Fred Phelps: a premature obituary

So, apparently Fred Phelps is in a hospice and on the verge of death.

The founder of the Westboro Baptist Church is clinging to life, despite the combined wishes of the majority of the American population.

Apparently, although the Westboro members refuse to talk about it, Fred was voted out of the church by the other members, according to people like his estranged son, Nate Phelps (who regained his sanity 37 years ago and left the church).

Now, it's possible that the other members of Westboro Baptist Church realized that Fred was the worst person in America, and decided that they didn't want him around any more. It's just as likely, though, that much like the Tea Party and the Republicans, they've decided that Freddy was holding them back from reaching the true depths of hatred available to them.

Here's the thing, though. Our boy Freddy isn't dying because of some unexpected illness or because his body finally got tired of his shit. It appears that he is dying from an extended tantrum.

After Phelps was voted out of Westboro Baptist Church this past summer, he was moved out of the church and into a house, where he was watched to ensure he wouldn’t harm himself, a son estranged from the church said Sunday. Phelps eventually stopped eating and drinking, and on Sunday, he was near death.

And at age of 84, you can't do that to your body, as Fred has apparently just discovered.

So, having warped the minds of at least three generations of followers, Fred has just learned that you can't keep your body running for over eight decades on a diet of hate, and then try to replace it with sadness.

When he finally stops wasting our oxygen, he will not be missed.

One of their aircraft is missing

Let's be certain of one thing today:  Nothing whatever has been going on on planet Earth for the last couple of days that is worth interrupting the constant speculation and obsessive concern with the missing aircraft.  There is no armed uprising in Venezuela, escalating Russian aggression against the Ukraine isn't worth mentioning, and that the Dow is down nearly 260 points this afternoon is of no consequence whatever.  One of our aircraft is missing, or rather one of Malaysia's aircraft is along with 200 odd mostly Chinese passengers.

If any of the other things that go on every day happen to interest you, CNN doesn't want to be bothered with it and you'll have to tune in to something like BBC or Al Jazeera where you might learn about the collapse of  the cease fire between Gaza and Israel, the struggle for democracy in Turkey, a left wing victory in El Salvador, the arrest of journalists in Egypt. . .  you know all that boring stuff that none of the hip people are interested in when there are celebrities and calamities carefully selected as the thing we need to hear about to the exclusion of all else.

No, the proliferation of the all-news format has resulted in far, far fewer choices and much less information for Americans and apparently we like it that way.  Entertainment news, infomercials, rumors of scandals and commercials and one major story at a time, chewed on, speculated on, extrapolated from endlessly until some other profitably sensational thing comes along to drown out our interest in the real world as we are led through the chutes to be fleeced.

I want my Obamaphone!

The younger generation, and to me that means almost everyone, sees a cellular phone as something much more than a telephone.  It's a symbol even if everyone and his 5 year old kid has one and the semiotic value has much to do with the snob quotient, the joy of having something before anyone else has one, and very little to do with making phone calls. So judging from the jealousy in Rush Limbaugh's voice, the phone to have, the phone he doesn't have, is the Obamaphone.

No, being filthy rich won't help, in fact it has no price and it's so exclusive it doesn't actually exist.  It's just another vintage lie from past Republican campaigns, wandering zombie-like from lectern to podium to  press conference to blog page to radio show.  Yes.  Yes indeed.  There is one born every minute and a Tea Party con-man to take him.

If you're dumb enough to believe that Barack H. Obama is handing out free telephones to the gleefully unemployed "takers" along with the free money he takes from you and hands out to leeches and bums and welfare queens -- you're just the sort of person the Tea Party wants on its side.  That's why they keep telling you you can't have one of these phones even though your life's blood is being drained in order to pay for thousands of them.  That's Tea Party Dumb.  That's Drudge Report Dumb.  That's the sort of dumb Kansas Senatorial candidate Milton Wolf  hopes Kansans are when he uses this moldy, mangy, sleazy and threadbare lie  to make people so angry they'll vote for a piece of shit like him.

