The Syrian Minefield

The dire situation in Syria has exploded on the world stage and the global reaction to it has quickly become the geopolitical version of an M. C. Escher painting.  You know what those are - mind-bending drawings of staircases that go around and around but end up nowhere, or buildings with unending twists and turns which also lead nowhere.  Likewise, the political twists and contortions that are still going on also seem to expend a lot of time, energy and media bandwidth but fail to go nowhere.

It all started several weeks ago as the Bashar al-Assad dictatorship in Syria, feeling threatened by a rebel insurgency that wants to see it gone, turned chemical weapons on its own people.  We all cringed at the photos and videos of the dead and dying Syrian civilians suffering the ravages of what has to be some of the most horrific and awful weapons ever created, next to nuclear.  President Obama, being the highly moral person he is, was thoroughly appalled and horrified over what had happened and rightfully condemned the government in Syria for violating a U.N. proscription against the use of chemical weaponry.  Saying the Assad regime crossed a "red line," Obama left it quite clear that he felt a military response against such an atrocity should not only be appropriate, but almost mandatory.  Obama expected the American people and the rest of the world to be properly and instantly outraged, and to fall in line in support behind him in moving forward with a military strike which would cripple or eliminate Syria's capability to gas their own helpless, innocent people.

What he got instead of support was ... virtual silence.  Obama was all set to go ahead with the attack using his powers as head of the executive branch without consulting Congress.  There was a clear precedent to this when George W. Bush decided to invade Iraq about a decade ago, on a wildly dubious and ultimately untrue basis of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, which proved to be something between astonishing incompetent intelligence information or just plain old-fashioned lying through your teeth.  But conspicuous in its absence in the wake of a terrible atrocity was a groundswell of incensed clamoring for immediate military action.  Where were all our allies in the West - Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Australia, even Poland?  Surprisingly, the prickly French, who seem to delight in taking a contrary position to whatever the U.S. is taking, were the most agreeable to a forceful response to Assad.  The American people, while recoiling in disgust to the human tragedy, were also recoiling from the prospect of dipping our toes in another Middle East quagmire, with Iraq and Afghanistan being prominently featured in their reasoning.  Baffled and caught off-balance by the blatant non-response to a humanitarian catastrophe, Obama still went ahead and tasked the Pentagon with coming up with a plan of action and risk-assessment for what was being portrayed as a "surgical" strike.

This whole Syria issue has taken on a life of its own.  It has split into two different news stories: the first being the gas attack itself, and the second being the political reaction to the gas attack.  The second story has grown so rapidly that it has overtaken the original event, relegating it to the status of an afterthought or a mere detail in a bigger picture.  It has produced some very unusual and novel things, like Republicans calling for calm and restraint in the face of an opportunity to attack another country, which is like a starving dog turning down a big piece of filet mignon, or Democrats screaming to let the bombs fly sooner rather than later.

Syrian president Bashar al-Assad looked like a character out of a John Waters movie on an interview today.  He denied that chemical weapons were ever used by his forces.  In fact, he made some vague, unsupported assertions that HIS military forces were the ones who got gassed.  Assad is quite a creep, and looks like he would be most comfortable in the back row of an X-rated movie theater.  When asked about the deaths of the people he is supposed to serve, he acted like he just got caught by his wife, making out with a trashy waitress he met at the downtown Damascus Hooters restaurant - deny, deny and deny some more.

The situation is very fluid and things change every day.  Now the Russians have come up with a proposal to put all of Syria's chemical weapons under international control, to be eventually destroyed.  This may be an out for all concerned that avoids a military conflict.  The American people are staunchly against any military involvement, and many make the "slippery slope" argument that a "limited surgical strike" will lead to American boots on the ground, and another Afghanistan in the making.

There are so many variables, so many possible ways this can play out.  If Congress does give the go-ahead and the U.S. goes through with the attack, how will the Assad regime react?  How will his neighbors feel about another country lobbing rockets at someone right in their back yard?  Will Syria pop a couple of missiles over the fence on Israel?  Would a surgical air strike against Assad's chemical weapons capability actually do any good?  It would be virtually impossible to cripple his entire chemical weapon stockpile, and would he then be much more willing to use whatever remains?

If Congress says no to the whole thing, would that encourage other dictators to use chemical weapons because obviously they could do that and get away with it?  What will a "no" vote do to American prestige and influence all over the world, but especially in a region where fear and intimidation are the main glues that hold together a fragile peace?  What will that do to the Obama administration as its second term plays out?  Will it cripple an already lame-duck president and compromise his ability to push through all the other things he wants to accomplish?  Will it be more difficult for him to get his way on other issues, like the upcoming debt crisis and immigration reform?  Will Obama himself be seen as weak and dithering on important issues?

Obama's move to drag Congress, kicking and screaming, into the fray may be either a good idea or the worst idea ever.  Now Congress will be on record as either opposing or approving an air strike, so they will share either the credit or the blame.  But bringing this incredibly dysfunctional body into center stage may be really dumb, since Congress seems incapable of doing anything constructive or useful.

We will probably get the first vote on the Syria matter in a couple of days, when the Senate votes to invoke closure on the topic, and deny any use of the filibuster (the Republicans' weapon of choice when they can't get their way by, you know, actually coming up with good alternative solutions to a problem) to gum up the works.  The House of Representatives looks like to won't vote for a couple of weeks on the matter, conceivably giving the Assad regime time to move its chemical stockpiles around and conceal them, or "harden" them by making it tougher to find and destroy them.  This will also involve moving them into civilian neighborhoods so if the chemical weapons do manage to get blown up, the gas will be released and cause horrific collateral damage and deaths of innocent people.

This is a quagmire of the first order, and one which definitely changes daily and often seems to evolve by the hour.  It would be completely fascinating to watch if it wasn't for the fact that so much is riding on what will happen when the U.S. and the world finally decide to take some sort of action against a heartless dictator who sees no wrong in subjecting his fellow citizens to die in a gas attack.

2012 Year End Review: Part 2

Oh I'm not finished yet.  2012 offered an embarrassment of riches when it came to batshit-craziness.  To wit:

Most Baffling Cultural Phenomenon:  Gangnam Style.  Not that I follow popular culture all that closely (yes I do), this "Gangnam Style" thing completley blindsided me.  Apparently some South Korean rapper (and I can't quite wrap my head around THAT concept) named Psy came out with this song and accompanying spazzy dance moves which has swept the nation and the world too.  I just read where the YouTube video of this has just passed one billion views.  That by itself is astonishing and worthy of some kind of recognition, but everything boils down to the question of "Why this?" and not something else?  The music is not that remarkable, and the pretend-pony-riding dance step doesn't seem all that inspired, either.  In fact, "Gangnam Style" makes the Macarena look like the Bolshoi Ballet.  So I'm left scratching my head wondering what the hell is going on.  I'm sure this Psy person has had a field day being the center of the world's attention for more than his alloted 15 minutes, but now he's facing the unenviable, Herculean task of coming up with something new and better to surpass this big splash he just made (not likely), or getting thrown on the next bus to oblivion and never being heard from again.  We will see if anyone remembers what Gangnam Style is in a month or two.

Most Hysterical Meltdown of 2012:  Has to be Karl Rove's total schizophrenic breakdown on Faux News' election night coverage. Things started going south early on for the Mittster, as state after state went into the Obama column.  But when the race in Ohio was called and thus the election, Karl Rove crapped his Depends undergarments right on camera and had some sort of grand-mal seizure that made him get all flustered and bug-eyed like a walrus getting a prostate exam.  He looked like he was going to pop a sphincter blathering about two or three Republican votes not being counted in some hinterland Ohio county, even though several HUNDRED THOUSAND votes in heavily Democratic Cuyahoga county were still outstanding.  But the piece de resistance was when some siliconed Fox newsskank toddled off backstage on her stripper heels and confronted the numbers geeks at the "decision desk" where the Ohio call was made.  The math nerds were NOT HAVING any of this "Are you reeeeally sure?" whining, and bitch-slapped that newstrollop (and Karl Rove, by proxy) back to whatever passes for reality on Fox.  In the end, Obama won, Karl Rove got banished (for a while) from spewing lies on Faux News, and I had a big ol' glass of chocolate wine.  Now THAT was a good night!

The "You Want To Do WHAT?!" Award for 2012:  Okay so, there's this dude, right?  And he has this balloon thing with a space capsule attached to it and rides it up to over 120,000 feet, which is like 700 miles or something, I don't know.  And he opens up the capsule and he's like, right on the edge of outer space!  No kidding, it's like the Starship Enterprise could run his ass over if he's not careful.  And it's like 500 degress below zero, too.  So he starts to crawl out of his space capsule like he totally wants to jump out or something!  I KNOW!  This other camera shows him looking downward probably thinking either, "Yeah, I can do this, no sweat!" or "This is one of the most f**ked-up things I've ever tried."  So he says YOLO and jumps out!  On the way down there's no air resistance and he hits over 800 miles an hour, and my cousin told me that's like four times the speed of light.  Dude starts to spin and twirl around until he finally remembers to press the SAVE MY ASS button and his parachute opens.  Believe it or not he lands safely, but I don't care how many dry cleaners he goes to, he will never get the puke and nasty B.M.s out of that space suit.

Biggest Buzzkill of 2012:  Climate change.  People keep screwing up the climate and most are completely oblivious to what they are doing.  This summer saw the biggest ever melting of Arctic ice, and that by itself has world-wide consequences, mainly in the disruption of long-established weather patterns and warmer-than-normal sea temperatures, which generate bigger, meaner and more destructive storms and hurricanes (hello, Hurricane Sandy).  The shape of things to come?  Yeah, most likely. Is anything going to be done about it?  Not until it's too late.

Best Things of 2012: "The Walking Dead," chocolate wine, Greek yogurt, board game parties with friends, sushi, "Sons of Anarchy," vegetarianism, desert sunsets, more states approving same-sex marriage, clear dark moonless nights, and of course RABBITS!

