The Takers take it back.

You don't have to have sensational hearing to hear the rustling in the woodwork as the reshuffling of the Republican hierarchy begins. The opening move for the hopefuls is to distance themselves from Mitt Romney and his sour grapes and his nonsense about Democrats having bought the election by giving gifts and his outright lies about half of us not paying taxes. "We have to stop being the stupid party" says Bobby Jindal and somewhere can't we hear a small voice crying "bingo?"  Let's hope it's the end of that error foretold in the gospel of the bumper sticker.

Making up a fake Obama, fabricating facts, cobbling together stereotypes about "Liberals" and using them like pawns to play fantasy chess with -- raging about God being against birth control, calling women sluts for wanting to have non-reproductive sex, insulting gay people, insulting immigrants of color, 10th generation Americans of color, using God's name in vain to back their every prejudice and snarling hate and all their ignorance. Nobody, particularly the struggling citizens working two jobs if they can find them and trying to keep a roof over their heads, likes to be told they're a "taker" a parasite by some silver spoon aristocrat. Nobody likes waking up and finding out he's been taken for a fool.

They've been the party of Stupid for a long time and more so for thinking it wouldn't end badly. The anti-science party. The delusional party, the party that shouts down the truth and punishes the truth tellers. The anti-education party, the contempt for women party. Perhaps you can fool enough of the people enough of the time, but you can't do it forever by belittling them, insulting them and telling lies without bothering to think some people might remember what you said last week or last year to a different audience. Fox news can only cover it up for so long. They can and did rave for hours about how women aren't put off by the war on planned parenthood, the rhetoric about legitimate rape and God's will that they give birth to a rapist's baby, but there's a limit to the effectiveness of telling women what their opinion actually is.

Telling  people who know damn well that they pay 28% of their income in taxes that they're not paying any taxes while Mitt himself pays 14% on the income we know about and refuses to disclose his tax returns. Telling Chrysler execs they're going to move the Jeep Division to China, telling millions of auto workers their jobs should have been trashed. Missing the point that selling billions of dollars worth of cars to China is a good thing - an essential thing. Telling us that high taxes cause recessions when taxes are at the lowest in a lifetime and our best years featured much higher taxes. Most of all letting people suspect that to the GOP Brahmans, we all exist on their sufferance and Noblesse oblige.
 The question remains -- how are they going to do it?  Or perhaps rather, the question is whether they're actually going to do more than look for a better salesman to market the same old platform.  How can they not be the stupid party while selling a failed economic plan?  While basing their vision on a tendentious work of fiction. Are they going to admit that 99.7% of climatologists aren't part of a liberal conspiracy or that we need regulation if we don't want oil platforms to blow up and poison the Gulf?  Are they finally going to examine the Bush legacy and accept blame for having ignored the warnings and shut down the anti-terrorism efforts right before 9/11? Admit that markets aren't perfect self regulators and that private insurers do have death panels and don't provide the best coverage to the most people at the lowest cost? Are they going to stop blaming the colossal Bush era borrowing and spending on Obama?

Fuhgettabout it!  It ain't gonna happen and if we relax and buy into it and think we've won at last, we're the stupid party.

Cycles of Life

I love a good laugh in the morning, don't you?  Especially on a gloomy and rainy one.  Looking at CNN.com today the story of a "signed original Salvador Dali" showing up at Goodwill Industries not only made the sun emerge, but their golly-gee-whiz glee almost had me spitting coffee on the keyboard.  Somewhere the ghost of P.T. Barnum is sharing the mirth. An art business truism is "never buy because of a signature."  Doubly true for a Dali' print.

Look, the term original Dali' is a joke in the Art community because the term fake Dali' is considered a tautology.  There are so many fakes, most experts consider any Dali to be bogus unless proven otherwise - and maybe proven again.   Oh but it's signed, one hears. Sidesplitting, really.  Dali' was discovered back in the 80's signing thousands and thousands of blank pieces of paper and selling them to forgers who got  rich selling them to the gullible as 'original' Dali' work. Indeed sculpture made from drawings or paintings by Dali' are sold as "original" even though the artist never saw them and may have died before they were cast -- and yet some accept them as being "original Dali'" To me, the Dali' market is a bit like a mirrored carnival fun house. What you see may or may not be what you get and original is damned hard to define. Many people, some people I know, went to jail for Dali' scams and hearing "Original Dali' print" still makes any dealer or collector active in the late 20th century smile - or wince as the case may be.  OK, I admit to having one hanging here in my office as a reminder or the roaring 80's, but I bought it knowingly because I was madly in love with the dealer. Money well spent, but that's another story.

Look -- an etching, a wood block, a stone lithograph or even a silk screen  may be original, but a number of copies are made, sometimes by the artist himself, sometimes with a professional to do the final printing.  A photo-reproduction done with the artist's approval and cooperation is less original even if part of a limited edition, but faking a print with today's technology is easy enough even without the cooperation of someone like Dali'. Caveat Emptor and please don't confuse a limited edition print, as CNN is breathlessly doing today, with some $20,000,000 painting from the 1940's  that Sotheby's or Christie's may offer from time to time.  You can afford a Rembrandt etching, you can't afford a Rembrandt painting.

 Dali's were printed like overpriced wallpaper back during the art boom of the 1980's along with fake Miro's, Picasso's and Chagall's that the hyperventilating public hoped to get rich on -- and didn't.  A 1992 expose' by Lee Caterall  The Great Dali' Art Fraud  helped to deflate the Dali' madness for a time, but this is America -- who reads?  Time and gullibility march on and Iron Pyrites isn't called fools gold for no reason.

Much of the public is still unaware of the fake art industry, although the business all but collapsed in 1989 with the general collapse of the art bubble.  I hear there was a resurgence of Dalimania when peddlers began to clear out storage lockers and put the stuff back on the market in 2007.  Scams seem to go in cycles. They burn out but recur periodically as Mr. Barnum told us, when a new generation of suckers enters the market.  They never go away, sad to say and Fine Art fraud will always be with us. Even the experts get fooled.  Scammers can and often do take a photo-reproduction - a poster and forge a signature and edition number on it.  A few weeks ago I got all excited about a "signed" Wilfredo Lam painting -- a really beautiful one offered by a dealer in Peru, but thinking it through and carefully comparing the signature with a few in my collection, I decided it was a fake from the wicked 80's. Some other bargain hunter got burned, or perhaps turned it around and flipped it to some parvenu.  Caveat Emptor and if it's too good to be true. . . it is.

So I wouldn't be surprised if many Dali' prints showed up - Miro,  Picasso, Matisse are all common even fake Dali' with legitimate signatures, in charity shops.  Although I'm too lazy to look it up in a catalog raisonne' I think think the Goodwill item is as real as any Dali' from his declining years.  I doubt it could be worth nearly the $12,705 it's going for at their auction website, this Saturday morning.  It's from 1979, late in the artist's life when he was recycling bits of images from his iconic paintings from the 1930's and 40's.  I can buy a  Cycles of Life retail from a legitimate dealer I know for under $10k, but who knows?  Art is only worth what someone is willing to pay, but that truism obtains when they go to resell it as well.  Did I say Caveat Emptor?

The takers

You'd think George W. Bush was never born or had never been president, since you never hear from him or about him and are often accused of some kind of dementia if you mention his legacy.  To be sure, I'm grateful that he's keeping quiet and hasn't spent years making dire predictions of doom and accusations of treason like other parts of the still twitching corpse of his administration -- none of which have come to pass, by the way. Perhaps his quiet reclusiveness has to do with the GOP plan to redact him from the record so that they can't be accused of wrecking the country and a good part of the world with their drool-down economics, but I'll be kind since I'm grateful not to hear from him for any reason.

