Happy Solstice 2009

"...people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world."

Health Care Reform 2009: DOA

Time to Reveal that Elephant Tattoo on your Ass, Joe

Savannah, Ga. Those feckless wonders currently holding majority status in the U.S. Senate have made this bed--now crawl under the covers and spoon with Joseph Isadore Lieberman.

Reid and his flaccid captaincy should have done any number of things regarding the Hypocrite from Connecticut. The Nevadan could have demanded complete and total obeisance from Sen. Droopy Dog in exchange for keeping his former Democratic party seniority. He didn't. He could have better courted the Mainers--Sens. Snowe or Collins; he didn't. He could have employed reconciliation, (despite foot-stomping from Sens. Byrd and Feingold) necessitating only 50 votes and quickly setting the Senate on a path to better match the House Bill. Again, Reid didn't.

So here we are. A whole lot of nothing. Something much, much less than a majority of us thought we were voting for a year ago. Oh, and about that November vote: where's the President in all of this? Cogitating. Collating. We may have thought we were voting for an FDR, but we got another Clinton after all. And not the better one.

Today the Tiger of the House, Speaker Pelosi, says Congress might have something for Obama to sign in time for the January State of the Union Address, again thanks to Reid's pussy-footing in the Senate. We also hear rumors that Leiberman may finally remove that rubber-mask of Independence and officially join the GOP.

Happy Holidays.

Bill O'Reilly: Spinning Into Butter

Summon Old Scrotum, the Wrinkled Retainer

Savannah, GA. Bill O'Reilly's brain is liquid at room temperature. Like the toxic element Mercury his cranial gruel sloshes about from one perceived injustice after another--when it isn't arguing with the voices inside his head. A self-appointed grunt ("traditionalist") in the Ragnarok of "the secular-progressive movement (also known as the S-P Crew)", he fights his adversaries with "superior analysis", if not humility. He likes to brag and spin tales about his so-called humble beginnings; he dodges a sex harassment suit while confusing loofahs with ground, spiced, chickpeas rolled into little balls, something he's certainly familiar with through suffering the indignities of TMM (Tiny Meat Madness). Classic symptom: Anger basted in self-importance.

Billo seems to currently have his moob tits in a wringer over a recent episode of 'Law & Order: SUV'--a primetime entertainment fictional drama, mind you--where a make-believe character said, "Limbaugh, Beck, O'Reilly, all of 'em, they are like a cancer spreading ignorance and hate… They've convinced folks that immigrants are the problem, not corporations that fail to pay a living wage or a broken health care system."

Lordy. Can't you just see that silver metal rushing up into Billo's bald, penile-shaped little head? To O'Reilly, the program's producer is, "a despicable human being" and the fictional TV program is "out of control." His feelings really smarting now, BO goes on to opine, "[the clip was] defamatory and outrageous". Ouch! Cue Mommie; make it better!! He's bound to have burbled something along the lines of some of his best friends are poor. He's angry. Again. Surprise.

But then, without his 'anger schtick' he's just another empty sack. Gelded. And, time for his fruit cup and diaper change.

1% War Tax on Incomes over $200,000

Obama's War is no Free Lunch

Savannah, GA. Now that the President has laid out his plans for the next few years regarding the war in Afghanistan, it's time to revisit the 'guns vs. butter' model of production possibilities.

The Troglodytes on the Right have been insisting the approximately 900 Billion dollar cost of passing health care is a price too high, a burden which will increase the deficit, punish future generations and must of necessity pay for itself down to the dime. The Beck's, the baggers, the blowhards, the birdbrains, the boobs and boneheads have been bleating about this for months.

Let's see if we can make them squeal like little piggies: Tax the Rich.

General McChrystal's Afghan Strategy asks for 30,000 additional troops and support for a long-term commitment, costing about 900 Billion dollars,

Time to make the Birthers/Freepers/Jeepers/Creepers pay for their plan, too. A 1% War Surtax on incomes over $200,000 annually would go a goodly way to redress this inequity. Especially since so precious few offspring of the elite monied class have seen fit to make the sacrifice by volunteering to serve. Most of the burden of our Iraq/Afghanistan ventures are carried on the backs of America's less wealthy.

Make the rich kids serve, or make them pay for the privilege of sitting on their hands in the stands. This is a war, after all.