Worst Things of 2012:  Republicans, conservative trolls on Facebook, Fox News, the NRA, religion, terrorism, bigotry, hillbillies with guns, animal abuse, murdered children.

Proof That Some People Still Live in the Dark Ages in 2012:  The astonishing, unrepentant and deliberate ignorance of some Republican legislators regarding rape.  The very idea of "legitimate" rape, and the belief that a woman's body can "shut down" the pregnancy process after a rape clearly shows that they are beyond any kind of help or redemption.  The fact that they are anywhere near a public office shows that their supporters are equally pathetic and worthless, and they deserve nothing but the highest contempt and most strident condemnation.

Extra Credit for Scientific Achievement in 2012:  The landing of the Curiosity Mars Rover.  Sheer joy, and an absolute, unmitigated triumph.  The fact that they were receiving photographs from the surface of Mars within SECONDS of landing is completely mind-blowing.

Mr. "No I Can't Keep It In My Pants and Thank You for Noticing" for 2012:  Gen. David Petraeus.  Really?  Are you that desperate?  You just threw away your marriage, your career, your reputation and your legacy.  I hope it was worth it, but I'm sure it wasn't.

Loathsome Disgusting Toilet Scum of 2012:  Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Mitch McConnell, Eric Cantor, Jim DeMint, Orrin Hatch, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, Allen West, Michelle Bachmann, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, that token Negro in the Republican primary debates, Sean Hannity or anyone on Fox News.  Sadly, this looks like last year's list.  Nothing changes.

Ultimate Obnoxious Blowhard of 2012:  Donald Trump.  Once again, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that a huge amount of money can't buy even the tiniest iota of class.  He truly is a national embarrassment and a disgrace.

Best Reason To Remain Hopeful in 2013:  Rachel Maddow said it best in a short promo-segment on MSNBC.  She said that in the last election, we had an opportunity to defund Planned Parenthood, institutionalize bigotry by outlawing same-sex marriage, continue giving outlandish, obscene tax breaks to people who already have so much, privatize Social Security and Medicare, pack the Supreme Court with right-wing creeps for decades into the future, and listed a number of other horrible legal consequences of electing Romney president.  She said we had the opportunity to do all that... AND WE SAID NO!  That fact, that the American electorate finally said enough of the extremist conservative bullshit and decisively kicked the Republican party square in the crotch, means that there is still hope for our democratic form of government.

I'd like to think that 2013 will be better than 2012, but I'm starting to realize that these days, the best you can hope for is that 2013 won't be quite as awful.

2012 Year End Review: Part 1

2012 was a year dominated by politics, from beginning to end.  The batshittery started early, like on January 1st, and did not let up through the November elections and beyond.  2013 looks like it's going to do much the same, as scary as that sounds, but for right now let's review shall we - Why 2012 Sucked:

Theatre of the Damned (Presidential Election Edition):  The Presidential election this year was a galaxy-class train wreck, populated by the creepiest characters this side of a zombie apocalypse.  It was like someone loaded up your DVR with the most badly-written, incomprehensible, nonsensical, parallel-universe, bad-LSD-induced, four-month-long psychodrama imaginable.  Possibly the zenith (or the nadir, if you prefer) of that whole passion-play-from-hell was the Republican National Convention.  Almost derailed at the beginning by a hurricane, even devout atheists like myself knew that was a big "thumbs-down" from the Old Man Up In The Clouds.  It most certainly did not disappoint when it came to utter, total disappointment.  Spectacularly boring, this celebration of fat, old, white people had something to offend and annoy everyone.  The most unbelievable thing of the whole convention was aging, grizzled movie icon Clint Eastwood having some sort of bizarro-world conversation with a chair.  Once revered as the ultimate big-screen tough guy in edgy, stylized westerns (like High Plains Drifter or The Outlaw Josie Wales) and shoot-the-uppity-minorities cop potboilers (the Dirty Harry series), it was more than a little disconcerting seeing him degenerate into a disheveled, wild-eyed, crazy old man who could easily be mistaken for a deranged old coot having a political shouting-match with his dish of lime Jell-o in any cafeteria in this country.  It showed once again that mental illness is not at all pretty, and I can only hope when I turn into an unkempt, babbling, glassy-eyed old geezer, I can hopefully get caught talking back to a radio or something.  At least THAT would make a tiny bit of sense.

2012 Douchebag of the Year:  Hands down, the leader in this sorry category has to be Willard Mittens Romney, The Asshole That Roared.  Republicans have this uncanny talent for choosing the most repellent, unattractive and unelectable candidates for national office, and we didn't think they could do any worse than John McCain, the goofy, senile old dickhead they nominated for President in 2008, or the execrable Queen of the Inbred Sarah Palin, but damned if they didn't top themselves this year.  Apparently they base their choices on the highly questionable premise that if you stick around on the political radar for years and years, losing more primary elections that you can count, eventually that will make you look supremely qualified for the highest office in the land.  Romney's candidacy was its own worst enemy, and it was very entertaining to watch him torpedo his own chances at every turn - the leaked "47%" comment, his disastrous European visit - the list goes on.  At nearly every instance he came across as a creepy, awkward, socially inept douchenozzle with a very unfunny sense of humor, and I think a lot of Americans decided early on that they did not want to put up with his weirdly stilted persona and scary, sexual-predator smirk for four long years.  Dishonorable mention in this category has to go to anyone who participated in the Republican primary debates, a veritable smorgasbord of everything that's wrong with American politics, but the mildly-surprising runner-up to Mitt is his own wife, Ann.  Ostensibly brought into the campaign to "humanize" her husband to wary, unfamiliar voters, she managed to hammer the last couple of nails into the coffin of his candidacy by coming across as nasty, imperious, short-tempered, sharp-tongued, condescending, bitchy and elitist.  I find it endlessly amusing that Ann Romney turned out to be the one who needed "humanizing," and I'm just waiting for all the tell-all post-election books that will document her sloppy-drunk (I wouldn't be surprised if she has a drinking problem, Mormon or not), profanity-laced, behind-the-campaign-scenes tirades.  You just know she used the N-word a lot.

Welcome Back My Friends To The Show That Never Ends: Gun violence is like a big ugly wound across the heart of America. Gun violence in this country left its mark in a big way on 2012, most horribly on December 14th when 20 young children and 6 adults lost their lives to one deranged, monstrous murderer with a semi-automatic rifle.  Earlier this year another psychotic loser shot up a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado.  There was also a smattering of mall shootings and workplace violence incidents and incredibly, on Christmas Eve, some scumbag shot to death two firemen responding to a building fire.  But, the 20 dead children in Newtown, Connecticut, seem to have really set people off, maybe because of the sheer immensity of the horror or the fact that it has happened so close to the holidays.  Not surprisingly, the NRA held a news conference in which they blamed everyone and everything in the world for what happened, without even touching, however tangentially, on the fact that some of the blame just might be due to the easy availability of ridiculously powerful assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition delivery systems.  Even for a bunch of ignorant douchebags like the NRA, it was an astonishingly stupid, arrogantly defiant, self-serving, tone-deaf non-response to a really critical national problem.  Their "solution" is to place armed guards in every school in the United States, at an estimated cost of nearly $7 billion a year.  Yeah, I'm sure the Republicans in Congress are going to pass THAT appropriation.  According to the NRA, the answer is guns, guns, and more guns.  It's really amazing that the NRA can't see what everyone else can - what hopeless, pathetic assholes they are, and what spineless, evil cowards the members of Congress are who buckle under it like wet cardboard.


Death We Regret The Most:  Lots of notable people passed away this year (Michael Clarke Duncan, Neil Armstrong, Whitney Houston, Phyllis Diller, Donna Summer to name a very few), but one passing hardly anyone noticed was the death of representative democracy. We learned this year that Congress does not give a single crap about doing its job - which is representing their constituents and working to, you know, get stuff done and accomplish things.  Instead, we learned that they prefer to spend their time manufacturing financial-Armageddon events in order to scare themselves into doing something (i.e. THEIR JOBS), and then when they do nothing and the contrived financial-Armageddon event actually begins to draw near and - much to their surprise and horror - MIGHT ACTUALLY HAPPEN, what do they do?  Bail out of town on a Christmas break, leaving the rest of us to peer over the edge of the so-called "fiscal cliff" they created and wonder how the hell we got into this situation.  It's pretty easy to understand - Congress is utterly and totally devoid of integrity and courage, does not give a rat's ass about what's best for this country, and would much rather postpone uncomfortable decisions so they can screw stuff up not only in the present but in the future, too.

More vicious slander and blatantly biased criticism in 2012 Year End Review Part 2, coming up next!

Election 2012 Wrap-Up

Election 2012 is now history, and what a historic night it was.  Barack Obama was given four more years to continue his leadership and his efforts to repair the economy after the 2008-2009 collapse.  We can look forward with great satisfaction for continued health care reform and one, maybe two, Supreme Court appointments, which is a huge, huge deal.  The news media were all predicting that the presidential election would be a nail-biter clear into the next morning, but in fact the election was called for Obama shortly after 9pm.  When Ohio was seen going to the president, it was all over.  To no one's surprise, Florida is still undecided because it seems as if it's impossible for them to have an election without a lot of fuss and hoo-hah and delay.  Florida is the Drama Queen of the nation.

A number of other regional races took on national significance, and a lot of them did go the right way.  Elizabeth Warren, a very capable, intelligent and resourceful woman, took the Massachusetts Senate seat away from empty mannequin Scott Brown.  Drooling, knuckle-dragging religious bigots Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, who gained national infamy with their astonishingly ignorant opinions on rape and abortion, went down in flames, and deservedly so.

In non-office related elections, three states - Maryland, Maine and Washington - approved marriage equality, and another state, Minnesota, turned down an initiative to ban it.  All wonderful news, and milestones in what I believe is the inevitable march toward full marriage equality, something that absolutely should be a basic American right.  Also the first openly gay Senator was named, Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin.  In Illinois, Tammy Duckworth ousted loathsome dirtbag Joe Walsh.