Mitt Romney however, is a sore loser; bleating about how Obama only won because of all the 'massive' handouts to the "takers" which is his way of derogating minorities without having to call them wogs and worse.  You'll notice that he prefers to name corporate takers who pay little or no taxes but get huge subsidies "job creators" and forgets that the demand for goods and services from the lesser elements create more jobs than Bain Capital ever did, but typically, he gives no examples of handouts that can be attributed to Obama and leaves it to the  prejudices of his piteous and self-pitying audience to fill in the blanks with the usual subjects. Those people aren't real, 100% Americans as the Klan has long told us.

What he does mention is the 'dream act' which would give an advantage toward legal residency to unwitting and accidental immigrants that have something to offer; an education, a valuable skill, military service: something more than or at least as good as Romney's own immigrant ancestors from Mexico brought here. It's similar to plans proposed by the invisible ex-president himself, but that was then, when Romneycare was a good thing to Republicans and we had a "commander guy" in the oval office bleeding the economy dry.

But as for the "takers" as the malphemism dubs most of us of lesser means than the Oligarchs, surely Romney isn't talking about whole states: states like Texas, Florida, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee and North Carolina which gobbled up nearly a quarter of all federal revenues allotted to the other 47 states.  Six of those seven states, incidentally, have gathered more than 25,000 signatures in petitions to secede from "the greatest country that ever existed since the Jurassic."  But don't call those states, those places where literacy and having front teeth are considered "elitist," takers. 

They're just sore losers and they want their Confederacy back; their culture of God, Guns, grinding poverty and degradation.  Don't call them takers, it's far too kind.  Don't call those companies who employ only foreign workers and don't pay taxes here takers.  Let's just keep sniping and snarking and snarling like sore losers for four more years.  Let's look forward to obfuscation and obstruction and the end of Obama in 2016 when we can put some rich, white Republican back in the manse where rich, white Republicans belong -- and laissez les mal temps rouler!

Swinging 'round the circle

Observing the American political process, do we really need a geneticist to tell us we're getting stupider?

• Take the American Bigots Family Association -- please. We need to "clamp down" on immigration because those genetically inferior races Socialist immigrants always vote for Democrats says a spokesman who would never make anyone think of the Nazis.

• Failed VP candidate Paul Ryan says he lost the election not because he's a dangerously unbalanced and stupid dirt bag but because the genetically inferior races 'Urban' voters turned out to vote.

• National Disgrace Fox News exhumed that vicious Swift Boat ad after a Washington Post suggestion that John Kerry might be the next Secretary of Defense, continuing their tradition of smearing wounded combat veterans who aren't demented, neo-Fascist, psychopathic liars Republicans.

• Demented, neoFascist psychopathic liar Grover Norquist told us all that the dynamic Romney/Ryan duo lost because Obama's "attack ads" called Romney a "poopy head." Whorequist ( sorry, that's a typo) maintained that his party has a mandate not to raise taxes even if it causes the destruction of the nation.

• Ambulatory pustule Rush Limbaugh affirmed that the Republican loss was all about Rush Limbaugh and his grotesquely dishonest, racist, bigoted, misogynist, indecent, seditious Conservative commentary.

"I am, by the way, the primary reason the Republican Party will keep losing, until I am denounced by the Republican Party."

Unfortunately that grotesquely dishonest, racist, bigoted, misogynist, indecent, seditious Conservative commentary is just what the enemies of all things good and decent Republicans like about him

Losers

John Perr at Crooks & Liars today quoted Romney as having said about his wife Ann, back in 2007 "Her positions I do not think are terribly relevant to my campaign"   Hell, his own positions haven't been either! "Whatever you wish I would say - well I just said it" would be more accurate.

Almost as telling as the loser  Allen West's insistence that the frivolous law suits he keeps filing, trying to get recount after recount the law does not entitle him to, are "not about me" but rather about justice.  It's about you West and about time you got your "war hero" ass the hell out of town and be content that you weaseled out of an 11 year sentence at Leavenworth.

And of course Obama didn't win fair and square either.  People, you know, second rate people who should know their place, like Women and such voted for Obama because he lied and told them Republicans would march them into "rape camps" if Romney was elected, says Michael Graham, one of the Tea Party's maddest hatters.  You never heard of Rape Camps?  They're right over there next to the Death Panels and the filing cabinet where they keep Obama's Kenyan birth certificate and his Bin Laden autographed Koran.

What, you're just now noticing that the GOP is only a replica of a conservative party and probably put here by body snatching alien invaders who ate the originals?  What were you thinking and what were you thinking with?

Let them secede!

I wonder, should we classify the GOP as some sort of cancer?  A malignant thing that keeps creeping and metastasizing into your vital organs, coming back, time after time?  I could mention Allen West, former candidate for Florida House District 18 who having lost, refuses to concede and keeps filing suit after suit claiming election improprieties for which there is no evidence other than his amazement that people would reject a convicted war criminal posing as a hero and a gentleman. The recounting and the re-recounting continues today at the behest of a cadre of  GOP funded lawyers from Boca Raton.

And then there's a Texas Gopper who is calling for secession because Texas is just to special to be governed from Washington and by “baby-murdering, tax-raising socialists.”   Who ever heard of a cancer that tries to remove itself?  We're all "maggots" for having elected Obama he says: a man who has "apparent contempt for White people."  

Say, didn't the Bush Doctrine assert that we have the right to invade a country that we perceive to be a threat?  Nuke Texas!  Of course that's a joke, but I'm proposing it mostly to be able to giggle when some roaming Republican quotes it as proof that "Liberals" are dangerous.  Hell, let them go and put up a damned wall. We don't need that cancer infecting America. They're not even worth keeping as proof of the rank, dishonorable, despicable and disgusting nature of the tumor that replaced the Conservatives since, like Zombies, they're past persuasion and the normal people already know. Give Texas back to Mexico!

After the Ball was over

Drive down Florida's A1A in my town and you'd think the campaign was still going on.  The roadside is defaced with mile after mile of campaign signs, sometimes only a few feet apart, but you'd also think only Republicans were running.  The Democratic signs disappeared the day after the election but the Republican campaign workers, most of whom were bussed in from Texas at the expense of shadowy Republican campaign financiers (is there another kind?) seem either not to give a damn about the District they spent tens of millions to acquire, or are just not around any more.

But perhaps it's part of a pattern of abandoning anyone no longer immediately useful to Romney or the GOP after the ball is over.   When the attempt has failed, someone has got to walk home and it's not going to be Mitt.  We can dispose of our ten million worth of plastic signs on our own and those dedicated campaign workers who tried to settle up with their Boston hotel keepers after the victory party went sour found that their credit cards had been cancelled and they were on their own with some explainin' to do.  Wham, bam, thank you Ma'am, you've been Romneyed. Screwed by the candidate who cares.

No word about the fleet of huge Corporate jets parked at Logan, but I'm sure those credit cards were still golden and no CEO's were harmed or financially embarrassed in the making of this fiasco.

Kind of Blue?

Anyone who saw Karl Rove raging around the Foxhole in the moments after Fox News and all the others called the election for Obama -- and anyone watching him waving a tablet with numbers on it and squeaking madly yesterday; explaining why Obama beat the Great White Dope, might not suspect that this is all over now or that the nation has decided or will decide that the United States has now gone kind of blue. 

They might look to the past and not expect the far right will settle down and go along with the tide of the future any more than they did after the humiliation of Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon.  Ask Bill Clinton about the revenge of the Republicans or their patience while waiting for retaliation.  Hell no, the fight is still on, and while Fox News broadcasts and there are people who watch it; while Limbaugh roars and while Coulter hisses and snarls like a syphilitic witch, it's still on. While money talks, it's not over.

