Good night America

I saw Good night and Good Luck last night. Yes, I think it deserved an Academy Award for best picture, but this was a frightening movie and without any special effects or giant apes.  Very little has changed in the 50 or so years since Joe McCarthy staged his war on communists but what has changed has changed for the worse.  Television, as Murrow warned, has become an instrument of isolation and deception and the game is no longer being directed by a crackpot junior Senator, but by the demagogues who control all three branches of the Federal Government.

The game is the same, of course. Whether we’re fighting communists or terrorists or liberals or intellectuals they’re fighting freedom and using fear and patriotism to sell us a war against ourselves. Today we have uncountable institutions smearing and threatening anyone who upholds the truth and our right to know it; launching countless unfounded accusations and fantastic fables. We have a press afraid to expose lies and show us reality out of fear of the advertisers and owners. Today we have a leader who takes pride in ignoring the will of the governed and who has a following who views that with patriotic pride.  Little has changed since 1954 except to become worse.

It was never luck we needed, it was courage and instead we showed patriotic arrogance.  We needed a public with a will to oppose fear mongers, thieves and liars and instead we have the Superbowl and the X-box and the iPod and American Idol and the rest of the pop-culture opiates.

It’s too late for good luck.

You say AD, I say CE. . .

I’m pro family. I love my wife and children and grandchildren and wish them well, but Don Wildmon wouldn’t agree. Being pro family is all about having enough hate and anger for people and ideas and facts Don Wildmon and his American Family Association are afraid of. That’s a lot of people and a lot of ideas and a lot of facts.

The AFA is very concerned that for the last half century or more, historians and archaeologists around the world have been labeling dates as BCE and CE. This includes scholars of all religious persuasions. One can read CE as Common Era as I think most do, or as Christian Era but those in the know are more comfortable with this than with the implicit declaration of faith in the term anno Domini. Not everyone is a Christian and to the AFA that is something that needs to be remedied. Everyone needs to talk and act and believe as Don Wildmon does or he will hear from the AFA and its enforcement division and wholly owned subsidiary, the United States Government. But wait, that’s not all; one must not only acknowledge, but must pay constant homage to Wildmon’s God and to Wildmon’s definition of Christianity

The AFA wants to make BC and AD the only legal way to give dates, lest Wildmon’s God of wrath place his vengeance upon us. It’s not enough to acknowledge the Christian Era, one has to embrace Christian supremacy.

Of course Wildmon’s biggest bogeyman is the same as that of most of these brimstone and bullshit bullies: homosexuality. It’s obvious to me that these folks who constantly tell us that being gay is a sinful choice that can be remedied through the worship of the proper idols are themselves gay. If one has deliberately chosen not to be homosexual, one is homosexual. For the honest, there is no choice. Perhaps that’s why belief in any of the entrees on Wildmon’s salad bar of sophistry requires so much de facto dishonesty.

Imagining insults to the faith and proclaiming war against objective reality and the modern world are as old as faith itself, indeed I’ve often referred to prophets and priests as the world’s oldest profession and I’m sure some Cro-Magnon Wildmon raged about some cave warning that the bison would not come if some sacrifice were not made or if someone married outside the tribe, but we humans have an inbred weakness for dictators, tyrants and preachers, don’t we?

I’m not a believer. I don’t believe in believing, but if there’s an entity that somehow controls events, let it load Wildmon and his ilk into a church bus and drive it off a Mexican cliff so they can die screaming like demons. Then I might believe there was a God who had any concern for the things I revere, like justice and family values.

Three Strikes and you win

Hit it out of the park with bases loaded and you lose.  Is this some Bizarro World Comic from the  50’s where everything is its opposite or is it just Bush world?

When Paul Wolfowitz predicted that there would be no ethnic conflict in Iraq, that we would be welcomed as liberators and that other countries like France would get involved in rebuilding that country at little cost to us, the snot-quaffed gnome was promoted to the world bank for his incompetence.

Remember General Eric Shinseki?  Back in 2003 the former Army Chief of Staff was one of the first high ranking officers to challenge the official happy talk scenario given us by George W.  Bush.  He was absolutely right and paid the price for it.  

In testimony before Congress, he stated that the Iraq operation would require "several hundred thousand troops."   His assessment was based on 38 years of active military service which includes  being Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations and Plans. In Bosnia, where Shinseki served as Commander of the Stabilization Force, NATO used 50,000 service members to police a population of 5 million people. Iraq's population in 2003 was over 26 million people.  Do the math.

Rummy told us he was far off the mark, Wolfie told us he was far off the mark, Bush told us the mission was already accomplished.  Guess who is gone.  Guess who Bush still unequivocally supports.

It has taken quite a while for other Generals to step up to the microphone. I’m sure it takes more courage to stand up to the incompetent psychotics in the Administration in today’s military than to face an armed enemy and we can see the tide of slime begin to rise against them already, but the flag has been raised, a toehold gained – do we dare to hope?

The French General

Is this man French? I’ll bet he’s eaten more MRE’s than quiche and it’s getting harder and harder for the slime slingers to dismiss those who think our administration is incompetent, arrogant and war-crazy.

If General Swannuck thinks we’re losing in Iraq; if he wants heads to roll in Washington, he’s going to be hard to refute by calling him French, or a coward or an America hater or a hippie. If grainy, awkward pictures of him with Jane Fonda show up on sleazy Republican hateblogs or a bunch of guys who have never been in the Army Airborn Division start yammering about his lack of credentials, it isn’t going to be convincing to anyone but a pathological Republican.

They’d have to dismiss Maj. Gen. John Batiste -- who led the 1st Infantry Division in northern Iraq as well. They’d have to smear former U.S. Central Command chief Anthony Zinni, former Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, and retired Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold who also want Rummy out. Not a Frenchman amongst the lot.

Of course the White House and many of Rummy’s pet Generals think he’s doing a great job. Gen. Pace, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman and thus unable to speak against his bosses, also defended Rumsfeld this week saying during last weeks press conference:

"People can question my judgment or his judgment, but they should never question the dedication, the patriotism and the work ethic of Secretary Rumsfeld,"

History records the names of many incompetent fools who have worked hard and made a mess of the world, causing the deaths of patriots and protestors; peasants and plutocrats alike. Maybe if he took a year off from work, we’d all be better off; almost as well off as if he’d never been born.

"nobody works harder than he does" says the General, whose name means, ironically “Peace” in Italian -- Except maybe for George. George works very hard – it’s a hard job. He’s a hard worker and a warpresident and we know because he says so.

Nuke New Zealand!

If Fox News is really looking for evidence that there is a war on Easter, it’s surprising that they have not mentioned that hotbed of anti-Christian sentiment, that god-hating cauldron of sin, New Zealand.

