Back To “Reality”

After a long vacation – some might call it a minor meltdown – I’m back to my old tricks. The last two months had so much bad news, so much sensationalism, so little corrective journalism, that my head literally exploded. Luckily I’m on COBRA, so they were able to put it back together. I’ve come to realize that our health-care is great! It’s the System that’s fucked…

Anyway, this whole December 25th foiled attack – don’t know if you’ve heard about it? – pointed out a truth that every media outlet has ignored. Al Quaida can’t really do anything. In eight years all they’ve managed to do is move where the non-working explosives were located. It is – rather – how we respond that makes Al Quaida successful. They send one miserable bastard to set his nuts on fire and we’ll spend a trillion dollars not finding the person who sent him to do it. If you met an Al Quaida operative without knowing who they were, your first instinct would be to get him to eat something and see a dentist. I’m not talking about the millions of people who now relate to them as a result of our colossal overseas fuckery this last decade – or the two or three master criminals who were taught by the CIA and educated in American schools who spend their days in the lap of luxury downloading iphone apps. I’m talking about the knuckle dragging hayseeds who are called upon to blow themselves up.

Cheney came out of his cave to criticize Obama – a man who gave a speech about war while receiving a prize for peace – for not mentioning war enough. Clearly his cave doesn’t get cable. Which reminds me, Cheney is sort of like Bin Laden (or Puxatony Phil) – you only see him when he comes out to make a false statement. But you can’t blame Obama for the outrageous intelligence failures that allowed a Nigerian with no luggage to buy a one-way ticket to Detroit with cash and try to blow up an airplane. Intelligence failures are the norm. If they weren’t “classified” we would be able to see that our intelligence agencies are collectively the greatest group of hapless dumbasses in the history of the world. Their failures are so consistent and so resoundingly incomprehensible that it would be ruinous to ever bring them to light. No matter who is in office. Whether it be a timid bleeding heart tree hugging environment caring liberal or a war mongering subnormal non-linguist nose-picking conservative – that guy still gets on the plane and still tries to incinerate his junk.

But enough about how our media has morphed into a corporately run collection of salacious ratings obsessed truth slanting helmet headed liars. Let’s talk about our culture and how messed up it is. I was coming home from holiday (I said holiday instead of vacation to make you wonder where I’m from! Ha!) and a five year old told his brother to “step back from my johnson yo!” His father told him “not to be so rated x; keep it rated r.” to which his kindergarden aged son replied, as if his father was the toddler, “dad, rated x is so much worse than rated r; it’s like 20 times worse.”  Next we find Gilbert Arenas suspended from the NBA for keeping a collection of firearms in his locker in the Wizards locker-room. It’s rare to find a place outside of Texas that would look fondly at an employee stowing firearms in his office. Arenas though, made the incomprehensibly stupid even worse by jokingly shooting off his fingers at fellow Wizards – a.k.a. Bullets – during warmups before a game. Haha! Get it! And last year we saw a couple of culture whores try to drag our highest office into the “reality” mire that our country has become by crashing a state dinner.

Our country is teetering over a mighty chasm of debt and all we want to do is get on television or do something stupid so we can Twit about it. We might want to take a long look at the messages we’re giving ourselves before we cross over into the grim dimness from which there is no going back. Once we’re too dumb to know we’re dumb we’re doomed.

Happy New Year!

As The Media Turns – The Obama Edition

We all knew over a year ago, when Obama was being touted as our nation’s savior, that it would come to this. None of us – not one – truly believed he would be able to fix all of the problems he inherited and follow through on his promises – in only a year! And yet here we are, a year later, and the guy can’t wake up in the morning without someone going on television and listing all the ways he did it wrong. Politicians – who are not human beings – stretch the truth alarmingly as a matter of course; they absolutely shred it when they’re campaigning. We all know this; we even have learned to expect it. It’s the system we sit back and allow them to operate in. We knew – even as he said it – even as he meant it and wanted it to be – that Obama wouldn’t be able to meet his desired goal of getting us out of Iraq by this August. We just liked the sound of it and knew for a fact the other guy would have us engaged in trench warfare around the globe within two weeks of his inauguration.

Obama is getting shredded in the news no matter what he does. The media no longer plays it objectively. It’s all or nothing and now Obama is slowly being dismantled by a relentless media that is highly frustrated at their inability to procure pictures of Tiger Woods’ penis.

The man has made some mistakes. Like listening to the CIA. A group of ivy league dingbats who have no single positive accomplishment to their name since their very inception. Like listening to General McChrystal – a thoroughly corrupt international assassination machine who is now tapped with winning the hearts and minds of people who want us to stop killing newlyweds and schoolchildren: something he can’t even do with his own troops.

Afghanistan is blowing up. Pakistan is in turmoil. We’ll make Yemen a lot worse starting tomorrow. Obama is doing a fine job of hurting himself the more he listens to his pool of so-called “experts” – the professional liars and stooges who call the shots in the corporately fucked Washington of 2010.

He doesn’t need the media to do it for him.

An Afghanistan Analogy

 

Public opinion is split on Afghanistan: slightly over half the population thinks it’s a bad idea to send more troops to Afghanistan; the rest were on Twitter posting pictures of themselves puking in a trashcan and never finished the survey. A select few – who I like to call the No Fucking Ways – actually believe the following: 1) That we are in a “war” against something or somebody 2) That we can “win” this war 3) That John Wayne could fly – and 4) That democrats want to turn tail and quit like a bunch of pansies… Unfortunately this group is either in Congress or on Fox News.

It’s not going to happen. The Afghans will never have Starbucks and malls and millions of mindless drones that go to work and go home and watch television and drink beer and watch football. It’s not going to happen.

Don’t believe me? Well I’m going to prove it with this here analogy:

Let’s say – and this could totally happen, and I frankly would encourage it – a big and mighty superpower, like China or the old scary Russia or, considering the current state of affairs, Estonia – demanded that we turn Rush Limbaugh over to an International tribunal of intellectuals for crimes against the global good. But we refused, claiming he was a United States citizen and the U.S. didn’t turn over it’s citizens – even Texans! – no matter how flatulent they were. Then, let’s say China bombed Texas and invaded it. Then let’s say they tried to instill Communism on Texans and make it illegal to hunt rattlesnakes or execute innocent people. Then let’s say, if they refused to cooperate, they were rounded up and forced to live in Oklahoma and watch Sooner games.

Wouldn’t work, would it? Shit no it wouldn’t! Sunburned would-be cowboys in wife-beaters – driving pick up trucks and wielding shotguns and swinging lariats – would come out of the woodwork to fight back – Republicans and Democrats alike! – banding together to fight against an occupation by communists. (Rush Limbaugh, for his part, would be safely ensconced in Idaho – a state long partial to bigots and hypocrites and potatoes.) Patriots from other states would sneak across the border with molotov cocktails and propaganda (Sarah Palin memoir); weapons from the United States that were smuggled into Mexico to fight U.S. drug enforcement agents would be smuggled back; insurgencies of all stripes – both big and small – would crop up everywhere – most of whom, if cornered in a bar, would freely admit to a palpable loathing of the man who started the whole thing.

Well, that’s Afghanistan: it’s Texas without the TEXAS-SIZE FLY SWATTERS! No amount of money and lives and political careers and fiercely lobbied privatized mercenary forces and torture chambers is going to turn the Middle East into Las Vegas. After all, that’s what Las Vegas is for.

Changes everything, doesn’t it? Probably not. Otherwise I wouldn’t be building a bunker. With the No Fucking Ways in charge of things, it might just be too little too late.

 

Beware The False Profit

 

Wall Street – the epicenter of what is now being called The Great Recession (even though it’s a depression) – that worldwide phenomenon best summed up with Holy Shit! – is patting itself on the back and giving itself outlandish tax-payer supplied bonuses. Why? Because our economy is overly reliant on the stock market as an indicator of the economy’s health. Which is a travesty. Because it’s not really an indicator of economic health. Nobody is economically healthy right now. But the dow is over 10,000 points anyway. Why? Because corporations are making money, which is good news for investors and shareholders. Shareholders, for those of you who don’t know, is a term used to describe an extremely heavy group of naked sweaty gentlemen – and by heavy I don’t mean deep or profound, but grossly overweight – who meet once a week high above New York and make phone calls to different corporations letting them know that, despite the economy, they fully expect – not the same profit they got last year, but more. This starts a relentless cycle of short-term stupidity that drags the economy down further and adds to the unemployment line. Companies, who are expected to give the shareholders their money, have to lay off their workforce to cut down on overhead, and thus increase profit. Which does two things: one, it adds more people without income to the large group of people who aren’t going to buy anything that costs more than 99 cents. And two, it makes these companies incapable of sustaining themselves: they lose the manpower and ability to meet their obligations – and their output suffers. Then the whole thing starts all over again. An endless loop of corporate nihilism: Sales plummet. Workers get laid off. And shareholders demand ever more money while the government spends billions paying for protracted unemployment.

Further compounding the problem is who is getting laid off. Companies are more likely to lay off ten just out of school workers than one useless chickenhawk who does nothing but play golf with the boss once a week and fondle interns. There seems to be two types of workers in corporate America: those who actually do work, and those who don’t do any work but are very adept at office politics. Which is fine for short recessions. But for a prolonged recession, like this one, you end up with a whole host of companies across the landscape filled with overpriced perverts who don’t know how to do anything but tell fond yet tedious “stories” about the old days.

Profits are good. But sustainable profits are better. Shareholders and those whose souls they own, would do best to understand this. Because, if this thing keeps going the way it is, these companies will eventually cannibalize themselves; they will shrink and shrink and then nobody will profit – not even the shareholders. That’s right fat guys – that means you.

 

Note: I’m no economist, so this could be totally wrong. But I doubt it. I’ve seen it first hand in two recessions now and it boggles my mind. But feel free to set me straight…

Dick Cheney Tortures Still…

Not since Torquemada has a hunchbacked evil bastard caused so many so much pain so consistently. Forget stabbing friends in the back; he’ll just up and shoot them in the face. (There have been plenty of evil bastards, of course; but they all had better posture.) Anyway, today a court in Italy found 23 CIA agents guilty of kidnapping stemming from their practice of Extraordinary Rendition of people the United States were suspicious of. They were sentenced to prison. Not that they will actually go to prison, as they have asylum here in the United States – which is THE place to live these days for those who answered the demands of the Bush Junta. Kidnapping was the least of their crimes. That was just the first step. Next these people who simply vanished from the sovereign countries in which they lived would find themselves in various “sites” around the world, where a whole host of nefarious deeds would be done to them in an effort to extract information from them. Sort of like the infamous scene in Marathon Man, where Dick Cheney is drilling holes in Dustin Hoffman’s teeth. He played a Nazi in that movie – and the parallels between that Dick Cheney and the real one are striking. But I digress. Mark Twain knew a hundred years ago what I know and what any sentient being knows: torture doesn’t work. Unless your goal is to thoroughly break someone’s psyche and ruin them as people, that is; if your goal is to actually get information from someone, it’s not remotely effective. Unless you want a whole bunch of made up bullshit. I know myself. And I know I wouldn’t even have to be tortured to make up all sorts of ill deeds if I thought it would make the pain go away. It’s no wonder that there was such a rash of false warnings about shopping malls being targeted. Either it was based off false information extracted from innocent people or it was ginned up fear from an administration that ran on lies and bullying.

Dick Cheney likes to go on and on about how torturing people is great and a wonderful way to foil plots and catch bad guys. When pressed for any sort of evidence, he instantly retreats to the tired old theory that to divulge such a thing would make us weaker or some nonsense. What I’m sure it does is make our soldiers – not prisoners of war – but targets of revenge. If we can’t honor our own propaganda, how can we expect others to? Exactly.

The most frustrating aspects of the behavior of the Bush administration is that they did all of the things they did even despite the fact that it defied any sort of logic or reason or research or knowledge of human behavior. We make the same mistakes over and over again expecting a different outcome: which is the definition of  - well, so much for that. Each new generation does something that has been done before – and failed before – but like Mickey Rooney – they try again anyway – because they’re better! Or different! And then: whoops! I married my mom again!!!

I can’t help but think that if Al Gore had been just a little less boring, this country wouldn’t be trillions of dollars in the hole funding quagmires oceans away in a desert among groups and fiefdoms and cultures we seem hopeless to understand. We wouldn’t be apologizing for torture while denying we ever did it; and we wouldn’t be closing a prison that isn’t closing anytime soon. Instead, 0ur money would be safely ensconced with treasury secretary Bernie Madoff on Capitol Hill near the Green House.

Where The Innocent Are Tortured and The Guilty Write Memoirs

Welcome to Dick Cheney’s America. Where you’re innocent until brutally beaten into guilt. Where, if you won’t admit the crime you haven’t committed, you will when we Rendition you to a country that will get it out of you one way or another. If, despite all of that, you are still found innocent, there will be no recourse for you. No way to make those that caused you great body and psychic harm pay for their mistake. Because, heck, if every innocent person the United States tortured sued for damages, it would fill up our courts from coast to coast! It would take up lots of paper and time that the government simply can’t afford.

Sorry innocent tortured people. But the closest you can come to justice is shooting out your television screen when you see my (Dick Cheney! I’m selling a book!) ugly twisted soul on television lying up a storm about anything and everything and shitting in everyone’s coffee during my book tour. Or shooting out your television screen whenever you see George Bush is headlining – of all things – a seminar on motivation! (George and I both highly recommend shooting out your televisions. That way you’ll have to buy a new one – which will stimulate the economy!)

(For your daily dose of seriously depressing doom, go here: http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/index.html?story=/opinion/greenwald/2009/11/03/arar)

You don’t think I didn’t have this all figured out, did you? Did you really think I would order all these innocent people tortured if I wasn’t sure there was no way I could ever be punished for it? I may be a lot of things, but one thing I definitely am is one hell of a good war criminal. So good in fact that I’m still a fine and upstanding citizen, immune from prosecution, and allowed to practice my free speech on anyone and everyone. Instead of being locked up for all the bad things I like to do, I go on Meet The Press so I can call the President a fairy. That Bernie Madoff Ponzi Scheme? My idea. I met that guy at a cocktail party and told him I would torture him if he didn’t become a criminal. They say absolute power corrupts absolutely; and, in my case, although I have always been corrupt, it’s so gloriously true! Unless you’re a Canadian. Those fools admit their wrongdoing and make reparations! What a laugh those guys are! If I could I’d extremely rendition that whole country to Syria!

Have you heard about the Arar case? It’s a case study in my lack of any moral bearings whatsoever. And the power I wielded in the White House and the Justice Department – and what I could do with it. Some Canadian software engineer named Arar had the misfortune to go through New York on his way home to Canada from vacation. And that’s when we nabbed him. But he wouldn’t confess to his evil-doing: he kept going on about being innocent and whatnot, so – realizing if we sent him to Syria they would torture him – we put a bag over his head and – next thing he knows – he’s in a Syrian prison along with a whole bunch of questions for them to ask! Where he is repeatedly tortured. He confessed of course. Finally. To something he didn’t do, just so they would stop beating him with cables. On and on and on it went. Various painful forms of torture. Day in and day out – for over a year.  Finally, the Syrians concluded that he was actually innocent. Oh well. Omelettes and broken eggs and all that. Now he’s all pissy about the whole thing. He even sued John Ashcroft – which is fine with me: that guy is a dithering pansy anyway. But, unlike Canada, which actually admitted to their wrongdoing, looked into the matter and published a weighty document detailing how wrong they – and the United States – were, groveled for his forgiveness and gave him 11.5 million Canadian dollars.

As Arar could tell you, the United States doesn’t play like that. Nope. I made sure of that, you see. I’m untouchable, frankly. The way it works is, we just deny it ever happened. After all, the United States doesn’t torture! Ha! Ask me a question and “I don’t recall” the answer. Pretty simple really. You’ve got evidence you say? Well, what is the definition of evidence anyway? You see, when you have a lot of power you can do tricky things like decide what evidence is; and the very meaning of words themselves. If it’s something we don’t want it to be, we’ll just change it. And, if you want to testify in front of a grand jury about all of the punishments the Syrians conducted on you at the request of the United States, well, good luck getting into the country!

Okay, enough about how great my power is. I have a memoir to make up and some paper shredding to do. I also have to celebrate how timid and cowardly this administration is when it comes to my rampant criminality. They protect me at every turn!

Cheers!

Dick

 

The Right – Doubling Down On Denial

In New York right now, the GOP is engaging in some public internecine warfare. The vote comes tomorrow and the GOP is urging its base to choose the more “conservative” of the two. In the automated phone calls that voters are subjected to, the following snippet can be heard:

Blah Blah Blah. Liberals suck – or something like that; and then: “Or do you believe in Republican conservative values, like thrift, personal responsibility, and family? Let’s tell the liberals, enough is enough.” – these calls went out in order to talk Republicans into not voting for the moderate one – i.e. not a dipshit – in favor of the hard-liner – i.e. demagogue fool.

You might not know this, and I didn’t either, but apparently one of the conservative values is Thrift. Who knew the Republicans were so concerned about saving money? They quadrupled the size of government; they spent a trillion dollars in Iraq; and they seem to be made up almost entirely of extremely rich bigots. And it’s been a long long time since an elected Republican showed much concern for thrift. I doubt there are too many Republicans eating Ramen soup to save money. Another conservative value? Personal Responsibility. This doesn’t seem to hold water either. In fact, right now the two individuals personally responsible for the current state of this country are in deeper denial than Pete Rose. Neither Dick Cheney nor George Bush have taken responsibility for a single misstep on anything. Not torture. Not the economy. Or making a huge leap towards socialism by buying into our country’s largest – and most incompetent – banks. Instead of taking responsibility, they choose to “not recall” what they did. Family. The conservatives claim this value to be firmly within their grasp. Yet it’s the Obamas who seem to be actually living this value conservatives hold so dear. We’ve seen a parade of Republicans fall on their family-value faces over the last year: whether it’s a governor hiking the Appalachian Trail in South America or a Senator going out of his way to find employment for his mistress’ boyfriend.

There comes a time when people wake up and realize that actions really do speak louder than words. You can claim something great in your mission statement  (you can bet Bernie Madoff didn’t have Ponzi Scheme anywhere in his mission statement); but if you can’t back it up, it’s time to change your tune. It’s time to rebrand yourself and start anew. For the Republicans, they can go one of two ways. They can either double-down on their current tactics of hypocrisy and latent racism – “Or do you believe in Republican conservative values, like largesse, cronyism and white supremacy?” – or they can come up with an actual viable alternative to what the democrats are doing. This is a two-party system we have. Republicans might want to at least try and make a play for being the second one.

The only way they are going to do that is communicate honestly on a platform that people can actually believe. Personally, I’m not holding my breath.

Should We Give Taxes A New Name?

You say the word “tax” these days, you end up in a dark alley with a letter opener sticking out of your belly. It’s un-American to use such a word. In this year – 2009 for those keeping count… – the highest tax rate is 35%, which is for anyone who earns more than $372,950. Let’s contrast that with 1945: I’m not suggesting the earning power is the same – but for the sake of this argument it doesn’t matter – as there is no tax rate over 35% in 2009 – but in 1945, if you made 0ver $200,000, your tax rate was 94%. Which meant that you could keep a whopping 6% of your income! Granted, at the time we had a war to pay for – but still…that’s a decent chunk of change.

(for those of you who are into numbers, you can find what I referenced here: http://www.taxfoundation.org/files/federalindividualratehistory-200901021.pdf

Now, we’ll just work our way forward in time:

The history books tell us that the 50’s were booming. The war was over. Soldiers were home after kicking some real Axis of evil ass. And one of the most popular songs of the era was about a lollipop. In 1955, those who made over $200,000 paid 91% taxes – but that wasn’t the highest tax bracket; ,moving forward to 1970, anyone earning more than $100,000 paid 70%. Not bad! In 1980 – ditto. —-Then things started changing as a greasy haired simpleton was now at the helm; a former California governor who once acted opposite a monkey named Bonzo. In 1982, the highest tax rate goes down to 50%; but you only had to make $42,5o0 to be in the highest tax bracket. It was the beginning of the deterioration of the middle-class. But let’s keep going. By 1988, at the end of Ronald Reagan’s second term, the highest tax rate was merely 28% for anyone earning more than 113,300. Reagan was the inventor and greatest proponent of Voodoo Economics, the theory of which seems to be that the less you pay in taxes, the more taxes the government gets. Or something like that. Something that is simply not possible. The government spends more and takes in less was at the very heart of the Reagan way. No wonder then that in 1989 people were so fed up with taxes, and barely having to pay them, that George Bush the 1st had to go on record as promising “no new taxes.” A promise he couldn’t keep. As, well, what kind of government can spend money without having any? By 1991, the tax rate had to go back up to 31% for those making more than $41,075 to help make up for all the money the government wasn’t taking in the previous six years. It cost him re-election: despite a quick and relatively painless Gulf War 1, the tanking economy cost him his job. Clinton – because he was a liberal and not at all conservative – raised taxes back up to 39.6% for those making more than $140,000, paying down the deficit and balancing the budget – an act that the Republicans admired so much they shut down congress. It stayed at that rate for both of his terms. George Bush the 2nd, who is closer in both spirit and stupidity to Ronald Reagan than his father, managed to get it back down to 35% – which is where it stands today.

To even imply a tax on anything is to risk being drawn and quartered by a mad band of Glenn Beck supporters with muppets and pick axes. But we’ve got a stimulus package to pay for, two wars to fund, a health-care overhaul that could turn out to be many things – free not being one of them – as well as a host of other problems finally catching up us. We’re paying for the last 27 years of irresponsible tax policy. While it’s nice not to have to pay as much in taxes as The Greatest Generation did (just one more thing they did better than the Baby Boomers. They paid 90% in taxes and sang about lollipops!), there’s something to be said for paying for what we take. We want better education, better health-care, better infrastructure, social security, Medicare – and a whole host of other things, we just don’t want to pay for it. The Republicans would have us cut taxes even further. They seem to believe that the less you pay in taxes, the more that money trickles down. (Actually I don’t think they believe this at all; I think it’s just a faux theory they came up with to explain the reckless hacking they planned to do to the national treasury. That money – as they well knew – didn’t trickle down: it trickled into fuck pads and silicone breasts and three hundred foot yachts and stomach staples and anything else they felt like spending their money on.)

It’s clearly time for us to raise taxes. We’ve got an almost two trillion dollar deficit for this year alone. That 4.6% difference in taxes at the highest level is nothing to sneeze at: in 2000, after all, we had a budget surplus. Maybe the problem  is the word itself. Taxes. Taxes. Taxes. It hurts saying that word. What if the word was changed to – and we’ll take a page from Bush for this one (he’s not using it) – Freedom Surcharge. We could call taxes taxes and then add a Freedom Surcharge of, let’s say, 4.6 percent. It would be a lot harder for the crooks at the highest ranks of the corporate latter to complain about paying for our Freedom.

If you love America, you should be willing to keep it in business. Even if you’re Republican. Even if it means paying what you owe.

In New Book, Andre Agassi Admits Desire To Sell New Book.

It’s all the rage these days. Athletes “writing” books admitting to things that will help them sell books. It all started with Jose Canseco, who admitted that the entirety of major league baseball was on steroids. Then Phil Jackson wrote a book about what a baby Kobe Bryant was and/or is. The Joe Torre wrote his book in which he spent a long time bashing A-Rod. Last week we had the Magic Johnson revelation that he no longer kisses Isiah Thomas on the cheek. And now this: Andre Agassi was using meth in 1997 when he dropped to #171 in the tennis world! And he has a book coming out!

It’s the virus of reality television and social networking creeping into publishing. America has an unquenchable thirst for other peoples’ deplorable behavior. The worse your actions are, the greater your sales will be. An athlete who wanted to write a book about – say – their career in sports, wouldn’t have a chance at getting published. An athlete who – say – had a great career in sports, but, nevermind that, liked to fondle panties bought off ebay before every game while snorting crack, would get a six figure advance and his/her own reality show on Bravo.

This can only be bad in the long run. Balloon Boy is just the beginning. If we’re not careful Joe and Janet Average will purposefully act in various depraved ways just to get noticed – because that’s what we seem to value; that’s what society holds dear. Being good at math or science isn’t valued. Being outrageous is. Which sends out the message that you can make it in life, not by pursuing academics, but by unleashing fifty pounds of fire ants into your neighbors house and tweeting about it.

We are turning into a nation of narcissistic boobs. Take this Joe Lieberman guy. His greatest accomplishment – aside from playing the father on Alf - is lying through his teeth to both sides of the aisle in order to get on CNN for doing so. He’s a congressional tease. He wants free drinks and his meals bought – sure – but he mainly wants attention. And he’s learned the best way to do this is to be completely and totally undependable and capable of just about anything. He’ll run for VP as a Democrat; promote war as a Republican; vote for civil rights as a Democrat; vote against health-care as a Republican; vote with the Democrats unless he votes against them; he rode the campaign bus with McCain and attended Obama’s inaugural dinner – he is a master at getting wooed by both sides. He’s the closest thing Washington has to Dennis Rodman — (who wore a dress to sell a book and painted his hair in the 1990’s – Dennis Rodman was a visionary and way ahead of the curve of our cultures values.)

It’s no wonder we’re in a recession: our countries minds are occupied not with the next great idea, but the next great gimmick.

 

Old Man Hiding In Bunker Slings Accusations At President

Dick Cheney, the former vice-President, who spent an eight year period hidden away in a bunker, ordering tortures from a safe distance, only going out rarely, most notably to shoot someone in the face, is now accusing Obama of being “afraid” – to send 40,000 men and women to an untamed Middle East hinterland filled to overflowing with AK-47 wielding citizens who don’t appreciate being their fiefdoms being occupied by foreigners. What he sees as “dithering” might be – gasp! – thinking something through! Imagine that! A President who values human life! Had George Bush been a ditherer and not hopelessly handicapped by ignorance, we might not find ourselves in two ongoing wars…against…something or someone that has cost us trillions of dollars that could have paid for healthcare or gone towards the creation of an island off the coast of New York – let’s call it Fat Cat Island – where Wall Street derivative traders could be allowed to consume one another on live television – like Survivor, only with bankers. There are all sorts of things that money could have been better utilized for.

Afghanistan isn’t the hopeless quagmire Iraq was and is. It’s worse. It’s been breaking empires for centuries. It broke the British and the Soviet Union – and it’s slowly breaking us as well. Obama is merely trying to make some sort of sense out of it. All this talk of “victory” coming from the military is nothing more than a group of people at the very top of a corporation suggesting something that will help their bottom line. Bombing things is good business. It’s one of the few evergreen industries we have these days.

Obama – hopefully – is looking to find strategies that actually make sense. Sending weapons to Pakistan and hoping they use them to bomb the right people isn’t a good one: they’ll just hoard them and wait for an opportunity to use them against India or something. Better to help them build infrastructure and improve security in exchange for them taking action against a group of people that have worn out their welcome even in the country that created them.

But I don’t know anything. Unfortunately neither do the people who are supposed to. I don’t know what Dick Cheney’s problem is – but he’s absolutely completely wrong about everything. In fact, he’s going to write a memoir filled with all sorts of wrong things he’s done that he thinks were correct. I’m just glad the guy doesn’t like me the way he does his country – because he almost single-handedly wrecked it. He was no doubt the kind of kid you wouldn’t allow to borrow your toys. He’d almost certainly break them and then shoot you in the face if you complained about it. He needs therapy; not a book tour. This is the guy who assured the nation that the Taliban “was finished” – eight years ago. Which makes you wonder why they’re surging right now and why the same one eyed mystery man is still strolling the caves of the Khyber Pass safe and sound. This is the guy who turned war into a for-profit industry; this is the guy who is on the board of a for-profit prison that tortured its prisoners. He oozes corruption out of every pore. And you can bet his breath smells like a dead skunk stuck in a chimney for six months. He stands for everything loathsome and deplorable about the potential of man; the fact that he has been successful in his life is an ugly insult to all that is inspiring and just.