Hell no, you can be sure that for the coming years, Obama will have won only  by "suppressing the vote," by enlisting the help of the Black Panthers or the Neptunian Trotzkyite Front -- or by any other means apparent only to the collectively paranoid psychotic Tea Party base. Their number one priority will not now cease to be the removal from office by any means possible, the blocking of every initiative and the unrestrained and unfounded vilification of Barack H. Obama.  To them, they are still the majority and when they lose it can't be their own fault.

Democratic urges to make nice and play well with others, and Democratic expectations of a sudden comity and cooperation may be dangerously premature. We're not facing a chastened and contrite enemy, newly motivated to re-examine its outmoded assumptions and tired tenets, we're standing next to a wounded and very powerful beast, and what beast has a conscience?  The Republican machine is hardly moribund and is still as red, still as rich and even more motivated to lie, cheat, steal and filibuster than ever.

The GOP may be a party in grief and shock, it may be acting out the first two stages of that Kübler-Ross hypothesis: anger and denial, but any expectation that we'll see an attempt to bargain honestly, much less to get to any kind of acceptance in the near or near-distant future -- or perhaps ever, is terribly premature, in my opinion.  Yes, we may have dodged a bullet this week and the next four years may be a reprieve from the GOP success in their war against human rights, liberty and Democracy and perhaps  the war against real Capitalism, but we have to temper our great expectations. 2014, 2016 are the numbers of the beast and there never will be an end of their era.

Wild America

  And he will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man's hand against him

Genesis 16:12

Florida is one of those places where wild men, or more accurately from the Hebrew, "wild asses" have a lot of presence.  Looking, county by county, precinct by precinct, you can see how much influence place of residence has on one's voting choices.  In a sea of red, virtually any county having a university is blue, for instance, but life is more complex than that and there are many factors that affect what kinds of people vote in certain ways. But Florida is not much different than the US in general other than that Florida is usually quite near 50/50 in any election and so small differences have a big influence on elections.

CNN.com posted some fascinating data yesterday; the sort of thing that delights a Freakonomics fan eager to see correlations between things we don't ordinarily think about as well as those things we usually do.  Sure, some of the categories are tautological.  Conservatives and Republicans vote red. That white men tend to be red and white women only a bit less so, isn't surprising either, but the way income plotted against political leanings varies by income bracket surprised me, at least.  It's not quite true that more money makes for more red leanings.

But age is a very strong factor with those over 65 being substantially more Republican  and those under 30 being even more strongly biased the other way.  Not much surprise at all there, nor is racial identification Vs. politics surprising even if it's possibly the strongest correlation.  People identifying themselves as white are about 69% red Vs. about 7% for claimants to African-American status.

But the one of so many factors that screams for attention and doesn't get enough of it I think,  is that religion, or religious identification seems to be one of the most dominant factors of all and that if you want to predict how someone will vote, asking what group they identify with and how often they attend functions  will give you a good prediction. In terms of religious fervor alone: if you never attend services, you're 62% likely to be blue. Go more than once a week and that drops to 36%.

Call yourself Protestant and you're 42% likely to be blue, but Catholics, not surprisingly to me, are closer to 50% Liberal minded.  But lump Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and others together into "other" and any one of those others has a  whopping 74% chance of  voting blue.  Atheists?  Almost the same at 70%.  The name you call God, if you in fact believe in one, may have more influence on your choices than all the reasons you give yourself regarding economic or foreign policy.

No, there's nothing intrinsically weird about any of these many categories, but it's sometimes not what you would have thought and there are quite a number of things that obviously are factors in that complex equation determining what we perhaps not so accurately call our free choice!  We all like to think we make our choices independently and based on facts, but the numbers suggest strongly otherwise. They suggest that what we accept as truth and as facts has everything to do with our micro-cultural involvement. Whether we're skeptical or gullible, authoritarian or libertarian may have something to do with life experience but obviously not entirely.  We're tribal animals and although we're able and eager to find tribes to belong to, some of our illusion of free will may be just that.  Illusory.

BUMPER STICKERS WE'D LIKE TO SEE

ROMNEY REJECTED!!!

 

Houston, the ego has landed

crash landed that is. 

If 2012 was the end of an error, it was Romney's error and the Republicans' error and although it won't be the end of their policy of taking us for idiots in order to take us to the cleaners, at least we won't have to listen to the nasty pastors predicting Antichrists and Apocalypses and the rest of their superstitious idiocies for a few hours.  We will get a rest from scurrilous fake economists telling us how tax cuts make us rich and pay our bills.  We'll have a few minutes peace from being told that Obama is responsible for the disaster that occurred before he was elected, for raising gas prices and all of those brainless and fraudulent claims that even the most idiotic and uninformed partisan has to strain to believe. We won't have to look at Mutt's  Botoxed and whitewashed face or listen to his ever shifting spectrum of lies and distortions and calumnies and complaints.   At least for a while.  They'll be back trying to bring down America within a day or so, or maybe sooner, like hyenas on a gazelle. They'll be back to make up ever more bizarre legends, ever more nonsense stories to fool the ignorant and bigoted and all designed for the benefit of a handful of people.

And we'll see them again in 2016, yapping about flag pins and the size of the flags on campaign jets and how the Democratic candidate eats Christian babies and was born on Mars and is financed by Commies from Kyrgyzstan, but their days do have a number as the population grows more diverse and younger, and angry, Bigoted, Southern white men go to sleep with their ancestors and their grandaughters date dark skinned men and have children more likely to piss on their Confederate ashes than to admire them.

Romney lost and he deserved to lose and the people who financed him and used him as a megaphone for their hate filled propaganda deserved to lose and to quote a favorite chant of  that androgynous and whining witch  Anthrax Coulter:  

Liberals Republicans go WAH -- they go WAH, WAH, WAH.

Vox clamantis in deserto

It will soon be over, all but the tears and the long road toward oblivion and certainly the hate will not stop or the plotting to restore the Confederacy.  My unincorporated slice of the county is festooned with Fire Obama signs and Allen West signs and Connie Mack signs or signs of the Apocalypse if you prefer.  But here and there, braving the flaming cross or at least social ostracism, there is a voice crying in the wilderness:

It's all over but the eschatology

There's a point beyond which I can no longer pretend to be an open-minded or fair-minded person disposed to find reason in others' opinions, or at least to try to be tolerant of them.  I think I reached it today, shortly after a flurry of last minute political calls from ( supposedly illegal) robots delivering diatribes from Ann Coulter, Allen West and the NRA.  Gungrabber Obama?  War Hero West? Seriously?  Am I listed as Hatch, Booby in the phone book?

In another venue I joked today about inventing a Taserphone that one could use to zap annoying, if not felonious and even treasonous callers like these, but honestly that's only an attempt to cover up, to add mirth to the boiling volcanic eruption of rage that's been keeping me up nights; has been filling my dreams with violence and wondering if I really have enough ammunition in the house.  I also joked about watching the election returns from my boat so that if things go all to hell, I could be in international waters within half an hour and in the Bahamas in three.  But that would not be to protect me, it would be to protect others from a large, rude, green hulk stomping toward Washington in an uncontrollable rage.

