Archive for the ‘Chuck Grassley’ 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.

The latest figures indicate that the fiercely embattled public option will cover a mere two to three percent of the currently uninsured and the CBO says premiums will most likely be somewhat more than current market price.  Sounds like a wash to me.  Sounds like the sucking of a drain.  This whole thing is so fucking ridiculous.  Smoke and mirrors, dogs and ponies.  You can bet your ass, along with your lunch money, with those kinds of numbers, the whole thing is doomed to failure.

Spruce Goose bitches.

It will flop like Gerald Ford coming down the steps of Air Force One but it won’t ever get up again, at least not in my lifetime.

Good job everybody.

Jackasses.

The only customers it’s poised to attract will be our sickest and least likely to succeed.  No prom kings or queens here.  Bottom of the gene pool, unhealthy, lowlife, walkin’ the dog saps.  So it will be fiscally overburdened by virtue of our lowest common denominator and our last shot as the richest nation on earth to provide health care for our citizens will probably not even enjoy another attempt for at least half a century.  Good job Democrats, you fucking pussies and even better job Republicans you obstructionist, plutocratic, avaricious, disingenuous, lying pieces of self serving shit.

I really hate you guys.

Did I say that or just think it out loud?

Is there a difference?

Well, let me say this:  Fuck, fuck, fuck, snot and mucus and bile and shame and fear and stupid and puke………

You, Joe Lieberman, who’s state is ground zero for health insurance HQ’s and who announced publicly the intention to filibuster the very debate,  and you, John Boehner lay off the embarrassing spray on tan and you, Chuck Grassley you lying prick and you, Mitch McConnel with more chins than a Chinese phonebook and you, Max Baucus who can suck my caucus and you, Kent Conrad and you, Blanche Lincoln, you Democrats in name only………every single one of you has sold out the best and most important life or death interests of the American people in general and your own constituents in particular for what you know will line your pockets, get you you re-elected and is nothing more than a pack of aspersions, distortions and preposterous calumny.

Whomever the asshole was that declared health care reform to be Obama’s Waterloo, forgive me it was Jim DeMint, might just have been exactly right.  I don’t care who you are, that there’s fucked up.

This party might just might be over.

Have you no shame?  No decency?

Y’all negotiated and philandered, lied and decried, wrung your hands and whined like little bitches while thousands died and ended up with the pussy party (D), still being able to save face with a donut hole public option, the asshole party (R), still able to fool some of the people most of the time while still screwing them with an atomic fucking jackhammer that put them there and paid there salaries and benefits all of the goddamn time.

Sick.  Fucking sick.  Pun intended.

Everyone got what they wanted, what they imagined they needed, while the lobbyist pimps, four to one for every legislator, spent a million bucks a day to make sure they and their corporate sugar daddies maintained the status quo and everyone got paid.  You and me excepted, of course.

Because a horse is a horse of course of course and what does that make a dumbass donkey?

Cigars and cognac all around.

Some one hundred and twenty two people die every goddamn day because they lack the insurance to pay for what is killing them and the naysayers would have us debate socialism.  Government takeover.  Bullshit.  Not just a theater but an opera house, with excellent acoustics, of the shrill and reverberating absurd.

I’m needing a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  Seriously.

Some tomato soup.

Mission Accomplished.  Major combat operations are at an end.  It’s all over but the shouting.

If I did my job as well as you do yours, I wouldn’t have one.  Either that or I’d be a CEO.

This health care bill, all 1990 pages of it is going to be such a charade, facade and so spectacular a bellyflop of POLITICAL PORNOGRAPHY, so profound and disgusting, that any chance of, or attempt at, meaningful reform in banking, civil rights, justice, execution and prosecution of wars, foreign entanglements, energy, food supply, federal aide, education, accountability by any bureaucracy, institution, agency, corporation or industry will be so stained and suspect and blood spattered from other more egregious crimes, that this administration, all it’s good intentions intact, will experience a serious faceplant and we will all have been complicit in climbing decades backwards.

There’s you and there’s me, rip off the mask and let’s see.

