Liquid Water on Mars - But No Signs of Intelligent Life on Earth

Planetary scientists recently detected hydrated salts on these slopes at Horowitz crater, corroborating their original hypothesis that the dark streaks on Mars are indeed formed by liquid water.

On Monday, NASA announced the results of a new study showing that salty liquid water flows seasonally on Mars, giving the red planet one of the essential ingredients for life.

The study focuses on the mysterious recurring slope lineae, or "RSL" -- narrow, streaky features on the planet's surface spotted by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft.

The RSL are typically about 15 feet in width or smaller, and appear on slopes during the planet's warm seasons. They fade during cooler seasons, then reappear the following year as the planet gets warmer again.

In the same newspaper, I read about the American conservative movement, for whom facts are subordinate to politics. I read bizarre conspiracy theories about birthers, death panels, undocumented workers, and imaginary voter fraud.  I read revisionist accounts about how GWB kept us safe, or why supply-side economics creates jobs – despite all evidence to the contrary.

I read about Donald Trump ("Mexicans are rapists and criminals"), Ben Carson ("no Muslim is fit to be president"), Carly Fiorina ("babies writhing on a dissecting table"), and Ann Coulter ("How many f*#king Jews ...").  Rampant racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, Islamophobia, misogyny ... the GOP has morphed itself into a HATE GROUP!

Then I read about how Super PAC money distorts representative democracy, and why any Republican who violates party doctrine can expect a primary challenge funded by the Heritage Foundation and the Koch brothers. 

I want to go home to the peace and quiet of a Martian landscape.  There is no intelligent life on Earth.

The Age of Bull

Some of the lab-coat bozos who dream up fake "studies" to convince you to eat or not to eat and to spend a lot of your money on buying books related to fake health and nutrition scams would like you to believe that wheat is your enemy.  Unless you have celiac disease, it isn't, but  if you're like most Americans, you don't know science from Shinola, don't know a study from a Studebaker or glutin from glockenspiels and the same goes for history and biology, but that's not what this is about.

A popular fiction is that "studies show" that the advent of  agricultural civilization (is there any other kind?) made people smaller and so you should avoid agricultural products. Of course it's hokum designed to sell product and is popular with inflated airheads from Hollywood, but it's not a study, a scientific, randomized large double blind study, it's motivated speculation -- like all those e-mails I get telling me that some new scandal is going to get Obama impeached any day now.

Agriculture allowed cities to form.  Cities allowed greater communication and closer association between more and more people and that fostered diseases and epidemics previously unknown or previously restricted in range. Such things had a strong effect on health and disease can easily explain what the diet "doctors" would like to blame, for their own gain, on grain.   Even in modern times, AIDS, which may have been around for a very long time, was spread around the world by airplanes.  Communication has a dark side, just look at what the spread of Europeans and their diseases did to the Americas.  Still we live longer than ever, are more disease free, are larger than ever and remain active longer, Pizza and TV dinners notwithstanding.


Of course if you like to give names to the "ages" of Man, you'd have to consider the title The Information Age.  Could it be however that pernicious, malicious, malignant and dangerous ideas, memes, lies, stereotypes, maledictions and political doctrines are the deadly side effect of  the electronic media, just as cities, ships and Camel trains spread death along with culture and commerce?

Obama is going to declare martial law, going to take your guns, send you to death camps, murder your grandmother. Apollo 11 never went to the moon, that German plane, that Malaysian plane never crashed, that bomb never went off.  Obama is a Muslim, Clinton tried to have the UN invade the US.  Cell phones will kill you, wheat will damage your brain, cooking your food is bad, The Koch Brothers and Woody Harrelson know what's best for us and Subarus are made with love. Sure, it's the information age, but who can deny, looking at the vast majority of that information, that it's the bullshit age.  Mythology has gone metastatic. It's mass produced for entertainment and profit, for greed and power and even though much of it is benign, much of it is deadly.  It's not only deadly to your health, but to your cognitive, your critical faculties and whether or not it all ends with bangs or whimpers, the cenotaph, the tombstone of our species will be inscribed with these words  STUDIES SHOW.

Mega Donors Buying Politicians and Influence...

Rational Nation USA
Purveyor of Truth

Thinking pro business and pro growth makes sense for everybody; after all economic growth, or an expanding economy (added demand)creates jobs which are in turn filled by folks looking for work, and it gives businesses the opportunity to increase their income (the result of increased demand for goods or services)and provide those extra jobs that get filled by folks looking for work.

All that makes sense; right? It does if viewed from the perspective that all businesses are, to a great extent, concerned with the importance of a growing vibrant middle class. But we all know this is not the case and mega wealthy corporations spend mega millions financing political campaigns of candidates they believe will be most favorable to their interests, not yours or the country's at large.

Very wealthy individuals and corporations spend the millions they do on political campaigns for one purpose and one purpose only, TO BUY INFLUENCE and CONTROL POLIT0ICIANS who make laws and regulations. In short they are attempting to insure their own special interests are protected. Whether that has a positive or negative impact on the larger picture is really of little consequence to the wealthy corporations or wealthy individuals.

So, in looking out for your own self interests be sure to do the research and learn if mega dollar donors are supporting a candidate you are considering voting for, whether they be a congressional, senate, or presidential candidate. Because if they are being bankrolled by big money the chances are the candidate will be looking out after the interests of the corporation or individual(s) whose money bought them.

POLIICO - The Koch brothers’ conservative network is still debating whether it will spend any of its massive $889 million budget in the Republican presidential primaries, but the prospect of choosing a GOP nominee loomed over the network’s just-concluded donor conference in the California desert. 

In an informal straw poll of some conference donors, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida came out ahead of four other would-be GOP presidential candidates who had been invited, according to an attendee familiar with the results. The poll was conducted by Frank Luntz, a veteran GOP pollster, during a break-out session of the conference, which wrapped up Tuesday after a long weekend of presentations and discussions at the Ritz-Carlton in Rancho Mirage, Calif.  

Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul — who received the least enthusiastic response from donors during a Sunday night forum of prospective candidates that also featured Rubio and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz — finished last in Luntz’s poll, the source told POLITICO.  

The poll is by no means a definitive assessment of the feelings of the hundreds of wealthy business leaders who comprise the vaunted network created by billionaire industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch. But it does provide an early glimpse into the leanings of a pool of megadonors who are being hotly courted by the field of would-be candidates, and whose checkbooks could go a long way toward determining who emerges with the GOP nomination — regardless of whether the Koch network decides to formally back a candidate.  

