Archive for the ‘Agnosticism’ Category

“This is a big fucking deal”  -Joe Biden.

“The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.”  -MLK

The Devil is thriving in the Catholic church.

The Ides of March have passed.

The health care bill passed with some drama.  As it should.

Outside, the wind blows hard.

My favorite part is that they lied without shame and cheated overtly and they still lost with ceremony all around them on worldwide television.  Republicans sucked the other day like they haven’t in decades and it was all on display.  They barked like dogs and continue to whine like toddlers.  Shameless.

I readily confess I don’t have my brain wrapped entirely around this bill and some specifics of the reconciliation language.  I have been paying attention.  I didn’t for a time and then I did again.  I got kinda sick of it all.  It does suck.  The bill.  As in sucking chest wound suck.  A mandate without fierce oversight, a mechanism to not only compete but provide accountability and barometric pressure is pure dumb.

A license to ill.

It was on it’s head already.  I sort of understand the economic imperative behind the mandate but throw us a bone bitches or don’t even bother touching me there.

 

I just can’t help but get caught up in the symbolism.  I know the bill sucks but it does accomplish some pretty important shit.  I’ll defer to the fantastic Ms. Maddow:

“On September 23rd…

• All kids get covered (no pre-existing conditions)
  
• Can’t get dropped if you get sick (no more insurance companies dropping you)
  
• No more lifetime limits (on benefits)
  
• Children can stay on until 26 (coverage up to that age)
  

On January 1, 2011…

• Premium payment reformed (80-85% for medical care) with rebate if you don’t use coverage
  
• Free Medicare preventative care (no co-pays)
  

By 2014…

• Total ban on all pre-existing condition denials
  
• Health exchanges open
  
• End to annual limits on benefits

Republicans want to repeal this…”  -democraticunderground.com

I’m not sure I want to “do” Rachel but I’m positive I want to get her drunk and cuddle.

So yeah, some good stuff.  It’s just that it barely flirts with incentive for fairness via non profit competition.

That’s the part I liked the most when we started this whole thing.  I see it as key.  Public option, extended Medicare, whatever.  Vital.  We have miles to go before we sleep.

Single payer, Universal, whatever label you choose and whomever you choose to accuse,  the richest spender nation on the planet ought to be covering it’s people.  We buy half of all the weapons.  Half of all of them.  Half of all the weapons made for war, we buy.  I don’t think we’re as big as Canada geographically, but our dick is way bigger.  Can you hear me now?  WAY bigger.  We could take Canada in 72 hours without the military.  They don’t have many guns but we do.

What exactly are health exchanges?  We now know they will be open.  How many?  Where?  I’ll assume that’s good news.  A place to trade bandages and syringes.  Do I have to volunteer?  I’m gonna have to choke a bitch.  I’m gonna have to read this bill and the 157 page reconciliation.  I’m working like twelve hours a week and taking a class.  You can see how I’m underwater.

My feet hurt and it’s humiliating.

It’s a simple problem and the answer is simple.  Shave five or fifteen cents off the defense budget and we can throw in some jobs for infrastructure.  Health care, jobs and mortgage relief.  We spend half the entire global budget on weapons and ten times as much as our nearest competitor.  China.  That there is my idea of Socialism, spending way too much of the people’s money on things they vehemently disagree with.  Wait, that’s Communism.  Isn’t it?  When they can’t afford roof and bread it is.  There is your Goddamn communism.

That there is your buttock.

Wars are your ass.

Your ass mam, has gone missing.

I’m trying to make a point here.  We still are a wealthy nation, despite our recent financial regress.  Much of it was concentrated without equity in the last decade but there is plenty of money right here in River City.  There is no reason, moral or fiscal, we should be denied this right.  It insults my intelligence when anyone complains about paying for it.  They talk about health care being 15 to 18 percent of our GDP.  The defense budget is well over half of every dollar you pay in taxes.  We spend so much fucking money on weapons, it makes the world go round.

Literally.  The world turns because of America’s efforts to be able to kill everyone of us.  Thank God for us.  Don’t piss us off.

Still, I’m impressed and finally proud again of the Democrats.  They pulled it off and scared the crap quite literally out of the obstructionist asstards by supplying them with an example of lockstep so long taken for granted as a fundament in the Republican playbook.  Smoked them at their own game.  Here’s hoping this bodes well and emboldens this heretofore assemblage of invertebrates.  See little Billy, we knew you could do it.  Now get your little ass back out there because the game isn’t even half over.  Be a Democrat for fucks sake.

Now the crazies come out like corpses of Laurel & Hardy with giant red eyed rats speeding off and away from their persons and pockets and folds.  Slack jawed zombies repeating obsolete talking points and swinging scythes.  The Baggers.  The Birthers.  The Hawks, Neocons, Bigots and Bible thumpers.  What an egregious ship of fools.  Obsructionist pricks for infamy.  Avoid their rodent familiars and do not dance with either of any of them.

It’s not safe to drink their liquor.

They really are beginning to parody themselves.

I’ve always thought that being a good loser is important.  I’ve been on the losing end enough to approach being gracious I think.  I’m hopeful that losing has humbled me, it sucks and it shames me but I try to learn and stuff and be polite about it.  The way one loses speaks volumes about one’s character.  If you listened to Boehner on the floor the other night or The Human Shitsmear and Butt Boy Hannity these last few mornings you might think the sky is about to kill you in your bed.

Not good losers, but excellent assholes.

These pricks are the epitome of sore losers along with the entire lock step, teeth full of Orios, lime green plastic tumbler full of cherry Kool Aid and rum mouth breathing members of the 1/4 Paradigm.  That was a pretty cool sentence.  If you don’t know about the 1/4 paradigm, categories are on the right on the main page.  Just scroll down.  I have a fairly general theory about relativity and how it applies without bias but with predictable pattern in a sociopolitical context.  I offer a bold constant.

I don’t really know about other countries but I understand very well that one of every four people in this country are ignorant dipshits.  My “1/4 Paradigm”.  In stores near you.

You’d think an invitation was extended to a banquet just ahead of the apocalypse.  You’d think because we passed a weak ass health care bill we were courting Satan himself.  The bill sucks.  Hello irony.  Fuck us in the neck.

The reaction has been of the meanest of spirit and bafflingly irrational.  Childish and callow.  Pointless.  Some fourteen state attorneys general have or intend to file suit.  Futile.  Not going to happen, if any single case enjoys a day in court it will be ashes, ashes and they will all fall down.  A waste of time money and the attention of even the dumbest citizens.  Give me a break.  Might as well piss up a rope.

Children of the corn.

What has my attention is the ugly and still gathering brutal reaction of the great unwashed.

Bricks through windows and awful terrorizing threats directed at our elected representatives that have finally and with courage, attempted the right thing on behalf of us all.  Stupak came around and they went after him like a common enemy.  Cheers Bart.  Those were your people.  An articulate bunch.  Very brave and very cool.

Kucinich is still the king of composure and principal.  What a class act.  I think Maddow and Kucinich should snuggle.  Just then, Dennis’ hot, six foot tall, copper haired, wife with a scorching accent enters the room in a black skirt, pumps and a line up the back of the stocking.  Nobody gets the Kucinich cool like I do.

Cantor’s claim of a bullet is looking dubious.  I bet that little prick is lying.

What frightens me is the virulence and vehemence, the irrational fury of those that would oppose a leap forward.

What makes me sick is the publicly elected officials who foment such dehumanizing disregard for common decency and difference of, or deference for, an opinion.  This is America.  We aren’t ever going to be herded onto boxcars for mass extermination.  If it ever happens here it will last an afternoon, maybe a day.  I’m not referencing irresponsible roundheads like Limbaugh, Hannity or Beck but rather the Boehners, Bachmanns, Cantors, Kings, Grassleys and Demints.  Allegedly responsible representatives who hobby, trade and wage in fear and dangerous incendiary nonsense.

Dirty, filthy immoral bastards who would blow anyone for $20k.  How do these people get taken seriously?  See above.

They deliberately cultivate and collect the same brand of bigoted, racist and ignorant subhuman that so violently opposed civil rights legislation.  Dumbass mouth breathing fucktards.  A handful of those folks have ended up being assassins.  Murderers.

American tradition and legacy is such that justice and liberty for all eventually prevails.  When there is will there is way.

It can take a while and never without a price.  The vulgar and profane consistently manage to extract more than a pound of flesh.  They are arrogant and bereft of humility.  At this pace, there will be blood.

They will go too far unfortunately and their cause will be consigned to history as ill advised and malattempted.  Political leprosy.  Social pariahs.  Just like McCarthy, Nixon and Dumbya’s entire posse.

These people are as ridiculous as they are dangerous.  There will be blood.

Just do the best you can to think peace.  It’s gonna get ugly.

It just might start rural.

All these earth quakes.  Bound to be a volcano.  See what I’m saying?

Health care is no mere privilege but a right that comes with being born human at least.  I believe that.  I always will.

Drinks for my friends.

Last night I pontificated vitriolic over the idiots that think President Obama’s address to America’s school children is some sort of socialist plot to indoctrinate them.  It goes without saying it’s one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever heard.   A shining example of the stupidity, ignorance and racism that still runs rampant in this not so great country.  It’s sad.  It breaks my heart.  I’m not kidding.  It breaks my heart.

The one man who represents most of these moron’s best shot at a better life is vilified by them.  They are programmed, indoctrinated if you will, by those shallow, transparent entities who have their very worst interests at heart. Vicious irony.  Cruel.  The blind and deaf hatred, suspicion and fear sometimes overwhelms even a cynic like me.

I stand in awe.

It’s all about blatant, overt avarice.  Simple.  Plain.  Machiavellian in the most perverse sense.  Sociopathic in it’s indifference.

It moves me.  I can’t help but write about it.  It’s my therapy.  My vent.  My catharsis.

It occurs to me that the difference between liberals and conservatives is profound.  Duh.  Aside from the obvious, I’d like to point out the less than.  Liberals have a tendency to be disgusted with conservatives.  So much so they are reluctant or refuse to listen to them at all.  Yet they are still willing to investigate, seek alternative points of view and even sample the rantings of those irresponsible broadcasters who’s stock in trade is the fomenting of hate and judgment.

Conservatives on the other hand, refuse to listen at all.  To read or investigate.  They do not want to know.  They don’t want to hear or see anything contrary to what they’ve been told.  They don’t care.  They are unwilling to care.  What their icons tell them is better than good.  It is their truth, regardless and despite.  It’s all they need or want.  What lies beyond is confusion, vast tracts of gray between black and white.  George W. Bush was famous for not doing nuance or subtlety.

The great unwashed take orders very well.  They adhere and obey very well because they don’t want to to think for themselves.  Intellectually lazy and spiritually complacent.   To discern or debate confounds them and makes them very uncomfortable.  They have an overriding need for all or nothing.  Right or wrong.  No in between.  From there, the pattern is clear.  God is good, all knowing and all seeing.  God will keep them from harm or even mistake because he is always right.  Follow God and you’re cool no matter what.  You simply cannot wrong if you go with God.  It’s an absolute and the contemporary conservative covets the absolute.

Without absolutes, they flail and flop, sweat and panic.  They are agitated and bewildered because their whole system of belief is under a fire that only logic and rationale can bring to bear.  What follows is desperation, irrationality, lies and obfuscation.  They show up at political events with guns and rhetoric invoking Nazis, communism and Armageddon in the biblical sense.  The only thing they have in the face of an onslaught of truth is what they see as their absolutes; the lie of contemporary Christianity, morality as they define it and the righteousness of their twisted concept of patriotism.

