THE TEAPUBLICAN DICTIONARY

Posted on Huffington Post by a commenter with the screen name of Outlandish.

THE TEAPUBLICAN DICTIONARY.

CIVIL LIBERTIES, n. Unnecessary privileges that you aren't afraid of
losing unless you are a God-hating,, elitist liberal who
loves Terrorists more than your own safety.

CLIMATE CHANGE, n. Global warming, without that annoying suggestion that
something is wrong.

DEMOCRATIC ALLY, n. Any democracy, monarchy, plutocracy, oligarchy or
dictatorship--no matter how ruthless--that verbally supports American
diplomatic and economic goals.

DEREGULATE, v. To pursue greed and exploitation with a straight face.

ECONOMIC PROGRESS, n.
1. Recession;
2. Rising unemployment;
3. Minimum-wage freeze
4. One of the many reasons for tax breaks for the rich.

FAITH-BASED INITIATIVE, n. Christian Right Payoff for being on the side of corporations over people.

FAMILY VALUES, n. Oppression of women and something to be practiced by others.

FOX NEWS, n. Republican Press Office.

MODERNIZE, v. To do away with, as in modernizing Social Security, labor
laws, etc.

OBSTRUCTIONIST, n. Any elected representative who dares to question
Republican radicals on the issue of the day when they are in power.
Not a Republican protecting the rights of corporate citizens when they aren't.

OWNERSHIP SOCIETY, n. A society in which Republican donors own the rest
of us

PRIVATIZE, v. To steal the resources of the national community and give
them to private business.

SPECIAL INTEREST GROUP, n. Any members of society that the Republicans want to disenfranchise
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And if anyone can think of items to add to the list, let me know.

AN (IM)MODEST PROPOSAL

I have a modest proposal, and yes I know what Dean Swift wrote about in his essay with the same name.

We, the female citizens of the United States will submit to your invasive trans vaginal ultrasounds on one condition. Every male member of any legislature who votes yes on any bill that remotely authorizes this procedure and the governor who signs it into law must submit to a weekly prostate exam, in the legislative chamber, in public, cameras running, wearing only a sheet. Let's see what these middle aged and senior citizen Ceasar wanna be's look like without their power suits.

Do I hear a yes? I'm waaaaaaaaiting.

I'M A DOUBLE X AM I A FULL CITIZEN?

Almost all the far right candidates claim to support a smaller government. At the same time they support measures to control women’s health care and reproductive rights, while keeping women out of the discussion. At the same time too many of them want to control who marries who, even though most of us still haven’t figured out how couple A’s marriage has anything to do with couple B’s. We finally got past don't ask don't tell in the military. Every excuse in the world had been used to undermine the authority of the president, except the obvious one. He’s black.

I believe I may have finally figured out the real problem. Deep down in the darkest corner of their minds where the light never shines the WASPs and WASP wannabes truly believe that they are the only full citizens of this country. Women, minorities, gays, non Christians, or non conforming Christians are not full citizens and may not even be fully human in their eyes. So they can, with a straight face and clear conscience (in their opinion) claim that they are for smaller government, for them; while mandating intrusive government and limited rights for others. As for all the rest of us? From now on, if I don't have input on any law then frankly, I don’t feel bound by them.

MAN IS BORN OF WOMAN

And some of them have never forgiven us for that fact.

TO THOSE WHO DO GET IT.

I’m sorry I wasn’t clearer in a couple of posts I did for the blog. My frustration is not aimed those who “get it.” And Lisa, this is meant as the highest compliment, you DO get it. The frustration is aimed at a very vocal minority who don’t seem to get it.

Technically the men, and yeah they were all white men who were property owners, were only supposed to amend the Articles of Confederation. And I’ve run across a few websites that argue that they went off the reservation when they came up with the constitution. I believe they did the best they could with what they had to work with, within the beliefs and prejudices of their times. And that if they meant the constitution to stay frozen in time they would never have set up a way to amend the blessed thing in the first place.

Maybe I can compare the document to a person. You’re born, the years pass you go through the stages, toddler, child, teenager, adult, but you’re still the same person. The framers wrote a document. It was a baby. They accepted some amendments, the idea of what our constitution is grew and changed but it’s still the same constitution.

