Same old, same old Party

What's more disgusting than CNN giving copious air time to Florida Representative Connie Mack this morning so that he can continue to demand the firing or resignation of Tim Geithner for reasons of complicity in a no strings attached, unsupervised AIG bailout under Hank Paulson and the Bush administration? Why, it was natty, nasty and nefarious young Connie Mack himself. Representative Mack, in trying to pin the tail on the donkey, seems to have overlooked the fact that it's an elephant's tail and wants us to buy the notion that the AIG bonuses were not only Geithner's fault, but proof of the incompetance of President Obama in fixing the Republican train wreck. The spectacular smugfest of Republicans acting as though oversight of Wall Street was their idea is just that -- spectacular.

Asked pointedly and repeatedly on CNN this morning however, Mack refused to comment on whether Geithner or the Obama administration should attempt to recover the funds, repeating again and again that they never should have been given and asking what Geithner knew and when he knew it.

"Quite simply, the Timothy Geithner experience has been a disaster."

said Mack last Wednesday. Once again, CNN missed the opportunity to ask whether the huge disaster of the last 8 years was anyone outside the current administration's responsibility and whether the 8 years of mismanagement could reasonably be expected to have been rectified in a matter of weeks without the waste of a hundredth of a percent. Are we to have forgotten that the kind of oversight that would have prevented the mess was the devil himself to every Republican of the last several decades?

I have to recall however that the Republicans waited two months longer to declare the Obama Administration a failure and disaster than they did when Bill Clinton was elected. Some couldn't wait for him to actually take office to begin the disinformation, investigation and sabotage and what can we call this but sabotage as they offer no practical alternative other than to attack, attack and attack?

One can never hope for contrition from any Republican it seems, nor can anyone expect their cooperation in any attempt to deal with their failures and misdeeds. It's just the Same Old Party and the Same Old Excuses.

Mail order science

One might think that I would be on the side of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board in opposing Texas House Bill 2800. It's effect would be to exempt any private non-profit institution from the need to be accredited by and receive a certificate of authority from the state. The entire idea is of course to establish "universities" that give science degrees without any requirement to study science. Normally attempts to Push the Christianist agenda by equating legend with science earn my contemptuous wrath and of course so does this one to a degree, but wait, there's more.

If, as would happen should this act of insanity be passed, one could simply dream up any curriculum and award degrees of any sort, the value of any Texas institution's degree program not funded by the State would be suspect. Of course the Libertarian in me might be inclined to ask why Acme Bible College shouldn't be able to confer a Doctor of Divinity on anyone they please according to their organized delusions, but not Bachelor, or Master or Doctor of Science. Thinking back to the mid 19th century however, when one could attend Acme Medical College with an unregulated, unexamined course of study and emerge with black bag and scalpel to treat the unsuspecting populace, I have to take pause.

What would the result really be if any charlatan could establish a school and anoint its graduates with advanced degrees in science with no other education but a literal interpretation of Bible Stories for Children? An extra headache for those institutions and companies hiring physicists, geologists and such perhaps. An opportunity for me.

Fogg University of Christian Knowledge. It has a certain acronymical appeal, you have to admit, although Fogg U would be shorter and easier to remember for the kind of students it might attract. Prerequisites? What are you, some kind of Commieliberal intrusive government type?

Let market forces determine the value of unaccredited education, but for you, if you call in the next ten minutes, you can call yourself a Master of Science for $49.95 plus shipping, handling and framing charges. But wait, there's more -- the first 50 callers get a free Sham-Wow with the logo of our sham university on it. You getting this, camera guy?

Engaging A Future Generation

Our dear SWASHZONE tends to be more than a little angst ridden on most days (& lord knows my own posts contribute to this!) so I thought I would post a feel-good post - yes - me! - Squid.

So the gist of this post is that I adore my students - or, at least, most of them. I truly do. They give me fits sometimes, sending me into head-clutching fits of despair, but through it all - I am genuinely very fond of them. Some of them cause me from time to time to ponder nervously the future of the world when it is run by people INCAPABLE of following simple directions or turning assignments in on time . . . but underneath all their slackery they are good-hearted delinquents - so perhaps the world will survive their air-headed slackness. And they are balanced by my wonderful students who put these slackers to shame - students who always go the extra mile towards academic achievement. Please may they be our future leaders!

Curiously - some of my personally favorite students tend to be the ones I give miserable grades to. At this point in the semester they start ducking into corners when they see me coming down the corridor - knowing that they are going to get an earful from me about their latest academic transgression. But they've learned to take my cussing at them as genuine concern and, to their credit, none of the students with whom I have developed a personal rapport has ever been fool enough to think that this meant they were going to receive preferential treatment. And this is to their credit. For the most part - they take responsibility for their abysmally low grades.

There are of course those for whom personal responsibility means nothing & everything is everyone else's fault & how dare I presume to think that I call the shots etc. - but in all honesty - these students are in the minority.

