You're doing fine, Oklahoma!

As we inch ever closer to women having fewer rights in this country than they did 40 YEARS AGO, I have become gradually inured to the idiocy and cruelty of those in the anti-abortion movement.

So it came as no surprise to me that the Oklahoma legislature has decided that women (all women - without exception for rape victims, or those who have conceived through incest) seeking to have an abortion must not only submit to an ultrasound, as several other states already require, but that the doctor must position the ultrasound monitor where the woman can see it, and (in case she chooses not to look) the doctor must also describe the physical characteristics of the fetus, including its limbs and organs.

Pfft! Snooze. Why don’t you call me back, Oklahoma, when you pass a law requiring women to name the fetus, paint the nursery, and buy one of those really expensive strollers? Then we’ll talk. Until then, you’re fucking rank amateur female subjugators. You’re like the Bristol Palin of women hating. You’re all blah blah blah, don’t have sex if you aren’t rich enough to hire someone else to take care of your baby for you, sluts. I challenge you, Oklahoma, to get all medieval on us women, and I mean literally medieval. Like, pass a law that any woman wanting an abortion must be burned at the stake first. Then we’ll know you’re really serious about this oppression of women shit. Until you do that - fuck off, Oklahoma. Go stage another production of that nancy musical with your name in it that you love so much, you fucking pussies.

Except, uh-oh, it appears that Oklahoma took me up on my dare, readers. Because they just also passed a law that “protects doctors from malpractice suits if they decide not to inform the parents of a (sic) unborn baby that the fetus has birth defects. The intent of the bill is to prevent parents from later suing doctors who withhold information to try to influence them against having an abortion.”

Wow. Just fucking wow, Oklahoma. You got me. I mean, I wasn’t expecting you to come at us from quite this angle but I got to say…wow.

You’ve just legalized doctors lying to women so that doctors can make women’s medical decisions for them.

Ah…it’s fucking brilliant. I applaud you, and your stupid musical, too. And I expect you not to rest on your laurels Oklahoma, but to muck back in straightaway and start passing some legislation that will enable others to lie to us too, like pharmaceutical companies, and medical device manufacturers, and oh, fuck it, why not include the people who make tampons and douches and feminine hygiene sprays and Pamprin and condoms and spermicides and all that shit that women use to deal with that nasty fucking hole they got between their legs that separates them from all the real people walking the face of this earth? Because bitches be some dumb fucking bitches, bitches. And the fewer things they got to think about, the better.

¡Atienda, usted dumbass gabachos conservadores!

Latino activists have been using re-fried beans to smear swastikas on the windows of the Arizona state capitol building to demonstrate that in terms of fascism, extending healthcare benefits to the poor, and reining in corporate greed, really can’t hold a candle to enabling the police to detain anyone, at will, and demand proof of citizenship before being released. I mean, weren’t you paying attention during any of those World War 2 movies I know y’all love to watch? At the very least, you must remember that having one’s papers in order was a very big deal every week on Hogan’s Heroes, right?

Sooooo….maybe you should stop complaining about Latinos, because they seem to have a better understanding of history, government, and, um, what words mean, than you do.

They’re also funnier than you - admit it. I mean, you guys didn’t even know what teabagging meant - you had to have the media explain it to you. Whereas Latinos employed refried beans, a substance that A) they love, B) looks alarmingly like shit, and C) has been used against them via pejorative stereotypes for decades! It’s the perfect medium for their political statement, and what’s more, there’s none of that pesky sniggering over unintended gay-adjacent innuendo.

You’ve been outplayed, dumbasses, and if you had the sense god gave a gander, you’d slink back home and think about what’s really making you mad, and stop pretending it has anything to do with how much money the government spends.

And speaking of fascists, as a special bonus to those right-wing dumbasses out there who also happen to be Catholic, I challenge you to go home and also think really hard about this bureaucratic demi-god you’ve got lounging about in Vatican City. Are you aware that he’s basically hiding child molesters, and those that covered up the crimes of child-molesters, behind the drapes in the Basilica? Doesn’t that…bother you at all? Are you going to try to oust him, ever, or do you intend to give your highest spiritual leader on earth the kind of free pass you wouldn’t give to a grade school principal?