As always there were disappointments, and not surprisingly a lot were in Arizona.  This benighted, ignorant state chose greasy, buck-toothed scam artist Jeff Flake for the Senate seat occupied by the flabby, flatulent Jon Kyl.  Ancient, bloated media whore Joe Arpaio was reelected Maricopa country sheriff for the hundredth time, thanks to all the senile old fools in Surprise and Sun City, all the anti-immigrant bigots and literally millions of dollars which poured into Arpaio's campaign coffer from out-of-state right-wing PACs, who seem to see Arpaio as a conservative (read: racist) icon.  Still undecided is the contest for new Congressional District 9, where I live, and I'm hoping Kyrsten Sinema will pull off a win over perennial Uncle Tom, Vernon Parker.  I'm also hoping for Anne Kirkpatrick to win over payday-loan-pimp Jonathan Paton in District 1.  And late today, Anne Kirkpatrick was declared victorious in her contest.

Also very much on the plus side is that AZ Proposition 204, which would have permanently extended the 1% sales tax, went down in flames with 65% of voters saying no.  This tax was passed a couple of years ago on the promise that it was only to be a temporary increase, and greedy special interests in this state thought it would be easy to make permanent.  They thought that people would go for anything that nominally was portrayed as helping school children, but voters in this state weren't snookered by this charade and rightfully told them to go pound salt.  Also, Proposition 120 the "sovereignty" amendment, a ridiculously blatant and stupid attempt by the state legislature to take control of public lands, also went down very decisively.  So, there was a little bit to be thankful for in this wretched excuse for a state.

There were some really funny things that happened last night.  Apparently Fox News - Stupid News For Stupid People - was one of the first outlets to declare Obama the winner.  One of their commentators, the execrable Karl Rove, went completely batshit crazy ON AIR, frenetically blathering about and trying to grasp any kind of straw, real or imagined, to deny the outcome in Ohio.  He looked like a gigantic, bug-eyed catfish who was yanked out of the water and was gasping and thrashing around.  Then, one of Fox's newsskanks trotted off stage and stumbled back into their "Decision Room" to confront the number-crunchers with the news that Karl Rove did not approve of their pronouncement.  The number geeks practically told her to GTFO, because numbers, unlike everyone on Fox News, do not lie.  Ohio was definitely Obama country.

But to me the most amazing and inspiring thing was that despite everything the Republicans tied to do to steal this election - lies, misinformation, voter suppression and intimidation, pathetic, un-American attempts to restrict poll hours or early voting times - everything they tried to do was to absolutely no avail.  Most amazing were the American voters who stood in line for an extraordinarily, unbelievably long time (as long as seven hours in some cases) but would not be deterred by Republican skullduggery and dirty tricks.  They were going to cast their ballots and would not be denied, and as a result, democracy itself would not be denied.

Political pundits are already furiously dissecting all of last night's happenings and assigning blame and credit as they see appropriate.  In my opinion, the Republicans lost the presidential election for two reasons:  1) a pair of profoundly unattractive candidates at the top - Romney and Ryan; and 2) a party which has been co-opted and corrupted by right-wing extremists who made the party very unappealing to the more moderate American electorate.  The Republicans thought this election was going to be a cakewalk - they just had to repeat the word "economy" over and over like a mantra and the voters would flock to them - but much to their dismay that did not happen.

Complicating matters for them was that Romney was such a repellent, off-putting candidate who was his own worst enemy.  His infamous "47%" remarks kind of scuttled his candidacy at a crucial point, and his own chronic, incurable awkwardness and creepiness turned many voters off, even on a subconscious level.  Scrawny, big-eared geek Paul Ryan did not really help much.  It seems the Republicans have a really amazing talent in picking very unattractive, unappealing candidates for their elections.  They did so in 2008 and thoughtfully repeated the same mistake in 2012, and for that I thank them very much.

Everyone, including me, was fretting about the unprecedented flood of anonymous, untraceable money that was poured into the process by the horrendous Citizens' United Supreme Court ruling, but much to my surprise, American voters - not known for being particularly discerning or resistant to idiotic campaign rhetoric - were not swayed by sham super-PACs with lofty, misleading names like "Americans For Prosperity" (because who in their right mind would be against prosperous Americans?) and "Club For Growth Action" (whatever the hell that means).  Quite a few super-wealthy billionaires - casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, for one - dropped a huge chunk of change on Romney's campaign, and essentially threw their money down a rat hole.  I wonder how much good that money could have done, donated to food banks or domestic violence shelters, instead of being utterly wasted on a political campaign.

By Anne Romney's own statement, she and her husband are through with politics.  We can only hope we've seen that last of that corrosive, elitist, hatchet-faced old trollop.  Initially her role in her husband's campaign was to "humanize" him to the voters and make him seem like a regular person.  In the end, Anne Romney was the one who needed "humanized," because her presence and role in the campaign proved to be a major misfire.  She needs to just throw on one of her pioneer smocks and go be a good little Mormon wifey.  It's hard to humanize someone who lacks so very much in terms of basic humanity, and maybe her next dancing horse can do a little jig to make her feel better.

America dodged a huge bullet (more like a thermonuclear warhead) when Romney lost.  I can barely imagine how unspeakably awful and horrible a Romney administration would be.  Our nation would have become a weird, Frankenstein-like hybrid of theocracy and oligarchy, with government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich becoming the norm.

If I can be indulged for a little bit of tooting my own horn, I wrote in an entry on this blog called "This Just In: Time Marches On," dated almost a year ago November 15, 2011:

"My prediction is that Mitt Romney will be the Republican nominee and will go against Obama in the 2012 election....Obama will coast to his second term."

If you don't mind my saying...  Nailed. It.

Election Night Blog

6:44 pm:
It's election night 2012 and I'm here with my blog, Facebook, CNN and a couple of other things on my laptop, in front of my flat-screen TV.  I feel so digitally connected and "with-it," I can't even tell you.  I'll be making periodic updates to this blog post in real time as stuff happens.  Hopefully most everything will be resolved in reasonable time but I am going to be here for the long haul.  I will be taking a "Sons of Anarchy" break around 8:30.  Ain't gonna miss my SOA.

6:57 pm:
Early results from Massachusetts shows Elizabeth Warren in a slight lead over Dirtbag Deluxe Scott Brown.  Kick his sorry ass, Liz!

7:06 pm:
More early results:  Obama takes New York, New Jersey, New Mexico and Michigan, Romney takes Texas, Louisiana, Wyoming, North and South Dakota and a couple of other states that no one gives a shit about.

7:08 pm:
Florida is tied 50-50 with 74% of the vote in.  PLEASE Florida, don't be a bunch of assholes.

7:15 pm:
Pennsylvania my home state goes for Obama!  WOOHOO!  Thank you, PA, I am loving you big time.

7:17 pm:
Arizona senate race between Richard Carmona and slimy scum-sucker Jeff Flake still too close to call.  It would be SUCH a sweet triumph if Carmona won.

7:29 pm:
Wisconsin goes to Obama and their 10 electoral votes puts him ahead of Romney for the first time tonight, 158-153.  I like this trend.

7:42 pm:
NBC News projecting Elizabeth Warren the winner for the Senate seat in Massachusetts, over Scott Brown.  YESSSSS!  Wonderful, wonderful news!!!

7:46 pm:
Indiana Senate race has Democrat John Donnelly projected to win over fundamentalist asswipe Richard Mourdock ("rape is god's will").  Karma is a bitch and so are you, Mourdock, so grab your ankles and take it up the butt like a good Republican loser.

7:50 pm:
NBC News projects New Hampshire going for Obama!  YAAY!  This was a hotly contested state and they swung the right way.  Democrats making some great gains in Senate races.  Keep it up!!!

8:04 pm:
Electoral vote count tied at 162-162.  Not worried.

8:06 pm:
Claire McCaskill wins over gigantic bowel movement Todd Akin in Missouri.  YES YES YES!!!!

8:17 pm:
Formerly Democratic Senate seat in Kansas goes Republican.  Do not like.

8:34 pm:
Arizona, the Land That Time Forget, goes for Romney.  This state is full of ignorant, uneducated dirtbags.

8:43 pm:
Minnesota goes to Obama.  Whoopee!!

9:00 pm:
Obama wins a BIG, BIG prize - California - 55 electoral votes!  Also Washington, Oregon & Hawaii. Damn!!!  Obama is in striking distance of victory with 243!!!!!

9:05 pm:
North Carolina goes to Romney.  Bastards.

9:12 pm
OH MY GOD!!!!!  OHIO GOES TO OBAMA!!!!  OBAMA WINS!!  THANK YOU JESUS!!!!  WOOHOO!!!!!

9:55 pm:
Fox News is going nuts, they are the funniest show on television.  Karl Rove is grasping at thin air, trying to say that Romney has a chance in Ohio.  Even Fox News' own number crunchers say NFW, Ohio goes to Obama.  SO damned funny!

A Different Kind of Storm

Everyone is taking a break from the usual pre-election programming to concentrate on Hurricane Sandy, which just blew through Manhattan and is probably soaking my home state of Pennsylvania right now.  The news media went into full-blown apocalypse mode for this, with the kind of breathless whirlpool of coverage usually reserved for assassinations or major earthquakes.  Even days before, they were sounding the warning claxons about "Frankenstorm" making its way up the east coast and putting a real damper on everyone's Halloween.  And is "claxon" an awesome word or what?

Some people are already saying that the unusual trajectory this storm has taken is related to global warming and the huge, unprecedented reduction in the Arctic ice sheet, which alters ocean currents and air temperatures in such a way that big, weird storms which move in new, unexpected pathways will start becoming more frequent.  While it's still probably premature to link the two events, I think there is a great deal of truth in the idea that human-caused climate change will alter the planetary weather engine in ways we can't even yet imagine, and more unpleasant things like these loose-cannon superstorms are in our future.

