Typical

"Now isn't that typical"

-The Church Lady-

There are always stories in the local paper that make me rant and rave philosophical. At first glance these two stories seem to have little in common, but they do because of the different reactions people have to them -- which illustrates my point.

The first story is about an undocumented Guatemalan man who worked for a local gardening service. The truck he was riding in was hit head on by a drunk driver and Luis Jimenez suffered severe and irreversible brain trauma. Having no money, no local family and no insurance the local hospital took him in and over a period of a few years, his bills climbed into the millions. After three years, the hospital was granted a court order allowing them to charter a Medivac jet to send him home to his family, but the bill of course stayed here and will eventually be covered by increased insurance costs to all of us. End of story? No, his family has charged the hospital with kidnapping and is suing for damages.

The second story about a local homeless man caught swiping M&M's, T shirts and other items from a convenience store. He has a history of drug and public intoxication arrests, but he claims that he's entitled to all the M&Ms he can steal -- because he served in Iraq.

So what do these stories have to do with each other? Nothing really, but my reason for comparing them is that while people who write to newspapers use the first to howl and scream about illegal aliens and how this is typical of all of them, nobody uses the second to tell us that all Iraq veterans should be deported.

What makes something "typical" of a group? Usually our prejudices, our hidden fears and our dishonesty. Aren't we typical!

Say it ain't so, Bobby

We can see that Bobby Jindal likes to talk as though his audience were all preschoolers and wear ties he borrowed from Bozo the Clown, but did Bobby Jindal make up a story? Seems like it.

Tuesday night's speech to congress had the man who would be president calling himself a hero, insisting that boats be allowed to rescue people of New Orleans stranded on rooftops; standing firm when some nasty ol' gummint bureaucrat was telling the sheriff that boats without proof of insurance would have to stay home. Only problem is, says Talking Points Memo -- he wasn't in the sheriff's office -- he may not even have been in New Orleans and the sheriff didn't know about the policy until weeks later.

Seems his only course of action may be to insist, like Sarah Palin, that she really did say "thanks but no thanks" and really did sell the state jet on eBay when she didn't and blame it all on the Liberal Media. Good luck to the both of them.

Let them eat Lobster

I just don't know any more and perhaps soon enough I just won't care. I got cornered by a woman at my club last night who went on and on about her money being wasted in earmarks for tattoo removal. This seems to be the red herring this week and the fishy smell of course is emanating from Fox, with people ( and I use the term loosely) like Michelle Malkin working overtime to make the most of it.

Apparently some money will go to a program to remove gang tattoos in California. Some will go for the Lobster fishing industry in Maine -- I don't need to repeat the litany, just turn on Fox or read any of the Ditto sites that repeat it ad nauseam, but we're hearing far less about billions to companies that use it for executive pay and bonuses; jets and yachts than we are about millions to entities that spend money on the poor and disadvantaged or on industries that employ Americans. All around her, of course are bankrupt businesses, foreclosed houses and homeless people. Perhaps one of them works for a dermatologist who removes tattoos. Perhaps there's someone who works in maintaining the 20,000 or so acres of parkland in this county -- land that attracts more in tourism than we spend making it pretty.

Certainly some of them in this coastal village are commercial fishermen whose boats are being foreclosed on, which is affecting the sales of gasoline and services which is forcing marinas to close and people in boatyards and grocery stores and tackle shops to be laid off. Saving an industry that employs Americans is at least a bridge to somewhere and criticism from people who have represented and supported the greatest orgy of non-productive pork barrel spending is almost as disgusting -- well, as Michelle Malkin.

It's easy to call any budget a series of "earmarks" and it beats me to think about how one allocates funds without allocating funds, unless you follow the Bush/Paulson "don't ask because we won't tell, you liberal bastard" model. One thing is for sure; some Maine fisherman is more likely to be salting cod with whatever comes his way from this package than salting money away in the Caymans or buying German cars or yachts made in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

The whole idea of economic stimulus is to produce liquidity and improve the velocity of money so that maybe fewer people will lose their homes and jobs and businesses. The sudden parsimony of people who said nothing as tens of trillions of debt piled up, as money disappeared into the bowels of offshore corporations like Halliburton, was disbursed in pizza boxes to Iraqi war profiteers and corrupt politicians, should be embarrassing. Being a Republican however, is never to feel embarrassment, guilt or remorse, but to look for the solace of being told it's the doing of the "liberals."

As I said, I'm almost to the point of not caring any more. If we really are a nation of people hypocritically obsessed with the motes in other people's eyes, or stimulus packages, to the point where they would gladly see the end of the United States as a world power, we deserve what we get.