"The Easter icon is in fact a villain," said Chris Macann, a spokesman for Environment Canterbury, a government-backed group on New Zealand's South Island. Yep, these Godless Environmental wacko hippie carrot-hugging Liberals are tired of being eaten out of farm and field by wascally wabbits and they’re out to do something about it, Dick Cheney style.

Hundreds of hunters will stalk and shoot all the rabbits they can find over Easter. “we want them dead," said McCann.

We can expect that the Rapture won’t be beaming up anyone from New Zealand when it takes place any minute now, but that’s just my opinion. I report, you decide.

Trailer Trash

CNN in it’s effort to be more like Fox News by linking every scandal attached to the Bush Administration with a fabricated excuse or a smokescreen, has been attempting to excuse the Texas tyrant for claiming that a couple of weather balloon trailers sold to Iraq by the British were Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Lots of high ranking retired generals are speaking up? Oh but many are not, says the Newsharlot. Massive evidence that the chemical weapons trailers weren’t? Oh but some still thought they were, she says, flickering false eyelashes.

Because Bush will believe what suits his agenda, he can accept the word of the most unreliable source over the best available intelligence and with a smirk tell you he did the best he could under the circumstances. Of course the intelligence establishment was made well aware of what Bush wanted to hear and what would happen to anyone who didn’t make a case for what Bush wanted to be true.

According to CNN a report last year from the Robb-Silberman commission said some senior CIA officials had begun having doubts about “Curveball's” credibility in 2002 and took their concerns to senior managers -- and eventually to former Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet and his deputy, John McLaughlin. The information remained in Powell's U.N. presentation. Powell was made a fool in front of the world because of his loyalty and indeed so have we all.

One of Bush’s main faults is that he is a faith based idiot with no sense of humility – he can’t be wrong and like the weakest of men, he can’t admit or permit doubt. Without doubt there is no thought, if I may invoke Descartes and without doubt there is no honesty.

Still CNN continues to back the administration by downplaying the level of doubt and the level of mendacity in the President’s decision making. Bush didn’t know because Bush didn’t want to know and just as Bush ignored al Qaeda while obsessing about Iraq he ignored any evidence that didn’t support his crusade.

"I cannot count how many times the president has said the intelligence was wrong.” Said serpent tongued Scott McLellan. But Bush continued to use it for as long as he could, even knowing that it was wrong and all the while mugging and sneering and snickering at the doubting public.

Of course what CNN won’t bother to bring up is that even if there were a couple of trucks that could make poison gas rather than hydrogen for balloons, you can’t drive them to Kansas. Saddam was simply no danger to the US because of such equipment and comparing it to nuclear weapons with intercontinental delivery systems is the kind of shell game only Bush can play and only Americans are stupid enough to believe.

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Die Bunny Die!

I read in The Daily Curmudgeon and in Think Progress that the morons are on the March again and Fox is in the vanguard as usual.  The last time there was really a war against Christianity by a non Christian agency was back in the 4th century of the current era.  Of course Christians of various flavors and odors have been killing each other over variations of baseless conjecture for hundreds of centuries.

If there ever was a war on Christmas it was waged by Christian Puritans; fundamentalists different from today’s more degenerate forms by virtue of their literacy if not their propensity to hysteria.  They of course knew the pagan origins of Easter and Christmas traditions – the very parts most beloved of Christian Supremacists.

“we have documented a number of cases where Christian holidays like Christmas and Easter have been attacked by secular interests.”

Said Lyin’ Bill O’Reilly, sounding like Joe McCarthy with his blank piece of paper telling us it was full of names of Communists.

We’ve all forgotten about Tailgunner Joe and Bill O’Reilly is the history we are condemned to repeat.  Of course it’s totally false. He has no cases, there is no attack save the attack on our liberty by religious nuts for whom freedom and democracy are dirty words.  His claims about Christmas were all debunked albeit on the back pages of newspapers Christianidiots don’t read and those of us who do read and do remember can so easily be dismissed as atheists and liberals and French speaking elitists.  We just can’t win and we probably won’t.

As Crankyboy points out, it’s not about religious freedom. Religious freedom is the enemy of religious zealots who recognize only one authority. You won’t hear O’Reilly whining about a war on Ramadan, nor will you hear him stand up for anyone’s right to sing the Hari Krishna Mantra in courthouses and airports. When the feds confiscated a human skull from a Miami Voudun Priestess in Miami today and charged her with a felony even though you can buy such things every day on eBay, that is religious persecution. O’Reilly was as silent as the Pope about Auschwitz.

I have only one question – why are we silent? Why don’t we shout him down; flood his mailbox and voicemail and fax machine? Where are the crowds outside his door? Where are the boycotts, the lawsuits? What country is going to come in and overthrow these tyrants for us?

The History major

You may not be old enough to remember the radio show It Pays To Be Ignorant, but although it became a TV series in about 1949 and went off the air in 1951, it never died, you see; it became the Bush Administration.

Yesterday, lonesome George happened to be speaking to an audience that was smarter and better informed than he is. No, he wasn’t reading from My Pet Goat at some kindergarten class, he was at Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, where he had to admit he didn’t have a clue when questioned by graduate students.

when asked what law governs private military contractors in Iraq, Bush could only say “Help!”

"I was going to pick up the phone and say, `Mr. Secretary, [Rumsfeld] I've got an interesting question.' ... That's how I work."

That’s how he works, the Commander in Chief.

Would he consider changing his administration's stance against working with organizations that partner with prostitution networks to stop human trafficking, asked another student?

"You know more about this subject than I," said the president truthfully. "And I will be glad to call Condi and talk to her about our policy."

When a student claimed that the worlds first Constitution or code of laws was created by the Prophet Muhammed [c. 570–632] another corrected him by referring to the code of the Babylonian King Hammurabi [ruled 1795-1750 BC] from which, as I thought everybody knew, certain biblical passages originated.

"I was going to say that, you know," Bush said to laughter from the crowd.

I wonder what kind of laughter it was. This man got a degree in history from Yale. I wonder what advisors he called upon to do his reading and course work for him – or what men in black called upon his professors.

When Bush was running for the Presidency, a supporter admitted to me that he may not be very bright, but he would certainly pick the best advisors – oblivious to the irony glaring from the idea that a stupid man can tell who is smart, much less who is honest. Of course that is America in a nutshell; many stupid men choosing amongst prospective leaders smart enough to fool them.

Feel the pain

They found the 12 year old girl begging on the street. She had been sleeping at construction sites in Port St Lucie Florida after running away from the people her father had sent her to live with friends "who share the same religious beliefs and values" and to be beaten by while the father listened to the screams from his home in Coral Springs by speaker phone. Michael C. Bilodeau, his head clean shaven and wearing steel rimmed glasses explained that the girl just wouldn’t accept Jesus into her heart and used slang and of course the way to get Jesus into someone’s heart is to have them stripped naked and whipped; naked of course because Bilodeau wanted her, as he explained, to “feel the pain.”

