The bow that shook the world

Actually it shook very little outside the Fox's den other than the behinds of the Wingnut Obama haters when President Obama did the traditional Japanese equivalent of the European handshake with the Emperor of Japan. Inside the borrow however, it was immediately dubbed the Bow-Gate in the tired old idiom of "let's get 'em back for what they did to Nixon."

Yes, we've all seen pictures of Don Rumsfeld bowing and shaking hands with Saddam Hussein, and we've seen too many pictures of George Bush lovingly caressing the Saudi Royals and all but making out with Prince Bandar -- not to speak of the Andrea Merkel supergaffe. What we haven't seen, except on blogs like The Reaction, is Richard Nixon bowing to Mao Zedong as though he were the Emperor of China.

Fox Folk may have short and selective memories, but the Internet remembers. To give him due credit, Nixon's little bow opened up an era of detente, increased cooperation and a liberalization of human rights in China. The internet remembers.

Neither a borrower nor a lender be

And he said unto them that stood by, Take away from him the pound, and give it unto him that hath the ten pounds.

-Luke 19:24-

Once upon a time there were people who would lend you money at high rates of interest. We called them loan sharks and we put them in jail if we could catch them. We had usury laws to protect the public from being forced into ruinous transactions. We were just inches away from Marxism.

Then came the deregulators who told us that it was toxic government interference and was depriving us of our "freedoms" to apply the same laws to that class of supercitizens known as corporations and so now we are free to borrow at rates Don Corleone wished he could have charged. Sure, some states jumped in and capped payday loans and the government "protected" the military from being charged more than 36%, but of course that's an outrageous assault on our "freedoms" and sure enough, the lobbyists came out of the woodwork and bought themselves a House subcommittee which went to work legitimizing loans with a 391% APR. For many in the payday loan business, that's not enough.

H.R. 1214 introduced earlier this year by Congressman Rep. Luis "dances with jackals" Gutiérrez [D-IL4] is still in committee. Yes, Luis is a Democrat, let's give credit where it's due and Luis, who rose from poor Hispanic roots in Chicago promising to help others like him is now the champion of legalized juice loans and the big banks that screw the little guy in a big way.

The congressman got into trouble last year for getting a $200,000.00 loan from a contractor for whom he had intervened with the zoning board, but I'm sure he isn't paying 391%. A competing bill from Congressman Joe Baca would prevent States from capping rates at all and would allow much larger add-on fees and charges, but the really great feature would allow you to roll over the loan indefinitely, racking up that 400% or so until you're forced to commit suicide.

Meanwhile, for the rest of us who aren't desperate enough with trying to pay medical bills and mortgages we can't afford, the Credit companies are out to protect our freedom too. Faced with having to warn us they're tightening the screws in the near future, they're tightening them now without warning. I got a letter yesterday from my friendly MasterCard folk ( I won't mention the name but it rhymes with Citibank) informing me that since I've been such a good customer for 25 years and always paid the full balance on time, they would raise my interest rates to over 20%. Well to tell the truth there was a time or two when I got the un-postmarked bill on or after the due date although the last two times they tried that I'd switched to e-bills and had documentary proof that they sent the bill too late to be paid on time. They refunded the charges which would have amounted to nearly 100%, but I never got an apology for their attempt at petty larceny and I don't expect a letter of appreciation for my part ( and yours) in bailing them out when they choked on their own greed.

Yes, I know, when the Republicans justify their crimes by insisting the Democrats aren't pure at heart either, they don't avoid the guilt, but they're not always lying.

The unbearable madness of America

Rush Limbaugh may get his wish and what used to be a viable, if flawed democracy may just disappear into the kind of thing that used to go on in Michael Vick's back yard. Barking, snarling bared tooth and bloody clawed madness is everywhere, in the wild, outraged e-mail I got last night showing Barack Obama "refusing" to salute the flag on Veteran's day, to a new attempt to propagandize small children into supporting mad-dog mentality and bigoted mockery against liberal political figures, Jews, and gays. Even Geraldo Rivera, of all people, is calling Fox and Gretchen Carlson "preposterous and irresponsible" for insisting that trial by jury is dangerous. That may be the first time I've caught him in an understatement.

It doesn't help any more to refer the hoax spreaders to Snopes.com or FactCheck.org, since there are ten thousand web sites telling us that these sites and the facts they cite are wildly biased against the Gospel of Obamahate and never mind the unimpeachable sources they reference. Fox news? The voice of God, of course and we never question it. I don't think we have any chance to survive it.

It's chic to disparage American products. We can't make cars Americans say, but in China? They'd really rather have a Buick and the US is seen as an innovative technological leader with a competitive advantage over the rest of the world. We have the best health care we insist although our nation's capitol has a higher infant mortality rate than Sri Lanka. Socialism and terrorism are our biggest fears yet acetaminophen alone kills many times more people in a year than have ever died in all the terrorist attacks on our country while the healthiest, happiest, most prosperous, free countries offering the most opportunity for advancement are described as Socialist, third world hell-holes by people who can't find Denmark on a map.

The nativists are restless, the bigots are howling like banshees, the Christianists are speaking in tongues while we roll our eyes and babble about birth certificates, our Muslim president and Sarah the Rogue Palin who wants to lead us into a future although she insists the end is coming any day and traffic accidents are the result of witchcraft. Millions of my countrymen are as out of touch with reason and objectivity as anyone languishing in a padded cell ever was and I'm without hope. There is a tide of hate and madness in the lives of men and countries and I'm beginning to think we're surfing it straight to hell.

Ugly American

Have we become a nation of skateboard and spray can street brats who live just to piss off the adults and piss on everything we can just for the fun of it; laughing with idiot glee while impressing our idiot friends?

Maybe not all of us, but certainly the Tea Baggers and the third of us who think Sarah Palin would make an outstanding president and most assuredly the idiot CNN reporter who thought she could get noticed by wearing a T-shirt with the president of the US dressed as Mao Zedong in a Red Army uniform -- not at some idiotic Republican rally, not in a high school parking lot, but in the streets of Shanghai and while Barak Obama was making a historic visit to convince the world's largest country we're rational and dependable and trustworthy.

That's right - look at me folks, I'm an American and I'm an offensive and ignorant twit! One wonders at what feelings such a spectacle elicits to the Chinese. Mao, after all and after all the horrors, is still a hero of the "anti-Japanese War" and the man who ended much of the horror of Chinese history, albeit by instituting his own horror. Still, his picture looks down at Tian an men from the gates of the forbidden city.

Is this statement meant to say: "look, our leader is just like your great founding father, which might be an insult? Perhaps it means "look, your leader was a monster and so is ours" which would be a very confusing concept since drawing any parallels or valid comparisons between these two men is the stuff of foil hatted and straight jacketed ravers -- or unscrupulous reactionary propagandists. What must it seem like when a representative of the country that has everything China wants mocks the system that gave it to them by comparing it to the dark days of starvation and violent oppression?

Who knows, but if we hark back only a handful of months to when criticizing the US or it's leaders while abroad was considered treason - at least when non-Republicans did it, it would be confusing to anyone. No Chinese thinks Obama has anything to do with Communism, much less with the dictatorship of the Party or the Gang of Four or the Cultural Revolution.

Emily Chang, a Chinese based CNN reporter was hassled by Shanghai police who had put a ban on such display in order to avoid offending America. That an American news network would make an effort to openly flaunt it rather than some anti-American local must have seemed as strange as it seems to me, but perhaps no stranger than the tokens and tags of the domestic brat culture with its graffiti, self mutilation and 'attitude.'

Nice job Emily. Thanks for reminding the world that we're as sophomoric and scatter-brained as we ever were and the world can feel safe with us, our massive nuclear arsenal, our worshipful militarism, our xenophobia and the joy we feel in our disrespect for everything and everyone.

God is great - Bill O'Reilly? Not so much.

Blurry words and fuzzy logic are the tools of the deceiver. Take the word "terrorist." We're still trying to fit it into the Procrustean bed, or should we call it the Republican Bunk? In fact we can no longer distinguish between terror, the emotion or terrorism; the acts designed to produce terror. We're always arguing about who is a criminal and who is a terrorist but, always willing to help us find our balance, Fox news and Sean O'Reilly are on the job.

In order to keep the terror, angst and anger flowing and the ratings high, it's important to keep the supply of terrorists visible and to keep them ethnic -- and here comes Sean Hannity to tell us that what makes a terrorist a terrorist is that he praises God before he terrorizes. It's not all that simple though, he has to do that in Arabic otherwise every foxhole would be full of terrorists of many faiths.

It's simple enough however to say that because Major Nidal Malik Hasan allegedly said Allahu Akhbar before shooting up Fort Hood. On the other hand, attacks from the bombing of Guernica to the Rape of Nanjing to the shocking and awing of Baghdad are not. Simple haters like simple rules for hating. They like simple things that can be used to create convenient groups: tropes like "political correctness" of which O'Reilly accused The Washington Post's Sally Quinn Wednesday night. It's much easier to condemn a group fabricated for the purpose than to address her reluctance to call the man a "Muslim Terrorist."

"You have a hard time saying the words 'Muslim terrorist. I don't know why."

