Tag Archives: editorial

by

The Running of the Bulls. . .hit

irs3Okay, get your outrage ready followed by your thinking caps. It, to pare a Bette Davis phrase, “is going to be a bumpy ride.”

Let’s get rid of the outrage first.

  1. It’s bad to target identifiable public groups of people for special scrutiny unless they are promoting pedophilia or making Adolph Hitler’s birthday a national holiday.
  2. A man as smart as President Obama is, is surely very good at getting elected and surely very bad at managing his Administration–at least he has a lot of really incompetent people working for him that aren’t doing him any favors.
  3. Anything that gives Tea Potters the ability to dance in the street in glee is just wrong on so many levels–mostly because they dress like idiots who missed the bus to the Super Bowl tailgate party.
  4. Fourth, Jon Stewart already said it better than you could anyway with this:

“Well, congratulations, President Barack Obama, Conspiracy theorists who generally can survive in anaerobic environments have just had an algae bloom dropped on their fucking heads, thus removing the last arrow in your pro-governance quiver: skepticism about your opponents.”

TeaPotters should of course get somebody to explain to them what he said meant.

Okay, outrage over.

baby-shocked-face-03-copy

Now, let’s examine the facts, which are still fairly small in number, which allows me the joyous whimsy of speculating all over the place about both what might have happened and why. Given that I’m reputed worldwide to be a fairly decent prognosticator (if you don’t count the times I was wrong), I’m sure you will find my analysis spot on as they say or don’t say. You choose. (We are not getting into the DOJ “new” scandal today, so relax, you won’t go into brain overheating).

Okay, let’s begin.

This goes back, in my humble opinion, and with a tiny bit of help from the ever bubbly Contrarian, to *drum roll* Citizens United. That amazingly short-sighted, ill-thought-out, and all around stupid decision opened the floodgates as you no doubt recall to all kinds of bad things. Corporations could give unlimited amounts of money to elect those persons who would support their cause that the only good dollar is one in the pocket of a rich person, for only they know what to do with it.

Okay, okay, so it also allowed all sorts of other “groups” to also gather and spend tons of dough to influence the minds of mostly mind-numbingly stupid voters.

With me so far?

So a lot, and I do mean a lot, of folks figured out that they wanted to get in on the action.

In the world of the IRS is a thing called a 501 (c) 4. This is a tax-exempt status, not quite as pure as a 501 (c)3 status. It allows you to collect money and not pay taxes on it, but the donor can’t claim it as a tax-exempt donation. The status is reserved for groups who operate “for the promotion of the public welfare.”

mack

See the truck? See the truck drive through the gigantic hole in the wall?

What the hell is public welfare?

Well, I knew you would ask that.

The ACLU is considered to do so. But so is the NRA.

See the more rigorous status, the 501 (c) 3 status requires that you stay the hell out of politics in any way shape or form. The 501 (c) 4 status is a bit more lenient. It allows one to lobby for legislation and also to engage in political activities as “long as their primary activity is the promotion of social welfare.” The mack truck as you can see is still driving right on through.

So a whole bunch of organizations pop up, all claiming they are for the public welfare, when in reality they are really about promoting candidates and issues. Enter the TeaPotters and various other right-wing groups.  To be fair, and we aim for fair,  there are (although to lesser number) plenty of left-wing organizations who also are trying to do the same thing.

Now Cincinnati is the office that apparently is the hub of the IRS operation to approve or deny applications for this status. One can assume that following Citizens United in 2010, there was a general flood of applications as everybody including grandma wanted to get in on the action. (I’m told something like 60,000 would not be far off the mark) The status is valuable since, some of the money is tax exempt which allows more of it be used as the organization desires, whether it be to “public welfare” or quite frankly in some case to allow for bigger salaries to those who run the things. Hint: you can make a good living by setting up and running one.  Also donor lists are not required to be publicized.

What to do with this flood of applications which may well have driven the wait time up many additional months?

I figure that some mid-level bureaucrats, who were told in no uncertain terms to clear the backlog, and “no you were not getting any more workers” because the GOP just says NO!, dreamed up this computer program to sort through applications and flag those that would in all cases require further scrutiny–i.e., were they actually doing “public welfare” or only a front for a political agenda. (It’s fairly hard to argue that any Tea party group or any Occupy Wall street group could be anything but political.) The program used words like tea party, phrases like government not working, taxes, and so forth.

As I understand it, of the numbers of kicked out applications (requiring further scrutiny and action) 25% involved right-wing organizations. The rest involved either left-wing or other groups who did not meet the criteria, being not fraternal organizations of chickadee lovers, chocolate addicts anonymous, or things of similar ilk.

At some point, higher-ups learned of the practice. Discussions were had, and all seemed convinced that it was not aimed at “enemies” so much, as to simply weed out by computer rather than by hand, those applications that would require more time. The normal applications could thus be passed through within a reasonable time.