Bobby Jingo

"We oppose the national Democratic view that says the way to strengthen our country is to increase dependence on government. We believe the way to strengthen our country is to restrain spending in Washington, to empower individuals and small businesses to grow our economy and create jobs"

says Bobby Jindal, the Republicans' attempt to offer an alternative dark complexioned spokesman in an effort to portray the differences between the GOP of the last 30 years with the Democratic Party as a matter of well considered philosophy. Averring that the Republicans simply lost sight of some basic principle rather than having steadfastly and corruptly pursued policies that fail again and again and again in cataclysmic fashion is the deception most plausible of their current defenses, and so in taking virtually every penny of the funds offered to Louisiana while posing as an opposer of government investment, he follows the lead of the Governor of Alaska, sucking up the earmarked funds while bleating about Government excess.

I can't help but remember how the very purchase of Louisiana by Tax and Spend Jefferson was opposed by the conservative element on the same pretended principles, but if I pursued all the ironic elements of Republican posturing, I'd be at it for years.

At a time when even Ayn Rand disciples like Alan Greenspan have come around to the position that no, markets are not self regulating and that regulation is needed to keep free markets free, Bobby J's restatement of the same old unfounded and debunked "principles" are sounding more and more like the 450 pound diet guru lecturing you about healthy eating.

Some of the government spending that made our insignificant nation the most wealthy and powerful of all time, were, like the Louisiana Purchase, howled about in the same way as this stimulus package: the purchase of Alaska, the building of the Erie Canal and the national highway system. Whatever the merits of any individual element of the stimulus package may be, the administration is proposing to spend American money in America, not turning it to smoke and bloody sand in Iraq and those who supported the unprecedented squandering of our fortune have a lot of nerve posing as responsible leaders who simply let the steering wheel slip for a moment.

What we have here is a failure to cogitate

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke sees 2010 recovery "only if" markets and banks stabilize, says Bloomberg.com. I see prospects for cheap, aerial fertilizer delivery if pigs learn to fly.

Listening to songs that have "degrading lyrics" may cause teenagers to have more sex. So said Dr. Brian A. Primack, a pediatrician and co- author of a study released Tuesday. Yep and a billion or so years of evolution contribute to the tendency too, but thanks Brian -- I think I understand much better now. It's a bit like insisting that to grant veteran's benefits to Filipino soldiers who fought alongside General McArthur will hasten the financial collapse of the US economy or that unplugging your cell phone charger will "save the planet."

I feel lucky if I can save my sanity.

Bigger, more intrusive government

"The makers of the Constitution conferred the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by all civilized men—the right to be let alone."

-Justice Louis Brandeis-

Whenever there's a lot of outrage being sold, whether it's about protecting children, preventing tax shelters or defending the faith, it's fairly safe to assume they're selling something else and it's safer to assume it's something you wouldn't have bought otherwise.

There are few things easier to bundle with invasive, intrusive or even abusive government than protecting children, hence the carefully maintained impression that children are in vastly more danger then ever before and controlling the internet in the cause of controlling people and their unwanted thoughts and words attaches to our parental fears like a remora to a shark.

A free internet

"offers anonymity that has opened the door to criminals looking to harm innocent children,"

says U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican. Well of course! So does freedom of association and freedom of speech and assembly and of course, so does freedom in general. It also offers opportunities for dissent, for exposure of secrets of invidious nature and other things authoritarian and paranoid governments fear. So in order to protect the children, Cornyn would like to make sure that with every word you write, every breath you take, every move you make, he'll be watching you. listening to your calls, reading your mail, checking your financial records, tracking your movements: all these things we bought in the name of Bush's "warrontare" and yet it's not enough.

The plan is to have everything you say on the internet and a list of every search you make and every site you visit stored for the benefit of anyone who may want to investigate you -- for two years. Two bills have been introduced so far--S.436 in the Senate and H.R.1076 in the House. Both bills bear the same title: "Internet Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today's Youth Act," or Internet Safety Act. Both use the same words:

"A provider of an electronic communication service or remote computing service shall retain for a period of at least two years all records or other information pertaining to the identity of a user of a temporarily assigned network address the service assigns to that user."

And what is a provider or remote service? If you're got a home network with a wired or wireless router, you are! Better buy another hard drive and keep it backed up, you potential child molester, you.

"That sweeps in not just public Wi-Fi access points, but password-protected ones too, and applies to individuals, small businesses, large corporations, libraries, schools, universities, and even government agencies. Voice over IP services may be covered too."

says CNN.com's Declan McCullagh.

Alberto Gonzales may be gone, George Bush may be a bad memory, but the Republican Dream lives on. A country where nothing you do is private and nothing they do is public; a country where "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects" is seen as an unnecessary impediment to control.

