WHAT MY BRAND NEW 2010 PRIUS TAUGHT ME ABOUT BLOGGING

My new Prius Hybrid is two months old and I am pleased to report: It performs as advertised. Your eco-friendly Octopus gets 50 miles/gallon on average, about 40% more fuel-efficient than my last car. There is one more benefit I did not anticipate: Fewer traffic violations. That’s right!

According to a recent survey, hybrid drivers get 78% fewer speeding tickets, 75% fewer violations for running lights and stop signs, 82% fewer violations for failing to yield, and zero citations for driving the wrong way down a one-way street. Zero. Zip!

For years, I have been a PhD candidate in the Professor Henry Louis Gates School of Driving, earning myself a perfect grade-point average of four violations per swear word. What I have learned: A beer and a teaching moment can turn careless drivers into instant law-abiding citizens.

All is not perfect, however, in the world of hybrids. Driving one will not dissuade bloggers from posting too much text or replying “me too” in response to a “me too” comment. Furthermore, if you are “recklessly clueless,” chances are your posts will have 400% more reader comments than if you are “cluelessly reckless.”

One caveat - the bipartisan model (pictured above) has been discontinued … Octopus got the last one. However, Toyota has announced a GOP model that will be even more fuel-efficient. It has no engine but two trunks, which means you will have to get out and push.

The sickness unto death

Dealing with the morning e-mail hasn't been a pleasure for a long time and it is certainly getting worse now that Obama is in office. Yesterday was something of a record for Obama Derangement Syndrome messages but remarkably, I got the chance over lunch to confront the jovial fellow who sent me a number of them. I had already sent detailed refutations of all of them and I asked him why he didn't bother to check out the fantastic claims before sending them to his large mailing list -- particularly after I had debunked virtually 100% of what he'd sent me over the last few months.

"I just don't like what this administration is doing,"

said he. Of course I don't either, but I'm sure we're talking about different things.

"Oh well, I've never heard of a N*gger keeping a job for 4 years anyway."

said he with a smile as we parted. I've known the man for years, a retired engineer for GM. You wouldn't think him a stupid man or in any other way unusual. Well anyway, I thought I knew him. What evil lurks in the hearts of men? If the Shadow knew, he'd commit suicide.

Among yesterday's viral outbreak was the story warning me about the "secret" House bill: HR1388 "they don't want you to know about." Shortly afterward the outraged notice that it had just passed (back in January) "behind our backs" and that Obama had added on (what?) a provision providing tens of millions to settle thousands of Hamas terrorists in the US. Of course it wasn't broadcast by the Liberal media, always trying to pull one over on us.

It's a small matter to look up the bill which actually was signed in April and read that it has to do with summer jobs for teens and veterans benefits, but who looks? Not the ODS sufferers.

Then there was the one about the millions and millions and millions "Queen" Michelle was wasting on various repugnant and narcissistic projects.

Next came the one on Henry Louis Gates, whose CV was blended together with W.E.B. DuBois' to show that Gates is a Communist Insurgent bent on a black takeover of the United States and of course the conclusions -- why should we care about his civil rights or the Constitution at all and why does Barak Obama love this man so much?

Then there is the nefarious Page 425 of the Obama health care bill which forces every citizen to undergo forced counseling about the suicide option so as to reduce the surplus population.

The rest of it? Well I have my limits. I deleted it all but I can't delete the feeling that The United States of America cannot survive. Certainly the party that creates this psychotic mythology and refuses to disown it doesn't deserve to survive, but what force can counter this kind of well funded and fanatical evil?

Regulation is bad for business

One of the favorite targets of libertarians and "smaller government" arguments is the FDA. The market should, could and would preserve us from tainted, unsafe and worthless products, just the way it didn't in the 19th century. Perhaps there's some truth to that, but the store window where the idea is sold doesn't contain a display of all the poisoned, sickened and fleeced consumers waiting to be redeemed or resurrected while the market forces grind on in the darkness of unregulated capitalism.

Of course the FDA, or what remains of it after years of Republican misrule can't do much better it seems and the free press that's supposed to be an agent of illumination in a libertarian utopia doesn't care to try. Witness today at CNN.com an article telling us that products widely being sold as steroid free, body-building aids do actually contain dangerous synthetic steroids and can, in several ways, kill you. Thanks CNN.

Of course prominently displayed on the home page is a photo of a grotesquely, steroidal male torso which links to an ad for the very things the FDA is telling people to avoid like the plague they apparently are. "Safe, natural, legal!" Never mind that little liver failure thing.

The solution is clear. We really need to get rid of the FDA and that damned government regulation - bad for business, don't you know.

Angertainment

It's the biggest thing in America and Fox News is the dominant purveyor. Their sole purpose is to select, modify, slant and sometimes create stories to make you angry at people or things selected by their owners and sponsors.

Using animatronic devices like Britt Hume, whose synthetic skin hangs from it's metal underpinnings which in turn no longer have the ability to mimic human facial expressions, Fox sells anger and unlike our automobile industry they can come out with a finished new product in minutes.

The current angertainment opera has to do with President Obama's seemingly hasty and harsh comments about the Cambridge Massachusetts police force. That occurrence has been welded together with another twisted work of fiction in which he has been touring the world "apologizing for America" to come up with the logically contradictory premise that he is "arrogant" and too arrogant to apologize even though he apologizes too much.

The subtext is that the country never has done anything it shouldn't have and we are always perfect because of our military strength and number of privately owned Hummers and that of course is a position broadcasting megawatts of arrogance like some annoying beacon.

Of course that Obama actually has apologized and in addition arranged to mediate between the two contestants goes unnoticed by the corpse-faced Hume and to the Fox Flock who only listen to the Fox product, that never happened and so presto chango, the wimp Obama becomes the arrogant Obama all at the same time. It's all angertainment.

Who cares that self contradictory arguments based on little but manufactured tribal anger are by nature false and in effect are crippling and disuniting our country? It's angertainment and it makes money and it takes power and it feels so good to be part of an angry tribe with an enemy to be attacked!

“The president could have said ‘that was a stupid thing for me to say,’ but he can’t say that for some reason"

said Hume yesterday. It could also be that Obama's actions speak louder than Obama's words and it could also be tragically humorous since he follows the most arrogant president in our history who admitted no fault while dragging us all to ruin and lawlessness. Of course Hume and whoever runs his software never wanted you to be angry at Bush who apologized for nothing. They wanted you to be angry at his critics and they remain far too arrogant to sum up their entire malignant war on truth by saying "that was a stupid thing for me to say."

Fox 2

The call for CNN to fire Lou Dobbs has been spreading, from SPLC to Media Matters and of course The Swash Zone. Although there have been a few encouraging signs, like a memo from CNN President John Klein to Dobbs' staffers saying that:

"It seems this story is dead- because anyone who still is not convinced doesn't really have a legitimate beef."

Dobbs is still far from being dead and far from being fired.

As Greg Sargent writes in Plum Line, Klein's position is that CNN is off the hook since they've already reported the truth on other programs -- and even on Dobbs' show while he was gone. What he's apparently saying is "we report, you decide." As at Fox News, it appears that the technique is to give you some lies, some distortions and some truth - just enough to make the political point of view seem valid -- and then "let you decide." In short it's just fine to broadcast anything, even if proved false, even if it jeopardises the country and aids it's enemies. They don't feel they have to side with honesty at all. You decide. Enquiring minds want to know.

John Klein pals around with terrorists and Lou Dobbs was born in Guatemala and is not a citizen and both are registered agents for North Korea -- I can't be sure they're not, after all. You decide.

In an interview with Klein, Sargent was told the objection to CNN's repeating scurrilous, unfounded lies with respect was all political.

