I was reading an article on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and his "girlie men" comment. Check it. Shwarzenegger's 'Girlie Men' LIne Under Fire.
What interested me is not that he said something in a failed attempt at being hilarious and endearing and ended up reinforcing the fact that he is a sexist pig, but the part that people aren't really talking about and it seems to be gaining popularity in the Republican Party.
 
" If they don't have the guts to come up here in front of you and say, 'I don't want to represent you, I want to represent those special interests, the unions, the trial lawyers ... if they don't have the guts, I call them girlie men," Schwarzenegger said to the cheering crowd at a mall food court in Ontario.
I love it that the Republicans are saying the same thing that the Democrats have been saying forever about catering to special interests. Is it such a bad thing to cater to the special interests? I guess it depends on the special interest. As Arnie states the horrible groups that the dems are giving into are unions and trial lawyers. the unions that are your policemen, your teachers, your hospital staff, your firefighters. Those democrats should be ashamed! Unions are the bastards that fight for fair wages and proper working conditions for the union members. Essentially, they fight for the right of the members not to be fired for asking for a better quality of life and for the public, thats you and me, to have civil service people like firefighters and teachers that are not overworked or understaffed.Trial lawyers are the guys who go after the major corporations like the tobacco companies or the HMO's that try to make or save a buck at our expense. Yeah, fuck them. It's better to cater to the special interests that the Republican Party caters to: the oil companies, the tobacco companies, the pharmaceutical companies. Fun party people.
The Republicans also have started to say that the democrats are trying to rewrite history. I know, I laughed too. After King Bush forced us to go to war on the notion that Iraq had WMD's. Now it is coming out through the 9/11 commission that Iran allowed several of the terrorists to pass through there, although it is not clear whether they had prior knowledge about the attacks. Does this mean we are going to go to war with Iran?
US Probes Possible Iran Links to 9/11.
Bush had this to say:
"I have long expressed my concerns about Iran. After all, it is a totalitarian society where free people are not allowed to exercise their rights as human beings."
I am having dejavu. First will come the reported link to 9/11. Then will come The Colin Powell Show live from United Nations Plaza. Then will come our president saying, fuck the UN, we have to invade preemptively. Then will come an invasion, a draft, and the deaths of thousands of people, American and Iranian. It will be great business from the Republican Party and their special interests. What I would like to know is how many terrorists that have caused a violent attack on a country have passed through our borders, have lived in our country, have had American educations or jobs. If anyone knows, please pass on that information to me.
Also the Federal Marriage Ammendment failed. Na-Na-Na-Na-Na. The Republicans also said that the Democrats are trying to fill the courts with "activist" judges. I personally prefer the kinds of judges that believe in civil rights then the kinds of judges that try to tell me what to do with my uterus, the kinds of judges that don't believe in evolution, the kinds of judges that believe women don't get pregnant from rape. (You can search my archives to read about that particular reference.)
I do believe that there are Democrats that cater to special interests and are just as bogus as there are Republican politicians. I said it. What gives me hope is that there is growing opposition within the Republican party and there is an interesting article on commondreams.org. A Penchant for Canceling Elections.

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Tom's Petition!

Today I am home waiting for my bathroom ceiling to cave in because their is a horrible leak from the upstairs shower and the staff of my co-op apparently don't think it is as much of an emergency as I do. Is it bad when the ceiling starts dripping and gets mushy?

Anyway, I welcome the time off from my shitty job because I have to say, I hate it there with an intense passion I often reserve for Hitler or those OnStar radio commercials that make me bawl like a baby. There is only just so much one person can take. Since being a receptionist isn't my career, I feel that as a day job I should be able to come in, do my work and then leave with enough energy and time to do the things I really want to do with my life. This job doesn't permit that. I am surrounded by negative people that suck the positivity out of me. I don't want to say they are ignorant either because really they are not. They just choose the path of least resistance at that moment without foresight into the potential outcome from their actions or inactions. It then creates something to complain about and like Garbage sang, they are "Only happy when it rains."

that's not me. I wonder if the nature of this blog might make me seem like a negative person when really I am quite positive. I like to help people because it makes me feel good. I like to look for solutions and to do things in an organized way. This is not rewarded when you work for a corporation because then everyone wants to know who you are trying to impress, why you think you are better than everyone or they get you to do all of the work while they take all of the credit. It's utter bullshit.