We’ll march I guess, with rotting teeth and stage four cancer and we’ll get coupons for nachos and Hostess products at the 7-11.  They’ll sell those bacon wrapped franks along the quarter mile route.  There will will be tents for the overexerted at the halfway point.

Watch your NASCAR and your World Series while the politicians dither away at your rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  By the way, I was more than happy to see the Phillies hand the the Yankees their ass tonight and did you see the wrecks on Sunday at Talladega?  Nice that both Newman and Martin walked away.  But by the time both contests are actually decided, your life or death fate will most likely be determined well in advance.  If you are uninsured, it is likely you will remain uninsured.  Categorize yourself as therefore fucked.

The irony of death panels is that it’s a reality here and now.  The irony of health care rationing is that it exists and is practiced without compassion today.  The irony of socialized medicine, which we have now via Medicare and Medicaid, is that no country that enjoys it would ever give it up, us included.

There is no irony about the lies and obfuscation.  They are simply lies and and obfuscation.

The idea of single payer health care is among the most humane, compassionate and progressive notions ever implemented by modern states, governments and societies.  It is growth and progress where the human condition and even evolution are concerned.  After all, it does serve to affect the perpetuation of our species in a constructive way.  To utilize a small portion of the proceeds from our labor and largess to care for the people who are responsible for it, is a profoundly good idea from the perspectives of either the often mutually exclusive concepts of morality and commerce.

It makes fucking sense.

At least pot is legal in LA.

Drinks for my friends.

The far right neocons persist in marginalizing themselves with hate and irrationality, taking with them the entire GOP, Christians, evangelicals, conservatives and moderates.  It’s a spectacle.  A spectacular one.  One buoyed exclusively by vituperative vitriolic invective vehemence.  Pardon me but brainspank literally loves alliteration and it just happens to be entirely true.

I’m trying to tell you it lacks substance entirely.

They’ve abandoned facts and reason completely for fear, anger and hatred.

Republicans used to be wrong, not unreasonably stupid.  Not so unapologetically obtuse.

Misguided perhaps but not insane.

What the fuck happened?  Whatever it was, it took place on my generation’s watch.  The elephantine have always been more racist, a little more greedy, a little too covetous of power and influence, a little too hypocritically pious and a little too lacking in compassion for the plight of the average American. That at least has been my perception.

Over the last two decades however, they’ve morphed into the political equivalent of little Regan from The Exorcist.  Pun firmly and resolutely intended.  Nasty, pea soup projectile vomiting, head spinning, cartoon effigies. When called on their bullshit, they hide behind an ugly wrongheaded nationalism thinly disguised as patriotism.  Naked ugly jingoism.  Ironic the “isms” they so casually toss at the rest of us.

They leave scales like fish wherever they go.  It’s true.

My generation has witnessed the emergence and fortuitous exorbitance of such profound and disgusting dicktards as Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck  and Sean Hannity.  Elected representatives like Santorum, Ensign, DeLay, Palin, Dumbya, Grassley, Bachmann, Cantor, Gingrich, Joe Wilson and John Boehner.   Birthers, Deathers, Teabaggers, Tenthers and Twelvers.  Michael Steele, Joe The Plumber, Dick Cheney and Fox fucking news.  Each and every one on this incomplete list of a uniquely American cavalcade of contretemps is a lying, obfuscating, shamelessly and hypocritically unpatriotic goddamn piece of shit.

And they all represent the contemporary conservative movement.  Bear with me, I’m getting at something here.

Worthless, toxic, poisonous entities.  Zero contribution to constructive public discourse.  Absent everything save prurience and avarice.  Giant boulders of sand in a smallish tub of Vaseline.  Kidney stones the size of a thumb in an already inflamed urinal tract.  Ugly and dumb.

Soon, they’ll disavow being mammals.

Take for example the rhetoric over the Nobel.

Some dickhead from Fox, Brian Kilmeade, wonders aloud whether Obama delayed the decision on troop deployment in Afghanistan to better his chances for the Nobel.

The Human Shitsmear announces that the “Nobel Gang have just suicide bombed themselves”.

