On Tuesday’s election

We got so many calls from Steve Poizner [Republican gubernatorial candidate], I figured he was having an affair with someone in the house. But my husband said it wasn’t him.

The four San Diego County candidates who ran for judge because God told them to must have misinterpreted him — they all lost. It’s one of those Fundamentalists are from Mars, God is from Venus sort of things.

Over martinis: Don’t you know any single Marines? I need to be ravaged.

Mother: Last night, after eating pig snouts and sauerkraut, I watched a dwarf in a medieval costume hawk ale to the college students outside my hotel. Oddly cynical.
Daughter: That might be the creepiest thing I’ve ever heard.

Read more Fallbrookisms…

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

The volume of campaign collateral littering my mailbox confirms that Tuesday 08 June is indeed California’s primary election: I’m buried in the noxious stuff. So far, our mixed-party household has received fifty-eight pieces of propaganda from candidates, special-interest ballot measure sponsors and for-profit slate-mailing scoundrels who promote whichever campaigns are willing to pay (one of the truly heinous banes of democracy … as are many candidates). And every piece of the dogmatic toilet paper is urging us to vote as its propagators see fit.

For your disgus— ah, entertainment, I’ve selected a few choice examples.

Let’s start with Joel Anderson. A seated assemblyman, Joel wants to fill Fallbrook’s termed-out State Senator Dennis Hollingsworth’s homophobic shoes. The candidate sent us nine pieces of propaganda explaining why “Liberals Hate Joel Anderson.” He apparently considers this a stellar endorsement.

Yet, I’m a liberal and I don’t know enough about him to hate him. Yet.

I reviewed his pieces for some redeeming virtue and read that he “took the fight to terrorists.”

“Cool,” I thought, “he’s a vet, just like my dear husband!” But I searched and searched, and Joel reports neither military service nor battlefield contractor status, which means he in fact did not see the armed conflict most reasonable people would have interpreted his message as suggesting.

I feel jilted, Joel. You try to woo me to your camp and then you spurn me with deception. I hope no one who really did take the fight to the terrorists gets her or his battle-hardened hands within reach of your wannabe-warrior neck. But, because I’m not such a bad person for a liberal, I’ll help you out a little by hiding your misleading brochures from my infantryman husband. After that, you’re on your own, buster. Time to atone.

Oh — there is a clincher: Joel quotes Glen Beck, whom he mistakenly identifies as a talk show host, but who is actually an alien televangelist fleeing scandal in a galaxy far, far away. Glen says of Joel, “I wish there were more people like you. Thank you, sir, for getting it.” I wonder who got what from whom. …

As for us, we got plenty of propaganda from Proposition 16 sponsors — enough to paper the powder room. At first glance it seems an easy “Yes.” Who wouldn’t want to “Protect Our Right to Vote” — the propaganda’s claim?

The power industry, that’s who. The very manipulators who brought us the California energy crisis of 2000-2001, the perpetrators of ever-increasing utility rates exceeded only by their profits, want voters to believe that they are trying to help us.

But, if you read the teensy print — that plain-black stuff they bury at the bottom of their star-spangled propaganda so folks won’t notice it — you’ll see that Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) is financing Prop 16. This is because PG&E wants to prevent public utility providers (as in “nonprofits”) from competing with them (as in “profit pigs”).

What is most gross about Prop 16 is that PG&E is usurping our citizen ballot initiative process to protect their monopoly from public utilities. That is, this huge honking corporation is using the very tool the voters adopted in 1911 to stop big business from controlling our state, and PG&E’s Prop 16 would amend our California Constitution to require a two-thirds vote for public entities, such as municipalities, to become energy providers.

And there’s one more dirty trick PG&E pulled: They slapped a bunch of Democratic candidates’ mugs on a slate-mailer endorsing Prop 16, which the Democrats oppose. Although it happens every election cycle, this is really bad form, buckos. PG&E, you are dirty rotten mendacious bastards! And even I am surprised by who agrees with me — check out this list!

