The meaning of is

It's funny how the things that characterized the United States in it's best and most prosperous years are being characterized as bad for the country and a one way valve in the sewer pipe that leads to Marxism, while the days before we had things like unemployment insurance saw poverty, hopelessness, homelessness, broken families, social unrest and egregious injustice far beyond anything we've had in generations.

Why for instance are unemployment benefits bad for America? because they encourage people to stay jobless said smiling Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) Yes, I've noticed that the families living in old cars, scrounging in dumpsters and sleeping in the woods or in shelters are really living the life of Riley in increasing numbers these days, taking vacations in the sun while hard working Republican Senators who have free health care have to support them. I mean that we were once the most productive people on earth even with social security, unemployment and disability benefits doesn't really tell us anything, does it?

Of course being of the same party, Republican Senate Whip Kyl would likely have defended most anything fellow Republican Senator Jim Bunning (R-KY) said that was an attack on one of those things that makes us a nation rather than a bunch of individuals looking out for themselves alone. Unemployment benefits are one of those things: things that make us a society with common goals and values rather than serfs doing without to support the lifestyles of corporate barons -- and Senators.

Of course to a Republican, a hypothetical reason for something to be bad is more to be believed and waved about as a tribal emblem than any mere empirical observation to the contrary. Unemployment insurance makes people lazy and unwilling to work, just like life insurance makes them want to die, health insurance makes them want to have surgery and liability insurance makes them suicidal drivers -- and insurance itself, being a system for pooling risk, taking a small amount from each participant so that no individual has a catastrophic loss, must therefore be Communism. The true Randian Monad will never accept any cost that might benefit anyone else as well as himself -- right? Of course the idea of insurance is saved from Communism only if instead of a 3% administration fee, someone makes 30 or 40% from it: the more money, the more justified by the grace of profit, amen. Unemployment insurance

"doesn't create new jobs. In fact, if anything, continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work,"

says the Senator, but of course that depends on what the definition if is is. If is denotes observable reality, the statement is shaky for want of evidence. If is denotes adherence to ad hoc dogma nailed together as an obstructive barricade, then perhaps Kyl makes sense. I'll leave it up to you as to whether you believe his peremptory proclamation or your lying eyes.

If you do side with Mister Jingles from Arizona, I'd like to ask you why, if we can't afford to temporarily keep the unemployed from starvation without running the risk of irreversible Communism and the irretrievable loss of precious bodily fluids, why then can we can bail out millionaires and give them special tax relief without similar concerns? After all, experience dismisses the argument that they will create jobs with the extra millions and shows that they will buy unregulated derivatives, invest in hedge funds and pump up the market until it crashes. Kyl? Are you listening? Kyl?

Some kind of savior

Pray for America: do all you can to block Obama's agenda says a letter from a local reader in yesterday's paper. The online edition has 165 comments, mostly favorable. I can't bear to read things like this any more -- and it's everywhere.

The agenda, of course is a hysterically hypothetical fabrication and without much resembling factual support from anything the administration has done, said aloud or published: "grabbing" our guns, raising taxes on working people and the middle class, giving massive handouts to the indigent, encouraging terrorist attacks, putting privilege in peril and deliberately raising the debt -- and of course sabotaging the messianic mission of Saint Sarah D'Arc in a most egregiously unfair way. Most of all, his agenda is dangerous to the divine right to make huge and ever increasing profits through collusion and dubious restraints of trade with no regard for the suffering of Americans who have to watch their children die so that some corporation can make 40% profits year after year.

"Americans need to stop sleeping and stand up before this becomes a third world nation" said the voice at the other end of the table this past weekend. "They saw this guy as some kind of savior and someone who would give them something for nothing."

The table, of course was in a room full of millionaires observing the change of watch at our yacht club, which as one expects, has a policy against discussing politics at club functions. Such angry lapses are more frequent of late however, as the propaganda and lies percolates up from the sewers of Fox, the Corporate funded think tanks and policy centers with deceptive, patriotic names.

Of course this voter remembers the posters, the paintings, the rhetoric announcing George W. Bush as being part of the second coming, sitting at the feet of and being anointed by Christ, and this writer certainly doesn't see either man in a religious context. Obama was the lesser risk of more of the same and vastly more intelligent of the two candidates but never mind, the meme is abroad and pandemic and there seems to be no way to stop it. With all indications that this administration and the current court has no interest in additional gun control legislation much less in disarming the country, the rage against Obama, the gun grabber grows. Obama, the clownish, dishonest watermelon-eating political devil from Birth of a Nation. Although over 90% of America has got a tax break, the conviction that Obama is going to squeeze them persists, driving otherwise sane people into public displays of ignorant rage.

