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

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

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

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

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

The tantrum!!

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

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

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

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

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




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

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

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

Dearly beloved

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

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

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

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

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

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

If I had a son

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Obama's gas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Act Now! No Time to Lose!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let them get pregnant, like God intended.

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

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

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

Oh please

Marvelous Mitt must be desperate to have something scary to say to distract Republicans from the religious wedge issues the public is getting tired of. He'd rather not talk about religion anyway and he needs of course, to distract from the dumb things he keeps saying. So he's had to come up with something dumber, if not quite original.

Remember when Darth Cheney told us in solemn tones that "Obama will be tested" and that there would be an onslaught of terrorist attacks should we be so foolish as to elect him; that candy-ass, ultra-liberal crypto-pacifist, watermelon stealing coward? Well Republicans may not remember, but we all know the result - more terrorists killed than ever and that includes Osama bin Laden. I think he's passed the test.

No, he didn't take our guns, he didn't make capitalism or Christianity illegal, he didn't appoint Jesse Jackson as Secretary of State and he didn't give us a huge middle class tax increase or a confiscatory corporate tax rate. He didn't institute Sharia law. In fact he's usually done the opposite of what the Chicken Littles have been squawking about for 4 years now.

So a return to objective reality not being possible when your entire platform and your strongest base are pickled in delusion and ignorance, what option does he have but to go nuclear? That's right, if we re-elect the president, the world will be blown up in a nuclear holocaust says Mr. Bluster of the plastic face.

" If I’m president, that will not happen. If we re-elect Barack Obama it will.”

I couldn't make this shit up, but then, I couldn't make this Mitt up. I couldn't vote for him either.

“Ahmadinejad having fissile material that he can give to Hezbollah, Hamas, and that they can bring into Latin America, and that they can potentially bring across the border into the United States to let off dirty bombs here — or more sophisticated bombs here.”

Sure Mitt, Just like Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons were potentially going to be smuggled into Peoria in a briefcase even though he had none, nor the means to make them, and we had to blow a few trillion and kill nearly a million to wipe him out -- and why is Obama going to get us into a nuclear war? Why, says make it up as you go along Mitt, because he hasn't been threatening to blow Iran off the surface of the planet for even thinking about it and possibly because according to the Secretary of Defense, Iran hasn't been doing much more than thinking and blustering about building one.

"Potentially." It's such a great word to weave a plot around. Potentially I'm an NBA linebacker who writes music like Mozart and travels the world in his magic submarine fighting for justice. Is Romney potentially a President? Oh please.

Plan B From Outer Space

It's hard to observe the growing and comical chaos in the GOP without thinking of B movie icon Ed Wood and his Plan 9 From Outer Space, wherein space aliens resurrect dead humans as zombies and vampires to stop evil men from creating the 'Solaranite' bomb. With the Republican circus trying to breathe life into mouldering, uncouth candidates reciting ancient and eldritch formulae to fight the evil Bill of Rights, secularism and the Obama Bomb, it's harder and harder to avoid the suspicion that this is only a movie.

With the economy showing signs of recovery and the ability to substantiate the hysterical portraits of Obama as a Kenyan Communist, Indonesian Socialist ally of big banks, Wall Street and the World Caliphate fading, the GOP must feel like Ed Wood trying to piece together a movie with $273.50 left in the checking account and an unwritten plot. The rising star candidate and the great white hope is making such a fuss about the need for a gospel-based theocracy with sex by permission only that any platform they can cobble together at this point would be so far beyond city limits and so rickety it can't support itself much less a coherent and discernable political position.

Whispers are being heard, CNN.com writes today, about coming up with a new candidate for the GOP ticket and ditching the Chameleon, the Worm and the cut-rate Rasputin. Finding any brand new candidate with any potential of being passed of as sane or decent (if not quite qualified) is remote, as the Tea Party element and the Holy Rollers simply won't accept him any more than they did Huntsman. The rest of the black-hearted Plutocrats aren't going to support Ron Paul and even if they could bring back Reagan from the dead, he wouldn't pass muster as a Conservative in today's party. Who ya gonna call?

The prospect of an open convention with desperate delegates acting like football hooligans in Tampa this August must have Republican strategists doubled over with cramps trying to come up with a plan B before the Grand Old Barrel goes over the falls in November.

With an inability to field a credible candidate so late in the game, the voters are going to have to reconsider a blind allegiance to a party that can't run itself much less a complex 21st century superpower.

