His name was NOT Steve.

 "When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross"

I wish I could say that was Sinclair Lewis, and perhaps he does too, but it seems he never did. Perhaps someone needs to say it however, because there is something coming; something already here dressed in red, white and blue, blowing hard about Christian values and lying, slandering, maligning, dripping with hate and evil and blood and grasping for power enough to make the devil blush.

You can't talk to some people about Allen West if you are objective about him.  To many ex-military people, it seems as though he is some sort of a hero or, perhaps it's more about some sad kind of solidarity than about sympathy.  I saw a lot of that during the Vietnam war:  the way people looked at me when I talked about the My Lai 4 massacre or when others suggested that indeed Lt. Cally was a war criminal who disgraced his country as much as anyone ever had. Perhaps you've read accounts of how he ordered a small boy who had just escaped the bullets, running screaming from the pit of murdered women and children to be shot. The order was carried out. It was outrageous that he was held accountable said my war supporting, true American coworkers -- just outrageous.

We don't burn no draft cards down on Main Street;
We like livin' right, and bein' free.

 I never did quite understand the attitude, but as I wanted to keep my job, I just kept quiet.  By the time  Allan West 'retired' from the US Army to avoid a Court Marshal for abusing an Iraqi prisoner, I no longer was a working man and loudly protested his attempt to become my Congressman.  For many here, the attitude was strangely the same.  He ran as a hero and of course we can't criticize anyone who was "fighting for our freedom" as such things are so grotesquely described.  In fact such people who thought differently then he or John Wayne or the people from Muskogee did, said West, should be deported.

But West's campaign failed and he promptly pulled up his tent stakes and went somewhere else to live and to prosper as the head of something called the National Center for Policy Analysis.  Of course as another failed far-right politician and criminal, he followed in the footsteps of Oliver North and became a Fox News contributor. 

West's current Bogeyman, as is that of his owners at Newscorp seems to be the alleged emergence of Sharia Law under the Muslim alien Obama.  Sadly people listen to him and because there never is a hint of rational cognitive function supporting the claims of the Far Right and the Fox Right you hear it discussed all the time.  Sharia law is taking over, even though it isn't -- not at all, not in Muskogee, not at Wal-Mart.

It's a strange proposition for people who strive with flapping tongues and logic all curled up like a pig's tail to push Christian Values as a substitute for the body of laws we've had since the beginning.  They want Christian law, even though there is no such thing, and they fear Muslim Religious courts that don't exist.  Hell, they think Wal-mart is part of the legal system and they get rich from this stupidity.  But Allen West has announced "Proof" that even without any courts or any mechanism to impose it, even such all-American importers of  foreign goods as Wal-Mart is trying to impose it on its customers.  Yes, that's right and as he observes with ungrammatical and folksy charm:

There was a young man doing the checkout and another Walmart employee came over and put up a sign, “No alcohol products in this lane.” So being the inquisitive fella I am, I used my additional set of eyes – glasses – to see the young checkout man’s name. Let me just say it was NOT “Steve.”

I pointed the sign out to Aubrey and her response was a simple question, how is it that this Muslim employee could refuse service to customers based on his religious beliefs, but Christians are being forced to participate in specific events contrary to their religious beliefs? Boy howdy, that is one astute young lady.

Imagine that, this employee at Walmart refused to just scan a bottle or container of an alcoholic beverage – and that is acceptable. A Christian business owner declines to participate or provide service to a specific event – a gay wedding – which contradicts their faith, and the State crushes them.

Seems the nonSteve checkout boy was a minor.  There was a law, an American, Christian Values law forbidding  a minor to serve or sell alcohol.  As usual the devil is in the details and as the devil speaks through Allen West and his Tea Party hooligans, liars, traitors, schemers, thieves, torturers and war criminals are lying about those details.  His screed was titled, Sharia law comes to Walmart? but he later changed it to More ominous signs of Christian persecution. (Did he mean to say persecution of Christians ?) What does it matter?  Lies have their own grammar, it seems and to the people who are looking to put a rational face on their bigotry, racism and hatred West's face will do fine.   See, we're not racists.

In a way, it's liberating to be old and not to have to give a shit about what the tinhorn patriots and liars for God have to say or what they threaten to do, and there's no reason to refrain from saying that the My Lai murderers and the unnamed perpetrators of similar massacres are no better than the Nazi Criminals we executed years ago, and that Allen West is their brother in dishonor.   They dishonor our country, they dishonor all things honest and true and decent, they dishonor our species .

Wal-Mart will take your guns

And Obama will whistle at the white girls if we don't act now.

Conspiracies certainly occur.  The assassination of Lincoln involved a conspiracy as did the American Revolution, the Russian Revolution and the Babington Plot amongst countless others.  The selling of something as a conspiracy however has been refined to a formula and indeed the absence of evidence seems to make it all simpler.  An observation out of context, a partially true statement or a totally untrue statement loudly asserted is all one really needs to get the theory rolling and momentum creates enthusiasm which creates more observations and assertions the preposterousness of which are enthusiastically overlooked.  The Internet can produce more than enough "experts" to verify or deny anything and hide facts behind a labyrinth of web links.  I remember a certain white coated "doctor" touting a diet pill that proved not only useless but ineffective and dangerous.  How many people bothered to use the Information Superhighway to discover that the man in the medical costume was a Doctor of Marketing from some college you never heard of?