And on a final note - I find it fascinating sometimes to learn about how people 20 years or so younger than myself view the same world that we all inhabit. Their point of view is often fascinating (& scary!) but always important to consider. I consider myself privileged to be able to converse on a daily basis with our future. And hopefully they learn a bit from we old fogies as well. (I remember in a class discussion once about a piece of literature that contained sex one of my students making a comment about people over 40 not being interested in sex anymore - it was SO HARD to keep a straight face!) Yes their view of the universe is staggering sometimes.

Mine is such a terrific profession.

FIRST DAY OF SPRING

Enjoy!

Flori-DUH

JESUS IS LORD AT
SHEFFIELD’S FAMILY DINING
ALL YOU CAN EAT CATFISH DINNER

Declares the peeling, sun damaged roadside sign to highway travelers in the Sunshine State. I've never been tempted to stop and ask whether Yahweh is on the staff as well, perhaps, despite their not being Kosher, filleting catfish back in the kitchen.

I guess even the Godstruck of Florida have to admit there are places where exception is taken and of course you don't have to drive too many more miles to encounter billboards announcing your approach to Cafe Risque where we are enthusiastically assured that "They bare all." I doubt Jesus is even a busboy at Cafe Risque.

Despite the massive and daily influx of New Jersey exiles looking for the cheap life, Florida is still Florida, particularly in it's chewy, nut filled center. Whether it involves writing laws making it a felony to watch animals having sex ( only if you find it arousing of course) or making sure you don't kiss your spouse in the wrong places; Florida is still Florida no matter which lords are leaping at Sheffields and Florida still writes bills and passes laws the way the National Enquirer ( a Florida based tabloid) writes articles.

According to some legal experts, Florida is a state where you can wear a bathing suit to a restaurant, but only if you don't sing. It's a state in which by law one may not do anything "unnatural" which to anyone of a cynical bent would suggest that magic and miracle are illegal, but extra-Biblical sexual acts, being natural enough in the animal kingdom, are not. In fact it appears that taking your clothes off in order to shower might earn you a fine, should anyone notice. Thank God I have a bath tub and that my bedroom is on the second floor.

SUNDAY SPACE SHUTTLE LAUNCH

Goodbye, Faux News.  Goodbye, AIG. Goodbye, Dick Cheney, Rush Limbaugh and the Congressional Republicans. Octopus is hitching a ride on the space shuttle in search of inhabitable exo-planets.  The cephalopods are massing; the Octocalypse is near!

Here is today’s question:  A gaggle of geese, a school of fish, a pod of dolphins … what do you call a ____________________ of humans?

Guillotine! Guillotine!

It is the best of times. It is the worst of times. They report, you decide.

One doesn't expect the spokesmen for conservative interests to be using the French Revolution as a model for future action. Of course I'm no kind of cynic and so all the calls for blood, all the evocations of victims carted off to some public square to be guillotined or of some Supreme Court Justice bleeding to death in his bathtub like Marat aren't at all hilarious to me when I watch Fox News.

"Whether it’s terrorism, international crises, domestic crime or, in this case, excessive corporate greed, some conservatives seem unable to see problems as anything other than a nail for which the only solution is a hammer."

says Think Progress. Fox's solution is a Krauthammer.

Charles Krauthammer, who like so many Fox denizens looks like he's overdone the Botox, told us all yesterday that we should hold public executions for AIG executives whose contracts include a bonus.

"Have it in Times Square, invite Madame DuFarge. You borrow a guillotine from the French and we could have a party. If that’s what it takes to maintain popular support, let’s do it."

Conservative Mort Kondrake just wants to boil them in oil.

Ok, so it's hyperbole although with paralyzed faces like these guys have, one has to make some guesses as to what they really mean. But inflammatory rhetoric in such times as these is like flicking your Bic with gasoline all over the floor. Put them together with Ann Coulter who has advocated poisoning judges and with Rush who would rather have the country collapse than accept any offense to his "principles" and we have not only an assemblage of rogues but a perfect example of people who are not conservatives any more than were the Parisian mobs cheering as heads rolled in the Place de la Concorde in 1793.

It's a Doocy, all right

I think we'd all feel better if we stopped fretting about things and realized that the world we live in is no more than a huge, slowly revolving madhouse with no walls. It's the notion that things and people ought to make sense that drives us crazy -- because they don't. You only have to tune in the news for all the evidence you might need. Take Fox, for instance: any one of those shows with giggling night of the living dead zombies batting fallacies, conjectures, hypertrophied hyperbole and lies back and forth like a game of three-way badminton.

CNN is a communist organization says Steve Doocy on Fox and friends. Like "Liberal" It's a term without fixed meaning, used often enough on Fox that it really means little else than that the victim doesn't have rabies and doesn't preach abject obedience to Fox approved authority and doesn't exhibit a Pavlovian rage response on cue. That certainly describes CNN, who sometimes actually does indulge in honest reportage rather than to derive stories from the Ouija board used by Fox and Friends. But anyway they are all Commies - perhaps some of the few left in the real world and they don't need to tell you why or how. All the proof you need is that a former CNN employee, Mauricio Funes, has been elected President of El Salvador. Elected, not installed by a military insurgency or people's revolution or quasi legal action by the courts. Elected by popular vote. Elected as in Democracy.