“I understand that people with a partisan point of view from one extreme or another might get annoyed that certain subjects are aired.”

Truth is an extreme position and truth is partisan and so lies should be equally respected. Maybe it's not enough to fire Dobbs. I'm taking advantage of my television's ability to block channels and as of now CNN is outta here. I also think it's worth writing everyone that advertises there.

FOR CAPT FOGG

I picked up my new truck today at the dealership. Due to a defective wheel, we ended up at the dealership most of the day and finally made it home at 7 pm, but that's another story...

The story in this post is about :

This pristine 1953 Buick Roadmaster 2 door Skylark. It is all original..

And the reason both the interior and exterior are in such great, original condition is that this car has only 11,000 original miles!

It belonged to a woman whose family owned a Buick dealership in Greensboro, NC. It was kept on display in the showroom and only driven by her in parades or on certain holidays.

When she died and her children took over the dealership, the car continued to be kept in the showroom but once the grandchildren took over, they sold the dealership to the owner of the dealership I patronize and threw in the Buick for a song.

Needless to say, it is not for sale, but we can dream about it!

JOIN THE CALL TO OUST LOU DOBBS

There was a time not long ago when broadcast news was considered fair and impartial, when news anchors did not abuse their positions of trust to advance a personal or partisan agenda. No longer.

These days, news stories are no longer reported with objectivity but shrink-wrapped inside the bias of reporters and their corporate employers. News is editorialized, politicized, and hyped by talking heads eliciting the phony hysteria of a game show. The news, and our supposed responses to the news, are pre-packaged upon delivery as if citizens can no longer be trusted to make their own judgements.

In recent days, Lou Dobbs has joined the ranks of birth certificate conspiracy theorists, alleging that President Obama is not an American citizen and may even be undocumented. Of course, other CNN reporters have investigated these claims and found the infamous birth certificate exactly where it is supposed to be … on file in the State of Hawaii … along with birth announcements in the local press.

But these are not enough to dissuade die-hard conspiracy theorists, who will not be deprived of any opportunity to undermine Obama’s legitimate claim to the presidency. Like all conspiracy theorists and delusional nutcases hearing voices in their heads, Lou Dobbs dismisses the evidence (even the investigative reports of his own colleagues who have confirmed the existence of a valid birth certificate). Worst of all, Dobbs infers that Obama’s actions as president may be deemed illegal and therefore null and void.

Yesterday, Dobbs called his critics:

"limp-minded, lily-livered lefties"

... who attacked him only because he "had the temerity to inquire as to where the birth certificate was and why the president of the United States would not turn over that birth certificate to the national media and end the noise."

Dobbs’ epithet is an insult to the 69,456,897 Americans, a 53% majority, who voted for the President. This goes beyond crazy. This is a prelude to inciting insurrection, not the province of ethical journalism. And that is why it is time for Lou Dobbs to go.

If you feel as I do, please take a moment to write a letter to CNN calling for Lou Dobbs’ dismissal, names and an address below:

Jon Klein

President

Richard Davis

Executive Vice President

News Standards and Practices

CNN Worldwide

190 Marietta Street (1 CNN Center)

Atlanta, GA 30303

I sent my letters via registered mail – return receipt requested.

--------------------------------

Update (4:00 PM): The Southern Poverty Law Center has written to Jon Klein, President of CNN, demanding that Lou Dobbs be removed from the air. Here is the published letter reproduced in full:

Dear Mr. Klein,

As an important and respected news organization, CNN has a special responsibility to ensure the accuracy of its reporting. We have written to you before about our concern that Lou Dobbs repeatedly fails to live up to this standard in his reporting on immigration. Now, Mr. Dobbs is again trading in falsehoods and racist conspiracy theories, questioning President Obama's American citizenship.

On the July 15 edition of "Lou Dobbs Tonight," Mr. Dobbs questioned the official certificate provided by the president and the State of Hawaii and complained that President Obama has not made public the "original document." On his radio program, Mr. Dobbs has repeatedly questioned the president's fitness for office, demanding he "show the documents" and, at one point, jokingly suggesting President Obama may be "undocumented."

The truth about the president's birth is not in dispute. It has been verified by Factcheck.org, among many other serious news organizations, and his official birth documents have been made public. CNN itself has repeatedly reported on the falsity of the claims of the "birthers," and the network's esteemed legal analyst, Jeffrey Toobin, recently called those claims "a joke." As you know, even Mr. Dobbs' frequent fill-in anchor, Kitty Pilgrim, debunked the birthers on the July 17 edition of Mr. Dobbs' own CNN show. The fact that Mr. Dobbs suggests otherwise on CNN -- while real CNN reporters tell the truth -- is both deplorable and an embarrassment to all serious journalists.

As he has in several other instances, Mr. Dobbs, in taking up the birthers' claims, is adopting an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that originated on the radical racist right. As Gawker.com has reported, this particular conspiracy theory was first developed by an open anti-Semite and circulated by right-wing extremists who cannot accept the fact that a black man has been elected president of the United States. Among its adherents was neo-Nazi James von Brunn, the alleged murderer of a security guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., this June. Von Brunn had helped spread the birthers' claims on the Internet and attacked the "dishonest & conspiratorial Media" for not taking them up.

This is not the first time Mr. Dobbs has pushed racist conspiracy theories or defamatory falsehoods about immigrants. We wrote you in 2007 to bring to your attention his utterly false claim that 7,000 new cases of leprosy had appeared in the United States in a recent three-year period, due at least in part to immigrants. (The real number, according to official statistics, was about 400. Mr. Dobbs took his spurious information from the late right-wing extremist, Madeleine Cosman.) In addition, Mr. Dobbs has reported as fact the so-called Aztlan conspiracy, which claims that undocumented Mexican immigrants are part of a plot to "reconquer" the American Southwest. He has suggested there is something to a related conspiracy theory that claims the governments of Mexico, the United States and Canada are secretly planning to merge into the "North American Union." He has falsely claimed that "illegal aliens" fill one third of American prison and jail cells. And Mr. Dobbs has routinely disparaged, on CNN's air, those who have had the integrity to point out the falsity of these and similar claims.

Respectable news organizations should not employ reporters willing to peddle racist conspiracy theories and false propaganda. It's time for CNN to remove Mr. Dobbs from the airwaves.

Sincerely,
J. Richard Cohen
President

Same old

"marijuana is “dangerous” and “has no medical benefit,”

says our new "Drug Czar." What the hell our Republic is doing with Czars at all mystifies me, but no more than these baseless statements made contrary to evidence. He's not a doctor, he's not a historian, he's not a toxicologist or statistician: he's a cop.

Former Seattle, Washington police chief Gil Kerlikowske seems to me to be the worst of President Obama's appointments and it leads me to wonder whether he put any thought into the matter, or chose him to appease the gigantic, bloated and quasi-fascistic anti drug industry. If it's the latter, then the irony of the observation that it was in large part to keep the gigantic anti-alcohol industry employed that Cannabis was made illegal in 1937 with forged medical testimony and fabricated stories about brain damage published by William Randolph Hearst who hated the hemp growers because they were lowering the price of wood pulp that he was heavily invested in.

Back when it was fashionable to be logical, or at least it wasn't proof of criminal intent and religious heresy, arguments based on first principles could be challenged by petitio principii or "begging the question." Just how does this sneering Barny Fife know there is no medical benefit when Physicians insist there is -- or that it is dangerous when physicians say it isn't? What makes it so dangerous that it is the most restricted substance in America -- more than botulotoxin or Plutonium or nitroglycerin?