This is not a long rant on how much I hate my job. I know I am lucky to have one to hate. I am actually perplexed on whether I should stay or if I should quit. I wasn't born with a silver spoon in my mouth and I have to work for a paycheck. But I don't want to be a person that drags their feet to work just to make a buck. I want to enjoy my life to. I don't know if that's possible. I don't know anyone who truly loves their job. It is work after all. There has to be a better way of looking back on these years and not feeling like I have wasted myself and my talents on a company that wasn't worthy of me in the first place. I know a lot of people in their twenties that are coming up against this brick wall. I have written previously about it. I am not afraid of working hard, I am afraid of hating my life and myself and becoming trapped. I am afraid of having low expectations. I am afraid that I will start to look at companies that offer health insurance that take up half of my paycheck and think that its okay. I am afraid that I will lose the fight that MAKES me hate this job because I have settled into the routine, into the monotony, into the depression. I am afraid that this life will have meant nothing to anybody including me.

I haven't decided if this fear is more comfortable than the fear of taking a chance and letting fate decide. It's easy to settle for the crappy jobs that one knows will be horrible because it is the path I know. To do what I love, to try to succeed and possibly fail even though success is scarier to me, it makes my head spin. Some might say, well with all that is going on in the world how can she possibly be so preoccupied with something so trivial. Well, because if I am not happy and confident in what I do, how can I possibly effect change in the world? How can I face people when I am miserable and tell them to rise up and break the chains that bind them when I am bound like a slave to an immovable boulder, trying to carry it up a mountain. How can I save others when I cannot save myself? The toxicity of my environment will kill my spirit and then I will become part of the apathetic masses that stare at their televisions simultaneously numbing themselves and praying to feel something, anything, just to remember what it felt like to be alive again.

In closing, I would like to leave you with the warning that the elections might be postponed in case of another terrorist attack. What this tells you is that President Bush is planning to go on vacation around October/November and hope for the best. US Mulls How To Delay November Vote In Case Of Attack

P.S. I am going to see Prince in concert tonight!

Democrats were dancing in the streets because John Edwards could potentially be our new vice president. I have to be honest with all of you. The thought of John Edwards as vice president gets me more excited than the thought of John Kerry. He reminds me of the tree that helped Merry and Pippin in the Lord of the Rings. He made the right decision because a Kerry-Gephart ticket would have made me lose hope that we can take back the white house this election. The New York Post reported that Gephart was going to be the vice presidential choice, which leads me to believe one of two things. Either they guessed at what Kerry's decision would be and they were unlucky or they were trying to throw the public off. They are a right wing newspaper, so you never know what they were thinking.

According to the New York Newsday, President Dubya said upon hearing of the nomination, 'Dick Cheney can be president.' This apparently was his way of dismissing Senator Edwards' skills and experience. Okay, what does that mean? I pondered on it for more time than I would like to admit. I think it means that Dick Cheney has so much experience and skills that he could be president, he is just that gifted. Does that mean that somehow he feels his own skills and experience are superior to Dick Cheney and that is why he is president right now? He might, he talks to God you know. Maybe he just meant to prove that the amount of experience that Dick Cheney has in politics is vastly greater than Senator Edwards and on that I have to agree. What we have to ask ourselves come election day is which matters more- quantity or quality? Sure Sen. Edwards has only had six years in the Senate, but he has done great things for North Carolina. Dick Cheney has managed to continually fuck us over. He has spent many years perfecting ways in which he can make himself richer and set up a system so that the divide between the haves and the "have nots grows into the Grand Canyon. As President Bush stated in the film Fahrenheit 911, the have-mores are his base. He and Cheney have been very loyal to them, especially since the beginning of the war on Iraq. In fact, so loyal that this is the first war time era in which there was a tax CUT, not an increase in American History.

Some of the great things that Senator Edwards has done for North Carolina are what irks President Bush the most. He has continually blocked conservative judges from being appointed to the federal judiciary. Listen, I am all for freedom of speech, obviously, but some of the people that Bush appoints say things like:
"Women should be subservient to men" and "Pregnancy results from Rape about as often as it snows in Miami." I’ll give you a moment to process that. While you do, please process the fact that President Bush has stated repeatedly that the jury is still out on evolution.