BOOGIE MAN

He is the great Boogie Man;

He is why kids keep their lights on;

He is the reason people

aren’t always nice

to their neighbors -

(that guy could be like Dick Cheney!)

He is a muse for the misformed -

and a beacon

to all who hope one day to grow up

and destroy everything.

His presence is usually presaged by a cold front.

Trees blow on windless days.

Thunder rumbles under a clear blue sky.

He is the boogie man;

the dark cancerous pimple

on the ass of the American Dream.

And he should shut up.

 

 

The Problem With A Tuned-In President

It’s great that we have a President that knows how to read. And think. And how to use his opposable thumbs. But it’s not good that he takes offense and feels the need to push back against every groundless story that he reads. Because – as most people know – the news is largely made up these days. How it works is, an editor gets up early and works out on the elliptical machine, thinking up possible stories to create that day. They make a list and then assign escaped convicts or full-time prisoners to fabricate a story. At which point it just simply comes into being as “news.” Usually on Fox. The White House – rightly – feels the need to push back against such nonsense. But there’s too much real stuff to deal with to take time out and fight back against gibberish. Because that’s exactly why such stories make their way into the world in the first place: to drive people crazy with their reckless fabrications. If the White House and the Democrats go out of their way to push back against stories only the most desperate would choose to believe then they are playing right into the GOP’s hands. They will waste their time in office trying to win arguments with fools and con men. That’s why people – and by people I mean slobbering psychopaths – like Glenn Beck have jobs. They are sociopaths who aren’t afraid to simply make things up on the fly and needle the other side. To fight back is to give these people legitimacy. The last thing we need is for the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Chuck Norris and Joey Plumber and that MNF country singer guy to be seen as anything other than goons.

My message to Obama would be to take a pass on the “news” and turn off the television and simply ignore the babble.

The Worst Defense Lawyer In The World (One Hopes)

Normally I like to unleash my bile and vitriol at the stupidities I see in today’s media and political discourse. But not today. No. Today is about the person who simply HAS to be the worst actual real defense lawyer in the world. And I wouldn’t have known a thing about him if I hadn’t stopped channel surfing because I thought I saw Randy Quaid…

It looked like Anderson Cooper was interviewing Randy Quaid. And Randy Quaid was wearing a cowboy hat. I thought maybe it might have something to do with that bizarre hotel story in Marfa where he skipped out on his bill and got arrested. But no. This wasn’t a character actor playing up some goofy Texas stereotype. It was a real person more than living up to it. He was, specifically a defense attorney in Texas named David Martin. And, if you’ve retained his services you are in all likelihood either in prison or dead. The interview begins with him apologizing “for checking cows.” He is wearing a ten-gallon cowboy hat. It only gets worse from there.

He was being interviewed about the innocent man executed in Texas for setting his house on fire and killing his children. It’s a story that has been in the news lately because the governor of Texas, Rick Perry, has gotten involved – going so far as to stall any investigation into the possibility of Texas being the first state to openly be able to claim the murder of an innocent man – by kicking person after person off the commission created to investigate the case.

The executed man was Cameron Todd Willingham. He was no role model. But neither are lots of people. He might not have been guilty either. His “lawyer” was David Martin. And he was not on television to defend his client – but to attack him. Relentlessly. And he declared even the possibility of his innocence to be “hogwash”  and “absurd.” Absurd seems to be a big word for him – as he used it frequently as a rejoinder for everything. David Martin – worst defense lawyer in the world – is quoted in the New Yorker as saying that “98% of the time my clients are guilty as sin.” Which is all fine and good. This is America and I am a fan of freedom of speech and personal opinion. But I’m also a fan of justice. And, as expert after expert after expert have come forward and made abundantly clear – an innocent man, who tragically lost his three children in a fire, lost his freedom and his life – thanks, in part, to the WORLD’S WORST DEFENSE LAWYER and a crap sandwich of “evidence” bordering on the criminally ignorant. (For example, two details that led to Cameron Todd Willingham’s demise: he had an Iron Maiden poster in his house (he was 20 years old at the time the house burned), which the prosecution drummed up to mean that – rather than being a fan of heavy metal –  he was obsessed with violence; Also, he had a tattoo of a skull on his arm. Bad taste perhaps; but not indication of mass murder…

At one point in what is an entertaining (Nobody can stereotype the Texan like a Texan) and bizarre interview, the defense lawyer claimed that he knew his client was guilty because he and another lawyer got some lighter fluid and burned a piece of carpet and…it looked just like the burned carpet in the house! (My guess is it was black and charred and burned looking.) My next guess is that this guy is a stone cold idiot – a supreme embodiment of both inexcusable confidence and willful ignorance. (sort of like a certain ex-President who liked to wear cowboy boots and bomb stuff.) Now, I love Texas; my family is from there. But Texans are so full of their own propaganda that it’s flat out dangerous. They strut and amble the world over, causing all manner of havoc and mayhem everywhere they go. (I was once in Rome and asked my tour guide which tourists drove him the craziest. I was sure it would be America. But he said, no, he loved Americans. In fact he loved all of the people he has met; everyone, that is, but people from the “country” of Texas. He said they were loud and abusive and acted superior even though they dressed like fools with giant hair and were always drunk.)

I could go on and on about what a high-class boob this guy is – but no amount of words can do the guy justice – and there’s no point in satirizing that which is already a satire and a tragedy. So, without further ado:

watch the interview here:   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5cFKpjRnXE

read the story here: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/07/090907fa_fact_grann/

I was glad to discover that I am not alone when it comes to thinking this guy is a jackass and an assessory to murder. And, of course, terrible at his job. Going on national television, as the clients’ defense attorney, to attest to his own clients’ guilt seems to go against the whole confidentiality and attorney-client privelege thing. I didn’t even know he was the defense attorney until half-way through when Anderson named him as such; the way he was talking and acting defensive I figured he was a prosecuting attorney. But I was wrong. Also, if you think 98% of your clients are “guilty as sin,” wouldn’t that limit your ability and motivation to prove otherwise? I mean, if you think about it, that sort of mentality grants you the ability to throw in the towel, not try at all, and only screw up 2% of the time. (Statistics actually show that in reality only about half of defendants are guilty of their crime (according to the New Yorker article) – which, now that I think about it, totally sucks.) You get what you pay for – and in the case of Cameron Todd Willingham – who had no money, he got a know nothing. In this country you are only as innocent as what you can afford. Which means half the people in jail are stuck there until they are rich enough to get out.

The gist of the articles below is that David Martin hurt his client by trashing him on national television. I don’t know about anyone else who watched the interview, but it seems to me he mainly trashed himself. And only gave more ammunition to the growing belief that a great injustice was done in this case. And a man is dead as a result.

Here’s what people who actually know what they’re talking about say:

An actual defense attorney defends his profession and stomps David Martin here: http://gamso-forthedefense.blogspot.com/2009/10/selling-out-client-part-iii.html

and here: http://bennettandbennett.com/blog/2009/10/david-martin-willinghams-trial-lawyer-speaks-up.html

and here: http://rantsofapublicdefender.blogspot.com/2009/10/if-you-cant-say-anything-nice.html

and here: http://blog.simplejustice.us/2009/10/17/never-smear-your-own-client-not-even-in-death.aspx

and here: http://brownandlittlelaw.com/blog1/2009/10/17/shameful/

and here (this was the lawyer who had the misfortune of trying to fix all the crap this moron got wrong): http://www.wacocriminallawblog.com/

Obama Deserves The Nobel Peace Prize

He does deserve it. It sounds silly to even say such a thing – since he hasn’t really done anything. But think about who he isn’t: George Bush. Or Dick Cheney. Or some other hopeless dipshit. No. His very presence at the top of the totem pole has caused innocent people around the world to breathe a big sigh of relief. Whether it’s a placebo feeling remains to be seen. But instead of picking fights with anyone and everyone, he seeks to know what the fight is about first. And that is a sea change over the last eight years. Instead of creating Guantanamo and privatizing inhumanity in secret torture chambers the world over – he seeks to find an acceptable reversal of course. The fact that he is still involved in two wars abroad as well as tensions with Iran and North Korea is more a matter of bad timing. Sort of like inheriting all of your parents’ debt when they pass away. It’s not that he is actively advocating peace so much as he isn’t actively advocating mass murder.

Truth be told, we can all enjoy this award. We did – after all – vote for him; and what he stood for; which was against the war in Iraq and against torture and against rampant illiteracy and knuckle-dragging menace. We, in essence, by voting for him, chose a more peaceful path in the world. Voting for John McCain would have got us the Nobel Prize for Rage and the International WTF! Award.

This in essence – more than anything else – is the world’s way of saying thanks.

Anything You Can Do I Can Root Against

The Republicans are so upset with being out of power – having lost their toy – that they cheer anything that goes against Obama. Even if it goes against their own country. To see Republicans jumping up and down with glee that the U.S. didn’t get the 2016 Olympics was – to take a phrase out of their playbook – somewhat un-American. It’s one thing to disagree on policy – which they would do if they understood it; it’s one thing to disagree on their philosophy – which they would do if they had one; it’s something else altogether to simply cheer against something that would have benefitted a country starved for income – simply because someone from the other side worked to make it happen.

No, Chicago didn’t get the Olympics; Rio did. Yes, Obama flew to Denmark to lobby on behalf of his country. No, it didn’t work; and no, it’s not something to celebrate. It is – in fact really dumb – especially from a party who has eyes on the White House in 2016. What if a Republican were in office in 2016? Why, he or she would host an Olympics! Horrors!

Perhaps, underneath it all, the giddiness that greeted America’s most recent setback revealed an underlying insecurity: perhaps the GOP knows they don’t have a shot at 2016…maybe they look to their left and right and see someone like themselves – a complete fool – and they think, fuck it – might as well boo.

Yet Another Dick Post

It’s been awhile since I’ve had anything negative to say about Dick Cheney. Like a week or something. But the recently released findings from the EU on the Russia-Georgia war of 2008, reminds me all over again just how shit-ass terrible the Bush administration was when it came to foreign policy. (Which brings up – yet again – the question of just what is it they were good at? The answer to which is: misinformation and wedge issues and transparent corruption; other than that – nothing.) Dick Cheney – like torture and lying and fearmongering and face-shooting- has always been a fan of Georgia. It was one of his pet projects to get them into NATO – so that they could check the Red Menace from marching! Not that there is much menace these days. No. In fact, back before we up and squandered it, the only power even capable of any marching was the United States. But so much for that. Russia is more interested in no longer being in an economic hell-hole.

“We are all Georgians now” – John McCain

The findings show that it was the Georgians who started the war with Russia. With weapons and training we gave them. Then turned to the West looking for help – playing the victim. The Russian response was overwhelming and uncalled for. But – it must be said – they did not start it. You would be hard-pressed to find a western publication that didn’t side itself on the side of Georgia.

“For Russia to have exerted such pressure in terms of invading a smaller democratic country, unprovoked, is unacceptable…”  - Sarah Palin

It’s not for nothing that the Right (wrong) was so quick to come to the aid (verbally) of Georgia. They had no choice. Their hands were just as dirty. The attack couldn’t have occurred if we weren’t plying them with weapons. And now we’ve got one more reminder of just how inept the 8 year Bush junta really was on just about everything.

“After your nation won its freedom in the Rose Revolution, America came to the aid of this courageous young democracy. We are doing so again as you work to overcome an invasion of your sovereign territory, and an illegitimate, unilateral attempt to change your country’s borders by force that has been universally condemned by the free world. America is fully committed to Georgia’s membership action plan for NATO and to its eventual membership in the alliance. Now it is the responsibility of the free world to rally to the side of Georgia,” – Dick Cheney

Vintage Cheney. Full of certainty. And dead wrong as usual. His words ring hollow now. They rang hollow then, of course; but now they’re downright embarrassing. It’s hard to think of a single thing – other than keeping us safe from attack, which isn’t nothing and probably had more to do with Homeland Security than anything coming out of the Cheney lair- and combatting AIDS in Africa, which was George Bush’s doing and for which he must be given some credit – that the Bush administration didn’t bungle, distort, break, ruin, ignore, destroy, or otherwise make in some way worse. The media may be having a field day with Obama and all the stuff on his plate – and wonder whether or not he’s tough enough to play politics globally – but perhaps it’s time to step back and gain some perspective. Compared to the Bush administration, this is a President that people actually respect. Compared to The Decider, this is a guy who can tie his own shoes. Compared to an administration working actively against the nation’s interest, we’ve got an imperfect one that has made great strides in picking us up off the ground.

It’s good to remember how much worse things were when Bush was President – especially when you see the mass of hysteria tossed up on television on a daily basis. It’s hard to keep a hold on some sort of reality in such circumstances. When you have people like Glenn Beck announcing that Vancouver lost a billion dollars hosting the 2010 Winter Olympics – an event that has yet to even transpire – you know that reality is not only beside the point, but not even an afterthought. It takes diligence and curiosity to try and unravel the threads of truth when those entrusted with that job aren’t even trying.

Okay…

Addendum:

Now, to be fair, right or left, we still seem to have Georgia’s back. We’re still helping their army. And we might still be arming them. Once these things get rolling, it’s hard to stop them. But perhaps the EU report might make them rethink whether or not Georgia has the right temperament to be an ongoing pet project moving forward.

Things Have Been Bad For A While

I know I keep harping on this, but I’m continually surprised by the outrage that people are showing about our financial plight. We’ve been going broke – for obvious reasons – for a while now. Iraq – by itself – has cost a trillion dollars and counting. Which we borrowed from China and which we are continually paying interest. Any time you spend more than you make you end up with less money. Sounds crazy I know! No, I don’t. I think it seems like a great big “No duh.” But not to the pundits on television. Not to the people who write op-ed columns each week. Not to the financial news show people who get “panels” of “experts” together, so that they can figure out all this mysterious financial crap.

Ever since I have entered the work-force, for more than a decade and closer to two – every year I get a statement from Social Security letting me know how much money I will be given when I retire. Also on that statement is another statement telling me that there won’t be any money to give me when I do retire, but rather, that the figure is what I am qualified for – not what I will be able to expect.

Bill Clinton tried to overhaul health-care in 1992, not because he wanted to help people necessarily, but because the writing was on the wall: as the system was set up – and with a huge herd of Baby Boomers heading down the chute – the health-care system was clearly not sustainable and would drag down the deficit for years to come. And that was in 1992 it was going to do this – way before George Bush and his one and a half trillion dollar double-quagmire Middle East fuckaround.

So let’s not get all righteous about money right now. Let’s not act shocked that something we saw coming decades ago is with us in the here and now. It’s disingenuous at best. Unless it isn’t; in which case it’s a sign of complete ignorance and is better kept to yourself. All this talk of “oh my gosh, we’re leaving the next generation with nothing but debt!” needs to cease. It has been expected and accepted for a long time now. The older generation has tabled everything difficult for decades now; I’m just glad enough of them are around to enjoy the fruits of their labors.

We can get out of this mess. We can pick ourselves up again. But not through the normal channels. Not through corporations, Wall Street or Washington. Our salvation is going to come from odd corners – from people with innovative ideas; you know, things that actually do something productive; someone will invent something we actually need. Not the expensive useless poop we used to pay through the nose for; but rather: expensive useful things that fill a void in the marketplace and a need in our lives. Hopefully these people will be young entrepreneurs – and not corporate slaves forced to obey the Fat Table – New York shareholders that demand so much free money that they strangle the usefulness and effectiveness right out of companies. That model has brought us nothing but trouble; it’s time for a new independent model that isn’t taking its cues from the “market.”

Palin Gets Paid To Spread The Stupid

Sarah Palin made such a dubious mark on the worlds’ psyche that they can’t get enough of her unique brand of stupidity. So much so that she can command – according to the news, so take it with several grains of salt – somewhere between 250 and 300 thousand dollars to give a “speech.” This means a couple of things. A, she was absolutely brilliant to quit her job as governor of the great state of Alaskah; and B, there’s no price to high for quality entertainment: in this case about an hour of marveling at murderous syntax, historical inaccuracies, geographical falsehoods, political misinformation, and scurrilous political anecdotes. In one night Sarah Palin can make what Obama does in nine months. I am perfectly willing to admit that my price at humiliating myself for monetary gain is much lower than that.

Her speech – for those that were there – was anything but serious. It was what you would expect from an animatronic Dolly Parton. Lots of camp; plenty of hokum; and loads of bile directed across the aisle. She is nothing less than the world’s most perfect political attack dog; she is not expected to be remotely cohesive on any subject at all; she can take aim at an opponent, and direct all manner of falsehoods their way, along with a barrage of less than charming winks – and there’s not a damn thing they can do about it. To fight back would be ethically perverse: like beating up a three-legged dog.

The GOP seems to have a farm team of sub-normals that they can call upon for attacks that are too below the belt for their more serious candidates. People like the emotionally unstable Glenn Beck – who should be watching television next to Randle McMurphy in a fortified mental institution, force-fed downers every half hour for the public good; people like Joe The Plumber – who is not named Joe and is not a plumber; people like Rush Limbaugh, who has no limbic system and cruises the deep,dark streets of Houston late at night in order to feed on the bile of unsuspecting passersby — these are the geeks the GOP uses for its darkest attacks and most inexcusable tactics. And to a certain contingent of the upper classes, they can be quite entertaining. For them no amount of money is too high to pay to see this uniquely American archetype in the flesh. It’s a depressing indictment on what America means to the rest of the world: a menagerie of ridiculous goofballs and political jesters; a continental-wide Graceland; a land of melted cheese and 3 bad t-shirts for ten bucks. And Sarah Palin, the quintessential American and our most lamentable export.

Why All The Disappointment With Obama?

A President can only do so much if it goes against the interest of those in power. Bush was able to do a lot of damage – specifically because he took his orders directly from the interests who got him the job in the first place. Obama is trying to do things – as progressives so often do – that fly in the face of the moneyed minority. Oil. The military industry. Big Medicine. Wall Street. These are the people who call the shots in this country. They have the money and they spread it around – like political anthrax – sprinkling it on those they send to power – in order to get their bidding done. It’s no surprise that a small number of senators can jam things up and bring things to a virtual standstill. If a New York politician wants to run for office, there are many would-be suiters who can help him or her get there. In Wyoming, the only people with money are those lacking any common sense. They’ll line your pockets with money so long as you promise to put John Wayne on the four dollar bill. So we’ve got a lot of smart well-meaning people being held hostage by rich ethically challenged hillbillies who call all the shots. Obama is impatient. We’re impatient (most of us want reform after all); but nothing’s going to happen anytime soon.

Our political shitstem makes Change You Can Believe In all but impossible.

Confessions Of A Confused Health-Care Protestor

It’s the weekend. Finally. Well, I guess it doesn’t matter, in my case – what with me being retired and all. (To me every day is the weekend.) But the weekend is better because there’s less traffic and more people to rile up. And rile them up I will! I plan to go out and protest big government as is my right as a citizen of the Republic of Texas or America or whatever.

I plan to compare Obama to Hannibal Lector for one thing. I found a picture of Anthony Hopkins in that mask on the Internet. I will walk around with that for a while. Then, once that is done, I plan to drive all over town and run over people’s pets. Which has nothing really to do with the health-care “debate,” but so what? It’s a form of expression and I’m fed up with my government telling me what to do. Then I’m going to go stand outside a grocery store with a machine gun over my shoulder for no reason at all.

The truth is – and here I will have to make a sad confession – having had someone read the new health-care bill to me – and then having someone else tell the two of us what it was trying to say – well, it doesn’t sound all that bad. And that sort of sucks. Because it goes against my instincts of disliking everything the government does. For one thing, I found out that my Medicare is actually a government run program. And here I was three weeks ago with a sign telling the government to stay away from my Medicare! This knowledge is certainly something I would rather just not know. In principal I’d really like to not have Medicare. But holy bird blossoms! If I didn’t have that I’d lose everything I had paying for getting all those pain pills removed from my stomach each month. No. I need that Medicare. I’m about the least healthy a person can be and not be attached to a machine.

And my social security. Apparently the government has something to do with that too. And, now that we’re on this subject, is seems they also pay me my unemployment benefits. And have done so for about twenty years now…Shit: just about everything I have right now is paid for by the government now that I think about it -except for the pornos, my fighting roosters and the machine gun. Which stinks! Because, by God, I hate the government. Or I’m supposed to. It’s all so confusing. It makes me want to sniff magic markers just thinking about it.

I did go to that rally last Saturday in Washington put on by those health-care folks who put me on the bus and gave me the sign and bought me meals (I had the drinks stuck in my boots) and gave me money and told me what to say and whatnot. They had all sorts of signs to choose from. They looked hand-made, but when you got really close were actually manufactured. Sort of like those sweepstakes you get in the mail that look like your name is handwritten on but is really ink. I could choose between Obama as Stalin or Hitler or Pol Pot or Saddam Hussein. (No Hannibal Lector though!) I chose Stalin because he had a thicker mustache. Obama is a handsome man (I can admit it) but even he looks silly in a Hitler mustache.

People kept asking me what I was protesting – and I just didn’t have an answer for them. I’m what you would call at a crossroads with all this unfortunate knowledge I wish I’d never got wind of. Luckily though, with my braided mustache and long fingernails and missing eye, I just have to stare at someone without saying anything for them to back off and go about their business. I couldn’t remember what that nice looking woman on the bus told me to say. I was drunk as a loon for one thing. And the words she used were all kinds of fancy sounding. And her blue eyes were the kind a person could get lost in. But that’s another sad song in the story of my life: she was clearly revolted by me.

The protest wasn’t all that big as what it looked like on the news. It was only about ten people in all truth. Or nine. Because I got kicked out of the protest for a reason I’ll get to shortly. The rest of the crowd were reporters and Cigna employees. When I saw the news I was shocked that I was part of such a large protest: it looked like a band of millions were there. But no. You can’t trust the television anymore. Or your own eye. Must be some trick the camera can do or something.

Chuck Norris was there. He was signing autographs and trying to hand them out to people. But even protestors like to avoid people shoving paper into their hands. He’s short, is Chuck Norris. And he dressed like a fool – in all black for crying out loud. Like some Hollywood dandy. But anyway, they have this huge – well, I thought it was a water trough – what they call a Mall there; but it isn’t anything like what we call a mall in Texas: I guess it’s just one more thing I don’t like about the government: they can’t even name things right. Instead of a mall it’s a really long trough of water. And I was really thirsty…

I was thirsty because of the Cialis. On the bus they had all sorts of pharmaceutical reps giving out pills like candy – all the while reminding us that Obama would take it all away. We got muscle relaxants and pain pills and anxiety pills and valium…and Cialis. Which I’d never tried so I up and took one on the bus. But it didn’t do anything really except make me thirsty and turn my face red…

So by the time I got off the bus – between the Cialis and the hooch I’d been swilling from the flasks in my boots – I had worked up a mean thirst. So I went to that mall and began to drink; which, as would be made very clear to me, you aren’t supposed to do. For one thing, the water is not like any water I’ve ever tasted. It tastes sort of like recycled spit. And for another if you do drink out of the trough the cops will grab you and harass you. Especially if you have a picket sign comparing the President to Stalin. The whole scene was wrong the minute I got off the bus. Protesting the government for reasons you don’t understand is best done from afar if you ask me. The cop kept referring to me as “one of those teabaggers…” Cops. They wear a uniform and they think they can attack your sexuality. I would later find out that we were actually called that! And it also explained why that guy on the bus kept saying that his “lifestyle” was his own business and what he did in the bedroom and in the bathroom of dance clubs was nobody’s business but his own and whoever the lucky recipient was. But that also is another story that hasn’t got anything to do with anything. But it does explain why some outrageous queen was protesting liberals.

I was eventually let go by the cops – so long as I promised to get back on the bus. Which I was glad to do: it had a bathroom and air conditioning and there wasn’t a soul on it but me and that Public Relations lady from the health insurance company and the cute pharmaceutical reps and me.

I’ll admit it. I did let my mind wander to unsavory places; all kinds of fantasies availed themselves to my mind in that bus with those women. And I learned that Cialis does have its charms. But I will tell you this: it’s not to be taken unless you’re ready for it. Those women thought I was the vilest thing on earth, what with my long fingernails and missing eye and a tent popping out of my lap.

Which is all a very long way of saying that this weekend I am going to protest – my way – this weekend – against big government; even though it appears I owe my very life to it. Because I’m an American and I guess that’s just the way it works.

ACORN Tapes Reveal Lots Of Lousy Acting

Having watched the videos, it appears to me that the employees involved, using extremely poor judgment, went along with a couple of lousy actors trying to be right-wing Borat’s. Pretending to be a pimp and a hooker – while succeeding more at looking outrageous and goofy – they asked questions as the cameras rolled; and employees went along. I’m sure ACORN is guilty of all manner of infractions – just as they are guilty of doing all manner of good deeds – but this seems like a contrived controversy that in steadier times would be shelved as a non-story. But these aren’t steady times. And straight news no longer exists. I’m sure the raw footage would reveal employees asking questions and the “actors” telling them just to play along with their little skit…bad judgment on one side; bad taste on the right; and bad acting throughout…

Health-Care Deform

It’s silly. It’s absurd. And totally real. It’s called congress. And it’s nuts are in the vice of health-care lobbyists. How else can you explain a plan that would mandate bad and expensive health-care coverage? That’s, like, so not reform. Not only is it expensive, but you’ll be penalized for not having it! Woohoo! Who wrote this plan? Cigna? A mandate makes sense with a public option, because costs would be less, so volume is essential; but without the public option – which was taken out of the bill to please all the Republicans that won’t vote for it – a mandate is absurd. The Republicans got every concession they wanted in a bill they never did – and still don’t – have any intention of voting for. So, for the Democrats – once again they’ve managed to write up something that they don’t like yet will only become law if they all vote for it. It discriminates against poor people and old people and those with pre-existing conditions. Best of all it costs 880 billion dollars – about a quarter trillion more than the Kennedy health-care bill. That liberal skunk.

The guy would have been better off holding a press conference to announce he would be commuting to work on a donkey than to unveil such a monstrosity with a straight face. It’s like spending three months on a term paper, only to finally turn in a drawing of your ding dong.

It’s depressing watching these so-called legislators attempt to make things better. I mean, it’s their job and all: but a lot of them probably just went to Washington for the free cocktails and foot rubs. Now that they are actually expected to DO SOMETHING, they’re confused and hopeless.

And the wheels go round and round…

Both Sides Play Race Card; Jinx Each Other

In a sight rarely seen among adults, two talking heads pulled out the Race Card at the same time on a CNN panel last night and were struck silent, according to the childhood games rules. It all started with Jimmy Carter’s all too obvious reading of the recent tone of Obama protests – (but because it came from a former President it was seen as highly controversial. Honesty from a politician is almost always seen as a breech of protocol.) – when a Republican talking head, an African American ironically – from Mississippi (in other words a trained actor hired specifically to prove Republicans have such people) – accused Jimmy Carter of using the Race Card. Which struck many as an easy thing to accuse him of. It’s not like he was subtle about it. The former President straight up accused many of the protestors 0f having racist feelings; it wasn’t something he was trying to hide.

