Where's the rum gone?

Avast, ye dogs! Listen up or it's the lash fer ye!

While a warship from those dogs what broke away from the accursed British East Inja Company dishonorably prevented a poor pirate ship from defendin' hisself against attacks, we don' hardly care fer that, now, do we? The Bay of Aden is halfway around the world, an' almost where the map tells us there be dragons. So enough of those scurvy wretches, then. We has more important things ta speak of.

There be rum wars afoot!

Aye, it seems that Puerto Rico is screaming like a midshipman getting his barnacles crushed because the Virgin Islands has stolen their rum. O' course, instead o' weighing anchor and hoisting the Jolly Roger, they be whinging about it like a cabin boy told it's his turn in the dress, saying that the Virgin Islands did some nefarious deal, when really, they just made Captain Morgan a better offer.

O'course, ye can trust me on this much; since Captain Morgan is going there, we'll just be calling them "the Islands" from now on.

First, the obligatory old joke...

Awwk!!! Polly want a cracker!

...Oh, sorry. Thought you said "Talk Like a PARROT Day"...

IMO: What's Right On What's Wrong

No pictures today. No jokes. There'll be plenty more to come, I imagine. Today, I want to spell out what I think is happening in our country, what I think it means, and where I believe true morality lies. This is for me. And for JMartin.

I had a couple of comments on a recent post( on my individual blog) from JMartin who made it clear that he or she did not agree with me, but was not swayed by demagogues like Beck and Palin. This commentor was interested in what others, who did not share his or her opinions, had to say. I realized that I read so many progressive blogs--from writers who are dead serious, to writers who use sharp-honed humor beautifully, to writers who wax obscene to make their point--I just assumed that everyone knows all the arguments, all the issues, all the stances available on the left. And that anyone can instantly recognize all of my positions by extrapolating logically from a joke here and a jab there. Or, else, I assume that no one gives a damn what I think. Well, maybe someone might.

So, here's what I think (and I'm not taking time to justify or explain these positions on this post):

1. The War In Afghanistan: The President could not have gotten elected if he had run on pulling us out of both wars at once, so he chose the one on which public opinion had most obviously soured. The Afghanistan surge was a waste of men and money, an expedient that just stirs the hornet's nest. Continuing to back Karzai was wrong. We can't afford to stay on in Afghanistan. The task now is to get out with some balance between saving global face (which ain't what it used to be, if it ever was) and minimizing further loss of life. And that's a balance that cannot be struck. It will be ugly for the Afghans; it will be publicized; we will be vilified; we will have deserved it. Bite that bullet, Mr. President. Fight terrorism as a police action, because terrorists are criminals; proceed accordingly. If there'd been a draft, neither war would have happened; we'd have cared enough to pay attention.

2.The Koch Party: At the bottom of the pile is the duped herd that actually thinks it is part of a grass-roots movement. This mass thinks it's been had, but it is confused about who the enemy is. It's members follow pied pipers, demagogues, and fools (Beck, Palin, Limbaugh) who are blinded by their own celebrity; they are delusional narcissists. Behind the mass and driving it are politicos who are determined to regain power at all costs (Gingrich, Boehner) and who believe that the end justifies the means. And, above the dust of this cattle drive are the Kochs, Murdoch, Cheney and corporate Robber Barons who believe that they belong to an entirely different species from the rest of us...and that works for them as long as we agree with their assumption that they deserve to be in control.

3. The Fundamentalists:  These are often so braided into The Koch Party and the Republican Party, they can be fooled into thinking they have a vital role in both--even a leadership role. Their primary cause is opposition to abortion and to anything that legitimatizes the LGBT citizenry. In fact, they provide a smokescreen that permits the Robber Barons to operate freely to ensure their financial monopoly. As long as the Fundamentalists are willing to beat the morality drum, Big Money will finance their cause. It's about the money. Corporate interests could not care less who gets an abortion, who marries whom.

The Republican party is hoping to let Reverend Beck and Spokesmodel Palin hold the moral hot potatoes for them, leaving the Repubs free to go after independents who have been scared into believing that only unfettered free markets can save us. We tried that already; they didn't and they won't.

4. Wall Street, Big Bank, and Capitalism: Investing is a game of chance largely played by computers now. We've applied our creativity and our energy to designing more and more complex financial products with which to rip off  the working class. Capitalism is a fine thing, but it is a cancer if it goes unregulated. The function of markets is amoral. Greenspan should be prosecuted. Elizabeth Warren should chair Consumer Protection, not advise it...unless there's a Cabinet position for her, even better.  Free markets will NOT operate indefinitely on their own to benefit individuals and the society, as the Bush years proved. In a society that worships The Free Market, money operates as a test of right and wrong--the good make it and the bad fail. And that's not right; hell, it's not even wrong.

