Romney Shrugged

One casual observation I suspect of having some merit  is that people who complain a lot about some failing in others are covering up something similar in themselves.  Perhaps those who make such a constant noise about large numbers of our countrymen being freeloaders while covering themselves in self-adulation would give weight to the conjecture. Are they really getting a raw deal?

One certainly does hear more than enough fiction from the Republican Party's candidates about welfare queens driving Cadillacs and the stifling of initiative that comes from subsidized school lunches and perhaps a bit less about subsidies for business interests and of course, now we have that abominable new straw man, the 47%.

It's an American habit, and not just a Conservative habit, to dismiss, and often angrily dismiss any discussion of  factual support for political arguments and particularly examples of how our assertions fail to be born out in other countries, so of course those who support Mr. Romney for reasons known only to their subconscious minds, that 47% of Americans do not make enough money at present to pay Federal Income Tax are happy to frame that in terms of government dependency.  

Of course, as with most things you hear from Romney and Ryan, it's not true at all, finely crafted as the rhetoric might be and as effective in pushing that American middle class self pity hot button. As Ezra Klein pointed out in the Washington Post not long ago, the taxpayer supporting a family on $40,000 a year may not pay Federal Income Tax, but he's paying tax on every dollar he makes while the fortunate one ( excuse me, the selfless job creator) making $4,000,000 is likely paying  less than 35% on the whole chalupa.  As Klein says, it's phrased that way to make it seem only fair to give a break to those heavily burdened 'job creators.'  What it's not supposed to do is to remind you that the $40,000 'freeloader' is paying payroll tax on every dime up to around $100,000.  So when you look at the total family tax bill, it seems quite a different story.  The numbers make liars out of a lot of people and the burden is being shouldered by the rich and poor only it's the poor and the struggling middle who can't pay their bills because of it.  Taxes aren't cutting into the caviar budget, they're making it harder to buy the canned tuna and hamburger helper; harder to pay for college, harder to pay those ridiculous medical bills and harder to buy those new cars and appliances and houses that are the real job creators.

Not 47 percent paying nothing, but everybody paying something, and most Americans paying between 25 percent and 30 percent of their income.  Where are the freeloaders?  Where are all those hordes of freeloaders eating up the hard earned dollars of the job creating Galts?  The taxpayer earning a hundred grand pays more than the one making over a million and the poverty stricken have to pay 20% of their miserable $25K all of which they need to spend to stay alive.  Is it difficult to refrain from bad language and malediction when listening to such damaging lies?  You bet.

So they're lying of course and as usual. The total tax burden is far more equally distributed than the Republicans want you to believe and one might make a case that the people crying loudest about freeloaders are getting a better deal then they would like to admit. Perhaps there's some hidden guilt involved, perhaps not.

There is no more factual support for calling nearly half of us freeloaders dependent  upon government subsidy than there is for Ryan's 3 hour marathon times and in reply to that cynical bumper sticker I saw yesterday sneering "4 more years?  Are you out of your mind?"  Why no sir, I'm not and I'd remind you that neither intelligence nor honesty are more equitably distributed in the world than money. 

Sin and Atonement

Today is Yom Kippur and being an atheist and unobservant Jew, the fact that I remembered is unusual for me.  A collection of ritual and remembrance and appeals for mercy to some doddering old imaginary reprobate in the upper troposphere aren't the sort of things I often occupy my mind with, but for the random musings I sometimes indulge in on gray mornings such as this. 

I don't know all that much about the origins of  this holy day.  Vague memories from childhood religious school attempts at indoctrination, involve the guilt of pretending to be Christian following 1492.  I'm not sure it's quite true, but then even the true myths aren't quite honest, are they? Besides that was a few years before I was born and I never pretended not to be a Jew.

Anyway, Judaism is hardly unique in being soaked to the bone in feelings of guilt and sinfulness and the feeling of remorse for things that need not produce it; things that often never happened. There are sins we get from sexual thoughts not approved by authority ( few are) and sins we get from mythological ancestors who didn't exist and couldn't have committed them. That's more of a Christian thing, of course and even if a childless, non-Christian God might forgive you ad libitum and with regard to your subsequent actions.  We can't avoid it though, even as Jews, and prophets from time immemorial were there to tell you that every misfortune you'd think God would have prevented happened because -- well just because you're steeped in sin. Whatever happens, there's always a prophet there to cash in by blaming it on sin and with his hand out for offerings.

