An embarrassment of witches

Yes,  many of us still think we can fix stupid with an embarrassment of regulations, but hey, there's one thing I've learned down here in the Cracker State is that you can't fix ignorance, hate, fear and superstition by kindness or firmness or cynicism or by embarrassing the practitioners thereof. People who like, who get rich on a society of serfs and barons don't want it fixed. If you're in the religion business, you sure as hell want a large reservoir of the downtrodden.

The town of Pahokee, Florida might be in Palm Beach County, but you'd hardly confuse affluent Palm Beach with this town of roughly 6000 people, almost as many churches, 12 billion mosquitoes and I don't know how many alligators. It's a sugar cane town and only an aging and unstable levee separates it from becoming the bottom of Lake Okeechobee once again.

Very little separates it from most rural South Florida towns. High crime, low income, high unemployment, low education and a hell of a lot of churches, both mainstream and esoteric; most of whom seem overly concerned with witches. Yes, I did say witches and in that respect, Pahokee seems to have much in common with far flung places like Wasilla, Alaska where a popular preacher and friend of Sarah Palin has bragged about killing such unfortunates in Africa.

The Lake Okeechobee Resort and Marina will, if all goes well,  host its first Lake Okeechobee Summer Solstice Festival on June 19-23. Now, recognizing the change of the Sun's apparent angle in the sky is more than geometry.  As every SwampChristian knows it's PAGAN and pagan means witchcraft, and witchcraft, both here and in pagan Papua New Guinea as a great danger to our moral, spiritual and actual health and the preachers of Pahokee ain't gonna stand for it, by God.

"An abomination" said Pastor Brad Smith, Florida Director of Kids for Christ.  “We don’t need this in our town. Not now. Not ever,” said Rev. Raul Rodriguez, of Church of God Door of Jesus Christ.“We cannot expect our city to survive and prosper if we allow these things,” said Pastor Eugene Babb, of Harlem Church of God. “God cannot heal our land if we have witches and warlocks violating our community,” said Evangelist Lillian Brown, of Saints on the Move. “We are opening ourselves up to things we should not, like belly dancing and magic spells,” said one citizen at a recent city commission meeting where protest against letting anyone express the most attenuated form of  religious freedom: abominations like belly dancing lessons.

So am I indulging in the same intolerant  thing by mocking the rubes, poking fun at Christians because I'm an atheist and think I'm superior to people who believe that occult incantations change nature and that tolerance of freedom risks having one dragged down to eternal torture by demons?

Not really. I'm mocking people who think it will ever be different, people that a free and liberal democracy is compatible with the culture that derives from and thrives on ignorance and superstition and hate, that tolerance of and indeed the support of such ignorance, poverty, disease and depravity is required by the mandates of "Smaller, less intrusive government."  I'm talking about the Republican base.

What will I be doing while witches shake their demonic bellies while the Devil beats the drum on the 21st?  If weather and witchcraft permit I'll be on Green Turtle Cay.  I mean who wants to be near Pahokee when the sky begins to fall.

Smoke gets in your lies

They asked me how I knew

None of this was true

Oh I of course replied

It cannot be denied

Bill O'Rielly lied

 -With apologies to Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach-

Newspapers have long been chastised for either getting it wrong or just plain lying on the front page and apologizing or retracting on the last page.  And then there's Fox News where the lies never stop, the lies never die -- ever.

On a recent Thursday night, Lyin' Bill  O'Reilly told us he'd found a "smoking gun" of some unspecified sort because  former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman had visited the White House 157 times between 2009 and 2012. One has to wonder what kind of smoke it was or into what orifice it was being blown since in actuality, as it came out the following day, the story was fake, Shulman having only attended 11 events having to do with health care, far fewer than he had been cleared to attend and having nothing to do with any kind of scandal, real or imagined. 

"You must explain under oath what you were doing at the White House on 157 separate occasions."