Also, Catholics: no more making fun of Scientologists, or Mormons, or any other sect in the Pantheon of Preposterous Beliefs. You’re officially ridiculous now, so sign over the great art and buildings and fade into history, already, wouldja? Thanks.

Everybody must get stoned

The recent 7.2 magnitude earthquake that hit the twin U.S. and Mexican border cities of Calexico and Mexicali on Easter Sunday raises two issues in my mind:

God must be hella pissed at Mexico and Mexico-adjacent Southern California! I’m not sure why he would miss LA and our even more godless and even more latte-swilling and lord knows, gayer neighbors to the north, and hit all the Catholics on the border! Maybe he’s trying to tell them that it’s time to dump that Nazi pope guy and found a church not based on buggering children. If so, he’s going about it exactly the wrong way. Everyone knows that the more you fuck with a people, the more they will loyal up to the worst kinds of leaders. Can I get an amen up in here on that?

And given the contrast between the two towns in terms of the kind of damage done, and the amount of casualties, I would say that it’s become clear that stringent building codes, and the enforcement of same, are clearly life- and property-savers in events such as this. The recent quakes in Haiti and Chile also prove this fact.

But what I want to know is, when are the teabaggers going to march in protest of these socialist building codes? We are being forced into a government-run safety program, financed with not only our tax dollars, but our take-home pay as well! It’s the nanny state again, people, telling us that we can’t be trusted to keep ourselves safe and healthy!

Okay, look, you know what? I am tired of this.

I mean it. I can’t do it anymore. I can’t keep doing this stupid sarcastic parody of someone who believes this idiocy.

So listen up, teabaggers, because I’m going to give it to you straight: building codes are yet another example of why you don’t know what the fuck you are talking about. I don't know what kind of wild west fantasy you think you're living in, but I can guarantee you that you are not really living there, and if you did, believe me, you would tuck tail and run back to the real USA, where the government tries its best to keep at bay the thousand different corporate fuckers who are trying to poison and/or cheat you and yours.  And just because the media is too chickenshit to say WTF when you assert that the government’s role is too keep us from doing bad things, not to make us do good things, doesn’t mean that your fact-free shit don’t stink.

Also, if you wouldn’t mind, I would like a pledge from each and every one of you that you will never go on Medicare, Medicaid, or receive any kind of VA-financed health care. Plus, a pledge to never show up at any public hospital emergency room, unless you have the means to pay in total for the care you receive.

In addition, if your spouse, children, mother or father, grandparents, or any other close family member receives any of the above services, you will need to remove them from that program, and pay for the equivalent level of health insurance for them as well.

I believe this requirement falls under “family values.”

When you have done this, then you may hurl your bricks. Until then, maybe you should think about what Jesus said about glass houses.

The best medicine

Well, I certainly hope that everyone who considered voting for Ole Whitey McCain in 2008 is breathing a huge sigh of relief with accompanying exaggerated forehead-wiping gesture. Whew! What a dodged bullet that was, eh?

And if you’re not sure what I’m talking about, please to check out Grumpy’s reaction to his party being unable to stop the health care reform bill:

"There will be no cooperation for the rest of the year…they have poisoned the well in what they've done and how they've done it."

It goes on in typical McCain keep-away-from-my-Gran-Torino fashion.

In response, Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid released the following statement.

Reid of course makes an excellent point about the revelation of McCain's brazen hypocrisy on the ol' "Country First" front.  I guess country only comes first when it's a Republican country.  Democratic countries can go fuck themselves, apparently.

"For someone who campaigned on ‘Country First’ and claims to take great pride in bipartisanship, it’s absolutely bizarre for Senator McCain to tell the American people he is going to take his ball and go home until the next election."

But Reid also, and in typical Democratic leadership fashion, misses the bullseye on one crucial point: the Republicans can't take their ball and go home, because IT'S NOT THEIR FUCKING BALL.  So, they can go home if they want to, but no one's going to chase after them and beg them to come back, nor is the scoring going to cease in their absence.