People will tell you that prostitution is the oldest profession, but of course freedom to exchange favors didn't originate until some priest, some prophet, learned to control his tribe by threatening them with some imaginary god; by inventing sin and selling a way to make it go away.  Give part of the hunt to God by letting the priest eat it, support your synagogue and maintain the kind of ethnocentrism needed to support the clergy and government by expiating the guilt, atoning for the "sin."

And sin, almost by necessity, has nothing to do with  harming anyone.  The original sin had to do with disobedience to arbitrary command ( he's jealous by his own admission, remember) and in particular the disobedience involved in learning about morality -- taking moral decisions into one's own hands as one takes a piece of fruit into one's mouth. It involves a forbidden improvement of our human lot for which we will be punished -- unless. . .  Upon that unless is many a church founded.

So if you're a Jew, you may be afraid not to spend today hungry and thirsty and miserable, chastising yourself for committing all those sins we surely must have committed  but not necessarily reporting to the police or the IRS or our spouses so that old whoozis in the clouds will let us live another year and you'll do it in full knowledge that there's no correlation whatsoever between ritual, sin, expiation and living another year.  After all we've made decisions and had thoughts the priests and prophets, rabbis and our relatives didn't decide or think for us and  Yahweh-in-the-sky-with-lightening wouldn't approve of us making all by ourselves.

But of course, this is a Jewish holiday, observed by many Jews simply because they are Jews and feel in need of that sort of identity for one reason or another even if it's only to set them apart from others with their own ways of expiating their innate feelings of unworthiness.

CNN's Belief Blog asks us what we are atoning for, and some of the answers gave rise to this post.  One sad response was about pushing his sister down the stairs and blaming it on the dog. Another pointed out that as a Catholic, she atoned for her laziness and impatience, as though she somehow owed some cosmic entity much hard work without asking for any return. (40 days longer than those flaky Jews as she pointed out) Perhaps that lack was somehow as bad as pushing someone down the stairs, but I'll leave the ranking of sins to the self-appointed experts. All I can do is talk about the harm one does to another. Perhaps therefore, an apology to the sister would do more good than religious ritual or the profession of a credo, but I fear an apology to the dog would be as effective in obtaining forgiveness from the infinite and uncaring cosmos.

Then of course was the writer who tweeted:

"I don't need to atone for anything. Jesus Christ already atoned for every wrong thing I've ever done or will do."

I don't know if he or she was standing on a pedestal while tweeting, but that's how I imagine it.  Forgive me if I find that to be dangerous and arrogant and a rejection of moral scruple and if I cannot imagine any mystic process by which the execution of an ancient political and religious dissenter  would free one of moral responsibility (or any trace of humility) but that's religion for you.  Chum the waters with fear of unavoidable and dire consequences and then offer a hook with a way out wrapped around it that's so entirely meaningless in moral terms it can't be dealt with by appeal to fact or reason and perhaps only with Tertullian's 'Credo quia absurdum' which, being in itself absurd really doesn't deal with it anyway.

So anyway, I'm a Jew and it's Yom Kippur and even though there are countless things I'm sorry for having done or not done, my thoughts are my business and I go where they lead me and I don't expect special favors or indulgences for not eating bacon or sewing a cotton shirt with linen thread or any of the 600 some odd commandments or for not atoning for things that never happened or can't be made better or be undone because I don't matter all that much.  It all comes to the same thing and our Earth will boil away and our Sun die and the universe disperse forever into the cold and dark and all our gods and atonements in vain, time without end.

Smoke some Tea with Bruce Tinsley

Life provides some tasty moments, even in lean  and hopeless times: delicious little bonbons like the news that the Romney campaign had to borrow $20 million last month and is still $11 million in the hole. Of course that wouldn't have happened if it weren't for that socialist Obama.  Say, maybe he can pay off that debt by cutting costs and quitting now!  Nah, he'll have to raise some revenue by going after the very, very, very rich.  Irony is sweeter than Tupelo honey.

But it's the disconnect, the discontinuity at the interface between reality and the wild and hyperbolic hurricane of principle and theory and doctrine and ad hoc explanations that makes these things so sticky, gooey sweet.