Extending jobless benefits is now "communism" and it costs too much. The unemployed are going to have to suffer because the millionaires at yacht clubs all over America need the lowest tax rates in the civilized world to stave off Communism and can't be expected to pay down that debt incurred by Bush and Obama in order to bail them out.

Yes, America needs to stand up and continue howling as though Count Barackula had risen from the grave to suck us all dry and bark the louder so that nothing true, reasonable, factual or sane can intrude on the festival of tea soaked madness.

Obama's agenda, if you believe your eyes, seems to be about pacifying corporate (Republican) interests. It seems to be more of the same as concerns our two forever wars, the "Patriot Act" and weakness about standing up to the health care and drug cartel. His supporters weren't looking for someone who heard God's voice, but to get rid of a President who heard voices but not American voices. They were looking for a fixer and not a savior and if fixing the mess Republicans created takes more than an eighth of the time it took to ruin the economy, some are still willing to wait, just as we're still waiting for the "surge" to "win" the war we were called traitors for opposing. ( Remember when we were America-haters for suggesting it might take longer than 6 weeks?)

Third world country? Isn't that one where all the wealth is owned by a tiny percentage of the people? Is that Obama's fault or is that the result of the deliberate and consistent tax policies of the Republicans? Isn't that one where the police and military answer to the rulers and not the people and have a frightening amount of power? Who wrote the patriot act, ended Posse Comitatus and Habeas Corpus, built secret prisons off-shore so as to bypass not only the constitution but the fundamental and natural rights of man upon which it is based?

No, have another martini, go sleep it off on your yacht and tomorrow get up all refreshed and cry about Obama's agenda all over again because you'll never really get over that sense of entitlement, you'll never be as free of responsibility to your country as you'd like or as wealthy as you deserve to be.

A Christian argues against teaching the Bible in schools

Before becoming a journalist, Betty Winston Baye spent 20 years working for national denominations and faith-based civil rights and community organizations. She is “unabashedly and unashamedly Christian.”

But she does not believe the Bible should be taught in taxpayer-funded schools.

Baye rightfully argues that the United States is not a theocracy and that to claim that God has been taken out of the schools runs counter to a very basic Christian premise that God is never absent. He’s everywhere.

A bill is moving through the Kentucky Senate that would require the state Board of Education to establish guidelines for an elective course in Bible literacy.

The course “shall follow applicable law and all federal and state guidelines in maintaining and accommodating the diverse religious views, traditions and perspective of students in the school. A course under this section shall not endorse, favor, or promote, or disfavor or show hostility toward any particular religion or nonreligious faith or religious perspective.”

But the Bible is not religiously neutral. Moreover, here in Kentucky, religious neutrality and tolerance for diverse religious views are often viewed as controversial, weak-minded, “liberal,” even un-American. . . . Young people are not only highly susceptible to being proselytized, but may lack the tools to react to a teacher who teaches the Bible from a perspective that hardly can be considered neutral.


There were good reasons why America's founders, after fleeing religious persecution, pointedly sought a separation between church and state. Mixing the two, history shows, is a potion for disaster and conflict.

Brian Willis, who focused his doctorial studies on church and society, is vice president for academic affairs at Simmons College in Kentucky.

If the purpose of the bill, he said, “is to educate students from a social science perspective on biblical texts, then the five major world religions' sacred writings (Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam) should be incorporated into the curriculum.”

Wells' broader view, however, is that “religious communities and private faith-based institutions are better equipped to teach courses like these without violating religious freedom rights.”

On a more practical level Baye suggests that “when so many Kentucky public schools are performing poorly in the basics and are being beaten down by the state's budget crisis, it doesn't make sense to spend time and money developing guidelines for “elective” Bible literacy courses. These are readily available in private institutions — churches, mosques, temples and schools of theology — that have the history, the experts, the expertise and the desire to teach a knowledge-thirsty public.”


Betty Winston Baye is a Louisville Courier-Journal editorial writer and columnist.

The enemy within the gates

Imagine that you have an enemy who wants to defeat you. (For many of us, this is true in one sense or another -- and lately the Republicans frankly seem hell-bent on playing that role!) That enemy may or may not be able to overpower you. But sometimes it can find a powerful ally against you, an ally inside your own psyche, in fact.

This enemy within the gates is the tendency, which we all have, to dwell on the negative, to wallow in gloom and doom. Everyone's situation includes both good and bad. Even if you were the most fortunate person on Earth, you could easily make yourself utterly miserable if you insisted on contemplating only the unpleasant aspects of your situation (for there would still be some) while dismissing or ignoring the positive.