Sex. Lies and Santorum

"He is imposing his values on the Christian church. He can categorize those values anyway he wants. I’m not going to,”

lied Republican candidate Rick Santorum to an assemblage of Tea Bag idiots immediately after having categorized President Obama's "values" and his "agenda"as being

“not about you. It’s not about your quality of life. It’s not about your jobs. It’s about some phony ideal. Some phony theology. Oh, not a theology based on the Bible. A different theology,”

Yes, some phony ideal is on the agenda. A phony ideal involving liberty, Democracy and a constitution that never mentions God or gods or scriptures of any religion and declares that there shall be no religion in government. Science is a phony ideal to sanctimonious Santorum too because we all know that Senators Jesus, Mary and Joseph agree with the oil companies and that the president's job, as 'Rick' told the 'baggers, is to keep gas prices down (and the subsidies up, no doubt.)

No sir, all that Washington, Jefferson and Madison secular prattle is phony and if we're looking for full employment, a decent quality of life and personal liberty you must turn to The Christian Scriptures which forbid us to charge interest on a loan or obtain a divorce or marry whom we will or even to enjoy sex when it isn't only for making babies. Some churches I won't mention have interpreted it to demand a king chosen of God rather than an elected government, but don't bother Rick with that. It's already on his agenda.

So why is this sex-fearing, woman hating, half-witted fake theologian; this lame-brained Longinus and meretricious medievalist mewling about theology while pronouncing Ernulphian maledictions on what he pretends are President Obama's values, cursing them one by one? Because theological statements don't have to be true, you see; don't have to be supported by evidence and are easily and frequently used to do horrible things to people. Cognitively impaired, confused and historically ignorant "conservatives" seem pre-lubricated to receive ecclesiastical wisdom without discomfort and Faith invents facts as well as it rejects them to the despair of brother Ockham.

So Obama, who thinks a Harvard Law degree makes him as good as a white. Christian man, agrees with Justice Scalia that religious freedom does not legalize acts done in the name of religion and yet, conservatives still want to shove the notion that he's a radical, Liberal, Christian-hating Sodomite Commie up the national hoo-ha and true to form, the 'baggers assume the position and take it.

How can any curse suffice?

Virginia, the Rape Me State

Sic Semper Tyrannus is the motto of the State of Virginia, but as with any matters involving Republicans, a government is not a tyranny if it subjugates individual liberty to the prejudices and perverted morals of the Religious Right. I read over at The Impolitic that Virginia passed a law last week forcing any woman seeking a legal abortion to have an ultrasound examination. For those who don't know, this means that for a pregnancy in the first trimester, she must, by law, have a probe inserted into her vagina and maneuvered around by a technician until an ultrasound image satisfactory to the state is produced. As Libby points out, without that state mandate, this meets a general description of rape.

It doesn't take much to imagine the feelings, for example, of a 14 year old rape victim being violated a second time by the accursed state that murdered Lincoln and had no reservations about taking children from their mothers and selling them -- or raping those mothers for that matter. It's a state that talks a lot about Jesus and distrusts those who don't. It's a state wherein people tend to like Rick Santorum and others who have a lot to say about what consenting adults can do with what and with which and to whom -- and talk about Jesus and small government a lot.

Keep in mind, this is not an examination done for a medical reason. It's not done to protect the public from a disease or to protect the woman to whom it's being done. It's not something that one can opt out of. It's an act of intimidation and a deliberate act of humiliation. It was passed because of the religious objections of men who were elected to represent everyone, but instead represent preachers and priests -- and in a state that has just decided that a single cell has civil rights but a breathing female of child bearing age has not, can't we be excused for wondering whether these "conservatives" will either ban contraception soon or require some other humiliating procedure before allowing it?

Can't I be excused for seeing this insane drive to bring back the horrors of medieval Europe in high-tech form to a nation that was formed by repugnance for it as anything at all but Conservative?

Where is the outrage from actual conservatives? You know, those people who insist on a government too weak to do anything but leave us alone. I guess when those sentiments put them in a light that makes them seem too much like Liberals who designed a government that must leave us alone and respects the sanctity of our persons, our bodies, our homes and our rights, they scurry like roaches when the lights are switched on. They scurry because they're the same roaches who supported the horror of slavery, the obscenity of racism and are still at war with the rights of women and a government that protects them.

Conservatives, and this liberal, often decry the trend, falsely identified as Liberal, toward seeking safety by making the public helpless and dependent on authority, but it's in conservative strongholds like the secessionist states that we see just how much that obscene ecclesiastical tyranny has made the weakest and most vulnerable totally dependent upon the state in the most personal way. Small government my ass, it's the old Confederacy out of it's coffin like a putrefying zombie, its pockets filled with church money, corporate money, the money of tyrants staggering toward Washington to eat your freedom.

Mars needs women

It's an odd fact that, for some male astronauts like former Space Station resident Mike Barratt, spending 6 months without gravity produces changes in vision that often are irreversible. He went up nearsighted and needing glasses for distance and came down eagle eyed and needing reading glasses. His condition seems permanent. The phenomenon is under serious study at NASA which is concerned that the possibility of a long trip to Mars might just carry the risk of blindness. Just why it happens and whether or not it can be prevented may be, according to CNN.com, the determining question as to "whether he or any other astronaut ever journeys into deep space or sets foot on other worlds."