Of course, it became known up the chain of command what was going on. But apparently this raised no red flag (as it should have) as it was discussed and explained to them.

This is born out by the fact that during this entire episode, one Doug Shulman was head of the IRS. Now Mr. Shulman was appointed and began his leadership of the IRS in March of 2008, having been appointed by George W. Bush. He completed his term in November of 2012. He testified that there was no such thing going on in the IRS, as late as March of 2012. While it is still unknown whether he was aware of the practice, it is now thought that he probably did.

This suggests to me, that he did not consider it aimed at suppressing right-wing groups so much as helping to alleviate the backlog and limited to pulling out those applications that would otherwise require additional scrutiny anyway. It appears that the agency’s interests had turned to increasing revenue since the early 2000′s, and it was felt that as much as 1.2 billions were being lost to tax exempt groups in the 2012 election alone. Clearly some of this, if not most of it, should not be tax exempt under the current laws.

Shulman is and has never been a politico. His entire career has been spent in the business arena. That suggests that while his political affiliation is unknown,  he probably supports business interests and it seems unlikely to me that he would deliberately turn a blind eye to some deliberate effort to damage conservative groups, which typically favor business interests. Thus we can take him at this word I think that there was not attempt to “target” conservative groups per se.

This suggests that the real problem here is not one of an “enemies list” so much as what you get when you try so hard to depoliticize an organization that none within it have the political nose to see a HUGE problem for what was probably created as a benign process to speed up the process for legitimate applications while leaving more problematical ones for later.

In other words, any political junkie would have seen this immediately as “DANGER, DANGER WILL ROBINSON!”,  but they were not so seen by your average apolitical bureaucrat.

So that’s my initial take on it.

3stooges_face_palm

Of course weigh in.

Related articles
by

Why Are We So Crazy?

conspiraciesI’ll leave it to you to wrap your head around the events in Boston. I woke as usual, turned on the TV, and was bowled over with lockdowns of neighborhoods and then the entire city of Boston, the death of a young man who only yesterday was only a face, and the race to locate the brother who was trying to escape.

I shake my head in disbelief, for after all my 63 years of experience, I have yet to understand what motivates people to do these things.

I’m not interesting in speculation at this point. Rather I speak to the first issues that now come to those of us who are “normal.”

The Contrarian breathed a sigh of relief. “At least they entered the country well before Obama took office. That will stop the usual blame-it-on-the-Black-Man.” I too joined in with the hope that the remaining suspect would be brought in alive. This for the obvious reason that I hate our murderous tendencies in the first place, but admittedly because I hope the young man might inform us as to his motives. That might stop some of the conspiracy theories about them and their intentions. Of course it will never stop all of them. We are the best conspiracy theorists in the world I think.

Conspiracy is a simply defined crime: the agreement between two or more people to commit an unlawful act. In a few places one overt act toward the commission of the crime must be taken, in most not. It is known as a crime with an active actus reus, meaning that people can join the conspiracy at any time and be fully culpable of the entire enterprise, whether or not all parties are known, or even when some are acquitted.

As any lawyer will tell you, it’s a crime that almost never goes undetected for long. If “loose lips sink ships” well, people who are criminally liable for serious offenses are all too willing to spill their guts to save their own skins. Somebody gets an attack of conscience. Somebody thinks “things went too far”. There are as many reasons as there are words to explain why conspiracies don’t work.

Yet, to the American public there is a conspiracy under every rock. And more to the point, they are almost always massive, involving tens of thousands of co-conspirators and lasting over decades and sometimes longer. We have always loved conspiracies, for some reason they make us giddy. It’s as if we and we alone have uncovered this intricate, vast, complicated plot. We feel deliciously smart. Yet we are actually silly, and not a little unhinged.

We are prone to believe that inexplicable events can be explained by reference to covert groups of various sorts and sizes. They effect our political, social and economic well-being. In the end, it’s just easier to posit a conspiracy than to dig deeply and see all the various factors that contribute to any particular situation. It’s also a good way to attack something when you have no other good reason for doing so.

Ulterior motives figure prominently in the creation of conspiracy theories, and that may be the key to understanding why they are so popular. You tell me that President Obama is not a legitimate president because he was not born in the USA. The evidence for that may be weak to non-existent, but of course since I hate him for my own reasons, I’m more than willing to believe this conspiracy exists. For indeed, if it’s obvious that he is not a citizen, there must be those who are “covering up” that fact for “nefarious” reasons. The conspiracy widens and deepens as you adopt it.

Usually conspiracy theories relate to the government. But there are two big ones that don’t. One is the conspiracy to teach evolution when as everyone really knows, God created the earth as enunciated in Genesis. This theory is held by fundamentalist Christians and includes by requirement that the not only biology scientists are involved in this massive conspiracy, but also astronomers, physicists, geologists, archeologists, paleontologists, and a host of others are also in on the deception.