DIE, Suckers!

punkboi via photobucket

The Republican Health Plan

Savannah, GA. Finally a member of the House of Representatives tells it like it is:

But, we knew this already.

via Towleroad

Making a Fetish of Democracy, Cont'd

Let's vote, shall we?

Savannah, GA. The god-fearing followers of the evil god of Abraham may have to confront their 'majority-rules and I deserve a vote on everything' dogma in ways they never considered.

It's a pretty sure bet at the voter's craps table that many of the opponents of gay marriage are still smarting over the fact the Supreme Court unanimously ruled against the wishes of the majority in 1967. In that year--in fact, up until the early '90's--a majority of Americans were opposed to interracial marriage. Right up to the SCOTUS decision majority-vote-holding Americans supported varying miscegenation statutes in locales around the country.

And wouldn't you know it--they used scripture to justify the bigotry:

Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with this arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix. -- Virginia trial judge Leon Bazile, January 6, 1959, sentencing the Lovings to a one year prison term.

Loving vs. Virginia put an end to all of that democratic chauvinism.

But people in CA, and now in WA and ME, are demanding votes on the rights of a minority vs. the greater number.

Since we're making a fetish of majority rule, let's vote on a few more topics, eh?

How about: Is Scientology a religion? (Or just bad science fiction with 501c3 tax-exempt status?)

How about the great cult of the 19th Century: The Latter-Day Saints? Is Mormonism for real? You just know a majority of Americans--deep down--don't really believe it's a legitimate branch of Christianity. Let's put it up for a vote--but not in Utah--and find out, shall we?

Heck, the First Amendment only guarantees Freedom of Religion; it says absolutely nothing about that freedom extending to taxes on the generation of income. We'll even be magnanimous: Houses of Worship--tax exempt. Everything else, to every property, every strip mall, and to every apartment complex owned by these religions--well--meet your friendly I.R.S. auditor. Let's vote on it!

Follow CA's lead (again) with their recently filed, "2010 California Marriage Protection Act" which would outlaw nearly all divorces. "Every divorce is the death of a traditional marriage." Vote. Vote. Vote.

Making a Fetish of Democracy

Erik S. Lesser for the New York Times

The Majority is Always Right

Savannah, GA. Let us be perfectly clear: The rights--the civil rights--of the minority should never be subjected to the tyranny of the majority. Full stop.

No tax-paying, law-abiding, American should be forced to ask permission of another if they may have equality under the law. See Proposition 8 in California, Referendum 71 in Washington, Question 1 in Maine, for example. Another example:

Yet this is exactly what is occurring within our Republic, today. An entitled majority is demanding and being allowed to vote on the rights of a disenfranchised minority, all in the name of democracy. This is wrong, this is perverse, this is evil.

It is time for America to accept civil marriages between two gay women, or two gay men.

Religious arguments against civil marriage for homosexuals absent a theocracy are irrelevant. Religious leaders and their followers have no place writing State or Federal law. Their freedom to believe in deities of their choosing is guaranteed by Amendment I, of The Bill of Rights, of the United States Constitution. That freedom does not allow forcing nonbelievers to have to live by the same.

Democracy has limits; it is not absolute. Majority dominion without restraint is nothing but rabble, gangs, mob rule.

We're better than that.

via gayrights.change.org

Senator Inhofe Loses It

Okey Dopey

Savannah, GA. One of the most humorous comments made by Independent presidential candidate John Anderson in the 1980 election was the charge Ronald Reagan's ideas were so old, so out-of-touch, the actor surely must have worked for 19th Century Fox.

Cue Senator James Mountain ("Senior Moments") Inhofe R-Oklahoma. This paleolithic reactionary relic hasn't quite made it into the Holocene. A former real estate developer and failed insurance company president, this man lives in the past and legislates by hyperbole.

Inhofe's purple prose and pufferies include:

[There is] compelling evidence that catastrophic global warming is a hoax. That conclusion is supported by the painstaking work of the nation's top climate scientists.

[Global warming is] the second-largest hoax ever played on the American people, after the separation of church and state.

