Archive for the ‘Religion’ Category

This is goddamn ridiculous.  No public option, no expansion of Medicare but a bill that still mandates Americans buy insurance from private, avaricious, corrupt, compassionless corporations that avoid caring for the sick as deftly as they obviate promoting health care for the healthy.  This is fucking bullshit.

Zero sum game.  Embarrassing.  All this work and debate.  We will end with nothing or worse than nothing.

Depends on how you look at it and what passes.

All the power in the hands of this jackass Lieberman?  How did that happen?  He says he’s getting closer to being able to vote for health care reform.  Closer?  Who the fuck is this guy?  I’ll tell you who he is.  His state, Connecticut, is ground zero for the insurance industry.  They give him tons of cake and they let him eat it too.  He first championed expansion of Medicare during his bid for the Vice Presidency with Al Gore.  He’s said it since in many ways and so many venues.  Now he says he’ll support a Republican filibuster for any bill containing that, or a public option.

That or a public option.

Benedict Fliptop, what a dick.  The ghost of Ted Kennedy should visit this asshole over the holidays and punch him in the mouth.  Then Teddy should show him the future of his Christmas’ with thousands dying and him losing elections.  I loathe this prick.  I will personally campaign against this douchebag like nobody’s business.  Did you know that Joe Lieberman has sex with prostitutes?

See?

He will never again represent the citizens of his state or anyone else in this country.

Then we have Ben Nelson from Nebraska.  He’s still not happy with the abortion language in the current bill.  This guy is a fuckhead.  This is not about your ridiculous moralizing, it’s about 140 people dying everyday for lack of coverage you asshole.  Ben Nelson and Trader Joe can take a long slow lick on my diseased scrotum.

Here’s the bottom line.  This bill mandates that we buy into this egregious clusterfuck without any mechanism for protecting us from their abhorrent policies.  If we don’t, we will be fined and that money will go directly to their coffers.  How’s that for truth, justice and the American way?  Here’s a shit sandwich, no condiments, no lettuce and no bread.  Just shit.

This is what the cause for health care reform has become.  A cool water sandwich and a Sunday go to meeting bun.  What do you want for nothing?  A rubber bisquit?  Bow bow bow.

See the job of our legislative branch has never been to legislate morality, although it too often has, it’s job is to legislate ethics and fairness, although it too often doesn’t.  This protracted and vulgar instance is a shiny red thumb of that example.

People are so fond of screaming for the reconciliation strategy.  What they don’t understand is that it’s a purely fiscal process.  Preventing big insurance companies from denying coverage for pre-existing conditions or exercising caps on lifetime or annual coverage is not possible in this process.

Dr. Howard Dean is a physician, that’s why he has that “DR.” before his name.  He’s also a former candidate for President of The United States and former chair of the Democratic party (DNC) where he was a leading architect in gaining a legislative majority in congress.  He’s smart and has the courage of his convictions.  Despite my impression that he always looks like he’s swallowed a turd or at least snorted one, I like him.  He’s tough and speaks truth to power whether it gets him in trouble or not.  This is a man who doesn’t give a mad fuck and has nothing to lose.  Tonight he announced on public television that the bill, as it exists, should be killed by Democrats.  He said that his recommendation to U.S. Senators is to vote against it.

That’s pretty heavy and it carries more than water where I’m concerned.

He pointed out that although the bill provides for no exclusion based on pre-existing condition, it does allow for charging three times as much based on age alone.  It’s a fecal falafel.

I understand there are important reforms still in this bill but they are rendered moot by the mandate that we purchase the product.  It’s right here that it becomes nothing more than smoking a Tootsie Roll of cat crap in hell.

We’ve reached a point where the greasy oily Republicans aren’t even a legitimate factor in the debate.  The ignorant fucktards have long since marginalized and rendered themselves inconsequential.  Now it’s just the Democrats fighting among themselves over the definition of “Real Reform”.

This really is nothing but a butt based product buffet.  Spoons up.

The good news better be what I think it is.  Reconciliation.  Could be used after some legislation has passed.  Fund stuff through the back door to support the bill, the policies, the ideal.

I’m really not holding my breath but you can’t telegraph that move even if both parties know what’s next.  It would be nothing short of grandiose to find out Harry and The Dems are as clever as Benny and The Jets.

I gotta tell ya, this piece has been easy to write but tough to stomach.

Drinks for my friends.

A composition:

The difference between Republicans and Democrats is painfully obvious.

Republicans are greedy sociopathic reptiles who don’t give a mad fuck about their constituents but love to suck corporate dick.

Democrats are spineless douchebags, who lack the courage to get down in the mud and fight for their constituents but love to suck corporate dick.

Evidence being the massive ongoing struggle for any meaningful legislation despite significant majorities enjoyed by Democrats in both houses of congress.  A pathetic, ridiculous and vulgar burlesque.  Shameful and stupid but an attestation for Democrats being far more inclined to think for themselves or someone else as opposed to conventional party wisdom or lack thereof.

All on embarrassing and inept display.

Libertarians don’t care about anything, they just want commerce to flow.  Anybody who wants to suck dick should be allowed with a particular deference to profit.

If you’ve been paying attention to the main stream media of late, you know that Republicans want to save us from socialism despite not understanding the concept, and Obama’s government lusts like a pizza faced adolescent army in neck braces or orthodontal head gear to takeover our health care so we can be killed off at their convenience.

Meanwhile, Republicans seek to kill pizza faced teenagers or adolescents in head gear for profit if possible.

Libertarians take no exception.

Responsible parents everywhere insist children wear helmets these days.

If you choose the contemporary Republican model,  you see them as unrelenting right wing, neoconservative, intolerant evangelical Christian zealots who are afraid of anything homosexual or any other religion.  You understand that they believe they know better while enduring a fusillade of common sense and science to the contrary.  Book burning and creationism and the like.

Retards at the Roundtable.  Scopes trial as blasphemy and all that.

I remember a time when what was contested was ideas, philosophy and policy.  Discourse was just that.  Polite and respectful.  It was about issues.  Then something happened.  That something was William Jefferson Clinton.  Far from perfect, but charismatic and smart as all get out.  He presided over the longest period of economic prosperity America had ever seen.  He left us with a massive surplus and a balanced budget for the first time ever.

We were cookin’.

The Republicans though, they did hate.  They began to investigate.  Afraid Bubba was Jesus, a special prosecutor named Kenn Starr was appointed to investigate Hillary’s real estate dealings while she was a member of the Rose Law Firm and they came up with dick.  Pun to be intended.  Nothing.  Sand in hand they kept on…… and discovered Bubba got a blow job and so they impeached him.  Never mind that it was none of our business.  They spent tens of millions of dollars, more than on all investigating into the events of 9/11, to shine light on a Jewish woman unable to remove a stain from a dress.

First one ever I hear.

And that is really why we are where we are.  It will all go down as the darkest and silliest period in American history.  Yet it’s sordid smell means we are less likely to forget it than UFOs, Elvis or pick a disease.  Let us hope the legacy will not be merely that of a cautionary anecdote, but rather a lesson about a forest instead of individual trees.  Otherwise, America will not be America come one hundred years from now.

Tom DeLay is on dancing with the stars and it offends me.  He’s paired with Cheryl Burke whom I think is the hottest thing since Georgia asphalt.  Goddamn, the woman is gorgeous.  Delay grins his lying rictus and looks as he has the breath of a sewer rodent.  Creepy with a ‘K’.  I really don’t like this guy and I’m a little jealous.  Never watched the show and don’t intend to but that woman is one ripe gust of feminity

Share a smoke, Make a joke
Grasp and reach for a leg of hope
Words to memorize, words hypnotize
Words make my mouth exercise.
Words all fail the magic prize
Nothing I can say when I’m in your thighs
Oh my my my my my mo my mother
I would love to love you lover  -Violent Femmes

Democrats are communist, anti constitution, caped crusaders who want to steal from anyone who has anything and give it to anyone who has nothing no matter how big of a loser the loser happens to be.  I’m not really a Democrat but I tend to identify with them and that sucks on many levels.  Giant dingbats who somehow manage to keep their self righteousness in place while failing at everything they attempt like pre-pubescent soccer players who get a trophy for simply showing up.