I had to laugh today at a newspaper comic strip called Mallard Fillmore that illustrates that discontinuity; bashing Obama and Liberals and free thinkers so desperately, it's obvious that Bruce Tinsley the perpetrator, has long since run out past the boundaries of the real into a world of his own where Obama is falling in the polls and Tinsley has some far better alternative to offer, but don't ask. 

Humor from the alternate reality where Bush's failures were Clinton's fault, where the Bush economic fundamentals were 'robust' and where paying off Bush's unprecedented spending spree means the debt is Obama's fault.A reality where the government cannot create jobs but that Damn Obama isn't creating the jobs we demand.

Hey, I'm four years older than I was four years ago.  Damn those Liberals!

No, sorry Tinsley, you never were funny. Bitter, angry and a bit delusional and really a bit pathetic certainly.  You've been very wrong for a very long time and you need to recognize it.  You get printed so that the papers can pretend to be balanced, so that their corporate owners can be told that their viewpoints are being served and so that the barrel scrapings, the scab picking, booger eating, shack dwelling, debt ridden 98 IQ dregs of hung over humanity might buy an occasional paper and find something they have the vocabulary to read and feel good about themselves that they too can hate that Damned Obama just like you -- find an anger bigger than their own to unite behind.

Those people

You're going to hear a lot about it today and I have to admit, there's a smile on my face this morning.  It's not because I put a lot of store in some stupid remark that may or may not be a window into the true mind of Mitt, but because I've been hoping all along that the sheer arrogance evidenced by the ballooning buffoonery of the Swaggering Right would be their downfall.  After all, it's damned hard to step carefully when you're goose-stepping. Looks like Mitt has done just that -- stepped right in it.

"There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent on government, who believe that, that they are victims, who believe that government has the responsibility to care for them. Who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing."

 Said Willard M. Romney, thinking he was still in an age when you could say things and the words would just fade away.

Romney was, of course flattering his audience as politicians always do; flattering people who like to think of themselves as special because they make or have or have inherited a good deal of money - or people who certainly would be rich if it weren't for all those freeloaders and Democrats. Build up their self-esteem,and a  good way to keep up that head of steam is to look down on others. And so Mitt reminded them that his job is not to worry about those people, which is a sideways way to say his job as president would be to worry about these people, his wealthy constituents. Remind them that Obama supporters are just looking for an excuse to pick their pockets.

And should any be troubled by Marley's chains rattling in the background, Mitt is there to remind them that those people don't rate sympathy because they all think of themselves as victims, because they depend on the largesse of the large-assed assembled patricians.  Don't worry about those people. His concern is with the 5% the 10% who are thoughtful, not the ignorant under $250K a year rabble with all their cooties.

Those 47% of course don't really live tax free of course.  28% do pay payroll taxes and we're not talking about Social Security and Medicare -- and nearly everyone pays real estate taxes directly or indirectly and we all pay sales taxes. About 17% just don't make enough money or are elderly and dependent -- those whose jobs went to India perhaps or those devastated by huge medical bills, but although there are millions of different stories, it's good to know that Mitt thinks the President's job is not to worry about them.  Let them worry about themselves.  The real problem for a president according to people like Mitt is that he and his audience have to pay taxes.  America is about us.  The business of their president is asset retention and Mitt is here to tell them he's their man -- one of these people.

Off to see The Liz

The Wonderful Magical Apology tour Is waiting to take you away over at Fox News.

"I will not and I will never apologize for America. I don't apologize for America, because I believe in America."
-  Mitt Romney -

"You know, after he went over there and apologized to them, I can't vote for that guy"

-heard everywhere and every day- 

Associated Press Fact Check would beg to differ and the Washington Post agrees that this Wagnerian cycle of Obama's Apology Tour, like Ryan's 'under three hour' marathon time -- a lie.

With the November Elections close at hand, one might expect to be hearing some concrete plans about what the Republicans might actually do about the economy and since we are not hearing some concrete plans about what to do that differ from the deed that got us into this mess, we might rightly expect that, as with Nixon's infamous "secret plan to win the war" the plan consists of  clinging white knuckled to the same course that ran us off the cliff and swept the GOP out of power.  The plan is to keep the lies coming, keep them consistent enough, outrageous enough and nasty enough to satisfy the Josef Goebbels system requirements.  Hey, it works and it got Tricky Dick re-elected.