I do know why. If the only difference between Charles Manson, Timothy McVeigh, David, Son of Sam, Berkowitz and Major Hasan is religion, it becomes awfully hard to launch the Fox Crusade against Muslims alone. So one hates along with Bill, or one is politically correct which means unwilling to hate along with Bill. One jumps to convenient conclusions with him or one refuses in that politically correct way, thus defining PC as smart and honest and responsible for people more logically adept than the Fox Fools.

One must be a hater of Muslims or a terrorist supporter and without that assertion O'Reilly melts on the floor like the Wicked Witch. A nice binary, Good V. Evil choice to replace the kind of reasoning stupid people hate and fear and are incapable of: the kind of choice Lyin' Bill peddles like crack in the high school parking lot.

Shameless in the morning

Fox may just be the most busted name on Television, but it never seems to affect them or the faithfulness of their coven. We've heard plenty from them about how President Obama is a racist and the lack of evidence doesn't keep them from clinging to the slur or using it to disparage anyone who dares disagree. It also doesn't keep them from airing obnoxious and personal racist attacks without any disguise at all. What else would you call Bo Dietl, pulling on his eyes and mocking CBS anchor Katie Couric for looking Chinese and "oriental?" Probably the same thing he would call me if I put burned cork on my face and said "Holy Mackerel, Andy:" a racist idiot.

"Ten years ago, she looked American," Dietl remarked. "Today she is an Oriental"

as though nobody of Asian ancestry could possibly be an American. As though nobody with dark skin could possibly be one either. As though Dietl weren't a nasty little racist prick.



Dietl, who is a frequent Fox contributor, former Bush appointee and midwife to the "birther" hoax, chose Imus in the Morning simulcast on Fox for this infantile insult. In any other venue, he would immediately be fired and Imus, if he had a brain in that zombie-like head of his should have thrown him off instantly, but of course Imus is Imus and all he could do was to call Curic a rodent in that whiskey and heroin voice of his, but of course it was on Fox and the racism and ugly slander is fair and balanced, you dirty Liberals.

Sure, they'll have an excuse, it wasn't racist, he was misunderstood, Liberals have no sense of humor and yada yada. We've heard it all before. They'll get away with it because Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch and their employees are pigs who deserve nothing better for Christmas than to be visited by the ghost of Bruce Lee who can demonstrate to them just how hilariously funny it is to be Chinese.

Who would Jesus blackmail?

A high proportion of the atheists and agnostics I know are, or have been Roman Catholic and I have to say a good number of my favorite comedians as well. The sense of alienation and the sarcasm of such people no mystery to me when I read stories like the Washington Post's piece on the Archdiocese of Washington DC and its threat to discontinue being all charitable and Christlike about feeding and sheltering the homeless and hungry if a proposed bill allowing same sex marriage passes.

Although the Church would not of course be required to perform or to lend their floor space to such unions, they would be required to obey the same laws forbidding discrimination against gay men and lesbians as the rest of us.

"The city is saying in order to provide social services, you need to be secular. For us, that's really a problem" said Archdiocese spokeswoman Susan Gibbs.

No, the city is saying that to be a partner with a publicly funded service, you don't hold the city hostage until they deny civil rights to law abiding citizens. Consider the homeless of the streets, shall we let them starve if only two gay men are allowed to marry? Shall we let them die if we allow people to divorce? What other taboos must we as citizens observe before the Archdiocese of Washington will deign to obey Biblical commandments to help others?

I do understand that they have a problem recognizing certain lay employee's right to share employment benefits, I just can't see Jesus making an issue of it or attempting to use the homeless as a hostage if the Romans refused to implement Jewish law.

Of course the peanut gallery will respond with nonsense about religious persecution and freedom and there will be no reasoning with them, but if a religious test to receive public services is repugnant, the demand that the public go along with their dogma or the poor will not be served is more so. It's another example lending credibility to all the warnings about "faith based" initiatives. It's another example illustrating just why Congress shall make no laws concerning an establishment of religion.

Smaller, less intrusive religion

Just who owns your life and when you die, who owns your remains? Do you get to decide or does someone else's religion get to decide?

Let's say the great love of your life dies. Let's say you live in Rhode Island and you want to retrieve the body from the morgue, take it to a funeral home and plan a funeral. That's fine as long as you're legally next of kin, otherwise you're eroding traditional heterosexual marriages says the Governor. I'm not even going to try to figure out the tortuous path down which the Republican Governor of Rhode Island, Don Carcieri trod to get to that conclusion. I'm just going to assume that there is no logical process at all and that it's just the same nasty religious authoritarianism that sparked the existence of the Rhode Island colony in the first place.

I'm going to venture to assert instead that blocking such a simple act of decency toward people who are in a committed relationship; allowing any of us the freedom to decide who is our family or not, who we want to give a responsibility to or not, prevents a danger to heterosexual relationships is ludicrous and offensively stupid and that he is only acting in the traditional theocratic role of forcing his religious doctrine up the collective arses of the Rhode Island citizens.

Don Carcieri vetoed a bill yesterday allowing same sex couples to plan the funerals of deceased partners, although Democrats may have the votes to override it. Carcieri believes that elected representatives do not have the power to write such legislation and there should be a direct ballot referendum instead. I wonder if this will erode the institution of our republican form of government as much as treating domestic partnerships outside of a Church approved relationship with equal protection under the law will erode my own marriage. So far my wife and I have survived such "disturbing trends" and are getting along just fine minding our own business.

A right wing bigot owns our media

Well there you have it. With Fox News, it starts right at the top. He's not sure if it's valid to compare President Obama with Stalin, he says, but he certainly is a racist and Glenn Beck was right in saying it, says Rupert Murdoch.

"But he did make a very racist comment. Ahhh…about, you know, blacks and whites and so on, and which he said in his campaign he would be completely above. And um, that was something which perhaps shouldn’t have been said about the President, but if you actually assess what he was talking about, he was right,"

he said on Australian TV. Well ahhh and um, anybody who can look at Barak Obama in the context of early 21st century America; stand him against Murdoch's race-baiting bogus journalism and call him a racist is either deranged, dishonest or stupid. I don't rule out that Rupert has hit the Trifecta here.

Of course Murdoch denied being aware that Beck had compared our President with Joseph Stalin even though, of course, he did just that and of course Fox in general is engaged in an often self-contradictory orgy of slanderous invention deceptive video editing and stealing rumors from disreputable blogs without investigation. If Murdoch isn't aware or doesn't understand, it argues strongly for the deranged and dishonest. If we're looking for the reason behind Fox's loyalty to someone who is loosing advertisers and making our country and much of its media a laughing stock, here you have it: Rupert Murdoch thinks Glenn Beck is right and I don't mean far Right.

Obama may not hate white people, admitted Beck, but he has a problem with "white culture" and I suppose that might be true if you define white culture as Glenn Beck's kind of loathing for anything smelling of decency. Indeed lumping together the "white" people of the world into one culture is in itself an act of idiotic, deceptive and ugly racism, but do we need to need to explain Glenn Beck or do we need to boycott every and any Rupert Murdoch enterprise until he feels it in his swollen bank accounts?

The great dollar plot -- There's a conspiracy in my coin!

It's not only the idiot Sarah Palin who sees a conspiracy in the current dollar coin issue. I've had shopkeepers refuse to take it (in violation of the law) because they too see a conspiracy. I confess to using them as often as I can, just for the petty pleasure of irritating the subhuman ascendancy.

Yes, I know, the idiot Palin sees conspiracies and witches ( and uninhabited Russian islands) all the time and likes to talk about such things to cover up the total absence of any constructive ideas, much less a child's knowledge of American history and current affairs.

Palin's Wisconsin speech last Friday night wasn't recorded because forbidding all recording and communications devices has become a standard tactic in her war on sanity, but still it isn't necessary to have audio or video to stun the rational public with -- well, with her idiocy. At the "Right to Life" rally, writes Jonathan Martin at Politico, she dishonestly extrapolated the legality of abortion rights to the government's desire to cut off all health care to the elderly and children with birth defects just to see them die and re-iterated that euthanasia would be a likely result of extending Medicare-like coverage to the general population. Yes, she's still raving about death panels as though her constant yammering and stammering could create an alternate reality in which she made some kind of sense and where she wasn't lying through her cheap lipstick.

“It is so bogus that society is sending a message right now and has been for probably the last 40 years that a woman isn’t strong enough or smart enough to be able to pursue an education, a career and her rights and still let her baby live”

said the idiot Palin. Those of us who still remember some English will wonder why more people don't laugh, since bogus means counterfeit and what she is really saying is that society is not sending that message, but of course people who line up to hear the idiot Palin aren't able to see the idiocy. It's proof that with stupidity, it takes one not to notice one. It takes one not to have noticed that the "message" that a woman can pretty much do what she damn well pleases with respect to having a career and children, is a Liberal one that's been fought hard against and took centuries to achieve in the face of conservative intransigence, dishonest appeals to "family Values," fictitious fears and the kind of pseudo-Biblical claptrap the idiot Palin is famous for.

