AS NORTH CAROLINA GOES, SO GOES THE NATION

The Raleigh scene since the gubernatorial election could be slated as “GOP Gone Wild.” With a Republican governor and a Republican dominated state legislature, they have wasted no time tearing apart the fabric of our society from Women’s health to education, all are on the chopping block – unless you are one of the knuckle dragging, flag waving illiterates who have no clue what is going on here. Or one of the lucky associates who share the stratified air with their fellow Repungentans.

The governor has spouted off about bringing our state prosperity and improving our lives. To date this is what he and his minions have accomplished:

The Governor signed into a law an anti-abortion bill limiting abortion access to most women and allowing health care providers to opt out of performing abortions if they object (what’s next, opting out of caring for persons they object to because of color, ethnicity or sexual orientation? Forget the pesky Bill of Rights) It also eliminates abortion coverage for city and county employees and bars state residents from paying for the coverage through state health exchange plans.

It’s a great time to be a woman in North Carolina I tell ya!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/07/29/nc-gov-mccrory-signs-anti-abortion-bill-into-law-monday-night/

Next up, unemployment benefits – remember all those lazy suckers that don’t have a job? Let’s make sure they all end up starving on the streets. North Carolina has one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation so the state legislature’s current claim to fame is to make North Carolina the ONLY state to reject federal funds meant to help states fund unemployment benefits for those who have been out of work long enough to have their current benefits expire. And for those that are still eligible? Why the good Governor and his toadies slashed benefits from a maximum of $535 a week to just $350 a week. Anyone want to try to feed, clothe and house a family of four on that?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/19/pat-mccrory-unemployment_n_2719342.html

The Governor also signed a voter suppression law that he admits HE HAS NOT READ! Thank you SCOTUS for paving the way for this bit of tragic tomfoolery.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/07/29/1227401/-Clueless-N-C-Gov-McCrory-will-sign-voter-suppression-bill-he-hasn-t-read

Next up education – we are now in the bottom three states in education spending. The state budget slashes education funds to public schools while the Governor continues to push for private school vouchers. He will tell you he plans on adding 1800 new teacher positions but the way education budgeting is structured it will not happen.

http://fayobserver.com/articles/2013/06/25/1265479

And finally the Governor and his minions also pushed through legislation to lift the state fracking moratorium in a crazy late night session that saw dirty deals and mistaken votes to make fracking a reality in our state. Yay…

http://www.southernstudies.org/2012/07/the-crazy-late-night-vote-that-legalized-fracking-in-north-carolina.html

But the Grand Governer is optimistic that he can create jobs and bring in companies to do business in North Carolina. If you owned a business, would YOU come here?

Whatever happened to "citizen journalism"?

I've been wracking the lump of meat I jokingly call a "brain," trying to figure out when, exactly, we turned the corner, as a country, with regards to whistleblowers.

I've been wondering this for a while. It crops up in weird places: earlier this year, a hacker revealed that the police were ignoring blatant evidence that a rape had been committed. He's facing ten years in jail, while the now-convicted rapists only got two years each. Was exposing the rape a worse crime than committing it?

At what point did we start to think it was more important to keep secrets hidden, instead of dealing with the crimes being covered up by those secrets?

Edward Snowden is currently hiding in a Moscow airport, living on vending machine borcht and energy drinks (I assume); he's under fire for disclosing the fact that the American government is spying on American citizens. And everybody else on the planet. His guilt is just accepted, at this point: the focus of the argument against him seems to be "well, he ran to another country! And he's a traitor!"

But what's being ignored here? Maybe the nature of his crime? Maybe the fact that... well, let me just quote from some people who were much smarter than me.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Does anybody remember what the phrase "probable cause" means? I'm pretty sure that a global, sweeping review of every phone call in America isn't covered by "describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

Yeah, but fuck that Fourth Amendment, right? The Second Amendment is the only important one!

