Damn the lies -- part II

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


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


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


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

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

You've got to be kidding - part II

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

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

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


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


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


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


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


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

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


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

You've got to be kidding!

Paul Ryan -- yes, I know it's already old news, but Jesus. . . . Paul Ryan? 

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

<i>We must code</i>

Blogger recently did a redesign on its pages, and a lot of people don't appreciate it.

The spacing has gone weird, it likes to reset your font at random, and sometimes the background color will just do whatever the hell it wants. The problem is, I'm willing to bet, that you're working in "Compose" (that little button in the upper left, assuming you have the standard layout).

See, I have a little (very little) training in coding. And damn, but I wish I'd kept it up - in 1999, I could have made a ton of money just correcting a programming error in COBOL.

If you're having weird formatting issues, open that post, and click the button in the upper left labelled "HTML." What's probably going to happen is that a lot of crap that you've never seen before will suddenly appear in the middle of your post.

I know you don't care, but HTML stands for "HyperText Markup Language." It's just the commands that tell your computer how to do things on the internet. It's not usually scary, until you let a machine try to do it.

Because they use a program to put the HTML in the middle of your text. And one of the things that the program does is set your format for every paragraph (the font style, the font size, everything). And if you go back to something you've already written to change a few words, the program wants to reset the format again.

And sometimes, when you throw in a space it doesn't think is necessary, it'll throw some invisible symbol in there (usually starting with an ampersand and ending with a semicolon). You normally can't see those, but they exist.

And sometimes, there's so much unnecessary crap there that you can only barely find your text, hiding between various commands that have no real excuse for existing.

It's automated. Like any machine, it does exactly what it's been told to do, and doesn't vary in the slightest. So you just have to cut proto-Siri out of the equation. Here's what you do. And don't worry if you have no experience with computer code: we're going to start slow and work you up to it.

First, just accept the standard font and background. You can mess with those later when you're more comfortable with it. So, the first thing you need to do is to click the HTML button again. You're about to take a few (very few) tentative steps into the wonderful world of computer code.

Now, every HTML command gets bracketed by "greater than" and "less than" signs. That tells the computer to sit up and pay attention, because you're talking to it, by god!

So, for example, to tell it to put things into italics, you type <i>. That "i" tells it italics. (Exchange it for a "b" and you've just told it to bold the next bunch of letters.)

An important thing to remember at this point is that, just like in the Sorcerer's Apprentice, if you tell your computer to do something, it will keep doing it until it dies. So every command you open, you have to close. And in this case, that means that once you've told it to italicize something, you have to tell it to stop, usually with the same command, only preceded by a slash (so </i>). Think of the slash as you, telling your computer "stop, you bastard!"

In fact, once you've done it for a while, you'll discover that a lot of programming involves counting commands and seeing which one you didn't shut down. (Or counting parentheses and seeing which one you didn't close.)

The next thing you'll notice is that HTML doesn't like paragraphs. Everything you type ends up in one big block of text. To fix that, we have another command. We'll call it "break" (programmers like easy-to-remember commands, by the way.) It looks like this: <br/>

You'll notice that the slash is at the end. This one isn't paired up with a second command. It just inserts a break (what us old guys would call a "carriage return" - those of you too young to have used a typewriter... fuck you. You'll be old soon, too).

Me, I like double-spacing between paragraphs. So I end up typing <br/><br/> at the end of every paragraph.

Pro-tip: just to make it easy on you, after you enter the breaks (<br/>), hit "enter" and make a new paragraph (which the HTML will just ignore): it'll make it easier to edit your work later.

Now, there's just two more things to show you tonight.

The first is the hyperlink. It's a jump to a new web page. It goes like this: <a href="">

Now, inside those quotes, you'd put the address for whatever webpage you were interested in. If, for example, you were writing for a particularly slow audience and wanted to steer them to the Google homepage, you'd type <a href="http://www.google.com/">Google</a>

(Notice that the closing command was just "/a" - the first part of the command is the important part. Everything else is just details, giving it the specifics of what you want it to do).

