Plymouth Direct / Harriet Carter: Sneaky, Sleazy, Online Merchant

"The 'As Seen on TV' Product Development Company"

Savannah, GA.  We've all seen the ubiquitous TV ads.  Smart Mop®, Urine Gone®, Mighty Putty®, Fast Brite®--these are just a few of the items this company hawks both on television and online.  What you may not know is this:  once you buy something from these folks (or one of their aliases), you become a likely member of a Very Special Club.  Plymouth Direct/Harriet Carter's little in-house Shopping Sprites take you (and your provided credit card information) under their collective wings and transform into eager volunteer Shopping Assistants, selecting unbidden items willy-nilly and shipping them to your home while freely charging your account.  Not unlike a gift that keeps on giving, this outfit is a TV/online purchase order that keeps on charging and shipping.  And not multiple selections of your original order, either--that would be an easy mistake--but new and different products from their clever inventory of "inventions."  Intuitively, they'll provide this service without any direct contact or prior permission.  Surreptitiously, they'll do this often after months have passed from your initial and only purchase. 

Plymouth Direct customers have been known to cancel an existing credit card, obtain a new account number and replacement ID, all in an effort to put an end to the random shipments of Stream Clean®, with Code Yellow™.  Thank you, Harriet Carter & plymouthdirect.com.

Always remember:  unsolicited merchandise is considered a gift throughout most of the U.S.  Thanks again, PD!

Pietist, Phony, Fake

reuters.com

Blinkered Historian; Drama Queen, Sociopath

Savannah, GA.  A life in the Theatre pays many surprising dividends. Not the least of which is the ability to recognize an overweening ego in a fellow actor.  The rehearsal hall can be very revealing in this regard.  In short order it becomes abundantly clear the modesty-challenged are in it only for themselves.  Collaboration is not a word in their vocabulary.  It is a sad spectacle.  We're now in the rehearsal stage of the Teapublican presidential nominating process.  What is true in the theatre is especially so respecting the juvenile named Newt now in the running for the nomination.

This boy-man will say anything so long as it self-promotes.  He is sneaky and slick.  Incapable of fidelity to vows, he'll lie directly into the lens of a camera or the eyes of a spouse.  He revels in the creation of chaos.  Challenge him, he'll call you a traitor.  Call him out, he'll spout whatever bullshit pops into his head.  He has no pole star; he utterly lacks any sense of empathy.  He is empty, no core. Gingrich has a many phases to the truth as the Moon has aspects of shadows to the Earth.

And this lunatic wishes to be our President.

Sarah: Shut Your Pie Hole

The Twit Who Tweets

Savannah, GA. When the thin-skinned diva isn't quitting her elected responsibilities, 'aw-shuckin' her blue collar roots, (my grandfather was a commercial fisherman for 40 years--purse seiner, not gill-netter; the step-father a pulp and paper mill worker--yet we all somehow managed to pronounce our final "g's"--note to Todd: I'm part Yup'ik, too) she's dragging her family before reality TV cameras only to complain about a lack of privacy, coyly showing up to upstage others at political events, and very quick to quip and criticize.  What she seems incapable of doing, however, is offering up any solution(s) to the problem(s) or issue(s) about which she bloviates.

Burning down the boathouse is the easy one, Sarah. Destruction comes with the strike of match. Constructive stick-with-it leadership is an elusive trait and a measure of true leadership so clearly beyond your grasp. Until such time you have some productive solutions beyond bromides posted to social networks, do America the blessed favor of keeping your gaping pie hole shut.

LGBT to Dems at Midterm: Fuggedaboutit

Fed Up With Being Taken for Granted

Savannah, GA. Do you hear us, Democrats? Your feckless, spineless approach to employment security, DADT--even marriage--has earned you the apathy you so justly deserve from gay and lesbian voters at these midterm elections. Our 'enthusiasm deficit' is the fruit of your lack of progress on the issues near and dear to us. You have no one to blame but yourselves. The timidity from most, and indifference from the rest, is the driving force behind our collective dispassion towards all things Democrat. Your dilly-dally/shilly-shally with your elected majorities in Congress has been a waste of time and has squandered the goodwill and Hope of 2008. Your palpable lack of courage has let all of the air out of the room.