Yes, indeed -- we all know the debt is enormous and we're told all day and all night that it's all because of  Obama's  never specified 'Policies.'  You know, those policies that have more people on welfare than ever, according to the river of e-mail I get every morning and  which isn't any more true than that he eliminated the  Democratic 'work for welfare' program or tried to keep military voters out of the polls or that "he went over there and apologized to them."  Yes, yes, "the government keeps printing money."  They keep saying it, but then the bills need to be paid and there's no new money coming in thanks to the cuts.  But remember -- for the most part those bills were run up by the President Who Never Existed: George W. Bush who actually told us the bills would pay themselves - by magic. Now why is it you haven't heard Bush quoted or mentioned for quite some time now?  Haven't heard him speechifying for Mitt, now have you?  Bush who?

The most expensive war in American history, the GWB prescription drug plan, the biggest, most expensive agency we've ever had and the large cuts to revenue which for 30 years have been promised as the magic fertilizer from which prosperity grows, haven't grown anything but the noxious Kudzu of debt and never actually were supposed to, since as Co-President Dick Cheney smilingly said "Debt Doesn't Matter."  No, it's true, no new private sector jobs were created during the Bush frat party years, the government ballooned in size and expense and so did the debt and we didn't hear a God damned peep out of Chicken Little who's clucking himself half to death at the moment.  We heard a lot of Liberal bashing though, didn't we?  And the Liberals were right though, weren't they? 

But we're not hearing it, we're hearing about birth certificates, death panels, radical Socialism and magical, mystical apology tours to 'over there' where he apologized to them.  And of course the US has never done anything it needs to apologize for, being the magically mystically greatest country since God created the Earth 5773 years ago today. The Slave auctions to Wounded knee to My Lai, we've always been angels and heroes in our own hermetic consciousness.

You're not hearing that the facts make liars out of the Fox and its friends, that 90% marginal tax rates once presided over prosperity and full employment and diminishing debt, that slashing the top bracket funnels money into the market and real estate and hedge funds and inflated bubbles which bring on busts and recessions. You're not hearing that we're paying less taxes than ever and still after decades it hasn't showed a hint of paying off.

Hell, you're not hearing anything but lies or breathing any thing but the smoke of desperation.  That Colored boy - now he's gone and abandoned Czechoslovakia, that empty suit, Commie tyrant Muslim from Africa! whines Fox News.  That smell? It's the smoke and the stink of desperation. The collapse, the bailouts -- all that began under Bush and the current candidates loved it -- and Czechoslovakia went out of existence 10 years ago before you ever heard of Mr. Obama and his apology tour over there.

So keep believing, as Liz the Wiz Cheney tells us on Fox, how he went over there and apologized to them even though he didn't, because it's all you've got if you're a Romney supporter. It's all you've got. Keep joking about how he's not an American like fancy pants Willard because the smoke would be blown away if you had any memory and were willing to use it. The curtain of slander would be torn asunder and all you'd see is the few dozen wizards burning up millions and millions  trying to make themselves very, very much richer at the expense of your future.

" The president himself has got a terrible record on national security, and it’s clearly something that Gov. Romney ought rightly to be pushing” 

Continued the Liz, as the Fox folk danced down the yellow brick road away from the fact that Al Qaeda is in tatters and the 9/11 planners including Osama are dead and there have been no more attacks on our soil.  Yes, and I'm sure he will be pushing it while bashing the health care plan he wrote and extolling all those empty shibboleths like smaller government and all that religious claptrap about morals and birth control.  What the hell else can these people do when the facts, if facts be remembered, would cast them all into the pit?

Obama killed Jesus -- and a whole lotta other stuff.

Scientists plead for urgent action to tackle the growing dementia crisis

 reads the headline in The Observer. Have they been listening to the 2012 Presidential campaign or watching Fox News?

Brit Hume of the paralyzed face; has the Botox affected his brain or has he been surgically altered so as not to grimace when he dutifully reveals what his corporate masters want you to think: that President Obama sympathizes with the people who  killed a US ambassador and some of his staff.

He loved it, Obama did. He loved it like he loved 9/11, like he'd love to grab your guns, raise your taxes and steal your chickens. He hates America and everything you hold dear and he pisses on the Bible and shits on the flag every morning before breakfast and uses them new smart meters the power company installed to sneak through the wires and  have phone sex with your wife at night.  You know, he does things -- things like the way he 'went over there and apologized to them' and other things, other policies, other histories that only happened in the Budweiser soaked minds of America's demented underclass, straining for some excuse to make it appear that they're not ignorant, demented bigots.

