Matt and Mitt

And all that shit.

You can't say they don't try to please everyone, and since most people are idiots, or at least made equivalent to idiots by their ignorance, their faiths, beliefs, prejudices and anger; the way to please one idiot without offending the other is to make ambiguous hints, to use a  mouthpiece to provide plausible deniability and to make it sound like it's only a joke. You libtards got no sensa humor! Just jokin' here.

"No one’s ever asked to see my birth certificate. They know that this the place that we were born and raised.”

For example, we have Willard Mitt Romney "joking" that everyone knows where he was born ( not like that watermelon thief hiding in the woodpile) for the benefit of  Detroit's demented minions who might suspect that WMR is secretly one of the boys.  Indeed Mitt is good at making everyone think he's secretly on their side rather than being simply ambitious for power. 

My memory is good enough to remember son Matt ( how cute) bloviating his Birther bullshit last year,  of which  Raw Story is good enough to remind us.  I also remember  Plastic Matt  "joking" about how Plastic Mitt would release his tax returns after Obama would release his (already released) birth certificate. Just adorable, who cares if it's true?

Reminds me of all the folks I know who take pains to be polite in public but trot out the racist epithets in conspiratorial tones when they feel safe. Yes Rombo and company are good at playing both sides of everything without actually stating any principles and their constituents are really bad at noticing.  Have you noticed?

OMG!

Could it be that Anne Coulter just said something I agree with?  I think I need to wash out my brain with Lysol.  But I guess it's not quite that bad.  Yes, I do believe that the oh so Typically Tea Twit Tod Aiken is a swine, but I would stop short of using nuclear weapons on him as she demands ( rather messy at best) but I don't think he's not a real Republican as she asserts and I certainly don't, as most of my saner readers will agree,  think the Democratic Party financed his campaign just to make the Republicans look ridiculous.  Hell. they've looked ridiculous for over 30 years.

“What he cares about is his own ego,” said Arrogant  Anne of the Thousand Ton Ego on Insanity Hannity's Fox News show.  She complained about his lack of knowledge of medical facts, as well one could expect of a propagandist who carefully researches and checks her facts to be sure none of her assertions actually corresponds with any.

I probably should rephrase that to use the word 'whined' in ironic emulation of her favorite phraseology:  Anne went wah - she went wah, wah wah.

The legitimate Rape of Freedom

I went to bed ruminating about the predicted course of Tropical Storm Isaac which had it ravaging the West coast of Florida from fort Meyers to Tampa next week.  Am I a bad person for dreaming that a random raging force of  nature might do what our miserable excuse for a righteous God never seems to do and tear the Tampa Convention Center to pieces, rending flesh from barbarian bone and yet somehow leave the Tampa General Hospital just across the channel intact to tend to any decent folk who got caught out in the storm?  Perhaps I am, but the teeth and claws of the GOP are as visible to anyone with eyes to see as if they were painted red with gore -- as indeed they are -- and who will be there to rescue us when the wolf has eaten Grandma (and blamed it on Obama?) Sadly today's National Hurricane Center prediction shows Hurricane Isaac passing to the west of Tampa, leaving only some wind and rain to drown out the demented cries of a dying country.

It won't be quite loud enough of course, to obscure the lies and libels, the slanders, the fabrications or the calls for armed insurrection against the decent, the humane or the lovers of freedom  -- nor wet enough to wash away the Tea. But don't bring your guns to Tampa.  It was OK for the toothless Tea Whores to bring firearms to Democratic meetings and threaten to use them, but the GOP has banned guns at their sabbath.

There will be and there already are howls about spending and taxes and budgets, but put in the form of a passion play that has more to do with reversing the guilt for having started a war on invented information -- the most expensive war in our history -- and proposed that it would cost nothing if only we relieved the richest of us of a few more percent in taxes. They'll go on pretending that a middle class tax cut was a tax hike, that no additional gun control was somehow a "gun Grab" and that restoring Ronald Reagan's tax relief for the richest Americans, many of whom like Mitt Romney paid paid nothing and are still paying almost nothing was "the largest tax hike in history" and a flirtation with Marxism.  They'll continue the tradition of posing pornography, legal birth control, the "personhood" of fertilized eggs and abortion as the great issues of the day and the same people who claim that the universe is only a few years older than the pyramids will howl like idiots about how 14 year old girls won't get pregnant if the rape wasn't forceful enough and how women with hydrocephalic babies can't actually die in childbirth. They'll stand on the bloodstained platform or their vampire religion and call for the subjugation of women, the abandonment of the old and sick and weak and claim we simply can't survive if we do what everyone else in the free, modern world does.  They'll suggest a country with a double standard of morality, where the government sleeps in your bed but not in theirs and where they pay nothing and obey no rules. 

No, sorry Messrs. Romney and Ryan, I'd like you and your numbered accounts in Bermuda and Luxembourg and Liechtenstein washed out into the Gulf, never to be seen again and soon to be forgotten by the madmen, the congenitally stupid, the misogynists, the sexual perverts who support all the silly, stupid, racist rhetoric. I'd like to drown the contempt for facts, for science, for mathematics, for history and of course  your contempt for anyone who didn't lie cheat and steal their way to wealth and power, but of course I can't.

I can't because this is a stupid country, a petty, angry, prejudiced, bigoted, selfish and deluded country who thinks it would be better off and safer with no government at all. We're the country that elected George Bush twice and Richard Nixon twice and Spiro Agnew and savaged everyone that spoke up. This is the party that was outraged at anyone who said the economy was unsustainable and now sneers and snarks about how the economy is unsustainable.  This is the country that cheered at the biggest borrow and spend spree and now looks at the spendthrift culprits as saviors. Perhaps we deserve our fate. Perhaps we deserve even worse.  Perhaps a better nation might some day emerge from the stinking wreckage, but probably not and probably some other power will come to dominate the world -- a power who cares less for the kind of country we pretended to be and insisted we were while we danced around a bonfire chanting as America died.

You've got to be kidding, part III

When is a joke not a joke?  When it's about Allen West the convicted war criminal winning the Republican primary for Florida's House District 18 yesterday. He has been running as a war hero of course, Florida being a kind of Bizarro World where things are their own opposites. 

It's considered a swing district and is a snake pit of  Tea Party sentiment. So much so that his opponent  has been ostracized from the Republican party for even suggesting himself as an alternative to West, that Fascist son of a bitch. That was enough to christen him and all his supporters as Communists in the minds of the local Teabastards.  Crowder, a formerly popular county sheriff lost abysmally of course,  having only a few thousand bucks, decades of intimate familiarity with the district and good job performance to advertise as opposed to West, who never has lived in the district but had the bottomless pockets of the terrorist Right to fund him.

It remains to be seen who will prevail, but the completely unknown 29 year old Democratic candidate is unlikely ever to win in this Republican cesspool although there once was a one term Democrat in that office after the traditional values Mark Foley made a fool of himself with teenage boys.  

I'd call it another unfunny joke that  former State Representative William Snyder also carried away the nomination to Replace the pariah Sheriff Crowder. Snyder, as our State Rep strongly supported an Arizona Style "show me your papers" law, which of course made him very popular in this overwhelmingly pretend-Christian area where there are more Churches than dentists and Fluoride is banned in the water supply because it's a Communist plot but only "Liberals" worry about the Arsenic and pesticides and Mercury.

Of course our future as a nation is a pretty unfunny joke too, isn't it?

