Government injections

There must be some way out of here
Said the joker to the thief
There's too much confusion
I can't get no relief

___________________

So Michelle Bachmann claims some young girl suddenly got all retarded like, after her "Government injection" of Guardasil. That's not too surprising. I know someone who got loaded on Private Reserve Brandy and voted for Bush, but one thing always follows another and that's enough proof of causation for a desperate liar speaking to the profoundly ignorant and superstitious primitives who listen to people such as she; people who see the rage of gods in every storm, lightning bolt and tectonic movement, who are terrified of mysterious rays and forces and 'toxins' and couldn't pass a 5th grade science exam.

"Government Injections" eliminated smallpox, you know, and would have done the same for Polio and other diseases if we didn't have that other pandemic in America -- ignorance. Perhaps the absence of Government fluorides in our local Republican drinking water would explain all the brown and missing teeth I see at Tea Party rallies and I don't think it has anything to do with too much Lipton's.

But hey, we're a country (and I use the term loosely) not only infested with idiots and idiocy, but one where there's a good chance someone stupider and with even less integrity than Mark Bachmann's smokescreen wife may slither into high office like one of those young snakes that wriggle under my patio doors.

Speaking of things that creep and crawl, take my Congressworm, Tom 'Looneytunes' Rooney -- please. Tom who keeps showing up on my Facebook page to remind me that Government is not only impotent but incompetent and also tyrannical -- and all without explaining how those things aren't sort of mutually exclusive and more importantly, since he's part of it, why the hell he isn't as much to blame as anyone else who's part of it. Really, I'd be pleased if he'd just follow that other anti-government, moose-eating grifter and simply fly over the cuckoo's nest and drive around the country in a bus and get rich, like some inverted and less lysergic Ken Kesey.

But no, polluted air isn't bad for you, polluted water can't hurt you, unless it has government fluoride in it and besides Florida Governor Rick Scott says we can't afford it because disease and degradation are good for business and bad for 'jobs.' But condoms don't prevent disease or pregnancy, says the gospel of Tea and vaccinations are a genocidal hoax and freedom from disease and unwanted pregnancy will promote teen promiscuity and the gay agenda and we don't need no government health insurance because when we get leukemia or Alzheimers we can go to the emergency room and the taxpayers will pick up the bill and if you can't understand that you're just a libtard elitist and part of the problem.

Ditat Deus

God enriches: it's the state motto of Arizona. To some it surely suggests that the rich are the chosen of God and the poor and struggling? Your papers please.

My hypocrisy alarm has burned itself to a cinder over the last few days simply from the stench coming from our self-styled Libertarian friends from Arizona who have just given far more power to the State government than the Constitution allows and reduced constitutional protection from the power of law enforcement provided by that constitution -- a step away from Libertarian principles that even the notorious Glenn Beck balks at.

Anyway, if God has enriched Arizona in any way, the government of that stolen state has done a great deal to cheapen its claim to being a part of a free country and to impoverish its moral status as well. Perhaps taking a clue from the Texas school board's redaction of American history, Arizona has decided that no courses taught in its schools may give students the impression that they belong to a persecuted minority.

That's right, the Navaho have always had it easy, no one ever gave a black man a hard time and the state itself was never taken by force. It's now official.

Tennessee Tea

Some people might give them credit for never giving up and of course, like congenital stupidity and genital herpes, the Republicans never really go away.

Yesterday's e-mail viral outbreak flared up with another version of a letter excoriating Barack Obama for such inexcusable acts of treason as not placing a flower at the World Trade Center crater with a sensitive enough wrist action and of course referencing that old groaner, the photo of him singing without his hand on his heart. Both these things and more, insisted the weeping and wailing writer are proof of his Christian hating Islamic faith and his mission to destroy all that is held dear by the pretend conservatives who hang upside down in belfries and eat bugs.

Not that such people actually write these things. Virtually all of the phony celebrity letters libeling and threatening Michael Moore, Hillary Clinton and the Obama family are written by the same, easily recognizable hand, although the attributions change from day to day. The faux outrage and breast beating pretend patriotism are always the same.

The letter I got was attributed to Sherry Hackett, the wife of the famous and raunchy comedian although she didn't write it nor likely did the others it's been "from" in the last 6 months. The person who forwarded it to me was crying for our country or so she says. Actually I think she welcomes any scurrilous and seditious screed that oozes from the Republican cesspool. I think it just hasn't sunk in that far from shoving things down America's throat, democracy has shoved change down theirs.