The other big storm of late has taken a temporary back seat to the march of Hurricane Sandy, and that is the presidential election, now just one week away.  It seems like this election has been going on for years, and this last week will no doubt be the most intense week ever, with everybody pulling out all the stops when it comes to trying to sway the last two or three undecided voters out there.  It's beyond me how anyone could be undecided about who to vote for.

I've heard people on the radio say that there's "not much difference" between Obama and Romney, and that statement completely blows my mind.  In my opinion the two candidates could not be more different, both in style and substance.  Obama seems so intellectual, so measured, controlled and sincere; Romney so aloof, privileged, entitled and hypocritical.  There is little question that given their backgrounds, Obama truly understands what the middle class people, who are in many ways the backbone of this country, have greatly suffered due to the economic collapse of 2008-2009.  He really "gets" what they're going through and empathizes with them.  Romney, on the other hand, has had every single thing in his life handed to him, coming from a family of privilege and power, and is completely and utterly clueless about what average people have to go through to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table.

Likewise, the vice presidential candidates are quite different.  Biden is loud, gregarious, sometimes prone to embarrassing gaffes and misstatements, but given his background you have no doubt he understands what it is like to go through very rough periods in your life and still manage to triumph over adversity using little more than sheer strength of character.  Paul "Lyin" Ryan is an uber-nerd, someone who's obviously much more comfortable around masses of fiscal data and reports than around people, and comes up with a witches-brew of spending cuts to government programs which aid the poor, the elderly and students (to name a few) in order to fund massive, unnecessary defense spending and more tax breaks to the ultra-wealthy one-percenters, who already have so very much but still want to take more and more.

The differences even extend to the candidates' wives.  Michelle Obama is beautiful, sleek, intelligent, articulate and very easy for anyone to relate to.  She has such great poise and presence, and in my opinion has been one of the most notable and successful First Ladies in recent history.  Ann Romney, on the other hand, is brittle, imperious, condescending, sharp-tongued, elitist and thoroughly unsympathetic to anyone outside of her own socio-economic class.  With her fake, painted-on country-club smirk and mannerisms, you just know she sits around drinking appletinis with her wealthy cronies, cackling about how pathetic poor people are and complaining about how hard it is to find qualified domestic help these days who won't expect to be paid more than $5 an hour and won't steal you blind behind your back.

There is so very much riding on what happens next Tuesday, but to me one of the most important is the future of the Supreme Court.  Latest prediction is that the President-elect will get to choose at least one and possibly two new Justices, and that will directly affect each and every one of us for decades to come.   Right now the Court is split 5-4 in favor of upholding Roe v. Wade, but it would only take one Court appointment to reverse that to 5-4 in favor of overturning it.  Then you can absolutely certain that anti-abortion zealots would push a test case through the lower courts and into the Supreme Court, and Roe v. Wade would be scrapped, sending the abortion question back into the states, where many if not all of the red states would outlaw it completely.  That would be an astonishing tragedy and catastrophe for anyone who holds dear the concepts of freedom and government not making decisions in such an incredibly personal thing such as family planning.

Another very important thing, related to the Supreme Court, is their horrific and spectacularly awful Citizens' United ruling, which unleashed a torrent of untraceable, unaccountable money into a political system already mortally choked and corrupted with cash.  One of the most wrong-headed and destructive rulings ever, a top priority should be to overturn it, with a constitutional amendment if necessary.  The choice of President could not be more important to this vital legislative task.  One candidate will fully support reversing the ruling, and other candidate will do everything he can to keep it in place, because as he famously stated, "Corporations are people, too."  I will leave it up to my discerning readers to figure out which candidate is which.

Funny thing about these neoconservatives, they will scream unmercifully about how the evil, incompetent and corrupt government is blatantly interfering in everyone's lives and making choices for them, but they are perfectly fine as long as this interference is with the right to abortion, or marriage equality, or any number of personal-freedom issues they personally oppose.  They seem to think that government is evil and satanic if it messes with something they believe in, but perfectly fine and proper if it goes after things they don't.  According to them, it's okay if government restricts the freedoms of people they don't like, but it is a horrendous abomination if it seeks to restrict their own freedoms and choices.

Thus is the ultimate contraction in the conservative point of view - as long as government is doing what I like (or conversely, attacking things I don't like), it can have free rein and untrammeled authority to do whatever it pleases.  But just let the government try to do something to curtail something in which they fervently believe, for instance, gun control - outlawing the sale of semi-automatic assault weapons comes to mind - then people scream that government is a vile, cancerous conspiracy hell-bent on destroying the very fabric of this nation.  Government-provided farm subsidies could not be more "American", but affordable health care is "socialist."  It is this cultural and political schizophrenia, this infinitely subjective cherry-picking of what is right and what is wrong, that ultimately dooms neoconservative thinking to the intellectual trash-heap.

One week to election day, and is Hurricane Sandy a metaphor for the shitstorm that may be released on this country as a result - one that will last not a couple of days, but for four long years.

Four Weeks

It's now four weeks until the 2012 elections, and things are going just about as expected; that is, chaotic, mind-blowing and depressing all at the same time.

The presidential race is tighter than ever, and while it's pretty normal for the race to get really tight in the last couple of weeks, there is an uncomfortable trend going on.  Every time an obscure poll shows a one-point shift in the highly fluid preferences of some media-created segment of voters, it creates a seismic jolt through the news media which is analyzed and re-analyzed to death.  The polls are watched with the same intensity and anxiety as the Cuban missile crisis created in the early 60s.  For those of you too young to remember that (unfortunately that does not include me) I can tell you those were pretty scary times.  There was a palpable fear and terror in the air, obvious even to my ten-year-old self, and a real foreboding of what the future might bring.  While a Romney presidency wouldn't quite be the same as a nuclear missile crisis, in many ways it would be every bit as destructive.  More on that later.

There was the first of three presidential debates last Wednesday, and President Obama sent some clone of himself in his place who really wasn't up to the task.  Romney was there in full creepy-mannequin mode, looking and acting like Satan's ventriloquist dummy and spewing lies and bullshit like some kind of demented lawn sprinkler set on high.  All of a sudden, Romney professed to have found his love and support for 100% of the American electorate, even though back in May of this year he wrote off 47% of those very same people as lazy, useless leeches.  Let me just say once and for all that Romney will never EVER know the financial pressures middle-class people have to face in their lives.  He was born into a life of wealth and privilege, and anyone who even thinks about installing a CAR ELEVATOR in their home or taking a tax write-off of $77,000 (about 50% more than the $51,914 the average American household earns, according to the Census Bureau) for his wife's DANCING HORSE - categorizing it as a "business expense" (????) - has no idea what it's like to stretch a food budget to the point of breaking or dressing their children in hand-me-downs.

It is painfully obvious that Romney and his imperious, elitist, over-Botoxed trollop of a wife care only for the ultra-wealthy people in their own socio-economic class and will never do anything for the lower classes other than disdainfully look down their noses at them.  And there is always the unresolved problem of Romney's refusal to make a full disclosure of his federal income taxes even though the American people have demanded he do so.  For someone who proclaims so loudly to be "pro-business" and "pro-American" his propensity for employing offshore tax shelters for his enormous wealth tells a different story.  His arrogance is truly monumental, and his contempt for the American people and the values upon which this country was founded is staggering and appalling.

The media have already labeled last weeks' debate as a "game changer," and it's a little hard to believe that after a month or more of Romney being a world-class fuck-up and saying and doing completely preposterous, absurd things, all that could be changed in a 90-minute debate.  This just illustrates the short attention span of the American voter, as aggravated and dictated by the 30-minute news cycle.

As if to emphasize the perversity of politics (as if it needed emphasized), none other than Big Bird, a long-running character on the PBS children's series "Sesame Street," was dragged kicking and screaming into the debate when Romney gleefully announced he would "fire" Big Bird as part of his defunding of public television. I won't even mention what a miniscule part of the national budget public television comprises, but it only further illustrates the ignorant, small-minded hatred Republican supporters have for education and the arts. The National Endowment for the Arts is another favorite target, because god forbid we should spend a little bit of money enriching the cultural and intellectual life of this country instead of wasting it on another civilian-killing drone in Afghanistan.

On the state level, elections are no less contested but a lot more tawdry.  One of Arizona's senate seats is up for grabs, and slimy scumbag Republican Jeff Flake is up against former Surgeon General Richard Carmona.  Flake thought he would have an easy coast right into the Senate, but he's finding it a lot more difficult than he thought, even in a very conservative state like this one.  What is really alarming are all the media ads paid for by super-PACs, those heinous abominations the dipshits on the Supreme Court created.  But I found out recently that super-PACs are only one facet of this hot mess.

Rich people seeking to sway the outcome of an election can dump a bunch of their money into a super-PAC but they will be identified.  But if they choose, they can create a 501(c)(4) "social welfare" entity to dump money into with complete anonymity.  These organizations can basically do whatever the hell they please with all this money and lobby for any candidate or legislative agenda.  The law says that in May of next year these entities will have to report their funding and donors to the IRS, but the entities can be disbanded at any time (such as right after the election), and will not have to reveal one damned thing about their finances or activities.  This is a truly frightening perversion of the American democracy that will go a very long way in completely poisoning and corrupting our system of government.  It's like a get-out-of-jail-free card for anyone with a lot of money seeking to buy an election.  Once again in this country, money speaks louder than anything or anybody.

Locally, it's even worse and sleazier, with Republican candidates invoking the name and image of President Obama every chance they get as some kind of damning mantra against their opponent.  Again funded mostly by super-PACs, these ads seek to link a candidate with Obama in hopes of generating a knee-jerk reaction in the dimwitted, low-information voters that pollute this state.  And ancient, pathetic asshole Joe Arpaio is running for Maricopa county sheriff for the 100th time, and despite the fact that he's an 80-year-old jerk and a buffoon, he will most likely get re-elected by the stupid voters in this county.