Rights, religion and cockroaches

Even if you're not a criminal, you probably know that a good way to pull off a heist is to create a distraction. Plainly, when nature or circumstances provide one, the slight of hand artists, the flim-flammers and fast fingered scammers; the looters and pillagers come out of the woodwork like roaches -- and so do the Christianists.

No, it's not just the nutjobs with sandwich boards yelling about the end of the world, it's the politicians and preachers and the "crossover" models as they say in Detroit. Sure, the argument for the apocalypse seems better every day, but that's never enough satisfaction for God's own nihilists. They have to make sure we're all either under strict control, or lined up like ducks for the Jeezimator to come and blow us all away.

Take South Carolina State Senator Robert Ford. He is trying to get a bill banning profanity passed that would make it a felony to utter certain unspecified words and which would carry a five year maximum sentence. The push goes on and is probably advancing, to convince us all that the Constitution was really founded on the Bible so Christianity should be the State Religion and while we still haven't retrieved the civil rights the last Republican Administration took away, the State of North Dakota is trying to grant them to any fertilized human egg cell. That's right, "any organism with the genome of homo sapiens" according to the bill, is a person and a citizen. As far as I can tell, King Tut's mummy is an organism with a human genome, but he doesn't live in North Dakota where all that treasure would have to be given back to him.

"This is very simply defining when life begins, and giving that life some protections under our Constitution — the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"

says the bill's sponsor, Rep. Dan Ruby. I wonder why swearing isn't my right, but I don't have to tell you he's a Republican and I shouldn't have to tell you he's a moron either, since the Constitution says no such thing, those words being the preamble to the Declaration of Independence.

I shouldn't have to tell you, unless you were educated in some remote jungle, that both the zygotes involved in fertilization were already alive and that in fact, human life exists in an unbroken line back to some microbe or proto-microbe that lived back before the Pre-Cambrian. I shouldn't have to tell you either, that the Bible; the same Bible these same folks tell you is the basis for our laws, contains no such prohibition but rather asserts that life begins with breath. Even the Biblical word n'shemah is deliberately mistranslated as "soul" by Christians which is really what the right-to-life scammers want to protect. It really means "breath."

It takes a certain kind of mind to look at this picture and see a "baby;" an organism capable of thought, action or even life outside of another human body that has more rights for instance than someone who is accused of being an "enemy combatant" by an unreliable source. It takes a certain kind of person to brag about our freedom while wanting to take it away for using the anglo-saxon word for feces. It takes a certain kind of person to read the angry denunciations of Christianity by James Madison and Tom Jefferson and call them devout fundamentalist Christians.

So when someone bumps you in a crowd, or there's a commotion in a busy street or when the economy is collapsing all around you, keep your eyes open, your hand on your wallet and maybe your finger on the trigger. Yes, they are out to get you.

It's not fraud when we do it

We've certainly seen and heard plenty of haughty harumphment aver the tax problems of Tim Geithner. We've had more of the "more of the same" from the same folks who gave us, or tried to give us Sarah Palin as a Joan of Arc reformer and an upholder of the kind of ethics Republicans like to talk about while trying to keep us from examining their own failings.

We're not seeing a hell of a lot about Sarah Palin's tax problems. It seems that it hadn't occurred to her that the additional "travel related" money she was being paid for staying at home in Wasilla ( since her home isn't in the capitol, Juneau) was taxable income. Of course we learned a long time ago that the State of Alaska has been paying for all kinds of family expenses like tickets to basketball games, and sled races, but these things are "private matters" according to her spokeswoman. That's because she's a Republican in a Red State. otherwise any personal detail would be a public matter and could and would be used against her by her party's scandal machine. I'm still waiting for the "Liberal Press" to make a fuss about it. I'm still waiting to hear why everything we do or say on the phone or in our mail: why everything we buy and everywhere we go is no longer a private matter as far as the Government is concerned.

Next time they tell me what a bad break Sarah got from the mean old media, I might just have to mention this, as well as to relate my litany of her other lies.

Of course Alaska is in for some hard times, since 90% of its revenue comes from soaking the oil companies, hard as that might be to explain to laissez faire lovers who supported her ant-Tax rhetoric. " living within our means and putting money aside for a rainier day" is something, like ethics, that Sarah likes to give lip service to while running up debt like a mainstream Republican.

But they're still talking about her as a Presidential Candidate, which is fine with me. Let her select Joe the Plumber as VP too and maybe the accountant she used to hide her expense account shenanigans for Secretary of the Treasury as well. The country's going to hell anyway and we might just as well get it over with. You betcha!

Penny for your insanity

Some people are feeling a kind of smug delight at the increasingly hysterical dementia of the religious right. I'm not delighted at all, nor do I count them out. In fact they thrive on persecution and so much so that they usually invent it when they can't actually provoke it.

