Just Send Them to a Psychiatrist

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budget, cartoons, Catholic Church, China, Congress, espionage, GOP, gun control, Humor, immigration, NRA, religion, teabaggers

I finally figured it out. How stupid of me not to have seen it before. Nobody beats their head against a wall forever. The outcome does not change.

It is apparent that the GOP is suffering from a bad case of masochism. I mean a really severe case of it. I mean let me explain it by way of a baby.

Okay, you hold an animal cracker in front of an infant, and they will reach for it. You hold out four animal crackers and they will drop the one and grab for the four. Then hold out one, and they will drop the four and grab for the one. They don’t differentiate because they don’t know the concept of quantity yet.

Now the GOP sorta like this. You dangle a few teabibbers in front of them, and they will drop a legion of regular fiscal conservatives. They can’t seem to get the idea of counting. They give up the vast middle because the fraction dances a jig in front of them and threatens to go (where exactly?).

I think they get a perverse sexual kick out of it. Just a theory mind you. But you explain why they can’t let go of the crazies in favor of a really much larger middle.

The Chinese are busy stealing our intellectual property.

That used to be done by stealth by men and women sneaking into offices and jimming safes and taking pictures of formulas.

Cloak and dagger stuff. Something you could at least applaud for the sheer audacity of it.

Now? It’s all done thousands of miles away by geeky types with lips smeared with pizza sauce and button-down plaid shirts and cheap sneakers.

I am very sure that if you go to that building in Shanghai where the special section of the Chinese army is busy breaking into computers all over our land, that is what you will find.

I think we should shame them. I mean, “hey Chinese government, can’t you think up these things yourself? Are you so pathetic in intellect that you have to steal it? So much  for your much touted smarts!”

After all, it worked so well with Japan and South Korea.

It must be something in the rice that makes these folks so wily when it comes to cheating. Or again, it may speak to just how smart they really are.

In any event, we are getting screwed.

The GOP are messing up the immigration thing.

There is no way out for them.

Even if the “calmer” heads in the GOP (stop laughing!) prevail, do you think that the Latino population is going to forget the fight within the party?

When folks are talking about keeping them in guest worker mode forever as a way to insure cheap labor for the “dirty” jobs, well, I think you have already lost the battle no matter what the final outcome.

Perhaps the GOP needs a lesson in “shut the f**k up” when it comes to talking outside of very very closed doors.

It’s that masochism thing again I think.

It is lost on no one, that anything the President proposes, is “dead on arrival”. They actually use those very words.

So if the President proposes  some ideas on immigration, they call it “interference” and “political posturing”. If he leaves Congress alone, they call it
“unengaged” and “not leading.”

They also think we are too dumb to catch on.

They always think we don’t see the truth.

But to be fair, when you have been divorced from the truth as long as they have on almost everything, it’s probably pretty hard to know fact from fiction.

And they are still using the old Rovian playbook which states on page one: If you say a thing again and again, sooner or later, it will be taken as true.”

Of course that is only true if you keep a straight face and are talking to a Teabibber. Actually with a Teabibber, you don’t need the straight face. They are so wrapped in their own little alternative reality that the won’t know the difference.

Lord, things are getting wicked in the Vatican.

Now they are talking about a secret study that shows that the Curia is just chock full of backbiting intrigue, jockeying for power, and *gasp* homosexual liaisons.

Sounds like your average government to me.

Sounds like Benedict has buyers remorse.

Sounds like the Catholic Church is in for a very bumpy ride.

I sigh a lot. I’d even consider going back to the Episcopals, but here in my town, there are no liberal Episcopals only the conservative Anglicans.

It’s just about enough to make a person give up organized religion and just steer an independent spiritual ship. I’m sure Jesus gets tired too.

Once upon a time it used to be pretty easy to tell who was crazier.

Kim Dong Un, like his crazy daddy, Kim Jong Il, were just about the craziest of the loons on the globe.

But America does like to be first.

And we have been running that race into the ground lately.

I mean, like I said, it’s darn near impossible to pick a jackass of the week in Amerika any more.

There are people just standing in line for the honor of being named to that lofty pedestal.

A perennial finalist every week is Wayne La Pee Pee Pierre.

But I’m pretty convinced I’m gonna live long enough to see him placed in a lock box and buried. Better yet, he can be chopped up and put in the nose cone of every nuclear device we have. I bet he would like that.