The other one, that tangentially involves the government is that of climate change. This is a direct attempt by Democrats to favor green technologies and give them tax breaks in lieu of oil and gas interests. It’s all about getting grant money for scientists in universities.

These conspiracies cross all countries and are international in scope. They involve scientists who are all “part of the lie” and who are by choice wasting their professional careers to help sustain them. They have gone on for a couple of hundred years in the case of evolution, and a good hundred years when it comes to climate change.

Here are a list of general categories of conspiracies prominent today or recently:

  1. The central banking institutions are the means by which large organizations seek to impose a “one-world government”.  Just assume that everything is being orchestrated by  shadow people–including wars,  and depressions.
  2. False-flag operations are devices used by the OWO groups to deflect attention from themselves. If the terrorists in Boston are all killed, inevitably, whatever answers law enforcement gives as to their motives, some will assume it is to deflect attention from the real reasons, and the real perpetrators. There are some who believe there is such a false-flag conspiracy regarding 9/11. The same is true of the Kennedy assassination.
  3. Wars are sometimes thought to be begun by the “military-industrial complex” for their own purposes. Iraq is often believed to have been started not for noble goals of eradicating WMD but for oil. There are some who believe that our own Civil War was started for other purposes than those who learn as children.
  4. Most assassinations are subject to conspiracy theories. JFK of course, but also RFK, and King and Malcolm X are commonly thought of as conspiracy cases. Diana, Princess of Wales is another death thought by some to be the result of a conspiracy.
  5. There is the whole “Clinton body count” which claims that Clinton regularly assassinated his enemies and there has been a conspiracy to cover it up.
  6. The unbelievable list of Obama conspiracies–his birth, his college record, his law license, his religion. They have may twists and offshoots.
  7. Various conspiracies involving religions–Jews drink the blood of Christians, Catholics sacrifice babies, Jesus was married.
  8. Various claims that we have technology that is being deliberately supressed, such as electric cars, super cheap energy, cures for diseases.
  9. Conspiracies to hide the fact that the government is developing cloaking technology, invisibility, mind-control, time travel, weather control, man-made earthquakes.
  10. Conspiracies that involve military technology gone awry–which accounts for various “accidents”-death rays, electromagnetic weapons, and various other top-secret weaponry that sometimes causes things like the Haitian earthquake.
  11. Media technology is being used by some to institute Big Brother or mind control. The use of movies and television shows to “desensitize” us to some events so that the government can conduct such things in the future.
  12. Medicine routinely suppresses “cures” to keep their businesses going, as well as creating diseases to destroy races or groups of people.
  13. Alien conspiracies which posit that alien races have visited the earth regularly and are involved in shaping the earth to their purposes, evil or otherwise.

There are more. The groups involved that you hear about regularly include the Bilderberg group, Freemasons, Scull and Bones, the Illuminati, Jews, Opus Dei, the Trilateral Commission, the Mafia. There are more of these too.

Of course, after Boston, there will be more. What makes us so prone to this stuff? Are we just looking for the “quick” answer? Are we unwilling to delve into the myriad threads that actually cause events to occur? Are some conspiracies more plausible than others? If so, is it because we like the claims of some and not others?

Jump in and share your thoughts.

List of conspiracy theories–Wikipedia (source)

Related articles
by

It’s the DICKS!

BYyWCJRDnmerdenlwlqj1OFYo1_500A person I know has been known to say that being conservative is a difficult thing. What he means of course is that one must get past the emotional desire to help everyone (known as the bleeding-heart syndrome) and recognize that such a thing is economically impossible.

Of course the truth is that being a conservative is a very easy thing to be. No one put it better than John Kenneth Galbraith in his famous quote:

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

The difficulty is in fashioning a good excuse as it were. The excuses were helped along wonderfully by the Protestant work ethic (something to do with the devil finding good use for idle hands), rugged individualism, and pulling oneself up by one’s own bootstraps.  The work ethic comes from Calvin and his belief that successful people (i.e. hard workers) were the identifiable chosen of God. Rugged individualism arose during the Hoover administration and was some sort of plea to every day people who their success was in their own hands and presumably not in the disaster that was coming at them from a failed American and world economy. The last about the bootstraps arose from a tall tale that finally became another euphemism for working hard to succeed.

This of course was all immeasurably aided when a group of “elitist” Eastern scholars decided to expropriate Darwin’s evolutionary “survival of the fittest” to explain why some people succeeded and why others did not. Mix them all together and you have the perfect storm of excuses for why I’m wealthy, and you not only are not, but don’t deserve to be.