We're back in an age of faith however, but at risk of sounding like an infidel, I'd like to ask our Czar here for a shred of peer reviewed evidence and I don't mean the opinions of Cops. I'd like to ask Mr. Obama just what the hell he was thinking about or whom he was bowing to when he decided to put some cop in charge of public morality as well, but the chance of getting any answer is so remote it isn't worth wasting time on --especially in a country where you get a knock on the door if you ask too much.

Ron Paul -- in the tradition.

Why does Ron Paul have to sound so damned reasonable? Why does he sound so much like I did in the late 60's? The party he somehow belongs to has been telling us we can't afford anything but wars for as long as I can remember and most of them, including the metaphorical war on drugs have produced no discernible benefit to our security or prosperity. Since much of the equipment we bought at irrational prices isn't suitable for any threat facing us, why the hell don't we stop doing that and spend the money on health care?

“Even though I have my ideal system I would like to see, with the government out completely — because that would be a much better system — that’s not going to happen. I’m realistic.”

Pragmatic, realistic, flexible and non-dogmatic? Stop it Ron -- you're killing me!

"I would cut from these trillions and trillions of dollars that we have spent over the years and bring our troops home so that we can finance it [health care].” Said Paul on CNN

Is that Dylan I hear in the background? No, not really, but it's about time that someone from the GOP, even if he's not really one of them, mentioned those trillions and trillions when complaining about the Democrats' big spending, and it's stunning to hear approval for Obama's curtailment of the F-22 fighter program at least as a first step. Of course he believes we can eventually wean ourselves away from such government health care programs and says "freedom" will produce better coverage than a bureaucracy.

Having worked for many years for insurance companies I see their bureaucracies as more expensive, less honest, more reckless and sometimes quite malignant, so I'm not so sure I agree. Still Dr. Paul is certainly not a war lover, has the courage to say it out loud and that's novel. All in all, when he described RonPaulSingles.com (”We put the ‘love’ in revolution”) the dating website for Paulistas on American Morning yesterday:

“It sort of fits a famous slogan that I sort of liked, which says ‘Make love not war,’"

I was inspired to dig out the John Brown gladiator sandals I used to wear back in the day. The times they are a'changin' you know.

perspective please.

Here we go again. Some group called the Violence Policy Center has released statistics showing that in a 23 month period 44 US residents were killed by people legally carrying concealed weapons and therefore "the violence" is too much to bear and we must ban the practice of allowing private citizens to bear weapons. Perhaps my math is faulty but I think in a country of 300 million people, this translates to a 0.0000075% chance of being shot and killed in any given year by someone with a legal concealed weapon permit. That's quite a bit less likely than an innocent person being killed by the police either as a victim or a bystander and it suggests that private permit holders have a safer record than the police.

No figures were given with regard to the number of lives saved by legally owned guns, but in my small county of 130,000 people several have been this year so far by thwarting home invasions, and of course shooting deaths in Florida have declined steadily since the State started issuing licenses and instituted the "castle doctrine." Overall, shooting deaths have declined over the decades and that includes shootings of police officers in the line of duty. Yet the beat and the myth of escalating violence go on.

I don't feel like doing all the work, but I'd like to see how many people die in ER waiting rooms every year because they can't get insurance. I'd like to see how many people are shot by drug gangs and more than anything I'd like to see how many innocent people are shot by the police. I'm willing to bet that more people are killed by MADD members driving SUVs while talking on the phone.

Of course the Flu claims about 36,000 lives every year and cars even more. Cigarettes and alcohol? Well, you know. More people are killed every year by lightening in Florida alone and we're not closing the golf courses in a hysterical panic.

At the risk of being called a "gun nut" I take a vastly higher risk of dying or of killing someone else every time I take the boat out -- or the car for that matter and I have to conclude that our friends at the Violence Policy Center are proceeding from the conclusion that guns are so frightening to them that the right to self defense against violent criminals is washed away by their phobia and so they must grasp at these self contradictory arguments and fallacious conclusions like a drowning man at straws.

Yes, yes, the NRA -- the Gun Lobby. Everything including the ancient right to self defense is the fault of "the gun lobby." Forget not that that worn out straw/bogey man only exists because people are tired of being forced to accede to other people's phobias and it has such clout because it has so many individual, dues paying members. Much more of this twaddle and they'll have one more.

THE SOUL MURDER OF MICHAEL JACKSON AND THE CULTURE OF VICTIM BLAME

If ye endure chastening,

God dealeth with you as with sons;

for what son is he whom the father chasteneth not?

But if ye be without chastisement,

whereof all are partakers,

then are ye bastards and not sons.

(Hebrews 12:6-8)

Celebrity gossip and tabloid news have never interested me. After weeks of nonstop Michael Jackson media noise, I made myself a promise to avoid the subject … until this caught my attention:

"How often would he beat you?" Martin asked.
"Too much," Michael revealed.
"Would he only use a belt?" Martin asked.
Covering his face, Michael replied, "Why would you do this to me? No, more than a belt."
"I was scared, so scared that I would regurgitate," he added.
"What would produce that sort of reaction in you?" Martin asked.
"His presence, just seeing him," Michael said.

This dialogue is from a 2003 interview conducted by Martin Bashir. Here is Michael Jackson revealing a stolen childhood when he was the youngest member of the Jackson Five … beatings by strap and metal cord, rehearsals run like military drills, memories of being locked in closets, of being told by his father that his nose is “fat and ugly.” In short, his was a childhood marked by physical and emotional abuse, fear and humiliation, and ultimately trauma.

For years, media focused on Wacko Jacko, the Freak. A leering public witnessed his Dorian Gray transformation from child star to grotesque. Tabloid gossip condemned him with rumors and innuendos, maligned him for his flamboyant self-indulgences, and vilified him long after a jury acquitted him of child molestation charges. The real story of Michael Jackson is not about these sensationalized tabloid accounts but about the long-term consequences of child abuse and our celebrity culture that engages in victim blame. Why should we care about the tragedy of Michael Jackson’s life and his inner struggle?

The eminent child psychologist, Alice Miller, has waged a lifelong crusade against “poisonous pedagogy,” an outmoded parenting style aimed at breaking the will of children and turning them into obedient subjects by means of coercion, manipulation, and cruelty.

“Spare the rod and spoil the child” is an example of what Miller calls the burden of inherited wisdom that inflicts strict upbringing upon diabolical offspring for the purpose of forcing submission. Unlike adult survivors of abuse and torture, children do not always recount what has been done to them. Often, they feel shame. Sometimes, their memories contrive to forget their torments or deny or repress them outright. Nevertheless, those memories are preserved inside the victim in excruciating detail … only to emerge later in bizarre, seemingly irrational, or even violent behaviors.

When a cruel upbringing is represented to children as righteous and proper, they will grow into adults who will avenge themselves without qualms by inflicting the same cruel practices on their own children or charges. Society will revere and commend these newly minted authoritarians as upstanding, God-fearing enforcers of the community standard. Thus, sadism is allowed to originate, flourish, and pass from generation to generation under the cover of piety and patriotism and always accomplished with an injunction:

This is for your own good.

In her crusade against cruel childrearing practices, Miller reminds us that it takes time for scientific and social knowledge to gain acceptance, more time to reach those with less schooling or less access to information, and even more time to reach those whose own repressed experiences prevent them from accepting an uncomfortable truth [1].

Seemingly irrational behaviors headlined in tabloids are not irrational when understood as signs and symptoms of abuse and trauma. Why should it surprise us when a “lost child” casts himself as Peter Pan reincarnate, surrounds himself with a Neverland construct of perpetual childhood, and chooses children, no matter how specious and suspect, as peers and playmates … all in an effort to reclaim a stolen childhood?

