yeah, after hemming & hawing & bullshitting for four years, joe biden paints obama into a corner by straight out saying he supports same-sex marriage, and BOOM obama “evolves” overnight.

while i’m glad he finally came out, couldn’t he at least have told the truth about his “evolution”? spared us all this bullshit about his daughters and his faith?

something like this would’ve (finally) showed us that obama actually had a pair:

I want to apologize to every GLBT American for the fact that I played politics with your rights, with your lives, during my first term as President of the United States. I know that some of you have been unable to see your loved ones on their deathbeds, or watched as your partner was deported, all because you weren’t legally considered family. I know that some of you have gone and continue to go without health insurance because of the institutionalized discrimination practiced against same-sex couples in this country. I have been in favor of same-sex marriage since my undergraduate days at Harvard. Yet, as your President, I allowed fear and politicking to silence my voice. But now, thanks to Vice President Biden, who so clearly and forthrightly spoke the truth as he knew it to be, I am compelled to say, clearly and unequivocally, that I agree with him on this and, further, that I always have. Yes, politics is the art of compromise, but there is a line between compromise and falsehood, and on the issue of same-sex marriage I have sadly, until now, placed myself on the wrong side of that line. It was disingenuous to tell you that my position was “evolving” when, in fact, my position was — in my heart and mind — already quite clear. I allowed myself to maneuver around this issue, to manipulate language and show only half my hand, in order not to alienate the most conservative voters before the next election. I see now that this strategy, if I can call it that, has done more harm than good: not only to me, though it has done me harm, but immeasurably more so to you, same-sex couples in this country who have only second-class citizenship. I could have done quite a bit in the last three years to remedy that, and I did not. For that, I do not expect to be forgiven. But my “penance”, if you will, for this is that now, for the rest of my time — whether months or years —  as your President, I will do everything in my power and the power of this office to make it right.

WHEREAS there is no medical benefit derived from forcing sonograms on women who have already decided to terminate their pregnancy; and

WHEREAS  legislation mandating such sonograms has been introduced by individuals with no medical experience or training; and

WHEREAS this legislation further requires that said unnecessary procedure may only be performed by doctors or certified sonographers, an unprecedented requirement that only applies to women seeking to terminate a pregnancy;

WHEREAS these requirements are grounded not in science but in politics, and serve no purpose other than restricting women’s reproductive choices; and

WHEREAS doctors are already organizing civil disobedience and repudiating this legislation; therefore

THE LEGISLATION IS HEREBY AMENDED AS FOLLOWS:

All state-mandated pre-abortion sonograms to which the patient explicitly objects must be performed by a member of the state legislature that voted in favor of this requirements. Such legislators are hereby required to take, on their own time and at their own expense, any training necessary to become certified sonographers. Any legislator failing to meet this requirement within one (1) year will forfeit their seat.

Furthermore, no limitations on speech shall be imposed on the patient receiving the sonogram. The representative performing the sonogram shall not be permitted to wear headphones, earplugs or any other device that would impede his ability to hear the patient clearly. Such patients have the right, without limitation, to videotape or otherwise record any and all aspects of the sonogram procedure while it is being performed and to use, share, publish, and promote such video in any and all available forums. 

this is what these goddam right-wing control-freaks sound like to me.

i’m not satisfied with the latest message from Carbonite.

buried in this sideshow-to-the-sideshow is something that i believe is critical to getting us — politicians, corporaticians and everyday citizens alike — back on track in the good-old but bad-new US of A: making public statements and public choices in accordance with your own true values, whether for better or worse, come hell or high water. people don’t need focus groups to tell them right from wrong; companies shouldn’t need them either.

the message from dave friend that i addressed at length in a post earlier today, has since been updated. giving credit where it’s due, the new information that Carbonite is, in fact, pulling its ads off of limbaugh was posted as an update above the earlier blog entry, which remained as it was. Carbonite gets honesty points for that: i fully expected that yesterday’s post would have been pulled, or overwritten, altogether.

however, this attack of transparency only serves to illustrate the larger, more insidious dishonesty in Carbonite’s handling of the RushMouth affair.

yesterday, it was

I too am offended and very concerned about his comments.