The network has thus far steered clear of endorsing specific candidates in primaries, but it is coming under internal and external pressures to do so. It hopes to raise $889 million from wealthy backers like those who gathered in Rancho Mirage to push its agenda in 2015 and 2016, more than double what it spent in the 2012 election cycle.  

In addition to Cruz, Paul and Rubio, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker paid a visit to the Ritz meeting, though he was not present for the forum.  

The three-day conference was organized by Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, a nonprofit outfit that oversees the vast political and policy network created by the Koch brothers.

More BELOW THE FOLD.

Via: Memeorandum

IN ORDER TO FORM A MORE PERFECT UNION

The Cap't has addressed this issue in his usual sharp and focused style but this is so important to our future as a nation I felt the need to repeat it.

The photo is of a pen presented to my husband’s cousin who successfully argued a case before the SCOTUS some years ago.  She was very proud of this accomplishment and we were proud for her but I wonder what she would think of the recent rulings handed down from on high.

Actually I don’t wonder, not really as I know what her reaction would be and it would be loud and scathing. How far the SCOTUS has fallen into the political mire of the far right and it’s batshit crazy denizens. Unbelievable and yet, it is happening. Better to disband this crooked den of thieves than to allow them to further desecrate the constitution and our whole legal system.

The SCOTUS most famously ruled in favor of corporations siding with Citizens United  in allowing unregulated spending sprees in political elections thus paving the way for corporations to buy politicians and unduly influence elections. Despite the new Koch Brothers' warm and fuzzy TV ads, they remain one of the biggest offenders to American patriotism.

So when Washington didn’t burn and the people did not rise up, the conservative majority of the SCOTUS became even more emboldened and have since ruled to disallow buffer zones for protests around planned parenthood type facilities that also perform abortions - while considering it constitutional to have a rather large buffer zone around the Supreme Court building (they may be needing that) and will no doubt  rule against any group challenging buffer zones around other legislative facilities such as the zone recently placed into law that keeps Moral Monday protesters away from the North Carolina State Capitol building.

And while the regional news  is broadcasting headlines about the recent case of a toddler cooked to death in a car and a newborn buried in a backyard, the SCOTUS has seen fit to rule in favor of religious exemptions for corporations in order to allow them to deny providing birth control for their employees. Women of limited means are further marginalized while more babies will be born to suffer from torture, neglect and death. Not to say that poor women hurt their babies, but this certainly closes the door on choice so they can limit the number and timing of their childbirth and pull themselves out of poverty. And those who are ill equipped and do not desire to have children will be forced into a situation where their children will be in grave danger.

I’m no legal scholar but doesn’t it seem completely senseless that the SCOTUS majority would rule that a corporation, which exists only on paper, has personhood and religious convictions? Once there is incorporation, there is no “owner”. There are company officers such as the CEO but he or she is NOT the corporation. So, where does the corporation attend church? How did the corporation form its religious convictions?

The right continues to scream that our Kenyan, socialist, leftist President is going to have us under Sheria law which, of course, has not happened in the nearly 8 years he has been in office but the Supreme Court, with just a few strokes of their mighty pen would have us living under Krazy Konservative Khristian law, completely vacating the US Constitution and they have the nerve to call liberals unpatriotic? HA!

Once again I find myself seriously exploring my options to expatriate.

SHAME! On the Supreme Court of the United States and SHAME! On us if we allow this to pass without protest and a demand that the favoring Justices step down. They have proven they cannot be trusted with our most sacred of documents, the Constitution.

Post-SOTU Reflections and the Continuing War of Words

Contrary to the constant sneer and jeer of rightwing rhetoric, President Obama has always been a centrist politician and hardly the “socialist dictator” as alleged by Republicans.

Perhaps Jon Stewart expressed it best last night: “President Obama is apparently now in the 'f*ck it' stage of his presidency" - given six non-stop years of legislative obstruction, filibustering, gridlock, and Godwin-style name-calling

F*ck it, indeed. Consider this ABC News interview of Warren Buffet and his secretary, Debbie Bosanek, who reveal an inconvenient truth about the American tax system:

 

What drives income inequality in America? Debbie Bosanek pays a Federal income tax rate of 35.5%. In contrast, her boss pays 17.5% on income estimated to be 200 times greater!

“Everybody in our office is paying a higher tax rate than Warren,” she says.

“I pay hardly any payroll taxes, Buffet admits. “Gov. Romney hardly pays any payroll taxes. Newt Gingrich hardly pays any payroll taxes. Debbie pays lots of payroll taxes,” he continues.

Repeat this admission across the economic spectrum of American life, and what you have is a massive redistribution of income from the middle class to a special privileged class. Yet, Republicans have lashed out: They dismiss Buffet’s admission as an act of “class warfare.” One has to ask: Which side of this war is hurling the bombs?

Here are more inconvenient facts: Since 1979, the productivity of American workers has risen 80%; yet, the wages of these workers have risen less than 11%:

Please note the precipitous rise in income for the privileged class: Over 240%.  In other words, American workers have put enormous wealth into the pockets of their employers, yet received next to nothing in return.

Since 2001, this trend has turned ever more ominous as shares in the national economic pie have essentially turned upside down. Middle class wage increases have fallen to less than one percent. The überclass now pockets a whopping 99% slice of the national pie but constitutes only 1% of the population.

Meanwhile, US multinational corporations are laying off workers at home and shipping jobs overseas:

Given these data, consider this thought experiment: If you are a Kochroach raking in $1 billion per year, what is the cost benefit ratio of spending $100 million on PACs and stink tanks to avoid a tax hike? The difference between a 17.5% tax rate versus 35.5% (drum roll) is:

$180,000,000 each and every year

for as long as ye shall live (badda boom)!

“[The GOP] has built a whole catechism on the protection and further enrichment of America's plutocracy. Their caterwauling about deficit and debt is so much eyewash to con the public … [The GOP] could not abide so much as a one-tenth of one percent increase on the tax rates of the Walton family or the Koch brothers, much less a repeal of the carried interest rule that permits billionaire hedge fund managers to pay income tax at a lower effective rate than cops or nurses” (Mike Lofgren, Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult).

Mike Lofgren's words explain the stalking point phrases of “class warfare” and “job creators” framed and marketed by PACs and stink tanks to protect the überclass. Now you know why the Kochroach Brothers spend buckets of bucks to convince ignorant country bumpkins to vote Republican - and against their own economic self-interest.

