Not worth saving

Does anyone really still think the USA is a viable country?  Can I avoid calling such a person a delusional fool?  Have we been facilitating a Republican sabotage of our government while obsessing about sniffing out the last racist, wasting so much attention on gay marriage and school shootings, defending against every bogus scandal to come out of the Foxhole that we might as well just hand them the keys and move to Canada?  Show me otherwise!

With the Republicans calling the ultimate failure of  the Neocon Crusade in Iraq "Obama's greatest blunder" and demanding a "game plan" right now, this minute --  with the Supreme Court confirming that Congress is in session if the Republicans say so even if it is not in session and no one is there and so they can impeach the president for making a recess appointment, I think it's time to realize that we've lost, that we're being attacked on so many fronts that the current Iraqi administration has a better chance of survival than the United States government has of  representing its people. No Democratic Party president can perform his job, nothing can get past the Republican Party in the Senate and Republican plants on the Supreme Court are effective in making sure the Republican Corporatist/Christianist agenda has a clear path.

I'm tired of complaining, I'm tired of the self righteous and grossly ineffective opposition with their thousand petty ideologies, their straw men and shibboleths and yes, their lies and delusions.

Maybe it's time to get the hell out now. Now before I have to hear some other Republican howler use the world 'freedom' and I have to do something irresponsible.  Stick it up your arse, America.  I'm done with you.

Da Skins

Redskins - that's what we call the tourists with their New Jersey complexions who come down here in the Winter to expose themselves to old Sol in all his ultraviolet glory.   Mad dogs and Northerners go out in the noonday sun.

But anyway, I wouldn't dream of calling one of our proud Seminoles a 'redskin' and for more reasons than that they're actually not red at all, having the sense to stay out of the sun, but none the less, they are an indigenous population which is not really the case with a Washington professional football team or its owner. No thought has been give to calling them the whiteskins or blackskins despite the player's origins.  But this is America now and  the right to make money, even if it defames or mocks the innocent is sacred.  Daniel Snyder, even though as a Jew he should know far, far better, still thinks it's OK. 

I'm sure I don't have to waste time illustrating how obnoxious this team name is even if the owner is too stupid or too greedy (or both) to realize it but for someone who loves irony, it's fun to speculate about a buyout.  If the Florida Seminole tribes could buy the Hard Rock Cafe franchise for a billion dollars, perhaps the Washington Redskins might become available and particularly if Snyder gets tired of the ridicule he so richly deserves.  It's fun to speculate about a name, but I'll keep it to myself and I have a feeling the tribe has too much class and business sense to consider any of my suggestions.

Keep your God in your pants.

Oh come on, at this point you really can't get away with telling us the Christian right doesn't have more perverts and hypocrites lecturing us about morals than the general population and don't pretend that turbo-charged Christianism isn't a way to get around the morals nearly everyone was born with.  A cynic might be tempted to suggest that getting around common decency and respect for life and freedom itself has been central to religion, public and private.

" Popular Michigan contemporary Christian radio DJ fired after arrest on child sex charges"

Blared a headline on Raw Story yesterday.  Ho hum. Now you may be tempted to start in with the "most Christians" argument, but don't bother. It's not my intent to smear most Christians unless they're the ones who look the other way or argue that because most Christians aren't child sex traffickers, bigots and perverts or hypocrites who make a living excoriating behavior they indulge in, you can't condemn preachers, colleges or their moral or financial exploitations.  Hell, there's even a Christian parable condemning such rock throwing dirt bags, not that normal people with a normal sense of right and wrong need such primitive tales.  Child prostitution?  What a quandary - perhaps we should ask what Jesus would do or take Bible classes because the law is too vague and you can't trust the unbelievers.

I'm not often in churches and so the fact that I've heard an alarming number of "God loves sinners"sermons is disturbing.  Could it be that churches are offered as a hiding place for rapists, for haters, for criminals under the assumption that Christianity will make them better people or at least help them avoid punishment, secular and divine?  Could it be suspected that the main purpose of the religious posing and bad music is to cloak the hate, the prejudice and bigotry and self righteousness and sometimes the nastier things like child prostitution and rape?  It would be hard to show that church attendance or loud Gospel quoting has any salutary effect on morals and harder to claim that being involved with the Christian Media or a Christian College hints that someone is not a moral monster.