A Romney presidency would be such an unmitigated disaster for this country on every conceivable level.  I honestly don't know which would be worse - the two or possibly three Supreme Court vacancies a President Romney would most likely have an opportunity to fill (leading to an unbreakable conservative majority on the Court for several decades which would overturn Roe v. Wade and prohibit gay marriage, among many other horrible things) or the fact that the US would be a big step closer to a theocracy, in which the Christian religion would have a much bigger say in the lives and liberty of ALL Americans, Christian or not.  For a country that was ostensibly founded on religious freedom, government and religion have developed an extremely toxic relationship and a deadly embrace, and the more religion tightens its grip on government, the less freedom and liberty we have.

Americans are so ridiculously obsessed with religion and a lot of them see it as a simple-minded one-size-fits-all cure for the myriad of problems we face.  But that is putting your faith in a fairy tale, like relying on Santa Claus to save the world from destruction, and the easiest solutions are rarely the best.  Any "solution" to a set of problems which require free-thinking people to conform to a set of rigid, dogmatic and unscientific delusions and corrupted prehistoric claptrap will spell the end of this country faster than any terrorist attack or environmental disaster.

Forty-Seven Percent

Yesterday marked 49 days until the elections.  Seven weeks, and yesterday was a day not quite like any other.

A surreptitious recording of Republican Mitt Romney at a fundraising event last May in Boca Raton, Florida, was leaked to the media, and it was incendiary.  Mitt was in his natural element, talking to a bunch of super-rich supporters who paid $50K per plate to get past the front door, and I have no doubt he really meant everything he said.  After all, the event was nominally closed to the new media, and he was among his people.  He had no reason to put on any airs for them.

At one point Romney make the astonishing statement that he considers 47% of the American electorate to be freeloaders and victims, and are dependent on the government for all their sustenance.  50 million Americans are, according to Romney, shiftless, lazy, and looking for nothing other than a handout.  They feel they are "entitled" to have the government provide food, housing and medical care for them, and do absolutely nothing to fend for themselves or pay their own way.  They take everything and give nothing in return.  Frankly, I would like to get in on that gig.

The news media went absolutely berserk, as they should, and despite everything else going on in the world this was the big news story.  The liberal media had a feeding frenzy, and there was an overabundance of red meat to go around.  Even a number of more conservative media outlets and newspapers leveled some withering, merciless criticism on Romney, pointing out in no uncertain terms how totally off-base he was.

The Romney campaign went into major crisis mode, but no amount of whiplash-inducing spin could pull this mess out of the toilet.  You could just see his campaign managers running around their office in a panic, bumping into each other, not knowing which forest fire to put out first.  But the best was yet to come.

The Romney quote really making the rounds is something that you would never believe a candidate for national office would say.  Romney said his "job" is "not to worry about those people" because they will vote for Obama no matter what.  So, he is writing off nearly half of the electorate because they do not pay federal income tax, and Romney's tax-cut message would be lost on them.

It is certainly true that a lot of people pay no federal income tax.  The tax code is structured in such a way that people of very low income, or senior citizens, or members of the armed forces do not have to pay federal income taxes.  That doesn't mean they pay no tax at all.  They pay all the other taxes everyone else pays - state tax, local tax, sales taxes, payroll taxes.  As a matter of fact, middle and lower classes workers pay payroll taxes, and after you earn $106,800 you pay none at all.

Through all of this, Romney looks the same he always has:  ridiculous, stupid, awkward, creepy and floundering around like a fish out of water.  His performance in his quest for the White House as been a breathtaking series of gaffes and misstatements, from when he managed to insult the United Kingdom over London's Summer Olympics to writing off any chances of peace in the middle East.  He has resolutely refused to turn over anything more than the minimum amount of information regarding his federal income taxes, something which has gained new urgency lately given his assertion that a lot of Americans are bums and leeches.  I am convinced that he refuses to make public his tax returns because they will show that HE has not paid anywhere near his fair share of federal income taxes, and perhaps none at all for a number of years.  I have four words for him, and I wish every news media outlet in the world would keep repeating them over and over to him:  What are you hiding?

Even his phony, brittle wife Ann has reinforced all the negative impressions about her and her husband when, in an interview, the subject of his tax returns came up and she snarled in as imperious a tone as she could muster (and she's had a ton of practice) that "you people" (meaning the press and the American electorate) have gotten all the tax information that you're going to get, so be satisfied with that and STFU.

Still, no one is counting Romney and his campaign out because it doesn't matter to most of his Republican supporters what stupid, ill-advised and idiotic things he says or does, they will support him no matter what.  Facts be damned, those people will vote for Romney even if he was proven to be a child molester who set a nursing home on fire while selling China white heroin to grade-schoolers.  Republicans are never, ever encumbered by facts or reality.  Their racist hatred of Barack Obama is stronger than any love of country or sympathy for their fellow citizens.

Presidential candidates have recovered from serious setbacks in their campaign before, but it's hard to see how Romney can run a credible, viable campaign from here on.  It would be very interesting indeed to watch Romney's chances flame out and crumble, but it's impossible to overestimate the capacity of the American voter to see what they want to see, and ignore everything else.  And above all, this election season is one where substance takes a distant back seat to style, and if your candidate says or does something really stupid, the best thing to do is double-down, dig your heels in, and deny, obfuscate, and deceive.  After all, Republicans could not care less about facts.  They have put all their faith in voter suppression drives, and none in the voters themselves.

A Gathering Storm

It's Labor Day 2012 weekend, and tomorrow marks the traditional start of the presidential election campaign.  There are 65 days till the election, and it's safe to say that all forms of media, especially television, will be flooded with diatribes from both sides, vilifying and demonizing the other, in their insane quest to pick up as many votes as possible, by any means.

This year, it's going to be different.  We have something called the Citizens' United ruling in place.  In a moment of stunning, breathtaking insanity, the Supreme Court decided that it's perfectly all right to inject a monstrously huge amount of money into an election system already choked and corrupted beyond recognition by dirty money.  In a move that seems incredibly un-American, extremely wealthy individuals can pour money into what are called "super PACs", completely anonymously and shielded from discovery and in effect, buy the American democracy.  Democracy, like justice, has always been available for purchase by the highest bidder, but this ruling makes it much, much easier for the election to be swayed by whichever side can line up more billionaire donors.  If this doesn't go against everything on which this nation was founded, taking elections away from the common people and giving them over to the super-rich, nothing does.

Another stunning development is the diabolical, blatantly biased laws passed by state governments restricting and complicating the act of voting.  Everything from selectively shortening early voting periods to ridiculous, unreasonable photo-ID requirements, and more, has been utilized by Republican-controlled state legislatures to make it more difficult for the poor and minority voters (whose choices skew very much toward Democratic candidates).  Advocates of these Jim Crow 2.0 laws claim they are necessary to prevent "voter fraud," but it is a scorched-earth, Draconian solution to a very small problem.  Studies have repeatedly shown over and over that voter fraud is an extremely rare occurrence, several orders of magnitude smaller than what would be needed to swing any important national or regional election.  It's like using a neutron bomb to get rid of a fly.  It's so obvious to everyone that these laws are not geared to prevent voter fraud, but instead to make it as hard as possible for people to vote, some of whom have been voting for decades.  And in a democracy, isn't the whole point to make it easy for as many people as possible to vote?  Voters are what make democracy what it is.

The Democrats are having their national convention in Charlotte, NC, this coming week.  It will no doubt be nowhere near as freakish and insanely toxic as the recent Republican psycho-fest in Tampa.  That convention was a hellish parade of the truly ugly and repulsive in American politics.  From a snide diatribe by the repulsively obese Chris Christie, to Anne Romney's scripted-to-the-last-comma snooze-inducing attempt to "humanize" her extremely wooden, awkward and creepy husband, to the much-ballyhooed screed by veep candidate Paul "Lyin'" Ryan in which he STILL hasn't said anything interesting and valuable, the convention was one of the most repellent, distasteful things shown on television so far this year.  Republicans seem to be making a Herculean effort to be the source of the most repulsive media of all time, between the convention and the primary debates.

Still, no one was prepared for the supernova of batshit-craziness when film icon and new poster boy for dementia Clint Eastwood did a stunningly bizarre piece of performance art by talking to a chair where an invisible Obama was seated.  Almost universally panned by pundits and critics, it will go down as one of the weirdest, creepiest and saddest things ever.  It did have one delightful effect - Mitt Romney also gave what was billed as the most important political speech of his whole life after Clint got finished embarrassing himself, but very few people were talking about that the next day.  Everyone was reeling at how pathetic and sad Eastwood appeared on stage, in front of all those puckered, withered and desiccated faces of all those boring old white people at the convention.

This election will also be different in that it will most likely not be a war for the hearts and minds of independent voters, but more of a battle to see which side can get their bases the most riled up.  The country has gotten so very polarized over the past few elections that the number of undecided voters has shrunk to a small sliver.  I can't imagine there are many people who look at Obama and Romney and consider flipping a coin to make the choice easier.  The vast majority of voters, myself included, have had their minds made up for many many months.  The election can be held this coming Tuesday for all I care, I'm 100% ready to get it over with.  There is absolutely nothing in this enormous universe which would make me switch my vote, so why do I have to put up with all the bullshit?  The country is split down the middle, with very few swing votes, and the emphasis now is to get your core constituencies all cranked up and excited to cast their votes.

As is typical for paranoid-hysterics, Republican leaders drone ominously about how the very soul and existence of the United States of America is on the knife-edge, teetering at the abyss of destruction, and everything will surely be lost if Obama gets re-elected.  Notably, a judge in Lubbock, TX opined that there will be "civil war" and a lot of civil disobedience if the election doesn't go their way.  While those remarks can be easily dismissed as mentally-disturbed rantings of some inbred, cousin-marrying Texas hillbilly, it does illustrate the demented fear-mongering to which the Republicans are stooping this year.  Always known as the party of fear, the Republicans are pulling out all the stops in their hell-bound campaign to frighten and terrify all their racist supporters, promising them that the Apocalypse Pizza Company will be delivering an extra-large to their front door if the black guy gets back into the White House.  Desperate, fearful people do desperate things, and crazy, paranoid rednecks do really horrible, ugly, desperate things.