today it’s

No one with daughters the age of Sandra Fluke, and I have two, could possibly abide the insult and abuse heaped upon this courageous and well-intentioned young lady.

i’m sorry, but you just can’t get there from here. it’s not as if any actual news came out between blog #1 and blog #2; the same excremental rhetoric continued flushing from the potty of RushMouth, it’s reasonable to assume that dave friend had the same daughters this time yesterday that he has today.

so what changed? looks like the tipping point for Carbonite arrived after more than half of limbaugh’s advertisers publicly jumped ship, leaving only a handful stranded in the sinking business-as-usual boat that a RushMouth media buy has become.

only then did dave friend evolve from being “offended and concerned about” to “no one…could possibly abide” the insult and abuse directed at Sandra Fluke.

does that mean that advertiser trends mean more to him than his daughters? pretty unlikely. i have no reason to doubt that dave friend loves his children, no reason to think he’s anything other than a good parent to them. he looks and sounds like pretty nice guy, based on his record and statements made while he was an independent (and very successful) New England entrepreneur.

it more likely means that he wasn’t willing to take a public stand on this for fear of losing the few dollars Carbonite might realize by getting a few new customers from limbaugh’s audience (though anyone stupid enough to listen to that steaming pile of conservatism is likely also too stupid to back up their data) or incurring shareholder displeasure.

in other words, business before principles.

and why? ah, now we’re in the belly of the beast: Carbonite only went public last summer. now they’ve got shareholders to answer to, and every move must be dictated by that heartless master, shareholder value. also known as wall street.

i know what that means; i waded through its sewage in my corporate hip-boots for over thirty years. on wall street, money — and only money — talks. brand image impacts earnings, therefore brand image also equals money, therefore maximizing the brand image trumps any principles you may or may not have.

so, david friend, here are my questions to you: if Carbonite had not been, at this moment in time, a publicly traded company, would your initial response to the limbaugh backlash have been as mild? or, conversely, did Carbonite only bail out of that advertising relationship after it was pressured by shareholders to do so? even more conversely, was Carbonite perhaps prevented by its shareholders (in their board-of-directors disguise) from making the stronger statement, and pulling its ads, in the first place?

i look forward to hearing from you.

Carbonite advertises with Limbaugh, as i learned in the aftermath of this week’s GOP meltdown over Sandra Fluke’s attempt to educate the walking dead who have snatched the bodies (or at least the minds) of half the US Senate.

as a longtime customer, i left a brief message on Carbonite CEO Dave Friend’s voicemail (after getting his direct dial from the helpful souls on Reddit) inquiring whether or not that was the case. i left my phone number, though they’ve already got that, along with my email, in their customer database.

here is the formletter i received in reply:

We do not endorse political views or opinions of the companies, magazines, newspapers, TV stations or radio stations that we advertise on. We simply choose a range of programs designed to reach a broad range of people so they might hear about Carbonite. Dave Friend, Carbonite’s Founder and CEO wrote this on his blog here.

apparently, dave friend is SO fucking outraged about the way the student was treated that he is actually going to have a meeting with rush limbaugh! yep, called him and set it right up for next week.

as odious as the idea of sitting in the same room with a bag of gashole like limbaugh is to me, i somehow don’t think mr. “friend” shares my view. in fact, i think he’s a card-carrying woman-hating wingnut himself, seeing how easy it was for him to set up a one-on-one with his buddy Rush.

i’ve just instructed Carbonite to cancel my account. i did my own backups before and i’ll do my own backups again.

a word to my progressive friends: DO THE SAME. not just with Carbonite (though it’s a good place to start), but with ANY company that supports our increasingly distorted status quo.

the fuck-you masquerading as an apology that limbaugh released today is a sham and a lie, where he purposefully continues mis-stating the issue. even an authentic, heartfelt, reasoned and passionate apology would not have been enough, though clearly gives no thought to anything beyond the spin. that’s all he does is spin, that’s all most of congress does now is spin, sometimes it feels like spin is the only thing our politicans and mainstream pundits DO (besides collecting the money that pays for all that spin, of course).

i’m not subsidizing the goddam spin if i can help it. we complain that the democrats don’t fight, that they roll over too easily — and good god almighty they sure do. but what about US? you don’t like having a bought congress, a bought presidency, a corporate-sponsored life out of some goddam futuristic leave-it-to-beaver fantasy? THEN WALK THE TALK.

