Obama: Democrats are Wimps that is Why We Lose

Have you ever been at a party with Liberals talking politics?

I am often at parties with Liberals and the thing that comes over loud and clear is no one in the room has ever punched anyone in the mouth.

Liberals used to have tough guys, Robert Kennedy, Cesar Chavez, Richard Daley, Lyndon Johnson, Walter Ruether, Harvey Milk, Harry Truman and many other Liberals were tough and they were not afraid to fight for what they believed in but somewhere during the 1960's these tough guys all went away and what we got was Professors, Poets, Artists, and Volvo Drivers.

As I look back at Obama's first year and also one year where I have been unemployed I just get angry. It is almost like Herbert Hoover , he lost in 1933 and then during the Hundred Days he came back to challenge FDR and convinces everyone that the Depression is FDR's fault. Why is that Obama and Democrats have not driven home that they won a huge election and they have the right to govern and change America.

Because they are wimps.

The other day my Republican father who by the way gets Medicare and Social Security and VA Healthcare complained that Obama is a Fascist ( he watches a lot of Fox News). I wish Obama was a Fascist at least something would get done and the Republicans would be shut up. What Obama really is is a professor.There is nothing wrong with professors but the Republicans are armed with lead pipes and we are armed with what.... irony and metaphors?

The reality my Wimpy Democratic friends is that 51 Million Americans are either out of work or victims of joblessness in their families.

These people are angry-- I am angry-- and instead of fighting for us and blaming the people who caused this-- that is 30 years of Free Market economics and the Robber Bankers that have not created a job since 1999-- Fox News and the Conservatives are allowed to blame President Obama and no one says or does anything about it. Can you imagine FDR or LBJ allowing this to happen? May be Michael Moore should run for President?

Democratic wimps get some backbone before we have President Sarah Palin .

Limbaugh, EWTN, Fox News, Robertson & Haiti

Well the truth of our friends has been made manifest.

Rush Limbaugh does not want people to help in Haiti
because we have already paid taxes. EWTN our Catholic version of Fox News has absolutely nothing on their homepage to help
a nation that is 80% Catholic. Pat Robertson believes that Haitians made a 'deal' with Satan and Fox News's prime time programming is all Hannity, Beck and O'Reilly and little about this tragedy.

The truth is for all these folks Haiti does not matter because they have dared to one elect a former Liberation Theology Priest as president and because most Haitians are Black? Or is it something else? Why is it that the people who watch Fox News choose to ignore Haiti but want to continue to listen to the escrement coming from Fox?

It has been said by Rush Limbaugh and company that they want Obama to fail. This is completely true they want him to fail because if a Liberal who also happens to be Black succeeds how do they get power back??

I am just nauseated by them. I am nauseated as well that a "Catholic" Channel like EWTN is going along with this? I guess that the corporal works of mercy are only for those who want the Latin Mass?

Shame on them....

Catholics Come Home. To What?

catholicscomehome.org

Anyone who watched TV during the holidays could not help but see the ads by a group called Catholics Come home. The ads are vaguely like those run by Mormons and other groups inviting Catholics who are fallen away to return to the Church and others to investigate Roman Catholicism. They invite people to investigate the Catholic Church as a spiritual home.

My reaction as a Catholic who is still observant but who is very dismayed by our Church was to ask "come home to what?"

Recently I was talking to an active female member of my home parish in suburban Chicago about the state of the community. My home parish was a wonderful place to grow up. It was the place where I learned about justice and the service to God's people. It was the kind of place where Catholics be they conservative or liberal felt at home.

When I wanted to be a Catholic Lay Volunteer I needed to raise money- and my Parish gave double the amount needed. I have nothing but good memories of the place. It was home to me and always dear but things have begun to change.

One of the areas of my home parish that was always excellent was adult education. There is this Sister who runs that program and every year major speakers came and gave missions and classes helping people learn about 2000 years of Catholicism. This is not the kind of Parish that has much patience for pictures of Jesus that talk to Polish nuns or bleeding Madonna's. It is the kind of place that Vatican II imagined when they talked about the Church in the Modern World.

To contemporary conservative Catholics the way my home parish was run is an affront. In fact

anyone who dares to hold progressive Catholic views is an affront to their interpretation of what the Church stands for. As a result whole segments of the Catholic Community are anathema. If you like the books of Thomas Merton you are not "really" a Catholic. If you think Dorothy Day and the Catholic Workers have it right you are a communist. If you think that women and gay people should be accepted and empowered you are 'dangerous'. If you dare to organize yourself against the Church's refusal to realize that pedophilia is not the result of "Homosexual Predation" as was asserted on EWTN (The Media/TV Megaphone of these Catholics) but rather the result of a stunted and perverse view of women and sexuality you are anathema.