The latest piece of insanity to arrive in my inbox seems hysterical enough, but of course it was written as a cold, calculated attempt to push the nut buttons and release another wave of irrational religious anger toward supporters of the US constitution. Nothing works quite so well for so long as the endlessly repeated threat that "They" are trying to take God off the money, where God so longs to remain.

We are due for a new series of Lincoln Cents this year, which is the year Honest Abe turned 200. The reverse side of the coin will contain scenes from different parts of his career. There will be four versions. The obverse side will remain the same as it has looked since 1909 when Victor D. Brenner designed it to replace the "Indian Head" coin to honor Lincoln's 100th. There are no plans to remove "In God We Trust."


The viral e-mail of course only shows us the plans for the reverse side, but belief addicts never ask, do they? They just believe. They just have to have the adrenaline, the feeling of belonging that believing brings. Of course we went through this with the Presidential Dollar Coin series and of course the fact that each and every coin in that series had God engraved on it never affected the beliefs of the gibbering Republican idiots who still have palpitations over the outrage. I've had shopkeepers refuse to accept them and one refused to be shown that In God We Trust was indeed there for fear, no doubt, that the Devil would drag him down to hell for looking.

The fact that the supply of attempts to restore our coinage to what it was before the Civil War when politicians needed to use religion to get people to kill their own countrymen, has long exceeded the demand and so the Liars of the Lord have to invent more. Worse, they have to heap fallacy upon fiction and invent an entire paranoid fantasy to inflame the three chambered hearts of their devotees.

It's because of the ACLU of course, along with the Atheists, the Jews, the Liberal stooges thereof -- and continuing down the slippery slope of fallacy: if they can take God away from the penny they surely will outlaw prayer in Churches, have the word God eliminated by fiat from the English language and forbid the sale of Bibles. No, I'm not making this up, they are.

Ignore them at your own peril.

Occam's butterknife

entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem

Perhaps we owe it to Barak Obama that Darwin's birthday passed by without massive hysterical demonstrations attempting to prove that all species on Earth sprang into existence from thin air about 6000 years ago. Hysteria, the other mother of invention, is required since there is no evidence other than belief and all beliefs are equally possible and equally credible, as any number with zero as a factor is equal to any other. The barking and howling Republicans were too busy yesterday denying the demonstrable truth of Barak Obama's citizenship to deny the demonstrable truth of speciation through natural selection.

The amount of evidence for the proposition that Mr. Obama was born outside the USA or its possessions is nugatory and is as dependent on wishful thinking as is the evidence for "creationism." None the less, "lawmakers" in Tennessee, the former site of the only-in-America Scopes trial that proved to the world that Americans are demented idiots if not actually an atavistic subspecies, are up to something completely similar. They are insisting that our new president prove his citizenship to them by furnishing his birth certificate -- again.

Beyond the question of how one proves anything to demented idiots, is the question of why they haven't looked, as did the Supreme Court, at the evidence they are demanding: the evidence already on record and verified. His birth certificate has been furnished, verified by the Registrar of Vital Statistics and the Health Department of the State of Hawaii and by an independent group. Let me say it again: The director of Hawaii’s Department of Health confirmed Oct. 31, 2008 that Obama was born in Honolulu.

In Tennessee of course, Occam's Razor is as dull as a Republican's mind and so Republican Congressmen Eric Swafford, Stacey Campfield, Glen Casada and Frank Niceley, suspicious of a conspiracy, have agreed to join in a suit by the hilariously Orwellian sounding Defend Our Freedoms Foundation, demanding a writ of Mandamus to obtain the birth certificate that has already been obtained and immigration records which do not exist. Postulating a conspiracy of incredible proportions between the State of Hawaii, the US Supreme Court, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and a legion of America hating Liberals to elect an alien president, certainly constitutes the multiplication of entities without necessity, other than the necessity to lie and cheat in order to unseat a popular President.

"Let's just put this to bed," Says Casada, who is also the chairman of the House Republican caucus.

"Yes, people may say, you're just chasing some conspiracy theory. It's a simple act on his part to just do, and we're done — move on."

People may indeed say so, even people on the Supreme Court. People may also keep lying until, by some kind of auto da fe, it becomes truth. What people ought to do, if they give a damn about their country and its future is to run these delusional, dishonest, dimwitted mystics out of the Congress and perhaps import some Chimpanzees to the State of Tennessee to improve the gene pool.


cross posted from The Swash Zone

Fox, Felons and kiddy porn.

Devotees of Fox News know all kinds of things to be true, from the terrorist fist bumps of the Obamas to the "fact" that Marquette Michigan bans Christmas trees and the colors red and green in an attempt to erase the holiday and Christianity itself from America.