Prolonged weightlessness causes papilledema -- a swelling of the optic nerve for about half the male astronauts, some of whom recover and others, like Barratt do not. Women seem to be immune. Of course another question that doesn't seem to be addressed here is why we don't just hire more female astronauts? Sometimes we obsess so much about a puzzling matter that we neglect to look at obvious alternatives.

Every sperm is a baby

It will always be impossible to convince all religious people that religion isn't the mother of religious fanaticism and of the self-righteousness that makes fanaticism so dangerous. In fact they may be right in that such ego disorders seem to be a general human failing, albeit one that so often finds a home in Churches, Mosques and Synagogues -- but that doesn't soften the fear that from the frustration believers in old religions feel about the implacable advance of what I like to call enlightenment, a movement will arise like movements in the past to overthrow an age of reason and science and relative freedom.

"any action in which a man ejaculates or otherwise deposits semen anywhere but in a woman’s vagina shall be interpreted and construed as an action against an unborn child.”


There seems to be nothing in that statement that might hint it did not originate in the 5th century before the Christian era and nothing to suggest that it wasn't a measure introduced by a Republican, but alas, neither is true. Oklahoma State Senator Constance Johnson is a Democrat and she has introduced an amendment to pending Senate Bill 1433, a typical "life begins at conception" bill, that says that the resulting fetus

“at every stage of development (has) all the rights, privileges, and immunities available to other persons, citizens, and residents of this state.”

Ms. Johnson wants to extend that right to a sperm cell, although apparently she thinks egg cells are exempt -- since otherwise not getting pregnant might also be as murderous as masturbation. Still, the "every sperm is a baby" bill doesn't have a chance, but apparently Rick Santorum does and probably for few other reasons than his own ridiculous positions on interfering with private lives in the name of small government and Big Religion. Santorum has attracted a plurality of Republican loonies in Missouri, Colorado and Minnesota.

It's hard to think that Rick has a real shot at the presidency, but you know, I've been looking at Costa Rica lately.

I'm generally very intolerant of the "both sides are equally bad" arguments that depend on fraudulent accounting and false equivalence to forgive the side with the preponderance of guilt, but Geez - what does it say about Oklahoma Democrats that she is allowed to speak for them?

Campaign logic

Argumentum ad ignorentiam: "appeal to ignorance" (where "ignorance" stands for: "lack of evidence to the contrary") Argument from ignorance may be used as a rationalization by a person who realizes that he has no reason for holding the belief that he does.

Argumentum ad Obaminem: special case of above or appeal to ignorance (where "ignorance" stands for: " all evidence to the contrary") May be used as a rationalization for libel or slander or accusation without evidence or most commonly: strongly contrary to all evidence or logic. An argument from authority in the absence of authority. Used frequently by Republican propagandists.

Argumentum ad Republican: A special pleading. It's only radical when Liberals like it or conversely: that argument doesn't apply to Republicans.

________________________

Forget the Superbowl commercials or the half-time show. Forget football. The most entertaining event of Superbowl Sunday was Newt Gingrich trying to convince his audience that Barack Obama is at war with the Catholic Church. Parroting the sentiment that a secular government refusing to bow to ecclesiastical pressure as the secular constitution demands, is a declaration of war, Newt, Gingrich, appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press, Sunday, said the decision represented

“a radical Obama administration imposing secular rules on religion.”

Well I hate to bring it up, lest anyone esteem me to be needlessly argumentative, but all religious people and their organizations have always been subject to the secular law of the land and by constitutional law, none of us can be held to any religious restrictions, taboos or responsibilities by the government. You see, that's why we don't have laws about blasphemy and punishment for heretics. That's why we're not held to the Biblical command against eating Cheeseburgers or chitterlings or watching football on Sunday - or divorce which of course Newt knows as well -- just as we know by all evidence that Newt is the consummate opportunist and a veritable prince of duplicity.

Yes, of course people are very protective of their beliefs and rituals and practices and in our country as well as in most of the civilized world, they are allowed to be and protected in that right but that's only because there are no official religious laws and no special protection for church policies that do not comply with our secular laws and our rights and our protection from faith-based tyranny. Newt is following in the muddy footprints of those who continually argue against the religious neutrality and secular nature of our Republic in spite of all evidence and despite the law itself.

Please forgive me for stating the obvious and writing as if for a child, but we're talking about Newt Gingrich here and I may be talking to some who do indeed think the government should indeed take such a dim view of our personal liberty as to allow clergymen to deny us birth control or having music on Sunday or divorce or living where and with whom we please. In many places they did after all get away with that for years.

We're talking about Newt Gingrich here who, after playing with several religions in his effort to bed many women including his own high school teacher, presumes not only to speak for but to dictate Church dogma to Roman Catholics who in very large part do not agree with it.