But really, the level of criminal indecency to which the Republican Party has descended should sponsor far more rage than even this half mad writer can feel.  If it had come all at once rather than incrementally over a period of years, I'm sure there truly would have been blood in the streets.  Had we not had a multi-billion dollar industry soothing and rationalizing and reinterpreting the rape of reason and the murder of truth and the deportation of ethics, Republicans would have had to flee the country for their lives a decade ago, if not sooner. But as it is, stories like this one about an Arizona non-profit laundering eleven million for the GOP  which may be a true drop in the bottomless bucket of  corporate money, offshore money and other somewhat less than sanitary money being used for things like starving public education, sure, but perhaps the straw that broke this old back. As God knows, and has the GOP has stressed, an educated public is a "brainwashed" public, an 'elitist' and snobbish public less likely to buy into the raging idiocy they sell. So education is another beast the Tea Terrorists, the bar room brown shirts and the ruthless pirates of industry need to starve.

Will all these crimes ever be punished?  Not likely, no matter which candidate wins and if someone is prosecuted, their soulless, corpse eating associates will manage to make it seem all political and public opinion will turn against that damned liberal press all the more.

I'm not ready to say "you can't win" or that it's all lost, but I'm afraid it's none the less true.  Our debt problem isn't going to be repaired no matter who wins.  Obama or the Mutt, even if all spending were to cease, it may take a lifetime for the debt to go away, unless it's through massive inflation we haven't seen the likes of in our own history.  Think Zimbabwe, think Weimar Republic, think third world America.  My biggest worry isn't about the post-prosperous America, it's about the post-Liberal America; an oligarchy of entities deriving their power not from the consent of the governed, but of global financial interests, of religious demagogues and corporate feudal lords.

So no, I'll likely watch the circus from the local Democratic headquarters, at least until it gets late, but win or lose, the difference is, I fear only in the nearness to the abyss toward which we're inexorably headed and no, I'll probably not push those throttles forward and head for West End, no matter who wins Tuesday night, but I'm sure as hell not going down without a fight or go gentle into any Goddamned Republican night.

Vote the Bible!

I can hear the wailing and tooth gnashing all the way at the other end of the country from Texas.  Some woman is asked to cover up the "vote the Bible" T-shirt and it's like a wake up call to every stupid, seditious and  secessionist pervert in the Babble Belt to start howling that the request was because the Bible is "offensive."    Um, I guess that down in the dark heart A Texas, the illegality of campaigning or telling people how to vote in a polling place or its environs is neutralized if the deed is wrapped up in the Bible like a Burrito.  Wrapped up in the Christian version of course and served with a spicy ignorance sauce.  Show up at the polls in Bunghole, Texas with an Obama T-shirt and see how different the reaction is and who takes offense.

Look Tex, the Bible is all about obedience to an unelected, unaccountable and unquestionable authority that threatens to kill you and eat your children for the most ludicrously minor infraction like refusing to rape your sister in law. (Genesis 38: 8-10)  The Bible tells you to forgive debts after 7 years and forbids you to charge interest (which would make Capitalism illegal) if you "vote the Bible"  but that's OK I guess.  You have no idea how it works anyway, do you?  Or you can specify the Christian Bible wherein Saul of Tarsus tells you all those gruesome threats about eating your children (Leviticus 26:27-9) or those 613 Commandments mean nothing -- which makes the whole idea of voting the Bible meaningless. That should be a relief of course, thinking about the 42 children God murdered in hideous fashion for mocking a bald man. (2 Kings 2:23-24)

 Yeah, right, that's not what Pastor Pervy taught in Sunday School, or your idiot Attorney General  raves about and it's not what the Constitution allows if you want to get down to some basic literacy. The Bible is full of atrocities nearly all of us wouldn't want to exist in the world any more and besides, the Christian version says that following Jesus with love in your heart absolves you of those laws and threats of violence (Romans 8:2)  Why the hell can't you be content with that and stop trying to take over a secular democracy that allows the freedom of religion you take for granted.  Why the hell can't you practice the religion you claim to believe in?

Like we didn't all know that?

No shit!  Now say that with as much condescending and  snarky cynicism as you can manage and yet it won't be enough to fit the circumstance.  You see, the central tenet of Republican politics has been the idea that cutting the tax rates for the very wealthy will spur the economy and yet, as far as I can tell the evidence for that has been the repetition of the formula in very stentorian and hortatory tones. In fact all the evidence I can see, and many economists agree, suggest that quite the opposite is true and reduced sufficiently, the economy will at first experience soaring markets and catastrophic busts and recessions.  And of course we've seen some very prosperous times with 90% tax brackets for earned income and much higher rates on Capital gains. One can argue all day about what should happen according to one hypotheses or conjecture, but of course most people have learned in the last half millennium  that the outcome of experiment, of experience counts more than dialectic and endless repetitions of doctrine.  It wasn't politics that settled the question of how fast things would fall after all.

But it seems to be politics that has to decide for all time whether the very wealthy are "job creators" who will create more and better jobs if they have sufficient capital, because experience shows otherwise.  The numbers history gives us show otherwise and like so many battles involving politics and religion, those made powerful through those things have to resort to things other than honest numbers.  The other lesson of history is that denial, anger and retribution are the responses of  religious and political power, threatened by strongly supported truth.

So you're not going to be surprised  to hear that a report by the research service, a nonpartisan arm of the Library of Congress argues that the foundations of the Republican edifice are as solid as Lamarkian evolution, an Apache rain dance or the Heliocentric universe. Actually they've been far easier to refute.  Supply side economics is a crock.  No shit! Is this the first time you've bothered to seek confirmation of that whackadoodle gospel?  Didja examine entrails, consult the oracle, sacrifice a goat?   Well you know about those first stages of grief.  Denial and anger, right?  So withdraw the research and repeat the catechism sirs -- and do it loud!

Hate is in the blood, says Lyin' Bill

So lyin' Bill is still at it.  I don't go looking for his wisdom any more than I go around opening manhole covers looking for a pleasant smell, but sometimes you just stumble into it - like you might step into some dog shit on the sidewalk.  Anyway,  here we have him again running his foul mouth for his foul audience hoping to promote evil and ugliness and hate wherever he can -- and get rich from doing it.

So Barack Obama hates half the country, says O'Reilly -- the white half, of course, because even though the only family he ever knew was white, he must hate white people because he's black -- even though he's every bit  as white as he is black, unless of course, the old Confederate, Secessionist USA hating bigots like Lyin' Bill  are right that one drop of "black" blood means you're black and inferior. Old Confederate, Secessionist bigots like Lyin' Bill must think that "black blood" is mighty powerful stuff though, if one drop of it can pollute an ocean of whiteness and all the superiority it conveys. Lyin' Bill must believe in "black power!"  Whattaya know!

But Dennis Miller, that other Fox bastard who, back when he was funny and before he sold his soul for a buck thirty seven used to try to impress us all with his brilliance and erudition and vocabulary is reduced to making a living with pusillanimous persiflage for the amusement of the stupidest fraction of mediocre American minds by bantering with Bill would none the less opine that he seeth not the anger of blackness but the haughtiness of the educated.  Fox and grapes, Dennis? Nobody thinks you're smart or funny any more.

So they're back to this -- still at this, since every factual seeming accusation has been erased like grafitti under the blast from a power washer.  The face numbers, the fake stories, the false identification with George Bush's blunders misdeeds, blunders and frauds -- it all has a shelf life and perhaps the lies have gone past it and are beginning to spoil and so it's back to racists and Bolshevik class warfare:  he's a racist, he's a snob, he's consumed with hate (just like us.)

It was the end of times, it was the beginning of times

I called God this morning after breakfast.  (You don't want to talk to him before he's had his coffee, ) but I just had to ask him about the Texas Problem.  I mean I have friends there and I'm concerned that if he applies the Sodom and Gomorrah standard of needing ten good people to be granted immunity from destruction, they're going to get blasted.  Hell, I think the place is long  overdue, but maybe my friends could be given a warning or something.  There's precedent.