Damn the lies -- part II

Perhaps you'll recall my post entitled Damn the Lies the other day about the latest act of treason from the Republican Lie Machine, or Fox news as it's sometimes called.   It was about a totally fictitious story warning us about how if  "Obama gets his way" voting rights of military personnel would be restricted in Ohio. I suppose that adherents to the Obamahate faith accept unquestioningly that the POTUS writes election laws unconstitutionally in the State of Ohio. I suppose Fox Folk are actually stupid enough, or at least so disgustingly desperate enough  to legitimize their hatred of  our uppity president that they will believe anything without question and guard the lies with their miserable lives.  But needless to say, the most polite thing an honest observer can say about Fox Fraudster Shannon Bream is that it's a filthy, contemptible lie worthy of tar and feathers.

But who cares?  This isn't actually reality you know, it's a kind of  fantasy amusement park for deranged sociopaths and other borderline personalities with room temperature IQs and it isn't nearly possible for even a well funded and staffed effort to counter the lies or disseminate  the facts.  It's not just that there isn't enough money outside of the insurgency, it's also that believing the lies is a mighty fortress of faith. If you don't like the Flavor Aid, why then, you're a Liberal and that's that.

So, sure "that Obama" hates soldiers or "warriors" or "warfighters" as the anger merchants like to call any GI who ever peeled a potato.  It's all just another passion play.  So why get angry about the latest round of TV adds, paid for by unidentified "concerned citizens" who actually are the Koch's Folks or Rupert's Raiders which insist in full snark mode that "that Obama" has removed the Work for Welfare system put into place by that other Commie, that most far left Liberal ever, not the real president; that one-term-at-most Bill Clinton. 

Do I have to tell you it ain't true?  Probably not if you've read this far.  Should I mention that not only is it not true, even in part, but that what the White House is trying to accomplish with further Welfare reform is to accede to the long time requests of  Republican Governors to allow them the flexibility to tailor their State's programs to their needs? 

Perhaps it's galling to the Fascists and Bigots and Brown Shirts masquerading as Conservatives that, as it was with Bill Clinton, the man they tried to portray as another Trotsky was actually more conservative than they were in some respects and no further to the Left than the center.  It's nearly as galling to me that a mob of irate patriots doesn't put these lying bastards, these unscrupulous despoilers of liberty, Truth, Justice, Democracy and Decency in a pillory and piss in their faces.

You've got to be kidding -- part II

There's something infuriating about those election year robo-calls.  For me, it's because of the feeling of helplessness.  You can always interrupt a human or even a sub-human caller, or if one has fallen into an incoherent, blubbering rage, can hope for some small effect by slamming down the phone on someone whining obscene untruths in your ear.

I had just finished an annoying conversation with my mechanic yesterday about being in line for a very expensive marine engine repair and before I could stand up, go outside and scream at the top of my lungs, the phone rang again.  I normally screen my calls because the majority of them are from people I've never heard of trying to sell me everything from Viagra to mortgage scams, but this time I didn't look at the caller ID. I just picked it up.

Before I could issue a surly "hello" I was blasted by a wild and frenzied voice demanding that I make "an emergency contribution to help Romney fight Obama's disastrous policies."  Well, of course it was a recording and no human was offended by my returning the handset to its cradle just a bit harder than the Chicxulub asteroid impact, but the real pain was not so much that I couldn't vent my rage but rather that there was no possibility of asking the paid actor just what those "policies" might be.

Doesn't it seem that the reference is always to unspecified policies?  Why would that be but to harness the inchoate rage of the Teabastards while allowing them to preserve the illusion that that rage had anything to do with President Obama and his policies -- and not his ancestry.  Perhaps it's no different than the constant reference to "liberals" rather than to people who are opposed to the various scams and handouts and outrageous intrusions into private life that constitute the Republican political platforms of recent years -- things like the war on birth control, the war on pornography, the battle against public education (because as Rick Santorum told us, it promotes "elitism.") and the continued persecution of people who don't wish to be bound by religious taboos or would like to speak Spanish now and then.

Yes, I would have liked to get Mr. Roboto in a stranglehold and demand to know why Obama is to blame for paying for Bush's war and Bush's Medicare prescription plan and Bush's gifts to the oil cartel and why Obama is to blame for giving a tax break to the 98% of Americans who are not in the upper 2% of income earners rather than telling them to eat cake and giving an extra 2% to the Koch brothers and their ill bred ilk. I'd like to know whey that had nothing to do with the recession that started under Bush.  Really, the only "Obama Policy" of any stature I can think of is the health care plan written by one Willard M. Romney in conjunction with the health care industry and the one that hasn't really gone into effect yet, nor has it been a "disaster" to Massachusetts.

So what are these "Disastrous Obama Policies" other than paying the bills, other than being unable to remove the Bush tax structure, being unwilling to actually increase the policy that basically broke the back of the economy by neglecting to pay for the Most Expensive War in American History because the Tax Fairy would somehow bail us out by making war profiteers even richer.

Let's face it Tea Twits and  Secessionists and all you dishonest hordes of political whores yearning for a scapegoat to excuse the way you've been fighting to ruin life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in America -- repeating lies that you hear because you can't admit that you've been wrong, because you can't admit that you don't know a damned thing about history or economics, because you can't admit that you've made mistakes and because you can't accept that "I've got mine and fuck you" isn't the definition of Capitalism, Democracy or even decency -- let's face it:  you applauded everything that got us here, you mocked and persecuted everyone who warned you and you ignored the history you should have learned from.

It's your damned fault, not "the Liberals" the Mexicans, the people who told you that no, there were no Goddamn nukes in Iraq and no way to build them: the people who told you that al Qaeda was a menace when your cowboy president shut down the anti-terrorism team right before 9/11 -- it's yours.

Who was it who told us we hated America when we told you slashing the upper bracket would pour a torrent of capital into the markets and hedge funds and real estate, creating the same bubble and bust we had in the 1920's?  It was you, you smug, self pitying, Velveeta and white bread eating, Pat and Rush and Ann cheering sock puppets.

Time to suck it up and take responsibility. There's no way to undo what you've done, no folksy homilies and vague generalities, no Mighty Mitt to save the day.  The debt can't be paid down by putting the old and the sick and the young and dependent on an ice floe. You can't fix things by "deporting" people for their political opinions like that malignant Republican war criminal parasite Allen West suggests. We can't "decrease the size of government by spending even more on Homeland Security the largest Federal Agency ever or by building more carriers and bombers to counter the defunct Soviet Union.  We can't raise taxes enough to do it.  We're going to see inflation - lots of it, at least those of us who can't hide billions offshore like our corporate citizens do, like our Republican supporters and candidates do. We're going to see enough devaluation that foreign countries can hire our non-union, no minimum wage serfs for less than they hire Chinese peasants to work in sweat shops until your grandchildren and your great grandchildren curse your memory, dig up your miserable bones and grind them for fertilizer.

You've got to be kidding

Paul Ryan -- yes, I know it's already old news, but Jesus. . . . Paul Ryan? 
What is it with the GOP that they didn't learn from the Palin experience; that they didn't learn that you don't balance out a weak wishy-washy, candidate (which in Gopspeak means there might be hidden traces of sanity lurking within) by pairing him with some radical anarchist wackadoodle?   Ok, ok, it worked with Dan Quayle, but Dan was just an oaf and an ignoramus and after all George I had to protect himself against impeachment. . . .  but Jesus. . . . Paul Ryan?

Damn the lies

If some day, someone erects a cenotaph somewhere in the arid and polluted desert that used to be called the United States of America, some inscription marking two vast and trunkless legs of stone, it should give credit to Fox News.  Amongst the other factors that contributed to the fall of "The Greatest Country there Ever Was" Fox must stand out -- Fox must at least be in gilded letters or garish neon lights, because no day and few hours have passed since its inception wherein some grotesque lie, libel or hyperbolic defamation designed to undermine truth, decency and democracy has failed to appear.