When police went to the home the girl had been sent to the father was there, having arrived to help look for her. He told the investigators the girl needed discipline and sent her to live with fellow sick fundamentalist beasts because his wife, the girls mother was an internet user and couldn’t care for her. He was arrested when he told police that he himself had recently made her take her clothes off and submit to a whipping with a leather belt.

Sadly these stories are too common and too infrequently reported, although in civilized societies there are serious penalties for what amounts to torture and child neglect. Port St Lucie is probably not a civilized society although it certainly contains a fair number of churches that are regularly attended. Comments to the local newspaper’s web edition often contain calls for summary executions of pickpockets, calls to gouge out the eyes of petty criminals and attacks on “liberals” who are at war with Christianity. This article, as of 10:00AM had 17 comments attached, nearly all of which supported Bilodeau’s actions.

Damn them all. Damn their beliefs, damn their ugly Republican hearts and damn their words. May whatever God there is or gods there are place their vengeance upon them, although 15 years in Raiford would do very nicely.

They hate us for our Freedom Fries

Yesterday was Freedom Day in Iraq – the day commemorating that country’s conquest by foreign infidels and marking the beginning of an even lower standard of living and safety for Iraqi citizens than they had previously endured. It must warm the heart of Iraqi families to know that even though they have no electricity and not much water and put their lives into the hands of Allah every time they leave their homes, or the remains of their homes, to work, shop or worship, they now have some freedom of speech. Is anyone listening to them?

Looking at the empty pedestal that once supported the statue of Saddam Hussein we all watched being toppled with great difficulty three years ago, Abu Mohammed told AP reporter Bushra Juhi in Baghdad ''I am too preoccupied with my work, and numerous problems and worries to notice it, For me, all statues represent tyranny.''

I’m sure the day was marked by celebration – but not in Iraq. Our efforts to rebuild the country now include little more than building large American military bases and concocting fake “upbeat” news items for local consumption while the infrastructure falls into ruins to rival Babylon in her desolation. I cannot imagine that Iraq or any other country in the Middle East, democratic or otherwise, would tolerate the presence of American troops and their machinery of war on their soil but under duress. Indeed, the presence of our Military in what they see as their world may have been a major force behind alQaeda: but as for now, freedom and Freedom Day notwithstanding, they are not free to choose.

Fatherland

"If this is Homeland Security, I think we ought to be a little afraid," said the Englewood Elementary School Principal Gail Brinson. Who can disagree?

Leander Pickett, a teacher's assistant at Englewood Elementary, was directing bus traffic Tuesday afternoon, making sure everything worked smoothly and the busses had a safe place to pick up the kids. Naturally, two men in black in a sedan parked in an elementary school bus stop crowded with kids seemed enough out of place and in the way to motivate Mr. Pickett to politely ask them to move the car. A more suspicious man than Pickett might have called the cops, but little did he know, they weren’t pederasts looking to kidnap children, they were agents of George W. Bush’s Gestapo – Homeland Security.

When I first heard that name, it seemed so oddly reminiscent of something a totalitarian régime would invent – Fatherland security, perhaps, black boots and all. I was right. Ordinary public servants might have replied – “excuse us, but we’re just looking at a map and will be gone in a moment – don’t worry, we’re law officers – here is my badge.”

Of course Pickett wasn’t quite so lucky; according to WJXT channel 4 News in Jacksonville, even after the principal intervened and asked them to move, the defenders of liberty refused to budge. He was roughed up, slammed against a car, handcuffed and humiliated by Emperor Bush’s private army – America’s Gestapo. The incident occurred in front of many credible witnesses, including the school principal, but of course the DHS immediately responded with the accusation that Picket was “annoying” the officers. I’m sure that before long the web will bristle with bloggers insisting that Pickett trained in Afghanistan because that’s how the Fascist Right works, but Pickett and his school teacher witnesses are sticking with their story and I wish them luck. I wish us all luck, because we’re going to need it. Today it’s Leander Pickett, tomorrow it might be you.

Why is this man smiling?

He’s smiling because although you can chase the crook out of office, he still gets paid and he still gets his health care benefits. If DeLay is telling the truth (what a concept) about his intention to resign from Congress in a couple of months, he’s not going to have to go looking for honest employment or cancel any appointments with his expensive hair dresser or makeup artist. Even if he’s convicted of a crime in Texas, he will still get his pension of about $67,000 and his free health care. As we know. Most Americans aren’t so lucky and especially those who haven’t stolen anything.

Of course he’s been making a salary of $180,000 and who knows how much more that’s less visible and $67,000 isn’t a lot for a man with Tom’s tastes. He's going to have to continue to absorb money from other sources, but as he said to the Houston Chronicle today, he intends to go to work for “Conservative causes.” I’m sure he will and I’m sure he will continue to prosper from his crimes in the most conservative fashion.

It's a Wal-Mart world

Americans were rudely awakened by the realization that whether or not a Dubai government owned corporation was to run major US seaports, foreign corporations had taken over a long time ago because American firms were incapable of handling the huge and growing amount of imports from the far east. Freight from China has been overwhelming west coast ports to the degree that it’s often preferable to send ships thousands of miles farther through the Panama Canal to ports on the Eastern seaboard. China surpassed Honduras last year to become the Port of Miami-Dade's top trading partner.

The Miami Herald today explains to us in a lengthy article, that handling such trade requires doing business with large, international companies with bigger ships and more expertise. These companies want to run their own port terminals because it's more efficient; because they can make sure their own ships dock first; because they can get rich from our fashion-fed contempt for domestic goods and our insatiable propensity to borrow and consume. At the Port of Los Angeles, for instance, 80 percent of the terminal space is now foreign-run and Florida is following suit. The Port of Jacksonville's new 158-acre cargo terminal for instance, is being built at Dames Point for the Tokyo-based shipping line, Mitsui O.S.K. Lines.

America has been getting out of the shipping business for decades. Like the Chinese in the 19^th century, we don’t build, own or operate the ships that bring us the foreign goods or the ports that receive them. Richard Nixon declared over thirty years ago that we had no further interest in maritime trade and that was long before the tidal wave of Chinese and Japanese goods broke on our shores; before port security became a matter of life or death.

When you talk about Chinese imports, you have to think about Wal-Mart. When you think about Wal-Mart you think about greed. A new report delivered to members of Congress today by the AFL-CIO alleges that lobbyists for America's largest retailer are blocking efforts to secure the nation's ports. Retail Industry Leaders Association (RILA,) a lobby group controlled by the big box giant, has poured money into Republican coffers since 9/11 (over 90% to Republican House Homeland Security Committee members) in an effort to keep their prices low even if the security risk is high. According to Raw Story, a RILA Vice President argued yesterday before Congress that improving these security measures would help “terrorists” because if we regulate our international trading system, the “terrorists” will win. He’s wrong. The game is already over and it’s the oligarchy of corporate entities taking home the trophy.