I would argue that the average business entrepreneur is anything but a true conservative. We like to think of conservatives as being people who don’t like change, who harken to the “good old days”, albeit as seen through rose-colored glasses. This cannot be true of the business person of course, since nobody who thinks like this is likely to risk their all on some belief that they have invented the new wheel of the day.  Business persons simple vote for and support those that promote the kinds of policies that most protect their interests.

Of course all these terms don’t explain anything at all. One may ascribe to the belief that some of the great titans were perhaps brilliant in some way, but more likely they are men who had an inordinate desire to (a) make fabulous sums of money, (b) acquire fabulous amounts of power, or (c) acquire fabulous amounts of accolades for being “successes”. Actually all three feed each other. And with that personality in tow, they happened upon the right idea at exactly the right point in history. The rest is as they say, history.  Imagine the poor hunter-gatherer who happened upon a pool of black sticky goo. He might have dreamed of using this substance in some way that would power his lifestyle, but without either the steel, refinery or car awaiting, it’s unlikely he would become Chief Rocker-negie.

These “conservatives” were a different sort of course than the ones we have today. They cared little about social issues, the rabble could act and interact within their tenements in whatever manner they chose. And they were and are not the same as those “new conservatives” known as the neo-cons, who have applied survival of the fittest to the very nation itself, and given our superior  American exceptionalism, the right to fashion the rest of the world to our liking, even if it means by force.

No, the “New” new conservatives suffer from a much different issue than the mundane guilt facing the average conservative of old, assuaged as was by the phrases above, expropriated to their cause of “me first, you probably never.”

I am of an age, when we were taught that each generation in America did better than the one before it. Each family wished better for their children than themselves, and they expected that. We are the first for which, for many at least, that was not so. In fact for most, staying even has been the best we could hope for.

This leads to the inevitable question of why. And that question scares the bejesus out of the rich. For if the rabble in mass discerns that it has lost at the hands of those who have profited by our misfortune, the wealthy cannot withstand the onslaught. They know it and they have worked tirelessly to avoid that question being turned to them.

The corporate interests, flush with their bulbous bank accounts, bought up the media, and in some cases created their own. The chants began. If you are feeling left behind by the American “dream” then look left.

It is the fault of the blacks who just maybe (hints are everywhere) aren’t as capable in the first place, and are genetically lazy. They are the “takers” the “lazies” the 47%’ers. The subsist on “freebies” and from the Santa Claus syndrome, making a “good” life while aspiring to be nothing more than they are.

It is the fault of the browns, the “illegals” who take our jobs from us, and are prone to being lazy and takers as well. It is all the more horrific because they don’t have any “rights” having entered this country by nefarious and illegal means.

Recognizing that there is a strain of Bible Belt Christianity, you can turn your ire upon the “non-Christian” especially those who look different, are brown, and follow Islam. They are intent upon bringing their hate religion to our shores, taking control of our government and forcing us into their mosques. They are out to destroy American and everything we hold dear.

It is the fault of uppity women and gays who demand equal rights and are surely a part of that “One World Government” thing, that sounds un-American and sinister to boot. It all means that white men are losing their grip on power and money in this world.

Throw in a good dose of government is bad because it just is, continue the mantras of work ethics, and you have a supper to be served to the rank and file American who spends little or no time reading books or articles that deal with real issues in the world.

Soon you have a strange mix of folks who don’t want to pay taxes for all those “others” and who have managed to extricate from their King James’ Bible, plenty of justification for blaming it all on everybody not white, not male, and not Christian.

YOU COULD MAKE IT IF YOU WORK HARD AND IF IT WERE NOT FOR THEM.

The angry mobs will elect people who spout this, and assure them that they are right in their new-found angers and hatreds. A new cadre of grifters are paid to stir the pot daily, assuaging your guilt that tugs at your heart from time to time, making you feel just the slightest bit petty and selfish.

State legislatures across the land become engaged in bizarre bills to destroying women’s reproductive rights, limit the rights of immigrants, legal or not, ban gays from equality, pass looser gun laws (just in case we need them against the government), and otherwise suggesting that life outside the US of A might be better for all, and other secessionist blather.

These bands of ignorance can be found all over America, calling themselves “patriots” and other misbegotten appellations. They are no party, but a band of misfits of no particular ideology other than “stop taking my money” and “it’s not my fault I don’t have the life I dreamed of.” Those two ideas drive all their so-called “opinions. They know nothing, and care to know nothing.

But to call them the Know Nothings is to do a disservice to  another time and place and to misrepresent the meaning of the term when used. They deserve their own name, these “new, new” conservatives.

I coin the phrase The DICKS© to define them. They are the Determinedly Ignorant Conservative Koalition, or DICKS.

by

Class Warfare in Amerika

class-warfare2Once upon a time there was no class warfare in the USA.

True? Of course not, it’s a fairy tale we tell ourselves. Mores to the point, it’s a fairy tale that has been told to us, taught to us, and pushed on us to hide the truth.