Democrats seem to “fail up”, almost as much as Republicans although not quite so deliberately.  Max Baucus may be shocked to see the hand entirely up his ass and into his mouth via x-ray, but John Boehner would consider it as much business as usual as his spray on tan or morning knuckle and back shave.  I fucking hate that guy.

They are different, Democrats and Republicans, but they are all still politicians.  The qualities they share are a moral and ethical bankruptcy, a willingness to feast on or make a meal out of any cock connected to money, and an instinctual fondness for anything other than the absolute truth.

This is why reasonable reform of any kind, be it health care or of industries financial or military, is in perpetual jeopardy.

Nothing can change until we have reform for our system of campaigns and polling.  Zero corporate money.  None.  Entirely financed by the electorate.  Firm start and stop dates for campaigns and equal air time for candidates.

No meaningful change before that one.

Drinks for my friends.

Surreal.

Life gets more and more strange and I thank the powers that be for that.  I am grateful.

I’m not bored.

I sort of covet anarchy.  I kinda like chaos.  I’m a big drinker and like to burn one.  Indeed, after a few glasses of gin, the wing of a plane can be achieved rather easily by a well packed bowl or two.  Maybe a percocet or uh, oxycontin, when the Devil’s weed is unavailable.

I’m just sayin’.  It puts me firmly in my thoughts.  This blog fueled by gin only.  Tanqueray ’cause it was on sale but I prefer Bombay Sapphire.  I covet the bottle whether it be green or blue.

” ……..don’t doubt that the randomness of life is in some way synchronized with all the things that we don’t
understand about the universe. It’s what we do know that confounds us.                                                                                                                                                                                       All the while, what we don’t know blows us along. ” -Me

Now, as much as I favor the random, let me be clear, I’m not about violence.  Violence confuses and disgusts me.  Religion confuses and disgusts me as well.  As does politics.

I need to be disgusted and confused.  I like politics.

Let’s talk about what I like.  Dean Wormer’s wife from Animal House is my original milf.  I’m not sure why.  She was dirty and  somewhat sophisticated.  Well, her and Robbie Chiappe’s mom, Pam.  She was hotter than Georgia asphalt.  Sucks that she’s probably in her sixties now.  Oh, and Julie Newmar.  Damn, all these women that I wouldn’t have known what to do with even if I had the chance, are old now.  This concept really chaps my ass lately.  Not fair.

I think it’s important to always have a jar of decent pickles in the fridge.  Various cheeses including Bob’s Big Boy Bleu Cheese Dressing.  I like white meat smoked turkey franks from Ballpark.  A selection of gourmet mustards and no other brand but Best Foods Mayonnaise; Hellmann’s east of the Mississippi.  Olives are good and so is a decent tapenade.  Crackers.   It’s important to have good olive oil and balsamic vinegar on hand.

Good God the right wing is fucking nuts.  The more they marginalize themselves the more violent their tantrums become.  Blind shithouse batshit.  I’m completely confident in stating, with all rational conviction, that the underlying, indeed barely concealed catalyst, is nothing other than racism.  They fear the pigmentation.  They held with certainty the notion that neither a black man or a woman could be elected president and thus their brains were dashed and broken on the rocks of the emerging ethic of American progress.

It really is that simple.  The truth is simply this bare.  Stark.  Austere.

It was one of the late night hosts who wondered how this ass clown Wilson from Sanford territory, was able to endure eight years of Dumbya telling him everything was just fine without losing his shit and then barking during a nationally televised address before both houses of congress, prime time.  The obvious answer, it wasn’t a half black liberal president saying it.  That and he’s a goddamn moron.

By far the largest concentration of Birthers reside in the South.  Not so coincidentally, the least educated and most likely to be Republican region in America.  Not all Republicans are hypocrites, but if you’re a hypocrite, you’re most likely a Republican, as the saying goes.

I really hate these pricks.

How much longer do we put up with this insanity?

Eddie Murphy said in 48 Hours to a bunch of backward ass country fucks, “I’m your worst nightmare, a nigger with a badge.”

That is precisely what’s afoot here at our Circle K.  I’ve taken this tack before, but I’m starting to get really spooked.  I mean instead of being appropriately embarrassed by Turret’s Wilson, many in the GOP are emboldened.  Before this, we had screaming astroturfers strapped to the nines at town halls.  Birthers, Deathers, Tenthers……each manifestation of racial hatred more ignoble and meretricious than the last.

Palin accuses the President of demonizing our troops on her facebook page for mentioning the cost of the war of no reason in his speech before congress.  I thought it was solid irony.  We spent this much killing people, why not spend next to nothing saving lives?  I’m still hopeful they run this clueless hag in 2012.  Oh, the burlesque.  Please Santa, I’ll be real good ’til then.  I’ll give up my two front teeth.

Glenn Beck, Fox news’ most pulchritudinous clown, the same dickhead who claims the levees were allowed to fail to cover up ACORN corruption, will be exploiting 9/11 in the most audacious of ways with his 9/12 project.  A march on the Capitol and festivities funded by Dick Armey’s  Freedom Works (charging as much as $10,000.00 a pop for participation) and co-sponsored by NARLO, a domestic terrorist organization that anticipates with zeal, a violent revolution against our government and secession leading to civil war.  Joe “you lie” Wilson will be speaking along with crazies like Mike Pence and Jim DeMint.  A clusterfuck of mental invalids.  Astroturf at it’s most egregious.

Ever more frightening.  Ever more ominous.  Something wicked this way comes.  I’ve gone from disgusted, to amused, to fearful.  The climate gets indefatigably uglier and ever more maniacal.  Death threats against the President of The United States of America are up over four hundred percent compared to the previous administration.  Feel me?

“Its all building up to something,
Something that can be repeated with fire” -Pete Townshend

You see where I’m going with this.  I’m wondering where it stops.  Where does it end?  Can it be thwarted and how?  I really don’t know.  The far right base shrinks as  desperation blooms.  The animal is wounded.  Nothing more dangerous than a wounded animal in fear and cornered.

The hate train steaming under the guise of our first amendment is poised to do damage that can’t be undone.  I’m confused and disgusted.

This is where we are.  Happy 9/11 everybody.

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.

I’ve gone through a change.  Transformed.  Like menopause.  Suddenly, the Republican Agenda makes sense to me.  I’ve gone from liberal to vacuous.

Seriously.  Work with me here.

Torture makes complete sense in the context of liberty and justice for all.  Dick Cheney and his minions should not be investigated or prosecuted.  They were merely doing their best.  It’s hopeless silliness, not to mention unpatriotic, to pursue any form of persecution of these brave defenders of the American way.  As American’s, we are better than everyone else, we don’t deserve the scrutiny.  We are above it.  God put us here to rule the world and he is on our side.  Our unique responsibility is to rid the world of evil.

We are special.  Jesus tells us so.  The Bible tells us so.

Our qualifications are exclusive and divine.  Christian Americans are The Chosen.

Republicans in particular.

The faithful.

Those who’ve failed to reach their fiscal potential are not my problem, my concern and certainly not my fault.  Maybe God’s will is that they should be left behind.  A kind of religious natural selection.  Ha!  Take that you atheist Darwin lovers.  After all, God only helps those that help themselves.  Christ has no use or patience for the weak or impaired, they are unable to do for themselves and are therefore worthless to the Holy Spirit.  Never give a fish to a Democrat, teaching the worthless to fish is a waste of time. Some have been chosen and some have not.  The Christian way and obviously what the Heavenly Father intended for the Christian nation of America.

The rich should be taxed minimally, if at all.  Wealth drives the modern economy.  They provide the largess for jobs and industry.  They are the chosen.  Thus, their generosity is evident and already in place.  They do far more than the beggar or the homeless can or would.

I’ve come to loath the rotting toothed, stupid and desperate poor.  God has not chosen riches for me but I shudder when I gaze upon the worthless because I know my tax dollars go to prolong their miserable lives.  Poor but obese, they lack the sense to choose wholesome and nutritious food.  They neither know nor care enough too seek proactive medicines or practices and I don’t doubt that’s all part of God’s plan.  That these zombies are allowed to drain the money and resources of American society in general confuses me.  God does work in mysterious ways.

I don’t hate them because God says not to.