Still battling the Axis Powers in his head, Inhofe has compared the Environmental Protection Agency to the Gestapo and Clinton-era EPA Administrator Carol Browner to Tokyo Rose. He probably tries to buy Slim Jim's at his local 7-11 with WW II food ration stamps. Jim must toss and turn at night knowing President Obama appointed Browner Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change last January.

No friend of college-bound students, he was one of 12 Senators who voted to oppose lowering interest rates for student loans. He lost: 72-12.

In June of 2006, on the Senate floor, pointing to a large photograph of his family he trumpeted, ...As you see here, and I think this is maybe the most important prop we’ll have during the entire debate, my wife and I have been married 47 years. We have 20 kids and grandkids. I'm really proud to say that in the recorded history of our family, we've never had a divorce or any kind of homosexual relationship. (Nothing cheerful about the Inhofes.) The Senate was debating the Federal Marriage Amendment, a proposed amendment to the Constitution of the United States. He lost: 49-48 on a cloture motion.

The Idiot from Oklahoma wants to drill for oil EVERYWHERE, (the contributions Inhofe has received from the energy and natural resource sector since taking office have exceeded one million dollars); he wants to make English the Official Language, complete with an English Proficiency Test for immigrants, and as a member of the Armed Services Committee, he was outraged by the outrage over the revelations of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. You get the picture.

But it's his recent comments at a town hall meeting, reported by the Tulsa World that garners him several advanced dementia points:

Gitmo: There has never been a case of torture there. The people there are treated better than in the federal prisons.

I don’t know why President Obama is obsessed with turning terrorists loose in America.

Despite the fact the President has requested more military spending: Barack Obama is disarming America. (A pet pork project of Inhofe's--a cannon to be built in OK was scrapped.)

I never dreamed I would see an administration try to disavow all the things that have made this country different from all others...

I have never seen so many things happening at one time so disheartening to America.

Every institution that has made this country the greatest nation in the world is under attack.

Those of you who think like I do hope this country can hang on another 16 months.

Will someone wipe the drool from Inhofe's chin and give the poor man another pudding cup?

GOP: Incentive to Kill

No Friend of the Elderly

Savannah, GA Health Rationing. Euthanasia. Death Panels. "Pull the plug on grandma." It's no wonder the Republicans get so frothy at the mouth over the current debate on Health care reform: they've already enacted into law motivation to kill seniors.

According to Newsweek writer Jacob Weisberg it's "been the Republican policy for years."

No less a Senator than Captain Chickensh*t himself, Charles Ernest ("Chuck") Grassley (R) of Iowa devised the death stimulus in the GOP 2001 tax cut. As Weisberg writes:

The estate-tax revision he championed will reduce the estate tax to zero next year. But when it expires at year's end, the tax will jump back up to its previous level of 55 percent. Grassley's exploding tax break has an entirely foreseeable, if unintended, consequence: it incentivizes ailing, elderly rich people to end their lives—paging Dr. Kevorkian—before midnight on Dec. 31, 2010. It also gives their children an incentive to sign DNR orders and switch off respirators in time for the deadline. This would be a great plot for a P. D. James novel if it weren't an actual piece of legislation.

With friends like these...

Birthers: F**k Off

Conspiracy Wingnuttery

Savannah, GA. In the so-called Birthers' Cloud Cuckoo land of perfectly sealed birth certificates, everyone has a copy of, or access to, their "original sealed birth certificate." To those who are Adoptees--either by one or both parents--know this is not the case. They have amended certificates. Amended certificates listing the adoptive parent(s) at the top of the "Certificate of Live Birth", not their birthparent(s). In fact, the birthparent(s) has/have been eliminated from the document.

Example: In Washington State, if a step-father adopts a child in their early teens, the new Certificate of Live Birth issued will list the step-father as simply the "father" and show the date of his marriage to the birthmother. As there may be a number of years between the child's birth and the birthmother's subsequent marriage to the step-father, the child has the onus of officially becoming an illegitimate birth in the eyes of the State, until such time of the new marriage. This could be a period of several years. This official, State-issued document is now blatantly inaccurate, insulting, and embarrassing.

My question to the conspiracy fetishists known as 'Birthers' is this: Are these individuals fully-fledged citizens? Are they some kind of demi-American because their birth certificate has been altered by the State?

