Thou shalt not laugh

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As the Businessweek article says,

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

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

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

Dream on

Dear Mr. Romney Willard Mitt Willard Romney WMR

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

I'm glad to hear that

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sincerely,

Capt. Fogg Fogg Capt RG banana fanna fogg . . 

Halleluja, it's the Higgs

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

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

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

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

Rocket's red glare

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three pigs for Doctor Higgs

Deus ex machina at CERN


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

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

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

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

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

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

Let them get chauffeurs

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

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

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

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

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

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

Obey in the name of freedom!

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

-Pope Leo XIII-

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

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

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

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

Upside Down

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

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

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

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

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

Shackled

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The tantrum!!

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

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

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

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

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




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

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

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

Dearly beloved

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

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

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

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

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

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

If I had a son

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Obama's gas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Act Now! No Time to Lose!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let them get pregnant, like God intended.

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

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

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

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.