Yessir, Romney was right, just like Mister Brit said -- but Ol' Rom  just didn't say it right so's them libby rills would be satisfied, but hell, ya'll know that boy ain't a real Amerkin. And never you mind that ol' preacher Terry Jones  who went from roastin' weenies over Koran fires to makin' films showing us how all them other prophets like to lick Satan's privates and Jesus hates 'em all.  Just because them pagan ragheads got all exited don't make it his fault or our fault for promotin' him and stirrin' up the good Amerkun Tea Paytry-its in the name 'a righteousness.

Logic 101

Let's say it's because the truth hurts, but I really hate to be taken for stupid by people who don't know me from Adam. I would at least prefer to be given the opportunity to say or do something to prove it.

So they tried to take me for a fool last night. When my Caller ID screen flashed "Opinion Poll"  I was suspicious.  It didn't say something like Zogby or any name I would recognize, so I paused the TV and picked it up hoping to have an opportunity to express my displeasure at the illegally late hour.  I soon detected that "David" from the "polling company" was actually a computer. Didn't take any Holmesian deduction really.  If the Voice on the phone does not stumble or pause at my assertions as to his oedipal relationships it's likely that old Dave is a new Dell.

But I went along, hoping to have my shot, answering that yes, I was going to vote, yes I was certain I was going to vote, am a registered Democrat and no I wasn't going to risk divine retribution by voting for some tin horn torturer  like Allen "deport the commies" West,  but noticing that the questions all compared the Republican Party with the "Democrat" Party, I began to lose patience.

You probably aren't old enough to remember how easy it was to determine political polarity by noting how the speaker pronounced Vietnam. It rhymed with Pete Ham if you were for the glorious crusade to protect American freedom.  Curiously the same dialect discrimination obtained with our invasion of Iraq.  If it was Eye-wrack, you were for it.  But these chuckleheads can't bring themselves to acknowledge the Democratic Party by saying it right and they're too smugly stupid to notice that I might notice. They always and steadfastly and in the face of cannon fire, call it the 'Democrat' Party. 

But I digress. One might expect a careless listener of some intelligence to miss this point, but when Digital Dave asked whether my preference might lie with the Republican plan to create jobs, build prosperity and bring on a new dawn of American world domination in Jesus' name amen by getting rid of crippling business regulation and those unnecessarily Marxist corporate taxes --- or whether I might somehow, perhaps accidentally make the thoughtless mistake of  destroying the fabric of the space-time continuum by letting the top bracket rise to the point where Ronald Reagan shocked us by lowering it -- and voting for the Democrat agenda?

So would you vote for peace and prosperity or for disaster?

Somewhere in a primary school class where they teach basic reasoning skills; ( they do do that, don't they?) somewhere in the beginning pages of Logic for Dummies, there must be mention of forced choice questions. No, I don't have advanced degrees and my Greek doesn't exist. My first grade teacher thought I was not first grade material and I only had three years of calculus in College, but really.  If this reeks of stupid to me, is this the best these bozos can do?

 Somewhere in Hell, just south of the place reserved for cannibals and mass murderers there's a parking spot with a nice tin sign that reads:  THIS SPOT RESERVED FOR THE TREASONOUS BASTARDS AT ELKHURST COMMUNICATIONS.

Cursing God

Men shall clap their hands at him, and shall hiss him out of his place.

Job 27:23

I was going to begin this with "Only in a Godless universe could Chuck Norris thrive" but of course that's not true.  Perhaps there is a God like YHWH who has made another cynical bet with one of his drinking buddies that a nation claiming to be Godly and "under God" and to be possessed of divine virtue and guidance and "values" would reject evil counsel.  If so, my money is on the Paraclete and not on that Religious-Right parrot Norris.

In a  video released this weekend, Chucky Cheesus, with his wig on his head and his wife by his side and looking like a talking armpit, told those foolish enough to watch him that:

 “If we look to history, our great country and freedom are under attack . We’re at a tipping point and, quite possibly, our country as we know it may be lost forever if we don’t change the course in which our country is headed.”