But no, he says.  I try to be fair and Texas has a vastly larger population than those mud brick slums did and I have to grade on the curve. No problem if I only needed ten, but I figure I'd need about a million to keep me out of smite mode what with the population explosion and all, but one of the problems is corporate personhood.  I mean, do I consider Texaco to be a person?  Is ZZ Topp one person or three? (That would count on the plus side, like Janis.)  And of course I have to think about certain Texans as perhaps counting for more than one minus point on account of extreme douchebaggery and assholeness.  I'm thinking of certain current and former Governors.

I'l tell ya, those people who insist that they're my exclusive authorized agents really get to me and they sure as hell don't stick to anything like 15%  I don't see a dime out of any of them, not that I need it, mind you, but it's the principle of the thing and if anyone is going to give out the kind of conflicting and ambiguous commandments I enjoy, it's not going to be some pencil neck twit with a comb-over like Robert Jeffress.  The man is an insult to my authority and I can't believe I created somebody who can tell you that Obama is just like Hitler with a straight face.  Not that his face is all that straight, come to think of it and I have to wonder what's happened to quality control.  I don't recall having outsourced it to Dumbfuckastan like I was a Republican or something.

Anyway, sure, the dipshit is right.  Mormonism is a cult, just like any other followers of any of the other uppity pricks who insist I gave them some kind of exclusive commission or something.  Jesus?  Hey, I never touched that girl and that Saul or Paul or Raul or whoever he calls himself is full of shit.  Has been since he fell off his jackass, as if that were a coincidence.  So if you believe that mierda, you're no smarter than if you believe Joe Smith wasn't just trying to get laid by pretending he had my private number.  I don't have a private number as you well know. Ahem. You try taking 7 billion calls a day and see what it does to your mood!

Actually, I was just thinking about Texas myself this morning 'cause I read in the paper they banned wearing those fucking "Vote the Bible" T-shirts in polling places. They get some credit for that but how much do I subtract for them not stoning the cocksuckers* who insist I wrote that pile of political shit myself. Why the hell would I ban cheeseburgers but allow slavery?  Think I'm fucking stupid?

I'm thinking damnation is what I'm thinking and maybe some shitload of boiling brimstone as an amuse bouche and fuck y'all with this rapture-crapture. It's crowded as hell here and I closed the border a long time ago, what with Cousin Krishna pestering the female help and cousin Wotan stinking up the john every morning. That Ganesh is eating me out of house and home you know -- he has an elephant stomach to go with that elephant head.  Look - I don't need any more damn company, OK? Y'all can stay where you are and it was a damn decent place when I gave it to you and the warranty was up a long time ago. No deposit, no return. Live with it.

Anyway yeah, Texas is a pain in the ass, but not the only one in your part of the mudball planet. The way you treat each other and blame it on me has put me off my feed and the old lady is bitching about my temper and about how I'm not doing enough about that human infestation I started on her otherwise perfectly nice planet and I'm thinking smite night Fogg.  I mean it.  It's ass kicking time.  You either get rid of the trash yourself, or I'll jiggle the ballot box and give you Romney and Ryan and maybe Reverend Phelps as Secretary of State. Noah is long gone and no stupid boat is going to save your asses this time.  And by the way, stop calling me.  I'll call you, and that's all the warning you're gonna get.

________________________________

*And by the way, about that particular practice -- I don't give a shit what you do as long as you don't do it in the road and scare the horses.  If I don't participate, it's because I don't have that appendage - or any other. Why the fuck would I want to look like you? What? In my image? Monkey's image, dude. Monkey's image. I told you I didn't write that book.

Everything they say is a fucking lie

I try to learn something new every day and lately, thanks to our friends in the media and all those helpful folks who work at PACS and "think tanks" today has been very informative indeed.  Sitting a doctor's waiting room, watching ABC this morning between 9:00 and 9:15, I learned that Democratic candidate Patric Murphy, running for Congress against Disgraced war criminal Allen West, was really the morally reprehensible choice because he'd been arrested at age 19 for being drunk.  Probably unforgivable even  25 years afterward and much more so than West's being forced to resign from the Army rather than face a Court Martial and a probable 11 year prison sentence for torturing an innocent Iraqi.  Abu Ghraib?  Never heard of it.  Did you hear about Obama's apology tour?

But wait, there's more.  The Democratic candidate has a secret plan to eliminate Social Security (which he doesn't) and Allen West who has campaigned long and hard to end it, is obviously the better choice -- but you say you want more for your money -- you say you're not satisfied with the level of mendacity?  Why, you can be certain says another half panicked voice on the tube; you can be certain that if Murphy is elected, then  Iran will launch the nuclear weapons they don't have on missiles they don't have and commit suicide by bombing  the United States. I guess a junior Representative has a lot more power than I thought!


Arriving home, there was a large flyer in the mail from the NRA insisting that "After four years of Obama, we have More Debt ( 87% of which is attributable to his predecessor) There is more Spending ( vide supra) and Higher Prices." I did a little quick arithmetic and under Obama there seems to have been a smaller increase than under the Commanderguy, but never mind, this isn't about the numbers, it's about tactical dishonesty.  It's about the triumph of lies, the ascendancy of evil --  a Republican campaign.

  "There's only one thing we have less of," says the NRA "and that's FREEDOM."  You can look it all up at gunbanobama.com.  That's right gun ban - the one thing you can't honestly accuse Obama of  doing and during his administration, not only have there been no new gun laws, but gun laws limiting where I can can carry a weapon have actually been loosened.  Yes, the pigs have slightly less freedom to use fake Bible quotes as a suppository today.  Less freedom to interfere in our marriages and romantic attachments and private moments.   Again, none of this is about truth and again, half the country sucks up  this sewage like a vulture gulping down carrion.

Which brings me to my conclusion.  For the 8 years of the Bush misadventure, which brought us the longest and most expensive wars in our history, the biggest increase in government borrowing and spending in memory and the largest most extensive invasions of privacy (remember when Bush told us we'd have to give up civil liberties, 'cause there's a war on?) During the Bush years of  slashed taxes that gave us zero job growth and the biggest economic catastrophe since 1929 -- for all those years I was told that I, as a Liberal, hated America, was unforgivably rude for mentioning Bush's transgressions against the Constitution and individual liberty -- and just laughably and liberally trying to bring down the robust economy with pessimistic predictions (which came true.)

Well Guess what, you lying Tea Whores, you lying revisionist Zombies, you lying enemies of everything you pretend our country stands for -- at this point I do.  At least I hate half of it's brainless, undead beasts.  I hate the half that can't see any difference between pretty good and bottomless evil.  I hate the millions that decide not to vote because Obama can't raise the dead or walk on water or undo 8 years of sabotage in 6 days. I hate the ones who have been yelling that the government can't create jobs and now are sobbing that the government can't create jobs for them.  I hate you smug, ignorant, Denialist bigots; paranoid that 'the coloreds' are living off your money and too many people are having sex against your wishes and that we aren't letting them all die to decrease the surplus population and lower Mitt Romney's already meager taxes.  I hate you irredeemably stupid weasel turds who insist that high taxes gave us economic collapse when they've never been lower ( under both Bush and Obama)  and while we've had our most prosperous times under much higher tax burdens. History matters. Numbers matter. Truth matters and while your dogmas never, never, ever produce results, you still want to choke us to death with them. I hate breathing the same air that carries the sound of your lies.

I hate the average moderate Americans -- like me -- who aren't dragging these horrors out of their homes and dragging them through the streets in tar and feathers, because as nasty as that might be, we'll get accused of it anyway no matter what we do.