Recently a frozen virus was dug up in Antarctic ice and it's still viable after 300,000 years.  Republican lie makers can only dream of such near-immortality, but their lies do last, don't they?  They still believe Democrats started the Great Depression, that Barack Obama started the near-Depression years even before he was elected and they still believe 47% of Americans live tax free and get free money, food, lodging and telephones and people like Rush Limbaugh pay far too much of their hard lied-for income so that lazy black women can have free cellphones to talk on while they lay around eating free food and waiting for the welfare check.

Now there has been a program in place to provide phones for the indigent so that they can look for jobs, but it's private money and it was started by George W. Bush, just like the recession and two wars and the record spending and unemployment they think you're dumb enough to blame on Obama.

And are they right about you -- you Tea Party stooge, you Limbaugh-listening, Fox-following empty headed fool?  If you're one of those, eat your heart out.  You can't have an Obamaphone or one of those special Welfare Queen Edition Cadillacs or any of that free money and you can't have a country with any future either. And that's no lie.

Sometimes a finger is just a finger

" So long as the Arabs fight tribe against tribe, so long will they be a little people, a silly people - greedy, barbarous, and cruel,"

Who knows what T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) really said, but Peter O'Toole delivered that line in the eponymous movie.  I can't help recalling the scene when listening to the God Damned Republicans trying to blame the situation in the Crimea on President Obama and trying to make sure it all goes badly for everyone so that Americans will come to their senses and elect some silly, greedy and barbarous puppet to represent crackpot religion, rabid nationalism and klepto-Capitalism. Why not? We're already silly, greedy, barbarous and cruel: a little people with big rhetoric, a cruel people with small minds and big guns.

It's not because of Republicans -- it's because of us, because of who and what we are and it shows in everything we do, well-intentioned or not.  It shows in how we latch onto theories and justify them with good intentions and use them to make things worse.  It shows in how we alienate allies by making good causes less about goodness than about rhetorical conformity, it shows in how we make facts bow to theory and let the theories we obey make things worse.

So how do you make schools safer?  Does it help to reduce tensions, make students feel less alienated and helpless and marginalized to expel one for pointing a finger at another student?  Of course not, but "we have a rule" against even pretending to be using a weapon and so because a student could conceivably think of his finger as a gun barrel, pointing it at someone is, in some mystical way punishable. A thought -- a presumed thought is magically identical with action.

We may laugh at the assertion that minimum wage laws stifle job creation because the State with the highest has the highest rate of job creation. We fail to laugh at our attempt to reduce school violence by insisting that a hug is assault, a kiss is rape and a finger is attempted murder. Silly, barbarous and cruel.

When an aspirin is "drugs;" when a nail clipper is a "weapon" -- when punishments explore the far reaches of what is reasonable and effective and meaningful and are defended with all the passion of a Spanish inquisitor without any  reference to the consequences --  so long as we continue to marginalize the reasonable for not adhering to formulas and incantations -- as long as we continue to marginalize decent, ordinary, well-intentioned people for saying the wrong word or pointing the wrong finger we will continue to be a little people: silly, greedy, barbarous and cruel.

From My Crystal Ball

How long did that take?

I sing the body mechanical

"America's love affair with the automobile" used to be the most noticeably overused cliche in the the American idiom and indeed, starting with the 20th century few things transformed private life and personal liberty like the automobile. Few things contributed so much to economic growth From the end of  WWII and through the 1960's everything was about cars.  If you're one of the dwindling part of the population who remembers first hand, I don't have to explain.  You'll remember the car culture and you'll remember how it made the USA run.  Our youth was about the freedom cars brought.  The status of our families was displayed in the driveway and our introduction to love had a lot to do with the freedom of the road and the secluded areas it led to. It's gone. It's strip malls and plastic signs and Japanese designs. It's people locked safely inside, staring at little screens.

What would have happened to Jack Kerouac, who would have heard of Ken Kesey if this had been a nation where people gleefully chose some soulless transportation appliance chosen for cheapness and that simply took you places safely and economically without your participation?  Where do you find America, how do you get there but on the road?  Why even have a road if we can live in a hive?

I can't understand the mania for taking away our cars, for looking forward eagerly to cars that differ from Subway cars only in the passenger capacity --  that run on electronic rails?  Safety and economy and the vision of  a future without back roads, the crunch of gravel, the wind in your hair on Summer nights, the smell of gumbo in road houses you pass as the V twin rumbles between your knees or the V8 sings as you change down from 6 to 5 to pass that Toyota safetybox with blacked out windows nd the 'Star Safety System' and the airbags.  I sing the body mechanical -- the music of the night and of freedom. The poetry of machines.

