Held Hostage By the NFL

Tags

agnosticism, Bill O'Reilly, Christians, Contitution, faith, farm workers, gravity, Health care, Humor, immigrants, John Boehner, Latinos, Literature, Mark Twain, Muslims, NFL, physics, Politics, religious doubt, Sports, Steve King, teabaggers, terrorism

Shhh. Be very quiet. This is a house of where now we whisper. “It’s the Playoffs!” Shhhh. Turn around three times, and blink twice. Rub the rabbit’s foot and wiggle your toes. Avoid the black cat.

Negativity be banned. The Packers are poised. They are coming to a TV near you soon. They will prevail. They will overcome.

Okay. Get my drift. My house is in a tizzy all because a bunch of overpaid prima donnas are about to take to the fields of America and cheat, beat each other to a win, all entitling them to advance to the next round.

Everything under heaven and on earth stopped this morning as the Contrarian frantically searched the TV guide looking for THE teams’ game day and time. “I can’t find the early game!” he moaned, nearly swooning with fear.

“Try the Internet,” I mumbled, making the bed.

“Oh God, that will take forever!” he intoned.

“Try NFL Playoffs,” I suggested helpfully.

“I know what to put in!” he huffed.

Ten minutes later, he was pouting, “It’s taking so long!”

“Welcome to my world,” I chuckled.

Suffice it to say that the early game was the late game, and the late game was an even later game, and I get to watch football tonight and then, joy of all joys, do it all over again tomorrow. Whew. I’m sharpening my knitting needles for all the fun!

Now I admit, I can watch football with the best of them, but gee wiz, this is a bit obsessive dontcha think?

Oh, and if there is any question in your mind, the Packers are gonna win the whole thing. You can bet on that literally. Now personally, I have my reservations, but God, I sure ain’t gonna utter them around this house. I’m lucky I got the old goat   Contrarian to go out and bring in some wood to keep my tootsies warm today!

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Bringing another voice to the Huckleberry Finn controversy, I give you one Roger Ebert. His take is I think worth your while. The more I read of Mr. Ebert, the more I respect this man.

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Political Irony has your late night political humor here.

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Don’t know if you heard or not, but Steve King (R-IA) put foot in mouth again. Chastising a Democrat on the floor of the House, for criticizing Speaker Boehner, King regaled that Boehner was full of mendacity, not knowing what the word meant. Boehner indeed is a liar when he claims that the Affordable Heath Care Act is a job killer and costs too much.

Actually it’s working pretty darn good. And that is according to no less than Forbes Magazine. There has been a major uptick in small business buying health insurance for their employees, many for the first time ever, made affordable by the tax credits within the Act.

No doubt Boehner will call that an “opinion” just as he did the CBO estimates that repeal of the act would cause deficits in the area of 230 billion within ten years.

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Since it doesn’t fuel the narrative offered by Faux News and the GOP, you might have missed this story. Egypt, rift with Al Qaeda like attacks on Coptic Christians, and not confident that their government could protect the latter, saw fit to unite to protect Christians worshiping on Christmas. Yes,  that’s right, Muslims  protecting Christians.

It is essential that we report, and spread the word, that Americans who have an agenda that includes vilifying Muslims must be met with facts. Muslims are not to be another “excuse” to blame some “other” for our own failings.

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I’ve tried in the past to interact with atheists, but the NeoAtheists are a different breed, younger, and arrogant, and unwilling to discuss issues on any other plane but from a fundamentalist outlook. I know not where to find agnostics, who by their very nature aren’t usually of such a serious bent as to blog on their questions.

James McGrath, does an admirable job of addressing such concerns, with lots of links to atheists, believers and those in-between. I found the discussion heartening and informative.

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Border Explorer has a very important post on migrant workers in this country. It’s a must read. We owe a great debt to our Latino brothers and sisters for all the work they do. Please read.

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Inexplicably, Billo the Clown (Bill O’Reilly) seems to believe that the fact that the sun rises and sets and that the tides go in and out, is evidence that God exists. Inexplicable because although I believe that O’Reilly is a horses butt and rather uniformed by choice, I didn’t think he was flat-out stupid. Both Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have had occasion to query how Billo seems to not understand the concept of GRAVITY?  I mean junior high kids could explain that one to Billo. (H/T to James McGrath.

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We mentioned the other day that the GOPers in reading the Constitution in the opening session of the House, omitted the 3/5ths clause, because it had been “amended” out. In reality it doesn’t fit with their narrative that the Founding Fathers were perfect and only instituted a limited government. Forgetting of course that the Articles of Confederation were a “limited federal government” and scrapped as unworkable. Of course the 3/5ths clause suggested that our FF were flawed humans as we all are. An excellent article to that effect is by Paul Harvey, teacher of history at University of Colorado. (H/T to James McGrath)

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What’s on the stove: hotdogs, hash browns and coleslaw.

Are We Watching the End?

Tags

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?