Typhoid Mary's Revenge

Reductio ad absurdum.  Its a common tool used in informal debate both properly or improperly, but although I won't say it's more common with the arguments we hear from the self styled Right, arguments such as this one seem to need no assistance from any opposition to reduce themselves to the ridiculous.  Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) told us this week that the government has no business demanding that the people who handle our food should wash their hands after using the toilet. If you don't see this as ridiculous, you probably shouldn't read further because I'm going to insult you. In fact I mean to insult everyone who considers himself rational but, like all of us, is not. 

Putting principle above survival and practical necessity seems to be a widespread form of  communicable idiocy, for when I mentioned this bit of crepuscular wisdom in jest to some friends last night I got no laughs but rather some grim recitations of the formula "we have too much regulation."  It's the same reaction although from different people, that I got when mentioning that the disastrous BP oil spill would not have resulted if regulations had been followed.  "We have too much regulation."  If you've been listening to the yapping from the Republican kennel for as long as I have, you'll see it as new bullshit in old crocks -- or from old crocks if you prefer. We want law and order but without the law. That absurdum enough for you?

If we assume that in fact we do suffer under excessive regulatory burden, I should think it would be obvious that the gap between that debatable observation and a valid attack on any specific regulation isn't easily leaped with anything but blind faith or the kind of stupidity that removes all obstacles. "All laws reduce freedom -- this is a law -- this reduces my freedom."  Do we really need to ask Aristotle to explain such sophistical refutations? CAn you honestly proceed from a false statement to a valid one? Do laws facilitate freedom? Without law, how do we protect life and liberty?  Who decides what is excessive without laws providing us with the power to do so?  Principle!  it's the defense against having to answer such impertinences.

 Sometimes freedom needs to be reduced, else I could show Mr. Tillis, inter alia, just how much the laws restricting my freedom might be useful to his health.  Getting from the proposition in question to eliminating any particular regulation requires dismissal of the specific need, benefit and effectiveness thereof.  Since I'm sure that regulations against poisoning him wouldn't be on his list of excessive regulation, we can assume that he does give regard to his own safety if not to yours and mine.  Is that dishonest?  Does that reveal some unmentioned contradiction in his logic?  Does it matter when people, all of us, steadfastly believe what suits us to believe irrespective of any native intelligence?

I won't waste much time waiting for Tillis to explain his temerity however.  His audience isn't asking for one, a false syllogism being satisfying enough and as is so common and in line with our ancestry and ancient habit, we put principle above survival, follow it up with brandy and a cigar and call it an evening.  Things will turn out in the end, the invisible hand of the market spreading pestilence more effectively than it spreads wealth and opportunity and justice.  "Restaurants that kill customers will eventually go out of business," is the fallacious foundation of the Tea Party argument -- unless they remain unaccountable in the absence of all regulatory agencies. I wonder too, how much he worries about FAA regulations when he gets on an airplane, or whether his doctor or his cook washes his hands but sure -- consistency and hobgoblins and little minds and besides when it's his ass on the line it's different.

48 million Americans get sick from food born illnesses and 3000 die every year, yet the government has a very hard time doing anything to stop it:  principle, you see and the inviolate rights of corporations.  But Tillis at least is standing up for the little guy, the right of individual free and sovereign citizens to wipe their asses with your lunch.  Principles matter, you know and it's good we have him standing up for freedom.

Skuby Dooby Do

I'm glad it's a long way to New Jersey but Bill Skuby, who owns Skuby & Co. Lifestyle Clothing in Spring Lake, N.J should be happy too.  I think I felt something snap in my head when I looked at the ABC News web page this morning and saw the thing he has in his store window.  Quite frankly I'm not sure I'd be able to restrain myself.  It's not that I actually advocate an act of violence against him or his property and I certainly don't want the Government to deprive him of the right to be a stupid, ugly, bigoted, ignorant and anti-American bastard ( no insult to involuntary bastards intended here.)  I'm all for the right to sedition.