"Every time you turn around secular government is closing in on and shrinking the rights of religious America,”

Said Newt -- who has turned around about 200 years too late. The right of "Religious America" to be the law of the land by diktat was eliminated by the first Amendment, if the rage against such tyranny by the Founding Fathers wasn't already enough to put a stop to it.

In fact, 98% -- nearly all American Catholic women who have sex have used "forbidden" birth control methods and a solid majority think the Church policy is wrong. I don't think they're going to back this flim-flam Lothario who while indulging in it himself, tried to impeach a president for extra-marital fellatio in any bid to have Washington embargo the local drug store in the name of religious "freedom." Not any more than they would have the government outlaw the kind of bed hopping, marital leapfrogging Gingrich is noted for even if they frown on it. Don't we wonder why Newt thinks Catholics are so damn stupid that they won't notice he's arguing both sides of the question?

Organized religion is about many things, but personal choice and freedom of thought has never been thought of highly, to say the least, by any of them. To have to explain to someone with a Doctorate and a writer of history books, something a slow schoolboy should know, that professed belief or membership in some religious group does not convey legal authority in the US is laughable, but of course Newt knows it. He knows a principle and constitutional law that's been around since our beginning isn't radical and it isn't about Obama. He knows he's a lair even if he doesn't know he's a disgrace. I think the voters know too.

Will the real Jesus please stand up?

“But for me as a Christian, it also coincides with Jesus’s teaching that for unto whom much is given, much shall be required,”

Said the President of the United States to a nation fulsomely fond of telling us that not only were our founding fathers fundamentalist Christians, but that our laws are really a re-statement of the Bible and that we are a Nation under God -- whatever that's supposed to mean.

Apparently it doesn't mean that a man with an African father who can't be considered a "real"American or a "real" Christian and most assuredly not a "real" president can presume to have such values in a country in which they have almost always been honored in the breach. Why that boy must think he's not only as good as the rest of us to whom America was given, but he must think he's Jesus himself if he presumes to quote from the book that belongs to us as white people.

"Someone needs to remind the president that there was only one person who walked on water, and he did not occupy the Oval Office.”

said the reprehensible Orrin Hatch (Hypocrite-Utah) at the National Prayer Breakfast Thursday.

No Orrin, those Christian values you pretend to aren't any different than Muslim or Jewish values with respect to the love of justice and our fellow humans and mocking anyone for attempting to put them into action doesn't allow one to walk on water, even if one actually is Jesus of Nazareth. Walking on, wading through and bathing oneself in shit however makes you just another lump in the cesspool and whatever magic ceremony you perform or whatever special underwear you put on, you're an enemy of everything any good man stands for whether he be Jesus or Jefferson.

Memory and Irony

The jobless rate has declined to 8.3% according to the latest reports -- well below the Reagan rate and the lowest in three years after adding about a quarter million Jobs this January alone. That's a quarter of a million more in one month than were added under eight years of Republican flim-flam economics. The markets are booming, but we can be sure to hear nothing but sneer, snark, scoff and panicked pessimism from fact-free America and its electronic Svengali, Fox News.

I'm hesitant to make too much of it or to extrapolate too far, but unlike every Republican I talk to, I am willing to remember the Bush years when the air was full of nonsense about how Democrats were pessimists and Republicans were optimists and bullish on the economy. Of course it would be fun to mock the Fox News survey that gave "proof" that Liberals were trying to damage the vibrant economy with gloomy reports during the Bush years and of course the prophets of doom were quite right although not one of Fox's friends seems to remember, because after all, this is Obama's recession and Bush had nothing to do with it and the predictably dilatory nature of the trailing indicator -- the unemployment rate -- proves that it's all going to hell any time now.

A sense of irony would make fertile fields for all kinds of sardonic humor, since with the economy steadily improving, having already this year added more jobs than were added during the entire Bush administration (unless you want to count all the government jobs created by bloating the size and expense of our government,) they're still pretending the man who inherited this disaster caused it. But if there's any essence at all to American Conservatism, it must involve total blindness to the most glaring irony. They're still insisting that continuing what brought it on would end it quickly if only we'd have elected an empty headed beauty contest runner up and a doddering old man who couldn't remember his address but was sure the crash wasn't actually happening.

And while we're talking about irony, do we care to speculate about how many would have been lost if General Motors had disappeared and how many are working now that GM is again the worlds largest automaker? No, that investment is spending, while the massive expenses of Bush's prescription drug plan written by and for the drug companies increases as the population ages isn't even to be discussed -- and of course people are only getting older because of "that Obama's policies" hard as they are to discern. If I were a Republican you can damn well bet I'd be blind to the irony too as well as the outright dishonesty.