“If President Obama gets his way, the special voting rights of some of America’s finest will be eliminated,” host Shannon Bream said Friday night. “The campaign is suing to keep members of the military from having extra time to cast their ballots in one key battleground state.”

No it isn't.  The suit does not seek to impair voting rights for anyone but seeks to reinstate rights taken from the general population by the Republican controlled Ohio Legislature and if there were a God anything like the fire and brimstone scourge of iniquity people dream about, the earth would open up and swallow Ms. Bream, and Roger Ayres and Rupert Murdoch would become pillars of shit. 

The Suit by the Ohio Democratic Party and the Obama Campaign argues that Ohio's new law creates an unconstitutional tiered voting system, where early voting is only allowed for military personnel. As Jonathan Terbush writes at Raw Story:

"The suit would not prevent military members from, “having extra time” to vote, as the Fox report insinuated. Rather, it asks that the court, by blocking enactment of the new law, reinstate the extra time all voters used to enjoy for casting their ballots."

You may suspect that I've lost faith in this truth forsaken land and its lunatic tribes and you'd be close to the truth.  Our once powerful and always dishonest country won't be powerful forever nor will its self-righteousness last forever.  The worms, the maggots chewing on the gangrenous  flesh of America are employees of Fox and Shannon Bream is a liar -- if not damned by God, then at least damned by decency.  God damn Fox News. God damn them all to hell.

Keepin' it white

In general, I support the laws allowing most licensed and qualified citizens to carry concealed weapons in most places.  Here in Florida someone who has a permit does none the less, not have the legal right to carry weapons in many areas, like courthouses, police stations, schools, stadiums and of course, bars.  A national political convention however, where emotions run high; where the attitudes resemble the local stop-and-sock tavern, and people whom other people would like to harm are present, would seem to be another proper exemption. 

I'm afraid it's not so in Florida, where during the upcoming RNC in Tampa, squirt guns, pieces of chain, ropes and other items which might be used to harm or at least get people wet are strictly illegal, Republican Governor Rick Scott seems likely to refuse the City Council's request to keep guns out of the convention. You can bring your Beretta , but leave the Super-Soaker at home.

There are other reasons of course, to wonder how Scott gets away with avoiding the other common nickname for Richard.  No, I'm not talking about his rejection of Federal funds because as he says, hiring people kills jobs -- and I'm not talking about the dozen or so felonies his company committed in a billion dollar orgy of Medicare fraud.  I'm not even referring to his recent attempt to "purge" the Florida voter rolls  of likely Democrats.  This time "Rick" deserves a nice cold blast from one of those banned squirt guns for neglecting to tell nearly 18,000 Floridians that their voting rights have been restored and that they can now register.  I'm sure he has forgotten how a few hundred votes can put a President who the majority of voters did not vote for into office.  Otherwise he would be ashamed, right? 

Or maybe he is out of the loop once again. Maybe he just didn't know, the way he didn't know about the 1 billion, 700 million dollar Columbia/HCA medicare fraud; in charge but not guilty by virtue of some ineffable virtue and of course well deserved of his severance package of  10 million dollars, 300 million in stock and a million a year "consulting" fee.

I wonder what he'll make for his part in defrauding America this time; his help in making the White House white again.

All's fair in fraud and felony

Voter suppression -- there's nothing new about it, but when the support for it comes from people who think testing city water for arsenic is "too much government" you have to expect odd, snarling  noises from the cynics.  Pennsylvania's latest attempt to reserve the right to vote for the landed gentry, posing as a reaction to voter fraud that might possibly occur but actually does not seem to have, has Pandagon snickering and me barking  -- and for good reason. Government intervening in the free exercise of a constitutional right is different I guess, because the goal of keeping Pennsylvania for "real" Americans sanctifies a little bit of  double-think.

". . . the argument seems to be that the state can impair a constitutional right because…well, because they can. It doesn’t really matter why, it just makes a kind of instinctual sense, like  how vaccines cause autism or how evolution can’t exist because I’ve never seen a thing evolve in front of my eyes despite staring at it and chanting “evolve” for hours on end." wrote Jesse Taylor yesterday.

Meanwhile, back in Florida, where excluding "undesirables" from the voter rolls is a tradition of long standing, former Florida Republican Party Chair Jim Greer is suing the “whack-a-do, right-wing crazies” that filed  criminal fraud charges against him in 2010 in a plot to force saner Republicans including former Governor Charlie Crist out of the party and suppress the African-American vote by once again purging voter rolls.

Florida of course, bans ex felons from voting for life for those without good connections in the GOP, like Governor Scott of the Fourteen Felonies, so if one wrote a bad check in 1956 or was found with an ounce or so of Cannabis in 1968, one can go fish forever.  In fact if your name sounds like someone else who did, and you live in Florida, you may have been illegally banned from voting in the 2000 election by a similar voter roll purge that targeted minority voters and probably put George Bush in the White House.  You may be banned once again and you won't likely know until you show up at the polls.

It's funny how consistently the voter fraud circus parade neglects to mention the voting machine "problems" in Ohio.  Again, I'm a cynic so I find it easy to believe that GOP tampering is treated differently in the Post Bush, Tea Party era.  Remember those "unhackable" Diebold machines that took only minutes to hack, delivering more Republican votes than could be accounted for by registered voters  -- and delivering Ohio for Bush, as the CEO openly boasted before being forced to resign over accounting fraud?  I wonder if he's still on the voter rolls.

The terrorists within

Perhaps now that John McCain is no longer running for president, he doesn't have to be so afraid of every little thing he says  to the point where he says and does some incredibly stupid things.  Choosing Sarah Palin, for one thing and telling us in all snarkiness that the economy is robust and those lying liberals are talking it down because they hate America or Capitalism or whatever, he made himself foolish to the point where, had he been a Democrat, Republicans would be vilifying him for the next three hundred years. 

At least and at last, he has recovered some character and a little dignity yesterday by describing the attacks by such unworthies as Michelle Nachmann and Florida  District 18 Representative Tom Rooney against Secretary of State Clinton's deputy chief of staff, Huma Abedin  as having "no logic, no basis and no merit."  Abedin, of course has relatives "tied to" the Muslim Brotherhood which of course makes Clinton a "serious security concern."  It takes some kind of person -- and I use that term loosely -- to think that our Department of State shares an agenda involving "destroying Western civilization from within," as the raving Bachmann wrote and all because of some tenuous and contrived "links" with organizations somehow associated with other organizations by virtue of being Muslim with other groups who may or may not be enemies.  It's as obscenely contrived as Rooney's obsessive efforts to impeach the President for treason.

Someone watching all this from Mars might find it very amusing and probably would have found it all rather predictable that the party that since the beginning of the 20th century has manufactured support  by manufacturing enemies, would still be grasping for new evil empires to scare us with with stories of  Sharia law being instituted in New Jersey and government plots to hand the country over, now that the Communist threat seems almost ludicrous to all but the galaxies far, far away, to some grand worldwide Caliphate. They've been desperate for credible enemies since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Yes, certainly we have had some very, very real enemies, but I seem to recall that during the Rise of Hitler, the Republicans were advising us to ignore the Nazis and the Empire of Japan because of the far more important Communist threat at home.  Curiously similar to what Hitler was telling the Germans.  Most of those reading this won't remember Joe McCarthy who made a fool out himself and out of America by overplaying his hand - stuffed with blank pieces of paper claimed to be lists of Communists in the State Department and the "Jew Dominated" movie industry. It was shameful, but as with much of rewritten history, Joe is back and his lies have been whitewashed and he has become a model for such equally shameless whores as Tom Rooney and Michelle Bachmann.  Here we go again.