Of course certain observations can assist the necessary triage.  Might the theory have merit or not? Should we bother to investigate or can we reject it out of hand -- or is it obviously true?  One helpful process is of course, to consider the source.  Karl Rove, Glenn Beck, Fox News, Ted Cruz?  No, that sound isn't a truck backing up, it's the bullshit alarm. So far not one of the dire predictions have come true, from the "death panels" to the "double Dip' recession to the Communist Agenda.  Is doesn't seem to matter. "Change you can step in" read the bumper sticker I saw yesterday.  Never mind the recovery, the market highs, the unemployment lows, Obams is a "disaster." He went over there and apologized to them and if you can't see that, you're part of the conspiracy.

Consider the "Jade Helm 15" conspiracy theory.  Do we need to read all the web posts, the YouTube clips to reject it?  Do we need to follow the "arguments," look at the pictures, examine the witnesses? Do seriously think Obama is going to use the military to invade the South?  Is he conspiring with Wal-Mart to grab our guns, swarming up out of underground tunnels pushing Wal-Mart shopping carts?  Ted Cruz seems to doubt it, but as the government is "untrustworthy," we have to give it some credence. Of course when Bush suspended Posse Comitatus and made it legal to use the Army to invade the US, we didn't hear a peep or a whimper, but that's different.  It's OBAMA who is untrustworthy and we know that because Ted Cruz tells us, because the Texas Governor tells us the invasion is imminent The wolf is coming, never mind those ten thousand mistaken cries and when this passes away and nothing comes of it and when the whole thing is denied, there will be no shame and you will believe the next one.

One might consider that since this latest is so similar to the propaganda that reached a crescendo during the Clinton years and has yet to diminish, it has no more merit than the Vince Foster Murder or Clinton's plan to turn the armed forces over  to the UN and furnish them with nuclear weapons stored in tunnels and bunkers under Philadelphia.  I can't list them all but suffice it to say it was all hokum.  Too bad we don't remember and like an old man with advanced dementia, every morning in America is a new day.  You can be wrong every day for 25 years but we will believe you again and again.  Every Democrat is all about inviting the foreigners to take over, to bankrupt us by supporting the "takers" and grabbing our god given guns.  Have we been wading through the bullshit so long we can't smell it any more or is it just so much fun to suspend disbelief?

Hell no!

Brian Williams -- seriously?  6 months suspension with no pay for "misremembering" an incident from the early days of the Iraq war.  Bush's war, the one based on blatant and documented lies.  Did they actually fire at Williams' helicopter 12 years ago or not?  That's what matters. Sure, it was a bit of braggadocio on Williams' part, he should be ashamed to be no better than most politicians with padded resume's and he will be punished. 

Fox News will not be punished for reportage that according to those who supply facts to back it up, supply us with an estimate of  40% outright lies about substantive matters  Another 38% are partly false. Less than 25% of their reportage is really true and the electorate makes their decisions based on damned lies.  They're still on the air.  Is this a double standard?   Is this a country where any use of the term ethics is ironic enough to make the Devil giggle with delight?

Is Brian Williams to be compared with an entire network of burning pants sociopaths?

Stuart Varney:  "It will cost $50,000 per enrollee in Obamacare over the next 10 years."  

Steven Emerson:  "There are actual cities" like Birmingham, England, "that are totally Muslim where non-Muslims just simply don’t go in."

  

Megyn Kelly: A new Colorado law "literally allows residents to print ballots from their home computers, then encourages them to turn ballots over to ‘collectors.’ " 

George Will:  Some doctors say Ebola can be transmitted through the air by "a sneeze or some cough.

Brit Hume:  President Barack Obama is "sending a much larger (force) " to deal with Ebola "than ISIS is getting."  

  

Ann Coulter: A friend’s sister "died from Obamacare" because Blue Shield "completely just pulled out of California."  (they're still there)  

Lyin' Bill O'Reilly:  "The 'Denver Post' has actually hired an editor to promote pot." (Oh really?  No, O'Reilly)  

Sean 'Insanity' Hannity is in a league of his own.

Are there any standards at all when it comes to promoting the interests of the bigots, plutocrats, and the deranged?   Hell no!

Fox Lies, America dies

"You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" 

asked Joseph Welch of "tailgunner Joe" McCarthy, for decades the prototype for the vicious, unscrupulous and dishonest Republican Jihadist.  The unstated but nearly universally understood answer was "hell no."

McCarthy has been somewhat de-demonized after years of propaganda and  revision, but compared to what we had in 1954, at the height of the Communist witch hunt, the wealthy Corporate Political monsters now stomping on America like something from a 50's Japanese monster movie makes those little demons as pathetic as the rubber suited Godzilla compared to the thousand foot tall  computer generated version.

But is it surprising that the one thing Foxzilla has to say about the ultra radical (too radical for the al Qaeda leaders)  ISIS, now rendering all those dead and wounded and all those spent billions nugatory, is that not only is this not Bush's fault, but Bush foresaw that this would happen if we had some weak, Muslim-smelling, black Communist incompetent like Barack Obama in the White House. 

This is how America ends, not with anything but Fox.  Of course as any non-Republican -- and by Republican I mean malicious, truth-hating saboteur -- Bush signed off on the pledge to remove troops by 2012 and of course the troops wouldn't have been there but for him and his malicious lies and greed for conquest in the first place. We might not have had the Great Recession either if  he didn't lust after the title of "warpresident" he invented for himself but just like that recession that followed his war and deregulation policies, Iraq's inevitable collapse, long predicted by Bush's opponents now becomes Obama's fault and a Republican prediction.