Yeah, the ball belongs to the Dems, and if the Republicans want to play, they have to play according to the rules of the playground, the most important of which are these:


1. Stop fucking whining about the rules.
2. Cop to your own fouls, if you want a call to go your way.


If you don't follow 1 & 2, then no one will ever want to pick you again, no matter how good you are.

Ah, but just like every thickheaded jackass bully you ever met in your childhood, the Republicans just can't seem to figure out why everyone is laughing at them.  They can only rage and stomp their feet and shout words whose meanings they do not understand, and then become even more enraged when they discover that their demonstrations have only made people laugh even louder.

And I think laughter is a perfectly fine reaction to have to all this.  Yes, it's troubling to hear their bench yell "Nigger" and "Faggot," and yes, it's heartbreaking to see them treat a sick man with a disrepect you wouldn't show to an organ grinder's monkey, but in the end, their histrionics have become so telling that it's just sorta sad.

The best was when Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) said on the floor of the House, "If ObamaCare passes, that free insurance card that’s in people’s pockets is gonna be as worthless as a Confederate dollar after the war between the states — the Great War of Yankee Aggression."

First of all, "free insurance card" is pretty funny.  Perhaps no one has ever hipped Broun to the fact that Congress is pretty much the only place where health insurance is still free. 

Secondly...The Great War of Yankee Agression.  You know, when the overly-agressive Yankee types tried to tell the Southern man what he could do with his own hard-earned darkies.

I told you it was sad.  Because they have no idea, no idea that we're onto them.  They think they're pretty clever, with all their talk of deficits, and future generations, and constitutionality, and interstate commerce, but really, it's all about the colored boy in their White House, giving away free health care to all his no-account jigaboo cousins.  It's all about health insurance welfare queens, my friends.  Because some people, and yes, they're mostly old white dudes, believe that every thing they have ever gotten they have earned, whereas every thing non-old white dudes have ever gotten has been handed to them, completely undeserved.  This is a necessary belief, if they are to continue to perpetuate a system that favors them, you understand.   They must believe it, in order for the planet they inhabit to remain in place, and not get knocked out of its orbit of presumption like some juiced-up Barry Bonds dinger.

So we may as well laugh at them, because there is certainly no talking to them.  How do you talk to someone who has free health care from the government, but doesn't think anyone else deserves it?  How do you talk to someone who believes that a seven hundred billion dollar mistake in the desert is a bargain, but that same amount spent on the health of our people is a scam of historic proportions?  How do you talk to someone who, when confronted with the tragedy of the thousands of people who die in this country every year due to lack of coverage, wants to quibble over how many thousand?

And in the end, we may as well laugh because this bill that they have demonized, does precious little to deserve its reputation.  It doesn't really help people who can not afford coverage at all.  It makes health care more expensive for many women.  Many of its most important reforms don't take place for years.  It's a step.  A very small step.  And very dearly paid for by those who fought for it, yes, but much more dearly paid for, of course, by those it disappoints.

Why does the Lone Star State hate our fifty stars?

Well, now that they’ve discovered a blonde, white woman from Texas who’s a terrorist, I certainly hope that the right wing will subject the Lone Star State to the same kind of pejoratives that they did California in the aftermath of the hoopla over John Walker Lindh, the “American Taliban,” AKA the “misguided Marin County hot-tubber.”

I can’t wait for all the televised hand-wringing about how the conservative Christian climate in Texas makes it a breeding ground for anti-American sentiment. I want Texas listed alongside of Syria and Iran as state sponsors of terrorism. I want to erect a fence around Texas to keep them from crossing the border into the real America. When we do allow them to travel, I want them to be searched, x-rayed, and body-scanned. I want to see their passports; I want their Lone Star beer confiscated if it exceeds 3 ounces, or is not contained in a clear ziplock bag. If someone in a cowboy hat prays to their “god” or goes to the bathroom while on a commercial flight, I want crazy hysterical fucking hell to break loose.

And I call for the government of Mexico to enforce the border along the Rio Grande with national troops, and to stop allowing Texans to cross over to trade guns for cheap hooch, illegal drugs, and sequined sombreros.