And if you're tempted to call me prejudiced, I admit it, I am -- the same way I'm prejudiced, I'm prepared to assume that after all this time, the e-mail from a Nigerian princess who wants to send me ten million bucks is any more sincere than the "Christain DJ" who pays to have sex with little boys and if all these Christian Nation, Christian morals blowhards have their way, we won't have a secular government to lock them up.

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

Remember Rosemary Woods?  Perhaps I should give my customary sigh and ask if you're even old enough to remember Richard Nixon's secretary who, as she claimed was dextrous enough 'accidentally' to erase a potentially incriminating tape seven times!  that was long before e-mail but she gave many months of material to the comedians of the mid 70's when Republicans were heavy handed thugs and bungling burglars as well as ordinary liars, crooks and cheats. the psychotic religious mystics and professional manipulators came later.  Somehow we became inured to such executive chicanery by the time the Bush White house lost  some 22 million e-mails.  Losing data was part of the nature of things said Darryl Issa and how "shameful" of the Democrats to whine about it.

They've become so smooth, of course, that we no longer hear the tables turn and turn they do and the White House press secretary nor any Democrat can dismiss the whole lame story by saying "we screwed up" and get away with it.  Once again, it's the old Republican refrain "It's OK when we do it" and of course, making a bombastic fuss about e-mails is a convenient diversion from the fact that there really is no evidence of any scandal. Sad to say, too many people still see fires when the sleazemeisters light their smokescreens.

It works so well that all the smoke about Benghazi has obscured the fact that the ten embassy attacks and 60 dead during the Bush/Cheney years have disappeared from the American consciousness, even now that the elderly warmongers have risen once again like Nosferatu from his foetid coffin, seeking to spill more American blood.  Does anyone have a stake?

I'm tempted to write my Democratic senator to suggest a new national anthem: Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.  I've always liked the tune.

Never forget, never remember.

Good morning Republicans and welcome to another bright new day of  washing our sins in Obama.  And haven't we been having fun preempting the Democrats from using our martial spirit, thanking every veteran for his service by damning Obama for rescuing the one and only soldier (oops, warrior ) who was treasonously disillusioned with our dear war?  Another day, another reason to impeach!

And welcome back to our neocons. Awake after their long sleep to remind us how Obama's weakness has, as we predicted, turned our faultless, perfectly arranged, positively inspiring bastion of freedom in Iraq into a flaming hell of Extremist violence. Let's greet their resurrection with a resounding chorus of  Bonzai Benghazi, Benghazi as we turn his success in capturing a perpetrator into another outrage and let's waste no time since corroboration that the attack really was a response to an Internet video works against us.

It may be another good time to toss out more chaff, more distraction: immigration, gay marriage, climate change racism and Christian rights to make sure the Libtards exhaust themselves chasing the chum while we triumph where it counts, our weapons gleaming in the bright light of a martial dawn.

For lies are the truth and truth lies and Fox is forever.  Thank you for your service. How else would we accuse the father of a war prisoner of being a Muslim terrorist or elevate a rumor to a final verdict but for Fox, the botoxed faces incapable of betraying a lie.  Chemical weapons, Biological weapons, mobile labs, nuclear weapons, centrifuges, yellow cake -- al Qaeda training camps and rape rooms: Saddam and 9/11!  not a smirk, a twitch, a tell.  No, the  America haters were wrong when they said it would be a quagmire with no end and we're right that it's now a quagmire with no end because of Obama.

The quagmire is our glory and our glory eternal, hail Bush and Cheney.  In the words of  Saint Giuliani:

President George W. Bush stood amid the fallen towers of the World Trade Center, and he said to the barbaric terrorists who attacked us, "They will hear from us." Well, they heard from us. They heard from us in Afghanistan and we removed the Taliban. They heard from us in Iraq, and we ended Saddam Hussein's reign of terror. And we put him where he belongs, in jail. They heard from us in Libya, and without firing a shot Gadhafi abandoned his weapons of mass destruction. They are hearing from us in nations that are now more reluctant to sponsor terrorists or terrorism. So long as George Bush is our president, is there any doubt they will continue to hear from us until we defeat global terrorism.

We succeeded and Obama failed and the Fox shall lie for ever and ever.  Benghazi!  NEVER FORGET, NEVER REMEMBER.