Indeed, since Florida has been redistricted, my Mr. Rooney will no longer be representing us and the massive support of his would be replacement, the reprehensible and disgraceful Allen West who claims that 80% of Democrats in Congress need to be deported and that Obama supports slavery, is astonishing.  How many politicians have failed by overestimating the ignorance and stupidity and gullibility of the American voter?

How is it, I have to ask, that we have a whole party, a vastly wealthy party, dedicated to terrorizing the American public out of their freedom -- until they give up their rights -- and nobody sees them as terrorists? Communists, Muslim radicals, welfare mothers and of course Liberals - anything to keep the rubes afraid and angry to the point where the real enemy can take over.

Thou shalt not laugh

Is it bigotry?  Or shouldn't the greater question be: "is it true?"  It's no secret to anyone who has read my blog posts that I don't hold religious belief to be any more unassailable, any further off limits than any other opinions and beliefs people hold and since nearly every nasty thing humanity has done has employed some sort of belief to justify it, I think it's dangerous to refuse to question the influence of any particular religion or creed that presents itself to the public, whether it's personal or institutional.

Yes, our founding document does guarantee that the government not interfere with the "free exercise" of religion but that such non interference does not convey license to ignore the law doesn't need to be restated every time some group decides it's exempt from restraint ( or subject to taxes.)

Certainly I am not opposed to the right to build churches or attend them and I am very much opposed to a government suggesting or forcing anyone to attend or not to attend or to worship or to recite allegiances to belief systems or gods -- and I suppose I'm not in a minority in that respect, unless we're discussing Islam.  In fact I've frequently irritated people by defending Muslims from unfair criticism and bigotry. I've also irritated many by insisting that my freedom of speech and my freedom of belief trumps their efforts to keep me from criticizing their saints and deities and highly criticism worthy personages like Joseph Smith and Elron Hubbard.

It's often be explained to me that Islam is a "transcendental" religion, attempting to convert the world and so is dangerous, while religions like Christianity are not of that sort and so "Christian" or more ludicrously, "Judeo-Christian" law is the basis of our constitution and perhaps takes precedence.  Sharia law alone is a clear and present danger say so many Americans.  Can we really say that the enormous efforts Mormons make to convert the planet are different than other Christian efforts? 

So why are there accusations of bigotry against Businessweek and Caroline Winter's article  How the Mormons Make Money,  which examines the finances and enterprises of the LDS?  It's an

"in-depth look into the business side of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, with much attention given to the tax benefits the church enjoys and the extent of its holdings of property and stock in multinational corporations"  

says Dan Merica at CNN Belief Blog. And why is that off limits?  Why is the anger more justified than the anger against pictures of Mohammad with a bomb in his turban?  Of course a spokesman for the Church of Later Day Saints was quick to tell us the article was in poor taste and intended to insult Mormans, but then I haven't noticed the same attitude as concerns the Book of Mormon and its vile insults against American Indians and people of color nor the same sort of thing as concerns Jews in the Gospels. Unfair and often vicious criticism isn't exactly uncommon in religion or religious texts.

The LDS is a Church, but also in fact, a huge international business enterprise claiming special treatment and  special exemption from inquiry or criticism as a religion.  It's not unique in that respect but I don't think any church is off limits when it comes to business interests and the obligations that obtain. Is freedom from taxes on income and capital gains and the right to secret dealings really part of the protection of free exercise?  No more than the freedom to traffic in underage girls. We have the right to criticize, to contradict, and yes to laugh.  As an old friend of mine used to say  "one man's religion is another man's belly laugh."

As the Businessweek article says,

"A recent study by Ryan Cragun, a sociology professor at the University of Tampa, estimates the church receives around $8 billion in tithing from members each years and is worth around $40 billion."  

They don't have to report it or disclose it and they do get to spend it on influencing Congress to make our laws more in line with their sometimes abhorrent moral doctrines.  To me that puts them in the same category, only with more money behind them, than those American Muslims, a few of whom would like to see our laws more in line with Sharia. 

Was our bill of rights intended to protect the right of belief, of worship or was it intended to allow organizations to operate as separate countries within our own, free to tamper with our laws, but exempt from taxes and from criticism?  I don't think so and I'm far more offended by money they earn at the taxpayer's expense being used to deny freedom to others then I am by a cynical magazine cover.

Dream on

Dear Mr. Romney Willard Mitt Willard Romney WMR

Forgive me for shredding your name, but as your letter of July 6th was in the same format, I assumed you would find it preferable if I used the same scheme.  It's best to assume it was done deliberately rather than being the product of the same method you use to formulate your political positions from one minute to another.  Thank you for your letter reminding me that I may legally contribute an amount greater than the average American family income to your campaign, but I suggest that if you can't run a campaign with the hundreds of millions the corporate aristocracy has given you, you might not be the frugal sort of leader you'd like us to believe you are.

I'm glad to hear that

 "Growing up, I was fortunate to have been an eyewitness to the American Dream." 

but I suggest that your vantage point might have been different from that of the actual

"people [who] worked hard, seized opportunities, and hammered out a legacy of prosperity and hope for their children and grandchildren."  

Most of them didn't have multi-millionaire parents who served as governors and Presidential cabinet members and of course very few of them ever realized the kind of success you had handed to you.   But I have to ask how you have arrived at the notion that people can no longer work hard or seize opportunities -- after all you're currently engaged in at least one of those activities and I have no doubt that you've spent many hours campaigning.  I see absolutely nothing in "Obama's policies" that have interfered with your or my or anyone else's endeavors. Perhaps you could enlighten me as to what policies you refer.  Doing that would at least set you apart from your colleagues and staff writers since not one of them seems to know or acknowledge that those policies have either been thwarted or in many cases are policies inherited from the previous administration along with its unprecedentedly expensive wars. Obama has lowered taxes for most of us -- wasn't that supposed to be the Republican panacea?  Where were all the jobs that tax structure was supposed to create?  Why did we have 8 years with zero private sector job growth which then began to grow under "Obama's policies?" Without some actual economic policy suggestions that might somehow pay off the massive debt Mr. Bush left us -- I mean suggestions other than making our government more like the weak and ineffectual government of India so as to import a wage scale like theirs, without ideas like eliminating Social Security and Medicare and the very health care plan you wrote yourself -- without some real ideas that a moment and a contribution won't reverse, all we can do about opportunity is dream.

Anyway Mr. Romney Willard Mitt Willard Romney WMR, I remember too.  I remember solid growth and high employment levels and a land of opportunity when we had a 90% top tax bracket and strong unions.  My grandparents remember a time when that wasn't so and 12 hour work days and 6 day work weeks with no vacation or benefits and mostly the rich and the Caucasian went to college was the way it should be according to Republicans -- and you were a communist if you didn't agree. 

I remember when I couldn't live in many neighborhoods, when I would be a felon in Florida and most of the south for marrying outside my race -- a time when many jobs and many schools were not open to me and other minorities and when firehoses and dogs were turned on women and children who may have disagreed with your fictitious views of our immediate past.  I remember the "conservative" opinions and I don't see that they've changed all that much.  For all our problems - for all the problems Republican policies have caused - Today my children and my grandchildren are closer to their dreams than I could have been and  it's still a better country than it was when you were born.

In terms of upward mobility and opportunity, in terms of education and health our country has been sinking for a very long time, with perhaps the exception of the all too brief Clinton years.  I'm sure you remember Clinton, the fellow your ilk branded as being against Capitalism and business and the "American Dream" and many other absurd and dishonest charges you now try to pin on Mr. Obama.

I'd also be interested to know what your policies actually are other than to beat Obama at any cost and undo the health plan you wrote for Massachusetts. I'm asking how you're different because I and most of the economists I know feel that no matter who is elected, the only way Republican generated debt ( be honest now, the biggest borrowers and spenders in your lifetime have been Republicans and much of the "spending" you accuse Democrats of consists of paying Republican bills) the debt will finally be settled by devaluing the Dollar and evaporating the savings of Americans, leaving us with the kind of America I dream about and wake up screaming. There's nothing you can do to change it.