Some asshat from Redstate said it was part of an “affirmative action quota”.

Glenn Beck thinks the Teabaggers deserve it more.

And The Human Shitsmear says “Something has happened here that we all agree with the Taliban and Iran about and that is he doesn’t deserve the award.”

Curiouser and curiouser.  Crazier and crazier.  From shrill and scary, to gangs of banshees on meth.

Thus they further isolate themselves and alienate the humane and honest.  As their bubble shrinks, it’s skin grows thicker.  They hear and see less and less of the real world.  Their shared view, ever more myopic.  They inhabit more and more the CAVE dweller acronym.   To wit: citizens against virtually everything.  Get it?

I could spend all day providing egregious example after outrageous foray into overt racism, lies, baseless smears, deliberate distortions, hypocrisy, mean spirited interpretations………but see, I already have.  I have been for years.  I’m not alone.  Not by far.  They are so very afraid and fear is a great force multiplier.

It’s a fact that the number of Americans who identify themselves as Republican is way down and there’s no end to that atrophy in sight.  Disdain for for their lies and misrepresentations grow.  The last two election cycles have borne this out.  Yet The Human Shitsmear still has about 20 million listeners and Fox yet enjoys better than twice the audience of CNN and MSNBC combined.  I can’t help but be ecstatic about the their self perpetuating and therefore self defeating dynamic, but they stall manage to kick a lot of balls and infect substantial consciousness on the way down.

I believe at least 25% of any given population is incorrigibly stupid.  Roughly the number that still supported Nixon.  Roughly the number that still supports Bush.  It’s a fact.  Show me what you’re workin’ with.

Ah but:

“The White House’s battle with Fox News reached a new high on Sunday, when Communications Director Anita Dunn went on national television to blast Fox as a partisan organization that functions as an appendage to the Republican Party.

“Fox News often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party,” Dunn told CNN, adding, “let’s not pretend [Fox is] a news organization like CNN is.” Dunn also took her beef to The New York Times, saying in a Sunday interview that Fox is “undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House [and] we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.” -The Nation

Fuckin’ A.

There are those who would say, among them David Gergen of CNN, that the administration can neither afford to engage the FOX network in the context of so many larger issues at hand, and that it is somehow unseemly or inappropriate.

I admit I understand, and even feel that on certain levels, but still I have to call bullshit on it.  This ain’t your dad’s TV News.  There are no rules, no decorum, it’s all changed and these guys are assholes.  They have no integrity, they’re in it for the money and they won’t quit until it stops paying.  Reptiles pure and plain.  They all spend time on a warm rock every day.

Never has a President been so embattled with zero emphasis on policy, ever.  They never ever even bother to introduce or even recognize actual stated, written positions or policies ever.  Ever.  FOX news and it’s cadre of asshole spokesholes is the worst example of journalism in this or any other civilized country.  They are the suicide bombers of the American Media.  They would never die for their beliefs but they willingly fall on swords of stupidity and blow themselves up with combustible bigotry all day long.  The key difference between them and the real thing is the lack of integrity and courage.  Truth and honesty.  The ‘real thing’ being fanatics with the twisted courage of conviction and journalists with truth as their ideal.  FOX falls no where in between even those two extremes.  At the end of the day, they sacrifice their dignity and self respect.  They wake every morning fresh, to plunge into ignorance, reckless hostility and enmity and lie after fucking lie after fucking lie.

For nothing but the filthy lucre.

I’m completely aware of the potential consequence (s) a protracted street brawl between the White House and an entity like FOX and I am fully in favor of this administration taking them on and cleaning their clock.  When they do their damndest to lie, call them on their irresponsible and misleading shit.  You think the brain trust at FOX can even approach the level of intelligence, wit and wisdom in the White House?  Me either.  It’s not like it will be heavy lifting or time consuming.

I know full well that there are way bigger fish to fry but this has a strategic component to it too.  Although the mouth breathers are a minority, they are a sizable and vocal one, and the most obvious and singular ringmaster is…….well, the Cartoon Network and then FOX.

Again, this ain’t your dad’s TV News.