And because we like to quote our sources sometimes, it's cool to be able to set them off from the stuff we wrote, perhaps slightly indented. To do this, you'd use the command <blockquote> at the beginning of the quote, and </blockquote> at the end. (Personally, I like to italicize those as well, which looks like this: <blockquote><i>quote goes here</i></blockquote>

To be honest, you don't have to get them in the exact order, either. I do, because it's easier to look at it and say "OK, I opened italics here, and closed them here. The hyperlink starts here and ends here." Like I said, if you get into any detailed coding, it's a good idea to have a simple system to follow.

So, to recap, if you type the following commands, you'll get the following results.

<i>Italics</i> gets you Italics

<b>Boldface</b> gets you Boldface

<a href="http://www.google.com/">Google</a> gets you a link to the Google homepage

If you need to set off a quote from the rest of your text, you use <blockquote>The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.</blockquote>, which gets you this:

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

And just so you know, you don't have to put breaks either before or after a blockquote. It already double-spaces on both sides of it.

Once you're comfortable with that, you can move on to more advanced commands. Which you can learn about by going to Google and asking for "HTML for background colors" (or whatever it is you want to change). But start slow: wait until you're comfortable with what you're doing right now.

____________

(8/14/2012: Slightly updated to correct a (non-)coding error, because certain cephalopods pointed out that I'm an idiot sometimes...)

The Romney-Ryan Ticket: Thoughts from the Jurassic

I've witnessed every election since the cliffhanger between Republisaurus Tex and Dennis Democriraptor -- we dinosaurs are still talking about that one, over a hundred million years later! -- so here are a few walnut-brained observations that may nonetheless prove nutritious:

1. Lissenup, "you libs" (as the trolls like to call us), take a hint from every more or less sentient pundit or pol since at least Machiavelli: don't misunderestimate your opponent. Sure, Romney probably picked Paul Ryan because he realizes that at present, he's unequivocally on the wrong end of the Charlie Sheen winning/losing equation. Why else would he choose a purist so popular with the rather awkwardly large tea-wing of his party? But that simple-dino fact doesn't lead us to the proper strategy to use against the Romney-Ryan ticket. Read on….

2. By not misunderestimating the opponent, I mean the following: Paul Ryan may not be my idea of an über-intellectual – he apparently has a bachelor's degree in poli-sci from a reputable school – but to many thought-starved so-called conservatives, the fellow is worshiped as just short of a deity. Now that sounds like liblizard-intellectual snark, and in part it is, but here's the real point: Representative Ryan comes across as an earnest, serious young man, and not necessarily an unlikable one. He no doubt wants to be seen as a younger version of Ronald Reagan, and Reagan wasn't called "the Teflon Prez" for nothing. So that is a real strength for Paul Ryan. Don't mock him mercilessly in personal terms because that's not only in bad taste, but it won't stick. It won't stick for the same reason the Batcrap Right™ attacks against one Barack Hussein Obama generally don't work: the minute the man himself opens his mouth, all sane people realize that the batcrap version is – well, batcrap. Obama seems like the earnest, personable college professor who lives across the street from you, not a fire-breathing terrorist-atheist-Marxist-radical-Islamist dragon bent on simultaneously (and psychotically) Sovietizing America and instituting Sharia Law. Don't try to make Paul Ryan look like Attila the Hun -- he isn't, and people will hold such a negative characterization against you, not him. Liberals tried to pull the same thing on Reagan with lots of overwrought "warmonger" and "idiot" characterizations, and it obviously failed miserably because millions of people sort of liked the guy.