They spew an invective infused jingoism and mediaeval archaic notions of religious superiority.

It’s like battling robots.

By the way, their next actions will be violent.  Violence will be justified in their minds.  They imagine it as we speak.  Many of them on the fringe have already  embraced it.  They shoot doctors don’t they?

This how we arrive at tomorrow.  Our president will address the children of America and simply encourage them to be good people.  Work hard, study hard and dare to achieve and aspire.  That is all.  But the right wing paints it in very broad strokes as something entirely different and I for one understand exactly why.  I’ve just described it to you as best I can.

Without further ado, I give you his words to be spoken tomorrow, so you may judge for yourself the potential of his dangerous and controversial words.  If there is a God, may he help us all.

“The President: “Hello everyone – how’s everybody doing today? I’m here with students at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia. And we’ve got students tuning in from all across America, kindergarten through twelfth grade. I’m glad you all could join us today.

I know that for many of you, today is the first day of school. And for those of you in kindergarten, or starting middle or high school, it’s your first day in a new school, so it’s understandable if you’re a little nervous. I imagine there are some seniors out there who are feeling pretty good right now, with just one more year to go. And no matter what grade you’re in, some of you are probably wishing it were still summer, and you could’ve stayed in bed just a little longer this morning.

I know that feeling. When I was young, my family lived in Indonesia for a few years, and my mother didn’t have the money to send me where all the American kids went to school. So she decided to teach me extra lessons herself, Monday through Friday – at 4:30 in the morning.”

“Now I wasn’t too happy about getting up that early. A lot of times, I’d fall asleep right there at the kitchen table. But whenever I’d complain, my mother would just give me one of those looks and say, “This is no picnic for me either, buster.”

So I know some of you are still adjusting to being back at school. But I’m here today because I have something important to discuss with you. I’m here because I want to talk with you about your education and what’s expected of all of you in this new school year.

Now I’ve given a lot of speeches about education. And I’ve talked a lot about responsibility.

I’ve talked about your teachers’ responsibility for inspiring you, and pushing you to learn.

I’ve talked about your parents’ responsibility for making sure you stay on track, and get your homework done, and don’t spend every waking hour in front of the TV or with that Xbox.

I’ve talked a lot about your government’s responsibility for setting high standards, supporting teachers and principals, and turning around schools that aren’t working where students aren’t getting the opportunities they deserve.

But at the end of the day, we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents, and the best schools in the world – and none of it will matter unless all of you fulfill your responsibilities. Unless you show up to those schools; pay attention to those teachers; listen to your parents, grandparents and other adults; and put in the hard work it takes to succeed.

And that’s what I want to focus on today: the responsibility each of you has for your education. I want to start with the responsibility you have to yourself.

Every single one of you has something you’re good at. Every single one of you has something to offer. And you have a responsibility to yourself to discover what that is. That’s the opportunity an education can provide.

Maybe you could be a good writer – maybe even good enough to write a book or articles in a newspaper – but you might not know it until you write a paper for your English class. Maybe you could be an innovator or an inventor – maybe even good enough to come up with the next iPhone or a new medicine or vaccine – but you might not know it until you do a project for your science class. Maybe you could be a mayor or a Senator or a Supreme Court Justice, but you might not know that until you join student government or the debate team.

And no matter what you want to do with your life – I guarantee that you’ll need an education to do it. You want to be a doctor, or a teacher, or a police officer? You want to be a nurse or an architect, a lawyer or a member of our military? You’re going to need a good education for every single one of those careers. You can’t drop out of school and just drop into a good job. You’ve got to work for it and train for it and learn for it.

And this isn’t just important for your own life and your own future. What you make of your education will decide nothing less than the future of this country. What you’re learning in school today will determine whether we as a nation can meet our greatest challenges in the future.

You’ll need the knowledge and problem-solving skills you learn in science and math to cure diseases like cancer and AIDS, and to develop new energy technologies and protect our environment. You’ll need the insights and critical thinking skills you gain in history and social studies to fight poverty and homelessness, crime and discrimination, and make our nation more fair and more free. You’ll need the creativity and ingenuity you develop in all your classes to build new companies that will create new jobs and boost our economy.

We need every single one of you to develop your talents, skills and intellect so you can help solve our most difficult problems. If you don’t do that – if you quit on school – you’re not just quitting on yourself, you’re quitting on your country.

Now I know it’s not always easy to do well in school. I know a lot of you have challenges in your lives right now that can make it hard to focus on your schoolwork.

I get it. I know what that’s like. My father left my family when I was two years old, and I was raised by a single mother who struggled at times to pay the bills and wasn’t always able to give us things the other kids had. There were times when I missed having a father in my life. There were times when I was lonely and felt like I didn’t fit in.

So I wasn’t always as focused as I should have been. I did some things I’m not proud of, and got in more trouble than I should have. And my life could have easily taken a turn for the worse.

But I was fortunate. I got a lot of second chances and had the opportunity to go to college, and law school, and follow my dreams. My wife, our First Lady Michelle Obama, has a similar story. Neither of her parents had gone to college, and they didn’t have much. But they worked hard, and she worked hard, so that she could go to the best schools in this country.

Some of you might not have those advantages. Maybe you don’t have adults in your life who give you the support that you need. Maybe someone in your family has lost their job, and there’s not enough money to go around. Maybe you live in a neighborhood where you don’t feel safe, or have friends who are pressuring you to do things you know aren’t right.

But at the end of the day, the circumstances of your life – what you look like, where you come from, how much money you have, what you’ve got going on at home – that’s no excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude. That’s no excuse for talking back to your teacher, or cutting class, or dropping out of school. That’s no excuse for not trying.

Where you are right now doesn’t have to determine where you’ll end up. No one’s written your destiny for you. Here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future.

That’s what young people like you are doing every day, all across America.

Young people like Jazmin Perez, from Roma, Texas. Jazmin didn’t speak English when she first started school. Hardly anyone in her hometown went to college, and neither of her parents had gone either. But she worked hard, earned good grades, got a scholarship to Brown University, and is now in graduate school, studying public health, on her way to being Dr. Jazmin Perez.

I’m thinking about Andoni Schultz, from Los Altos, California, who’s fought brain cancer since he was three. He’s endured all sorts of treatments and surgeries, one of which affected his memory, so it took him much longer – hundreds of extra hours – to do his schoolwork. But he never fell behind, and he’s headed to college this fall.

And then there’s Shantell Steve, from my hometown of Chicago, Illinois. Even when bouncing from foster home to foster home in the toughest neighborhoods, she managed to get a job at a local health center; start a program to keep young people out of gangs; and she’s on track to graduate high school with honors and go on to college.

Jazmin, Andoni and Shantell aren’t any different from any of you. They faced challenges in their lives just like you do. But they refused to give up. They chose to take responsibility for their education and set goals for themselves. And I expect all of you to do the same.

That’s why today, I’m calling on each of you to set your own goals for your education – and to do everything you can to meet them. Your goal can be something as simple as doing all your homework, paying attention in class, or spending time each day reading a book.

Maybe you’ll decide to get involved in an extracurricular activity, or volunteer in your community. Maybe you’ll decide to stand up for kids who are being teased or bullied because of who they are or how they look, because you believe, like I do, that all kids deserve a safe environment to study and learn. Maybe you’ll decide to take better care of yourself so you can be more ready to learn. And along those lines, I hope you’ll all wash your hands a lot, and stay home from school when you don’t feel well, so we can keep people from getting the flu this fall and winter.

Whatever you resolve to do, I want you to commit to it. I want you to really work at it.

I know that sometimes, you get the sense from TV that you can be rich and successful without any hard work — that your ticket to success is through rapping or basketball or being a reality TV star, when chances are, you’re not going to be any of those things.

But the truth is, being successful is hard. You won’t love every subject you study. You won’t click with every teacher. Not every homework assignment will seem completely relevant to your life right this minute. And you won’t necessarily succeed at everything the first time you try.

That’s OK. Some of the most successful people in the world are the ones who’ve had the most failures. JK Rowling’s first Harry Potter book was rejected twelve times before it was finally published. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team, and he lost hundreds of games and missed thousands of shots during his career. But he once said, “I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

These people succeeded because they understand that you can’t let your failures define you – you have to let them teach you. You have to let them show you what to do differently next time. If you get in trouble, that doesn’t mean you’re a troublemaker, it means you need to try harder to behave. If you get a bad grade, that doesn’t mean you’re stupid, it just means you need to spend more time studying.

No one’s born being good at things, you become good at things through hard work. You’re not a varsity athlete the first time you play a new sport. You don’t hit every note the first time you sing a song. You’ve got to practice. It’s the same with your schoolwork. You might have to do a math problem a few times before you get it right, or read something a few times before you understand it, or do a few drafts of a paper before it’s good enough to hand in.

Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Don’t be afraid to ask for help when you need it. I do that every day. Asking for help isn’t a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of strength. It shows you have the courage to admit when you don’t know something, and to learn something new. So find an adult you trust – a parent, grandparent or teacher; a coach or counselor – and ask them to help you stay on track to meet your goals.

And even when you’re struggling, even when you’re discouraged, and you feel like other people have given up on you – don’t ever give up on yourself. Because when you give up on yourself, you give up on your country.

The story of America isn’t about people who quit when things got tough. It’s about people who kept going, who tried harder, who loved their country too much to do anything less than their best.

It’s the story of students who sat where you sit 250 years ago, and went on to wage a revolution and found this nation. Students who sat where you sit 75 years ago who overcame a Depression and won a world war; who fought for civil rights and put a man on the moon. Students who sat where you sit 20 years ago who founded Google, Twitter and Facebook and changed the way we communicate with each other.

So today, I want to ask you, what’s your contribution going to be? What problems are you going to solve? What discoveries will you make? What will a president who comes here in twenty or fifty or one hundred years say about what all of you did for this country?

Your families, your teachers, and I are doing everything we can to make sure you have the education you need to answer these questions. I’m working hard to fix up your classrooms and get you the books, equipment and computers you need to learn. But you’ve got to do your part too. So I expect you to get serious this year. I expect you to put your best effort into everything you do. I expect great things from each of you. So don’t let us down – don’t let your family or your country or yourself down. Make us all proud. I know you can do it.

Thank you, God bless you, and God bless America.”

Drinks for my friends.

So Ann Coultergeist goes on Faux news and says Lou Dobbs was right on racism, I mean immigration, but wrong on the Birther movement.  Dobbs is saying he’s not a Birther but merely wants proof.  Nevermind that the issue is less than silly and Dobbs is at least willfully complicit by irresponsibly shining a mainstream media spot on it.

Duh.

The punchline is that Coulter is in a shitstorm over the whole thing.  The far right whackaloons are marching on her cottage with torches and pitchforks.  I love it.  What does it say about these people if they’re too nuts for Coulter?  Ignorance is bliss.  If you’re retarded, do you really know you’re retarded?

This is rich.

Somebody on Hardball put it pretty succinctly.  I’ll paraphrase.  When the river is low, sand bars and rocks at the bottom are exposed to the light of day.  The Republican river is low.  I may have put a more than poetic flourish on it than was originally intended but that’s my job and I’m sure you get the point.  The GOP is experiencing a drought.  With that drought comes famine.  A famine of ideas, leadership, intellectual honesty and common sense.  The fabric of commonality, the fish net if you will, is rent asunder and the carp are left to flop and writhe and wheeze amid the sand and stones while baking in the hot summer sun.