It's startling how often one sees people do this. All is lost. We can't win. The good guys are no better than the bad guys. What we've accomplished counts for nothing -- only the things we've (so far) failed to do really matter.

The reason this matters is that the way we perceive our situation can affect how we deal with our situation. Wallowing in doom and gloom leads to pessimism. Pessimism leads to despair. Despair leads to paralysis. And paralysis leads to defeat even when defeat was not inevitable. If you convince yourself that everything is hopeless, you will not take action, because you will have trapped yourself in a state of mind where you believe that taking action is futile or will even be counterproductive, regardless of the actual track record of such action in the real world. This is why the enemy within the mental gates is so dangerous.

This may be part of the appeal -- defeatism legitimizes laziness and inaction. If the game is rigged against you and you can't win, why do anything? Might as well take the easy way out -- sit on the sidelines and carp at the people who are trying to accomplish something. If those people point out that some things have, in fact, been accomplished and therefore the defeatist passivity is unwarranted, just call them names or ignore them.

Who gains from this kind of thinking? Only those who want to defeat us.

If you fight for what you want, you might not get it. If you don't fight for it, you definitely won't get it.

Live Dino-Blogging the Health-Care Summit

Health-care summit held -- check.

Today's Lesson? Right-wingers invariably treat kindness as weakness, and willingness to talk things over as a billboard-sized "Roll Me" sticker on your suit lapel. God Almighty could step out of his magnificent chariot (the same one Christ uses in Paradise Lost to scatter the rebel angels down to bottomless perdition) and command the Republicans in Congress to do something fine, generous, and noble for the country, and they still wouldn't do it.

Seriously, though, enough soliciting opinions from people with the soul of a stone -- let's pass meaningful health-care reform promptly through reconciliation, and stop pretending that the cynical or deluded supporters of some mythical version of "the free market" in access to health care will ever be willing to stop complaining about "socialism" long enough to sign on to significant improvements on the status quo.

The Obama Code

What's black and white and red all over? What about proof that Barack Obama has a Muslim agenda?

The "Conservative blogosphere" as Raw Story calls that big ball of slime, is "abuzz" with much sound and fury now that the "Conservative" Drudge Report has identified the new logo of the Missile Defense Agency as a secretly coded message that Barack Obama is going to make the USA a Muslim country through the use of anti-ballistic lasers and missiles.

This fits in with my theory that because the US flag has red stripes and stars, Betsy Ross was a Chinese Communist.

"New Missile Defense Agency Logo Causes Online Commotion,"

says the Drudge Report. I'm sure he'd like that to be true and perhaps he will be able to create commotion amongst the large proportion of his readers with fewer working synapses than a jar of mayonnaise. Perhaps there are other mental midgets so terribly desperate for one more absurd calumny to be flung at the White House they'll willfully suspend the kind of disbelief that would inhibit a normal person, but we'll see just how far the "conservatives" can pull that anti-American bandwagon before the clowns themselves jump off and the mules run away giggling.

Yes, it's red, white and blue and looks, if you're astigmatic, vaguely like the President's campaign logo based on the US flag. It has some curved lines perhaps to suggest missile trajectories and orbiting satellites. There's a point of light indicating a missile hit with a laser, which if you're trying hard might suggest a star and as everyone knows, the flag of Turkey, a predominantly Muslim secular democracy has a crescent moon, a red background and a star, and so does the American based Nation of Islam which has had known terrorist members like Mohammad Ali and Michael Jackson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and John Coltrane, so how can we avoid that hidden message shouting at us? Thorazine or some heavy anti-psychotic drugs perhaps?

Drudge packer Frank Gaffney, writing at BigGovernment.com, a Web site run by the well known "conservative" blogger Andrew Breitbart, says the new logo may be a sign that the Obama administration has "nefarious" plans for US defense. No, really. You couldn't make this up or at least you couldn't try to sell it while keeping a straight face, even to an idiot -- or to American "conservatives" whichever is stupider and more demented.

Hey, have you ever noticed that the Capitol building has a dome? Like the Dome of the Rock maybe? And the Washington monument looks a lot like a minaret - and don't you hear those voices?

$108 MILLION INCOME … TAX-FREE!

Jamie and Frank McCourt made $108 million from 2004 through 2009 but paid no federal or state income taxes. The secret lives of the rich and infamous came to light when the couple filed for divorce in Los Angeles County Superior Court.  According to Michael Hiltzik of the LA Times:

The court papers indicate that the McCourts deliberately structured their business at least partially to allow them to live tax-free ...