That would have been enough, as the old Passover song goes, but the idiot Palin, finding the audience less than mindlessly ebullient about her incoherent rants, launched into a riff on the sinister conspiracy behind putting "In God We Trust" around the rim of the dollar coin instead of the obverse. Stopping short of blaming it on the Elders of Zion, she asked her audience to fill in the blanks from their own piggy banks of bigotry, ignorance and idiocy. As Martin writes:

"Noting that there had been a lot of “change” of late, Palin recalled a recent conversation with a friend about how the phrase “In God We Trust” had been moved to the edge of the new coins."

Of course the coin in question was issued by the Bush administration and perhaps the Treasury Secretary thought it would be fine to follow not only what much of the world has done with their coinage, but what the US $20 St. Gaudens gold coin displayed from 1907 to 1933 and mint an inscription around the edge. Traditionally such things have been done for 200 years to make it impossible to shave off precious metal without detection, but many countries still follow the practice with the brass tokens we use today. So far, YHWH hasn't dispatched them like Gommorah. None the less, the inscription was put back on the face of the coin to please the unclean and unintelligent rabble that sees conspiracy in everything -- years ago. Hasn't anyone noticed? Certainly not the idiot Palin. None of our more common coinage has an edge inscription - hasn't the ambassador from the Pleistocene noticed? Apparently her demand for outrages to put around the edges of Liberals has exceeded the supply and so she's minting these counterfeit slugs herself -- and the Republican rubes are filling their pockets with them.

“Who calls a shot like that?” she demanded. “Who makes a decision like that?”

I've asked myself the question of who thought up the practice of putting theistic proclamations on coinage in the first place. It certainly wasn't the 'Founding Fathers.' According to the Treasury Department itself, it began during the Civil War, which coincided with a large influx of the huddled masses yearning to retain theocracy and the Union's need to find a "God is on our side" justification for all the carnage. The practice has certainly not extended to all coins in all years, and that fact hasn't been made much of in the past, but never before have these United States been in such a fugue state of holy rolling, snake handling, tongues talking, foaming at the mouth, apocalyptic insanity.

The answer to her question of course was Republican Senator John Sununu with heavy Republican support in the Senate and House and with the blessings of George W. Bush and his Secretary of the Treasury and the idiot Palin is going to have to outdo herself in order to convince me that Bush or any of his cloven-hooved accomplices was plotting a war on Christianity by removing a religious oath from where God told us not to put it in the first place.

“It’s a disturbing trend.”

She said, illustrating either her disregard for any actual meaning or applicability to reality her words might have. Something that happens for a year and then returns to the way it's been for 150 years is not a trend, but hey, that's why she's called the idiot Palin and that's why the angry, fearful, confused, uneducated, unintelligent, underclass finds her mysterious pathological fears so appealing. That's a a disturbing trend indeed.

Rape, racism and Republicans

A friend of mine used to have the job, back during the Vietnam war, of flying a helicopter over dangerous areas so as to draw fire from hidden gun emplacements, flushing out the enemy so that we knew where they were. Barak Obama has been a bit like that and sad to say, I've now identified far too many enemies, some that I thought were friends.

I got another e-mail this morning, from someone I would hardly call a redneck: a northeasterner, ex military intelligence with a long career at the Pentagon. "I despair for the country" was the title and it had a link to a YouTube video wherein the President confesses to being a Muslim. It's an obvious cut and paste job that wouldn't fool anyone who didn't want to be fooled -- and there's the rub. Too many want to be fooled and bask like pigs in the warm and stinky deception. The hate and fear of our President long preceded his election and for some it preceded his birth. The closeted racists of America desperately need such insultingly stupid stories as a defense against the obviously true accusations of racism.

I grew up in the 1950's and I'm no stranger to segregation or blood in the streets for that matter, but still I'm amazed at the breadth and depth of the long concealed and highly fermented racial and ethnic hatred that's been lurking in the jungle and is emerging like tracer bullets whose dotted line shows the way, right to their source.

I can't count the outraged e-mails and comments I've seen about the recent California schoolyard rape, which of course has allowed the haters to vent their paranoid fear and loathing of Hispanics. It was of course a Hispanic girl who reported it, not a "regular" American as Archie Bunker would have said, but no matter. Hate has its own sort of statistics and only needs an example to declare it "typical." Indeed, it doesn't even have to be true if you have even a mediocre shareware video editing program.

In its own way, this sick and disgusting incident seems not to be out of context of what is happening in many disparate groups, even of white, Anglo-Saxon protestants, marching in the streets for lower taxes as though Obama had actually raised them; showing pictures of Nazi death camps as though any sane person connects piles of murdered bodies to a government administered health plan -- the people who call the Democratic health care bill "Obamacare" but never think to call Social Security Roosevelt Retirement or identified the GI bill with Communism or call the public library the Socialist Book Store -- or identify the recession with Republican economic policies. These things and more are part of the Us against Them view where the government is "them," the 15% fringe element and the corporate lobbyists are "We the people," the government is the enemy and only illegitimately exercised authority is legitimate.

The twenty or so witnesses to this crime, if they had any compassion at all, were prevented by the entertainment value and hatred of police and the Maverick mentality from doing anything or reporting anything. The criminals are The People, the cops are not and the law is the enemy because it interferes with our freedom to commit crimes ad libidum. Is that really different from not caring how many innocents are killed abroad in a war started and continued under false pretenses and appeals to fear and patriotism? Is that different from not giving a flying damn how many millions die, how many sick children clog the emergency rooms and drive up the cost of insurance and spread disease, or how many lives are ruined by insurance companies? Its them against us and 'them' are the unfortunate, the minorities, the sick the old and unemployed. Who wants the damned law and the government to help them even if it protects us too?

Perhaps you find the connection tenuous or even far-fetched, but I don't. There is no "us" in the US any more unless it's in the context of us against them and that miserable, militant and malicious group who flatter themselves with the stolen title of 'Conservative' are as much to blame as anyone for the rape that is our for-profit, cartel run health "system." Anyone who brings the government in is a "snitch."

Oh no, it's those liberals who insist any criticism of the President is racist and we're not racist at all - it's just that he's a foreign born, Marxistnaziterroristracist who "hates white culture" (whatever the hell that is) and murdered his grandmother and wants to murder yours. It's because he's trying to reconstitute the Auschwitz death camp by giving us health insurance, not because he's a Ni - I mean black.

Hey, we're not responsible for not reporting a vicious and nearly fatal rape, it's because we can't trust the cops, the cops are the problem, the government is the problem and we want less government, you know.

Dick the Impaler

We seem to have forgotten about torture. Comedians and far right shamans still make jokes about how those still left in the cages at Guantanamo are the "worst of the worst." People are heavily against giving them any amenities like flu shots and some have the audacity to say we treat them too well, even though so many of them have never had any case proved against them or have been cleared: so many are guilty of little more than being Muslim or accused of something by an enemy.

That Dick Cheney, the once and in his own mind future Führer pokes fun at the idea that we ever engaged in torturing prisoners and although he's not well liked by any but the most extreme subhumans, he has never suffered any consequences for having directed and promoted things we used to hang people for when I was a boy: kidnapping, torture and murder. Republicans prefer to believe him, many of the rest of us believe so much in our essential virtue that we just don't want to hear any more of it.

It's not that there is no evidence of the Bush Administration's capital crimes, not at all. We have imprisoned and tortured many people with essentially no evidence against them, but there has been a constant flow of increasingly horrible information about kidnapping and the kind of torture even Limbaugh or Dick the Impaler himself couldn't pass off as a fratboy prank. Crain Murray, the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan now tells us, says Raw Story, that the people the CIA sent to secret dungeons there were raped with broken bottles and/or boiled alive until they "admitted" to being affiliated with Al Qaida. Some were forced to watch their children being tortured and all so that the Bush administration could justify destroying Iraq to the eager war lovers back home.

"I'm talking of people being raped with broken bottles,"

he said at a lecture in October that was re-broadcast by the Real News Network.

"I'm talking of people having their children tortured in front of them until they sign a confession. I'm talking of people being boiled alive. And the intelligence from these torture sessions was being received by the CIA, and was being passed on."

I'm not ashamed to say that I'm ashamed of my country. I'm ashamed not so much by the monsters and tyrants and murderers of children some of us still revere as heroes and patriots, but by the way we still support what they did, still can't accept the horror, don't want to be told about it, still want to continue crimes as hideous as any ever committed, because after all, these people are "suspects." These people are "the worst of the worst" whether guilty or not and most of all they aren't Christian, like us. It's not really important anyway, not like gay marriage or insurance company profits or ACORN or tax breaks for Cheney and Bush.

Lucy, I'm home!

How many Cubans does it take to screw in a light bulb? I'm not counting, but it never has taken many Cuban "exiles" to direct our relations with the island nation that lies only 90 miles from Key West. For most of my lifetime, it's been nearly impossible to travel there legally and the effects of our embargo have done little to change anything for the better either here or there. Indeed the Sugar subsidies designed to hurt Cuban sugar sales have done stupendous damage to the Florida ecosystem and our trade policies have been a benefit to other nations that trade with them.