Anyway – then the Democrat accused the Republican of playing the Race Card for accusing the former President of using the Race Card. It was a highly confusing segment of the show and it was very hard to follow the back and forth between who said what when and what who said and what they meant when they said what they said and then some yelling and talking over each other and – wow, is this really news?

The only part I got out of it was when the Republican guy blatantly showed his strategic cards when he said, “This whole race thing is a distraction. What we in the GOP want is serious discussion about policy!” Which, of course, is supreme low-quality bullshit. The LAST thing they have wanted is any sort of discussion about anything substantive at all. They have brought nothing to the table but whoopie cushions, air horns and hand-shake buzzers. They have grasped, desperately, to change the subject to anything other than policy. So when the hired actor  playing a Mississippi Republican pundit said, dramatically, “Enough with the distractions!” it was greeted with a befuddled silence of: who the fuck are you trying to fool? Had the Democrat not been rendered mute, he could have said something like, “Fine. Great. Let’s shake on it. No more distracting bullshit. You said it and now shake on it.” But then the buzzer would go off and the circus would start all over again…

So, in essence, the GOP playbook is this:

1: Say something outrageously: evil, wrong, outlandish, absurd, and easily proven false.

2: Watch Democrats flounder in outrage

3: Check watch for how much time is off the clock

4: Demand that the time for distractions is over

5: Create another distraction

6: Repeat as necessary for four to eight years

They did it for eight years with Bill Clinton and they’re doing it with Obama. Spray the field with inanity. Keep the Democrats from focussing on accomplishing anything. Wait until it’s your turn to bat and then: lower taxes, plunder the treasury, start some “wars” and attack some weddings.

They are all a bunch of dipshits, of course. But their plan seems to be working…

Judge Determines Hawaii To Be Part Of The United States

- Columbus, Georgia

In a not really all that landmark of a decision, U.S. District Court Judge Clay Land determined that the state of Hawaii is indeed part of the United States. “Hawaii is a state in the union of the United States of America; and, as such, it can’t also be part of the Republic of Kenya, a country in East Africa,” the judge ruled. “Nor does it specialize in making sandwiches, in case you are thinking about arguing such a thing in the future. While at one point Hawaii was part of the Sandwich islands, it did not make sandwiches. Case dismissed and holy fuck,” the judge continued, hitting his gavel and exiting the courtroom.

The ruling comes at the end of a trial prosecuted by Orly Taitz – a dentist – in the case of Captain Connie Rhodes, who refused deployment to Iraq, arguing that Barack Obama, the President, could not possibly be as American citizen, being as that he was born in Kenya, which she described as “a string of Polynesian islands in the Pacific Ocean.”

White Supremacy Isn’t What It Used To Be

To be a white supremacist these days is to spend most of your time depressed. I look around at my fellow supremacists and, well, it’s just no fun at all. We’re overweight, dumb as bricks, and we all love smoking that meth! Our teeth are falling out; we’re illiterate, and our trucks sit in our front yards – out of gas. The only thing to be proud of these days is how well represented we are in the House of Dipshits. These people know that if they don’t further our cause of being really good at being white – and we’re really good at having white skin (except for the tattoos) – then we will vote them out of office. And then what will they do? Where we live – out here in our militia groups and fortresses – there’s no jobs once you lose the one on Capitol Hill. So those guys will do whatever we tell them to: or else they’ll have to come back here and live with us. And who wants that? I don’t. Hell no. I look around at my fellow supremacists, and I can’t help but notice that we’ve fallen a hell of a long way down from our peak of supremacy. It used to be we knew how to operate our opposable thumbs. Now I look at those things and wonder just how they operate. I go over to talk to a fellow supremacist and all he can do is sniff gas fumes out of his truck. It’s a crying shame is what it is. The other night I decided – just for shits and giggles – to get out my old Klan outfit. And damn if the thing didn’t absolutely shred itself to pieces trying to surround my more corpulent frame. The truth is we’re about as supreme as a strung out armadillo lying on my lunch plate. And it scares the high holy creeping hell out of us. A couple of weeks ago at a town hall, two supremacists got into a heated argument – each claiming to be the most supreme supremacist. So they got into a fight and one of them ate off the other one’s finger. Which is exactly the kind of stupid shit that drags our supremacy into the mire. If you get mad at another supremacist you’re supposed to set ‘em on far – not eat off a dern finger.

So I quit. I’m turning in my ceremonial chrome-plated John Rocker doll and taking my ass back to school.

Rush Limbaugh Apologizes For Eating Intern

Rush Limbaugh apologized today for accidentally eating one of his interns in a fit of “rabid all-consuming hunger.” The 400 pound talk-show host, best known for his right wing racist demagoguery, swallowed whole one Jenny Porthow, an intern working towards a journalism degree at the University of Texas.

“He can unhinge his jaws just like a big snake,” claimed audio engineer Bud Peterson. “It’s a hideous sight. One time – when Tiger Woods won the British Open – he got so angry he ate his mic stand.”

The pill popping radio host has been putting on an alarming amount of weight lately; but this was out of the norm even for him. “It’s definitely an alarming trend to say the least. If I were his doctor I would be very concerned. I would also stay the fuck away from the guy,” said Dr. Sanjay Gupta.

The intern’s devouring also provides a vital clue as to the whereabouts of another intern, Josh Taylor, who was last seen walking into the sound booth to give Rush his afternoon snack of sixteen klonopin, fifty five vicotin, three quarts of motor oil and a platter of two hundred chicken wings.

For his part, Rush Limbaugh is fine – and was on the radio today accusing Obama of Jimmy Hoffa’s murder. No criminal files have been charged against the morbidly obese talk-show host. Developing…

Obama Not The Right Messenger For The Right

Obama is storming the airwaves next weekend to sell healthcare reform. And it won’t help at all. For one thing, the demographic that is on the fence about health-care reform – for one reason or another – doesn’t like the guy. He’s too polished. Or he’s too liberal. Or he’s too black. And they have shut him out. They also don’t tend to get up Sunday morning and watch a news show. Unless it’s Fox – and right before a football game. Even if they did do such a thing, they would no doubt skip it for the reasons mentioned above. Some people won’t believe any amount of common sense or truth -even if it’s in their best interests – if it doesn’t come from a narrow group of people they can trust.

It’s time for Plan B. It’s time for Obama to get his message out through people this demographic can trust. Obama will overwhelmingly sell healthcare if he can get the following people in his corner and they are willing to spread the word:

1. Hank Williams, Jr (Hank Williams Jr. is a country singer of the Monday Night Football song, among nothing else)

2. Chuck Norris (he sells abdominal exercise machines on late night television.)

3. Waylon Jennings (is dead)

4. David Duke

5. Richard Petty

6. Jesse James

7. Anyone in the WWF

For some people, a well-spoken President coherently laying out why he feels health-care needs to be reformed and why is besides the point. To them, the man scares the hell out of them. Plain and simple. They are best simply ignored.

Obama Uses Fire Extinguisher To Put Out Fire

The hits just keep on coming. In what is yet another example of an administration out of control, Barack Obama used a (tax-payer funded) fire extinguisher to extinguish a fire. The fire was discovered in a little-used bedroom in the West Wing, used most recently last November by Vice President Dick Cheney.

“Without asking anyone, President Obama used a fire extinguisher to extinguish a fire. Now, I ask you, who is going to replace that fire extinguisher? Who is going to keep this rogue fascist Black Panther in check?” Rush Limbaugh wailed in his talk show this morning.

“When he took over the Presidency, he promised change. And he’s given it to us alright. The economy is a wreck. He’s trying to turn our kids into Obama Youth. And he’s putting out fires without even talking to congress. This racist demagogue is out of control!” Screamed Glenn Beck, who became so irate he forgot to breathe and fainted on set.

In Houston, the Political Action Committee: Citizens Against The Free Use Of Fire Extinguishers was created, and its members compared Obama to the devil himself. “His very presence probably created that fire – what with him being the devil and all,” one protester said from atop his horse. “We can’t afford this President. Between Death Panels and Fire Extinguishers, he’s bankrupting this country!”

The White House, taking valuable time away from several key meetings on health care, issued the following statement. “The President smelled smoke. Investigated the source of the smoke. Found a fire. And used a fire extinguisher – the sole purpose of which is to extinguish fires – to extinguish the fire. His action saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages were the fire to have been allowed to continue.”

This is just another sordid tale in a Presidency steeped in failure. And it sets a new precedent in Presidential hubris.

Obama Calls Kanye An “Assalope”

He like so totally did! He was like, “This is off the record, right?” And I’m like “yeah!” And then he said, “that Kanye is a jackass. He’s also an assalope.” And, you know, he’s like the President! So, like, how do I not tell everyone, right? Sure, I took an oath and I’m a journalist for a well-respected news program and all, but come on! This is really juicy stuff! And I can always have someone come out and apologize later. That’s how it works these days. Fuck protocol and all that old person stuff! Of course, my, like, journalistic integrity is like totally shot. You’d have to be a fool to trust me any more. I will so totally tweet anything anyone tells me if it will get me more followers! I’m awful like that! Lol! It’s true! The weird thing is, I like wasn’t even the person interviewing the President. Even weirder is I’m not some dumbass tweener. I’m a grown man who should absolutely know better. In a perfect world, my career would be fucked. Off the record is supposed to be, well, off the record – which, these days the record includes Twitter and Facebook and Linked In and Myspace and Adult FriendFinder and Furries and Assballoon – and all of those important sites I belong to.

Hmmm. Rahm Emanuel just called to tell me I’m a dipshit – on the record. Oh boy!

Is Obama A Socialist Nazi?

The Republicans have been quick to label Obama with all manner of things. He’s a Socialist, a Marxist, a Black Panther, a Kenyan, a too-white racist, and a Nazi. (It’s only a matter of time before they accuse him of being a Republican. But he isn’t: he’s said time and time again that he doesn’t favor illegal wars or torture.) The irony is that – as has been the case lately – he’s been labelled these things for stuff that, well, doesn’t sound so bad. Which makes me wonder just how bad they might be. I received a lovely piece of propaganda in Texas last week with a picture of Obama on the cover wearing a Hitler mustache. And it got me thinking…did Hitler advocate healthcare for everyone in his country? When it comes to Hitler, I’ve only heard horrible, dark, evil things…but shit, maybe the guy had a good idea once in a while. The GOP is making it out like Hitler wasn’t such a bad guy, wanting people to be healthy and not die unnecessarily.

More recently, when Obama gave his speech to school-children, a number of (southern bozo) parents took their kids out of school, lest they be subjected to Obama’s “socialist agenda!”…of staying in school and studying hard. Hmmm. That doesn’t sound like the worst idea in the world, that staying in school and studying hard. If that’s Socialism, then I’d certainly welcome it. It sure beats not being Socialist and dropping out of school and smoking crack. The next thing you know they’ll claim Obama is a Communist because he wants you to brush your teeth. I remember another President, actually in the school, staring incomprehensibly at a tome called My Pet Goat; his finger moving right to left, his lips moving, trying to make sense of the big words and comical illustrations- and nobody accused him of trying to indoctrinate our youth.

Some of this silliness is based in fear. But most of it is straight up ignorance and intolerance. If the other 43 white guys who have held that office suggested our kids stay in school and apply themselves intellectually, I doubt even the relentlessly dumb of our country would take offense. But this is a black guy! He must be up to no good! He wants our kids to stay in school and study hard so they can graduate and hack us to pieces in our sleep! Or something like that. I can’t pretend to know what goes through the mind of these hoopleheads.

This is a guy with a lot on his plate; and he clearly doesn’t have a huge appetite. He can’t afford to spend valuable time placating a rabid group of world-class fruit loops when he has an economy to repair, two wars to end honorably, an empty treasury, failing infrastructure, bankrupt cities, rising oceans, and a generation of celebrity obsessed narcissists with no real skills or abilities to deal with. So, to that end, I will hereforth put an end to several falsehoods you will soon see plastered in the media:

Barack Obama is really Jimmy Hoffa: Not True

Barack Obama sleeps upside down inside a giant jar of Jello: Not True

Barack Obama’s favorite dish is poached Puff Adder: Not True

Barack Obama is the President already! : True

Shut up and deal with it, bigotsphere

OpEd: We Must Stop Health-Care Reform

Dear Congress:

As an old sick person with plenty of really good health insurance, I detest and find abominable all this talk of reform. Any time the government starts talking about reforming things, they break stuff. Like monopolies. Monopolies were great. I had one when I was younger. Staples. I had all of the staples in the world. I made tons of money. And then it was considered wrong by that San Juan Hill charging bastard. Now I just have a few staple companies. 

Then there was that affirmative action, which outlawed me being allowed to be a multi-ethnic bigot in my own company. This country was founded on freedom and smallpox – and I think I should be free to be as intolerant as I want to be – which, as it so happens, is extremely intolerant. I don’t like anybody really. And that’s my right. Who is the government to tell me who I choose to hire? 

Then they made it illegal to dump toxic waste into the drinking reservoirs of major cities. So I had to pay to have the stuff sent away on a barge and dumped in China. There’s no end to the useless crap the government has made me do over the years and I’ve had enough of it.

Let’s stop it now. Enough with reform,

Sincerely, 

Fan of the Status Quo

Joe Wilson Issues Non-Apology And The Wheels Of Power Continue On

Joe Wilson yesterday apologized for screaming out “You Lie” during President Obama’s speech to congress – while reiterating that he thinks the President is a liar. In other words, he didn’t apologize. Rahm demanded the apology and Obama accepted it and Wilson never really gave it. 

Today he’s playing the victim and asking for money. I think what he did was horrible. But I would give him money if he would promise to use it for barbituates or some sort of medicine that paralyzes the vocal cords. But he won’t. He’ll use it for secret blowjobs and blow.

Just another day in Washington. 

But it did serve as yet another wake up call to the old hands in the Republican party: they can see the present of their party, and it isn’t pretty: it’s a who’s who of loonies: Sarah Palin, Joe The Plumber, and now Joe the Spontaneous Outburst. Bob Dole is rolling over in his grave – and he’s not even dead. 

The democrats don’t have all the answers, and they make plenty of mistakes; unfortunately their opposition sniffs glue and revels in nihilism and White Lightning. When Republicans rumble about the new administration, I remind them who they offered up on their end – and they hang their heads in shame. Even they couldn’t bring themselves to pull the lever for Old Man Crank Pot and Sexy Librarian Syntax Murderess.

We used to have a two-party system. Now we have a one-party system balanced by a collection of hyper-active ether sucking raccoons: they make lots of noise and upend things and eat the stuffing out of their chairs, but that’s all they seem capable of.

What is annoying is the fact that Obama seems to believe that he has to deal with these people as actual grown ups. He asks for mature political discourse – but the other side is too busy following Kid Rock or being rushed to the hospital to have a grape removed from their nostril or their stomach pumped from eating too much paste.

It’s got to be exhausting relentlessly pretending the other side isn’t a farce.

Thanks To Joe Wilson, Doofuses Worldwide Breathe Sigh Of Relief

It was a good day for morons. Thanks to Joe Wilson, as of last night arguably the world’s most famous moron, dumb people throughout the world were free to act in ways both obscene and confusing without fear of rebuke.

“Oops! The Skittles I fed Fido made him sick!”

“No worry. It’s not like you yelled out “You Lie!” during a Presidential speech to congress…”

A person – even one routinely given to acts both outrageous and incomprehensible – could work tirelessly for days and not approach the level of famous imbecility Joe Wilson managed in two hapless seconds on September 9, 2009. It’s only been a day. Yet the repercussions will be felt in the Wilson household for some time to come. His name will never be forgotten for those who witnessed the outburst. The blogosphere – hey! that’s where I am! – and social networking web-sites had a field day with the world’s most famous outburst. “You Lie!” will show up on t-shirts and in video spoofs on Youtube. It will be yelled for laughs at dinner tables and boardrooms and classrooms throughout the country. Joe Wilson dolls with pull-strings will be made where the only thing he says, no matter how many times you pull the string, is “You Lie!” over and over again. He’s a joke. So much so that even shows that prey on celebrity fools like Dancing With The Stars will turn him down. Saturday Night Live is no doubt scrounging up a skit in which Joe Wilson repeatedly shouts “You Lie” in various silly situations. Joe Wilson’s Spontaneous Outburst Gin will hit shelves just in time for the holidays. 

In a single stroke, Joe Wilson single-handedly made stoogery his own. And fools around the world can only shake their heads and squeeze their horn noses in admiration.

Obama Addresses One Side of Congress And A Carefully Selected Group Of 3rd Graders On Health-Care Reform

It was a sad sight. The President of the United States addresses congress – and gets treated like a substitute teacher in a Hoboken, New Jersey Middle School. In the hallowed halls of congress, men in suits and bad hair and the minimum required blood alcohol count of .16, showed the rest of the country that it’s entirely possible to get your hands on the levers of power without sacrificing poor manners, intolerance, and a 3rd grade reading level. But, unlike 3rd graders, it’s perfectly acceptable to arrange secret trysts on your Blackberry while the President speaks. Or hold up signs in a desperate attempt at television time. (Signs like “What Bill?” could be seen; as well as “I love you, Larry King!” and “FOX rules!”) 

Last night was a watershed moment: 9/9/09 – the night one of our elected leaders dragged political discussion to the level of professional wrestling. Joe Wilson, the drunken hillbilly from South Carolina with a clip on tie- (South Carolina, ironically, is the well-known home to a lying Republican governor) -who screamed out “You Lie!” midway through the speech – will go down in history as a pioneer of anti-decorum. In front of millions of people – a national and international audience – he urinated in the proverbial fruit punch of our politics. In other countries – like, say, Texas – it’s not unusual for elected leaders to act like howler monkeys on acid. In Washington, however, it’s been a long established protocol to be polite when the world is watching. Protests historically only go so far as refusing to stand up or clap. Now, thanks to a new generation of GOP leaders – juvenile delinquents and sociopaths and sub-normals of every stripe no longer have to rule out congress as a career path. “Why do I have to go to school, mom? I can always become a house Republican…”

Joe Wilson’s “regrettable” accusation was ironic for a slew of reasons. A 5-term house Republican, Wilson has been lied to countless times by a President of his own party. About war and torture and the economy and education and taxes and weapons of mass destruction. Yet those lies were okay, apparently, as they were his kind of lies. 

As soon as the words were out of his mouth, his political “instincts” kicked in: he knew he had to put out an insincere apology as soon as possible. And he did. It is understood on both sides of the aisle that, whenever your true beliefs become public – especially if they are either controversial or ugly – an insincere statement of contrition – usually spoken by a congressmen’s “spokesman” – must be released to the media, at which point the whole matter is understood to be forgotten.

And this has been a banner year for unfortunate comments. Usually racial: a governor makes a joke about applying for a hunting license for the President; another “kiddingly” compares the President to a monkey. Another unknowing satirist accuses the President of racism. The comments are many and frequent. And they all revealed an ugly inner truth about our refusing to evolve national psyche. Sometimes, though, you have to say, “Fuck damage control! That guy’s a jackass!” Us regular folks can’t apologize away our jackassery. So why can members of government? People who are supposed to have higher values and morals than us degenerate commoners? I think they should be held accountable. If I “jokingly” compared a work colleague to a monkey, he or she would be well within their rights to “humorously” beat the shit out of me.

If a certain congressmen decides to lower the standards of our political discourse, I think the response should be at the same low level as the infraction: rather than accepting the apology of a reckless nabob meth-head, congress should deal with him in his own rudimentary language; he should be dealt with just as he would be in any bar in his home state of South Carolina. He should be taken out into the parking lot where people can take turns kicking his ribs in, before being run over by his own monster truck. 

It will never happen, of course. Democrats wouldn’t be democrats if they acted like that. But it would damn sure work. Both sides would think twice about acting like hormonal badgers; and maybe we’d see some actual progress in Washington for a change.

Health-Care Reform: Behind The Scenes On Capital Hill

The following document is deep background. Very sensitive material. Getting it took a lot of work, several brown bags of unmarked bills and threats of immediate violence to small men in cheap suits. It was all worth it. It is nothing less than the real-time negotiations on health-care reform that are taking place in Washington as we speak…

(Conversation in progress)

Unknown Democrat: well, what if we went ahead and took that off the table too…

Unknown Republican: Yeah…no. That’s not going to do it.

Unknown Democrat: Okay, so speaking hypothetically, what if we took the public option away, took the co-ops away, increased the costs of medicine, increased insurance rates and lowered the capital gains tax again as a freebie? Would that bring some of your people to the table.

Unknown Republican: I doubt it. We hate you. We think you all smell like a vomit filled New York City subway. 

Unknown Democrat (whining): But, but…we promised we could do this…

Unknown Republican: And you can you cowardly dipshit. You don’t need our help. Use your almighty super-majority. You could outlaw religion if you wanted to.

Unknown Democrat: We’re scared. And it’s not that super of a supermajority. Those Blue dog democrats are just Republicans with gay friends. They’re worse than you guys.

Unknown Republican: Here’s a Kleenex. Pull yourself together. 

Unknown Democrat: Obama wants to get this thing through. He now says that it’s not essential that there be a public option. Except when asked on television. So that’s dead. He doesn’t care all that much about co-ops either. He wants to sign something. Anything. It could be a huge pile of blank pages…

Unknown Republican: Yeah, we won’t do that. We aren’t signing a damn thing.

Unknown Democrat: What if we vacated ten of our senate seats and let you rape us every night for a month?

Unknown Republican: Well…hmmm…could we fill those seats with lobbyists from the oil industry?

Unknown Democrat: Sure!

Unknown Republican: Nope.

Unknown Democrat: Well, what do you want?

Unknown Republican: For starters, you can announce that Wall Street banks need another round of bailouts. Then you send that money to us. Nobody will know. It worked before. Then, eliminate taxes in their entirety. Pardon Manuel Noriega. Bomb Russia and North Korea. Sell Vermont to Iran. Make Rush Limbaugh speaker of the house. He can take Kennedy’s seat. And arrest T. Boone Pickens, that miserable traitor, and shove a wind turbine up his ass. Then, maybe, we’ll at least consider negotiating with you elitist bastards. 

Unknown Democrat: Okay. If we do all of that – and I’ve written it all down – then we can see if we can come to some sort of consensus on health-care reform?

Unknown Republican: Who said anything about health-care reform? No. That’s just what it will cost you if you don’t want us to make you look like a party of effete wimpy pencil pushing fairies for the next three years before Chuck Norris becomes President.

Unknown Democrat: Well, that doesn’t sound too bad…no more wedgies?

Unknown Republican: We’ll see. You’ve got a nice mouth…

(transmission abruptly ends…)

Obama Health Care Town Hall Transcript Released

The following is the transcript of a town hall Obama held in Pheonix early this week. It was sent to me by a source who wishes to remain anonymous because, like a lot of anonymous sources, he’s a complete fabrication.

Obama: There has never been a better time for healthcare reform. And that time is now. Yes, you in the blue shirt, do you have a question?

(Guy in blue shirt): Your nose looks funny. Haha!

Obama: So do my ears. Do you have a question?

(Guy in blue shirt): Listen to what I can do with my armpit! (farting noises)

Obama: Charming. You in the red, what’s your question?

(Woman in red): What’s it like growing up in Kenya?

Obama: I grew up in Hawaii. Next question. You…

(Muffled): I challenge you to a thumb war!

Obama: Okay. I’m only going to answer questions that you might have about health-care. A lot of people went to a lot of trouble to get in here because they are concerned about their healthcare. You next to the guy with the sign saying I’m a Nazi.

Guy: Oh, that’s my sign. Had to tie my shoe. I’ve got a question: hey Hitler, why’d you shave your mustache?

Obama: Next question! You guys are seriously testing my annoying habit of not showing any signs of anger. You in the pink shirt.

Pink shirt: Why do you want to kill my grandmother?

Obama: Surprisingly, I’m glad you asked that question. It is – in theory – related to health-care. I DO NOT want to kill your grandmother. That is not true at all. It’s a lie made up to scare you into screwing yourselves out of health-care that won’t fleece you at every turn…

Pink shirt: But I want her dead! She’s rich and won’t die!

Obama: Good Lord…(muffled crying) …does anyone in here have any question at all related to health-care in any way?

(Silence)

Obama: I want anyone who doesn’t have a health-care question, who is here just to accuse me of things that aren’t true to leave.

(feet shuffling…door rattling…)

Obama: you have to turn the knob and then pull to open the door…

(knocking on door…cries of fear…)

Woman: He’s trapped us! He’s going to wipe us all out with his Tonton Macoutes! We have to flee!

(glass breaking…pandemonium; tumult and chaos…then, finally, silence)

Obama: Wow. Looks like it’s just you and me Reggie. 

Woman: Mr. President. I’m still here…and I have a question.

Obama: Shoot.

Woman: You can’t mean that.

Obama: I mean ask your question.

Woman: Can I be on your death panel? Is there a form to apply for it or anything?

Obama: This town hall is over. And this country is screwed.

(end of transcript)

How To Repair Media Bias And 5 Things For The Crazies

Media bias exists. No doubt about it. But fixing it will not be that hard. All that has to happen is for people in power to stop being shitheels. Right now there are so many people in positions of power lying and cheating and giving people the fuckaround and accepting bribes and embezzling money and all manner of other depravities and unethical acts, that any decent observer could not help but be affected by it. If we want to return to fact-based objective journalism, then we will have to start hearing facts. And donkeys can see through lead. No think tank, study or commission need be established to reform media. Media is merely a reflection of the deformity it is exposed to. On both sides. So fuck it. Let’s move on:

Here are five things it’s technically legal to do – like, say, walking around with a loaded machine gun at a Presidential event – or accusing a Jewish congressman of being a Nazi -but you probably shouldn’t. In other words, some good ideas for the nabobs of hate and the perveyors of crazy to add to their growing arsenal…

1. It is not illegal to fuck badgers while driving your car. You do it at home. A car is just an extension of that. It’s your personal property and what you do in it is your business. Once you crash though…

2. Public Testicle Painting: this is not specifically illegal in any state. It is, in fact, as some might argue, a form of artistic expression.

3. Discussing the erotic appeal of Mr. T’s mohawk. This is not illegal, though – oddly enough – you never see or hear a thing about it.

4. Humming during church. Worshipping rattlesnakes is legal. And so is humming. 

5. Competitive eating your Thanksgiving dinner. Why not? Be sure you have plenty of water on hand to dunk your food into. 

These are all free and legal and fun things you can do to both horrify and stun. Do so with my blessing.

Neo-Nazis Don’t Get The Obama-Hitler Connection

The Aryan Nation is confused. They’re watching the news and seeing all the townhalls, in which Obama is being compared to Hitler, and they just aren’t seeing it. 

“Hitler and Obama ain’t got nothin’ in common,” says Bubba Portnoy, Chief Executive Officer of the Aryan Nation of Bayou Teche, Louisiana. “Why, they ain’t even the same color! It’s an outrage!” What is even more purplexing and unacceptable was the townhall yesterday, where an outraged voter compared a Jewish congressman to a Nazi. “How in hell can a Jew be a Nazi?” Portnoy asks, as he absentmindedly carves a swastika onto his forearm. “That don’t make no damn sense at all if you ask me.” At 450 pounds, with an IQ that is “off the charts” at “almost 9o,” Bubba Portnoy is the foremost expert in all things neo-nazi. At least he is here, at Angola penitentiary. “If I weren’t locked up, I’d probably have my own show on Fox. I’d be a Nazi pundit. Don’t nobody know as much as me. I’ve even written a book about it.” He hands me his book, which is written on a roll of toilet paper in blood. “It’s my only copy,” he says warily. I ask him if Obama could be a secret nazi. He screams and tries to bite into my deck, but a prison guard calmly tazers him. 