NO, RUSH LIMBAUGH, you can’t vilify a young american citizen from your bully pulpit, calling her names — calling her a PROSTITUTE, for god’s sake — for days. DAYS! and then say, oops, you all misunderstood, i’m just an entertainer and it was supposed to be funny ha ha. it wasn’t funny and wasn’t MEANT to be funny. there’s nothing funny about you, rush limbaugh, you are a walking, talking demonstration of exactly what has gone most wrong in this country.

NO, DAVE FRIEND, you cannot brush this off with the equivalent of “it’s just business” and bullshit talk about media buys. you either support the flaming hatred of oppression or you don’t. period. if anything is obvious in 2012, it’s the fact that there IS NO MIDDLE ROAD. not in this country. not any more.

A WORD TO SANDRA FLUKE: i apologize to you on behalf of our country. speaking truth in the House of Lies is not a walk in the park, and even though i’m pretty sure you knew that going in, nobody could have expected this much shit to hit the fan. you have handled it both honorably and adroitly; i salute your courage and equanimity under fire. america needs more people like you, and i hope the conservative freak-show to which you were subjected does not scare you away from taking a stand and speaking your mind in the future. i’ve tried to imagine how you might have felt when the eye of this shitstorm exploded into your life. one minute you’re simply a student doing a civic duty, the next minute you’re shoved to the center of the spotlight from hell with a choir of lunatics hooting and no emergency exit in sight. i don’t know what good, for you personally, will come of this; i only know that some manner of good will, a powerful good, will eventually, come.

just like i know what’s coming, sooner or later, for limbaugh and his ilk. i’m no christian, but you don’t have to be a christian to understand this:
god don’t like ugly.

Video Contest!

with my head exploding over right-wing idiocies such as the komen foundation defunding planned parenthood and the new rape-by-ultrasound-wand proposals floating through several anti-choice, anti-female red states, i wrote & recorded a song.

The New Back Alley needs a video as fierce and edgy as itself. i know that one of you has the chops to do it. so here’s the deal:

Prize: $500 cash.

Guidelines:

• no restrictions on content or form
• must have the rights to any footage or images that are used
• original content preferred; Creative Commons content (with attribution) is also fine
• feel free to incorporate text of all or some of the lyrics into the video if you like (kinetic typography rocks!) or feel free not to use the lyrics at all
• include a brief caption at the beginning with the song title (The New Back Alley)
• include a brief credits screen at the end — credit yourself for the video, of course, and credit the song as follows: “The New Back Alley / Jackie Sheeler & the Wordrock Project”
• no entry fee, though it would rock if you made a small donation to Planned Parenthood

How To Enter:

• upload your video to youtube
• put these lines in the video description: “The New Back Alley, music by Jackie Sheeler & the Wordrock Project / http://www.reverbnation.com/jackiesheeler
• put your youtube link in the comments below, and also add it to The New Back Alley page on Facebook (you’ll get an email to confirm your entry was received & met the guidelines)
• deadline to enter is March 25th
• winner will be notified by March 31st
• winning video will be featured on this blog, on the Wordrock Project site, on several Facebook pages, and on my YouTube channel

What’s the Catch?

well, at least ten people have to enter the contest. with ten videos there’s sure to be one that feels right to me. that said, if only three people enter but i LOVE one of the videos, then they’ll win. whereas if only three people enter but none of those videos are working, then there’s no winner.

winning videographer grants me non-exclusive worldwide rights to use the video to promote the song and the pro-choice effort. and of course you’ll be credited for the video production.

questions? holler back! and let your camera-loving friends know about the contest!

good luck!

gotta watch the whole thing (90 seconds). simply brilliant.

please forward WIDELY! let’s send it viral–

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OW-NadlTFIA

takes 2x longer than it should to get from astoria to city hall due to MTA total NYE FUBAR, so i don’t make it to the noise-in at metro correctional & go straight to zuccotti.

brookfield rent-a-cop politely checks my backpack for bottles. cops fairly low profile.