Why should we be shocked by an addiction to plastic surgery to correct an imagined defect in appearance … and remake the “fat and ugly nose” ridiculed by his father at an age when adolescents are extra sensitive about their physical appearance?

Why should we be surprised by Michael Jackson’s alleged abuse of prescription drugs - craved and consumed in prodigious quantities ostensibly to numb feelings of depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem?

Let us avoid the temptation to characterize Michael Jackson in diagnostic terms, which are best left to qualified and licensed mental health practitioners. The inherent dangers of popularizing psycho-speak is simply this: Diagnostic terms are very often misunderstood by laypersons and misused by others whose purpose may be to engage in character assassination.

Abused children are never victimized once. They are victimized repeatedly when the guardians of conformity and public morality dismiss their signs and symptoms as character flaws and target them for ridicule and scorn, further reducing them to silence. Once compromised, the prodigal child turned adult is an easy target for continued abuse and exploitation, as Chris Hedges explains in this perspective:

Those who created Jackson’s public persona and turned him into a piece of property … are the agents, publicists, marketing people, promoters, script writers, television and movie producers, advertisers, video technicians, photographers, bodyguards, recording executives, wardrobe consultants, fitness trainers, pollsters, public announcers and television news personalities who create the vast stage of celebrity for profit (...) The moral nihilism of our culture licenses a dark voyeurism into other people’s humiliation, pain, weakness and betrayal … which is pretty much the story of Jackson’s life …

As Chris Hedges reminds us, a successful celebrity raking in millions of dollars is a money tree to the legions of media vultures in the food chain. Media is a shallow, fast-moving stream intolerant of our need to pause, analyze, and understand the accelerated grimace of a culture turned monstrous.

The issues raised by Alice Miller have social and historical implications. Violence is learned in the home. Obedience is a condition of beatitude. Sometimes abused and traumatized children reenact their childhoods on the political stage and turn themselves into tyrants or become the adherents, adulators, and henchman of tyrants and lunatic ideologues. Systemic child abuse is the wellspring of injustice, ignorance, and evil in the world. When we finally treat our children with the dignity, love, and nurturing they deserve, only then can we dream of a world free of violence and tyranny.

Reference:

[1] Alice Miller (2001). The truth will set you free. NY: Basic Books.

Online Resources:

Child abuse and mistreatment - The Alice Miller Official Website.

For your own good: Hidden cruelty in child-rearing and the roots of violence - This book is available legally online - highly recommended.

The Andrew Vachss Official Website - A lawyer and novelist who writes about child abuse as the root of violence … its cost to individuals and society.

Humbling The Privileged

There's an old saying, that I'm sure most everyone has heard, that goes something like this -

Don't presume to judge someone or to understand someone (something) until you've walked in their shoes.

The philosophical spirit behind this saying, it would seem, is to encourage sympathy and understanding - maybe even empathy - for the plights, the realities of others. It cautions against "being holier then thou" and echoes the sentiments of "there but for the grace of God go I."

Taking a cue, then, from these good ole axioms, I would like to suggest (insist) the following. That every single member of the House and of the Senate and health care lobbying groups and their employers - irrespective of party affiliation - be forced to spend a year living WITHOUT health insurance if they fail to do the right thing, the compassionate thing, the moral thing in a timely fashion and pass health care legislation that gives the god almighty PRIVILEGE of health care to all.

Yes you out-of-touch individuals in Washington and you sanctimoniously greedy health care lobbyists and those health care executives you work for - it is that simple. Wear the shoes of the uninsured and underinsured and find out how it feels. How it REALLY feels. How it impacts your quality of life.

Then sit back, folks, and watch how fast they come up with legislation when it suddenly becomes about THEM.

The perpetual foreigner

It's funny how the people who spend their lives trying to destroy democracy in America insist that everyone who stands in their way hates democracy in America. Barak Obama, regardless of what kind of a president he will turn out to be in the long run, certainly is an obstacle to the far right and their dubious objectives and of course, to the racists. Someone who doesn't give a damn about the country might find some humor in the myth making and the rebarbate logical fugues that characterize the believers and the creators and the marketers of Obamahate, but I'm not one of them. Unfortunately however, I seem to be on their mailing lists.

I wrote the other day about one US Army Major Stefan Cook who volunteered for duty in Afghanistan in order to generate enough publicity so that his claim that Barak Obama was foreign born would make the papers and boost publicity for the fabricated myth. His case was thrown out of court as expected, but the crusade wears on and it may soon be that you will receive another e-mail diatribe attempting to prove with every fallacy in the book that Obama's three week trip to visit a college friend in Pakistan proves he was travelling under a foreign passport, never had or had renounced his US citizenship, was born in Africa and must have received foreign funding of his education and travels -- which in turn proves a conspiracy to make him president a quarter century later: the same conspiracy begun 50 years ago with the intent of taking an African, Muslim baby and making him the president of the US sometime in the next millennium. It's the same conspiracy that involves the Honolulu newspapers and the Hawaii bureau of vital records.

The serial fallacy proceeds from a false premise: that it was illegal for a US citizen to travel to Pakistan in 1981. It wasn't. Supporting false premises are that it was part of a round the world cruise, which it wasn't and that it would cost a fortune to crash with a college buddy for three weeks, which it doesn't. It's worth reading the screed at Snopes.com simply as an example of poorly crafted, disjointed and clumsy fallacy and a lesson in the power of bigotry to overcome one's ability to spot it.

I should point out that Snopes has debunked so many of the products of the hateful underground that it itself was recently the subject of an e-mail and blog assault attempting to "prove" that it's owned by Liberals and so it's facts weren't facts even if independently verifiable.

I've made it my practice to denounce these never-ending viral e-mails and to hit reply all when doing it. I've irritated people, I've infuriated people, I've lost friends, I've made enemies -- but I've kept some sense of self-respect because I've not let lies and slander and subversive plots pass me by unhindered. Whoever it really was who told us that all evil needs to prosper is that good people look the other way was absolutely right. I hope you'll throw these things back at the perpetrators and the traitors as well.

KB2GSD -- Silent key

Others have been talking all day about the man I consider to have been the best Television news anchorman and perhaps the best TV journalist ever: Walter L. Cronkite Jr. That there is no one like him today seems obvious, that we as a country have allowed his style of journalism to be replaced by bought and paid for opinion, psychodrama and angertainment is less obvious but true none the less.

With Cronkite you felt you got the story, not his opinion or the opinion of the corporation who owned the station or the party that owned him. You rarely saw his emotion, but sometimes you did: when for a moment it seemed like John Glenn hadn't survived re-entry, when Dan Rather was punched in the stomach by Mayor Daley's goons at the Democratic convention and of course when he finally had to read the news that John F. Kennedy had been declared dead. Listen to Hannity, or O'Reilly or almost any TV talking heads today, and you have to mourn a lost tradition. Who amongst them today would the public vote to be the most trusted man in America?

There was more to him however. There was Cronkite the Radio history enthusiast, there was KB2GSD as his fellow radio amateurs knew him, powerful spokesman for Amateur Radio, a strong voice for community involvement and patriot and there was Cronkite the yachtsman and sailor who donated his beautiful custom built yawl Wyntje to the Norfolk Marine Institute and the Tidewater Environmental Program to help troubled teens. By early this morning, QRZ.com had listed him as KB2GSD/SK -- the SK is for silent key.

Do they make men like him any more? Sure they do, but you won't find them in politics or TV journalism, which have of course become the same thing.