“How dare you!” he finally says. “Obama is the enemy of all things everything! I hate him. Just as I hate…” – here he lists off an impressive number of ethnicities and religions and – for some reason – animal species. “Hating is my job. I don’t know what kind of tw0-bit bigot would dare compare Obama to one of the greatest haters ever. Let me out of here and I’ll set those extremists straight!”

Its tempting.

Favre To Step Down As White House Health Care Communications Czar And Return To The NFL

After weeks of waffling on what exactly is in the health care plan, Brett Favre is resigning his communication duties and returning to the NFL. Or so it seems. “Yes, I am. No…Maybe,” Favre said, looking confused, in response to his own statement on the matter at his press conference that he called and then cancelled and then called and then cancelled and then called and then cancelled. His time with the White House was marred by many flips and flops and reversals of course. Interns and staffers learned early on to stop listening whenever Favre made any decisions about health care reform, knowing he would inevitably turn around and say the exact opposite in a matter of minutes.

“What I like to do is, I like to just float contradictory statements out into the air and just sort of see how they are being received. If people don’t like something I say I can always retract it and blame the media for jumping to conclusions.”

“Will there be a public option in the health care bill,” an irate journalist from the Atlanta Journal asks. He shows no sign of bothering to record the answer. The response is typical Favre: ”Yes? Or no. It’s possible. But we will make that decision. Or we won’t…”

It has gotten so bad that Favre is no longer even believed by his own family, including the dog. His wife explains. “If Brett is asked if he plans on being home for dinner, the answer is almost invariably a five minute long extremely tortured back and forth self monologue spoken aloud. Should I? I will! No…I mean… It gets old. I’m glad he’s returning to the NFL. He was bringing the entire country to its knees. His tenure as a civil servant was a colossal failure. And it might cost Obama his job.”

Rumors that Obama offered him the use of Airforce One if he would just get the fuck out of Washington already can neither be confirmed or denied. But to those that know Favre, it would make all the sense in the world.

A Taste Of Their Own Medicine

When the Republicans were in power, they tapped our phones, bankrupted the country, started two “wars” and went on an international torture and mass murder orgy. The Democrats aren’t even willing to use their power for something good. They are so used to losing, and looking like wimpy dipshits, that they can’t see their way to voting for something they are sure won’t pass – because it has the word ‘democrat’ stamped on it. They are afraid they will lose their jobs – getting voted out of office by all the angry old people who get their healthcare from the government. Irony indeed. But not the funny kind. 

Thanks to the internet, which has flattened the world, all of the smart people no longer have to leave their countries to get jobs. Which means we’re stuck with our stupid kids to do something great. Which means we’re fucked. How can a person vote reasonably on an issue if they think California and Florida are next to each other because they’re both warm and have palm trees? We have nobody to blame but ourselves that we’ve turned into a nation of dullards and fools. 

So, in order to get something accomplished, congress needs to vote their conscience, which – theoretically – is their job. They represent us, and sometimes we’re too dumb to know what we really want. If congress voted for everything we wanted, we would be a country of warmongering consumers who are slaves to reality television and ambien and – hmmmm. No. Fuck us. Do what’s right. Ram a bill down our throats. Shove the fucker through. The votes are there. The cojones aren’t. What would LBJ do? Go with that.

I do have a compromise though: any citizen who doesn’t want government controlled health-care, doesn’t have to have it. They can sign their name and – in the blink of a mouse click – have their Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security forever revoked. Why not? It would save money. And it would make for good television, watching these hapless old geeks sitting around falling apart, wondering what happened…I think this would be particularly entertaining for the congressmen themselves who don’t want reform but enjoy government health-care. I’d love to see a reality show with Republican congressmen raging about not being able to afford chemical peels and botox and viagra and bi-weekly prostate massages. 

Change is never easy. Any time a new BMW comes out I think it looks like shit. But a year later I want one. Change is even harder for old people. That’s why they’re so irritable. It’s why they still dress for an era long ago passed. Why they frantically channel surf looking for Gunsmoke. And why they are forever whining and complaining about any and everything. They’re all deranged, like young children. They don’t know what they want. 

ROAR!

Parent – Teacher Day More Interesting With My Machine Gun

Heads turn these days when you walk into school with a machine gun over your shoulder. Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking I must be some sort of maniac! This is not true. It’s just me taking advantage of my constitutional right to look like some sort of maniac. I am legally allowed to wear a machine gun over my shoulder. And so I do. So what if kids break into tears and teachers run away screaming? It’s not like I’m doing anything illegal. Just following the rule of law the way I see fit. People make a big deal out of an armed citizen such as myself. Especially teachers who tell me it’s not a responsible thing to bring to a school. Well…they’re just jealous pinko fascist socialists. They probably like healthcare too, the bastards. And so what if I’m not a parent and have no reason to actually be in the school? It’s a public school and I pay taxes and I’m perfectly within my right to wander the grounds armed to the teeth.

It unnerves people, the machine gun on my shoulder. But I’m not a violent person. Not always. I’m just an American. The swastika on my forehead…well, that’s just freedom of expression in my book. I’m a big fan of expressing my freedom. So much so it’s cost me the ability to hold down a job. Not that I care. I live off the land. Sort of. I live in a foreclosed house. But hey, that’s how this country was founded. If you want something bad enough, you start a plague and steal it. Yeah. 

Well, I have to go. I have church. I believe in God – not really – so long as he lets me do my thing. Which means bringing my perfectly legal machine gun everywhere I go – even into the confession booth. Better believe that priest thinks twice before he says anything bad to me…

You Don’t Negotiate With Terrorists

This healthcare thing is a mess. And worse, it’s looking like Obama is going to cave in to the Republicans. He seems to have this consensus thing. This whole bringing people together thing. But it’s not going to work. You can’t negotiate with a group of people willing to lie and torture and murder for profit and expect them to have empathy for the health of people they can’t even begin to relate to.

No. The only thing Obama is doing by letting the public option fall by the wayside – if it happens – is lose respect in the eyes of the people who have no intention of coming to the table anyway – and piss off all the people that voted for him. In his desire to work with Republicans he’s driving away his own party. Who, it should be noted, have the votes and the power to affect change for the next year and a half without one vote from the GOP. 

The democrats should just say fuck it and do what they want. They are going to be criticized no matter what they do, so they might as well do something. There’s more to this debate than left vs. wrong: the fact of the matter is, as it has been for a long time now, this country is flat out owned by corporations. Someone from Big Pharma probably called Obama and told him he had to drop the public option or be evicted. No change is possible through mere politicians, because the system is such that politicians can’t even become politicians without being on the hook to somebody. Every last one of the 435 fat bastards in congress owe their careers to someone pulling their strings behind the scenes. The money to buy the advertising. The money to send out pamphlets full of lies – it all comes from people who have money to throw around: and we all know the only people in our present economy who have money to throw away are criminals. Thus, if we follow the trail, it looks like this: Big rich criminals fund the careers of greedy fat congressional criminals who pretend to run the country as proxies. They talk about reform and change and bright shining beacons of freedom – then, behind closed doors, they call up their benefactors to make sure they understand exactly how they are supposed to vote on what. 

And, if the phone call doesn’t work, the master corporate criminals resort to Plan B: Public Relations Scullduggery. This is where the corporations wrangle up a bunch of their pawns, dress them up, tell them what to say, and drop them in front of some cameras (the cameras are there because they own the cameras and can put them wherever they want) and tell them to act like a regular angry mob of middle America dumbasses. Which they do. Screaming and drooling and calling attention to themselves and drawing attention away from the thing their controllers want left alone. 

This isn’t Big Brother. This is Brave New World. A world in which we’ve sold ourselves to a group of master white collar criminals voluntarily. Animals don’t act very smart when they’re scared. Humans are animals. And we’ve given away our rights in exchange for chronic corporate buggering.

Where Fame Meets Violence

There’s a lot of FEAR out there these days. And in the south that means “Buy a shit-ton of guns.” The media makes a mockery of the idiocy that passes for political protest these days. It’s good for a laugh and good for ratings. The right cheers it on and the left gives it a larger audience while condemning it. In other words, both sides are giving these numbsculls exactly what they want: encouragement and airtime. 

The downside of all this, of course, is that these people really do have guns. And they really are dumber than dirt. And they really are scared and distrustful of the new administration. They really are walking the thin line between reality and complete starkers. It’s the media’s responsibility not to give these people the slightest encouragement. My dad once made a big deal out of me jumping off the front stoop into our front yard. That’s all it took for me to climb on the roof and manage to fall off. I was an idiot at the time, of course. But my point is, so are these armed ass clowns looking to start world war three. But the media doesn’t seem to care what happens so long as they can get some ratings out of it. Give these people and inch and they will rape your dog. Put them on television and there’s no telling what they are capable of.

Communication Breakdown Part II – The Obama Version

Part of the reason that this healthcare debate has gone egg-shaped, as they say across the pond, is the party in power is simply not getting their message out in a clear way. Instead you get a whole hose of messages and corrections and misunderstandings – this from the group in charge. The other side is lying through their teeth – but they’re doing it much more successfully. They are unified in their bullshit. And relentless in embracing it. John Kerry and what happened to him in 2004 should have taught democrats the power of owning the narrative. Which they didn’t do, figuring that truth would win the day. The truth is irrelevant if it can be drowned and beaten to death.

Obama’s op-ed in the New York Times yesterday was well and good – only it wasn’t. For one thing, dumb people don’t read the Sunday New York Times -which costs six dollars and doesn’t have any coupons. Far better for him to have written an op-ed in the Atlanta Constitution or the Houston Chronicle. In the New York Times, he’s preaching to the choir.

The main reason for the op-ed was to set the record straight on healthcare. But he didn’t get around to doing that until the third paragraph. Nobody reads anymore. The first paragraph, instead of talking about how lousy our healthcare is, which everyone agrees about, and then trying to put a face on it, he should have come out in the first sentence with: all of the following is pure made up bullshit. He did it. He just should have done it a lot sooner. Most of these loonies want to be angry and crazy: they’re not actively seeking reality. In essence, it was a blow at an enemy nowhere in sight. 

The democrats are all over the board about what exactly is or will be in the healthcare plan. Some say in has a public option. Some say it doesn’t. Its a mystery as to what exactly will be going into it. And it’s an even bigger mystery – sort of – as to how what gets in there gets in there. Because, one thing is for sure, it’s not playing out for everyone to see on CSPAN. It’s playing out behind closed doors, with lobbyists furiously wrangling, and on the airwaves, with 57 million in advertising for and against the plan. 

If this thing goes down in flames, the left will accuse Sarah Palin of scuttling it. But come on, that gives her too much credit. No way some Facebook screed brings down healthcare: what will scuttle it is the democrats inability to come forward with a sense of unity or any sort of cohesive message. And without that focus, well…the loonies win. And once again shoot us all in the foot, including themselves.

Communication Breakdown

You don’t need a study – even though there is one – telling us that text messaging and driving don’t mix. All you have to do is drive around and watch the madness. Or take a look at the news. Crashes of all shapes and kinds have happened in the last year. Planes. Trains. Helicopters. They all crash when the person supposed to be driving is sending sext messages. A helicopter ran into an airplane in New York. The guy whose job it is that these things don’t happen – well, he was on his cell phone. Probably setting up a date for the night. If drinking and driving is dangerous, then why not drinking and typing? Cars are more and more looking less like things to drive and more like home theaters. It won’t be long until the steering wheel is replaced with a flat screen television. Cars can then be made out of nerf so we can freely careen between two points while streaming Real Housewives of Atlanta on our way to work. 

We don’t need studies telling us we’re idiots and shouldn’t be trusted with gadgets while operating heavy machinery. The studies are done so the telecom industry can prove that they aren’t endangering our lives. Because who else has a doubt? I don’t. Every time I feel a sharp bump while typing on my way home I don’t even stop, because I know how distracted I am and I don’t want visual confirmation of my negligence. Who needs it? Not me. We are, quite simply, animals. Just as a dog will eat until his stomach pops like a balloon, a human will drink until he enjoys hugging public toilets. He will buggar a horse or get high in the mailroom sniffing white out. He can’t be simply allowed the free use of technology when it comes to vehicles. 

Technology isn’t that cool. It’s sucking the life out of us and turning us into zombies. I held the elevator open for a woman who works in my building. She wasn’t looking; she was thumb-scrolling on her Blackberry. She walked into the elevator and kept right on walking. She hit the back of the elevator with a dramatic SMACK and fell to the ground. It was a bruising blow and no laughing matter. And I showed not a hint of sympathy. I helped her up. I’m a gentleman after all. But I couldn’t very well console her, no more than I could a guy who puts a nail gun up to his forehead and pulls the trigger. She deserved to hit the wall. If enough people bounce off things, maybe they’ll get some sense knocked into them.

The Bad, The Dumb, and The Ugly

It’s getting grimmer by the day. Bad news is everywhere. Lies are rampant. Corruption wafts off one and all. The right is making some hideous noise – that to a smarter audience – would be laughed away. But like an old man who is too senile to know he’s too senile to know anything – the American people have finally passed the line in the sand and are now too godawful dumb to know how dumb they are. They’re angry; they’re wearing diapers; and they’re packing heat. Welcome to America in 2009, where bad news is a welcome respite from the normally wretched news. Rick Pitino has sex with an out of shape stripper on a restaurant table. A man in South Carolina has sex with the same horse twice. A man in New Hampshire goes to a town hall with a gun on his hip. A senator tells his constituents that a policy he once voted for would kill their grandparents. A man with a dixie flag t-shirt suggests that Obama is an abortion. A woman in Miami sets herself aflame and goes shopping. We live in desperate and terrible times. Militia groups are sprouting up like Starbucks. Hate and fear is everywhere. 

In short, the more things change the more they stay the same. The havoc and madness have been there all along. We just get a stronger dose of it these days. The hell with it! It’s Friday! Let’s get stoned and drunk and fuck and vomit for the next 48 hours!

There Goes The Middle

There’s nothing to really like about either side of the aisle these days. Anyone in the middle would be best served to go play golf and hope for the best. The right is a steaming pile of moronic racist propaganda headed up by a collection of fat assed overly sweaty white guys. The other side isn’t much better, but there is decidedly less sweat. There’s something about the right that attracts supersweaty barely cogent walking coronaries. Limbaugh, before he was ousted from his Monday Night Football gig for overt racism, went through a skinny but sweaty phase. Even Sarah Palin – who is – it must be said by even the most objective of observers – as crazy as a rabid honey badger in heat – seems to do a lot of sweating…

The left – of which there are many more these days – seem confused; like the guy at the crosswalk who has the right of way but is afraid to leave the curb. They seem to be waiting for someone to come and hold their hand and help them cross the road. They’re so used to being beaten up that they can’t seem to get their tails out from between their legs. And, who knows, maybe they do get beat up. The right has always been a lot more physical than verbal in their abuse. 

What’s missing in all this is the center. Between the sensationalistic ratings-driven media, and the lunatic anarchic hillbilly racist clueless howler monkeys that show up in town halls, there’s no independent middle ground. Lou Dobbs doesn’t count. A: he’s a cyborg; B: he thinks the country is being run by illegal aliens.

The nation is unattractive no matter which way you look. Ugliness is all around. As is usually the case in politics, neither side is perfect. Or all that good. Entertaining? Sure. Do they put on a good show? Yep. Are both sides blind to what the other has to say? Of course. Years of lying and intrigue and back-stabbing tend to do that. 

The question is how do you fix it? A third party? Won’t happen. Both sides will take turns pummeling any sort of third party to pulp. Then crap on the remains. The media is so completely corrupted – even the so-called independent prospective – that they might as well be sock puppets. When you can be ousted for saying the truth at any moment, you tend to hesitate. 

We’ve just hit the iceberg, and the thing is going down. Listen to the music and enjoy the ride. It’s going to be unpleasant, long, and ugly. When it’s all over, we will either miraculously find away to pretend everything is better. Or we will become Denmark with guns.

Obama And The Health Care Plan Of Death

While I must admit that I haven’t read the health care plan in great detail – what the hell for? –  I did find the following savage details in the fine print that give credence to Sarah Palin’s Facebook blog entry. Not only are there death panels, but there’s all manner of murderous brutality in the Obama health care plan:

1: If you get sick, goons in suits will knock on your door, put a bag over your head and “disappear” you. Unless you’re famous, in which case you are allowed to plead in front of the Death Tribunal, which is broadcast live. The tribunal will decide on how best to destroy you. You can be set on fire, shot out of a cannon or forced to eat fire ants among other spectacular ends.

2: If you have a treatable disease, your treatment will depend on how well people like you. Your friends and family will anonymously vote on whether or not your life is worth saving. The results will be pulled out of a hat and read live on the local news, like Survivor. 

3: If you are more than twenty pounds overweight, you are immediately deported to Greenland.

4: If you go to the doctor for a fever less than 1o6 degrees, your health care will be revoked permanently.

5: The shaft to hell. This one caught my attention because of the costs involved. A shaft will be built in Arizona that goes straight into the earth’s hellish core. People who are sick more than twice a year for three consecutive years trigger a “lemon” clause, which means they cost more than they are worth. These individuals will be sent to Arizona and dropped into the shaft – basically sent to hell – the earth’s core will melt them. As a deterrent, the shaft will have it’s own cable channel, where people can watch the so-called lemons explode.

6) Space Launches – those unfortunate enough to have an ongoing condition will be shot into outer space as human missiles. 

7) Alcoholics will be forced to become politicians.

If you are lucky enough to reach 80, you will be dragged behind fishing boats to be eaten by sharks.

9) Flu shots will no longer be wasted on “creepy wrinkled up old people”

10) Those who are mentally disturbed, intolerant, “crazy as a three headed sloth” or delusional will be forced to become frontrunners for high-office in the Republican Party.

Republicans Are Not Conservative

The Grand Old Party like to call themselves conservatives. It’s testament to the theory that, if you say something enough times, enough idiots will start to believe it. Every time a Republican finds himself in office, the economy falls to pieces. Nixon. Reagan. Bush. Bush Jr . They expand government, blow up countries, start secret wars, and fuck all manner of things up constantly. 

But they have one hell of a propaganda machine. They’ve managed to convince people that Ronald Reagan wasn’t a bumbling fool hell bent on war. He broke California and out-Nixoned Nixon. He cut taxes and ignored everything in favor of having a sunny disposition. His entire Presidency was about lying to our faces and saying everything was hunky dory. People love to be lied to; especially if it’s good news. 

Right now we’re dealing with the legacy left behind by a worldview in which the people who created the worldview got ridiculously rich and everyone else was out of luck. 

People have really short attention spans. Or they don’t pay attention. Because, in a mere six months, it’s as if this entire mess was created the minute Obama was in office. Both sides bear blame on this crisis. And guess what: so do we. We were the ones who believed the incredible crap that came out of the mouths of congress and politicians. And now we’re blaming the current collection of losers and greedheads for the thirty year long delusion we freely chose to take part in. 

But now the blinders are off. Everything is fucked. And we’re all acting out our anxieties and fears in different ways. Just like we always have. In the 70’s – after Watergate – an entire generation threw up its arms and went inside their shag-carpeted apartments to have orgies and ingest as many downers as possible. In the 80’s, the stupor was over. Everyone woke up out of their hibernation and decided, well, fuck it, join the fray. Cocaine. Money. And mullets. Everyone had fun. Taxes were down. And our President was an actor. 

It was a twelve year long ponzi scheme. The economy fell apart. So a democrat was brought in to fix the mess. And he did fix it, paying down the deficit. Then he got a blowjob and was impeached. 

And so it goes, back and forth, on and off the wagon. With the democrats we get practicality and empathy. With the Republicans we get an all you can eat buffet in which nobody pays the tab. 

The democrats inherited a government three times the size of the one they left to George Bush the Mentally Impaired. Along with a massive deficit and a greatest hits collection of all things immoral and wrong. 

It’s the democrats who are the conservatives. And they aren’t even that conservative. Better yet, there are no conservatives. Well, maybe in Canada. I say Republicans can no longer use this word. It’s obscene when they do. The only word I can think of that suits them is racist or criminal. They’re looking unwieldy and confused these days. It’s time for them to change things up. Maybe try some honesty. Call themselves the Grand Criminal Party. Just own outright sin and make it their own. It’s worth a shot.

Welcome To The Disinformation Machine

They’re at it again, those wily corporate troublemakers. Driving in their buses through small towns filled with old white people, they’re handing out lies, adding fuel to the FEAR these people already have of the black panther in the White House. Town Halls are filled with geriatric hate these days. Screaming. Crying. Shouting down those who try to speak sense into them, these bitter octogenarians, facing a long grim period of medical intervention to fix years and decades of deep fried bad ideas, are convinced Obama wants to kill them. They were already suspicious of him and his desire to beat down whitey; and they already don’t like the color of his skin, so they don’t trust or care to believe the truth.

And it’s getting ugly. It looks like last October all over again. Mobs of confused subnormals with picket signs and a love for violence unleashed on those who are trying to figure out just what in holy hell really is in the healthcare bill. And therein lies a problem. In the absence of any understandable truth, prejudice and misinformation has filled the void. Obama has repeatedly said he isn’t going to mandate health insurance (he also said he’d air all the proceedings on CSPAN alas) or make people change their provider if they like who they have. But that doesn’t matter when it comes out of the mouth of a crazy Kenyan black radical. In no time their health insurance will be taken away and they will be forced to have back-alley goiter surgeries and visit witch doctors for herniated disks. The white man will be driven into the sea and fed to the sharks. 

It all comes down to Fear, stemming from an understandable knowledge of undeniable guilt. These people know what’s in their heads, and they know their prejudices, and they are terrified that their day of reckoning has come. It’s the only thing that makes sense. Videos show aging men and women as tearful as children – absolutely terrified about what their future holds. 

Their fear is completely understandable when looked at from another angle however. If what they are being told is correct, that the government will be in charge of all health-care coverage, whether people like it or not, and have no choice in the matter, then that is a very sound reason to be worried. The government isn’t very good at being in charge of anything. Never has been. Look at the police and what a mob of nihilists and sadists that group is. Look at congress and what a thriving hornets nest of naked greed that is. No, America doesn’t do government very well… 

But Obama isn’t doing that. It would be too expensive, too impractical, have no chance of getting through congress, and one king bitch of a bad idea.

The only solution I can see is to get Obama to send out his Racists for Obama friends and have them barnstorm throughout the intolerant small towns of America to explain Obama’s health care plan, using the starkly racist language that these people will understand. They could even dress up in white sheets and hand out fliers with Obama’s healthcare plan. It’s time to play down to the levels of the major corporations that are fanning the flames of hate – and, like some sort of Aikido move – turn that racism to the Presidents’ advantage.

That Guy In That Infomercial With Christie Brinkley Is A Birther

Chuck Norris, the bearded shill on late night network television and former Mike Huckabee roadie, has joined the Birther movement. Despite what congress and Hawaii and, well, Coulter and O’Reilly, say, Chuck Norris has thrown his shoulder hair – (See Return Of The Dragon) into the fray. Like other so-called humans, he distanced himself from the movement by claiming he believed that Obama was a citizen…then discarded this belief by demanding to see the proof that’s there for all to see…

It’s a shoddy and dangerous business. The people who deeply believe that Obama is not a citizen – who believe it in their very marrow – are complete idiots. It’s the others, the rating’s and attention seekers, that fan the flames of these beasts, who are the biggest problem. They know – off the record – that the Birther movement is a sideshow and a joke. But they goad and prod these people into ever higher flights of rage. It only takes one nutjob to bring a country to its knees. It’s happened before. It can happen again. My guess is Chuck Norris just wants to sell that ab thing he is always going on about. Or  he wants a new television show. Just as Lou Dobbs wants more teeth bleach. But where will they be if one of these gas huffers go off? 

Were Obama really to be from another country – and forget for a moment that the Clintons were more than a little eager for such information were it true – you can bet they left no stone unturned – congress has already claimed that he is a citizen. So, then, to get him out of office, he would have to be impeached by a democratic congress. Whereupon Joe Biden would be President. And the economy would still suck and rednecks would still be perpetually smoking meth and unemployable and the country would still be in need of a major overhaul and so on and so on and so on. The woman – from Delaware no less – who screamed that she “wanted her country back,” still wouldn’t have it. No. She will never have her country back. Or whatever it was she was talking about. She seemed pretty old and people rarely vote a complete subnormal into office more than once every forty years. Besides: it’s like when you’re a kid: once you break a toy you don’t get a new one. So even though she feels like her country was taken from her, we won’t be giving it back. 

Tempers are flaring. The economy is reeling. People are not happy. And, like true lemmings, they’re not blaming the state of the country on the people who got them into this mess, but the people who inherited it. The GOP is right there with them though, goading them on. Not all of them. Some rational Republicans look out at their base and feel nothing but horror. But the rest would be perfectly happy if Bo or Luke Duke (or better yet, David) ran for President.

This is a tw0-party system. But one party is hell-bent on ignoring the obvious and is seeking a path to self-destruction. The democrats invariably make mistakes. If the Republicans were smart they would work to get themselves into position to take advantage when the pendulum swings back their way. They could do this, not by courting snake swallowers and horse buggerers, but by courting people who are fed up with the Democrats but also have a brain in their head. That’s the independents and the conservatives and plenty of other people.

Otherwise we’re going to have a one-party system that calls the shots for no small amount of time. And that really is un-American.

Stocks Rise On Lack Of Bad News

Sometimes stocks rise just because people are bored. Investors just pick a day and they all take a ride up. Then they get out. It has nothing to do with reality. But it sounds good. And these days it doesn’t take much to sound good. In fact, news doesn’t even have to be all that good to start a feeding frenzy. A major company’s profits can be a hundred thousand dollars better than expected and see their stock soar on a given day. By the end of the next week, however, it will come back down. That’s why they are always lowering expectations. So they can beat them – barely; and get rich – temporarily. 

There was one of those pundits – a rising class of people who make money blabbering nonsense on television “news” – saying that if the stock market breaks ten thousand all of our problems will be over. Health-care. War. Unemployment. All of these things, he argued, would disappear and not be a problem, if the stock market hit ten thousand. This is how most on Wall Street see things as well. As long as they can convince people to invest in the stock market, all is good. 

But not really. This manipulation of the market, while good for shareholders and speculators, overlooks the fact that it’s all bubkis. The companies that are making money now are making our money. Washington bailed them out and now they’re back in the casino, smoking packs of cigarettes and banging floozies. What’s missing is substance. What is actually being done? The media and Wall Street might be able to convince people it’s time to get back in the market. But why? Companies basically just tossed a bunch of people out on the street. And, in the majority of cases, they tossed out the wrong people. So companies are no longer hemorrhaging money. But many of them have lost the ability to get anything done aside from the occasional press release. 

I was talking to someone in my “office” – the bar of the hotel I call home, and he got to talking to me about the stimulus money and where some of it went. He said that billions of dollars went into under 5 education. It went towards stuff that won’t possible prove successful for a decade or more. A decade is a long time in politics. That money went towards long-term thinking. I think this is a very good thing. It breaks all the rules of politics though. Because these days it’s all about instant results. By the time that money bears fruit, Obama will be out of the White House. A lot of politicians would balk at putting money into something that they couldn’t immediately brag about. We need to move beyond the 24 hour news cycle if we want to right this listing continent we call home. Companies need to look at “making things that people want” rather than firing a whole bunch of people so you can put out good quarterly numbers. Invest in a future more than sixteen weeks from now. 

Tomorrow a headline will show up saying that something is worse than previously thought and the stock market will tumble again. And so it will go: up and down, back and forth, driven by word of mouth and media attention. All the while, nothing, of any lasting worth, is actually getting done.