Recently one of those country bumpkins - or perhaps a psy-ops troll employed by the überclass - left this comment under a recent post by Shaw:

"Just compare the "poor" in the US to the rest of the world and you have to come to the conclusion that our system is better for poor people. How much more do you Bleeding Heart Liberals want us to do for these people, most of them ar [sic] lazy slobs anyway who just take, take and take!"  Steve

My reply:

"For your information, most of the impoverished people of this country are the working poor earning subsistence wages - people who mow your damn lawn, pick up your damn garbage, flip your fucking hamburgers, and pick your damn fruits and vegetables under a hot sweltering sun – jobs which shiftless lazy bastards such as yourself consider beneath your contemptible dignity."

In response to President Obama’s State of the Union Address, Republicans have responded with:

"Kommandant-In-Chef" - Randy Weber (R-TX);

“6,778 words. 'Benghazi' is not one of them” - Steve Stockman (R-TX);

“Obama speech reads like dictates from a King” - Tim Huelskamp (R-KS);

“The world is literally about to blow up” - Lindsey Graham (R-SC).

Words and more words, but nothing of substance. How long will the middle class tolerate this bullshit? Historically, no society has tolerated unchecked economic privilege and injustice for long. It is only a matter of time before the war of words spills into the streets. When that day arrives, my choice of weapon will not be ink.

This Land is Your Land

Despite the continuing efforts of the Republicans

I was never a big Pete Seeger fan, but my college years having coincided with the folk music revival, I certainly heard him a lot. I appreciated that he came from the time and conditions that produced Woody Guthrie and John Steinbeck and a lot of skepticism about how well our version of Capitalism served freedom and democracy.  Those folks and many others weren't well received by the same sort of  -- I hesitate to use the word bastards, but it fits -- who are still calling everything and everyone Communists for every spurious reason they can.  Seeger has my respect, for his courage more than for his musicianship. He used his humor and his banjo against the union bashers and skull crackers, stood up to the Joe McCarthy thugs and the war mongers and spawned a generation of musical protest that seems strangely absent at a time when much of what he fought is metastasizing like a cancer. We still need to be reminded just who it is who owns this land, the Koch Brothers, Roger Ailes, the Tea Party or the voters.

Pete Seeger died yesterday at the age of 94 after a very short illness.  4 days before he entered the hospital he was chopping wood, says his grandson. He died in the hospital 4 days before he could collect the Woody Guthrie Prize.  So long Pete, it's been good to know ya but your conscience still sings to us.

Things Go Dirtier With Koch

A friend from my hometown posted this on his facebook page:


"David and Charles Koch are in the process of hosting their biannual conservative training session for billionaires in Indian Wells, California. The effort this year is to raise millions to mislead the public about Obamacare and to use that information to defeat vulnerable Democratic representatives and senators in the upcoming mid-term elections. They have rented out the entire Hotel Esmerelda (558 rooms), closed the restaurants to the public for three days, and shut down the recreational facilities (see the picture). They have also surrounded the grounds and nearby golf course with telephone laden security guards, all dressed in black (see my new friend). It was truly eerie watching this unfold."


If anyone can refute this, feel free to do so.  But I don't think anyone will.




"Though the donors will funnel tens of millions of dollars into the election this year, they will not have to disclose a single cent. Using an elaborate array of foundations, nonprofits, and other legal entities, the Koch network sponsored bus tours, attack ads, think tanks, and hired Tea Party organizers to shape the midterm elections two years ago. 

Now it appears they are expanding the effort. The most that the public knows about these meetings has been culled from leaked audio tapes, reporting from journalists like Ken Vogel, and from an invitation I exclusively reported back in October of 2010. The document I posted over a year ago explained that during the meetings, strategy is discussed, from legislative campaigns to judicial elections, and money is raised from an assortment of executives from the oil, banking, manufacturing, and real estate industries." --SOURCE



Now what was all that whining about we hear from the GOOPers about George Soros?

Do they really know nothing about the conservative corporatist fascists plotting in their own backyards to forever alter our democracy?  The low-information voters were fed the lie that it is President Obama who would "fundamentally change" America, while, covertly, the billionaire Koch brothers are doing that very thing.  The Koch brothers cynically turn us against each other, while plotting to buy up every legislator they can to make this country into their own private empire.  It won't matter who the president is.  America will belong to the Kochs.

Liars Can Figure

The last half of the old saying, "figures don't lie, but liars can figure."  I'm referring to what is by far the most important story to have surfaced in the last couple of weeks, the tale of a paper written by two Harvard trained economists, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff.

This paper, called Growth in a time of Debt,  purported to show that, when a nation's debt exceeded 90% of its annual GDP, a tipping point was reached which crushed economic growth.  It has been constantly quoted and hailed far and wide by proponents of the miserable "austerity" policies which have nearly destroyed the European economy, and which continue to damage our own.

It now turns out that this paper contained a number of serious errors, the most comic of which (if it wasn't so catastrophic) was a simple Excel coding error that "accidentally" left out the data of several of the most well-off countries.  Including that data, the conclusion of the paper is totally negated.  Thus it may be very fairly said that a large part of the suffering forced upon the people of Greece, Spain, Ireland, Italy, and indeed here, is the result of what can at best be considered a mistake which anyone who uses Excel should be able to spot quickly.

I am not an economist.  I tried to find a way to explain the whole thing quickly, but as you might anticipate, I was easily bested by Paul Krugman, who is beginning to seem like the only sane voice in the whole mainstrteam press:

"In fact, Reinhart-Rogoff quickly achieved almost sacred status among self-proclaimed guardians of fiscal responsibility; their tipping-point claim was treated not as a disputed hypothesis but as unquestioned fact.

...the truth is that Reinhart-Rogoff faced substantial criticism from the start, and the controversy grew over time. As soon as the paper was released, many economists pointed out that a negative correlation between debt and economic performance need not mean that high debt causes low growth. It could just as easily be the other way around, with poor economic performance leading to high debt. Indeed, that’s obviously the case for Japan, which went deep into debt only after its growth collapsed in the early 1990s.

Other researchers, using seemingly comparable data on debt and growth, couldn’t replicate the Reinhart-Rogoff results."

I occasionally recommend that your read some article- I plead with you to read all of this one, as it reveals the utter bankruptcy of the endless campaign by the rich and powerful to restructure the whole world for their sole benefit.

Krugman, of course, never gets to the question of motive.  As a civilized individual he is content to let this whole incident pass as a tragic mistake.  Green Eagle has no such brake on his behavior, so he will take up the question with a few comments about Carmen Reinhart.

Before continuing, however, I need to turn to another subject:  that of Peter G. Peterson.  I was surprised a couple of days ago to discover that my wife had never heard of him, and if she hadn't, I suspect most other people haven't either.  Here's some information from an article in the Los Angeles Times:

"Who's the most influential billionaire business figure in national politics?