I can’t help it, that visual makes me a little sad.

Ahhh, but then the lunatic fringe marches ever onward, if not forward.  Not forward at all.

Through nefarious effort of various obfuscationists, I may have just invented a new word, the elderly are being led to believe they will be evaluated on their individual likelihood to die and whether it’s cost effective for the government to pay for cost saving measures based on that likelihood.  Some are even expecting government employees to literally visit their homes to determine how they would prefer to die according to mortality statistics and actuarial tables with their specific affliction as a determining factor.

Think I’m kidding?

“The Republicans have a better solution that won’t put the government in charge of people’s health care……… and is pro-life because it will not put seniors in a position of being put to death by their government”  -Virginia Foxx (R-NC) on the floor of the House of Representatives

“A lot of people are gonna die……..this program of of government option that’s being touted as this panacea, the savior of allowing people to have quality health care at an affordable price is gonna kill people” -Paul Broun (R-GA) on the floor of the House of Representatives

I think he might be saying quality affordable care is impossible unless we kill some of us off.

What new devilry is this?  They have either been led to believe by lobbyists that it’s all true and that would make them gullible idiots, or they are so deep in the pockets thereof that their chief concerns are money and power.  Either way, it is profoundly fucked up.

And as Rachel Maddow points out, all this morbid retarded fucking bullshit starts with and is propagated by the likes of America’s preeminent Human Shitsmear, Rush fucking Limbaugh.  They are taking their talking points from this drug addled, lying and thrice divorced douchebag.

The GOP needs immediate health care.  The GOP needs a surgeon for it’s tumor.

But wait, there’s more, lets listen!

“This is very dangerous.  We, in Michigan have already fought back an attempted assisted suicide several years ago and yet you see that the people who support this are trying to use this bill to advance this agenda.” -Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI)

Really, what?

Wait.  It get’s better.  Let’s listen!

“We’ve been battling this socialist health care, the nationalization of health care, that is going to absolutely kill senior citizens.  They’ll put them on lists and force them to die early because they won’t get the treatment as quickly as they need… Once the government pays for your health care, they have every right to tell you what to eat, what you drink, how to exercise, where you live…Any time you have economic chaos, people are always willing to give up their liberty to get economic stability” -Louie Gohmert (R-TX)

Sheezus.  I really like the word ‘diphthong’ don’t you?  It’s meaning is so nebulous.  A sliding vowel.  Sorry, let’s keep moving.

He then goes on to compare the quest for reasonable and affordable health care for American citizens to the aspirations of Hitler and Mao.

This asstard is a genius.  Buy his free book.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, this is simply the most voluminous wad of shit any single agency, much less, American political party, has ever attempted to shove down your ignorant neck.  If you buy into a single aspect of it, you are stupid and worthless.  You probably still think the Iraq war was a great idea.

Ask yourself what this is about.  The answer is Fisher Price.  Money.  Each one of these shriveled dicks is gagging on giant pharmacuetical cock and loving it.  Can’t get enough of that huge milky cock.  These fucks.  These fucking fucks, are nothing but avaricious politicians who’s sole concern when they wake up everyday is money and power.  They don’t give a mad fuck about you.  They don’t want you decent tax paying citizens to be able to cross violent car crashes or brutal insidious cancer off your list of things to worry about because they’ve got eyes on a new boat or hookers in another city.

They lay their heads each night on pillows wrapped in high thread count sheaths and pray for your continued gullibility.  Oh, and more pharmaceutical cock.  Milky cash and medicine spewing cock.

This, is the exact nature of the battle being waged on your behalf by your elected representatives.  These are actual statements mouthed by the lying thieves you elected and trust with your best interests and every single goddamn one of them is a Republican.  I’m not here to tell you Democrats are much better because they aren’t.  At best they are spineless pussies and supine in contrast to the snarling overfed neoconservative hounds wandering the moors in search of weakened foul exactly like you.

God helps those that help themselves.  I don’t believe in your God but you better believe in this one thing or we all get nothing.  Nothing.  The richest country on earth will deny you treatment that will save your life when disease is acute enough to kill you if we don’t make this happen now.  It won’t even be your country, it’ll be your insurance company.

Here comes the hard part.  The irony.

You think the horror they preach isn’t possible?  Get sick now.  What they are screaming about has already happened.  Fourteen thousand a day losing any chance at affording a life threatening occurrence.    It’s a right, not a privilege and as the richest nation on earth we deserve it.

What these fucks would have you believe is worse case scenario, already is.  If you have insurance, you assume you’re insured.  You get sick and it’s fifty fifty at best.  Your insurance provider can and will walk away from you and there isn’t a damn thing you can do.

Now, there is no bill yet, but why are they so scared?  Simple things like no discrimination against pre-existing conditions etc……

Let it begin.  It won’t be perfect but it’s easier to fix a tire once the car is on the road rather than having to reinvent tires all over again.

We spend more than ten times our nearest competitor state on WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION and we pay for all of it, there’s plenty of room and money for us to be taken care of when our darkest days come.  And they will come.  For each of us, they will come.  Wanna be scared?  Be scared of that, because it’s inevitable.

Fuck Israel, fuck Iraq and fuck Afghanistan.  There is plenty of filthy lucre and it’s ours.  All ours.  Time to stand up and tell them how to spend our goddamn money.  Our money.  Our country.

” We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

So be it.

Drinks for my friends.

Johnny Angel Wendell is actually owed credit for the subject matter here, a left leaning radio talk show host, by simply voting yes in a facebook poll as to whether Sarah Palin should run for the Presidency in 2012.

I too am in favor, if only for the burlesque it promises.  After reading “It Came From Wasilla” in the latest Vanity Fair, I’m convinced that the entertainment value of such an endeavor would be no less than awesome by way of spectacle.  And really, if by then that’s the best the GOP can do, it will guarantee a  second term for Obama or whomever else the Democrats see fit to choose.  Just think of the gritty pathos.  The humanity.  The vacuum of humility.

Now, 2012 is a political millennium away.  To be honest, I estimate Palin’s political career, much less her aspirations, to be toast crispy and black.  Stick a fork in her.  Sarah Palin is a dry, overdone pot roast no gravy can mitigate.  So yes, it’s a fantasy.  Forgive me; it would be grande.

The thing is this, the Republicans have nobody.  Not one man or woman.  Not one credible individual with even the remotest potential to entertain the notion of leading the party to any elected office other than say, dog catcher or assemblyman.  Bereft of leaders, message or even philosophy.  Reaping what they have sown.  Karma not just nipping at their heels but ripping chunks from their asses.  Callow adolescent diphshits and geriatric has-beens.  The C Street house of cards collapsing on what would have been potential stewards like Ensign, Pickering and Sanford.  Not so much burlesque as an ill advised, asinine dress rehearsal.

It get’s harder and harder to watch.  More and more disgusting.

As much fun as there is to be had here, this shit is pathetic.  It’s embarrassing.

There are members of congress who believe the earth is but six thousand years old.   Yep, Republicans almost all.  We look to these assholes for leadership?

I feel a rant coming on.  Yep, it’s in the back of my throat.

I’m coughing.  It’s like a goddamn sagebrush.  This is gonna hurt.  Sorry.  Feels like a tumbleweed.  Yep.  Sorry.  Got any grape Kool-Aid?

Ahem.

Go ahead, read your Bible or your Qur’an or whatever gets you through the night.  I’m less sick of your shit interfering with my life than it so violently and presumptively interferes with the lives of everyone else.  Then, it influences my life.  This is no way to run the world.  My God can beat up your God.  Wanna race for pink slips?  Archaic and absurd.  Fonzi vs. Ponch.  Two would be Italians, one played by a Jew the other an Hispanic.

We really need to leave this shit behind.  It’s stupid.

Catholicism is dumb and hypocritical and evil.  A religion based on ancient, obsolete treatise and decorum as much as rampant Church sponsored pedophilia.  Fuck these cocksuckers.  Pun violently intended.  Bullshit from the ground up.  The bureaucracy of this institution has no excuse and even less shame.  They steadfastly protect those who have or would have diddled your children.  Those who have or who would have ass raped your little boy or girl.

Yet they posture in front of you and deign to share God’s will and the way to a moral life with you.  Snake oil.  Charlatans.  Idiots.  Pretenders.  Phonies.  They don’t know or understand shit.

Them having never shared their pudenda with a mature female makes them sacred?  Holy?

Bullshit.  They stick it wherever they can.

I use the Catholics as an example because I loathe them.  But really, all organized religion is the same through the jaundiced lense of hypocrisy and evil.  So many of you need to go play in the street.  You’re not relevant and don’t deserve to be tax free.  You hurt and damage far more than you help and your “faith” is literally based on an imaginary man in the sky.

And they believe the earth is six thousand years old.  I’m done with you people.

Shut up.  Go away.  Jesus is not the way, if he existed at all he may have been a nice guy.  That’s it.

I hate religion.

Drinks for my friends.

Seemed like a kinda profound topic when it first occurred to me.

I want it to be good.  Pleasant.  Everyone gets their fair share and we are allowed to make our own happiness without concern for shelter and food or medicine.  We should have to work for these things for sure.  But, it’s ridiculous given the largess mother earth produces every day that so many go without.  Criminal that those lacking do so only by the hands of them that have so much.  There is a point where sanity ceases to be sane.  A point where it all is so ridiculous.

We are there.

Work with me here.  The last decade has seen the the single most massive redistribution of wealth in the history of history.  The rich got filthy richer and the poor got less and less than shit.  Veterans, handicapped and disabled.  Mentally ill and inner city humans, minorities and laborers.  All of them bound ever harder.  And middle class mouth breathers shriek about socialism and health care like they haven’t been ripped the fuck off by their own for decades.  Absurd.  Stupid.  The richest country ever on the face of this blue marble, afraid to distribute her gargantuan excess equitably enough to provide for the common welfare at hand.  To secure liberty and perhaps even the pursuit of happiness.

They wail and whine about any change at all to a corrupt system that incentivizes greed over service, while their very own pockets are beseeched and invaded by the paper champions they so covet and support.  Them that fall from grace in hypocritical scandal after embarrassing calumny.  Just how stupid are the great unwashed?

Yep, just that frustratingly stupid.  Just like that.  Over and over.  Again and again.  Fucking stupid.

Fools.  “Why behave in public if you’re living on a playground?” -DLR

An 8,000 square foot house for two people?  Maybe.  I don’t know.  Why would someone who makes twenty million a year aspire to make two hundred million?  Who cares at that point?  Unless you intend to give it away.  I can see buying a nice car.  I like cars.  I have a penis.

A guy named Horace Walpole said a hundred years ago that life is is a tragedy to those who feel and a comedy to those who think.

I don’t want my government using my money to buy so many fucking bombs and guns and ever more efficacious ways to kill.  WWII was the really the last time we needed all that paraphernalia of death and destruction.  What we need now is clean air and water.  A safe and reliable food supply, a clean well lit place to live, health care and a decent education.  These are not outrageous things to ask from the richest country in the world.

I’m not suggesting that everything be free, rather simply that productive employed citizens be able to afford life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  The poor and disadvantaged should at least see a light at the end of a tunnel.  We can’t take care of everyone but we can do a helluva lot better than we are now.

I don’t understand why the great unwashed or so afraid of it.  Health care.  I believe it to be a right.  It shames and sickens me that we are not afforded this merely because all of our money, yes, our money, has been spent on our ability to wreak havoc on the undeserving around the world for the last six decades.  To establish dominance.  To show who’s boss.  So there’s no mistake about who’s boss.  Disgusting.