It wasn’t terrorists who transformed the American Eagle into a helpless fledgling, its mouth open to be fed with toys and TV’s and T-shirts and trucks and skateboards and iPods; it was us, the smug, bigoted, sports watching, game playing, Fox believing, fad-following, flag waving, lie buying, Republican voting consumers.

Don’t blame the corruption, the decay, the greed and stupidity and loss of freedom on anyone else. We did this; all of us.

The enigma of departure

This morning has bought us many official encomiums to the departing Tom DeLay. Here are some of the best. House Majority Whip Roy Blunt has released the following statement which oozes:

“Tom and Christine's commitment to faith, family, smaller government, and national security is unshakable”

The key phrase here is smaller government. That’s the kind of statement that just takes the breath from your lungs and leaves you stunned. I just don’t know how to comment on it unless we can define smaller as larger and faith as corruption. What definition can we give to the growing chaos, hostility and nuclear proliferation that would make it sound like security? I just don’t know.

“His leadership helped take our Republican conference and, as a result, our nation in a new direction” said U.S. Rep. John Boehner. The Captain of the Titanic also took his ship in a new direction and certainly was a strong leader if you define strong as oblivious to reality and driven by ego.

"The House Republican Conference is losing a powerful conservative voice in Tom DeLay.” said National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) Chairman Tom Reynolds. “We celebrate him for time and again delivering on our party's bold agenda of reform.”

I really don’t know how to look at criminal and unethical behavior as a bold agenda of reform or for that matter, how to define bold reform as a conservative rather than progressive goal, but in newspeak the objective is to hide and distort and not to communicate. The Republicans are here to bury DeLay, not to praise him. The fusillades of fulsome praise are there to distract from the fact that Delay is being jettisoned in an attempt to save their troubled ship; steered by pirates, laden to the gunwales with debt, steaming into a hurricane and taking on water.

What's in a word?

I love to listen to the blowhard racists and xenophobes sound off about the danger to the English language posed by immigrants. Most of them, being unaffected by any significant education, don’t know how diverse have been the languages spoken in American cities over the last century or two. It’s one of the reasons we speak the language differently than the British after all. English itself is a mixture of several languages, like Saxon German, Old Norse, Norman French and others and that accounts for the enormous vocabulary and depth of the tongue. Words like Kindergarten and Gesundheit didn’t come over here on the Mayflower either and they haven’t spoiled our language any more than French, German Italian, Mexican and Chinese food have spoiled our cuisine.

I have to admit that there have been times when I’m frustrated with phone systems that put me through a hundred questions before I talk to anything sentient and wish I could just bypass the “para continuar en español, pressione quatro. . .” part but is it terrible that my bank wishes to accommodate anyone’s money? Is it somehow a risk to the English tongue that Americans occasionally have to hear Spanish or German or Italian? After all if you don’t recognize the above as meaning “to continue in Spanish, press four” you’re not too bright anyway and there lies the problem.

I agree that too many Americans hardly speak English, but I’m not talking about immigrants, I’m talking about Presidents, news commentators and journalists. I’m talking about ad writers and all the rest of us with weak vocabularies who think we’re being creative by mimicking the ignorant, wallowing in cliché, jargon and obsolescent hip-talk.

I’d much rather listen to Spanish than to journalists who have to measure everything in the universe in football fields. I would like to deport the next person who can’t discuss any kind of record without calling it a track record. Ball Park is not a verb and if you can’t understand words like “estimate” you don’t get to complain about anyone other than yourself ruining our language.

Think you’re making a statement by calling your latest Gucci or Bulgari accessory “Bling?” Think Rush Limbaugh is showing his open mindedness by calling a rape victim a “ho” instead of a whore? Half the reason for that kind of slang is to make rich, white, fake hipsters sound like idiots. It works.

Ever notice that you can’t buy a house or apartment or trailer any more – they only sell “homes.” Ever wonder what the hell a “mobile Estate” is? Ever notice that cove, bay, point[e] ridge, dale, height, valley, ridge and terrace all mean “housing development?” Deport these people! Leave the Mexicans alone.

Why is a $75,000, 6 and a half ton Cadillac or Lincoln or Mercedes with acres of leather and entertainment systems a “utility vehicle?” If they can’t learn English, get them out of my country!

April Fools

Listen carefully – hear anything? Neither do I, but you’d think by now, after all those tax cuts and corporate handouts, the giant trickling sound would be louder than the giant sucking sound Ross Perot predicted. I don’t hear a thing.

I read in Marketwatch.com that Corporate profits are up 21.3% for the last year and before-tax profits rose to 11.6% of national income in the fourth quarter of 2005, which is the biggest share since the summer of 1966 and you’re probably seeing these figures all over the place as a justification of the Bush administration’s gang rape of the economy, but unless your last name is Inc. you’re probably not going to feel the moisture. This rising tide has left most boats high and dry. The share of national income going to wage and salary workers has fallen to 56.9%. Except for a brief period in 1997, that's the lowest share for labor income since 1966.

Comparatively little of this gain is being pumped back into capital spending despite the special tax breaks that the Republican lie machine said were supposed to boost investment. Fixed business investment has been falling steadily.

Less than honest apologists for the looters in Washington will tell you that wages are up and that the tax cuts have paid for themselves but after you adjust for inflation the gain almost disappears. They’ll tell you that debt doesn’t matter and they’re right – your debt doesn’t matter to them at all.

Still we get daily headlines like: S&P posts biggest first quarter gain since '99 and Markets close the best first quarter in years but is this really a sad story dressed up like a jeweled elephant? Corporations are making more money but those Americans who still work for those corporations aren’t. In 1999 we had a large budget surplus, today we have an incomprehensibly huge debt and the bubble of leveraged consumer spending may be about to burst as interest rates rise and real estate prices stagnate or fall.

The next time you watch Judge Judy or Jerry Springer and laugh at the poor fools who just can’t stop making excuses for lying, cheating and abusive spouses; think twice. If you support Ali Baba Bush and his gang of thieves, the joke’s on you.

Silver Bullet

You can kill a vampire by driving a stake through its heart, you can kill a witch by burning and you can destroy a werewolf with a silver bullet but you can’t kill stupid.

We learned a long time ago that Bush was planning to cook up a reason to attack Iraq long before he paid any attention to al Qaeda.  We’ve learned more recently that he told Tony Blair that he was going to attack even if he had to do something to make Saddam attack a US plane painted up to look like a UN plane.  At this point only a complete idiot or a complete Republican could support the Bush lie that Iraq needed to be invaded for reasons other than the President’s ambition.

But proof is not enough, proof is not even relevant. What you believe has everything to do and only to do with what side of the cultural divide you’re on.  The same people who were quick and enthusiastic about calling Al Gore a liar when he misstated the cost of dog food by a few tenths of a percent won’t consider the Downing Street Memo or the recent White House memo to be proof of mendacity.  Facts don’t count. Where there’s a smoking gun, believers see only smoke.