Next to PG&E’s cynicism, the slate of four Christian attorneys who want to be judges seems almost mainstream: Craig Candelore, Harold Coleman Jr., Larry “Jake” Kincaid and Bill Trask are on a mission from God to run for San Diego County Superior Court judgeships.

Under the red-white-and-blue banner of BetterCourtsNow.com, the four candidates seem, well, red-white-and-blue. What they fail to reveal to site visitors is that God told them to run. You’d think with an endorsement like that, they’d be blasting it to the heavens.

Could it be they are suffering a crisis of faith? But sins of omission are still sins, so we can only hope they let God out of the closet before Tuesday. Or maybe they’ll call on their backer, El Cajon Gun Exchange, to nudge voters out to the polls.

There are a couple other little agenda items they also fail to share on the website, including their ultimate goal of a Christian takeover of government at every level and their opposition to abortion rights and same-sex marriage.

That’s a hell of an agenda, boys, but I have to warn you: My invisible friend told me not to vote for you all.

We’ll have to wait until Tuesday night to see whose deity wins. In the meantime, I can at least be thankful for the free TP.

Love,
K-B

The League of Women Voters operates a great searchable source of nonpartisan candidate and ballot measure information: SmartVoter.org.

©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

During the 2008 presidential campaign, a dear former colleague railed at me in rather frothy email verbiage when I took a written poke at Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Although he eventually calmed enough to offer a sort of apology, I never heard from him again. If he’d just given me an opportunity to explain, I could have, well, I don’t know, explained — explained the humor to him. Ye gods, the thing was titled “You Can Put Lipstick on a Fib”! You’d think that would be a dead giveaway to take what follows with a grain of giggle. Jeez!

What can I say? We Gressitts are prone to humor; it’s a powerful coping mechanism — the darker the better. When Mother was still driving, she joked about keeping Father’s ashes in the trunk in case she needed extra traction to get up her hill in the winter. It took the sting off her sorrow. Years ago, when I joked with the ER doc suturing my battered face (I suggested a bribe of homemade shortbread in exchange for his working some magic to prevent scarring), he joked right back. The levity got me through the procedure without grabbing a scalpel and preventing my now-former husband’s dick from having any more fun with jane. Although I have to admit, after recovering from the assault, I found the doc’s response really depressing and I was pissed with both of us — and I never made him that damn shortbread. We need to train ER staff not to enable victimhood. Right after we train women to duck faster.

See what I mean? It is unrelenting.

Just the other day, a friendly reader questioned the sincerity of true feminists joking about breast cancer. She was gracious, and her comment made me wonder how many folks might have taken offense at the joke I had published. But if you’ve never been close to cancer, you might not understand how fabulous a death-defying tool laughter can be — even a wise-ass smirk can prove useful. And I find California senatorial candidate Carly Fiorina (the subject of the joke) and her politicking in the realm of breast cancer as worthy of a one-liner or two as is staving off the angst of alien-possessed boobs. A breast cancer survivor herself, Fiorina used the Susan G. Komen for the Cure fund-raising page to make a pitch for her campaign for U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer’s seat (watch the video):

Cancer strengthened my faith. Cancer strengthened my family. And I come through all of this battle, not only with it behind me, but with a renewed determination to make the most of my life. And for me, now, that means to try and make a difference for the people of California, in Washington, D.C. My doctors have given me a clean bill of health. They’re actually extremely excited that I’m running for the Senate. I feel great. I’m raring to go. And the good news is, after chemotherapy, Barbara Boxer isn’t very scary anymore.

How deliciously crass! My feminist friend’s response to Fiorina’s play of the breast cancer card? “Maybe Barbara Boxer could have an iffy mammogram.” Spoken like the funny breast cancer survivor she is.

Albeit only one tool, humor can help sustain us through the most atrocious assaults on our sensibilities; for example, Arizona’s continuing effort to incarcerate, forcibly repatriate or otherwise excoriate anyone who isn’t, well, you know — sshhhh — one of us white folk.