America is the land of opportunity.  Always has been.  Those who’ve failed to take advantage of America’s vast and ripe system of free education and abundant possibility are simply beyond hope, especially once they pass the threshold of adulthood.  I work, I have a job, so these greasy, dentally challenged trailer park dwellers, these weak and worthless veterans of our wars who can’t get it together and refuse to do for themselves, make me want to puke.  Look at all the goddamn foreigners that take jobs as convenience store clerks or manual labor workers that take jobs from worthy Americans.  Are these people less capable, less able than honest Americans?  Maybe they are, maybe they’re not.

Falls under not my fucking problem.  All I know is I’d much rather have my tax dollars go towards fighting the raghead terrorists than these wastes of God’s air.  I see these people in wheelchairs sporting an oxygen tank in casinos and I just know my money is paying for them instead of keeping us safe from Satan’s Muslim evil doers.  They should be euthanized like the diseased cat’s and dogs that make a mess of my trash and threaten neighborhood children with a cornucopia of malaise.  Tics, fleas and ringworm.

Ever heard that expression “Kill ’em all and lot God sort them out”?  I’m down with that.  I’m no judge and jury but get them off my block and out of my town.

Sometimes I think Hitler was more on the ball than he gets credit for.  Everyone knows the Jews control the banks and the entire entertainment industry.  You know “The Family” on C Street more or less agrees.  He really was just looking to rid his country of Faggots, Gypsies, Jews and the ethnically impure. Hitler was a Christian too, you know.  He had “The Ultimate Solution” and I think we could take a page or two from his playbook.

It’s a good dose of reality as opposed to the fascism and socialism pinko liberals try so hard to cram down our necks every fucking day.

See, they’re not patriots like me and you.  They love niggers and spics and anyone who isn’t from the Mayflower like us.  They are weak.  They give money to all the dirty and lazy regardless of their color.  Ask me for money on the street, I’ll tell you to get a job you piece of shit.  They wander around pushing their stolen shopping carts full of stolen trash and I hate them.  Their skin a map of rashes, their eyes bloodshot with their hands out and the cloud of foul stink they walk in.  This instead of a job?

Fucking lazy if you ask me.  No excuse.

Christ has blessed my soul with charity but these people have no will or desire and don’t deserve the fish I can afford.  If they won’t die, better off behind bars at $30k a year because they are a menace.  Know God or pay the price.

We should attack and punish those countries who threaten us.  The future of the world depends on the triumph of Christianity over Islam.  They’re heathens and there’s no chance of co-existing with a bunch of towel headed camel jockeys.  Crude and uncivilized.  We have nukes and they don’t.  Time to use them.  Negotiation is pointless.  Turn their the desert into glass.

Take a breath.

I hope you understand that I’m kidding.  I’ve painted a picture for you of what I hate.  It is a caricature for sure.  A broad stroke, the impetus, the catalyst, being a solid month of right wing talk radio and it’s blatant, overt dishonesty.  Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh are simultaneously American icons and stains on America’s aspirations and her identity.  What they do everyday is sick, irresponsible and evil.  They and their ilk seek nothing more than to pollute our national discourse so egregiously as to rile the stupid and offend the thoughtful to the extent that they are actually paid handsomely for their treason.  Shining examples of the worst of us.  The physical manifestation of everything that is wrong with American society, patriotism and all our precious ideas.

They are paid handsomely to stir shit.  Disgusting.  I would swing on either one.  I fucking hate these guys.

This blog is dedicated to Teddy Kennedy.  Not perfect by any means, I understand his flaws better than you can know, a lion nonetheless.  A champion of all those I’ve lampooned so harshly here.  The dynasty has ended.  It really is America’s loss.

His passing is poignant and symbolic.  It was with JFK’s assassination that the modern era of brutal politics flooded us.  The subsequent courage of LBJ and the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King cemented the vulgar ugliness of right versus left in this once vital and proud nation.  We have fallen from those heights.  Those ideals and those hopes.

In so many ways, we are in the same place.  A half African, half Caucasian man as President.  We are back in that place more than you probably know.  Round headed idiots showing up to Town hall meetings sporting  loaded weaponry enough to slay everyone in front of them.  Adolph fucking Hitler invoked over and over.  There are so many children in America, both literally and figuratively.  I worry so much that despite the election, we are forced to choose between a martyr or Superman.

It would be convenient and gratuitously exculpatory to pontificate here, but I’ll spare both you and me.  Save this:  Both John McCain and Orin Hatch disingenuously lamented the absence of Ted Kennedy from the health care debate in the last day or two, insinuating that his presence would have made a difference.  Fucking pricks.  Shame on you assholes.  You and your ever shrinking party are beginning to trip over your own dicks in your own race for shamelessness.

Public option or bust.

Drinks for my friends.

I’m not gonna look this up because it’s stuck in my head.  Some 75% of Americans want health care reform anon.

This is about as popular an issue gets in America, as at least a quarter of us are retarded, misguided, rich or willfully ignorant.  They kill horses don’t they?

I love that phrase.  Willfully ignorant.  I made it up for my own self but it’s a likely coupling so I’m sure I’d read it somewhere, then one day I summoned and it became mine.  Non exclusive of course.

Yet congress and their convoluted committees scramble, and media is so complicit it’s pissing kerosene onto the politics thereof as opposed to shining the spot on the humanity of it.  How important it is for the individual as well as the whole.  An equitable system in the world’s richest country and the only one without it.  The promise of helping the economy and by giving the middle class a little more discretionary cash by simply reducing what it costs to protect a family.

Now that’s a tax cut.

Taxing the rich.  Yep, they that had largess heaped upon by the last administration might now be called upon to put a little paper in the pot instead of nickels and slugs.  Oh my God it’s socialism!  You people are killing me.  Teabaggers and racists.  Stupid is as stupid does.

Big important stuff that is nothing more than a goddamn pinata on the nightly news.  They are creating a degree of drama that is understandable given the short attention span proscenium beneath which they are forced to enact and pontificate, but this shit is important and their looseness with the football is inexcusable.

What the fuck is going on here?  Ratings and revenue.  Our own damn fault at the end of the day.

It never stops being about our own stupidity.

I can’t believe what I’m seeing.  The tremendous pressure brought to bear on already spineless elected bureaucrats behind virtually the same proscenium.  Again, the asshats in Congress playing inexcusably loose with the ball.

Four lobbyists for every elected member of the legislative branch.  Three quarters of the people wanting what they don’t understand will be a bloody beatdown on industries from insurance to pharmaceutical.  The big boys besides energy and military industrial.  The Democrats pissing themselves.  A signpost ahead.  No Walking In The Park.

I need to wade in and study the minutiae further but we don’t really have a bill yet.  I was hoping to read a bill.  Maybe it’ll be less substantial than an Elmore Leonard novel.  Hoping for a thickish pamphlet.

This is huge and so are Obama’s balls.  He’s pushing a big pile out there after just sitting down.  They make him work for it.  I confess I have yet to see tonight’s press conference.  Didn’t pay the cable bill.

This Clintons saw their clocks cleaned over just such calumny decades ago and the beast has gained muscle and influence ever since.  The gravity of this specific issue is almost immune to underestimation for anyone who pays attention.  If Obama manages to prevail here, his wizardry will be all but unavoidable.  At his command will be the attention and affection of America’s heart along with her best and brightest.

Should he be bested and lose this contest, the path for him to accomplish any other important thing will be much steeper and traction much harder to come by.  I worry because so much is out of his hands.

This is bigger than you know.  Support your President.  He is showing you courage and fortitude.  Just because you voted for him is no reason for you to think your job is done.  Civic duty and patriotism are an American imperative.

“Walk right out into a brand new day
Insane and rising in my own wierd way”
-Art Alexakis from Everclear’s “Santa Monica”

Drinks for my friends.

Birthers.

For those of who haven’t heard this nomenclature of dolts, it refers to a small but vociferous group of nutbags who insist, despite all legitimate evidence to the contrary, that Barack Obama is not an American citizen by virtue of not having been born in the United States.  Gotta give to them.  Sounds big.

Eh.  Gimme a break.  Like McCain Palin or Hillrod wouldn’t have beat this like a baby seal.

I’ve been aware of them for nearly a year and rightly assumed they were a brand of conspiracy theorists who’s inevitability was matched by  inconsequence.  Now, regrettably, it seems the media has afforded them some attention.  Regrettable for a handful of reasons, the most important could be the silly but vulgar stain the movement visits on an already gore festooned Republican party.