Things are looking at least a bit better of late and at a rate proportional to the improvement, the apocalyptic predictions increase. The Mayan end times, the Rapture, the death of the Dollar and the Zombie Apocalypse hold fewer horrors than are being predicted daily as the people who insist every time they hold the White House, that the government cannot create jobs and should not try, scream themselves hoarse nonetheless about jobs, jobs, jobs, dangling that elusive carrot in front of the desperate.

It's a hell of a thing to remember well, and that's why I'm sure amnesia, like ironic obtuseness is a necessary component of the conservative mind. It's a hell of a thing to be the only one to remember that "debt doesn't matter" was the keystone of Republican economics since Reagan and right up to the disaster of 2007 because tax breaks for the people who put all their windfalls into real estate, hedge funds and offshore accounts in Luxembourg, Liechtenstein and the Caymans would boost the economy so much, the debt would wither away in Marxist style.

Jobs, jobs, jobs and debt, debt debt in the relentless Republican ostinato like drumbeats in some dark jungle night, as though debt did very much matter and matter more than the ability to pay it off -- as though paying Bush's bills and saving the financial structure of our country with a far smaller amount of money than the shill for Goldman Sachs Bush used for a treasury secretary were an invitation to disaster rather than fiscal responsibility -- as though a three trillion dollar war to be payed for by magic; massive bailout packages without accountability and unprecedented spending weren't things the Democrats were howling helplessly about for 8 years.

Increased military spending along with an amazing record of eliminating al Qaeda means Obama is "slashing the military." Allowing increased freedom to carry weapons means he's a "gun grabber." Arresting and deporting more illegal aliens than Bush means he's "pro-illegal." Giving most Americans a tax break means he raised taxes, and although every day I have to listen to some Republican blowhard telling me he hates "Obamas policies" not one has been able to come up with a policy that actually exists -- that glib trope having become nothing more than the password to the club they think every white man belongs to.

No, sure they don't remember nor do they see the irony. Like Janus, they look both forward and back to see the easiest way to slither away from accountability and as and if the economy slowly improves and the spectre of Depression recedes, they'll continue to boom and bellow and snicker and sneer without any memory of how they accused Democrats of "hating America" even though all those dire predictions we made for 8 years came true while none of theirs ever materialized.

New Rules, Old Enemies

Heresy: from Greek αἵρεσις, which originally meant "choice."


Sometimes I think that without their preoccupation with the "sinfulness" of human sexuality, all Western religions and some others as well, would be unrecognizable. For a Secular Humanist like me, it's difficult to understand this because the allegedly universal and inescapable condition of being a 'sinner' from birth is entirely separate from the commission of acts that harm others or their property. Indeed, harming others and their property is often fulsomely praised as something done in service of some rather helpless or lazy deity who would, were he able to act on his own, punish people for their very thoughts and the unhistorical actions of mythological ancestors. To many and perhaps most, even thinking about sex can be a 'sin' almost on a par with having sex without clerical approval. To some, sex and sin are nearly synonymous. God help the government that lets us make our own choices.

Perhaps the action of a number of Roman Catholic bishops last weekend won't be much heeded by the congregations to whom it was directed, but the letter, read aloud from thousands of pulpits last Sunday told the faithful that President Obama has

“cast aside the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, denying to Catholics our Nation’s first and most fundamental freedom, that of religious liberty.”

Now how has he done that? Well, by asserting that freedom of religion does not include the freedom of religious organizations to illegally deprive others of their freedom: the freedom to plan whether or not and when to procreate, the freedom to choose.

Of course the sentiment isn't exclusively Roman; evangelicals and many others seem to make a lot of noise about the first amendment being a violation of the first amendment and of course again, such cognitive contradiction, to put it politely, is the rock upon which the edifice is built. But obviously the decision of the Administration to stand by the Affordable Care Act which requires virtually all private insurance policies to cover family planning -- including female contraceptives, essentially guaranteeing near universal access to birth control, is being sold as the precise opposite of what it is. To some Bishops at least the first amendment guarantees an infringement of civil rights by religious authority. The anti-establishment clause means the opposite of what it says and it's our God given right to have our lives limited by clergymen.

“People of faith cannot be made second class citizens. We are already joined by our brothers and sisters of all faiths and many others of good will in this important effort to regain our religious freedom. Our parents and grandparents did not come to these shores to help build America’s cities and towns, its infrastructure and institutions, its enterprise and culture, only to have their posterity stripped of their God given rights"

wrote Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted in one of the numerous letters, reeking of dishonesty, illogic and lust for power -- as if freedom of religion meant ecclesiastical tyranny embedded within civil government.

What's at issue is a provision that says that unless a religious organization hires its own members exclusively, those employees: janitors, gardeners, secretaries, are entitled as first class citizens to access to birth control through their health insurers. All other organizations, including non-profits run by religious groups that hire based upon non-discrimination policies, must enact the new rule by August 1, 2013.