The truth is we have ALWAYS been a country of classes. From it’s very inception America has had classes. Voting was restricted at the earliest times in our history to landed persons, in other words, you couldn’t vote if you didn’t own land. Moreover, only white men could vote.  Blacks, who were accounted not citizens were prohibited because they were permanently defined in the CLASS called Slave.

Women were not allowed to vote of course, they were in the CLASS permanently defined as Not Men. By the time of the Civil War, we allowed most white men to vote propertied or not.

There has always been an UPPER CLASS in America, or there soon was. The rich are those who could afford to hire or enslave others to do their cleaning and planting, and lawn care, same as they do now.

This reached its nadir during the time called the Gilded Age, when a small percentage of families and individuals were exceedingly wealthy while the balance of the population was known as WORKING POOR. There was no middle class (the very name that we so casually throw about denotes of course, our understanding that class has always been a part of our existence.).  The WORKING POOR was only so named because of course there was the POOR, those who by circumstance were unable to work and thus relied on charity for their very survival.

We were taught in our schools, and still are for that matter, that we aren’t a class society. We certainly aren’t in the tradition of Old Europe. We have no kings, no lords, no feudal serfs. But we did have their equivalency in the guise of the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, the Vanderbilts, Waltons,  the plantation master, and  so forth. We had the equivalent of the serfs in the tenant farmers and the mine workers who were held in virtual bondage by land owners and mine owners. There was the company town where every dime “earned” was returned to the boss in  the form of rent and food.

What we were told in our schools was that our classes were fluid, namely that with hard work and determination, one might rise from the working poor to the middle class (a class created almost single-handedly by Teddy Roosevelt when he broke up the monopolies and helped workers finally make some decent gains in wages). Nobody I know wanted to be rich in the classical sense, they just wanted the think of themselves as middle class, people who worked and came home to nice homes, people who could afford to send their kids to college, people who could take a vacation each year, maybe have  a cabin at the lake. Simple stuff, really. The stuff that the rich take for granted.

Today, the Republicans would take us back to the Gilded Age, the age where there was (until today) the greatest discrepancy between the very rich and the rest of us. They would do this in the name of economic progress. Of course they are right. They would and are making very good progress. It’s just that the rest of us aren’t. And they have worked extremely hard for decades and decades to maintain the mantra that we are not a class society, and that you too can achieve what they have.

We have always been a country torn between our sense of community, our desire to journey together in equanimity, and our urge to be individuals (rugged actually) and our work ethic forged in the Protestantism of the 17th century. It was an invention of the late medieval period but given structure by Max Weber, German economist, and consisted of diligence, punctuality, deferment of gratification and primacy of the work domain. What a gift to the wealthy business entity!

They (the rich) have pushed that notion as the “way to get ahead” for, as I said, decades. And it has not been for my benefit, or yours, but theirs. True enough, they have always been willing that you and I rise, as long as we did not rise too far. Stories of how the nouveau rich struggled to be accepted by the Old Money are hysterical, especially so those of the rube Texas oil millionaires and their uncouth behaviors.

But things have changed. Too many, far too many, worked hard yet achieved but a modicum of success. The small business owners were and remained just that–small. And no matter how much they worked, they were barely able to leave their kids a better life. The corporations arrived. Borders and Barnes and Noble put the small book seller out of business. Wal-Mart put the mom and pop stores out too. And the small pharmacists, and the small dress shops. And on and on.

The government stepped into the breach and provided a stable ground to land on. Social security, medicare and Medicaid helped out the older Americans who worked hard all their lives yet couldn’t make a go of retirement except in dire poverty. As the industrial machine merrily ground on, millions were left behind. Women, raising children alone only got little jobs with low pay. Again the government intervened with assistance for children, Head Start, free school lunches and so on. The poor kid had no hopes for college, and the government stepped in and offered grants, the same help it had offered returning veterans from war.

This has all angered the rich, who want more of the pie, as always. They started through their minions (Republicans and Democrats), to secure a redress of their grievances. The old meme of work ethic is pushed relentlessly, although it of course fails for most people most of the time (small gains aside). They upped the ante by pushing the nonsense that they are “job creators” (sit in at any board meeting and wait for the topic–how can we create more jobs?) and that they are the “makers”. They pushed the utter crap that everyone who receives government benefits of any kind is a “taker”, a non-contributor, a vermin to be eradicated.

They push it for their own benefit and they of course convince the small business owner that it should be their mantra too. They continue to entice them with promises that if not for the government and their taxation policies against YOU little business, you too could be like us, and vacation on your yacht off your favorite Caribbean island. They tell you that if it were not for “government handouts” you too could be skiing at Vail and gazing from a lovely chalet. They teach you to use this crappy mantra against others, and you do, snarling out your anger  (deep down you know the truth that you have been HAD), spitting out  “takers” in venom and sitting in your white shirt of self-generated superiority.