The desperation seems to call for deliberate denialism and cultivated delusion. If Obama takes off his shoes, that means he's a Muslim and not a Christian was a sentiment presented by a small townTennessee Tea Party organizer along with a picture of a shoeless president. Frankly I wish he were, but even so, it's a statement that could only be applauded by people not likely to be found at a Mensa meeting unless they're simply dishonest exploiters of the traditionally stupid.

For a group whose meetings sometimes draw dozens of people, God willin' and the creek don't rise, it can't be hard to avoid the leaders knowing that it's a tiny minority cult representing a fringe Right element, yet their solution to the problems posed by an electorate that emphatically rejected the Right in the last election is to go further right. The Washington Post quoted David Nance, the founder of the Gibson County Patriots, in Jackson, Tenn as saying

"This effort is to try to get the Republican Party to try to give us more conservative candidates"

and he believes it's working, yet his choice of Stephen Fincher, gospel singer and cotton farmer from Frog Jump, Tennessee for the State's 8th Congressional District seems to have little to do with stated Tea Party goals of reducing the cost of government and eliminating "entitlements" what with Fincher raking in a cool, conservative $200,000.00 per annum in farm subsidies and being financed by others riding the same gravy train. He's pulled down over $2.5 million since 1995. Of course that' just all tea in the harbor and doesn't seem to matter as much as the president with his shoes off or the stories about flag pins and tardy salutes, a too small flag on his campaign jet and the laying down of a flower at the WTC with insufficient wrist action as discussed in the letter Sherry Hackett didn't write.

The shame of it all really is that Barack Obama, with his continuing support of some unpopular Republican policies may be too conservative for Liberals and perhaps even for some centrists while this collection of Beverly Hillbillies wants to tell us he's a Muslim version of Pol Pot while selling a faux populist version of Corporatism.

It's more of a shame we don't seem to have any genuine conservative opinion worth reading these days, and of course if we'd had it earlier, we might not have needed it so badly now.

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.

The truth is left-wing

I guess I'm a limp-minded, lily livered lefty. Truth itself of course is an "extremist, partisan" position according to John Klein, president of CNN and I'm a lefty for asserting that Barak Obama's passport is legitimate, has been furnished to the press, has been independently verified by the Governor of Hawaii and looks just like every other Hawaiian birth certificate. God knows, I must be Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin rolled into one for stating that I have a valid Florida drivers license and that it really isn't an Indonesian forgery because we just can't know for sure, can we?

As to the turgidity of my brain and the color of my liver, they're both just fine -- if you believe doctors who after all tend to be liberal. I might after all be an android since I haven't provided a birth certificate, even though I actually did. There's always a controversy; there is always the difficulty of telling truth from political propaganda when you're either schizophrenic or so dishonest the difference is moot.

So my IQ and my liver make it OK for Dobbs to continue with his "nudge, wink, you know what I'm saying" program of libelous innuendo and I guess that since all is fair by his lights, I can point out that there is no proof he isn't a charter member of NAMBLA either. He hasn't furnished a shred of evidence so you can't just dimiss the controversy and enquiring minds want to know, after all - even the limp ones.

Should a black dog wear a white dress?

If you allow this, then you will not be able to disallow it and it will lead to that which will inevitably lead to that and then that. Got it?

Therefore if we allow women to vote, we'll soon have to allow inferior races to vote and then who is to say we won't have to allow dogs to vote and then chickens and down all the phylae to protozoa. Imagine having to design a voting machine for an amoeba? Those stupid Liberals!!

In a Slippery Slope Argumant, a sequence of increasingly unacceptable consequences is offered as stepping stones to hell. You'll find it listed under Fallacies of Distraction and you'll find it on the tongues of Fox opinionators like Bill O'Reilly and without the slightest embarrassment, it seems.

So of course allowing (as though you had the right to disallow it) people of the same sex to enter into a marriage contract will absolutely and inevitably lead to people demanding to marry earthworms. It's a testament to American stupidity that anyone would fail to see this as an unfounded assertion, but then, the foundation of American Stupidity Culture and Fox News' prosperity, is this very inability.

Of course, just as Zeno can be invoked to prove we can't get there from here, the Slippery Slope can be invoked with similar illogic to prove we will all go to hell without guidance from traditional things like Bigotry and Bill O'Reilly.

The fool asks why, if human beings can enter into a contract without prejudice as to their gender, why not animals? The wise man simply tells him he's an idiot because animals are not human beings, cannot enter into any contracts at all, and the constitution guarantees equal protection under the law only to humans in the first place. The fool doesn't understand and turns to Fox and the Churches who make him feel better by telling him God loves fools and all those other people are heretics and Liberals.