Swinging for the fences.

So there’s a bill in the house, authored by a Republican and sponsored by ten other Republicans seeking to mandate Presidential candidates prove citizenship before being inaugurated.  Redundant methinks.  This bill will end up in someone’s ass long before it sees the floor.

It is raw, desperate and willfully ignorant racism.  Stupid, unfounded, crazy eyed hate.

“The conservative talk show host Michael Medved recently referred to the movement’s leaders as “crazy, nutburger, demagogue, money-hungry, exploitative, irresponsible, filthy conservative imposters” who are “the worst enemy of the conservative movement.”  “It makes us look weird. It makes us look crazy. It makes us look demented. It makes us look sick, troubled, and not suitable for civilized company,” he mourned.” -Politico

Interesting that journeyman nutbags have issue with these particular nutbags.

On the other hand, world class dipshit Alan Keyes called it, “the greatest crisis this nation has ever seen” and warned of “chaos, confusion and civil war.” -Politico

Sheezus.

What concerns me here, and what may be the salient reason this whole thing is so unfortunate, is the insidious and desperate rage it lays bare.  I’m compelled to draw some frightening but obvious parallels.  I’m neither predicting nor endorsing what I’m about to say so excuse my caveat.  It’s just that these kinds of shrill and intellectually bereft movements provide fertile ground for the gun loving, God fearing wing nut, who sooner or later opts to take matters into his own hands.  These people are around whether we like it or not.  Often the best we can do is not stir them up.

By the way, if there was no religion and they couldn’t be addicted to God,  maybe these people would come to worship the clarinet.  In a few thousand years, the oboe.  Eventually the saxophone.  Sounds nice doesn’t it?

Guns don’t kill people, people do.

Unless there’s an accident.

Give them a really dumb reason and they morph from plain nuts to domestic terrorist in a week or two of  24 hour news cycles.  Trouble with a capital T and that rhymes with P which stands for personality disorder at the very least.  Already angry and just waiting for a reason.  Probably off the meds because of no supervision or no money.

Tick.  Tick.  Tick.

I’m watching Liz Cheney and The Ragin Cajun, James Carville, go at it on Larry King.  Tonight’s topic comes up and I’ll bet Liz is about to stick her foot in her mouth.  Let’s watch!  She’s all supercilious as she says ‘one of the reasons people are so concerned, is they are uncomfortable with having for the first time ever, a President who’s so reluctant to defend us overseas……….fundamentally uncomfortable with a President who seems to be afraid to defend America.’  -Larry King Live

What the fuck?  Are you kidding me?  Instead of calling it what it is, retarded and paranoid, she chooses to offer rationale.  A rationale of fear for our national security.  Pathetic.  The GOP insists on puking down it’s frilly conservative blouse.  Cut to the sins of the father.

Please let this ridiculously stupid cunt run for office.  Please.  She could honor tradition and be Palin’s running mate.  Oh my stars the grandiose buffoonery.  Palin McCain.  I’m so on board.

Given that I’m a bleeding heart, progressive goddamn liberal, I have real reservations about our role in Afghanistan.  The escalation and troop infusions.  Military might can’t ever be long term infrastructure and anchor for a foreign people’s societal and political constructs in their own land.  We are perfectly capable of kicking their asses but what then?  Iraq again with darker facets of Vietnam.

Afghanistan is a far bigger and more lethal power vacuum than was Iraq.  Iraq was stable.  This, the part of the equation Dumbya’s sock puppets ignored.  This, the part of this equation no one is really talking about now.  In fact, no one seems to be talking about that war very much at all.  You know we’re losing lives over there.  You know we’re mowing them down.

It is a movie far worse than you can imagine.  Just watching the movie would change you forever.

These “birthers” do us all a bad service for polluting the national dialog with their baseless and recklessly incendiary crap.  Swift Boaters still wearing paper masks of patriotism.  Traitors.  I wonder what would happen if we tried them.  Bet we’d figure out they’re breathtakingly despisable.

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.

“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.

There simply is no cogent remonstrance to be made for Sarah Palin’s resignation being in anyone’s best interest but her own.  Callow, cowardly and nothing if not character as yet still inchoate.  A better, smarter  politician would have stepped back, done personal inventory and realized her own tempest was precisely that.  Her own.

Instead, she threw in the towel and walked away, blaming everyone but herself.  She did not belong there and that’s not entirely her fault but none of it is mine.

Maybe there was an epiphany.  Maybe she finally realized she was in way over her head.

That would be nice.

Ideally, she could own some some humility, regroup and educate herself on the issues;  a little geography and some foreign policy.  If the content of her character was what her and her mouth breathing Christian conservative base would have us believe, after some sincere and earnest wood shedding, she could rise to the occasion.  Re-emerge a more sober, thoughtful and with luck, a far better informed public figure.

Either way, I suspect she has for all intents and purposes, taken the political dirt nap.  Notwithstanding her rabid enthusiasts, typically of the under informed and aforementioned mouth breathing variety, the pooch has pretty much been gang raped.  The resolute, far right, Christian neoconservative base is in decline.  An accelerated rate of atrophy as it goes the way of the Dodo.

Cheney tried.  He failed.  He will be hated forever.  He dines on live infants.

I’m not too broken up.  Political Darwinism eroding a really stupid and toxic doctrine.  As rapidly as the jackasses ascended, so precipitous is their decline.  Self correction as it should be; kinda vengeful.

Should she choose to run in 2012, her comeuppance will be complete.  Even were she to stage the most spectacular transformation ever witnessed by the instantaneous post technocratic media, she will arrive obsolete.  Redundant.  Too little too late.  She will embarrass herself and her party.  Her mascara will run.  She will remain a sullen runner up to prom queen.  No ride in the magic float.

It’s my hope she tries her hand at something else.  I get the feeling this was her first real ass kicking.  She caved.  Better to know it now, huh?

Sheezus.

My advice to you Mrs. Todd Palin is to pursue entertainment.  Not journalism.  Entertainment.  Broadcasting.  Somebody said something about a talk show.  This your best option.  I would get there soon.  You’ve already got a huge book deal.  Get a radio show.  Start slow.  Learn the business.  You’re not stupid, just not very smart.  You are the paradigm of right wing radio.  Right between G. Gordon Liddy and Glenn Beck.  The very exclusive, very elite of the ridiculous douchebags.

Learn to talk to people that are only as smart as you are.  You’ll be so much happier.

So will the rest of us.

Drinks for my friends.

More than a little pensive.

The citizens of Iran have a profoundly legitimate beef.  One of the best kind.  Noble and justified.  An obviously rigged election.  Blatant.  Ridiculous.  The turn out was over 120%.  Bullshit is the given.

Tomorrow may inform us of eventual fate.  The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,  deigned to wade in today on the Sabbath, by vehicle of his scheduled sermon.  Just another day of worship.  He was clear:  Those who “take wrong measures which are harmful, they will be held accountable for all violence.” He called President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “the absolute victor” in last week’s election…..”  -CNN.com

This sucks.

I’m spooked.  The difference between these human events and Tiananmen Square for example, is that despite the Iranian government’s game face and perseverant campaign to control information, this revolution just may be televised.  Forgive my trite.  I’m not here to obviate something so big and ripe.  I fear what happens next.  Both sides are more than aware that the entire world watches.

The chances of a fistfight are always multiplied by an audience.  Always.

The Ayatollah didn’t merely draw a line in the sand.  He came out with serious lumber.  He tells the people of Iran that they are welcome to test his bat.  He tells them it will be ugly.  I’m really afraid of that.  I think it’s quite likely.  Man, I hope not.  Did you know that Iran is arguably the most pro-American country in the entire region?  These people are in trouble and I doubt they will walk away.  There will be blood.  There already has been.

Iranians are not pussies.

Our Man’s facility with it all has been pitch perfect.  He understands that any movement in Iran perceived as being fomented or even endorsed by the US government is a guarantee it will sink under that weight.  The asshat Republicans shouting jingoistic bullshit from the rooftops are posturing with lamentable irresponsibility.  Man I hate these pricks.  No compassion, zero sensibility, reckless abandon in pursuit of grandeur.  Shut the fuck up.