In this article in the New York Newsday, Bush Dismisses Edwards in South Carolina Speech, Bush states, "I'm going to carry the South because the people understand that they share—we share values." One must wonder exactly what values they are sharing, given Bush's track record of oppression and appealing to his base. The values of being on vacation forty percent of your presidency when we are supposedly fighting a war on terrorism. I also love when Republicans call Kerry and Edwards liberals, like that is supposed to be some kind of insult. Maybe I am too much of a liberal myself to realize what a blow to someone's reputation this might be. I personally think that they need to go ultraliberal. They need to motivate the masses and pick people up again the way that Kennedy did and the way the current president of Brazil does, despite the fact that he hasn't produced any quick results to end the poverty.

I have heard that Edwards is a great orator and I look forward to any debates he may have with Dick Cheney. Although I have heard a rumor that Bush might drop Cheney and call McCain as his VP. That explains why he is doing the campaign trail for Bush, doesn’t it? He is probably hoping that 4 years of washing the devils back will turn out in a Presidential race of his own in 2008, one that would be backed by the Bush family and the CCC- Corporate Christian Crusaders. I am not saying that McCain is a card carrying member. I just think he is playing his cards right in this game, this silly political game. I happen to like McCain, despite his being a Republican. Just saying that makes me cringe at my own partisanship. However, I loved the way he went after the truth like a ravenous wolf for the 9/11 committee. I like the way he speaks the truth. I am just expecting all of that to end now that he has hopped in to bed with King Bush.

I finally have stepped into the year 2004 and I now get Internet access at work. Expect more postings now that I can write while I shuffle paper and fake enthusiasm.

By now I hope all of you have seen Fahrenheit 9/11. I saw it opening weekend and I was overwhelmed by how many of the shows were sold out or filled to near capacity. I was also shocked to see how many elderly people had come to see the film. When I think of revolution, I don't necessarily think of this generation. However this is the group of people most likely to vote. This is the same group that worries about things that my generation is yet to ponder, Medicare, prescription drugs, social security benefits, etc. This is a group that lived before cable t.v. and video games rotted our brains. They (gasp) read books and walked and went outside to play. They weren't all fat and lazy the way we are now. I don't really want to come down on my generation. But there is something that happens to you when you raise a family through two world wars and when you grow up in the depression that strengthens you, makes you not shy away from hard work and choose the path of least resistance. It's the children of this generation, the baby boomers that fucked us all up.

Moving on, I think that the film was very skillfully filmed from an aesthetic point of view, politics aside. I especially loved the music and the beginning where the credits rolled and we see various sunshine makers of the Bush Administration getting prepped for television. I cried during the parts on 9/11, as did many in the theater with me. I wondered if it was because we were all New Yorkers. I wonder still if anyone can feel what we felt that day, to be locked down and trapped here with all tunnels, bridges and roadways closed for better or worse. I wonder if people could feel the emptiness that we felt as we watched the pillars of smoke billowing from where the two towers had once stood. The fear. The shock. The grief. This movie made me feel that in a way that I had not remembered for quite some time. Then to see the mother that lost her son in Iraq, it was difficult. Not as difficult as the scariest moment of the film: seeing John Ashcroft sing a song about soaring eagles that he had written himself.

When I see Ashcroft, I feel sorry for him. I used to feel nothing but anger but now I feel almost a sadness for him. Look into his eyes. He is terrified. He is the most terrified man I have ever seen in my life. I bet if I jumped out of a closet and screamed "Boo!" he would shit himself and then die. His eyes are slightly glassy and they dart back and forth too often like he is scanning the room for the enemy. Since he is our chief justice guy, he dictates according to his own psychosis. Fear of women, deny them rights. Get their medical records, see what they've been hiding from us. He had a gallbladder operation, which I have written about previously, and I think all of that bile that couldn't be processed by his body was not only from hatred but from an inproportionate amount of fear. This is what happens to you if you are filled with hate and fear. You get an infected gallbladder. Watch out, America. Whereas if you are just filled with hate, like Dick Cheney, your own heart refuses to support your body and you get a pacemaker. If you TALK a lot of hatred, like Farakkhan you get cancer. Look out Bill O'Reilly, next time you call for the assassination of Michael Moore (Hello, FCC, are you listening?) you should go for a prostate exam, get your PSA checked out. If you are a special kind of duplicitous evil, you get Alzheimer's Disease ala Ronald Reagan and Charlton Heston. Soon, he will be just lucid enough to be standing in the 7-11 in his pajamas threatening the clerks to try to pry a slushie from his cold, dead hands.