I think the best response came from the Rude Pundit:

The reaction that most infuriates the Rude Pundit is that Snowden didn't do the nation any favors because, well, fuck, we all knew that our phone calls and other information was being monitored... Yeah, but there's a huge difference between strongly suspecting that your husband is fucking around and being shown pictures of him balling the babysitter. There's vast gulf between "knowing" and knowledge. The intelligence services have been forced to say, "Okay, yeah, you caught us." The twist is that they're adding, "And, oh, by the way, we're gonna keep boning the babysitter. Just try to stop us from fucking her."

But if we're honest with ourselves, Snowden isn't the problem. His story is just a symptom of a larger problem.

In Maryland, the closing arguments in the Bradley Manning trial have been made, and as I write this, we await the judge's decision. Was Manning guilty of espionage?

Let's remember what he's guilty of, shall we? He leaked documents that showed that, despite our noble words and fine sentiments, America was still torturing and killing innocent people. He didn't damage our war effort, or put any spies in danger. He just told us that the American government was lying to us. He showed us what our tax dollars are paying for. He didn't commit espionage - he committed journalism.

Julian Assange, who's "guilty" of the same "crimes," held a press conference by telephone last week, where reporters also got to hear from Daniel Ellsberg - Ellsberg, you may or may not remember, was "guilty" of a similar "crime." He leaked the Pentagon Papers, embarrassing the US government; he never went to jail for telling the truth. Why should Manning? Why should Snowden?

Why should it be a criminal act to tell the truth?

California and New York See Huge Obamacare Savings

We all know how the opponents of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) predicted the destruction of the universe, and the restaurant at the end of it, if it passed. And we all know how many times the Republicans in the House have voted to repeal it.

But has the Republican Noise Machine bothered to tell their Chicken Littles anything about the good news that's been reported concerning the ACA?

Other than the sound of their heads exploding over President Obama's remarks after the Zimmerman trial, I've heard nothing.


Report: Obamacare's '80/20' rule has led to nearly $4 billion in savingsAs "Obamacare" continues to be one of the most controversial pieces of legislation ever implemented, a new report shows that Americans saved nearly $4 billion in 2012 due to a key provision in the Affordable Care Act. 

 The American people have often been divided by the new health care reform, and with all Americans required to be covered with insurance by January 2014, uncertainties are up in the air. While "Obamacare" is controversial, a new report shows that it has saved consumers billions of dollars. According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the new "80/20" rule, which requires insurers to spend 80 percent of every dollar earned on medical services, helped saved American consumers $3.9 billion in 2012. 

 The savings were divided into two areas. About $3.4 billion was saved by insurers keeping their premiums lower in order to comply with the new law and $500 million came in the form of rebates being sent back to consumers who overpaid for their premiums. The total cost wasn't solely the result of the "80/20" rule, but it was the leading cause of premiums being kept at a lower level. 

 While some states have seen a rise in premiums, the result has not been pinpointed. Premiums often increase with each passing year, but "Obamacare" being the sole reason for the increase is not factual. A new report released last month noted that premiums in California will see a large decrease due to subsidies from the federal government. 

 "Rates will vary by region, age and level of coverage, and many lower-income Californias will qualify for federal subsidies that will greatly lower the premiums. The plans will come in four tiers, ranging from bronze to platinum. The former will charge lower premiums, but carry higher out-of-pocket benefits, and the latter will have the highest premiums but have the lowest out-of-pocket costs."


Here is Paul Krugman, Nobel Laureate in Economics:

"Still, here’s what it seems is about to happen: millions of Americans will suddenly gain health coverage, and millions more will feel much more secure knowing that such coverage is available if they lose their jobs or suffer other misfortunes....
 So yes, it does look as if there’s an Obamacare shock coming: the shock of learning that a public program designed to help a lot of people can, strange to say, end up helping a lot of people — especially when government officials actually try to make it work"

And here's an opposing view by Peter Ferrara of Forbes:

"He overlooks the equal millions of Americans that will suddenly not get health coverage under “universal” Obamacare, the millions more who will choose not to get health insurance “secure knowing that such coverage is available” if they get sick later, the tens of millions who will lose their employer provided health insurance, regardless of whether they like that coverage or not, the millions more who will lose their full time jobs for part time jobs with lower incomes and no benefits, becoming truly middle class in the Obama/Krugman era, where middle class is just another word for declining real incomes." 