And it's our own God Damned fault.

All Truths wait

All truths wait in all things

-Walt Whitman- 

It's been asserted that Nancy Hanks, Abraham Lincoln's mother was illegitimate and that President Lincoln himself was her illegitimate son.  History as is commonly taught to school children seems to have left the legitimacy claims behind to those who continue to impugn the man on the Dollar bill and continue to say the same sort of things about every enemy of injustice ever since.  Certainly those who continue to growl and grumble about the man who bent and broke rules to get the 13th amendment through Congress have much in common with Lincoln's mid 19th century detractors, Northern and Southern, and our current assailants of  nearly every Democratic president since FDR. It's tempting to believe that Americans of today, with their rabid and intransigent and often delusional views are something quite new, but Lincoln's campaign for re-election has far too much in common with Barack Obama's effort to make that idea stand on it's own.

He's a tyrant! he's the enemy of freedom! He's trashing the Constitution and our rights! -- are we talking about Lincoln, or Roosevelt. or Kennedy or Clinton?  All of them and more have faced such accusations.  Did Obama go on an "apology tour?"  Did Honest Abe openly endorse 'miscegenation' (a term that may have been coined by the Religious Right,) and were there articles and pamphlets describing a ball that never happened where 'colored belles'  danced with white men and containing fake pictures?  Yes there were!  just as Houston was flooded with wanted posters and other leaflets the day Kennedy was murdered.

 "At the very time shots were being fired at President Kennedy a right-wing protestor stood a few feet away, heckling JFK by comparing him to Neville Chamberlain"

Relates Donald E. Wilkes, Professor of Law, University of Georgia School of Law; ostensibly for such things as not forcing Communists to register with the government and for "turning the country over to the UN."  Heard it all before?  Of course we have and we've heard it ever since and from the same damned people in many cases.    "The American Fact Finding Committee" apparently actually the John Birch Society, printed one of those insidious, seditious calumnies. Fred C Koch, founder of Koch Industries ( who used to do business with the USSR) and founder of the John Birch Society and  father to the Koch Brothers bankrollers of the Tea Party now hounding Obama with the same slimy and false accusations.  Like Father, like sons. Like American Conservatism, like Treason.

Perhaps the "Modern Man" of the mid 19th century of whom Whitman sang isn't much different from the modern men and women who sit up nights fabricating stories about Barack Obama's ancestry and actions. 19th century calumnies about "Abraham Africanus I" and his fictitious dialogues with Satan smell as ugly as anything Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh or the Koch boys have ever cooked up in their stew-pots. No, I'm afraid America's 'Conservatives,'  those people who will go to war to preserve the past and particularly a  fictitious past designed to cover up injustice and promote privilege, have been with us all along.

Did the infamous but recently recrudescent Joe McCarthy really say "show me a man who talks about the Constitution and I'll show you a communist?"  I don't know, but his 'Conservative' henchmen didn't think that was as anti-American or trashing the constitution or beyond the definition of free speech as reading Marx or having a certain political opinion or promoting civil rights -- and even, in the case of Lincoln: ending constitutional support for slavery.  The Gospel chewing Bible bullies, the feudal Barons of industry then and now only care about the constitution when someone tries to use it to preserve individual liberty, and so granting the same rights to Biblical pariahs as to others, is "trashing the constitution" when Obama  -- or Africanus II -- favors it.

All truth waits, but who cares to look when it's too likely to challenge our politics, our lies, our precious delusions, our profits, our power?

Tales of the Bizarro World

Remember Bizarro World, where everything is its opposite?  As Superman said, "If I win this crazy game, these Super-Creatures will say I lose"  Hit the ball over the fence and they'll call you out.

Somehow this has been the tactic behind Republican campaigns since that great Victim, elder statesman and non-crook Richard Nixon was forced to resign rather than be convicted of burglary and obstruction. Everything is its opposite, the loonies run the asylum. Democrats want to oppress women by allowing them to use birth control, or get innoculated against HPV and by not forcing them to give birth to two-headed, hydrocephalic offspring of rapists. Democrats (according to radio ads for Allen West) want to take away our Social Security, while the Army Colonel who had to resign rather than face 11 years in Leavenworth for war crimes is a "war hero."

Of course it's not just Republicans, it's the Christian Right some of whom insist that "you can't be a Christian if you don't own a gun"  Just like Jesus would if Jesus were his own opposite.

Dr. Gary Cass, with heavy-hitter credentials in the Republican Party and the Bizarro World of forcing militant, heavily armed Christianity upon America and the World -- Dr. Gary who now heads the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission,  perhaps another exercise in contradictory rhetorical gymnastics, insists that Christians need guns because those Satanic, non-cult members want to kill babies and allow people to marry in contradiction of Dr. Gary Cass's 'moral' compass.  Bizarre enough for ya?  Is he saying that these "Christians" need to kill doctors and blow up women's health clinics in the name of morality?  Sounds like it to me, but then it could mean the opposite, couldn't it?

Could it be that the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission is the Bizarro way of being the Defamation-of-everyone-else-Commission?  Certainly, or of course not, depending on whether you're a Bizarre Super Creature or a rational human being. If you are a Bizarro creature, you see, Victims are victimizing the persecutors and the ancient institution that's been persecuting others for millennia, is the Victim here:  the victim of the victims and if you shoot someone for not obeying you, why you're the victim. Just like Jesus.

When arguing with the Right, you can't win because they'll declare you the loser, just Like Superman said -- so should I declare that you can't be a Liberal, or even that you can't be moral if you don't own a gun?  Sounds Bizarro right to me -- make mine a Kalshnikov.

Who needs Satan when we have the GOP?

Disgusting, isn't it?  So much so that I'll just let it speak for itself lest I lapse into disgusting vulgarity myself.  Suffice it to say that no one who would perpetrate this can be said to have any regard for the United States or truth of common decency.  Yes, the Romney campaign continues to explore new depths of mendacity, or at least those entities paying for the campaign do.  Yet we who find the man and his backers to be traitorous villains out to destroy our society for profit continue to be polite lest they insult us or make us cry.

Obama bowing to the Saudis? Perhaps they've forgotten this:

 

Or this:

Yes, That's Rumsfeld sucking up to Saddam and yes, giving him a lot of money and weapons.

So do you remember Bush's massive bailout plan where we were not to know how much went to whom?  Do you remember the largest increase in debt and the most expensive war and 8 years of zero job growth and the record breaking in the size of Federal Government.  Do you remember George W. Bush?

So are you stupid? Are you going to let them continue? Are you a damn liar or an irredeemable and deluded idiot? Or is it just to much fun to bash Obama and giggle like a Klansman at a lynching?  Do you really think a President sets international fuel prices or that the dip during the depth of the Recession perhaps had something to do with supply and demand.  You do know how Capitalism works, don't you, because it's a free market for petroleum out there. 

Are you going to listen to McCain tell the Marines to go on one last mission and vote for Romney and are you going to remember how that Gibbering jackass told us hours before the Collapse in 2008 that the economy was "robust" and blamed the rumors on "liberals" just as he blamed the high gas prices on -- you guessed it -- Barack Obama who wasn't yet elected.

No, I do not have the words to describe my contempt for any Republican, whether complicit in this sleaziest in history campaign or just stupid and bigoted enough to buy the lies. A vote for Romney is a vote to abandon America to Feudalism and Fascism and villainy.

Let this be a sign unto you. . .