3. DO take on Ryan's ideas – I view them as college dorm stuff and easily assailable at a level that need not be, and should not be, overly technical. His ideas seem to come from Ayn Rand, frankly, and he's a known praiser of Randian philosophy. Avoid getting bogged down in the tiny details of his very bad budget since anyone can spin numbers and you know the GOP can. What they shouldn't be allowed to spin, though, is the general tone or attitude that the budget projects. And here's the key thing to reversing any advantages Ryan may bring to Mr. Romney: for all his civility and seeming sincerity, I think it's eminently fair AND effective to say forcefully that Ryan's notions mark an ABANDONMENT OF JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING WE HAVE ACHIEVED SINCE THE GREAT DEPRESSION. I'm suggesting a reverse-Reagan strategy here: Obama should cast himself – honestly, I believe – as the real optimist in this race, while the Romney-Ryan ticket is the one that is in effect calling bull on the Reaganesque meme, "Morning in America." If you're for the Ryan budget, I say, you must believe America's best days are behind, and there's little to recommend our future to us but semi-Malthusian gloom and, at best, a scenario not unlike the old political joke about the conservative whose idea of saving a drowning person 100 feet offshore is to toss out ten feet of rope and shout encouragement – or in Ryan's case, heartfelt admonishments about the power of individual effort from one of Ayn Rand's novels. Medicare? Social Security? Sorry – all we got is ten feet of rope. But you have to MAKE this case again and again, forcefully -- not trash Paul Ryan personally. You have to define him first and irretrievably as a candidate whose ideas cut against American optimism, against any genuine prospects for "morning in America." Fail to do that, and lots of people might just support the young man's earnest rhetoric about personal and fiscal responsibility rather than seeing it for the admission of national, collective failure it really is. This is important because Paul Ryan is NOT Sister Sarah, Herman 999 Cain, or Mars-Happy Newt: what's in accepting a veep-candidate spot for him in 2012 may well be a presidential run in 2016 or even 2020, when he will, after all, be only 50 years old.

Finally, it won't do simply to remain at the general level, of course: the case has to be driven home that while Mr. Ryan's ideas may have a certain consistency and surface attractiveness about them, they will without any doubt do specific, real harm to real people: to ordinary, hard-working people who will be told that America is a field of dreams for the very very rich and privileged and that there's no help to be expected anymore when life kicks you in the teeth.  I believe that is quite simply THE TRUTH about Paul Ryan's political philosophy -- it is not a distortion, and there is no reason to be shy or hesitant about driving it home without any walking back or dissimulating or temporizing.

Real men drink Monsanto milk (and so much more)

It started out as a joke. Whenever Sharon and I were in the States after closing time up here, we’d visit a U.S. grocery store for a few supplies, and I’d always check the big milk containers to see which brands contained rBST.

In case you don't know, rBST is recombinant bovine somatotropin, a growth hormone administed to cows to force them to produce more milk. The practice was developed by Monsanto with its Posilac rBST brand, and it works quite well at increasing milk production and farm profits. It also happens to make the cows sick.

Cows treated with rBST develop mastitis, a swelling of the udder that produces pus, which, of course, gets into the milk supply. This is not a particularly appealing prospect, especially when one is picturing this as one reads the labels on the milk jugs on the shelf.

Unfortunately, traces of the hormones remain in the milk and are transferred to us. Not only that, rBST milk is not quite like regular milk, and this complicates things a bit. Like the fact that Monsanto milk contains a whole lot more natural growth factor (called IGF-1) which is easily absorbed by the human gut. And research has shown that high levels of IGF-1 are implicated in a rise in breast, colon and prostate cancers. Not only that, but high levels of IGF-1 block our natural defenses against early stage microscopic cancers.

And if that were not bad enough, the same cows treated with Prosilac are almost always treated with antibiotics to suppress infections like mastitis, and those antibiotics are transferred to us in the milk.

I can see that you're starting to rethink the idea of buying cheaper milk in the U.S. Me too. Breast feeding women, I’ve read, should be particularly cautious. Personally, I’d speculate that a mother drinking a tall glass of Monsanto milk is a higher risk to her newborn than if she drinks a glass of wine. Then again, I’m no research clinician.

Of course, some modern science seems to contradict that caution. I just read that the Chinese are modifying cow’s milk to produce human breast milk. “It’s good,” said worker Jiang Yao. “It’s better for you because it’s genetically modified,” in a quote from a piece on the Natural Society website.