Leaders of the erstwhile Barry Goldwater, Sr. state are afraid that public schools are vulnerable to the ravages of ethnic solidarity among the dark hordes — why, those heathens could rise up and vote them right out of power! But traditional social studies curricula were cleverly crafted to induct our young ones into the still-pervasive doctrine of Manifest Destiny, to keep white folk on top, literally and figuratively. Hence, alternate curricula — any study of perspectives other than that of the white landed gentry — threaten the status quo and, consequently, comprise what Arizona’s good old boys and gals fear: “courses or classes that either promote the overthrow of the United States government or promote resentment toward a race or class of people.” Bear in mind that Arizona’s legislators had to strike “Caucasian” from an earlier version of that statement — at least in their minds, if not in print. That’s ethnic cleansing Arizona style.

And Arizona’s recent purge of teachers with heavy accents or bad English grammar strikes another blow, but to an unexpected target — the South. Those damn Yankees are at it again! This prejudicial policy renders teaching positions in Arizona unattainable to any progeny of my paternal ancestral home, Gressitt, Virginia. In this kudzu-creeping hamlet of clamdiggers, crabbers and valiant volunteer firefighters, one might hear the likes of, “Aah juss mahoov mah deeah suhee mama eeanduh reeuhl naahs dubahwahd.” For those unschooled in Virginia Backwaterese, that translates as “I just moved my dear, sweet mama into a real nice doublewide.”

After a good laugh, I’ll shed a tear for Arizona’s lost opportunity for cultural exchange with the unabashed South and hope that the state’s educators are devious enough to do some fast “Find and Replace” in their curricular materials, to pacify the ethnic-phobic.

Thank the goddess there is enough idiocy out there to keep us endlessly entertained, which is a nice segue to Sarah Palin.

She’s ever rich fodder for comedy, but I’m not sure who is more laughable — Palin, for assuming the title of feminist at an anti-abortion gathering, or the feminists who jumped through various and contorted rationales to lend it to her. God forbid they should deny the nomenclature to a powerful woman and thereby risk their own standing in the Sisterhood! What they fail to recognize is that power, position and number of Facebook fans do not a true feminist make, any more than poofy sleeves, a calico Bible cover and “God Hates Fags” signs stacked in the garage make you a true Christian.

Now, what Palin doesn’t understand is that no feminist would advocate putting women’s reproductive decision-making in anyone’s hands but the women’s. We’re good with our hands; we don’t need any help down there from no guhmint.

Yeayah. … That doesn’t really translate.

Love,
K-B

Want to learn more about immigration?

Read “The Devil’s Highway” by Luis Alberto Urrea (2004, Little Brown and Company) and watch “Lone Star,” written and directed by John Sayles and featuring Chris Cooper and Elizabeth Peña.

— My thanks to Professor Silverio Haro, CalState San Marcos and Palomar College, for the great recommendations.

©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

On California’s senatorial race

Feminist 1 (but not Sarah Palin, newly self-proclaimed feminist): Carly Fiorina is playing the breast cancer card.
Feminist 2 (nope, not Sarah Palin either): Maybe Barbara Boxer could have an iffy mammogram.

On aging ears

Feminist 3 (still not Sarah Palin): He can’t hear anything anymore.
Feminist 4 (maybe Sarah’s not really a feminist?): Sounds like paradise.

The beach is warming up on Camp Pendleton, Camp Del Mar

Read more Fallbrookisms…

The Vampires and Demons Edition

Sookie Stackhouse Southern Vampire Series author Charlaine Harris on writing

Effortful – writing’s really hard. Read everything you can and then put your butt in the chair and write. That’s all there is to it, but that seems to be what most people can’t do.

The Demon Sheep of California

First, Carly Fiorina, the ousted Hewlett-Packard CEO who is trying to steer her parachute toward Barbara Boxer’s Senate seat, went after her Republican primary opponent with the demon sheep of Fiscal Conservative in Name Only?