At this point there's little left but gallows humor and bleak despair because we're all idiots, all deranged and all preoccupied with our own petty grievances:  missing airplanes, private racist comments by old men. Preoccupied by irrational fear and hog-tied by our own propaganda we just don't care enough to recall the things of only a few years ago and while we natter about like nitwits, we take step after step toward fascism and jingoism and a government of dollars, not men.

Suffer the Children?

Want to know what ticks me off?  Of course you do -- it's that so many of us who think we're out of the woods because the Republicans lost the last two presidential elections   have resumed the idiotic posturing and bickering, hyperbolizing, fear mongering and in-fighting about our often worn out  liberal issues.  Does anyone really think that right wing extremism has slunk away like the loser in a dog fight?

Is the Democratic party going back to being the ban-it party, the baby-on-board ' can't trust anybody party that can't agree with each other enough to get anything done? Are we back to 'ban-the-bomb' naïveté while real evil marches on? Of course, that's what we do, but guess what bucky, Limbaugh still draws ratings and the Fox is still alive -- or at least undead.

Remember when Obama's little talk about patriotism to schoolchildren was "just like Pol Pot?"  Well when Obama cancelled some White House tours, it was only so that he could "maximize the pain" for children says grimacing Gretchen the witch of Fox News.  "Can we be adults about this?" she asked while meanwhile back at the fortress of evil, a Republican (Texas of course) Rep was proposing that Obama can't play golf again until the Republicans say so. Is Louie Gohmert old enough to remember when Eisenhower was accused of playing golf while the Russkies missle-gapped us?

Meanwhile, while Carlson and the Doocebag are trying to Fox Block Obama, inquiring minds are asking whether the Evil Empire will discuss the effect the sequestration gambit will have on American Children.  That's right, children.  They're such useful tools and they're great for breakfast too.  Just ask the Fox.

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?

Lies and consequences

I think there's a kind of hysteresis in politics.  You get a certain effect from telling a bold lie, but you don't lose nearly all that gain by retracting it, so it pays to lie.  You may gain 100,000 votes by saying your opponent is a cannibal, but if you only lose 30 or 40 thousand when you admit "I was wrong to say that" why not keep lying?  There's no limit to how many you can tell and a good part of the public, who really wanted to hear bad things about the other side will tell themselves you were forced to retract it by "the liberals" and it's really true - he's a cannibal from the dark jungles of Kenya. It pays to lie even when you get caught. It doesn't hurt to say one thing to one group and another thing to another. You may actually gain support from people who will think you're being a big man for correcting yourself and will forget that you deliberately lied, deliberately tried to cash in on the meanest and nastiest and most dishonest impulses of the public to get votes.

No matter how much the candidate lies, we can count on the fact that the public is as least as dishonest with themselves and often far more so.  If one tells one's family that taking a pay cut won't add to the family debt, one has a tough sell, but the candidate is talking to people who want to believe they would be much better off  if their personal tax load were lightened and so they will listen eagerly and listen dismissively when the truth is explained. Tell them their taxes are actually lower than ever and they won't listen. Show them that nearly everybody pays 25 to 30 percent of what they earn and they'll put their hands over their ears and chant liberaliberaliberal.  I think this is why the Romney ad I heard this morning on TV could get away with claiming that an independent study proved that Obama planned to tax the average Joe an extra $4000 next year ( and presumably by executive fiat. )  Not one of his likely supporters will bother to check any facts that support their beliefs.  First comes the distrust and anger and dislike, and then the reasons we tell ourselves and others. What we want to hear is what we hear and when we hear it, we stop listening further.

So Romney may substantially reduce any loses he suffered by his 47% gaffe by admitting he was "Completely wrong."  Takes a big man, after all and of course, we all know that there are still huge numbers of loafers and leeches and welfare queens driving Caddies -- enough to cause us to scrap any attempts at helping people become productive again, keeping children from falling hopelessly into inextricable cycles of crime and poverty and disease by using MY HARD EARNED MONEY that all belongs to ME and of course NOBODY EVER GAVE ME ANYTHING. And isn't it annoying that we have to be so "politically correct" and just like we can't say Merry Christmas any more we can't call 'these people' by our traditional words?  I mean traditional values mean something.

Tampa and the will to power

As I've been saying since Richard "you sure as hell are a crook" Nixon departed the White house and the Republican War on Truth began, if the Republicans accuse their opponents of something, you can be sure not only that it isn't quite true, but that the accusation is an attempt to distract from their own guilt.  So when the war criminal Allen West disgusts us with the accusation that the Democrats are "the most racist party I've ever seen in my life" we know the opposite is true.

And why doth West protest? Why because the press isn't showing him the respect his hypertrophied ego demands and why would anyone detest the torturer of innocent civilians; despise the accusations that Democrats are Nazis and Communists (at the same time no less?)  It could only be that he's got dark skin, of course. 

And then, there's Paul Ryan, the delight of Tea Perverts everywhere who enlightens us with lies like:

 "And the biggest, coldest power play of all in Obamacare came at the expense of the elderly. ... So they just took it all away from Medicare. Seven hundred and sixteen billion dollars, funneled out of Medicare by President Obama" 

when it isn't actually true -- the cuts are in payments to hospitals, not in coverage to individuals. The cuts are savings  while Ryan's plan would actually deprive Medicare recipients of coverage.  Paul Ryan is a liar, but what did you expect?  The truth would ride out of town with him on a rail and covered with feathers.