“This ain`t no party, this ain`t no disco, this ain`t no fooling around
No time for dancing, or lovey dovey, I ain`t got time for that now”  -The Talking Heads

I believe it to be an absolute imperative of cunning and tactics.  Bring it.  And just maybe, for once, the Democrats will be seen to have a spine and a pair of testicles.  Wouldn’t that be cool?  Like punching the bully in the mouth so hard he falls down in front of the bus and the Democrats just once, walk up the steps breathing steam, proud and righteous.

That’s what I’m talking about.

Drinks for my friends.

 

 

 

 

Why is Obama allowing him self to be so humiliatingly chumped by empty suits like Chuck Grassley?  I’m hoping it’s political rope a dope and Grassley will soon wake on the canvas, the taste of his blood in his mouth.

Fingers crossed, boys and chicks.

I’m betting on it.  Think a knuckle dragging moron like Chuck Grassley is any match for our President?  Don’t forget the guy you elected is whip smart.  Made the Clintons look Fisher Price and McCain was Play Doh.  Five or six moves ahead.  The entire GOP will be crying in front of their friends by the time the leaves begin to fall.

Wanna know how I know?  Unwitting pawns showing up to town hall meetings wearing AR15’s.  A shrieking right wing media.  The paranoia is palpable.  The Secret Service could easily expand the perimeter to a mile or more at the behest of the White House and that would be that.  Ask yourself why that hasn’t occurred and a correct answer affords you a glimpse into what is really happening here.  When the day is done, if meaningful health care reform is not passed and signed, the entire GOP will  be left to suffer the slings and arrows of their own outrageous demise.

They will be forced to filibuster, actually filibuster.  Bring on the cots and porta-potties.  Coverage will be live and through the night while ass squeaking octogenarian obstructionists are forced to ramble ad nauseum for the purpose of keeping the poor and middle class from accessing what should be their right in a country so rich, a society so advanced.  This, after every opportunity to entertain compromise has been offered and then scorned.

What we see unfolding here is analogous to the sixties civil rights movement.  The guns.  The shrill psychopathy  I pray not the violence.  It is the old guard Republicans resisting change and what is right with lies, deceit and power whatsoever they are able to bring to bear.  Same as it ever was.  Same as it ever was.

I may be wrong, but when the talking heads gasp and wonder at what the White house is up to, when they all scratch their collective crowns at the the strategy or lack thereof, I’m hoping hard it is this.  I’m hoping this administration and it’s super intellectual brain trust is allowing this pot to boil over on the stove because they understand that the only way real change comes is through this brand of passive violence.  Political judo.

I pray it is so.

Today, former Homeland Security honcho Tom Ridge, from a book to be released September 1st, finally cops to the fact that terror threat levels were subject to political manipulation by the White House and the DOJ.  Um, no shit.  Thanks for your candor, you spineless coward.  Somebody get this man a Presidential Medal of Freedom.  I mean, Tenet, Franks and Bremer got one.  It’s only fair, clearly commensurate…….

In other news, John Ensign deems himself morally superior to Bill Clinton because he broke no laws.  Remains to be seen.  Hold your breath.  Former House Majority Leader, felony indicted and architect of K street, Tom DeLay, announced his new gig on dancing With The Stars and called for Obama to produce a birth certificate.  We also learned that Cheney’s secret CIA assassination program was to be outsourced to the notorious Blackwater.  Keystone fucking Cops.

Oh, and today Karl Rove in a Wall Street Journal op-ed called for an apology from The New York Times and The Washington Post saying, “Judging from the evidence released, [the committee] uncovered facts that show that my role in the U.S. attorneys issue was minimal and entirely proper.”  My advice to the periodicals in question?  Invite Mr. Rove to piss up a goddamn rope.  And maybe request a sample of whatever he’s smoking.  Rove is as filthy as a half melted plastic doll discovered in a native American fire pit.  His hubris blocks out the sun.  His mother sucks cocks in hell.

Man I hate these guys.  Even after they’re gone, a pungent, greasy slick glistens on the surface of our water.