Bill is there to tell the bottom third that if we allow gay marriage, you'd better buy a white dress for your parakeet and they would rather believe that then to believe they're ignorant idiots a parakeet wouldn't want to marry in the first place. I'm tempted to think that in some cases, it might actually help the gene pool.

Violins on television?

"I suppose, Gorgias, that like me you must have been present at many arguments, and have observed how difficult the parties find it to define exactly what the subject is which they have taken in hand and to come away from their discussion mutually enlightened; what usually happens is that, as soon as they disagree and one declares the other to be mistaken or obscure in what he says, they lose their temper and accuse one another of speaking from motives of personal spite and in an endeavor to score a victory rather than to investigate the question at issue; and sometimes they part on the worst possible terms, after such an exchange of abuse that the bystanders feel vexed on their own account that they ever thought it worth their while to listen to such people."

___________

Said Socrates, at least according to Plato. For those Americans under 40: both these men lived long before the internet, but how well the description fits the arguments we read on the web every day!

Raw Story ran a somewhat cooked story the other day about a gift of an "assault rifle" to Sarah Palin and as usual, the article treated the gun in question as "military style" without mentioning that it is not, in fact, military in anything but appearance. As is customary, the righteously wrathful posted a frenzy of caustic comments about Palin, machine guns and the wholesale slaughter of innocents and wolves that we are experienceing because the NRA wants everyone to have a machine gun.


As usual, both the author and the audience had no common terminology and no more real clue as to what they were talking about than the late Emily Litella. When the public hears "assault Rifle" they hear "machine gun" and hardly anyone is interested in correcting them since to insist that we talk about reality instantly identifies one as the enemy, the gun nut, the NRA controlled devil.

Even a combat veteran chimed in, telling us his experience with fully automatic military weapons showed that machine guns are too dangerous for the public. Others proudly proclaimed that they were hunters and didn't need machine guns to kill a moose, still more that nobody has a legitimate need for "assault weapons." Would any of them stop and say "never mind" if they were reminded of these three facts?

• Automatic weapons have already been effectively banned since 1934
• The difference between a legal "military style assault rifle" and a hunting rifle has to do with the shape of the stock and not the rate of fire or the type of ammunition. Legal assault weapons are not machine guns.
  
• The now expired "assault weapon ban" didn't actually ban these look-alike weapons if they were made in the US, nor did it remove the millions of them from the market or prevent the sale of those made before the ban.

Which of these two is an assault weapon? Both or neither is the answer, the only difference between them is the stock. The rifle given to Sarah and the many she already has are essentially the same but phobia is, by definition, not rational and with such money being spent on panicking the phobic as well as the obsessed, we have the entire country talking at cross purposes, with undefined terms, completely failing to understand what the other side is talking about and making fools of themselves with their hollow passion.

I think Socrates is still laughing, but for my part, I'm just tired of the endless ranting about misperceptions.

Trying to fix stupid

It's risky to talk about IQ or innate mental ability these days. People are so afraid of recognizing differences between people that we really can't talk about it and have to pretend that intelligence is free of any genetic cause, which is of course, utterly impossible. So anyway, I won't say much about it either, save to say that far beyond the silly bickering that some people do over two or three or even 10 point differences and about whether it's nature or nurture, the latter does not explain why some people score 150 and about an equal number score at 50. We also like to pretend that big differences mean little, which is an attitude that goes away fast when you have some experience with people over 3 standard deviations below the middle. It's easier to pretend that the really gifted are something other than smarter than us and that their ideas don't tend to be more insightful and yes, indeed, correct. It's easiest to just get all Republican and call them names.

But I'm not talking about or really interested in the gifted, I'm talking about idiots and even though we're not allowed to call people stupid except in the political arena, a large percentage of us are, statistically speaking, not so bright. What I'm here to talk about is my suspicion that the people most zealous about codifying behavior, making laws and protecting us from evil, fall into the category of just plain stupid.

Take for instance, the lawmakers of Iowa. I'm not going to tell you they're brighter than the lawmakers of Florida who force sexual offenders to sleep under bridges by forbidding them to live almost anywhere else. I am going to tell you they're stupid. In their zeal to ever widen the category of child abuse they're trying to make the parent whose 14 year old discovers the Playboy hidden under the mattress a "child abuser" which of course is a lifetime stigma that can force one to live under a bridge, have one's children taken away to be raised by the kind of stupid people who make such laws, and other life changing experiences.