 Not much need to actually, Shulman had been cleared, as the public record shows, to meet, mostly in other venues than the White House with administration staffers involved in implementation of the health-care reform bill.  Still he did not attend 146 of them. Is it possible, under oath or not to explain what one was doing at a place one was not?  Perhaps Lyin' Bill would like to explain what he was doing in North Korea 157 times.  What?  He wasn't there?  Now there's a smoking gun for sure.

But it's too good a story for Fox to let go, even if it's not true, so although the debunking was thorough, Lyin' Bill was at it the next day saying:

 "We still don't know much about former IRS Chief Douglas Shulman visiting the White House 157 times.  That's extraordinary."

No, of course we don't know what he was doing there when he wasn't there to do anything and  if anything is extraordinary it's Lyin' Bill's ability to charge about like a bull in the arena with all sorts of facts stuck in his hide like banderillas and  bellowing discredited and debunked charges ad nauseam. Of course we're talking about Fox News here and their garbled and disreputable gospels have a following of the faithful and of course it was picked up as divine word by Investor's Business Daily and metastasised through the drainage system of the Blog world where, at least in the minds of the Right, it became true.

You know we still don't know about Bill O'Reilly meeting 157 times with Kim Jong Un to discuss an attack on Hawaii.  I think he needs to explain under oath just what he was doing there don't you?

Church of Hate

The old cliche has rats leaving a sinking ship.  Southern Baptists aren't that smart and it seems they do intend to go down with their foul and foundering wreck of antique bigotry.

Lifelong member President Jimmy Carter left that self-righteous ship of fools about 4 years ago over Church teachings about the subservient role of women and I'm waiting to see who tumbles into the lifeboats over the latest decision to dump the Boy Scouts because they decided on May 24th that they no longer are going to excommunicate gay Scouts.

It's a "Moral" thing you see and it's not really bigotry because they justify

it with some ancient political propaganda they somehow attribute to some god and so they can, in all good and righteous confidence recommend that Southern Baptist Churches all over the South withdraw support from about 100,000 scouts.  I wonder how many of those will, lacking something decent to do after school or in the Summer, lacking the impetus toward self-improvement will wander toward making bad personal decisions and wind up getting into trouble and into jail where predatory Southern Baptists can recruit them for the faith as though youth homes and penitentiaries  were prep schools and seminaries. 

Of course the SBC was a supporter of Slavery and Segregation because it was a moral thing and a Biblical one - not because they're a bunch of bigots and moral cowards. It's what God wants and who can question the absolute truth of anything someone put into God's mouth for his own purposes?

Yes, yes, they decided to stop beating that dead horse and renounced all that back in 1995 -- decades after the horse died but perhaps that's only because they had gays and women to turn to while blathering about God's word.  One wonders what they will choose as the next life raft when the world of decency, respect and morality, in due course rejects once again that rotting prison hulk of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Fox News Boosts Preposterone to the Max

By (O)CT(O)PUS

I don’t think Greta or Megyn will be fetching coffee for Erick and his sidekicks anytime soon. Here is the latest imbroglio from Fox News, a gender comedy in five acts:

Act 1.  Breadwinner Moms: Mothers Are the Sole or Primary Provider in Four-in-Ten Households with Children:

“These “breadwinner moms” are made up of two very different groups: 5.1 million (37%) are married mothers who have a higher income than their husbands, and 8.6 million (63%) are single mothers” (Pew Research Center).

Act 2.  Fox News: Rise In Female Breadwinners Is A Sign Of Society's Downfall:

“You're seeing the disintegration of marriage, you're seeing men who were hard hit by the economic recession in ways that women weren't. But you're seeing, I think, systemically, larger than the political stories that we follow every day, something going terribly wrong in American society …” (Juan Williams).

“When you look at biology, look at the natural world, the roles of a male and female in society, and the other animals, the male typically is the dominant role” (Erick Erickson).