A handful of very powerful anti-Castro immigrants have had the rest of us supporting their Castrophobia and its consequences since the 50's but a change may slowly be emerging. Fewer and fewer of the more and more "Americanized" Cubans believe in continuing the unique and uniquely non-productive policies and President Obama was successful in restoring the right of Cuban-Americans to visit relatives and to send money.

Of course it's wrong. The idea of restricting travel or permitting it based on one's ethnicity or national origin is as out of date as segregation and it needs to be addressed. The the freedom to travel to Cuba act, introduced this year in both the House and Senate may just pass over the traditional opposition of the Cuban Lobby, much of which still asserts that increased American tourism will not change anything in Cuba, thus ignoring the collapse of European Communism and the steady retreat in Asia. They're wrong of course, but the tide is turning from bellicosity towards pragmatism, diplomacy and the power of prosperity to overcome Communism.

One of these days I'm going to make that trip.

Tales of Hoffman

It's hard to know what to make of Doug Hoffman's defeat last night. After the foam-flecked Glennbeckery, after Sarah's transfusion of roguery by proxy and a million bucks from the Club for Growth, the voters clubbed him with the first Democratic victory in his backwoods Republican bailiwick since the U.S. Grant administration. He had everything going for him but the votes writes Chris Kelly at The Huffington Post.

Everyone seems to want to make yesterday's elections seem like a precursor, an omen and a bad one for Democrats -- at least everyone who gets paid to make a ratings-generating ruckus. I'm not sure what it proves other than that third party candidates have little credibility, have no coat tails to ride on and don't benefit from party loyalty even when the party's big guns are saluting him.

"I believe America is turning the page to a new dawn"

said Hoffman. It's easy to say his metaphors are mixed and I think almost as easy to believe the chances of the Freakazoid Right for a comeback are too.

Deep in the Cornyn hole of Texas

I got an e-mail from Texas Senator John Cornyn this morning. Somehow I had the urge to take another shower. In the relentless crusade to mock, rebuke, deride, insult, sneer at and taunt the "opposition" Cornyn is an endless cornucopia of crepuscular reasoning and shady opinions, such as his assertion that the "delays" in supplying Texas and the United States with hundreds of millions of H1N1 vaccinations argue against the public option in health care reform.

"These delays and limited access make me question whether the government, which cannot run existing public health programs competently, should be trusted with even more responsibility – such as running a new government health plan. " [italics mine]

Of course Cornyn doesn't give examples of how the government can't run health care, either from Medicare, the Veteran's Administration or indeed from the Government health care Cornyn and his cronies enjoy. Of course he doesn't have to, he's preaching to Republicans -- a faith-based group who never seem to question the tenebrous tenets of that faith. The Government just can't do anything right: Reagan said so and the Republicans are hell bent for leather to make sure it's self-fulfilling.

Perhaps John can explain what the failure of the oil industry that supports him to end oil shortages and give us 29 cents a gallon gasoline again argues for or against, or why we shouldn't say that Exxon can't run anything properly, including keeping tanker captains sober. One offensively stupid argument deserves another, I should think, and the argument that the Government can't do anything and so shouldn't be allowed to do anything is a stupid argument and an annoying one coming from someone who is part of the government and is stalling, obfuscating and sabotaging health care reform -- right after having supported Bush's massive increases of unaccountable executive power and failed wars for 8 years.

No, A public option for health care is a

"Trojan horse that will ultimately lead to a government takeover of our health care system. "

says John Cornyn: another way of invoking the slippery slope fallacy. If we allow A we'll allow A+B and if we allow A+B, we'll allow A+B+C. . . Of course any truth to this is no more than accidental because none of these steps compel the other, That's why we call it a fallacy, but again, he's arguing to Republicans and Lone Star Republicans at that, not exactly a constellation bright enough to light up the sky. Funny that he didn't argue that an invasion of Iraq would lead to a "government takeover" of the world or that warrantless surveillance and the end of Habeas Corpus would lead to a police state.

No, we're not on a slippery slope toward invading Ireland, the US Postal Service isn't going to take over DHL or UPS or FedEx and none of those could handle a minute fraction of the envelopes, post cards, advertising fliers or periodicals the USPS delivers. No, the public schools aren't going to take over the private schools and the Social Security Administration isn't going to take over your pension. The County Hospital or the VA hospital isn't going to take over the private hospitals. It isn't the "Government" producing the vaccines and if we had to depend on the profitability of doing that to induce the pharmaceutical industry to do it, we'd have far greater shortages and tens of millions who wouldn't get any and couldn't afford it and would help the disease spread because of it. Of course I'm sure Tex Cornyn will get his vaccination, one way or another. He'll get it for free. He gets all his health care for free, so why should he give a Texas damn about you?

It's a cream puff!

Would you buy a used car from this man? That used to be a popular phrase back in the Nixon years when we were asked to buy his "secret plan to win the war." The secret was that there was no plan, but never mind, there was nothing to win and we didn't win it.

It's the first thing that comes to mind listening to the last ditch effort by Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell who is still telling us the public option will kill us all, although you can see he's having a hard time keeping his face straight while doing it. It's a prodigious effort of course, since he and his henchmen all have government health care just like the French and the Norwegians and the Germans and everyone else and all too many of them live to really ripe old ages because of it.

"I think if you have any kind of government insurance program, you're going to be stuck with it and it will lead us in the direction of the European style, you know, sort of British-style, single payer, government run system, and those systems are known for delays, denial of care and, you know, if your particular malady doesn't fit the government regulation, you don't get the medication. And it may cost you your life. I mean, we don't want to go down that path."

Yes, we do want to go down that path -- the majority of us anyway -- and it's an argument dependent on American ignorance of what the rest of the modern world enjoys and benefits from and chooses to have. There is no slope here, it's only his logic and his grasp of truth that's slippery. The problem with our health care cartel system is exactly the problem he tells us we will have if we abandon it and the coverage we have to buy now isn't even available to millions and millions. It may cost you your life and it's cost millions of lives already.

No, I wouldn't buy a load of fertilizer from this man and that's what he's selling and no matter how many times the truth is flung back at him, he'll continue. He's paid handsomely to continue and he's got a great health care plan as well which isn't known for denial, delay or enormous annual price increases like the one we have if we're lucky, young, in a good job and haven't ever been sick.

It's the old Republican song he's singing -- the corporate song, the best money can buy: I've got mine and screw you.

Blood diamonds and Halloween

Pat Robertson -- where do I begin? I don't know whether his record speaks worse of American stupidity or of his character.

No, I'm not talking about the soliciting of funds for relief in Rwanda that actually were spent on Diamond mining operations in Zaire with dictator President Mobutu Sese Seko and to benefit other African genocidal madmen. I'm not talking about questionable use of Katrina relief funds or various tax-evasion charges. This Bozo runs a faith-based circus of stupidity and one of his side show acts is to be the grinch who stole Halloween or All Saints Day as it was known for a while.

Robertson's God forsaken parody of a broadcasting network, CBN, has a dire warning on its blog about virtually all Halloween candy having been "prayed over" by witches and carrying curses and spells which will be absorbed by any children eating it. Halloween is dangerous, it warns. Don't buy candy in October! It's a holy day, but if it's not a Christian holy day, it's a SATANIC holy day. Nice insult to the vast majority of humanity that's given up belief that ancient Celtic religious practices had anything to do with the Devil the Christians invented to demonize other religions.

"Curses are sent through the tricks and treats of the innocent whether they get it by going door to door or by purchasing it from the local grocery store." Says CBN.com

The colors orange brown and red are dedicated to Satan. Respect for the Earth is Satanic. Bonfires are about Satan, even the harvest is about Satan. Everything he doesn't like is Satan -- everything is Satan and the world is full of evil entities and magic and spells and his followers listen with a straight face.

I could go on, but there's enough raging pathological, libelous insanity and foul ugliness to drive any normal person to projectile vomiting. Read it yourself,** but there's something wrong with a nation that once considered this man for President, something insane about a Nation that still talks about witches and spells and a political party that embraces this ugly medieval madness.

** Since writing this last night, the article about witches, Halloween and demonic tootsie rolls has been removed from the site. View the cached article here.

Mutant ninja drivers

That guy in front of you, the one who can't stay in his lane, who takes 20 seconds to respond to the light changing to green, who needs four lanes to make a turn, who slows down for green lights and sails through the red -- who amongst us hasn't made rude anatomical and ancestral references? Perhaps we should be more tolerant.

Steven Cramer, a neurology professor at the University of California Irvine, has published a study in Cerebral Cortex that indicates the presence of a gene variation in about 30% of the population that makes them not only bad drivers, but drivers that don't learn from their mistakes. I've read many studies showing that nearly all accidents are caused by a small percentage of drivers and that that group is not distinguished by high speed driving. They're just bad drivers and maybe we now have some idea why. As to whether this genetic marker occurs more frequently in some population segments? Why yes, I do have a ten foot pole, but it's on my boat and I'm not going there, thank you.

I don't want to put too much faith in one study, but I do like studies that confirm my prejudices and maybe the next time some idiot looks me in the eyes and pulls out onto the highway 5 feet in front of me or stops on the entrance ramp or cruises through the red making a right turn, I'll roll down the window and shout "You miserable brain-derived neurotrophic factor deprived mutant!" instead of the usual.