It’s time for a change of philosophy.

New Poll Shows 58% Of Republicans To Be Morons.

In a rare piece of good news for the Republican party, only 58% of Republicans are dumb enough to believe Obama wasn’t born in the United States. It’s a much lower percentage than they could have hoped for. The poll was considered by more than a few top Republicans, who will say, over drinks and off the record, that the entire party has become festooned with the bottom of the intellectual barrel, to be a small glimmer of hope for a party in retreat. They would have been happy to learn that only 80% of the party were knuckle dragging glue sniffers. This was very welcome news and sent several Washington insiders to area brothels for well-deserved celebratory handjobs. 

The poll also showed a decidedly regional bent as well. The dumber the part of America was, the more likely it was to be both Republican and delusional. 93% of Republicans in the Northeast and Northwest believe that Obama was born in Hawaii. In the South, however the number shrank considerably. Even among democrats and independents, only 47% of those polled believed the President to be an American citizen. A surprising number, considering how vast and considerable is the evidence proving them all decisively wrong. 

The North-South division of delusion is further proof that the whole Birther phenomenon has nothing to do with citizenship. The Birther conspiracy is nothing more than an outlet for racism. Show me a Birther who isn’t a fat dumb white person and you can prove me wrong…

I couldn’t be President. Not now. It’s too much hassle, number one. And number two, my birth certificate – from Arkansas – is only a credit card looking thing I keep in my wallet. Lou Dobbs would not be pleased with me. That fat boob would yap about it through both terms of my administration. Unless he took me up on my offer of making him ambassador to the Aleutian Islands. I think he would be perfect for it. I’d even let the government build him a highly overpriced three billion dollar shack to live in using tax payer money. He could make sure that the island chain only got its allotted eight days of sun a year. Then I’d switch things up on him and open up the area for aerial bombing practice. 

If I were a Republican today I would turn my card in. I’d look at all the stuff I’d bought with my money that didn’t trickle anywhere but into toys for myself, and count my blessings. Because the immediate past, the present, and the future is bleak for a group that began transforming itself with Nixon’s southern strategy from fans of small government and civil liberty into an angry pulsing wound of civil rights stomping jesus freak inbred porcine nihilists. A dim highly guilty collection of fat white globe raping hillbillies. They spent eight years in power slaughtering horses, turning the ocean into a sewer, exporting fear worldwide, swindling the treasury, torturing anyone with a tan or a strange name, unleashing a virus of loopholes into any policy they touched, listening to our phone calls, going through our mail, peering into colons, and disappearing anyone they didn’t like. Then, desperate to hold onto power, they cynically tried to get us to vote for an old crank-case and a sexy but illiterate librarian fantasy. 

It didn’t work though. They lost. They don’t like it. And they’re trying to blame their mess on those who are trying to clean it up and make sense of it. While their strategy of publicly embarrassing themselves isn’t working, it is still highly annoying. Like a boxer who dances around the whole time talking trash but never throws a punch. It’s all a big charade. We know the cards they hold yet they continue to bluff anyway. 

The good news is that, while this is distracting and amusing to the media – and confusing to the rest of the civilized world – the majority of people still think the Republicans are a group of sub-normals. So it won’t win them any votes. And that’s one problem they will have to come to terms with, before Nixon’s southern legacy devours the GOP in an orgy of assault weapons, crystal meth and sweet tea.

I’ve Decided To Hate The White Man

It’s not going to be easy to do, what with me being white and all, but I’ve decided to hate the white man. At least the ones I’ve been seeing lately. The ones who call Obama racist against “the white man.” People like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and Lou Dobbs. People who actually use the term “the white man” to describe themselves. Fat pasty racists who spew hate for ratings and accuse other people of being the prejudiced ones. If you watch video of Rush on his radio show, the amount of flying spit is nauseating. The man literally spews when he talks. Between that and the flop sweat – he works himself into a lather – that radio booth is probably ground zero for some new form of virus that seems to be spreading through the Republican party. Maybe it’s Swine Flu. Maybe Rush Limbaugh started Swine Flu in Mexico on one of his frequent pill pilgrimages. He’s got something and people would be well served to avoid it.

What all this Crazy boils down to is fear and frustration. Outnumbered in congress, a party in tatters, and a President from the other side of the aisle who doesn’t embarrass himself on a daily basis. They’ve got nothing to legitimately complain about and nobody to blame but themselves for the things that they can complain about. Wars and a cratering economy all happened on their watch. The truth is killing them. So they accuse Obama of being an illegal alien. Or being a racist. Or they make fun of his blue jeans. Their arsenal is lacking in quality ammunition.

They aren’t the only ones who don’t know how to handle their frustration. Buggery is on the rise in the south. Horse sex is spiking in South Carolina. For some people it’s a form of stress relief. For others its a trigger for projectile vomiting. Looking out the window to see Trigger getting raped by your neighbor is not a sight you ever want to see. To see it twice…

Yep. Crazy is everywhere these days. From Birthers to Buggerers, the GOP doesn’t have a lot to be proud of. Answering to constituents who donate their fingernail clippings to your election campaign can’t exactly fill one with pride. There’s no rule that says Crazy can’t pull the lever. Catering to Crazy, though, seems to be all the Republicans can do. And it’s a poor strategy for long-term success. Better to just sit back and wait for the democrats to overreach, so the pendulum can swing back. And when it does make sure “the white man” isn’t allowed near a microphone or camera.

Abandon All Hope

Hope makes us stupid. Every time we get hopeful we create some new unholy mess. I think it might be better to just assume the absolute worst at all times. That way you can’t be disappointed when it doesn’t work out. Every day something “unexpected” happens on Wall Street. Consumer confidence, which is lousy, somehow manages to be “lower than expected.” A lot of this hope comes from greed, of course. People want to make money. But they can’t make money if they can’t convince other people to spend it. So they toss some hope around. Now is the perfect time to get into the market! Or buy that house! Or turn in your clunker for some cash! Or send in your parents gold heirlooms to be melted down for a check!

Wall Street will take some of their bailout money and pay some assweed economist to say that the economy has finally “turned a corner.” They will say these things because they want you to buy something stupid again so that they can speculate on it and make some money. I say screw that. Forget letting them talk us out of our stupor. I would rather never buy another piece of stupid crap again if it meant some fat ass greedhead in New York has to go out looking for work instead of profiting from mine.

Make no mistake: I love to consume. I have all manner of crap lying around my apartment that I neither need nor use. If it has no redeeming value, I want it. But not if that money is just going to get pilfered from the economy and disappear into the solid gold wine cellar of some investment banker in the Hamptons. I went nuts after the dot-com bubble burst when George Bush told me it was patriotic to go shopping. But that money just up and disappeared into the ether; into the bank accounts of a herd of surprisingly similar looking fat bald guys in suits. My money went into the system so that the banks could loan it to investors in order for them to buy up toxic crap. It it caused cancer or killed people on contact or had no value to anyone at all ever, the banks would scoop it up, divide it into tranches, and sell it to investors as a can’t lose opportunity. 

Like an out of control adolescent who can’t stop gambling online, the entirety of the banking system had to go to dad and ask to be bailed out. And, like any 21st century pushover parent, dad agreed, once he got permission from China, handing them billions of dollars of theoretical money, printed up just for them. And what did they do? What any good junkie, they took the money and squirreled it away to spend on their next fix. They certainly aren’t lending it out. And they certainly aren’t willing or can’t explain where it went. The banking system, in short, the entirety of it, is the bad guy in a Die Hard movie. Maybe that’s why they all shave their heads. It’s all a big swindle, bilking the country of almost a third of its wealth. The other third is giving soldiers and civilians cancer in the form of exploded ordinance in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And yet despite it all, they’re all still neck deep in denial. They still manage to muster up hope that they can do it again. Don’t let them. Keep your money in your pillow. Or make them sign a non-fucking idiot agreement, in which they agree in writing not to loan your money to a Wall Street algorithm. But whatever you do, don’t give them hope.

Why Is George Bush So Concerned With His Legacy?

It seems odd that George Bush would be worried about his legacy. For one thing, he doesn’t have one. And what he does have isn’t worth protecting. Torture. War. Inaction. Lies. Coverups. Illegal wiretapping. Leaks. Secret prisons. Hurricane response apathy. An outsourced military. Economic Sabotage. None of these are things a person should want to protect or justify. Yet…when George Bush does show up in the press, it’s usually through a third person making some statement or another about the President “working on his legacy.” As if the guy is just like any other ex-President. Why? What for? You don’t see Charles Taylor waxing on and on about his legacy. What is there to protect? 

Maybe he doesn’t know what he never had. Maybe he sees himself in a way that only he can. Because the guy doesn’t seem to have a care in the world. Of course that could be the drugs. A lot of guys, criminals, they end up spending their days hopped up on anti-anxiety medications. Guys like O.J. Simpson, who, while alive, seem to be inhabitants of some far off planet located behind their eyeballs. George Bush could be popping valium like tic tacs. But I doubt it. Sociopaths and fanatics have some missing things in their brains that allow them to not suffer a shred of remorse. The “civilized” world is sliding ever downward into the red by the day; the world that Bush administration policies worked so hard to break. What little legacy the man has is all bad. The best thing that could be said of him is he could ride a mean mountain bike. 

What could be, and this is certainly possible, is he just wanted to get all of the bad ideas our nation could hope to come up with, and get them out of the way in an eight year span. “Here’s a terrible idea. Let’s implement it at once so that future generations will know just what a truly horrible idea it is.” Maybe the guy was just doing us all a favor.

And now I am going to flip upside down and argue against myself…

George Bush wasn’t that bad a guy. He’s just a simple good old boy with a heart of ash. Dumb as a post, sure; but not evil. He just trusted the smart people around him and “decided” on their ideas. And it’s not like Iraq is the first country we’ve illegally occupied. There’s quite a long list (in no particular order and not counting repeats). Haiti. Cuba. Chile. Argentina. Nicaragua. Honduras. Dominican Republic. China. El Salvador. Korea. Laos. Libya. The Philippines. Somalia. Vietnam. Cambodia. Colombia. Liberia. Pakistan. Lebanon. Yugoslavia. Bosnia. Mexico. Panama. Granada. Some others. And, well, this country too. We’ve tortured and lied and murdered massively before. Just not at such a technologically savvy time. Had James K. Polk been President now, his legacy would be a pile of rubble too. No. George Bush isn’t all that bad. He’s way up there, of course; but he’s not the boogie man we like to think he is.

Yeah. No. Can’t do it. The guy’s a hateful dim-witted human pile of excrement. He should be dropped into a hole somewhere along with his shameful legacy.

Cutting Fat From The Health Care Plan

As health care costs have skyrocketed, so has body weight. Hmmm. Maybe there’s a connection! Americans, by and large, are very large indeed. A flight in the midwest is delayed while flight attendants wait for more seat belt extenders… 555 pound man stands up for first time in four years…  The obese make up almost 10% of all health-care costs. A one-third increase in only the last ten years. The number of people who can be termed “Obese” has risen 37% in the last eight years. If you were to draw the typical American today, he would look like a tattooed version of Santa Clause. 180 billion dollars a year is spent on keeping the overweight from killing themselves. I say let them go. If they can’t keep themselves from  eating eight pounds of ice cream a day, they deserve what they get. I’m not some heartless shrew or anything. I’m not saying people who have a hereditary disposition towards being overly large should go without care. I’m talking about the other 90%. The ones you see snarfing down a popcorn the size of a garbage can at the movie. The ones who have secret hiding places for candy bars. Almost the entirety of Wisconsin and all of Mississippi. You cut out healthcare costs related to people who don’t take preventative action, you’d save about two trillion dollars (in theory) over a decade. Which could help fund another war or help pay the minimum amount due on our  Chinese credit cards. If a person requires a medication to keep their adult onset diabetes, which is usually brought about by eating like a fat bastard your whole life, then it should be paid for out of that person’s pocket. Doctors should prescribe a few pushups for these bozos, and, if they don’t heed the advice, then they have to foot their own bill. Hey, it’s only fair. 

 

Speaking about something else entirely: what exactly is wasteful spending? Both sides look into the camera and declare that they want to cut out wasteful spending. But they never say what that is. I’m guessing it’s a 12o0 dollar toilet seat. But if it was something easy to spot, it would have been cut out of the budget years ago…unless…wait!…maybe politics is involved! For every 1200 dollar toilet seat, there’s a small town voting for a member of congress. You take out that toilet seat, that guy loses his job and a small town goes broke. And if you target one guy’s 1200 toilet seat, he or she is probably going to turn around and accuse your Bomb Sniffing Squirrels program of being wasteful. Fingers would be pointed everywhere, and the whole gravy train would come to an end in a big pile of waste and scandal. No. That’s not going to happen. Rarely does a program like the recently scrapped F22 become so wasteful that both sides agree it needs to go. That’s why it was such a big deal. Nevermind that the program amounted to one-one fazillion of the budget. It was a big deal because it was one of the few things both sides have agreed on in decades. Which is both sad and telling. These days there is a line in the sand and neither side wants to cross it. Bipartisanship always sounds good during the campaign. It rarely finds its way into reality however.

Meanwhile, the country continues to send an unanswered mayday to Washington…

GOP Gives Birther To A Movement

When your political base is made up of the crazy and the disenfranchised and an army of Jesus freaks, you’re courting trouble. The Republicans have sought a group of people who are less credible as sentient beings by the hour. It used to be a bunch of greedy business people running around. Now it’s just flat out losers and hoopleheads. Like this Birther movement. It’s a terrible name for an even worse group of people. It’s gotten a lot of play as of late because of its foundations in the bizarre, mixed with a heavy dose of denial and no small amount of racism. There are conspiracy theorists. And then there are these bozos, who are getting a lot more attention than most fringe movements. Like that group in Ohio that believes the world will come to an end in 1986. You never see them on television. But this isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s a disproven non-conspiracy theory. A disproven non-conspiracy theory crapped out by disgruntled unemployable ragemongers. In otherwords, voting Republicans. You can’t very well write them off as goofballs. After all, they are the future of the Republican party. And they can vote you out of office.

This is, after all, a President who fought through one of the toughest primaries in recent memory. He had to go through the Clintons, and the GOP and, well, the FBI and CIA and Secret Service, and all manner of other checks and balances to get to the office Obama now holds. It makes no sense to attack something so easily disproven. But, perhaps, for these people, the veracity of their rage isn’t as important as having an outlet for it. Its as flimsy as an argument can be. The level of disbelief or delusion involved precludes all but the completely unserious.

It’s like looking at your family and realizing, well, crap, all of the kids are eating the paint off the walls. Maybe something needs to be done. A good start, I think, would be a nice note on GOP stationary. Something official with an elephant on it, saying thanks for being on our side, but we don’t want you anymore. Please kindly move along. Because what’s the point to having a club or group of people if it’s only comprised of people you don’t really want? That’s where the GOP finds itself these days. If you were in the GOP and you looked to the left and right of you, there’s a good chance that at least one of the people on either side would be drooling or eating their belt. Sometimes you just have to throw in the towel and start over again. It looks like now might be a good time.

I Love Obama. But He Needs To Go On Hiatus

He’s all over the place. Seemingly on the cover of every magazine, the subject of every news story – whether it’s an interview or an op-ed he writes himself – and he doubles down whenever he wants to talk to the American people. When he has something to sell, it’s Obama 26/9.

But there’s only so much you can see of a person before you get bored. This guy has been in office only six months and he’s already gone on prime time more than Clinton did. And that guy wasn’t exactly shy. Three and a half years from now, if he isn’t careful, could seem like thirty. Bush never went on television. He was usually asleep by then. Plus, most of what he was doing wasn’t legal. It’s not like nothing was going on at the time either. Granted, you don’t need someone to come on television and tell you the shit has hit the fan, but nevermind.

There is something to be said for moderation. Harrison Ford was famously self-disciplined about how often he showed up in a movie. He was afraid if he took too many roles people wouldn’t want to see him any more. A Harrison Ford movie – as a result – until recently – was heralded as an event. Obama is smart. He’s a great communicator. But too much of a good thing is still too much. Americans are a fickle group of people; and our attention spans have turned to garbage. We can’t even drive anymore without sending sexts or tweeting these days. Long lasting fame is no longer an easy thing to accomplish. Now we have celebrities. And we celebrate them. Briefly. Then we celebrate savaging them and move on. 

Obama probably regrets holding a press conference devoid of details, where the only takeaway had nothing to do with health-care. Was there a health plan, Obama would have been a very good person to communicate it to us. But there was no plan. Only a faux pas. By the time there actually is a plan, we just might no longer care to tune in. Which would be a shame.

Hell Hath No Fury Like A Secret President Scorned

Dick Cheney is not happy with George Bush for not pardoning Scooter. He commuted his sentence, but didn’t give him a full pardon. And now, here we are, two years later, and Cheney, who ran the show until he no longer did, can no longer hold his tongue. 

At least that’s how it seems. But with Dick Cheney, anytime something looks straightforward, it probably isn’t. Every time Cheney defends some repugnant policy or decision, Bush looks better. Silently holed up in Dallas, trying to raise money to put together a “library,” he’s letting Cheney put his foot in his mouth every week. Cheney is acting like he is the ex-President defending his legacy. Or the loyal vice-President standing up and taking the hits so W. can avoid them. Either way the guy just needs to shut up and go away. Unless his conscience won’t let him. Unless he has a lot to hide. Unless he knows what can be dug up and wants to do all he can to make sure it stays buried. Which makes you wonder what W. really did know. Because he is acting like an ex-President without a worry in the world. Or is he? The guy is so incredibly dim it’s all a big guess as to how in charge and how much of a “decider” he ever really was. He was surrounded by guys fully entrenched in intrigue and how power works in Washington, having been tutored under Nixon and Reagan; under Watergate and Iran-Contra. Cheney. Rumsfeld. Rove. And Poppy Bush. Just how much of a puppet was Bush? And how long will it take us to forget what a ridiculous travesty his Presidency was? It will happen, of course. Like Reagan, the Republicans will find a way to canonize all of his subnormal fumblings and turn him into some kind of reactionary genius. And maybe Cheney’s public fight with Bush is just the first step in the process. Only time will tell. If, in 8 years, we’ve got a guy named Jeb walking around Washington we will know they succeeded.

Hey Obama, Thanks For Changing The Subject

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out the Republican game plan. Distraction. Distraction. Distraction. Of any form; at any time. Earlier this week it was that silly Birther thing. Now, thanks to Obama himself, we have this Gates story. It’s an unfortunate story, one without any real bad guys, but plenty of boogie men. It’s a story about our demons and the underbelly of racism that is everywhere. And reverse racism, if there is such a thing. Isn’t reverse racism still racism? Nobody knows what happened between an esteemed professor and a policemen called in to investigate a possible break in. Other than the people involved. But everyone has an opinion. And it’s all fine with the Republicans. Because it distracts people from making sure something actually gets done in Washington. Whether it’s on healthcare, or the economy, or some of our wars. Let’s talk about something else please. 

Race is going to be talked about a lot over the next four to eight years. As it should be. But it’s also one more major huge thing on the President’s plate at a time when the whole country is feeling sorry for all the self-destruction and global destruction and torture and mass murder it’s responsible for these last eight years. It’s up to our President to address all of these things. Which he ran for office to do. If we can manage to let him do it.

Next week the media will be chomping on something else. Something silly and distracting. Maybe the President’s dog is homophobic. Maybe Liz Cheney will not really mean to accuse Obama of being from outer space. 

Harsh Words

It’s an out of control trend in politics. The over-the-top harsh words to describe something silly. If you wear the wrong jeans to throw out a pitch at a baseball game, it isn’t a bad decision, it’s a “shameful disgrace.” In fact, it’s hard to read the news these days without one side or the other saying “shame on you,” for something. There’s plenty to be ashamed about in congress these days without feeling shame for your choice of tie. Maybe people do so many things in Washington for which they feel shame that they are desperate to pass some of it on to someone else. And the media is more than willing to quote the passer of the shame. To be in the mainstream media these days is to write about the purely inane and pretend it’s important. Anything deeper and it’s speculation or littered with anonymous quotes. Shame on the media for going along with it.

Birthers – Racists By Another Name

Since the charge is absolutely baseless, and being openly racist won’t get you anywhere, we have the so-called Birthers. People like Lou Dobbs and Rush Limbaugh (who is also openly racist) and Liz Cheney –  as well as some surprisingly mainstream voices. Plus the wingnuts, like the lady in Delaware who carries her birth certificate with her in a zip-log bag. All of them are white. And all of them are 100% certain that their charges are baseless. But they can’t very well go on television and scream that our President is African American. Because we’re well aware of that. And more than a little proud. So we have to put up with pure lunacy. The lunacy is so bad that it’s gotten them more than their fifteen minutes of fame unfortunately. When you see them talking this nonsense, now you’ll know what they’re really trying to say.

Some Secrets Should Stay Secrets

I’m all for transparency. But lately there has been a lot of leftovers from the previous administration that the Obama administration has decided should just as well stay buried. And a lot of people are crying foul. Which is silly. There’s no reason to ever yell such a thing unless you are an umpire and are working a game. Yet some people – grown men and women – will actually yell such a thing.

Anyway, let’s just take a moment to think about what we do know about the assbags who set fire to this country: They tortured people in secret jails around the world. They killed people. They lied to congress, the American people, and the entire world. They sold the country to China. Dick Cheney went so far as to shoot some guy in the face. They listened to our conversations. They rounded up people and stuck them in jails without cause. 

These are facts. So if this administration saw things that they would just as soon people not know about, I’m willing to agree with them. Because, let’s face, it’s got to be grim awful terrible stuff… Idi Amin isn’t dead and is living in the basement of the White House setting suspicious people on fire. Osama Bin Laden is on the CIA payroll. Dick Cheney collects fingers and eats them at dinner. Whatever it is, it’s something that would set us back even further in our goal of proving to the world that we aren’t a nations of dim gizmo toting psychopaths. Lurking beneath the slime of the previous administration is something uglier still. And I personally have no desire to know what it is.

I DIDN’T MEAN WHAT I MEANT…

Politicians have become such vulgar hacks these days that they routinely say horrible things, knowing that it’s expected of them and they can just apologize. Politicians are talking back things that they truly believe and meant to say whenever the heat is on them. “Yesterday when I said that Obama wasn’t born in this country, what I meant to say was that I don’t agree with his policies.” “The other day I used the N word. It was an accident and was never designed to be taken in a derogatory way…” Politicians let their insides out every day, usually in front of a camera or a hot microphone, and then compound the problem by telling an obvious lie. Michelle Bachman does it almost hourly. She’s so absurd and outrageous that she’s mostly treated like a congressional mascot. Someone to listen to and watch for the show. Minnesota has the right idea when it comes to politics. You know the people are crooks and liars, so they might as well be entertaining. A wrester. A comedian. A right wing lunatic. Whatever. Makes no difference so long as its fun. The rest of the country could learn from them. Then we could end the whole charade that these people are actual civil servants trying to do the right thing. It’s a PR spin that no longer works. They’re bought and paid for. They’re like athletes. Besuited entertainers with bad hair and belt buckles that point to the floor. 435 people paid to keep the foundation of our country from obvious collapse – pointing fingers at shadows; shaking their fists in mock outrage; working hard not to mess up their hair or make-up.

Ramble ramble reeble flue.

Lou Dobbs: White Teeth. Black Heart.

In case you haven’t heard, crazy has reared its head again. Or taken a ride into the absurd. Obama, now, somehow, despite all odds, in the president of the United States, even though he is a citizen of Kenya. If you don’t believe me, you can see the proof here. 

http://www.opensalon.com/blog/kerry_lauerman/2009/07/20/birthers_gone_wild_he_is_a_citzen_of_kenya   

That’s somebody’s mom. And she should probably be tranquilized. Check out the roar of approval in the room, though, when the woman starts her slide into loopytown. Anyway, as these people have it, and we can add Lou Dobbs, with his overly white teeth and senile old man personality to the mix, Obama should be removed from office because he isn’t an American citizen. And somehow, because it’s all a big conspiracy, this is being overlooked. The Clintons overlooked it. John McCain overlooked it. Congress overlooked it. Rush Limbaugh overlooked it. The state of Hawaii overlooked it when they announced his birth – knowing, as they did, that he was supposed to be President when he grew up… It’s so absurd, and there’s so much proof to the contrary, that it seems to me that there are plenty of things about Obama for these nutjobs to latch onto. This one is a nonstarter. Yet you won’t see any Republicans correcting these people. Because they are the only ones left who vote for them. Nutjobs are a critical element to the Republicans current overall political strategy. It’s why Michael Steele is their spokesman. It’s why Sarah Palin is considered a front-runner to run for President in 2012. The GOP needs stark raging gas sniffers to vote for them. Bill Clinton had his brother Roger. Jimmy Carter had his brother Billy. The Republicans have their entire base. Crazies, each and every one of them. Even rich people have run screaming from the party.

The whole birth-gate flap is just silly. So it’s surprising that so-called “legitimate” people are latching onto it. Liz Cheney might be a politician, but even for a politician this is a particularly bizarre form of nuzzling the base. And Lou Dobbs. His whole show is about how nothing makes him happy. He has a voice on CNN most likely because they are afraid of him. They’ve no doubt been trying to let him go for years. Nobody wants to tell a senile old man he doesn’t have a job anymore. He might bite them with his bionic teeth. The guy’s a mess and hard to listen to no matter what side of the aisle you’re on. He’s the embarrassing uncle who gets fed in the kitchen on Thanksgiving. Maybe it’s a ratings thing. A way to get noticed in a world that has passed him by. My guess is he will be “on assignment” for awhile; followed soon by being “on vacation.” Then, well, he’ll just be gone. Stuffed into the CNN prop closet somewhere, to be replaced by Mel Gibson’s dad…

Obama has a lot of qualities and opinions that drive Republicans mad. For very valid reasons. Not being born in this country just isn’t one of them.

Cheney Knows: Lots Of People Don’t Like Dick

So does Obama. Normally, Vice Presidents disappear the minute they leave office. Unless they make a documentary or something. Unlike Presidents, they don’t get Secret Service details following them around the rest of their days. They get six months and that’s it… 

Not this time. Because Dick Cheney knows more about what he’s responsible than anyone else. He looks in the mirror and it’s probably not hard for him to picture just how much satisfaction it would bring to someone to wring his neck or force fire ants down his throat. So he asked Obama for an extension on his security. And Obama, being the nice guy, and knowing himself how much fun it would be to clobber the old geezer, granted the request. It’s an irony that the rules of secret service are changing. It used to be a fact that ex Presidents got security for the rest of their lives. Unless something changes, George Bush won’t get that perk. Which is too bad, because he’s way up there on the list of the world’s most hated. My guess is Obama will have to grant an extension to him as well. The last thing you want is to have open season on previous heads of state. Even dickheads of state. Even face shooting assbags need protection these days. More than most. Because there are a lot of out of work vigilantes out there who’d like nothing more than to take hammer and tongs to King George the Terrible and the Dark Lord of the Undisclosed Location. And who could fault the person who did? And that’s the problem. Better to keep these two safe from having to deal with the possibility of punishing someone for meting out a just punishment on a couple of clueless sadists. Like keeping Madoff in his own padded room. It’s a mess better avoided…

Congress gets more and more like the WWF every day. Screaming epithets into microphones. Hurling abuse. Spit flying. It’s only a matter of time before things turn South Korean and the fists fly… Or maybe not. In fact, my guess is, once the cameras are off, and there are no constituents within earshot, both sides of the aisle start square dancing and snorting crack. It’s in both parties best interest, at least in the minds of the people in Washington, to joust back and forth in a tightly orchestrated dance of ineptitude. To do anything at all is to garner too much attention, resulting in a backlash from the other side. Better to lay low in an out of the way beach resort with lobbyists until things calm down a bit.