So, no matter who wins this election, pretty much 50% of the people in this country are going to be very, very angry and upset.  Depending on how the Congressional elections go, we may be in line for a gridlocked, hyper-partisan government that will accomplish absolutely nothing.  As the world enters a critical period on so many fronts - the environment, global economics, terrorism - having a paralyzed, divided superpower such as the USA will only make the world a much more dangerous place than it ever has been, or that it needs to be.

News From Hell

The past six days have been an amazing news cycle, one of the busiest we've seen in ages.  A lot of very important stuff happened, and there was something for everybody to love and hate.

First off, last Friday the jury in the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse trial came back with 45 guilty counts out of 48 charges.  The whole situation is pretty dreadful and awful, and is an object lesson in how things can get completely out of control when authority figures feel they can do whatever they damned well please and the "good ol' boy" network will shield and protect them.  Sandusky's predation on young boys is stomach-turning in the extreme, and the administration of Penn State University choosing to do nothing in the face of undeniable evidence is something they will have to answer to and pay for dearly.

One has to wonder how such horrendous abuse seemed so easy.  There has been a lot of investigation into the mindset of child molesters, and a lot of them pick occupations or endeavors that place them in direct contact with their quarry.  Sports coaches in the past have been automatically assumed to be benign and the vast majority of them are, but for the small percentage who are child predators, it provides an ideal shield and opportunity for their nefarious activities.

When I was a child, I was taught that adults were to be obeyed unconditionally and they were always right.  For me it was a fact of life that if the teacher gave you a beating in school for doing something wrong, when you got home you got another beating, because the teacher was always right, and you were always wrong.  That kind of blind, abject deference to "authority" creates the perfect climate for abuse.  It's like if a burglar comes to your home to rob it, and you welcome him with open arms and make him a nice dinner as he ransacks your house.

Sandusky will die in prison, as he deserves, but what of the lives he has destroyed with his sick activities?  There are no winners in this whole sorry situation, just pain and wreckage.

The following Monday had the Supreme Court striking down most of Arizona's hateful, racist SB1070, the draconian anti-immigration law passed in 2010, much to the delight of the bigots and hate-mongers in this wretched, godforsaken state.  Governor Jan "The Walking Dead" Brewer signed it with much fanfare, and used the resulting court challenges as a tool to raise nearly $4 million to defend it.  Even as recently as last week, when conventional wisdom indicated (incorrectly, it turns out) the Court would uphold the legality of SB1070, that dried-up old corpse was gleefully sending training materials out to police officials.  So it was particularly gratifying when the Court struck down most of the provisions of the law, and left the door wide open for future legal challenges to the part of it that was left standing.  Brewer immediately went on the news media and we were treated to the pathetic sight of that delusional, hatchet-faced old hag trying in vain to spin the ruling in her favor.  It's been obvious for a very long time that Brewer is incredibly stupid and most likely mentally disturbed, and she can add pathetic embarrassment to the very long list of reasons why she needs to go.

There was also a ruling in a Montana case which very tragically affirmed the vile, loathsome Citizens United ruling of 2010, which opened the floodgates to a deluge of corporate money into the election process.  This is plainly astonishing, as nearly everyone except the Republicans agree that the original ruling was a horrendous, horrific abomination and probably one of the very worst Supreme Court rulings in the history of this country.  As Mannequin Romney says, "Corporations are people!" and much to the detriment of this country, the Court agrees.  Another terrible, awful ruling from a Court that seems to take the side of corporations over the welfare of the American people.

Of course in the midst of all this history there just has to be some batshit-craziness, and that was provided by the witch hunt tight-assed douchebag Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Ca) is waging against Attorney General Eric Holder.  There was this little sting operation by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives called "Fast and Furious." started during the George W. Bush administration, which sought to trace firearms used by Mexican drug cartels back to sellers in the US.  They ran into a little snag due to the incredibly lax and ridiculous gun laws in (where else?) Arizona.  It seems that a couple of people plopped down $350,000 for 650 guns, got them, and just waltzed across the border to the south where drug cartels got an early Navidad, because according to AZ gun laws, there wasn't anything illegal or suspicious about a purchase that size. Now that this fiasco has blown up all over the place, AG Holder is getting blamed for everything, and the 2nd Amendment gun nuts are all bent out of shape, saying the failed sting operation is all a big scheme by the Obama administration to ram stricter gun laws down everyone's throats.  Because it's so important to be able to spend $350K on guns without some law enforcement agency asking you a lot of inconvenient questions.  Yeah, they really ARE that stupid.  They're gun nuts.

The big-deal ruling dropped this morning, when the Supreme Court basically reaffirmed the constitutionality of Obama's centerpiece Affordable Health Care Act, individual mandate and all.  There is still much to discuss and learn about this ruling, but the important take-away is that Republicans and right-wingers are crapping broken glass now, and will do so for the foreseeable future.  It is extremely gratifying to see all the right-wingers losing their shit in a very public fashion.  Anything that makes conservative right-wingers unhappy makes me EXTREMELY happy, and I have a great deal to be happy about this morning.

A Republican Primary Dictionary

If nothing else, this blog is all about public service. You may think a major reason why I write Careless Whispers is to satisfy some deep-seated need in me for attention and an obsession-level quest for fame and media notoriety, and you would be pretty much correct. But mixed in with all that psychological stuff is my desire to bring clarity and enlightenment into a world so often choked and obfuscated with dullness and stupidity.

In my mind, nothing more clearly illustrates the innate tawdriness and runaway putrefaction of the American political system than the Republican presidential primaries. Rising like a rancid zombie out of a pile of garbage in a junior-high-school drama class reenactment of Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video, the primaries or caucuses or "preference polls" or whatever the hell they call themselves reared up on their cloven hooves for about two seconds and then immediately started a headlong and inexorable plunge to the lower depths of Stupid Hell, trying to drag us all down with it.

But fret not, help is on the way. I have created this guide to the political language of the primaries, which I hope will allow the Gentle Reader to understand the hidden meaning behind all the lies, deliberate misstatements, and dog-whistle rhetoric which so often these days tries to pass as legitimate discourse. Consider this your political life preserver, and please, don't thank me. My reward is spreading around the awareness of what utter pieces of shit the Republican candidates are.

"Class Warfare" - This is one of the most patently hilarious things the Republicans have come up with yet, other than Sarah Palin running for anything other than Queen of the Inbred. Oh, those poor, sad, downtrodden billionaires - the Republicans would have you believe they are the most misunderstood and unfairly persecuted minority in this country . Imagine, they bleat out as they squeeze the crocodile tear or two from their rheumy old eyes, all the unwashed multitudes attacking the uppermost 0.5% of wage earners in this country solely because of their wealth and success! Yeah, you need to watch out for the middle class, they'll turn on you in a second. They start making 25, maybe 30 thousand bucks a year and all of a sudden they get uppity and bite the hand that feeds them. Why can't they just be satisfied sitting in their worthless, over-mortgaged homes watching Donald Trump's comb-over terrorize the mentally handicapped on "The Apprentice," or be happy with the crumbs that trickle down from the more fortunate? Never you mind the decades of tax cuts, offshore tax havens and specialized financial instruments you can access when you have a lot of money. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain - just heap disdain upon the Democrats for daring to criticize the people who underwrite and benefit from every wasteful, deficit-expanding thing the Republicans do.

"Phony Theology" - This is a rather late entry to the Sweepstakes of Stupidity the Republicans are running, but it's pretty good. It seems that, according to the priggish, sanctimonious Rick Santorum, President Obama has some kind of "phony theology" going on with his energy policy. Yeah, it sounds stupid because it IS stupid; I don't know what he means, either, and who really cares? However let us savor for a little while the delicious irony of Rick Santorum opining that someone else has a "phony theology." Santorum should know all about phony theologies because fundamentalists like him are world-class experts in "pretending" to be Christians while "doing" the exact opposite. To wit: Fundamentalists believe that you should use any means necessary to keep a fetus from being aborted but the instant they're born you turn your back on them and they are on their own. Fundamentalists don't believe you should feed the hungry or provide medical care for those who can't afford it. Let's see, where have we heard that before? If I'm not mistaken someone named Jesus Christ thought that was a good idea. Fundamentalists, not so much. Santorum also believes gay marriage is an abomination and wants a constitutional amendment to outlaw it. It will destroy traditional marriage, he bellows. He misses the irony that the 50% divorce rate among traditional marriages is what's destroying it. I guess serial adulterer Newt Gingrich is also irony-resistant because because his cheating on two of his wives is doing so much to keep traditional marriage alive and well. Now I realize that for fundamentalists, irony is so much of their daily lives and belief systems that after a while they just become inured to it and don't even notice when it jumps up and slaps them in the face, but someone like Santorum preaching about "phony theology" is absolutely astounding. The fact that he doesn't get how stupid and hypocritical it makes him sound is really amusing.

"Secure the Border" - Here in Arizona we hear a lot about "securing the border," but what that really means is keep brown-skinned Spanish-speaking people out of our country unless they're picking our crops, tending to our lawns or cleaning our houses.

"Anti-religious Social Agenda" - Another one of those catch-all phrases that can be stretched and shaped to cover any number of perceived problems, from marriage equality to access to contraceptives. Any time you push back on the fundamentalists when they try to shove their religious biases on the general population, all of a sudden you're "anti-religious," and you "hate Christianity." While I gladly and proudly admit to both, a lot of people aren't, and they resist the fundamentalist urge to conflate "standing up for your rights" with "taking away their right to practice their religion". No one is taking away anyone's right to believe in the delusion of their choice, but I have a HUGE problem when they try to make everyone else defer to their beliefs, as if their beliefs are preeminent and trump everyone else's. I don't suppose it matters to most of them that the majority of people on this planet are either Hindu or Muslim, and that their beliefs are in the minority. As for contraceptives, conservatives are blanching at the fact that a church-affiliated employer might have to provide contraceptives to their employees, against their religious beliefs. Tell that to the 98% of Catholics who already use some form of contraceptive.