Then the California Democratic Party decided to have their own bit of sheepish fun with Demon Sheep: Mutton on the Lamb.

I’m all for mutton madness — it’s a lot more fun that traditional mudslinging.

Read more Fallbrookisms…

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Super Bowl’s Slippery Slope

Oh ye gods! A Focus on the Family advertisement spurning abortion — during the Super Bowl? What is CBS thinking in allowing such an ad during the preeminent U.S. televised sporting event? This is no time for polemics! There are beers to drink, chips to dip, high fives to slap, manly sideways hugs to share. What has the Super Bowl come to?!

Nothing much more than it’s been since Super Bowl I in 1967.

The Super Bowl is a dandy marketing machine for the National Football League and its advertisers. The machine works because 100 million folks are willing to devote a Sunday afternoon to balls, boobs, and clever, sexist and crude ads — a list to which we can now add “dogmatic,” thanks to the abortion ad — all to the tune of $2.5 to $2.8 million for a 30-second spot.

So?

So of course CBS would run Focus on the Family’s ad regardless of its advocacy content. Of course the media corporation would make a decision based on profit. Of course, if you think political propaganda an inappropriate diversion from men hurling their hulking bodies into one another and scantly-clad gals shaking those things they shake so well, you could spurn the ad and instead follow the crowd to the kitchen for more brew, hit the head to tinkle — or write a check to National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) so they can buy their own ad next year.

Ah, what CBS has started!

Carly Fiorina for Shepherdess?

Carly Fiorina is running for something in California, but suddenly the seat to which she aspires is not quite clear.

The former Hewlett-Packard chair and CEO was booted out by her board in 2005 and trotted off with a $21.4 million payout for her failed strategy that included laying off more than 17,000 workers. Her golden parachute eventually landed her a role as financial advisor to Senator John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, which touted putting an end to multimillion-dollar payouts to failed CEOs. Oops.

Then, last November, Firorina announced her candidacy for the U.S. Senate, hoping to oust California’s incumbent Senator Barbara Boxer. Fiorina did make a wee bit of a public confession in her announcement: She hadn’t bothered to visit her polling place much, believing her vote wouldn’t make any difference. Oops.

Now, Fiorina has launched a campaign advertisement (view it below) that reveals several things voters might find interesting about her and her campaign. Read no further, however, if you are weak of heart, as some of the revelations are shocking — shocking, I say!

• Fiorina’s rival in the Republican primary election, former California Congressman Tom Campbell, is either a devil-eyed wolf in sheep’s clothing or the Fiorina team has an unnatural preoccupation with Bo Peep’s sheep.

• Fiorina categorizes California’s male fiscal conservative leadership as a flock of sheep. One wonders how that flock — the one she’ll rely on for help if she aces the primary — feels about her depiction of them.

• Fiorina finds “purity,” “piety,” “wholesome,” “honorable” and “true believers” worthy of some rather dark sarcasm. A bemusing tactic, given her desired conservative voting base.

• And that pedestal — the one from which the devil sheep is toppled — it looks like, well, something unmentionable in pure and pious company.

Perhaps Fiorina and her team have smoked too many of those greenbacks she snagged from Hewlett-Packard’s stockholders. Or it could be that Fiorina’s true calling is not the U.S. Senate but YouTube — as a producer of political satire. How refreshing, if we’ve actually found a public figure who can laugh at herself.

And that is a far, far better thing to imagine than the prospect of a campaign season befouled by bizarre mudslinging from Fiorina.

Save the Pigs

U.S. Senator Richard Shelby (R–Ala.) pulled a fast procedural maneuver on Thursday, putting a blanket hold on all presidential nominees (70 or more) — until he gets the billions of dollars he believes are his state’s due. His ploy has been lambasted as a self-serving, obstructionist pork hunt, particularly for the delay it will cause in Department of Defense appointments.