Devotees of Fox News don't know all kinds of things that are true, but embarrassing to the Murdoch empire: things like the fact that Marquette does not and never has done any such thing and fist bumping is just another kind of handshake your kids know all about.

Then there's the interesting case of Fox News Channel producer Aaron Bruns, who was arrested yesterday for distributing child pornography: interesting because so far, the Fox has kept the story in it's burrow along with all the other creepy, crawly things.

It's worse because Bruns is a repeat offender, having been arrested with some 6000 pornographic images of children ten years ago, a felony for which he was sentenced to probation and dropped out of the University of Michigan. Fox made him a producer anyway, which is not surprising when one considers the thoroughness with which they air unsubstantiated rumor and make-up stories while throwing on-the-air tantrums about the very techniques they use so often.

Did Fox know when they hired him that he didn't actually graduate from College? Did they know he was a pervert of the sort they love to become hysterical about? Either way, one expects better from the National Enquirer and usually gets it. They've dropped the "fair and balanced" title as well as the "we report, you decide" hokum. Is it only a matter of time until they buy "Belive it or not?" from the Ripley people?

God kills

Evangelicals -- why do I have to call them that? It sounds too much as though I had some respect for their ideas or their actions when in fact those ideas differ from the ideas of the certifiably insane only by virtue of their numbers.

Witches, demons and evil spirits; a malicious bastard of a god who buries cute little children in mudslides, drowns them in floods and lets them rot with AIDS, starvation and malnutrition while performing "miracles" for those who cower, grovel and praise.

Of course it didn't take long for some jelly brained "evangelical" to declare the horrible holocaust in Australia the work of their God O' Love; his vengeance against the innocent for the collective and apparently hereditary guilt of not killing abortionists. I would hope he gets hit by lightening, but it would be more like justice to let him roast over the fire he justifies. I'm willing to bet his miserable god won't bother to do the Shadrach, Meschach and Abednigo trick on his behalf.

I'm not even comfortable with words like insane, since that would elicit feelings of sympathy such people do not deserve. I'm not of course calling opposition to abortion insane, but their justification seems to have little to do with anything more than keeping a fetus alive until it can be baptized. After that, their god or they themselves may just wish to kill it anyway for having some illegal opinion. God kills, says Pastor Nalliah of Catch the Fire Ministries. Particularly the innocent, it would seem.

The Riot Act

"We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity"

-Ann Coulter-

We've been hearing about the dangers of song lyrics and video games for decades and of course there's some statistical correlation, according to some researchers, between constant exposure and violent behavior. Why is it then that we're not hearing about the effects of the unrelenting barrage of furious denunciations of the various straw men set ablaze by the religious right and the political right? Why aren't we concerned about the effect on Jim Adkisson?

Dubious denunciation has been around since the Biblical prophets, but we've certainly outgrown hand copied parchment scrolls as the medium. We have blogs, we have newspapers, newsletters, e-mail; we have radio broadcasts, we have 24 hour opinion shouting by people like Michelle Malkin, Anne Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and others. Anger, hate and bigotry can be spread faster than Smallpox and we have enough angry opinion to drown out reality. For some men like Adkisson, it's been enough to push him into domestic terrorism.

So when Jim Adkisson, an unemployed truck driver, killed two people and wounded six others with a homemade and illegal sawed off shotgun at a Tennessee church last summer, it was because he hated the "Liberals" he perceived as infesting the Unitarian Church. He still hates them so much that he smiled as he entered a guilty plea yesterday and was sentenced to life without parole.

So when Ann Coulter, for instance, proclaims a "Fathwa" against Liberals and blames everything from 9/11 to the current failure of Republican economic policy on "treasonous" Liberals in her hysterical and incessant way, when she advocates the poisoning of Federal Judges and armed assault on Islamic countries: when the American public sits mesmerized in front of Fox News and their endless fantasies about "terrorist fist bumps" and sneering, condescending and fictitious stories about "Liberals" conspiring against us all, perhaps it's time we remember the Riot Act. Perhaps it's time we saw these wealthy commercial hatemongers in the same light as we see the bearded Bogey men from Afghanistan who incite people to blow up infidels.

At least Jim Adkisson admitted his motives, even if he has no remorse.

Odds and endings

Sometimes I'm overwhelmed with despair. Sometimes I don't believe the United States of America has any future in any way similar to what was envisioned in 1776. Sometimes I think civilization itself has reached the top of its arc and has begun to accelerate downward.