L'état, c'est moi

Brent Douglass Cole has described himself as a “sovereign American Citizen attempting to thwart the obvious conspiracy and subterfuges of powers inimical to the United States.”  Yes, these Sovereign Citizen folks are few and deliberately far between but they're like an appendage of something large and pervasive and disturbing.  Cole for some reason fancies himself “a statutory Attorney General of the United States”which he'd have a hard time explaining, at least to me, since if each man is sovereign, the entire concept of a United States and a government with elected officials with any power to do anything is suspiciously self-contradictory.What he's saying is that all which makes the United States United and comprised of states is sinister and inimical to statehood and unity.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  The Sovereign Mr. Cole shot a Bureau of Land Management ranger and a California Highway Patrol officer who were investigating some vehicles at a campsite. Predictably, he got shot himself although not fatally. I'm not sure why but of course when one is sovereign, one rules, by definition which makes for problems when someone else rules too and everyone is armed.  Perhaps that explains the universal and ancient need for rules that modify and limit and define sovereignty. It's why we need some form of elections or some form of ruler to replace that personal sovereignty, it being a mess if every voter votes for himself.  Short of being totally bonkers, anyone has to admit that personal sovereignty has to be strictly limited in scope and power if anyone is to survive long enough to enjoy the wild and free life of the animals.

Now of course we'd like to portray Cole as being just plain nuts, and indeed articles about him list his preoccupation with conspiracy theories most of us don't hold.  I have to defend him on that if I want to defend my own opinions and my right to have them -- and who knows?  Conspiracies abound and even wars have been started and prolonged by real, genuine conspiracies, as you may know.  No, that's not the nuts part, or at least not the dangerously nutty part: it's the notion that one is not subject to laws, that any piece of ground is mine to rule and no one else's, and all by some nebulous right that can be defended with lethal force.  Mr. Cole seems to believe that his right to declare sovereignty the way some kid might call 'dibs' makes law enforcement illegal and laws inapplicable unless he approves of them and unless he makes them.  It's the law of the jungle, in essence.  The law of  tooth and claw if you've got them and guns if you don't. It's the law of the brat and the law of the bully and a law individuals rarely enforce successfully, thank God.

Now Civilization has a price and a price that may seem excessive to some and nay well be excessive to all but doing something about it is only possible without that odd notion of  the "sovereign citizen" and the individual's right to make or ignore laws ad libidum.  A paradox, isn't it?  But in today's ultra polarized America everything we do to deal with the fringe enrages the more mainstream and the cynical Right, the Corporate Right, the Religious Right are sure to make use of it.  Cole is now a cause and another one of many and I don't know what the hell we're going to do about it.

Fox lies, America dies

"You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" 

asked Joseph Welch of "tailgunner Joe" McCarthy, for decades the prototype for the vicious, unscrupulous and dishonest Republican Jihadist.  The unstated but nearly universally understood answer was "hell no."

McCarthy has been somewhat de-demonized after years of propaganda and  revision, but compared to what we had in 1954, at the height of the Communist witch hunt, the wealthy Corporate Political monsters now stomping on America like something from a 50's Japanese monster movie makes those little demons as pathetic as the rubber suited Godzilla compared to the thousand foot tall  computer generated version.

But is it surprising that the one thing Foxzilla has to say about the ultra radical (too radical for the al Qaeda leaders)  ISIS, now rendering all those dead and wounded and all those spent billions nugatory, is that not only is this not Bush's fault, but Bush foresaw that this would happen if we had some weak, Muslim-smelling, black Communist incompetent like Barack Obama in the White House. 

This is how America ends, not with anything but Fox.  Of course as any non-Republican -- and by Republican I mean malicious, truth-hating saboteur -- Bush signed off on the pledge to remove troops by 2012 and of course the troops wouldn't have been there but for him and his malicious lies and greed for conquest in the first place. We might not have had the Great Recession either if  he didn't lust after the title of "warpresident" he invented for himself but just like that recession that followed his war and deregulation policies, Iraq's inevitable collapse, long predicted by Bush's opponents now becomes Obama's fault and a Republican prediction.

At this point there's little left but gallows humor and bleak despair because we're all idiots, all deranged and all preoccupied with our own petty grievances:  missing airplanes, private racist comments by old men. Preoccupied by irrational fear and hog-tied by our own propaganda we just don't care enough to recall the things of only a few years ago and while we natter about like nitwits, we take step after step toward fascism and jingoism and a government of dollars, not men.