I want an apology from the governors of Texas from 1985, when Colleen LaRose (What is that, French?)was first arrested, to when she was allowed to escape their jurisdiction in 2005. That means you, Rick Perry, and you, George W. Bush. Please explain to the American people how you allowed the radicalization of Jihad Jane to happen on your watch.

And I call for the people in New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana to build new settlements along their borders with Texas, in order that Texans may be contained within their existing lands. And I call for patriotic Americans to populate these settlements in order to ensure that the country of the United States of America is not threatened by the growing menace of domestic Texan terrorism.

Lastly, I want to remind the American people that the Lone Star State did secede from our Union once, and had to be forcibly integrated back into these United States by order of a treaty of war. And it has not escaped my notice that Texans, including their terrorist-colluding Governor Perry have frequently expressed a desire to secede from us once again. And so I say unto them…now seems like a really good time to do that.

So, you know, feel free.

Oscars 2010: Let's face it, everything below the waist is kaput!

Whoever said there is no balm in Gilead wasn’t lulled into an insensible stupor last night by the 82nd Academy Awards telecast. Hey, world, got earthquakes? Tsunamis? Crazy teabaggers flying into buildings? Crazy teabaggers setting their houses on fire? Crazy teabaggers trying to storm the Pentagon? Crazy teabaggers refusing to admit that their central beef, i.e., government giveaways to the banks and corporations, can only be solved by more government and not less? Just curl up in front of the world’s most predictable media event and wash all that scary hopey changey stuff right on out of your hair.

The Oscars!® It’s good for what ails ya!®

The Oscars have long suffered by comparison to other award shoes, and have famously sought to distinguish themselves from them, so of course the show began with a musical number danced and sung by Neil Patrick Harris – which was a completely new and original idea if you do not count the last Tony Awards show. Or the last Emmy Awards. Oscar then followed that up by proceeding to reward exactly the same people it always rewards and be ridiculously overblown in all the same ways it always is.

Case in point is that a major acting award went to someone who does a lot of crap but who managed to pull off a respectable serious performance. And no, I’m not talking about Sandra Bullock. Jeff Bridges finally won the Oscar on his fifth try for what was basically Tender Mercies 2, and I’m fine with it even though he is frequently terrible because he did Starman, and I love Starman, and he was really really good in Starman. The academy, like Olympic judges, prefers performances with a high technical difficulty, which usually means that they’re unduly impressed when an actor plays a real person. Morgan Freeman must’ve thought he had it all sewed up then, since he played not just a real person, but a real black person. A real, cool, black person – everything Hollywood loves, in theory. But I think the voters realized that Bridges, the Dude, was not, you know, getting any younger, and it was time for him to have his little statue.

Similarly, Sandra Bullock won for Steel Magnolias 2 under the Ron Howard Provision of academy voting, which is, if you stick around long enough and don’t rock the boat and do reliable box office, you will be rewarded, even if your work is mediocre.

And so, blah blah blah, predictable awards, predictable witty banter, predictable self-effacing visual humiliation of Ben Stiller, predictable terrible dance number in which the dancers’ interpretation of the song tends toward the hilariously literal…

The only mild surprise was that The Hurt Locker managed to hang onto what everybody figured it would get, in spite of a last minute whispering campaign against the filmmakers (financed by, oh, I don’t know, the producers of Inglorious Basterds, maybe?) and a rather suspiciously-timed lawsuit filed by one of the soldiers that the screenwriter interviewed before he wrote the script. But the Academy was rather obviously prepared for their first female Best Director, as they had long time bridesmaid Barbra Streisand there to hand over the award for which she was at one time herself famously snubbed. Also, they had the band poised to play “I Am Woman,” because hey, that’s not dated and cheesey!

Another predictable result of the Oscars was Japan’s reaction today to the Best Documentary win. The film, The Cove, tells the story of a small Japanese town and their horrific and secretive culling of the local dolphin population for food. If you’ve never seen film of what they do, they trap, drown, and spear the dolphins in numbers sufficient to turn the water of the cove completely red with blood. It’s barbaric and ugly, to say the least, and Japan has shut their eyes to it for years, saying that, essentially, we should respect the practice because it is a very old practice. As if that makes it okay.