Now, I'm sure to be accused of being all sorts of things, including a bigot and an arrogant Humanist, but since virtually all the Roman Catholics I know seem to have a healthy degree of skepticism about the virtuousness and infallibility of Church men, perhaps I shouldn't make too much of this desperate appeal to medieval mores, but there are plenty of people of faith who don't and religious, economic and social fundamentalism -- and the stupidity on which it thrives -- are no less dangerous than when Jefferson and Madison wrote about it.

Jailhouse Rock.

"Well, victims have rights too," is the usual evasion given to the question of why the United States has more people in confinement or under correctional supervision than the Soviet Union under Stalin. Well, of course they do have rights, but it's hard to reach the notion that a victim of a crime, or the state which represents that victim has the right to do anything at all to satisfy the rage we feel when someone harms us or our property from that position. Even the harshest laws of classical antiquity were set in place to hinder the endless cycle of revenge.

Harder it is indeed to get to the level of punishment typical in our land for crimes that in fact harm no one at all: "crimes" that throughout the years include marrying outside the arbitrary dictates of dominant religions, drinking from the wrong faucet, having a beer in private or smoking the herb that makes you feel mellow and sleepy. Most hard to justify is the rage for "Zero Tolerance" that makes judges into clerks and executioners unable to apply reason or a sense of proportion as it relates to crime and punishment.

Imagine, as Adam Gopnik suggests in Mass Incarceration and Criminal Justice in the January 30th issue of New Yorker, "Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience." At least 50,000 men don't have to imagine it at the moment, they simply have to be conscious.

Although it's tapered off some recently, we've been given editorials and articles and TV harangues about how prison life is too "soft" for "Criminals" such as some teen who sent a naked picture on a cellphone to another teen and gets life in a cage -- or another unfortunate caught with marijuana who has to endure 10 or 20 degrading and terrifying years and lose his civil rights in perpetuity, but Prison life in the US is a veritable nightmare in comparison to what it is in places like Europe. 70,000 prisoners are raped in our prisons every year where HIV is widespread. Texas alone has sentenced more than 400 teenagers to life imprisonment.

My own state of Florida, with a governor who somehow escaped incarceration for having been involved in the largest Medicare swindle ever, is as I write this, trying to "privatize" Florida's prison system. Is that another way of washing conservative hands of blood or is it simply that to the conservative mind, being profitable makes it moral: a corporation locking up people and keeping the corporate bottom line healthy by squeezing convicts as well as punishing them?

Of course Florida, as many other states have done, turned to prison labor as a substitute for slavery after Liberals ended their horrific atrocities, locking up "vagrants" and selling their "slave" labor for private gain in much the same way as China is accused of when we try to seem better than they are.

" More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives"

says Gopnik and mass imprisonment has tainted our mass culture with affluent kids in shopping malls imitating prison dress and speech and tattoos. We wear our incarceration culture on the bodies of our children, like the mark of Cain.

"Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then."

Nor is it tapering off. The rate of incarceration is accelerating; tripling in the last couple of decades and with the tendency toward private slaveholder corporations, the comparison to the anti-bellum south is all the more frightening. We'r e being sold a southern sense of justice, suggests the author, and we sell it, as we sell our wars and our attacks on what we were taught were fundamental rights and even our attacks on reformers with appeals to rage. "If the accused had shot someone in your family, wouldn't you want to kill him?" asks the voice and of course I might, but fortunately for all of us, we have a system of laws, we have a civilization to prevent it. Indeed civilization exists as a brake on our base instincts, which instincts so often destroy it.

Is our current fascination with a withered government that thereby facilitates freedom in some magical way really compatible with a government so concerned with keeping all freedom away from so many people for ever expanding reasons? Or is the subjugation of such a huge number of people only a part of a vast scheme to subjugate most of us, to establish America as a vast plantation for the benefit of a very few slaveholders?

Perhaps not. Perhaps it's simply the fear in which we're all marinating in this safest period in history that's pickled our sense of justice; our fear of terrorists, dope fiends, predators, drunk drivers and heretics, but regardless of where the blame is put, we are, and continue to grow as a nation which more than any others, keeps people in cages and allows other people to profit from it.

Bring out the Bibles, bring out the guns, Jesus is coming to town

The headline in yesterday's paper summarizing the President's State of the Union message is 3/8 of an inch tall. The headline just under it, reading RICK SANTORUM RALLIES IN STUART is in bold face type and is much bigger. Welcome to the monkey house.

Santorum was here on Florida's Treasure Coast Tuesday, holding forth at the Community Christian Academy to parents and grade school students, a horror of which some are particularly proud. It's an "up-close look at politics in action," said school officials.

That live action, these politics, included a prayer by the 'Reverend' Dan Holland, affiliated with the school and the pastor of Community Baptist Church in Stuart, Florida.