And then There's Paul Ryan howling like a damned soul about the "corporate welfare" that was the stimulus package. Welfare and Communism and all that, even though the Republicans asked for a much bigger package and with no requirement to tell us who was getting what - even though Ryan stomped his feet and whined and begged for even more money for Wisconsin companies.  Paul Ryan is a lying, duplicitous, forked tongued son of a bitch, but I repeat myself.  I already said he is a Republican candidate.

And then there's Paul Ryan, the con man, the liar, the swindler, the bearer of false witness -- there's Paul Ryan blaming Obama for the closure of a Janesville Wisconsin plant that was shut down before Obama became president. Ryan, following in the tradition of accusing FDR of  causing an economic crash that started three years before he was elected. And there's Ryan condemning from the platform in Tampa that Obama disregarded the advice of a bipartisan debt committee that Ryan himself condemned. Did I mention that Ryan is a Republican?  Lying is what they do, whether it's lying to start wars, lying about how top bracket tax cuts don't cause recessions when they do and raising them prevents growth when the opposite is true.  That's what history says, but hey, you can't believe history -- history is Liberal. Hell you can't even hear History, it speaks in timorous whispers while the Right Wing roars and threatens and rages from every screen, from every radio speaker and every corporate owned newspaper.

But why lay the lies on Ryan alone? They're all liars and pickpockets and Romney has to take responsibility for it all.  He has to explain why taking the $716 billion in Medicare savings achieved by Obama and spending it will reduce spending and why reducing revenue will pay off the debt. He has to give us more than vague generalities and slogans and promises that are negated by other promises, but he can't because what he says is designed to "energize" people who know nothing and prefer to remain angry at their chosen scapegoats.  

But of course the truth would lose the election for him and of course the New Right isn't about fixing the country anyway, it's about power.  It's not about you or your life, your liberty or your pursuit of happiness; it's about power, power and more power and such such concentrated power that answers only to money -- power over a country that is more and more irrelevant, increasingly deluded and ignorant, ever more bellicose and yet has the power to destroy the world. 

Damn the lies

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

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

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



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

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

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

Comrade Obama?

I must disagree with Bill Maher that Rick Santorum thinks of gay sex more than a dildo salesman but only because Rick Santorum doesn't actually think, unless one defines that word very loosely. He doesn't remember things too well either and I say that in all generosity since one might interpret the things he says he remembers as outright lies. They aren't even up to date lies or original lies or good lies, yet there are always enough misinformed, low intelligence dung flingers in fatuously faith based America to believe them and make this country seem like the primate house at the world's largest zoo.

Take Santorum's tired repetition of John McCain's 2001 attempt to sell the embarrassingly ridiculous notion that President Obama wants to redistribute the nation's wealth in some Socialistic way, a bit like Jed Clampett arriving at the Royal Wedding in his beat up old truck. Coming from a Republican, whose party has engineered what might be one of the largest upward redistribution of wealth, that's already laughable but Mr. Rick seems to be the last man standing who is still driving that rusty jalopy -- the idea that Our president, beset by critics calling him a corporate whore and a sell-out to Wall Street is a radical socialist and perhaps a communist to boot. What Santorum claims to remember is that Obama supported a constitutional amendment to give your money to the poor ( read black people) when what the president really said in a 2001 interview was that the

"Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And to that extent, as radical as I think people tried to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution. . .”

Essential constraints -- it sounds very little like a man who is deploring those constraints. Indeed when Obama said the court had limited itself to insuring that he could eat at a lunch counter as long as he could afford to pay for his lunch, only a stupid man who thinks other people are even more stupid would interpret, or should I say twist, this as a quote from the Communist Manifesto.

"In the interview, Obama went into extensive detail to explain why the courts should not get into that business of ‘redistributing’ wealth. Obama’s point — and what he called a tragedy — was that legal victories in the civil rights led too many people to rely on the courts to change society for the better. That view is shared by conservative judges and legal scholars across the country."

said Obama spokesman Bill Burton during the 2008 campaign. Certainly no development since then has given credibility to McCain's sad attempt or justification for Santorum's calumnies.

I'm finding it difficult, even without the waves of nausea and loathing, to accept that any candidate could have got as far as Santorum has without being laughed out of town as a cheap, incompetent liar and unscrupulous scoundrel. I can only blame the media ringmasters who continue to provide this charlatan with his own ring in this sad and tawdry circus we call a campaign. Have we forgotten that the purpose of news reporting is to sort truth from rumor, slander and lies? Perhaps we have and it's certainly been a long time since the news was anything but a way for big news corporations and their sponsors to make money. Perhaps we should stop making them richer by occupying Wall Street and start occupying CNN and Fox and the rest instead.

HIPPIES!

With the Florida Coven of the Republican Party making the Visigoths look like Cub Scouts these days; arguing that a prohibition of "Dwarf Tossing " is destroying American jobs, I think I'm more than justified in a certain lack of restraint when describing the moral character of that party as having everything to do with gaining power by any and all means, and having nothing whatever to do with making the US a real Democracy. These days it's as much about making the news a series of passion plays meant to obscure and often reverse the facts as it has been about suppressing votes and Gerrymandering.

The practice of dirty tricks has come a long way since Richard Nixon. Tricky Dick used the media to convince us that the media was lying and that the vast and silent majority was a small and unpatriotic minority. That hasn't changed. What has changed is the confidence level that allows them to strongly support something one day and denounce it in hyperbolic tirades on the next according to tactical needs.