Soulless appliance, we don't know how it works and don't care -- a place to wait and text message and facebook and link to Linkedin and watch American idol as the soulless matrix sucks the life out of you in perfect safety.  What the hell has happened to us?  Are we really heir to the termites, the moles -- timid troglodytes  living in plastic tubes and breathing filtered air -- too timid to take control?

Pardon me, I'm making myself sick.  It's a beautiful Saturday and in the garage, my new Harley gleams, a symphony in Blue -- and route 714 waits, just over the bridge, leading west out to the big lake under miles of  trees, arched over the asphalt like a cathedral knave and the air smells the way most of you have never smelled it.  South along 441, along the levee, the live oaks and Spanish moss and fish camps and orchards and road houses and kids that still wave from front lawns as you ride by.  America, I'm still here, and I still remember. Of thee I still sing.

McRussia

The 31st of January dawned cold but clear in Moscow in 1990. It had been two years since the Communist Party had given their permission to open the first McDonalds in the former Soviet Union. Located in Moscow's Pushkin Square, the largest McDonalds restaurant had 28 cash registers and seating capacity for around 700 people.

That capacity was quickly exceeded, as people stood in line for up to six hours for their first taste of Western fast food. The Moscow restaurant broke a record for first-day sales for any McDonalds in the world - they served 30,000 people that day alone.



They remain popular in Russia almost 25 years later: McDonalds controls 70% of the Russian fast-food market, and the flagship store in Pushkin Square still serves 20,000 people per day. Ironically, it wasn't the American headquarters of the McDonalds Corporation which had pushed the new branch of the franchise. It was the head of McDonalds Canada, George Cohen, who had opened the twelve-year-long negotiations with the Soviet Union.

But within 8 months of the first McDonalds restaurant opening, the Berlin Wall fell. And within two years, the Soviet Union was dissolved.

So the next time someone tries to tell you that Ronald Reagan toppled the USSR, you can tell them that, no, it was Ronald McDonald that killed the bear.

Hitler, Newton and Barnum

I. Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it. 

That's true for things above the level where quantum physics makes hash of such laws but for things which are not things, but lies, it has no bearing.  Promoters of things for which there is no evidence whatever and promoters of lies, hoaxes and propaganda rely on the fact that no external force will impede, delay or arrest the appointed rounds of  lies while truth often demands too much of us. Every day a new crop of gullible witlings and angry little twits is born to be deluded. Call it Barnum's Law.

I saw this once again the other day, it's been defaming anyone with any intention and a great number of people without the intention of  modifying the national policies on private ownership of firearms.

One might expect that anyone trying to equate Hitler with liberal philosophy isn't dealing with words as we generally accept them and is using definitions of terms like "liberal" that steer us away from rational dialog and into the corral to be fleeced.  and like all humans those who don't like liberals and don't want any interference with gun ownership will simply latch on to anything that seems internally cohesive in some blurry way without further question.  We're all guilty of it to one degree or another, but in this case it's more likely to be questioned by the people it's directed against and guess what.  There isn't a germ of truth to it.  There is no evidence that Hitler ever said it and the history of Post WW I German gun laws contradicts it.  Hitler in fact made guns much more available (except to Jews) in 1938.  The Weimar Republic required registration but that was only some time after the Victorious allies forbade Germans to have guns at all.  Some one made this up, probably during the Clinton years, and no opposing force has been able to stop it.  Facts don't matter. Barnum's Law prevails.

Fact is never the test of belief, if it were, this thing wouldn't keep appearing all over the place.  I've been seeing it for years and so far it seems more ridiculous every day, but as long as the need for Obama to be scandalous exceeds the supply of  scandals, it might as well be a perpetual motion machine.

There's as little evidence that it will cease to orbit and burn up in the atmosphere as there is for any actual scandal to have occurred, but it doesn't matter in a nation where half of us are so greedy for scandal, desperate for outrage and hungry for something, anything to anchor our prejudice and feed our greedy need to feel superior by knowing things we don't care enough about to research.