It is a rather blatant display of chutzpah, conspicuous amid a pomposity of politicians. But Shelby has never been coy: He’s the fickle Democrat who leaped to the other side of the aisle the day after Republicans gained House and Senate majorities in 1994. This time, however, he has outdone both himself and precedent.

The combination of Shelby’s elevated pork lust, Fiorina’s sheep obsession and CBS’ evangelists touting life over abortion amidst men battling to feminize each other in opposing end zones, brings to mind Cicero’s commentary, “Any man may err, only a fool persists in error.”

Let’s see which, if any of the three, self-defines according to Cicero.

©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

* For a fabulous collection of terms of venery, read An Exaltation of Larks, by James Lipton.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Outside your local grocery store, a fellow wearing a bedraggled Santa Claus hat stands by a folding table festooned with political slogans. As he fumbles five or six clipboards, you’re thinking you wouldn’t want him dating your daughter, and then he thrusts a clipboard into your path.

“Wanna sign this initiative petition to protect local voter control?” he asks. “Or how about stopping sexual predators? Or religious freedom — do you support religious freedom? Just sign here.”

Religious freedom is a little iffy these days, with all the folks who demand it for themselves while they condemn the rest of us to sizzle in hell in perpetuity. So you look a little closer and read that what the initiative would actually do is exempt Bible-based speech from California’s current hate speech restrictions. This means all those charmers from Kansas’ Westboro Baptist Church, who haunt military funerals and communities across the country with signs that read “Thank God for Dead Soldiers,” “God Hates Jews” and “God Hates Fags,” could incite violence in California with their epithets — sans repercussions.

“Well, now, that’s misleading,” you say, “and gross.” But the petitioner is busy pushing a clipboard at someone else.

So you take a look at the petition for stopping sexual predators. Those bastards sure need to be stopped — with extreme prejudice. Problem is, you start reading it and discover the sexual predator language is a front for the next in a long line of failed biennial attempts to force parental notification of abortion on pregnant teens and their healthcare providers.

“You know, you should be calling this what it is, a parental notification proposal.”

“Huh?” he replies dully.

You decide you wouldn’t even want him dating your worst enemy’s daughter. Nonetheless, you check out the local voter control initiative, because you suspect you and your fellow bucolic burg dwellers couldn’t do any worse than the state legislature. You ask the dullard how local control will be accomplished.

He says, “Uh, it’s complicated. Er, I don’t know, and I have to keep moving — I get paid by the signature.”

“If it’s such a good idea, can’t we get volunteers to collect signatures — Fallbrook volunteers from among Fallbrook voters?” you ask. “And how can you represent something you don’t understand?”

Now you’re a little suspicious, so you ask who’s paying him to gather signatures, who’s funding the campaigns, and he says, “They don’t tell us that stuff.”

“Well, I have a right to know, don’t I?” you mutter as he ignores you to body block the next shopper before he makes it to the grocery store door.

And this is much of what’s wrong with California’s initiative process.

The grassroots citizen initiative was adopted in 1911 in response to the common perception that rail and land barons controlled the state legislature, neglecting the needs and will of the citizenry. The California Constitution defines the electors’ right to propose and vote on constitutional amendments or statutes, bypassing the state legislature and going directly to a vote of the people. “Direct democracy” it’s called, and though it’s a highly valued concept, it has degenerated to a big business that caters to moneyed special- and single-interest groups (often from outside of California), whose proposals range from the cynically ridiculous to the ridiculously complex. In a recent interview, former State Senator Lucy Killea, who worked on an unsuccessful initiative reform effort while in office in the 1990s, explained why reform is so important.

“It’s become commercialized. You’re not getting people voting for an initiative because they want it or because they’re informed on the issue, but because there’s a young man at the grocery store with a whole list of things. Some of these people will have eight or nine different measures — some of them even opposing each other. It’s really too bad. It’s become a business for people; they treat it as a business. It’s the buying of votes.”