Iran is a modern society.  It has a vibrant and youthful population, progressive by regional standards.  Amazingly, a huge chunk of them don’t hate us.  Really.

My fear is that the Iranian people will suffer for whatever they do tomorrow.  For years.

It is the covert option that most media fails to talk about.  I’m afraid they will be picked off at random, regardless of participation, until, you know, morale improves.  I don’t see tanks but I do see terror.  For years.  They know full well, both sides get it.  Tomorrow is going to be interesting.

See, we’re all just citizens of the world.  After the sun impregnates the horizon and the stars come out, the day is done and we are all the same.  We really are all the same.  I live in a big city so ethnic diversity is but a part of my coat of many colors.  Whether your thing is prayer or the power of positive thinking, it’s time to do a little dance.

Wisdom, safety and support to the people of Iran.

And, um, fuck the Ayatollah.

Drinks for my friends.

Today the DOJ, in support of the DOMA  (Defense Of Marriage Act), issued a brief using language invoking pedophilia and incest, eerily reminiscent of the vituperation vomited by the religious right ad nauseum since the dawn of the cerebral cortex.

Puns intended.

So much for change.

I don’t care if Obama was aware of this or not.  The only acceptable action here is swift, unambiguous refutation.  Obama and his administration need to get in front of this crap like yesterday.  It’s not just bullshit, it’s madness.  Best case scenario is Obama talking about this before I get out of bed.  The time difference alone gives him a hell of a head start.  Time to show me something Mr. Fierce Defender.

Enough.

Let this pass at your peril.  Hope will turn to doubt.

While we’re on the subject of Our Man, I was none too thrilled by the glaring omissions in his remarks in front of the AMA today.  It was a good speech, but no substantive reckoning that big pharma and big insurance are hopelessly infected by avarice and therefore ground zero for reform and regulation.  No mention of what an inefficient, bureaucratic clusterfuck the FDA is.  These items are at the very root of the problem and no reform has a chance at efficacy without force being brought to bear on them.

Blowing up balloons with holes in them.

The sad truth lies in the why.  Along with the AMA, pharmaceutical and insurance companies are championed by some of the biggest and most influential lobbying cabals in Washington.  If there were stars on K street or Pennsylvania Avenue like Hollywood Boulevard, two thirds of them would be dedicated to these filthy bastards.  For all you sniveling morons who live in such fear of communism, here is a bonafide  Red Menace for you.

Welcome to the plutocracy.  This thing is way bigger than just stubborn Republicans.

Along with energy, campaign finance reform and the military industrial complex, these are the windmills I expect Our Man to be tipping.  That’s why I voted for him.

We loves us some Bill Maher.  Maher said the other night in his New Rules segment:  “…..I’m glad that Obama is president, but the “Audacity of Hope” part is over. Right now, I’m hoping for a little more audacity”.

Me, I’m looking for those balls of zirconia  I thought I glimpsed on the campaign trail.  Dude, please don’t Jimmy Carter us.

Remember how I was pissing and moaning about pumps on lotion and soap bottles not long ago?  Well, for the record, adding water to any of the soap dispensing ones is pretty viable.

Sometimes I think all Americans are either corrupt or stupid.  Often both, but rarely neither.

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.

I talked about it last night but didn’t realize that Senate Democrats had walked away.  Seems they want a specific plan.  As in, where exactly will the money go?  That seems reasonable to me.  $80 million is a lot of cake.

You know, Gitmo.

What baffles me is this:                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    “I can’t make it any more clear,” Reid said. “We will never allow terrorists to be released in the United States.”  Was he quoted out of context?  As far as I know there’s no debate here about what town or city street they’ll be dropped on, they are to be incarcerated.  Harry is a friend of my Mother’s.  I got an inscribed, autographed copy of his book for my birthday.  I’m wondering if he’s getting a little old.  His handwriting describes the drawing of sea monkeys.

What is the deal?  There’s two hundred and forty of them and we already have more people behind bars per capita than any nation on earth.  There’s two hundred and forty and if America has a specialty these days, it’s locking people up.  Specialty?  Industry.  Bring them here, try them like Americans because we still have a system of justice and courts in which they may prevail if they aren’t guilty and are allowed to prove it.

Regardless of the outcome, the truly guilty ones will burn in a Christian hell.  Right?

What scares politicians so much about our justice system functioning as an equitable litmus for these particular “detainees”?

Anyway, it get’s better.

“Republicans are poised with an amendment by James Inhofe of Oklahoma that would block any of the Guantanamo detainees from coming to U.S. soil to stand trial or serve their sentences” -yahoo

Republicans just keep on sweetening  the elixir that will be the lubricant of their demise.  Ha!  Can I make that stick?  I’m way ahead of you.

“Shuttering this facility now could only serve one end: and that is to make Americans less safe than Guantanamo has,” said GOP Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.”  -yahoo

Guantanamo made us safe?  I’d say with the torture and death and all, the hawks would be lucky to slide into obscurity as opposed to jail.  Zero sum for them but a nasty stain on the rest of us.

Mitch McConnell is a scurrilous,  multi-chinned rodent of a Senator.  A nasty, long of tooth and sharp of teeth, a warm blooded, razor incisored dumbshit.  Even his dog hates him.

He warned that if the United States withdrew from Iraq, “the terrorists would come after us where we live.” -1/10/07 CNN

I can actually smell that sentence.

He loathes the idea of campaign finance reform.  He get’s giddy over the NSA listening to whatever and whomever blows their skirt up.  Sans warrant.  He’s very pro Iraq war as a central front for the war on terror.  I love how they accuse us of dangerous political stripes like socialist, when they stand to applaud fascism and nearly shit themselves with glee.

The cherry atop my shit sundae is the reality of scripture superimposed over  dramatic military landscapes as cover pages for top secret war memos to Dumbya.  While we were beating and abusing, torturing to death, people confined and bound.  Dumbya got a report with an inspirational poster for a cover.  I hear he really likes pears and carrots from a jar.  We did this to extract corroborating evidence for what we were about to do and then continue to do in Iraq and everywhere else.  On the off chance there was to be a super secret memo on Sunday, it was wrapped in Easter themed paper.  A candy bar tied in the bow.

Spuriouser and spuriouser.

Dumbya knew there would be pretzels later.  With supervision of course.  Plenty to wash them down with.

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.

I have no problem with Miss California’s answer to the question put to her on same sex marriage. I disagree, but it was an honest answer. I don’t think she was particularly inarticulate; she was plain spoken and sincere. She did the best she could, I’m fine with it.

Having said that, I’ve long maintained that the legitimacy of same sex marriage fits succinctly and logically in the context of civil rights, obviously a much broader issue. I heard Dennis Prager say the other day that it can’t be a civil rights issue because there is no difference between a black man and a white man but there are profound differences between any man and any woman. It’s not an entirely weak point, he’s on the nose about substantial biological differences at least.

But that’s easy. And weak.

What a firebrand.

Maybe he wasn’t deliberatly being intellectually dishonest, but his argument is just that. I think it’s stupid. The most salient flaw being a presupposition that homosexuals choose to be homosexuals. I’m here to tell you that they do not. They will tell you the same. Individuals have no more control over who they are attracted in terms of gender, than they do over whether they end up with an innie or an outie.

Some of these things do go together.

I cannot wait for the day when science bears this out so people will shut the hell up about it or at least look ignorant.

I want to talk about the instructions posted at the trash chute.

I started to tear the laminated sheet from above the very well maintained, door to the trash chute. Right away I knew that was a mistake. I’m no longer twenty five years old. Stainless steel handle with a locking lever handy to your thumb.

If I ever get to design my own house, I’m going to include a dumbwaiter.

The Rules:

1) All trash bags must be placed inside the chute.

2) Do not leave trash bags on the floor.

3) Do not clog the chute. Use smaller bags.

4) Do not leave recycalable boxes or bags on the floor.

I have some observations I’d like to share. First, rule #2 is really just an extension of rule #1. What they are trying to tell me is to make sure I put my bags in the chute. In addition, they caution me that my bags are not welcome on the floor. In a sense, they posit that the only place for my bags, is the chute. Well, inside the chute.

I understand and agree with where they’re going with this. It’s the only place I really want to put my bags.

I’m a bit of a rebel but so far, there’s no conflict here.