So sure, Hitler will always have said what he didn't say and the Obama scandal will always be quickly approaching and  your God and your Guns  and your freedom to ignore decency, the law and the tenets of both Capitalism and Christianity will continue to make a stink that no fact will diminish and no test of logic impair.

The Constitution Wins in Arizona --On this One.

Arizona Republican Governor Jan Brewer vetoed the anti-gay bill passed by both houses of the Arizona legislature.

The crazies in the TeaPublican Party, quick to accuse President Obama of "shredding the Constitution," propose outrageously unConstitutional legislation every chance they get.  Their latest unAmerican, unConstitutional bill would have allowed businesses to refuse service to Americans whom they believe would injure their religious sensibilities.  Their target was, of course, the LGBT community, but the legislation was so poorly written that it would have allowed discrimination against any group of Arizonans for any religious reason. It was a bill that codified bigotry.  And the amazing thing is that a majority of Arizona Republican law makers passed it.

And they're not the only anti-Americans trying their best to "shred the Constitution."  Some idiot in another state wants to make it illegal for gay athletes to play football. As long as these morons are voted into office, we'll see more attempts made to enact laws based on religious bigotry.  Think about that when these hate-based zealots and bigots want your vote. 

And think about what they'd do should they gain the power of the presidency.

(CNN) -- Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer vetoed a bill Wednesday that would have allowed businesses that asserted their religious beliefs the right to deny service to gay and lesbian customers. 

The controversial measure faced a surge of opposition in recent days from large corporations and athletic organizations, including Delta Air Lines, the Super Bowl host committee and Major League Baseball. 

Fiercely divided supporters and opponents of the bill ramped up pressure on Brewer after the state's Republican-led Legislature approved it last week. 

On Wednesday, the governor said she made the decision she knew was right for Arizona. "I call them as I see them, despite the cheers or the boos from the crowd," Brewer said, criticizing what she described as a "broadly worded" bill that "could result in unintended and negative consequences." 

Brewer said she'd weighed the arguments on both sides before vetoing the measure, which is known as SB 1062."



So the governor weighed the arguments on both sides? Why it took this long for Brewer to veto this repulsive bill should be frightening to any American who believes in liberty and justice for all and who entertains the idea of putting more TeaPublicans in charge of government.


The proposed bill passed by the two legislative houses in Arizona was not about religious liberty.  

All one has to do is look for any proposed legislation crafted by religious zealots that would have allowed people to refuse to serve divorced Americans, or Americans who took the Lord's name in vain (that's against the Ten Commandments and these people claim the Constitution and this country is based on those ten prohibitions), or people who bore false witness, or people who committed adultery.

(Imagine a business in Arizona refusing to serve Newt Gingrich or any other serially divorced American?)  

Adultery is prohibited by the Ten Commandments, so any God-fearing, God-obeying Christian would have to find a state forcing him or her to serve adulterers a state that practices fascism!

Of course no laws were ever proposed to protect Christians from having to serve or do business with people who broke those particular Commandments. That's why it is so disgustingly obvious that the Arizona "Hate The Gays" bill was nothing more than an attempt to shred the Constitution and encourage hatred against a minority.

Governor Brewer did the right thing for the wrong reasons. Faced with the loss of millions and millions of dollars in revenue for Arizona from businesses and the NFL, she vetoed the bill. Had she warned the Arizona legislature against passing the bill at the start, I'd believe she did this for the right reason.  She didn't.  So I'm not waving the flag for her.

Let it be a warning to the other red states that would use "religious freedom" to denigrate and marginalize minority Americans.  Your religion does not give you the right to institutionalize what Jim Wright of Stonekettle Station aptly calls religious apartheid.

Beer, Bigots and Business

My Nietzschean opinions about religion are no secret although I really don’t believe, as some do, that religious belief is the root of all evil.  Bigotry doesn’t  kill people after all:  bigoted people do.  Is the current attempt by some Republican legislators to revisit the arguments of the 50’s and 60’s really best handled by signs and chants and proclaiming just how nasty their ignorant beliefs are?  Do we try to outlaw speech?  Make hate illegal? Do we party like it's 1964?