Maybe the only hope is that stupid will kill itself and there will be enough left to be able to rebuild our nation with. Maybe we all have stupid hopes. The stupid hope I cling to despite the evidence is that somehow, democracy can work.

When the whistle blows

As a tool for predicting the future, I rate the Bible along with tea leaves and sheep entrails and most particularly that book which found its way into the canon over the protests of the saner Church Fathers: Revelation. Even so, all predictions are potentially self-fulfilling if enough people believe, and George W. Bush believes. When he sidestepped the question of his belief that these are the end times following his speech on the War on Terror at the City Club of Cleveland, you could tell he was lying. He “hadn’t really thought of it that way?” Of course he has.

George chose a time of apparently uncontrollable nuclear proliferation to make us the most hated nation on Earth. Even those who cooperate with us hate us and consider us rapacious industrial, religious and cultural imperialists .

The same crapulous crusaders who tried to sell us the “war on Christmas” story last year have escalated the fraud to a “War on Christians and the Values Voter in 2006” which of course is a cover-up for their war on everyone else. All their hopes and dreams are for the end of the world so that the universe can be turned over to ignorant Bible Believing bubbas while God stomps the unbelievers like a cheap 1950’s Godzilla movie.

Sure it reminds us of the situation in Europe in the 1090’s save for the fact that the bows and arrows of the Saracens are now being replaced with nuclear weapons and the fact that the US is far less capable of defending itself after 6 years of incompetent management, outsourcing and involvement in the quagmire of Iraq. Apparently one can smuggle in nuclear materials past airport security and port security is even more lax. Can we still pretend that the administration isn’t inviting disaster because they see it as a divine plan?

Iran is building nukes, Pakistan has nukes, North Korea has nukes, India has nukes, Israel has nukes and now it seems Saudi Arabia may be close as well. According to an article in the April edition of German political monthly Cicero, The Saudi rulers were the financiers of the Pakistani nuclear program and the technology is being imported with the help of Pakistani experts.

According to Express India, the Saudis have built secret underground facilities complete with missile silos in al-Sulaiyil, South of Riyadh. So much for the rapturous idiots who think George has made the world a safer place. The end times are coming and believe what you want, when the whistle blows, everybody goes.

Scalius Caesar

The religious right is fond of telling us that our constitution is based on something called “Judeo-Christian” principles, although they usually leave us guessing as to what those might be. None the less, our country is obviously steeped in the Enlightenment idea of the basic rights of man. Whether endowed by Nature, an unnamed creator or Nature’s God, we as human beings were thought to be so endowed. One would think that this was a kind of bedrock principle for the conservatives. One would think wrong.

Anton Scalia, that scaly, fat-faced, duck quacking, finger giving, sociopathic thug tells us otherwise. Anyone, he believes, can be deprived of the rights my state gives a pregnant sow and without any trace of process, due or otherwise. An accusation by parties not to be revealed is enough to confine one to a cage indefinitely and apparently, to subject one to beatings, torture and misery without end.

In a speech to Swiss law students at the University of Freiburg earlier this month, he said "War is war, and it has never been the case that when you captured a combatant you have to give them a jury trial in your civil courts." The question here begged is “what is a combatant?” Is Saddam’s driver a combatant? What about his dentist? What about internationally agreed upon rights?

"If he was captured by my army [italics mine] on a battlefield, that [Guantanamo] is where he belongs” said Scalia, coyly avoiding any discussion of what constitutes a “battlefield” in a “war” where the world is a battlefield. Geneva conventions be damned, to hell with Judeo-Christian ethics, lex talonis rules and we do what we want to do. Damn decency, damn God and damn any silly “inalienable rights;” if we can do it, we will. Sieg Heil!

Knee deep

It’s a small thing, but it holds an important lesson. If you’re part of the Bush administration, you can use obscene language and obscene gestures on worldwide television and in front of Congress; you can do obscene things to people but you can’t say shit if it’s for the purpose of criticizing a Republican President.

Ask Denise Grier, an Athens, Georgia oncology nurse who was ticketed for having a bumper sticker that says “I’m Tired of all the Bushit.” Perhaps you’ve seen one like it. I’ve seen far more vulgar bumper stickers than that one, but this one is different because it criticizes a Republican President. She was pulled over and given a ticket that carries a $100 fine; a fine for “lewdness.”

Now you can turn the country inside out, charge the taxpayers tens of millions and cripple a government if a Democrat president fires his travel agent or says something rude or hooks up with a woman, not his wife and the folks of Georgia will run wild in the streets with glee, but George Bush is God’s president and you don’t criticize God in Georgia.

Now if it were me, I would have given the officer Cheney’s advice or perhaps Scalia’s “Sicilian” gesture, but Denise has more class than I do and will take it to court.

"This is all about free speech," said she to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "The officer pulled me over because he didn't agree with my politics. That's what this is about, not whether I support Bush, not because of the war in Iraq, but about my right to free speech."

What about giving Denise the same rights that the wise-guys in power have? What about an end to the duplicity, hypocrisy, secrecy, mendacity and censorship? Isn’t it time to put an end to being so polite to the religious hypocrites and Republican opinion shouters that we let them turn this into the kind of country we pretend we’re saving the world from? You’re damn right, and I’m damned tired of all the Bushit too.

Gimme that FU religion.

In many ways Dick “Shotgun” Cheney and Anton “Quack Quack” Scalia are as alike as two turds in a toilet. They enjoy killing animals together and they both have as much concern for decency, honesty, justice, law and “family values” as any other criminal associated with the Republican conspiracy to bleed our country dry before it becomes uninhabitable.

Supreme Court Justices once had the image of sober, serious, and restrained people. Whether or not that stereotype ever applied to all those who wore the robes, one would still not expect to be given the finger by Blackmun, Brandeis or even Rehnquist for that matter, but Scalia, as reported this morning by UPI, conjured up images of Mafioso Tony Soprano by making the traditional one finger obscene gesture to a Boston Herald reporter who asked him if he faces much questioning over impartiality when it comes to issues separating church and state.

Scalia had just attended a special Sunday Mass for lawyers and politicians at Cathedral of the Holy Cross, and had been the keynote speaker at the Catholic Lawyers' Guild luncheon.

"That's Sicilian." Said the Judge, flipping the bird in full view of a photographer from the Boston Archdiocese publication. Perhaps it is, but it’s also disgusting, unpatriotic, undignified and typical of the thugs, bullies, thieves, contract killers and all the other made men of the Republican Mafia who have pushed their way into power in America.

We deserve him, we deserve Cheney and the legion of dishonest, malignant creeps who run America. We deserve them because either we voted for them, with our private, stupid and ignorant little ideas, or we allowed other people to do it for us because we didn’t vote, didn’t follow the news or didn’t care.