It's possible to denounce Wall Street brokers and banks; insist that we let them die and scream about it in the streets with tea bags stapled to three-cornered hats, yet support the same corrupt and unpunished entities passionately by denouncing the same sentiments; associating them with "hippies" in fine old 1968 style two generations after the last real hippie got a haircut and went to work on Wall Street.

And yes, you're damned right that Fox News is the Joseph Goebbels of the new Right. You'll remember how ACORN was smeared and destroyed by patched together video, You'll remember fake video made to look like millions were at Republican rallies, but you're less likely to remember that fake video was used by Brit Hume to denounce Iraq war protesters in 2003 as "hippies" -- Protesting the Protesters documentary and other fake documentaries like Indoctrinate U that was intended to show how righteous "conservatives" were being censored at those hotbeds of hippieism, the Universities. You may then not be surprised that the same saboteur behind those atrocities, one Evan Coyne Maloney, has been at work on the sidewalks of New York, handing out rolling papers with pictures of Che Guevara and bongs so that the recipients can be filmed with them and another invidious documentary can be patched together so that we can be Foxed again.

Never mind that the streets are filled with veterans and economists, businessmen and others who demand respect and deserve to be heard, Fox wants them out of the way and can think of no better way than to dredge up hoary straw men in tie-died T-shirts. Look! that investment banker, that war veteran, that Nobel Prize winning economist: HIPPIES! COMMIES! DRUG FIENDS! HATERS OF OUR SACRED CAPITALIST VALUES!

Has any nation been able to stand; been able to avoid catastrophe, been able to maintain the illusion of freedom under such an internal assault?

Killing him slowly

There simply aren't words adequate to describe Rush Limbaugh unless we quote his own. I'm tired, to tell the truth, of trying to match polemics with him, tired of denouncing him and of course the ears of his acolytes are deaf to such things anyway.

I admit that I don't actually listen to him any more and that's been true for many, many years. I simply can't trust myself in the presence of so much evil, so much hatred of the kind of America I hope for, but at the bottom of it, I can't stand to hear some sinister thing that the law requires us to treat as a human being and citizen, so incapable of reason, so bereft of any human feelings and so unable to feel any kind of shame, so full of hate.

But as I say, his followers can listen to him demanding harsh treatment - even death - for drug users while knowing he's a long time abuser of opiates who has had his employees risk their freedom by buying drugs for him. His hangers on can quote his self contradictions without pause and will smile and nod when he wishes disaster on our country if disaster is what it takes to promote Republicans and destroy any Democratic president. Who but Rush, after all, can call Obama an ineffectual "empty suit" and a tyrannical demagogue at the same time; tell us he was born in Kenya and Indonesia simultaneously and not instantly be dismissed as casually as one flushes a toilet.

Certainly not Limbaugh's ignorant army. They surely applauded his latest verbal atrocity; telling us how that evil Obama sent troops to Africa to help kill Christians: The Lord’s Resistance Army. They certainly aren't going to notice or care or believe that the LRA are a genocidal terrorist group who has murdered, raped, kidnapped and terrorized tens of thousands over many years. They've killed some Muslims, you see and that makes them Christian Soldiers, marching as to war.

They aren't going to be shocked at the way Limbaugh assembles scraps of misunderstood or non-existent or invented stories without any concern for truth or decency or patriotism or anything but the potential to destroy Barack Obama. No, not as long as he keeps up the endless supply of nasty little lies they can tell their friends over a beer and at the barber shop where Fox plays on the TV, where the stupid go to get their wisdom confirmed and hate is in the air.

"Hey didja hear how Rush called Oh-BAH-ma an empty suit? He sure got that right!"

Pants on fire

“The judicial power of the United States, shall be vested in one Supreme Court, and in such inferior courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.”

-Article III of the US Constitution-

“There is no Supreme Court in the American Constitution"

-Newt Gingrich-

Really, Newt? Are you really a history professor? Do you really think we're that stupid?

It's getting hard to tolerate the stench coming out of the pre-caucus Republican cesspool; from Presidential candidates getting government funds -- our tax dollars -- to teach people how to pray away the gay and advocating the use of Federal might to stamp out all forms of pornography frowned on by their frowning religion and to legislate and limit and punish our personal relationships -- while griping about too much government interference and too much spending and too much social engineering. It's getting damned hard to tolerate morally, mentally and ethically bankrupt creeps like Newt Gingrich, who is quite happy to feed the malignant idiocy now consuming the remnants of our Republic by telling us that our constitution does not "mention" much less provide for a supreme court, Article III of the Constitution notwithstanding.

"We now have this entire national elite that wants us to believe that any five lawyers are a Constitutional convention. That is profoundly un-American and profoundly wrong.”

lies the moral multimillionaire elitist with the million dollar line of credit at the jewelry store and a string of illicit mistresses and abused ex-wives. That's profoundly un-American and profoundly wrong and profoundly Republican. But of course anyone who thinks the highest court is an extra-legal ad hoc assembly of five self-appointed members foisted on the public by "elitists" and with no constitutional authority can hardly be considered an elitist of any kind unless there's a ranking of candidates according to their ignorance and mendacity and greed. Perhaps Newt just forgot that the Supreme Court Justices are approved by Congress or perhaps he's just a lying tub of septic scum who thinks he's entitled by birth and party affiliation to feast on the corpse of America.