not too many people here at 10, couple-few hundred. an embarrassing pissing contest between two self-serving loudmouths goes on (and on) at the broadway-side staircase. these assholes make me sad, remembering the polar opposite of the energy in that exact spot during pre-eviction GAs. even after the NYPD ambush & property-theft of 11/15 there were glorious, even noble, hours and moments and days in the park (thanksgiving was a wonderful example of zuccotti at its finest).

at around 10:30 the noise-in group comes marching down broadway, banners and horns and chants to spare, and in the space of ten minutes our numbers triple. at least.

the mood’s positive, celebratory: not a rally, a party. noisemakers, lights, costumes and several big flags (both US & Adbuster-style) fluttering around the park. not much chanting.

out of nowhere, just a couple of feet from where i’m standing by liberty street, a commotion breaks out: two cops come in, knock a guy down and drag him out of the park. what for? if he was making some kind of a problem it sure was a quiet one. (someone tells me later he was “being an asshole”: if that’s cause for arrest, a couple million New Yorkers better get ready to assume the position.)

outside the barricades, two cops pick the guy up by his arms and legs and carry him (“shame! shame!”) to their wagon across the street. a bunch of people (30? 40?) jump the barricades, surround the van.

i’m holding my breath, because from here it looks like they’re gonna pull the cops right off this guy. NYPD’s hugely outnumbered, at least a thousand people in the park now, and far less than the usual number of babysitters in blue, courtesy of lady gaga tourists at times square. the cops aren’t wearing riot gear.

is this the beginning of the revolution? or the MMS-spun “rioting protestors” moment that turns the already brutal police handling of the movement into a complete KGB-style crackdown, sending us all to the newly legalized Gulag Guantanamo? i don’t know what i’m looking at.

all the cops are on the north of liberty now, none left on our side. from here, it’s impossible to tell what’s going on at the wagon. barricades are nudged, then shoved, forward–everybody’s trying to get closer to the action. all of a sudden a whole line of barricades gets pushed straight out of the park.

a light bulb goes off: nobody’s minding the fences. first we shove them aside, one by one. then start dragging them inside, to the center of the park — not out where somebody can just put them back up.

not sure how the situation at the copwagon gets resolved. i heard they let the guy (whose name i didn’t get) go.

what i AM sure of is this:
that one suprious arrest sparked everything.

i go south, over by the coffee cart, where Occupiers are playing a tug-o-war with a few NYPD for the barricades on that side. some brookfield supervisor runs by me telling all the rent-a-cops “that’s it, we’re outta here” and they disappear like smoke.

guess who won that tug-o-war?

single barricades become long lines of still-attached barricades dragged like toy trains to the center of zuccotti. piled & stacked, they are now Occupy Wall Street’s answer to the times square stage.

when i leave around 12:30, the park is still jubilant. some people are organizing a march, but i’m out of gas, after my new-years-eve-day supreme virgo housecleaning ritual.

now i hear that not going on the march is what let me to wake up in a sparking-clean apartment instead of central booking, because NYPD spent the rest of night making retaliatory arrests.

♣

ATTENTION NYPD STREET COPS:

you are not the enemy unless you decide to be; these protests are NOT about YOU, they are FOR you — don’t  you have any idea how pro-union OWS is? don’t you know that OWS has already helped at least one cop to keep his family in their about-t0-be-foreclosed home, and that we’d do the same for you?

but no. i politely try to ask a cop a question and he says, loud, “back off! just back off!” as if i was all up in his face when i’m standing 3-4 feet away, my hands in my pockets, my voice low & friendly.

last night i hear, for the first time in … decades? people shouting “pigs” and other such slogans against NYPD — not against one officer in particular, but against NYPD as a whole. that is different. that is not the conversation OWS was having with the force a couple of months ago.

NYPD did this to themselves.

just go on dancing to bloomberg’s tune, officers. keep on turning a deaf ear to these protests, don’t bother reflecting on how the income inequality affects YOU, in YOUR life.