Slowly but surely the Conservatives have driven out people. Cities that used to be predominantly and culturally Catholic like Boston are today a memory because of Pedophilia. While Cardinal Law lives in luxury in Rome still a Cardinal of the Church.

The promise of the Second Vatican Council has been traded for a Church that refuses to realize that Women, Homosexuals, Divorced People and others need to be empowered and respected. The Church refuses as well to realize that those millions of people who have left the Church may be in places where they have more power and do not have to worry about their Children.

I write this because I was told that at my home parish a speaker was not allowed to speak because conservatives complained that the sister invited used Reiki Massage in her therapy practice and this is not 'healthy'. She also dares to believe that God thinks women should preside at the Eucharist. So amid all the unhealthy attitudes using Chinese medicine techniques and believing that women are equal to men merits not being allowed to speak?

At the same time being a pedophile merits protection and "care" ?

John Paul II is a saint according to them but the fact that he and Pope Benedict ignored the pedophilia scandal here in the US and in Ireland is unimportant?

Conservative Catholic's hatred for the Second Vatican Council and everything that came from it from Archbishops Oscar Romero and Dom Helder Camarra to Guitar Masses has created a toxic environment that does not feel much like home. Deal Hudson, a Catholic Right winger who, by the way, was accused and admitted to molesting a student of his at Fordham has called all these people I love "Fake Catholics".

In fact what has happened over the past 20 years is that conservatives have decided that ignoring pedophilia as the past and current Pope have done, and love of the Latin Mass is more Catholic. Pluralism, openness and the open window letting in the fresh air of the world that Pope John XXIII tried to bring in is fake Catholicism.

So I say... Catholics Come Home.... To What??

GO IOWA BEAT GEORGIA TECH

The Poetry Foundation and the Poetic Class- My First Rant of 2010

http://www.poetryfoundation.org

It only took two days of 2010 for me to find something to rant and froth at the mouth about.
When Ruth Lilly first gave her millions to the Poetry Foundation I listened as 'avant garde' poets made comments about John Barr and Christian Wiman and the Poetry Foundation. There were complaints and challenges so many poets told me "I will never work with them" "they are reactionary" well that all changed when the money and fame began to flow and today they all write things for the Poetry Foundation site or magazines.

Poetry in the the United States is the most insular art form where poets are mostly interested in impressing those who are part of the Poetic Class elite. That Poetic Class includes people like Marjorie Perloff, Ron Silliman, Caroline Bergvall, Eileen Myles, and Matthew Zapruder who were featured in a recent "poetry over the past decade article on the Poetry Foundation Blog".

Poetry in the US is the only art form where there is little audience and no public to sell to and as a result the Poetic Class decides what is good and bad. The Poetic Class once scorned the Poetry Foundation but today they are merging well.

It is important to understand that in The Poetic Class system that elitism is central to being taken seriously. Basically what Charles Bernstein once called Official Verse Culture is alive and well and it appears that the Poetry Foundation is trying to become its college of cardinals. For all the Blogs and all the "new media" real access to poetry and the levers of critical power are held by academics and members of the Poetic Class.

A strong criticism of the Poetry Foundation's Decade in Review is that in all of these short articles there was nothing about global poetry. How is it possible that one non American poet was not included? Surely there are international poets who matter?? Eliot Weinberger in his great talk at the Poetry Project in 2003 said the following that still applies here...

"How many of those 8000 poets have ever been to a Third World country (excluding beach vacations)? How many think it worthwhile to translate something? How many can name a single contemporary poet, not living in the U.S., from Latin America or Africa or Asia?"

"After thirty years of self-absorption in MFA and MLA career-mongering and knee-jerk demography and the personal as political and the impersonal as poetical, American writers now have the government we deserve."

This is still the best summation of American poetry over the past 10 years. Poets who are unconcerned about the greater world and who are writing to serve the Poetic Class and become loved within that structure. If all the money that the Poetry Foundation has is now to be in service of that Poetic Class Structure then poetry in the next 10 years will become even more irrelevant.

It is important as well to not delude ourselves that "multi cultural poetry' in the US is Global Poetry it is not. A Hispanic or Asian origin poet writing in the US is a unique expression but it is not the river of poetry being written globally and needs to be defined as what it is an immigrant literature.

In China there are poets who are sitting in jail cells for writing poems critical of their government or environmental degradation. there are poets in Iran who are persecuted for their work and one who were killed . There are poets in Brazil whose work is quoted in major media yet none of these poets were deemed important for these articles.

But the musings of a small poetic elite in the US was deemed important. In the end no one in the general US really cares about the musings of the Poetic Class . Poets should be prophetic and challenge their society not become part of a Poetic Class.


Lets hope that in 2020 that more American poets are reading globally and that the Poetic Class includes more poets and critics from places other than Brooklyn, Palo Alto, Berkeley and Iowa City.