You can fool some of the people all of the time: you can fool a lot of them in fact. They're called Republicans. They're called perverts, they're called liars, thieves, embezzlers and saboteurs.

Fox News has learned. . .

By Capt. Fogg

No they haven't.

Alex Jones' Prison Planet website is the kind of place you expect to find very right wing viewpoints and so when I find agreement that Fox News lies, I feel good about it. It gives me a defense when people behind the Fox curtain accuse me of being a far-left Commie/Liberal liar, which seems to be the best they can do, considering all the evidence that Fox is indeed a lie factory and propaganda machine -- more than just simply being affiliated with and a sponsor of the GOP.

"The latest example comes from Fox News, who completely manufactured the claim that Gaddafi was using western journalists as human shields to prevent fighter jets from bombing his compound,"

writes blog editor Paul Joseph Watson today.

In a piece entitled, EXCLUSIVE: Libyans Use Journalists as Human Shields, Fox News’ Jennifer Griffin & Justin Fishel wrote, says Watson:

“An attack on the compound of Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi on Sunday had to be curtailed because of journalists nearby, Fox News has learned.”

But there’s a problem, he says. One of the CNN journalists supposedly used by Gaddafi as a human shield subsequently appeared on CNN and labeled the claim,

“Outrageous and absolutely hypocritical. The idea that we were some kind of human shields is nuts,” CNN international correspondent Nic Robertson told Wolf Blitzer.

"Fox News has proven itself to be a complete tool of the US military-industrial complex. Nothing it now reports about the attack on Libya can ever be trusted."

says Prison Planet, QED -- and who can dispute it?

Relief is just a leak away

There's nothing like a good leak. No, I'm not talking about beer drinking or kidneys. Yes, it may still be all about indecent exposure, but exposure of a different kind of naughty bits. God bless the leaker.

Remember "Climate gate;" that clumsy journo-speak title for some e-mails between British Climatologists that after a bit of redaction seemed to be saying that the evidence for Global warming was fabricated by a great worldwide network of rogue paleoclimatologists plotting to be characters from a James Bond movie? Well the hoax may be on the other foot now, so to speak, but you won't hear it from the folks at Fox who spread it around the planet. You won't find the Fox admitting or mentioning that NASA data confirmed a rise in temperature quite independently and in irrefutable scientific rigor.

You won't find Fox admitting to error of any kind much less to deliberately lying, whether its hoaxing us about scientific data or showing the fake and fraudulent video that ruined ACORN. I admit, those e-mails had me going for a while but that was before the new data and the new revelations. Even Andrew Breitbart publicly washed the egg off his face, but Fox? Well, you decide.

It was all too easy to call Julian Assenge a "terrorist" or call for his summary execution, but I'm curious to see the outcome of some recent leaks showing just how Fox slants the news.

"Given the controversy over the veracity of climate change data... we should refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question,"

said Fox News Washington managing editor Bill Sammon in a leaked e-mail in response to correspondent Wendell Goler's report that that the United Nations' World Meteorological Organization data again confirmed that the 2000 - 2009 decade has been the warmest worldwide on record, not just warmer than the previous one.

Like anything Fox gets paid to misrepresent, conflicting data must always be impugned by the " some say" or "people say" trick as though those "critics" weren't simply Roger Ailes or Bill Sammon or a Fox sponsor or most of all the Republican party. When the data conflicts with the politics, always mention "the critics." That's unslanted journalism, Fox style.

And when something you don't like sounds good, change the name. Take the "Public Option," for instance. According to Republican pollster and Fox man Frank Lutz,

"if you call it a 'public option,' the American people are split, if you call it the 'government option,' the public is overwhelmingly against it."

Public sounds popular; sounds democratic; sounds like the people want it and polls show that they do, so let's call it "the Government option" said Sammon to Sean Hannity in another leaked e-mail. "Great idea" said Sean.

Let's also claim that the "government option" would be "sponsored by the government, although in fact, the proposed public option would have funded the program with the premiums paid by enrolees - just like private insurance. So we need even stronger language - let's call it the "Government run option" and drape it in the Soviet flag. Never mind that we're lying, whatever serves the Party, that's what we'll say. That's journalism, Fox style.

We lie, you decide

Keep saying it until it's true - that's Fox's other motto, the one you'll only hear in the board room, but you'll see it in action every day. President Obama is a far left socialist, repeats Roger Ailes to the Daily Beast. That's why his trade mission to the far East was an abject failure -- he's just too socialist for China.

"He just has a different belief system than most Americans”

said Ailes to Howard Kurtz. He's different, he's extreme, he's foreign. That's why he was elected by a majority of Americans, I guess. That's why his ratings are higher than Reagan's at the same point. He's the same, he's a conservative corporatist influenced by big business, he's no different. That's what so many liberal and non-liberal Americans are saying about him. Sorry Roger, you can lie report all you want, but we've decided.

Which Obama are we talking about?

" I literally never heard an Obama speech that didn’t blame Bush.”

says the Fox chairman. I guess I'm not listening carefully, but that's literally a lie and why isn't Bush to blame for what Bush did and why hasn't Obama come out and said it? Who else pissed away the surplus, spent the trillions shocking and awe-ing third world countries and was at the helm during the largest redistribution of wealth in our history? History blames Bush. The facts blame Bush and facts are what's missing in Ailes' endless accusations.