There’s Nobody To Like Or Believe Anymore

That’s it in a nutshell. It’s one side against another. And they’re both lying. We tend to go for the one who is less the obvious criminal. Obama was swept into office in a massive wave of rage at the criminal junta we voted into office possibly once. Obama was everything we wanted in a politician. So long as he allowed us to project want we wanted onto him. Which he did. 

And now…what? There’s nothing of any particular good coming out of any branch of government these days. It’s an orgy of corrupted aspirations, willful neglect, and paid ignorance. State governments are breaking by the day. No money. No confidence. And no logical way out. Unless we hike taxes up to 138% for the next fifty years, we’re going to be one big I.O.U to the world for decades. 

Walter Cronkite passed away. He’s the last talking head on the television who didn’t say exactly what his boss told him to. He was called The Most Trusted Man In America for that reason. Now we just have a sliding scale of people just making shit up as they see fit. To know what’s going on is to have access to the people who tell you what they want you to say. To dig any deeper is to not have a job. The media owes it’s existence to corporations who owe it’s profits to laws made in Washington. The corporations bought Washington and they tell the media what to say. Anything outside of that system is rogue. 

Nowadays, if you were the most trusted man in America, you wouldn’t be allowed to deliver the news at all. You’d spend your whole time asking people to make sure what you were saying is factual and angrily ripping up patently false stories given to you by your editor. It just wouldn’t work. And so much for that. No, best to just go with the side you think is doing the least amount of lying or who is lying for a higher cause. It’s the way we do it now. Or we toss out everything we don’t know – which is everything – and just pick whoever is taller. George W. is the only guy who beat out a taller person for President. The second time. The first time he swiped it. It’s not a bad way to look at things really. Shorter people – like smaller dogs – tend to be quick to anger. Don’t want some insecure pug-like figure pacing around the oval office. Nope. All the policy speak and rallies and money and orations and it comes down to which guy you think has the ability to lose his shit . To react to a crisis by setting the office on fire. 

So now the honeymoon is over. It’s been five months and the new guy hasn’t fixed everything yet. We’re upside down as a country. Several trillion dollars in debt to China for letting us bomb Iraq and Afghanistan for seven years. And, we’re willing to help out so long as our taxes don’t go up and we get healthcare reform and get jobs and the government stays out of the way. Wall Street has a whole new form of toxicity to make money on, now that they know we have their back…If it weren’t all real, we could just shake all the pieces off the board and start over again with a new banker…

Health-Care Made Easy And Other Gibberish.

Health-care is expensive. That’s something you see in the news. And I believe it to be true. Not much that you read is true. Most of it is trumped up editorial brainswill. But I know that if it costs four hundred dollars to go to the doctor, fill out some forms and shake some dude’s hand, with no actual doctoring going on, then something is wrong. Baby boomers – a notoriously unhealthy swath of decadent bastards who never met a bad idea they couldn’t adopt and make their own are getting older. Despite the facelifts and bypass surgeries and liposuction, they are aging nevertheless. And they are notoriously unhealthy people, in both heart and soul. A lot of them are in congress now complaining about the cost of healthcare. They scream on cable news shows, their faces beet red from an ill-advised combination of gin, high-blood pressure and viagra, about the terrifying expense that health-care reform will cost the “tax payer.” And, by “tax payer”, they mean the out of shape fat cat who pays for them to go skiing every Christmas, not the recently furloughed factory worker who has spent his whole life breathing in cancerous air to build shitty American cars.

One way to cut down on the cost of health-care is simple. Get healthy. In Mississippi, as it is widely known, the average weight has ballooned up so six hundred pounds. Ticking time bombs of racist lard waiting to explode. Deep fried lethargy. And now these people – who to be fair can be found throughout the country drinking PBR’s for breakfast – can no longer stand up without a live-in nurse to forklift them up. I say they’re screwed. There should be an Asshole Clause that excludes deliberate hedonists from weighing down the system. If you don’t have a condition and you can’t see your feet, tax payers – even super rich ones – shouldn’t have to foot the tab for your life of gluttony. That should cut out a few hundred billion a year right there. 

Republicans, or the G.O.P. – that shrinking party of bigots and criminals – a party that has strayed so far from their roots they might as well be on diprivan – are shrieking about how much money the democrats are spending. But they’re faking it. It’s all a show for the cameras. Because they surely know it happened on their watch. And they also know the money we’re spending is all theoretical. We’ve been broke for years. We’re all Chinese. Bush sold us out years ago, but nevermind. States are out of money. Cities are falling apart. And entire generations only know how to send text messages and pirate things off the Internet. So it’s all a big joke really. When economists say we’re almost out of this recession don’t believe them. How can we be? We don’t do anything. Sure we twitter cool articles to each other. We can take a picture of a cat and make it look like he’s breakdancing. But what will that get us? It’ll turn us into South Canada is what. A country that people think about as a case study in self-destruction.

Paper Newspapers Committed Suicide Long Ago

All this business about how newspapers need a bailout and revenues being down and how are they going to survive is about a multi-billion dollars short and a decade late. I’m no business man. I don’t have an MBA, got an F in economics, and can barely balance the checkbook I no longer use. But even I could see the writing on the wall. We’ll just give our paper away for free online and charge for the paper version! This is the business plan the papers went with. The result is, of course, obvious: why pay for what you can get for free? This was a question I would ask myself time and time again as I read all the free newspapers I could get my laptop on from around the world. 

The Sunday New York Times is now six dollars. It’s thinner than Angelina Jolie with less ink and more typos. And it’s probably the best of the bunch. It’s all over. Even my 70 year old father reads the newspaper online. He doesn’t like it, but he does it. 

So spare me all the shock and hand wringing. This was all by design. Any fool could see it. Or could they? Could it be that those at the very top were in such deep denial that they refused to look at what was right under their face the whole time? The newspapers had their chance to charge money for online content, but didn’t. Instead they let you register for free. Then they tried to charge for “premium content.” But by then it was already too late. There’s no going back once you give something away. 

Now the papers are floundering. And, if they want to see why, all they have to do is look at themselves in the mirror.

Hard Liners Take Hard Line In Iran

Maybe it was what we witnessed in the United States, where we elected, for the first time in our history, an African-American to the office of President. Maybe that’s why we got so enthused by the election in Iran. What happened in the election in Iran? Apparently, the same thing that goes on in every election there. The difference: the perception. Iran has been, for thirty years now, run by a theocracy of fundamentalist hard-liners. And that hasn’t changed. What has changed is the people who want reform have cellphones and twitter accounts. An isolationist government running smack day into the 21st century gizmo-gasm culture. We see images of countless thousands of marchers openly protesting a sham election. The difference: the images. In the old days you could jail the journalists and smash their cameras and nobody in the outside world could see for themselves the bones and brains that were also smashed. No more. Everyone has a camera. Two or three images – in two or three seconds – can cause a shift in global consciousness. Holy crap! The Iranian government is mean! 

But it changes nothing. Iran is still run by maniacs. Iran still hates the west. Iran still blames everything on The Great Satan, even if The Great Satan stands mute. The bearded holocaust denier will still be President, and still serve as a beacon for those who seek the destruction of the west. Same old same old. The Iranians might have had a march of mourning. But this time, the rest of the world got to join in.

Nut Job Nation And The Death Of Satire

For people who like to poke fun of people, this is no time to live. People just up and make asses of themselves these days. There’s no need for someone to point it out. Today’s newspapers are beginning to resemble The Onion. Only it’s all real. Yes, a man did get bitten by a rattlesnake attempting to pet it. Yes, a man was caught at LAX with 16 songbirds hidden in his pants. Yes, Oklahoma is taking federal money and complaining about the conditions placed on it. Yes, a hedge fund manager who bilked money from investors did accuse Obama of abuse of power. Yes, Rush Limbaugh did accuse Obama of starting Swine Flu. Yes, Texas did talk about seceding from the union. Yes, in each and every case, these were grown men and women. In some of the cases they were grown men and women that other grown men and women voted into office under the assumption that they weren’t windbag dumbshits. And maybe, compared to those that did the voting, they weren’t. But what does that say for the rest of us? 

Personally, I think we’re all stupid. Or at least more so than we used to be. Or our heads are occupied with things that don’t lead to being able to accomplish anything. We might not know how to do our jobs, but we know that, according to a quiz on Facebook, we should live in New York because we like to eat hot dogs. 

Pardon my cynicism. But I made the mistake of visiting a “third world” country a few weeks ago, only to learn that they were better at just about everything we hold dear. Internet? They had us beat. Cell phones? Cars? Food? Better. Better. And better. They also seem to be better informed about us than we are about ourselves, what with being better at speaking our language and more informed about our past and all. Man, did they grill me though! Asking me all sorts of questions about domestic policy and war and credit card debt and George Bush and…well, all I could tell them is LeBron James is a really good basketball player and…hey! Brad Pitt is ours! We’re not all bad! Lay off! But it did put me in my place. Made me realize what a big tent empty propaganda machine we’ve become, coasting on our successes now sixty seven in our past. I contend that the last thing we did of any import was the movie Ghostbusters. Before that it was coming in at the end and helping defeat Nazism. 

That was a while ago though. And if we keep our noses buried in Iphone apps and reality television, it will be a while yet before we do it again. The good news is, with the exception of China, we’ve so thoroughly destroyed the finances of every country on the planet, that nobody but us – or China – is in any shape to take our place on top of the pop culture mountain. So yay! We’ve still got that.

Our Tortured Media

It should come as no shock that, once again, the media is making a mountain out of a mountain now that they are allowed to. In other words, six years after the entire world knew America was in the torture business, it is now front page news. Usually the articles are editorials talking about how “it should be investigated!” (it already has – by lawyers worldwide and for years) and quotes about how “we don’t do that!” and just all around shock and outrage. Even though we’ve known about it for years. The media just didn’t want to get in the doghouse with the Bush administration. So they skirted the edges of the topic and dropped ominous hints on the periphery, but – with few exceptions – left the subject alone.

Alas, it’s a new day. And a new administration. The rules have changed and editors are taking advantage of the fact. Along with the steroid scandal we all knew about and the shitty cars we’ve knowingly driven for years, torture has been known, then ignored. The next outrage will no doubt also be something well known and obvious: prime time television sucks! Sarah Palin is a moron! Our kids are stupid! 

The media- and by media I am referring to broadcast and newspapers – the traditional stomping grounds of what was once “journalism.” I’m not talking about tweeting or sidewalk chalk writing or any other confounding fad of useless time consumption. These grey headed dinosaurs are losing their shirts, which is to say billions of dollars, and they are doing anything and everything to right their ships. But the problem is, they all grabbed money from companies that never had any and are no longer able to give them any. Advertising has disappeared because the products that were advertising in newspapers either don’t exist anymore, suck, or offer something nobody is buying. (Like penis enlargement powder. It was a gamble when the stock market was soaring. In a recession it’s not something the desperate feel they can currently afford.) And the corporations that bought up all the newspapers as investments no longer feel like funding them now that they’re deeply in the red. Even though it was there short-term profit mindset that drove them into the red in the first place. Like any bad company that deserves to fail, these corporations forced the hand of newspapers, giving them budgets that forced papers to let go the people who make sure things are spelled right, aren’t pure fabrications, and have some bearing on some fact at some point somewhere. Instead they used spellcheck and hired interns and porn bloggers. 

Desperation fuels insanity. Like huge forty foot font headlines screaming that the Bush administration was a pit of criminal dickwads. No! It can’t be! If newspapers and television news want to remain relevant, or aspire to actually become relevant once again, they would do well to hire investigative reporters, pay them in actual money, and have them run around looking for actual news. Actual news is not a nut job with eight tiny little babies. That’s a sociological effect of a culture that worships pure inanity. Actual news is digging up proof Dick Cheney had a torture chamber under the vice presidential lair. Not that we’ve water-boarded countless innocent people in various secret prisons around the world and that many of them had no relevant information and quite a few languished and died once this knowledge was finally realized. It’s horrible. It’s wrong. And highly ineffective. But, sadly, it’s nothing we didn’t already know. It’s time for the media to tell us something we don’t.

What I Think About Everything! by Dick Cheney

Hey folks! As you might have noticed, I have all sorts of opinions these days. You may be wondering if I am off my medications. The truth is I’ve always had plenty of opinions on just about everything…only I’ve always had someone who was paid by the government to care what I had to say. No matter what I said, they would invariably say “That’s a great idea, Dick!” Or something like that. Nowadays, dang it, I don’t have such people hovering about. So I do the next best thing. I call up some editor and give them an earful. But even that is beginning to change. So that’s why I decided to write a book. Not a memoir, but a book of my opinions. Opinions about anything and everything. Here is a random sampling:

Pet frogs that ignore you should be stomped to death.

If you live in a cold climate, just wait!

Wild Mustangs aren’t so wild once they’re turned into soap.

Fuck Mexico.

Fuck France.

If you criticize me, do me a favor and raise your hand so I know whose car to blow up.

Fuck Obama.

You should be allowed to charge as much as you want on a credit card.

The Daily Show should come on less than daily.

Fox News blows. Especially if you’re in the GOP and play hard to get.

War. It’s good for lots of things!

I’ve got more opinions than just these. This is just a small sample. These opinions take up pages and pages and pages and pages. And they’re such good opinions that they are what I like to believe are facts. You need to buy my book. Because I have lots and lots to say and I need an outlet!

AIG Execs Save Economy By Returning Bonuses

There is something so simplistic by all the attention being paid these unwarranted bonuses. Do they deserve the money? No. They’re really greedy and stupid people. They probably can’t tie their own shoes. Nevertheless, the 165 million dollars their bonuses added up to, minus the thirty million returned due to death threats, are but a pittance compared to the trillion dollars in bailout funds floating around. 

Yet these bonuses are taking up days and days and days in congress, as one congressman after another gets on the microphone and yells at some guy who has only been on the job four months. You have to ask yourself why. And the answer that your brain comes up with is alarming. They’re doing it because they don’t know what else to do. They don’t want to go on record trying to help. They don’t want to attack each other. So they latch onto this lint hair of a problem and don’t let go. 

Meanwhile the economy is tanking. Banks are holding onto their money tighter than Ty Cobb. Nobody’s lending. Nobody’s spending. And people are getting laid off by the hundreds of thousands. Right now, both sides of congress are doing all they can to wage a populist battle against greedheads and making it all but impossible that any actions Obama might make trying to get us out of this mess are either made impossible or turned into an epic slog. 

And when it all goes further south, they will all turn and look at Obama as if the whole thing was his fault. He’s a socialist with a wife who refuses to wear shirts with sleeves! He’s more interested in March Madness than doing anything about the economy! He’s too cool for Washington’s sewer level fighting style!

The media and congress all have us looking at the little bitty things while the big things go undone…

Taking AIG’S Lead, Bernie Madoff Changes Name

Bernie Madoff, in an effort to avoid prison, is taking AIG’s lead, and is starting proceedings to change his name. “It’s this Bernie Madoff guy that’s in all the trouble. Me? I’m Frank Ludoff…” In jail for money laundering and massive fraud, the chances of his ruse working or slim. But then so are the chances of running a 65 billion dollar ponzi scheme for thirteen years…developing…

AIG Playing With Fire

There are greedheads. And there are buffoons. And there are criminal sociopaths. But what AIG has done, considering their history and all they have done before and all that has happened since last September, defies any logical explanation. First they come begging for help after helping unleash a cancer on the global economy. So we gave them billions of taxpayer dollars. Which they used to go on a junket and got facials. They were hauled in front of congress and publicly lambasted for it. Then the CEO of Merrill Lynch comes under fire for using taxpayer money to give out bonuses. Much was written about how colossally dumb it was for him to do it. You would think AIG would have seen the writing on the wall and chose a wiser course for themselves. But no. They take 165 million dollars of tax payer money and give it out as a reward to its executives for being absolutely lousy at their jobs. Sort of like finding out you are paying money to the inventor of the Ebola virus…

It says something about how corrupted our culture is at the very top that they simply have absolutely no way of acting like normal rational human beings. They have done things – with our money – their way for so long that they can’t bring themselves to show a lick of remorse or act the slightest bit humbled by the destruction that their greed unleashed. Like someone breaking a vase and then getting mad when you ask them to clean it up.

What I don’t understand is this: we have infused countless billions in capital in AIG to keep them from falling apart. You would think that they would want to do everything they could – passing out checks at golf tournaments don’t count – to repair their reputation and work their way back towards solvency. Instead, they are doing all they can and more to assure themselves that nobody will ever trust them or want to do business with them or ever give one penny to them again. (You know you’re doing bad when a republican senator suggests you commit suicide)

AIG claims that the bonuses – which are being given to the very ass clowns in the very division that is at the very epicenter of Wall Street’s demise – are “necessary” in order to “retain talent.” This makes no sense to me. These are clearly people who lack talent, unless one considers bankrupting your company talent. 170 billion dollars has been given to this company. The most ever. And, to repay the favor, they have decided to send bags of excrement to their benefactors. Thanks for the help, now sit down and watch helplessly as I burn your house down.

Technically I own 80% of this company. So do you. But I don’t feel like I’ve made such a good investment. In fact, I want my money back.

John McCain and the Death of Twitter

John McCain is so famously out of it technologically, that Obama that it was the focus of a campaign commercial against him. The man is plain old out of it. So it can not be good news for Twitter that John McCain is using it for political sarcasm. If the likes of John McCain are employing social networking it can not be long before we see its demise. Twitter has just jumped the shark.

Stimulating Nothing

If you listen to Republicans, all this spending Obama is proposing is outrageous. He is a socialist and the harbinger of the end of free enterprise. The democrats promote their package as a massive, but necessary, boost to the economy. Neither is correct. The truth is, our situation is such a mess that tripling the amount of the stimulus would barely fix what we’ve done to ourselves and the rest of the world. It’s ugly. It’s an economic virus that we’ve unleashed throughout the world. Other countries have already stepped to the plate and stimulated their economy. We will dither and grandstand and flail about in order to pour a cup of water in the ocean. 

We know this. Our leaders think we don’t. And I think that’s why there’s not a lot of confidence in the market right now. Washington -on both sides-isn’t showing any signs of knowing what to do. Our system of checks and balances – combined with 24/7 news coverage-make us not the most nimble of countries in times of crisis. Six months after this thing- and by thing, I mean the bedrock from whence the entire global economy relies-started to go, we’re still waiting for the starter gun to go off. Politicians go on television and make speeches for one viewpoint or another, accomplishing nothing and getting us nowhere. 

This stimulus bill will make it through congress over the protesting bodies of lots of brainwashed Republicans. But it’s not enough. It won’t do enough. And that’s the pathetic sad truth nobody wants to acknowledge.

So what if we spend a little money?

I don’t care how big this stimulus thing ends up being. For one thing, it appears to be more than merely a handout. When George Bush inherited a surplus – before 9/11 – he did what all Republicans do. He immediately squandered it. He gave everyone 300 bucks. Then, in September of this year, long after he had spent more deficit money than any President since such things have been recorded – he gave 700 billion dollars to three bald guys in New York, who then promptly disappeared. 

Our economy is a mess. Bush went on television and assured the nation that the best thing we could do, given the situation, is shit our pants. Talk about not being able to inspire. The man was a walking panic button. So people locked themselves in their homes and curled up into fetal balls and rocked back and forth…

Enter Obama. He’s been in office a month. He’s inherited the biggest pile of decaying stink in over 70 years. So he decided that he needed to stimulate the economy. But, rather than simply give money away to pigfuckers on Wall Street, he decided to create a pro-active stimulus package. Sure he’s spending money. Lots of it. Oodles of it. Millions and millions of zeros are involved. But it’s actually going towards something. And it is for this that the Republicans are pissed. In their world, a stimulus package means that they pay less taxes and have more money to spend on whores and colonoscopies. Obama wants the money to go into things that create things and add jobs and make things easier and more efficient. This is unacceptable to the right. It goes against the formula that they have relied on for decades. Cut people’s taxes and who gives a shit if you know what your doing. That’s their game plan and they’ve been working off of it forever. Well, guess what? That has come to a screeching halt. Those days are over. We all have our eyes open now. And we can see what’s going on. And it’s pissing them off. They need to either come up with an alternative solution (talk radio shows are not solutions; just noise.) or shut up and go home and count all the money they’ve stolen over the years.

Baby Boomers Faced With Prospect Of Having To Finally Grow Up

Much like the cartoon character that can float in space so long as he doesn’t look down, the generation that came after The Greatest Generation, the so-called Baby Boomers, along with the rest of us, have just looked down. And now gravity is exerting its laws on all of us. The days of doing and getting and behaving however we want are over. Luxuries like fat injected into lips and removed from hips are over. It’s time to spend money on things that have some sort of value aside from self-esteem. Gizmos and doodads and ski chalets are nice – so long as you can afford them. And this generation has long known that it has been driving the country into debt. Yet they chose to ignore it and drive the car further into the mud. Generation X and Y and Millenials and Echo Boomers and whatever other term we apply to a grouping of people of similar ages in the future, will have to look at the many many many zeros on the national debt that it has been saddled with. 

This is nothing new. This is nothing to pretend to be shocked by. It just is. Unfortunately for baby boomers, the reckoning is coming a dozen years earlier than expected. The American Dream, as it has been called, has always had the word Dream in it. Dreams are things that happen to you until you wake up and see where you really are. And right now we are in a huge mess!

So how did it come to this? Everyone has a theory. And their theory usually involves pointing the finger somewhere else. But I think it comes from the current American Soul. It comes from that desire instilled in us all to matter. To succeed. To drive the nice car. To wear the nice watch. To have the deluxe apartment in the sky. To move on up. To keep up. No matter what. Even if it means lying and making money from it. Our very nature has been corrupted. Wall Street bankers knowingly misled investors so they could reline their pool in the back of their castles in Germany. Mortgage lenders knowingly lent to people unprepared to pay back their loans. And average Americans raised to finally get the house of their dreams signed on the dotted line. 

Unfortunately, people around the world are paying for our consumptive culture. Our very foundation is built on consumption. Shopping is in our DNA. The big TV. The boat. The beach house. We consume 25% of the world’s resources. We use the most gas. We make the most waste. We buy the most crap. And we get the most boob jobs. 

So how do we fix it?

Well, for one thing, we’re going to have to raise taxes. The uber rich may not like it. But they’re the ones who profited off this world-wide mess, fuck ‘em. We have trillions of dollars in debt. And we will soon have trillions and trillions more with Medicaid and Social Security. Someone will have to pay for it. And it might as well be the fucking bozos who are behind every travesty of the last fifty years. Those rascally baby boomers who sold their free spirited 60’s soul and joined the squares with a vengeance. The ones who invented and made Viagra the biggest sponsor of Major League Baseball and Nascar. The ones who spent the seventies lying on their shag carpets downing barbituates and having orgies. The ones who invented cocaine fueled modern-day greed in the 80’s. The ones who made Walker, Texas Ranger a hit television show in the 90’s, and the ones who created and profited off reality television in the ’00’s. 

It’s time for them to be humbled a bit. The rest of us have long known we’d eventually have to tighten our belts and get to work. That time has come. Now we just have to figure out how the fuck to do it.

As the world falls into a massive tailspin, here comes Tiger!

This was originally published in February. And we all know what happened – ed.

Like a superhero swooping in to save the day, Tiger Woods is set to play golf again. So what you say? Because he’s going to bring us all back. In every direction we are bombarded by bad news. The economy is fucked. The politicians don’t know their ass from their elbow. Baseball is filled with steroid injecting douche bags. Kevin Garnett is injured. Kobe Bryant is really good at basketball and a total dick. Bad news is running roughshod around the globe at the speed of bandwidth. But there is some light – a flicker anyway – out there. A little piece of good news. Tiger Woods is teeing off again. It’s good news for the PGA, of course. But it’s also just good news, of which there has been precious little to sensationalize. The only thing the media cares to print these days is how sick and hopeless our global spirit is; determined, they are, to take a bad situation and see how far they can push it downward. Their goose is cooked and they won’t be happy unless they take everyone else down with them. But some good news you can’t ignore. Like the sight of Tiger hitting 350 yard bombers up on to the green, once again slaughtering the competition like a super-focused Mako Shark on speed.

We’ve been in dire straits before. And we always turn it around. In 1996 things were bad. Then Michael Jordan realized he sucked at baseball and returned to the Bulls. Then every stock he was affiliated with climbed up a combined 70 billion in a single day. My guess is Tiger won’t be able to save Buick. My guess is nobody can. My guess is a Buick is a Buick and is therefore doomed. But his superiority on the links will serve as a much needed salve to our collective gloom.

We Saw This Coming

You don’t need a sociology degree to know that whatever culture promotes, in time, eventually comes to pass. And for years we have worshipped at the altar of consumption and riches and fame. Wall Street is all about making money. Lots of it. These titans of malfeasance can’t just buy a house. They have to buy a castle. They can’t have a car. They need a fleet. Nevermind that none of them could possibly live in the manner that they have through legitimate means. Just like you can’t hit 73 homeruns in a year without help, you can’t have your hedge fund appreciate every year without a fair amount of make believe. The stock market hovered around 14,000 as recently as last September because everyone agreed that things were going along swimmingly. They all agreed to ignore the obvious. As did we. We knew baseball was juiced. We knew we were losing the war. We knew our products sucked. We knew our kids were stupid. We knew we couldn’t afford what we bought. We knew there was no market for 300k condo apartments with communal bathrooms. And we willfully ignored what we couldn’t repress. Growing up my dad would always pay for dinner. He put it on his credit card. He was trying to show off to his friends. Who was in turn showed off to my dad. None of them had a lick of money, but it was very important that the others not know it. So they faked it and amassed up oodles of debt. That’s what the entire globe has been doing for about sixteen years now. 

We haven’t been amassing wealth. We’ve been amassing debt. Except for a few very smart criminals at the very top of the banking system. And the Chinese government, who funded our futile quest to turn the Middle East into a shopping mall. When our heroes are the likes of Brittany Spears and Jay Z, instead of, say, Bill Gates or those Google geeks – what else could we expect? Our kids want to be rich and famous. Not from inventing something brilliant. But by living in a television house with cameras in the bathroom. The only thing going for us right now is the fact that we’ve fucked up everyone else.

There’s a lot of rage and anger out there. And the media is looking for fresh targets. So we pillory A-Rod for being a lying jackass. We pillory that CEO for buying a 35,00o crapper. And we pillory Obama for trying to stimulate a failed economy. But the truth is, the targets are everywhere. Except for our grandparents. You know: that generation that lives and lived within their means? Their probably pissed. And the baby boomers: their pissed because their plan to foist all their problems onto the next generation has backfired prematurely. They are feeling the pinch. As well they should. For they are the ones – these one-time hippies – who embraced greed and worked so hard to make up for their parents frugality. 

Right now, we’re mad. We can’t afford to survive in a world that demands so much investment. It costs more for basic things than even the best of jobs – Wall Street and Cocaine Cartels don’t count – can provide. There are solutions. But they aren’t ones the majority of us are prepared to accept. So, in the meantime, I suppose we can just continue to criticize everyone who tries to do anything to fix it.