Yes, things like taking care of the old and infirm and helpless children will certainly do that or daring to tax people like Prince Romulus and his Court Jester Ryan as much as we tax my gardener.  If we   dare not to reject the African/Indonesian born Antichrist and his evil plan to salvage Democracy from God's own Ecclesiastical Christian Feudalism.  Indeed, as the nitwit Norris claims:  the only reason the Evil Obama was elected is that God's own martial artists stayed home, doubtless rolling and gibbering on the floor licking rattlesnakes instead of  following the Idiot's Crusade down to their holy polling place to elect a hypocrite whore of a candidate who couldn't remember his own address but was able to parrot anything the Billionaire Electors and pious pimps of God told him to do to gain high office and like Pilatus, serve the needs of Empire.

Yes sir, if the vicious Roman occupation of Judea had had state managed health insurance, Mary would have aborted Jesus for sure said the martial arts messiah, his capped teeth clapping together through his crotch-like facial hair. But not, of course if the Romans had used the nearly identical Romney version.   If this makes your head spin, you must be some kind of heretic who has forgotten the mysterious ways of God. Have you forgotten that the more something stinks of bullshit and deceit, the more redolent is it of  sanctity?

Yes sir, we're in for "a thousand years of darkness" says Norris' familiar, Gena, quoting the Great Buffoonicator St. Ronnie the Reagan, praised be his name -- even though Reagan, blessed be his memory, raised the evil taxes most high and may have cut a deal with the Ayatollah and facilitated the rape and murder of nuns and other innocents.  A thousand years, even though Obama the Unclean hath not done these things nor banned he any sacred guns as did Bush the Elder.  It's not the facts that Damn the evil Obama, it's the "policies" we tell you about in our moronic maledictions but never mention specifically, lest truth intrude.

A thousand years of darkness, perhaps much like the darkness pre-Enlightenment Christian world enjoyed in Europe under the domination of the Church and all its pomps. 

A thousand years of darkness after those Democrats "enshrine Islamic moral codes into US law"  and turn the Boy Scouts gay.

Sure, there could be a God.  He could be hardening the hearts and forcing the stupidity of these pusillanimous Pharaonic pretenders in order to destroy them, but I suggest that  we don't wait for waters to part or for manna from heaven nor should we wait for 40 years to get to the polls. By all means let's not wait for that Thousand year Reich Norris dreams of.  These people are evil and if you don't like such crapulous, worn and loaded usage, lets just call them dishonest, deluded and  demonstrably dumb. When you hear them talk about God, know they're talking about a different entity than you might expect and that the praise of God, in their mouths, is a curse.

Your name, so long the last word of the Savant, the sanction of the judge, the force of the prince, the hope of the poor, the refuge of the repentant sinner,  -- this incommunicable name I say, henceforth an object of contempt and curses, shall be a hissing among men.

-Pierre-Joseph Proudhon-

Tampa and the will to power

As I've been saying since Richard "you sure as hell are a crook" Nixon departed the White house and the Republican War on Truth began, if the Republicans accuse their opponents of something, you can be sure not only that it isn't quite true, but that the accusation is an attempt to distract from their own guilt.  So when the war criminal Allen West disgusts us with the accusation that the Democrats are "the most racist party I've ever seen in my life" we know the opposite is true.

And why doth West protest? Why because the press isn't showing him the respect his hypertrophied ego demands and why would anyone detest the torturer of innocent civilians; despise the accusations that Democrats are Nazis and Communists (at the same time no less?)  It could only be that he's got dark skin, of course. 

And then, there's Paul Ryan, the delight of Tea Perverts everywhere who enlightens us with lies like:

 "And the biggest, coldest power play of all in Obamacare came at the expense of the elderly. ... So they just took it all away from Medicare. Seven hundred and sixteen billion dollars, funneled out of Medicare by President Obama" 

when it isn't actually true -- the cuts are in payments to hospitals, not in coverage to individuals. The cuts are savings  while Ryan's plan would actually deprive Medicare recipients of coverage.  Paul Ryan is a liar, but what did you expect?  The truth would ride out of town with him on a rail and covered with feathers.

And then There's Paul Ryan howling like a damned soul about the "corporate welfare" that was the stimulus package. Welfare and Communism and all that, even though the Republicans asked for a much bigger package and with no requirement to tell us who was getting what - even though Ryan stomped his feet and whined and begged for even more money for Wisconsin companies.  Paul Ryan is a lying, duplicitous, forked tongued son of a bitch, but I repeat myself.  I already said he is a Republican candidate.