If you answered one of the Koch brothers (Charles or David) or George Soros, you're wearing your partisan blinders. The former are known for their devotion to conservative causes, the latter to liberal. In either case, you're wrong.

The most influential billionaire in America is Peter G. Peterson. The son of Greek immigrants, Peterson, 86, served as Commerce secretary under President Nixon, then became chairman and chief executive of Lehman Bros. Subsequently, he made his big money as co-founder of the Wall Street private equity firm Blackstone Group.

Peterson doesn't attract venom from the left like the Koch family or bile from the right like Soros. In Washington, he's treated with sedulous respect as a serious thinker about public policy willing to support earnest public discussion with cold cash. His money backs a large number of think tanks across the political spectrum...Peterson's views are subtly infiltrating the Washington debate — which is why Americans should start getting worried about him."

Peterson is the number one proponent of "austerity" proposals in the United States.  And let me say that I put that word in quotation marks, because it always turns out to mean austerity for you and me, but more money for people like Peter G. Peterson.

Now, why the detour to discuss Peterson?  Well, it turns out that, in 2010, a few months after publishing this paper,

"Carmen Reinhart, the University of Maryland professor who has studied eight centuries of financial crises, was named a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the Washington-based nonprofit said."

But of course, nothing to be seen here.  You can be positive that, with this "appointment" Reinhart's income increased vastly, but of course that could not possibly suggest that there is anything deliberate in her having produced a fallacious piece of academic "research" which so fully supported the positions of her future employer.  And just to add insult to injury, we learn:

"Her husband, Vincent Reinhart, is a former monetary- affairs director at the Federal Reserve and now resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute"

The American Enterprise Institute- possibly the biggest corporate lie factory in the United States.

So, the question remains, cheesy, high school grade error, or deliberate lie fabricated to delude the nations of the world into following a ruinous economic policy?  Unfortunately, whichever is true, the results are likely to remain the same.  I'll give Krugman the last word:

"So will toppling Reinhart-Rogoff from its pedestal change anything? I’d like to think so. But I predict that the usual suspects will just find another dubious piece of economic analysis to canonize, and the depression will go on and on."

All truths await

All truths wait in all things

-Walt Whitman- 

It's been asserted that Nancy Hanks, Abraham Lincoln's mother was illegitimate and that President Lincoln himself was her illegitimate son.  History as is commonly taught to school children seems to have left the legitimacy claims behind to those who continue to impugn the man on the Dollar bill and continue to say the same sort of things about every enemy of injustice ever since.  Certainly those who continue to growl and grumble about the man who bent and broke rules to get the 13th amendment through Congress have much in common with Lincoln's mid 19th century detractors, Northern and Southern, and our current assailants of  nearly every Democratic president since FDR. It's tempting to believe that Americans of today, with their rabid and intransigent and often delusional views are something quite new, but Lincoln's campaign for re-election has far too much in common with Barack Obama's effort to make that idea stand on it's own.

He's a tyrant! he's the enemy of freedom! He's trashing the Constitution and our rights! -- are we talking about Lincoln, or Roosevelt. or Kennedy or Clinton?  All of them and more have faced such accusations.  Did Obama go on an "apology tour?"  Did Honest Abe openly endorse 'miscegenation' (a term that may have been coined by the Religious Right,) and were there articles and pamphlets describing a ball that never happened where 'colored belles'  danced with white men and containing fake pictures?  Yes there were!  just as Houston was flooded with wanted posters and other leaflets the day Kennedy was murdered.

 "At the very time shots were being fired at President Kennedy a right-wing protestor stood a few feet away, heckling JFK by comparing him to Neville Chamberlain"

Relates Donald E. Wilkes, Professor of Law, University of Georgia School of Law; ostensibly for such things as not forcing Communists to register with the government and for "turning the country over to the UN."  Heard it all before?  Of course we have and we've heard it ever since and from the same damned people in many cases.    "The American Fact Finding Committee" apparently actually the John Birch Society, printed one of those insidious, seditious calumnies. Fred C Koch, founder of Koch Industries ( who used to do business with the USSR) and founder of the John Birch Society and  father to the Koch Brothers bankrollers of the Tea Party now hounding Obama with the same slimy and false accusations.  Like Father, like sons. Like American Conservatism, like Treason.

Perhaps the "Modern Man" of the mid 19th century of whom Whitman sang isn't much different from the modern men and women who sit up nights fabricating stories about Barack Obama's ancestry and actions. 19th century calumnies about "Abraham Africanus I" and his fictitious dialogues with Satan smell as ugly as anything Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh or the Koch boys have ever cooked up in their stew-pots. No, I'm afraid America's 'Conservatives,'  those people who will go to war to preserve the past and particularly a  fictitious past designed to cover up injustice and promote privilege, have been with us all along.

Did the infamous but recently recrudescent Joe McCarthy really say "show me a man who talks about the Constitution and I'll show you a communist?"  I don't know, but his 'Conservative' henchmen didn't think that was as anti-American or trashing the constitution or beyond the definition of free speech as reading Marx or having a certain political opinion or promoting civil rights -- and even, in the case of Lincoln: ending constitutional support for slavery.  The Gospel chewing Bible bullies, the feudal Barons of industry then and now only care about the constitution when someone tries to use it to preserve individual liberty, and so granting the same rights to Biblical pariahs as to others, is "trashing the constitution" when Obama  -- or Africanus II -- favors it.

All truth waits, but who cares to look when it's too likely to challenge our politics, our lies, our precious delusions, our profits, our power?

2012, the end of an era

I've been a Newsweek reader and subscriber for more than a half century and of course I haven't always been appreciative of all their regular columnists.  I haven't ever in fact, but none the less, people like George Will or the current counterpoise to rational thinking, Niall Furguson, haven't made me cancel my subscription  as I've threatened to do on occasion. But you can't fight progress and you can't fight the kind of decay progress leaves in its wake and the magazine that once published some of the best political writing and news reporting in America has been fighting a losing battle. Advertising revenue is drying up in the slow economy and advertisers may feel they get a bigger bang and a bigger audience elsewhere.

 The venerable publication was sold last year and combined with The Daily Beast.  Controversial editor in chief Tina Brown, known for saving The New Yorker a few years back hasn't been able to save Newsweek or stem the flight of advertising revenue -- or as I might speculate, stem the rising illiteracy and unwillingness to read objective journalism and I read this morning that as of the end of this year, Newsweek will cease to put out a print edition. Alas.