Through the Looking Glass

No offense intended to the Buddhists out there, but the middle path is often the road to hell. While I'm as apt to ask why we can't just get along as any other exhausted and beat up person, I'm not about to attempt it with the people who tell me that it's OK to launch into hysterical fugues of hyperbole about leading Democrats and things they never said or did, but insist that reacting to it in any way but submissive whimpering is nastiness or name-calling and a justification for further libel, slander, bigotry and threats.

I'm disgusted enough to dream about my own gun-toting tea party when citing established facts or exposing blatant lies of the previous administration are described as being just as bad as the furious lies about death panels, birth certificates and Presidential Marxism. Citing massive evidence for global warming is just as bad as comparing Democrats to Communists. Detailed studies showing that certain economic policies produce recessions, that markets self-regulate only within certain limits is just as bad as incitement to murder the President's family, as accusing him of murdering his grandmother and planning to murder yours. It seems to escape a great number of trolls that calling a thief a thief is not the same as accusing an honest man of stealing. Truth matters, facts matter and nothing but weeds grow in the space between facts and lies.

Is retaliation really the equivalent of unprovoked aggression, is self-defense? I don't think so. Is there a reasonable middle ground in an unreasonable attack against reason? I don't think so. Where after all can a middle ground exist between lies and truth; between insane accusations of Marxism or Fascism or extending Medicare being just like Pol Pot or Leon Trotsky? And where does the accusation of being the most, far-left radical Liberal ever to sit in the Senate intersect with the actual Obama who so far seems far too conservative for the people who voted for change?

Are we really the "party of hate" for "picking on" poor Rush for engaging in unprovoked and dishonest slander or trying to defend against him? Is there really any relationship between the label Liberal and the attempt to identify it with irrational hate, beyond the wish of an unscrupulous aggressor to distract us from discussing truth and responsibility?

No, the shadow world, the bizarre country between whatever the truth is and the worn out, beat up used car the Republican apologists are trying to sell is down some rabbit hole somewhere. Some twilight zone where all the terrible things we said about Nixon were untrue and just political, but none the less Obama, by beginning to denounce some of the lies told about him is "building an enemies list" just like Nixon. Nixon wasn't a bad guy they say; it was all political, but Obama is a bad guy for being like him -- even when he isn't. I told you this was a strange land.

Old Nixonian Lamar Alexander suggests that the administration might, like Nixon adviser and Watergate felon Chuck Colson, be planning to "use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies." So what advice is Lamar giving here? Obama should, he suggests, stop blaming the banks, should stop chastising the insurance companies, stop taking advice from advisers Congress hasn't approved ( remember when Bush asserted his right to do so and our non-right to know who they were or what they said?) and stop "calling out" members of congress who disagree with his policies. That's like "street brawling." Calling a lie a lie? That's the equivalent of Nixon's plan to use the IRS to "go after the Jews." That's just like burglary, Arson and obstruction of Justice!

Not.

Curiouser and curiouser, this path between truth and fiction and somewhere Lewis Carroll is watching this through a looking glass.

It's not true but it is because we know it is

No, that's not some Zen Koan, it's Rush Limbaugh. Caught being fooled by some blog with a fake Obama speech allegedly from his college years, Rush didn't apologize for his total lack of journalistic integrity but instead called it "satire."

"You can't beat that", said Chris Matthews this evening on Hardball this evening and he's right. Rush did his usual bouncing up and down excoriating Obama for advocating massive redistribution of wealth and using as evidence a speech Obama never made. Typical Rush stuff and typical Limbaughian attempt to weasel out of it.

Humor he said, needs to have a grain of truth in it and this is humor, which of course wasn't identified as such until it became clear Rush was a victim of an amateur hoax, and that truth is provided by our inner knowledge that although Obama never ever said it he somehow has inner knowledge that Obama was thinking it - as has not been demonstrated. Get it? That's right. Rush is a mind reader and therefore can be excused for denouncing someone for something he never said or did. You can't beat that and since we know Rush is a Satan worshipping prophet of the Auntie-Christ who eats cute puppies, has sex with dead goats, is an admirer and homosexual lover of Slobodan Milošević and has a secret collection of Nazi memorabilia in his attic that he wears on Jewish holidays -- since we know it, we can sell it as the absolute truth and claim that it's journalism. That's Rush.

You can't beat it.

Nothing too shameful

There are a lot of Facebook and web pages and blogs from all kinds of people and organizations and it's nothing all that unusual to find something racist, something disturbing something shameful in all the vastness: the enormity amongst the enormousness, for those of you who still make the distinction. I'm quite old enough to remember segregation, Jim Crow, miscegenation laws and even the outrageous Coon Chicken Inn, something that would shock most of us today, and I remember who supported the civil rights we now take for granted and who opposed it.

We have come a long way, or at least most of us have, otherwise there would be more widespread laughter at the audacity of the RNC Facebook page now showing off Susan B. Anthony and Abe Lincoln as GOP heroes. A few years back they were trying to sell Martin Luther King as a Republican hero and some continue to portray Jesus as a Conservative.

Neither audacious or shameful adequately covers posting racist pictures a short time ago, including this one of the President of the United States eating fried chicken and demanding repeal of Love Vs. Virginia that in 1967 locked the intrusive government and its God fearing Southern Conservative bigots out of deciding which races could marry which. It was only a few years after they were forced to stop telling us where we could eat or sleep or live or ride or swim or picnic or find a bathroom or go to school, based on our race. Obviously some Republicans haven't forgiven us for it. Evidently the GOP has done little to excommunicate or even to censure such people. Indeed many of the Republicans I know think such things are funny.

It remained up on the RNC site until those pesky and humorless liberals complained. Disgusting, but typical, and all the sniping from the snarky, snickering anonymous trolls won't change that fact.

Look, up in the sky. . . it's a bird, it's. . . .

I'm constantly accused of making gratuitous and unfair fun of religion. Whether or not that's fair to say, I couldn't begin to approach the creativity of some pious people who having no sense of humor, much less the knowledge or ability to see their creations in the context of history, in giving us their truly American and truly hilarious concept of the holy.

I'm indebted to Libby at The Impolitic and Gymo at The Spork for pointing out the work of Merritt Ministries of Tracy, California who found a unique, reverent and authentic way to represent the love and compassion of Jesus as he descends from the clouds on his apocalyptic mission, (which includes the horrific immolation of Jews and other infidels) with "compassion and love."

And what better way to do it than to flip the bird at the Second Commandment by making a likeness of the heavenly Jewish offspring, with Northern European features and straight, chestnut brown hair, wearing purple and gold robes like a the Roman Emperor under whose auspices Jesus was tortured to death? And what better likeness than a huge hot air balloon to provide that reverent touch? After all, if you're going to create God in your own image, isn't hot air the perfect filler for this flying apocalyptic cream-puff?

Just as the secular right finds all they need to know of the Constitution in the Second Amendment, all a large segment of the Religious Right requires to serve the needs of 'authenticity and reverence' is the Book of Revelation, written far away and in another country and selected for the cannon almost a quarter of a millennium later by the high priest of Sol Invictus.

I'd love to see this catch on though. I'd love to see the sky filled with lighter-than-air deities of all sorts, from YHWH blimps to Buddha balloons; soaring Shivas and zooming Zoroasters and gas-bag Ganeshas. Launch them all and let the real God sort them out!


(Cross posted from The Swash Zone)

No exit, no return

I like pawnshops. I've been a fan of the recent History Channel series Pawn Stars featuring a 24 hour pawn shop in Las Vegas and of course I like to hunt for treasure at flea markets. The local B&A flea market isn't so great and is only open on weekends, but since the economy tanked, every day is like a bad day at the crap tables and cool things do turn up at pawnshops. So yesterday I happened to be passing one on US1 in a shabby strip mall between CW's Barbeque and a vacant storefront and having little else to do, eased the Red Rocket into a parking spot right by the door next to a badly repainted yellow 50's pick-up truck and stopped in.

Yes, they sure did have more stuff than last time, which was a few years ago. The walls were festooned with T-shirts comparing Obama to Mao Zedong and a whole pandemonium of tyrants. One showed some Greek columns and read "Obama -- molon labe" a reference to the words the Spartans supposedly said to the Persians when asked to turn over their weapons: "come and get them." Tools, motorcycles, construction equipment, raggedy stereos, drum sets, guitar amplifiers and shelves full of stuff to the point where I could hardly walk -- and guns: lots of them.

A large plasma TV had Fox news blaring out the hysterics of the day and the friendly pistol packin' proprietor oversaw a forest of racked long guns and glass cases of overpriced handguns.

"You can't trust the government to do anything" he was saying to a couple of camo hatted compatriots. "Except maybe to run an army"

"Not even that!" replied one. "They should just tell the generals what they want done and then let them run it the way they want."

I feigned interest in an 1851 Colt Navy revolver with all the original finish gone (I'm quite sure it was a fake) while the conversation shifted to why they weren't racists for hating "that SOB" it's just that he's such a far-left radical and why any competent president would have restored the economy to it's former glory under George Bush - he's had months, after all.