Hyperbolic or hypergolic?

I’m starting to think that the best way to treat the Republican motor mouths is to give them a platform and enough rope to hang themselves with.  I was disgusted when the Washington Post hired Ben Domenech the perpetrator of the new Washington Post conservative blog, Red America, but perhaps the attention now being focused on the man’s apparent plagiarism and massive lack of basic decency will have the cleansing effect of sunlight on a vampire.

Among the allegations of iniquity published in Editor and Publisher yesterday, was his calling Coretta Scott King a Communist the day after her funeral.  Being a communist by the lights of the New Right simply means that you give a damn about people outside your immediate circle of friends (or coven if you prefer) and thus the McCarthy gambit is the kind of accusation they use as a default.

In an attempt to grovel just enough to save a bit of face and perhaps to distract us from the vague sulfurous smell his writing exudes, Domenech issued a coy mea culpa in his nasty little blog that is so encrusted with qualifications as to continue to damn her with faint praise while pretending to have had some other message than plain, ordinary Republican nastiness.

It was only “hyperbole in the context of a larger debate about President Bush's political priorities” Quoth the lizard, following that with his thanks to “the Liberal side”  saying “ I'm happy that no one's engaged in any ridiculous hyperbole, unfounded accusations or unintentionally hilarious name-calling. We can all agree that such things lower the quality of debate on the Internet, play to the worst side of our knee-jerk partisan nature and have no place in the modern public square.”  Sadly there is no way to observe the straightness of his face when he writes, or perhaps I should better say excretes such things – which is only a bit of hyperbole in the larger context of calling him a dirtbag.

Out of focus

Bush is troubled – troubled he says, about the dire fate of an Afghan convert to Christianity.  Now Bush is rarely troubled and isn’t known to be aware that the rosy picture he paints of the new Afghanistan isn’t exactly the hard edge realism one gets from a photograph.  He tells us that women are liberated, girls are going to school, the Taliban is gone and it’s all about Democracy in action.  That, as well as most of what issues from God’s Own Party, should long since have made us aware that a partial picture is a kind of lie.

Afghanis voted, according to the propaganda we receive, for a constitution that guarantees religious freedom.  The Afghan constitution provides death for those who exercise freedom of belief.  

"I look forward to working with the government of that country to make sure that people are protected in their capacity to worship" says George.  I believe him, but I don’t believe he’ll be playing up the point that if Afghanistan is to be restrained from hacking off the heads of infidels,  change will not result from an internal Democratic process, but from the military might of an occupying power with a secular constitution.  Afghanistan has no separation of religious power from Governmental power and that is something George has to render blurry and out of focus.

Abdul Rahman has been a practicing Christian for 16 years and the new US backed government, basking in the democratic light of freedom wants to kill him for it.  Their government, it seems, takes the same position as the religious right in the US: that law is based on received scripture and so should have the same power.  It’s a prescription for the same old horror the West once had and the East has yet to get rid of.

So when they tell you the Taliban is gone, it’s not the story.  They are still there, just over the border, like part of a cancer that the surgeon didn’t get all of.  Their program was only a bit more tyrannical and draconian than what obtains in “free” Afghanistan. The country is under the heel of malicious mullahs and drug lords and the government is held together by the military power of infidels. The story, just outside the edges of the photograph is very different from what the photographer wants you to see.

The insanity of Hannity

in his own words:

3/24/99: "My question to you is from all reports that I have been able to dig up, 2,000 killed in Kosovo in the last year. We keep hearing the president refer genocide, ethnic cleansing, comparisons to Adolf Hitler. Is the president purposefully using propaganda and hyperbole to garner the American public for support?"

3/20/06: ““At what point do we say you are undermining the troops, you are hurting their leader, that this is beyond political discourse, this is hurtful to what they’re doing, their effort?”

“There used to be a time where the left cared about humanity, about security, about liberty. But obviously that's not the case anymore because if they had had their way, and now we're talking about the appeasement-minded, surrender-minded Democrats of today.”

You say you want more of this? You say you want more for your money? Well go check out News Hounds – if you can handle the truth.

Sean Hannity is close enough to being the Devil that the man in red is really irrelevant these days. Hannity lies, but Hannity is a bad liar, a cheap liar without enough memory to be consistent in his lies and so he depends on the bad memory and the insanity of his audience. Unfortunately, those who oppose him aren’t as likely as their counterparts on the Right to call for his assassination by poisoning and even if they were, they’d be less likely to get away with such things than Satan’s other spawn: Ann Coulter.

Of course, you can talk back and of course it’s immoral not to follow in the steps of Dr. Ben Marble and tell Sean Hannity to F*** himself. Do it. It’s not just fun, it’s your patriotic duty. hannity@foxnews.com Do it!

Bonus post

Post hoc ergo propter hoc is one of the popular and feeble fallacies of rabble rousers like Hannity and Hitler. If it happened afterward, therefore it happened because of. Stupid, but enormously popular with those who thrive on the stupidity of the public because it’s emotionally satisfying – and less filling too.

So when Charles Martin called 911 in Batavia Ohio on Sunday afternoon to report that he had “just killed a kid” I can assert that it’s not because he’s nuts, but it’s because he is a political conservative with an American Flag and a US Navy flag on his well trimmed lawn. Patriotism caused a senseless murder. You and I know he’s just the sort of flipped out sociopath who listens to Hannity and gets angrier and angrier until the sight of a kid walking across his lawn prompts him to load up his constitutionally guaranteed shotgun and assert the Judeo-Christian precepts upon which our country was founded by cutting a 15 year old in half.

You can’t argue with logic.

Semper eadem

Always the same.

We all know at least one person who forwards every hoary e-mail hoax they come across without taking the trouble to verify that the sick child who would like a post card has been dead for 15 years or find out whether the words “so help me God” actually were removed from the Veteran’s monument, but the impassioned albeit incoherent speech of Darryl Scott before the subcommittee on crime of the House Judiciary Committee on May 27 that I received yesterday really are the words the father of a Columbine High School shooting victim gave to congress – 7 years ago. The text in which the quote is imbedded, like a rabbit turd in a Tiffany setting is as deceitful a piece of propaganda as the Republican Right can produce.

Of course the e-mail I received tells you it never got any press coverage, which isn’t true, it’s just another gratuitous attempt to paint a false picture of the fake war on religion, but the gist of the message was that the reason for the tragedy was that God (his God of course) isn’t honored enough in this country. We are a nation founded on God, lies the anonymous writer who includes Scott’s rant in his e-mail.

