Archive for the ‘Republicans’ Category

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

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

The Devil is thriving in the Catholic church.

The Ides of March have passed.

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

Outside, the wind blows hard.

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

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

A license to ill.

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

 

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

“On September 23rd…

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

On January 1, 2011…

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

By 2014…

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

Republicans want to repeal this…”  -democraticunderground.com

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

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

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

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

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

My feet hurt and it’s humiliating.

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

That there is your buttock.

Wars are your ass.

Your ass mam, has gone missing.

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

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

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

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

It’s not safe to drink their liquor.

They really are beginning to parody themselves.

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

Not good losers, but excellent assholes.

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

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

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

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

Children of the corn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It just might start rural.

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

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

Drinks for my friends.

So, the Democrats run a lame candidate for Senate in Massachusetts while turning their backs on a nest of Republican snakes.  So, the Republicans simply cater to the lowest common denominator.

Meet Scott Brown.

He posed.  Hairspray on an empty corn cob.  He’s a goddamn lead singer.  How new are you?  Look at my thumb, gee you’re dumb.

Maybe, just maybe if he wasn’t up against cardboard.

I should be angry.  I suppose I am.  Should I be angry at Republicans for being such ignorant, obstructionist asstards, or Democrats for being such paper tiger pantywaste losers?  I feel like being confused, but I’m not.  What I am is disgusted.

“The Republicans are playing chess and the Dems are in the nurses office because, once again, they glued their balls to their thighs.” – Jon Stewart.

Teddy Kennedy held this office for forty seven years.  The lion of the Senate.  I admired Ted Kennedy.  Comity no longer exists anywhere in the Senate.  It went from solid to gas.  The way of the Dodo.  What we have here, is piss all over his grave, equal parts Democrat and Republican.  It will freeze and eventually evaporate come spring.  It will still stink for summers to come.  Them with more mild sensibilities and weaker constitutions will wonder if the reek is merely rotting vegetation.  The dying foliage of deciduous urban landscaping.   Only in the fall.

You and I, along with the forest rodents will understand it to be the odor of personal weakness and the strength of filthy lucre.

And the shit of urban rodents.

No equitable, compassionate health care for the richest nation ever.  Health care is a right, not a privilege.  Yet this crap persists to blow in our faces.  Tens of thousands die here every year because of greed and cowardice and/or no health care at all.  Then there’s them that go broke.  Hundreds of thousands dead in Haiti, not because of an earthquake, but because of decades of poverty and neglect.  Wait til you hear how complicit we’ve been.  Hundreds and thousands die every month in the various wars we conduct.  Plenty of funding there, but no conscience.

We are getting sucker punched every morning out of bed.

I need to remind you that by shaving one tenth off our budget for the military industrial complex, we’d all have health care and groceries forever. Higher education would be free.  No potholes.  No collapsing bridges.  We’d all have enough for the fruit of the month club.  We’d be excited about the pears.

Pete Townshend once said something about ending The Who before they became parodies of themselves.  He was anxious for them not to become a joke.  It’s too late for America.

Since when did a party have to have 60 out of 100 votes in the Senate to scratch their own balls?  How is it that after barely a year under a new administration, a twisted referendum is allowed to hold sway in state like Massachusetts?

This is profoundly and spectacularly ridiculous.

I’m not sure I give a mad fuck.  The only option now is to ram the diseased phallus that is the Senate health care bill down the blistered, milky, puss oozing upper gastrointestinal tract of the house.  It’s a shitty bill.  A mandate to buy but no mechanism for controlling cost or avarice.  A non starter for me.

I’m having a hell of a time giving a shit.  Whatever happened to hope and change?  Does anyone remember laughter?

I am disgusted.  I’m romancing apathy.  Sure, there’s been progress, but on such an infinitesimally incremental level that I’m struggling with what appears to be a wish sandwich.

“Have you ever heard of a wish sandwich? A wish sandwich is the kind of a sandwich where you have two slices of bread and you, hee hee hee, wish you had some meat.”  -The Chips 1956

This really is stupid.

You give me twenty, maybe twenty five bucks, I’ll make you the best salad you’ve ever had.  I have skills.

Drinks for my friends.

What the hell?

A thoroughly embrocated, hallowed chair and institution of itself, was became the Senate seat occupied by Mr. Kennedy for decades until his death.

Now threatened by an “independent” Republican goddamn teabagger.  I stumble over the last sentence more than once because it sounds so dirty.

In Massachusetts for fucks sake.  He posed nude in Cosmo for crying out loud.  Show me a politician with some juice and I’ll show you a lead singer wannabe.  Even Ashcroft had pipes but he was ugly, stupid and mostly evil.

A bitch.  A diva……

A frustrated cross dresser like Guiliani.

Scott Brown claimed to not know about the tea party movement but took their money after attending a fund raiser this very month.  He supports Roe v. Wade as “the law of the land” but pledges to be the the 41st vote against virtually any health care reform.  He says he drives a truck with over 200,00 thousand miles but is by any contemporary standard, at least somewhat wealthy.  What and who exactly is this guy?

According to his own website he favors lower taxes.  Forgive me, but a Republican never says that without meaning lowering taxes on the rich and to hell with the rest of us.  Trickle Down Economics is pure crap and anyone in favor of it is either ignorant or not a friend of the middle class.  The middle class used to be our moral, ethical and intellectual ballast.

Now that it’s in atrophy, we’re having an identity crisis see.

“Israel has made enormous sacrifices in an attempt to secure peace – including unilateral withdrawal from Gaza”  -from Scott Brown’s campaign website.  And yes, that is bullshit.

What we do know is that a health care bill is on a very steep hill if we lose this seat.

I’m having a tough time giving a mad fuck because the last one out of the Senate was prime swampland.  No public option but a mandate to buy with fines if you don’t.  Fines that go directly to the insurance companies.  There’s more but that’s enough.  Blow me.

Other than that, I’m real worried about Sarah being a contributor to FOX tie me to the bedpost News.  Not.

I gotta find that O’Reilly interview.  This shit is gonna be great.  What I’ve seen is already good.  Pray she doesn’t wig to early because the longer it goes on the more spectacular the flame out.  Don’t be afraid.  Embrace the Palin.  Encourage her celebrity.  Don’t buy any of her books though.  Make sure you don’t end up providing her with a dime.

The best part of this circus is about to be free.  Jon Stewart and the like are pants shittingly gleeful.

Cirque du Palin.

It works if you make the ‘a’ long……like Pawlin……accent second syllable.

Make the ‘a’ long….see?

Another thing that is bothering me still:  How much faster our black President responded to an international disaster of enormous magnitude than did our white president to a domestic disaster that was allowed to live up to most of it’s potential as a direct consequence of neglect and egregious incompetence.  Maybe it’s genetic.  Dudes from Hawaii with big ears are smarter.  Dudes from Texas by way of Connecticut with big ears are charismatically retarded.

It’s not racial at all.  Despite Limbaugh, The Human Shitsmear’s assertions that our current President has hopped and skipped to because of the color of your average Haitan’s skin.  Without a nod to any other megalomaniac with media access, it’s not racial at all.  Don’t forget that.

Understand, Rush Limbaugh is a racist.  For those about to rock, we salute you.  He’s a turd in the punchbowl.  He’s a bloviating, pontificating, make shit up as he goes, racist, bigot fucktard that I would debate or play chess with or both in a heartbeat so I could pull his limbs from his body after spanking his brain with the brick of my own.

Sincere political debate pivots on policy and reason and a modicum of comity.  That there’s a dialog here about Haiti beyond what to do, is proof that the conversation is in the woods.  Proof that a lot of us still aren’t paying attention.  Let me say this, 25% of Americans are incurably stupid.  This is a long standing theory of mine that consistently bears itself out.  Proof can be had on this very show.  It will now be known as “The 1/4 Paradigm”.  You will think of it often as one of every four people you meet is a dumbass.

That’s all you need to know.

Drinks for my friends.

This fucking Harry Reid as a racist thing is comedy.

Harry Reid will never be caught in an ethical or moral scandal.  My Mother was his secretary and he is at least an honest man.  I will take your money over this.  I simply know it to be true.

I blame society and the media.

Really, I do.

I haven’t always agreed with him and he’s pissed me off.  I understand he’s not polling well.  I dare say it might and maybe should come down to the Devil you know versus the one you don’t.  Harry Reid as Senate Majority Leader is a big deal for a state with our meager population and vast tracts of irradiated desert that Washington wants to turn into the nation’s toxic nuclear septic tank.

Fuck that shit.  No more nuclear energy until we figure out what to do with the waste.  Thanks be to Harry thus far.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada described in private then-Sen. Barack Obama as “light skinned” and “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.” -Yahoo

Sounds a little rough.  Context kids.  Biden said something like clean and articulate.  A far poorer choice of words and he’s Vice President.  See, Mr. Reid was speaking with candor among colleagues.  He was assessing the candidate’s chances of success in light of how racist America remained.  Remains; because, bear with me here, we’re really finding out just how racist America still is.

You must admit it’s really reared its ugly head.