"I like what he said in the South Carolina rally, where he said ' I come from a place where they have a Bible in one hand and a gun in the other'"

Rick Santorum doesn't need a script, because he really isn't saying much and with such an audience, it doesn't matter whether he makes sense or mangles facts or makes them up. Rick speaks from the pulpit and anything said Ex Cathedra will not be questioned by this crowd. Besides, it's precisely what they want to hear: Barack Obama is the worst president this country has ever had, who hates capitalism, wants to take away what God wants you to keep to yourself and is destroying our natural order of things. Don't forget this is a religion that demands that women be subservient, hints that black people should stay in their place and since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would vote for anything that hated Democrats.

Santorum's ever predictable message was about "family Values" "fiscal responsibility" and "ridding the White House of Barack Obama." One can take the last of the three as the real message since my idea of family values does not include veiled calls to armed crusade and lying about the economy.

An all-white group of 350 heard him say:

"we have to have a candidate who stands proudly, consistently, aggressively, forcefully for the values that made this country the greatest country in the history of the world."

Presumably that greatness was attained with Bibles and guns and anyone suggesting that we are in any way sinners, transgressors or less than perfect instruments of God's Christian ambitions, can go straight to Hell along with that apologist Obama.

They heard him howl about That Commie, apologist, freedom hating Obama bailing out Wall Street from the excesses and crimes the Republicans encouraged them in instead of using "free market forces" which would as any legitimate economist would likely tell you have brought that "greatest country in the history of the Universe" down to the level of Haiti. Still, the problem of galloping poverty isn't lack of resources, said Santorum, contradicting himself,

"the problem is in the home, the problem is in the churches, the problem is in the community. The people living in these woods are not the federal government's problem. . ."

Let's use poverty, disease and misery to fill the pews, because a just society is a commie, secular humanist Christ-hating society.

Perhaps he could have explained to me why the Republican's promise to provide jobs instead of food stamps while it's 'not the government's problem' isn't honest or consistent -- or how unlettered country folk with bibles and guns are going to help in the new anarchistic utopia he offers them -- but trying to present Rick Santorum as a rational candidate with any further agenda than dismantling all the rules that keep markets free, creating a new Christian aristocracy and most of all, hanging up that "White's Only" sign over the door at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is a scam and a con and a farrago of flim-flam as great as any in the history of the world.

People like me can wonder how dismantling our entire economic system, refusing to pay the bills, can be called Conservatism, or any of the other radical, ultra-Chauvinistic, denialist and dishonest rhetoric that smells more like Attila's unwashed hordes, but the blue-hair church ladies, their God smitten and brainwashed children and the rest of the angry Community Christian Academics don't seem to care. There's just something wrong out there and they don't know what it is and the sick Mr. Rick and his sanctimonious rabble are at hand to point out the enemies and heretics for the burning.

SOPA Opera

Should the Senate bill called PIPA or the House version called SOPA emerge as the law of the land (and probably a few other lands as well) odds are you won't like it, whether you're a downloader of music or a blogger who may have borrowed a photo you found on Google or elsewhere. Neither bill is there to address the concerns of the public, but rather the (you guessed it) big corporations hell bent on retaining every last crumb, every last cent of potential profit from every word or image or sound they can claim as their own in perpetuity.

In my opinion, it's gone far past any position I could call reasonable. I've given many a guffaw when nearly every image one could call art has to be blurred out when shown on television and although I'm sure an effort will be made to blame yet another corporate triumph on "the Liberals" and of course "that Obama" this "intellectual property" and "artist's rights" crusade is a trend that started twenty years ago or more. There's always a noble purpose, of course -- like protecting the interests of widows and orphans of dead artists and writers and such noble purpose often devolves into huge lawsuits like the squabble between France and Spain as to which one can be the executor of the Salvador Dali estate in the absence of any widows or offspring. I remember the difficulty of using an image of a work of art to sell it because whoever owned the rights to a long dead artist's work might sue you even though your efforts were actually supporting the price of the commodity. It's nearly always about money and lawyers, no matter what it's dressed up as.

But my disdain for monster corporations stomping all over Congress screaming "mine, mine, mine" isn't my main concern. I'm more worried about the enforcement, which seems to allow huge fines for downloading some two and a half minutes of some Cramps tune from the early 90's or, God forbid, a little night music by Mozart, but about the next increment of surveillance and the possibility of making the Internet a very, very inhospitable place for non-corporate bloggers and providers of information like Wikipedia. While people of all political persuasions dislike the idea of Big Brother watching us, perhaps too few are watching Big Brother, Inc.

People often learn from mistakes, but it seems corporations do not. Prohibition and the war on drugs and stringent gun control and the war on pornography have hurt far more than they have helped and they haven't helped very much. Draconian penalties don't reduce crime and as a great article at Bloomberg.com today points out this morning, this War on Piracy isn't likely to stop, slow down or to have any effect.