I’m not sure why, if they’re so miffed and defensive, they don’t simply point out the incredible hypocrisy of our position. After all, lambs are cute. Pigs are intelligent. What exactly is the basis of our objection to this? There’s nothing going on in that cove that doesn’t happen on the kill floor in slaughterhouses all over the United States in every single minute of every single day.

You know what else is predictable? That there will be two reactions to this part of my post: 1. crickets, or 2. but I love bacon! Man, that shit is tired.

So go at it. I’ll be in the bar, trying to replicate that insensible stupor.

Grating expectations

According to a new study, that tracked fifty thousand cell phone users through logging their locations when calls were made, you could write an algorithm that would predict the current location of any particular person with 93% accuracy.


Yeah, right. You know what this really means? That people who are on their fucking phones all the time are unimaginative slaves to tedium. What the fuck else is new?

I object to being judged based on such a selective sample, mostly because I already live in a city that admittedly loves to hear itself talk, especially via the latest technology. In fact, I would pay cash money for someone to do a study that would consist of walking up to people who are on the phone in public and shaking them silly and yelling “Who the fuck could you possibly need to talk to for 18 hours out of every single fucking day?”

Come to think of it, fuck the study. That sounds like an awesome reality show to me. Someone get my agent on the phone.

Not that we aren’t a highly predictable species, because we are – although if you were paying attention, you might have noticed that something fairly unpredictable happened last night.

An American skater won the men’s figure skating gold medal, even though he didn’t attempt a quadruple jump – a Russian skater (barely) landed a quad, and didn’t win! Yes, it was a victory for skating over jumping, which was an unexpected direction for the stodgy and normally predictable Olympic judges. Of course, this unexpected event was immediately followed by an eminently predictable Russian response from silver medal consolation prize winner Plushenko and his coach, who ventured that any male skater who couldn’t land a quadruple jump was, essentially, a fag – a fine statement from a dude who minced and air-kissed his way through a long program so pandering and cutesy that it made Johnny Weir’s routine look like Don Imus on ice.

Unlike those conservatives who have been in a perpetually apoplectic state since November of 2008, I welcome the occasional bout of unpredictability. I voted for change not just as a catchy slogan, but as an actual means of progression toward a goal. Unfortunately, it’s been lean times for the unexpected, especially in the good ole’ US of A.

I mean, it’s all wealthy powerful male role models apologizing for shagging skanks here, and delusional religious meatheads dictating America’s education curriculum there. Yawn. Total snoozeville - although I have to say I never have figured out why conservative types home-school their kids, I mean, except, I guess, unless they’re worried about their kids forming opinions about racial minorities based on their own experience, instead of their parents’ rabid pronouncements. But no doubt conservatives own the public school curriculum. The only soupçon of progressive a kid in America is likely to get is from the teacher her/himself, who is, after all, still a mammal, and is still capable of catching the stench of bullshit wafting off his or her teaching materials.

But make no mistake, the course we are currently on, wherein progressives become disillusioned with the man they voted into office because he has to, after all, be president of a country wherein not everyone is as progressive as they, was predictable. Progressives deserted Clinton in droves in his first year in office, vowing to NEVER VOTE AGAIN! Fucking pussy-ass so-called liberals give liberals a bad name, if you ask me. I mean, I’m grateful that they delude themselves long enough to get to the polls for a Democratic presidential candidate, but their subsequent four-year-long case of the political vapors has become quite tedious, and it also makes me want to upchuck on their Shepard Fairey collectibles. I long for them to buck the fuck up, but I know in my heart it will never happen.

And adding to the general atmosphere of been there, done that thing, is the omnipresent shit-for-brains conservative Washington Post columnist writing a smug, condescending and factually-challenged column about how smug, condescending, and untruthful liberals are. Dang! If I had a dime for every time I’ve read one of those in the last year, I could buy myself a latte and start on to swillin’ it.