"Food Stamp President" - Newt Gingrich came up with that one, and it's only fitting because he looks like he really knows his way around a dinner table. Nothing like making a less-than-subtle racial comment because 1) Obama is black and 2) everyone knows the majority of people using food stamps are black. Except that they aren't. Only 22% of food stamp recipients are black; the rest are white, Hispanic, Asian, Native Americans, and others. But why let facts get in the way of a good racial slur?

These are only some of the interesting linguistic stunts the Republicans are pulling in this very bizarre primary season. One might have thought with the exit of the truly moronic wing of the candidate roster - Rick Perry, Michelle Bachmann and Herman Cain - we could maybe get into a little more substantive discussion of the great challenges this country faces, and you know, actually talk about ideas and stuff, but that was wishful thinking. The Republicans are looking for someone who can get their ultra-conservative base all riled up and ready to hit those voting booths come November, so they know they have to appeal to the very lowest, basest nature of the obese, knuckle-dragging mouth-breathers who vote for them. It is truly a shame that, in their haste to get to the slimy muck at the bottom of the voter pool to find their support, they have to pull the rest of the country down with them.

This Just In: Time Marches On!

My, my, I've been really bad lately. It's been over a month since I've posted anything here. I know, the world has not ended but it hasn't gotten measurably better, has it? Coincidence? I think not.

Autumn is in full swing here and I must say I am really enjoying the weather. We've had a little bit of rain recently and it's made everything smell and look wonderful. My roses bushes in the front of the house are blooming, and these autumn roses are quite beautiful. Even better, the little shamrocks in the front are growing like crazy and getting their little white flowers on them. I have these shamrocks that grow every year, they will be lush and green with dozens if not hundreds of little white flowers that open during the day and close at night. They'll do that until it starts getting hot, next May, and then the die off, only to remain dormant throughout the hot summer, and start to grow again right around Halloween.

I've been busy writing, just not in my blog. I am writing Chapter 7 of my "Archangel Chronicles" book, my science fiction opus. This chapter is called "Fallen Angels" and one of the things I am going to deal with is the death of a major character. I love writing stories, because it allows me explore my own emotions through my characters. It allows me to take a look at my own beliefs and analyze them. "Fallen Angels" is about death and betrayal, about growing older and feeling left behind as the world changes all around you, and about the value of friendship and relations with others.

I've been working pretty hard on "Fallen Angels" for the past two weeks, and that's the way I write. I usually have two or three writing projects going on at the same time. Sometimes, I'll be working on one project and another project will suddenly become ready to write, so I will switch projects and concentrate on the newer. An idea will bang around inside my head, sometimes for months and even a year or more, and then all of a sudden it will be ready to write, and then it just pours out. Sometimes I can't even keep up with how fast the story evolves and comes out. When I'm in this dedicated writing mode, I think about the story incessantly, night and day. Usually I spend two to three hours every night writing, until I get everything out of my head and written in a Word document.

I am also writing a book of rabbit stories, titled "Songs of Abundance and Beauty: The Stories of Josiah." I have three stories completed out of a projected 8 to 10 individual stories. I have an idea for another Josiah story but it is not ready yet. I tried to start writing it back in the spring but it just wasn't fulled developed yet. I have no doubt when it is ready, it will come pouring out of me, as the other stories have.

There are some really silly, ridiculous things going on with the Republican race for their presidential nominee. Far too much nonsense has transpired since stubby-fingered vulgarian Donald Trump insulted everyone's intelligence with his ersatz faux-candidacy for me to really address everything individually. Trump's "candidacy" was much more of a publicity stunt or a failed reality show than a serious attempt at a presidential run, and he certainly did not present himself in the best possible light during that exercise in stupidity. But plenty of other candidates have stepped up and showed the world in amazing detail just how stupid, ignorant and pathetic Republicans can be.

There's Mitt Romney, who has apparently been running for president since 1994 and hopefully taking his final crack at it right now. He is an arrogant, two-faced, hypocritical liar, and will say and do anything, no matter how contradictory or ridiculous, to get votes. His Mormon background is doing him no favors, and it will be hard to imagine all the good-ole-boys and bigoted Christian fundamentalists getting behind someone whose religion is widely regarded as a dangerous cult of people wearing magic underwear.

Texas governor Rick Perry burst on to the scene last spring with much fanfare, and he was widely expected to coast into an easy win as the Republicans' choice. Trouble is, there were a couple of little bumps in the road, and those bumps were his own stupidity. It's hard to believe that someone would make a complete idiotic dunderhead like George W. Bush look halfways intelligent, but damned if Perry doesn't do that. Perry is an astonishing dope, totally without class or any redeeming qualities, and was definitely proven during a recent televised debate how totally and utterly unqualified he is to be anything other than governor of Texas. Because apparently Texans elect only stupid idiots to be their governor.

The very execrable, loathsome Newt Gingrich has somehow decided he needs to run for President this year, even though he has more bad baggage and generalized ickiness from his multiple marriages and two decades in politics than he can ever get over in the general election. Maybe this is his last attempt at some kind of relevance since his heyday, such as it was, was fully 15 years ago. Anyway, he is far less intelligent than he or his supporters like to believe, and if he gets the Republican nomination, that's fine by me, because he will be shredded like Chinese chicken during the general election.

Herman Cain, what is there to say about him? A black conservative whose every speech and pronouncement is a celebration of idiocy and stupidity, Cain is a gender-and-race mirror-image of Sarah Palin. Pizza Boy is being called on the carpet for his predilection for getting touchy-feely with women who crossed his path when he was head of the National Restaurant Association. He seems to have an eye for blonde white women, and when one of them tried to blow the whistle on his hanky-panky, he had the Restaurant Association pay her a whole year's salary if she would just shut her trap and go away. Then he insists that such pay-offs are standard practice in the world of Washington lobbyists, because apparently no one in that line of work can keep their hands to themselves. Now all these little dalliances and indiscretions are starting to come back to haunt him, like the Ghosts of Pizzas Past, and personally I think it would be a lot of fun to watch if it wasn't so stomach-turning and just plain tawdry.

There are a couple more people, like Ron Paul and John Huntsman, who are far too normal and comparatively sane to be attractive to the conservative scumbags and batshit-crazy Tea Partiers that make up most of the Republican party these days. Then you get to the really mentally ill, beyond-batshit candidates like Michelle Bachmann and Rich Santoilet. There's not much I can say about either of them, other than the fact that Bachmann needs some very serious and intensive mental health care, along with her gigantic nelly queer of a husband, and Santoilet needs to get laid or something because he's just far too sanctimonious and fake-pious for this planet. Realistically neither of these "candidates" has a snowball's chance in hell of getting anywhere near the White House, which is as it should be, and Bachmann in particular needs to go back to wherever she came from and spend her days exchanging shoes and underwear with her "husband."

My prediction is that Mitt Romney will be the Republican nominee and will go against Obama in the 2012 election. Unless there is some major economic disaster in this country, in which the stock market drops below half its current value, or the Eurozone completely collapses, or North Korea or Iran lose their minds and start waving nukes in the air, Obama will coast to his second term. The Republicans themselves will tell you they are very unhappy and unenthusiastic about the current roster of candidates, and that will be their downfall in November, 2012.

As for me, I'm just going to continue caring for my rabbits, writing my stories, painting my artwork, spending time with my friends, and enjoying life every single day.

Delicious Dilemma

I know I said I was going to stay away from political rants but sometimes they are just too good to pass up. As always, anything that makes Republicans look even more idiotic and loathsome than they naturally are makes me squeal and giggle like a Girl Scout who just sold all her cookies to the fat family down the street.

The 2012 Presidential election is still a year and a half away but the campaign is just getting started. The Democrats know who their nominee is going to be, so no issues there. All eyes are focused on the Republicans and their gaggle of potential candidates. And what a load of creepy, disgusting and appalling dirtbags they are. They range from the merely tiresome and eccentric, such as Texas Representative Ron Paul - who has been down this road a number of times and failed miserably, and will do so again - to really despicable, toxically ignorant buttheads like Romney, Gingrich, Santorum, Bachmann, Pawlenty and just about everyone else in that sorry Theater of the Inbred that is the G.O.P.

Luckily the sun appears to be setting on a couple of the more misguided candidates. The nation was diverted, willingly or not, for a couple weeks by the sad, sorry sideshow of Donald Trump, egomaniac, narcissist par excellence, and stubby-fingered vulgarian who did what he does best, promote himself and his hair to anyone who will pay attention. He thought he had a winning issue with the "birther" controversy, until their intended target Barack Obama produced a valid Hawaii birth certificate for himself and permanently shut down that little cottage industry. Right afterward, all the gas went out of Trump's presidential bid, but not before he tried to take credit for everything from the birth certificate itself to the killing of Osama bin Laden. By that time the rest of the country wised up to what a charlatan and cheap huckster Trump is and has been merciless in their criticism and condemnation of him for wasting all our time with his bullshit. And rightfully so.

Newt Gingrich's ill-advised presidential bid was barely out of the gate when he stumbled and landed right on his Pillsbury-doughboy face. He made the unforgivable sin of criticizing Paul Ryan's Economic Plan/Welfare for the Super Rich on Meet The Press last Sunday. The Republicans are pinning all their hopes on Ryan's plan, and they know they absolutely need to get everyone in the G.O.P. on board with it. The Newtster must have missed that memo, because he called Ryan's plan "right-wing social engineering," among other things, and was immediately drop-kicked by nearly every Republican pundit around and taken to task in the harshest possible terms. His remarks were in direct contrast to Ronald Reagan's golden rule, "Thou shalt not speak ill of fellow Republicans." Newter suddenly realized he stepped into a vast sea of manure of his own making, and clumsily tried to make amends by accusing the mainstream media of tripping him up with a deliberate "gotcha" question, but even Republican spin-meisters knows the only person who "got" Gingrich was himself. Watch his support and money dry up faster than the leathery skin of his weirdly robotic, bug-eyed wife.