 Though opinions might vary on the new health care reform, millions of Americans will now have access to affordable health care. Whether you think the government should have a role is an open question and one that may or may not fit into your political ideology."

Here's another thought:  The Republicans in Congress  made a pact on the night of Mr. Obama's inauguration in January of 2009 to obstruct any and all proposed legislation, appointments, and programs so that his presidency will be a failure.

If they had worked with President Obama to help fine tune and implement what they themselves had proposed as an answer to our national health care crisis, perhaps a plan with fewer problems could have been hammered out through compromise.  But the GOP, in thrall to extreme ideologues, did all they could to scare the American people into believing that the passage of the ACA would be tantamount to treason and the descent into totalitarianism led by the America-hater, Kenyan Usurper, Barack Hussein Obama.

A list of those hideous totalitarian governments that provide universal coverage for  their citizens is HERE.

And here is a list of the countries from the World Health Organization that are better than the USA [ranked at 38] at providing health care to their citizens:

France
Italy
San Marino
Andorra
Malta
Singapore
Spain
Oman
Austria
Japan
Norway
Portugal
Monaco
Greece
Iceland
Luxemborg
Netherlands
United Kingdom
Ireland
Switzerland
Belgium
Columbia
Sweden
Cyprus
Germany
Saudi Arabia
UAE
Israel
Morocco
Canada
Finland
Australia
Chile
Argentina
Denmark
Dominica
Costa Rica
United States of America

Here's another ranking from Business Insider that ranks the USA better than WHO.  In their ranking we're not #38, we're #37!



U.S. Ranks Last Among Seven Countries on Health System Performance Based on Measures of Quality, Efficiency, Access, Equity, and Healthy Lives

"New York, NY, June 23, 2010—Despite having the most expensive health care system, the United States ranks last overall compared to six other industrialized countries—Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom—on measures of health system performance in five areas: quality, efficiency, access to care, equity and the ability to lead long, healthy, productive lives, according to a new Commonwealth Fund report. While there is room for improvement in every country, the U.S. stands out for not getting good value for its health care dollars, ranking last despite spending $7,290 per capita on health care in 2007 compared to the $3,837 spent per capita in the Netherlands, which ranked first overall."


New Health Rankings: Of 17 Nations, U.S. Is Dead Last

Throughout the battle to pass legislation to bring the United States in line with other developed western democracies, President Obama received not one vote for the ACA from the GOP.  And yet that same political party has offered nothing as an alternative except to vote to overturn the only legislation that addresses our health care crisis. That's not political opposition; that's self-destructive obstinancy and insanity.

The GOP will pay dearly for it as the benefits of Obamacare continue to be reported. 
 

Another orphan.

It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan

Call it Outrage on Demand.  I wrote a while back about how the emotions and passions of American public remind me of  a marionette made to dance; made to laugh, cry, rage and mourn as strings are pulled by the various puppeteers, corporate, religious and political.  Some seemed to agree, but I'm not sure that many will admit to being just another wooden character in the great Punch and Judy show of America.

I used to blame Republicans for acting like dogs being sicced on selected targets, inflamed by slanted accounts of various incidents real or fabricated, to serve the political objectives of off-stage players.  Of late I think it describes us all: addicted to outrage, unable to advocate a cause without an outrage, and I'm increasingly alienated by the increasingly transparent performances of  Oz-like string pullers and drum beaters who in turn are increasingly desperate and increasingly careless.

It's easy to blame the media for the endless series of  outrages they trump up and package to command our obsessive attention, but we who watch, we who bark like dogs when told to, and demand that something be done or undone or punished or set free as the voices behind various curtains direct -- we who are addicted to following those voices because it makes us feel important, intelligent, worthy, are really to blame for the failure of  enlightenment, the fracking of progress and the increasing subjugation of the people.