This is no way to bailout anything

I like Obama. I think he’s very smart. But, because of the way politics works, he is surrounded by a bunch of extremely smart ass eating greedheads. They have been lining their pockets for years on end from the very people who have chased so much risk to line their pockets with cash bonuses for basically buying up crap and selling it as gold while knowing it was crap. Wall Street culture is as corrupt as a culture can be. They are a breed incapable of behaving in a manner the rest of the planet can understand. They go to the dentist in a rented jet. They get their haircuts in Florence, Italy. They don’t know how to get us out of this mess because their brains are no longer capable of behaving rationally. They want all the money they had back. All the imaginary money that only existed on paper. They want their shallow fuckball lives back. And if that means they use our hard-earned money to do it, so be it. If they have to break the very back of the country to keep their Hamptons house, they will do it. It’s in their nature. They can’t help it.

The problem is worldwide and huge. Congress is grandstanding over a massive stimulus package that is roughly nine hundred trillion dollars less than the amount of toxic waste banks have been using our money to buy up with such gusto. No amount of money – even nonexistent money! – can fix this mess. Banks aren’t lending because they don’t have any money. People aren’t paying their mortgages, because they no longer have jobs and couldn’t afford the houses they were talked into buying. 

This is a reckoning. Over-bloated home prices are going down rapidly. Who knows? One day they might make it all the way down to what they are actually worth. Washington and Wall Street and banks and corporations are now frantically shaking down the entire population looking for loose change. 

Building a bridge here and there won’t make up for the oceans of people who are wandering the streets in confusion, unable to pay their rent, keep their insurance, pay for their kids to go to school, and wondering where all those decades of hard earned savings went. It’s better than a kick in the head, but it won’t come close to fixing the damage that a long entrenched culture of excess and greed has wrought on each and every one of us. Not by a country mile.

This whole bailout thing is just theatre.

I Don’t Care What Some Greedhead Makes

The media wants to create a class war. You can’t turn on the television or read the newspaper without some new fat cat’s face on the front page for one thing or another: CEO gets seaweed facial! Executive takes family skiing! It’s all designed to piss people off. Like all the people that have lost their jobs.

Let me just say that I don’t give a crap what some New York pasty faced fat ass gets paid. I just don’t want him or her to be a moron. That’s all. You can pilot a three hundred foot yacht around the man-made lake in your backyard for all I care. Just don’t be lousy at your job. It’s not too much to ask. Or it shouldn’t be. But it is. These people at the top – they aren’t all that smart. That’s the big secret that’s recently been unveiled. It was probably there to see all along. We just didn’t want to look. (Sort of like professional baseball. Everyone knew the players were juiced. Everyone. Every ass last one of us. But now that there is more and more proof to the fact, we’re all up in arms. Fuck us. We’re hypocrites. We can put up with all sorts of ass-baggery until it’s rubbed in our face. Then we turn around and attack…) 

The media isn’t remotely innocent in any of this. Of the 800,000,000,000,000,000 jobs lost every hour, a good quarter of them can be directly blamed on the media’s habit of blowing everything to such a high pitched sensational whine that rational people have no choice but to run around screaming, kicking their pets, and stocking up on weapons. We are collectively talking ourselves into a massive depression. We are creating a self-fulfilling prophesy of doom. Companies lay off people so they can have a “better than expected quarterly return” so that there stock will rise. Then all those laid off people go home and lay on their floor and cry for months. Or they do something else. What they don’t do is run out and by a 61″ plasma television. So sales plummet. And the people in the suits in New York release more human ballast to stay afloat. They “restructure” and “reorganize” and “seal their fate if they don’t get tax payer relief.” The reason for all this, of course, is The Shareholders. Who are the shareholders, you ask? They are a group of extremely sweaty fat people with bad hair and zipper scars on their chests, who sit around a big table in a conference room in Manhattan and demand the same profits they get when the economy is singing. So what if sales are down – I want my money! The leader of this group – and this is just a guess on my part – is Tommy Chong. It’s the only thing that makes sense. It’s the only plausible conclusion based on the choices that have been made by major corporations throughout the country these last three or four months. I hope I’m wrong but I doubt it.

Don’t blame some greedhead for being rich. Don’t blame that guy who makes polo shirts for selling them for four hundred times more than they are worth. That’s the American Way. Blame the rat eating lunatic who ignores his company’s health because he’s chasing silicone down Hollywood Boulevard instead of paying attention. And the desperate editors who refuse to publish anything that won’t start a riot of fear.

They’re Doing It Again

It’s what they do, these Republicans. Derelict, adrift, out of ideas, and out of office – they pester and annoy and trivialize and attack. They are “no” bodies. They tell you your ideas suck, but offer up none of their own, excepting lowering taxes on the very jackals that unleashed the global financial virus the world is now experiencing. John McCain did it during the campaign: he complained about Obama getting a slide projector for a Chicago Museum. They nitpick the picayune so that what is truly important is overlooked. And they have the gall to act like this whole mess didn’t transpire on their watch. They are the waiter that forgets your order and gets mad at you for reminding them of it. They are the guy at the meeting that shoots down all the ideas and tells everyone you don’t know what you’re doing and never comes up with anything or even pretends to. They deserve nothing but our scorn and perhaps a few years of hard labor.

Change You Can Hide From The IRS

This is a hell of a way to start. After campaigning as the Elliott Ness of Presidents – vowing to clean up Washington and change the way they’ve been going about doing business for decades – Obama can’t seem to find people who can pay what they owe. It’s embarrassing. Much has been written and spoken about the level of scrutiny Obama’s job application went into. It was “unparalleled!” It was “invasive!” It was “overly thorough!” It was, apparently, “not used!” Obama, unlike his predecessor, George the Terrible, is at ease with apologizing. He likes to say, “I screwed up.” This is nice. This is a welcome change. But it will only take him so far. We are trying to get away from leaders who screw up all the time, even if they openly admit it. Obama has opened up his flank to attacks from a vicious criminal enterprise filled with venomous overfed rats. The degree of moral superiority Obama exudes, combined with the hero worship he has been receiving from a mass of people terrified that the country is falling to pieces, means Obama doesn’t have a long leash. He has a narrow ledge on which to walk. He’s orated himself into a corner.

And if he’s not careful, he’ll find himself trapped there.

GOP Resorts To Public Poop Throwing

There’s a point in many relationships – bad ones that never should have been entered into – when things go from bad to ugly. The GOP was bad during the campaign, tossing off lies and innuendos and relentlessly attacking with falsehoods. It backfired. It backfired to such an extent that many of the people who had been doing it distanced themselves from themselves. John McCain, Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee – even Newt Gingrich! – and anyone else with aspirations beyond public disdain are working hard to get away from a national party that had gone ugly early and lost resoundingly. 

Most people when they reach a point when their tactics spectacularly backfire, change course. Not the RNC. Now, as they seek to taint the President-elect with the Blogo scandal, releasing a video in which they connect the two with no evidence at all, other than a tape recording in which the scandal-plagued governor refers to Obama as a motherfucker – hardly a term of endearment that – have publicly lost their shit. They’ve snapped. They’re the guy who shows up to work wearing a diaper eating a dead squirrel and laughing. No longer lacking any sense of a moral compass, they have tacked sharply towards the insane. Publicly despised, they seek immortal infamy. In four years if they nominated the world’s largest tomato, it would not surprise. Rather than seek a way to return to public discourse they’ve chosen to be the guy who shows up to the office party covered in their own feces. It’s sad. But it’s not deserving of sympathy. Or news coverage.

A Red State With Subsumed Rage

I just got back from Florida. (They always pick a winner; even if they have to cheat.) There is something in the air when you visit a state that saw their man win. The air is easier to breathe. The people are more approachable. The beers are cheaper. And laughter is louder and more genuine.

Contrast that with Georgia, where, for reasons unclear, I call home. Georgia has a long and mixed history. It was founded by crooks. And it’s the very center of Dixie. Rebel flags. Moonshine. Shotguns. Hate. Meth. And kudzu. It’s the home of Deliverance. Which was a complete understatement of a book and movie.

On the other hand there’s Atlanta. Where a reverend with a dream changed the world and the course of our country forever.

Slavery and freedom; Civil War and Civil Rights; MLK and KKK; Saxby Chambliss and Ludacris. But for all of that history and all of that progress, underneath there is plenty of the loser’s resentment. The south lost the Civil War – but it was Georgia that Sherman burned to the ground. It was well over a hundred years ago, but there are plenty on both sides who feel it happened yesterday. Civil rights may have started it’s march in Atlanta, but it was never really taken to heart here. Black and white are largely still separated to this day. And racism’s effects show a remarkable disparity between the two…

What the hell am I talking about?

That’s a good question, and had you not asked it I might never have given you an answer. But there is a point. In Florida, turning from red to blue wasn’t all that hard. The red guy was an obvious fool and the economy was in the shitter. And the blue guy was clearly smart. In Georgia they just saw black. And they voted for or against it. They worked off an older ideology. And the majority of them lost. Some like it; many don’t. People go about their days and smile and do all the crap they do to keep the city and their lives moving forward. But there’s an underlying tension. They smile less. They eat more. Their laughs are harsher and less care free. Their eyes are a mix of fear, hostility, and emptiness. Southern Hospitality if it ever existed, didn’t find it’s home in Georgia. The New York of the south would never stand for its inclusiveness. Tomorrow many will cast a vote for a man clearly courting the openly racist. 

The pundits on television may speak of a post-racial era. But while we may have taken a large step forward, there are still plenty of people who never even put on their shoes.

His Brother’s Lame Duck Body Still Warm, Brother Jeb Seeks His Oval Office

Jeb Bush. You know, they like to tell us, he is the smart one. As if that was a hard thing to be. He was the governor of Florida before the guy they secretly think is gay was. The Florida governor is a basically ceremonial post unless one’s dumb mean older brother is running for President and your family dynamic has instilled in you to lie, cheat and steal in pursuit of family interests. Well, with Obama already further to the center than the left would like, Jeb feels the right is already being undermined. So he is suggesting they set up their own government separate from well, the real one. This is, after all a center right nation, as they now like to say. Right now, in the current GOP administration, the government is so far to the right it tipped the scale years ago. The center-right is so far to the left they can’t even see it. Their sense of balance is so awry that the outlawing of torture seems like an intolerably liberal concept. Good old Jeb seems to know his brother has forever ruined his chances for being the next Decider. So he is suggesting setting up a different government. One in which he could rule. You know. Sort of like secession. The last time we had two governments we had a thing called a Civil War. Now, I don’t think Jeb really even thinks that’s a good idea. I don’t even think he’s that smart. I think his brother is so dumb and stubborn we see his brother as smart because we never hear or see him. I think that what we’re seeing is the result of the ever growing power of the current state of news. These days you can’t just hold a press conference and get on the news. You have to say or do something outrageous. If you act reasonably nobody will notice. If you say you are running for office and want to make the news, you have to take out a flaming torch and set fire to a cauldron of screaming monkeys. You have to announce your plans to run for office and then actually run for miles on end. You have to take off all your clothes and tow a barge with your junk.

So now we have Newt Gingrich accusing the nation of becoming “violently fascist” for voting against an ever more demented old man and a Mean Girl. And you have Jeb Bush saying he wants to start his own country. In order to get noticed you have to say things that would send normal people to the nut house. If normal people said what GOP politicians are always spouting off, at the very least, they would be put on a secret unknown and unprovable government watch list. Their phones would be tapped; their bank accounts would freeze; their pets would have microphones implanted in their fur; their neighbors would wear suits and sunglasses and talk into their sleeves; their mail would be suspiciously mangled; and they’d never be able to get or keep a job. In the GOP though, you become a shiny beacon of bullshit on a hill of lies and they compare you to Reagan.

Hypocrisy. Live On C-SPAN

Washington is demanding a plan from the auto industry before they give them any money. I think that’s a good idea. Such a good idea that I think Washington should also create a plan for the economy. They agree to 700 billion dollars for Wall Street – to fix something that they clearly caused with their out of control greed – with no oversight, and a make things up as they go mentality. Yet they refuse to give 25 billion – which, like being in Las Vegas, is a number lacking any real significance when the numbers get this large – to the auto industry. I’m no fan of mismanagement. And I also don’t like greedy dumb people. But it seems hypocritical to demand something of one industry but not another. Especially when it’s something they themselves are incapable of. I’m beginning to feel insulted at how Washington spouts from a place of self righteousness, when we all know that they are clearly only feigning their outrage. They themselves helped create this spot the auto industry is in. The auto industry has been making crap cars for decades now. Just like the airline industry has had shitty service for decades now. Just like our internet service is worse than some third world countries. Just like our cell phone service drags behind the Sudan and Burkina Faso. Just like our best actors come from Australia and Europe. We pretty much suck at everything these days. Except sports marketing. Only now, thinks to technology, our enemies, hiding away in caves along the border of Pakistan, can see it for themselves on Youtube. We are the fat bully on the playground who push other kids around right up until the other kids push back. Rather than trying to humiliate the very people they play golf with when the cameras are off, they should work to help them restructure themselves. This is where Henry Ford invented the assembly line. We can’t afford to be unable to field automobiles in our own country. We need to take a cold shower and get to work. Forget the executive pay issue. Give them money with some very public strings attached. Make them accountable to create products worth purchasing. This isn’t rocket science…

Is Thanksgiving Necessary?

Let’s admit it: Thanksgiving is just plain dumb. It’s a holiday based around a feast put on by a bunch of confused yet gracious people who made us a lot of food, and introduced us to corn, right before we slaughtered them. It was basically a prelude to genocide. And Turkey? Come on. The only reason they ate turkey is there was nothing else available. Had they had the option of Mexican food or pizza, it’s a good bet that even Puritans would have chosen to go for the pizza. And, do we need to eat so much of it that we drug ourselves into a stupor? At a time when the entire world sees us as a nation or irresponsible dipshits, do we really want the requisite footage of our fat selves gorging as the world goes into the depression we’ve created? I think not. I think we should put this holiday back in the closet and leave it there.

For those who don’t know, Thanksgiving is a pagan holiday that was celebrated by native americans as a thanks to mother earth for the fall harvest. When the Pilgrims arrived in the “new” world, they arrived too late in the season to plant crops. So the native Americans shared their food with these strange visitors, what with their high heels and powdered wigs and witch huntings, and taught them how to survive in a harsh land. Then we slaughtered them all and gave the rest of them Smallpox. And we’ve been thankful ever since.

Congress Is Brutal When They Know They’re On TV

Congressmen – especially the Republican ones! – are total suck ups to big business – right up until they go against their free enterprise ideology. And have an audience. After the bailout – the one that turned out not to do anything, lack all oversight, and raise more questions than answers – senators from both parties lined up and waited a long time to stand in front of a microphone and congratulate themselves. You would have thought they had collectively saved an entire nursery full of babies from a burning building. Yet, now, after it all but killed John McCain’s candidacy and prevented only a handful of fuckwits on Wall Street from being put on the dole, ruined Iceland, and crashed economies throughout the world, they have all turned against it en masse. 

Now, because the government is printing what money they can’t borrow from the Chinese, every industry on earth is asking for a piece of the inflationary pie. The auto industry flew into the nation’s capital today on their corporate jets to beg for help. Congress, who has long worked hand in hand with the American auto industry and Big Oil to insure that American cars were the least marketable and least practical on the planet, kicked sand in their face. Because, hey, the cameras were on! It’s ironic that it’s the Democrats asking to help big business and the Republicans willing it to die. They call Democrats un-American, then actively work to crush three iconic car companies. They called the companies dinosaurs. (which they are). They say the unions and the health care benefits are dragging the companies down and can no longer compete (they can’t). They speak all kinds of truths. What they don’t mention is that much of it was their doing. When Detroit agreed to contracts with the unions, American cars made up 98% of all cars in the United States. Today that number stands at 43%. Thanks to trade agreements voted on, well, in congress.

So, in essence, they are blaming Detroit for doing exactly what they had to do. They couldn’t out-reliable the Japanese; they couldn’t out-competent the Germans; the only thing left was to make stupid inefficient city tanks that averaged (thanks to Reagan) two miles a gallon and made no sense at all. However, unlike what those in congress are saying, Detroit has not been asleep at the wheel. They know what they’re doing. They have merely been in cahoots with Washington and the oil industry. Like they have been for decades.

Washington likes to go on television and humiliate the very people they have worked so hard and so closely to help avoid being responsible. And they want us to believe that they are the stern parent reprimanding an out of control child. 

The auto industry is, and has been, operating on a flawed business model for decades. But let’s not pretend it’s anything new.

Is Obama Deja Vu All Over Again?

So I’m reading this book called Nixonland. And the parallels between what was going on in the country when Nixon was running for office and what is going on now is ridiculous. Nixon promised to get us out of Vietnam. Nixon ran on a mantle of “change.” Nixon was the candidate the country fell in love with. He could do no wrong. He was a media darling. He embodied the change the country so desperately needed after four years of an unjust and unnecessary war created by a crazy Texan. The country was desperate to move beyond divisive politics. Nixon promised to bring people together. Red was Blue and Blue was Red. 

(Insight I learned: there is no such thing in politics as coming together. Politics is all about polarization. All about amplifying differences. All about harnessing resentment in pursuit of power.)

Then Nixon got into office and almost right away began making things even worse, turning his no doubt hairy and sweaty back on every promise he ever made. When the press complained, he banished them. When people protested, he paid goons to beat them up. Whenever he was insulted, he turned the insults onto a group, pitting group against group. He accused those who wanted out of Vietnam, the ones he courted, as being dangerous and un-American. He agreed to withdraw the troops, unless he felt he was endangering them. The country wept with relief. Two days later he began bombing Cambodia, even though the troops were in no more danger. 

Do things change? Or do new people repeat the same stupid shit of the generation before? Your parents tell you not to put your hand on the skillet because it will burn you. So you put your hand on the skillet and it burns you. Your dad tells you crazy chicks are fun, until they throw a knife at your head. You smile. You nod. You date a crazy chick and…you get the idea. 

I don’t think Obama is Nixon. (And even if he was, McCain was a toolbox and Palin was an outrageous dumbotron) But there is a lesson to be learned. Whenever expectations run so high based on so little, they are certain to eventually come crashing down. Also, if people truly want to come together, they can’t look to politicians to do it. That dog just won’t hunt…

Newt Gingrich Announces Candidacy For Governor of Alabama In 1956

Yesterday, with a rousing speech, Newt Gingrich announced his pledge to work as “a voice of reason” in a sea of “radical agitators” and announced -to much perplexity- his intention of running for governor of Alabama. In 1956. Fifty two years ago. Charles Barkley, who has also announced his plans to run for governor of Alabama in 2012, had this to say: “He just plum crazy.”

Is he crazy? That’s the question a number of people in Washington who don’t know him are asking. Those who do know him are in response saying, “Of course. The man is plain nuts.” The GOP is not leaking anything, but Newt himself was all over the airwaves. “Communist agitators will not be tolerated within our schools!” Gingrich declared. “Women who want equal rights are violent fascists” who “are working to destroy our nation’s moral fabric.” He went on to denounce rock and roll as “the devil’s work” and claimed Elvis Presley to be “the anti-Christ.”

Mike Huckabee thinks the man is off his meds. “I don’t think a time machine has been invented yet. And until someone can prove to me one exists, I will stand by my contention that the man, like much of what is left of the GOP is operating from a playbook long out of print.

Obama Adds Man In White Sheet To Cabinet

Barack Obama is taking the current book he is reading, Team Of Rivals, a little too much to heart. The book is about Abraham Lincoln and how he filled his cabinet with people who disagreed with him. A team of rivals. It began with Hillary Clinton, his bitter foe during the Democratic Primaries. Then he made John McCain Secretary of the Treasury. And now he has added a mysterious KKK member to his cabinet. “Obama likes to hear all sides of an issue,” sources say. “But this is a bit much.” No word on what the man’s responsibilities will be, but he is expected to speak up often in an indecipherable southern drawl and throw frequent fits of hate-fueled rage. How he managed to fill out the job application without being immediately sent to prison is a question many want to know. His hobbies, among other things, include: frequent cat murder. 

He first came to Obama’s notice when he showed up at his front door with a pitchfork and murder in his eyes. Instead of being shot in the head, as the Secret Service suggested, Obama invited him in for a club soda and a plate of flax seed.  

Barack Obama is the President-elect of the United States. He was born in Hawaii and lives in Chicago. No word on what book he will be reading next.

What If Obama Really Does Bring People Together?

It’s something the media hasn’t really focussed too much on, what with this question about the dog looming so large, but it’s not something to be ignored. Today’s meeting with John McCain would lead one to believe that Barack Obama has every intention – for the moment – of bringing diverging people and philosophies together to get things done. This would be terrible for the media if it actually came to pass. The media makes its money by catering to the partisans of either side. It creates conflict where none exists to keep people watching. It elevates the smallest of slights into giant irreparable breeches. If there was no conflict, if people did work together for the betterment of the country, Fox News would have to report that. “Today, people on Capitol Hill once again got along.” They would have to rename themselves Fox News Classic and rerun old scandals and divisive issues from days of yore. Keith Olberman and Bill O’Reilly might even co-anchor a show. Rush Limbaugh would just have to yell about the lack of rage wafting from Washington. 

It won’t happen, of course. Too much is at stake in this country for consensus to rear its beneficial head. There are too many resentments to harness, too many constituents to coddle, too many lobbyists to satisfy, for any long-term mutually beneficial progress to be made. If you don’t believe me, just ask someone in the media.

How To Not Handle A Recession

One problem I have with downturns like the one we are experiencing, and will probably continue to experience well into the next year, is that those at the very top make decisions for the short term – and with a very narrow view of the future – that make recessions several times worse than they need to be.

Shareholders want their money. And corporations need to meet their numbers, because shareholders demand a certain amount of profits regardless of the state of the economy. With sales down, this means that companies have to lay off staff. When this happens across the board, as it is today, thousands upon thousands of people are taken out of the economy. They go on unemployment and scrape by. Forget about going out and buying anything.

We are, whether we like it or not, an economy almost entirely based on our ability to go out and buy stuff we really don’t need. If we don’t have an income, we don’t buy anything. So sales spiral further down. Yet the shareholders still want their money. So more people are laid off. And companies lose their ability to handle their workloads and clients walk away and more people are laid off and nobody is buying anything and we find ourselves in a vicious cycle..,

What if shareholders looked at the situation differently? What if they thought to themselves: you know what? We’re in an extremely dire economic situation we’ve never seen before. Instead of demanding a profit that will break the back of the companies in my portfolio, I will instead revamp my expectations. That way my companies can stay competitive, so they don’t have to lay off staff, and more people can take an active participatory role in the economy. In the long run, my companies will have a leg up on the rest of the country and will be able to weather this storm better than a company that shoots itself in the foot out of greed.

Greed is what got us into this mess. Greed can also get us out. Because, wanting to hit a certain number at a dire time will in fact take away the ability to consistently compete in the long term. The greedy person would want to stay competitive. Hitting a number in the short term at the expense of your ability to compete long term is a losing strategy in the long run.

Palin Beginning To Act Like Crazy Bag Lady

Last week I wanted the media to leave Sarah Palin alone. They were pummeling her for hurting McCain even though he picked her. Now it’s a week later and the woman has not ceased to remind us daily why the McCain campaign kept such a tight lid on her. Far from redeeming herself, she is only adding to the national opinion that she is out of her league. Lately though, she has also seemed out of her head. Like yesterday, for example, when she spoke at a conference of Governors. Which she seemed to think was a campaign event. She seems not to know that the campaign was over. She spoke to the governors about Joe The Plumber and Tito The Builder. Without a teleprompter, she stumbled and stammered and blinked her eyes and stared with eyes like saucer into a dimension none of us can see. She claimed great respect for Obama and said she prayed for his success and that now was the time to stand united behind a new leader and that, unlike him, she didn’t just get to vote “present” all the time. 

She is, in short, in denial. The media is milking her stupidity for all the ratings they can get. She will no doubt be the future of a party that seems to be banking their entire future on Americans only getting dumber. The media has clearly also lost their minds. They have lost the pulse of the people. They are looking for the salacious in every situation; they have tabloided themselves; and Walter Kronkite – who isn’t dead – is nevertheless rolling over in his grave. 

Do us all a favor, media. Start seriousing(sic) yourselves before it’s too late…

Bush. As Competent As Ever

It could be that we are taking out too much bile on the current President. He is, after all, the same ignoramus he has always been. He might be a little more religious and he might have tacked more to the right, but the guy was never a very competent or capable person. He has a long track record of driving companies into the ground. Everything he has ever touched has turned to dust. He never showed so much as a hint of intellectual curiosity. He has always had a mean streak. He has lost every debate he has ever taken part in. Details have always, and will continue, to bore him. He wanted to be the commissioner of major league baseball, but major league baseball didn’t think he had the chops for it. He has always run from responsibility. He is pretty much what he has always been. 

Should we heap so much scorn on him? We did, after all, slightly less than half of us anyway, vote him into office. We did – more than half of us – re-elect the man. All he has done the last eight years is do all he ever has. The man has never showed any real promise. The truth is, he ran for office during a time of economic prosperity. And he promised outrageous tax cuts. And Gore was boring. And Clinton was receiving fellatio from fat groupies in the White House. So we took a chance and voted for the dumb guy. And the dumb guy acted like what he was: a dumb cruel bastard. Yet we’re blaming him for it. What we really should be doing is heaping scorn on ourselves. If you read the resume of someone, and find it filled with typos and a long history of failure, and you still hire the guy, you deserve what’s coming to you. 

550,000 Americans lost their jobs last week. 550,000 Americans won’t be going to the mall and buying stupid shit anytime soon. Which means more people will lose their jobs. The media will probably blame Bush for it. But it’s really the fault of all of us.

Iran Ready To Talk To U.S. -If They Meet Preconditions

There was much controversy over Obama’s stance that he would talk to enemy leaders “without preconditions.” This is a stance Iran, for one, has been waiting for. Right up until they got it. Now they are the ones with a whole host of preconditions. Sort of ironic. That’s like John McCain finally getting his ten town halls and then up and canceling them. It is not in Iran’s interest to talk to us. Their entire country is branded on the idea that they don’t like the United States. If they started to agree with us on issues, then there would be no need for them to exist. By acting diplomatic, they would be seen by rogue failing governments everywhere as sellouts. They would be kicked out of the cliquish clan of despotic countries. They would no longer be invited on the yearly retreats to Somalia, where leaders gather to learn the latest advances in feudalism and genocide. They would be stripped of their free subscription to Corruption Digest, with articles like: How To Keep Freedom At Bay and Beheading Made Easy. 

None of that would do for a country that is famous for making Burma look like Nirvana. Iran only gets press for doing something illegal or paying people to blow themselves up. If they turn their backs on that legacy, they would have no identity in the international world. The United States called their bluff and now Iran is running scared.

Palin Still A Fool

Seeing Sarah Palin all over the news these last few days, and however many are to come, made me feel bad for John McCain. She’s the worst kind of bozo. One who isn’t aware of their limitations. Like George Bush, she has that same dangerous combination of confidence and ignorance. (There’s an annoying banner ad that claims she has an IQ of 118. If that’s true, then she is seriously underperforming.) The McCain camp was caught between letting her loose and showing the world what a bozo she was, and keeping her quiet and letting people assume she was a bozo.

Some people say that the Republicans are preparing her for a 2012 run. But I doubt it. If they seriously thought she was the future of the party, then they would send her to Future Of The Party School, so she could learn to speak in a syntax that people could understand and where they could teach her geography and international and national issues. No, I think this is more of Sarah Palin going rogue. She’s trying to dig her reputation out of the mud. But what she doesn’t seem to realize is, she’s only getting more and more mired in the muck. Worried people see her as unqualified, she is going on television every night and proving it. 