But I'm only human and a picture of the President of the United States dressed as a semi-naked witch doctor taped to a tombstone and a bold face title with OBAMA CARE in which the letter C is a hammer and sickle, makes me have bad thoughts; very bad thoughts. Why is it that the two legged vermin who insist we worship a flag like some religious icon, that we swoon in an ecstasy of Chauvinistic self-praise at every mention of our often ugly history can condone the kind of disrespect that makes the world laugh contemptuously at our delusional stupidity and willful ignorance.

 

No, Skuby, the health care plan drafted by Republicans in conjunction with the health care corporations has less to do with Communism than you do with sanity or honesty for that matter. Switzerland, the holy land of Capitalism and Conservatism has a similar one and arguably the best health care and healthiest population anywhere and they spend a hell of a lot less then we do.  You're an idiot, Skuby Doo.  You're an idiot not only for putting a disgusting picture of the President on a tombstone but more of an idiot for telling us:

"if Mitt Romney had the same plan as the president; his picture would be in the window."  

You're worse than an idiot, you're a liar, because Slippery Mitt did have that plan until he decided to sell his withered soul to the Devil and run for President. Did you forget?  And no, you're not a racist and if there's racism now, it's Obama's fault, he says.

"This is America, isn't it?Aren't we able to say and do pretty much what we want to do?"

 Asks the scummy Mr. Skuby. I really wish that were true, but then we'd have to condone tarring and feathering and probably worse and if this idiot isn't one of those dumb Limbaugh loving lizard brained bastards who wanted to put people in jail for criticizing W, I'd be very surprised.  You should be thankful we can't do pretty much what we want to do to you.  Damned thankful if you know what I mean, wink wink, nudge nudge.

So, I'm glad people are shunning your store and I truly hope you'll go broke and be unable to file for bankruptcy protection because of the Republican "reforms" and that you'll lose your health insurance and be unable to replace it because of the interrupted coverage.  I hope your kid needs an operation and runs up a quarter million dollar medical bill you can't pay and so you'll lose everything and wind up on the street with a tin can so I can go by and piss in it.Why don't you ask the Koch Brothers for a handout?

The Gap

Does it matter that a real, bona fide conservative Republican like historian Bruce Bartlett thinks the Texas Governor Rick Perry is an idiot? Not really, and face it, Perry is the kind of idiot that appeals to the kind of Americans who somehow have taken control of what passes for dialog today -- or at least have drowned it out with their idiocy and superstition. Like making a copy of a copy of a copy, Perry would be the blurriest and least readable page in the Bush dynasty: George III

I confess, when I heard that pathetic American primitive condescending to a schoolboy, telling him that Evolution is a theory that has gaps in it, my first comment didn't contain words nearly as polite as 'idiot.' But upon further reflection, I can see a lot of gaps in Rick Perry and I'm willing to bet that there are gaps between his synapses big enough to hide all the creation myths of the world, not just the one it's profitable for him to accept as truth and enforce as a standard on the rest of us. Sadly his misunderstanding of science is as great as his ignorance of economics and history and. . . well it's a very long list, because Rick Perry is an idiot.

But the Fed is "treasonous" says Perry and not because it actually is in any way, by any definition of the term, but because it provides yet another enemy for the Teadogs to bark at and makes him a leader, a dragonslayer, the Great Stupid Hope. It's treasonous because it delights the swamp critters and desert rats and mountain men; the losers and lamebrains, the anger addicts and the addlepates. The people who eat fried butter on a stick and watch Fox News love to see anyone so brave as to tell them suits and them college boys all about how there weren't no universe 7000 years ago -- because it makes the ignorant feel they're important, that they have a cause, that the world belongs to them.

Rick Perry's audience doesn't really know what the Fed is or what it does or how capitalism works or what Socialism is. Understanding genetics and evolution is as far beyond them as the level of wealth disparity their gullibility supports, nor do they question the Tealords when they're told the stimulus package didn't work or that entitlement programs and NPR and Planned Parenthood have bankrupted the country or that an extra few grand in my pockets will create US jobs. They believe this idiot when he tells them that Evolution, like gravity, is "only a theory." They believe because it justifies their abject ignorance and lets them pretend. In a part of the country where half the population couldn't manage to graduate 4th rate high schools it's a matter of pride to identify with one's idiotic, back of the schoolroom, tobaccy chewin' peers and so we have Rick Perry being taken seriously as presidential material, hell bent to destroy the country just to prove that "idiots rule."

