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WilliamPitt
WilliamPitt's Journal
WilliamPitt's Journal
August 16, 2012
By William Rivers Pitt
Truthout | Op-Ed
Thursday 16 August 2012
Have you ever wondered what's under the bottom of the barrel? I found out on Tuesday morning, when I cracked open the fetid wasteland that used to be the Washington Post. There, in the Editorials section, was an article titled "Senior Citizens' Financial Woes Are Exaggerated", written by something called Charles Lane.
The timing was interesting. Just as I read that headline, I heard the sound of clinking and clanking coming from the front of my house. I knew what it was immediately: one of the Can People was making her daily pass through my recycling bins. Years ago, the town I live in provided every home with a pair of large blue bins for residents to properly separate and store their recyclables for collection. Every Tuesday afternoon, a big yellow truck rumbles by to empty them. All week long, my neighbors and I fill these bins with paper, plastic, cans and bottles, and every day, the Can People come by to pick the bins over and collect anything worth five cents at the redemption center in the supermarket down the hill. More often than not, they push battered shopping carts to hold what they can find, but sometimes they have only a garbage bag slung over their shoulder to carry the load.
There are no young people doing this, nor even middle-aged people. The Can People are old men and women, stooped, wearing worn-out clothes and fraying shoes as they rattle through my refuse with gnarled, arthritic hands. Some are White, some are Asian, some are Black; can-collection, like poverty, knows no ethnic boundaries. I wave to them when I see them, but they seldom respond, either because their eyesight is too poor to make me out as I stand on my porch like a lord, or because they are too ashamed to acknowledge the fact that I see them, and thus see what it is they must do to survive.
When I heard the clinking and clanking on Tuesday morning, I remembered a brace of ginger ale cans I'd neglected to bring outside. Hurriedly, I tossed them into a bag and brought them to my porch. She was bent into the blue bin to the waist, and when she reared up at the sound of me, there was fear in her eyes. Maybe she thought I was going to shoo her away. Maybe that kind of thing happens a lot. I came to the railing, extended the bag of cans to her, and she took them without a word. Her face was a delta, a map of time itself, and she could not bring herself to meet my eye. She placed the bag of cans in her shopping cart, and I watched as she clattered her way down the sidewalk to the next set of bins.
When she was out of sight, I went back inside to read what Charles Lane had to say about how easy old people have it in America...
The rest: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/10933-beneath-the-bottom-of-the-barrel
Beneath the Bottom of the Barrel (about a WaPo article attacking elderly Americans)
Beneath the Bottom of the BarrelBy William Rivers Pitt
Truthout | Op-Ed
Thursday 16 August 2012
Have you ever wondered what's under the bottom of the barrel? I found out on Tuesday morning, when I cracked open the fetid wasteland that used to be the Washington Post. There, in the Editorials section, was an article titled "Senior Citizens' Financial Woes Are Exaggerated", written by something called Charles Lane.
The timing was interesting. Just as I read that headline, I heard the sound of clinking and clanking coming from the front of my house. I knew what it was immediately: one of the Can People was making her daily pass through my recycling bins. Years ago, the town I live in provided every home with a pair of large blue bins for residents to properly separate and store their recyclables for collection. Every Tuesday afternoon, a big yellow truck rumbles by to empty them. All week long, my neighbors and I fill these bins with paper, plastic, cans and bottles, and every day, the Can People come by to pick the bins over and collect anything worth five cents at the redemption center in the supermarket down the hill. More often than not, they push battered shopping carts to hold what they can find, but sometimes they have only a garbage bag slung over their shoulder to carry the load.
There are no young people doing this, nor even middle-aged people. The Can People are old men and women, stooped, wearing worn-out clothes and fraying shoes as they rattle through my refuse with gnarled, arthritic hands. Some are White, some are Asian, some are Black; can-collection, like poverty, knows no ethnic boundaries. I wave to them when I see them, but they seldom respond, either because their eyesight is too poor to make me out as I stand on my porch like a lord, or because they are too ashamed to acknowledge the fact that I see them, and thus see what it is they must do to survive.
When I heard the clinking and clanking on Tuesday morning, I remembered a brace of ginger ale cans I'd neglected to bring outside. Hurriedly, I tossed them into a bag and brought them to my porch. She was bent into the blue bin to the waist, and when she reared up at the sound of me, there was fear in her eyes. Maybe she thought I was going to shoo her away. Maybe that kind of thing happens a lot. I came to the railing, extended the bag of cans to her, and she took them without a word. Her face was a delta, a map of time itself, and she could not bring herself to meet my eye. She placed the bag of cans in her shopping cart, and I watched as she clattered her way down the sidewalk to the next set of bins.