Today, the super of my building told me the Iraq war started because of the Jews. The other day a woman that I worked with was shocked to find out that the US trained Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan to fight the Russians. The look on her face was insane. Like I just told her there was no tooth fairy. ( I will try to keep my personal traumatic experiences out of this blog, but I had to find the cold hard truth when I was in the first grade, which prompted me to go into school and tell everyone the awful news.) Another woman told me this weekend that welfare started because of all of the Puerto Ricans that came to this country and that made them lazy. She was Puerto Rican herself. When people talk to me like this, I have decided to stop yelling, to stop trying to be heard, and to really start listening. I have found that the best way to deal with these situations is to quietly ask why. Keep asking why. If you do then they will be forced to face the fact that either one, they are just repeating something they have been taught or heard on tv, or two that they are making assumptions and have no fact. Revelation ain't easy, so be prepared for more anger then you would have gotten had you just yelled right back at them.

I have been doing extra work this week. My company has started their India Transcription program. Look, I'm not made of stone people. I love new technology. I love the way I can upload the transcription recordings before I go home at night and the letters are in my email when I arrive at work because of the 12 hour time difference. I do feel a line has been crossed however. I don't like being all nationalistic and saying they are taking away American jobs. I just feel that the more private corporations outsource, the more we are becoming a country that just lives here, we don't work here. They sent the manufacturing jobs away, then the white collar tech jobs, now they send transcription away. But why stop there? I work in healthcare and there are alot of jobs that can easily be outsourced. Think long and hard about your job and see if it is really necessary to this country. For example:

1- 911 Service. This is a giant call center. Why do we need to have this service provided in this country? They can do this from India too. And like at Dell or other tech companies, the Indian call center operators can give themselves fake Americanized names so you think that the help is coming from your local precinct.

2- Medical Receptionist- I am a receptionist at a large doctors office. With the new e-voting technology all we really need are ATM-like machines that can take all of your information on entering the office and a giant sign that says now serving number etc., can flash so you know its your time to see the doctor. Not quite outsourcing, but it sorta falls into the category of fucking people over.

3- HMO Nurses and Doctors. Do you have an HMO? When you go to the doctor, they have to precertify CT Scans, MRI's and other tests of that nature. Why have these call centers in America? They have educated people in other countries, I know the accents throw people off, but all of that can be done outside this country.

4-College Professors. Online classes, baby. Who needs to leave their house and go to school? Grade me by e-mail, The OC is on.

5- Pharmacies. Who really needs an Eckerd or CVS so that we can by the latest harlequin romance when we pick up our prescription of Valtrex? Not me. It's cheaper to get your drugs in Mexico or Canada anyway. If it is an emergency and they can't FedEx it to ya, ask the doctor for samples, you know they have them, the drug reps bring it to them when they are stuffing them with free lunches and handing them free pens and post it notes. It's such a racket you would think the mob was involved.

6- IRS worker. Okay, maybe that crosses the line. But I guarantee you that the people in India and Russia can add, and if we are outsourcing for the Iraq war, why not the IRS? The second largest "allied force" in Iraq are private contractors, a.k.a. mercenaries. Can you just imagine accountant mercenaries? Dressed all in black with a pocket protector filled with pencils? A holster with a calculator on the left and a bottle of white out and a stapler on the right?

If you have any other suggestions, send them to me and I will post it for the world to read.

There is one job that the US is providing for in abundance. That is the US Army. They need people so badly, that they are calling up RETIRED and DISCHARGED SOLDIERS to come back and fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. Army to recall former military members. According to CNN, "Any former enlisted soldier who did not serve at least eight years on active duty is in the Individual Ready Reserve pool, as are all officers who have not resigned their commission. The Army has been reviewing its list of 118,000 eligible individual reservists for several weeks in search of qualified people in certain high-priority skill areas like civil affairs."

Can you imagine if you resigned from the army, you have a life and a family, and all of a sudden you get a call that you have to go to Iraq? Are you fucking kidding me? This is a draft in sheep's clothing! For anyone who didn't believe me that 4 more years of Bush meant a draft of your sons and daughters, look at what is happening now! They will take away your husband or wife and next year they are coming for your kids. Fuck you very much.

Finally, I am sorry it has taken me this long to write. It's not that I don't want to write and relieve me mental constipation and frustration, I just have a job that sucks the life out of me and sometimes all I can do is come home, eat dinner and watch Teen Titans.