Why is the Fed treasonous rather than timid and inept? Because as Bartlett points out, the Fed may be the only entity not yet tied down by the Lilliputian Teatwits. The only entity with any possibility of getting America to spend again, to bypass the political fatwa imposed by the Republicans occupying Congress like squatters -- to get those countless billions sitting in corporate coffers flowing through the capitalist system to create demand which creates jobs, which create growth. But discussing elementary economics with anyone like Rick Perry is like discussing calculus with a hamster -- and that's a gap that will never close.

West world

When Barack Obama was elected president of the United States, many of the ugliest Republicans told us that Democrats were "playing the race card" a mawkish cliché which means, I think, falsely accusing them of the racism they do really espouse. In other words, talking anal cysts like Limbaugh were having their pearls of wisdom denounced by the "politically correct" because you can't criticize a black man these days without being called a racist. It's a cheap dishonorable gambit, but like counterfeit money, it can be passed off on an uncritical populace.

An uncritical, astigmatic, angry and greedy American public seems to have had another bit of counterfeit money passed off it. Allen West, the Republican Congressman from the 22nd Congressional District right here in Florida, land of snakes, lizards, Teaturds, pollution and poisonous toads -- Allen West, one chromosome short of a tape-worm, says in his blog:

"I must confess, when I see anyone with an Obama 2012 bumper sticker, I recognize them as a threat to the gene pool."

Well isn't that special? Indeed it's the one feature of that pretentious Club of Fools that keeps it in business: it allows the mentally under-endowed, cognitively incontinent circus clowns to challenge their betters and to assault us with ideas that don't hold water nearly as well as a worn out douche bag. The giggle gallery in the back of the class, mocking the teacher.

Indeed West, speaking from his teabag-buttressed platform of arrogated biological superiority seems to be of an intellect too limited to have noticed the irony of a black man appealing to the snobbery of the uneducated, ill-informed, probably stupid and definitely angry whites, and offering soothing delusions of genetic superiority in a grotesque parody of white supremacists from Montgomery to Munich. But then, when has any American been too stupid and dishonest to be someones hero?

There is indeed a tide in the affairs of men and there is an armada of those now afloat on that full sea of hate, not only using it for their own purposes but seeking to make it rise further until it drowns the land. Allen West is such a man, a man whom under ordinary circumstances would be a nobody, a flyblown bit of flotsam in a stagnant pool; but because of this tidal wave of fury, he can pretend to be a battleship and his flatus a volley of cannon. He can twist, misuse, misquote and invent, he can put on the white-face and wear a red tie, He can grin like Uncle Tom and mock like a monkey, but while honesty is within reach of all, what he pretends to is not.

Women from Planned Parenthood and the activist group Code Pink "have been neutering American men" he says and making them weak. West tells us this with his genetically based intellect still unaware of Dr. Strangelove and bodily fluids. Perhaps he himself is having problems with his manhood and this talk of virility and gene pools tells a cover story. Perhaps his politics serve as verbal Viagra for the intellectually impotent Representative. But I don't need to postulate such questions, the doctored Obama bumper sticker with the hammer and sickle tell us the whole, sick, sad, disgusting tale. Allan West is a whore. Allen West is Count Dracula's rat-eating Renfield, Allan West is a liar. Allen West, and for reasons probably too disgusting to contemplate, is trying to ruin everything good about the United States of America. So what do I do when I see that sticker? You don't want to find out.

The president, despite all appearances and lack of opposition to corporate abuse and capitalist excess is a "low-level socialist agitator" reciting "Marxist demagogic rhetoric." Is West describing himself again, or is he just grabbing bits from the instruction manual like a tent-meeting preacher with his mouth full of Jesus and a mind full of money? Obama is a Communist to the extent that John D. Rockefeller was a Communist and Bernie Madoff was a capitalist.