Your son's friend comes over with his laptop to do homework and they discover Youporn? You're a sex criminal and branded for life, dude. Yes, it's hard to believe it, but the crusading idiots have found another way to ruin lives and break up families in the name of morality and protecting the children. Maybe it's not so hard to believe it. You see, by the logic of stupidity, since pornography plays a part in child abuse, you're a criminally negligent child abuser if your teen finds a naked picture or manages to sneak into the living room at night when you're watching HBO. At worst, since pornography plays a part in abuse, or so they say, and since pornography of any sort or degree is rape, you're a rapist!

Unless this proposed bill is an attempt at preventing people from reproducing for fear of living under bridges, I suggest it's just another way the idiots can make criminals out of innocent people and make up crimes for the sake of punishment.

“We have to have it.” said Kathy Lowenberg, director of Counseling for Growth & Healing in Iowa City. Lowenberg said she’s treated more than 100 children who have been sexually assaulted and that, in most cases, pornography played "a pivotal role" in the abuse. From there to blaming pederasty on Playboy or Showtime requires Logic Abuse - that's where the stupid part comes in, growth and healing notwithstanding.

State Representative Kurt Swaim, a Democrat no less, said he will do everything he can to get the bill passed this year and that it would only be used in the most serious cases, even though as written it's so broad it could almost be used in any case, depending on the mood or personality or prejudice or ambition or rank stupidity of the Iowa Department of Justice. I'm sure we can trust them with our children and our lives and our freedom though - they're politicians.

No, you can't fix stupid and that you can even vote it down is questionable at best. Perhaps voting against the bill will be deemed child molestation too, who knows? All I can hope for is that enough stupid people will put enough other stupid people in jail that the birth rate of idiots will plummet and allow the rest of us to evolve in time into creatures just a little bit smarter than we are now.

We used to pray for them, but it's all over now

Well the word is out on Main Street - Tim Geithner can't be trusted as Treasury Secretary because he is Jewish and Jews have divided loyalty. I was interested to hear that and not just because Geithner's family assures us he's an Episcopalian raised and married in that Church.

Is the phony honeymoon over? That the Republicans may be abandoning their pretense of being in love with Israel is a possibility. One perennial Troll at The Reaction called me "an arrogant Kike" for having asserted that no, Barney Frank bears no discernible responsibility for our global recession; but it's really too soon to tell if the frustrated masses yearning to breathe fire will switch scapegoats and replace witches, Liberals, illegal aliens and the ACLU as hate objects. Maybe they consider all those straw men to be Jewish anyway.

Of course it's hard to think of any immigrant group that isn't or hasn't been accused of divided loyalty in this nation of immigrants. John Kennedy stared down that bit of bigoted Waspery with grace nearly 50 years ago, but ask a Muslim -- hell ask someone who isn't a Muslim but has a suggestive name.

Of course it doesn't often occur except to cynics, that preaching the impending destruction of mankind and the dissolution of secular nationhood might be taken as a dilemma in as much as commitment to preserving the USA and praying for lakes of fire and brimstone aren't compatible, at least to me. I can't think of loyalty more divided than that of the Religious Right, promoting the Christian Bible as the foundation of the United States, rather than its secular Constitution. I can't help but think of divided loyalty when presented with a candidate who looks longingly forward to the destruction of our country and the flight of the elect to the Holy Kingdom of God in Alaska (no witches may apply.)

The unbearable Liberalness of Truth

Remember when Sarah Palin asked just what it was that Vice Presidents do? Evidently, she's seen a post card of Washington so now she's qualified to tell us:

"[T]hey’re in charge of the U.S. Senate so if they want to they can really get in there with the senators and make a lot of good policy changes."

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

According to a spokeswoman for Mrs. Palin, the statement was a reply to a third grader's question; as though the innocence of the listener justified a misstatement of Vice Presidential powers. In a year or so, that child will have to learn What the qualified Mrs. Palin has yet to learn: that the VP is not in charge of the Senate; unless of course the constitution has been by then abandoned in favor of "whatever the Party says."

Of course Palin, like George W. is fond of talking to us as though we were all in the third grade and none too bright. It's easier to do than to appear intelligent and it appeals to those who read and think at that level and it's typical of many cult leaders. Listen to tapes of Jim Jones, for instance: he refers to his wife as "mother" and explains things like the need to drink the poison to his followers as though they were babies not old enough to know that the cyanide in the Flavor-Aid was for their own good because the Liberals were out to ruin them.

Perhaps that's an exaggeration, but I don't think so. The people who will readily believe that Palin can as VP, draft legislation, that she's as competent in world affairs as Zbigniew Brzezinski because she could, if she wanted to, but never has seen an inhabited arctic island; the people who will fight you to the death to defend their position that Obama is an Islamic terrorist: these people are cult members. You and I are the enemy and they are not stupid at all. It's just that the facts have a Liberal Bias.