You are us, little business owner, you just can’t bear to accept it. And they are the ones who have divided us into classes far more than the rest of us who simply want a fair chance. Their classes are them (1%) and us (99%). I know you hate to think of yourself this way, but you are only deluding yourself, and we frankly feel pity for you. We got it long ago. But you go on. Keep carrying the water bucket for the rich. Oppose everything that would make them pay their fair share, and deny help to your brothers and sisters who believe it or not do raise families on the crummy minimum wage that you claim we should scrap all-together. Yeah, let us return to the $5 buck an hour day. You make your corporate masters so very happy.

And while you’re at it–BITE ME.

You sicken me with your callous indifference to reality, all so you can pretend you are something you will never be.

Related articles
by

And You Thought Things Would Be Different?

inaugeraladdressOne of the best things of a second term, is that the President is no longer looking over his shoulder to a second term, and tempering his remarks accordingly. That this is so, is perhaps a fact of life that is regrettable, but it would be a lie to suggest that first-term presidents don’t.

That said, there is much disagreement depending on whose ox is being gored. From the left, and I think fairly from the middle one hears that the Inaugural speech was masterful, and depending on his success, it may go down as one of the best given. Mr. Obama painted a picture that surely speaks to the heart of most of us. We have problems, indeed we do, but the solutions should never be placed upon the backs of any one segment of the population. The poor, the old, and the suffering should not bear the burden of our answers to grave problems, at least no more so than those who shoulders are sturdier, broader, and relatively unburdened.

For many of us, the President’s call for real efforts to help cure our environmental ills comes woefully late, but still is welcomed. The naysayers, propped up by the coal and oil industry “think tanks”, will squawk that this is all a hoax, and the Christianists will point to self-servingly-interpreted vague pieces of scripture and suggest that it would be an affront to God to presume to be causally involved in the destruction of our planet, but the evidence is strong and uniformly speaks with one voice–humans have seriously compromised the health of this planet.

On the Right, of course one hears the laments of the loser–”I heard no statement of wanting to reach across the aisle,” whines Senator John McCain. One might respond, “well Senator, tell us once in the last four years when you have done one thing other than complain that WHATEVER was contemplated by the Administration was wrong.” Yes do tell us Senator.

The Right found themselves shut out and they are pouting. Well, they have shut themselves out and it is clear that whatever is done at this point will be done by revising the filibuster rules so that a majority can once again actually pass legislation in the Senate. It will be done if at all, by the House, if Representative Boehner has the moral fortitude to begin bringing legislation to the floor absent the Hastert Rule, an arbitrary rule which says, “thou shalt not bring before the chamber a bill for which you don’t have a majority approval of your own caucus.” In other words, we will pass no legislation with bipartisan support, but only if we, the majority agree as a majority.

Beyond this, the President will have to come to us, the public and impress upon us the need to push our own representatives in government, to get off pot and actually govern as we elected them to. That is what the Address suggested to me at least.

No minds were changed I would hazard a guess.

Mitch McConnell, cries tears, lamenting, “the age of liberalism” has returned.

Well, yes, damn it it has. We, the left are unabashed in our efforts to bring liberalism back. We glory in the liberalism of Abraham Lincoln who had that liberal idea way back when that no country could continue to exist while enslaving a portion of its people. We glory in the liberalism of Theodore Roosevelt who curbed the power of big corporations by breaking them up. We glory in the liberalism of Franklin Roosevelt who ended a depression by putting people back to work improving our infrastructure and instituting social security so that people had the piece of mind of knowing their last years were not going to be spent in grinding poverty.

We glory in the liberalism of Lyndon Johnson who finished the work started by Abraham Lincoln, giving all citizens the same ACTUAL rights previously entombed only on paper in some states.

We glory in the liberalism of Barack Obama who began what for many of us was a long quest to secure access to medical care as a basic HUMAN right, not a privilege for only those who could pay the price of ever greedy medical conglomerates and doctors.

We await the big issue of immigration where we seek to invite our Latino brothers and sisters to join us in citizenship. We await the full rights of our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters coming to be across the land. We await fair wages for all. We await fair wages for women doing the same work as their male counterparts.

Yes, we are unabashed in our liberalism.

But has anything changed for the extremists and those who kneel before them? No I suspect nothing at all. If the following is any example, the Right will continue to fawn and bow before the tiny but vocal hysteria that is the howling extremism of nuttery:

Mitch McConnell sent out this frightening e-mail to his supporters near or on Inauguration day:

My friend, our freedom is under direct assault.

From those who want take your guns. From those who want to shred our Constitution, and as our good in friend Rand Paul from Kentucky says, from those who want to be King.

Let me tell you, Mitch McConnell is ready to lead the fight to protect your rights.