5. The Economy, Taxes and Jobs: Mr. President, dump Geithner and Summers. Repeal tax cuts for the wealthiest echelon and save the endangered middle class. But do incentivize banks to loan to small businesses, which are more inclined to grow and hire. (Huge corporations are primarily motivated to perpetuate themselves and continue to grow profits by laying off, dropping benefits, and going off-shore for cheap labor; they do not turn tax cuts into jobs for Americans. They haven't in the last eight years and they won't, period.)  And, Mr. President, push those infrastructure jobs now. Not later; now. They won't put enough of America back to work to turn the economy around, but they might prevent another man-made disaster. We are already becoming a Second World country, with our potholes, our failed levees, our crumbling bridges and rupturing gas lines.

6. Healthcare: Change had to begin, but, no matter how many times I read about the palatable separate ingredients included, I fear that too many crooks cooks spoiled this broth. Glad we did it. Worried about it.

7. The Democrat's task: The real moral message is that the Koch Party, the Party of Wall Street, the Party of Big Oil, the Party of Big Insurance does not care one iota about those of us who earn less than that proverbial $250,00 a year. They sure as hell don't care about those of us who earn less than $100,00 a year. What's truly immoral is that our earnings are stagnant or reduced, our retirement funds were raped and left to die, we all know someone who was laid off and can't find work. We were seduced by predatory lending and our hopes, our credit, our very country, was destroyed when Wall Street bet that we couldn't pay off those loans. Small businesses cannot get loans now; they'd hire us if they could.

8. The Deficit Reduction Commission: Alan Simpson is demented. Social Security is not the problem; years and years of war is a much bigger problem. If Soc.Sec. is privatized, Wall St. will get that, too. At which point, every state might as well legalize assisted suicide.

How could anyone vote for the party that designed and engineered those moral crimes? How could anyone vote for the confused Koch Party candidates? How could anyone vote for the Republicans who ignored our streets, our gas lines, our levees? How could anyone vote for the party that was brought to you by Big Oil, and radicalized beyond the point where they are recognizable? How could you vote for any party that doesn't care enough about the unemployed to extend them the pittance of unemployment compensation? How could anyone vote for the party that wants to hold the middle class hostage to tax breaks for the richest 2% of the country?



[Imma turn the mic back over to Slutticia von Heretik, now]

p.s. Well, okay, maybe just this one picture. Big H/T to Tom Degan at The Rant

I AM SOOO PROUD OF MY NEW KENYAN BIRTH CERTIFICATE

Here is proof positive that your cephalopod-in-residence is not an actual Octopoda americanus but an Octopus vulgaris, a pretender, a usurper, an invasive species.  Yup, its true.  I am the dreaded Manchurian mollusk feared by everyone. Even more horrifying, my clammy male chromosome has that annoying terrorist fist-bumping, basketball-dribbling, TV channel-flipping gene that drives newts and salamanders nuts.  Here is my REAL birth certificate:

A special hat tip to Sheria for helping me research my family background.  If you would like to join President Obama, Sheria, and the cephalopod in solidarity and have an authentic Kenyan birth certificate of your own, you can generate one here.

Ground Hog Primary

So we have another source of wisdom and another voice to add to the panel of sages, prophets and certainty sellers we've been inflicted with late and soon. The latest party guest of the Mad Hatter, Christine O’Donnell, told Bill Maher some years ago when the Biblemongers began to suck the blood out of lurid school shooting reportage, that it was all because there wasn't enough Bible study and prayer in our schools. Same old, same old.

It's not that she's the first to link random occurrences with public sin for the purpose of profit. In fact it seems to be the world's oldest profession, but fools that some of us are, we've grown to expect that things like lightening and tornadoes are the inevitable and random results of natural processes and it isn't witches, homosexuals, believers in alternate mythologies and the tolerance of the same who cause them. It was the 90's and nearly every thing possessed of a name could be advanced with the banner "no wonder kids kill kids." It was America where we never make the connection between child molesting, whore humping clerics, Reverend Jones, the Waco whacko, David Koresh and Bible study.

Our world is full of forces enticing kids and adults to kill others as well as being full of tectonic events, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and falling bits of space rock. There simply is no correlation with religious devotion, adherence or piety. It's also worth noticing that holy books are so often cited as a reason and justification for unjust and irrational behavior. The Bible belt is more than roughly congruent with various other belts of things from ignorance and bigotry to bad dental hygiene and Churches are as likely if not more likely to be hit by lightning as houses of prostitution, opium dens, gambling casinos and Mosques.

But candidates Like Palin, O'Donnel and Robertson still win elections, don't they. They still thrive on telling us about witches and heretics and the dreaded libertine liberals as the country slides so far toward the holy right that even Bush and his high father begin to be called liberals. Same old.