KB2GSD de N4HO FB OM AR ES 73

Hypocrisy house

Republicans deal with the almost daily revelations of sexual scandal in the "family Values" party by reminding us that there are Democrats who cheat as well. Of course the Democrats aren't the ones claiming that government should be more intrusive into the private sex lives of private citizens and they haven't made that nebulous phrase part of every party platform for decades, nor do they seem to be so brazenly promiscuous. So I'm sure that the latest evidence that the Family valuers may be running a veritable school for scoundrels on 133 C Street SE in Washington DC won't have any more effect than Larry Craig's wide stance on their claim to moral authority.

The house in question is owned by a shadowy "Christian" group called The Fellowship, one of those insisting that we are a Christian Nation and should have "Christian Values" without of course giving us any idea what those might be or why they might be different from non-Christian values. They assert that our leaders should be led by God rather than by the will of the electorate which is shockingly reminiscent of the government our founding fathers found to be anathema, and of course it's their God as interpreted by them.

But it's a rooming house as well as a lobbying and indoctrination center and Congressmen board there and claim to find it a place to study the Bible and the commands of Faith-based lobbyists. Moral pillars of the community who have resided at the house on C Street, like John Ensign and Mark Sanford and Chip Pickering are and have been involved in extramarital affairs. Need I point out that three out of five is a considerable majority? It would be enlightening to compare the rent they pay with similar rents on that street of elegant brownstones - and of course interesting to entities such as the IRS. Is there quid pro quo or votes for rent?

To me, the question of whether religious conviction is a marker for moral hypocrisy and turpitude is less important than the fact that at least 5 Senators and Representatives may being subsidized by a lobbying group posing as a Church. The Fellowship, which has been criticized for supporting such tyrants as Suharto, is run by the Coe family who take down large salaries. David Coe, the presumptive heir to the throne, has suggested that members of The Family are here to learn how to rule the world.

Of course it's only my opinion, but I'm convinced that the constant howling about socialism and Marxism and Liberalism and secularism from the Right is a smokescreen for organizations like this who are declared enemies of democracy, freedom of speech and freedom of religion and are runningMadrassas teaching revolution, one congressman at a time.

FRIDAY ROUNDUP

I spend a large chunk of time every morning cruising the bloggerhood, trying to get a take on the pulse of America (and avoiding actually doing any work for as long as possible!)

There is quite the diverse group of writers out here with some noteworthy posts and while this is not by any means a complete list, I thought I’d give a h/t to some of those I found most interesting this week.

First H/T to Time for his expose on a story that our resident cephlapods haven’t yet mentioned. Hmm, could it be they are trying to hide their darker side?

One of my favorite daily reads is Blog d’ Elisson where you will sometimes find something strange, maybe something gross, but always something entertaining. Whatever you find, I promise you won’t be disappointed!

Libby over at The Impolitic (my real life older sister, BTW) is keeping an eye on all the doings across the political spectrum and leaves no stone unturned. Go on over and get your daily dose.

Over at Who Highjacked Our Country, the posts run more like a forum and usually spark some lively debate – today’s topic; healthcare reform.

Also posting on healthcare reform with a slightly different viewpoint is the ever civil Jennifer at Thinking Out Loud. While you may not agree with everything posted there, please be respectful when commenting; it’s that kind of blog.

TAO at A Radical Perspective also has an excellent post on healthcare reform, so don’t miss it.

James’ Muse at Music & Musings has done an interesting post with a different twist on illegal immigration and will no doubt be generating spirited debate for days.

Shaw at Progressive Eruptions has done a most exemplary job covering everything Sotomayor.

And finally, Matt at Osborne Ink has a thorough and informative post on Zero-Sum Republicans. Go see him, but Matt, if you read this, FYI, still can’t post comments at your place so you need to keep working on that new format.

My apologies to anyone I’ve missed, but I DO have to go to work some time!

Hell no, he won't go!

Quite frankly the idea that our military has become an evangelical camp-meeting scares me more that the Obama presidency scares the people who think he's a Muslim secret agent or that the Hawaii Bureau of Vital Statistics cooked up a fake birth certificate and the Honolulu newspapers recorded his birth forty some odd years ago as part of a plot to make Baby Obama the future president. It's not just theBiblically deluded nature of such people but also the uncontrollable urges they have to believe things for reasons hard for others to understand.

It's hard to know whether U.S. Army Maj. Stefan Frederick Cook really believes the fantasy or whether he simply doesn't want to go to Afghanistan and couldn't bring himself to wear a dress. I would have to assume that he does believe. He claims that he has tremendous support from fellow soldiers -- 90% is his frightening claim.

He would get on the next plane says he if only it could be proved that his birth certificate was real. That's a remarkable statement and if birth certificates needed to be proved beyond establishing that the birth was properly registered, we could easily disallow every president. Quite a can of worms, this is and perhaps it's better to ask for some evidence that, like John McCain, he wasn't born in the USA. Of course there isn't any evidence beyond that malignant viral meme that seems to spread from loony to loony like lice in a flop house.

Of course it isn't just the loons and psychos keeping the idea alive. one of the favorite tricks of our scandal addicted media is to presentnasty, stale old memes in new bottles and so we often have Fox hinting that "people are saying" when they aren't and we have Lou Dobbs, fresh out of stories about the Mexican Menace saying "new questions are being raised." No they're not, Lou, it's the same insane calumny coming from yet another psycho. and shame on you for trying to keep the meme alive for fame and profit.

Of course and as we expected, a Federal judge threw the case out this morning and the Federal dumpster already contains the smelly remnants of other similar suits, but thanks to Lou and Fox and the Army of Believers the idea will survive and perhaps longer than our republic. It's not completely new of course, Clinton faced opposition from some in the military based on some some notion that he wasn't really the President. What does it tell us, I have to ask, that the notion that the SCOTUS decision to stop counting ballots in Florida and the serious evidence of voting machine fraud made W's presidency illegitimate has faded away? Maybe it tells us that the great ship of insanity lists heavily to the right. New questions are being raised, you know -- and people are saying.

SOP

It would be hard to substantiate a claim that the United States of America hasn't been a country safe from foreign invasion, at least since the war of 1812 ended, although politicians have been shouting "danger" and starting profitable wars to ward it off for a long time. Even during the infamous first year of this new millennium, more people died of influenza in the US than in the World Trade Center; more than ten times as many on the highway. There's no money in perspective however and there's no safety for the Republican party in it either and so we still have dishonest intellectual lightweights like Liz Cheney claiming that "We" have kept the country safe since September 11, 2001 by launching the second most expensive war in US history and torturing prisoners while essentially refusing to do a damned thing about the surviving perpetrators.

Her crime boss father may or may not be able to keep a straight grimace telling us tall ones like that, but she is and although she has no way of knowing much of anything (unless the old man has been giving away State secrets,) she claims that getting close to Cheney's crimes is demoralizing the CIA which is putting us all in further danger, danger, danger. Yes, the bogeyman will crash more planes into New York if we try to prove that her father broke the law by authorizing torture, lying to Congress and a host of other unprecedented crimes.

The evidence however is that the CIA isn't demoralized at all, but of course we have Fox and Friends to further the fallacy as they always do. It's their own private sector version of Screwing America for Profit, or from the viewpoint of the GOP, it's SOP.

Lizard-Musings about the Way We Live Now

First: the last few decades suggest that we want the benefits of a modern, advanced society but we refuse to align our governmental practices and our tax base with that desire. We want things for which we (especially the middle and upper classes) have no intention of ever paying. The services we want are good things to have (access to health care, for instance) and in my view there's no problem with government at all levels being part of implementation; the trouble is that we refuse to pay for what we want. This is a problem that really could sink the republic: when government fails to deliver the goods demanded, Americans may then turn to extremists who make wild promises and promptly forget all about them when they attain power. Rich as we are collectively, it seems as if the slice of our material means that we are willing to dedicate to the social goods we want isn't sufficient.