I had been meaning to write this week about the noticeable trend toward being 'fair and balanced' in Newsweek and indeed almost every other slowly sinking print publication by including a measure of snarky, sulfurous vituperation  to balance out any accurate reportage or fact based opinion that will irritate the delusional Right, as if  there actually were two sides to arithmetic or an alternate and opposite  history despite the accuracy of the record.  I was going to chastise Ms. Brown for the October 15th cover story "Heaven is Real" pandering, once again, to irrational beliefs, but at least for Newsweek, the Mayans were correct.  It's the end of an era.

It may be more of a dignified end however, than being bought up by Darth Murdoch or some corporation controlled by the Koch brothers or Karl Rove.  They plan to continue on the Web and I plan to read them but I can't say I don't have a feeling of loss or a suspicion that the future of Journalism is not the improvement of journalism but more like a large, dark cave full of screaming voices.

I OWE MY SOUL TO THE COMPANY STORE

I was greatly disturbed by the 2010 SCOTUS ruling that favored Citizens United and the abomination which is known as, among other things, corporate personhood.

The landmark case opened the floodgates of cash expenditures to influence political races, appointments and government policies. Some will argue this has been going on for years under the guise of lobbyism and other shadowy strategies.  And I would agree, influence buying is nothing new.

What has changed is the number of avenues into which this kind of corporate power grabbing can be channeled and the amount of funds that can be invested.  I was waiting for this first national election to see just how pervasive the ad campaigns would be.

Are you as sick of them as I am yet???

One big problem with these so called super pacs and social welfare organizations is their ability to legally hide their donor list and donation amounts.  We know Americans For Prosperity is a functional arm for the Koch brothers and that American Crossroads is a vehicle for the GOP run by Karl Rove, but what of all the others out there? Shells within shells within shells…The megacrooks have lots of places to hide.

This level of corporate involvement harkens back to the days when the robber barons were kings of the hill and middle America was locked into a vicious cycle of hard work and endless debt to the company store. No need to worry about what was going out in wages, most of it was coming right back in. How far are we from the 21^st century equivalent?

There is a bill on Capitol Hill, HR 4010 and S3369, also known as the Disclosure 2012 Act which calls for more robust transparency in donor lists, organizational framework and monetary amounts.

This bill is being strongly opposed by, surprise, surprise, Sen Mitch McConnell and his GOP minions. The list of organizations who oppose this bill includes the US Chamber of Commerce and just about every mega agriculture/industrial organization out there. American jobs may have been exported overseas but not the corporate slimeballs running the show. They are here, on US soil, pretending to be patriots who love their country, all the while gutting it from the inside out.

It will surprise no one that the list of those in the Senate and House who have received campaign funds from these groups is largely Republican but there are a couple of nasty revelations of those Democrats who have also received funds from these groups:

Harry Reid - $859,121 (reported)

Charles Schumer - $678,850 (reported)

As well as several House Dems.

To allow this decision to stand without oversight and some sort of controls is to put democracy on the chopping block. We need real Americans to come together in a genuine grassroots movement and demand this bill is passed before we are sucked back in time:

 

You load sixteen tons, what do you get

Another day older and deeper in debt

Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go

 I owe my soul to the company store.

Skuby Dooby Do

I'm glad it's a long way to New Jersey but Bill Skuby, who owns Skuby & Co. Lifestyle Clothing in Spring Lake, N.J should be happy too.  I think I felt something snap in my head when I looked at the ABC News web page this morning and saw the thing he has in his store window.  Quite frankly I'm not sure I'd be able to restrain myself.  It's not that I actually advocate an act of violence against him or his property and I certainly don't want the Government to deprive him of the right to be a stupid, ugly, bigoted, ignorant and anti-American bastard ( no insult to involuntary bastards intended here.)  I'm all for the right to sedition.

But I'm only human and a picture of the President of the United States dressed as a semi-naked witch doctor taped to a tombstone and a bold face title with OBAMA CARE in which the letter C is a hammer and sickle, makes me have bad thoughts; very bad thoughts. Why is it that the two legged vermin who insist we worship a flag like some religious icon, that we swoon in an ecstasy of Chauvinistic self-praise at every mention of our often ugly history can condone the kind of disrespect that makes the world laugh contemptuously at our delusional stupidity and willful ignorance.

 

No, Skuby, the health care plan drafted by Republicans in conjunction with the health care corporations has less to do with Communism than you do with sanity or honesty for that matter. Switzerland, the holy land of Capitalism and Conservatism has a similar one and arguably the best health care and healthiest population anywhere and they spend a hell of a lot less then we do.  You're an idiot, Skuby Doo.  You're an idiot not only for putting a disgusting picture of the President on a tombstone but more of an idiot for telling us:

"if Mitt Romney had the same plan as the president; his picture would be in the window."  

You're worse than an idiot, you're a liar, because Slippery Mitt did have that plan until he decided to sell his withered soul to the Devil and run for President. Did you forget?  And no, you're not a racist and if there's racism now, it's Obama's fault, he says.

"This is America, isn't it?Aren't we able to say and do pretty much what we want to do?"

 Asks the scummy Mr. Skuby. I really wish that were true, but then we'd have to condone tarring and feathering and probably worse and if this idiot isn't one of those dumb Limbaugh loving lizard brained bastards who wanted to put people in jail for criticizing W, I'd be very surprised.  You should be thankful we can't do pretty much what we want to do to you.  Damned thankful if you know what I mean, wink wink, nudge nudge.

So, I'm glad people are shunning your store and I truly hope you'll go broke and be unable to file for bankruptcy protection because of the Republican "reforms" and that you'll lose your health insurance and be unable to replace it because of the interrupted coverage.  I hope your kid needs an operation and runs up a quarter million dollar medical bill you can't pay and so you'll lose everything and wind up on the street with a tin can so I can go by and piss in it.Why don't you ask the Koch Brothers for a handout?

You've got to be kidding - part II

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

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

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


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


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


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


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


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

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


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

Is the GOP Abel to raise Cain?

Herman Cain's attempt to position himself as an "outsider" is a key plank of his presidential campaign: unlike the rest of them, he wants you to know that he is not a professional polician, and that's part of why he should be elected.

Perhaps that's the entire problem. Maybe his inexperience is the reason for the abject stupidity of his ideas, and has nothing to do with him being a brainless twatwaffle.

On the other hand, maybe it's both.

One of Hermie's earliest ideas, that as president, he would never sign a bill longer than three pages, was widely derided by anyone who understood that there are, in fact, complex problems that might take a little longer merely to explain, much less fix.

Hermie's response? He explained that anybody who actually listened to him or took him at his word was stupid.