Nobody’s freedom is under assault Mr. McConnell, and to continue this sort of sordid partisanship is beneath the office you hold. Nobody is shredding the Constitution, and given your utter disdain for the President, if there was one single piece of information that he was, you would be moving heaven and earth to encourage a House vote of impeachment. No one is trying to take anyone’s guns Mr. McConnell, only perhaps trying to remove from the public domain weapons that have no legitimate purpose other than to kill as many PEOPLE as possible, as quickly as possible. Nobody is trying to be a King, and I would suggest that you might read up on your British history since you and Mr. Paul might be a bit limited in your understanding of  what a monarchy is. Perhaps you might read Plato and get a firmer grasp of the various sorts of governments. Just a thought.

So, no nothing is changing. Because stupid men continue to act stupidly and in their own singular interests rather than for the common good.

Related articles
by

Is It Time NOW?

shootingenoughMy first reaction was not shock. My first reaction was, “not again”. I sighed and turned up the volume as I spent the morning cooking, listening to the reports.

Isn’t that something? I was not shocked.

How can we be shocked? This is now something that happens with regularity in this country. It’s nothing new. Another news cycle of interviews with all the usuals–the families, the almost victims, the psychologists, the police, the politicians. The awful intrusions into the private horror and despair of grieving families, the endless speculations about the “shooter.” It’s all too predictable, all to common for us now.

And the usual things are said by the usual people. “It’s time to talk about gun control.” “They are using this tragedy to push their agenda of taking our guns away from us.” “Now’s not the time to talk gun control, it’s a time to grieve.” “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” “A man in china cut 22 people with a knife. Shall we ban knives too?” This dialogue is the same, just the location changes.

And what am I to say? More of the same?

The Right is already at it. “Obama will just use this as an excuse to take away our guns. We knew he would. There will never be another election.” We are reminded that if we mention it, we are “using the tragedy.” Did we use the tragedy of Katrina when we talked about new levees for New Orleans? Did we use the tragedy when we talked about how to improve our national security after 9/11? How are we using this tragedy by discussing the insidious love affair we have in this country for violence and weaponry? How are we using this tragedy to figure out ways to stop this slaughter of the innocents?

But guns don’t kill people they tell me.

You know what? YES THEY DO. They kill people more efficiently than any other means short of bombs. Just because they need a human operator takes nothing away from their lethal potentiality.

Knives kill people. You want to ban knives?

No I don’t want to ban knives. Knives can be lethal but are a step down from guns. More people survive knife attacks than they do gun attacks. Knives take longer, you can’t mow people down with a knife.

The NRA remains steadfast that ANY legislation will take us down that “slippery slope” which ends in the total banning of guns.

WHO SAYS?

Is it the same fool that tells me that allowing gay marriage will inevitably lead down the slippery slope to animal-human marriage?

Or the one who tells me that use of marijuana will lead me down the slope to a full-blown shooting-up heroin addiction?

Or the one that tells me that masturbation will cause me to go blind?

You know what?

I’m sick of the NRA. Who are these crazy people? Why they are in the business of selling guns. They don’t want to sell less. They don’t have hearts and souls like yours and mine. They don’t care that what they produce kills. When President Obama was re-elected, gun sales went up 45%. Forty-five PERCENT. Because the NRA fools told the jackasses that love them, that Obama is gonna take away their right to buy and possess guns, and of course he’s a commie/pinko/socialist/NEW WORLD ORDER guy who is gonna destroy America so you better be prepared for the REVOLUTION.

And guess what? Gun ownership is actually down in the US. You can’t believe that can you? Neither could I at first. There are over 300 MILLION guns in America. But ownership is down. The percentage of people who own guns is DOWN. So that means that more guns are being concentrated in fewer hands. Mr. Patriot out there is building an arsenal. How’s that make you feel? Nervous? I sure am.

Explain to me why on God’s green earth or any other planet for that matter, why anyone other than the military NEEDS assault rifles, high-powered handguns, any handgun, multi-clip ammo, or any of probably a hundred other things I don’t even know about but whose only point is to kill something from as far away as possible, as surely as possible, and frankly as explosively as possible?

Tell me why such things are necessarily required in your closet, in my neighborhood?

You like to shoot them?

Fine. Let’s have licensed ranges all over the freakin’ country and you can go out there, pick the weapon of your choice and shoot at plastic deer until the cows come home. But you go home without your little friend. Get that?

You want to hunt? Fine. You can have a shotgun or a regular rifle.

Do you know it’s illegal in some states to hunt ducks with a gun that can hold more than THREE cartridges? Otherwise it’s not sporting. It’s just blasting away at a space and figuring you’ll probably hit some. Yet you can own an assault rifle with a 100 ammo clip.