President Obama

“had to be told by the French and the Germans that his socialism was too far left for them to deal with."

What Socialism? The French and Germans are Socialists and Capitalists and they pay enormously higher taxes than we do. Under the current administration our taxes are at historic lows. Trying to reform health care in a manner far less socialist than any other country? Restoring a tax bracket to less that Reagan gave us? Asking for much less TARP money than George Bush, making it more accountable and lending money to Americans that's being repaid with interest? Being too much in cahoots with Wall Street, beholden to corporate interests, giving us a large middle class tax cut? What Socialism, you lying son of a bitch?

Sorry Roger, you're going to have to say it a lot louder and longer if you want to make it true and if you wanted to be something in the same galaxy as honesty, you'd just come out and use the N word. That would be even more of a boost to your oily profits, wouldn't it?

PalinWatch: Baked Alaska

Somebody's got to do it, distasteful as it may be -- and what's she up to now? Same old thing. Presented with the facts, she said "thanks, but no thanks."

We all remember when the song was that Obama was the most liberal legislator - ever and it's fun to remember it and more fun to listen to people try to reconcile that idiocy with the likelihood that he will imitate Bush in giving the 1% who own it all another tax break like the one instrumental in causing the First Great Depression and the more recent Bush Depression Recession. Obama is as liberal as Corporate America allows him to be, and that's to the right of Reagan.

But wait, there's more. Sarah's now slinging the one where Obama is the most pro-abortion president to occupy the White House and slinging it with the same, soggy, snickering spite and scorn for reality. "Obamacare" of course will fund abortions, said she yesterday at a half-full old Texas Vaudeville house, even though it won't, any more than there are death panels trying to kill your grandmother or that the President's trade mission to the far east is using up half the Navy and will cost billions. Behold the power of rumor over a willing audience.

But bullshit in motion tends to stay in motion despite any friction caused by the truth and maybe it's that strange "dark energy" but these days it seems actually to expand at an increasing rate.

"People do not process information in a neutral way. Their preconceptions affect their reactions. Biased assimilation refers to the fact that people assimilate new information in a biased fashion; those who have accepted false rumors do not easily give up their beliefs, especially when they have a strong emotional commitment to those beliefs. It can be exceedingly hard to dislodge what people think, even by presenting them with the facts."

Cass Sunstein, "On Rumors"

Exceedingly hard? Understated humor is so refreshing these days.

Scare Factor

It's been many decades since I read Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi, but I remember his description of the man up in the bow of the riverboat measuring the depth with a lead line. When the line wasn't long enough to reach down to the river bed, he'd call out "nooooo bottom!"

I could hear that call yesterday when I read about the latest from Sharron Angle and David Vitter's campaign ads fincluding a picture of a trio of Mexican men used to imply that if their opponents were elected, these scary, swarthy, hostile and decidedly non-Aryan aliens would be sneaking about your back yard leering at the womenfolk, giving Marijuana to your toddlers forcing you to pay them social security benefits our of your contributions and spreading leprosy. The oldest of ploys, really and I'm trying like hell not to invoke that jerk Godwin and his damned laws, but of course everyone uses it from biblical prophets to today's iteration of the 19th century Know-Nothing party.

That the picture of three Mexican farmers taken in the far south of Mexico -- that's Mexico, not New Mexico -- and back during the Bush administration, may have been illegally used and do not actually portray aliens, illegal or otherwise, means nothing to these candidates or their supporters since anything they do in the name of the cause, even if they have no idea what that is, is justified. That is, of course, the very policy they attribute to Islamic terrorists, but never mind, only liberals would make an issue of it, you know. Liberals ( and that means anyone who opposes them) are "soft on illegals," love illegals, want more illegals and want to pay them Social Security benefits ( says the ad) and that makes Lou Dobbs a liberal along with that arch liberal George W. Bush who even speaks a few words of Mexican or whatever scary and incomprehensible-to-regular-folk language it is they speak down there. Of course that claim is as misleading as the photograph filched from the Getty Archives, but my experience proves that teabag zealots would rather pass along any lie than bother to check the facts.

There's no bottom to this muddy river. There never has been for any extended time in our history. The dream of a country run by white Protestant, preferably Anglo-Saxon males with guns (God and Guts) and their subservient families is still strong and apparently well armed. It's rapidly becoming a smaller minority and that of course only makes it an angrier bunch of dreamers with an ever greater number of unscrupulous opportunists and yes, idiots and the logically impaired. Few of them are smart enough to understand that their increasingly irresponsible extremism, the incompetent, morally unscrupulous tribe of candidates they support, harms the ability of rational conservatives -- and yes, liberals and even Libertarians -- to control the immigration rate, deal with the undocumented in a decent, American way and most of all to end the support they have from American industry as well as individual hypocrites like Dobbs and Whitman.

At first glance, it may appear that with the rise of the neo-Know Nothings, Liberal principles are under renewed assault once again -- and they are, but the real danger, in my opinion, is the death of principled conservatism and a dedication to efficient, honest government rather than one that looks good in theory but fails every test.

I have a certain amount of faith that the public will recognize the danger of the Christine O'Donnels and the Sharron Angles, the Pallidino's, DeMints and Vitters, but I have far less faith that we'll ever be able to survive the ability of Global corporations to steer us in any way they want, particularly since they are so good at keeping us fighting ourselves that we don't notice.