Well, Now that That’s Over With!

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American Exceptionalism, Arkansas, China, Constitution, GOP, Michael Steele, teabuggers, wingnuts

If you woke up similar to this on New Year’s Day, then presumably you’re pretty glad it’s over with too!

So it’s on to the January blahs, or as it’s commonly known in Iowa, freakin’ cold, freakin’ snow, and freakin’ bleak. It’s something you learn to live through, other options being less enticing.

So, we made it to the big city and done our shopping. We operate like a finely tuned team. We hit the first store where we buy our meat. No packaged stuff, just a long case with meat and a slew of butchers behind the counter to cut and wrap.

Then it’s drop me off at the mega supermarket, while the Contrarian heads off to Wal-Mart for dog and cat food, as sundry clothing items and so forth. Then he returns to locate me. As it turned out today, I had just checked out with a teeming cart load when he arrived, so we were in total synch.

The lane is partly blown in so we travel via the field. Can you say washboard? The Contrarian went out Friday when it was still slushy and created a trail that has since iced down. Now it’s like getting the tires in groove and lettin’ her rip, no steering required. It’s a hair-raising event.

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The most exciting news so far is that the GOPers are apparently about to unseat Mr. Steele as chairman of their party. Figuring they have “proved we are down with Negroes” one almost expects them to shout Arriba! and search for a token Latino or LINO, as they are called, to shore up that ethnic flavor. But as far as we know, no brown Beemers are in the running. No Cabin GOPers either.  Muslims are still too hot to handle, and women have been done (Sarah should suffice for a good twenty years). The Good Old P*ckers can be expected to stay fully in control.

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Hey, don’t blame me. I swore off meanness for nearly two weeks. I’m raring to go!

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It’s being reported that 5000 birds dropped out the skies of Arkansas, dead as doornails. Unlike doornails, they had once presumably been alive. Now we hear that 100,000 fish (did they really count them all?) have died in some waterway there. Reports of a Moses like figure and a guy with a lots of eye makeup named Pharoah, arguing on the Capital steps, are wildly exaggerated. We got the dead stuff report from Mock, Paper, Scissors, the rest  we dreamed up.

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We are a nation of noodles. The news is full of instances in which teabugger candidates who were elected have fired lobbyists as their chiefs-of-staff. Some wacko state elected as their representative a dude who was illegally placed in the Justice department by Rove and was fired. He is now scheduled to sit on the Judiciary committee. West, the blowheart from Florida who claimed he had a higher security clearance than Obama, but was forced to resign his commission in the armed services, now claims that Obama is no leader because he sneaks into Afghanistan under dark of night in secrecy. This is no “leadership” as Wacko West sees it.

We are getting what we voted for aren’t we?

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I’d like more than anything than to link up to great stories about the insanity of all these wingnuts, and do it without becoming angry, and despondent, and without hope, and resigned, and pissed off. I’d like that. I always say I’m going to remain above it all, just looking down and reporting the landscape, from up here in the trees, or clouds. But I don’t. Tell me how if you know. My blood pressure will sure thank you.

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I hear the GOPers in the House plan to start the festivities off with reading the Constitution from front to back. This is a good beginning. It will undoubtedly be their first experience with the document. They might find that it is printed in one continuous piece of paper, and that the amendments are not “optional”.

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I wonder who the GOP will put down once they have exhausted all the minorities on the planet. I mean after the Mauri and the Magyars. When they have hated and vilified and blamed all their woes on everyone else, who will they turn to them?

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I’m wondering if parents who have kids about to enter college and suggesting they learn Chinese or major in Asian studies. It seems prudent to me. I think American “exceptionalism” has reached it nadir, nobody overseas buys it much, and China seems poised to take the helm, with India not far behind. Both have invested in the future. We are still romanticizing the past and wanting a return to the “good old days” when everybody was happy (meaning white men felt a lot more secure and in charge).

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Related Articles

• Issa Fine Tunes His Investigation Target Net (themoderatevoice.com)
• 100,000 Dead Fish Wash Ashore in Arkansas: Is the End Near? (VIDEO) (blippitt.com)

Are We Watching the End?