I’m just a little troubled by how fucking stupid they must think I am or maybe how dumb the people around me are. It gives me pause.

I’m not looking to go in there swinging a Hefty sack full of holes, filled with yogurt, cat litter and rotting meat. Are they worried about that? I hope not. It’s this tiny little room just off the elevator.

I’m happy to follow the rules. They make sense.

Drinks for my friends.

I felt compelled to share this. It really is remarkable.

Steve Schmidt, former campaign manager for John McCain while speaking to Log Cabin Republicans today, had this to say:

“There is a sound conservative argument to be made for same-sex marriage,” Schmidt, who was McCain’s campaign manager, told the group. “I believe conservatives, more than liberals, insist that rights come with responsibilities. No other exercise of one’s liberty comes with greater responsibilities than marriage. In a marriage, two people are completely responsible to and for each other.”

He added: “If you are not willing to accept and faithfully discharge those responsibilities, you shouldn’t enter the state of matrimony, and it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference if you’re straight or gay. It is a responsibility like no other, which can and should make marriage an association between two human beings more fulfilling than any other.” -CNN

Gorgeous. Eloquent, fluent and beautiful.

This kind of thinking and honesty is precisely what the Republican party owes America.

Yep, I said “owes”. Given the damage the Republicans have wrought the last three decades and particularly the last eight years, well, I feel they are beholdin’ to the rest of us.

Mr. Schmidt also had this to say:

“If you put public policy issues to a religious test, you risk becoming a religious party,” Schmidt declared. “And in a free country, a political party cannot be viable in the long term if it is seen as a sectarian party.” -Huffington Post

Hallelujah! Pun intended. Wow. This is one man who understands what the future of the GOP will look like if it has one. I am impressed. Social issues such as these, as opposed to those of policy, are our biggest divide. To table such concerns, might could be an envelope for allowing vibrant philosophical debate to once again rise to the watermark of legitimate. Without such violent and vigorous clouding and muddying of what is actually an important and vital set of issues, this country stands a real chance of moving forward and so then, does the rest of the planet.

America was never intended to be the world’s police anymore than it was to be the world’s moral arbiter. We’ve become mired and lost in that as a nation and have as consequence, lost our way on the world stage. It is exactly because of this that we are estimated by every other State to be anything from silly to hypocritical to lethally wreckless.

Guilty as charged. We are all of those things.

Far too long we’ve neglected tragedies that demand our attention and devoted it instead to situations that were barely our business. A lumbering giant, recklessly careening, who’s size and stature shrinks by the day.

A modicum of humility is therefore in order.

But wait, there’s more:

Hugo Chavez said to Obama today, “Eight years ago I greeted President Bush with this same hand. I’d like to be your friend.” -Fox News

Let the record show it was an interlocking opposable thumb shake. A ‘bro’ shake. I like this guy Chavez, he called Dumbya “The Devil”.

On Cuba, Obama said:

“decades of mistrust” must be overcome, but noted that he has already loosened restrictions that limited Americans from traveling to visit relatives in Cuba and from sending money to them.

Obama lifted all restrictions Monday on the ability of individuals to visit relatives in Cuba, as well as to send them remittances.

That may be just the beginning. “I am prepared to have my administration engage with the Cuban government on a wide range of issues — from human rights, free speech and democratic reform to drugs, migration and economic issues,” -CNN

This comes a day after Cuban President Raul Castro said he was prepared to discuss “everything, everything, everything” with the United States. -CNN

The neocons will no doubt bristle over this. I anticipate high comedy for my witness. Yet, this is the change we voted for. The one we Americans turned out in overwhelming numbers to endorse. We are beginning to understand that saber rattling is far from our only option. It’s stupid to assume that’s all we have to offer countries in our own hemisphere who pose no military threat to us whatsoever.

We could probably kick Venezuela’s and Cuba’s ass on any Thursday afternoon. That’s not the point.

The same way our opinions about our own citizens must change, so does our thinking about the rest of the world. Our bigotry and bias has led us to this precarious point in human history. America has within her reach, the potential to allow itself and the rest of humanity to progress beyond and above where we find ourselves now. If we can only learn to accept and tolerate a little more ourselves and then, the rest of the world.

See, I’m not here to endorse torture, terror, fascism, dictatorship or anything resembling. I’m trying to tell you that we’ve been going at this assbackwards. Archaic and absurd.

All good change comes from inside. We are all people, humans. We all bleed and suffer. It’s time to abandon the notion that to prevail, other humans must suffer and bleed.

Mr. Steve Schmidt has said and done a wonderful, cognizant thing.

Drinks for my friends.

We are not Gods. We are ants.

Every few seasons there occurs one of the most baffling and almost exclusively American phenomena. Some furious, disaffected asshole goes on a rampage with a gun(s) and kills a grip of unsuspecting and otherwise faultless saps for no reason other than a self perpetuating hate and a far too loose access to lethal weaponry.

The answer lies in preventing the asshole from acquiring firearms.

Invariably they are oppressed, fundamentalist, disenfranchised, extreme right wing idealogues that are sometimes racist, white supremacist or religious zealots. Heads up as to why the the problem is so uniquely American.

They come in clusters, these incidents of horror. Monkey see, monkey do. Whackjobs being more impressionable and susceptible and all that.

The answer lies in preventing assholes from acquiring firearms.

We are but spectacular fools. I tell you this because there’s an ethic that allows this sort of chaos and it’s the same one that the far right enjoys thoroughly as a catalyst for instilling fear and hate among the great unwashed.

Unbelievably stupid.

I’m a liberal for serious lack of a better definition. I don’t want to take your goddamn guns away and neither does Obama so shut the fuck up. The second amendment is just as solid and safe as it’s ever been. It’s only the brazen fomenting on the right that elevates it into an issue at all. It’s methodology 101 for whipping the ignorant into a “from my cold dead hands” frenzy.

It makes me sick.

A curriculum that includes a ‘pro life’ agenda, a God and country syllabus and a ridiculous culture of fear and loathing featuring communism, socialism, fags getting married and an inevitable social decay so profound that men and women will cease to marry or reproduce, thus bringing about America’s eventual surrender to all things evil like gooks and/or the French.

They encourage you to shoot people because you may soon no longer be able to.

It’s a distraction. How does it feel to have your strings pulled?

If you’re feeling that tug from the puppet master, you’re a dickhead.

The answer lies in keeping the human cartoons from getting their hands on AK47s.

There is however, an even dirtier bottom to this. Almost always it’s the social retard, the guy who keeps to himself. That guy that can’t seem to hang. He was quiet they say, or he kept to himself. When pressed they tell you he was a little odd. There’s a myriad of reasons these people exist in this unique American society.

Could it be be we are cruel, judgemental, superficial and far too materialistic? Racist, biased and unsympathetic? Rubbed raw but simultaneously lacking any capacity for compassion?

Could it be we just can’t stop being afraid? Could it be that there is nothing to fear but fear itself?

My fellow Americans, it is a distraction. Feel free to move about the room.

Thought I’d check in to see what condition our condition is in.

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 massive swing of the pendulum to the right along about 1999. A percieved, albeit shallow impetus had been in place since Newt Gingrich fell from grace. Republicans got out outfoxed by Bubba. Clinton spanked their faces with bricks. They were pissed.

So, it had been brewing despite their growing power, not because of it. Slow but deliberate and venemously vengeful at the behest of the most unimaginably foul people. Like a bow being drawn. Weird. I ask myself about the hang time. I wondered how long circumstances and zeitgeist would favor such momentum. Rules of inertia and gravity dictated it would swing back, but social will and thorough retardation of the great unwashed can effect more than the laws of physics.

How is it a grown man pulls off the name Newt? He’s a bit of a baby face.

Years go by. Dark and horrible years. Death, destruction and redistribution of wealth on a biblical scale. Richard Bruce Cheney. Karl Rove. Unimaginably foul people.

Then, seems like it’s been forever, but the arc of the bob is once again in motion. It grows larger. It steams towards us. It’s path is to the left by way of East . After years of near suspended animation, the air displaced as she gains velocity goes from a whistle to a howl. I worry about apogee and thrust. Seems she’s coming too fast.