Or consider the following if you don't like the above argument about percentages: neither do we seem very resourceful in finding ways to come up with the necessary money without resorting to painful taxation – how about doing away with most components of "the war on drugs," at least insofar as that benighted effort focuses on possession and use of marijuana? (I don't use the stuff – never have; I just don't consider its use socially destructive, especially compared with alcohol. And I don't say this in wide-eyed innocence of the so-called drug culture: hard drugs like heroin and meth leave a trail of individual and collective destruction in their wake. They should not simply be legalized.) My guess is that refraining from such foolish, doomed pursuits would net us a sum in the tens of billions per year, perhaps enough to pay for a huge chunk of our health-care needs. Furthermore, if we simply adopted the philosophy that only the violent and otherwise most despicable of offenders belong in a cage, we could save an even greater sum. Spending thousands to try and then incarcerate someone for stealing a few items from a convenience store makes no sense whatsoever – surely there are better ways to deal with such bad behavior without condoning it. Our obsession with such nonsense stems less from stinginess and antigovernmentalism than from a failure of both common sense and compassion, and it costs us dearly. And I'm not even considering the elephant in the room, our military spending habits – I am all for a strong and thoroughly modern military, but we spend as if we are preparing for a combined full-scale Klingon - Borg invasion.

Second: the federal legislative branch is scarcely up to the task of dealing with the above problems of social will. Cloture in the Senate has gone from an occasional procedural tactic to a deadly weapon wielded by the minority party against the hopes of the majority. Those of us who live in California are now suffering through an extreme version of this debility: it takes a 2/3 vote in California to pass a budget. And since it's almost impossible to attain a 2/3 majority in today's polarized environment, nothing can be done most of the time. There are a few procedural tricks, but evidently they don't work very well. The Governator and the Republicans refuse to raise taxes in a time of recession (which is understandable), and the Democrats are set against gutting education and key social programs (also understandable). So here we are, waiting for inveterate opponents to come together and agree to a compromise they both loathe. We are now issuing IOU's that the major banks no longer want to redeem before maturity. The more fragmented and uncivil towards one another we become, the more damaging are all demands for legislative supermajorities.

My question, then, is as follows: might it best suit a weakened republic (one perhaps, alas, in a period of decline?) to quicken its upper legislative branch, making it a 51/49 proposition to pass legislation in both houses? Or at to least make cloture a 55/45 or 53/47 proposition? We need to do some big things in near-desperate times, and the way congress presently works, I'm not confident that we can do them, Big Al and Old Arlen notwithstanding. It is well and good to imagine wise men in periwigs playing the role of Lords to a mercurial House, but I'm not convinced that the Senate, as it now behaves, won't be the republic's ruin. What do you think? Is 60/40 cloture antiquated, or sort of like giving a box of loaded rifles to a roomful of lunatics? Or is it still possible within that constraint for an effective president to do some old-fashioned LBJ-style bully-pulpiting, arm-twisting and wheeler-dealing, thereby getting some big things done when he knows he has nearly 2/3 of the people on his side?

Guys like us

Boy, the way Glenn Miller played!
Songs that made the Hit Parade.
Guys like us, we had it made.
Those were the days!

We should worry. There are doubts. We don't know enough about her. She's "ethnic" and therefore might have "empathy" for other ethnics and therefore she might be prejudiced against us - and lets face it she's dangerous because we can't know how people like that think. Do we want someone with a special social or gender or ethnic perspective instead of a regular American anyway? It's not that we're prejudiced, it's that she probably is because, well you know. . . aren't they all?

And you knew where you were then.
Girls were girls and men were men.
Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again.

Change the "she" to a "he" and you have the same whiny, timorous Archie Bunker mentality that assured us their fear and loathing of Obama had nothing to do with the fact that he was a Ni -- I mean African American.

Turn on C-Span this morning and you have the same white collar bigotry from the same, expensively dressed, white Anglo-Saxon senators from the same tradition and the same party that fought school segregation, supported restricted real estate markets and hotels and caressed their bibles while telling us it was and should be a felony to marry outside your race. The same people whose family values trump yours, who want you to affirm their religion regardless of what you believe, who would never, however be so rude as to use a racial epithet whenblackballing you from the club. The same tailored suits who pretend to solemn deliberation to hide their knee-jerk prejudice. She's just not suitable, not one of us, don't you know old chap. It's nothing personal.

A wise Latina woman? Not at my country club, not on my court.

Didn't need know welfare state.
Everybody pulled his weight.
Gee, our old LaSalle ran great.
Those were the days!

RETURN OF (O)CT(O)PUS

Last week, Octopus took time off to explore the western shores of the Florida peninsula and visit the sponge docks of Tarpon Springs, a quaint fishing village originally settled by Greek divers over a century ago.

The way Florida hangs off the contiguous 48 states makes one wonder why this land is considered “florid” when a more apt descriptor should be “flaccid.”

To traverse the state, most Flaccidians take Interstate 4 that connects Daytona on the east coast to Tampa on the west. However cephalopods are water-bound creatures and land routes are not an option. I took the seaward route around the southernmost tip where the infamous River of Crass flows into Flaccida Bay. There I found this:


Clean, spacious, stupidity-free, and ready to move-in, it appears to be a perfect place to start a family with plenty of room to raise 200,000+ octopod fries at one time … all destined to become liberal bloggers!

There are ships in bottles, but Blue Moon is a treasure-trove of empty bottles inside a ship … beer, wine, and gin discards in assorted colors and sizes. Empty bottles are important to Octopods because we prefer them to beds. Perhaps this is a throwback to our univalve days when we carried our abode everywhere.

All I need now is to find a calmly mimic octopus for a mate. Why a mimic octopus, you ask? Even among the most faithful of cephalopods, la diversité est le sel de la vie.

Home from the sea

After days of overcast skies, it was refreshing to be awoken by sunlight streaming through a porthole on a bright Sunday morning. It was hardly refreshing to watch the usual Sunday TV Godblathering over breakfast. The Something Or Other ministries was appealing for last minute funds to fight the coming national disaster: the confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor, who would, because she is ethnic and her record notwithstanding, bias the court in favor of Hispanics in direct contradiction to God's will. It's nice to live in a country where such bigots get special tax status because they wave Bibles now and then, even if it's only to bludgeon people with.

We cast off and pulled out into the Intra-Coastal waterway just in time to wait 15 minutes for the Atlantic Avenue bridge to open and looking around the cloudless sky, I spotted something I haven't seen for a while - a skywriter. U + GOD was soon spread against the sky like an idiot screaming from a window.

An hour later. with an extra hundred gallons in the tanks and some $330 poorer; we were booming out of the Lake Worth inlet at 22 knots into the open and turquoise sea. It felt almost like an escape into a fresh, clean and fragrant world -- and not an easy one with all the small fishing boats who seem to think the middle of a shipping channel is a perfect place to spend the morning fishing. Switch on the radar, check the proper waypoints on the chart plotter and push the red button on the auto-pilot. Heading due North, the blue hull cuts through the swells and we're free of the land and its barbarism for a while.

If only it were as easy to escape the smell of religion, the reek of stupidity and the stench of bigotry.

Out of town musings

I'm not the least bit surprised at the Pew poll showing that only 6% of scientists are Republicans. Republicans, at least these days, are all about belief, whether it's in some magical beings and magical places and magical events or magical economic schemes that somehow never seem to be demonstrable. I was told some years ago of a Mensa study indicating that religiosity declined significantly in proportion to IQ, but I can't confirm it.