Thank you Mr. Bush

 Our efforts against Al Qaeda in Iraq and elsewhere have been much like the indiscriminate use of antibiotics, killing off the weak bacteria and letting the strong get stronger.  The group they're now calling ISIS seems more radical and has more blind hatred for America and the West than the old guard and they're likely to "take back" the Iraq we set up for destruction, killing hundreds of thousands and putting control into the hands of brutal and incompetent people.There's not a hell of a lot we can do, even if  that most strange of bedfellows Iran joins forces with us, setting new records in the World Cup of irony.

As much as that idiot John McCain and that fool Tony Blair would like to re-invade, it's not likely to happen, although some wag might suggest that the only reason to suggest such a thing would be an opportunity to call Obama cowardly and weak.  They're already doing that and have been doing that since before he was elected.  But speaking of irony, hardly anyone seems, except perhaps for Fareed Zakaria, to be calling attention to the weak, cowardly and dishonest George W. Bush who lied us into invading a country, a recent ally, where Al Qaeda was not, that had nothing to do with an attack on our country and doing it with an inadequate force and a non-existent plan for what to do after the conquest.

This is nothing less than an inevitable continuation of Bush's War, a war we lost by starting it.  For those who remember the premises of that war: the nuclear program, the WMD, the connection with 9/11 and the presences of al Qaeda and its training camps within Iraq, it might be a sad thing to remember than none of those things so often repeated in such bellicose language actually turned out to be true and all of us who were called anti-American traitors, cowards and worse were actually right -- and that includes whole countries like France.  In a sane country apologies would have been made long ago, but this is not a sane or honest country, but one still trying to justify it's tragic mistakes and to blame it all on others. 

Al Qaeda, as we were warned, is now bigger, uglier, more insanely brutal and about to take over in Iraq.  Thank you Mr. Bush although you'll have to share the ignominy with Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, inter alia. This is the world you have given us along with an America too divided and self-hating to pay its bills and maintain itself.  We stay up nights listening to lies, inflated or invented scandals and hating each other for it. We install depraved religious idiots, fascists, anarchists, separatists, denialists and bigots in the legislature while slandering, libeling the president and thwarting every effort to deal with the mess the Republicans left us. Thank you for uniting Syria and Iraq under the flag of  death, for destroying any hope that this new century might be better than the old one. Thank you for bringing back the spectre of nuclear war in the middle east, for giving Iran and other nearby countries a good reason to build nukes. Thank you so much. 

Silly Saturday

OK, call it silly Saturday, but they're all the same, all silly and it's a shame.

Went to the grocery store and grabbed a package of the yogurt covered cranberries my wife likes and what do you know?  They're now Greek yogurt covered cranberries although they taste exactly the same. The revolution is over.  There's no more non-Hellenic yogurt to be had anywhere in any form.  Active, inactive, fruit on the bottom or no fruit at all, it's all Greek, all the time and forever. Another win for commercial groupspeak.  Opa!

The way we talk!  I've never heard it before but in the last few days, I'm hearing "in the wheelhouse" over and over.  Sometimes it's my wheelhouse or your wheelhouse and as far as I can tell it might mean what "in the ballpark" meant last week, or perhaps it still does -- who knows?  Not me. Anyway, my boat has a wheelhouse but I'm not in it.  Too damn hot today and  by the way God Damn it, it's not genius whatever it is - nothing is genius, it's a damned noun, not an adverb!  Is that in your twerking wheelhouse brah?


So whatever else might be trending today amongst the low word count, #instaenglish set, keep it to yourself. I've had enough, go put it in your hashtag and smoke it or shove it up your shark and jump it. I don't need a reminder of how nothing makes any sense and how much you like it that way

Who's blowing those pipes and where is he leading us?

There's something happening here

What it is ain't exactly clear

-Buffalo Springfield-

Another day, another school shooting, or so it seems.  It's not clear yet, as I write this, just what happened to the perpetrator except that he's dead and I'm only using the male pronoun because face it, almost all rampage shooters are male.  The only other facts available at the moment are that one person was killed and that the weapon used was "semiautomatic" which is really of no import but that it excites people who have no idea what that means and are afraid of guns, which is precisely the effect the media desire because it pins us all to the tube.

