Category Archives: Activism

Journalists and Anchors need to do their jobs too.

@andersoncooper Do your job to correct panelists! Twice last night you let two Repubs (some would call them a cracker and an uncle Tom) use the diminutive “Democrat party.” This is a thing! #doyourjob  The capital D name of the party is DemocratIC.

There is more to being a journalist than just fact checking and putting on a pretty face.  It’s not just congresspersons who need to do their jobs right.

Dubya, Limbaugh & Gingrich have been pulling this stunt for years and need to be checked on it, lest we do the same to them.  Don’t let them disparage progressives with this pejorative. Words are powerful and created by humans for a reason.

Follow me on twitter @haydennetdotcom.

Indivisible – Stay and Fight

My late mother has a home in Calabria, Italy, that is still in our family, but I have chosen to fight for the country where was born, even though I could move to Europe (where I lived twice) at a moment’s notice and legally become an EU citizen and resident with permission to work because of my mother’s citizenship when I was born.  
 
“Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda”
 
Former congressional staffers reveal best practices for making Congress listen. 
 
 

White people in the Midwest should only get One Vote too

I want to live in a democracy (I’ve lived in two other countries that are, but not the United States).

I just signed a petition to Donald Trump, The United States House of Representatives, and The United States Senate: Amend the Constitution to abolish the Electoral College. Hold presidential elections based on the popular vote.

I don’t feel that European-Americans, aka white people, who choose to live in forsaken parts of the country where they think they can be entitled to 1.5 votes each should be rewarded for choosing there.  Don’t get me wrong, living in fly-over country is just fine and that’s their prerogative, but they cannot expect a reward of their votes to count for more than one person. The result of the electoral college has ONLY been proven to be — and by design, it is — to give white people (especially with means) more than one vote per person. This is why I oppose undemocratic methods of voting for the leader of the free world and this is how the PREDATOR in chief was elected.

Boycott Time Magazine

In addition to RJR, Nabisco and Kraft (tobacco owned), my personal boycott of trash-mag/tabloid approaching Time Magazine and anything Trump has to do with will be happily added to the list.  How dare they capitalize on the minority vote recipient as “Man of the Year” for his bombast, racism, xenophobia, fascism, islamophobia, misogyny (all words that have been heavily searched for online this past year) as if he is an icon, as if he is not a gloating bigot and an admitted sexual assaulter, justifying it by his concocted “celebrity.”

How am I letting Time magazine know about my disdain?   I’m blogging about it, for starters.  We should all vote with our wallets. Regardless of the precedents of putting infamous people up on there to sell ads in desperation, extolling a man who is already gloating about this specific cover with no doubt the most flowery of articles, is how this demagogue got elected by a minority of voters by the pandering media (and yes, I’m talking about the LIBERAL media mostly).  Who voted for him?  Well demographically in particular the swing voting white people in the Midwest who are entitled to a vote and a half based on their geography and an antiquated undemocratic elitist-based system that the USA still has in place since the 18th century.

Post Election Depression

Mom dying this year was hard enough, but then the election and two friend committing suicide has made this a very bleak year indeed.

Sometimes music helps me cry, even if it’s hard to believe the lyrics of an amazing performance like Ledisi’s cover of What a Wonderful World, which takes my breath away.
 

 Likewise, the performance by Alex Newell with a trans choir makes me cry EVERY time, especially when you hear his unworldly last note.  This performance alone deserves an emmy!

I also burst out in tears listening to the lyrics of a song I’ve known for many years, My Grown Up Christmas List:

Do you remember me?  I sat upon your knee
I wrote to you with childhood fantasies
Well I’m all grown up now, And still need help somehow
I’m not a child but my heart still can dream
So here’s my lifelong wish, My grown up Christmas list
Not for myself but for a world in need
No more lives torn apart, That wars would never start
And time would heal all hearts, And everyone would have a friend
And right would always win, And love would never end, no
This is my grown up Christmas list
As children we believe, The grandest sight to see
Was something lovely wrapped beneath the tree
But Heaven only knows, That packages and bows
Can never heal a heartached human soul
What is this illusion called the innocence of youth
Maybe only in our blind belief can we ever find the truth?

We Don’t Live in a Democracy

I’m seriously renewing my efforts to pursue the dual Italian citizenship I am entitled to after the nightmare of an election we had.  I have no choice but to give this pig-adent a chance, but the question of the harm he will do to this country (especially to those who voted for him) is only “how much?”  It is going to hurt our entire economy that had just started to be picked up by progressive policies.  Mark my words.