Mr. Reid was guilty of being matter of fact in light of what the stupidest quarter* I’ve alluded to before would end up thinking and doing.  For the record, the stupidest quarter have behaved exactly as we all thought, thus vindicating Senator Reid.  They didn’t make fun of how he talked and only accused him of being an Arab or maybe Muslim.  Turns out Harry was exactly right.

Senator Reid apologized immediately and our President said, “I’ve seen the passionate leadership he’s shown on issues of social justice and I know what’s in his heart,” Obama said yesterday. “As far as I am concerned, the book is closed.”  -Yahoo

More than enough for me.  To be fair he also characterized the comments as “unfortunate”.  Who knows what he meant exactly but I agree.  Unfortunate.  Yes.  It shouldn’t be an issue, but it is, and you’re an idiot if you can’t see it.  I’m not here to apologize for ignorance or stupidity and I don’t believe that’s what has occurred here.  What we have here is a truthful man speaking privately in support of a man who would become our first black President.

I know it’s awkward but Harry Reid was being honest and I admire his prompt contrition.  He knows what he he meant but he’s humiliated by how it sounds.

Michael Steele called for Dirty Harry’s resignation today.  Didn’t see that one coming.  Let’s politicize racism and who better to foment than a black Republican?  He asks rhetorically.  Somewhere Gomer Pyle chuckles with abandon.  Surprise, surprise, surprise.  Michael Steele should be the titular Head Douchebag of the Republican party forever.  He’s as good for the world as Sarah Palin because they’re both the same caliber of stupid.  The somewhat sociopathic kind that is relatively rare in most walks of life but prevalent in low IQ conservative, ideological and fucktardian political circles.

You know, the kind that fail up.

Is this racism?  You bet.  Is Harry Reid a racist?

Piss up a rope.

Drinks for my friends.

*When Nixon was forced to resign, his approval rating was about 25%.  When George W. Bush left office, his approval rating was about 25%.  I can think of no better proof that one in four Americans is a dipshit.

My girlfriend flies in tomorrow night and I’m a little uneasy.  Concerned.  The whole industry is in panic and disarray.  As you now know, terrorism has reared it’s ugly head and begun the new plague with a single man successfully igniting his underwear but not the bomb therein.  Trump’s wife got thrown off some flight and there was some other different skinned guy with another funny last name with food poisoning.

The golden trifecta of international terrorism.

The man with the explosive underwear was thwarted by passengers.  I like that.  Just like Richard Reid, the notorious and equally incompetent, “Shoe Bomber”.  Ha.  The people did rise up and they did smite the evildoer.  They did so to save themselves, maybe their fellow passengers and that’s probably the only two reasons they had.  I’m not saying it didn’t take courage, I’m just saying it’s logical and these passengers weren’t stupid.

What are we so afraid of?  Sure, it would be horrible to be the one tackling the guy with flaming underwear in the middle of a fuselage at thirty thousand feet.  If I were about to be a martyr, I might have shit my loin diaper.  So, Al Qaeda has pretty much obviated a Keystone Cops comparison.  These guys are losers.

They suck at this terror thing.  Makes you wonder.

Perhaps Yemen holds the answer.  First, there is mime school.

It is comedy.  Wanna be terrorists find their way onto a commercial airliner headed to the states rather easily and we’re regulating personal products by the ounce, specific sizes of Ziplock baggies and taking our shoes off.  I hear now we won’t be allowed a pillow or blanket on our lap or a trip to the piss trailer for the last hour of any flight.  LA to Vegas is about 45 mins.  Your not allowed to urinate or conceal a bomb in your underwear for fifteen minutes before you board the flight and of course, the duration of the flight.

This shit is dumb.

I refuse to believe any terrorist attack was ever halted by the seizure and confiscation of a regular consumer sized tube of toothpaste.  That happened to me.  It made my bloomers constrict.  They took my decoder ring and that little chunk of strontium 90 I had in my cigarette pack and my lighter but not my matches.

Reactive when we need proactive.

Duh.

Our guys are more Benny Hill than the Keystone Cops.

None of this shit means a thing.  If someone is determined to blow up an airplane and isn’t any sort of fucktard, they’ll blow up an airplane.  If a decent car thief wants your car, it’s his.  All this policy and alleged regulation while 95% + of shipping containers coming in never even enjoy a glance.  Look at my thumb, gee you’re dumb.  They deliberately inconvenience and annoy the gen pop to impress upon them that something is being done about something I really doubt we should be so worried about in the first place.  Nothing is being done about anything.  The only two retards to make it on a plane sailed through security and were stopped by passengers.

I imagine that’s all I really need to know.

Anything else I might have needed to know, I’d have gleaned from the typically reprehensible attempts by jackass Republicans like Pete Hoekstra and Jim Demint to either cash in on the event or shamelessly exploit it into politicization.  I’m telling you, Republicans are dicks.

America is smarter than this.  There really is nothing to fear here but fear itself.

Don’t even bother to get distracted.  Move along.  Nothing to see here.

Drinks for my friends.

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.

What bothers me so much about the senate bill is that it mandates we buy in, with penalty if we don’t, but the public option has been so diluted that it will only cover three to four million Americans.

This really chaps my ass.

The entire impetus of a public option all along has been to supply much needed competition for the Goliath, thereby forcing the whole clusterfuck bureaucracy into some modicum of accountability in terms of quality and affordability.   Well, do the math.  They bray at lung top that 98% will be covered, yet that number is egregiously misleading when it’s laid bare that it will be accomplished by forcing the majority to buy into the hopelessly corrupt monolith that has been selling death and discrimination to us for decades.  These numbers come not even close to establishing meaningful competition. Four million of 350 million living breathing Americans.

I beseech you, do the math.

Various Senators and representatives, including Anthony Weiner have come forward to say that it’s not perfect but a giant leap forward.  I like that guy, but the numbers are leaving my dick in the dirt.  Here’s another number:  The most important components of this bill, like the weak ass public option, are not due to manifest efficacy until 2013 or 2014.  Thus, the giant has five fucking years to mitigate, obfuscate, lobby with a million bucks a day to spend, to ensure that all protections and rights afforded us in the original legislation are stillborn.

This shit is fucked up from hell to breakfast.  Even if this legislation is passed intact, the fight will merely be in it’s infancy.  We get nothing for five long years and at the end of that road, we will be forced to buy insurance and our options might just suck more than they do now.  Forced to buy their product.  Forced.

Why is no one talking about that?

The great unwashed rail and stomp about a government usurping of free enterprise and democracy.  Fuck them in the neck.  Fools.  Why behave in public if you’re living on a playground?

The government takeover of health care will most assuredly be complete because the government is a plutocracy.  Not for, of and by the people but for, of and by the corporations.

I understand that the progressives and liberals are optimistic for momentum.  They are gleeful for potential.  They seek, against impossible odds to set the ball rolling toward the the pins of avarice and corruption.  Hoping that inertia befriends them.  Once in motion it stays in motion and they can coax or accelerate it’s velocity despite it’s initial mass.  I fear that that the ball has a balsa center, it’s being released far too slowly and by the time it reaches those pins, they will be obelisks bolted down.

And thus the idea of public funded health care or even *gasp* single payer health care dies an ugly, painful and protracted death.

There are significant merits in this bill, such as the language that prevents cancellation upon actually becoming ill or the rendering obsolete of denying care for a pre-existing conditions.  Yet realistically, they are euphoric sentimentality in the face of a mandate that we all buy in to whatever is available.  I’m calling bullshit on the whole thing.  We are required to carry auto insurance but it’s barely regulated, so those that can afford it get ripped off while a third go without in some states.

I can’t see how the exact same scenario is avoidable in this instance.  It’s a prescription if you will, pun intended, for the status qou.  With the exception being that the insurance companies bathe deeper in filthy lucre as the fines imposed on those who can’t or won’t participate go directly into their coffers.  That’s right, did you know that?  What kind of shit is that?

Now of course, the procedural vote for cloture, so the bill can actually be debated without filibuster, has yet to even take place.  Word is that it’s scheduled for Saturday night at 5 p.m. West Coast time.  At that point, amendments will be proposed, hard ass Republicans will wail and whine and the outcome is anyone’s guess.  The way I understand this procedure, after cloture is achieved, it tooth pulling time.  The proposed legislation, if it survives, will emerge with less teeth than it entered the arena with.

Picture a Roman Coliseum.

I’m no legal eagle, but I’m no dummy either. At the same time, I’m not an expert when it comes to Senatorial procedural logistics, but it’s worth pointing out that a lot of these guys are obstinate dicks.  I can only imagine that the future of this bill and health care will not be scrambling for sunglasses in anticipation of a bright future and there’s a chance there will be a rush for fresh dirt for the coffin.

Somebody talk me down.

Drinks for my friends

I knew this was coming.  This blitzkrieg of all things Sarah.  I knew the book was coming.  I understood that no matter the political wisdom of every move she’s made from quitting as governor to tragically inserting herself in the district NY 23 race, that her intentions and decisions are far from nuanced.  She’s an attention whore.  A high school cheerleader with an insatiable thirst for fame or even infamy.  The nature of the attention we pay is as unimportant as the truth to her.

She milks us with tremendous success.