Cross posted from The Swash Zone

Pigs, arrows and outrageous fortune

That giant oinking sound you hear is all the pork being herded into the Bailout Corral. Even though the plan passed last week has been so brilliantly successful at transferring all that nasty smelling bad mortgage debt to the Taxpayer Government, the Fed is planning to make us a present of bad commercial paper as well. There just wasn't enough pork in the original deal.

You can't expect to have a barbecue of wall street lobbyist proportions without big chunks of pork and little scraps like the tax relief for manufacturers of wooden arrows designed for use by children. You have to admit that their plight is central to the economic health of all of us. Who knows, your ex-broker may be making wooden arrows designed for use by children before the week is out.

Don't worry about it. All of us are going to hell or to Alaska in the next few months according to Sarah "ya betcha" Palin. She has a plan for everything.

Burn witch, burn

There are enough red herrings strewn about this campaign to stink up the foulest fish packing house in Alaska or any place else. All those people pretending there is any doubt as to which candidate to support, inquiring into credentials and policy and all the rest are lying to themselves. Nothing about the Republican ticket is about the economy, Iraq, the constitution, national security, patriotism, health care, social security and particularly not about freedom.

If we had any suspicion that The McCain campaign might not be about fixing the country's problems, Sarah Palin is the clincher. No candidate and no party that has the effrontery to offer her as a candidate has any legitimate reason to claim sanity, much less honesty or serious concern for the future of the country.

Sarah Palin isn't unqualified, inexperienced, crooked, deceitful or ignorant as much as she is fucking nuts, batshit, barking at the moon loony, spinning head, green puking psychotic -- and dangerous. Sarah Palin believes in witches and is the disciple of witch hunters.

George W. Bush may have had his higher father, but Sarah listens to shamans who hunt witches. It was witch hunting Pastor Thomas Muthee to the Wasilla Assembly of God who intervened with heaven and made her governor, who went to Kenya and nearly got some poor old African folk medicine practitioner killed for being a witch and the consort of demons. Sarah practically worships the guy.

This to her is Christianity - the religion of those divinely appointed to show us all how to live and raise our children and care for the needy; those appointed to persecute science, unwed mothers, rape victims and people of the same gender who love each other - and witches.

The republicans want the support of these malicious paranoid psychotics that they will put witch hunters in the White house, and they give such a small part of a damn about our problems in a collapsing economy and hostile world because you see - God is going to attack and destroy America and save Alaska.

Not one of the doom and gloom forecasters of economic, social or any other type of collapse has ever foreseen the depravity we face now. We fret about flag pins, we whine about pledges and songs and elitists and taxes as though we had a plausible pretense to intelligence and we vote for more witch hunts. We cheer demented, foaming at the mouth, brainless idiots who can't wait for God to kill the unbelievers - and the witches.

It's the lies, dummy

It keeps rolling in. The latest was titled I never thought of that and perhaps that was an inadvertently apt title. The central theme, or gravamen of the argument, if you prefer, was that Obama has had only143 days of government experience and is therefore not qualified to be President. Now for my part, I think experience is vastly overrated, particularly when intelligence, education and integrity are balanced against it. After all Nixon was superbly qualified in the experience department and Goerge Bush certainly was the governor of a largish state.

But, of course the recurrent 143 day motif was designed to slip by unnoticed -- that is to say it was designed to be read by people who still haven't decided whether the Harvard review editor, University of Chicago Law instructor with two terms in the Illinois senate and about 3 1/2 years experience in the US senate, is more presidential than the proven liar, failed pilot and class dummy who got into school with political connections and never says the same thing twice. Such people are more likely to find only 143 days in 11 1/2 years or at least to be afraid to ask.

Of course as sheer idiocy it pales in comparison with another one by some "retired Marine" screaming about how Clinton got us into a war in Somalia and was too busy with Monica to retaliate against terrorists. Do I really have to explore this one?

Yes, these things are of dubious origin, but the speechwriters who created Sarah Palin's acceptance speech, entered it onto the teleprompter and coached her in it's delivery aren't any more honest, and the millions who thought it was wonderful aren't any more intelligent than those who pass along these e-mails.

"this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or even a reform, not even in the state senate"

slipped past the lipstick as smoothly as the clear water of an Alaskan stream over polished stones. It's a lie of course.

""Al Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America and he's worried that someone won't read them their rights"

That's far more than hyperbole, far more than a lie, actually. Not to dwell too much on the fact that she also thinks God is plotting to destroy all life but that which subscribes to her religious belief, but there is a gulf of unsurpassed size between ignoring constitutional rights and civil liberties even for citizens, a gap as wide as the space between galaxies between years of torture, indefinite imprisonment without trial in secret prisons and the kidnapping of people because of rumors or similarity of name and "worry about reading them their rights."