If Birthers--and their GOP handlers--want to accomplish something good out of all this, press for the truth on ALL birth certificates, help the cause of ALL adoptees to finally, at last, be provided with verity, accuracy, and fact-based information about the most important day of their lives: The Day They Were Born.

The Quisling Right Wing

The Axis Powers

Savannah, GA. Our last President preferred engagement with the Muslim world through unilateral enmity, using guns, bombs and warfare. A group of wingnut al-Qaeda jihadists, lead by a wealthy member of a Saudi royal family killed over 3,000 in lower Manhattan and so Cheney attacked Iraq. Patriotic Americans questioning the reasoning behind this action were quickly vilified and branded traitorous. Chubby-Tubby Limbaugh, his 'anally poisoned' butt-boy Hannity and the Drama Queen Known As Beck, were quick, oh so quick--even eager--to attack fellow countrymen who didn't goose-step to the party line.

Now President Obama delivers a major policy speech in a major Muslim capitol, seeking comity among the less radicalized in the region, and the well-upholstered balloonicle Limbaugh, along with the talking pointed-heads on FOX have gone all Vidkun Quisling on us, collaborating with al-Qaeda in a mutual wish for American failure in these efforts of association to mutual benefit.

Their hatred for and shrill rhetoric against the best interests of America are shocking in their magnitude, if only for the sheer weight of the overlying hypocrisy.

Benedict Arnold, meet your 21st century counterpart: the Quisling Right Wing.

GOP and Rick Perry: Why Do They Hate America?

A New Confederacy of Dunces: THE REPUBLICAN SUCCESSIONIST ANTI-AMERICAN TREASON FLAG

Savannah, GA. Too wonderful for words.

Completely the courtesy of Hebiclens/WMxdesign's Photostream on flickr

Hysterical Bigots

They Just Don't Get It

Savannah, GA. This organization seeks to destroy marriage. Pure and simple. They are an abomination. They would willingly split up families, remove children from loving parents, deny equality within American society. For these miscreants, committed relationships between consenting adults must pass a litmus test of some Christer Purity.

Let us be clear: Followers of the evil god of Abraham may teach and preach wholly what they wish within their churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, tents and parking lots. Within their homes and apartments they may certainly raise their children to believe as they see fit. Welcome to America. What they may not do--and yet desperately seek--is to do the same in the public square. To reduce the "other" to secondary or demi-status. Too bad for them, but that's both outside of their homes and certainly, by virtue of definition, not their place of worship. Besides, I pay full taxes too; so I get to sit at the big table. Ride at the front of the bus. Enjoy equal rights under the law. Intolerant spiritual chauvinists, they can only see a binary universe; a sad existence of naughty and nice, black and white, right vs. wrong.

They are hysterical and bigoted.

TwitterTwaddle

It's total bullsh*t

Savannah, GA. Finally, for the utterly ego-challenged we have another way to waste time and socially network. Yet another tool and outlet for "All Things ME Right Now." Twitter: for the self-centered, self-obsessed, and their sycophants. As if the creepy adolescence of Facebook (writing on 'walls', 'poking' others, meaninglessly long lists of 'friends') weren't unserious enough, the collective self-importance of Twits can let many, many people know everything and anything their twitter-pated self-esteem deems share worthy. Twits are tweeting the trivial, the trifling, the truly incidental. As Katie Couric so eloquently put it, Nobody gives a rat's ass if I'm about to eat a Tuna fish sandwich.

You're not that important, folks.

The Bunghole

Rusty Limbaugh

Savannah, GA Often gripped by wretched rectal references, Jabba the Rush outdid himself the other day when he pinched a load on Prime Minister Gordon Brown's compliments of President Obama

So here is a full-fledged, committed global socialist praising the president of the United States for all of his achievements in the first 70 days -- a global socialist happy with the changes Obama has made, and 'you have changed America's relationship with the world,' which is why all of the losers that make up the protesters are breaking bank windows, but the slobbering, the slobbering - this guy, folks I'm telling you - if he keeps this up throughout the G20, Gordon Brown will come down with anal poisoning and may die from it.

Classy.

He may be number one with his regularly listening audience, but for most of us, he's simply number two.

Lifetime Portrait of Shakespeare Discovered

Lefteris Pitarakis/Associated Press

Wow.