What confounds and disgusts me so much is that she is able to do this.  To do this to us.  That we are apparently so complicit.  That we are so willing to afford her audience.  To command our attention despite such a voluminous cornucopia of lies and empty rhetoric, absent policy, minus substance and with such prurient intentions.  Americans, at least some of us, adore idiots.

I know I do.

It’s true, I can’t help it.

But I can’t stand that she’s getting over on us.  Nixon fled the office of the Presidency with a near 25% approval rating.  So did Dumbya.  That proves that about one of four of every person I encounter is a dipshit.  So be it.  I hate that but what can I do?  She’s on Oprah, talking to Barbara Walters, being discussed on the network news and obsessed over by cable news.  She is literally fucking everywhere.  She’s selling mad books to all of us.

Or is she?

The Human Shitsmear declared her book one of the most substantiative on policy he’s ever read.  I don’t doubt that for obvious and numerous reasons.

Wallmart has her book at $8.98 and the right wing rag Newsmax, is offering it for five bucks and throwing in a four month prescription er, subscription.  Way off the $28 cover price.

Hmmm.

Let me tell you something, the fact that she has allegedly written a book (sans index), is proof that she has written more books than she has read.

What I want to know is why do so many of us pay attention?  Is it because we consider her to be compelling or is it the spectacle?  Is she interesting or is she a multi car pileup with flames and blood and sirens, highway flairs and stuff?

That she is already at odds over the facts with the McCain campaign staffers and personnel, belies her version of events at the very least, and her assertion that she was billed $50k for being vetted gives me pause.  Given what we now know and understand about her character and personality, the sudden and abrupt nature of the of the selection and glaring lack of process, it’s difficult for me to believe that any more than a few hundred bucks was thrown at the entire thing.

Gimme a break.  I doubt that much was even spent.  I think McCain woke up with his first piss hard on in months or even years and picked up the phone.  Two or three days later it was a done deal and they had a press conference that left us asking who?

She’s a one hit wonder.  She’s got no legs as we used to say in the music business.  She may yet exist in our periphery as some sort of pundit or talk show host but she will never again run for office, she has not the fortitude.  By 2012 she’ll be a mere memory of spoiled Alaskan fish on the palates of the intelligent or empty competition for the great unwashed on daytime television.  Probably both, but she’ll be a bigger threat to Springer than to Oprah or Martha or Ellen.  It is where she belongs.  I don’t think she’s dumb, just obviously intellectually lazy.  I can spot a person that hasn’t had their ass kicked in life and that’s because I have had mine own kicked up and down the block.  I’m here to tell you she hasn’t.  What is worse and potentially far more dangerous is that she has had her ass handed to her and she refuses to accept or even recognize it.

The latter is the truth and that makes her crazy and perhaps destructive, but only to the GOP.  Ha!  Good stuff.  Methinks disasters like hurricanes may be on the horizon for the party of “no”.

We’re just about the same age and she is as naive and arrogant as I have ever seen.  Not talking about a river in Egypt here, know what I’m sayin’?

It speaks volumes about the Republican party that she remains their most impressive marquee, their most convincing and visceral star.  I admit, this does excite me.  That their tank is still this empty…….do the math.  Romney?  Guy Smiley, seriously?

Sheezus.

My brother in law was the first person I ever heard describe George W. Bush as an “empty suit”.  I’ll happily co-opt that term in describing Sarah Palin.  Um, pantsuit though.

I know women like her.  Personally.  They exist in my own family with all the vindictiveness, jealousy and capacity for baseless recrimination.  They are loathed, feared or laughed at.  Those that are closest to them are the most disgusted or confused.  Occasionally they get punched down from above by those that are merely weary of their shit.  We do like that.

Drinks for my friends.

The need to communicate.  To write.  Despite not having anything immediate to say.

I’m here in Carson City because I imagined it to be a haven of sorts.  If not that, then friendly.  Sanctuary from exorbitant bills and ridiculous drama.  I was weary of the drama and the bills.  Mostly the bills.  Spent am I.  Pun intended.  It started off okay.  Business prospects were promising.  I had irons in the fire.  Sibling drama did rear it’s ugly head but I was honest and above it.  Restrained.  I chose distance in light of the wildest cards and it served me for a time.  I’m smart.

Dad fell from a ladder, broke six ribs and a shoulder, madness prevailed on every level.  Soon after, sibling rivalry exploded like Krakatoa.  I wake up checking to see if I still have an ass.  I realize now I’m in deep depression once again.  I would risk the reader’s patience at this point were I to detail how often and how hard life has been punching me straight in the mouth in the last year or so.

I’s okay, I roll with it and drink a lot.

A carnival of nonsense.  My sanctuary a mirage.  I do tap the occasional oasis and it is like paradise by the dashboard light.  I get refueled, nourished and a chance to wash my face and hands.  I wash my stinking crotch and put on clean socks, put on a little lotion.  Don’t always know where to find those islands, but I know if I sail long enough……   No sooner than this and I’m waiting for vulgar to ring the bell.  Ugly will revisit any day.  It’s true I’m feeling sorry for myself but you can’t know what’s visited me in the last year or so.

It’s been pretty fucked up.

I am weary.

I hate most people and most things.  Sometimes.

Outside the wind rages, but inside Swirly Girl the Cat snores like a drunken boxer, whistling and snorting.  It makes me smile.  Her face flinches and flickers in the throes of a dream.  I smile some more.  Her paws are curled inward.  Her nose tucked between them.  We’ll move to the bedroom and she’ll sleep beside my head all night.  I am her father.  She is my beloved problem child.  She frowns and objects a lot.  I just love on her as best I can.

I have to care about what happens next but it’s easier said than done.  People really suck.  You have no idea.

I’ll take politics and world events for five hundred Alex.  If you visit regularly it’s most likely the reason.

Item one:

Can you believe this fuckhead Stupak?  Smoking tobacco is no different than smoking lettuce leaves.  He didn’t say that but I don’t care.  No real surprise that he rents a room at C Street and his head is misshapen.  Can you say hydrocephalus?  This guy is a dick.  44,000 people a year dying due to lack of health care insurance and he wants to make the whole thing about Roe v. Wade?  What an asshole.  News flash, we’ve got it covered with the Hyde amendment.

No worries dickhead.

To stir this brand of shit in light of just how important this issue is, is beyond irresponsible.  It’s plain stupid and I think someone’s ego needs a leash and a muzzle.  Thanks you peniswhipped cocktail.

Item two:

Sarah Palin and her new book and book tour.  She’s doing the “battleground” states.  Who cares?  Run the stupid bitch in 2012.  Please.  Run Romney and Huckabee and Limbaugh or Hannity.  The Keystone Cops, The Stooges, The Flinstones or maybe Tucker Carlson and Orly Tates and Wile E. Coyote.  Yep, bring it.  Give us a show.  I swear I equated Romney to Guy Smiley before the Daily Show did.  Bitches.  I’m way on top of this shit.  Sometimes.

Item three:

I’m very much encouraged to hear Obama has rejected all battle plans he’s been presented with for Afghanistan.  We don’t have the resources in terms of personnel and we don’t have the money to even attempt to support a government we know to be abstrusely compromised.  It’s a no win boys and girls.  The pooch was raped seven years ago.  People die for no reason everyday.

Time to take the long way home.  Russia failed.  England failed.  No invading force or country has ever prevailed despite it being among the poorest countries on earth.  We’re certainly no smarter and likely even dumber than those who’ve come before us.

We have no clear objectives or realistically realizable goals.  No one can define “victory” or a “successful mission”.  We are lost.  Strangers in a strange land fighting for what?  Use the money we are spending there, to increase security here, if the idea really is to be proactive.

I’m not talking about taking off your goddamn shoes or limiting the size of your toothpaste or shampoo containers before you board a flight from Burbank to fucking Reno.  I always travel to Reno at the behest of Allah because I don’t shit where I eat.  Ha!  Such policies are useless and miss the point entirely.  It’s all about demonstrating that someone, somewhere, is doing something to show the dumbest among us that someone, somewhere is doing something to protect us.  Nevermind that it represents nothing more than an inconvenience and an egregious breach of logic.  Somewhere, someone is doing something.

In the meantime, more people die everyday because of lack of health care or insurance than in our elective wars.  Pretty fucking stupid, huh?  It’s no wonder the world thinks we’re a big stupid bully.  It’s no wonder Sarah Palin still has a realistic shot at the presidency.

The only way to even find out if the conflict in Afghanistan is solvable is to escalate it to the level of the Vietnam conflict.  That means 50,000 dead Americans and millions of dead Afghanis, many of whom will be civilian.  Good plan.  Time to walk away.

Wait.  That’s actually more than we lose every year due to our health care clusterfuck.  Oh boy.  Now we’re cooking with butane.

Item four:

I don’t really care if the Ft. Hood massacre is defined as “terrorism” or not.  It was terrible.  Horrible.  Horribalism?  Anyone?  It’s a fucking tragedy and Republican efforts to label it as terrorism amount to nothing more than a cheap shot as well as shameful exploitation of what is simply an American tragedy.  Somehow these pricks believe that if they can succeed with the blatant polemic nomenclature of terrorism they can claim that a terrorist event occurred on Obama’s watch.  Good luck with that you fucks.  Your’s happened two months earlier under your watchful and diligent eyes and you lost three thousand in an event so contrived that I doubt we know half the truth.  We lost thirteen.