I love this country and I love it’s people.  Well, some of them anyway.  We all deserve it, whether you’re one of the shit bags who buy into the specious, self serving bullshit fear the Republicans cram down your neck everyday or not.  We’ve all actually earned it.  We deserve it.

Are you aware that there at least four pharmaceutical/medical insurance lobbyists for every member of congress?  The legislative branch of our government is bought and paid for.  Duh.  The thing is this, we the people have the same advantage we’ve always had.   Same potential.  Same power.  They all still need to get elected.  It’s true we’ve seen rampant polling malfeasance, but I’d like to believe that if Iranian brand fuckery happened here we’d be pretty pissed and the revolution would be televised.

I’m not so cynical as to as to imagine the reverse.  Just cynical enough to understand why they do it so slow, so incremental, so deliberate.  The powers that be fear this muscle unflexed.  They know better than most that should the muscle contract, they are fucked.  So they shoot anesthesia directly into it wherever, whenever and however they can.  Enough of you turn the other way for them to get away with it.

It’s pretty fucked up.

Ultimately, the power lives and dies with the people.  I’m not sure how to put a fine enough point on that.  You want health care?  “Only you can prevent forest fires.”  – Smokey Bear

See what I’m saying?  We are in a better position now to get what we want than we have been in a long time.  What we have coming.

Look at it like this, nuclear weapons are weapons of mass destruction and they are obsolete.  It’s razors edge, but right now the game is plus or minus zero.  Even Steven.  Penis withering logic.  So long as no other country or state manages to acquire them.  That would be a game changer.

Anyway.  Massive armies are made obsolete by two things.  The clash of hundreds of thousands of soldiers is an archaic concept.  It will never happen again.  And the advent of nuclear arsenals ensure that as strategy, a hundred thousand on a battlefield is a relic of an idea.  Kind of  two in one bonus logic.

I work hard to bring this to you.

The only realistic way to cure what infects us is a carpet bombing of our defense budget.  The biggest budget for any single concept in the history of man.  Eisenhower warned us of the perils of a military industrial complex and it all came true regardless.  The peak of the pyramid of our plutocracy is breaking this country’s back more than anything else that is actually on the goddamn TV.

I’m cutting to the chase here.  The 800 lb. pound gorilla is us and our ridiculous fantasies of superiority and exclusivity.  America needs to understand that we are no better than anyone else and by that I mean country, state or ethnicity.  If we want a kinder gentler world we need to back off.  This insane figure of over a trillion a year spent for the killing of other people is just not getting us anywhere.  We’re good at it but does nothing but backfire.

I’m no xenophobe but we really need to look inward.  Devote more time to introspection and infrastructure.  Acting as the world’s over armed mall cop has done nothing but cost millions of lives and elevate us to the level of world bully.  The bully they can’t wait to see trip so they can kick and use their sticks and clubs.  Our foreign policy sucked and so did domestic.

Israel, for example, is a billboard for diminishing returns.  A postcard for liability.  Our sugar daddy relationship with Israel is embarrassing.  I don’t doubt they have enough nukes to turn the middle east into glass.  Time for them to pull their shit without the biggest guy on the block backing them up.

For example.

We are stumbling and it’s ugly.

We are the only wealthy country without health care.  We are the wealthiest.  We pay twice as much as most and  what we get kinda sucks.  It’s a joke.

It’s not that simple but it’s a good place to start.

Drinks for my friends.

Good evening.

Bill Clinton gave the keynote speech to the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee yesterday.

I’m cutting to the chase here with direct quotes.

“Global cooperation is crucial for the survival of mankind…..”

“If we have a chance, it has to begin by people accepting that they can be proud of who they are without despising who someone else is,”

….”we are genetically “99.5 percent the same……..”

“From time immemorial, people have fought over identity rooted in that (half percent),” Clinton said. “We should have spent more time thinking about that other 99.5 percent of ourselves.”

“You teach your children their ethnic heritage; their religious heritage; their cultural heritage with no negative reference to anyone else because it’s the only shot we’ve got to make the most of our interdependent world,”

All quotes from CNN.com

You’ll have to forgive me but these sentiments strike a real chord with me.  Beyond that chord, is a three part harmony and a choral ethereal behind it.  With a Hammond B3 through a tube Leslie cabinet and some tympanies and strings.  Some brass and wood.  French horns and Oboes.  Oooh, and a Moog.

“Teach your children well,
Their father’s hell did slowly go by,
And feed them on your dreams
The one they picked, the one you’ll know by.” -Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young

These simple notions explode in my heart.  If we could just live by them, we’d enjoy so much more peace.

John Lennon beseeched us gently to imagine.  To imagine an entire world with no religion, no hell and just the blue sky above.  No country.  No nationalism or even patriotism.  No reason to even covet wealth or profit from famine.

“A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world” -John Lennon

That’s big stuff there.

Then there’s proof we’re almost outta rope.  This is such a simple thing but the climate is getting ever more polarized and violent.  While the right wing frolics in it’s own pudenda, evangelicals are snug as a bug in a rug with the idea they are somehow among the righteous and will somehow live forever.

These folks are stupid.  These folks are mean.  Sheezus.

As cynical as I am, I’m still an optimist.

The latest xenophobic diatribe from the asshole club foolishly denounces the concept of being a citizen of the world.  Newt the Salamander (new nickname alert), mocked it last week in a speech before rotting doddering sycophants.  That’s dumb.  I don’t care what backward crap you subscribe to, if you are reading this, you are a citizen of the world.

Some of you don’t like it.

Tough shit.

Newt the Salamander cracks me up.  The hair of a robust but premature gray talk show host, the face of a caramel and Scotch addicted bigot, the grill of an octogenarian who’s still got some baby teeth.  Thinks he’s got a shot at the head office.  The way he’s shoveling sewage, he doesn’t have shit to say.

Whatever he does say smells like ass.  He packs his jowls with feline fecal tootsie rolls to lend his face symmetry.  I’m really happy I just said that exact thing.  I don’t care much for the Salamander.

Nattering nabobs of negativity want to know Newt’s languor.  How does the Salamander balance the warm rock and the cool water?  Plump and bellicose.

I’d like to have him over for drinks and duct tape him to a space heater.  Make him watch CSI Miami.  Feed him nothing but Slim Jim’s and Dr. Pepper.  He would change his own diapers whilst suspended by a chin strap.  Morticians would be allowed to practice on his pale countenance and somewhat alien bone structure.  I could invite some NBA size trannys.

” George W. Bush left office with a public approval rating under 30 percent. Less than 30 percent of Americans currently describe themselves as Republicans. The amalgam of evangelical Christians, hardcore gun-rights fanatics, anti-tax, anti-immigrant and anti-choice voters who make up the base of the Republican Party amount to less than 30 percent of the overall electorate.” -William Rivers Pitt, truthout.org

Salient point of ensuing article by Mr. Pitt is that it’s own base is reason for the GOP’s demise.  The Sarahs, salamanders and Huckabees are prisoners of their own device.  The once muscular, hard right base of the Republican party, the guns and God crew, are essential for candidates to be allowed to sit at the table, but now a virtual guarantee they’re exempt from being dealt a winning hand.

My synopsis: These guys are fucked and it’s all their fault.

Will Pitt rocks.  Like a hurricane.

As much as I loathe the great unwashed, I sincerely wish they’d wake the fuck up and smell the world along with America’s place in it.  They nearly screwed the pooch when they were in power last time and now they are poised to do their worst despite being the minority.  Irrational fear, ignorance, prejudice and unwillingness to judge a man based on the content of his character, but rather his religion, political affiliation, culture or social beliefs, has the whole movement flirting with obsolescence.

The Republican party is a parody of itself.

They have begun to eat their own.  They drag their party moderates toward a house still fully engulfed instead of even entertaining the idea they are less than absolutely right about everything.  Frustrating to watch.

It has always been true, always an imperative, but now it’s damn near an emergency; we must get along.  Share the world.  Humankind can no longer afford to relinquish reality and truth while clinging to individual interest and willful ignorance.  The fomenting of hate by right wing media is not just reckless and irresponsible but is literally a menace to society.  I’m not here to suggest we revoke the first amendment rights of fucktards like The Human Shitsmear (Limbaugh), Hannity, Coulter, Glenn Beck, O’Reilly or even the Cheneys.

Fight fire with fire by using your own rights under that same amendment to drown them out.  How hard would it be for every American who loathes Rush to storm his phone lines regularly?  Sunday afternoon in the park.  We could do it from facebook and myspace.

What then, of the example by the Iranian people this weekend over the travesty of their national election?  They took to the streets.  I understand that the chronic malfeasance of our ’00 and ’04 elections was not nearly so obtuse.  We are guilty nonetheless, for behaving.  Not nearly enough ‘what the fuck?’

They are furious and showing courage.  Point to me the American who doesn’t cheer this struggle.  These people are ass pissed as they should be.  This is incredibly good stuff.  Anybody looking for inspiration or even an example?

As I write this I watch dickheads go swine stupid downtown over a goddamn basketball championship.  Now that’s blind shithouse irony.

I have it on mute but LAPD are going paramilitary and scaring the crap out of them.  Herded like cattle and KCAL9 cuts to commercial.  Lean it up against what’s happening in Iran right now, that’s all I’m saying.

Drinks for my friends.

“And I’m also proud to carry with me the goodwill of the American people, and a greeting of peace from Muslim communities in my country: Assalaamu alaykum.” -Barack Hussein Obama, President of the United States of America.

Awesome.

Honestly, I teared up.

I am so very proud of my President and my country.  Our Man was amazing today.  He said things no American President has ever said.  And they were all true.  I was transfixed.  Enchanted.  Slack jawed.  I’m grateful I was alone, just in case I drooled.

It’s worth pointing out that in light of the elaborate smear effort to paint him as some sort of extremist Muslim conducted during the Presidential  campaign, his speech in Cairo today was goddamn courageous.  Beyond that, it was an overt in your face to his neoconservative right wing Christian critics. You know, the ones that so desperately want you to believe that we’re in the middle of some war that is ultimately about our God being able to beat up their God.  The ones for whom ridiculous dogma and apocryphal ideology trump compassion, reality and common sense.

“More recently, tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations. Moreover, the sweeping change brought by modernity and globalization led many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam.”

“So long as our relationship is defined by our differences, we will empower those who sow hatred rather than peace, those who promote conflict rather than the cooperation that can help all of our people achieve justice and prosperity. And this cycle of suspicion and discord must end.”

Oh man.  That’s the shit right there.

“As the Holy Quran tells us, “Be conscious of God and speak always the truth.  That is what I will try to do today — to speak the truth as best I can, humbled by the task before us, and firm in my belief that the interests we share as human beings are far more powerful than the forces that drive us apart.”

There it is.  We are all just people.  Humans first and foremost.  How breathtakingly refreshing.  How important and authentic.

Obama quoted John Adams: “The United States has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Muslims.”

This notion, so widely held, that America is at war with a religion or an ethnicity or even a geographic region is so very wrongheaded, so perspicaciously misguided, that most Americans, along with too much of the world, have no realistic understanding of just exactly what is happening and why.

It’s understandable, given the litany of lies we’ve been force fed, and our own failure in laziness and apathy to not even bother to investigate for our own edification, the absolute crap the media has foisted upon us so irresponsibly, so relentlessly and for so long.  The failure of journalism in America is mirrored by the doppelganger of breakdown by Americans ourselves, to question what we’re told, to challenge what we are led to believe.  Exactly why we are in this mess.

