention and Clint Eastwood's speech:

My take is simple: there was a reason why the Obama camp repeated all week that Romney was such a ''master debater'', and it is because they let him win. Obama had no reason whatsoever to answer to everything Romney put forth, and not just because more than half of it was lies.

Obama's lead was more than 5 points, and in some polls, close to the 10-point mark, at 55% versus 45%. A difference of merely 5 more - half the undecided voters left - would make it a 20-point margin (+5 on one side and -5 on the other makes a 10-point difference, simple math).

At 20 points, the risk for Obama's supporters to want to stay home thinking ''he's got this'' and of Romney's supporters going all-out to ''make every vote count'', resulting in an improbable Democrat defeat was too great, and with the PBS crowd (where this debate took place) already being set on voting for the Democrats and, thus, not likely to switch either way with the result, Obama just read his notes, said what he had to say as he would in any press conference, and didn't bother with Romney at all. Had he been a batter in a baseball game, he would have walked three times, not even swinging at strikes, giving him an impressive 1.000 on-base percentage, but a boring 0-for-0 at bat, and a .000 batting average.

When the debates turn to CNN and Fox News, you'll see him as he usually is: strong, decisive, adept, alert, funny, and perhaps even sarcastic.

Proof of that exists not just in every speech Obama's ever given and every debate he's ever participated in, but also in an address he gave yesterday in Denver, the same city that hosted the debate:



Let him be. He knows what he's doing. We are, after all, talking about the best American orator not named Bill Clinton or Samuel L. Jackson.

Homer Simpson Votes For Romney

Now that The Simpsons are sure to be paid until Season 25 and not come back for a 26th, its creators and writers aren't afraid to take sarcastic political stances on current events and going against the Fox family - even in its ads!

Usually, Family Guy and The Simpsons stick to complaining only on their shows and not bite the hand that feeds them outside of the framework they're given. This time, they went further:

Inevitable Irony

Just hours after I'd posted the Vote With A Bullet video, a man erupted at the Parti Québécois' victory celebration, shot two people and started a fire with a molotov cocktail. One died, the other is in critical condition; someone else is treated for extreme shock.

Newly-elected (first female) Prime Minister of Québec Pauline Marois was escorted off mid-speech, but returned a few moments later, asking attendees to leave the place calmly, because ''that's how a Premier reacts''.

More to come as it develops, probably.

Video Of The Week: Corrosion Of Conformity

On this election day in Québec, one on which we must decide between the current, corrupt status quo, the status quo of the mid-90s, a new right-wing party made up of old candidates from other parties or smaller, more regional fringe parties, I opted to follow the theme our leader Jean Charest has been hammering about in the media (''it's us against the street, violence, and chaos; we are the Party of Law and Order'') and go for one of the best metaphors in hard rock: Corrosion Of Conformity's Vote With A Bullet.

While C.O.C.'s first two albums were mostly thrash metal hybrids, 1991's Blind was more melodic, heavy, and groovy, pioneering a sound Pantera would later perfect. Perhaps no stranger to this was the fact that it was the only record with Karl Agell on lead vocals, letting Pepper Keenan concentrate on his guitar abilities. Ironically, the song I chose is Keenan's lone lead singing track...

By their next record, Deliverance, C.O.C. really became Keenan's band, as he was its chief songwriter, guitarist, and lead vocalist.

Killing The Truth

The Republican Convention is over, and many will remember it because of Clint Eastwood's surreal stand-up comedy act featuring an interview with an invisible President Obama in an empty chair. It showed that, should Condi Rice not run in 2016, he could definitely pull a Ronald Reagan and become a two-term, senile, funny, everyday man in charge of the world's biggest economy and army. Would be entertaining, to say the least.

But that moment overshadowed the Republican presidential and vice-residential nominees' speeches - more specifically, the fact that they were full of lies, half-truths, and dangerous innuendos. Many of them were outed by the New York Times in this article, not surprisingly the most of them coming from Paul Ryan, who has made it his mission to see Barack Obama fail and has obstructed everything the President has attempted, even his attempts at compromise and Republican-friendly policies.

Here is but one example:

In his attack on the president’s time in office, Mr. Ryan said: “It began with a perfect AAA credit rating for the United States. It ends with the downgraded America.”

When Standard & Poor’s lowered the nation’s credit rating, it was in large part because of the standoff last year over the debt ceiling — which needed to be raised so the government could borrow money to pay for spending that Congress had already approved. The White House had asked Congress to simply raise the debt ceiling; Mr. Ryan and House Republicans balked at doing so without reaching a deal on significant spending cuts. The ensuing standoff took the nation to the brink of default.

In its statement explaining the downgrade, Standard & Poor’s wrote that “the political brinkmanship of recent months highlights what we see as America’s governance and policy making becoming less stable, less effective and less predictable than what we previously believed. The statutory debt ceiling and the threat of default have become political bargaining chips in the debate over fiscal policy.”

That one's on the Republicans - not Obama.

For decades, politicians have exacerbated the population's cynicism by lying making deliberately false campaign promises, such as ''vote for me and I'll fix the economy'', or ''vote for me and I'll fix the roads / schools / system / healthcare'', and we accepted those because they were pipe dreams told by snake oil salesmen. We knew they were likely to try a little, but never completely succeed, and it's not like we wanted their jobs anyway.