Never mind that the USA is the most church-going of all the industrialized nations, never mind that we have God on our money and on billboards and courthouse walls and on the windows of pick-up trucks and porta-potties; never mind that religious organizations have more political power here than almost any modern nation save the Vatican. Never mind that your child is more likely to be killed in a sports accident, vastly more likely to be killed in a car accident than by a demented fellow student. Never mind that violent crime has been declining for two decades and never mind that highly secular nations like Holland and much of Europe have a vastly lower crime rate than one finds in the American Bible Belt, never mind that pagan nations like Japan and Singapore have practically no shootings, never mind that despite Darryl’s impassioned but tendentiously distorted assertions, our government has never told anyone they couldn’t pray – Darryl thinks honoring God by holding public prayer in school will make it stop. The problem as I see it is that we honor religious nuts and their lies far too much. We’re afraid to call a turd a turd. We’re so afraid we’d rather eat it than identify it.

I can forgive almost anything of someone who has lost a child like that, but I cannot forgive the sick bastards who use such things to sell religious extremism, denounce the very concept of a constitutional republic and to portray the NRA as a victim. Mohammed Atta died with a prayer on his lips.

False witness

It’s not that I’m obsessed with Katherine Harris, it’s just that she’s such a perfect example of the New Republican; a mouth full of “Christian values,” face painted like a cheap whore and a moral certainty that God’s will justifies whatever immoral means are used to implement it.

Harris claims that God wants her to win and apparently he has authorized her to lie, cheat, steal, take illegal campaign contributions and undermine the foundations of representative government toward achieving that divine goal. During a recent appearance on Fox News Channel's seminar for scoundrels: Hannity and Colmes, Harris said she will not end her campaign and will instead spend "my legacy from my father" and "everything I have." I certainly hope that she does; at least to the extent that she spends the rest of her days on public assistance and eating cat food in a dilapidated mobile home in Ft Pierce. It’s God’s will.

The party doesn't worry about criminal behavior though. Ed Kennedy, Broward County's Republican state committeeman, said the party needs to quit worrying about political liabilities, like her role in the 2000 presidential recount.

''It's too late to have doubts. She's in,'' he said. "Republicans are going to rally around her because we want that Senate seat.'' Apparently greed and lust for power are holy motivations and of course doubt is sin.

Harris’s campaign staff however has largely abandoned her and few think she has a chance to become Florida’s second Republican Senator by beating incumbent Democrat Bill Nelson this November, but there is always an audience that doesn’t care about morality, doesn’t recognize reality and whose fanatical and irrational allegiance can always be bought with a little glossolalia and a few thumps on a Bible: the Christian Right. This weekend, Harris took the pulpit at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale as part of the Reclaiming America For Christ conference and received a standing ovation. According to the account in the Palm Beach Post, Harris said she "redirected my life to the Lord when I was only in the third grade" and was "blessed to be raised in a godly family." She claims to have studied under Frances Schaeffer, who in his book A Christian Manifesto, called for Christian activists to demand "biblical morality" in government affairs.

I have not read Schaeffer and cannot confirm that disenfranchising minority voters and interfering with the ballot count is included in his concept of biblical morality. She also draws inspiration from Bill Bright's book, The Joy of Supernatural Thinking — Believing in God for the Impossible. One can see why.

Further illuminating the depth of her intellect, she cited the movies (not the books) The Last of the Mohicans and The Lord of the Rings because according to her lights it was about people willing to die for something bigger than themselves. If she made any references to sending people to die for lies and for the aggrandizement of the man her misdeeds helped to install as President, it was not recorded. “Everything is possible with God” parroted the parrot faced Harris as though everything would be possible with sufficient biblical bloviation.

Katherine has of yet not volunteered to die for any reason great or small - more’s the pity - and chose instead to avoid reporters after the meeting and disappear into the crowd at the Palm Beach Seafood Festival, where the smell of fish no doubt made her trail harder to follow.

Swan song

"And after many a summer dies the swan."

-Tennyson-

Is the Bird Flue scare as idiotic as the Y2K bug? Will it become as much of a non-issue as SARS or the West Nile Virus or Africanized bees? It remains to be seen, but the premise behind it is that a virus will predictably mutate into a specific form with specific characteristics while retaining specific other characteristics and that’s about as likely as that your sore throat will mutate into a deadly form that your dog will catch. It’s equally as likely that the virus will mutate into something less deadly or not mutate at all and the possibility exists that the Dutch Elm disease could evolve into a form that might make your feet itch, but don’t lose sleep over it. Mutations are random and accidental and most often fatal to the resultant life form. The only thing that’s not based on speculation is the fact that hundreds of millions of doses of Tamiflu will be sold and that Don Rumsfeld will personally profit from it even though there’s no hard evidence that the stuff works on H5N1. Indeed, although U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt says that despite the $3 billion that’s been allocated and the $2.5 billion requested in addition – we’re all on our own, just as we have been during the last few natural disasters.

It’s probably inevitable that birds around the world will be decimated and I’m sure that people who sleep with birds and spend their days with birds will have a higher likelihood of contracting this new strain than you or I would. Anything else is less than inevitable.

From the perspective of a disease organism itself, the most viable is a form that sickens but does not kill. Diseases that always kill usually die out for obvious reasons. If this were not true, we would not be here.

As I wrote yesterday, we do not know how many people have been infected with the viral strain called H5N1. We have no clue about how many cases are mild enough to be unreported. The cases that have come to light are the ones who were very ill and at the moment that consists of less than 100 people in a world with over 6 billion. Ordinary flu infects and kills vastly more people – I’ve never had it in my 61 years.

So when Chicken Little Leavitt tells you to dig a hole and climb in it until after it’s all over, swallow it cum grano salis. Wear gloves and a mask if you have to clean the chicken coop, otherwise remember we’re in more danger from the Pirates in Washington than from the pigeons in the park.

The money machine

When you want to find out who’s behind something, follow the money – all the way to Washington. Last September I wrote about Don Rumsfeld and the money he’s made from the pharmaceutical industry. You didn’t think that was all in the past, did you?

Some of the huge portfolio that Rummy owns consists of shares in Gilead and he’s already made at least $5 million from selling shares of the company on whose board he sat for years. Back in 2004, he owned another $25 millions worth and that share has probably grown enormously, even though it’s a drop in the Rumsfeld bucket. His net worth is probably in the hundreds of millions.

Further details are not likely to become known until Daddy Warbucks Rumsfeld makes his next disclosure in May - and that we will ever know the truth, is an assumption based on the hope that the report is a bit more honest than most of what issues from this war monger and fear profiteer.

Is the H5N1 strain of flu really that dangerous? It’s possible that many have had it and survived without incident and the mortality figures are wildly skewed. Will it really mutate? Maybe, maybe not. Does Tamiflu effectively treat it? There is doubt in some circles and the record is not encouraging. Can we really trust any of the crusades promoted by that vast bastion of greed in Washington? Of course not. Does Rumsfeld’s promise not to be involved in any particular matter when the matter would directly and predictably affect his financial interest mean anything? Don’t make me laugh.