Also predictable? That some right-wing-fed looney bird, no doubt feeling the flames of white man entitlement like the heat from a thousand white-hot suns, would attack hapless federal employees in their cubicles. It’s been done before, remember? And conservatives failed then, and will fail now, to convincingly distance themselves from the murderer. In other words, Joe Stack is NOT Joe 6-pack. Joe 6-pack works in a goddamn cubicle at the Austin office of the IRS, assholes.

But the all-time queen of the clockwork reactionary is, of course, former governor Sarah Palin. As appalling as it is for such a prominent political figure to openly mock the sincere and even desperate dreams of the majority of Americans, as the former governor did when she fake-asked Obama voters “how’s that hopey, changey stuff workin’ out?”, it is, at the same time, neither surprising that she did it, nor that she proclaimed herself a proud American in the next breath with a straight face.

Of course I have lots of sympathy for anyone trying to raise a mentally disabled child, because I think no other group of Americans is more consistently discriminated against.

Hopefully the former governor will forgive my liberal stance on that subject.

I also personally feel that when the soup goes bad, you need to stop serving it up. So, put a rubber on it, Todd, because Mother Nature is telling you that you’re done. You’re in your forties, you have five kids now – which seems to me to be more than sufficient - and besides, your offspring have demonstrated that they’re more than capable of picking up where you left off.

It’s a shame that pimping out your children for praise while also insisting that they remain off limits to criticism doesn’t pay sufficiently to keep the Palins in ammo and snowmobiles, because without a doubt it is there that the former governor’s talents truly lie. Palin has recently appointed herself the arbiter of all things retard, and apparently has no compunction regarding the hypocrisy of using political affiliation as the determining factor in her pronouncements on acceptable use of the term.

And so, predictably, the Palin retard alarm went off this week when an episode of the network cartoon “Family Guy” featured a character with Down syndrome who identified herself in the script as a child of the “former governor of Alaska.” Palin described her reaction to the line as feeling like a “kick in the gut.”

Predictable results ensued. Right and left talk-show yammerers lined up and duked it out, no doubt for significant personal compensation, although no actual edification on the subject was produced.

Until yesterday, when, quite unexpectedly, the actress who played the character, and who has Down syndrome herself, weighed in:

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.

I don’t know if Palin felt a kick in the gut when she read what someone who is actually “retarded” thinks of her, but if not, I certainly volunteer to fly to Alaska and deliver one.

How you like me now?

I have been mulling President Obama's recent State of the Union speech, and the controversy over Justice Alito mouthing the words "not true" after Obama criticized the recent court ruling granting corporations "free speech" rights to use unlimited sums to influence elections.

My feelings about the ruling I've already made known, but what about the feathers that this incident has ruffled in Washington?

Some say that by, in effect, talking back to the president, Justice Alito has damaged the veneer of SCOTUS political neutrality.

Others say that Obama committed a grave breach of etiquette by criticizing the ruling in a forum wherein the justices could not defend themselves.

I say WHO GIVES A GOOD GODDAMN? Oh, and also SHUT THE FUCK UP YOU FUCKING IRRELEVANT HACKS.

It's just so typical of our self-important legislators, and the press that enables them, that this became such a huge story. As if their make-believe world of "esteemed colleagues" and decorative judicial gold sleeve bars matters one tiny fucking bit now, or ever did.

The SCOTUS decision was recent, it was huge, and it matters a lot to the business of the American people. And oh, look, it just so happens that Obama has a pretty important speech to give wherein he's supposed to inform the American people what the fuck is going down right now in the country and uh-oh! Too bad! He can't talk about the decision because 3 of the dudes who voted for it are in the room. Once again the rights of the people have been thwarted by the false propriety of a room full of bastards who hate each other so much that one side wouldn't piss on the other if it were on fire.*

Well, here's my message to the pitiful Roman circus that we call the fourth estate: stop fucking talking about yourselves! No one gives a shit about your insular world and its inane code of conduct! It's not your job to tsk tsk over meaningless protocol and fret about who was verbally served. That's why we have rappers.