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China, Congress, Contitution, economy, filibuster, Health care, legislation, mega corporations, politicians, Rome, special interests

Washington is looking more and more like the bloated, rotted corpse that was ancient Rome. You may think that is going a bit too far, but frankly, I don’t think it is. After all, Rome, which as we all know, was not built in a day, didn’t die in one either. It took decades and indeed centuries for the final nail to be pounded into a barely breathing empire.

No doubt some will say, that there are always naysayers and doomsday predictors throughout every era. Much like the perennial apocalyptic “the sky is falling” proponents, who surface at almost every moment in history, the claim is that “this too shall pass.” Things do indeed look worse up close and personal.

Perhaps, but I don’t think so. I think we are sliding down that ever slippery slope into the era of the reliving of past glories. Just ask the British, they probably never saw it coming either, nor I dare say, did the Romans. We’ve been through rough times before, and we survive. Yes, indeed we have, but it seems that what is going so very wrong in America these days has a cause–its an utterly dysfunctional government subject to archaic rules and laws that no longer make sense in the strange new global world in which we find ourselves.

My DD had a fine article on this today, and one that I urge you to read.  Most all of us have in recent years commented on the almost ground to a halt condition of our congress. Many things are undoubtedly to blame but I seem to see a couple big causes.

One is when we declared (for perfectly good reasons at the time) that corporations had some near human status in our legal world. This of course made it subject to being sued in tort actions and indeed occasionally in criminal matters. But it set the tone and allowed them to claim for themselves other “citizen” rights. Mostly, it gave them the right to “freedom of speech” and with that the right to support candidates both verbally and financially.  Little did we realize that soon, all our politicians would be owned by these increasingly large behemoths.

We did not foresee the growth of mega corporations, and certainly didn’t envision their global reach. Now their interests are often at odds with purely American interests, and they expect that their bought and paid for politicians will legislate in a manner than protects their interests even when the public is ill served by their actions.

We all know we need serious overhauling of the health care system, yet we are going to get a bizarre mishmash of directives that actually don’t do much of that, and don’t serve the public, but do protect the industries involved for the most part with a few “crumbs” to the masses.

We seem powerless to stop this, or change it. We have this odd, and I would suggest, irrational belief that our Constitution, so perfect for so many decades, is capable of  coping with the new world it finds itself in. Between the mega corporation and it’s puppeteering, we have the “special interest” lobby groups who have infiltrated the Beltway, their pockets stuffed with money and their demands backed up by a loyal mass of “followers” who claim they will vote their interest in large blocks against anyone who attempts to stand in the way of their legislative favorite. It is no accident that Joe Lieberman is now referred to as “Mr. Aetna” for his irrational and contradictory opposition to the public option and opening up of medicare. He is simply owned by insurance interests.

I cannot see a solution to this dilemma through elections. We would have to utterly replace every senator and house member for the most part, and all would have to be dedicated to an total overhaul of the rules of both houses that now seemingly bog down everything in endless debate, vote, cloture moves, threats of filibuster, and on and on. All of this is aimed at one thing only, and that is–effectively blocking anything meaningful coming from any quarter.

Better  to consider a constitutional convention to look at how our legislative process needs be changed in this modern world. And, without doubt, no senator or house member should be allowed to participate. No one on the payroll of any corporation or special interest should be allowed to be a delegate either. Yes, yes, I realize that there will be cries of “unfair” from nearly every corner of America.

But clearly, no sane person can argue that the Founding Fathers, whom we tend to lionize as gods of some sort, ever envisioned the world we inhabit today. Not even close. They could not, as we cannot possibly imagine the world of even a hundred years from now. Until we let go of our maudlin nostalgic clinging to words written on parchment long ago, we will continue to flounder in this growing cesspool  of greed, power, money, and sex that has become our national “shrine.”

I’ve had enough, but then I said that twenty years ago, and nobody was listening then. The chorus who join me in decrying this abysmal situation no doubt has been doing the same for twenty years. The big question is: Will we ever get beyond the rhetoric to truly address this or not.

If we choose to continue lamenting with no real effort to initiate reform, then the future looks bleak indeed. We have befouled our planet, and turned our government operation into a rusty, smelly, barely to be tolerated joke. And given our lackluster and ineffectual promotion of “good” education, it’s doubtful most of our kids will be able to speak the Chinese that will soon be required to live in America.

The ball, as they say, is in our court. Table tennis anyone?