So, who's left in this assortment of assholes, I mean, candidates? Mitt Romney, the apparent front-runner, has a huge amount of baggage he brought with him from his time as Governor of Massachusetts, where he put in place a universal health care system which was the model for Obama's health care reform package, something that Republicans absolutely love to hate and are trying to derail every way possible. Rick Santorum from Pennsylvania stepped on a land mine when he criticized John McCain for knowing nothing about enhanced interrogation, a.k.a. torture. I think McCain knows a little bit about torture, after five years of it when he was a Vietnam era P.O.W., and military service is an experience that Santorum has notably missed. It seems the G.O.P.'s best hope for the White House, Mike Huckabee, is happier being a much older, really ugly version of Ricki Lake on his own surreal, cringe-inducing talk show.

The B-listers on the G.O.P. side don't fare much better. Tim Pawlenty is universally regarded as terminally boring and bland. Current Governor of Indiana Mitch Daniels is also regarded as profoundly charisma-challenged. Former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson does not attend church, is pro-choice, and is in favor of legalizing marijuana, so he has zero chance with the drooling, knuckle-dragging evangelicals that dominate the early primaries. Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin are holding up the batshit-crazy wing of the party. South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham is burdened with a southern accent, which automatically makes you sound stupid and retarded, so no thanks, I don't think so.

And then there are the Z-listers, people who think they can run as a Republican through some confluence of massive self-delusion and mental illness. These include the token black candidate Herman Cain - former CEO of Godfather Pizza, a real pre-requisite for the White House; former U.N. ambassador John Bolton - who is like some weird hybrid of Mark Twain and Charles Manson; gay-rights activist Fred Karger - HAHAHAHA!; career flight attendant Tom Miller - also HAHAHAHA!; and Houston businessman Vern Wuensche. This is the second go-round for ol' Vern, who campaigned in 2008 and came in tenth in Iowa and New Hampshire before bailing out. His campaign material makes the interesting assertion that "businesses which survive do so through the good decisions of those who run them and they are therefore exceptionally qualified for public office," which is, of course, a totally awesome thing to say.

So, for this field of potential office-seekers, which completely covers the whole range of qualities from "abysmal" to "vile" and back, their first test of electoral viability will be the Iowa caucuses. Set in the monochromatic, frozen wastes of Iowa in winter, the candidates must put on their best evangelical-Christian, Sunday-go-to-meetin' clothes and work hard to appeal to one of most homogenous, non-diverse, and non-representative populations in the entire country. Required to cozy up to mostly old, white, obese farmers and their bloated, bovine wives, the candidates will be elbowing each other out of the way to get to the extreme-conservative end of the political spectrum. And thus we have the delicious dilemma that I mentioned about half a million words ago - namely that the Republicans need to appeal to the far-right-wing-nutcase branch of the party to get through the primaries, and then have to back-track and refute everything they said and scramble to the political center to appeal to everyone else in the general election. You can be sure that the Democrats will be closely watching every bit of action in the early primaries and the attack ads will practically write themselves. The Republicans have clearly painted themselves into a political corner early on, by casting their lot with the ultra-conservative factions in this country and they will have a terrible time trying to get the independent voters they so desperately need in the general election.

And I will be watching their struggle with a huge amount of gleeful satisfaction.

I'm Baaaaaack!

Whew, what happened to this blog? I didn't just fall off a cliff somewhere, I just took a 4-month sabbatical from Careless Whispers. And by "sabbatical" I mean being too damned lazy to write my own blog. How messed up is that? I've been meaning to get back on track and resume my random rants, and this time I'm going to do it. I missed writing my blog and promise to do better in the future.

Part of the reason I stopped blogging is that things really have gone to hell in the world of politics, until very recently. The elections in November 2010 marked the Ascendency of the Terminally Stupid, and voters have unequivocally proven AGAIN that it's impossible to overestimate the stupidity of the average American. Despite the fact that Republicans have repeatedly shown over and over how hostile and destructive they are to middle-class Americans, what do the voters do? Elect a bunch of the most regressive, neanderthal-like Tea Partiers to Congress, as if they are going to save the world or something.

The Republicans entered into an unholy alliance with the TPers, just like they enter into unholy alliances with every other right-wing crackpot group they can dredge up, and they rode the (unexplicable) voter appeal of the Tea Party to a majority in the House of Representatives. But what is different, and very encouraging, is that the Repubs are experiencing "buyer's remorse," and that keeping the TPers happy and goose-stepping in formation behind them is going to be a lot harder than they thought. Their blubbering, dithering "leader" Rep. John Boehner is nowhere near as charismatic and qualified as he needs to be to keep that unruly mob of cretins and mental cases in line. He is just one major screw-up away from watching his weird Coalition of the Inbred implode and split into two factions - the Crazy and the Crazier - thus allowing Barack Obama to coast into a second term. We can only hope that will happen.

The Republicans also have seemingly shot themselves in the cloven hoof with their batshit-crazy plans to solve the budget deficit by a whole witches' brew of draconian measures, like privatizing Social Security, replacing Medicare with a completely insane voucher system and getting rid of a whole spectrum of programs and services which directly help the elderly and the poor. And, at the same time, awarding the super-wealthy with lots of tax breaks and dumping more money into the Pentagon to fight costly, protracted and ultimately unwinnable wars. In a barely-believable demonstration of the old adage that says, if you repeat something often enough it will become true no matter how preposterous, the tired, boring Republicans are still flogging the dead horse of trickle-down economics, the decades-old, blatantly ridiculous and widely discredited piece of economic hucksterism that says if you make rich people richer, it will filter down to all levels of the economy and make everyone happy. The only problem with that is that is HASN'T WORKED IN 25 YEARS and it never will! Every single economic indicator available says the same thing - Americans are economically worse-off than they were 20 years ago. But, sad to say, so many ignorant, disconnected and disinterested voters in this country seem to think it's true, and will repeatedly vote for Republicans who are working so very hard AGAINST the voters' best interests. Why, I absolutely don't know.

Wait, yes I do know. It all comes down to the three G's: God, Guns and Gays. The Republicans are all about social conservatism, and their mantra for the past four decades is to frighten old white people into believing that a bunch of atheists are going to take away their guns and recruit their children into homosexuality and close all the churches. They keep hammering away at those social issues and convince voters the American way of life is in imminent danger because of the "others." Republicans are undisputed masters of the "us-and-them" game, pitting stalwart, conservative Americans against vast hordes of liberals, gays and gun-control freaks who are at this very second pounding on their front doors, demanding surrender of all they hold dear. And for so many voters, these are the only issues they can even remotely understand, so they figure that voting Republican is going to save them. But what they don't understand is when you vote for a Republican because you agree with their stance on gay marriage, for instance, you get a whole lot of baggage along with the candidate that you didn't know or didn't count on.

But more amazingly still, the conservative front line when it comes to completely destroying this country has moved into a new frontier, the state governorships. In a number of states, most notably Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio, new Republican governors and GOP-controlled state legislatures have embarked on an astonishing, mind-blowing campaign of fiercely conservative legislative actions which have, among other things, stripped the collective bargaining rights of public worker unions and allowed for the take-over of towns and cities that the governor has unilaterally deemed to be in "economic crisis". That includes nullifying the will of the voters of their cities and throwing duly-elected officials out of their offices. That by itself is a breathtaking usurpation of the democratic process rarely seen outside of third-world dictatorships like Myanmar or North Korea or at least a dozen places in Africa, or anachronistic, repressive monarchies like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. And yet, it's happening right in the American heartland. How the hell can something like that take place here?

The usual freak-show cast of political characters is still around, unfortunately. The eternally vapid and loathsome Sarah Palin is still polluting the scene but fortunately her star has fallen considerably and she is now viewed unfavorably by a majority of people in her own party. Just how disgusting and messed-up are you if even other Republicans can't stand you? And it couldn't have happened to a nicer bitch. Unfortunately, the even crazier and more repellent Michelle Bachmann has seen her political stock go up, and this batshit-crazy scarecrow now has her eye on a Presidential run. God save this country if she gets anywhere near the White House, things would truly be lost and I will pack up all the rabbits and head to Prince Edward Island in Canada.

We are also being treated to a supersized-version of the Theater of the Damned, as the execrable, annoying and low-class Donald Trump makes noise like he wants to be President. The late, great Spy magazine had him pegged 30 years ago when they consistently referred to Trump as a "stubby-fingered vulgarian." I'm not going to say anything more about him because he and the dead animal on top of his head need no embellishment, but again it shows how irretrievably broken and dysfunctional the American version of democracy can be, when any cheap, tacky blowhard thinks they can be President. Throw in the usual array of right-wing creeps like Romney, Huckster-bee and Gingrich, along with other third-string players like Pawlenty and the infinitely cringe-inducing Rick Santorum, and you have the makings of the most inept, repulsive and potentially destructive slew of jerks and assholes that the world has seen in a very, very long time.

But, as much fun as political rants can be, after a while it seems as if you are just beating your head against a brick wall. And the result of that is the wall pretty much stays the same while you have a massive headache to deal with. So I stopped doing political rants because there was just so much bad stuff going on that it seemed pointless to rail against it. But things have taken a turn for the better last week with the death (I prefer the word "extermination") of Osama bin Laden in his lovely little compound in a nice suburb of Islamabad, Pakistan, where he lived for years right under the nose of Pakistani intelligence services and within walking distance of the leading military institute of that country, and not in some cold grubby cave somewhere. I may write more about this in another post but suffice to say that in spite of the fact that Obama has been almost universally hailed as a courageous, skilled and resourceful leader, there is a large faction of conservative cockroaches who refuse to give him his due as the President who finally brought bin Laden to justice. And that is solely due to their racism and their refusal to admit that a black man can be a fantastic leader, a great President and a loyal American. And that, more than anything else, will cause this country to fail.

So, I won't be doing as many political rants as before, but I will be doing more posts on non-political topics. I hope to write more short stories and talk about rabbits and write more humorous stuff. I hope everyone who grants me the great favor of reading my blog will enjoy it. It is very good to be back.