Idiots.

Drinks for my friends.

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

Spruce Goose bitches.

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

Good job everybody.

Jackasses.

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

I really hate you guys.

Did I say that or just think it out loud?

Is there a difference?

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

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

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

This party might just might be over.

Have you no shame?  No decency?

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

Sick.  Fucking sick.  Pun intended.

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

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

Cigars and cognac all around.

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

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

Some tomato soup.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It makes fucking sense.

At least pot is legal in LA.

Drinks for my friends.

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

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

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

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

Misguided perhaps but not insane.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Soon, they’ll disavow being mammals.

Take for example the rhetoric over the Nobel.

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

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

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

Glenn Beck thinks the Teabaggers deserve it more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ah but:

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

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

Fuckin’ A.

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

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

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

For nothing but the filthy lucre.

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

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

Again, this ain’t your dad’s TV News.

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

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

That’s what I’m talking about.

Drinks for my friends.

 

 

 

 

The talking heads were hard at it yesterday, pontificating on how Obama has yet to accomplish anything.  This pisses me off for a number of reasons.  Dumbya accomplished nothing good for the average middle class American in his entire eight years.  All he did was consistently kick the feet out from under them.  With the palm of his hand, he held skulls against any given surface and visited violent intercourse upon them dispassionately, save some boyish cowboy glee, from behind.

Primeval.

Archaic.

Yup, in the ass.  Clearing brush and evildoers.  Smokin’ em out.  Fucking retard.

He smirked and smiled all Alfred E. Newman, chuckled and believed his retardedness to be anointed, appointed and ‘special’, to carry out such an awful and dastardly thing.  God made him do it, as opposed to Cheney and the PNACs I guess.

I beg to differ.

The quintessential violent and clueless bully who turns out not to be so bad when it’s over.  Except he’s dumb as a stick.

Oh, and President.  Elected twice and all.  By us and and all.  Without prejudice and presence of mind and all.  I mean President of the US of A.  Dumb as a goddamn branch floating in a polluted river.

And all.

The clusterfuck that Obama inherited is arguably the worst any president has ever walked into.  The blind partisan obstruction by Republicans is easily the most egregious in our history.

A wounded cur, sits and drools increasingly intrepid and malignant.  Snarling and snotty and shrinking.

Still, she keeps barking and smacking.  Protesting everything that moves.  She just can’t stand anything that moves.  Anything that moves.  Oh, she can’t tolerate it.  Kill it, she thinks, the vicious bitch canine trained to hate toddlers and grandmas and the disabled.

You know, not since FDR has any president walked into such a shitstorm.

Bear with me as this is entirely different, from FDR, or any other presidency ever.  Waaay different.

Needless to say, FDR strode bravely into the worst of modern times.   Still, he enjoyed near total congressional cooperation.  At least to begin with.  All on the same page, all willing to advance what needed to be done.  Patriotism over partisanship.  Few questions asked.  Get this shit done.  It was bad and in need of immediate repair.  What follows is the golden phrase.

They worked together for the benefit of us all.

Our man faces the extreme opposite while enduring the same environment and circumstances.  No cooperation.  A stark and ugly deficit of good will.  Twice as hard and he’s black.  So six times as hard.  This man is hoping for eight years and despite my lack of religion, God love him, his family and all of their souls. Godspeed, good luck and pancakes with peanut butter and syrup for each of their souls.

I say to you, you fucking go.  You charge ahead and do as much damage and make as much difference as you can.  Bring it.  Show us your courage and we will fly your flag.  I care less that you are our first black President than I do that you are MY first inspirational one.  You speak to me and to we and it really could be you and me together.  You may stumble, but as long as you get up, we will will be behind you.  At your back.  Wanting and hoping for the the same things.

Bring it and we will stay.  I will.  I will, you are stuck with me.

Fury, hatred and racism have once again become the dubious hallmark of the far right Christian wingnuts and an alarmingly malignant  component of the generic conservatives and workaday GOP.  The likes of Limbaugh and Hannity are so emboldened they simply lie these days.  By what?  Where does the courage come from?  Why?  Where do these fucks get off?

The public option has not the support of the majority they screech, it’s a government take over they wail.  I watched Cornyn puke it up yesterday morning.  He was lying.  They lie.  Over and over, again and again, on national television or whatever venue they happen to ass warm a seat in.  The money for their re-election is a greasy pizza with shitty crust but plenty of cash cooked and delivered by the folks who own and control over 16 percent of our entire GDP.

Let me tell you something.  Americans are goddamn dumb.  Gullible.

You losers who eat this shit should be ashamed.  Show up at the 7-11 after dark for your beef jerky and canned meat.  Slim Jims and greasy food for dipshits and protein starved mouthbreathers.  Watch your Springer and listen to your Hannity while you drive around in your ridiculous trucks feeling your genitalia are somehow more special than they should be.

Over two thirds of adult Americans want and wish for a public option.  I don’t believe a president has ever been elected with as vastly voluminous a majority as the one in favor of a simple public option right now and today.  It’s what we want.  It’s so simple.  But this is your government at work and it’s disgusting.  One of the biggest businesses in the history of man.  The precise and exact opposite is the truth and they know it as well as I and as well you should if you can afford to pay any attention at all.  Without shame or conscience they just throw tires on the fire, so everyone can see the thick toxic smoke.  Lie and lie, because that’s what they’re paid to perpetuate.  No different than your bought and paid for Congresspersons and Senators.

If we do not get this, it will not be ok.

I’m really not holding my breath because the Democrats have been nothing but a lesson in how to suck so far without regard to future endeavors at all.  Oh well.  I’m a little drunk.  Yer mama.

Drinks for my friends.

Did ya guess I’m furious?

Where exactly does the rub lie you ask?

I’m a little at a loss for words here.  Don’t worry, it won’t last.

Heh.

It’s just that this is so important.  In a country as wealthy as ours, health care is not a privilege, it’s a right.  Fuck me, every living being deserves it.  How embarrassing that far poorer nations are getting it?  Until we can make it available to us and for us equitably and fairly, how can we even advocate for it with a straight face for anyone else?  It’s moral and ethical and shouldn’t be political but it is and that’s just ugly.  Fucking disgusting.  The very idea that it’s being debated in our corridors of power just confounds me.  We have the money and the resources and everyone wants it.

We stood up against the Nazis and humiliated Japan.

For this most humane of causes, we battle our own.  We fight those elected by us to advance our very best ideas, interests and needs.  The fight for what we deserve is with our own alleged democracy.  They mock us by allowing it to even be a contest.  What is right is clear.  What we expect is obvious.  Why they represent us is clear.  What we want is clear and still, the outcome is in question.

You inglorious fucking bastards.

Ahem.

We’re talking about the public option amendments proposed by Chuck Schumer and J. Rockefeller today before the Senate Finance Committee in the precipitously spectator friendly fight for health care reform.  Note to elected reps, you’re being watched.

Okay, I understand this is the first authentic punch in this fight.  I’m well aware that it was meant to be ceremonial; a shot across the bow if you will.  Schumer and Rockefeller admitted as much.  Both amendments pretty much went down in flames.  The reckonings were 15 opposed to 8 and 13 opposed to 10.  Chuck was all smiles for the post game, saying that they did better than he’d anticipated and momentum is building.  I’m a little lukewarm on Schumer but I admit to having a soft spot for him.  His assessment is likely more cogent and certainly better informed than mine.

Pisses me off when he defends Baucus though.  Shumer wishes they weren’t running those ads.  Buacus is a pawn and an officious prick.  He deserves it and we’ll be talking about it here in a minute.

Here’s what chaps my ass.  Max, four million bucks in campaign contributions from big pharma and big insurance, Baucus.  After a suspiciously protracted process of negotiation, Baucus puked up a bill so lame, so transparently in favor of not just maintaining the status quo but adding bulkhead after bulkhead to protect and enrich insurance companies at the expense of the common American,  I’m simply in awe anyone in what was once the world’s greatest deliberative body can pretend to take him seriously.

I harbor dark oozing contempt for this man.

Let me give you an example.  His bill mandates that every American, regardless of income level, purchase health insurance.  Any American citizen who does not not purchase health insurance would be subject to a fine.  Either way, whether an individual buys in or not, monies for premiums or penalties for not buying in, go directly to health insurance corporations.  No reach around, just straight up cash.  All it does is give access to the money of the forty or fifty million uninsured to the insurance industry they haven’t otherwise been able to get their hands on.  Needless to say, without a public option to foment reasonable competition for rates and service, his bill is nothing less than a totalitarian dictate to further enrich an industry that has been ripping off the average American for decades.

Max Baucus really sucks.

Max tells us today on national television that his job is to deliver a bill that will garner sixty votes on the floor of the Senate.  Bullshit.  Where is that written?  Where does it say that his job as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee is to do anything but deliver a fair and equitable bill in the best interest of his constituents and as committee chair, a bill that reflects the will of 65% of the American people?  Just what is with this sixty fucking votes thing?  It’s absurd.  It takes fifty one votes to pass a bill.  Sixty votes guarantees cloture and therefore prevents filibuster.  But it only takes fifty one votes to pass a goddamn bill and there are sixty of you spineless bastards.