So no,  Mr. Romney Willard Mitt Willard Romney WMR, I won't be putting a stamp on the return envelope to spare your billionaire budget, but as as a measure of my esteem, I am enclosing an envelope sized piece of 1/8th inch rolled steel for ballast. It's American made steel. It's a piece of history. Use it as a reminder of how the greedy liars on the right exported opportunity. Use it as a paper weight for all that money Daddy Kochbux gives you.

Sincerely,

Capt. Fogg Fogg Capt RG banana fanna fogg . . 

Halleluja, it's the Higgs

So it may be the long sought Higgs particle observed by CERN and announced officially today. It also might not be and of course this God particle really has nothing at all to do with God or gods of proofs thereof. We owe that idea not to physicists, but to journalists who don't know a Boson from a Bos'n but know anything they can dishonestly and ignorantly claim to be about  scientific proof for any kind of God will attract ratings like mass attracts other mass.

“The whole world thinks there is one Higgs, but there could be many of them.”

said Dr. Joe Incandela of the University of California, Santa Barbara, a spokesman for one of the two groups reporting their data today.   So far the unofficial theologians of the press haven't mentioned the pantheistic possibilities should Super symmetry and its attendant multiplicity of Higgs particles be the next theory to be backed up by the worlds most powerful and expensive physics experiment, still only running at half power.  Even if it isn't and whether we have the Higgs particle or something that doesn't quite fit the model, we've had another giant step for mankind, not that many in the US will take much notice. A door has been opened to a whole new level of understanding and that reveals many other doors. It's another giant step away from mythology and speculation as the key to understanding.

 Perhaps few will notice that this was a discovery made in Europe because we decided we couldn't afford such a machine and the next most powerful accelerator at Fermilab was shut down last year because you can't have wars and tax cuts and take giant steps even though of course, we're number one and the greatest country in the history of the galaxy and the only place where freedom rings.  Who wants all those scientists here anyway, taking jobs away from Americans and looking down on us all -- confusing us with talk about reality being far more complex than you can dream about -- infinitely more complex than the Bible tells us.  It's not a sad failure, it's a victory!

Rocket's red glare

For the last month, the supermarket I frequent has had racks and racks of fireworks on display and of course the local fireworks store - a rather large one - is having a two for one sale today. The local newspaper has a front page article on how to use fireworks safely.   

The firecrackers, the sparklers, the small bottle rockets, pinwheels and other things you can fill your shopping basket with are, of course quite a bit smaller and less dangerous than the artillery your town or city are likely to be using  to light up the sky and they're probably set off remotely by professionals, but making smoke and noise on the 4th of July is still well ingrained in our tradition even now that candles are so lethal we're advised never to use them, burning leaves in the fall is highly illegal ( even though shooting a gun in your back yard no longer is in Florida) and every TV show or advertisement that shows anyone driving a car has to have a disclaimer advising us that only trained professionals on a closed course should ever, ever drive fast enough to make the fallen autumn leaves rustle.  A show about Alaskan bush pilots I often watch begins with the warning never, ever, to fly planes "at home."   Seriously.

I have to think it's sad that the fondest memories I have of childhood: riding my new Raleigh  for endless unsupervised miles with the wind in my hair and without body armor, the smell of burning leaves in October, of gunpowder in July -- things like riding beltless and booster seatless in Dad's new MG when I was 9, these are all things that could get you arrested today. Today when life is so dull and safe we retreat into a violent virtual world, when kids are afflicted with lethal allergies because they never encountered a bacterium until they were 25 and can be expelled from school for carrying a nail clipper or an aspirin tablet.

Yes, for sure  -- some Budweiser addled, shoeless swamp cracker will hold a firecracker too long today and blow off a finger and some kid will burn his hand with a sparkler, but I'll guarantee a bunch of people will be killed on jet skis and in boats, will drown at the beach and drive their cars under the influence and kill someone coming home from the municipal fireworks show, but that we really aren't going to be asked to ban boats, beaches or beer. Not yet, anyway.

Coming from Illinois, of course -- a state where your car can be confiscated if sparklers are found in your trunk ( but not a firearm) -- it still takes me aback that one can be a criminal so vile and loathsome  that your neighbors will shun you in one place and in another place,  sometimes right across the state line, you're just an ordinary, law abiding citizen with a good shot at running for mayor.

I saw on TV just the other day, that Chicago has seen more than a 35% increase in violent murders lately, while New York as had a 17% decrease.  Seeing as both cities have the most severe gun control laws in the country, I'm interested to know how the "ban it" people are going to explain it all by the need for more and stricter bans.  Of course the current Chicago crime wave is the result of  our fiercely defended 'substance' bans which finance gangs and gang wars,  just as it was during Prohibition when anyone could buy a Thompson submachine gun, or "Chicago typewriter" at the hardware store but a beer would land you in the slammer.

A cynic might be tempted to claim that bans are better at causing crime than at preventing it, but although I'm tempted to agree, I'm cynical enough to think that such an observation wouldn't persuade anyone that I'm not a terrorist and a public menace for having bought sparklers along with the Bratwurst yesterday or that I enjoy an occasional afternoon at the shooting range.  I'd really like to give my grandson a ride in my Corvette too, but alas. . .

Three pigs for Doctor Higgs

Deus ex machina at CERN


Fortunately someone turned off Dad's new flat-screen before I could draw my gun.  I guess my family knows me well enough to predict my reaction to the CNN headline about how "Science" might have found "proof of God" but my Colt Mustang .380 was safely locked out of reached in the car anyway. 

If you've read my rants long enough you probably know my frustration with arguments that attempt to prove some  concept of God since any of them, even if they weren't fallacious, don't argue for any one of the infinitely possible concepts of any deity over another, but of course, CNN was just being coy so that the viewers wouldn't tune out during the endless commercial breaks.  If we had waited long enough we would have  found out that they were only speculating further about a possible July 4th announcement by CERN that they have observed a Higgs Boson; that thing not one person in 10,000 is able to describe, but nonetheless knows as the "God Particle." What must he weigh if he's composed of such heavy particles?

I've often wondered why a incomprehensibly small yet massive particle  might have anything more or less to do with God than another. God after all seems to exist in some massless form;  in some formless, ineffable state that can interact with matter and energy, but is composed of some undefinable, self- negating, insubstantial non particulate substance one calls "pure spirit" and is therefore free from the constraints imposed by the universe on matter and energy.  Does not God also claim neutrinos and neutrons as well? If we create such particles artificially, aren't we creating gods, or at least "godstuff?"

The Higgs particle, if it exists, is postulated to  explain the property we call mass in the classical model of physics.  If gods have mass, it's hard to allow them divine properties if the universe is consistent and it's also hard to explain how some subatomic particle pertains exclusively to Krishna rather than Yahweh or Puff the Magic Dragon and maybe harder to explain why any god could not create a universe without inertia if he wanted to.  Can a boson be a trinity or a pantheistic infinity?  Crank up the accelerator because inquiring minds want to know.

If it were up to me, I'd have called it the ego particle but if it had been up to the Nobel Prize winner and Director of Fermilab, Leon Lederman who coined the regrettable term in his pop-Science book The God Particle and launched the meme that sunk a billion minds, it would have been called The Goddamn Particle but for his editor's objections. How I wish that editor had had more courage and that we'd been spared the endlessly dimwitted godbothering about some subatomic particle being "proof of God."