I grew up on science fiction and I'm used to stories that begin with someone walking though holes in space-time into other universes. I thought maybe I'd just walked into the fantasy universe of the Republicans but I'm not too sure what I walked back into is real either. In the "real" world, there's a new video game out, I read today. It's another alternate reality where "patriots" can compete to capture Obama before he can:

"toss out the Constitution, ban guns and merge the U.S. with Canada and Mexico into a 'North American Union.' "

As with science fiction, the stuff I liked best had some degree of possibility attached to it. This thing only stinks of stale sweat, damp basements, fear and industrial disinfectant -- like a madhouse: like America.

Internet Freedom Act and Net Neutrality

No, no, no. The Internet Freedom Act isn't about freedom for you as an internet user and you should know by now that when a Republican uses the word Freedom it's about corporate control over your options. John McCain's "freedom act" appears now, after we've just begun to recover from eight years of the Bush FCC acting as a wholly owned subsidiary of big communications corporations; fudging the science and ignoring its own rules with impunity. Under Michael Powell and Kevin Martin, the Commission has stifled, hidden and falsified studies concerning the adverse effects on the public airwaves and even disaster relief services, of using power lines as a conductor for broadband internet and has made censorship of "indecency" a prime directive. It's high time they were prevented from protecting the public interest rather than the power of the telecommunications industry and the religious right.

If McCain's legislation is passed, the Internet Service Providers will have the power to limit your web bandwidth and mine and give preference to - you guessed it - the people they like, the people they own and the people who say what they want said. Have a blog that criticizes Comcast? Back to the days of 300 baud for you old chap! Fox News can blaze along at any speed they like with all the streaming and screaming video and Glennbeckery they can produce and the FCC won't be able to represent you. The freedom of giant corporations and puritanical moralists to censor you -- that's the kind of freedom John McCain thinks is worth fighting for!

Jews, Guns and Jim DeMint

"There is a saying that the Jews who are wealthy got that way not by watching dollars, but instead by taking care of the pennies and the dollars taking care of themselves,"

said James S. Ulmer Jr. and Edwin O. Merwin Jr. chairmen of the Orangeburg and Bamburg county, South Carolina GOP.

There are a lot of "sayings" about the Jews. In fact there are a lot of "sayings" about all kinds of groups in South Carolina; real or fabricated but I suspect that these gems say more about South Carolina, the rest of the Bible Belt and it's prevalent mentality than they say about anything else.

Of course to substantiate an item of bigotry, one only has to show one example and I'm sure one could be provided, but I know a large number of Jews, rich and otherwise and those who have money seem to have acquired it by the same means as anyone else -- from inheritance to hard work and if I have to include myself, I'm notorious for letting the pennies fall where they may. I can't remember the last time I bothered to balance my checkbook and the luxury of not having to think about money is far more enjoyable than the big house and the boat and the sports cars.

Anyway these two party Chairmen wrote in a letter to a local newspaper that criticism of Senator Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) is unfair because he is like a penny pinching Jew for not bringing in federal dollars for projects in South Carolina. I hate to accuse the Republicans of being stupid, small minded and ignorant bigots, but they are in South Carolina. Imagine being dumb enough to print such things, not knowing how outrageous it is, not caring because there probably aren't enough Jews in those places to matter or enough decent people to be offended. They were wrong, of course but the comments at The Palmetto Scoop post decrying the letter are loaded with anti-Semitic diatribes so scurrilous I'd be hard pressed not to gun down the writers in cold blood, given the chance. Well maybe not so cold. In fact this prompted me to renew my membership in JPFO despite the furious anti-Obama rhetoric. Later today I plan to take advantage of a sale at a local gun shop and purchase the AK-47 I've always wanted. That way, I'll be more prepared to discuss "old sayings" with redneck Republicans. Sometimes discussion just isn't enough. Sometimes 9mm just isn't enough either.

J'Accuse!

Fox lies and America pays the price. Sean Hannity's latest witch hunt against anything good and decent has found yet another victim in Kevin Jennings. The Obama administration employee whom Czar Hannity, mad with power, calls a "safe schools Czar," has been accused of ignoring or not reporting the sexual abuse of a minor. Of course not only is Jennings not the absolute monarch of anyplace, he's only Assistant Deputy Secretary at the Department of Education for the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools (OSDFS) and more importantly, the story isn't true.

Hannity lies and one more piece of justice dies. Of course Fox sometimes quietly retracts a story after the damage has been done -- as they have with the story insisting that Jennings one ignored a report of sexual relations between a minor student and an older man, but such lies have momentum and the mad dogs of the GOP are issuing demands that he be fired for promoting a "radical gay agenda" they would like you to believe includes the exploitation of children by gay teachers.

Fifty-three House Republicans have written President Barack Obama calling on him to fire Jennings. Jennings isn't a Czar of any kind and the gay "child" in question was above the age of consent, but Jennings is also gay and Jennings has spent a lot of time trying to make schools safer for all students, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity. Such things infuriate bigots and witch hunting religious idiots and Retro-Republican trolls and Fox is happy to fan the flames regardless of who burns as long as those ratings stay high.

The disgusting, shit-eating cockroaches calling themselves the Family Research Council (FRC) launched the “Stop Kevin Jennings” campaign this week, warning that he is a

“radical homosexual activist” who has “worked tirelessly to bring the homosexual agenda into our nation’s classrooms.”

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/16/kevin-jennings-should-res_n_323547.html

None of these people care that the story was a lie or that the accusation is a lie. Even if Fox were to give serious time recanting it ( and ten thousand other lies) it wouldn't matter. The excuse to persecute heretics, to stomp all over freedom and justice is too valuable to let go. More foetid slime to fling at Democrats is far more valuable than truth or justice.

If a lie is as good as the truth, if preventing the abuse and promoting the safety of gay students is radical activism and if truth and justice for all is to be despised as the "Gay Agenda" then maybe it is time to stand up and say "Long live the Radical Gay Agenda!" Maybe it is time for those decent citizens to say we've had enough of the hate-stinking madmen with hate-foam on their lips and the lying enemies of freedom who whip them into a religious frenzy.

Is it any wonder the Republicans oppose hate crime legislation so vehemently? The persecution of Kevin Jennings is a hate crime and the lies of Fox are hate crimes and the Republican Party is the party of hate mongering, small mindedness, injustice and persecution of liberty. It's long past time to tell those values voters their values are evil and their deeds are evil and certainly at odds with anything this country claims it stands for. We get tens of thousands of armed idiots in the streets protesting a tax increase that's actually a decrease, but why is it that we sit by and let a good man be ruined and say nothing? Why is it that we keep watching Fox and giggling and never speak up? Is it because we're no better?

Tightening the belt

When A Texas jury set out to decide what to do with convicted murderer Khristian Oliver, the decision was made easier by a supply of Bibles in the jury room with specific passages highlighted. Whoever highlighted them chose words carefully because the jury decided to kill him -- based on their reading of the Bible.

Although the US Supreme Court decided in 1967 (Loving V. Virginia) that the government has no right to tell people they can't marry someone of another "race" the news may not have made it to parts of Louisiana. Keith Bardwell, (who claims he's not a racist) justice of the peace for Tangipahoa Parish's 8th Ward refused to marry Beth Humphrey and her boyfriend, Terence McKay because Terence is "black" and she's not. Actually Terence is no darker than this sun tanned white Floridian, but it's not about that, it's about the "traditional value" of not "mixing the races" one finds in the Bible belt and it's about the result of preaching that this is a Christian nation whose law emanates, like the musty smell of unwashed laundry and pious injustice, from the Bible.

Bonfire of the vanities part II

Frank Schaeffer has been right in the center of the Christian Right. His father, Dr. Francis Schaeffer, is considered to be the godfather of the modern religious right movement, says an exclusive article at Raw Story. So when he says he's worried about the extent the insanity has reached and that it's all too likely that some Christian fanatic will blow up another building or make an attempt on the President's life, I worry too. All over America, the loonies are restless.

The insanity, you might ask? What about a North Carolina church planning to make a bonfire of all "Satan's" books which include, to the amazement of anyone informed about the history of Bibles, all non-King James versions. Our with that silly Hebrew and Greek stuff or whatever Moses brought down the mountain - the real one was written in Robert Cecil's dining room in Hertfordshire, like God intended.

Of course the Amazing Grace Baptist Church in Canton, N.C., says there are "scriptural bases" for the book burning, so you know it's OK with God who always defers to the Reverend Marc Grizzard particularly on matters of inerrancy and infallibility.

Hate Crime

Race, religion and gender are "Immutable characteristics" said a spokesman for John Böhner. The House Minority Leader feels that existing Federal protections ore OK for people born with such handicaps as being female or dark skinned, but not for people who against nature and for entertainment purposes choose to be gay or to be in a wheelchair.

"He does not support adding sexual orientation to the list of protected classes,"

said Böhner spokesman Kevin Smith in an email to CBS News. It's important to note that he includes religion as something worthy of special protection. Of course gender is not currently given special protection, and religion is hardly "immutable" or innate or the product of genetics, but we're quoting Republican leaders here, who can't be expected to be rational or consistent, not normal human beings.