Willful ignorance.

“The enduring faith of over a billion people is so much bigger than the narrow hatred of a few. Islam is not part of the problem in combating violent extremism — it is an important part of promoting peace.”

As an agnostic,  I am moved  to say Amen.

“Let me also address the issue of Iraq. Unlike Afghanistan, Iraq was a war of choice that provoked strong differences in my country and around the world……….Indeed, we can recall the words of Thomas Jefferson, who said: “I hope that our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us that the less we use our power, the greater it will be.”

Sheezus.  Wow.  In Cairo, Egypt.  An incredibly bold admission about the abject failure of American policy.  I can’t tell you how impressed I am at this honest confession by Our Man on the world stage.  It’s true, America fucked up by invading Iraq.  We screwed the pooch.  Shame on us.

“And finally, just as America can never tolerate violence by extremists, we must never alter or forget our principles. Nine-eleven was an enormous trauma to our country. The fear and anger that it provoked was understandable, but in some cases, it led us to act contrary to our traditions and our ideals. We are taking concrete actions to change course. I have unequivocally prohibited the use of torture by the United States, and I have ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed by early next year.”

Of course I was aware of these steps by Our Man, but his restating of them beneath and behind the proscenium of a stage in front of the entire world is nothing less than golden.  And again, the admission of just how far this once great country has strayed, is so brave and nakedly honest, that I am at a loss for words.

He recounts these events, these egregious mistakes, because his intention is to put them behind us by reconstructing our integrity and pride with honesty and transparency, whenever and wherever possible.

Then, he swung the mother of all haymakers:

“On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people — Muslims and Christians — have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than 60 years they’ve endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations — large and small — that come with occupation. So let there be no doubt: The situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. And America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity and a state of their own.”

“It is a sign neither of courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That’s not how moral authority is claimed; that’s how it is surrendered.”

“The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements.  This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop.”

Unbelievable.  Finally.  A sitting American calls Israel on it’s shit.

This is change.  I can’t speak for you, but this is why this man earned my vote.  It is why I didn’t hesitate to hope.  I believed him then.  I believe him now.  I believe in him.  As I write this, I am inspired and awfully proud.

This speech will no doubt be read, remarked upon and lauded for decades.

This guy is so fucking cool.

Drinks for my friends.

Fuck that shit.  CHRISTIAN TERRORISM.

Timothy McVeigh was a domestic terrorist.

Whackjobs like Scott Roeder, who assassinated Dr. George Tiller yesterday in his own goddamn church, what should be a sanctuary, do so in the the name of their Christian God.  No surprise here that Roeder was a homophobe as well.  Christian Terrorist, nothing less.

Thank God I’m agnostic.  I crack me up.

“A man named Scott Roeder was convicted in 1996 of criminal use of explosives and sentenced to 24 months probation….” -CNN

Imagine this man was Muslim and he was known to stalk and then kill a Rabbi or a politician.  Think about it.  Really.

Like it or not, George Tiller was engaging in a legally protected activity.  Do these assholes really think these women simply wake up, watch an episode of Maury Povich and decide to seek a late term abortion as a matter of convenience?  I’m not even going to look it up, I’m confident that’s not the case.  Shut up, I will not entertain the issue.

Enter the glowering spectre of egregiously irresponsible “journalists” like Bill O’Reilly.  How much blood on his hands?

“Tiller, O’Reilly likes to say, “destroys fetuses for just about any reason right up until the birth date for $5,000.” He’s guilty of “Nazi stuff,” said O’Reilly on June 8, 2005; a moral equivalent to NAMBLA and al-Qaida, he suggested on March 15, 2006. “This is the kind of stuff happened in Mao’s China, Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union,” said O’Reilly on Nov. 9, 2006″ -salon.com

As of today, no apologies from O’Reilly.  In it’s stead, Bill the pinhead offers that: “The far left is exploiting the death of [sic] Dr. Tiller to stifle any criticism of abortion.”  Note the euphemism “death of” in the the place of what should rightfully be “assassination”.  As though, “Tiller the Killer” some how expired or succumbed to natural causes.

There is no doubt in my mind that O’Reilly and his ilk are responsible in some degree for so recklessly fomenting the hate and fear for which such tragedies are an inevitable conclusion.  Inevitable, you douchebag.  Time to man up, you penisless reptile.  Do you imagine your useless vitriol to be without consequence?

To quote Snoop: “Fuck Bill O’Reilly.”

Man I hate these guys.

In other news, I’m thinking Sonia Sotomayor has benefitted  from the magic of rhinoplasty.  Good decision methinks.  She used to have a honker like a potato.  Seriously, she’s hot, smart and exotic, at least to me, self confessed trailer trash.  I’m saying that under the right circumstances, I’d hit that.

For the record, my current significant other is very smart and way hotter.

I gotta tell ya, I think Barack taking Michelle out for dinner and a show in New York is unbelievably cool.  He loves his wife and so do I.  Class and glamor.  A little Camelot for us all.  I am only able to muster a mere modicum of amusement at the FOX news talking heads invective over the cost of the outing.  Vainglorious and vituperatively disingenuous valor on part of their talking heads pretending to give a mad fuck over the expense to you, dear reader.  Did they complain, on your behalf, about Dumbya’s record amounts of vacation time to clear brush in Crawford?  I think not.

Assholes.

Man I hate these guys.

Drinks for my friends.

I had a pretty swell day today.

I actually went to a barbecue.  I brought a couple good zinfandels, one was a Pejut.

I contributed in other ways.  I grilled some pineapple.  Quartered slabs of it.  I brushed one slab with teriyaki and another with a with a blackberry preserve based homemade bbq sauce.  I sprinkled garlic on both.

I like that both Deanna and Lisa don’t like to smoke in front of the kids.

Me, I don’t care.

I grilled red onions too.  I think my pineapple went over pretty well, it was gone fast, but I brought home some onions.

Extraordinarily nice people.

We watched the first half of the laker game and these women were on it.  I was the only adult male of ten people.  They sort of assumed I’d be some alpha male grill master.  We had ribs, hot links, chicken, hot dogs, hamburgers and I grilled pineapple and red onions.  The women and children were forced to cook the meat as my emasculation bloomed.

I supervised while I smoked a few of Deanna’s Marlboro Lights because they tasted interesting and I was drinking good zin.  They seemed to have a handle on it.

Anyway, shoulda heard the women talking the game.  Awesome.  Kinda bitchy but not missing a single thing.  I’m not a sports guy but I likes me an NBA playoff game.  I was sitting with at least three women that had been paying attention all season.  One told me the Lakers could for sure stop Cleveland.

There was too an enclosed porch on the second floor with widows on three sides.  As it got chillier it was a nice place to watch the sun sink and have a smoke.

Children were the stars of my day.  These little girls, sisters, were diamonds in platinum.  I tried not to smoke in front of them.  They sang to us on the way home.  I can’t put my finger on it.  Their obvious independence, their overt dependence on mother and whatever innocent sweetness they threw my way.  A rosy spotlight on them.

Two sixteen year old boys named Jonathan and a very pretty girl about the same age.  The young lady such a wide eyed doe.  All three literally teetering between adolescence and early adulthood.  I see it in their eyes and read it in their gestures.   Charismatic geeks and thank the powers that be.  Smart, funny and not thugs or idiots.  Good kids.

Then there’s me.  Huffing on Marlboros, drinking wine and soliciting the cooperation of any teen I can coerce into my onion and pineapple experiments.

It was an unconscionably pleasant day.

I brought a plate home.

It is Memorial  Day, a year and a half after the Thanksgiving I first and last met the Grandma.  No sooner did I enter the living room than she was pulling the thin tube for oxygen that ran across her cheek up so that I could kiss her there.  Not much can make you feel that welcome.

I hate war and I don’t believe in your God.  I am respectful of every single American that has served his or her country in any capacity that includes war.  It is a very big deal.  I have an uncle that served and he is damaged.  I’m an agnostic and a Democrat but I’m also an American.  I love this country, but  I’m not afraid to express my disappointment, disgust and dismay.

I am a patriot.

I take it very seriously.

Would any of you out there be willing and of a mind to come at me from there, I respectfully invite you to bring it.

My gratitude for every man woman and child who has defended these principles and this country.

Drinks for my friends.

Cable is out. Chose not to pay the bill.

What people fail to understand is that Obama cannot afford to even address this issue of guns, to do so would ignite an already hot pile of insanity. These fucks, these crazy zealots, are lying in a puddle of their own excrement waiting for Obama to utter the words “gun control”. It will be an excuse for them to snap.

Patient but dumb.

Wouldn’t be prudent.

Most of you are just stupid enough to not understand how dangerous you are. It really bugs me.

Sorry boys and girls. The issue of guns will see no play this season. Understandably so methinks.

Unless assholes keep shooting shit up. Give it a rest already. I refuse to to fear this.

I got comic books on the brain. I bought a thousand bags & boards and five long boxes the other day. For the last three days I’ve bagged and boarded. Surreal. Amazing nostalgia. I adore comic book art. My collection is perfectly preserved. Exactly the way I left it. Beat up books are still beat up books, but pristine ones are still pristine.

Crazy. I touch each one as I place it on a board and manuever it into a bag and I remember reading them, almost everyone of them stirs something in my head and there’s over a thousand. Damn. They were gathered with care as well as abandon. As I rember them, I understand they have informed me as much as they are going to.

They are everywhere in my apartment now. Leaning or stacked, grouped by title. Huge swaths of Ironman, Spiderman, The X-Men, Daredevil, Avengers, Fantastic Four……The Flash, Superman, Batman, The Justice League……….Star Trek, Adam 12, Richey Rich, Zoro and Archie……Boris Karloff, Ripley’s……….Swamp Thing, an assload of MAD magazines, Heavy Metal, Conan and Epic.

An amazing historical capsule. Late sixties to early eighties. The breadth and diversity of my collection affords me permission to brag and be proud because I was a child when I assembled it.

My folks are heros for packing them, storing them and delivering them to me when I bought my first house.

The way they smell and the way they look and my absolute romance with them when I barely had opinion about anything. I began to obsess when I was twelve. I was twelve.

John Byrne, Jim Starlin, Chris Claremont, Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, Bernie Wrightson, Barry Windsor Smith, Frank Miller…… Jack Kirby

Life is so sticky I feel the need for a bath about every hour. Sign of the gypsy queen. As thick as an old Supertramp record.

Everything I ever did you could hear the fucking kick drum.

The kick drum is lichen on a boulder.

When I was a kid there was lichen on boulders.

Primus grooves way hard.

My sincere advice to you is to Sail the Seas of Cheese and clean your house.

A little Tommy The Cat will cure whatever ails ya. I’m also a spokesperson for Alka Seltzer and fragrant pinecones.

Anyway, today Michele “We’re Running Out Of Rich People In This Country” Bachman (R-MN), by far the biggest assclown in the US House of Represenatives, gracelessly attempted to infer that flu epidemics somehow only occur under Democratic administrations. See if you can follow her logic:

“I find it interesting that it was back in the 1970s that the swine flu broke out then under another Democrat president Jimmy Carter…….” -Huffington Post

The Human Shitsmear had this to say:
“[E]verywhere Obama is spreading Obamaism, there is a deadly disease taking place, either in the TARP community or in the newspaper business … Obama goes to Mexico — they have an earthquake. Obama goes to Mexico — get pig flu,” -wowwowwow.com

Awesome. Do the math. You’ve got an evil humanitarian and Nobel Peace Prize winning philanthropist, and our current President, a nefarious community organizer and two, count ’em two, outbreaks of flu related to pigs of all things. Oh, and, they’re both Democrats. I bet they used the same lab. It’s probably deep in the basement of some Red Cross shelter or maybe a Salvation Army thrift store.