And don't fool yourselves; make no mistake: we'll vote--just not for you.

Sue, Shirley, Sue

Bust Breitbart's Balls

Savannah, GA. As a fellow Georgian, I am so very proud of how Ms. Sherrod has handled this grotesque, right-wing, oddly Soviet-esque smear and defamation campaign against her. Shirley hasn't backed down and gone whimperingly into the night. She's fought back (and many, many citizens hope she continues to fight on in the courts) against the blatantly false aspersions claimed in an edited video (worthy of a Kremlin Wall doctored photograph), promulgated by the creature called Breitbart. I'm no attorney, but it would certainly appear to this civilian that the injuries and wrongs Ms. Sherrod has suffered at the hands of the mucosal Breitbart (and the unnamed 'source' who purportedly performed the sly and duplicitous video editing) are actionable conduct. Court action would also reveal Breibart's mysterious 'source'--standard procedure when Journalists(*cough*) splash about in the wading pool of fraud.

Shirley also had a few choice words for the NAACP which unceremoniously dropped any support of her once the video became the story-of-the-day for media-outlet-but-not-real-news-organization, FOX. The NAACP has since flip-flopped, issued an apology and moved on. A little learnin' is a good thing.

If anybody needs a lesson on properly handling racial accusations it's this White House. The Right says, "jump" and the Obama Administration says, "in which pair of shoes?" How many more times will this White House make the same mistake assuming their political adversaries are honorable and interested in trustworthy discourse?

Free Market Hogwash

Conservative Hypocrisy

Savannah, GA. Conservatives--lately teapublicans--love to trumpet the benefits of a free market sans Marxist (gasp!) Socialist (horrors!) governmental intervention.

We won't even address the bizarro-world/Cloud Cuckooland and altered reality of the so-called libertarians--those blinkered fools who especially like to post comments on the government R&D'd internet, or who won't admit that capitalism always resorts to government in the end: gotta have government laws to protect those free market business contracts and government courts to enforce the free market contract laws, and police to remove squatters from your free market land and water--those rights to something you didn't make, couldn't create (the water, the land) but were awarded nonetheless through an exchange by the (yet, again) government--but that's grist for another column, another day.

A truly free market would scare the panties off of these breathless conservatives. Shall we discuss farm subsidies? Or BP's (hell, every oil company's) liability limitations in the Gulf of Mexico? Conservatives are all over the free market like out-of-town Baptists in a whorehouse at convention time. Yet these 'all for one; all for me' Free Marketeers do love themselves a little squeeze of big, ole, bad, guv'ment when it comes to socializing risk and privatizing profit. They'll switch and pitch for the other team if it means some actual public money--all the while inveighing against socialist handouts. They'll quote their Ayn Rand and get all moist at the mention of the "invisible hand."

In an actual Free Market, the hailstorm that flattens your crop before harvest would ruin the farm. One bad year, one major disaster, and you lose the enterprise. That's the nature of the REAL Free Market at work. I have yet to hear one of these Teapublicans advocating anything close to true laissez faire capitalism. Like the little boy who, when told masturbating would make him go blind, opined, "Can I just do it until I need glasses?" These so-called conservatives want just enough socialism to keep themselves in the green. Little boys, indeed.

Greed does strange things to an otherwise orderly mind.

Soviet Arizona: Present Your Papers!

image courtesy of Village Voice

No Profiling. Not here. Not nohow.

Savannah, GA. Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer has signed into law an Orwellian measure compelling police to determine the legal immigration status of any individual they encounter. In typical Red-Fascist fashion, this--to quote the President here--"misguided" law of the land "threatens to undermine basic notions of fairness." But let's not be coy about this, Mr. President. This kind of reactionary law not only encourages wanton racial profiling--as if that fact alone were't bad enough--this measure places a tremendous amount of raw, arbitrary, power into the hands of the State. In reality, this law will force all citizens to keep such information handy as to determine they're legal to move about in AZ country. "Let me see your papers. All Hail Arizona."