Tea Partiers Speak and Scare the Pants Off of Me

It all started with Tom T at Two Seeds On a Blog. If he hadn't written such a lucid article called The Myth of the Founding Fathers (HERE), the wing-nut blood pleasure levels wouldn't have shot up to near catastrophic heights. It's odd how intelligent mild mannered reason from one source can cause such anger and near hysteria from another.

Just a few highlights so you can see how Tom T riled up the know-nothings. What a guy.

Led by Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, Tea Party worshippers of the Founding Fathers want to return to the “good ol’ days” of 1787, when most African-Americans were slaves, many poor whites were indentured servants, and women couldn’t vote. At the time the Founding Fathers wrote the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, Native Americans were being slaughtered for their land, and Mexicans who were indigenous to the Southwest and the West coast of what became the United States were included in the genocide.

----------

Conservatives have trouble seeking sensible solutions to our present-day problems of poverty, violence, and perpetual war that make rich folks richer while poor people suffer and weapons makers and war profiteers make big bucks while killing and injuring innumerable innocent people. The problems are caused by big moneyed interests with the help of simple minded sycophants like Beck, Sarah Palin and the Tea Partiers. . . . The Tea Partiers believe the mythologized Founding Fathers are more intelligent and moral than anyone today except maybe radical right-wingers like Beck and Palin.

At this point Tom T provides an intriguing analysis of Glenn Beck, including his psyche, Beck's speech at his Come to Jesus rally on August 28, Palin's cliches, and the Tea Party mythology. The comments are just as absorbing so you have to jump over there (HERE). But not before you read what follows.

Judy T, the other seed on their blog, is understandably upset over some of the hate language that has been sent Tom T's way. She tells us to Listen to the Tea Partiers Speak for Themselves. (HERE) She writes:

Tom posted on our blog recently about the Restoring Honor Rally in Washington.  It was a controversial post that elicited a lot of angry comments, on our blog and several other places where it had been published or reposted. He was called some really bad names!  The commentors said over and over that he was an angry man (that was the nicest thing they said about him).

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I found a video of a young reporter who had been there, circulating through the crowd, interviewing ordinary people, people who had come with friends and family to be part of the huge event. They were eager to talk to the young man, and very enthusiastic about sharing their views.

Proceed with caution. In fact, you might want to brace yourself with a stiff Jack Daniels with no branch water. Maybe even two.



These paranoid folks need some heavy counseling and anger management classes. More importantly, if our education system doesn't improve, these poor ignorant people are going to pass their handicaps on from one generation to the next. This 13 minutes of ignorance boggles my mind and makes me worry for the future of our country.

Your media narrative is going kill us all (part 2 - updated)

The current media narrative is that the elections in November are going to be a disaster for the Democrats, with massive numbers of Republicans getting elected. (This message is often accompanied by metaphorical battlefield narrative, with the victorious conquerors striding over the bleeding bodies of their fallen foes.)

And this has many people panicked about the fate of America, with teabaggers coming into office and strengthening the obstructionist Republicans who are doing their best to ensure that the first black president's term in office is an abject failure. Because, after all, Americans have notoriously short memories and will always choose instant gratification over long-term gains: it actually sounds plausible that, since Obama did not immediately create untold wealth and prosperity, the small-minded people will decide to give the keys back to the people who drove the car into the lake in the first place.

What they're failing to rememeber, of course, is that the media narrative is usually wrong. For one thing, it's being driven by people who are motivated to tell you that the Republicans will save us all.

While right-wing media chooses stories that serve its political agenda, progressive media increasingly covers the same "news." True, the focus is on disproving right-wing accounts, but from the "death panels" for granny to the alleged "Ground Zero" mosque, the right wing is setting the agenda for the progressive media.

No wonder Americans are unaware of President Obama's many accomplishments, or think that he, rather than President Bush, signed the unpopular bank bailout bill. With progressive media primarily focused on rebutting conservative "news," little time is left to promote stories that build support for progressive policies.
...

And, unlike progressive media, Fox and right-wing radio feel no obligation to cover stories that boost their opponents. The right-wing media avoids news that does not serve their cause, which limits stories from echoing through the broader public.

That's why so few Americans know about the Ensign, Vitter and other Republican political scandals, but everyone knows about Charles Rangel's problems. And why so many are unaware of the jobs created and preserved by the Obama stimulus, or about the many positive actions Obama officials at the EPA have taken to improve the environment.

Many noted how the media never connected former President Bush to the Exxon Valdez spill, but directly associated Obama with BP's reckless conduct. That's because Fox News and others made Obama the issue from the start, and traditional media either parroted this line or joined progressives in noting that the Bush Administration imposed lax oil drilling regulations; either way, Fox's framing of Obama as a central figure in the spill prevailed.