When she was out of sight, I went back inside to read what Charles Lane had to say about how easy old people have it in America...
The rest: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/10933-beneath-the-bottom-of-the-barrel
August 15, 2012
"White House Honey Ale." Yes, Mr. Obama has installed a brewery in the White House...
...and the honey they use in the brewing comes from his wife's garden.
Full And Complete Win.
On edit: he should put "Imported from Kenya" on the label, just to fuck with the 'Baggers. 
A new White House facility: A brewery
By David Jackson, USA TODAY
The Obama administration confirmed today it has added a new facility to the White House: A small beer brewery.
Officials discussed the brewery after President Obama told some Iowa residents that he had some of its product stocked aboard the bus he's using for a three-day tour of the Hawkeye State.
"There is a home brew, if you will, at the White House," said White House spokesman Jay Carney.
It's called White House Honey Ale, with both light and dark varieties.
The rest: http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2012/08/newly-revealed-white-house-facility-a-brewery/1
August 13, 2012
By William Rivers Pitt
Truthout | Op-Ed
Monday 13 August 2012
The decision to add Paul Ryan to the Republican presidential campaign has, once and for all time, exposed the limp, rudderless vacancy that is the core essence of Willard Mitt Romney. Over the eighteen years he has been on the political stage, Mr. Romney has changed positions more often than most people change batteries. By tapping Ryan, and thus agreeing to take on the fourteen years of far-right baggage Ryan brings with him, Romney has all but announced to the world that he is folding his hand and ceding control of the party to the whacked-out denizens of his right flank.
Here is Paul Ryan in one sentence: He is an acolyte of Ayn Rand's sinister school of thought that human beings are only worth what they can earn or be sold for in the marketplace, the author of the blueprint Romney used to craft his notorious budget plan to raise taxes on 95% of Americans while cutting taxes for those who share his rarefied financial atmosphere, the latest in a long line of brigands seeking to eviscerate Medicare and make growing old in America the equivalent of growing poor again, a job-killer who wants to do away with Pell Grants in an age when educated workers are becoming harder and harder to find, a family friend of Big Oil, which explains his virulent hatred for any attempts to safeguard the environment, as evidenced by his oft-repeated claims that climate change is a giant conspiracy he says is invalidated whenever snow happens to fall, which explains his vote to overthrow the EPA's ability to regulate greenhouse gas pollution, his vote to block the USDA from preparing for climate change, and his vote to kill higher light bulb efficiency standards for reasons passing understanding, and let's not forget that he was a member of that very very very special cadre of House Republicans who signed a bill to make fertilized eggs into people so as to outlaw abortion, in vitro fertilization and many forms of birth control.
Why Paul Ryan? The answer lies in the cold bowl of pudding that is Mitt Romney's personal and political integrity.
(snip)
Since he began running for president six years ago, Mitt Romney has been hedged in by his right flank to an increasingly great degree, entirely because the man has evinced no core set of beliefs for them to cleave to or argue against. The far right has had to contend with him and his utter lack of convictions in these last two presidential elections, so they kept pushing him rightwards in the hope that he would become one of them, and like any jellyfish in a rip tide, Romney went with the flow...until Saturday, when he found himself beached on Tea Party Island.
What Romney has now in his running mate is not just a Times Square-sized billboard advertising his fealty to the wildly unpopular social and economic policies of the Tea Party right. Paul Ryan is also a watchdog serving that far-right, a guy in the co-pilot's seat who isn't going to let Pudd'nhead Mitt soil Ryan's conservative credentials with any of the undignified waffling we've seen on a regular basis from the presumed GOP nominee since he first stuck his tepid toe in the political waters back when everyone thought Clinton would be a one-termer, too. These people do not like Romney at all; he is a means to an end for them, like a condom or a wad of toilet paper. They own him now, period, end of file.
The rest: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/10858-puddnhead-mitt-and-the-great-giveaway
Pudd'nhead Mitt and the Great Giveaway
Pudd'nhead Mitt and the Great GiveawayBy William Rivers Pitt
Truthout | Op-Ed
Monday 13 August 2012
The decision to add Paul Ryan to the Republican presidential campaign has, once and for all time, exposed the limp, rudderless vacancy that is the core essence of Willard Mitt Romney. Over the eighteen years he has been on the political stage, Mr. Romney has changed positions more often than most people change batteries. By tapping Ryan, and thus agreeing to take on the fourteen years of far-right baggage Ryan brings with him, Romney has all but announced to the world that he is folding his hand and ceding control of the party to the whacked-out denizens of his right flank.