Would this be an administration we could trust to be more honest and open than the Bush/Cheney lunigarchy? They're not off to a good start if they would like us to believe it. Smearing one's opponent with this kind of disregard to moral scruple and common decency makes the crapulous claims to piety and "values" reek all the more. I think we have to conclude that this is simply a would-be administration with no qualms about saying and doing whatever it needed to do to promote the Christian/industrial domination or our waning republic.

McCain's goals are nebulous. Palin's are obvious: no birth control, no abortion, no books sympathetic to homosexuals, no sex education, no paleontology, no geology (except for petroleum exploration) no evolution, no heresy, no social services, no subsidised medical care, no equality for people who don't fit in to her religious utopia. Her personal and official record of feeding at the public trough while posing as a cost-cutter is there for all of us to see.

Is it too much of an extrapolation to see in her cynicism about civil rights an affinity for domestic spying and torture, or contempt for freedom of speech, assembly and religion? It doesn't matter. She has so little qualification in terms of common decency, intelligence or even sanity anyway. In that respect she's a mirror for the Republicans.

Debt is to Republicans as blood is to vampires

The government emergency takeover of Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac will place trillions of dollars of risk on the shoulders of American taxpayers. How does this fit with the "hands off -- the market will take care of itself" twaddle we've heard from Republican pulpits since Herbert Hoover?

It doesn't, but it fits nicely with the Republican practice of saying one thing and doing another and having their constituents not notice. It certainly would have brought down fire and brimstone from Olympus if the Democrats had hinted at such "interference." Americans don't care; it's easier not to have to think that such massive failure could have resulted from Republican policies in the first place, and it's probably only God's wrath for picking on Larry Craig and Mark Foley and tolerating non-Republican homosexuals.

It's good though that Poor Little Sarah won't have to tell us her feelings about it and be exposed to any less than deferential treatment though. She won't have to answer questions about why she left Wasilla deeply in debt or whether she knows Freddy Mac from a Big Mac. We know she will feel our pain when we're out on the street, even though she won't be able to find the funds to build poorhouses and shelters because that would be like Socialism. Meanwhile we get raped at the gas station while Alaskans get a subsidy from the oil companies. I'm sure she'll she'll be able to explain the Alaska First idea as soon as she finds a deferential reporter.

McCain however, even though he brags about not understanding economics, assures us that everything is just fine and all these troubles will go away as soon as trickle down economics starts to work and the ultra rich will be able to hire you to work in their gardens and plantations after we chase out the Mexicans.

Of course your personal share of the 5 trillion, 400 billion isn't that much, but it comes on top of the monstrous war debt and John has no plan or desire to pay it down - it's cheaper and more effective to pretend it's all about those big spending Democrats.

I almost sound like I'm gloating, don't I? Perhaps I am. Perhaps the only way the good gullible citizens of Americaundergod will ever notice what's being done to them is when they're on the bread line and it's starting to get cold out. Even then they'll have the consolation of knowing that Mythology has replaced science in the schools and any 14 year old who gets knocked up by Uncle Fester won't be able to have an abortion. God will be so happy. I'll so be living in the Caribbean and laughing.

The law is the law even when it isn't

We pretty much forgot about the Supreme Court decision that the Washington DC law forbidding people to keep a functioning handgun in their homes. I mean,when the court rules a law is invalid, they stop enforcing the law right?

Wrong. The Washington City Council passed an "emergency" law today that keeps in place almost all of the law that was ruled unconstitutional. Apparently the decision was made that ordinary autoloading pistols where the ammunition is loaded "from the bottom" are actually machine guns. and thus cannot be owned without a special license. Of course this is no more ridiculous than the former "assault rifle" ban which defined an assault rifle by the way it looked rather than by the way it operated, but I digress. The Washington DC City Council seems to have ruled that a 6 shot revolver is vastly different than a 6 shot semi automatic pistol and that's that. When Dick Heller, the man who brought the suit against the Washington Gun Ban tried to register his gun in compliance with the law, he was told by the police, who know quite well how dishonest this is, that he could not because it was -- oh yes -- a machine gun. Whether the law in our Capitol is the law depends on what the definition of is is.

OK so we have a municipal police department who simply refuses to acknowledge the ruling as long as an illegal law is on the books and is willing to effectively write it's own gun control laws. That's close enough to an act of insurrection, but as Congress has the power and responsibility to govern the District of Columbia, and whereas Nancy Pelosi being a Californian hoplophobe refuses to allow Congress to repeal a law that has been ruled unconstitutional, Congress may be considered to be aiding and abetting a rebellion as well.