The article goes on to say: “Chinese scientists have genetically modified dairy cows to produce human breast milk, and hope to be selling it in supermarkets within three years. The milk produced by the transgenic cows is identical to the human variety, with the same immune-boosting and antibacterial qualities as breast milk, scientists at China’s Agricultural University in Beijing said.

“The transgenic herd of 300 was bred by inserting human genes into cloned cow embryos which were then implanted into surrogate cows. The technology used was similar to that used to produce Dolly the sheep, the first mammal to be cloned by scientists, in Scotland.

“The milk is still undergoing safety tests, but with government permission it will be sold to consumers as a more nutritious dairy drink than cow’s milk.”

Well, that's reassuring. But here’s the thin edge of the ethical wedge in a Chinese scientist's own words: “There are 1.5 billion people in the world who don’t get enough to eat,” he said. “It’s our duty to develop science and technology, not to hold it back. We need to feed people first, before we consider ideals and convictions.”

I don't know what I could possibly add that you're not already thinking.

Ironically, correspondent Michael McCarthy reported in The Independent back in 1999 that Monsanto had removed genetically modified foods from one of its cafeterias in England, thanks to an enterprising catering supply firm. But it turned out it was just a tiny exception to the Monsanto rule of making GM food available to all, whether we like it or not.

Which is happening to our field crops whether we like it or not. Genetically modified Monsanto seed has now contaminated seed stocks across North America, from alfalfa and canola to beets. According to research in Poland, it is also happening to honeybees that have been fed GM corn syrup. Apparently, the syrup has altered the bees’ DNA and threatened their survival. Fortunately, to rectify the situation, Monsanto bought out the bee research firm, so problem solved.

Closer to home, potatoes are the next targets for genetic modification. I can’t wait to see how that works out for New Brunswick.

Meanwhile I'd suggest that real men, especially senior bankers, agribusiness and pharmaceuticals CEOs drink far more Monsanto milk and eat more GM food. In fact they should encourage their wives and children to do the same. While they’re at it, these same real men should start signing their kids up for the military so they can learn to use those great weapons produced here in North America on those unsuspecting foreigners who think we shouldn't have access to their natural resources.

In fact, if we can get all the real men to get all their kids to go to war, our kids wouldn’t have to. Hard as that might be for you and me, I think it's a sacrifice we’d be willing to make.

Damn the lies

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

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

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



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

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

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

Keepin' it white

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

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


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

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

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

Be careful what you wish for

Well, the Republicans have really gone and done it this time. In frantically trying to find a replacement for the Kenyan Devil-baby Usurper currently ensconced in the White House (oh, how ironic that term is now!), they seem to have all-but-nominated someone who is exactly like Obama.

Or, to be more accurate, someone who is exactly like the Obama that they see in their feverish hallucinations of a Destroyed America.

And I'm not talking about the fact that Mitt passed a healthcare plan in Massachusetts that Obamacare was modeled after. That would be too easy.

The frothing paste-eaters on the right like to claim, for example, that Barack and Michelle Obama are arrogant. (Google arrogant Obama - go ahead. I can wait.)

Of course, in this case, "arrogant" translates to "they're black and aren't ashamed of it!" So perhaps, by their extremely low standards, it's true.

Mittens and his wife Rafalka Ann actually fit the dictionary definition of the word "arrogant," rather than some racist dog-whistle. Mitt doesn't just fail to understand how ordinary people live, act and react, he just doesn't care.

And let's be honest. You don't get much more arrogant than referring to the common rabble as "you people."

Every time Obama visits another country or talks with a foreign leader, the right wing treats us to a strange, twisted version of reality, where Obama has been accused of going on an "apology tour" or "bowing to foreign dictators."

So, enter Mittens and His Worldwide Embarrassment Tour. What do we get?

Well, he went to England, where one of his manservants made a blatantly racist remark before he could be taken out back and strangled. Then Romney himself insulted the British people for being unprepared for the Olympics, leading, eventually, to a worldwide tour of fuckups and stumbles.


(I apologize for the ad - MSNBC has stronger mojo than I do.)

The right wing whispers conspiratorially that Obama is running some sort of "shadow government" that will lead to the "socialist transformation of America" because Obama doesn't explain every single move he makes, every hour of every day.