Act 3.  Fox News Host Rips Sexist Male Colleagues:

“Have these men lost their minds? (and these are my colleagues??!! oh brother… maybe I need to have a little chat with them) (next thing they will have a segment to discuss eliminating women’s right to vote?) …” (Greta Van Susteren).

Act 4.  Some Women Believe They Can Have It All, And That's The Crux Of The Problem:

“ I also noted that the left, which tells us all the time we’re just another animal in the animal kingdom, is rather anti-science when it comes to this. In many, many animal species, the male and female of the species play complementary roles, with the male dominant in strength and protection and the female dominant in nurture … One notable exception is the lion, where the male lion looks flashy but behaves mostly like a lazy beta-male MSNBC producer” (Erick Erickson).

Act 5.  Fox News Host Demolishes Erick Erickson and Lou Dobbs Over Sexist Comments:

"I didn't like what you wrote one bit. To me you sound like somebody who's judging and then wants to come out and say 'I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, and now let me judge judge judge, and by the way it's science it's science it's science it's fact fact fact fact. Well, I have a whole list of studies saying your science is wrong and your facts are wrong” (Megyn Kelly).

At Fox News, you can always count on the slogan "Fair and Balanced" to serve as a cover for "stupid."  Here is how other networks covered the Pew Research story:  Unlike Fox, CNN And MSNBC Turned to Female Panelists for Comments on "Breadwinner" Study.  Instead of R-2, E-2, and Lou-too, perhaps what Fox News really needs is a comment troll:

“Because who better than men to comment on women's issues? Sheesh, you libtards understand nothing. Obviously a noted mysoginst [sic] like Eric Ericson's [sic] opinion is far more germaine [sic] to the debate than some broad's. oh, and tell the dames to vote Republican, if they know what's good for them, rant, rant, foam, foam, blather, blather, my old man's a chipmunk, etc, etc... "  (remKuzucu).

Freedom of the press

In a column published in USA Today, Jonathan Turley is feeling a little cranky about the Justice Department investigating reporters; he even calls, in the headline, for the firing of Attorney General Eric Holder.

Turley is a very smart, highly educated man. This doesn't stop him from being wrong. Not completely wrong, I'll admit; but he is arguably incorrect in the larger sense here.

Turley's point, at its center, is that Holder approved the search of email and phone records for Fox "News" reporter James Rosen and (Turley mentions in passing) the Associated Press. Turley holds to the idea that a "free press," as delineated in the Constitution, is vital.

And he does make a point. It was a free press that showed Nixon as the abusive, power-hungry paranoid that he was. It is a free press that turns up scandals and crimes that are otherwise hidden from sight.

But what Turley is missing is that, just like free speech, a free press has limits. Or, to be more accurate, it has consequences: Turley and the AP both have the right to report on whatever they find, but they both have to take responsibility for any repercussions that might occur due to their reporting.

See, with Fox, the Justice Department got a search warrant from a federal judge, which gave them the opportunity to thumb through Rosen's phone records and email. And all because Rosen had reported on missile tests in North Korea; these tests were conducted as a response to the UN Security Council's condemnation of North Korea's bat-shit insane leader's nuclear aspirations. And Rosen learned all this from leaks of classified information which came from Stephen Kim, who has since been fired from the State Department.

North Korea is a notoriously paranoid and insular country, and the classified leaks allowed the North Koreans to cut off one of our few sources of intelligence from inside their borders.

The Associated Press story is a little more complicated, mostly because of the overblown hyperbole used by the AP in defense of their people. The AP published a story about a foiled bomb plot, and their story revealed the identity of a Saudi spy who'd been inserted into notoriously terrorist-friendly Yemen.

The Justice Department once again got a search warrant, as they should, and they used it to subpoena phone records from an editor and six reporters (including the Washington bureau chief, Sally Buzbee). Those seven people, though, used phones out in the common area of the AP news room which were used by every reporter who passed through the bureau; this allowed AP Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll to claim that the news service is "shocked" by what happened, and that the Justice Department cast a "very broad net" which pulled in AP operations "that have, as far as I know, no particular connection to the story that they seem to be investigating."