I was scanning around 20 meters yesterday afternoon, hoping to work KC4USV at McMurdo Station in Antarctica who was reported to be at 14.243 -- and as you might expect in this period between sunspot cycle 23 and 24, I couldn't hear a whisper from Ross Island. I did catch one Midwestern ham telling another that he'd heard that Barak Obama had gone "over there" and told "the Muslims" that he thought it was patriotic for them to fight against infidels. " If any of that is true, this country is doomed" said the man whose call I won't repeat. Tempted as I was to have words with him, I just shut the rig down and found other things to do. Of course, none of that is or was or likely ever will be true. But this is America. Over where? What Muslims? Failure to ask is failure to think. Failure to think and the hunger to believe fills the endless cornucopia of American political dialog.

My New York Bureau chief informs me that Alabama, in the name of protecting academic freedom and science itself, has passed legislation allowing teachers to teach religious mythology or apparently, any idiotic fairy tale they damn well please about the origin of species. The Bible is now called science in Alabama. And we fought a bloody war to keep them part of our country: and we dare to talk about optimism. How can we even say the word hope.

The end of the world makes strange bedfellows though. I stumbled into Coulterwatch this morning after reading that the shrieking harpy herself has become the subject of a formal probe by Connecticut’s Elections Enforcement Commission; moving her closer to being charged with felony fraud. Can she slither out of this one as she did in Palm Beach by having one of her familiars intimidate a Commissioner into dropping the charges? Probably, but the existence of bloggers calling themselves Conservative and yet actually dedicated to bringing about justice for Ann Coulter is heartwarming.

Coulterwatch.com blogger Dan Borchers has filed a formal complaint in Connecticut.

“For over 10 years, Ann Coulter has gotten away with illegal, immoral and unethical behavior, ranging from plagiarism to defamation, perjury to voter fraud,”

says Borcher. No, it's not a glimmer of hope. He and I may disagree on most things, but at least it's comforting to think we might all hold hands for a brief moment as the ship sinks into the abyss.

Death and Foxes

There's often some good to be found in our increasingly entropic economy -- like a pearl in a tainted oyster. I take comfort in the cosmic joke that is our mortal life; knowing that Rush Limbaugh and Dick Cheney and everyone at Fox News will go the way of Pol Pot, Nicolae Chaucescu and Madman Muntz in due time. But even before all the chips are cashed, it's good to know that News Corp, Rupert Murdoch's media empire and the parent company of Fox, is down by the bow and taking on water; nearly six and a half billion dollars worth of water, that is.

Blaming the grim economic situation, the obvious precursors of which the Fox fabricators have been denying for years whilst mocking the "Libs" for their warnings, Murdoch told the International Herald Tribune:

"While we anticipated a weakening, the downturn is more severe and likely longer-lasting than previously thought."

Who could have foreseen that? Well I for one and other, better prognosticators heard only dimly through the angry roar of the Fox filibusterers. Remember when Fox claimed that the robust economy was being "talked down" by "the Liberal Media" and offered statistics showing the "proof" in the fact that there was more bad economic news than good?

"We are implementing rigorous cost-cutting across all operations and reducing head count where appropriate."

said Murdoch, and of course I have a list of candidates for decapitation, but before we get to feeling smug, the bad news in the good news in the bad news, is that amidst the general Murdoch meltdown, Fox News itself reported income of $428 million, which is up $91 million from the previous year. Fox News increased its operating income by 32 percent. Is this also a reflection of a desperate America's increased thirst for lies, damn lies and hysterical hatred? I'm sure that when the statisticians stop chewing on the news, we'll find that alcohol consumption has risen by a similar amount.

In any event, I'm sure that the global meltdown will some day fade into redacted and ill remembered history, but I'm not so sure about the United States of America as we know it. America is failing, Fox News is why.

Et evasi ego solus ut nuntiarem tibi.

Keep it real

"F*cking espresso, Cappuccino, we invented this shit. . . now all these c*cks*ckers are making money on it . . . It's not just the money, it's a pride thing. . . This? this is the worst, this espresso shit."

-Pauly Walnuts-


So we're sitting at this rustic, open air coffee shop in Port Salerno, looking over the Manatee pocket and the old fishing docks where slick yachts, beat up trawlers, catamarans and open fishing boats are moored. The building is a collection of old fish houses that went bust years ago when commercial net fishing was outlawed in the area. A glass blower rents a corner and a potter, and there is a gallery and some workshops -- and a coffee house that's a great place to enjoy the view, the breeze, the sounds of a harbor; maybe have a cup of coffee, eat a home made cookie, play some checkers in the shade and watch the boats come and go. It's the kind of American ambiance that attracted me to the coast and to this part of Florida; an island in the river of change; a river that's ever rushing toward commercial strip mall plastic mass produced national franchise sameness. Panama hat and Ray-Bans, flowered shirt and deck shoes; you feel afloat in the serenity, you're part of the scenery. You remember why this feels like home rather than an address.