Then, my beloved Jon Stewart has Betsy McCaughey, propagator of the “death panel” schadenfreude and big medical industry shill, as a guest and subsequently shellacs her like a bar stool missing a leg.  A premature halt is called so we may watch the entire charade unedited online.  Brilliant.  We loves us some Daily Show.  What the hell was she thinking?  Oh, the shameless cuntiness.

You just can’t make this shit up.

And it goes on and on and on.

Drinks for my friends.

Here I am in Carson City Nevada.

Back on the grid.  Internet access achieved.  Kinda proud, as I’m a bit of a luddite.

The capital of the great state of Nevada, merely titular as the seat of power.  Since the seventies or early eighties,  the actual force and center of political influence has resided with indefatigable dominance in Clark county, some five hundred miles to the south, by virtue of the voracious development and a subsequent population explosion in Las Vegas.

Despite all that, Carson City remains a cracklingly political town.  My sister tells me it’s all about to change.  Power will return to it’s rightful place in the North.

Between nation trotting sojourns with my father in an RV better appointed and more luxurious than most apartments I’ve lived in, my retired mother still oversees vital components of the bi-annual legislature.  They are somewhere between small towns in Washington state as I write this.

My sister swings a heavy municipal bat.  She has big plans for this town.  A media center unrivaled on either coast.  Her husband, whom I’ve known since grade school, wields substantial influence with Nevada’s nearly omnipotent Gaming Control Board.  Friends of the family are the wealthy, elite and intelligentsia as well as the kind, humble, ordinary and delightfully quirky.

Hello, Don Carlson, Harry Reid and the rest of you.

Not at all out of the ordinary for me to crack my hometown paper to find an article or editorial written by my uber talented and modestly ambitious sister.  Just last week while having lunch in an ordinary burger palace, I enjoyed such occasion.

Their lives are impossibly full.  Easy to envy.  Very busy and purposeful people.  Even my sister’s three children, two in college and the youngest a senior in high school,  are elaborately involved.

The net effect of all this furious activity and humble accomplishment  allows for me to feel distinctly and unmistakably slovenly.  Sloth like.  As I sit writing this from my parent’s kitchen counter, my trophy, a gold record, prominently adorns a living room wall.  Not much in the scheme of things, but I’ll take what I can get, at least until I’m a famous and/or critically acclaimed writer.  Or maybe head of the cheese department at Whole Foods.  

Another thing that impresses the crap out of me is the depth and breadth of both my mother’s and sister’s larders.  The culinary treasures in each are enough to sustain one through the apocalypse.  Exotic condiments, mustards, pickles, oils and dressings of all kinds.  Cheeses and sausages.  Canned fruits and vegetables.  Spices, soups and seasonings.  Refrigerators and freezers stocked with meats and nuts, breads and more vegetables.  Everything from freshly frozen hand picked huckleberries to chicken nuggets, huge sides of mammals, frozen diet meals and seafood.  Sauces from barbecue, to soy ginger and sesame, vidalia onion and fig, chili, rice vinegar and raspberry pecan.  Tomato paste, tomatoes chopped, tomatoes whole.  Soups and pasta, raw beans and crackers.

Slim fast in a can and baby corn in a can.  Microwave popcorn and Cups O’ Noodles.

Alcohol from fine wine to to cheap champagne.  Malibu Rum to Creme De Menthe, blood orange liqueur, vodka, gin, whiskey and Amaretto.  Soda, beers and juices.

All manner of candies and chocolates.  Jams, jellies and preserves.

Farm fresh eggs from my brother in law’s chickens and home made pies from my sister’s oven.  She has an herb garden and shops the farmer’s market every Saturday morning.  She runs marathons.  Her husband is soft spoken, brilliant and absurdly funny.

Not much substance here I know.  Been away from the wheel for awhile so give me some room.

I will tell you this.

Without a public option at the center of any health care bill, all is lost.  Obama will have squandered too valuable political capital for next to nothing.  The only efficacious mechanism for curbing corporate insurance greed, for legitimate reform, will be missing.  Without it, it will be a band-aid on a sucking chest wound.  Consequences of a bill without it will be dire.  All momentum and any mandate from an overwhelming majority will expire.