I was trying out the new digital TV spectrum on Blue Moon this morning. We're some 6o miles south of home port on the Florida coast. I was amazed at the proportion given over to bombastic preachers such as the one trying to "prove" with authoritarian proclamation and a bullying tone, that the first amendment really asserts a Christianist agenda and that secularists, scientists, intellectuals and of course "Liberals" are the enemies of freedom.

Is it just me, or do they sound just like Republicans arguing that they stand for small, cheap and almost impotent government?

Yes, digital broadcasting is a big improvement in terms of picture and number of channels available, but the price we pay is to suffer greater indignities against truth, reason, logic, history, justice and most of all -- freedom of religion. I have to wonder if the age of reason would ever have dawned, even as briefly as it did: i have to wonder if there would have been an American Revolution had the vast majority of militant, authoritarian dullards been able to have such means of expression as technology has given them.

Posted from the Delray Beach Yacht Club

Some Things Never Change!

After several very frustrating weeks, my home network is up and running again. It turned out to be a simple fix but difficult to find.

Many of you know that I work in real estate and so I frequently receive all sorts of professional advertising. I was astounded to find this in my email today.
Remember the Great Mortgage Meltdown that happened a while back… oops, my mistake; that would be the Great Mortgage Meltdown that is still plaguing the real estate market TODAY!?!
People being given mortgages they could barely afford with no money down (read: nothing to lose) and walking away leaving toxic assets all over the country?

Remember government leaders decrying the dastardly money lenders for unsound lending practices and the takeover over of several mortgage companies and banks, including Fannie Mae?

As I pondered the wisdom of a government entity such as the USDA making 102% loans, I could only shake my head and wonder - WTF!?!

No, Mr. Bond -- I expect you to lie

The only creativity coming out of the Republican tribe these days seems to center around new and ever more precious ways to denounce Barak Obama. Still sweating from the effort it took to convince themselves that Obama Supporters see him as the second coming, they're mocking him for not being a messiah.

Take Senator Kit Bond (R-MO) for instance. Hoping you won't remember George Bush's pathetic swoons about looking into Vladimir Putin's eyes and seeing a soul mate, Bond told reporters yesterday that The president's trip to Moscow was a huge pile of shit because nothing was accomplished but an agreement to reduce the huge pile of nukes. Obama should, says Bond, have stopped the repression of the Russian media and commanded them to sanction North Korea if he were a president worth his salt. Obama has simply failed, in one magical moment, to make Russia an obedient, American client state -- as John McCain and Sarah Palin surely would have done with a great flourish of bluster, threat and bravado - and at a lower cost. George Bush? Who?

Posted from Blue Moon,
Port Salerno, Florida

Glass houses

Maybe it's just me, but I have a hard time understanding the pervasive attitude toward the Chinese crackdown on rioting Muslim separatists in Xinjian - if indeed that's what is happening. Articles like this one at Newsweek.com stress the "spin" being put on the rioting and the government response to it and indeed the reasons behind the unrest. I don't pretend to have facts that would challenge any accounts of what's going on, but I do have some history that fairly screams hypocrisy.

How many countries, including our own, treat separatist, secessionist movements without violence? How many can claim fair treatment for ethnic minorities? After all we've taken the opposite side in Israel, we came down hard and violently against the rather small Black Separatist movement here in the 1960's and there can't be anybody who hasn't heard of the bloody suppression of a Southern separatist movement in the 1860's. And then there were the Indian wars. There was the brutal supression of the labor movement in tth 1930's, brutal supression of anti- Vietnam war protesters and enough more to suggest that we're living in a glass house.

We concoct stories of Mexican separatism to scare children and Republicans and to support arguments for ethnic cleansing, yet we allow freedom of speech protection to White Separatists and Alaskan Separatists. I could go on, but it's easier to ask what the US would do if Texas, Arizona and New Mexico were to ask to secede, taking all the mineral and oil resources with them for ethnic and religious reasons. I think you know the answer.

Are we going to tell ourselves we support the Uighurs while a good part of America writes me e-mails demanding that "we" throw the Muslims out of the US? While we won't accept Uighurs we've falsely accused and jailed and abused because we are afraid of them?

Sure, China is trying hard to suppress news coverage. Heard much first hand coverage from Afghanistan lately or from any of the provinces where we're bombing and killing civilians every day in Pakistan? Were you accused of being a terrorist supporter or accomplice for questioning the WMD idea or the destruction of a neutral country? Many of us were, yet here we are, China bashing with tarnished halos and blood on our wings.

This Sums it Up

Keeping with the theme of cartoons, here is a card from someecards.com that seems quite appropriate given the media's current obsession. Couldn't have said it better myself.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

Octopus will be away for the next week. Volunteers are needed to keep the beach clean.

Passages:
My heartfelt condolences go to Lindsay for the loss of her grandmother, to Rocky for the loss of her cousin, and to Shaw for the loss of her sister.

Swash Zone Group Therapy:
May I prevail upon all Swash Zoners to dissuade Bloggingdino from feeling any guilt for the asteroid that trashed the planet 65 million years ago. It was sudden, unforeseen, and not his fault.

Global warming, however, is another matter. Those filthy, disgusting humans managed to dig up and burn over 350 million years of sequestered carbon ... in a mere 200 years ... making that asteroid seem puny in comparison. Creatures of the Earth, behold! It is time to hold those humans accountable and sequester THEIR carbon before it is too late!

Hot Florida nights, men in tights

Yes, despite the rain which delayed the fireworks, it was a great 4th of July in beautiful Stuart Florida. We watched the spectacle, sponsored by a local car dealer famous for bilking the elderly, aboard a friend's Hattaras and trying, as usual, to avoid talking about politics. As crazy as it was a year ago, it's crazier now that the last few decades of Republican policy and economic theory have been wilfully forgotten and new memories forged about the way we were.

In nearby West Palm Beach, not far from the homes of Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh, politicians and propagandists were out working the crowds of tea flavoured idiots, some dressed in items of late 18th century attire.

"Yes, we do need change, you can start by giving me my money back!"

yelled Joyce Kaufman, of AM station 850-WFTL.

"I don't care which side of the aisle you're on, if you're taking money away from my children, you've got to go"

said GOP Congressional candidate Edward Lynch who lost the 2008 race to a Democrat. Of course he cares about little else, but who knows whether he really believes our current predicament derives from the expensive attempts of the current administration to keep our economy alive long enough to recover and not from the decades of "debt doesn't matter' and "upper bracket tax cuts boost the economy" and "freedom isn't free?"

"yes, I had doubts about George Bush, but this guy. . ." was a common theme, as though any of the people clinging to it actually did anything to question the years of borrowing, revenue cutting, removal of oversight, deregulation, expense bloating and war mongering, the newly legalized scams and frauds and schemes and practices that havecharacterized those on that "side of the aisle." In fact most of these people would have deported you, if they could have, simply for questioning the Right Wing Religion.

To me, it's like yelling about dental bills when you haven't brushed your teeth or seen a dentist for 20 years. It's like complaining about how the repair bills are putting you into debt when you let the Sex Pistols crash at your house for years and left your checkbook and credit cards and key to the liquor cabinet on the kitchen table. It's your own damn fault and many of us predicted this collapse years ago to a chorus of your jeers and accusations.

Sure the dentist may be too expensive or the contractor may not be the best, but when you let it all go to hell, when you wouldn't listen to any advice, it's your fault and wearing three-cornered hats, knee length pants and tights in the 90 degree heat isn't going to get "your" money back after you spent it on a useless war that cost nearly as much as WW II and on gifts to the richest men and corporations in the world.

HAVE A BLAST!

Or else the dog gets it!

Whither Sarah?