No, this high water mark of anti-government anger that produces foul and foetid things like Allen West and the Tea Party has little to do with genetics and everything to do with our national ignorance and our manufactured delusions; both fed and cultivated by the people who reap benefits in their billions and trillions by subverting the values of civilization and setting the dogs on the ever expanding masses. It's an old story, but in our new version, not all the dogs have four legs.

The Horror

Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,

-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow-

________________

I had pretty much made up my mind that I wasn't going to grant Sarah Palin any more free publicity or waste any more stress-filled time reacting to the Idiot's Princess, but like the safety valve on a boiler, I have my set limit. Pop goes the weasel, or at least the blogger.

I read her garbled soliloquy yesterday, about how the immigrants who built this country up from an agrarian economy to an economic giant had a terribly hard time gaining entrance and getting citizenship and could not favorably be compared to those today who were raised in the USA from infancy, got an education and became part of our society only to be expelled on some error in their parent's papers. She's right, you can't. It took a matter of hours to go through Immigration in the Ellis Island days and if you weren't Chinese, you were all right. No English required, no guaranteed job, no nothin' -- and they came by the millions. Today it takes years, of course, but we're dealing with Sarah Palin, congenitally stupid product of a fourth tier higher educational system and a lifetime of reading nothing. She's dumber than a pre-schooler and she's a Republican front-runner.

My mother read me that Longfellow poem when I was little more than an infant and I don't think any of my contemporaries did not know by early grade school of that somewhat mythological event, but no, not Sarah Palin who seems to think that the famed Boston silversmith was a spokesman for the NRA and a right wing, saber rattling blowhard whose main concern was promoting gun rights in the American wilderness.

“…he who warned the British that they weren’t gonna be takin’ away our arms, uh, by ringin’ those bells and, um, makin’ sure as he’s ridin’ his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that were gonna be secure and we were gonna be free. And we were gonna be armed.” You betcha, gol durn it!

The fact that this perky little peanut brain couldn't graduate 5th grade much less pass a citizenship test -- or even, apparently, read a newspaper isn't just obvious, it's horrifying and what these daily enormities we're subjected to every day say about her is still less horrifying than what this says about America.

Sharia in Flori-Duh

I used to bridle at the popular smear: Florid-Duh -- after all I live here, but perhaps it's time to recognize that this smelly shoe fits pretty well and we can't avoid wearing it. My suspicion began back when a State Representative balked on passing a bill mentioning Animal Husbandry for fear it would lead to legalizing marriage between people and animals and now that I read about Daniel Webster, candidate for the US Congress, who is endorsed by the Orlando Sentinel and former Governor and Presidential brother, Jeb Bush as well, I have to confess. We're not just the Sunshine State; we're Flori-Duh.

Webster is no political neophyte and hardly an outsider to the Republican Party. He was Speaker of the Florida House, Majority Leader of the Florida Senate and was in the State Legislature for 28 years. While there, he introduced a bill which was meant to create something he calls "covenant marriage" and others have called the "Roach Motel Marriage." You can check in, but you can't check out. Under this law, so closely resembling what one sees only in Taliban controlled areas, there is no excuse for divorce except for the infidelity of one partner. If both are unfaithful, you don't check out. If your partner beats hell out of you, sets you on fire or molests your children, you live with it for the rest of your life. So much for the Republican fable that it's the Liberals looking to institute Sharia law in the US.

Certainly, the history of bizarre Congressional proposals is rich with idiotic attempts such as this, but remember, Dan Webster is not considered beyond the pale of modern conservatism, he's a favorite son of what's left of the Republican Party; a party not satisfied only to roll back all progress in human rights since the 1960's, but the 1860's and perhaps the 1760's. Don't forget the recent and still popular Vice Presidential candidate who spoke of Witches as a real problem or the elected officials who don't believe in evolution and think Geology and Archaeology are fraudulent.

If there are many of them who can smell the idiocy, they're too partisan to mention it and indeed, the ride they've been taking on the wave of superstition, suspicion and stupidity has taken them a long way and they're along way from giving it up. The wave never seems to break and it won't until we break it.