Some of these idiotic reporters thought I was serious. The joke’s on them. The message was short bills. Understandable bills. No it’s not literally going to be three pages. The executive summary will be three pages.

Of course, reporters aren't the only stupid people in Cain's tiny little world - basically anybody who questions him must automatically be stupid, right? In his latest book, This is Herman Cain, Hermie explained how Ron Paul's stupid followers were conducting a systematic conspiracy to make him look bad.

"I get the same stupid question at almost every one of these events," Cain writes. "I know it’s a deliberate strategy. How can a person randomly show up at a hundred events and ask the same stupid question to try to nail me on the Federal Reserve?"

(Apparently, Hermie isn't used to people with more than 5 followers.)

Actually, "stupid" is his favorite word. He loves to describe people that way: he gave a whole speech at CPAC around the theme that stupid people are ruining America. Which is odd. Because, despite having risen from a humble beginning to CEO of a crappy pizza chain, Herman Cain just doesn't come across as the brightest motherfucker on the planet.

Admittedly, his business model didn't take a genius to develop: pay people eight dollars an hour to deliver pizzas that cost less than a dollar to make, and charge twelve to eighteen dollars apiece for them. It's not like it's an original idea or anything. Hermie just put one interesting spin on the idea: if you use cheaper ingredients, they cost less. But then, instead of improving on the pizza, you give it an exciting, all-crime ad campaign. (As in, "I'm stealing from you by charging you money for this crappy pizza.")

Cain is more than willing to spew the most ignorant talking points with great authority, and totally without shame. It's not just that you're stupid if you disagree with him, you're lazy if you don't have a job. Oh, and by the way, this whole "Occupy Wall Street" movement? In Hermie's world, that's not just lazy people (OK, that's mostly what it is), that's lazy people being manipulated by the White House.

Because conspiracy theories go across real well with the modern Republican party.



Cain can't even get his birther talking points right:

"Barack Obama is more of an international," Cain said. "I think he’s out of the mainstream and always has been. Look, he was raised in Kenya..."

(Look, moron, Obama lived in Indonesia, and only for four years - ages six to ten. Were all your ideas set in stone when you were in second grade?)

He can't even spew the standard GOP rhetoric correctly. In the middle of accusing the left of being (once again) stupid, this time for not reading the Constitution, he tries to make his point by quoting... wait for it... the Declaration of Independence.

"...when you get to the part about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, don’t stop reading! Keep reading!"

Gonna be reading a long time there, big fella.



And his current big campaign promise is the 9-9-9 tax plan (9% income tax, 9% business tax, 9% sales tax). A plan which is basically hated by everybody, Democrat or Republican, except Herman Cain.

Bruce Bartlett, an adviser in the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, says that 9-9-9 is unfair to working taxpayers. "It's the most upside-down tax plan that’s been put forward to tax the poor and the middle class," he says...

Daniel Shaviro, a New York University law professor who specializes in taxation, calls the plan "not viable." For rich people—defined as those who work for themselves and don’t have to take a salary—it essentially becomes an 18 percent total tax on all money. But for poor people collecting a paycheck, Shaviro says, it amounts to a 27 percent tax.

This plan was developed, not by an economist, but an investment banker with ties to the Koch brothers (unless it was stolen from SimCity). And basically, the rich get taxed less, the poor and middle class get taxed more, and the government gets less money.

This is the kind of "leadership" we can expect from Herman Cain? It doesn't take a lot of logic to rip his ideas to shreds.

If he does, by some miracle, win the primaries, Herman Cain may actually make history, though. He will be the first black man to get another black man reelected.

Crocodile tears

Most bad drivers, like the American public in general have no concept of momentum or kinetic energy. Americans are the sort of people who will complain they're still falling after the parachute opens. Americans were the people who lapped up Fox News' "Democrats are pessimists trying to tear down the economy which is strong, strong, strong" and the Administration's "Debt doesn't matter" philosophy and are still the people who remain steadfastly unaware that the Republicans raised the Debt ceiling 7 times in the 8 years they held the White House and asked for a bigger bailout with no accountability or accounting. They're just shocked, shocked, shocked to see what that farleftliberalcommie president is doing and just look at the tears in Boehner's eyes.

Listening to Tim Geithner trying to be re-assuring on Meet the Press this morning didn't do much to dispel the idea that Republicans want nothing more than to allow default so as to give the illusion of Democratic guilt to their "look what Obama did" strategy. If he's right that the government will still pay it's bills after August 2nd, there will still be serious repercussions for all of us. If Geithner is right that a larger catastrophe than the Great Depression has been diverted it makes little impression on those who don't remember what caused the 1930's to be what they were and what brought about the rebound. They don't remember that every experiment in drastic upper bracket cuts has has the same negative result, that an extra few percent on the top bracket puts more back into the economy than cuts do or remember that paying off the debt on WWII brought steady expansion and job growth and infrastructure improvement. The kids in the back seat will continue to bitch until the money they imagined they had five years ago materializes again.

No, it's burn baby burn and the new Utopia will rise from the ashes and far better to let people who need Social Security and Medicare to stay alive die and reduce the surplus population than for hedge fund tycoons to pay an extra couple of grand more and send an extra couple of grand less to to offshore tax havens. If Medicare is indeed bankrupting us, it's by Republican design. If the debt is expanding, it's part of their plan to pay it off by reducing taxes and eliminating things they have opposed for 75 years on "moral" grounds. They look on economic tragedy as an opportunity and are probably quite aware at the Boehner and Koch Brothers and Murdoch level, that the 'lower the income to make the debt go away' strategy will, like pulling back on the stick and cutting the throttle, send us spinning downward instead of climbing. It's what they want.

I would be tempted to give a shit once again if there were any significant number of people who recognized that funny feeling in the rectum for what it is and weren't too easily seduced by the feeling of importance one gets by joining the Low-Brow Brotherhood of Trolls and Tea Smokers Marching Band, but there aren't enough and and no, I'm not tempted.

Koching up some trouble

By Capt. Fogg

"Good Lord. These are truly evil people"

says The Impolitic and it's hard to disagree. Of course the people that thought it would be a "conservative" thing to do; giving struggling Detroit homeowners fake foreclosure notices, don't think they're being vandals trying to destabilize civilization and built a "conservative" Utopia on the ruins. In fact the Koch brothers who seem to be behind this prank have a vision for the future that more resembles an Orwellian horror with the part of Big Brother played by corporate robber barons like them and the sinister, black menace portrayed by Barack H. Obama. Their lackeys see it otherwise, I'm sure. A step in the final solution of the "colored problem" that the Liberals and do-gooders brought upon Detroit and a reaction to the stunning affront of ACORN having forced a black president on us -- a man nobody voted for, of course. The new North. It's the old South without the sheets.