I have to say I'm grateful that Sarah Palin has somewhat abated the psychotic media obsession with a dead neurotic surgery addict. She has the media and the bloggers back to doing what we all do best: speculating. So why is she doing this? It's nearly impossible to tell from her tangled and mangled speech, which of course makes her verbal mulch the the perfect medium for hydroponic conjecture.

David Wallechinsky seems to think Fox has made her an offer she can't refuse and we'll be seeing her in their little shop of horrors before long. He offers no evidence to interfere with belief, but it's filling and very satisfying, like comfort food, so I'll go along with it.

Max Blumenthal has what I think is a more credible scenario, based around the theory that an Alaska construction company, the same one that built the huge sports complex in Wasilla ( putting the town into serious debt) built her house as an inducement to get that job and future jobs after she became Governor. Todd and she have had personal and financial ties to the company of long standing.

Blumenthal also speculates about the effect a recent Salon article might have had on her decision. Revelations about her attempts to kill the stories about Husband Todd's affiliation with that Alaska secessionist group and provide false cover stories, may be about to blow up on her. Who knows, but of course the delicious irony, considering her attempts to portray Barak Obama as a "terrorist" who hates America, makes the idea hard to resist.

There are so many possibilities to delight the palate that I may be sorry if and when we ever figure out why! In a way I would love to see her as the next Republican presidential candidate, since she's so amazingly unqualified, but to be disgraced as a hypocrite and possible felon would satisfy my taste for justice perfectly. The worst outcome, in my opinion, would be to have her take her place on the Fox News Chorus, where hypocrisy, incompetence, dishonesty, lack of intelligence, irrational hostility and incipient dementia are prime qualifications . She could be as big a threat to our country as she would be in the White House, and of course there are no term limits on Fox.

PALIN QUITS!

One would think such a headline would push the Michael Jackson insanity aside long enough for some news to leak through, but although Alaska Governor Sarah Palin has just announced that she will resign from office within the next few weeks, further explanation seems elusive.

Can we start singing the Wicked Witch is Dead song, or is it too soon? Is she resigning because Pastor Muthee told her the Rapture is coming? What will this mean for Michael Jackson, the patron Saint of Pop?

It's very tempting to speculate, but perhaps we'll just have to wait for the hysteria to abate before the networks can spare any personnel to find out what's happening outside the world of Michael Jackson - and that could take a while.

Oh! The Outrage!

I wonder if the wingnuts have to take time out from raving about how they are insulted by intelligence reports warning ( correctly it seems) of increased militancy amongst hate groups, in order to find ever wilder ways to portray mainstream liberals and moderates as Bolshevik extremists -- or whether they can do both at the same time.

The party that told us it was ridiculous to find anything questionable about the Palin family involvement with an Alaskan Independence Extremist group and witch murdering religious cult, finds it absolutely outrageous that Sonia Sotomayor once, many years ago sat on the board of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund which concerned itself with such outrages as Affirmative Action and voting rights, but far, far worse, opposed Saint Reagan's appointment of Judge Bork. Ridiculous and hypocritical you might say? Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) agrees, saying that the Republican Senate minority would find something to object to “even if the president had nominated Moses.” You remember, Moses; that bearded radical Israelite separatist, Zionist, baby killing, Jew-extremist Commie?

Anyway, despite the rash of wingnut murders and plots, they appear still ready to insist that anyone who is not a fanatic Obama Supporter is being and will be targeted by the government and not just slandered as a member of a hate group, but put in concentration camps. A far easier fate awaits a local gentleman and felon arrested today for having a garage full of explosives, guns and money. I don't know what his private gunpowder plot was about, but I'm willing to bet that he's not a liberal and like 2/3 of the residents of my red county, hates Mr. Obama.

Yes, yes, of course -- I'm just like Hitler for mentioning it, although to continue the metaphor to the point where the wingnuts start comparing themselves to the Jews may be beyond even their level of dementia and malice.

Well, at least we have our American Circus to entertain us while the "liberal" media crams that neurotic reject from Frankenstein labs up our noses 24 hours a day as though piling up teddy bears in the street is more important than blood and corpses in the roadways and Korean missiles falling from the sky and the continuing slide of our economic prospects. That's just how Hitler and the International Jewish Conspiracy took over Germany, I'm sure.

AN INK-THE-AQUARIUM SPECIAL EDITION: WHAT MAKES (O)CT(O)PUS LIVID !!!

(O) (O) MICHAEL JACKSON ON CNN (O) (O) (O) (O) (O) (O) (O) (O) (O) (O) (O) (O) (O) (O) (O) (O) (O) (O) MICHAEL JACKSON ON MSNBC (O) (O) (O) (O) (O) (O) (O) ABC HAS MICHAEL JACKSON (O) (O) (O) (O) (O) CBS HAS MICHAEL JACKSON (O) (O) (O) (O) (O) (O) (O) (O) BOUGHT A NEWSPAPER (O) (O) (O) (O) (O) (O) (O) (O) (O) (O) (O) (O) JACKSON HERE (O) (O) (O) (O) JACKSON THERE (O) (O) (O) (O) (O) (O) (O) (O) (O) (O) (O) (O) (O) MICHAEL JACKSON EVERYWHERE (O) (O) (O) PLEASE! (O) (O) (O) (O) (O) ENOUGH ALREADY! (O) (O) (O) (O) NO MORE MICHAEL JACKSON NEWS !!!

No lie too big, no mind too small, no lie too disgusting

Get ready for it: another surge in the Anti-Obama Wars will be arriving in about a week with a new and more specious attack from the Derangement Rangers, or as these vampires call themselves the Our Country Deserves Better PAC. Twisting facts and flinging fallacy, they intend to pump up the rage junkies for some purpose we can only imagine and we can be sure that if someone stupid enough to buy their product acts on that rage, they will wash their hands of it and blame the liberals. In fact they're already doing it.

I can say that because the ad will apparently reference the recent intelligence report warning of increased right wing terrorist activity -- which of course proved true: blood, bullets, bodies and all -- as an example amongst many, of how Barak Obama is just like Adolph Hitler.

"As the regime spun out of control, they labeled political opponents domestic terrorists, and warned of confrontations between such groups and government authorities."

Is their view of an all too correct observation. Too damned bad more attention wasn't payed over the howls of offended wingnuts and too damned amazing that they're still howling after the warning was proved accurate.

Of course it takes a special person to see this alleged spin-out of the administration, but the accusation is quite predictable. Indeed every accusation made against Bush, no matter how true, is going to be re-labelled and returned in the same fashion as Watergate was reprised in every word and action and relaunched against Bill Clinton.

"They proposed a civilian security force, and a Congressman warned it was exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany. Opposition heightened after voter fraud by the president's allies, including thousands of bogus voter registration [sic]"

Since I'm personally involved with civilian security (Amateur Radio Emergency Services) I would have to laugh at a bunch of retired engineers volunteering to do emergency communications in a disaster being compared to Storm Troopers, but it's hard to understand why a thousand or two bad registrations, which don't seem to have produced any actual votes could account for the 9 million vote Obama victory. Hard, unless you're up to no good yourself and of course the OCDB PAC isn't. It's the illegitimate child of Howard Kaloogian, the fellow who during his losing campaign to replace disgraced Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham told us that Iraq was safe and almost free of violence and that the fact was being hidden by -- you guessed it -- the Liberal Press who of course support terrorism. Is there any doubt?

"And now the Obama Administration is warning law enforcement to focus their attention on the dangers of conservatives."

says their website. They're not, unless you describe murderers as Conservatives, but I am and I can't help but mention that this kind of rhetoric and this kind of campaign was pioneered by Adolph Hitler himself.

These people are deranged, malignant well financed and well armed. Oh yes and dishonest, did I mention dishonest?