To Killea’s point, the examples reflected above are actual initiatives: the Local Voter Control and Government Accountability Act — enjoy reading its 10 pages of statutese; the Parental Notification, Child and Teen Safety, and Stop Predators Act, the introductory letter for which is signed by a John Smith without an address, a probable cover for Jim Holman, publisher of the San Diego Reader, who just can’t leave it alone; and the Religious Freedom Act, intended to “secure and perpetuate the blessings of Almighty God for the people of California.” You can read more about this initiative’s sponsors at YesJesusIsLord.org.

These initiatives are only three of a whopping 91 submitted to date to the California Attorney General’s Office for 2010 elections. Of the 91, four have qualified for the June or November 2010 ballots by acquiring the necessary number of valid signatures, four failed to qualify, three were withdrawn, 37 are in circulation, and the rest are pending.

In the meantime, those initiatives primarily funded by something other than grassroots supporters have incurred costs that are making money for members of the initiative campaign elite, commonly known as the “Initiative Industrial Complex” — political and campaign consultants, attorneys, list brokers, and firms that specialize in petition signature gathering, media, polling, public relations and direct mail. Most often, only those initiatives wrung through the complex actually make it to the ballot — the others don’t have the money to pay for such success.

But wouldn’t it be nice if success actually looked like volunteers — from California — who believe in the issues they’re promoting; independent judicial review of proposed initiatives — to weed out the idiotic, hateful and deceitful initiatives; online petition signing — to cut out at least some of the Initiative Industrial Complex money grubbers; and full disclosure of initiatives’ sponsors and contributors.

Until that vision is achieved, beware what you sign.

Although, as luck would have it, there is an initiative-reform initiative coming to your grocery store soon, the “Grass Roots Initiative Reform Act.” But if that one’s too esoteric for you, you could always consider the 2010 California Marriage Protection Act. It’s not another Prop. 8 diatribe against gay marriage; it is writer John Marcotte’s satirical response to the proposition. He has jumped into the “protect marriage” revival tent by proposing to “safeguard marriage from the evils of divorce.”

Marcotte’s campaign website is laugh-out-loud funny — but yet another scream for initiative reform.

Love,
K-B

©2009 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

(Westboro Baptist Church image via a Creative Commons license. Marriage graphic courtesy of RescueMarriage.org.)

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

This health-care insurance reform thing is confusing. Are you confused? I’m confused, oh yeah.

Of course, I don’t really have time to actually read anything about the House’s draft legislation. I mean, what do I know anyway, you know? So I could sure use some sage counsel on this from someone more knowledgeable than I, someone with a better-informed perspective of all the complexities of health care insurance policies and finance, reimbursement schemes, pre-existing condition stuff, policy cancellation terms, the whole shebang. Yeah, this requires a real brainiac, a Solomon, a, I don’t know, someone such as, hmmm, well, let’s take a look at who all is out there offering up their insightful opinions of this critical issue. … Could it be … Chuck Norris?

Naw, not the kung fu guy? Yes, indeedy, the kung fu guy. No kidding.

So, what does old Chucky have to say?

Welp, in his townhall.com column, “Dirty Secret No. 1 in Obamacare,” Chuck tells us that he “decided to research the reasons so many are opposed to Obamacare to separate the facts from the fantasy,” and in the course of his research he found some “dirty little secrets buried deep within the 1,000-plus page health care bill.”

Now first, I have to say, I am so impressed that the guy read the thing. Whooee! That’s a whole lot of time away from pounding on bad guys. Second, I am so grateful that he read it so I don’t have to! And I’m sure I can trust his interpretation because, well, you know, he’s like famous — and a good guy. And good guys don’t lie. Politicians lie, but not good guys, like movie star types.

So I want to know what secret he discovered about this critical health-care issue that the darn politicians tried to hide from us, buried in the 1,000 pages of that, um, well, it is a public document. But no matter. They must have known hardly anyone would read it. Thank God for Chucky!