So, who am I frustrated with? Well, there are the ones who want to keep the constitution frozen in time and barely accept the first ten amendments, never mind the ones that came after that. The crucial ones seem to be the 14th that grants citizenship to anyone who is born here, the 17th that allows for direct election of senators, the amendment that allows for an income tax and although they aren’t very loud about it, the amendment that recognizes your right to vote even if you do have two X chromosomes. Some of them aren’t too happy with the Federal Reserve either but that isn’t part of the constitution. Ron Paul and his loyal followers would probably fall into this group.

Then there’s the Dominionist/Reconstructionist/ whatever group that supports designating the US as officially a “Christian” nation. The quotes are deliberate. When somebody figures out what a Christian is let me know. There have been some efforts to deflect on the Reconsruction bit. Christian Reconstructionist? No such thing.

If Bill Moyers was able to put a documentary together on the subject in the mid eighties there must be something to it. Scrap the New Testament, ignore all the religious groups that settled in the colonies except for about half the Puritans and put the country under Old Testament Law. If you don’t belong to the right church you won’t have much in the way of civil rights. Heck, some of the first splits in New England were over who had the right to vote. Male and a property owner, that was a given. The split was over whether you also were counted as a member of the church. Some folks disagreed and that’s partly how Connecticut and Rhode Island got started.

I salute anyone who had the courage and the hope to roll the dice and take a chance on the New World. Most of them “got it” about five minutes after they got off the boat. And they had a few advantages my ancestors didn’t. Most of the ships in the late 1800’s had motors so the trip took weeks, not months. After about 1920, they had radios; a ship could yell for help if got into trouble. And we already had cities built. At least the newer immigrants didn’t find themselves looking at a patch of trees and underbrush thinking, Lord I hope I can get a cabin up and some ground cleared before the snow flies.

So, again, my frustration was and is aimed at the ones who want to roll it back to the original intent. Whatever the heck that is, not at the vast majority who do get it and realize that nations grow and change but they’re still the same nation. And as Ben Franklin is supposed to have said “we either hang together or we’ll hang separately.”

PASSED TICKED OFF ABOUT TWO MILES BACK

Rick Santorum is first generation immigrant on his dad's side, bringing with him a Catholicism that hasn’t really had to learn to get along and play nice with others. The godfather of the Christian reconstruc¬tion movement, R J Rushdooney was an Armenian immigrant. And he spent most of life trying to convince people that democracy is a heresy and we need to return to the Old Testament way of running the country.

I never much cared where the president’s parents were born, this whole birther schtick is just poorly disguised racism anyway. And there’s only so much a president can do. The current congress has been doing a bang up job proving that. Plague take their miserable, narrow minded, disruptive, small government except where the bedroom is concerned, souls anyway.

I'm rapidly coming to believe that your family should have to invest at least a couple of generation¬s into the country before you can start telling us how we got it all wrong. I've traced most of my family back to seventeent¬h century New England, Pennsylvan¬ia, New Jersey, Virginia and Delaware. All those folks who braved the Atlantic in sailing ships that would fit in my front yard and part of the neighbors must have gotten SOMETHING right.” We didn't always get along, we didn't agree on everything, but we managed to hammer something out that worked fairly well for nearly two centuries. Maybe we did it by pasting over the cracks that should have been addressed a long time ago. Too bad the cracks have turned into chasms the size of the Grand Canyon.

In my wildest dreams I would never have imagined a politician like Rick Santorum getting within a hundred miles of even being considered for nomination as president. The public attitude towards the women in this country is, frankly, shocking. I thought we left Kinder, Kuche, Kirche back in Nazi Germany. To see that hydra's head over the horizon in this country is making me very, very angry.

As the title of this post suggests I passed ticked off about two miles back, passed pissed off about a mile back, I'm coming up on royally pissed off, heading for JUST WHO THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU ARE, and looking for my broom because it's long past time to clean house.

WE ARE NOT SHEEP

“Let the rightful wearer beware. From now we will be subject only to laws that we have a hand in making. We are not sheep to made mutton of by your butchers.” A northern baron to King John in the remake of Robin Hood.