One thing we can depend on is that the Bush mafia and their capos in the drug, insurance, oil and munitions businesses will get even richer from promoting fear, war and rumors of war.

When God is a monster

He passes by me and I see him not; he moves on but I do not perceive him

-Job 9:11-

Dr. Wafa Sultan is working on a book. The working title is, "The Escaped Prisoner: When God Is a Monster." In 1979 when she was a medical student at the University of Aleppo in northern Syria, gunmen of the Muslim Brotherhood burst into a classroom at the university and killed her professor as she watched. "They shot hundreds of bullets into him, shouting, 'God is great!' "

"At that point, I lost my trust in their god and began to question all our teachings. It was the turning point of my life, and it has led me to this present point. I had to leave. I had to look for another god." Dr. Sultan no longer practices Islam.

Last week, from a link on in the Intellectual Insurgent, I listened to Dr. Sultan’s debate with an Algerian cleric hosted by Al Jazeera and I was stirred by her passionate denunciation of Islamic self-pity, violence and hypocrisy.

"The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions or a clash of civilizations," Dr. Sultan said. "It is a clash between two opposites, between two eras. It is a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another mentality that belongs to the 21st century. It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality."

This is progress, I thought, this is the kind of thing that will reform the Muslim world from within and restore some measure of dignity to their religion.

Maybe not. Dr. Ibrahim al-Khouli, another participant in the discussion asked, "Are you a heretic?" He then said there was no point in rebuking or debating her, because she had blasphemed against Islam, the Prophet Muhammad and the Koran. Dr. Sultan takes this as a formal Fatwa and she has begun to receive death threats in e-mail and on her answering machine.

The God or gods of a culture reflect the nature of the people who set themselves up as an interface between us and the divine. Through them, we learn what God likes and what God hates and what God would have us do as his agents. Whenever we wish to commune with the divine, we find a human standing in the hallway, blocking our passage, whether with his physical presence or by the stumbling blocks he and his culture have put in our minds since childhood. The God of monsters is always depicted as a monster. The Men of God are always less than God and sometimes less than human, yet these are all we ever see and ever will see. If there is a God he walks past us unnoticed.

You can’t say that in San Diego

Not if you want to have a job. Just ask Linda Lorca. The California labor code prohibits employers from controlling or directing the political activities of employees, so when her boss fired her on the spot and called her an Al Qaeda operative for having an Air America bumper sticker on her car, Beverly Fath, manager at Advantage Sales and Marketing, Inc. broke the law. Somewhere, tailgunner Joe is smiling. Somewhere underground, the tyrants we’ve been telling everyone our government was superior to are smiling.

But of course 9/11 changed everything. It changed us from a government of laws to a government of men; angry, stupid, fearful and unprincipled men – and women. So when the ape in the White house or one of his no-neck thugs tells us about our “wonderful freedoms” give him Dick Cheney’s advice.

You bet I’m angry. I’m fully aware that we have had two centuries of this kind of thing in war and peace. We’ve had a nation of passionate savages barely restrained by law, but somehow we’ve maintained, on the average, some level of reason and principle and justice. That doesn’t mean we need to stand for this kind of bullying, spying popular fascism. I know I won’t. Bogus war or no war, they’ll take my freedom when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers.

El Diablo Diebold

The American Faschisti, like their forbears, medieval and modern, do not advance by proving the truth of their doctrines or the righteousness of their actions, they thrive by punishing the non-compliant. We have countless examples of which the Florida voting machine debacle is one.

There is no longer any doubt that Diebold voting machines can be hacked to alter the tabulation and leave no trace of manipulation – quod erat demonstrandum – it’s been done. Computer expert Harri Hursti of Finland hacked Leon County's Diebold voting system. Hursti demonstrated that someone inside the supervisor's office could both alter the outcome of an election and erase any trace of his meddling. Some of the machines have undocumented infrared ports, the purpose of which is not explained. The fact that nobody seems to care is frightening enough, but guess what happens when an honest elections commissioner attempts to make sure that the upcoming elections will be free of criminal manipulation?

That’s right - Ion Sancho, election supervisor of Leon County (which includes the capitol in Tallahassee) is facing a lawsuit by the state of Florida for refusing to use Diebold machines until the secret back door has been closed. Other vendors of voting machines are refusing to talk to him and according to the Miami Herald, “the state snatched $564,421 in grant money away from Leon County for failing to meet a deadline for -- you guessed it -- obtaining new machines.”

No matter that the State of California, alarmed by this, conducted its own investigation which confirmed the situation; amply suited to be a plot in the next James Bond movie. The State of Florida needs bogus election results to keep the fascists in power and to keep those Republican campaign contributions from Diebold coming.

I don’t swallow the Bushist argument that a pro-forma election is evidence of a free society, but the converse is quite true. Fake elections are evidence of a society which is not free.

Hey stupid!

It’s one thing to be born stupid and another thing to achieve stupidity through an effort of will. It’s no secret that the Bible Belt and the ignorance belt are congruent. It’s no secret that Belief in mythology over confidence in evidence corresponds to low educational levels and standards, yet America’s ability to draw conclusions from this can only be described as willful stupidity.

I read in Editor and Publisher that a Gallup poll released today shows that more than half of all Americans; some 53% of us, agree with the statement, "God created man exactly how Bible describes it."

Frank Newport who directed the poll for Gallup wrote “Those with lower levels of education, those who attend church regularly, those who are 65 and older, and those who identify with the Republican Party are more likely to believe that God created humans 'as is,' than are those who do not share these characteristics."

I draw the conclusion that these people are willfully stupid. These people draw the conclusion that being educated and intellectually honest makes one’s opinions suspect. They have the majority.

Belief in something for which there is a total lack of evidence requires a disbelief in evidence itself regardless of the extent or peremptory nature of it. There is no intelligent argument for Intelligent Design whether that design was completed in a week or in 5 billion years. The opinions of 53% of Americans depend upon denial, ignorance and stupidity.

Perhaps the ascent of Man is subject to the Peter Principle and perhaps the achievements of the best of us are limited by the arrogant stupidity of the rest of us or perhaps it’s the accelerating speed at which new knowledge is being uncovered, that leaves so many behind. Simply put: there is no evidence for the account in Bereshit or Genesis as the gentiles prefer. None, zip, nada. There is a vast and growing body of contradictory evidence none of which requires a belief in magic or invisible beings or miracles or mysterious paradoxes.

But more importantly, all conjectures which require no factual basis are equal; zero always equals zero and therefore any mythology has precisely the same value as any other mythology that relies only on credulity and custom. If the Elohim created us all, then so did Vishnu and a host of others. If things are true because we want them to be, then everything is true and nothing is true and reason is meaningless. If half of us can’t see that or won’t see that or are afraid to see that because they live in the Bible Belt, then a majority of us are simply not rational beings or even honest beings.