Sorry, lady, that's the way investigation works. To pull out the gold nuggets, sometimes you have to pan through a lot of pebbles. You'd probably know this if the AP did any actual investigation these days, instead of just stenography of other people's talking points.

Thanks to these two stories, we've lost access to one of the few available sources of information on the nuclear aspirations of a raving madman, and to a spy embedded in a terrorist cell.

And that's the real scandal.

The end of an error

Well, it happened. Michele Bachmann announced today that she won't be running. And comedians across the country suddenly feel the weight of a great depression.

I won't lie. She is, by herself, everything that's wrong with America today. Fear-mongering, stubbornly ignorant, and wildly partisan; but she brought so much entertainment into our lonely lives. Every time she opened her mouth, it was like the Muse of Comedy showered us with rose petals.

I mean, who can forget, back in 2009, her attempts to be disengenuous?

"I find it interesting that it was back in the 1970s that the swine flu broke out then under another Democrat president Jimmy Carter. And I'm not blaming this on President Obama, I just think it's an interesting coincidence."

I mean, yeah, it's true that the swine flu epidemic happened under Ford, not Carter, but who are we to quibble over little things like "facts" when we've got talking points to manufacture, right? Or in 2008, when she called for a new McCarthyism?

"I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out: Are they pro-America or anti-America?"

But she was alway a uniter, not a divider, right?

Or her astute grasp of history?

"But we also know that the very founders that wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States... I think it is high time that we recognize the contribution of our forbearers who worked tirelessly -- men like John Quincy Adams, who would not rest until slavery was extinguished in the country."

You have to admire the work ethic of someone like Adams, who would continue to work for 20 years after he left office - and even 15 years after his death! - to get the Emancipation Proclamation passed. That's the kind of go-getter we don't see any more.

Now, of course, the fact that she's being investigated for both financial and ethical misconduct has nothing to do with her dropping out of the race. Nothing at all. (It also didn't stop her from renewing her call for Obama's impeachment. Although, unlike her, Obama hasn't broken the law.)

She'll be back in the public eye soon enough; after all, grifters gotta grift. I'm figuring that, six months from now, she'll be a lobbyist, a Fox "News" contributor, or maybe a televangelist. But she's too much of an attention-whore to drop out of sight.

It's always possible that she'd run for Senator, but unlikely. Under Obamacare, Minnesota has been able to afford to stay on it's meds, and the latest polls show Franken destroying her in a head-to-head match-up.

Of course, Bachmann claims that Big Government is destroying America. So you would hope that she's going to forfeit her pension from Congress, which, after eight years of misrepresenting the people of Minnesota, equals just shy of $24,000 a year, at this point. Somehow, I don't see that happening.

Bye, Bye Bachmann

Pack up all your cares and woe.  There she goes.  Singin' low.
The twittering twit quit last night.

No one ever loved or understood her.

She made her bed.  Now turn out the light. 

Bye, bye Bachmann.

The eye of the needle

Perhaps I suffer from a lack of imagination, because I simply can't imagine a fitting fate for Pat Robertson. It could be, of course, that there isn't one.  Pat, you'll recall, unless you share the short term memory defect such people like to call Conservative Politics has a habit of supporting criminal dictators and other monsters in Africa .  One thing I can't imagine either is the prospect of  this "Christian" entering anything resembling heaven any more than I can imagine the rock of Gibralter being extruded through the unlubricated eye of a sewing needle -- even a very big one -- and I'm not talking about his wealth, which some have estimated to be close to a billion dollars.