It's truly hard to describe this sort of thing in the way we describe rational human conduct, because it isn't any more rational than drunken football hooliganism or beer hall riot -- and a hell of a lot more dangerous. It's all the more dangerous for the lack of attention given. CNN.com today provides a bright colorful farrago of sex scandal, new Facebook features, the exploits of rappers and little else. Indeed what else concerns us?

Newtie!

OK, let's be clear here. We want there to be no misunderstanding.



Are we clear on that? He misspoke. It wasn't what he meant to say. He was frazzled. That wasn't a planned speech; he just went off the cuff, and dropped the ball. He went out there, and just flubbed it. It was a mistake, now let it go.

Of course, context is important, right? So let's take a look at these impromptu, unrehearsed remarks that he regrets having said now.

("But," I hear you wailing, "that'll take forever! That fucker starts talking and just won't stop! I don't have that kind of time! Plus, his voice gives me the shingles!" Ah, but I wouldn't do that to you: this is just the money shot. Three minutes and two seconds (plus a 15 second ad, because MSNBC has to pay the bills).

.
See that? Off his game. No way he could have rehearsed that, right? All that stammering and stuttering. He was winging it. Never would have said something like that. He was taken completely off-guard. Anybody who could say that was a prepared argument is just blind.

So let's repeat this for you. It's very important that you understand.



You got that? This has nothing to do with Newtie spending 15 hours on the phone with every Republican in Congress. The Koch brothers didn't say a word to him. It was a complete misunderstanding. He was tired, and had to squint to see through the glare off David Gregory's platinum helmet of hair. He opened his mouth, and some truth just fell out. That's so unlike him! It landed in a big pile of bullshit, but there it was, naked. For everybody to see. It was embarrassing, but that's our Newt. Big enough to look the camera in the eye and lie his ass off about it.

And by the way, don't make fun of Callista.


She can't help it. It's fucked up you're even talking about it.


Bitch ain't crazy.


It's congenital.

The knock on the door

By Capt. Fogg

We've got a hard core Socialist Radical in the White House if you listen to people like the Koch Brothers -- and make no mistake, we do listen to them whether we want to or not and whether the slander comes from their mouths or the thousand mouths that speak their words. Yet the slide toward the right, the slide toward authoritarianism, the slide toward the business of America being war, continues without much popular resistance. Unless you mean the resistance of the voters of course but the voters don't matter since they're drawn along like hyena puppies following their mother, snarling about Socialism and Taxes.

Can we blame Obama, who hasn't done much to stop the wars, close the torture chambers and offshore prisons, end the DADT charade, temper the growing power of the Executive Branch or give us the kind of transparency in government we were promised? Sure we can, but if every naive campaign promise had been acted upon, we'd still have a long way to go to stop that slide.

Even while the Republicans, including my own Representative Tom Rooney, (R-FL) are howling about Obama exceeding his powers by authorizing a no-fly zone in Libya, his party has proposed giving the president even more war powers. The House Armed Services Committee's National Defense Authorization Act would authorize the United States to use military force anywhere there are terrorism suspects, including within the U.S. itself, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. Yes, yes, I know, you hate the ACLU Libtards, but I don't suppose you like the idea of a president sending the marines to your neighborhood or invading any country the president suspects may be harboring "terrorists" either. As it stands there was little opposition in the house save for one member of the House Armed Services Committee: Rep. John Garamendi (D-CA) who was the sole dissenter. Now let's all raise our right arms and shout "Libtard."

The President didn't ask for this awesome power boost. He didn't suggest that he needed it. He didn't ask for the extra billions in military spending or another extension of the Afghanistan War. It was the smaller government folks. It was the Republican House hissing with a forked tongue from both sides of their smirking mouths.

Yes, we're sliding and it's not toward Socialism but toward a military/police surveillance state. It's the courts, like the Indiana Supreme Court that has handed us a ruling suggesting that Indiana Police no longer need warrants nor to be in hot pursuit nor need they have probable cause to enter and search your home for any reason - and may beat hell out of you with impunity if you "resist."

“A right to resist an unlawful police entry into a home is against public policy and is incompatible with modern Fourth Amendment jurisprudence,"reads the decision.

And we're babbling about Planned Parenthood and NPR and the ACLU Commies and against right of the government to flood some fields to save millions of people or take poison of the store shelves in violation of sacred property rights. We're fantasizing about being economic secessionists free or restriction or responsibility. We're oozing lofty proclamations about property rights and the government of no government like medieval monks talking about angels and pinheads and hunting for witches and heretics.

Obama can't fix this and all the Republicans can do is offer people like Tim Pawlenty, Michelle Bachmann. Maybe we can't fix it either and if you want to know who's to blame, you need look no farther than your bathroom mirror.

Paranoid psychosis is the new normal.

Gather ‘round, children. Let me tell ‘ya how things was when I was your age.

Now, when I was young, fringe conspiracy theories were still kept... well, in the fringes. My father was a West Point grad, and as such, sentenced to life as an Army officer; we weren’t exactly flaming radicals and pot-smoking hippies around my house. You had your John Birch Society, but nobody "respectable" belonged to it since the Fifties. On the other side of the coin, there were "those radicals" (technically, an attitude left over from the Sixties, but there you are); they weren’t exactly in the majority in society, and were pretty universally looked down on, too. Generally, expressing a sentiment in public that didn’t fit into the "mainstream" was likely to either get you into a lively debate, or cause people to edge away from you (depending on who was around).

I’d run into fringe ideas every so often, but perhaps less than some people.
I still remember the woman in the kaftan nursing her baby and giving me a glowering side-eye as I, naïve military-brat that I was, cheerfully pored over independent-press books explaining how vaccinating children was another example of the white man keeping the black man down, by poisoning his naturally healthier immune system. That "we must return to the land of our ancestors." That white men were solely responsible for black people being poor. (OK, so in later years I'd learn that this last, while perhaps not even mostly true, did have a certain core of reality...)

I loved some of the fringier ideas: ghosts, UFO's, psychic powers. But for the most part, I always wondered why people would fall for some of the most unmistakably ridiculous ideas.

So, flash forward around three decades or so. And we have people openly believing the most paranoid, ridiculous crap that has ever left a skidmark on a page. And the majority of the sweat-stained stupidity seems to emit from the Right side of the argument.

I mean, if you think about it, it does make a certain amount of sense. First, we had the Clinton Years, where the Right was trying to paint him as a murderer, thief, rapist and philanderer (and as it turns out, one of those was true).