Sheezus! That’s iron clad. A slam goddamn dunk! But wait. The original swine flu epidemic occured under Ford. I feel dizzy. I think I smell yellowcake uranium……my vision is clouded by pockmarks not unlike those littering the visage of George Tenet.

In late March 1976, President Gerald Ford emerged from a meeting with 27 health advisers with an ambitious request: “I am asking every man, woman and child in the country to get an inoculation this fall.” -dumpbachman.blogspot.com

It’s fair to say I love to loathe this woman. I adore her stupidity. I covet her retardation.

Why, just the other day she deigned to lecture Congress about Carbon Dioxide. She posited over and over that it’s a natural gas. She’s right about that but then so is the methane in my flatulence. What’s the point? She’s sure it can’t be bad for us because it’s from “nature”. She goes on to inform the esteemed deliberative body that there exists not a singly study proving this natural gas is harmful to humans. Five syllables Michele, asphyxiation.

She gives truth to the concept of failing upward:

In response to a question from host Chris Matthews, Bachmann said on the Oct. 17 show that she was “very concerned” that Obama “may have anti-American views” and that the news media should investigate the views of members of Congress. -Miami Herald

Hello McCarthy.

Then there’s Arlen Spector. Booya! I’ve always thought this guy to be inconsistent but obviously of his own mind. He confuses though not predictably. Maybe he actually has his own mind. Just can’t tell with these damn white collar tweekers.

Franken will get to sit and Spector makes sixty. A nice number. The Democrats, should they choose to act in concert, will have a majority immune to fillibuster. It’s something they rarely do regardless of whether they’re formidable or not. I’m not about a lockstep majority in the Senate but we need to be able to swing haymakers and roundhouses. Change won’t take unless we land some.

Homogeny is not a given among the jackasses.

Whatever. What these two stories point to is serious structural damage in the GOP. Take Mehgan McCain’s remarks:
“Karl Rove follows me on Twitter. That’s creepy, and ” Later, she wrote: “I can’t shake the fact that Karl Rove is following me-it can be creepy. So watch out.” and “Call it savvy marketing, but I find it disingenuous,” she said. “And it’s a bit weird to think his people-not even Rove himself-are following me.” -CNN

This thing will heat up. It will be a battle of the titans. Not so much between Democrats and Republicans but a contest between progressive and ignorant. Between smart and stupid if you will. Pro peace, pro choice, not fooled by creationism or abstinence, unafraid of gay people, tired of organized religion in our face rational humanists, versus desperately afraid war pigs that believe shit like Democrats are responsible for the fucking flu.

Guess who wins.

Drinks for my friends.

Bill O’Reilly, who’s likeness appears along side the definitions of both ‘hypocrite’ and ‘blowhard’ in the most reputable dictionaries, said in an interview today that he boycotts any film in which Sean Penn appears because of his political views. In the words of Snoop Dogg, “Fuck Bill O’Reilly”. And, “He’s a motherfuckin’ prick”. And, “Suck my dick”. And, “so I can kick his motherfuckin ass when the show is over with”.

I don’t really have anything to add here.

In other news, I thought it was pretty cool to hear that the CEO of GM, Rick Wagoner, was walking away at the behest of the Obama administration. That is, until I read the greedy bastard could tip the fuck out the door with as much as $20 million. Excuse me, there seems to be some sort of canker on my penis. Does this look infected to you? It’s like deja vu all over again.

Also, thirty thousand pythons as long as twenty feet are threatening to go forth, multiply and overrun Florida and there’s a million pounds of pistachios out there that will kill you in your bed.

The world is an increasingly perilous place and I’m almost out of pot again. It’s legal here in California as long as one suffers from a serious and/or chronic malaise like ingrown toenail, sebaceous cysts on one’s genitalia or say, brewer’s droop from drinking beer.

A prescription costs between a hundred and a hundred fifty bucks. My fridge is broke.

I watched a comic tonight on Comedy Central. Josh Blue. Self deprecating, brave, honest and very funny. He suffers from cerebral palsy. Walk a mile in another man’s shoes but never forget about the man with no feet.

I’m an agnostic. My position has more to do with the abject silliness of just about every organized religion on the planet, as opposed to some sort of soaring epiphany. Honestly, I owe my stake more to the vacuum of logic that exists in every dogma fomented by people of faith on up to, but not exclusively, the goddamn Pope.

For example:
YAOUNDE, Cameroon (March 17) – Pope Benedict XVI said condoms are not the answer to the AIDS epidemic in Africa and can make the problem worse, setting off criticism Tuesday as he began a weeklong trip to the continent where some 22 million people are living with HIV. -AOL news

Don’t lose sight of the fact they boink all the little boys and girls they want.

Good luck with that crap you pointy hatted pontiff. I’m not sorry to tell you that Catholicism just may be the most egregious and archaic “faith” practiced in America certainly, and under the world’s proscenium without a doubt. I will be as blunt as possible here. Catholicism encourages me to root for Satan. Catholics are fools. So are Baptists, Mormons, Anglicans, Protestants, Muslims and especially Evangelicals and Born Agains.

They are all petty children in the eyes of the universe.

My sincerest apologies if I left any one out.

Buddhism occurs to me to be the only discipline that bothers to address the existential nature and uniqueness of the human condition. I just can’t help but appreciate a fat guy with a shit eating grin in the context of all the other tragic and sometimes stigmatically bleeding religious icons.

Most of it is about guilt and non intellectually curious blind shithouse faith. What I mean to say is it’s spectacularly dumb.

You gonna eat that?

Drinks for my friends.

A colleague and I had a mildly intense but friendly conversation about politics the other day. I’m hoping I disabused him of few ridiculous notions but I doubt it. Maybe I gave him pause on one or two matters. I may never know. Interesting guy. Very bright, very calm and very friendly.

I really like my little department at the bank. It doesn’t suck that Skippy’s gone.

So, same colleague tells me he agrees with Warren Buffet’s remarks this morning. I wasn’t aware of what he said but told my friend that I thought Buffet was a bright guy. He characterized what he’d heard as Buffet saying that the Obama administration should limit it’s focus to issues economic and stop using the power of majority to ram a liberal agenda down the throat of congress.

I thought to myself, less than fifty days in, and we’re being accused of precisely what Republicans have been audaciously guilty of for the last eight years, plus twenty.

Oh the humanity.

Here’s what Buffet said:
Warren Buffett, an Obama supporter, famously described the economic crisis as an “Economic Pearl Harbor” — but now says Congress, especially the GOP, has failed to adopt an appropriately unified “Dec. 8th” mentality. -politico.com

“The minority really do[es] have an obligation to support things that are clearly designed to fight the war in a big way,” Buffett said. “I think the Republicans have an obligation to regard this as an economic war and realize you need one leader… I think the [Democrats] should not use it … to roll the Republicans.” -firstread.msnbc.msn.com

I asked my friend if he thought Obama’s executive order today lifting the ban on federal funding for stem cell research was an example of the gratuitous Liberal agenda. His answer was, “absolutely”.

In other news:
The daughter of Republican Sen. John McCain called President Obama “the hippest politician around” – then complained that being a member of the GOP is “about as edgy as Donny Osmond” and blasted conservative commentator Ann Coulter as “offensive” and “radical.” -nypost.com

This sort of betrayal pleases me to no end. I wonder how long before she’s forced to walk it back a little. It won’t be long before daddy starts to forget.

Doesn’t Meghan McCain have a big rack?

Also, the practise of organized religion is on the decline. Some 86% indentified themselves as religious in 1990. These days it’s around 75%. Salient point here is that’s a long way to go. We need it closer to fifty-fifty. I’d feel better.

Last but not least is Our Man’s signing of the executive order today. Not only is it an economic opportunity and therefore part of a much bigger picture, but it’s intended to help “restore scientific integrity in government decision making.” -whitehouse.gov

“Today, more than ever before, science holds the key to our survival as a planet and our security and prosperity as a nation. It’s time we once again put science at the top of our agenda and worked to restore America’s place as the world leader in science and technology.” – President Barack Obama -whitehouse.gov

See what I’m saying?

Drinks for my friends.

Slow news day, with the exception of Al Franken as the “provisional Senator” from Minnesota, the slaughter in Gaza, Roland Burris as maybe the new Senator from Illinois and Leon Panetta picked for the CIA.

Other than that. Yeah.

There’s an idiot on myspace that I just can’t help but fuck with on occassion. If you read me regularly you may be familiar. I’ll give you a URL at the end in case you want to wade in. I couldn’t be less concerned about increasing his numbers, you people need to to know about people like this.

From his latest blog:

“Thanks to the lame stream media’s unwavering commitment to national socialism, B. Hussein Obama has been elected POTUS and will be making appointments to the Supreme Court in the near future. If any five members of that august body agree that your 12 year old daughter has the right to obtain an abortion without your knowledge, or that Adam&Steve have the right to become husband&husband, or that those pesky Islamic terrorists currently housed at Guantanamo Bay should be released in your neighborhood, well; you get the idea” -Dewitt

Heh. You’re a jackass. You’re worried about this stuff now? You must be kidding. Really. Clowns can’t even get work these days. You must be retardedretired. The worst of what you speak is about to be over. Forgive me, these things have your panties in a bundle today? This kinda shit keeps you up at night now?

Adam & Steve? Notwithstanding that it’s clearly a civil rights issue, exactly what about this frightens you so much? I can honestly tell you that were my religion to take exception to homosexuality, I wouldn’t give a mad fuck. You my friend, could better spend your time pissing up a rope. We have much bigger fish to fry.

I have giant boner gay naked rage for your ass to be penetrated now. I’m simultaneously completely heterosexual.

By the way, no worries here, I’m agnostic.

Sheezus! Islamic terrorists from Gitmo in our neighborhoods? Do you honestly buy that crap? Are you really that far behind the curve? Your shit is ridiculous.

Last but not least; twelve year old girls having access to abortions without parental involvement? If those other two ridiculous scare tactics didn’t make me spew Bombay Saphire and nearly squirt creamy fecal pudding………….

Then this, from a blog he posted but didn’t write:

“Mine was a people’s campaign. I was the surprise candidate because I had emerged from outside the traditional paths of politics and was able to gain widespread popular support. I offered the people hope that together we could change our country and the world. I spoke on behalf of the down-trodden, including persecuted minorities, but my actual views were not widely known until after I became my country’s leader. However, anyone could have easily learned what I really believed if they had taken the time to read my writings and question those people with whom I associated, but they did not. Then I became the most powerful man in the world. And the whole world learned the truth.”

For all intents and purposes, a direct and overt comparison of Our Man to Adolph Hitler. This guy is a world class pencil neck douchebag.

If you’re just spewing this shit without owning it, you may be a sociopathic, redneck dickhead.

If you believe it, I hope you wear a helmet and have supervision in public.

Either way, you suck bad and should always be monitored by the government you’re so desperately afraid of. You ARE the problem.

I would never endeavor to censor you, but I would urge you to shut the fuck up. You’re a goddamn fool. If you were next to me in a cubicle I’d throw shit at you all day long. Steal from you. Piss in your chair. Rub my balls on your phone.