The initial violence of the movement could send the bob swinging violently over the top. Three hundred sixty degrees. It’s that nine o’ clock position I worry about. No need to go far past there on the dial. Ninety degrees.

Sad and regrettable that events so odious as an economic implosion were the only catalyst with mass enough to dislodge the bob from it’s parking place in the neoconservative lot.

From a howl to a scream.

Ah well, here it comes and this is America goddamnit. Religious adherence is down, correspondingly, common sense is up. The pious right revealed as the shallow, callow, two dimensional fucktards they are. Credibility across that side of the spectrum in severe disrepair.

Republicans are flailing in a vast puddle of human excrement. Yes, their own shit.

Ann Coulter and The Human Shitsmear Rush Limbaugh bleat incendiary expletives between gags on authentic Red White and Blue liberal American cock. Cheney shows up on TV specifically to say thet we’re already less safe because we don’t torture. Just tell me what has to happen to shut this quacking, rounheaded, corpulent fingered fucking penguin the fuck up.

Booya! Bitch!

Are you getting the sense this is an angry sort of hit piece? I gotta tell you I’m feeling it. I really hate these bastards. I’m not even sure what I mean about that American cock bit, but it speaks to the spirit and depth of my rage somehow.

This is an opportunity for progressive thinkers to pay it forward. Foment and supply the kind of disciplined thinking, politics, and ethics America has been so deliberately starved of for so long. Pushback. Give to the ignorant and fearful in equal measure what they’ve so successfully crammed down our gullets for the last eight years at least.

They can all blow me.

Go ahead with the truth. It is more than good enough.

Drinks for my friends.

Just recently Our Man announced another welcome reversal from Dumbya era policies.

Along with closing Gitmo, ending torture, bringing troops home, allowing tax cuts for the wealthy to expire and no more raids on medicinal marijuana, Obama announced a lifting of the ridicilous restrictions on government funded stem cell research.

Hoorah and in your face bitches.

I’m looking at change. I’m looking right at it.

So today, Sunday, this tool who’s been on my radar for some time, Eric Cantor (Republican Whip) had this to say, “Why are we going and distracting ourselves from the economy? This is job No. 1. Let’s focus on what needs to be done,” – CNN

Hey Cantor, how is this a distraction? Why are the economy and potentially life saving scientific techniques or methodologies mutually exclusive? What kind of simpleton are you? One who’s so clueless as to imagine himself to be fighting for a baseless retarded principle? Or, so cynical as to pander impudently to right wing Christian whackjobs by fomenting ignorance and fear?

No secret that Cantor has been one of the most shrill Republican voices pissing on any and all of Obama’s economic proposals and policies.

White House domestic policy adviser Melody Barnes: “Advances with regard to science and technology help advance our overall national goals around economic growth and job creation,” she said, adding, “I think anytime you make an effort to try and separate these pieces of the puzzle, you’re missing the entire picture.” – CNN

Well said.

Cantor also said: “Frankly, federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research can bring on embryo harvesting, perhaps even human cloning that occurs,” Cantor said. “We don’t want that. That shouldn’t be done. That’s wrong.” – CNN

Fear, ignorance and proof that Cantor either doesn’t know what he’s talking about or at the very least, doesn’t think Americans do.

Government has very little judicature to be palavering over the morals or ethics of scientic research, save maybe for defense and national security. See how I just bitch slapped you with the irony? Did you like it? Call me daddy.

We would do well to remember that history provides plethora example of scientists and philosophers jailed or executed for telling what they knew to be the truth. We are not the center of the universe. We are not the center of the solar system, the sun is. The earth is round. Germs are really small.

I will paraphrase the local NBC affiliate coverage by telling you that opponents of stem cell research fear the destruction of human embryos and that the government will now be responsible for loss of human life.

Here are the motherfucking facts. We’re not even talking about embryos, we’re talking about blastocysts. I microscopic ball of about thirty cells, four or five days fertilized by in vitro fertilization only. In vitro fertilization is about numbers. The more eggs sperm conquer the better the odds. What I’m trying to tell you is that the blastocysts that don’t get used are discarded. Thrown away. The ones we want for research, end up in some strange receptacle with a scary symbol on it.

The entire controversy is over what has been biological waste until tomorrow.

Eric Cantor, fucktard that he is would have you believe that he’s not the one doing the distracting. Methinks he doth protest too much. Me also thinks he’s a jackbooted, lockstep Republican who’s just stupid enough to not see his base eroding.

Why behave in public if you’re living on a playground? – DLR

Two names: Bill Frist and Rick Santorum. Mumbling stumbling fucks, welcome to the clubhouse Mr. Cantor, sodas are free.

Drinks for my friends.

Bear with me. Take your time. I had a lot to say.

Little explosions of pork fat in a heavy iron skillet. The fire is hot and I’m not sure, so I pull it off. Good move. The bacon just overdone but still sweaty and fatty. No aroma like that of fresh thick bacon. Most folks like it cooked this way. I use tongs to put it on a plate.

Motes bob and dance in rays of sun, a subject of birdsong, butterflies and dragonflies.

Man has almost complete authority over his own clock. Animals, from rodents to whales, have the sun.

I drop a fistfull of white raisins. Some diced yellow onions and a little butter into the cast iron.

Next up is to smack some eggs in the fat and put the skillet back on the crackling morning combustion. Beneath a canopy of primeval. This part’s easy. They cook like that, the eggs. Smacking and spattering. Hope ya like yours yellow loose. Quick and hot. Soft in the middle with brown bubbles at the edges. They’re done. Sea salt? Tapatio?

Someone else is doing coffee. I smell it. Raw like tilled earth. Berries.

Potatos cook the longest, garlic and rosemary. Moist in the center, otherwise crispy and taut. Steaming. Glistening with butter and oil. Fresh ground pepper. With potatos, I don’t play games I can’t win. The best way I’ve found.

Everyone stares up and around. Nobody looks at their food while they shovel it at their mouths. The savour does not compete with the vista, it compliments it, the ambiance of a deciduous forest in the chill of a late summer morning.

Have some champagne.

Next up, pine trees and a good classic novel. Some Fitzgerald or maybe Jack London. Twain. Capote. Then a nice clean spot to evacuate oneself and soap and water and towels after and what not.

I bring my own ointments and salves.

Maybe an afternoon walk.

I never would have made it as some pioneer or frontiersman. Maybe if I was some version of royalty. Afforded a certain amount of privilege and staff.

I just want to live in San Francisco.

Gin and chocolate.

I believe in mankind’s right to self medicate.

There is simply no reason in a country as wealthy as ours that people should go hungry, without health care or as much education as anyone can tolerate. I can’t stand it.

I’m gonna go out on a limb here and proclaim that a little socialism might not be bad for us. Not just to give the folks who fall through the cracks a leg up, but to headbutt the absurdly wealthy who have enjoyed political, social and economic advantage by virtue of obscene largess for so long, the phenomena has manifested a momentum of it’s own now centuries old.

It may also serve to highlight the perverted version of Capitalism and Democracy we have chosen to embrace. We are in a place where our adherence to and practice of “free market capitalism”, as is the contemporary model, isn’t merely foolish, it is reckless, dangerous and unconscionable.

Fear and spying, rendering and detaining, holding people indefinitely without charging them………what does that look like to you? An economy hit by a wave any fool saw coming, so strong as to temporarily capsize us despite our size, displacement and power? More waves on the way.

Rotting infrastructure and an attitude of every man for himself on twenty million lips at least.

Hated so much a journalist throws shoes at Dumbya’s melon inside the Green Zone? More on that later.

We are stupid and greedy. Not necessarily in that order.

Fuck anything that moves.

Make these prick CEO’s live in a motel for a season. Three months. Twenty bucks a day per diem. Introduce them to the miracle of cheap chunky peanut butter and applesauce on the same spoon.

Ssshhhhhhhhh!!!

I covet and admire the idea of self determination. So far, the concept and my practice thereof has allowed me to reap almost exactly what I’ve sewn. Can’t ask for more than than that. What I’d like to see is that degree of parity afforded to not just every American regardless of race, color or creed, but every human.

We could render organized religion obsolete by achieving just that. Wouldn’t that be nice? I think so.

Replace an archaic institution that withholds (religion), with a concept, maybe a mandate, far more inclusive and progressive that holds as a fundamental ideal, prosperity of the earth and it’s inhabitants simultaneously. I’m a goddamn genius. Give me a can of beer and a Nobel, bitches.