The Democrats are so terrified of fillibuster they won’t bust a move without being able to prevent it?  So what?  Make the filthy Republicans actually filibuster.  Bring some sandwiches a cot and a laptop loaded with porn.  Have your aides set up a tent if you need to spank it.  Pretend you’re at the DMV.  Outlast them if it’s something you believe in and it’s the right thing for the American people.  You ARE the majority you know.  This is a walk in the park.

Why, why, why do the Democrats insist on being such pussies?  I’ll tell you why.  Because so many of them just as shamelessly beholding to the same forces as Baucus.

Procedurally, if Democrats stand together, they have enough votes to prevent filibuster on specific amendments.  What is the goddamn problem?  This is doable.  We have a majority in congress because the people have spoken.  65% of Americans favor a public option.  Between the congressional majority and the overwhelming majority on the part of the electorate, we have what I like to think of as a motherfucking mandate.

Fer fuck’s sake, do the math you retards.

It’s no secret that during the last decade profits have rocketed towards what Baucus and friends intend to be an apogee, while service, care and the number meaningfully insured has cratered below sea level.  Absolute power corrupts absolutely and dickheads like Baucus don’t give a mad fuck about being re-elected because his next gig will be with the very cabal of ruthless, greedy swine he’s now representing instead of the interests of the people who elected him.  The same can be and is said by me for Kent Conrad, Blanche Lincoln, Bill Nelson and Tom Carper.  Spineless, greedy sycophants all of them.

Cowardly inchoate vaginas that are looking forward the next cush gig.  Man, I hate these guys.

There is nothing wrong with prostitution as far I’m concerned.  It’s a contract, a transaction between two consenting parties.  You want to fuck for money?  Have at it.  Baucus however, is a filthy, disease ridden whore.  His entire reason is to let someone else screw you without your consent and get paid by them and you simultaneously.  He wouldn’t do it if it hadn’t worked so far.  How’s that make you feel?

Sucker.

He thinks you’re stupid.  He underestimates you.

Maybe.

Sucker.

Like I said in my last blog, shave a few points off defense spending, end the reprehensible, ineffective and exorbitant War On Drugs  and we’ll be swimming in cash.  Health care will be an “oh yeah, let’s do that” kinda type a deal.  Free cable and comic books for everyone.  The return of $4.99 buffets and all you can eat breakfasts.  We’ve got plenty of money, we’re just really stupid.

Sucker.

And for the record, fuck Roman Polanski.  He gave drugs and alcohol to a thirteen year old girl and raped her.  If I believed in hell, I’d advocate for him to roast on a spit there.  Guess I’ll have to settle for throwing the prick bastard in prison, introducing him to Big Jim Slade and tossing the key.

If more Americans believe in UFOs than oppose a public option, where does that leave me?

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.

I hear Tam stirred a little shit.  She called night before last to tell me I would be spending the night with Dad and I’d be wearing a mask because of my mosquito sized cold.  She announces it matter of fact.  This is what’s happening now.  Mom is spent she says.  Who am I to piss against the wind?

I’d had a minor but obstreperous summer cold so it was decided I shouldn’t sit with the old bastard at least until I ceased to leak the mucus.  The other morning I fell out of, yes fell out of, the shower.  I was standing on one foot scrubbing the other.  Pretty fucking slippery.  It’s a tiny shower.  For people under 200 lbs.

What new devilry is this?  Same kind my dreams are visiting on me I think.

I show up to the old place on Viking and Nye.  Dad’s got a German helmet on and no one else is paying attention.  Outside the weather is gorgeous. It darkens and everything that’s bloomed seems to flee before the wind hits.  Whites and pinks go first.  Children are screaming.  I smell maple syrup.  My fingers are sticky.

We’re at peace because the bright red shag really does work with the paneling in the master bedroom and the wallpaper in the bathroom.  All hells breaks lose.  Often it’s a hurricane, sometimes it’s an earthquake and about half the time the trailer ends up on it’s side.  Rogue waves.  The giant motor home plunges of a cliff into a violent ocean.

I try to call her back to see if she’s got a laptop I can use and eventually end up with my old man on the phone while he’s doing his best to push one out.  He sounds strong to me and I smile.  There’s no phone in the shitter, they handed it to him.  How cool is that?

I’m a private first class

Third behind my Mother, my Sister and the doctors.  I know, my math sucks already.  I see myself as third because I refuse to be last.  4th, 5th and 6th are available to my niece and nephews.  I don’t need to be the xo unless it’s cognac..  My youngest nephew Keaton,  might just be a Carson City analog of Sean Connery and Richard Gere.  This dates me, huh?  I suspect he’s smooth.  Across the board they’ve benefitted from their respective gene pools.  Big cool brains on them.  Their style is.  Priorities is.  No respect for the Mason Dixon Line whatever that means.  The Westergards are a credit to their race and I adore them.

I wonder if they think I’m cool.

Anyway, Dad still live and pushing.

Neither one of us knows what’s up between the women folk but he thinks Mom is on her way to me.  I’ve pretty much decided I’ll finish my drink, brush my teeth and head out once Mom shows because she is my CEO and I gotta be consistent.  My briefcase ready and my teeth washed, I sit sipping my Bombay.

She arrives home and parks where the driveway meets the road like she’s going to get the mail without even coming inside.

It’s still a small town, no more than sixty thousand or so but it is the Capitol and my sister has been well and beneficially involved in it’s downtown.  An old city, even for the West, so there is architecture and landmarks aplenty.  It’s both bucolic and sleazy.  The Sierra Nevada Mountain Range hosts the sun every evening this Fall and for every season ever. I can see just about all of town from my folk’s backyard.

This makes me think of Wednesday morning trash pick up so I haul it out to meet her.  No recycling today, it’s every other week.

She’s flustered and alludes to my sister being a pain in the ass.  I think I know about that.  I don’t ask but set to making her a gin and tonic.  My brother in law did the coolest thing the other night by showing up to the hospital with pre-mixed gin and tonics in a big jar.  Mom jokes she considered crawling into the closet with the jar.

Mom is rarely funny herself but has a good sense of humor.  She is my mother.  I adore her.  She rocks.

I help pack some food and include a small Tupperware with ice because she’s still got some of that pre-mix at the hospital.

I hung out with my dad yesterday, he was good.  He flipped me off a lot and told me I was a shitass.  My dad is very often very funny.

Mike Bacon called and wanted to hang and we did but first I went to see dad for the first time in three days.

They brought salmon, green beans and rice for dinner. We shared it.  So surreal.  I applied the supplied packets of lemon juice, salt, pepper, Mrs. Dash and tarter sauce according to the best of my culinary instincts.  He asked me which utensil I wanted.  I chose the soup spoon as I had eyes on his soup and he’d already confessed to giving up all soup to my mother for the last few days.

It was cool in that was what he expected.  He assumed he was sharing his meal with me.  We ate it together.  It’s not so unusual on any level but it touched me in a way I can’t really describe.  We also talked about how things freeze in your memory perfectly preserved.  And of course, we discussed the dipshit Republicans.

He told me it was best case scenario under the circumstances.  He really likes it there and he’s comfortable.  He told me it doesn’t fuckin’ beat home though.  He flirts with the nurses and has nicknames for all of them.  No matter who enters his room he flips them shit and simultaneously charms them.  They all stay and sometimes talk too long for my taste.  He tells me one is a lug or another talks too much or that his affection for another is sincere.  My father has his flaws but he one of the best judges of character I’ve ever seen.  To this day I would trust his instincts over my own.

Note to self, the head administrator is fucking creepy.

You know I like soup.  Even shitty hospital soup.  The concept of soup is both wholesome and genius.

The ice maker on the fridge just made a squeaky farting sound.  Kinda like souls squealing and kinda cartoon spooky.

I wonder if he was on his best behavior for me.

He always eats desert.  We had fun yesterday.  He was in good spirits.  Patty was there when I arrived and was reluctant to go.  This guy Patty is the coolest.  I think I’ve already told you.  My father and I don’t have much to talk about so I tell him the news of the world.

Two men were wiping at their eyes today.  One was Maury and the other was my father.  I just remembered this.  Morey Tresnit, brother of Joe, son of Bob, tells me he got my message and will fax Tuesday.  He tells me this as the sun is setting in front of his bar & grill, “Mo & Sluggo’s”.  I’m not really sure in either case why eyes were leaking.  I can only be sure there was pain.  A drunk told me I had great hair and hi-fived me.

Morey touches me on the shoulder when I tell him I’m there to meet Mike Bacon and asks me if I want a drink.

Mike tells me I’m in graduate school.  He means that’s where I am in life.  He thinks that’s how I should look at it.    He’s so painfully bright he dances around me and I hope I’m keeping up.  He points out things I did or said I don’t remember and it’s kinda hard to believe it came from me.  We’ve been friends since the fifth grade.  He shares all manner of things.  I think he tells me he’s gay because I didn’t ask and I’m almost sure he tells that truth one person at a time.