The civil rights movement didn’t depend on changing people’s minds, it was about forbidding practices that are not in the best interests of  our fellow Americans. The Fed has the power to regulate trade in the best interests of the nation after all. It’s funny you don’t hear it couched in those terms but I suggest that’s really what this is all about. It's about what nearly everything is about: money and power.

 Segregation was bad for business.  Bigotry stifles the free flow of capital. The south began to prosper only after segregation ended and the extension of equal protection to all improved.  Republicans are aware of this. Like some religious leaders, they only use the "government is the enemy of freedom" argument to generate votes.  They use a fictitious attack on religious freedom to rally the fringes who would otherwise never be a part of the democratic process,  making a devil’s bargain perhaps by ignoring Lovecraft’s warning never to call up what they can’t put down.  I think this effort will be stillborn except as a last ditch to use the power of evil to win one last round of elections. It just might drag them all right down to hell with the crazies they riled up.  I hope so.

That they are really only using the small-minded for that purpose is illustrated, perhaps by the attempt a few years back to pass a county law forbidding merchants to advertise in or describe their wares in anything but English. It was applauded by the anti-Immigrant crowd.  It had much sound and fury behind it, but  It simply faded away and likely as soon as the phones began to ring at Republican headquarters  -- because no merchant is going to kiss off 25% of his potential customers and if he has to use Urdu to sell groceries or cars, he’s going to do it. Bigotry is bad for business, se habla español attracts it.

 The proposition was probably intended to portray the Party as defenders of some obscure American value like fear of immigrants and probably did so as far as the run of the mill Florida lowlife was concerned, but  preventing people from spending money is a hard sell when you’re selling it to Capitalists. 

 Minorities of all kinds aren’t really insignificant in numbers anymore.  More gay people are open about it and if you add up all the people  the Hard Right objects to, they are actually a majority.  If you’re the grocer, the restaurant, the bank or the  taxi company in town and you don’t want to do business with  “those people,” no matter who your religion tells you to hate, someone else will.   Of course it’s pretty hard to identify gay people unless they're forced to wear pink badges, but the better you are at it, the smaller your customer base will be. The bigots won't buy extra groceries from your store, but the gay people and those who think they should be treated like Americans won't buy any.  In most cases, your competition will eat you alive. Money talks and if you turn away business, it will walk elsewhere and talk to somebody else. 

Now that’s not an argument for just letting Arizona businesses stomp on the law and American values in the name of God.  It’s an argument that this has nothing to do with religion or the free exercise thereof.  That should be obvious from the prospect of some oh-so-devout Christian refusing a drink of water to a thirsty traveler on Christian grounds.  And yes, that groaning sound you hear actually is Jesus.  

The argument that forcing some self righteous, anti-Christian casuist to feed Adam and Steve for having a David and Jonathan relationship is a violation of religious freedom is vapid.  Republicans, or the people who pull their strings and finance their campaigns care about business not religion or individual rights.  It’s about the free, unregulated exercise of business and it’s the ability of the Government to regulate trade that’s in their gun sights.  Hands off business, no more regulation, no more responsibility for the dire consequences to the public your business causes. No health care, no minimum wage, no unions, no sick pay no vacations.  No more EPA, no more OSHA, no more FDA.  Nobody on the Right cares about who eats at  the lunch counter,  it’s the toxic waste, the air pollution, the environmental disasters they want to perpetrate and they sell it as a question of our freedom because people only consider the facts they are given and don’t look at the wider picture.   

The low information voters buy it.  The religious fanatics buy it and all the other classes of people who have been trained to salivate at any hint the government is curbing their freedom buy it, but it’s those who hate your freedom  behind it.

Want them to listen?  Don’t appeal to their sense of morality, speak to their greed.  Let them know we are not going to eat their chicken, drink their beer or do anything  that profits the people that sell to segregated, anti-American businesses.  We won’t visit their states, watch their football teams or buy their products and watch those bigoted blowhards shrivel up and blow away and when I say we, I think I’m speaking for a Majority.  It’s easy for them to resist what them “Libtards” are forcing them to do. Easy for them to claim persecution but damned hard for them to thrive without money.  Don’t talk to Arizona, talk to Budweiser and it will be a dry and dusty day in East Shithook Arizona  when the beer truck don’t stop there no more.