Remarkable. Perhaps we can expect some sort of rebel flag to fly over the capitol in the near future. Of course a discharge petition to bring the bill to repeal the illegal law directly to the floor has been filed, but so far it doesn't have half of the required signatures. I have a better solution. If Washington won't secede, let's expel them; let's declare them to be enemy combatants, seal the border and build a wall around these folks. They won't have enough firepower to do anything about it and we're better off without the lot of them.

Don't we look foolish enough already?

I don't think I want to watch the Olympics this year. It's not that this iteration of the games will be any more or less boring or fulsomely nationalistic than the event ever has been, but I'm afraid that some self-appointed ambassadors are going to make damn fools and hypocrites of us.

My first reaction was "tell me it's a joke" when I read the Reuters item telling us that an unspecified group of "human rights activists" have asked George W. Bush to complain to the Chinese government about political prisoners while he is there, and to wear a wristband that declares: "free the North Koreans." They intend to show up under full sail in Beijing wearing their version of the trendy rubber band rhetoric. I can almost hear the jeers.

Tell me it's a joke.

According to White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe, Bush will not be taking wristbands with him. I'm glad to hear it. Another thing George will not be taking with him on the trip is moral authority; or indeed anything else that gives him the right to demand that China not expel illegal aliens coming across the Korean Border looking for work, or that they release militant Islamic separatists, much less to extend them anything resembling the right to Habeas Corpus.

It's not that no criticism is due, it's that we are in no position to make it. I can well imagine my own feelings should a Chinese delegation show up here demanding that we free Puerto Rico, close Guantanamo and open the border with Mexico.

I mean, it's really a joke, isn't it?

Let it all fall down

Subject: Obama's speech...on doing away with our military

Please send this to everyone you know TODAY as it will be pulled off the air soon. Here Obama reveals his true intentions to make the US a third rate nation - vulnerable to attack by every rogue nation on the earth.

_________________

It takes a strong stomach to read some of the e-mail I get and I don't have one any more. I don't have the patience to argue with these hydrophobic harangues. I don't have any faith in Democracy either because our wonderful technology has made it possible for a minority of morons and the coven of witches that control them to shout down everyone else. The truth simply doesn't have a chance, nor does decency, honesty or true patriotism. We have become a nation whose behavior would embarrass a tribe of New Guinea head hunters.

Of course the speech in question was made last year and far from being pulled, it's been resurrected like a brain eating zombie, but alleging that some bogeyman doesn't want you to see something is a hallmark of the Republican Hate Auxiliary.

Obama plans to disarm America screams the lurid title on the MacRanger Blog that is linked to this slime capsule and to a video that actually doesn't say that at all. What Obama seems to have said in October of 2007 is that he would like to develop no more Nuclear weapons, would like to reduce their numbers and make an effort to store the loose nuclear material sitting around since the fall of the Soviets. Of course that's all pursuant, I believe, to a 2002 treaty signed by the Hero George Bush, and Obama's speech was scheduled for the day after an announcement by the Bush administration that it had tripled the rate of dismantling nuclear weapons over the last year, putting the United States on track to reducing its stockpile of weapons by half by 2012. Funny that the howling hordes take no note of it, but then without the manufactured indignation supplied by the radio rabble rousers, no one would take notice of them.

The speech reflects a plan endorsed earlier this year by a bipartisan group of former government officials from the cold war era who say the United States must begin building a global consensus to reverse a reliance on nuclear weapons that have become “increasingly hazardous and decreasingly effective.” I do not recall hearing any foaming at the mouth hate shouters calling any of them "Manchurian Candidates" or Islamic militants, but of course that's what we get from commentors even stranger (and more stupid) than MacRanger himself on his website.

By calling for a combination of diplomacy and pressure to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and to eliminate North Korea’s nuclear weapons programs, Obama seems hardly more radical, pacifist, or to have a plan for appeasement, but you wouldn't know it from the foam flecked lips of "conservatives." It's just too much fun to scream HUSSEIN hysterically while denying any racist motives. I give up.

I give up becuase Americans love to hate. Americans love to justify hating and have no scruples whatever about employing lies, distortions and superstitions to do it. I give up because the military ambition and world domination obsession of this country makes it my enemy.

Go vote for Republicans - build more carriers, more space weapons, giant bombers, more multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles with 500 megaton nuclear warheads and make the world bow to us, our greed and our SUV's.

I just don't give a damn.