And what exactly did he find? Well, get a load of this: The government wants to go into people’s homes and usurp their parental rights over their children’s care and development. Can you believe it? The dirty rotten scoundrels! Bastard’s all! And I do feel quite right using the male, non-inclusive nomenclature, because that’s what Chuck does — no pandering to political correctness there. So what if we have a few women in Congress.

Anyway, Chuck writes that in sections 440 and 1904 of the House bill (Page 838) — and I must say my hat is off to the guy for honing in on this specific issue, among the whole 1,000 pages, and for sourcing the references so helpfully — the bill describes a program for educating new parents about early childhood development. In the home, no less! That’s so intrusive, so darn presumptuous, as though parents don’t innately know what’s best for their own kids, like we aren’t born with a deep understanding of “age-appropriate child development in cognitive, language, social, emotional, and motor domains” and “skills to interact with their child to enhance age-appropriate development.”

Why, this is an outrage, a blight upon the very freedoms our forefathers fought and died for as they birthed our great nation! (There were no female forefathers, obviously, because the gals didn’t know nothing about birthing no nations). Bravo to Chucky for bringing this most dirty of secrets to our attention, because this sort of thing could lead to the downfall of our nation. It’s just a disgrace, an abomination, I say!

Oh, except, hmmm, in my conservative little town of Fallbrook, California, our conservative little school district, which continues to preach abstinence only, despite our burgeoning population of teen parents, offered a very similar parent-education program when my daughter was a toddler. In fact, we allowed one of those “government agents,“ as Chuck describes them, into our home, and we adored her. She taught us some wonderful techniques for encouraging Katie’s readiness for school. It was, well, it was a great program, and it was free and we were grateful for the experience.

Oh, Chucky, I’m so disappointed. You happened to pick on the one thing in the House bill that I actually know something about, and you are so, so wrong. Bummer, man!

Now what do I do? I sure can’t count on Sarah Palin, with her bogus caca about senior citizen death squads, taking out the disabled — or was it disabled death squads taking out the seniors? I don’t remember. I just know better than to trust that nitwit to explain anything. Besides, she’s pretending to be all scared about “health-care rationing,” as though she’s not aware as a former governor that we already have that in so many ways. Of course, she quit that job, which might explain her ineptitude on the health-care issue.

So, I guess what it comes down to is I have to read up on this stuff myself, so I can form my own darn opinion about health-care reform instead of relying on someone else with her or his own nincompoop agenda. Jeez, what a bitch.

At least President Obama understands that I have a life. He put up a handy-dandy website, healthreform.gov, where I can get some for-real information about what he has asked Congress to come up with and the progress being made. This, despite Republican efforts to shoot down reform in a blaze of failure — in hopes of keeping Obama from being reelected — and despite the railings of folks who are lucky enough to have good health insurance coverage, both of which groups really kind of suck, because they don’t give a good goddamn about the millions of people whose insurance companies dumped them when they got really sick, who were denied coverage for life-saving treatments, who are not insured, who went bankrupt trying to pay for their health care, who died for lack of treatment! That’s the real bummer.

You know what would be really cool? It would be really cool if Chuck Norris and Sarah Palin and all the other naysayers would actually take a look at the president’s website and let us know if they agree or disagree with his goals:

• Reduce long-term growth of health care costs for businesses and government

• Protect families from bankruptcy or debt because of health care costs

• Guarantee choice of doctors and health plans

• Invest in prevention and wellness

• Improve patient safety and quality of care

• Assure affordable, quality health coverage for all Americans

• Maintain coverage when you change or lose your job

• End barriers to coverage for people with pre-existing medical conditions

Declaring their support or opposition would put their opinions in an interesting perspective, because, if they agree, then they should be helping make reform a reality instead of trying to undermine it. And if they disagree, then isn’t that telling!

Yeah, that would be way cool.

Love,
K-B

©2009 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

(Note: Chuck Norris photo from raindog808 via a Creative Commons license.)

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

It is summer in Fallbrook.