According to Jamie, the McCourts employed two mechanisms to live tax-free. One was to claim enormous tax losses from their business, which was mostly commercial real estate before they bought the Dodgers. These could be carried forward, offsetting income year after year until they were finally netted out ...

Depreciation is a non-cash expense that can be applied against cash income, reducing your income taxes or creating a loss to show the tax man, even though you're making money. It's common in real estate, though it can also be applied to things like a sports team's player contracts ...

Another McCourt maneuver involves financing and refinancing their assets. The tax rules allow real estate owners to refinance properties with rising values and take out cash tax-free ...

The McCourts have also borrowed against future business income -- in 2007 they took out a $140-million loan against future Dodger ticket sales, of which $20 million went to fund their lifestyles, tax-free.

According to court papers files by Jamie McCourt, Frank manipulated business accounts to make himself look $670 million poorer than he is. Cheating the IRS may be legal, but ...

Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned
Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.

Perhaps our good friend and honorary cephalopod, AZRainman, should have the last word …

Credit: AZRainman

Yoo's a viper

John Yoo called it a "Witch hunt" but he's lucky it wasn't. I have a feeling he'd have fared far worse had he been tried by a cross section of the American public who would have been more disgusted by his maintaining the legality of crushing an innocent child's testicles or murdering an unlimited of innocent bystanders by Presidential fiat in order to "keep America safe" than the actual jury of his peers -- other lawyers.

He hardly even seems grateful for having avoided the tar and feathers and the pillory, considering that he's upbraiding President Obama for not recognizing his efforts to allow a president to "keep America Safe" by exercising unlimited executive power under the aegis of a war he has the power to start for no other reason than to give him that power. Did any of our fabled founding fathers really envision such a thing except as the perfect opposite of an American President?

Yoo's image of an American president as unlimited by law, treaty or moral scruple to a degree not unfamiliar to Attila or Tamarlane or Ghengis Khan should be producing more widespread disgust than it is, but that no doubt shows the immense power of the massive, corporate sponsored, Republican organized eruption of noxious gas and poisonous accusations: a smokescreen the likes of which hasn't been seen since the close of the Permian.

No, Professor Yoo is claiming that even though the proceedings against him were initiated under the Republicans and he was let go by Democrats, he's a victim -- Obama's victim. That ungrateful man of sorrows who apparently is all things contemptible because with the power to do evil, we would surely be overwhelmed and conquered by a few dozen guys with explosive jockey shorts. He's a victim and it's because he loves keeping America "safe."

"an entirely false narrative of his own victimization." says Joe Mathis at the Philadephia Weekly. "Get this straight, the so-called 'smear job' came under the Republican president. The so-called 'vindication' came under the Democratic president."

Preposterous by the strictest definition of the word; the same problem with cause and effect that makes Obama guilty of Bush's economic train wreck.

Guilty of professional misconduct and poor judgment is a slap on the wrist considering that his support of giving the President the power to break constitutional law ad libidem as long as "there's a war on" might at one time have been punished quite severely. You'd think he'd just thank his luck and the corruption of justice that's become institutionalized in the US, but no, he has to be a victim, he has to vilify the administration that let him go free and he gets to keep his tenured job, his law license and most likely will have a great number of books bought up by CPAC and distributed for free to contributors so that he can be on the NewYork Times best-seller list and gloat about Democratic "Royalists."

There's a lot of money, there's a lot of safety in evil.

What's in a name?

After listening to the self-contradictory, incoherent, quasi-literate and massively hate-packed rhetoric emanating from CPAC, where we were told that the concept of progress was a Marxist idea, that Progressives wanted to progress toward Communism. Liberals were the enemy of freedom and most insane of all: "Royalists" It's hard to hold on to any hope that what's left of the American Right retains even a rudimentary grasp on reality or any commitment to any ideal in any way related to Democracy and the Rights of Man. Taxes are Communism, protection of the rights of minorities is Communism, secular democracy is communism, but collusion between corporations and government isn't, as Mussolini Defined it, Fascism -- it's freedom.

A party that won a solid majority in a free election is an "insurgency." Teddy Roosevelt, his opponent Woodrow Wilson and Adam Smith are all Communists who tried to destroy us and Glenn Beck got what he calls a "free" education, not by attending any private school, but by using taxpayer funded, government owned resources at the public library. Yes those of us who have pushed through legislation that finally allowed women and minorities to vote or own property or live like free men and women are simultaneously Nazis, Bolsheviks, Trotskyites, Maoists, and yes -- Royalists. Those of us who think vast sums of corporate money are corrupting the system are any wildly preposterous political epithet that comes to mind, but also Communists, Marxists, Trotskyites and the kinky sex partners of the Taliban. That they're not calling non-Republicans Irridentists or Scrooby Separatists is only the result of their neglected education, but of course those things are only another form of Marxist Islamofascism and Trotskyite lesbo-Feminism with a bit of royalism thrown in for flavour.