It used to be easy for me to identify with the 'Left' when the right was openly advocating oppression, segregation, free speech and the like.  I became a 'lefty' when you could have your life ruined for being suspected or falsely accused of private political opinions, when conservatives could tell you where you could live, who you could marry, what you could do on Sunday, what you could and couldn't read, when they could restrict what you could work at, how much you could be paid, what public and private facilities you could use based on stereotype and prejudice and  religious belief and superstition.

It was easy to loath the party who supported Nixon, promoted him, lied for him and maintained ludicrous fictions about his words for decades after he skulked out of office rather than be removed.  It's been easy to feel disgust at their attempts to unseat Clinton and it's still easy to laugh at the claims of Communism, the promises that his tax policies would bankrupt us and his 'spending' was ruinous.  The stench of Republican hypocrisy was never more apparent than when they subsequently supported the ruinous spending, the reckless deregulation under Bush II.  The abandonment of government responsibility and massive escalation of  peremptory executive power all of  which actually was ruinous.  The Party that has resumed trashing the Executive with  unsupported theory, laughable fictions, vague, substance-free objections is no more worthy of  respect or support than it has been in half a century, but is that enough to make me a Democrat any more?

Is it enough to distract me from the troubling observation that the Democrats have also been the party that supports, perhaps eagerly supports silly regulations and prohibitions for their own sake, because 'our side' is touting it?  Are we as doctrinaire and unwilling to temper enthusiasm for obeying idiocies from national speed limits to regulations on how big a paper cup you can drink from?  Have we, and I'm still saying "we" for the moment, begun to paste together racial incidents from various events so that we can pretend it's still the 1960's when we had a clear mission?  Are we so obsessed with safety and security that we can justify anything "as long as one life is saved?"  Are we selling fear and ignoring fact, denying the abject failure of what we have sold as a panacea and refusing to change things that don't work or make things worse? After all, we're the party that signed off on that knife in the heart of liberty obscenity the Patriot Act, the party that seems to support the idea that unwarranted searches, universal surveillance, random investigation, hidden cameras, wiretaps and the reading of mail are a justifiable price for safety.  Incarceration without charges, secret trials and all the trappings of  totalitarianism all because "freedom isn't free."

The misrepresentation of  the George Zimmerman case by desperate, old-guard Democrats like Al Sharpton, with his long record of inventing racial incidents apparently forgotten, may have been some sort of last straw for me.  No I don't think the shooting was justified, but the case is black and white only in an ethnic sense. It has nothing to do with a law the overturning of  which is the real objective.  I want nothing to do with people who don't recognize that, who have no intention of reading the law or thinking about its implications to this case.  I'm tired of people who steadfastly misrepresent facts and law if they conflict with doctrine, who see racism everywhere, crazed, machine gun toting murderers everwhere, like the John Birchers see Communism and the Christian Right sees the devil.  I'm reminded of those who supported the horror in Vietnam because they missed WWII.

"Murder has now been legalized in half the states,”

 says Ladd Everitt, spokesman for the Washington (D.C.)-based Coalition to Stop Gun Violence.  Of course that's as wild and wooly and dishonest as the "abortion is murder" shibboleth.  Are we no longer the party of  liberation but the party of  bans, controls and worse, the party of the same old fictions, the same old failed solutions,  fanatically held? How does it compare to hyperbolic falsehoods we've been getting from the other side all these decades?  Are we as sold on the idea that extremism in defense of virtue is no vice as Spiro the crook Agnew?  Are middle of the road, pragmatic Democrats anywhere in sight?

The sordid events in Sanford do not mirror the murder of Medgar Evers or Dr. King or the civil rights workers in 1964 Mississippi. They have nothing to do with racism on the streets or in the courts.  They do not represent a return to Jim Crow and if  Democrats can't seem to live without an endless supply of  convenient but inapposite outrages; if  the Democrats can't find any way to promote progress toward freedom and justice for all without witch hunts and race baiting, lies and fabrications and misrepresentations, media circuses and fear mongering, then I'm an alien to both parties.