So when a young dude dressed in Urban Black sidles up to the counter and asks, without apparent embarrassment, for an "Americano" with soy and demerara sugar, I could feel the air turn stiff and brittle as a plastic strip mall sign.

Am I wrong to single out Starbucks as a singular agent of phoniness in America? Rightly or wrongly I do just that. Of course you can't cheat an honest man and you probably can't make a pretentious ass of him either. It was all here, that sense of provincial inferiority that makes people who've never been near Europe feel good about paying more for a 20 ounce coffee by calling it a Venti even though in Italy and the rest of Europe they don't use ounces. Perhaps we could solve the problems of General Motors by having them sell Voitures because for all our narcissistic nationalism, Americans hate being Americans -- or so it seems at Starbucks.

No matter how you feel about Starbucks, I had to smile at the planned closing of 600 locations in July and the additional 300 announced this last week. Perhaps now, that piece of untouched Florida wilderness still remaining where Bridge Road crosses US1, Starbucks has been trying to get a zoning variance on will remain the home of Sand Hill Cranes and alligators and not be replaced by "baristas" (baristi in real Italian) serving up overpriced, oversized plastic buckets of Italian breakfast coffee to pretentious lunchtime provincials.

Trying to open a Starbucks in the real Italy, where people want a glass of Vino Bianco with lunch and the salad comes after the main course and no two coffee shops are the same, would be as difficult as opening a Chop Suey joint in Shanghai. To the locals, as it is with Pauly Walnuts, our phony expropriation of their culture is just that: phony.



Truth be told, I find the coffee in Vienna - and the pastry that goes with it - far better and a morning "bica" at some hole in the wall shop in some Portuguese fishing village is incomparable. It's also not separable from the matrix. I do love espresso and I do love a plain ordinary cup of drip coffee from one of those Bunn coffeemakers you see in every diner on our continent. It's authentic, it fits, it's real and as American as red checked table cloths and waitresses named Flo.

So they've stolen one more piece of America from me. Oh sure, I can still go to Dunkin' Donuts or a Waffle house and get served a cup of coffee by a waitress and a damned good doughnut too and I don't have to feel like a jackass with pretend Italian nomenclature either. You can't see the water from there though.

GOP Heeds the call

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside
And it is ragin'.
Itll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin.

-Bob Dylan-

Perhaps imitation really is the sincerest form of flattery, perhaps it's coincidence, perhaps it's desperation, perhaps it's deja vu. After five rounds of balloting, Former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele is now the chairman of The Republican National committee. Governor Steele is, for those not familiar with him, an African American and while some call him a moderate, others find him staunchly conservative. Whatever he may be, he's a first for the GOP and in my opinion, it's about time.

“It’s time for something completely different. . . . We’re going to bring this party to every corner, every boardroom, every neighborhood, every community. And we’re going to say to friend and foe alike, ‘We want you to be a part of us, we want you to work with us. And for those of you who are ready to obstruct, get ready to get knocked over.’ ”

said Steele according to ABC this afternoon. A bit reminiscent of the 1960's hit Dylan song, if lacking in conviction.

Does this represent the beginning of a new RNC? Is the old order rapidly aging, or is Steele much more of the same old song? He has been a commentator on Fox News, he lead the crowd in cries of "drill baby drill" at the 2008 convention. Is it enough that his ancestry is African to bring more minorities into the GOP or will a change in complexion not be enough of a change in everything else?

It remains to be seen, but whatever Michael Steeel is, he is not Barak Obama, much less Bob Dylan.

He's OUT!

It was unanimous; Rod's out and Quinn's in.

Bye-Bye Blogojevich, seeya later old boyavich. Actually I hope not. The defiant Rod, who was portraying himself in dramatic fashion today as a victim of his own excellence, Was stripped of his job and title this evening by the Illinois Senate in a 59 - 0 vote and Lt. Gov. Patrick Quinn, Blagojevich's two-time running mate, has been sworn in as the state of Illinois' 41st governor. I never heard him say "so help me God" either. I can't wait to see if Fox News will accept him.

Blogo commuted the sentences of two felons just before he left the building, one is a convicted drug dealer who now works as a janitor in the same homeless shelter Mrs. Blogojevich once worked at. His record will be wiped clean and he may well deserve it.

The other is a crooked real estate tycoon who was convicted of theft back in the 1980's. He recently bought Oprah's farm in Indiana, so he can't be doing all that badly. I wonder why he deserves the special favor, don't you?

Anyway, cold as it may be in Springfield, it's time to open the windows and air the place out -- and maybe to count the silverware.