And then there's Paul Ryan, the con man, the liar, the swindler, the bearer of false witness -- there's Paul Ryan blaming Obama for the closure of a Janesville Wisconsin plant that was shut down before Obama became president. Ryan, following in the tradition of accusing FDR of  causing an economic crash that started three years before he was elected. And there's Ryan condemning from the platform in Tampa that Obama disregarded the advice of a bipartisan debt committee that Ryan himself condemned. Did I mention that Ryan is a Republican?  Lying is what they do, whether it's lying to start wars, lying about how top bracket tax cuts don't cause recessions when they do and raising them prevents growth when the opposite is true.  That's what history says, but hey, you can't believe history -- history is Liberal. Hell you can't even hear History, it speaks in timorous whispers while the Right Wing roars and threatens and rages from every screen, from every radio speaker and every corporate owned newspaper.

But why lay the lies on Ryan alone? They're all liars and pickpockets and Romney has to take responsibility for it all.  He has to explain why taking the $716 billion in Medicare savings achieved by Obama and spending it will reduce spending and why reducing revenue will pay off the debt. He has to give us more than vague generalities and slogans and promises that are negated by other promises, but he can't because what he says is designed to "energize" people who know nothing and prefer to remain angry at their chosen scapegoats.  

But of course the truth would lose the election for him and of course the New Right isn't about fixing the country anyway, it's about power.  It's not about you or your life, your liberty or your pursuit of happiness; it's about power, power and more power and such such concentrated power that answers only to money -- power over a country that is more and more irrelevant, increasingly deluded and ignorant, ever more bellicose and yet has the power to destroy the world. 

The eye of the idiot

"For dogs have encompassed me; a company of evil-doers have inclosed me; like a lion, they are at my hands and my feet."

 On August 28, 1963, a year short of 50 years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King told us he had a dream.  I wonder if anyone still does. 

Watching and listening to the madness growling and the lies howling across the country, I have mostly nightmares.  If  "America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned" it's now intent on defaulting on any promise it has ever made to anyone but the corporate robber barons, the rabid Christianist insurgents and the anarchists.

We have a self described Anarchist group of US military personnel, a militia plotting to overthrow the government by violence, some members of which are now on trial for murder. We have the most popular cable news network inventing calumnies against our elected government and some of our wealthiest citizens and businesses spending billions on so distorting the truth that we can't remember how we got here and are eager to repeat everything we did to cause the two largest economic catastrophes  in the last hundred years. We have widespread attempts at voter suppression.

No, you can't get to the truth easily these days, but you can bet that if the Republicans are screaming about all the things the demon Democrats and the Beast Obama have done, are doing and are about to do at any minute, you can be sure the truth is that the Republicans have done the same or are engaged in doing it or plotting it.  Yesterday I received a thick envelope in the mail, ostensibly from John McCain but certainly written by others.  Designed in every way to generate a sense of emergency, it insisted that I take the opportunity and use the express mail envelope (postage not included) to mail $2000, or maybe a little less if I want to risk an accusation of Marxism, as AN EMERGENCY DONATION to "stop the billion dollar Obama fundraising Juggernaut." 

Whether or not Jesus cares enough to weep any more, I do.  I do at least when the growing rage allows it.   Yes, yes, I know.  You poor victims of truth, justice and common decency will tell me as you've been doing since you turned the most prosperous nation on earth into the largest debtor with a cynical smile on your face -- you'll tell me I'm simply wrong and generally stupid because I'm angry at the "legitimate rape of America."

It's the logic of liars, the argument of the evil and if God has forsaken us, or left us behind, which may be a better translation, we're still too stupid to know it. We're legitimately stupid enough to see God's will in our own evil that we nod together like hollow bobble heads and agree with the Robertsonians that God saved the Republican convention from getting wet but if an asteroid fails to fall on the Democratic convention, it will mean nothing.

But in a way, that's true. This is America and meaning is in the eye of the idiot.

Matt and Mitt

And all that shit.

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

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

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

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

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

OMG!

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

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

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

The legitimate Rape of Freedom

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

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

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

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

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

You've got to be kidding, part III

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

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

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

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

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

Damn the lies -- part II

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

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

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

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

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

You've got to be kidding -- part II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You've got to be kidding

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

Damn the lies

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keepin' it white

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

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

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

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

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

All's fair in fraud and felony

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

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

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

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

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