It's where he got that wealth that matters and although much of it comes from preying on elderly widows and other people who can't afford it, the lion's share, or should I say the jackal's share comes from dirty dealings in gold and blood diamonds financed by those contributions from sad old ladies who think the bastard is going to help them by intervening with God and curing their ailments.  That money of course has gone to purchase airliners to assist his mining enterprises with Mobuto Sese Seko and Charles Taylor and God knows what other cannibalistic demons, to extract blood diamonds and gold with slave labor and spend it on increasing his wealth and power, in the name of the almighty dollar, amen.  Of course some has gone to politicians who have seen to it that he's so far avoided the cage in Guantanamo with his name on it and the red hot poker up his ass that features regularly in my speculations about justice and Pat Robertson.  The IRS gives the extreme right a hard time?  Really? By allowing him to pay his debt with contributions to his own charity that uses it to steal even more?  What obscenity can I use to express my contempt here?  You tell me.

But I digress. This piece of shit, who of course has his own TV network, regularly uses it to damn his critics, to disparage the unfortunate and instill a sense of hatred in his followers in Jesus' name amen. His current mission is to run a " full-scale exposé" on some unnamed web entity: a “nasty group” that's all about “embarrassing conservatives.”  Once again my imagination fails to construct any hypothetical means to embarrass such unrepentant evil; the kind of  'nastiness' that can chide women for complaining about unfaithful spouses because it's their own fault.  Why even bother to mention the slavery, genocide, rape, mutilation, wholesale theft, deception and suffering that give him his tax-free income along with a microphone with which to complain that it isn't enough and that someone dares to complain.

Only in America.  Only in a country saturated in blind faith, trained from infancy to swoon with love and respect for any fork-tailed fraud can such a thing occur. I can't possibly list his crimes here, there's no scale big enough to weigh his sins and apparently there's no way to control the way he sponges millions from shacks and trailer parks and retirement homes to buy race horses and bribe politicians and undermine truth and goodness and decency.

But whose fault is it really?  The country that supports his crimes with donations, that gives him special tax status, that whimpers and cringes at his threats, that turns on his detractors like rabid vermin, that insults any noble notion of divinity that might still exist?  Who else? where else but the USA, it's brains, its moral conscience, its heart and soul eaten full of holes by false faith and greed
and cowardice -- its very damnation purchased with its greed for personal salvation.

But exposé away Pat.  Sooner or later that glass cathedral will shatter, your stink will stop the noses and empty the stomachs of  the nation and I hope it happens while you're still alive and able to suffer even just a tiny bit for a tiny fraction of what you've done.  Or so I pray.

Kneel where our loves are sleeping

Someone said "happy Memorial Day" to me yesterday evening as she was loading up her FUV after a day out on the water.  Honestly.  What with all the wailing and gnashing and lachrymose warrior worship going on in the media, you'd think she'd have more sense, but for most working people in a country that gets less vacation time than any other free country, it's just another three day weekend.

Memorial Day, originally called Decoration Day, is a day of remembrance for those who have died in our nation's service.

I'll bet your newspaper says almost exactly that this morning and like most of what you read in the papers it's sort of true. Of course the truth is a matter of perspective and depends on how you define "our nation."  The holiday may have originated in the Confederate South.

The sheet music for Kneel Where Our Loves are Sleeping by Nella L. Sweet carried the dedication "To The Ladies of the South who are Decorating the Graves of the Confederate Dead" But Decoration day was officially established by decorating Union graves at Arlington in 1868.  By 1890 it was recognized by all of the northern states but the South wasn't going to memorialize no damn Yankees and although since WWI when it was modified to include US troops, it began to be noticed in the South,  States like Florida have their own day for honoring the fallen in that War of Northern Aggression.

Many southern states retain an additional separate memorial day of their own in fact: January 19 in Texas, April 26 in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and Mississippi; May 10 in South Carolina; and June 3 (Jefferson Davis' birthday) in Louisiana and Tennessee, but of late and after so many wars with so little behind them but lies and aggression, Memorial Day is part of our growing martial spirit, our obsession with "warfighters" being the sole guardians of what we call Freedom whether they died carpet bombing civilians or facing suicidal attacks by Kamikaze pilots.