To the congressmen who dance to the puppet master's tune, it's past time we showed you exactly the same loyalty you have shown us. If we truly have no hand in making laws because you dance to another's pipe then it our right to refuse to obey them. If it comes to it, we have the right to withdraw our allegiance.

WHERE ARE THE JOBS?

Image posted on a site called Americans against the Tea party. They're on Facebook. This is so spot on I just had to share.

TAKE ME BACK TO 1790 (REALLY NOT)

Some of the Republican candidates, Ron Paul especially, are really gung ho about taking the country back to the constitution as it was right after ratification.

I really should create a little banner for these entries "Danger, Jackie's thinking again."

Well, if we're going to get all original framers's intent an all that maybe we should limit the members of the debate to those who had family in the US at the time the constitution was ratified. After all it was OUR ancestors who voted to ratify (or not) in the first place. Who better to have a say in how it's interpreted now? LOL

SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE FROM THE PAGAN POINT OF VIEW

All this manufactured hoo haw over insurance companies paying for birth control for women even if the outfit they’re working for is church affiliated, got me to thinking. Dangerous I know. And it is manufactured. If the editorial in the Register Guard is accurate over half the states in the country require insurance companies to cover contraceptives. So, gentlemen, please take your outrage elsewhere.

Recently picked up a little volume on women in church history; Catholic church history so you know there is a bit of an inbuilt bias. The first is Prisca or Priscilla who worked with Paul. One of the early churches was in Ephesus, located in what is now Turkey. Ephesus was also the site of a major temple of Artemis with a well attended festival held every year. And every year the silver smiths did a land office business in little silver images of Artemis. Not content to mind their own souls, the church in Ephesus went after the pagans for their “obscene” images. The church, successfully minding other people’s business for nearly two thousand years.

Jump forward to the late fifth century. Newly converted to the Roman branch of the church by his wife Clotilde, Clovis of the Franks sets out to share the joys of his new faith with the people he rules; at the point of a sword. Here’s to you great great grand dad, four dozen or so times removed. You can choose your friends. All you can do with your ancestors is to try not the repeat their mistakes. Clovis was one of the original “my way or the highway” missionaries.

Surprising how many worshipers of the Old Gods chose the highway rather than convert, or kept as many of their old customs as they could for nearly a thousand years. No wonder the church made attending mass mandatory. At least many of the old ways did survive until they were caught between the hammer of the Reformation, the anvil of the Counter Reformation and the general you’re either with us or against us of European nation building. Even then, some folks on the fringes of Europe, the western highlands of Scotland and the western Isles, kept fragments alive well into the nineteenth century.

We don’t usually look at it from the pagan point of view, but I’m guessing that many of my unnamed and unknown pagan ancestors would have appreciated a little separation of church and state in their own time.

EVERYTHING THAT IS,

One of the shots from the Hubble telescope.

"is alive.

Life forms did not come into this world. The life forms of the earth are a natural product of the earth, as the living planet is a natural product of the living universe.

Life in any form is part of life in every form. One, indivisible. The terrestrial spark is connected to the most distant star, just as the collective consciousness of the earth is one cell in the infinitely greater intelligence of the universe.

It is said that no one can know the mind of God.
Yet we are the mind of God.
And so we dance for joy.

We dance to the music of life, which ripples and shimmers across the universe. Even in the coldest depths of space, something is dancing the dance. Something is part of the music.

Every molecule of air on the earth has its part to play in the whole. Millions of life forms dance in what appears, to human eyes, to be empty air.

Air is not empty. Air is alive.

The angels of the air sing the songs of the spheres."

Morgan Llywelyn in The Elementals

HOW WE RATE

in the Republican universe.

Michele, I filched this from your website, hope you don't mind.

This hits even harder when we take a hard look at the possible candidates for the Republican nomination. Put the whole crew together and you won't get enough empathy to fill a teensy, weensy eyedropper. Newt's off the rails. Every time Romney tries to act like a regular person he sticks his foot in it. Santorum has taken sanctimony to new highs (or lows) depending on your point of view. And Ron Paul just can't shake those pesky newsletters. Heck, they don't give a damn about us so...........