It was easy to appear to be on the side of the angels when we had the Commander Guy, the Old Ranger and Tricky Dick to be compared to, but after two consecutive presidential victories; after gaining some ground on the devil, it's time to ask ourselves if we haven't become, or at least come to more closely resemble what we've been fighting -- or have we been that way all along?

Justified

This isn't the first time I've said that Justice in America isn't about the law, it's about the lawyers.  It won't be the last time.  The web footed honkers and quackers at CNN were still telling each other as I switched it all off and went to bed that we have a pattern of letting killers go free, but if you have a memory longer than a goose and if you still make an effort to look past the selected stories the angertainment industry allows us you'd be aware that if there is a pattern, it's a pattern of  framing the innocent.

I was appalled last Friday night when Cornell West told us on Bill Maher's show that Florida's Stand Your Ground law allowed everyone to carry a gun, but not surprised.  The level of ignorance about gun laws is shockingly high, stubbornly held and sadly near universal amongst those most vociferously opposed to public ownership of weapons. Tragically sad because the  law is written to exclude the right to chase down, confront and threaten or even to escalate a dispute if one wants to claim self-defense, but as I said, it's not about the law, it's about glib and sarcastic trial lawyers, dull witted jurors and ignorance.

I dread to read the news this morning. I don't want to lose my breakfast over yet more railing against guns, I don't want to hear that the decision to acquit Zimmerman was all about race or any of the other stale arguments imposed on this case before Trayvon Martin was interred. As far as I'm concerned, it's just another flim-flam defense based on making the law seem to say what it doesn't, and it doesn't say that you can shoot someone -- an unarmed someone who knocks you down or gives you a bloody nose particularly when you instigated the fight and violated someones civil rights in the process.  In fact, the law was designed to allow someone like Martin to use deadly force to defend himself against someone, some "crazy cracker" posing a credible threat to his life to force him out of any place he had a right to be.  He brought his fists and some skittles to a gun fight.

Innocent people wind up on death row. People are incarcerated for decades and their lives ruined for smoking Marijuana or receiving naked pictures of a girlfriend on a cellphone. People are locked up with false accusations and to me, that's worse than that a guilty man should go free, but although the NRA will doubtless try to make him a folk-hero like Bernhard Goetz, there is little similarity. Martin wasn't carrying a sharpened screwdriver and demanding money and Goetz didn't corner the muggers in a dark alley. Goetz wasn't a vigilante, Zimmerman I think, was, defending a community against burglars by carrying weapons and confronting and chasing suspicious people, something the gun laws do not permit.

But again, it's about the lawyers and while it's a respectable and necessary profession in any civilization, people like Mark O'Mara disgust me, convincing a jury that his "muscle tone" and perhaps his dangerous, hoodie wearing image was responsible not only for Zimmerman having chased him down but justified shooting him.

No doubt many axes of all sorts will be ground on this case.  Perhaps as with OJ and Bernhard Goetz there will be a wrongful death suit and I think there's a good case for it. Although I don't think either victim or vigilante was without fault or are in any way heroes, I do think the preponderance of responsibility is on Zimmerman.  There is a responsibility on us as well -- not to traduce the law, misrepresent it or to make more of this case than it is for the purpose of furthering our politics, but of course, this being America it's a false hope to expect us  not to -- as false as we are.

Impactification is now trending and it's awesomly resourceful.

I'm losing hope that the use of the word "trending" to mean occurring or becoming popular or simply being talked about is going to share the fate of "efforting," an equally bilious attempt that even my spell checker chokes on, to make a verb out of "trying to find out about."  I'm seeing "trending" everywhere, from shoe advertisements to CNN and they're not talking about a vector. It will soon become incomprehensible to the rising generation of Newpeakers to say the Dow is trending downwards.