He dated Cecilia Martin right before pining for dudes.  This is huge to me.  You gotta understand Bacon and I just can’t help you there.  I can tell you things about him but they don’t define him.  Plus, Cecilia Martin was an absolute vixen by the sixth grade.

I believe she had braces.

He’s episcopalian and he says he goes to church.  We drank gin.  Bombay Sapphire only.  I think I bought two drinks.  Joe Tresnit, who lives with my friend Kelly’s dad, Reg bought a couple, Morey Tresnit who’s business I want, bought a couple and Bob Tresnit father with the one leg bought a couple.

We liked the gimlets the best.  Mike had to remind Joe how to prepare them.

A subtle but sublime pleasure to indulge in cocktails and conversation with this man I’d not seen in fifteen years at least.  Erudite, razor sharp and lightning fast wit.  He’s currently a candidate for Ph.D. in Victorian literature, his thesis to be centered around his own novel concept of “gentrifuge”.

I either spent twelve or eight dollars.  Maybe both.

Bacon took me to his athletic shoe of a rental car and gave me a small tin with Obama’s countenance on it’s sliding cover and a chunky little bit of green inside.  He also supplied me with a one hitter painted to look like a cigarette.  I’m no stranger to paraphernalia  but I never sold these.

I’ve just discovered an entire box of Twinkies.   What new devilry is this?

I can hear Beddy wailing a little in the bedroom and Billy The Tripod and I have enough of an understanding for her to sigh and act like she can’t hear it.  A very good dog.

I think a piece on the actual difference (s), between Democrats and Republicans might be in order.  Thanks for the reminder.  It will be challenging yet educational………maybe a little didactic.

Bacon said something pretty profound about re-branding the word ‘socialism’ into an “E. Pluribus Unum” kinda vibe, “Out of many one”.  They didn’t teach Latin here in the brush but I got it.  Pretty elegant and disarmingly simple.  I think it means nothing about leaders or demagogues but ideas.  I hope.  That’s what I got.  I think he was reminding me of consensus.  Maybe he was reminding me that we have one.  Could be genius and could be a fool.  Either one of us.

It’s this kind of confusion what makes pot great.

He spoke so calmly and sincerely.  He half asked if he was effeminate.  I shook my head.  What he is, is who he is.  He’s a sensitive and sincere man and a little hypervigilant.  In Carson City, Bacon is like a well dressed comedian from New York City.  Jewish maybe.  Carson folks have no idea but they like him.  He is as close to the ten to twelve year old that I knew, as a 44 year old could possibly be.  He looks you in the eye and with very little physical language, imparts crazy thoughtful observations and very perceptive conclusions.

He delivers wisdom and humor in the same voice because it is the same to him.  He’s advanced.

I am rich to have a man like Michael Bacon look forward to spending a minute with me.  He told me, me and his grandmother had made his day.  He is exceptional in many ways, but so foghorn, lighthouse bright it would be intimidating if not for the lack of ego and a completely unassuming honest look in his eyes and on his face.  I don’t doubt Master Bacon is what he his without exception.

Drinks for my friends.

I kinda like that Obama called Kanye a jackass.  Know why?  Because he is.  I like this side of him.  Obama, not the jackass.

Kinda like how he handled Joe Wilson’s retarded outburst.  Kinda like him sinking an unscripted, non-rehearsed three pointer in front of a 60 Minutes camera crew.  Kinda like his speech about Reverend Wright when everyone anticipated some sorta Mea Culpa.    He’s so fucking cool.

Wouldn’t it be the damn dickens to eavesdrop on the pillow talk between he and the first lady?  You know that would be some funny and revealing shit.  She’s hot.  A long limbed beauty with a booty.  What really informs her sexiness though, is her intelligence and subtle strength.  Michelle Obama possess a certain physical grace, but it is her emotional deftness and intellectually adroit approach, evidenced by the shine of her smile, the shimmer in her eyes and the subtle edge of her tongue.  She comports herself likes she’s been America’s first black First Lady since she was eighteen.  A beauty Queen with a big ass brain.  I adore her.

Were I Obama, I would have chased that until the road ran out too.  His wife speaks volumes about him.  Not so much because he was able to make an honest woman of her, more to do with her allowing herself to be exclusive to him forever.  He was no doubt an impressive man when they met.  A conspicuous education, but the pedigree potential of a hospital administrator or assistant DA maybe.  He wasn’t exactly presidential for reasons obvious and reasons less than.  Feel me?

I doubt that Michelle Obama is a woman who takes any shit, not from her husband and not from anyone else.

I have been impressed with her from day one.  They appear to be a gorgeous family unit.  I believe with all my fibers that we are lucky to have them in the White House.  When she said she was proud of her country for the first time, I understood exactly what she meant.  You bet.  Fuckin’ A.  Me too.  First time in a long time.

I wonder how the average American woman estimates our president’s hotness.  He’s tall and athletic, but he looks a little goofy to me.  That is until he opens his mouth.  The greatest orator of our time.  It’s not just rhythm, cadence and lilt, it’s substance and yes, soaring inspirational rhetoric.  I venture those who would despise him do so because they are confused by his charisma and threatened by his prowess.  A half African American president who embodies the antithesis of their previous stumbling and bumbling champion in every single way.

Smart, where Dumbya was well, dumb.  Articulate where Bush was um, dumb and lacked eloquence altogether.  Lucid as opposed to clueless.  In control and on the case, whereas monkey boy spent a third of his tenure on vacation, pants around his ankles, while Cheney and company did whatever the fuck they wanted.  Before, during and after every national disaster on their watch.  You, know, murder, torture, war profiteering, hurricanes, stage four financial cancer and stealing candy from babies of war veterans.

Humans with compassion and wisdom instead of a carnival of assholes.

Big stupid toast and the sigh of brainrot.  Superman vs. Karl Rove or Max Headroom.

People Magazine vs. National Geographic.

This compare and contrast is exactly why they hate him.

Politics certainly ain’t what it used to be.  I remember disagreeing on policy and issues but this game of vilifying one’s opponent with the powderless ammunition of nothing but perceived or exaggerated moral or ethical imperatives is nonsense.  It’s a cheap and tawdry counter to the people’s best interest.  There exists no legitimate place for it.  Manchildren like Beckerhead, The Human Shitsmear and Hannity propagate it for nothing other than profit.  They have no shame.

Elected officials purvey such less than fine filth without conscience or even a single eye towards consequence.  They don’t give a mad fuck what happens should we not enact  new law dealing with the inequities and egregious avarice of contemporary health care.  These people would oppose anything at any cost to defeat the magic negro, regardless of the total due to their own constituents.  They will, without reservation, break the backs of the same people who elected them, to hand our first progressive half African American President a Waterloo.

Such singleminded, disciplined adherence to demagoguery reminds me of only one modern regime.  Irony is it’s the same one they consistently and ignorantly hurl at any and all who endorse what is best for everyone including them.  It just keeps going round and round.  Where she stops, nobody knows.

It’s wearing me the fuck out.  Conventional wisdom, common sense and the responsible polls, eat me Rassmusen, tell us the majority of America is overwhelmingly in favor of what this administration attempts to advance.  It’s what we voted for.  It’s what we want.  We delivered a voluntary popular mandate.  What happened was, we espoused free will.

So they lie, they obfuscate and they conceal and confound.  And not a goddamn thing gets done because Democrats are almost as filthy and far more spineless.  Obama tells us change must happen from the top down, not the bottom up.  Ketchup little tomato.  We don’t like the way you fight.  Even democrats wonder if you’re a sissy and that’s just  an emasculation proclamation.

I guarantee you a fighting force if you just announce the charge.  What are you waiting for?  Stop fucking around with Republicans and wiping Blue Dog asses and while you’re at it tell Max Baucus to blow me.  Why aren’t you out in front proclaiming the Baucus bill is utter shite?  Why?  Kick this ludicrous circus out of town and get on with it.  You wanna be the next Jimmy Carter, with a majority in both houses?  You have a majority of both citizens and lawmakers.  A mandate entirely different than Dumbya declared.  Your detractors hate and fear you and that will not change no matter what you do.  Let’s go goddamnit.  Time to get on with it.

Let’s do as much damage as we can and not worry about what happens next.  Just like them.  Time for rubber to meet road.

Bring it.

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.

He spoke clearly.  With confidence and conviction.

Righteous ferocity.

“Ours is not the first generation to understand the dire need for health reform. And I am not the first president to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last.”

No more Rope-a-dope boys and girls.  Ha.

“We did not come here to fear the future; we came here to shape it.”

“The danger of too much government is matched by the perils of too little”

“If you misrepresent what’s in the plan, we will call you out.”

“But know this: I will not waste time with those who have made the
calculation that it’s better politics to kill this plan than improve
it.”

As for the “Deathers”:

“Such a charge would be laughable if it weren’t so cynical and irresponsible. It is a lie, plain and simple.”

And the Republicans.  The Fucking Republicans like Boehner and Cantor and McConnell and Hatch, who sat seething and smirking with turds in their mouths.  Transparent and stupid.  Cantor texting.  What a dick.  The whiplash of your arrogance is on the way.  Half of you will be gone come 2010.  I can’t wait.