Anyway.

I honestly believe that the defining moment of Dumbya’s reign occured on this very day, December Fourteen, the year of our Lord, 2008. I’m sure you’ve seen the footage by now. To his credit, our President did skillfully dodge two well launched shoes from not very far away. We learn that this is some major insult in that part of the world. To throw your shoes.

An Egyptian reporter with a pretty good arm fired said shoes at Dumbya’s head and screamed:
“This is a farewell … you dog!” “You killed the Iraqis!” -CNN

Ha! That’s goddamn golden. Forgive me, but if he’d taken one right in the fucking face? I would have called paramedics before screeching sobbing laughter could consume me. Go ahead, picture it. Me laughing ’til I puke or him taking one right in the kisser. Sheezus. That would have been gorgeous.

Picture it.

In any case, it was just so perfect. Vicariously cathartic. This really should be the swan song for the dumbest man to ever be President of America. We should remember him forever as the guy ducking shoes thrown hard by a journalist at a press conference in the “Green Zone”, the safest place in Iraq.

Bush Sr. had, “Read my lips…..”, Clinton had “I did not have sexual relations with that woman……”, Nixon had “I am not a crook”. Dumbya, among all the other ridiculous shit he’s said and done will nonetheless be remembered for his physical adroitness in ducking angry shoe leather in contrast to his profound lack of any kind of mental acuity in any shape or form.

He still doesn’t get that he’s an idiot.

Meet your legacy you stupid sonofabitch. Beet the Meatles.

I just want him to know what a complete loser he is. It’s not just angst. Hundreds of thousands died because no one in this man’s life had sense enough to teach him banjo and take him to the river everyday. They took him to school instead. Millions of Americans made the same mistake and now we’ll pay for it.

I went to hand her the remote. She said put it next to me dear, I’m scratching my butt right now. I looked and she was. So I did.

The Holidays. Weird. Didn’t have the Christmas I was used to last year. The old man was sick. Very. Spent my time at the hospital or sleeping because I’m a pussy and that’s what I do when I’m afraid. He’s so good now I want to punch him in the mouth.

To know my old man is to understand that he’s the shit. He’s only afraid of one thing. It has nothing to do with him. If you’re smart you’ll guess it.

My brother in law, Todd, a man I’ve known of since we were boys, lost his Mother just a few months before. Her name was Dixie and I really liked her. She was a writer. I see her face.

Here it is again. The Holidays. I’m expecting something different this year. It will be somewhere between now and then. Holidays are always a little step back in time. We may all have a similiar lense for this one. I hope so. I’m looking for the love and warmth of family unmitigated by illness and sadness. He is well now. I think it will be big and special.

My ass is broke so the only gift I have is my etchings.

Not being able to buy Christmas presents used to scare the crap out of me. It nightmared me. I was a fairly prodigious giver. I’ll bring really good wine.

Life is good.

Here’s the thing. A well worn theme for me, forgive me if I bore you. The difference between humans and animals is not the ability to reason. It’s not love or compassion. If you’ve ever been lucky enough to share your life with an animal you loved, you feel me. The difference isn’t even a sense of humor. Every cat I’ve ever shared a house with has been funny as fuck and tragic all at once.

The difference is art. Animals don’t make art for the sake of art. Humans do.

I sit telling you this, one of my cats is high up in a ficus tree I’ve had for twenty years that has been dead for at least a year. My other cat sits next to me on a dilapidated red velvet sofa staring at her. If only they could talk and I could understand them.

Happy Holidays.

Drinks for my friends.

I got nothin. I’m rolling the bones, hoping I can come up with something. Sometimes it works.

Where is everyone on wind chimes? Love hate for me.

I never wear bright red. It’s a dumb color on a man no matter what.

It’s raining. Excellent.

She was a class A cruiser aspirated by an engine that took her to warp in under an hour. I just wanted to write that sentence.

Here we go.

I think the rules for fluids in your carry-on are preposterous. If there just happens to be a regular sized tube of toothpaste in your luggage, it will be seized. Confiscated. It’s because of the barbarian terrorist hordes who storm our train stations and airports every day with ordinary toothpaste tubes filled with high explosives and containers of over four ounces filled with socialist DNA and yellowcake uranium.

Hint: Pay special attention to any retard trying to light his shoes on fire.

Ignore that shit at your own peril.

There are specific rules about the size of your Ziploc. Before you know it, you’re taking off your shoes and trying to remember when you last cut your toenails.

This, while we barely bother to pay attention to over ninety percent of the 20 x 8 foot shipping containers that show up by the tens of thousands on our shores everyday.

Here’s the deal. If they want blow up an airliner or use it as missle, they will. They can poison your water or your food. Nothing we are doing now in terms of security, policy or protocol is even remotely efficacious. Doesn’t even address the problem.

By the way, the bad guys haven’t tried any of that for awhile if ever.

It’s kind of analogous to the saturation of cars with alarms in LA. They pollute the atmosphere everywhere. No one even looks. Mine could be going off within yards of me and I wouldn’t know. It’s an archaic and obsolete solution to a problem that is far too unimportant to warrant the industry that’s prospered around it.

See what I’m saying? These are things they’ve implemented to show you they’re doing something and make you feel better but still afraid. What you should feel is insulted and pissed off.

I’m here to tell you that forcing Americans to study the cubic or liquid volume of their various toiletries is not paying out any dividends in terms of enhanced security. I’m saying it’s really fucking stupid.

See, Ziploc freezer bags make ultimate sense for one’s personal creams, potions and lotions. More than big and durable enough to contain all of ones necessary liquids while protecting the actual luggage from leaks and oozings propagated by the pressure differential that occurs in the cabin of any commercial jet.

Just how dumb are we?

Let me think of another one.

I thought of another one. It’s a really good one. The ultimate in absurd. It’s really big. One of the biggest devices embraced by the Great Unwashed. Gen Pop. Perhaps the most insidiously self defeating institution ever endorsed by humankind. The world’s largest bureaucracy of shame, guilt and hypocrisy.

Starts with an ‘R’.

We’ll save that for another time.

Drinks for my friends.

We shall overcome.

The difference in hard numbers between those who voted against fair and equal rights for gays last time around and this time, prop. 8, is staggering. Encouraging.

20 plus points in two thousand as compared to four points this time. Talk about a shrinking violet. You thinking what I’m thinking? Do the math.

Progressives need to start pushing for a ballot initiative post haste. We need to get one on the ballot every election cycle. It’s a matter of time. The seismic upheaval we witnessed in this election has not begun to run dry of portent. Nope. As of this writing, it grows and gains strength. The downtrodden realize that their voice is legitimate and vital.

Fight fire with fire. Watch the jaws of the bigots drop as we push to put this issue on the ballot over and over until enough die off and allow us the majority we need for one of the last and most important civil rights issues to prevail.

Walk right out into a brand new day.

The tyranny of a majority is near to being obsolete.

The irony of Mormon culpability in all this rocks my planet. That these sick, sacred underwear wearing fucks, take it upon themselves to inject their archaic moral standards into modern American life is beyond audacious. What possible reason could such pious idiots have for the steaming hardon they brandish exclusively for homosexuals?

Just who the fuck do you think you are?

The extreme ends of their cult, the sick and disgusting fringe of their dogma, would make your average Southern Baptist blush and run to refill his flask. Revoke their tax exempt status for the role they played. They waded into politics and it should cost them. I’m sick and fucking tired of religion intruding into public policy and politics.

There is no religious bureaucracy in this country that isn’t guilty. They should all have their tax exempt status jerked away. I will tell you that the very idea religious institutions in this country deserve to enjoy any autonomy at all is ridiculous.

Money may be the root of all evil but money and religion are synonymous.

Tony Perkins from the Family Research Council is an asshole. He and his ilk are a dying breed. The racism and discrimination he and his organization espouse are near obsolete. I’m not reluctant to share with you that I despise this prick and all his misguided minions.

Organized religion is mankind’s single biggest mistake.

The single most positive thing human beings can accomplish in my lifetime is to walk away from this absurd idea of Santa in the sky.

“Two men say theyre jesus one of them must be wrong” -Mark Knopfler

Drinks for my friends.