But in the past 15 years, with negative ads becoming more and more prevalent, it seems the speech / ad writers feel the public has assimilated the ''personal attack'' technique and may be ready for the perpetual lying about the opponent's positions. Except that TV ads, usually paid for by a SuperPAC or a lobbying group of some sort, could historically be called out by the candidate it supported, who would just have to say ''I don't agree with what was said in there and apologize to my opponent'' while the message still got across; nowadays, the politician will spew the bullshit himself, live, in front of an audience (and the media), but for some reason, there isn't an entity who can put them back in their place, and maybe fine them (hit them where it hurts, their money).

I guess that's what you get for always demanding a smaller and smaller government: you get a free-for-all party of bullshit and fuckery, and may the meanest asshole win (and fuck up the country).

Raging For The Machine

By now I guess you've heard: Mitt Romney's choice for VP, Paul Ryan, cites Rage Against The Machine as one of his favourite bands. And the band's guitarist and chief militant, Tom Morello, has a few choice word for him via Rolling Stone:

Paul Ryan's love of Rage Against the Machine is amusing, because he is the embodiment of the machine that our music has been raging against for two decades. Charles Manson loved The Beatles but didn't understand them. Governor Chris Christie loves Bruce Springsteen but doesn't understand him. And Paul Ryan is clueless about his favorite band, Rage Against the Machine. (...)

I wonder what Ryan's favorite Rage song is? Is it the one where we condemn the genocide of Native Americans? The one lambasting American imperialism? Our cover of "Fuck the Police"? Or is it the one where we call on the people to seize the means of production? So many excellent choices to jam out to at Young Republican meetings!

Don't mistake me, I clearly see that Ryan has a whole lotta "rage" in him: A rage against women, a rage against immigrants, a rage against workers, a rage against gays, a rage against the poor, a rage against the environment. Basically the only thing he's not raging against is the privileged elite he's groveling in front of for campaign contributions. (...)

Many activists around the world, including organizers of the global occupy movement, were radicalized by Rage Against the Machine and work tirelessly for a more humane and just planet. Perhaps Paul Ryan was moshing when he should have been listening.

He even ends with humour:

My hope is that maybe Paul Ryan is a mole. Maybe Rage did plant some sensible ideas in this extreme fringe right wing nut job. Maybe if elected, he'll pardon Leonard Peltier.  Maybe he'll throw U.S. military support behind the Zapatistas. Maybe he'll fill Guantanamo Bay with the corporate criminals that are funding his campaign – and then torture them with Rage music 24/7. That's one possibility. But I'm not betting on it.

I'm so glad to see he hasn't lost his spunk.

R.I.P. Sally Ride

Sally Ride, the first woman in space, died yesterday of pancreatic cancer.

Mitt Romney had this to say about her, to try to gain capital on her demise:

Today, America lost one of its greatest pioneers. The first American woman in space, Sally Ride inspired millions of Americans with her determination to break the mold of her time. She was a profile in courage, and while she will be missed, her accomplishments will never be forgotten.

The thing is, she ''broke the mold of her time'' in more ways than just jumping a shuttle and flying above the planet: she was also in a same-sex relationship, and her partner of 27 years Tam O'Shaughnessy will not be allowed to receive any federal benefit because, well, they are of the same sex.

I think it's safe to say that when you've co-authored 4 books, lived together and been a couple for 27 years, it's a stable relationship...

At least one blog took offense:

Memo to Mr. Romney: If you don’t support our most fundamental relationships — if, in fact, you dedicate a significant amount of your political career to undermining those relationships, and make political hash out of marginalizing us and playing on people’s fears and hatred of us — you don’t get to speak about us with sentimental gushing after we’re dead.

Second memo to Mr. Romney: Fuck you.

I agree wholeheartedly.

Now, since she decided to keep her sexual orientation on the down-low, can't we all just let her go away in peace?

The Thing With Mitt Romney

Earlier this week, Jon Stewart said smart things about Mitt Romney on The Daily Show. Because Viacom are being jerks, it's difficult to find clips of it online - and the rights to the show differ from country to country, so I'd probably have to find 6 or 7 videos anyway, but have instead affixed it on an image:

I'd like to add this: Romney's running for President of the United States. Chief of the country with the biggest influence on Democracy on earth. As President, one of the things he'd have to decide on is how to spend his people's money - what services to provide, what benefits to give, who to subsidize, what wars to wage.

This money comes from taxes.

Romney (and folks like him) paid 15% in taxes last year, yet is worth roughly about half a billion dollars. His money is and always has been held in tax shelters (previously Switzerland, now the Bahamas and Caiman Islands).

How can he be an authority on - and have authority with - his people's money when he, himself, barely contributes to the pot?

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. As an elected official, he's allowed free health care, paid for by seemingly everybody in the country except himself.

That's what's offensive. Not the ''fact that he's rich'' - everyone deserves a fair shot at life. It's what you do during it that matters, and what he's done is hide his away from the greater good and try to manipulate everyone else's. It's unfait, it's wrong, and above all, it's unfit of a Presidency.

Mitt Romney Hates Cops, Firemen And Teachers

''Did (Barack Obama) not hear the message in Wisconsin?''

The Republicans did, and it seems they heard more than just ''let's kill unions''.

Now Mitt Romney says America doesn't need police officers, firemen and teachers. Sure, civic security and education don't matter if all you want to do is create shitty minimum-wage jobs and have people live 20 at a time in tiny foreclosed houses owned by your baker friends.

Ridiculous!

Wolf Blitzer puts his pants on and calls Donald Trump on his bullshit. Trump has trouble making sense of reality, since he can't get Blitzer fired from his own show.