Mea Culpa

Hey, I'm a stupid lefty. I must be, since so many obviously intelligent people tell me so. After all, I don't think the health insurance reform bill is any worse than what's already been done by prominent Republican presidential candidates and neither does Mitt Romney so he must be a stupid lefty too.

The Cato Institute, obviously a bunch of lefties as well, has pointed out that Mitsky (let's give him his due as a Trotskyite) enacted a health care plan identical to Obama's while he was Governor of Massachusetts in 2006. Of course that Maoist/Islamofascist radical Romney won't admit to it and he was only trying to hide his Marxist/Maoist sympathies when he called the identical Democratic plan all those nasty names. Hell, he's probably right to do so since 2006 was so long ago we didn't even have Twitter and nobody remembers.

The Cato Institute remembers, stupid lefties that they are.

"As President Obama himself has pointed out, Romney is the guy who created the prototype for ObamaCare. How can he lead the charge against a health care plan that is modeled on his own?" said Cato's executive vice president David Boaz.

Well hell, he's a lefty and lefties do that and the Cato "cel"l is probably a front for North Korea. But the concept of "its only wrong when they do it" really requires more intelligence than I have so I'll just never cut it as a right wing "patriot." I really am not smart enough to get angry at the President for raising taxes when he lowered them or furious at his forcing his predecessor to put us into crushing debt, so the Tea Bag patriots won't accept me either. Who can blame them for suspecting a wealthy investor and fund manager of loving Stalin and longing for the worker's paradise?

So Mea Culpa -- I'm a stupid lefty and I'll go say ten Hail Reagans and pray for understanding.

God retarded my baby

Giving birth to a disabled child is God's way of punishing women for having had a prior abortion, says Virginia Representative Bob Marshall, R-13th.

“In the Old Testament, the first born of every being, animal and man, was dedicated to the Lord. There’s a special punishment Christians would suggest.”

Yes it's redundant to mention that he's a Republican; a raging mob which for the last few decades has been the party of and a party to promoting such shameless indecencies. Of course some biblical scholars tell us that the story of Abraham and Isaac was a priestly way of moving away from a prior and very ancient practice of sacrificial infanticide, but indeed, the first born male lamb in the flock of a Hebrew shepherd was to be sacrificed and the first born son was at one, very pre-Christian time, dedicated to service in the Temple.

Of course there hasn't been a Temple since the 9th of Av in the year 70 CE, and Christians really don't hold with more than 9 or 10 of the 613 commandments and none of the Rabbinical laws, but that doesn't stop the kind of shoot-from-the-hip theology prevalent in these days of the senescence of American Christianity. Christians might suggest anything in truth, but if they're suggesting any such thing, it's a suggestion with no roots in the teachings of Jesus.

One might be tempted to ask Bob why, according to antique Jewish law largely set aside by Jesus and his followers, Christians who don't force their first born to become priests aren't subject to the same punishment, but his answer isn't very likely to enlighten us.

Surely anyone who still believes in a God with some tenuous attachment to decency if not actual justice will have trouble with the bloody Saturnine entity who condemns a child to a lifetime of pain and deformity because of something his mother did. But not Bob Marshall.

Some will have difficulty reconciling the position that it's indecent to mention that someone may be mentally retarded unless the mention is made by some pasquillant Republican creep like Limbaugh; but not Bob Marshall and probably not a large number of morally retarded, power hungry and profoundly ignorant Republican Theocrats who haven't bothered to consider that the enormously vast majority of children with deformities and defects and abnormalities are not born to mothers who aborted their first pregnancies.

Down Syndrome for one, seems more likely to affect children of older mothers. Conjoined twins, anencephalic babies, Spina Bifida, heart defects -- can anyone show any statistical correlation with sin? Of course not and anyone promising that virtuous people are less likely to give birth to lives affected by diseases and afflictions and deficiencies is likely to be a liar and an idiot, willing to use other people's tragedies to gain political power -- like Bob Marshall.