The media is also thinking about their own future as well. What good would it be for them if Palin went back to Alaska and disappeared? No, what the media seems to want, and what they keep bringing up, is the possibility of her running for the senate, so she can move to Washington and make all manner of crazy and inane comments that the media can cover for many years to come. Not to mention the spectacle of her driving McCain to insanity in front of one and all on CSPAN. It would be Christmas every day for the media then. Ratings would soar! And it would be a tragedy. Granted, as we have seen this election, most politicians are not all that bright. But that doesn’t mean you should promote the idea of someone already known to be a bozo to run for an office we all know she isn’t qualified for. 

Let’s all take a deep breath, let the election frenzy out of our system, and, if it’s absolutely necessary, check back in with this woman after she’s had a chance to read a few books.

Obama Is Going To Drive The Media Nuts

One thing you can say about Obama, he plays his cards very close to his chest. The media and his closest advisors won’t know what he is considering until he makes a decision. Which means there won’t be a lot for the media to chew over and spin and criticize. He will absolutely drive both houses of congress nuts, as they won’t ever know quite what he’s up to. I’m not saying he will be secretive. But he won’t leak which way he is leaning on a particular issue. He has learned, and he is correct, that those around him will be compelled to argue for whatever side of an issue they think he is on. Knowing what your president wants to hear, especially if you respect him, makes it all too tempting to give it to him. However, if you don’t know what your President wants to hear, you are much more likely to give the President your true feelings. And that seems to be what Obama wants: his advisors actual thoughts on a topic. 

This is a complete reversal of the Bush administration, which told people what they were thinking and shunned those who didn’t agree with them. Obama welcomes the dissenting opinion. He seems quite capable of making decisions from a place beyond ideology. For a media that has grown over the last two years into an overly partisan group of blood hounds, digging around looking for dirt, an Obama administration could cause them a lot of pain.

A Real Family In The White House

It’s a highly unusual sight. A family on the biggest stage in the world who convincingly seem to be in love with each other. It’s almost jarring to see people who truly love one another in politics. Most of our political families are dysfunctional wrecks. In each other’s company they tend to smile for the cameras and try to play the part, but it’s usually unconvincing. It’s also nice to see young children with huge grins on their faces seemingly take it all in stride. You have to go back 48 years to see young people in the White House. And these kids are bursting at the seems with charm. Their joy and enthusiasm is genuine and very refreshing. Hopefully, being in Washington won’t ruin their lives. It seems to have a unique ability to turn people into weird looking cartoons. Bad hair. Fake teeth. Strange clothing. Washington is the capital of off-putting looking people.

Redistribution Of Wealth

This latest argument of the McCain campaign seems lacking. For one thing, we just redistributed a lot of wealth to Wall Street thanks to George Bush and years of underestimating mankind’s ability to take advantage of a situation. Greed finds a way. It’s not that Republicans think Obama is a Socialist. McCain himself in true Maverick fashion even admitted as much on Larry King. It’s that they don’t like where there tax money will be going. It’s the same argument we have every four or eight years. People want lower taxes and smaller government. Except when it comes to waging war or getting their way on domestic issues. All I know is that people are looking at their money, or what’s left of it, and what we have to show for it. We cut taxes during two wars, which we have been paying for on borrowed money from a country the right used to demonize for political gain. So called Fiscal Conservatives have been increasing the size of government 5% a year for the past eight years. The very thing they are supposed to be against. John McCain, who, in the primaries ran on the mantra “The True Conservative” could have won if he had laid out an agenda and explained to people just where Bush had gone wrong, and where he should have gone, and how he could take us there. Instead he chose to label his opponent one thing after another in order to feed the media narrative. But we are plugged into this election. We have been following it for two years now. We know when an opponent is shooting blanks. The kitchen sink approach doesn’t work. Especially if you call it that. You can’t say to the media, “We’re just going to throw all kinds of stuff at him.” It’s an admission of the emptiness of the claims. McCain would have been better served to stick to his True Conservative mantle. (Now, some will say that he isn’t a true conservative. This is true. But it’s also true that he doesn’t put his Country First.) Conservatives are starved for a Conservative candidate. But they don’t currently exist. Or they are too boring to get elected. Since 1992, the Liberals have been more conservative than the Conservatives. They either need to get back to their roots or change their names to the Psycho Party. They’ve driven the country so far off the road that a center right country could very well elect a Socialist Marxist Black White Radical Christian Muslim Black Panther Elitist Generated Crisis Inducing Wealth Redistributionist with no experience to be the next President. And they will do it because Obama used the Republicans time tested trump card against them. It’s the democrat who will be cutting taxes for most of the people in the country, taking away the Republican’s only idea.

So Long Partisan Media

Barack Obama, should he win, has campaigned hard on the strength of his promise to move past the politics of division. Which I think everyone not part of the media is ready for. It’s something both sides have campaigned on. George Bush was a Uniter, not a Divider. He was right. We are now united in thinking him a colossal mistake. Do the media, who have followed Obama almost religiously for two long years now, understand what that could mean to them? They’re very business model is founded on appealing to partisans. Fox News is watched not by people interested in the news, but rather by partisan’s who need their daily intake of liberal hate. The same is true for some of the shows on MSNBC. Not to mention Rush Limbaugh and The Drudge Report and Huffington Post. What will they all do if Obama makes good on his word? What if there’s no acrimony any more? What will the pundits of the left and the right do if people no longer want to hear them scream at one another? For a lot of people in the media, this could very well be their last day of work…but don’t bet on it. As long as the media has a say in politics, there will be bitter partisan divisions. That’s what sells. Choose a side and let the media enrage you against the other. If we do indeed move into a post-partisan world, media will be the next in line for a handout.

Get Ready To Be Disappointed

Not to be a wet blanket or anything, but whoever wins today, they won’t be able to do a tenth of what they have promised. Considering the mess we’re in, and the current insatiable media landscape, there’s a good chance that whoever wins will be colossally unpopular before they ever even take office. There’s simply no way that anyone can match the media’s tendency to overhype just about everything. With McCain, at least, like Bush, he would have the benefit of exceedingly low expectations. Obama has nowhere to go but down and McCain has nowhere to go but up. The entire globe seems to be looking to Obama to save them from all manner of American ills. But it won’t be easy or even possible to fix all of Bush’s and Cheney’s eight years of nefarious deeds. 

Part of me is glad that the economy has finally cratered. It hasn’t been a working model for decades now. And I am glad that most Baby Boomers are still alive to see what they have wrought on the very kids they have been so protective of. The reason we are dealing with so much debt on such a large scale is that most Americans can’t afford the most basic of things. Healthcare, Education, Technology – all of these things have been going up at the same degree that our paychecks have been stagnating or going down. Combine that with easy credit and you have a looming disaster. For eight years we’ve had a fake economy. We’ve given jobs to people to build things that nobody can afford to live in. We’ve given jobs to people to build cars that people can’t afford and don’t even want. This is a reckoning for many industries. The money they’ve spent to game the system so that they didn’t have to evolve themselves have now come back to kick me in the ass. The auto industry needs a bailout because they have been greedy and stupid for thirty years. The airline industry needs a bailout because they absolutely suck at every aspect of air travel. Banks need a bailout because they’ve been lying and cheating the system for years. Over the years my parents have stepped in to help me when I’ve gotten in over my head. And now it’s the other way around. For the next thirty years or so, I will be the one bailing them out.

Where is the economy going? It depends on who wins. I’m an optimist. So let’s assume Obama wins. Here is my guess on where the economy will change compared to the Bush administration:

 

Current Industries of Profit Under Bush:

Oil

Military

Mysterious Interrogation Prison Building

Nation Building

Eavesdropping technology

Airplane Shoes

Right Wing Attack Propaganda

Prescription Medication For Bizarre Diseases

Morally Bankrupt Constitutional Lawyers

Money Laundering

China Money For War Borrowing

 

Profit Industries Under Obama (one would think…)

Infrastructure

Energy Efficient Cars

Broadband Infrastructure

New Technologies

Green Industries

Economists

International Relations

Community Organizing For Would Be Politicians

Morally Non-Bankrupt Constitutional Lawyers De-Breaking The Constitution

Special Prosecutors

Secret Interrogator Prison Destruction

Generic Foods

Credit Card Addiction Therapists

Stem Cell Research

Canned Soup Buying

Right Wing Attack Propaganda

 

That’s what I have so far…One question though. The Pundits have been saying that in times of economic crisis, Democrats always do better. And Republicans are famously lousy at foreign policy. So just what exactly are they good at? It seems like the only thing they’re good at is getting into office. Once they get there they usually shit on the carpet.

Nixon? Warmonger. Criminal. (2 terms)

Ford? Accidental President. Good golfer. 

Reagan? Optimist? Yes. Hair gel? Yes. Good President? Only in revisionist history. Secret wars. Debt. Went nuts at the end. (2 terms)

Bush 41. Good War. Good Fisherman. Bad Debt. Bad economy. (one term)

Bush 43. Two Wars. One based on a lie. Colossal Debt. Bad economy. War criminal. Socialist. Environmental Destroyer. Global Disgrace. Liar. (2 terms)

 

The records clearly indicate that the Republican brand has not served us well these last forty years. And yet we keep forgetting that for some reason. Let’s not do that anymore!

White People Also Vote For Democrats

Living in Georgia, as I have to, one could get the opinion that all democrats are African American and all white people are Republicans. Today, our bozo senator, Saxby Chambliss, said, “You should vote because those other folks are voting…” Implying that other folks, by which he seemed to be insinuating African Americans, were voting, and not for him. Well, I have to say that even though I can’t be called an “other folk,” I am also voting for the Democrat. Mainly as payback for one of the ugliest senate races in modern times. At some point the Republicans decided their last hope was to turn the election into a black or white issue. Which would make sense in the United States of Black or White. But there’s no such thing. So that’s a loser of a strategy. These last two weeks, if things are actually the way they seem to be, we will all be able to look back on these last two weeks with an appreciation for the absurd. It has been a greatest hits of bad ideas and terrible instincts and stinky lies and slimy mistruths and underhanded deeds and uncharitable insinuations and a whole slew of retro -but not in a cool way – political tactics from the 1950’s. 

I can’t wait for this thing to be over. I can’t wait to go vote on Tuesday and stand in line for fourteen thousand hours because I live in a red state and the Republicans run the joint and their winning strategy is always based on as few votes counting as possible. I don’t think it will work this time though. I think people will wait it out. As long as it takes. To push the computer button that could so totally be fucked with. Because opportunities to avoid calamity are few and far between. Here’s to righting the ship. Here’s to throwing out the bums. And getting better ones.

Why Do We Keep Doing The Same Stupid Shit Over And Over?

“It’s the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy.” 

 

That quote is about Vietnam. It came from General Omar Bradley in 1951. But it certainly holds true for Iraq. And that’s a problem. People with the best of intensions (and I’m being generous here) make the same ill-advised mistakes over and over and over again. Like the woman who marries a notorious philanderer and thinks that she alone holds the magic power to turn him. The Best And The Brightest got us into Vietnam. So it’s no real surprise that an extremely dumb President and a bunch of holy roller boneheads could do the same in Iraq. And now here we are. In another ill-conceived war, with absolutely no strategy or game plan – trying to kill the Iraqis into peace and democracy. LBJ lied us into Vietnam. Bush lied us into Iraq. The question is: why? 

This campaign has seen candidates tossing out the same dire warnings and threats that the left and right have been tossing out for decades. Is it because each new generation has to learn for themselves that they aren’t the most singularly brilliant people in the world? That they aren’t the first to try to spread peace at the tip of a spear? That they aren’t the first to try to change the way Washington works? Now the Republicans are warning us what could happen if there is a Democratic congress. What would happen, of course, is that things might actually get done. Just not the things the Republicans would want. And it might even work. For four or eight years. And then a new President will be sworn in. And if the American people are bored, they might pick the other party just for a change, and that party will work to undo the work of the last one. And so it goes. Tacking back and forth, getting essentially nowhere. 

We’re still talking about energy independence 44 years after we first made in an issue. We’re still talking about clean air and clean water. We’re still talking about education and infrastructure. And we’re watching our auto industry fall apart because they paid vast sums of money to politicians so they could avoid having to fix itself. From above we might look like a car on a busy highway, changing lanes but making little progress.

Enough About Joe The Plumber!!

I don’t know if you’ve actually seen the interaction between Joe the Plumber and Barack Obama. The interaction that John McCain and the GOP have made legendary, mentioning it on the radio, on television, at rallies, and everywhere in between. But if you watch the entire exchange between Obama and Joe the Plumber, you would probably vote for Obama. In fact, I think Obama would be well served to turn the exchange into a campaign ad. It turns everything McCain is postulating on its head. Not only does Joe the Plumber claim to have been a plumber for fifteen years – which, we now know is fifteen years longer than he has been a plumber – but Obama rightfully points out that he would have made more money under his plan during the last eight years than he has under George Bush. It’s a fascinating encounter. And after watching it you have to wonder why John McCain chose to draw attention to it. 

John McCain seemed to outdo any candidate in history yesterday when, while interviewed by Brian Williams, he said he was not about to “redistribute the wealth!” He said everyone should be able to “keep all the money they earn!” Which means, apparently, that he is going to abolish all taxes. Because taxes are, and have always been, a redistribution of wealth. So if he’s against that, then he’s against taxes. And if he’s against taxes, then he’s against all government revenue. Which means no war. No military. No social security. No police. And no job for John McCain. Wow! He really is a Maverick!

If you see the interview, you will have to judge for yourself if there’s an odd “negative energy” between him and Sarah Palin, as has been reported. To me, he seemed like the same cranky old man who refused to look Obama in the eye. Maybe that’s just the way he is. Maybe he never makes eye contact with anyone. It did seem like he was massively uncomfortable with allowing Palin to speak at all. He appeared to be doing all he could to appear civil. My guess is, if he loses the election in a landslide, we will see a very ugly and very public divorce. Both are ambitious politicians who have careers to protect. And both are vindictive. So that will be an interesting meltdown to watch…

By the way, I could give two craps about how much money they’ve spent on Sarah Palin’s clothes. Sure she pretends to be a regular old hockey mom. But that doesn’t mean she could hit the stump wearing jeans and a hockey jersey. Appearance is important. So that’s a non-issue if you ask me. I have a bigger problem with the fact that she doesn’t know what the Vice President does and that she’s a complete bonehead.

Sarah Palin, Ladies and Gentlemen

This is from People magazine. It’s pure satire. But it’s real! 

(you can read it here: http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20235099_1,00.html

 

Do you think you’re intellectual?
SP: Yessss. And you have to be up on not only current events, but you have to understand the foundation of the issues that you’re working on as a governor. I had to do the same thing as a mayor. So it is not just current events but it’s much more in-depth than that to understand how, in the case of me being governor, how did our state get to the position that we are in order for a decision to have to be made. You can’t just go on what is presented you. You have to know the background, you have to know the players involved before you make a policy call. So, um, it’s uh, it’s a good job, it’s a tough job and it’s a very, very serious job. And no. You don’t get to be a governor by being –
TP: – going with the wind.
SP: Yeah definitely. You don’t just go with the flow and take a political pulse on policy. You have to go with what the foundational knowledge is that you have on issues in front of you and you have to put the people you are serving, put them first. You put them before partisanship you put them before special interests. That’s how you make decisions as governor. 

 

She speaks in vast amazing busts of words – they fly out, a storm of them swirling around, attacking your inner ear, trying to trick you into irritability so you won’t notice they are absent of all substance. This actual People interview is just ridiculous. I wish John McCain had picked someone with – say – 5% validity as a Vice Presidential candidate. But he didn’t. And now we have this absurd interview. She doesn’t answer a single question. She seems to be stuck on transmit…

What The Hell Is Going On?!?

Obama is trouncing McCain in the polls. McCain is gaining rapidly. Obama has a 10 point nation-wide lead. Obama is now only up by one. It’s a dead heat! It’s over…what the hell is going on? You can find whatever answer you seek depending on where you go. Just go to the web-site or “news” source that caters to your views and you have nothing to worry about. Sarah Palin is either the worst Vice Presidential candidate in history or the future of the GOP. McCain is either running the dirtiest campaign in history or really needs to take the gloves off. It’s all a long way of saying that absolutely nobody has a clue what’s actually going on. Oh sure, they may wear coats and ties and have helmet haircuts and say things like “It is without a doubt apparent that, if you look back, and consider the implications and drill down and see what’s really going on…” but long-windedness(sic) doesn’t mean they know any more than us what’s going on. They just make a lot more money because we watch them so they can infuriate them.

–Sorry. I had to change the channel to a station that’s closer to my views…

It really is all fucking spin. On both sides. And Lou Dobbs is not in the middle. In the middle are a whole bunch of old or out of work people. They pick and choose and cherry pick the stories that fit in to their narrative. Fox takes it further by making the narrative up. “Let’s say he’s a dirty bomb maker! Maybe that will work!” It came out today that most McCain coverage is negative. This could be taken care of by not covering his rallies or interviewing him. That would reduce 80% of the negative coverage right there. 

The truth is…nonexistent. Don’t even try and find it. Just go vote. McCain both praised spreading the wealth around and hammered it in one paragraph on Brian Williams. If Sarah Palin does it, it’s great. If Barack Obama proposes a tax cut – which is only a good idea for rich people? – then it’s socialism. As crazy as this campaign has been, it shouldn’t be as close as the media makes it seem. If they’re right then we’re all doomed! If we’re wrong…

Republicans Can’t Be This Dumb

There has been a lot of Republican dumbness out there. From Limbaugh’s racist ranting to Michele Bachmann’s attack on the liberal spin machine denying comments that the world can see coming out of her mouth on Hardball. And last night Fay Buchanan on CNN went so far as to declare Sarah Palin the future of the Republican Party. She has been dragging McCain down like a lead weight and the Republicans couldn’t be more thrilled with her. They’re talking about her being a Presidential nominee in 2012. And blaming John McCain for not bringing moderates and independents to the table. The GOP doesn’t seem to realize just how far to the right they have gone and plan to go, and how, like it or not, most of the country has no desire to go there with them. Making Sarah Palin the face of the GOP would all but guarantee their failure for years to come. And that’s fine with me if they’re going to be as ignorant and antagonizing as they’ve been for the last eight years. 

With polls coming out daily saying that the attacks on Obama’s character don’t work, the Republicans just want to attack more. It seems that’s all they have left. To be ugly and small-minded. If Rush Limbaugh is convinced the only reason people are voting for Obama is because of his race, then there is simply no hope for him or his party. This goes beyond race. This goes to a basic philosophy difference between Democrats and Republicans. Democrats think it helps if you are not an idiot, whereas Republicans promote only idiots. The smart ones are being hunted down and pushed out of the party. It defies all logic. And it’s a losing strategy that will only become a bigger losing strategy down the road. Racist intolerance is dying out, not mushrooming. Bipartisanship is in; hyper-partisanship is out. Transparency is in; secrecy and criminality is out. Diplomacy is in; torture is out. Fiscal conservatism is in; deficit spending is out. Supporting the troops is in; Supporting the troops with more than flag pins is more in. The sooner the GOP comes to grips with the way the world is today, the better.

Obama Wins Endorsement of 115 Major Racist Newspapers

When it comes to newspaper endorsements, Obama is leading 115 – 38. Rush Limbaugh and McCain campaign saboteur Rick Davis scoffed at the notion that 115 newspapers would choose Obama over McCain, unless done so “for a clearly elitist and radical and socialist and anti-American racist far left reason. What do they know, anyway, those newspapers?”

This comes only a day after it was determined by Rush Limbaugh and – oddly – considering he wrote a scathing article about the selection of Sarah Palin and the erratic nature of John McCain in his campaign – George Will – that Colin Powell endorsed Obama for reasons of race. Which all goes a long way towards showing that the McCain campaign is almost comically desperate at this point. They are terrified. They know exactly how drunk on power they were when they held both houses of congress and the White House. So drunk on power that almost all of them were voted out of office. They are reaping the whirlwind and they don’t like it. In one quote I read yesterday, a Republican pundit spoke on television and declared that, in times of crisis, Americans really want “continuity in the White House. And change…”  That makes no sense, of course. But the media feels they need to have equal time, for the astute people who want to take the country in a different direction, and the party of bumbling snarky boneheads that currently call the shots. The contrast between pundits is almost striking. One side makes sense and the other side is simply enraged and petulant and hateful. The country has changed a lot under the George Bush/Dick Cheney dictatorship. The era of simply attacking your opponent with false charges might have worked in 2000 and 2004. But this is 2008. The tides have shifted. Change is in the air. And lying for the sake of lying simply no longer works.

Joe The Plumber Finds Out How US Weekly Gets Their Pictures

John McCain tossed out the unvetted name of some guy he saw on Drudge Report. Joe The Plumber. A 1980’s advertising hack’s wet dream. A beautiful marketing ploy circa 1983. The man in the Hathaway Shirt made real. Only the man’s name wasn’t Joe and he wasn’t a plumber. He was a hypothetical question with a bald head. He was Kevin Costner’s character in Swing Vote. 

The guy asks a question. Someone records it. Someone reports it on Drudge Report. John McCain mentions it during the debate…twenty two more times than he has talked about the Middle Class. McCain rolled the dice and decided to make almost the entirety of the third debate -that wasn’t a personal attack- on some guy McCain read about on a blog.

He had to know what would happen. You can’t do something like that to someone you care anything about. If you include Sarah Palin, it was the second basic stranger McCain had sacrificed in his desire to claw his way into the White House.

So we got to see a man torn apart by the media. Normally, we just to this to celebrities. Like Barack Obama. Go through their garbage. Try to dig up some dirt in order to write stories and sell magazines and attract interest on news shows. To please us! There is a huge market of learning the most trivial things about another person’s life, so long as they are entertaining, and, hopefully, odd or highly dysfunctional in some way. 

Some guy asks a question and next thing you know, he’s got a flashlight shoved up his ass. He’s got all these things wrong with him. He owes back taxes. He wants to buy a plumbing company in the future. He asks a question that is only theoretical. He is, in other words, just like most of us. Full of shit. 

Some people say he must be a plant. Why else did he ask such an unusual question? I don’t think so. I think he might be getting the wrong information about Obama’s tax policy. (It’s not a surprise. I can’t wait until this thing is over.) He sees Obama in his neighborhood. He asks the guy a question. And learned how the media works. 

John McCain needed a gimmick and Joe the Plumber was the guy. The day after making Joe the Plumber the most famous name in political debate history, he then goes and defends “the smears” Obama has made against Joe the Plumber. (What smears those are, McCain doesn’t say. You really need to suspend your disbelief in order to be a John McCain supporter.) He drags the guy out into the spotlight and chastises Obama for doing it. He’s the guy who taps you on the shoulder and, even though you saw them do it, says it was someone else. The man has no shame. His entire campaign is a bunch of antiquated marketing ploys. Don’t believe me? On Saturday, Palin brought up, and I’m not making this up, Ed the Dairy Man…

An Unfortunate Infection In The Republican Party

A lot of conservatives that also have brains have been distancing themselves from the GOP. This is a turning point for the Republican party. They can continue to allow evangelicals to call the shots, and continue to put forth Joe Six Pack and Ed the Dairy Guy to run the loftiest institutions in the country as we sink ever more irretrievably into our own muck. Or the Republicans can pivot back to fiscal conservation, smaller government and pragmatic policy making. 

There is an intolerance and a hubris that has infected the party that says that they are absolutely right and everyone else is absolutely wrong; that the ends justify the means; that might makes right; and anyone who disagrees with them is either unpatriotic or un-American. This management style and way of thinking has hurt the constitution, hurt our system of checks and balances, and crippled government efficiency. Those conservatives who see this are immediately spurned and pilloried.

Should the moderates in the Republican party be banished, they would be welcome as democrats. Smart people, even if they have different beliefs, are always welcome. Eventually, and sadly, it looks like the future party make up will be between smart people and idiots. The GOP is going down ugly: it is looking more and more authoritarian and ugly by the day. It is running against everything we need right now. Instead of working to improve our education, they denigrate it; instead of winning the War on Terror, they prefer to beat up more Iraqis. Instead of working to fix our flailing economy, they seek to cut more taxes and add to the problem. 

They’re infected with crooks and idiots. They need to detox and clean out their system. And, as the races taking place around the country seem to attest, they will have the downtime to do this.

The Media Sucks Donkey Balls

The whole system is flawed. There are very few truly objective journalists anymore. There is no center anymore. Sure. There’s that Lou Dobbs guy. But he’s not really independent. He’s just an angry guy with fake hair and bad teeth. He hates both sides and the middle and everything else. So count him out. Now if you watch cable news, all of them have the same basic format:

 

“To get to the truth we have two people. One a democrat and one a republican. Both are extremely angry and will yell at one another, dodge the questions, and spout off their talking points. We won’t cover any new ground and you won’t leave with anything but a headache. Okay. Start your spinning…”

The people the media gets on are usually paid by one side or another – usually one of each – to talk a blue streak without actually saying anything. Savvy people, who are looking for some semblance of truth will be left hanging. Perhaps that’s why there are so many “undecided” voters out there. They’re so put off by the tone from both sides, along with the pundits and the so-called anchors or journalists or commentators or analysts or experts or whatever they call themselves, that they end up not liking anybody. Just one more mess the next President will have to fix…

2008 Political Season Uncovers Ugly Truth

This political season has been one of the most dramatic on record. There’s been hurricanes, an energy crisis, an economic crisis, flooding, wildfires, the first black nominee, the first female republican vice presidential nominee, an old coot, and screaming maniacs from every corner of the country. It has unearthed an enormous amount of emotion that Americans are taking and turning towards time consuming projects that are both complicated and totally useless. Instead of going out and getting a job or working on the job you actually have, millions of people are making up jokey videos and karaoke tributes in an effort to get themselves a little notoriety. It is this mind-set, what I like to call the Reality TV effect, this desire to be famous, this collective narcissistic love of narcissism, that has brought us to the very brink of disaster. Why go to law school or medical school when one can become a millionaire by going on television and eating a plate of cow brains in a bikini? Why write the great American novel that nobody will ever read when you can go online and send the world a picture of your cooter? Why go door to door drumming up votes for the candidate of your choice when you can go and design cute doggy t-shirts bearing their likeness? Why start a small business that will create jobs when you can go on The Real World and have sex with a donkey? Why become an investigative journalist and seek to wrong injustice when you can make millions of dollars on Fox News screaming incoherently? Why travel the world and experience new cultures when you can spend your time remaking Howard the Duck frame by frame using small poodles? Instead of creating things that will last or exporting things that create money we’re making things to send to our cyber buddies on second life. We’ve become subservient to our own cheese ball culture and we don’t even know it. Our highest selling magazines are Us Weekly and InTouch magazine, a cavalcade of pictures of hungover celebrities drinking coffee and trying to surf. We place on a pedestal people who are most noteworthy for being dysfunctional. We talk in a patois of ‘like’s’ and ‘you knows’ and ‘whatever’s and OMG and WTF and don’t even bother with what used to be known as English. It used to be that those who didn’t know history were doomed to repeat it. Now we’re rapidly moving towards a time where people will cease to remember history even exists. People are mangled in horrible grocery store accidents because their carts crash into one another while they text on their iphones about Lindsay Lohan’s clit piercing. As a result, we are not just facing an economic crisis. We’re facing an education crisis, a culture crisis, a class crisis, a debt crisis, a consumer crisis, an energy crisis, and a crisis of depth and substance. As the only superpower, we are lagging behind most of the world in all the things we used to lead the world in. The good news in all this bad news is we’ve just got slapped upside the head. Maybe that will knock some sense into us before its too late. 

Buy canned soup!