The slant even makes itself apparent in who they choose to tell the narrative. A new study from George Mason University School of Law shows that among the panel guests making up the Sunday Morning talk shows, "diversity" is a myth. The most common panelist is overwhelmingly an older, white, male Republican.

The study, of the five network Sunday shows from February to December 2009, found that while 14.6 percent of members of Congress were minorities, just 2.5 percent of the Congressional TV guests were minorities; and that while 16.9 percent of members were female, 13.5 percent of the guests were female.

A supplement to the study also singled out a group of “30 white, male U.S. senators in office six plus years” who represented 5.6 percent of the Congressional populace, but 61.4 percent of the TV guests.

Other fine examples of media compliance with promoting a false narrative can be found with allowing Republicans to call the act of allowing the Bush tax cuts expire a "tax increase." Or the continual references to a community center as the "Ground Zero Mosque." Despite the fact that it's partly modeled on the 92nd Street Y, which is a Jewish community center, which nobody ever calls "the Upper East Side Temple".

So, where does that leave us? Where should we turn?

Perhaps to the facts.

Flash back with me to February, 2008. Check out the headlines. If you alter the search terms from "Clinton leads" to "McCain can win", you get results like this. I love that first headline, don't you? October 29, 2008, just a couple of days ahead of the election, and the headline from the Seattle Times and others around the country is "McCain can still win..." Just for more fun, look at the news results for August-September 2008 when Palin came onboard -- she was a "game-changer".

We don't know what will happen. But really, we almost never do.

In the end, all we can bring away with us is that things are probably not as cut and dried as the "liberal media" would like us to believe.
___________

Update (9/16): So meanwhile, if you're looking for more reasons to doubt the media's narrative about the unstoppable GOP machine, perhaps you should consider that the Republican party is currently curled up in the corner, trying to gnaw its leg off. And as for the public, well, it turns out that while they don't like the Democrats much, they like the Republicans even less, and they believe the Democrats have a better chance of fixing the mess we're in. So, you know, calm down. And don't forget to vote.

Let it bleed

"What about the Jewish heart and Jewish compassion and Jewish morality?"

asks Elie Wiesel. Perhaps those are no different from anyone elses heart, compassion and morality: just ornaments to wear on parade and to mock when it's not profitable or when we're not comfortable. People who are troubled by plans by the State of Israel to deport people born and educated there; sometimes minors, who speak the language and often no other language because their parents, brought in as 'guest workers,' have overstayed their visas.

In a country offering automatic right of citizenship to any Jew, born there or not, it seems inconsistent, unless we consider that universal human tendency to surround one's self with one's ilk. These native residents are not, of course, Jews and apparently the official design of Israel as a "Jewish State" is threatened by religious diversity -- and who or what country remains moral when threatened? Not the US, not Israel.

Eli Yishai, Minister of the Interior and the man who oversees immigration policy invokes the "bleeding heart Liberal" straw man so well used by right wingers everywhere as though compassion, mercy and indeed, morality had no place in that questionable construct: the Judeo-Christian ethos.

The US doesn't seem to be in a position to offer criticism or guidance, of course. We have our own problems reconciling our facade with what goes on, and like Israel, we cling to the word illegal as though it were a solid refuge against moral condemnation. People; small children who are illegal as a result of no action of their own and who have had no ability to comply with immigration laws rightly make one's heart bleed if one has a heart with blood in it. Indeed it can be said of both nations, that they make a big issue of alleging Biblical origins for their laws while using the law as though morality were too expensive, too inconvenient and too frightening.

It's ethnic cleansing and it's always a dirty business and these days our tendency to continue to make such noble statements as one finds on the Statue of Liberty reek of hypocrisy concerns me more than the admittedly real problems with uncontrolled immigration. Perhaps we should come clean and put an "If you're white, you're all right" in Lady Liberty's hand or at least stop pretending our laws are a salute to Jesus. If we follow through on the assault on the 14th amendment, making people born and raised as Americans, who pay taxes, have jobs and businesses but never knew there parent's weren't citizens, we're going to inherit the same moral dilemma. I have to wonder in fact, as to whether, having had a grandfather who was never a citizen, my mother would retroactively be an alien, making me, after 65 years as a citizen, subject to deportation and constant fear lest there be a midnight knock on the door by a black gloved fist.

If there's no moral problem with sending a kid who speaks only English back "home" to Azerbaijan or Guatemala with no chance of appeal, then it's time we stopped pretending we're any different from anybody else.

TWO OCTOPODES MOMENTS

In another 100,000 years, cephalopods

will be farm-raising human beings.

SHAW EXPOSES IDENTITY THEFT AND RIGHT WING CYBER-TERRORISM RING