Of course those  who are prematurely jubilating today about how science proves God -- those disciples of those who have been battling against science for centuries, aren't going to accept the actual scientific proof of the age of "the world" or anything else that challenges their celebrated certainties and I doubt they'll feel remorse about the closing of Fermilab's accelerator for lack of funds, giving the opportunity for divine revelation to foreigners.  If those those atheistic, socialistic geeks, buried with their witches circle under the soil of Europe were the ones to prove that the Bible and all our holy Christian beliefs in all their wholly different forms are true, so much the better.

Let them get chauffeurs

Considering the constant need for scapegoats required by political movements today; in this time when the traditional bigotries are less effective then they were in the days of minstrel shows and segregated lunch counters, it's not surprising to see article after article telling us just how bad for everyone (everyone of course means Randian Rangers) it is to  allow  older people to survive past the end of wage earning, what with how much it costs us real working-folk (and parasitic political journalists) to maintain that surplus population.  After all, back in the dog eat god golden age, people knew their place and had the decency to die in their 50's and 60's after a few years of abject poverty and disease - like God and the Conservatives intended.  Too old to work?  Die Grandpa, die.

We are asked by Liberals ( and how we hate Liberals) to tolerate the strain of civilized values on the economy these days, and those values require constant inflow to the Medicare and Social Security systems, but of course it's rarely mentioned that today's recipients have been paying into those funds for their entire working lives and that future recipients are building credit for themselves as well as supporting current recipients. In fact that's how private insurance plans work too but at a higher cost.  

But I've talked this to death and my rant today has more to do with the more important things in life -- like cars and driving.  David Frum writes in Newsweek today that "old people" once again are jeopardizing the prosperity and safety of the eternally and righteously young and -- if we allow it  -- they are going to bankrupt our country -- because after all, that undefined category of drivers: the elderly, has more accidents than anyone but teenagers.  It's hard, of course to argue that teenagers are going to bankrupt us in that way, but really, the most common tool of douchebag Republican flim-flam artists like Frum is to create categories and attribute the proposed characteristics to all individuals in that group.  Of course by bankrupting the economy, Frum really means his insurance rates might go up - you know just how his health insurance rates are so high because so many people have to resort to the most expensive health care: the emergency room.

In the interests of glasnost, I have to mention that I'm old, but with 20/20 vision, unimpaired senses and reflexes; with decades of  accident free driving, on and off of race tracks and in high performance cars, I have to weigh a million miles and 50 years of experience in rain, snow, sleet and dark of night against the skills of  chubby cheeked Dave, whom I'm willing to bet would soil himself  in circumstances I've safely dealt with since before he was born.  SUV drivers have a higher accident rate, so do those who like to talk or smoke while driving. Frum is silent about those ad hoc groups.   Could it be that this really isn't about economics or about safety on the road?

But we have to get them off the road, says the Frumster. We have to cut them all off from society and relegate them to dependency and poverty because, this isn't actually about cars or safety, it's about shirking responsibility, about increasing economic disparity - the foundation of modern Conservatism. It's about promoting poverty and suffering so that the elect can live better while their parents are put out on ice-flows to die where we don't have to see or pay.  Don't weed out bad drivers, let's disenfranchise millions of good ones and justify it with fallacious arguments.

Why not simply require vision and driving tests for those over a certain age?  (perhaps 16 for New York drivers) That way guys like Paul Newman and me can continue to race cars into their octogenarian decade and the incurable menaces of all ages -- the cellphone addicts, the people who stop on tollway entrance ramps and slow down for green lights -- the incurably confused  -- can be put into oil drums and sunk to the bottom of the Marianas trench along with David Frum.  Why not argue for decent public transportation like they have in decent countries so that perhaps I could actually get somewhere without driving?  What are you -- a tax and spend socialist?  Let them get chauffeurs!

Obey in the name of freedom!

"[It] is quite unlawful to demand, defend, or to grant unconditional freedom of thought, or speech, of writing or worship, as if these were so many rights given by nature to man."

-Pope Leo XIII-

Face it, we live in a country in which the KKK can adopt "We shall overcome" as a song about their own struggle for freedom, where the unrepentant South can pretend that their secession was about protecting  freedom -- and where only a 'genetically inferior Liberal,' as Allen West, Republican candidate for Congress in my district calls me, would mention anything like irony.

So really, I shouldn't be surprised to read in the local paper that the Roman Catholic churches of the Florida's Treasure Coast are hosting a "Fortnight for Freedom," in a pathetic attempt to avoid having to comply with the demand that in return for the tax exempt status they consider their due, they treat secular employees in the way that other employers must do. Perhaps the hope is that while a major political party, fond of asserting nearly absolute personal freedom can get away with saying "Take your government hands off my Medicare," they can get away with campaigning against reproductive rights, the equality of civil rights and other guarantees of a secular Democracy.

Forgive my recurrent mention of irony and my  ridicule of organizations that promote freedom only when it suits the need to maintain authority, but if there is one single organization that has campaigned against religious and even secular freedom longer than any other in the Western world, it is the Roman Catholic Church, and please remember that heresy is just another word for religious freedom. We've had nearly 2000 years of genocide, repression, torture, war and the most grizzly executions imaginable resulting from claims to divine authority.  A decent respect to the opinions of mankind, as Jefferson wrote in 1776, seems always to have been at odds with the peremptory proclamations of  God's enforcers, and the idea that we the people have an innate and inalienable right to liberty and  pursuit of happiness that owes nothing to the demands of priests, preachers and shamans is clearly anathema to the Catholic Churches of the Treasure Coast, much to their shame.

The fact is that nearly all American Catholics ignore the ban on birth control that is based on a rather flimsy interpretation of  what their God(s) said to a man who never existed in a time long before birth control was an option.  This embarrassing little attempt has little support amongst anyone but churchmen (Church women have no vote and are sworn to obedience anyway) and it certainly has nothing to do with our freedom.  I hope that some people, even in this stupefyingly religious and resoundingly Republican part of the country, will see through it.

Upside Down

Remember when the word bitch referred to a female dog or colloquially, to a female human who wasn't very nice?  Remember when it was a one syllable word?

Today it seems odd to apply the calumny only to a female.  To many it conjures up a sexually submissive prison inmate and it seems odder to pronounce it without the usually grotesque attempt to mimic the grossest racially stereotypical dialect. 

It's as though our popular culture, while avoiding proscribed words, none the less has become a racist minstrel show with white people in baggy pants, backwards hats and thousand dollar shoes, calling  each other "ho."  Hispanics covered head to foot with gang tattoos and young, black men with oversized, beltless pants all striving to illustrate the basic shiftlessness, ignorance and propensity to steal  so dear to the heart of racists everywhere.  How far have we come from "I am a man" to "I am a bee-otch."  Do young people still dream of being able to say "I am a doctor, I am an engineer, I am a professor, I am a poet, I am a president?"  Or is it all about conformist, commercial self expression through self mutilation and degradation? 

Am I old fashioned or clueless when I cringe at the echoes of "whasssuuuuuup beee-otch" in places filled with white teenagers?  Sure, the trend across the entire ethnic spectrum of  our "culture" is to dress like a bum, talk like a jailbird and make fun of  'da soots' but I can't think of a nation that has had a desirable outcome to such a cultural inversion. China's Cultural Revolution comes to mind and I can't help wondering how the ever immaculately dressed Dr. King might feel about his sacrifice if he were here to see this confirmation of the idea that a black man's place is in jail or at some level far below dignity and respectability.

Of course it's probably only one facet of America's infatuation with the low-life and contempt for civilization and its values. Anyone not part of the beggars opera must think he's better than the rest of us, after all and God knows, the rest of us are all about beer, dope, payday loans, unemployment and parole officers -- bee otch.