Meanwhile, Mitt Romney hides every detail of his life and the policies he plans to put in place if elected, on the fascinating theory that if he lets you know, you might point out a flaw or two.

Overall, Mitt has decided that the best road to the once-again-White House will be to campaign, not as a viable candidate, but as a not-Obama: he has nothing on his own, but he isn't the black guy.

A policy which might win him Mississippi and Alabama, but isn't likely to get him the gold.

FOAF Stories and Caius Mittensius Coriolanus

Well, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevahda is a smooth operator, I must say.  Yesterday it was all over the news that Harry says he heard from a Bain investor that the Mittster Man paid no taxes for something like ten years.  Does Harry know whether that's the Truth with a capital T?  Well, no, he confesses, but still….  It's a clever move, sort of like "beating" the fox from his lair, no?  What's that you say?  Oscar Wilde called fox hunting, "the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable"?  You may very well say so; I couldn't possibly comment.  I rather like Harry Reid.

Now Mitt Romney is in something of a bind – either he must put his taxes out there for the hooting, sweating, jeering plebes to see (a rabble straight out of Shakespeare, no doubt), or continue to take the fallout for a charge that may or may not be more than a cleverly insinuated FOAF story.  If I were Mitt, I would feel a bit like Coriolanus at present, "forced" to self-deport my own dignity and privacy in a quest for the consulship that a man of my stature just naturally seeks like salmon head upstream towards the latter part of their days.  In other words, Senator Reid has firmed up the "truth or consequences" matrix Mr. Romney is up against for the next 97 days: the governor can't do the kind of self-defining candidates need to do because his money is talking over him, and as we all know, when money talks, it talks loud and long.  Money may or may not have meaning, but it certainly has no manners. 

Neither do some of the former governor's fellow Republicans – you know, all those television and radio pundits who seem eager to pile on the criticism right along with gleeful Democratic talkers – I get the sense that Romney's party compradres don't believe he has a decent chance at victory, or they wouldn't be talking about him the way they do: if you don't mince your words in the pundit biz when you're talking about your own side, I think it's a pretty good indication that you're not worried about having to eat what you've uttered in a few months' time.

What would it mean if the possible FOAF tale turned out to be true?  Well, it would mean that Mitt Romney is part of a hyper-privileged investor class that sees no reason why it should pay any taxes at all – that would far surpass Mr. Romney's own suggestion that (as I'll put it more boldly than he did) anybody dumb enough to pay more taxes than he or she owes is ipso facto too dumb to be president of a great nation, or perhaps any nation whatsoever, including Borat's fictionalized Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.  Brewing potential translation of Mr. Romney's remarks: if what you owe thanks to the wonders of complex accounting methods is "nothing," then you're an idiot if you pay taxes. 

Hmmmm…. That wouldn't play well with wage earners in Peoria, would it!  I mean, the vulgar end up each year looking and feeling "like insects pinned and wriggling on the wall" thanks to those pesky W-2 forms their employers are required to send Uncle Sam before tax time.  Not so with the very, very rich, whose income has an almost magical way of vanishing into thin air with a wave of the accountant's wand and a few words muttered from the magic book. 

I don't mean to be unduly harsh with a candidate so many people almost lovingly call "Mittens."  I think we should treat all candidates like the fallible human beings they are and not reduce them to "bots" and so forth.  I sincerely wish Mitt Romney all the good things life can bring, excepting the presidency.  Indeed, he already seems to have many or all of them, and that's a good thing as far as I'm concerned.  But there's no denying that when a fellow runs for president, he's in for quite a bit of poking and prodding – some of it more or less civil, some of it much less so.  It's rather like having the Quartian fever, I should think – to paraphrase Joyce's hero Dedalus about his mother's last delirium, "everything you always wanted to keep a secret comes tumbling out."  It's best not to get into the business if you covet your privacy and dignity above almost all else.  The political world automatically translates those qualities, if such they deserve to be called, into arrogance and a Nixon-grade fetish for secrecy.