The ideas of hope and change will atrophy.  No bill will be failure.  A bad bill, without a public option, will be a stage for blame deserved, optimism smashed and the very last chance Americans will ever have at fair and equitable health care will fade to black.  The best promise of this administration will be shit.  Obama’s presidency, and our last best hope, will surface out past the breakers, missing a limb.

Fuck the Republicans.  Take one lesson from them and get the goddamn Democrats to march in step.  Marginalize the flat earthers by excluding them.  I’m weary of the vagina monologue here.  Tell the assholes that would terrorize their constituents  with stories of “death panels” and grandma’s plug being pulled to shut the fuck up.  Go to those states and wage war.  Get proactive.  Get medieval on their asses, with the truth.

Chuck Grassley should be invited to suck his own dick.  He’ll never vote for health care reform unless he’s shamed into it.  Obama needs to go to Iowa.  I’m not sure what Ted Kennedy’s status is but wheel him in.  Get proactive.  Fight, you you pussies.  More than health care is at stake here.  Don’t you see it?  Hope and change hinge on this.

Absent a public option will be proof that Democrats are unable to even lead a horse to water.  A majority in the House and Senate will be meaningless and it will all be for nothing.  Not a goddamn thing.  All for naught.  God will whisper in Michele Bachmann’s ear and she’ll be your next President.

You think the last eight years sucked?  I’m just sayin’.  It’s all about this.  Right here.  Right now.

Drinks for my friends.

“Joe The Plumber…you can quote me…..is a dumbass.  He should stick to plumbing.” -Meghan McCain

Nevermind his name’s not Joe and he’s not a plumber.

That’s rich.

Sarah palin has the highest favorability rating of anyone in the GOP and she remains the parties most effective fund raiser.

That’s just sick.  Disturbing.  Portentous.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Sessions, Cornyn and Grassley step on their dicks in the Sotomayor hearings.  They focus on her speeches as opposed to, and in obvious ignorance of, her seventeen years as a sharp and capable centrist jurist.  Dogs and ponies.  They can’t come up with a damn thing.  Didn’y lay a glove on her.  Pat Buchanan and Rachel Maddow collided over her on MSNBC earlier today.  Rachel rocked by telling Uncle Pat he was “dating himself”.   Summed up the disconnect between asstards like Buchanan and well, the rest of us.

That guy doesn’t lose many fights.  She kicked his ass.

I’ve written about this a lot but I’m not tired of it yet.  The Republican party is one hot mess.  Tying their own shoes and that’s a bad thing.  An implosion that keeps on giving.  Three sex scandals in as many weeks, all three by prominent moralizing Republicans, who happen to live on or in (?), C Street and happen to call themselves a Christian Mafia.  I believe all three have waxed hypocritical about other politicians who’ve been caught engaged in acts of untoward.  They hollered self righteously for resignations, and now refuse to resign.

Fucking poseurs.

All this in a venue the IRS has been led to believe is a church.  A goddamn church.  Some media began calling it a frat house today.  That works.  The fraternity is the Christian Mafia.  Fuck me.

Spying and torture and assassinations, oh my.  Now I hear they used insects, fire ants even during interrogations.  Another wingtip slams the marble everyday.  Turns out, Republicans really are idiots.  Fucking arrogant, willfully ignorant, lazy morons.  They do nothing but posture and make insipid pronouncements awkwardly disguised as rational disagreement.

The hangover is getting to be a bit much.  I knew it would be a long one but it’s becoming insufferable.

You can’t write this shit.

When I hear about this kinda buffoonery, I can’t help but wonder just how much of this ‘berg is above water?

It’s like Republicans only drink a certain kind of water and the Democrats just figured out how to infiltrate the supply.  It has become the perfect storm.

Or maybe, within the most cosmic of ironies, evolution is biting them in the ass.  A burst of honest, progressive and still empirical thought manifests as their own species threatening comet.  Or maybe ice age.

Whatever it is, a hard winter is upon the Grand Old Party.

Drinks for my friends.