If you're going to give me that old saw about living languages having to change, don't waste your words. If all change is a good thing, then it's a good thing for you to drop dead, not that I'm suggesting it and if all linguistic evolution is good, then every patios, every pidgin tongue and infantile balbation should be given prominence and all literature relegated to the compost heap.

I just read an article about new battery technology in Design News. The writer uses "resourceful" to mean there's a lot of  it available. Sand is very resourceful in the desert.  Hey, why use a dictionary when no solecism, ( no that's not an eclipse) no comically ignorant usage can ever be found to be in error. Smug ignorance is so resourceful, you know.  There's a lot of it around.

Yes, I know, technical journalism, like business writing seems to attract people who speak English as though they were native Wolof speakers who cheated their way through English 101, but the danger is in the cascade effect. 100 people will read it and begin to use the malapropism and it will spread to thousands like the disease it is and there will be nobody to say "hey, that's not what it means" because, you guessed it, language has to change. The meek may or may not inherit the earth, but the English language is already in probate and the beneficiaries are hipsters, hustlers, ad-men, con-men, marketers and morons.

In a educational system that ignores words as anything but random sounds with no history but treats spelling as immutable, it's not surprising that "in tact" is becoming a very frequent usage -- that is it's "trending."

I saw a tweet the other day "A plane crashed, lots of people impacted." and no, it wasn't a deliberate joke because 'Impact' now only exists as an unacknowledged metaphor having nothing to do with the collision of objects - like airplanes and the ground. Have an impacted molar? The dentist might ask you what it's impacted by. God help us, but our kids are being taught to use it that way and have no idea that words like affect and effect exist or what the difference is.

How many words have been subsumed into the universal "awesome" and how many times can a person work it into every expression? I'm sure the Guiness people are still counting. Is anyone counting the loss?  I don't think so and I do read fatuous articles ( I wanted to use that word one more time before it starts to mean fat) about how we're gaining so many new words like Diazepam and cloudsource, metrosexual and chillaxin.  But immensity and enormity, discomfit and discomfort,  infer and imply, noisome and noisy, torturous and tortuous, bated and baited, advise and advice, averse and adverse? -- half those words lost forever in a land where millions think Beethoven was a dog and couldn't read Melville if they were forced to. They're gone and won't be recognized by young readers if ny some accident they should read anything.

Yep, it's a living thing and as with children, you never say no and everyone is a winner and everything they do and say is perfect in this best of Panglossian worlds and no, that's not a kind of paint. Or maybe it is now - whatever.

For any reason

Lyin' Bill.  He earns his title every day. What's he lyin' about now you might ask?  Why, he's telling us that a Texas women can get an abortion at any time -- simply because of a sprained hand for instance.

“You can just kill the baby, or the fetus, however you want to describe it, any time you want for any reason, you know, women’s health, that’s any reason at all.”

Sure, we all know that women are hypochondriacs, prone to hysteria and likely to be faking things like they fake orgasms and I'm sure Bill has experience there. God makes sure women don't die in childbirth anyway, just like he makes sure they don't get pregnant when they get raped. So if a woman wants to terminate a pregnancy, we can be sure it's because she doesn't want to cancel a hair dresser appointment or something equally as important. Why we ever let them vote, I don't know.

In one of those bilious exchanges that Fox is famous for, O'Reilly and Kirsten Powers went back and forth ratcheting up the lies:

Lyin' Bill:  “In New York here, there’s a proposal, ‘I don’t want any limitations on anything!' It’s crazy.”

Powers: “The current status quo in Texas that these people are fighting for, who are fighting the bill, is to be able to abort your baby up until the third trimester.”

Lyin' Bill:  “Yeah! For any reason! Women’s health! ‘Hey! Look I sprained my hand!"

Powers: “Yeah.  For any reason. For any reason. Yeah.”