Shackled

There's an old and tired joke about a patient being given a Rorschach test.  To every ink blot, he replies with some sexual reference and when the psychiatrist suggests that perhaps the man has a problem, the irate patient replies, " hey, you're the one showing me the dirty pictures!"

When I saw the image of German shoe manufacturer Adidas' latest effort at teen exploitation; a shoe featuring a plastic shackle attaching the shoe to the ankle, the last thing I thought of was slavery and the first thing I thought of was the 'jailbird chic' culture that has our young and would-be young folks pretending to the lofty cultural and social status of convict.  In fact I had to smile a bit since a gang of tragically hip home burglars was finally apprehended in my neighborhood after having performed over 50 burglaries in the last year -- unable to run from police because of their fashionably laceless shoes and hugely oversized shorts which made it impossible to run and to hold the pillowcases of loot and their pants at the same time.  At least they were properly attired for the next stage of their careers.

Slavery was however, the first thing some thought about. The Rev. Jesse Jackson expressed his own outrage yesterday:

"The attempt to commercialize and make popular more than 200 years of human degradation, where blacks were considered three-fifths human by our Constitution is offensive, appalling and insensitive,"

The idea that racists would wear such things on their own feet, or worse, would force reluctant black teens to wear expensive shoes in shame seems far-fetched enough to suggest that life for some people is a continuous Rorschach test where every blot looks the same; where the shackled briefcases you might see in the financial district, being accompanied by a Brinks guard or two can only remind us of the anti-bellum South.

Of course  it's all too fashionable to get neck and face tattoos and affect the garb and gaudy patter of convicts and ex-convicts and soon-to-be convicts  -- as though the human degradation of our exploding prison system, choked as it disproportionately is with minorities, wasn't also offensive but it's self inflicted, self perpetuated and popular and has been for a long time.   Addidas, it seems to me, is trying like everyone else to cash in on fashion, exploit extant popular culture and is not commercializing or popularizing a longing for slavery as much as trying to make a buck out of being outrageous in already outrageous times.

If it's Obama, it's got to be bad.

and if it's bad it's got to be Obama.

Am I a hard-core Democrat? I have no idea, but I don't remember the last time I was of voting age and the Republicans offered a decent candidate for any office higher than county commissioner.

But someone who sends me an endless series of fabricated, fictitious and venomous "articles" proving that Barack Obama is the Devil's evil twin, just told me that's just what I am yesterday and even though I'm a Democrat only by default, I guess I'm flattered. You see, he's yet to send me anything that didn't prove to be a baseless and usually flimsy lie and that makes him mad. He's often told me I "always have an excuse" when I expose him as a gullible idiot and seditious liar as though the truth were an excuse -- and of course if debunking lies makes me a Liberal apologist, telling them must make him, by his definition, a Republican liar, if I might be excused the tautology.

The latest offense was a short video of the President, leaving the podium and kicking open a door under the rubric:

The tantrum!!

Picture worth ten thousand words - "The little boy" did not get his way - this wasn't in the news, but it sure can be visualized..... "Poor baby" did not get his way and had a "tantrum." Bet you won't see this on network TV: Obama leaving a meeting with Congressional leaders after Cantor told the president "Republicans would not vote for his proposed tax hikes."

What tax hikes? I guess the media has covered that up too!

It's typical to include rhetoric about the "media" not wanting us to know something to cover up the fact that it never actually happened, but in this case, the video actually was taken from "network TV" because it appeared as a joke on Jay Leno. No, of course it wasn't in the news any more than the previous pictures of a huge arms cache "on the Arizona border" the media didn't want us to hear about, or didn't care about because it actually was found hundreds of miles away in Mexico and had nothing to do with Arizona. Think these good folks know that illegal immigration is way down or that this administration has deported in less than 4 years, more than the Republican liars did in 8? If it's Obama, it's got to be bad.

Then there was the one showing Obama with his feet on the desk and the hysterical denunciation that insisted this desecration of a desk by this "arrogant, immature, self-centered idiot" proved he thought of himself as a king and that "generations to come" would feel the effects of his having had his feet on the desk.

This being another tu quoque attempt at distracting from Bush's naked imperialism, constitutional infractions, financial malfeasance, war crimes and putting his feet on the desk, of course I countered, like a hard core Democrat with this:




Of course one can find many pictures of many presidents with many feet on desks on the Internet. I'll leave that search to you, but I never expect evidence of fraud or the irony attached to it to have any effect on the lower orders of humanity. Inconvenient proof will only generate further rage, further scurrilous attacks and won't begin to stem the flow of fake picture after fake story after malicious and fictitious malediction.

So am I a hard core Democrat? Not really and I do perceive that Democrats have their own shibboleths and conceits and that they aren't always as scrupulous at fact checking as they might be, but I'm comparing apples to road apples here. There is no excuse for the bottomless cornucopia of scurrilous stories, fake videos and doctored photographs that have infested the Internet for the ignorant armies of the angry Right to use as a weapon.

Take the series of fake pictures designed to "prove" that Trayvon Martin was a dangerous thug now filling up the blogs and mailboxes. No, nothing is too racist or too false or too pathetic for the cause to ignore it nor do any of the GOP employees who work overtime creating it really have to worry about their constituents finally catching on to the long con. The left behind, the outmoded, the surplus population of maladapted Republican miscreants simply aren't capable of the level of honesty, the level of cognitive function needed to question anything so delightfully, so soothingly, so self-importantly hateful.

Dearly beloved

The world is full of mysteries, great and small. I hope to understand a few of them in what remains of my lifetime, but I'm not sure that there are some questions that shouldn't be left unanswered. Those have to do with human behavior and in particular the question of how and why people arrive at and maintain some of their opinions.

Take attorney Craig Sonner, long time friend of George Zimmerman and his family, who insists that not only is Zimmerman not a racist, but that when many listeners to the 911 recording discerned Zimmerman's voice calling the unfortunate Trayvon Martin a "fucking coon," what they really heard was a term of endearment. Yes indeed, said Sonner to ABC News, amongst the teenagers who reinvent our English language anew every day, "goon" is a term of endearment and that's just what Zimmerman was calling his victim as he prepared to shoot him to death. Most terms of endearment of course are preceded by the gratuitous, yet nearly ubiquitous "fucking" and followed by gunshots. Makes sense, right?

Perhaps it will play a part in Zimmerman's defense if Federal charges are filed and it no doubt will if the charges need proof that the shooting was "racially motivated" but as a pure example of deriving an argument by rectal extraction, and of the ability to state the preposterous with a straight face, this one is remarkable.

There is always the remote possibility that Zimmerman might have done the same to any person wandering the neighborhood. It's possible that he just hated kids, a group probably not intended to fall into a category protected by hate crime legislation, but the problem with hate crimes is that it isn't the crime on trial but rather the motivation and it's very hard to prove motivation. And yet, the kid is dead.

Is it possible, in our emotionally driven and politically directed society for Zimmerman to get a fair trail? I think the facts speak for themselves and I fear that minds are long since closed as usually is the case with witch hunts and lynch mobs and of course those with institutionalized agendas have already reached conclusions that make their causes the root cause of all evil.

It may evolve that there is no clear cut motivation that explains it all, no loophole in Florida gun laws, no ties to the KKK and little more than laziness on the part of the authorities. It may be quite the opposite, but people parading around in hooded sweatshirts or baggy pants or lace up shoes without laces or calling each other goons and calling for gun bans or simply indulging in public cultivation of anger is not going to help justice. The rusty gears of the system are turning and there's no rug big enough to sweep this or any other mixed metaphor under. It's time for the party to end and for dispassionate, blindfolded process justice to begin.

If I had a son

"You know, if I had a son he would look like Treyvon,"

said the president and I guess that's true to some extent. He'd have dark skin, of course, but I took it to mean that his son would be an ordinary looking, ordinary acting 17 year old and not a shooting gallery target.