Savannah, Ga. From the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust website: Professor Stanley Wells, Chairman of The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, and one of the world’s leading experts on Shakespearean studies, today announced the discovery of a portrait of William Shakespeare, which he believes is almost certainly the only authentic image of Shakespeare made from life.

Read on...

Note to GOP: Reagan is Dead

He's Not Coming Back

Savannah, GA. A focus and measure of a sane mind is living in the present. The unhinged dwell in the past, not content with learning the lessons to be found in history in an effort to move forward. Obstinate, mentally brittle, they cling to bygone days, to yesteryears, faithful the solutions of former times will solve the conundrums of the here and now. This is a description of the GOP of 2009. The perpetually tanned House Minority Leader John Boehner convinced every GOP member of the House (and eight Quisling Democrats) to support a spending freeze in the middle of a recession.

New York Times conservative columnist David Brooks said in an appearance on Sunday's "The Week with George Stephanopoulos" that it was "insane" for Congressional Republicans to propose such a thing.

"The problem with them and the problem with Limbaugh in terms of intellectual philosophy is they are stuck with Reagan. They are stuck with the idea that government is always the problem. A lot of Republicans up in Capitol Hill right now are calling for a spending freeze in a middle of a recession/depression. That is insane. But they are thinking the way they thought in 1982, if we can only think that way again, that is just insane. And there are a lot of Republicans like David Frum ... who are trying to say Reagan was right for his era, but it is time to move on. And there are just not a lot of them on Capitol Hill right now, and I think the party is looking for that kind of Republican."

Amazing.

Gods Bless The Daily Show

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

M - Th 11p / 10c

CNBC Gives Financial Advice

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Political Humor

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Thank you, Jon Stewart

Savannah, GA. It's been pointed out many times before, but bears repeating: what a comment on our society, and how sad for the media, when the truth only appears in a faux news* comedy program.

*not to be confused with the abomination and abortion of certitude that is "Fox News".

Limbaugh: Falloon Inflation

Bull's Eye

Savannah, GA. Last night, David Letterman nailed the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade Balloonicle that is Rush Limbaugh. (A man who really needs to stop channeling Dickens' Oliver "Please, sir, can I have some more?" at public eateries. The oxycontin chompin' Viagra poppin' artiste has clearly never met a pork chop he didn't like.)

Letterman refers to The Head of the GOP as a "bonehead" and openly wonders about Kingpin's open-at-the-top black silk shirt. (Easy, stomach.) Watch and enjoy.

As for RH, it's hard to take a sighted man seriously who has to pee by Braille.

Hat tip to The Huffington Post

CNBC: Clueless

Savannah, Ga. "You Can't Handle the Truth," said Col. Nathan R. Jessep in Rob Reiner's 1992 film, A Few Good Men. The same should be said of the vapid idiots on CNBC--those cretins tub-thumping for Wall Street, Chicago Traders, et alii. You know the type: the Clueless Wonders who got us into this economic mess. The ones who taught us that hard, honest, work doesn't get anyone ahead--gaming the system does.

But that's a digression.

Let's draw our attentions back to the mentally and economically challenged savants of CNBC when confronted with knowledgeable experts on the current situation:

Cue: CNBC Pointed Heads

Truly amazing, yes?

Hat tip to SLOG

Sam Adams Should Resign

photo: Ross William Hamilton

Portland Mayor Sam Adams

Savannah, Ga. Newly elected Portland, OR Mayor Sam Adams should resign his office. He has lost that ineffable quality so necessary for successful politics: Trustworthiness. The honesty and truthfulness exhibited as a Portland City Commissioner where Mr. Adams sought media publicity, scrutiny, column inches, was supplanted by mendacity over a personal relationship in his past, during his mayoral campaign. He lied to voters--and to that same media covering his election, on several occasions. A mentoring relationship with a young man had turned romantic once the 18-year-old legal threshold of consent had been crossed. Legal niceties aside, the articulate, bright, Mr. Adams knew full well that just because an action is licit, it doesn't of necessity make it right. A political reputation built on transparency and openness was set aside because candidate Adams felt the public couldn't handle the truth and elect him to office at the same time. Mr. Adams' assessment may be a sad certitude, but that same public has every prerogative to wonder what uncomfortable fact in the future this Mayor may also deem necessary to keep from them.

Sam Adams should resign.