Republican Joe Wilson actually shouted “You lie” while Obama assured us that reform will not cover illegal immigrants.  Fucktard.  Our Man flashed anger and moved on without missing a beat.  A superhuman burst of restraint, composure and civility.  A class act Our Man.  Not less than brilliant in the face of callow contemptible disrespect directed at a man who has earned and deserves nothing but respect.  He didn’t miss a beat, wasn’t rattled or even distracted.  We are lucky to have this man leading our country.  Forgive my gushing, but that brief moment reinforced everything I admire about our president.

At the end of the day, Joe Wilson did us all a favor by exposing what jackasses the contemporary GOP are.  Thanks Joe, you’re still an asshole, but I thank you for being one.

He stared down those Republicans.  Watch it.  When he looks to the right on television he’s looking to his left in the chamber.  The irony of where Republicans sit has never been lost on me.  Observe the steel of his countenance and the fire in his eyes.  He was picking them out and staring them down individually.  One by one.  The unspoken question, are you reptiles or humans?  His words and his gestures signaled unequivocally that the blatant ridiculous fuckery is over.

You know Fox news carried some reality show instead of the speech.

Whatever.

He delivered unambiguous  and vigorous support for a public option with some amount of caveat.  We’ll have to wait and see but I welcome the predilection.

Then Charles Boustany appeared on my screen and lied.  The same boilerplate, fear based bullshit.  He spoke as though he hadn’t heard the speech the president had just given.  Actually, given logistical constraints, he obviously hadn’t.  It was a joke sans punchline.  Pathetic, out of touch and he looked a fool as much as Jindal did.  How do they get these poor bastards to do this?

The GOP are famous for exploiting the stupid, often of late towards their own demise.

The Republican party has never looked more like a bunch of dickheads than they did tonight.  They have marginalized themselves with help of an unforeseen catalyst of Barack Obama’s expert political judo.

I have been frustrated for months now at the political calculus from the White House.  The passive taking of blow after blow on the ropes like some cheesy boxing movie.  I was disheartened and becoming bewildered.  Now I wonder if he really did know what he was doing the entire time.  Let them swing and shout, taunt and lie until they trod heavily on their own pudenda and cease to lay leather at all on anything that matters.

Masterful.

He may just be that good.

Wow.

Can one speech, even if before the entire congress and a national television audience (except Fox), function as a game changer for such a momentous and hotly contested concern?  The question on the lips of almost every progressive in America since it was announced.  We shall see.  It is more than incumbent on me however,  to point out that this is no ordinary president.  By that I mean he is extraordinary.  He did exceptionally well tonight.  Tone, nuance, sincerity and an overt sinewy rigor were all on display.

Impressive and I’m impressed.  The character of our country.  The letter from Teddy Kennedy.  He framed it earnestly and effectively as a moral imperative and I have no reservation in declaring him to be absolutely right about that.  Invoking Teddy was an appropriate, as well as emotional homage to a man who declared this the cause of his life.

Obama has once again acquitted himself a very smart man.  A very sensitive man.  An incredibly capable man.  Deft and adroit and not to be underestimated.

Awesome.

He came off the ropes to swing hard and with precision.  An expert boxer against a reckless and stupid brawler.  They retire to their respective corners, our man fresh and with lightning in his eyes and fists furious.  The brawler with legs of rubber, pukes his bloody mouthpiece, head swimming eyes confused as his crew goes to work and dreading the bell.

Todd Westergard, you may have been correct sir.

Show us this until it’s done Mr. President and we are golden.

Well done Mr. President.  Very well done.

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 hardly know where to begin.

Just when I think the army of ignorant, mouth breathing retards who oppose all things Obama, consistently and without grace or agility and discrepant against their very own interests, cannot possibly get anymore hypocritically and incoherently shrill, well, they pull down their pants, run around screaming, shitting and pissing themselves.

Now these roundheads are encouraging their children to skip school on Tuesday to save their fragile minds from some evil socialist indroctination by the President of The United States.  You can’t write this shit.

My old friend Gabby put it this way:  “Don’t worry kids, Obama’s not gonna ask you to procreate or practice loading your 45s.  He just gonna ask you to do your homework, which I guess from the conservative stand point, is a horrible thing.  Ok, so all you Republican Kids, just go back to your unprotected sex and guns.”
-Gabrielle Birchack

Racism, ignorance, stupidity and fear are alive and well in America.  It reminds me of leaving wet food as a treat for the warehouse cat at work, only to discover the bowl squirming and glistening with maggots the next morning.  I remember my disappointment and nausea inducing disgust vividly.  It was summer and I was a little saddened that my gesture had been so perverted by some of earths lowest creatures.

Well, it’s summer.

They would have us believe and likely believe themselves, that health care reform will:

1) Ration care, deny treatment to the elderly based on whether a government death panel deems them worthy and deserving.  It will do neither.  Um, by the way, health care is rationed rather egregiously in America today.  Weeks, sometimes months for an appointment with your doctor if you have insurance.  Automated phone voices instruct us that in the event of an emergency, meaning care is needed any more urgently than say, a month, hang up and call 911.  The chances of your insurance paying for the specific treatment, prescription etc. that you and your doctor have agreed is most efficacious is as low as sixty percent in many cases.  People have died and are dying as a result of the insurance company coming between patient and doctor.

Sounds like rationing to me.  It’s not just the uninsured that are going bankrupt or literally dying.  Sounds like death and or bankruptcy panels to me.

2) All illegal aliens, undocumented workers et al. will be automatically covered at our expense.

Guess what?  They already are.  They, as well as uninsured Americans go to an emergency room, as there are laws in all fifty states mandating that no one be turned away from emergency rooms.  We pay for it in higher costs across the board.  It should be noted, there is no provision in any of the bills in committee, that provide for care to illegals.

3) This is just the first step in a government take over of health care.

My first reaction is so what?  We’re the only modern industrialized nation without it and the wealthiest.  Contrary to the opposition’s chronically mendacious bloviating, those people in those other countries are quite happy with the care they receive.  Perfect?  No.  Would they choose to do without it?  In a word, nofuckingway.  Then, the fact that Medicare and Medicaid are tremendously popular in this country, despite both programs being entirely administrated by the government and the appearance that most of the opposition are willfully ignorant of this, reveals the argument to be specious on it’s face.

They use Stephen Hawking as example of someone who would never survive socialized medicine, despite socialized medicine being the best and only reason Mr. Hawking is still with us.  They are full of shit.  Idiots.  Empty blowhards.  Liars.

The stated goal is to increase efficiency and foster competition to bring down costs and end the chronic, unchecked avarice of the insurance and drug industries.

Every year, insurance company profits go up, premiums go up and the the number of insured goes down.  Remember, one way or another, despite the rampant suffering, it’s you and me who pay for those uninsured whether we like it or not.  Some estimates have the price of health insurance requiring half the median income of Americans within ten years.  Are you ready for $20,000.00 plus premiums?

4) We can’t pay for it.

I will admit, this perhaps their most legitimate protest.  But first, I say to you who would tout it, so what?  Remember Reagan spewing the nonsense of tax cuts to none other than our children during a period of double digit inflation, interest rates and unemployment?  Remember your icon telling us that deficits don’t matter?  So why do you care?  Why all of the sudden are you so ardently in favor of fiscal responsibility?  Why so vehemently concerned about the price our children will pay?  I smell political opportunism.  I smell hypocrisy.  You folks stink of intellectual dishonesty.  You folks reek of goddamn stupidity.

I’m a firm believer that increases in efficiency and a slim tax increase on those who’ve prospered so plenteously the last eight years will go a very long way towards funding a program that will improve the life of virtually every American.  Failing that, let me say this very plainly, we could opt to spend somewhat less than the near trillion dollars we spend each and every year to kill brown people overseas.  It’s just that simple.  Kill less brown people and foment life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all of us, including the brown people.  

The fact is, that without a robust public option to not only cover the 50 million who have fallen through the the cracks, but to obviate the greed and vacuum of compassion of the status quo, any “reform” legislation is antithetical and more than likely worse than nothing at all.

See, it will fail to incentivise competition and nothing will change. The simplest and most comprehensive as well as comprehensible way to do this is expand Medicare appropriately.  A walk in the park.

As to the trigger idea that has surfaced of late, I’m calling bullshit on that.  Ostensibly, it would give insurance companies a few more years to clean up their act before a public option would be implemented.  It won’t work.  The dirty greedy bastards will conduct business as usual at best, daring the powers that be to do what they haven’t been able to do for half a century anyway.  A pretty safe bet on their part.  At worst, they will go for broke, wring us all dry in the time allowed, take the money and run, much like the Bush administration and it’s corporate cronies did with everything including the war, leaving a gigantic mess, nearly beyond repair.  For eight years it was open field running for the plutocracy under Dick-in-Bush.  It’s insane to think they’d behave any differently under the same circumstances.  These people care far less about you than your government and that’s a mouthfull.

The real reason for such virulent opposition to health care reform is that it is literally the first, and therefore most important, domino to be tipped.  Should it lose it’s center of gravity, the horror show that is the great unwashed will be subject to any socialist whimsy we in the majority see fit to impose on their jingoistic, empty headed sloganeering asses.