And if you follow that with the Bush Years, where the party in power is trying to build that power up through the force of fear,
aided and abetted by an entire television network devoted to spreading their strange lies, you have a people softened up to believe just any ridiculous pile of idiocy that people tried to feed them.

Oh, I'm sorry. America didn't believe ignorant crap under Bush? You mean, like the multi-billion dollar Fortress of Evil bin Laden had dug into the Pakistani mountains? Or that Iraq could attack the US with unmanned drones any minute now!

But the Huntsmen of Greed failed to keep a tight enough rein on the Horses of Insanity, and, as these things so often do, Entropy entered into the picture and everything fell into chaos.

Actually, to an extend, the Huntsmen of Greed can be blamed for the collapse of their own fiendish plans; it was Rupert Murdoch, after all, who gave Glenn Beck a national stage, and thereby mainstreamed some of the most hair-flamingly batshit conspiracy theories - perhaps we can point to him, but perhaps Murdoch was merely giving in to forces already beyond his control.

Whatever the reason, drooling lunacy has taken over much of the Right Wing, and the politicians of the Gibbering Old Paranoid party, not willing to give up the tattered remnants of whatever power they might have had, are willingly being swept along in the tidal stream of tempestuous Teabaggers: the only strategy left for these figureheads at the bow of the boat of Bedlam at this point, is to obsess over trivialities, to keep the wild-eyed crowd that's carrying them from focusing on real issues.

The rabid weasels who imagined "death panels" and "Obama reeducation camps," and were able to convince the masses that these things exist, are finding themselves overwhelmed by the forces that they, themselves, unleashed, not imagining that throwing open the Gates of Madness might allow more through the door than they had predicted.

We have entire websites devoted to the idea that America has been taken over by a radical, terrorist-loving, Marxist socialist fascist tyrannical Satanic Islamic atheist Kenyan whose sole aim in life is the utter destruction of all that we hold dear.

We'll ignore the biggies: Townhall, Pajamas Media (that plucky, faltering startup of lunacy), Glenn Beck's the Blaze, and look even farther down the ramp, where the gibbering is loudest.

The most obvious of these black holes of idiocy is World Net Daily, where, just dipping into the rancid pools of whatever passes for journalism there, we can discover a banner headline proclaiming:

Birth certificate doesn't meet Hawaii standards
Image White House released 'may not be a certified copy'
(WorldNetDaily Exclusive)

Yes, Joseph Farah, the publisher and Birther-In-Chief at WND, can't let go of the idea that Barack Obama is the result of a plot forty years in the making, because there's no way that a black man could get elected as President of the United States, right?

In fact, scrolling down the page, we find no less than ten other birther-related stories (and three ads) before we come to the "international coverage" - if, by "international," you mean the-Middle-East-but-mostly-Israel (because we can't have the Rapture if Jerusalem falls, after all...). The overriding focus of everything WND-related is that Obama has taken over the country, and is struggling to put Sharia Law in place.

Other websites can't manage this kind of message discipline, of course. Renew America, for example, has a shotgun blast pattern, with stories on "Obama is a hypocrite!"; "raising the debt ceiling will destroy America!" (a Newsmax crossover!); a story stolen from Fox News telling us that George Soros, a liberal, has "ties" to news organizations (with nary a mention of Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brothers, of course); Michelle Malkin and her latest "one-lunatic-equals-Islamic-conspiracy" rant; and a string of other "news" items.

The "news," though, is not the entertaining part of RenooAmurika: that would be the columnists (splayed out along the left-hand border, ironically). There we find such notables as:

Jeannie DeAngelis: a housewife and grandmother who conflates things like the USDA studying children's eating habits and illegal immigration; she crossposts at the American "Thinker" and her own blog Jeannie-ology (with the hilariously unself-aware banner "WHERE WHAT STARTED AS A CATHARTIC EXERCISE TURNED INTO AN OBSESSION!" All caps, of course, but with only one exclamation point. This is self-control, for Jeannie.)

Randy Engel: claims to be "one of the nation's top investigative reporters," but that's only if you add the codicil "...in the field of Abortion and Stem Cell Research are Eugenics!"

Bryan Fischer: American Family Association member who I might have mentioned once or twice, who only occasionally branches out from "all gay, all the time."

Judie Brown: president and co-founder of the American Life League, who chronicles the decay of the Catholic Church. Oh, and abortion.

Among so many, many others.

From there, we can move on to the already mentioned American "Thinker," which doesn't even bother with the false patina of respectability of the "news" features that RescrewAmerica pastes to the wall. They go straight to the crazy, with columns and inane ramblings by anybody who walks by, as long as they can spew spittle when repeating the phrase "Obama is destroying America!" Some of their winners include:

Robin of Berkeley: a self-proclaimed former ("recovering") liberal, she also claims to be a psychologist, despite the fact that she is willing to diagnose full-blown clinical psychosis based on second-hand reports (or two-line responses from people who argue with her). Irony has no place in Robin's world.

Chuck Rogér: Despite the suspiciously French last name (probably born named "Charles" - pronounced "Shar"), he's more of a generalist, finding the death of Society-As-We-Know-It ("we" being white and male, of course) in Sex Ed courses that actually mention condoms. (Because we know how successful Abstinence Only courses are. Right, Bristol?)

Bruce Whitsitt: One of many authors who've only puked out three or less articles, explains how all leftists hate cops and police, and the police should never be chastised for killing the wrong person. Because they don't. And even when they do, it's not their fault.

Lloyd Marcus: Apparently only has one theme: "I'm black, and I hate Obama!"

Of course, for the deepest, blackest pit of ugliness, there's no place better than Free Republic. Ironically, although "freeper" is the commonly used slang term for this particularly virulent species of paranoid racist, "freep.com" is actually the website for the Detroit Free Press. Don't make that mistake!

And there are thousands of little, lesser websites - sweaty loners sitting in their basements, blogging away amid the cases of canned food and ammunition. They're all out there, willing to believe any ridiculous fantasy that comes down the pike. As long as it proves that they're right, and the end of the world is coming and it's the liberals' fault!

They rant, they rave, and they grind their teeth down to nubs, equating Barack Obama with every "villain" in history. Was he Hitler? Marx? Stalin? Mao? Satan? Or even Che Guevara? What about Genghis Khan?

(Quick hint - when looking for Che Guevara links, use the additional tag "-flag" - some low-level Cuban staffer working for the Obama camp put a Cuban flag with the image of Guevara on a wall during the election - probably a bad idea.)

It doesn't matter what you imagine as the most catastrophic event in the history of the universe - there will be someone out there who will find a way to blame it on Barack Obama.