I await Sarah Palin's response to what could, amongst people who can actually reason consistently, be taken as an accusation of having had an abortion. I'm sure she'll choose to ignore it however, for fear of damaging the fabric of the alternate universe in which the ultra-right lives: where right and wrong, left and right, up and down are nebulous and interchangeable concepts and useful only to defame the enemies of these Insaneocrats and to yoke Jesus to their bandwagon like an ox.

Tweet Tweet

In the winter, Florida sees countless twittering things with small brains, perching on power lines and trees, circling overhead and grazing my lawn looking for lizards and bugs. Of course, even a hundred years ago there were so many they would darken the sky, but we've hunted some to extinction, rendered many species endangered by draining the everglades to grow sugar and by poisoning the waters with pesticides, fertilizers, oil and heavy metals. All over the world, nature as we once knew it is in retreat, from the rain forests of the Amazon to the melting tundra and retreating glaciers. Even the birds know it and we all know who's to blame. It's not the birds.

Well, not all of us. Sarah Palin insults the intelligence of most twittering things by claiming that man can't influence or change "nature's ways" and is arrogant to think so. Yes, that's OK, speechlessness is a normal reaction to such idiocy. What can you call it but idiocy and what can you call it but arrogance to assert that the magical powers of God will steadily restore the countless square miles of ocean bottom scraped bare by drag nets, restore the countless miles of coral bleached by growing acidity and reanimate the countless species disappearing at an accelerating rate? And what is arrogance, after all, but making grand statements about nature without any knowledge whatever having to do with atmospheric and oceanographic sciences, geology, physics, chemistry or in fact, any damned thing but talking in tongues and burning witches?

"arrogant&naive2say man overpwers nature" tweets the idiot Palin.

The painful irony of course, is not that man is part of nature and man is changing the world in many, many obvious and quantifiable ways. It's not just that we've disassembled the building blocks of matter, decoded the blueprints for life, unravelled the history of the universe -- the irony is that it may be arrogant to say that we can ever overpower stupidity, cupidity, stone age superstition and the crackpot politics that eats away at America like a cancer.

'Tis the season

Yes, they're still pushing the "Obama is a Muslim" thing and one of the reasons must be that a central theme of the last presidential contest was that he was not only "the most liberal senator in American History," but a Marxist, a concept that is getting harder and harder to pin on our rather deliberate, frustratingly centrist and sometimes rather too conservative president. After all, an absurd claim is harder to counter and outrageous fabrications draw followings in inverse proportion to evidentiary support.

Legalizing 'Drugs' or prostitution are out of the question as a spur to the economy said President Obama to a student in Allentown Pennsylvania yesterday. Regardless of his reasons for the statement, it's not the opinion of a "far left socialist radical" trying to make us just like European Socialists. Better to rave about conspiracies to pass a Kenyan off as a native born American because the evidence is, that Obama is at best a centrist on social issues like allowing gays to serve in the military and no more of a Marxist than anyone at Goldman Sachs.

If only the knuckle draggers behind the Muslim libel wouldn't try to give evidence for it! The idiot mayor of some two-bit suburb of Memphis is blogging that the President's speech on Tuesday announcing 30,000 extra troops to fight Islamic fundamentalism in Afghanistan deliberately was scheduled to pre-empt that night's broadcast of A Charlie Brown Christmas , with its "Christian message" because as a Muslim, he hates our holiday "traditions." After all, Jesus himself watched the program as a child, didn't he? That's not of course, even contorted logic, it's bullshit. I would love to ask Mayor Russell Wiseman if Franklin Roosevelt was a closet Shinto supporter for choosing the Christmas season to ask Congress to declare war on Japan.

"Ok, so, this is total crap, we sit the kids down to watch 'The Charlie Brown Christmas Special' and our muslim president is there, what a load.....try to convince me that wasn't done on purpose. Ask the man if he believes that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and he will give you a 10 minute disertation (sic) about it....w...hen the answer should simply be 'yes'...."

said the ironically named Wiseman. Sorry, Russ, the answer is none of your damned business and none of the Government's business as concerns what any of us think about God, Christmas, Charlie Brown, the Son of God or the Son of Sam. The question is whether we consider you as a traitor for giving aid and comfort to the Taliban by calling Obama one of them, or for misrepresenting the Constitution and advocating that we replace it with your infantile and ignorant beliefs.