Living right on the Atlantic coast in Florida, I often see and hear blimps cruising the shoreline at low altitude.  It was a a beautiful day yesterday and I spent the balmy afternoon reading and listening to music on my boat and perhaps I would have seen the Romney Blimp ( technically a hot air dirigible) had it made the trip up the coast from Miami, just over a hundred miles south of here.

It didn't, because as WPLG TV reports, it was forced down by high winds, crashed and went limp in a field near Davie, FL.  In other words the winds of  reality outweighed the artificially created hot air holding it aloft.

There's something amusingly Ozymandian about the smiling image of Willard Mitt Romney looking out from the wreckage of a collapsed airship; something so appealingly metaphorical and  prophetic.  Please, God -- let it be a sign.

2012, the end of an era

I've been a Newsweek reader and subscriber for more than a half century and of course I haven't always been appreciative of all their regular columnists.  I haven't ever in fact, but none the less, people like George Will or the current counterpoise to rational thinking, Niall Furguson, haven't made me cancel my subscription  as I've threatened to do on occasion. But you can't fight progress and you can't fight the kind of decay progress leaves in its wake and the magazine that once published some of the best political writing and news reporting in America has been fighting a losing battle. Advertising revenue is drying up in the slow economy and advertisers may feel they get a bigger bang and a bigger audience elsewhere.

 The venerable publication was sold last year and combined with The Daily Beast.  Controversial editor in chief Tina Brown, known for saving The New Yorker a few years back hasn't been able to save Newsweek or stem the flight of advertising revenue -- or as I might speculate, stem the rising illiteracy and unwillingness to read objective journalism and I read this morning that as of the end of this year, Newsweek will cease to put out a print edition. Alas.

I had been meaning to write this week about the noticeable trend toward being 'fair and balanced' in Newsweek and indeed almost every other slowly sinking print publication by including a measure of snarky, sulfurous vituperation  to balance out any accurate reportage or fact based opinion that will irritate the delusional Right, as if  there actually were two sides to arithmetic or an alternate and opposite  history despite the accuracy of the record.  I was going to chastise Ms. Brown for the October 15th cover story "Heaven is Real" pandering, once again, to irrational beliefs, but at least for Newsweek, the Mayans were correct.  It's the end of an era.

It may be more of a dignified end however, than being bought up by Darth Murdoch or some corporation controlled by the Koch brothers or Karl Rove.  They plan to continue on the Web and I plan to read them but I can't say I don't have a feeling of loss or a suspicion that the future of Journalism is not the improvement of journalism but more like a large, dark cave full of screaming voices.

More of the same

Over 65% of respondents to the CNN poll so far this morning ( 10:15 EDT) say Obama "won" the "debate."  Of course it wasn't really a debate and nobody really wins because supporters always think their candidate did better whether he was lying or not.  I think Romney came off better than he should have, but then that's what a con man does.  A good flim-flam man makes the marks forget what he said or did ten minutes ago by sheer force of personality.  The truth just isn't as sexy and it's almost always harder to understand even for those few who try and I think Romney did as well as he could have in reassuring his minions that our current condition had nothing to do with the long standing Republican policies that caused it.  Did he do as well with his claims that his vague and not so honestly described "policies" would quickly restore the peace and prosperity of the Clinton era?  It remains to be seen.

Did Obama really stress adequately that Democratic policies, equally trashed by Republicans gave us unprecedented prosperity and near full employment or that virtually all our debt was acquired by Republican administrations preaching the same 'debt doesn't matter' idea and that  'slashing the upper brackets produces prosperity?'   No, but if the viewer doesn't see it already, he's not going to and the public is more dishonest with itself than Romney could ever be with us.

The fact check people of course, are suggesting that the fierceness of Mitt's assertions seem to correspond to their inaccuracy and mendacity, but again; fact checkers are to the cult members as liberally biased as is math itself and it won't change minds well trained to reject information from outside sources.  Perhaps Mitt's little tantrums about being able to talk over his opponent, or his foot stamping, infantile and dishonest demonstration about "government land" gives us a peek into his private self or at least a whiff of sulfur, but perceptive, informed and analytical people aren't really Mitt supporters in the first place.  Folders full of facts ( and the fact is that oil and gas production are way, way up despite the sluggish economy) can't outweigh the slick haircut, the the silver tongue and the polished art of the con.

So I'm not going to say who I thought 'won' this thing because I don't know.  I can hope that a sufficient number will be disgusted enough to go to the polls and vote. A large turnout usually favors the Democrats.

Why are these men laughing?

This just in:

Fox &Friends claims Biden's debate laughter indicates dementia!

            Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP/GettyImages

Ablow the man down

So, another Monday morning in this best of all possible countries; this greatest there ever was since the Big Bang and greatest there will ever be until Jesus comes back. And what do I read in the news this proud American morning?

Mark Sanford, as though he hadn't disgraced himself enough as Governor of South Carolina, calls President Obama a spear chucker.  Don't tempt me, Mark.

The American Family Association, that Far Right group of  Freaky Fundies masquerading as an American Family Association tells it's cult members to keep their kids out of school for an Oct 30
anti-bullying event, “Mix It Up For Lunch Day,” they insist, is 

"just another thinly veiled attempt to promote the homosexual agenda."  

Imagine trying to tell kids it isn't the Christian thing to do to beat up gay kids or torment them to the point of suicide.  What would Jesus do, after all?

And on Fox & Friends some alleged psychiatrist aptly named Ablow declared that Vice President Biden was probably demented based on what he saw in the 'debate' with Lyin' Ryan.

“I did not evaluate Joe Biden, but if someone said to me, we want you to do what’s really required. You have to put dementia on the differential diagnosis. You have to say bizarre laughter, interrupting. If this were your dad or your grandfather, wouldn’t you say if you brought him to me, Keith, tell me, is he suffering with dementia? Because he can’t seem to listen, he’s laughing inappropriately.”

I did not evaluate, so I know the problem. How very Fox.  Is this what they call an Ablow job?    to tell the truth, Ryan makes me laugh at him  too and I just can't listen to the goddamn lies and sedition from the foreign owned Fascist propaganda organization any more, nor do I think laughter is what is really needed here as a national response to the Idiot's Crusade. Bring back the laughing stock!

I read this morning at Raw Story that "A Florida judge has ruled that a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic who believes he is the “Prince of God” and is convinced that he will be resurrected to sit for eternity at God’s right hand is sane and can put to death next week."

Good to know that such people are considered sane in Florida and perhaps that explains why according to my local paper 81% of this county's inmates plan to vote for Mitt the Shit and Lyin' Ryan. So the hell with the Supreme Court ruling against killing the insane, We don't need no damn government and we're gonna do the Christian thing anyway.  Jesus is going to need a man like Prince John Ferguson when it comes time to shove the Jews into the lake of fire after the Rapture.

My current issue of Newsweek has a lurid cover story proving that heaven is real because some guy who went into a coma from meningitis says he went to heaven and met beautiful women there.  Another straight to the recycling bin issue.

So perhaps we have to put dementia in the differential diagnosis of our national psyche and definitely we have to be grateful there isn't a YHWH to blow America to kingdom come or to wherever Sodom wound up, because if this is the best of all possible countries, no god worth his apocalypse would stand for our sad, demented, ugly and hate filled planet. Or perhaps I'm wrong about that and perhaps that's what the newly discovered comet 2012 S1 (ISON) due to fill the sky in about a year is all about. If it doesn't blow us all to hell, perhaps the fundies and righties and all the other dimwitted, demented friends of the Fox will dress in purple robes and tennis shoes and take the Cyanide Express to the Mother Ship.  Even in the worst of times, there's always hope.