Newt Gingrich took it differently because he saw the comment, which was clearly an attempt to show compassion and to suggest that he couldn't avoid putting himself in the place of the grieving father of Treyvon Martin, as an opportunity to launch another Fox-faux outrage. Hasn't the entire Republican reaction to the election of Barack Obama been a collection of phony, trumped up, fabricated and exasperatingly stupid outrages?

" Is the president suggesting that if it had been a white who had been shot that would be ok because it didn't look like him?"

said Newt to Sean Hannity on Fox News. Certainly Fox is the Cape Canaveral; the launch pad of most such desperate grasping at rhetorical straws -- the place where the unscrupulously ambitious launch calumny after slander after blatant lie, not because this president is beyond criticism, but because they, the Republican insiders, are themselves accessories before, during and after the fact of the collapse of our economy, the corruption and outrageous economic policies and the unjustified war that precipitated it and only wild claims can distract the public from remembering. Only wild, unsubstantiated and preferably ridiculous statements can rally the bigotry against honesty and decency.

So is the president suggesting that it was only a tragedy because a black kid was killed? Only a Republican could twist words and facts to make it seem so and only a man of the "I will never apologise for America" persuasion could reflect on the Republican support for segregation, opposition to civil rights for minorities, females and non-Christians and not see the killing as part of a continuum; part of a mentality they've been promoting for at least a century.

The gambit is an old and tired and disreputable one, as much so as is Gingrich himself and the others Fox News gives the megaphone to. "Is George Washington suggesting that he should be king?" In fact he suggested the opposite, but the question suggests that there is indeed a question. Is Newt Gingrich a dishonest, morally unscrupulous, hypocritical liar blinded by an unholy ambition and hunger for power? Does a newt shit in the swamp?

Obama's gas

I confess, I'm a loud-mouth critic of people who insist on driving heavy and dangerous trucks to the office or to do daily errands, but a guy who nevertheless owns a vehicle that gets, with a good tailwind, about one mile per gallon.

It's a boat, of course and these days I think carefully about where I'm going with it before I leave the dock. I probably don't use too much more than 500 gallons a year, which is still a whole lot less than I used to use as a commuter driving a small car. If gasoline rose to 5 or 6 or 7 dollars a gallon at the fuel docks, I probably wouldn't change the number of hours I put on the boat, but if I were driving to work, as many of you do, that 7500 pound, 8-12 mpg "SUV" or super heavy duty monster truck might just get traded for something less absurd.

So I have to make another confession: I secretly wish fuel prices would soar long enough to make urban hipsters go back to taking the bus or driving Fiat 500's, and suburbanites trade in their grotesque fashion statements for cars.

Of course the noises bubbling up from the bottom of the national cesspool have been blaming Barack Obama and "liberals" for those scary numbers that appear on gas station signs, as if it were the president or some government office that dictated prices on the free world market rather than the laws of supply and demand and the mechanisms of capitalism. I'm tempted to say that the self-appointed guardians of the free market either haven't the most elementary idea of how those markets work or perhaps are simply too dishonest to risk not blaming Obama for rising world demand. No sir, there's no pea under that particular walnut shell and if even a small proportion of Republicans had the mental wherewithal to deal with the notion that economic recovery means increased demand for resources, they might figure out that those screaming the loudest have a vested interest in a collapsing economy. As the infamous Rush once said: "I hope he fails."

So yes, some Republicans, some voices from the corporate owned media are also wishing for a big increase because the public is stupid enough, or so they hope, to believe that the "socialist" Obama is behind it all. You'll remember John McCain making that moronic accusation when gas prices soared under George Bush. No, he didn't blame Bush or the huge demand for fuel his wars gave us, he blamed Obama, because that's what Republicans do, they blame the other guy for their own actions; they blame the opposition for the workings of the natural forces of the same free markets they pretend to worship.

No, the old song is about the holy market and how all the ugly features of unrestrained capitalism like disregard for public safety and the powerlessness of an oppressed work force would wither away if we only let them drill for oil in your town's reservoir or chain your kids to a punch press the same way those Commies do, but the reality is that they have a very selective interest in capitalism and the high priests of 'enlightened self interest' are trying as hard as they can to take the enlightenment out of it.

So yes, rising energy costs sap the strength of the recovery and so that's just what a certain party wants so that they can go on pretending there is no recovery or that it would be a much better recovery if only they had someone like that Mad Monk Santorum in the White House. So maybe "jobs, jobs, jobs" is now last month's mantra because we're creating more jobs every week that were created under that 8 year Republican debacle. So it's time to turn on a dime and let's put on that Jumpin' Jack Flash disc 'cause now it's all gas, gas, gas.

Act Now! No Time to Lose!

Henry Kissinger -- the name could be a metonym for dishonest defense of imperialism and reckless disregard for the consequences of military action, and so it's no surprise to hear him tell us to ignore the consensus of all 16 US intelligence agencies that there is no evidence Iran is building or is about to build nuclear weapons.

Yes, of course they could all be wrong and there is always the argument from cliche that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but even in a nation of emotionally disturbed amnesiacs like the US, some might want to remember our useless attack and occupation of Iraq for which we continue to suffer and will continue to suffer for a very long time. In case you don't remember, that country had no nuclear, chemical or biological weapons or the materials or technology needed to produce huge, heavy nuclear prototypes much less the probably fictional "suitcase" bombs we were told could be smuggled into the US at any moment. Act now!

On CNN's GPS with Fareed Zakaria yesterday, Kissinger told us he was "uneasy" with the intelligence and that we should ignore it as we ignored the lies about Iraq and make the presumption that a bomb was forthcoming.

“I am very uneasy with the so-called intelligence report that say we don’t know whether they are actually working on nuclear weapons. I think we should start from the premise that they are undergoing all this in order to achieve a military capability. I don’t think that is a disputable point.”

I think it is disputable in the extreme, considering that we're listening to a war criminal involved in and culpable for massacres, invasions and genocides in Indochina, East Timor, Chile, Cyprus and Bangladesh talking about fomenting yet another dubious and probably disastrous war.

Kissinger and warmongering toadies like Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu tell us we have no time to lose; that the time to attack is now as Former Secretary of State Rice once told us. Shoot first and pretend there is no question to ask, lest the "smoking gun" of evidence turn out to be a mushroom cloud. Frankly I think we have everything to lose, including our future and any basis upon which to base the proposition and pose of being a force for good in this world.

Let them get pregnant, like God intended.

What's worse than a bunch of creepy old man religious perverts conspiring against the health and well being of women? Well, perhaps a creepy young woman trying to make sure -- using copious amounts of taxpayer money -- to fight a requirement that health insurers cover the modest cost of birth control. Worse still, she's fighting something that in some cases is a medical necessity and in very many cases will prevent women from becoming unable to work and winding up in poverty and their children on public assistance.

Such things don't seem to matter to GOP apparatchiks like Pam Bondi, Florida Attorney General who is suing the Federal Government over the Affordable Care Act, a law that is starting to provide health care to Florida's 4.5 million uninsured and access to contraception. As the ACA will come before the US Supreme Court this month, the redundancy of this suit is as obvious as the smug unconcern Bondi has for truth, justice and freedom from the tyranny of religious nuts.

Sold as another attempt at "smaller" government, it's really nothing but a power play by the Religious Rich to make their perverted, obsessive, inhumane and antique dogmas into public policy no matter the cost. Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi may not be one of these foul, disgusting old men, but she sure as hell works for them while collecting a salary paid by the people she'd like to keep barefoot and pregnant and poor and in thrall to the superstition salesmen with the effrontery to use our freedom of religion and our tax revenues against us.