If this is Conservative thought in America then all our asylums are filled with Republicans.

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.

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?

Wild Wild West

If you see someone standing on your front lawn taking pictures of your house and you stick your head out the door to ask what the hell he's doing, maybe you'd better find out if he's a Republican first.

Robert Lutes, a resident of Boise, Idaho suburb, Meridian, probably wishes he had done that. Asking the man on the lawn to tell him what it was about, his question was answered with a .357 magnum revolver pointed at him by the Republican Party chairman of Boise County, Charles McAffee, a "tea-party" activist. No, it wasn't high noon, it was just before dinner time.

There is a controversy of course about whether Lutes was engaged in heated discussion or argument about his delinquent mortgage payments before McCaffee drew on him, but McCaffee, working for collection agency used by Wells Fargo, says he pulled the gun on the unarmed homeowner to "de-escalate" the conflict. No, really.

I am unable to establish Idaho's policy on such use of a concealed weapon, but I know that in Florida, it is illegal to display or "brandish" even a legally carried gun to gain advantage in or "de-escalate" a dispute or argument. Since McAffee was arrested for aggravated assault, I would assume a similarity in the laws. Again, I don't know if Idaho is a "castle doctrine" state, but I suspect it is and under that philosophy, Lutes would have been justified in shooting a Republican Party County Chairman and tax protester like any other armed home invader.

The more civilized part of my nature is glad he didn't, but the little demon on my shoulder sort of wishes the idiot Mr. Teabags had been dealt a little bit of old fashioned Republican justice.

Georgia on my mind

Florida, the state I live in, does not allow "open carry" of firearms. To get a permit to carry concealed, one has to attend a safety class, have a clean police record, clearance from the county sheriff or police chief and submit a set of fingerprints. Like Mack the Knife, the weapon must be kept out of sight and may not be used to intimidate or threaten anyone. You can't, if armed, sit at a bar or other "place of public nuisance" and may not bring it into private property or a court house or police station without permission.

Apparently it's different in Georgia. Although it's hard to get a clear explanation of the State code, it seems you as a permit holder, can walk around with an AK over the shoulder and a pair of .50 caliber Desert Eagle automatics in your belt -- and more if you can carry it all. You can dress in camo, festoon yourself with weapons and ammo belts like Pancho Villa and attend a political rally or event or demonstration and according to Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-GA) you definitely should! It's been happening of late; people showing up at public meetings where "Kill Obama" signs and signs comparing him with Hitler are displayed. Never mind the obvious danger to the country and to any President who tends to make delusional, stupid and ignorant people very angry,

"they have the right to do that"

Gingery told Chris Matthews yesterday. An interesting assertion in a state that has had so much to say about who you could marry, what you could do after you did, where you could buy a house and what kind of provocation legitimized a lynching.

Of course if you had tried that during the recent Republican era, you'd most likely have been bussed outside of town to a "free speech" area, if you somehow avoided any altercations with the police and secret service. But that was then, this is high noon in Dodge City. What better way for a determined terrorist than to come unarmed into a public arena, grab Bubba's old Colt Gummint model and blaze away at the President, Governor, Senator, etc. What better way to show them city boys just what we think about the way they do things up North.

Whether Gingery thinks the way to preserve one's rights is to abuse them in the most extreme way possible or whether he secretly hopes to intimidate the opposing party into submission: whether he'd just love to see Joe Biden in the oval office this year, It's impossible to tell. Perhaps he's only hoping that being surrounded by a hostile ad hoc militia will force Democrats to listen to their ravings about Death Panels, re-education camps, rationing of medical care, free medical care to illegal aliens, galloping Marxism, slippery slopes, the president's citizenship and the loss of precious bodily fluids, but really -- don't we already have Fox News and Rush Limbaugh for that?