And so it ends

The United States of America is doomed; at least in any form that can honestly be called a Democracy. Of course it may remain for a while as a pseudo Democracy where government and business are intertwined to the extent that no likely coalition of individual citizens has enough power to elect representatives who are not owned by some powerful entity, as any coalition that emerges is likely to be organized around fictitious causes and motivated by delusion provided by powerful, corporate interests.

Yes, the Citizens United decision was another step in the destruction of Democracy and the reduction of the power of the private citizen, but the real leash around our neck is Rupert Murdoch's lie machine.

I got an irate e-mail today with a link to a hysterical Fox news diatribe. To the casual viewer, it would seem that a town in New York State had decided to give Hispanic voters 6 votes as opposed to the one vote everyone else has. That would, they say, allow non-citizens, the unregistered voters and the otherwise ineligible Hispanics to outvote that traditionally disadvantaged bloc, White Christians.

There must be a better word than lie for this deceitful passion play, but lie will have to suffice and lie it is because what has been portrayed as a breach of constitutional law, the creation of an activist Obama court ( even though the decision was made under the Bush administration) and an affront to democracy, is simply the time honored practice of cumulative voting. Port Chester New York, has a voter base that is about 46% Hispanic. That being less than a majority, it's unlikely that the Village Board of Trustees would include a single member of Hispanic origin. That's the sort of exclusive majority rule Righties like and to allow a voter to give one vote to each of the candidates or to give more than one to a lesser number of candidates makes it possible to have a representational board of representatives. That's the kind of Democracy Righties hate, because it allows representation to those who are by virtue of race: inferior and dangerous.

Enter the Fox. The hysterical minstrel show leads the viewer to believe that any Hispanic, whether eligible to vote or not will be given 6 votes and everyone else will have only one. Branching out from that bald faced lie, are all sorts of accusations and misrepresentations and characterizations all designed to show how under the Democrats and Liberals and Elitists, the country is going to hell and the constitution ignored.

As I said, there should be a better word than 'lie' and perhaps there is: Libel, subversion, treason and if I had a thesaurus, I could come up with a dozen, but what matters is that we have an internal enemy who has already conquered and infected the minds and souls of America and is progressing further toward supporting insurrection day by day. I'm only illustrating one of countless assaults on truth, reason, decency, democracy and the dignity of mankind, but it's enough.

Is there any hope? Not on my part and my vision of the future is the jaws of the Fox around the throat of America, forever.

Is it over yet?

Yonder stands your orphan with his gun
Crying like a fire in the sun
Look out the saints are comin' through
And it's all over now, Baby Blue.

At what point do I give up and admit it's all over? The anti-Obama hate cult permeates every waking hour of my day, from technical seminars between engineers about packet radio networks interrupted by someone handing out disreputable Republican figures showing what a spendthrift radical socialist Obama is, from e-mails and phone calls asking me to participate in tax protests from people who won't have to pay taxes at all this year to the constant snide comments about Obama not saluting to this or apologizing for that. There are e-mailed clips of Gingrich preaching about the "most radical president" e-mailed jokes about him firing "cattle guards" and just about every captious hoax you'll find at Fact Check.org or Snopes.com or UrbanLegends.about.com. The mad blood is pumping like it's 1861, and US Rte 1 as it runs through my county, sports shiny new billboards for gun shops and firearms training.

"But these are real numbers" said a friend I should have thought would question any estimates published by the RNC about what "Obamacare" will cost.

"Real from the same people who predicted the Iraq war would cost nothing?" I replied? He looked puzzled. One doesn't suggest any doubt concerning the Party of God in these parts. One doesn't mention that 47% of American families won't owe any Federal income tax this year to a sign waving teabagger or that Iraq has cost us as much as WWII and isn't nearly over yet, not unless you want to invite hate mail and stuff thrown on your lawn, put your job at risk and have no friends at all. Want to know how Dr. Mudd felt? Just suggest that George W. Bush had anything to do with the policies that allowed Enron to ruin so many people, precipitated the bubble and credit crunch, started the most expensive war we've ever had on false pretenses. I spent years being called a traitor for suggesting that what has come to pass would come to pass, but exoneration is going to have to wait for the second coming.

Local papers have become unreadable and dripping with foamy saliva in their raving about Obama's religious agenda, secular and Islamic and I suspect that like many papers today, the owners thereof are writing some of them to use the power of insane hate to boost circulation.

One doesn't mention that Fox News, the fair and balanced network that is run entirely by and for Republicans, doesn't employ a single Democrat and not only slants stories, it invents them and remains silent when their hoaxes are revealed by every other outlet on earth. The Acorn Hoax, the Climategate hoax, the "Two Planeloads of Democrat Lawyers descend on Wasilla" hoax. People think you're crazy, or worse yet a Liberal -- you know, one of those black clad bearded guys who carry bombs and hate America. No one here will even listen for fear of being branded a liberal and people who call themselves skeptics can't imagine the Republican version of anything might be biased. No one will accept that Obama was elected because of the failure of a long Republican administration and Republican controlled congress.

The fact is that Dwight Eisenhower took equal flack for implementing integration to the horror of people who called him a radical, FDR took worse for Social Security, Johnson for his war on poverty and support of civil rights legislation and of course Medicare. Jefferson was called a tax and spend radical, because in America you can't just be wrong, you have to be the Devil, even the irrefutable facts can be the devil or the work of his hand.

What's the use of opposing it? Could any amount of truth or blather have stopped the civil war or done away with the institution of Slavery? Can anyone save America from the metastatic madness?