But it does seem that it's not only a growing thing, but a rapidly growing thing, but perhaps once again, impressions can be deceiving particularly when there's a strong desire to make it a political issue. 

Actually it may be otherwise and if  one looks for patterns, it might seem that rampage shootings on the whole reached a peak, along with violent crime in general, in the 1980's and has tapered off since and the Sandy Hook incident looks almost anomalous.  That certainly is not the impression I get from the news.

So lets look further back and let's average it out per period  and use the per capita figures to adjust for the exploding population to make it easier to differentiate noise from trends and it seems the years from 1980 through 1990 were indeed a maximum.  I might be tempted to say we're at a similar rate to what we had during the Great Depression.

 I might be tempted to mention that one of the largest gun control programs  dates to 1967 and that violent crime accelerated sharply thereafter.  There was a big bump during prohibition and a minimum during the 'Fabulous 50's' as Ike used to call it, but off the top of my head, that 1980 to 1990 period coincided with Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.  Make of that what you will and I'm sure one can look at other trends and events and conditions and make correlations and speculate about causation,  Does it show a marked effect of gun control milestone legislation like the 1967 restrictions on types of weapons, the end of mail order sales, the end of "saturday night specials,"  waiting periods, gun owner registrations and the like?  I don't see it. I see a long term downward trend. 

"Too many guns!"  is a favorite explanation for a trend that may be apparent without actually being true, but again, the number of households with guns seems to be steadily declining and while US gun production is up, it might have a bit to do with the 13 years of war we've suffered through. Fewer people have an inclination to have guns in the house and although it's easy to dismiss the positive correlation of gun ownership per capita with gun crime of any kind,  we're just not being objective if we see more guns everywhere.

Really, just what is happening here?  More than one thing certainly, but we can't rule out politics -- not in everything at a time when politics determines what we perceive in all things. What it is, ain't exactly clear but it's clear to me that there's a piper making some kind of music and we just can't seem to resist following him.

The End is Nigh

You don't mention the Southern Poverty Law Center down here in the South and you certainly don't want just anyone to know you're a supporter.  You'll be ostracized at best because they are on the shit list of every right wing group from top to bottom, all with their own pet hate, usually centering around that bogeyman : the United States Government.

SPLC's Hate Watch Blog had been tracking the pair of raving lunatics who murdered

two policemen, declared a revolution and killed themselves in a Las Vegas Wal-Mart.  They were part of the idiotic standoff between the Bureau of Land Management and Cliven Bundy this Spring and are fond of spewing the apocalyptic, revolutionary idiocies typical of a huge number of armed, hostile and bellicose Americans identifying themselves as "patriots."   SPLC is right to do so and too bad more attention wasn't paid to the warnings.  The as yet unnamed couple is hardly unique either in their armaments or attitudes and if the flood of e-mails I've been getting addressed to "fellow patriots" is an indicator, there are a number of them out there. A week hasn't gone by in years without a prediction of something horrible that Obama and the Liberals were about to do that fellow 'patriots' needed to be aware of.

No need to elaborate -- suffice it to say, none of their predictions have ever come true to the slightest degree, the FEMA concentration camps or the National Guard rounding up guns, although people like that will still still hang on to hope that there will be an excuse to get into the fortified bunkers and the armored vehicles and get out the big guns. I have no idea why these people chose today over yesterday or tomorrow, but perpetual predictions of that financial collapse and that gun grab would only make sense to a psychotic spoon fed hatred and lies by not only the militias and survivalist groups, but Karl Rove and Fox News and the Republican Party.

It's hard to crack down on people who haven't yet done anything and of course the above mentioned groups make it harder, portraying the subhuman hordes as heroes, but it's time we admitted we have a problem more serious than making sure no one ever says anything racist, or misogynistic or insensitive and it's time we pay attention.  History seems to be trying to repeat itself and the cast of characters is already in costume.

American Dreamin'

On this hot and steamy, Summer dreamy, hammock-sleepy Sunday.


I happened to have CNN on the other day and they were airing another one of their puff pieces on "The American Dream,"  one of those annoying reflections on how the land of opportunity is failing to be a land of opportunity.  I find it annoying because of the assumption that the USA is somehow a unique place when it comes to providing upward mobility, a more honest name for a dream that, let's face it, is everyone's dream.  I've seen figures  that argue for other countries -- quite a number of other countries -- being better places to get ahead, to get out of poverty, to save some money, to make a good life for your children, but we still call it an American Dream as we still use the word freedom to stand for some special thing we, and only we possess.