Hen's teeth

Political correctness: it's another all purpose diversion, used to dismiss valid arguments by referring to the alleged motivation behind them. Strangely, the fact that the PC accusation is so often politically motivated, never seems to attract comment.

Take the subject of evolution. Our knowledge of the genomes of many species is so advanced that we can contemplate reverse engineering animals like birds so as to bring out the hidden genes they retain from their Theropod ancestors. Laboratory experiments have led to scaly, lizard-tailed chickens with hands like a Velociraptor and a mouth full of teeth. Our collection of fossils is vast and the origin of species through natural selection is thoroughly founded. That's what makes it a theory and not special pleading: an argument based on nothing but selective credulity, which is based on politics.

It's politically correct among some people; or perhaps religiously correct (although in the world of Right Wing politics that's the same thing) to insist that Evolution is only a theory and a flawed theory and so baseless conjecture needs to be offered as an equal if not superior explanation. I say baseless because to use statements like "it just can't be" or "I don't understand" or "you can't get something from nothing" or "intelligence can only come from intelligence" as first principles is neither factual nor intelligent much less are these credos the building blocks of theory.

I can't understand why Pi is an irrational number.
Irrational numbers seem irrational.
I can't tell you absolutely what the number is, I can only get arbitrarily close.
God doesn't make up funny numbers.
Pi is only a theory.
I'm a Christian and Christians believe only in Hebrew legends.

If I were of the right political persuasion or subject to the right dogmas, I could easily insist from these "axioms" that mathematics can be dismissed as Politically Correct and I might substitute some number from legend that somehow does not correlate with observed reality but is a nice round integer - more compatible and more correct according to my politics.

You would think I wouldn't have to beat this subject to death, but here we go again. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, said to be on the short list for running mate with the idiot McCain, wants his kids to be exposed to the "best science" because he's a "Christian" and to be politically correct according to Christian politics, that means ancient and resoundingly debunked legends handed down from illiterate goatherds on the edges of civilization. Jindal insists that the denial of all observed facts packaged as Intelligent Design is a "legitimate scientific discipline." It's not. It's none of those three things, but perhaps it makes Bobby Jindal just dishonest enough to appeal to American voters.

Home of the Brave

Brian at The Impolitic today points out what the lapdog media should have been bellowing about -- but hasn't. John McCain has told us that in the name of fear, the Supreme Court should not have upheld the principles of justice that used to be one of our main bragging points.

"Our first obligation is the safety and security of this nation and the men and women who defend it. This decision will harm our ability to do that."

said the former prisoner of war to a crowd of New Jersey admirers: this man who has made so much of having been tortured and held without regard to his human rights and who apparently has forgiven his captors for his mistreatment back when he was an "enemy combatant."

Let's be clear here. McCain is calling for activist judges in the worst sense of the word; judges who being terribly afraid of some rag-tag saboteurs taking over Casper, Wyoming will deliberately break their oath of office by breaking the law.

When the phone rings at three in the morning, do you want it answered by a snivelling coward, a fear monger, a man to whom his oath of office and the Constitution it requires him to uphold is merely a convenience to be set aside at will?

A picture is worth a thousand lies

I guess I should be pleased that the Republican dogs are still gnawing on the bones of Barak Obama's alleged "gaffe" or misstatement about his uncle having liberated Auschwitz. It means they're scraping the bottom of the cesspool for want of anything substantive; but then the Al Gore bit about inventing the internet still flaps the lips of the fatuous and he didn't actually say it.

Glenn McCoy, the cartoonist who appears in the New York Times is an example of such nonsense, but then most everything he publishes is. Can we really compare the brilliant and erudite Obama to Dan Quayle? Yes, if we're so desperate and if we have an audience so deranged that any spurious attack will please them. Yes, that's just what McCoy does once again in his latest graphic excretion.

Yes, Obama's Uncle ( not his grandpa) was in the unit that liberated part of Buchenwald. If I told you that my great grandfather fought at Antietam when it was really Gettysburg would that be a gaffe? Would it mean he never fought in that war? But with a man like McCoy, all's fair in slime and slander and the Republicans are always right.

The other part of McCoy's coy mendacity is the insinuation that the press doesn't report these egregious "gaffes" because they're so biased in favor of Obama. Since the press has been full of this non-story for days while giving a free pass to the most corrupt, incompetent and blatantly criminal administration in our history, that makes McCoy ignorant, dishonest or both. Since he never has spent a moment illustrating the constant stream of lies, inventions and evasions; the gaffes, misstatements and other verbal idiocies of the Bush presidency, bias isn't a concept he should be hurling about -- lest someone stick it up his nose.