If you were my neighbor, I’d perfect a powerful short range catapult.

Can’t you just go somewhere?

Drinks for my friends.

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=132557808

Here we are. Judgement day less than one hundred hours away.

Show me a vampire and I’ll show you a Republican. Such singleminded avarice does not exist in mere mortals. Show me a lockstep conservative and I’ll show you a nearly brain dead zombie. Such singleminded lust for flesh only exists in the undead.

John McCain is Frankenstein’s Monster. Far less than the sum of his parts and dangerously insane.

Show me an indefatigable, unflappable, charismatic black man and I’ll show you a liberal Democrat. There are no black vampires, except maybe Blackula. There’s very few black zombies. With zombies, you can tell by looking.

Happy Halloween.

By the way, Black Republicans must be as close to stupid as Gay Republicans.

Are you aware that almost a quarter of the good folks in Texas believe Our Man to be a Muslim? Like there’s anything more unsavory about that religion than the next. Fucking rednecks.

It’s embarrassing.

If you think Barack Obama is a Muslim, it’s because you’re looking for a reason to fear him. It is willfull ignorance and it’s among the ugliest of American proclivities. Guess what else it is? It’s straight up, no apologies, racist. Tragic and shameful.

What I’m trying to do here is make the point that, were it not for the color of his skin, Barack Obama would be escorting McCain to a toilet after an enema right about now and then tucking him in. Once the elder statesman begins to snore, Our Man would slip off to contemplate his cabinet. He’s that kind of guy and Doubtfire has consumed copious amounts of carcinogens on the trail. He’s glowing.

No worries, he’s not going to explode.

Actually, he’ll melt. There will be a godawfull smell. The stain will be solvent-proof. Greasy, like charred opossum.

A horrible mess, but it will manageable as long as we can get him outside before he starts to sizzle. Away from dense foliage and wooden structures. Get the hoses ready. Call 911. Wear a cup. Maybe a helmet and eye protection.

The actual location will need to be incinerated for public safety.

The other point I need to make is that there will indeed be a deadfall. A biohazard. The great unwashed will not go quietly. Many of them will not go at all. People have lifetimes, generations, invested in this pervasive, insidious belief system. They cling to the religious components of it as a way to legitimize and justify their bigotry and narrowmindedness.

It’s goddamn frustrating because they hide behind it and we athiests and agnostics can’t go there. They will label us Godless and no one one will hear us out.

Bastards.

Conservatives, neocons and religious zealots have no love for America. They don’t give a mad fuck. They love themselves and they count on being romanced by the more persuasive among them. Hook line and sinker, these fools wait for orders and start marching as soon as they receive the message.

They disdain thinking for themselves. They’ve come to depend on being told what to do. How to act. What to think.

What should be antithetical, has instead become gospel.

How do they do that? It’s not like they’re all under the same roof. It’s cult behavior on an impossibly massive scale.

One more season of this witch and we’re toast.

Happy Halloween.

Vote you fucks.

Pimp this blog. Spread it. Cut and paste it. Cop a link. Just get it out there. What song are you hoping to hear next Wednesday morning?

“Here we come, walkin’
Down the street.
We get the funniest looks from
Ev’ry one we meet.
Hey, hey, we’re the Monkees
And people say we monkey around.
But we’re too busy singing
To put anybody down.” -Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart

Drinks for my friends.

I can’t stand it. It just goes on and on.

Blatant.

Notwithstanding reason.

Geniuses and Jack O’ Lanterns.

The issue is this.

Abortion.

The right tries so hard to call it murder. Ahem.

It is far more nuanced and organic than that. They only do black and white.

Mother Earth will ultimately decide the the fate of humankind. She will be fine. She will prosper. The Earth does not need us. All the Earth needs is the goddamn Sun. Last I heard, the sun is gonna be around awhile.

Earth may decide that humans are no longer compatible with her goals. Her ideals. No longer congruent with her plan for survival. In a time not far from now, The Earth might shrug us humans off. She might just heat up and burn us out.

If she does this, She’ll have decided we do more harm than good.

If she does this, She’ll have decided to save her life and that of all her other inhabitants.

Who can blame her?

Maybe we’ve been tolerated thus far because we advanced so rapidly. We emerged as a species so very capable. So bright and creative. We made art and beauty while either reaching out with compassion and concern to everyone, or raping, bombing and killing every civilization in sight.

We stormed her peaks, plunged her depths and polluted her lungs. She’s seen us kill on a scale that is both awesome and terrifying. In a mere few thousand years, we developed the ability to destroy just about every life she births and nurtures.

She is impressed. Not in a good way.

Earth doesn’t need your language. You need hers. It’s not as simple as humans not understanding. It’s as ugly as humans refusing to understand. Willfull ignorance.

Mother Earth may choose to abort us. It is certainly her right and obviously within her power.

The Earth is a Mother and it is her prerogative.

Men have no business passing laws governing a woman’s reproductive rights.

Any of you at this point desiring to invoke God should just shut the fuck up. My God is The Earth. In precisely the same way you do not wish to hear about my God, I’m not interested in hearing about yours. Fuck off. I think your’s is stupider by far, than mine.

It is my right to enter into a decision with a woman about our pregnancy as opposed to allowing a religion manufactured from convenience dictate our direction without regard to our lives.

The comedy is this. You that have so much faith, so much conviction that we are acting counter to the wishes of your God, why are you so unwilling to let your God decide?

Why are you so zealous as to kill doctors to prevent us from committing this “sin”? After all, your God will sort us out, wont he? If you believe so absolutely, what are you so worried about?

Is your faith so weak as to force a question about your God’s ability to keep us heathens in check? A question profound enough to force your hand to take it upon yourself? You will say that we imprison others in society who commit murder. We even murder them. I say your definition of murder is flawed and you’re not equipped to judge.

You do your cause no favors by vehemently opposing such basic science as evolution and stem cell research. You force the hands of us with a modicum of common sense to look at you as retarded. Overly enthusiastic, euphorically fanatical, idiots.

Isn’t it your God that would deny us access to Heaven for using condoms?

Some people are stupid enough to believe contraception is a “sin”. This in a time when the world has way too many humans. Some people are just fucking stupid.

Abortions will occur. With or without your consent. The rich will have them no matter what laws you’re able to pass. The poor will suffer. Ill equipped to even bring a baby to term. Unable to afford any prenatal care. From a practical perspective, I’m just looking to keep the coat hangers out of it.

Drinks for my friends.

A friend of mine recieved some insipid spam from a relative. She agreed to let me write this but I have not been allowed to send it yet. I’m not holding my breath. Anything in quotes is verbatim from the letter/spam.

I begin.

The Bible, it does speak about untimely death, doesn’t it? I keep forgetting about that untimely death thing.

“Be not deceived; God is not mocked:
for whatsoever a man sow,
that shall he also reap.”

The idea that we reap exactly what we sow. I just can’t seem to pile on. I do believe in doing the right thing. I can’t be sure it makes a difference, but at the end of the day, might as well. Even us agnostics try to do the right thing. We like to do it correct whether we reap or not.

You make another point about people who “mocked God”. Your very first example is John Lennon. In parenthesis “singer”.

Just a singer huh?

Lennon said:

“Christianity will end, it will disappear. I do not have to argue about that. I am certain.
Jesus was ok, but his subjects were too simple, today we are more famous than Him’ (1966).”

“Lennon, after saying that the Beatles were more famous than Jesus Christ, was shot six times, even though he was probably right.”

It’s interesting. See, if Lennon was right, he was right about the failures of organized religions to inspire and motivate beyond his own humble four piece band’s ability to do so.

Duh.

“Marilyn Monroe (Actress)
She was visited by Billy Graham during a presentation of a show.
He said the Spirit of God had sent him to preach to her.
After hearing what the Preacher had to say, she said:
‘I don’t need your Jesus’.
A week later, she was found dead in her apartment”

“Bon Scott (Singer)
The ex-vocalist of the AC/DC. On one of his 1979 songs he sang:
‘Don’t stop me; I’m going down all the way, down the highway to hell’.
On the 19th of February 1980, Bon Scott was found dead, he had been choked by his own vomit.”

Yes, it’s quite clear that god killed them for their mockery and overall disrespect. They were pagans. Barbarians.

I have to say that if this is all you can find in the entirety of Christian history of peope who have “mocked God”, you my unknown friend, are reaching for shit I can’t even be bothered to make fun of.

Then I see it’s some sort of chain letter and I want to send vicious people after you.

I don’t know you but it makes me wonder who you think you are to spread this sort of incendiary, vitriolic bullshit. If you honestly believe John Lennon was some sort of threat to your imaginary friend in the sky and that he lost his life for it. You are one dangerous dipshit and a goddamn fool.

May Bon Scott dine on your viscera.

Drinks for my friends.

James Dobson, leading evangelical, founder of Focus on The Family and therefore self righteous dipshit, took it upon himself to open fire on our man Obama today for suggesting in a two year old speech that it is impractical to govern solely on the basis of scripture.

Um, no shit. By the way, Our Man was speaking to a liberal Christian group named Call To Renewal.

“Which passages of scripture should guide our public policy?” Obama asked in the speech. “Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is OK and that eating shellfish is an abomination? Or we could go with Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount?” -CNN.com

Dobson said, “I think he’s deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own world view, his own confused theology,” Dobson said, adding that Obama is “dragging biblical understanding through the gutter.” -CNN.com

Well I for one would like to believe he was pointing out just how stupid and archaic so much of the Christian dogma actually is. Probably not though. I suspect he was merely saying it is impractical to base policy on an ancient text, regardless of the reverence it still enjoys.

For what it’s worth, I’m still plenty pissed at our man over the FISA thing.

I think any debate that entertains the inclusion of any amount faith into politics or government is witheringly wrongheaded and spurious. I am weary, wary and leery of it. Big suprise from an agnostic huh?

It is abundantly clear that the founding fathers had every intention of keeping church and state separate. News flash; your religion, faith or beliefs are your own. You chose them or were probably indoctrinated. I just don’t care and I’m completely unwilling to hear about it or them.

I don’t care and I don’t have to because I’ve long since made up my mind and this is America.

The idea that any religious bureaucracy wields even a modicum of influence on political discourse in this country inspires a gamut of emotion in me that ranges from disgust to rage. When I encounter it, my knee jerks as if to say fuck you in the neck.

Do people like like Dobson believe they have some kind of moral superiority and it is therefore incumbent on them, perhaps even their duty, to foist their wisdom on the rest of us? Yup, they do. That’s why I loathe them. So many insincere zealots. The quantity of their conviction almost always belies the depth of their hypocrisy. An inverse relationship that we are treated to over and over.

Larry Craig, Mark Foley, Cardinal Mahoney, Haggard, Swaggart, Baker, Roberts, Falwell, Tilton……………

Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion–several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn’t straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother’s path to happiness and heaven….The higher animals have no religion. And we are told that they are going to be left out in the Hereafter. I wonder why? It seems questionable taste.
– “The Lowest Animal” -Mark Twain

Were it up to me, no religious spokesperson would be allowed to comment on public policy, legislation, campaigns or the merits of titty bars. Not even from the pulpit. Any who dared break the rule would see their own house of worship taxed to the fullest extent of our convoluted tax code.

A portion of the revenue would be used to reconstruct said place of worship so that it’s entire exterior would be of glass. This house of whatever God, would then be afforded the opportunity to reduce it’s tax burden by allowing it’s own worshippers to throw stones at itself.