Greene v. County of Sonoma et al.

Sue The Bastards

Savannah, GA. In the name of equal protection under the law, read this "issues & cases" item from the NCLR website:

Clay and his partner of 20 years, Harold, lived in California. Clay and Harold made diligent efforts to protect their legal rights, and had their legal paperwork in place—wills, powers of attorney, and medical directives, all naming each other. Harold was 88 years old and in frail medical condition, but still living at home with Clay, 77, who was in good health

One evening, Harold fell down the front steps of their home and was taken to the hospital. Based on their medical directives alone, Clay should have been consulted in Harold’s care from the first moment. Tragically, county and health care workers instead refused to allow Clay to see Harold in the hospital. The county then ultimately went one step further by isolating the couple from each other, placing the men in separate nursing homes.

Ignoring Clay’s significant role in Harold’s life, the county continued to treat Harold like he had no family and went to court seeking the power to make financial decisions on his behalf. Outrageously, the county represented to the judge that Clay was merely Harold’s “roommate.” The court denied their efforts, but did grant the county limited access to one of Harold’s bank accounts to pay for his care.

What happened next is even more chilling: without authority, without determining the value of Clay and Harold’s possessions accumulated over the course of their 20 years together or making any effort to determine which items belonged to whom, the county took everything Harold and Clay owned and auctioned off all of their belongings. Adding further insult to grave injury, the county removed Clay from his home and confined him to a nursing home against his will. The county workers then terminated Clay and Harold's lease and surrendered the home they had shared for many years to the landlord.

Three months after he was hospitalized, Harold died in the nursing home. Because of the county’s actions, Clay missed the final months he should have had with his partner of 20 years. Compounding this tragedy, Clay has literally nothing left of the home he had shared with Harold or the life he was living up until the day that Harold fell, because he has been unable to recover any of his property. The only memento Clay has is a photo album that Harold painstakingly put together for Clay during the last three months of his life.

With the help of a dedicated and persistent court-appointed attorney, Anne Dennis of Santa Rosa, Clay was finally released from the nursing home. Ms. Dennis, along with Stephen O'Neill and Margaret Flynn of Tarkington, O'Neill, Barrack & Chong, now represent Clay in a lawsuit against the county, the auction company, and the nursing home, with technical assistance from NCLR. A trial date has been set for July 16, 2010 in the Superior Court for the County of Sonoma.

Thanks to SLOG

It's All About the Math

The Cruel, Cruel, Heartless, World

Humorless

Savannah, GA. Aw. Inside the Reality Distortion Field that is Sarah Palin's singular universe, Seth MacFarlane has hurt her feelings. Fox's sunday night episode of "Family Guy" included a scene where Chris Griffin (voiced by Seth Green) dates a fellow student with Down Syndrome, named Ellen (voiced by Andrea Fay Friedman), who has a line, My dad’s an accountant and my mom is the former governor of Alaska.

Silence is never a virtue when it comes to the former Gov., so Professional Victim Sarah (voiced by Sarah Palin) dashed down the hall of her new employer--which had aired the episode--onto the set and into the welcoming arms of the testosterone-challenged O'Reilly in order to unload. This world is full of cruel, cold-hearted people who would do such a thing, said Palin.

Based on some of her own political and religious beliefs, Palin is no stranger to 'cruel and cold-hearted' territory. But that's another story.

What Sarah didn't know is that the actor referenced above, Ms. Friedman, is not only accomplished voice talent, but a person with Down Syndrome. (Andrea also works at a law firm between acting gigs, and has done so for the past 20 years.) Moreover, she is an individual with a great sense of humor.

I guess former Governor Palin does not have a sense of humor. I thought the line "I am the daughter of the former governor of Alaska" was very funny. I think the word is "sarcasm." In my family we think laughing is good. My parents raised me to have a sense of humor and to live a normal life. My mother did not carry me around under her arm like a loaf of French bread the way former Governor Palin carries her son Trig around looking for sympathy and votes.

How's that pouty, hurty, thing workin' out for ya, Palin?

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.