April 26 seems to have passed me by unnoticed here in Florida, although there were a few more confederate battle flags than usual.  The last weekend in May is more about beer and the Indy 500 and Department store sales and of course NASCAR and those in turn are about advertising and consumerism, but we continue with the beery crocodile tears and newspaper encomiums to everyone who ever wore a uniform.  It's become too much like another of those "We're number one" holidays we use against the more circumspect and thoughtful or our fellows as we build new stage sets for our history and look forward to more wars for our warriors instead of  considering the real costs of war and who pays it.

No ground to stand on.

"I have seen something else under the sun: The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all."

I'd suggest the same observation is true of the quest for justice.  It either happens or it doesn't and sometimes we don't even know the difference because we never stopped to think.  We haven't come close to hearing the end of the Treyvon Martin/George Zimmerman opera and if the media whores can help it, we won't for a long time, the war of all against all being so very profitable.

Pictures of a gun and some hemp plants on Martin's cell phone along with text messages show "he was a violent, angry young man" is what you'll hear in one corner.  "It's all a racist scheme to prejudice the jury" shouts the other team's supporters.  It doesn't matter if either or neither is right because it's not about who was wrong and who is culpable nor about what constitutes justified self defense.  It's about politics.  It's about some people thinking a law that protected the victim, not the attacker,  justified the attack  -- was responsible for the attack!

CNN is telling us that the Florida "stand your ground" law gave Zimmerman the right to shoot an unarmed boy he'd been chasing simply because he felt threatened.  No it doesn't, not the way I read it.  In actuality it simply states that you don't have to run away and have the right to defend yourself appropriately if someone tries  to remove you from some place you have a right to be in. Unfortunately, bringing a knife to a gun fight is not only an old cliche, it's the truth and Martin only had a fist to bring, but he had a right to be there and a right to defend himself and he apparently did and apparently failed.  But hey, who's listening?  If you're on the Right, you piss to the left and vice versa and pretty soon it starts to get smelly in here.

Was Martin belligerent?  Bellicose?  Did he have a history of being that way, as one side is saying? Could very well be, but it doesn't matter.  The question is whether one has the right to shoot an unarmed person you've been chasing with a gun in your pocket and the answer is no. The mugger can't claim self defense under the law,  and I don't think Zimmerman can either,  particularly after law enforcement specifically told him to stay in his car; particularly because Martin was unarmed.  No one has the right to kill someone for slapping him in the face or picking his pocket and under Florida law, if you started the fight, or even escalated it, your right to claim self-defense -- even your right to display a weapon -- is without merit.

Did Zimmerman pull the gun before he was hit or after?  Either way his action would be questionable under the law which specifically forbids displaying a gun or the threat of a hidden gun to "gain advantage" in an argument. You don't even get to say "get out of my neighborhood, I've got a gun." 

Is deadly force ever justified because an unarmed person you've cornered gives you a bloody nose or pushes you down?  I don't think so and I'm not sure a jury would buy it, but this isn't really about the law and the law doesn't seem all that unambiguous anyway.

So I do have to wonder at people who don't like the idea that Martin wasn't legally required to run away, yet think he was a victim of racism, a victim of the "gun culture," a victim of his own civil rights!   I have to wonder at people who oppose their own right to resist an attacker. I have to wonder just as much at people who say Zimmerman somehow had the right to stand his ground when it wasn't his ground and he was stalking someone who did have the right to be there.  I have to wonder at people who defend Zimmerman and claim he had the right to kill because he was pushed or struck no matter how many times they're shown it isn't true.

I have to wonder at people who might have had some claim to be considered rational until their knees started jerking to the political rhythm and their jaws started flapping and mouths started foaming in true American fashion.  Justice?  Sorry,  as the song goes, "nobody's right if everybody's wrong" and ain't it the truth.