Skuby Dooby Do

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reality Show

Oh who cares whether Ryan or Biden "won" this TV spectacle? Vice presidents don't count, unless you think about Cheney, and although Romney is a sock puppet with the strong arm of  the radical authoritarians making his lips move, I don't see him being led around by Ryan as another Darth Cheney.  Who cares anyway? It's not as though the public has become smarter or has learned from experience.  These things are only a game and never, ever does a President resemble in office what he tried to resemble on camera and the platform they sell at the convention is rarely more than a facade.  There's a difference between dealing with the world as it is and dealing with the tableaux, the passion plays, the street theater, the Potemkin Village we take for reality.

So CNN says his supporters think Ryan expressed himself better.  I don't know. I have better things to do with my time, but assuming he did, does anyone think that getting the angry rabble to cheer is the indicator of suitability to administrate a Democracy -- even a pretend Democracy like ours?  Obama's haters were quick to syllogize at us in 2008 that he gave good speeches and Hitler gave good speeches, and therefore Obama is another Hitler. Who cares what such people think?

So the Romney/Ryan thing gives rousing speeches, albeit captious and dishonest ones. So the real truth is not quite as rousing, easily summed up to the satisfaction of one's enemies, or blamed on 'Libtards.'  Who gives a shit?

I had a conversation with someone last night.  An engineer, a very nice guy, a very devout Baptist and fellow Radio Amateur about the peculiar state of the ionosphere.  We're supposed to be near a sunspot peak and yet HF propagation is generally poor, without the Summer openings on 10 and 6 meters we've waited years for. I joked about writing my congressman. He quipped about killing all the lawyers because, as he said, "they'll only blame it on Global Warming and George Bush." He wasn't smiling.

So easily is scientific consensus and massive data dismissed and so easily the destruction of the US economy according to the 30 year experiment with trickle down, debt-doesn't-matter and wars-pay-for-themselves-when-we-cut-taxes agenda as given us by the Republicans. Truth doesn't matter, so how can these 'debates' mean anything?

Really -- why should I listen to these things?  I already know who has built a three ring circus around  the argumentum ad captandum argument, learned to enrage the public with lies and profit from the rage they ignited. No, I'm not going to tell you that Romney will exterminate minorities or that Ryan is a Nazi who wants to put Grandma in a camp, but the people who pull their strings have perfected the same rhetoric, the technique and the ability to harness tribal enmity, bigotry, superstition and self-pity.  They know how to make you passionately believe things that are self-contradictory, follow policies that always and dramatically fail and they know how to get their way. So sure, Romney won and Ryan won and whether or not they're elected, George W. Bush and Global Warming have sealed our fate, or at least made it unlikely that anything will ever be the same. 

What a Doocebag!

With a name like Doocy, one probably grows up with countless attempts to make fun of one's surname. I doubt I could come up with a new one, but why ridicule the man's name when you can stand by and watch him smear it himself; making himself the idiot's action figure, the bobble-head doll of arrogant, self righteous religious authority and enemy of everything the United States ever stood for or was supposed to stand for and still pretends to be all about.

Yes, I'm talking about religion again and I sure as hell wish you would too, because that bundle of authoritarian offal with a cross stuck on it stinks so bad, I'm sure you could smell it on the moon. Where is the resistance to this endless calumny, this unceasing assault on our freedom, in our classrooms, our meeting places, our legislative assemblies?

On Fox today, (where else?)  Stevie the Dooce made fun of religious freedom and our protection against official State religions by mocking Pennsylvania State Representative  Babette Josephs (D) for declining to recite that nauseating formula declaring the United States of America to be what it's constitutionally forbidden to be: Under God.

Good for her and like her, I haven't dignified that 'Satanic Verse' since the Republicans shoved it up the National ass in 1954, taking time out from their struggle to keep the 'coloreds' in their place and making sure the races didn't mix. Time out from making sure people lost their jobs because of their politics.

“I wonder if she refuses to use money because money has ‘In God We Trust’ on it?” 

chortled the coiffed and polyestered Doocy through three quarters on an inch of pancake makeup; totally forgetting a legendary tantrum of a certain Jewish agitator concerning money with God written on it being in the Jerusalem Temple, but like so many of these Christian pretenders, hiding behind some perverted pretense they call 'faith' as they hide their inner secrets behind stage makeup, behind patter and persiflage with their scummy Fox familiars,  He's an enemy of almost anything good, anything that stands for freedom, for respect, for kindness, decency, democracy and yes -- American Values and American law.  Is that schoolgirl giggling supposed to make us forget or be embarrassed by the fact that neither citizens nor their elected officials may be required to make religious oaths?   No, Doocebag, I don't trust your God and if I had the opportunity to shove the constitution and a Gutenberg Bible sideways up your gaping anus I would feel like an instrument of justice and a defender of America. Do you wipe your foul ass with the Constitution because it has that Establishment clause?  Do you pay for sex with money that has God on it?

I almost expect blood to ooze from beneath my fingernails as I try to avoid the most obscene and vulgar maledictions against Doocy and his gibbering boyfriend Brian Kilmead; foul mouthed imprecations and excrement encrusted execrations against that evil Republican empire that employs them to eat at the heart of America like a parasitic worm.  It's hard to do and words come to mind, thoughts I don't dare to mention.  Yes, it's hard not to dream of  these evil men being in fact under some angry God -- like a dead, oozing cockroach under an iron boot heel.

Chick-Fil-Ahole

"Families are very important to our country. And they're very important to those of us who are concerned about being able to hang on to our heritage. We support Biblical families, and they've always been a part of that."

Jesus, can't anybody see the logical disconnect between families being important and the right of some Bible pounding chicken plucker to interfere with the civil rights of his fellow citizens?  Freedom is important too and sure as hell, this kind of religion doesn't support freedom and has spent centuries killing people for thinking and acting free.

Well I guess not and it's just another example of how religion poisons everything; corrupts the critical faculties and undermines democracy.  Yes, it's Chicken Man Dan again "supporting Biblical Families" with a carefully extracted and deep fried opinion from a few extracts from the Greek section added on to the Hebrew Bible in the 4th Century CE.  

Tradition does not convey a right, particularly a right to interfere with freedom, nor does one "tradition" have the right to declare itself official in this free country any more than the smell of frying birds conveys wisdom or power or decency. 

So what about Lot's family, Abraham's family and all those Biblical examples of polygamy, romps in the sack with the serving girls, mistreatment of women, selling one's daughters into slavery and prostitution and the like?  Never mind.

Look, there's nothing that can't be supported by that pile of political hogwash written, edited, redacted and selected by ancient bastards greedy for power and that isn't being used by their smiling, Jesus plated contemporary imposters like Dan Cathy.  To be sure, he has the protected right to be an asshole, to act like he's got some special insight, to justify his petty, arrogant, small minded opinions about chicken plucking with what he calls the Bible and I call a fraud,  Indeed that's much more of a "heritage" than gay bashing, that horrible compilation of ancient ignorance having been used for every ill purpose including slavery, destruction of Native cultures and the burning of innocent women in this sad country.  And of course I have the right to call him any name I like, now that he's a public figure.

I have the right, as an American, to call him a malicious and ignorant and self-righteous idiot and we all have the right to take our hunger for greasy chicken to KFC or to that vacant lot a mile from here where they sell home made chicken, barbecue, greens, black beans and rice on the weekends and where they have a smile for everybody and mind their own goddamned Christian business.

"Chick-Fil-A Doesn't belong in Boston," says Mayor Thomas Menino. " you can't have a business in the City of Boston that discriminates against the population . . . and we're not going to have a company, Chick-Fil-A, or whatever the hell their name is, on our Freedom Trail."

Me neither, Mayor -- me neither.