The people interviewed all seemed to believe that those Americans about to enter or having recently entered what we like to call the "work force" will not have as prosperous a life as their parents.  I remember hearing the same thing about my children's generation some 30 years ago.  If hope for the future is the American Dream, pessimism is the American affliction.  Things are always getting worse.

One young female interviewee told us her vision for the future of  people her age was bleak "because of all the guns and violence" and the answers of  the others were is bizarre and confused as hers.  It's true, the middle class of America has been shrinking for quite a while, and with a possible brief interlude, so have living standards, including health and education for all but a tiny proportion of us, but perhaps the dumbing down includes an inability to correlate the marginalization of the masses with the rise of  retro-Capitalism and the idea that we're all dependent on the very, very rich for our prosperity.  It's an idea that does I think, depend heavily on a misunderstanding of Capitalism and of prosperity.  I could easily cite Mexico or other countries with a lot of wealth in a few pairs of hands and very little opportunity that doesn't involve swimming a river or climbing a fence.

But here at home, in my unincorporated area with large spreads of trailer parks and not much more than a crossroads shopping center or two, I have to wonder just how much trickles down from a few dozen multi-multi-millionaires and billionaires who live withing walking distance from me. They don't shop here, lobby effectively to keep much commerce and traffic away and although property taxes do help our schools, most people of the white persuasion send their kids to private institutions, many of them parochial. There are very few employment opportunities even at the minimum wage.

Most of the visible trickling is the water consumption of the private water parks and golf courses owned by the sports and entertainment folks you never see, unless it's one of their helicopters going overhead.  They might as well not be here.  I can only wash my car on Thursdays and Sundays while the bulk of our drinking water nourishes grass and water slides. Trickle Trickle.  They're not really job creators other than for lawn mowing and pool maintenance.  If you find a job here, your employer would likely be a local business man.  A shop keeper, painter, mechanic, grocer -- and they are suffering still, long after the market has hit historic highs and unemployment is back in the 6% range.
It's percolating up, not trickling down and of course we understand how it all ends with no affluent consumers to fuel jobs and opportunities -- and no dream, American or otherwise, just pessimism, hopelessness.

But a good part of  the malaise has little to do with the failure of Capitalism, the growth of  monopoly, the reduction of choices and opportunities, it's also the legacy of round the clock scandal, outrage and doom marketing having so little to do with objective reality.  The 20 something has less to worry from guns and violence than I did 50 years ago, she won't be drafted, she's more likely to live a long life and not to be bankrupted by medical bills, less likely to die in a car accident and a lot of other better than nothing things, but the spirit of defeat and hopelessness is there. The habit of looking backward instead of forward of seeing defeat in victory and victory in being a loser and I have to blame the information age and the technology that lets those very, very rich prosper by providing that stream of disinformation and outrage people just can't tune out and don't know enough to question. All we lack is a Colosseum.

Before Bowe Bergdahl spoke a word to anyone, the media had already turned from hope and relief to slander and scurrilous accusation lest any unity arise.  I understand his parents have received threats and that the slime machine is at full production levels. The machine that cannot tolerate our feeling good about anything lest we tune out, unplug, wake up, fight back. 

I think it's a fine example of how dreams and hopes and even hard work are turned to shit for corporate profit:  an explanation of the success of all those apocalyptic destruction blockbuster movies and those apocalyptic shooting/suicide shootings, stabbings and bombings because we all know the end times are here and nothing is ever going to get better, unless you live on Jupiter Island Florida with a private water park and a private helicopter to fly you between your yacht and your private golf course.   These good folks aren't interested in seeing Godzilla stomp on our cities.  They are Godzilla and they've been stomping for years -- and God help anyone, from peon to president who interferes.

Transient Sanity Events

Particles do escape from black holes, or so argues Steven Hawking. the phenomenon is called Hawking radiation. Things do escape beyond the event horizon at the NRA as well apparently. It's called a Transient Sanity Event.