Rep. Tom Price, who heads the GOP conservative circus caucus cites the slippery slope fallacy to predict that such legislation would lead to "thought crimes" while felonies of intent which account for a good part of our prison population would not. Sounds dishonest to me and it's apparent that the real opposition comes from the fear that some preacher might be called to task for preaching hatred against infidels or "sinners" or witches even though no violence can be traced directly to him. Don't tell me it doesn't happen, I've endured many a sermon that prompted me to leave in disgust and I don't mean Pastor Muthee. The danger of exposing the inherent anti-Semitism in certain foundational documents must seem very real to people like Price.

"We believe all hate crimes legislation is unconstitutional and places one class of people above others,"

said a spokesman for Buck. Perhaps this is all about principle, despite all appearances, yet it seems like yesterday to me when segregation was the backbone of American Conservatism and the exclusion of ethnic groups from neighborhoods and hotels was de regueur and fiercely defended by people like Barry Goldwater. Of course I think it's not about egalitarian sentiment at all. I think it's that if you took the license to preach hate away from the far right religious faction that owns the GOP, they'd be out of business.

Honor our troops - at least some of them

Yes, sir, I'm glad we have real men like Anton Scalia on the Supreme Court instead of some "activist" liberal pansy. Who but a Liberal would come up with the idea that putting a cross on a Jewish ( or Muslim, or Buddhist or atheist) soldier's grave would be an insult to the troops we're told to honor and support?

The court is hearing a case on the constitutionality of erecting a cross on Government ( our ) land in order to honor the dead of WW I. It's not really a religious symbol, opined Scalia but just a common thing to do in cemeteries. In Christian cemeteries -- certainly but here's where Scalia seems unimaginative enough to recognize that many of us and certainly many of us whose families have been here far longer than his, are not Christians nor is there an established religion in the US; Christian or otherwise.

Crosses never appear in Jewish cemeteries, said the ACLU lawyer, but like the hard hearted biblical Pharaoh, Scalia could only reply

“I don’t think you can leap from that to the conclusion that the only war dead that that cross honors are the Christian war dead. I think that’s an outrageous conclusion.”

Well I don't think it is outrageous and I imagine there are more than a few people buried in any military cemetery who would, if they could, disagree with him. As Ann Woolner points out on Bloomberg.com,

"Hundreds of thousands of non-Christians served in World War I. Jews alone accounted for 250,000, or about 5 percent of the troops deployed. To memorialize them, Muslims and other non- Christians who gave their lives for their country with a Christian cross doesn’t honor them. For many of their families, it insults them. "

There is no secular purpose and therefore no legitimate government purpose in putting a cross on government property, says the Amicus brief filed by Jewish War Veterans of the United States of America. Of course that's true and in my opinion, as each grave has it's own appropriate marker, the only reason to Christianize the entire cemetery is to put a Christian stamp on the US military and all it's endeavors and all it's men. One would think that the truly devout might say that it puts a US military stamp on Christianity and indeed some do.

All things considered, I'd rather not have a symbol of a religion ( particularly Scalia's) that's been persecuting and vilifying my ancestors since the Constantine administration on my lawn or my grave or the graves of any of my family who has been in the US military for the last 150 years. The party that so often screams about their "freedom" being taken away is usually quite silent when someone else's freedom of religion is being taken away and the honor and dignity of so many of our troops is being trod upon by their fellow Americans.

lying for God

I don't expect much from anything attached to the Breitbart enterprise, whether it's politics or religion or movie criticism and in part because such things are all the same in that venue.  Take the review of Ricky Gervais' new movie The Invention of Lying by the Great S. T. Karinick.  The movie was made to lampoon Christianity, he says, yet it proves, despite itself, that not only are we better off with God ( the Christian God ) but because belief is the source of all that's good, belief proves itself valid.

" The godless society is unpleasant and uninspired."

he says, never mind that most people would find much more inspiration and cultural development  in increasingly Godless and humanistic Europe than in the bigoted, gay hating Bible Belt. Most normal people that is, rather than failed people who find life so horrible and frightening that they have to invent another mystical one to mystically be transported to. Perhaps withdrawal from the opiate of the masses is indeed unpleasant for the addicted, but for others, like me, the flowering of humanism and liberty is to be preferred.

Freedom of belief is all well and good but if they would stop mocking and persecuting the sane for their efforts to improve the human condition and further the cause of secular liberty fewer of us would need that fantasy world they find so comforting.

"So what we have here are two worlds. One, without God and controlled by thoughts of evolution, is a spectacularly dreary, unhappy place without love or meaning. On the other hand, even a fictional God brings the world meaning, joy, liberty, and wonder."

Can it be that only someone trapped in the fictional world we call "conservative" could read this without sadness, pity and yes, horror?  I find precisely those things in a meaningless and hostile universe. I love the more because of love's futility, I treasure life more for it's evanescence and meaninglessness.  I wonder more at the spectacular  and vast and complex universe of reality than at the childish little one born of ignorance and legend -- and most of all I'm free without Gods as no man could be with their jealous tempers and wrathful deeds, their narrow minded  priests, preachers and divine retributions trapping him in a world of guilt, fear, original sin and self-loathing.

"Thus although Ricky Gervais has publicly said that his film takes an atheist position, it appears that even he cannot imagine a happy, emotionally fulfilling world that does not acknowledge a good many fundamentally religious thoughts, and in particular Christian ones."

What a smug and loathsome statement and how offensive to other religions -- as though love compassion, emotional fulfillment  and the rest of the fuzzy fulsome package belonged exclusively to any form of extant Christianity other than the ad hoc and ephemeral chimera he puts together for this argument -- as though history, it's wars, persecutions, tyrannies, oppressions and inquisitions  could be disregarded as anomalous and never anywhere was there a Buddha or an atheist willing to lay down his life for his family or his country.

Regardless of how I loath this man's precious, smug and egotistical disdain for non-believers and non-Christians, I have to smile a bit at how he claims Gervais' movie "undercuts" his atheist position,  because if even a fictional God is as good, as he says, as a real God; if objective reality is less important than the noble lie,  then truthfulness, objectivity and indeed honesty are unnecessary and perhaps dangerous in his happy world of fiction, a conclusion which undercuts everything that, in his conceit, he attempts to prove.

Guns, Guts and Nuts

I hardly cringe any more when they call it Floriduh. All I can do is shake my head in agreement and defeat. I'm quite sure we have as many brilliant residents as any other state, and looking at all the billionaires and retired intellectuals and scientists we have, perhaps we don't rank as low on the intelligence totem pole as we do on the latitude scale, but nevertheless -- we have our idiots in Florida. We surely do.

I don't think it's a big deal that The Southwest Broward Republican Club would choose to hold their monthly meeting at a shooting range. Of course I'd rather see my politicians doing something worthwhile along the lines of community service, or self education or discussion of our problems, but I'm from planet Earth after all and I don't expect it. It's more productive not to be associated with problems anyway since it might prompt people to ask for answers rather than gleefully to participate in the business du jour: mockery and macho posturing.

It's just that President Napolitano explained the idea by hinting at armed resistance to a democratically elected government and democratically approved legislation once more.

"Without the Second Amendment, I don't think the other amendments would hold up. I think they would just be suggestions that the government would decide to do whatever they want."

Even though we're certainly no more democratic or less oppressed than Norway or Belgium for instance, I guess he would know because the last Republican administration did just that and much of what they wanted was unconstitutional. Of course if we're talking revolution we hardly need to elect anyone in the first place, but OK, I understand the usefulness of such gestures. They're hoping to retain the Cracker vote by playing with guns although Broward county is a rather urban setting these days and overwhelmingly Democratic, yet still, it's a choice, a strategy even if it's a childish, stupid and certainly poorly thought out one.

But.

How much pre-frontal lobe capacity does a politician need to realize that shooting at human shaped targets with the initials of one's political opponents isn't really appropriate behavior for an adult, much less a candidate selling the idea of his wisdom, maturity and mental stability?

"One of the shooters at the Tuesday evening event was Robert Lowry, a Republican candidate hoping to unseat U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Weston. Lowry's target had the letters "DWS" next to the silhouette head."

says the Sun Sentinel. A joke, said Lowry and if I were 7 years old I might agree. I might think the targets portraying a turbanned "terrorist" carrying a rocket launcher was funny too, but I'm not 7 years old and feel no affinity for the giggling idiots who think it's a riot.

I'm fond of shooting sports myself and the ranges I go to have as many real country and backwoods people there as well as more urbane sophisticates from Hobe Sound and Jupiter Island, none of whom has ever exhibited a "personalized" target although Republicans dominate around here. Could it be that Broward County Republican Brats can't measure up to the maturity and manners of my friends from Yeehaw or Osowaw Junction?

Back in the loony bin

535 e-mails were waiting for me when I returned Wednesday night. As you can imagine, many were spam, many were blog comments but more than enough were little packets of outrage; pictures of Muslims carrying signs warning of retribution billed as a general picture of all Muslims, dire warnings of collapse if we reform health care, little buckets of irrational snickering about Obama and much more. All unworthy of further comment.