I know this because the blue jays have stopped attacking other birds’ nests; no more freshly desecrated eggs stop me along the path to the laundry shed, to wonder at the efficiency of the swarming ant waste haulers. Instead, the ants now attempt to haul away the contents of my kitchen.

I know it is summer, because the brilliant fragrance of our spring has faded into the organic rot of drops beneath our trees.

A Fallbrook lychee

Exotic fruits from our microclimates abound, while we are admonished to conserve water, from which we filter the resentment of distant rivers that nurture our arid land.

Sere heat ripples the winding road ahead, browning our verdant hills and valleys, and summer is indeed upon us.

Our little Main Street plays host on hot Friday nights to appropriately-aged tipplers and classic cars, tasty tidbits from the kitchens of local eateries, chilis competing to produce the most fiery reaction (to hell with the County that rules our unincorporated land with disregard, insisting it’s all happening on Main “Avenue”).

We have poolside barbeques and enjoy the fruits of Mexico’s cheap labor in our primly landscaped yards, while we spout unpruned slurs at those who dare drop brown babies in our fields — “invasion by birth canal,” one local yokel dubs it, surely afflicted by the delusion of sunstroke.

We hose the season’s dust from our air-conditioned vehicles, as large and as greedy as our wishes, while we decry the raucous herd of military helicopters overhead that prepare to battle terrorists — so we can feed our cars and have our apple pie, too.

The Citizens Crime Prevention Committee takes a break from hosting meetings of mostly white citizens who believe criminals are mostly brown aliens.

Unlicensed adolescents bemoan our boring-ass-redneck-nothing-to-do-town, while the Youth Prevention Group advises adults not to let our jaded teens take to drink. (Do you suppose they indeed want to prevent youth, with all its dratted problems — those darned hickeys, acne, toilet-papering the latest heartthrob’s front yard?)

Yes, I know it is summer in Fallbrook, when our overheated grove dogs chase their fleas with frenzied abandon, because it is campaign season for our honorary mayor, a thirty-six year staple in the Chamber of Commerce’s bag of fund-raising tricks, and the boldest of our local business owners step up to chase votes in the form of dollars. Politicians nationwide might give heed to Fallbrook’s electoral process.

The Chamber declares it a “pure and clean system: The person who turns in the most money to the organization wins.”

But our candidates stand no chance of claiming a seat among an august body of decision makers. Instead, they vie for the opportunity to represent the Chamber at every ribbon cutting and mixer, every dedication and grand opening in town; they compete for voters’ dollars to lend their mayoral lips to every new concoction whipped up to heal or thin or moisten or calm or simply sate with the essential bounty of our groves; they eagerly sell votes to friends, family and countryfolk — $1 each or 6 for $5 — to secure an honorary ride in a parading car, with smile in tow and those little sideways beauty queen waves. And they do it all with passion, making not a single vaporous promise, but pitching their civic assets — and cleavage assets when they’re available.

The honesty of Fallbrook’s system is refreshing. If only our candidates for elected office would be so forthright — just write a check for the seat of choice, and the biggest contribution wins. We couldn’t do any worse than the crop of rotting incumbents who serve us now, and it would help pay down the nation’s deficit.

From Mark Sanford, the unfaithful governor of South Carolina, who repeatedly practices his mea culpa press conference — with cameras rolling — to Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska, who would be presidential except even in her quitter’s speech she can’t embrace coherence, to Marion Barry, the former mayor and current Washington D.C. councilman, who awards a contract to his lover and tries to rescind it when she dumps him, to Pedro Espada, the New York State Senator, who sells his party affiliation to the highest bidder (if he’d just apply the concept to getting into office!).

So how about it? Transfer all those brimming campaign coffers right to the U.S. Treasury; scrap all the consultants and pollsters, all the phone banks and direct mail houses; and just give us the candidate with check in hand — décolletage, a nice bonus — and get on with the business of governing.

Love,
K-B

©2009 Kit-Bacon Gressitt