Orlando Shooter

No need spreading his name further, or allowing him to drag any religion or sect through the mud, but this closet freak was called out by me the moment I heard the news of his choice of venue. I do NOT accept the media’s interpretation of his going to Disney specifically during GAY days, and going to the club at least a dozen times before to be “surveillance” visits (emphasis mine).  He was looking for gay men to have sex with, to get drunk out of his mind against his father’s wishes because he didn’t have the social skills to find a boyfriend.  Just as he had been doing for YEARS (even before his first marriage to a woman) on those gay hookup sites/apps, he also was not doing “surveillance” or “investigation” for his suicide by cop.

Unfortunately his extreme familiarity with the club was probably why he was able to hold up in the bathroom with hostages and be so sadly efficient in killing more people than any other lone gunman in American history. What a legacy. What a way to prove to his homophobic, intolerant father what a gay-basher he was, instead of the deeply disturbed self-hating faggot he didn’t have the balls to be. His father is literally bragging about how his son couldn’t possibly have been gay because of where he chose to do this, so another loser drank the kool-aid.

Speaking of falling in line before thinking, these NRA cronies are still using their uneducated masses about the law and the 2nd Amendment without any interpretation by SCOTUS over centuries. Even the suggestion of controlling large magazine ammunition puts their panties in a twist.  Lying with statistics and worrying about their next armament purchase so they can fight against the US Military (the largest in the world, which no one can explain how these militias would have a chance against), just makes me laugh. Yet those born with the most privilege in the country (whites) are 100% of these die-hard self-deputized militias.  How’s that working out for them?

During his rampage he called 911.  He was so inarticulate about “them bombing his country,” he didn’t even know how to distinguish between the Sunni and Shiite extremist groups that he purportedly allied himself with. It still didn’t take last-gasp ISIL any time to take credit for his actions, even if it was embarrassing for them to have to admit that one of their so-called heroes lowered himself to going into a gay venue.  Lest we forget he was born in New York, lived in Florida, and probably never even went to Afghanistan, where his parents are from.

Never before was a ISIL attack so specific as to target a gay establishment. Why? Because gay sex is alive and well (and plentiful) in oppressive societies where women aren’t even allowed to walk down the streets by themselves. Remember Yassir Arafat and his beard of a wife in France who he never lived with and only married when he was near death to cover up the speculation about his sexuality and AIDS diagnosis? This is just one tiny example.  The muslim/arab world is not unique in its quashing of love between people of the same gender, but so help me if someone from ANY country contacts me without a face picture. I have been fighting for gay rights with pro bono work, including as a volunteer board member of an international gay parenting organization, for years.  That doesn’t make me a hero, but that should prove that I chose to take a different direction when I came to the realization as a man with a child and going through a divorce that I was going to have to grow up and deal with this.

We kiss in solidarity with the injured and fallen in Orlando. Here’s to not being closeted, bigoted and hateful like the monster who perpetrated this act out of his own insecurity.  His father contended that the shooter seeing men kissing one time in Miami caused this. Sounds like this failure of a parent has a lot to learn about his scummy offspring.

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Too Soon, Scalia?

I don’t think you have to have a law degree (as I do) to be OUTRAGED at the suggestion that the Constitutional MANDATE that the United States President (who happens to be Black), appoint a supreme court justice with 11 months left in office and that the U.S. Congress fulfil its Constitutional mandate to seriously consider nominees, which it should do in good faith.  If the judicial committee of the Republican majority Senate does not step up to the plate, not only should their constituents be outraged, as I am, but they should all be IMPEACHED.  As a legal scholar and strict constructionalist of the Constitution, Scalia would be turning in his newly dug grave if he had caught wind of this.  I’m sure he would be all over this if it wasn’t serving the conservative cause, so let’s not use their far right’s love of his retrograde opinions smoke the glass here.

To the Curb, Kasich

Maybe if Kasich didn’t try to sell himself as the only “reasonable Repub” and then a few days ago make a dick move to defund anything to do Planned Parenthood in Ohio, he would have had a chance at placing above the other crazies on his side of the aisle. Like the rest of his desperate party members who are trying to rehabilitate the party, he is obviously not above pandering. Timing is everything and he benefited from the economics of his Democratic president. That’s something that other lower politicians like Giuliani also never gave credit to. In his case it was Bill Clinton who started sending money back into the cities.

Trayvon and Cory

TrayvonMartinHooded
Still numb from hearing about Cory Monteith dying in Vancouver BC (where I was a month ago, myself) when I was in Europe, and the verdict in the Trayvon Martin murder trial.  Let’s hope people learn from these lessons (i.e., getting help for addiction and repealing these Draconian “stand your ground” gun laws in states like Florida).  From what I’ve heard the jury doesn’t feel like Zimmerman should have gotten away with murder, but because of the crappily way the law is written, he was acquitted.