Of course no one of integrity, no one who gives a rancid shit about the truth or human rights or anything but his stinking faith believes this garbage. Very, very few late term abortions are ever performed and even fewer of that "partial birth" procedure they'd love to tell you happens all the time.  Such things are done with dead fetuses,  fetuses with no brain and the like, but Fox has never stumbled over a fact so far.  Nor, for all their ranting, whooping and hollering, all their pusillanimous persiflage about how Liberals are trashing the constitution have they ever really seen the law as anything but a nuisance and impediment to "freedom" and something that can be and should be ignored by any state with or without public support. 

No, there should be no regulation of anything but women and if God didn't bother to ban abortion, well then the Great State a' Texas is gonna take care of it for him, now all y'all have a nice day, y'hear?

Ink Blots

Who needs ink blots?  Life itself is a Rorschach test. What you see as a pattern, a 'gestalt' if you prefer in something random or arbitrary is a window into your mind.  Likewise what you find to condemn in others may often illustrate what you feel - or fear to find - in yourself.  It's been my experience that people who feel guilty about all their lies are quick to see others as liars, for instance and when I hear certain TV personalities telling us how, as Rush once snickered, Michael J. Fox is faking his Parkinson's to get sympathy or the Republican hyenas who insisted that Hillary Clinton's cerebral blood clot was only an excuse to get out of testifying at the Benghazi witch hunt,  and when I heard Glenn Beck snickering yesterday that Theresa Heinz-Kerry, wife of our Secretary of State, hospitalized and in critical condition was faking it, what I heard was a faker, a phoney, a con man, a liar and a sociopath telling us his own story.

Am I wrong or is this a pattern?  Do the most vocal apologists for the wackadoodle Right routinely deny inconvenient reality and slander their opponents because they think everybody is like them?  Takers, leeches, liars, fakes and idiots?    Hey, the ink blots don't lie.

What happens in Vegas

Needs to be heard around the world

No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law

  -US Constitution, amendment III-

Of course our bill of rights is always being twisted by the perpetual state of hyperbole according to which we're always at war with drugs, poverty, crime, fear and moral decay.  Whether or not Osama Bin Laden hated us for what we're told is our 'freedom,' his attack on New York has been a gold mine for authoritarianism and the security state. Our conflict with Islamic terrorists has encouraged, as many 'paranoids' like me have warned, authorities of all types to trample all over our constitutional guarantees, whether it be searches and seizures without probable cause or, the right to confront our accusers, the right to a speedy trial, to know the charges against us and believe it or not, the right to be free from the quartering of troops in private homes.

One doesn't hear of  many court cases involving the Third Amendment although it was important enough to the American colonists and it's been a basis of the implied right to privacy that the Roe Vs. Wade decision is based upon.  Back in 1965 Justice William O. Douglas opined the amendment's implication that " an individual's home should be free from agents of the state" That followed the 1952 decision that inferred from the third amendment, the framer's intent: "to constrain executive power even during wartime." 

As far as I know, there is no law allowing a police department to commandeer one's residence and quarter policemen there in order to  conduct surveillance to see if there was domestic violence going on next door and gather evidence thereof. If there is, I would suspect it would run afoul of the third amendment, yet so confident were the suburban Las Vegas police that they could do any damned thing they wanted, that they blew open one Henderson, Nevada resident's front door with a battering ram, screaming obscenities at the unarmed man in his living room as the police are wont to do, pointing firearms at Anthony Mitchell whom they addressed as "asshole," forcing him to grovel before them on the floor while they fired several rounds of painful but non-lethal shotgun ammunition at him and his dog at point blank range and demanding that they occupy his house. As though this weren't enough, they continued on to occupy the victim's parent's house on the same street, rummaging, ransacking and arresting and forcibly removing everyone in manacles.

Oh it gets worse, but you can read about it yourself -- violations of the third, fourth and 14th amendments and of every principle of justice common to civilized societies.  It's not unique and it may wind up in the same limbo or wind up in some dark corner of oblivion as the many cases I've read over the years where police have entered the wrong house and murdered the occupants who were trying to defend themselves against what they thought, perhaps correctly, were armed invaders.