Some say insurance, some say IN-shurns, some say fraud

Ever get the impression that the Insurance industry has no idea what it's doing? Well of course you have if you've ever bought insurance. I remember buying my first house 40 years ago and being told my premiums were high because of the average distances to hydrants and fire departments in my town. I got nowhere with the argument that there was a hydrant on my front lawn and the firehouse was 150 yards around the corner. As with religion and political doctrine, the reasoning always refers back to the unsubstantiated assertion rather than to observable reality.

So when I read today on CNN.com that buying a smaller car might cost you more in insurance than your megatruck, I was amused. Seems that without taking into account better braking, better handling and more stability of cars over trucks, they're assuming that people in smaller cars, particularly ones chosen for fuel economy are, they guess, driving farther and probably are younger thus probably driving more aggressively and faster and such people probably have more accidents. Is there any difference between this sloppy sophistry and rank conjecture? How many probablys to we have to count before deciding they have no idea and are just making it up to maximize profits?

It seems odd since only two years ago they were saying that SUV drivers were four times more likely to kill someone and ten times more likely to suffer serious injury because they wind up rolling in the gutter more often than Barak's bowling ball. Could it be that they have no idea and don't care? And then there are the fast cars like Corvettes and Vipers. They have to assume, they say, that such people like them because they drive over the speed limit, which I have not observed. What I have observed are SUVs with their noses up Corvette tailpipes trying to prove that they are king of the road -- and I've been observing this for decades. Iv'e observed that my Ferrari friends never take their cars out of the garage for fear of the kids with winged economy cars and Hummermoms.

And then of course there's the assumption that fast drivers cause more accidents, which hasn't been credibly supported by any facts I've seen published by anyone not connected with the insurance racket industry. The National Motorists Association, for instance has studies showing the opposite to be true.

I've also observed that on the Interstates, it's the econoboxes and pickup trucks; it's Escalades and H2's weaving at 90 plus while the folks with expensive cars cower in the right lane. Keep in mind that the demographics for supercars are similar to those for wheelchairs -- very few youngsters.

Of course they're making it all up, but since the Insurance industry is large and powerful enough to do whatever it likes, no one really can refute them or argue successfully against them, so I'll go on paying twice as much to insure my car than Hard Drinking Harry does for his jacked up pickemup or that young lady in the 8000 pound behemoth who has a cigarette in one hand and a cellphone in the other who habitually uses four lanes in a turn and rolls through stop signs. Haven't had a claim in 40 years? Never mind, our records lead us to guess that I probably might be maybe sorta in a category that would lead someone on Mars to speculate that I might be dangerous.

Drop that Bible!

When will the time come when we no longer look to religion for moral guidance? Perhaps it should have come a long time ago; perhaps it never should have begun. The idea of rules for human behavior being based on compassion never really took hold in the Western world, although lip service has been paid to the notion, and our codes of behavior seem to owe more to fear of sexuality and the terror of what might happen if someone believes differently than directed by the priestly class.

At any rate, the idea that people should be left alone to pursue happiness and restrained only from acting to harm the same right in others is essentially American, essentially secular and essentially opposite to the teachings of American Christianity. Should young people be at liberty to form strong bonds of affection without the approval of Christian authority? Do I really have to ask? The religious say no to love, the secular humanist, the believer in the American way speaks for it.

I read in Raw Story this morning that A California appeals court ruled this week that a Christian high school can expel students perceived to be lesbians. [Italics mine] Of course a Christian school or a secular private school is not a public school, but it is, at least in part, subsidized by special tax treatment. Here they are denying the benefits of liberty and the pursuit of happiness without any protest from the law and with the assistance of your tax dollars.

I don't want to get into the legality of this and I recognize that those perceived to be too fond of each other have other educational choices, but haven't we come to the point where we can recognize that religious moral authority is not imposed for the good or the happiness of humanity but for the sake of fear mongering authority and those who make a living from it? I think most of us may be more morally evolved than Ted Haggard or Pastor Muthee or Pat Robertson or the ex-Nazi in the Vatican for whom minding your business, is their business. Yet we allow them to rule us and we don't find it strange.

I find it stranger still that people who profess patriotism and pretend to promote a government that only keeps us from killing each other and stealing each other's property and little else, will also promote a government that forces us to follow the mandates of ancient, bearded, angry and probably demented men against private consensual and harmless behavior? Why is it terrible to tax the population to support the elderly and sick but fine to force us all to adhere to their religious taboos? Where is the Christian morality in this -- unless Christian morality has nothing to do with love at all.

Of course it's all rhetorical. What I'm saying is that we can have prosperity, we can beat the swords into plowshares but we will never be free to love or live in peace until we stop allowing the perverts of "the cloth" to bend us over their Bibles and have their way with us.