"Protect our precious Medicare?" Well that's not communism even tough it and Social Security were until the country voted for health care reform. Why? because Obama is a Fascist follower of Pol Pot, trying to corrupt our youth and a Communist, Muslim, illegal alien, soft-on-terrorism, cannibal none the less - and because any hateful insanity must be true if it vilifies Obama - he's a Royalist.

No accusation is too ludicrous whether it contradicts all the other accusations or not. It' s not important to make sense or to tell the truth; it's only important to pump up the accusations, pump up the hate.

After listening to John Yoo describe a Republican justice department according to which, an American president like the one he served has more power than any European Monarch did in the age before Democracy, including the right to wage wars, internal and foreign, suspend civil rights, amend laws, refuse to obey laws, to lie, misrepresent and fabricate and to justify any action by Presidential fiat, it's hard to believe we're not simply listening to cross talk between parallel but vastly different universes. Is it legal for the President to order that the testicles of an innocent child be crushed to make his parent talk? But of course says Professor Yoo! Do as the President says shall be the law -- but we're Royalists all the same.

It's not so much that the Republicans seem to have defined conservative values as Marxist and indeed almost everything including evil itself as its opposite, they're inventing their own paranoid psychotic reality permeated by gibbering, drooling and incoherent rage, it's that we're not in open revolt against them; that they have a huge, armed and vastly wealthy base of support.

And we just sit and listen.

God retarded my baby

Giving birth to a disabled child is God's way of punishing women for having had a prior abortion, says Virginia Representative Bob Marshall, R-13th.

“In the Old Testament, the first born of every being, animal and man, was dedicated to the Lord. There’s a special punishment Christians would suggest.”

Yes it's redundant to mention that he's a Republican; a raging mob which for the last few decades has been the party of and a party to promoting such shameless indecencies. Of course some biblical scholars tell us that the story of Abraham and Isaac was a priestly way of moving away from a prior and very ancient practice of sacrificial infanticide, but indeed, the first born male lamb in the flock of a Hebrew shepherd was to be sacrificed and the first born son was at one, very pre-Christian time, dedicated to service in the Temple.

Of course there hasn't been a Temple since the 9th of Av in the year 70 CE, and Christians really don't hold with more than 9 or 10 of the 613 commandments and none of the Rabbinical laws, but that doesn't stop the kind of shoot-from-the-hip theology prevalent in these days of the senescence of American Christianity. Christians might suggest anything in truth, but if they're suggesting any such thing, it's a suggestion with no roots in the teachings of Jesus.

One might be tempted to ask Bob why, according to antique Jewish law largely set aside by Jesus and his followers, Christians who don't force their first born to become priests aren't subject to the same punishment, but his answer isn't very likely to enlighten us.

Surely anyone who still believes in a God with some tenuous attachment to decency if not actual justice will have trouble with the bloody Saturnine entity who condemns a child to a lifetime of pain and deformity because of something his mother did. But not Bob Marshall.

Some will have difficulty reconciling the position that it's indecent to mention that someone may be mentally retarded unless the mention is made by some pasquillant Republican creep like Limbaugh; but not Bob Marshall and probably not a large number of morally retarded, power hungry and profoundly ignorant Republican Theocrats who haven't bothered to consider that the enormously vast majority of children with deformities and defects and abnormalities are not born to mothers who aborted their first pregnancies.

Down Syndrome for one, seems more likely to affect children of older mothers. Conjoined twins, anencephalic babies, Spina Bifida, heart defects -- can anyone show any statistical correlation with sin? Of course not and anyone promising that virtuous people are less likely to give birth to lives affected by diseases and afflictions and deficiencies is likely to be a liar and an idiot, willing to use other people's tragedies to gain political power -- like Bob Marshall.

I await Sarah Palin's response to what could, amongst people who can actually reason consistently, be taken as an accusation of having had an abortion. I'm sure she'll choose to ignore it however, for fear of damaging the fabric of the alternate universe in which the ultra-right lives: where right and wrong, left and right, up and down are nebulous and interchangeable concepts and useful only to defame the enemies of these Insaneocrats and to yoke Jesus to their bandwagon like an ox.