This is not the wild west. No matter how romantic you think it was, it wasn’t. It was ugly and mean and people died horribly. There is nothing noble about Rambo. All your “let’s pretend we are Navy Seals and kill bad guys” video games are designed to make you comfortable with guns and the culture of violence. I promise you, the reality is nothing so fun or clean. It’s dirty, it smells bad, it looks worse, and rational people do not find such things either “fun” or exciting.

We need to stop blaming the shooters in these tragedies, for they are simply sick souls. Can you figure out why someone who feels that the world has screwed him thinks the way to go out is to kill innocents who had nothing to do with his “wrong”? No? Neither can I, which leaves the only answer–people do this because they aren’t right in the head. We need to identify them early and help them before they are so deranged that killing people in a blaze of suicidal glory sounds appropriate to them.

We need to end this.

I’ve had enough.

I’m don’t want to spend the remainder of my life wondering what’s in the mall besides the stores and the merchandise.

I don’t want to live that way or think that way.

It’s time to demand rational gun laws from our ELECTED officials, and damn them if they don’t pass it.

Enough is enough.

shooting2

 

Related articles

 

by

The Penis Should Be Attached to the Forehead

Seriously.

It’s a design flaw.

I intend to take it up with God the very moment I arrive.

The male pleasure stick needs to be out there visible to all.

It’s the only way we can be sure.

Sure of what?

That should be obvious.

Sure that they are not living up to their name sake when making any decision.

Think how simple it would be to avoid all this costly and embarrassing crap.

You see a guy with an erection, and you automatically remove all sharp objects from his vicinity. You refuse to allow him to make even the most basic of decisions without assistance from at least a thirteen-year-old. You take away his keys, his credit cards, his phone and his computer. You can let him watch old re-runs of the Beverly Hillbillies if you wish, that might even calm him down, although a man in the throes of a stiffy would probably get overly excited by Grannie.

When his dick is hanging down tickling his nose, well you know it’s safe to place him in control of such things as he is otherwise suited to by education and experience.  Such an easy system don’t you think?

WHAT THE HELL WAS DAVID PETRAEUS THINKING??????

I mean this is a 4-star general. Does that mean he is even modestly intelligent?

He has retired from service and taken the job that he says he craved to hold.

He has been married for eons.

He is getting up there in age when men start to appreciate steady, uneventful, calm, normal marriage, without bar-clearing fights and temper tantrums that result in credit card max-outs.

A little fluff of a nobody, with some seriously apparent psychological flaws, bats her eyes, and the General came to attention. And apparently stayed at attention, while his brain went into a coma. We would have known. We could have saved his career, and saved his wife all this unnecessary and awful publicity and public display.

This is not something new.

The Republican party, bastion of “family values” for everyone but themselves, regularly finds one of its members embracing somebody not their wife, sometimes even with pictures to seal the deal. I mean doesn’t it serve all of us to avoid this crap? Do we not have serious things to do in this country without the diversions of personal “oops I donked the wrong woman by mistake”?

Believe me I recognize that men are weak. Women are often able to forgive if not forget their man’s inability to keep it in his pants whenever a biologically identified female comes within one hundred feet, but can’t we at least minimize the damage these snatchers of free-hanging fruit do?

This is akin to a person confronted with heroin and thinking, “nah, I can handle it. I won’t get hooked. I’m smarter than the average duck.” Do all men think they can “get away with it?”

Is there a secret website that men go to wherein they can read stories of how other men “got away with it”? Are they encouraged by some statistics women are unaware of that informs them that 97% of all men who are unfaithful are never caught? Are we women being bamboozled day and night by our supposedly faithful spouses? Does the Contrarian have a squeeze on Aisle 27 at Lowe’s that he stoops a couple of times a month in what must be the definition of a quickie?

I only ask because any MORON with the IQ of over 12 and 1/2 would know that the head of the CIA cannot get it on with some “biographer” who had her own high level clearance, and obviously KNEW a lot of folks in the ARMY, and was on TALK SHOWS and was traveling in HIGH CIRCLES, and sending e-mails to HIM, without it getting out of the bag at SOMETIME, probably sooner rather than later.

I mean how likely was it to remain just their little tryst?

How likely?

About the chances Nate Silver gave Romney to win–9% or so.

I know this is hard to accept gentlemen, but it’s true. If you are at full-mast right now, I’m quite sure you cannot make sense of this, but save it until you are brushing little willie out of your eyes, and read it again. It will make more sense then.

IF YOU DO THE NASTY WITH SOMEONE NOT YOUR WIFE YOU ARE HIGHLY AND MOST LIKELY GOING TO GET CAUGHT.

So, if that doesn’t matter, then by all means have at it, but you probably are in the midst of a divorce in that case anyway. Otherwise–DON’T DO IT.

Got that?

Print this out, fold it up, put it in your wallet, and read it whenever willie starts to stir.

Got that?

Okay.