"SOPA and PIPA are just the next steps in this larger enforcement agenda. Whatever happens to them, online enforcement will remain a very slippery slope, with attendant risks of censorship, surveillance, and the loss of due process. Because nothing in SOPA or PIPA is likely to stop piracy, there will be strong pressure to keep sliding."

Individuals will be scapegoated and ruined, lawyers will buy gaudier cars and cuff links and the free flow of information we have learned to rely on will dry up while more and more ordinary citizens will be made into criminals. The inevitable failure of this new, expensive enforcement crusade will only be used as proof that we need more of it, if history is a reliable teacher, and the true danger here is that it will, and I'm certain of it, be another stepping stone to the corporate police state. These are measures the public by in large does not support, but of course the public is distracted at the moment by the Republican freak show and revival meeting -- and of course congress listens to the representatives of industry instead of representing us.

I'm old enough to remember the movie industry's attempts to block cable TV and video recorders. I'm not old enough to remember how the advent of phonograph records and later radio broadcasting would, so they said, demolish the music industry, but I do remember the push to add a tax onto VCRs to reimburse the movie studios God given right to profit. I do remember how the music industry effectively prevented Americans from owning Digital Audio Tape machines and I remember how FedEx and others insisted in adding a tax on Fax machines to stifle competition and I remember how all these things not only failed but also how in the long run some of this technology was a huge boon to industries that were terrified of them.

Face it, the Internet is terrifying to a lot of entities, many of whom don't have anything like the public interest in mind when they propose to bend it to their will or destroy it. This thing of ours has more potential for good than the printing press and the spectacle of corporations crying about too much regulation calling for the garroting of that good in the name of a guaranteed right to a profit is as disgusting as anything prompting my gag reflex these days.

Boo

"With regards to immigration policy, that those that come here illegally should not be given favoritism or a special route to becoming residents or citizens that's not given to those people that stayed in line legally,"

-Willard Mitt Romney-

One would think, if one had the fortitude to spend more than a moment watching what passes for television news, that for the last half decade or so there were nothing of more than momentary interest happening than the American political circus and perpetual campaign. Geological and meteorological calamities do get reported, but the vast bulk of air time is given over to "the candidates" and the unchallenged lies they perpetrate. There are no pauses between campaigns, no half time shows and no seventh inning stretches.

I say circus although circuses are intended to be family entertainment these days and freak shows have gone the way of Times Square peep shows, cock fights and lynchings -- and sadly, the traces of any sense of shame, decency and honesty that ever had the audacity to interrupt or question the ragemongering has disappeared.

At the South Carolina Fox News debate Monday last (and I call it debate with all awareness of the inherent dishonesty of the appellation) Mitt Romney was booed, not because of what discernible policies he may be espousing at the moment, but because his father was born in Mexico. I don't recall any booing in response to John McCain's having been born in Panama, but of course anything done or said more than ten minutes ago is irrelevant in today's Republican world and that hobgoblin called consistency is always foolish.

George Romney, Mitt's father, entered the US illegally from Mexico, which might have given a better, more decent, less ambnitious Mitt pause before making such harsh statements about not tolerating any mercy for illegal Mexican immigrants, but of course it's a racial and ethnic issue, not an immigration one despite assurances to the contrary. The name is Romney after all, not Ramirez -- and this was South Carolina, Glossolalia, Holy Ghost Power and Rebel Flags, just he way God likes it.

But the mood of the South Carolinian Republican Rabble was ugly and when moderator Juan Williams asked if it wasn't a bit insulting to minorities when Newt Gingrich spewed that nonsense about black people needing to demand jobs instead of food stamps, as though the unemployment problem were caused by laziness and a president that encourages it, the ugly mob conservative citizens booed the black moderator just as Republican snake pits at previous "debates" have booed Child Labor laws, booed a serving US soldier and cheered the killing of prisoners in large numbers.

Is it any worse that they insist on being called 'conservatives' and not snarling beasts and that our only sources of news collaborate in that farce? Is it surprising that the state of South Carolina, still unrepentant for having been the first to take up arms against the United States, would once again boo at Ron Paul's suggestion that the 'Golden Rule' so often quoted as a core Christian value be applied in US foreign policy?

" Quit warmongering, stop going to war, and treat other nations like we want to be treated. "

Hell, no! Boo the bastard! Ask not what Jesus would do, ask what Attila the Hun would do, what a tribe of savage head hunters and cannibals would do, what a pack of giggling, stinking hyenas would do while ripping and tearing at the corpse of America.

It's been suggested to me, that I should approach such people with a more polite demeanor -- that the people who have made most of human history a horror story need to be given a chance to discuss things, to debate things and that monsters and the people who promote monsters can be persuaded by kind words and reason to change.

Boooooooo!