We may choose to prevent bloody mass murders by over armed nut jobs by pressing for incrementally better gun control.  No, we’re not interested in taking your fucking guns away, even though you dress ridiculously to kill defenseless animals.  We may seek to at least make sure that creationism can’t be taught exclusively, but mandate that evolution at least be offered along side it.  We may just, *gasp*, insist that gay people be treated fairly under all aspects of law, including marriage.

The prerogative to get all bold and righteous will be upon us.

We might legalize the demon weed, in order to tax it, better regulate it and keep it out of the hands of teenagers.  Legalize hemp production and we’ve got oil, paper, textiles, plastics, even high protein food, all renewable in twelve weeks, no pesticides and no detrimental environmental impact whatsoever.  We may push to stop imprisoning all non violent drug offenders because we currently incarcerate more people per capita than any country on earth at $30k per.  You can bet we’ll pursue green industry more aggressively because even if we’re wrong about global warming, and we’re not, there’s nothing wrong with cleaning up the water we all drink and the air we all breath.

Our sun vomits more energy in an hour than we use in a millennium.  Might as well work that shit.  It’s free beyond the technology to collect it.

The whole human race can survive without war.

The churches will have to endure a renewed and vigorous scrutiny.  The message will be, get the hell out of and stay the hell out of politics or your considerable largess will be taxed.  Oh, and maybe, just maybe some real and actual campaign finance reform.  I’m getting carried away here but I hope I’ve scared the living shit out of all you neocons and thoughtless, unpatriotic, yes unpatriotic, dittoheads and obsequies followers of Hannity, Beck and O’Reilly.  Let’s be honest, you’re already scared shitless because a half African American, progressive Democrat is your President.

We know why you show up to town halls armed to the teeth.  It’s because you’re stupid and scared.  We’re not at all impressed.

The opposite also applies, should the first all important domino fail to be moved off it’s axis by the will of the people and a pantywaste full majority Democratic administration, any subsequent metaphorical monoliths will be twice as hard to encourage toward a capitulation to gravity.  We will be left with an administration weaker than that of Jimmy Carter and a better than even chance our next president will be some empty headed dipshit like Sarah Palin or crazy eyed Michele Bachmann (God will have whispered in her ear).

This is the first fight and it’s the most important because of the obvious and enormous precedent.  They know it on a sub-genius level almost as well as we do.  Get involved.  Contact your representatives, sign petitions.  You want change you can believe in?  Get up and get out.  This is no time to fuck around.

Drinks for my friends.

The Lion sleeps tonight and forever.  I for one am deeply saddened at his inevitable but still tragic shuffling from underneath his mortal coil.  If nothing else, I’ve been reminded anew of the sheer abundance and magnanimity of his legislative accomplishments.  A profound practitioner of comity and perhaps the fiercest defender of basic human rights to ever serve in what used to be at least, the greatest deliberative body in history.

A force, a  human hurricane of kindness.

Senators McCain and Hatch have take it upon themselves to soil it with contempt and hypocrisy beyond the proverbial pale.  They suck.  To think McCain had the audacity to run for President.  Stupid is as stupid does.

I don’t believe in heaven or hell, armageddon or a Christian God, but for his sake, I do hope Mr. Kennedy is somehow reunited with his so tragically deceased brethren.  I do believe in the soul, and I believe Mr. Kennedy’s to be of the most authentically unadulterated kind.  His passing is every single American’s loss whether they know it or not.

A grand patriarch of Americans needs and wants.  A father and protector.  A good man.

Teddy.

The tragedy for the redneck, great unwashed, is that they fail to realize what he did for them and including their hatred, vitriol and ultimate stupidity.  When made plain to them, they pretend not to care or understand.  Such is the state of filthy willful ignorance in contemporary American politics.  Ugly, shortsighted Americans that purport, at best despairingly, unable to understand the truth.  Hopeless and deliberately imbecilic because they’ve been indoctrinated with a simple shallow fear.  A fear they know and understand to be baseless and without merit.

Fools.  Goddamn fools.  Goddamn fools.

I’m not sure how this is, all the sudden, I’m reminded vividly of a retarded man named Johnny I knew some twenty five years ago.  I recently had the pleasure of spending some time with  him and a best friend for whom Johnnie is his charge.  My longtime friend, Sean and his significant other Johanna, are living with and taking care of, Johnny who is 56 years old and ridiculously sweet and affectionate.  Johnny is well adjusted, poses no danger to anyone but maybe himself and is funny as fuck. Can’t remember whether it was Jo or Sean who shared it with me, but apparently Johnny exclaims “I made it!”, every morning when he wakes.  How cool is that?

Whatever God there is, he loves you Johnny.

From Bob Cesca at Huffingtonpost.com, “Health care reform named after Ted Kennedy must not suck”.  If and when this gets done it better be good if we dare to do it in his name.  Are we clear?

So by the way, any of you assholes on the the right who choose to accuse us of politicizing Edward Kennedy’s death by celebrating his unapologetic liberalism can take a long slow suck on my runny scrotum you stinking cunts.  He was a proud liberal who never succumbed to the right wing stigmatization of the word or the concept.  He was never afraid of it, he embraced it. His record glows with it.  It’s why we loved him.  Piss up a goddamn rope, you misguided obtuse demagogues.  Tread there at your peril.

Not a single one of you dickwads who would take exception, ever voted for any bill, proposal, or amendment he ever put forward for the common man’s health and well being as far back as ’94.  Eat me.  Now is not the time to pretend you would have negotiated.  Simple bastards.  Disingenuous mouth breathers.

Puke on your own shoes.  Don’t even try to define this man as some moderate obsequious compromiser; even you respected him because he stood up to you and told you to pound sand over and over when you chose to abandon reason and logic.

Outclassed.  Way outclassed.

I’m so weary of the stupidity and the vacuum of logic or reason.  The only industrialized country, and by far the richest in the world, that fails, fails again and again, to care for it’s people in the simplest, most fundamental of ways.  I’m sick to death of the tower in place that dictates our basic needs according to profit and the filthy lucre that has poisoned the process for decades.  It’s bullshit and whenever someone, be they elected representative or clueless ideologue, tries to tell you different, you can bet they are far less than than full of shit.  Empty.  I mean empty.

Bet they are corrupt.  Bet they are ignorant and scared.  You can bet they will do no good.

I will never, ever lie to you.  I’m telling you the way it is.

Johnny wakes up and says, “I made it!”.

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.

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

Fingers crossed, boys and chicks.

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

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

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

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

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

I pray it is so.

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

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

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

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

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

You just can’t make this shit up.

And it goes on and on and on.

Drinks for my friends.

……a constituent asks, “Why are you supporting this Nazi policy?”  Frank responds: “On what planet do you spend most of your time?” He then calls her approach “vile, contemptible nonsense.” He closes by saying: “Trying to have a conversation with you would be like arguing with a dining room table.”  -The Huffington Post

And thus, Barney Frank owns the crazy bitch on national television.

Fucking brilliant.

Barney Frank blows my skirt up.  My favorite gay Jew member of Congress schools us all on how to respond to the paranoid obstructionist right wing nut bags.  Closest thing to tumescence since I woke up this morning with a piss hardon.  I hate waiting for those to go down so I can do my morning business.  Otherwise ya gotta get kinda horizontal; very tricky and often messy.  It does beg the question, why has Obama not said something similar to Senate Republicans?  I for one, think it’s time.

This national debate has long since devolved into a vulgar burlesque.  A cirque de bullshit.  Once again, I find myself embarrassed to be an American.  If only it could be about facts.  If only it could be about exactly how it will be funded as opposed to whether or not abortions will be free, or illegal immigrants will have access, or whether grandma will be euthanized, or whether Medicare, Medicaid or veteran’s care will be compromised.

It’s not about any of that.  Trust me.

How about the efficacy?  About exactly how the middle class and the poor will benefit, as opposed to what makes these fucking idiots think it’s somehow appropriate to show up with goddamn loaded assault rifles to what is obviously intended at least, to be a civil and decorous exchange of information on one of the single most conspicuous issues of our lives as topic.

Who the fuck are these morons?

Ladies and gentlemen, because brains are back, so is ignorance.  Say hello to militias and all the congruent, potentially violent, paranoid consequences.  Word is at least one of the asshats to show up at a town hall recently was a member of the Viper Militia, a 90’s group that saw many of it’s members end up in federal prison.

Oh man, here we go.

There is no action without an equal an opposite reaction.  An intelligent President equals the emergence of weird flat earther, birther, deather, desperate mouth breathers.  There is no free lunch.

He is a good man, our President.  If he’s unable to accomplish what we who elected him expected, who he is and what we hoped for will not be without the tragedy of disappointment.  But it does not change the righteousness of our aspirations and expectations any more than those of the man himself.  It changes nothing.  Man does not live by bread alone and Obama is no island.

This is on us.

Hunter S. Thompson said, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”  It is time.  Barney Frank, that smart and strange little bastard showed us today.

“This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco
this ain’t no fooling around
No time for dancing, or lovey dovey
I ain’t got time for that now”  -Talking Heads

Wade in you bitches.

Drinks for my friends.

Here I am in Carson City Nevada.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I will tell you this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drinks for my friends.