Every time I leave the US and come back I'm shocked and have to wait a few days for the numbness to set in and the shivering to stop the way you do when you jump into cold water.

I watched BBC news every day whilst in the UK. We really have nothing like it here. It's dull, reasoned, thorough, polite and controversies are actual and not designed to make facts look dubious and madmen seem sane and well intentioned. Yes, there was much discussion about "reforming" health care and disability insurance, but no shouting, no interrupting, no slogan shouting, no insults, no comparisons with Pol Pot, Hitler or Karl Marx: more like engineers talking about making your car run better by adjusting the spark advance or fuel mixture curve. "Yes sir, we could perhaps remove some people from inability payments but wouldn't we have to provide more money to train them?" I'd forgotten what civility was like.

We're a crazy country, mad, ill informed, agressively rude, contemptuous of reason, terrified of civilization and of its demands. I'm sick to death of it, sick of talking about it and sick of trying to do something about it -- at least for today.

Away from shore

Capt. Fogg will be off shore until Oct 8

Snatch and Grab at G20

The G20 circus is back in town and no matter how many rings it has, it's all sideshow. Does this picture show US troops shoving a protester into a car? The security people claim that no, these were policemen wearing camouflage. There is a mix of National Guard and Policemen on the street in Pittsburgh to keep the peace, but it matters who did this and why, because the US Military can't make arrests and may not be used to enforce the law - oh wait - there's the Patriot Act.

Again, G20 security claims the man was removed because he was vandalizing stores. Can we be sure? The blog DemocraticUnderground.com bulges with comments, some of which assure us it was all staged, or that it was an innocent bystander having his freedom of speech infringed upon - but who knows? There's the Patriot act - almost anything can be legal, either the death of Posse Comitatus or the spiriting away or arrest with no charges of anyone, or so it seems to many of us. Who can be sure what is happening here?

There's the Patriot act and many of its more egregious features are set to expire at the end of the year. Whatever it was that the picture shows, that legacy of George Bush will allow speculation of all sorts, legitimate and otherwise because it will allow things none of us want. As it is, the powers granted under the Patriot act have been used primarily to go after dope smokers, not terrorist suspects. A bill backed by two Democrats and an independent may be able to put the brakes on widespread abuses, although I would like to see the entire thing scrapped. Otherwise people who believe they really are planning to round us all up will be justified in worrying and none of us will ever be quite sure what's going on in Pittsburgh, Washington or anywhere else.

The plots thicken

I don't know why, but since the Vietnam era, the hawkish types seem to have preferred the world "embolden" to the more conventional "encourage." It may be simply that we prefer not to use the word "courage" when talking about our enemies, but figuring that one out is beyond any area of expertise I might pretend to. None the less, the Cheneyesque assumption that Obama, by being Obama, the liberal/fascist/Commie/Muslim born in Kenya and Indonesia will spur or "embolden" Islamic enemies to attack us to a greater extent than the refulgent presidency of George W. Bush did, is sure to be in the news again.

The last few days have seen the arrest of people involved in credible bomb plots, including the attempt to blow up a skyscraper in Dallas, Texas. Hosam Maher Husein Smadi, 19-year-old illegal immigrant from Jordan was arrested after he dialed a number on his cell phone that he had been duped by Federal Agents into believing would detonate a large bomb. He had been under close surveillance for some time.

This follows on the heels of the arrest of Denver resident Najibullah Zazi as part of another bomb conspiracy that had advance to the point of assembling the chemical components. Both of these plots were foiled by what seems to be good police work and not anything resulting from the massive powers given to the President by the infamous "Patriot Act."

It would be hard to justify the opinion that the 2001 attack was a one-shot deal not to be repeated and it's been a no brainer to predict that the next attack wouldn't involve hijacking airplanes. Although Zazi may have received training in Pakistan and Smadi claims to be a "soldier of bin Laden," these plots may have less to do with anything hatched at the top levels of some central organization than with the more diverse worldwide culture of anti-Western hatred. It's hard to say these attempts wouldn't have happened if Afghanistan had been cleansed of the Taliban or Qaeda training camps. Of course the threat remains vanishingly small to any individual but it's important to note that Smadi wanted to blow up Wells Fargo as a blow to our banking system -- and it would have been.

But again, the FBI seems to have done its job and without waterboards or Transylvanian castle dungeons or reading the mail of the Quaker churches and without bombing any country back to the dark ages and this makes the idea that Obama has disabled our ability to deal with terrorists less of a credible talking point.

Love in the time of Republican insanity

Face it, it's been downhill since that socialist Lincoln freed the slaves. In no time at all, we gave women the vote and only a hundred years after that bearded Marxist in the bad hat betrayed the freedom of slave owners, the descendants of those slaves could vote too. The speed of our nation down the slippery slope to Socialism is breathtaking. Only a century after those lazy slaves were allowed basic human rights, the damned Liberals were insisting that God was wrong in separating the races and wanted to allow interracial marriage. There will no stopping this slide and there's no fooling Representative Steve King (R-Iowa) it's all about galloping socialism.

"If there's a push for a socialist society, a society where the foundations of individual rights and liberties are undermined and everybody is thrown together living collectively off of one pot of resources earned by everyone, this is one of the goals they'd have to go to, is same sex marriage, because it has to plow through marriage in order to get to their goal. Not only is it a radical social idea, it is a purely socialist concept, in the final analysis."

Makes your head swim, doesn't it? The incisive and trenchant logic, I mean. Why isn't everyone smart enough to see that denying life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is our last defense against Socialism? Why aren't they smart enough to see that we need government to take over everything in our lives from our morals to our freedom to our love life in the name of smaller, less intrusive government? Thank God for Iowa!

Tea stains

Maybe Chuck Norris has been kicked in the head once too often. Maybe he deserves another one. He's been barking about being true to the "spirit of our founders" by avoiding the use of a contemporary US flag to wave over their "tea parties" unless the flag is first desecrated by staining it with tea. His op-ed in World Net Daily links to a WND page peddling pre-desecrated flags for $73.50. I don't know if Norris gets a piece of the action.

"If you insist on posting a modern USA flag too, then get one that has been tea stained, to show your solidarity with our founders."

The idea of being lectured to about political philosophies of the Enlightenment and the visions of the somewhat disparate men who drafted our constitution by an intellectual midget like Norris is galling enough but the spectacle of being urged to stain the flag by people who have been clogging up the legislative process for over 40 years trying to make it a crime to deface a flag is too much to let slip by without at least one Wilsonian "you lie!"

One of the things I'm sure our "founders" would agree on is that presidents are not to be chosen or un-chosen by mobs of belligerent barbarians carrying guns in the street. In fact the wisdom of letting the populace have much direct power was much discussed and protected against by the electoral college and the indirect election of senators.

Another thing I suspect they would agree on is that we the people are the founders of a country designed to be a constant work in progress through the institutions designed for that purpose. For someone who does nothing in this world but play a tough guy beating the crap out of stage ruffians in the movies to raise rabble that the rest of us will have to deal with is an outrage. For someone forgetful or dishonest enough to pretend that we don't remember him telling us that Bush was president and must be trusted, followed and honored as such, to now preach revolution is disgusting.

If talking about tea is supposed to remind us that taxation without representation is tyranny, perhaps it will remind some of us that we have representation, but Chuck doesn't like or respect the process that elected them. Is representation by self appointed gangs without election and without taxation their Utopian vision or is it just formless and inchoate rage?

Do we need anything better to remind us that Republican views of civilization and government are entirely situational and entirely opposite when they are in power and when they are thrown out in the street? It's all about winning at any cost and about vengeance at any cost when they lose.

Paling around with Communists

It's funny that we live in a country so afraid of facing up to its history and its responsibility that anything even so mildly critical as admitting your president was sometimes an embarrassment is a death sentence to your career and reputation. Ask the Dixie Chicks.

That doesn't apply however to Republican critics, particularly critics of Barack Obama. As you know, Sarah Palin has been touring China and viciously berating our country and its policies to an international audience, in speeches to which the press is not invited.

It's reported that some delegates to the CLSA Investors’ Forum, part of the French bank Credit Agricole, walked out "in disgust" complaining that she would only take pre-arranged questions, talked too much about Alaska and criticised Obama without offering any solutions of her own. Predictably, some said she was brilliant. Of those, one European delegate said: “She said America was spending a lot of money and it was a temporary solution. Normal people are having to pay more and more but things don’t get better. The rich will leave the country and the poor will get poorer.” That's a condition that well describes the Reagan and Bush years although she apparently spent much time praising Ronald Reagan.

I'll leave it to you to decide if reiterating her lies about death panels and "socialized" medicine to an audience, every nationality of which but the USA already has universal health care, indicates brilliance, insurmountable ignorance, vicious disregard for truth, justice and the United States of America. I won't ask if you think that telling an audience in China that Barack Obama and our trade policies are unfair to China nibbles away at any claim to patriotism she may have. She knows it does and CLSA reports that they closed the meetings to the press only because Palin didn't want to be known for what she is; a lying, chiseling, invidious little creep willing to sell out her country for her personal advancement.