So anyway, by the law of sympathetic magic, or perhaps something even more arcane; because he isn't Augusto Pinochet or any of the other murderous, fascistic, peasant slaughtering, protester torturing, nun raping, drug money laundering anti-communist Generalissimos the US traditionally supports and supplies, he's a communist and CNN is the "Communist News Network." What's more, the liberal party he belongs to has, according to Mr. Doocy "allegedly ties to Caesar Chavez," a man that those without heads spinning from Fox Poisoning will remember is long dead. Of course Doocy's duezy was not only to confuse Hugo with Caesar, but to confuse a baseless, irresponsible, malicious and speculative accusation with fact. That's Fox. That's what Fox is about: the voices from Neptune for a mad, mad, mad world.

I happened to be perusing an auction catalog over coffee, early this afternoon; thinking about the things I might have been bidding on if George Bush's irregulars hadn't stolen everyone's money and there were a couple of lots of antique Chinese opium pipes and accessories. That's right, drug paraphernalia and legitimately so because you really can't smoke anything legal in an opium pipe.

Of course the water pipes Tommy Chong once manufactured worked quite well with tobacco, that highly addictive, highly toxic and legal drug, yet Tommy went to prison and lost nearly everything he had. What's the difference between selling legal drug paraphernalia and illegal drug paraphernalia? Nothing beyond the personality involved. We have all sorts of laws enforced only to advance the careers of law enforcement, because, just like the traditional, criminally repressive generalissimos we traditionally support in Latin America, our Justice Department Buccaneers can make an honest man into a criminal as easily as Fox News can make Thomas Jefferson into a Communist and Jesus into Attila the Hun.

If you care about this insanity, you can't expect to survive intact and so I try very hard not to. Sure, I lost almost 80% of my net worth and the people who made that possible are fighting against any attempt to restore order; screaming like demons about Commies and Liberals and Witches and welfare queens but although I can still pay my bills, I can't afford to care. I've still got my house and my boat and a big ocean to float it in and as of today, I can even blog while afloat, hiding in my escape capsule from the madness of the world.

THE STIMULUS MANIFESTO

While commenters on the “Let’s Have A Revolution” series presented here at the Swash Zone and on parallel posts at Thinking Out Loud have had varying opinions, it is heartening to note we have found some common ground. I thought it would be helpful to summarize the series.

On The Economy:

Many of us agree a refund is a poor way to stimulate the economy and could be better spent creating jobs. Bringing back business and providing low cost loans for new business creation by those with a solid business plan.
Include investments in agriculture to produce cleaner, cheaper, better foods.

Fair trade agreements that are ACTUALLY FAIR to US businesses.

Improve the infrastructure and improve transportation methods, including developing new modes such as a high speed rail system. Include the improvement and development of greener, more abundant energy sources.

On Healthcare:

This topic proved to be more volatile with widely divergent ideas on how best to tackle healthcare reform.

While some would like to see some sort of personal health accounts, others lean more toward a national health insurance. TAO provided a good example of a compromise program used by Switzerland whereby every citizen is required to pay a mandatory deduction that provides a basic healthcare package. Citizens can then purchase more comprehensive supplemental policies if they so desire.

Another idea presented was establishing state review boards to separate frivolous lawsuits from those with merit, much like a Grand Jury. This could help keep down malpractice insurance costs while not penalizing a truly injured party.

And we mostly agree that we think Americans must be more involved in directing their care and keeping costs down by using the system appropriately.

On Education:

We seem to all agree education is an important aspect of continued economic growth.

Basic skills seem to be lacking among students such as simple math, history, English grammar and spelling and geography.

We would also like to see a curriculum includes courses in goal orientation and achievement and finances, including balancing a checkbook, creating a budget and understanding how credit works and what it costs.

Students and their parents need to be more responsible and teachers need to be supported.

And many support providing scholarships to anyone with the grades and desire for higher education who can’t afford to go otherwise. And why not require some community service in return so they actually earn their education.

We are facing many challenges, both individually and as a nation, but I hope that most of us “every day people” will overcome the obstacles and flourish.

The dissection of Jim Cramer

When there shall be no more lies and all the words of falsehood put to shame

-Scroll of community rules-

What do Tomas de Torquemada, Judge Judy and King Solomon have in common with Jon Stewart? Not a lot. As judges, inquisitors and arbitrators of justice, they are clumsy louts. Forensic surgeon Stewart can have your bowels in a bucket before you can ask for a second opinion and you'll probably grin and shake his hand for it. Not only can Stewart stop a flotilla of excuses and denials, he does it with a smile and so skilfully that the newly disemboweled has to smile at the abject humiliation along with him.

Perhaps, like me, you've been following the feud between the Daily Show host and CNBC's Jim Cramer. Stewart has been serving up the sins and failures, misstatements and disastrous recommendations of Cramer all week like a roast pheasant on a silver platter, prompting Cramer to dissemble, dissimulate, deny and attack like a politician. Last night however was the end of it.

For those who haven't seen it, here it is from Raw Story It's long, too long to post here, but worth your time and we may never see such skill in action again.