Members of Open Carry Texas, people who think it's really cool to act like a 6 year old with his new Hopalong Cassidy cap gun on Christmas morning, are cutting their NRA membership cards in half over a statement that somehow escaped the gravitational well of craziness and irresponsibility:

  “Let’s not mince words. Not only is it rare, it’s downright weird and certainly not a practical way to go normally about your business while being prepared to defend yourself. To those who are not acquainted with the dubious practice of using public displays of firearms as a means to draw attention to oneself or one’s cause, it can be downright scary.” 

The official apology for having allowed a sanity particle to escape was forthcoming from the NRA who called it one man's opinion and assuring the OCT people that

 "Our job is not to criticize the lawful behavior of fellow gun owners”

 except perhaps fellow gun owners who think these people are "downright scary."

 “If they do not retract their disgusting and disrespectful comments, OCT will have no choice but to withdraw its full support of the NRA and establish relationships with other gun rights organizations that fight for ALL gun rights, instead of just paying them lip service the way the NRA appears to be doing,” 

 responded Open Carry Texas openly.You know what's even scarier?  The idea that anyone thinks the NRA is too reasonable and that there may be other groups who are even more irresponsible.

Can this possibly end without bloodshed?  Texas, like many states, has a " menacing" law that has consequences to someone who causes you  to believe they will cause physical harm or serious physical harm to another person, their family or property.  Frankly, someone coming into a place of business or even a public square looking like Pancho Villa, or even carrying a holstered pistol makes me feel menaced and without a doubt, the police would be deluged with calls about armed men at playgrounds, gas stations, fast food restaurants and everywhere.  Welcome to the OK corral because every one of these open carry fools might just have that secret blaze of glory fantasy.

Impeach Obama, Court Martial Bergdahl

Damn the troops, Damn everything.  We're the Republicans

Didn't you see it coming?  The release -- let's call it a rescue -- of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl from the clutches of the Taliban after 5 years should have been a feel-good story for all of us as well as his friends and family in these days of supporting the heroic troops, but a country pleased with anything,  even for an afternoon,  just can't be allowed by the party that has long made it it's business to tell us just how awful things are  and just how it's Obama's fault.  As you know, some Guantanamo "detainees" yet to be tried for anything, were taken custody of by agents of Qatar in exchange for Bergdahl's release.  Even an old cynic like me went looking for a flag to fly.

Before the rest of us had finished saying "welcome home,"  Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe, the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, sternly warned America that this would have dire but unidentified consequences for all of us and of course "the troops."  Let the Inquisition, the disgusting denunciations and fear mongering begin. What did you expect? 

That Obama, said Oklahoma Jim, “clearly violated laws” that require him to notify Congress 30  days before any transfer of terrorists from Guantanamo Bay.  He betrayed us all, as is his wont, by failing to explain to Congress how the threat of releasing the satanic horde had been substantially mitigated before uncorking the Guantanamo bottle and thus denied the Grand Old Bastards the opportunity to filibuster, stall, vilify and ultimately prevent the recovery of Bergdahl, who, up until now, had been an illustration of Obama's uncaring negligence.

So stop your anti-American celebrating, Jodi and Bob Bergdahl and the town of Hailey, Idaho.  This is an impeachable offense, and your favorite son be damned.  And don't you dare bring up the sale of arms to our enemy Iran to bargain for the release of hostages because that's entirely different. Reagan was a Republican and it's OK when we do it.  Besides Obama has deprived the depraved party of their ability to denounce him for neglecting Americans in captivity and that's unforgivable.

And of course, say some of  the True American Patriots: sometimes our sainted troops aren't worth supporting.

"Bergdahl is a stank-ass hippie who accidentally joined the Army and decided to smell some Afghan flowers one night"

So he wasn't worth the time and effort even searching for him and it was, as when that Communist Clinton tried to punish al Qaeda with his "Monica Missiles,"  all a cover up for the Benghazi scandal, or the VA scandal or whatever scandal we are selling this week.

 "And, oh, yeah, Bergdahl will be treated as a hero instead of the little coward deserter that he is. If he makes it to a court martial, he’ll get slapped on the wrist, get an honorable discharge and go on his merry way to co-write a book." 

He's a traitor and deserter for sure say the patriots in and out of the military, proving, if proof is needed that there is no God who punishes those who need so badly to be punished.  Of course the punishment of living in a country that doesn't punish the Republicans is punishment for the rest of us.