For all the public knows in the age of cringing cowardice and lapdog obedience, an age where liberty be damned, when you can be locked up indefinitely without charges, where your possessions can be searched, where you can be beaten, tortured, tazed, roughed up and have your home and possessions trashed by brutal, obscenity-screaming, uniformed thugs without any recourse -- where for all the public is likely to know or hear in the 'reality show' media, what happened in Vegas never happened at all or at best might be an uninteresting crawl beneath the Snowden Story, or the Zimmerman story or some celebrity scandal or other Fox News fabrication.

So you want to tell me an armed citizen is a ridiculous idea, that the government can't be opposed by force and won't ever need to be?  Yes, I know, talk is cheap, but when to talk back to the police results in things that would make the KGB or the Gestapo veterans long for the good old days, what's a man to do?   How does the law and how does that blindfolded lady with the scales treat the man who defends his home against armed and rabid berserkers with no regard for the law or human life?  How does a man decide whether it's worth taking up arms when the law fails and nobody cares - decide between dying with dignity and groveling on the floor of his own home while he and his family and his dog are being shot and beaten and robbed and hauled away in chains. 

I know what I would choose.  The Mitchells have chosen to take it to court and I hope they prevail, but unless these thugs are locked forever in hot and tight cages, waterboarded, tubes crammed down their throats and screamed at day and night for the rest of their lives, justice will not have been done nor will this sad, ignorant nation of sheep be worthy of talking about, much less bragging about freedom.

The mourning will begin shortly -- after this commercial announcement.

Pavlov rang the bell, the dogs drooled. The media directs, we mourn or we scorn -- we rage, we mock, we believe, we vote, we ignore.

At last, at least for a while yesterday, our media circus was forced to notice that there's a world outside the Seminole county Courthouse and took some time out from endless speculation and pointless discussion of the George Zimmerman trial to obsess about the Asiana airliner that landed short in San Fransisco.  In fact as of Monday Morning, it's still "Breaking News" long after the wreckage has gone cold and the survivors taken to hospitals or released.

Yes, two people died, as did many others in transportation related incidents over the weekend. 67 people were murdered in Chicago, one of the gun control capitols of our nation. 10 people died horribly when their plane caught fire in Alaska but I didn't hear a thing about it on CNN, nor about the runaway train explosion that killed 5 with 40 still missing.as the maudlin dirge droned and the newsreaders groaned on and on speculating and conjecturing and playing the same interviews and showing the same pictures of a California runway until I gave up and turned it off.
Oh, the humanity.

Yes, people who still read news heard about those other things and more, but I suspect they're in the minority. We get angry, we get upset; we mourn and we get indignant according to what we're given to pay attention to by others who profit by it and through it.

Last Saturday, driving home, I was astonished to see an ocean of flags huge and small on Route 1 as it passes through this tiny burg. Dozens of police motorcycles, black limos, police cars and a hearse followed by hundreds of cars carrying flags; motorcycles with flags down a highway lined with mourners waving flags in the 86 degree heat.  The President had a far smaller motorcade when he came through town last year.

A local sergeant killed in Afghanistan was being brought home for burial.  It's not that many people knew him. It's not that his death was more or less tragic than all the others in all our needless wars.  It's not that he was more or less a hero than anyone else in uniform and it's certainly not as though his loss and his family's grief had anything to do with a sacrifice for "our freedom."  But that's how it was sold by the papers, or rather by the corporate owners answerable to people who want to promote war and acceptance of war and the glorification of war.  All those thousands, all these years, but this, now.

As with all parts of America,  friends, neighbors, sons and daughters have been lost in this longest and most expensive of American wars. For a long time after we blew Baghdad halfway to hell, the dead were brought home in secret, the media bullied into not printing or reading lists of the casualties lest we seem to disapprove of  it all, like those hippies in the 70's.  but it's not about America mourning the loss of its volunteer soldiers, it's about entertainment, about deluding ourselves that  we don't respond to the ringmaster like circus performers -- to the conductor like an orchestra playing this great emotional symphony while the grip tightens on our lives.