♣

ATTENTION NYPD STREET COPS:

here’s what the 1% has in store for you:

first they make you fix their tickets
then they prosecute you for ticket-fixing
then they take your pension.

that is always how it goes and you will not be exceptions. don’t imagine it for even a second.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLuBgzEv360

happy new year!

i’m reading the news. i’m looking at the presidential blog. i’m listening to al sharpton.

can’t find a word–NOT ONE GODDAMN FUCKING WORD–from obama about the brutal & criminal attacks police are making against peaceful protestors.

against MOTIONLESS protestors, as perpetrated by john “peppersprayer” pike at UC Davis this weekend.

against peacefully protesting iraq war veterans — first Scott Olsen, then Kayvan Sabeghi – both critically injured & hospitalized after being attacked for absolutely no reason. scott was STANDING STILL when OPD shot him with a teargas launcher and fractured his skull. kayvan was WALKING BACKWARDS WITH HIS HANDS AT HIS SIDE when OPD (again, OPD) beat him like a dog in the street with a yard-long baton, rupturing his spleen.

when did they start calling clubs “batons” anyway? they are fucking CLUBS, and they’re twice the size of the nightsticks cops had back in the day.

maybe nobody bothered to TELL the president that all this was going on? maybe now that he’s in the white house he’s forgotten how to use the web that he used oh so well when he needed our campaign donations?

peaceful citizens are beaten, pepper-sprayed, teargassed and hogtied while the whole world watches and the president gives us a blog full of BULLSHIT videos like “fighting to help our heroes find jobs” — there are no jobs. and why even bother with a “civil rights” category when the headline story yesterday — yesterday, with thousands or tens of thousands at UC Davis to protest the outrageous attack against some utterly harmless students — was this meaningless piece of crap about workplace equality.

IT’S (past) TIME FOR YOU TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT RAMPAGING, OUT-OF-CONTROL LOCAL POLICE. GROW A PAIR AND STAND UP FOR  US ALREADY!

most of us out protesting with OWS are the same suckers who knocked on doors for you a couple years back, in case you didn’t get the memo on that.

but no. your priorities are organizing an NBA-lockout fundraiser baseketball game and sending condolences over heavy-D.

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?

wake up and smell the coffee, mr. president. the revolution has started, and it IS being televised.

apparently you haven’t been watching. not *this* country, at least:

early today i ran across this note on the internet and said whoa, i have to be there — what better place to let people know about the petition to impeach bloomberg?

so i quick-fast made up a bunch of flyers and printed about a thousand business cards with the petition URL and headed over to east 79th street.

which was closed to all pedestrian traffic. closed.

obviously, bloomberg still hasn’t gotten the memo — most eloquently stated by keith olbermann at his spittle-spewing finest a couple days ago — that his heavy-handed tactics against peaceful protest are going to backfire on him EACH AND EVERY TIME.

so what did he do in response to the call for a drum circle at his place? HE USED NYPD TO SHUT DOWN THE ENTIRE BLOCK TO PEDESTRIAN TRAFFIC. steel barricades, dozens of cops.

got that?

i’m going to ask yes lab to call for a drum circle on my block and see if the whole thing gets shut down. what with us all being created equal and having equal rights and so forth. no doubt there’s a law that when anybody online says there will be drums in the street then that street must be closed down. of COURSE our mayor wouldn’t try to use NYPD as his own personal home security guards, so there’s gotta be a law somewhere that i just never heard of in more than half a century living in this great city.

the drummers went over to central park. i stayed at the barricades on 79th & madison, handing out my petition flyers & cards. NYPD officers manning that intersection were more than polite: friendly, welcoming, willing to engage in conversation, politely directing protestors to the park. it was sad to find this surprising.

when i ran out of cards and was down to my last few flyers, i went to central park (i.e., walked south to an UN-closed city street in order to go west) and the scene was fantastic! zuccotti north!

the cops over there? emphatically UNfantastic. fast forward to about :40, which was when a cop i’d never even laid eyes on smacked me the small of my back & said, “How many times I gotta tell you to keep walking?” then proved COMPLETELY incapable of providing an explanation as to why it is suddenly against the law to Stand Still On 5th Avenue:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NA-r60jRZk

bloomberg? fuck this. fuck you. the world is changing, whether you like it or not. get out of our way.

god bless their geeky hearts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzbTlY1uOJk