Honestly, I don’t have a problem with Jesus. Basic Christian tenets are pretty sound. I like the one about do unto others and that one about judge not lest ye judged. Good stuff.

I can’t help but despise a good number of his fans. They should be allowed their primitive rituals and blind faith. Whatever gets you through the night is your business. Keep it that way and we’re cool. Fail to respect that and I’m free to fire flesh shredding salvos of logic at you until the lies, evil, ignorance and corruption are all that’s left.

Upon molesting the bull, one automatically qualifies for the horns.

“So much blood has been shed by the Church because of an omission from the Gospel: “Ye shall be indifferent as to what your neighbor’s religion is.” Not merely tolerant of it, but indifferent to it. Divinity is claimed for many religions; but no religion is great enough or divine enough to add that new law to its code.”
– Mark Twain, a Biography

Drinks for my friends.

Today was a dark day in the great state of California. The dreaded marriage of faggots, dykes and lezbos was allowed to commence. What have we done? The venerated institution of marriage has been soiled. Shat upon by liberals and sissy lovers. Next thing you know, they’ll be marrying their pets or monkeys (I’ll be polygamist).

Woe is us.

David Lee Roth once said of this state something like, they tipped the map and everyone with a screw loose rolled to the left coast. As an agnostic, I just need to say, thank God I live here.

The same institution that until early last century legally posited a woman was a man’s property upon betrothal. The same institution that forbade the matrimony of an African American to one of European extraction until even later. The same institution that fails utterly and completely, at least half the time, with the carnage of children in it’s wake. The same institution that was the catalyst for delivering redneck bigots to the polls for the last Presidential contest in drooling, knuckle dragging packs.

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, pause for the laugh track, “decried the decision as a typical case of judicial activism in which the court overrode the will of the people. Too bad, the Family Research Council actually fought to have the will of the majority overturned when “the people of Oregon passed a law authorizing voluntary assisted suicide for the terminally ill.” -The Daily Fuel

What a tool. It was allowed because the California Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional. Hey Tony, keep your Jesus off my penis.

Now it’s going to be on the ballot. Again.

We have seen numerous examples in our nation’s history where the “will of the people” isn’t necessarily congruent with justice, compassion or fairness. This issue, in my mind, is overwhelmingly elementary. Homosexuality is congenital. It therefore belongs exclusively to the context of civil rights. Period. Next?

I’m reasonably certain most who would deny this civil right to their fellow human, have never even known, tried or wanted to know a gay person. What would they find if they did? They would discover, other than sexual preference, they are just like the rest of us. Some good, some bad, but almost all having the capacity for love, unless it was beaten out of them by some racist homophobe who’s masculinity was threatened.

The news was juxtaposed with footage of a lesbian couple that had been together since Ike was President, gingerly slicing a wedding cake. How cool, and just what the fuck is wrong with that?

I understand the terrible engine behind this idiocy combusts on fear and ignorance. What I don’t understand is what there is to be so afraid of.

I’m grateful time seems able to slowly but deliberately render discrimination obsolete as it’s practitioners are driven into shame filled closets of their own. Prisoners of their own device.

Drinks for my friends.

A fat spider hangs in it’s web. Patient and unbelievably plump. Dense and thick. Enough weight to scare any man by crawling across his torso.

Racism in the land of plenty. We know not what we do.

I have a biracial friend who describes Reverend Wright as a “crab in a bucket”

To her it means tearing down your own who succeed. Crabs in a bucket will pull each other down in a zeal to escape.

She tells me it’s regrettable for a man such as Jerimiah Wright to sink to the the role of a crab in a bucket.

We share a disgust for the media; for it’s willingness to supply fuel as well as ignition to what’s become a crab festival.

Republicans are already feasting.

Meanwhile the bigots can’t decide if Barack is a nigger or a sand nigger.

Forgive me, but that is the low bar of discourse in this country. How fucking sad. To think our best chance of turning this ugly thing our country has become, into something better, pivots on ignorant bullshit like that, breaks my heart.

We have gone nuts.

Perhaps we’ve always been.

I’m sure it’s the latter. But this is our best chance.

Obama said today that this man does not speak for him or his campaign and he does not speak for this man.

“saddened by the spectacle.” -CNN

“What particularly angered me was his suggestion somehow that my previous denunciation of his remarks were somehow political posturing,” -CNN

The very instance of this bull wreaking havoc in this shop of china owes it’s impetus to the goddamn media. This giant load of fresh moist horseshit is courtesy thereof. Steaming, from an ignorant and shameless platter.

Even Bill Moyers was willing to take shovel to shit.

This specific Frankenstein would never have walked if it wasn’t for the goddamn mainstream sonofabitching media. I cannot believe that in this century we’re even remotely concerned about what some egotistical and narcistic pastor has to say and that some of us are more than willing to put his words in the mouth of another man.

A man who did not utter those words. A man who is running for President of The United States.

Nevermind that the party of the first part still speaks the truth. Too many of you can’t wait to believe that the party of the second part uttered those words. Furthermore, you can’t contain your glee after committing to that lie, in painting my man Obama as some sort of reverse racist radical.

Idiots. Fools. Dipshits. COWARDS.

You purchase this shit at your peril. I doubt most of you can wrap your pathetic cleft brains around that notion. Much to the detriment of us all.

Forgive me. I’m just so sick of this.

It has nothing to do with why anyone should vote for this man or not. If I, as an agnostic, were to consider someone’s religious conviction when making a decision as to who to vote for, I could not, in good conscience, vote.

I wouldn’t even have any friends.

I think it’s time for me to stop giving some of you retards the benefit of the doubt.

I’ll tell you this. If we don’t opt for change, as much change as we can get, we’ll get caught with our pants around our ankles, screwing the pooch. All of us.

Drinks for my friends.

“So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations,” he concluded.

Of course their bitter, I am.

Perhaps the only thing wrong with that sentiment is it’s being of maybe too broad a generalization. It is however, true in at least some contexts. Shrillary endeavors to use the remarks as an adhesive to affix a label of elitist to our man Obama.

Forgive me here, but that’s fucking absurd. Abandonded by his father at two years old, a mother who died young and eventually being raised by grandparents; in so many ways, Barack Obama is the epitome of the American ideal of a self made man. Whereas Shrillary and her husband sit atop a pile of filthy lucre so vast it would feed and clothe a third world country. Nothing wrong with that pile save for the component of hypocrisy Shrillary insists on injecting.

This is non-news on a slow news day as far as I’m concerned. I’m an agnostic and therefore not of a mind to give a shit about any of it. It’s transparently disingenuous. Silly season.

We can do better than this. The Little Bootlicker should be drawing this kind of fire for sponsoring the idea that those very people die for one more day, much less a hundred more years, in a pointless war based on lies and for aspiring to keep tax cuts to the rich permanent. If Shrillary is looking for an elitist, she need look no further than John McCain. Silly season indeed.

In light of that, this kind of rhetoric is destructive, irresponsible and smacks of desperation. It is more than likely that Obama will secure the nomination and Shrillary has just handed Doubtfire a box of bullets with our man’s name on them as well as emptying his piss bag for him. Way to go Hills. You continue to disgust.

Meanwhile, back at the conflagration, gas is four bucks a gallon, eighty thousand jobs lost last month, people are losing their homes right and left, a seven hundred thirty six million dollar “embassy” the size of the fucking Vatican opens in Iraq next month while our troops suffer more casualties and deaths last week than any other so far this year. How’s that “surge” working you pricks?

You’ve got be fucking kidding me.

Drinks for my friends.

More TV.

Christiane Amanpour’s extensive piece on religion
titled “Gods Warriors”.

I watched most of it.

Fascinating and perhaps comforting on a certain level
to find practitioners of faith even more completely
insane than our own brand.

Scary because they have more conviction and less
hypocrisy.

Ironic they live in an arid region that supplies the
big blue marble with oil while the world’s breadbasket
drowns because of America’s abuse and control of the
filthy nectar sucked from their sand.

Religion is at the core of this conflict. It is the
fundament. It is why we are where we are. Neither
side of the marble will relenquish it’s imaginary
friend. Both sides insist that it’s imaginary friend
is morally superior to the other. By virtue of that, each side
is confident that it’s imaginary friend can kick the
other’s ass.

Yet, it was not the Muslims or the Christians that
poured nitro on this acient and acrimonius pile of
smouldering camel crap that has us on the threshold of
a third world war. The first where we are capable
of entirely erasing ourselves.

It was our government. Dick-in-Bush, a spineless
congress and a complicit judiciary.

Welcome to the fifth grade.

I gotta tell ya, I’m not happy to see proof that
they are just as gullible, dogmatic and stupid as we
are. Christian fundamentalists scare me every bit as
much as Muslim extremists.

It’s kinda like being in a dive bar. A small one.
And there’s two dumbasses that don’t have enough sense
to realize that the shit they are stirring will end up
with at least one of them bleeding bad on the floor.
As well as the real possibility that they’re both
packing and will kill each other and more than a few of
the rest of us.

That, my friends, is where we are. Organized religion
is comprehensively culpable.

Religion took the bait.

Religion smiled, held out its hands and
accepted the kool aid along with a formula to make
it available to the masses. They then followed
through with glee. They paid it forward.

We are in a war of religious ideology.

I’m about to piss a few of you off.

Faith* is stupid. Creationism is retarded. All you
people who buy into God, in any traditional sense, are
willfully ignorant.

Your goddamn beliefs are the root of most of the evil
ever perpetuated and precisely the reason the world
has remained in chaos since man has been able to write
about it.

The single most important reason I loathe organized
religion is it’s complete disregard of logic. Of
Science. Of what makes sense. Empirical
discipline.

There’s a sixty thousand square foot museum in
Kentucky dedicated to creationism. One diorama after
another of modern man hanging out with dinosaurs. A
sprawling complex in 21st century America, dedicated
to picking it’s nose and looking out the window at
every theory, fact, and mountain of evidentiary
information mankind has been able to compile
throughout history.

No apologies. That’s really stupid.
You have got to be fucking kidding me.

I don’t know if the Muslim religion has a parallel for
Santa Clause but I’ve always viewed Christianity as
Santa and his list of good and bad kids, for adults.

See all religion has long since been usurped by
avarice. Faith and bureaucracy do not mix. It is a
recipe for corruption and myopic pursuit of power and
control.

My point is this: If we are to prosper as a species on
this tiny blue moist spec of dust in in a universe
beyond our imagination, we absolutelty must learn
humility. We must discard these archaic and obsolete
notions of superiority based on distorted views of the
way our world was made and/or the badassness of our imaginary friends.

We are an accident. A biological coincidence lucky
enough to flourish and achieve consciousness. It
is imperative that we stop our bickering and begin to
be grateful for our barely consequential existence.

Walk it off people. Set it aside. There are things
so important you cannot begin to imagine them.

You want to worship? How about worshipping where your water comes from? How about the planet that sustains you? Your family and friends and all the people you’ve never met and won’t ever meet? Art. Kittens. Whiskey.

*What I’m talking about here is blind unchecked faith.
All I know, is if I were to observe merely faith in
the context of day to day, I would end up residing in
a cardboard box.

I am an agnostic. As such, I view your God, in
whatever form you believe it to be, as without proof
of superiority, or even existence. I don’t care. All
I want, is for you to refrain from trying to insert it
into my life, our society, our government, our world
and MY FUTURE.

Drinks for my friends.