Here is Paul Ryan in one sentence: He is an acolyte of Ayn Rand's sinister school of thought that human beings are only worth what they can earn or be sold for in the marketplace, the author of the blueprint Romney used to craft his notorious budget plan to raise taxes on 95% of Americans while cutting taxes for those who share his rarefied financial atmosphere, the latest in a long line of brigands seeking to eviscerate Medicare and make growing old in America the equivalent of growing poor again, a job-killer who wants to do away with Pell Grants in an age when educated workers are becoming harder and harder to find, a family friend of Big Oil, which explains his virulent hatred for any attempts to safeguard the environment, as evidenced by his oft-repeated claims that climate change is a giant conspiracy he says is invalidated whenever snow happens to fall, which explains his vote to overthrow the EPA's ability to regulate greenhouse gas pollution, his vote to block the USDA from preparing for climate change, and his vote to kill higher light bulb efficiency standards for reasons passing understanding, and let's not forget that he was a member of that very very very special cadre of House Republicans who signed a bill to make fertilized eggs into people so as to outlaw abortion, in vitro fertilization and many forms of birth control.
Why Paul Ryan? The answer lies in the cold bowl of pudding that is Mitt Romney's personal and political integrity.
(snip)
Since he began running for president six years ago, Mitt Romney has been hedged in by his right flank to an increasingly great degree, entirely because the man has evinced no core set of beliefs for them to cleave to or argue against. The far right has had to contend with him and his utter lack of convictions in these last two presidential elections, so they kept pushing him rightwards in the hope that he would become one of them, and like any jellyfish in a rip tide, Romney went with the flow...until Saturday, when he found himself beached on Tea Party Island.
What Romney has now in his running mate is not just a Times Square-sized billboard advertising his fealty to the wildly unpopular social and economic policies of the Tea Party right. Paul Ryan is also a watchdog serving that far-right, a guy in the co-pilot's seat who isn't going to let Pudd'nhead Mitt soil Ryan's conservative credentials with any of the undignified waffling we've seen on a regular basis from the presumed GOP nominee since he first stuck his tepid toe in the political waters back when everyone thought Clinton would be a one-termer, too. These people do not like Romney at all; he is a means to an end for them, like a condom or a wad of toilet paper. They own him now, period, end of file.
The rest: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/10858-puddnhead-mitt-and-the-great-giveaway
August 3, 2012
If you harrass/berate/shit on someone in the service industry because you feel like doing it...
...you suck at life.
Period. End of file.
August 3, 2012
If your upbringing or pastor or background or whatever leads you to hate total strangers because of who they love, where they live, what they look like, how they worship or if they worship, if you have devoted yourself to an 'Us' or 'Them' mentality and refuse to abandon such poison, if you have no ears to hear, but instead choose to pursue a course of vitriol and division, here is a truth: we will break you across our knee like so much kindling. We are large, we contain multitudes, and yours is a course of dissolution and despair.
Cast aside your furious obedience. Freedom begins with a "No."
It is enough.
From:
It Is Enough: An Open Letter to the Sick at Heart
By William Rivers Pitt
Truthout | Op-Ed
May 9, 2012
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/9016-it-is-enough-an-open-letter-to-the-sick-at-heart
A few words in response to the national day of hate and chicken...
I am sick at heart - sick down to the deepest roots of my soul - of treating this as rational, as logical, as anything other than utter and complete derangement. We are in a full mess, friends and neighbors, and pretending gravity doesn't exist beyond the will of God isn't going to cut it in the voting booth from here on out. I have all the sympathy in the world for those who have been scammed, conned and taken advantage of, but I am all the way done with living in a country run by the professionally duped.If your upbringing or pastor or background or whatever leads you to hate total strangers because of who they love, where they live, what they look like, how they worship or if they worship, if you have devoted yourself to an 'Us' or 'Them' mentality and refuse to abandon such poison, if you have no ears to hear, but instead choose to pursue a course of vitriol and division, here is a truth: we will break you across our knee like so much kindling. We are large, we contain multitudes, and yours is a course of dissolution and despair.
Cast aside your furious obedience. Freedom begins with a "No."
It is enough.
From:
It Is Enough: An Open Letter to the Sick at Heart
By William Rivers Pitt
Truthout | Op-Ed
May 9, 2012
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/9016-it-is-enough-an-open-letter-to-the-sick-at-heart
Profile Information
Name: William Rivers PittGender: Male
Hometown: Boston
Member since: 2001
Number of posts: 58,179