And it's all very well and good for the press to look down their noses on entertainment fare like The Housewives of New Jersey, but let me tell you readers, before the next season starts they'd better take a long look in the mirror and decide exactly what it is that distinguishes them from a room full of preening ignoramuses obsessed with who said what about who and who does she think she is, anyway. Because the distinctions are thin on the ground, guys, and the perceived slight is no basis for a system of government.

And before SCOTUS and its defenders decide to continue crowing about this veneer of neutrality, I would like to point out what motherfucking veneer of neutrality? I mean, huh? If there is a veneer, that is one thin mamajama veneer. I mean, the last time I saw anything as thin as the Supreme Court's veneer of neutrality, it was styling Nicole Richie for the red carpet.

As far as all future communications from our government go, I would like to suggest that they take the form of Obama's recent address to the Republican Cry-baby Club. Because if we stop with all the holy holy Washington protocol and let them go at Obama over policy in a real battle of the wits, guess who dunks on them all day long?

And so yeah, I think it's great that the president is doing the town halls on job creation blah blah blah. But I would like to see him face those who don't think that the perpetrators of the crimes on 9/11 should be tried in the U.S. justice system.

I would like to see him take it to that hack Giuliani, who you just know would be SO on board for a New York trial if it had been proposed by the Bush administration.

I would like to see him smack down Lindsey Graham, and ask him why exactly he hates the U.S. justice system so much.

I would like to see him ask Joe Lieberman what it is about our policies regarding Israel that he doesn't want publicly examined.

Okay, that last one will never happen, but still, a gal can dream, can't she?

And I would like to offer the people of New York - if they really really feel like they can't stand the heat of a trial - the venue of the Los Angeles Staples Center.

Because LA knows security. We know celebrity security. We know fucking hip hop security, which is the most serious security in the world. We do the Oscars. We do the Grammys. We did Michael Jackson's funeral, for fuck's sake, we can do the trial of some self-important deluded Kuwaiti goon. Of course, they'll have to work around the Lakers schedule, but we can give the trial some of the Clippers' slots. They won't mind.

*Unless there was a primary challenger threatening to drive the party even further from center.

Me and Bobby McGee

I can appreciate a true Libertarian when I meet one. That is, I can appreciate that they are vain, cruel, naive, self-centered assholes.

But a true Libertarian is a rare creature, thank god. Usually you only meet the fake ones that attend protest meetings with badly-spelled and punctuated placards, or troll the internet armed only with a Caps Lock button and list of words whose meanings they are not so familar with, like "socialism."

True Libertarians would have taken to the streets yesterday with spittle-flecked lips and pitchforks after the US Supreme Court's absolutely fucking stunning decision to negate a century of precedent and lawmaking when they elevated the rights of corporations above those of American citizens. But the silence from those who supposedly value liberty above all was pervasive, revealing that 99% of those tea-bagging jerks are actually Republicans who want, above all, to see the GOP dominate our government, no matter what the fuck they get themselves up to. And dominate the Republicans will, as it is the party of corporate ass ponies that are poised to benefit the most from SCOTUS's latest valentine to corporate America.

See, what these so-called Libertarians never seem to get through their thick skulls is that less restriction does not always equal more freedom. This is a concept that most 4-year-olds grasp easily, as they ponder what life would be like outside the safety of their parents' influence. Freedom may be what we all want, but other people's freedom tends to fuck you in the ass, don't it? It's, um, kind of a basic concept of civilization that you trade some measure of your own liberty in exchange for the freedom to be able to walk down the street without being Shanghaied into a cage match with Tina Turner in a mohawk and chain mail.

Corporations are not people, and money is not speech. I may be allowed to tell a cop what I think of him (unless I'm a black man standing in my own house, of course), but I'm not allowed to give him a fifty as a means of persuasion. If you equate money with speech, then every corporation on Wall Street has the voices of a billion people, except it's not the voices of a billion people really, it's one voice, a billion times louder than yours or mine, and it only cares about one thing: going about its way unfettered from concerns about the quality of our air, or the price of our utilities, or the passability of our roads and bridges. It doesn't care about our health, our wages, our working conditions or whether our kids go to school or what they learn. It wants the path of least resistance, no matter what the cost to us. It only wants to grow and amass more wealth and grow some more. And it owns us, completely, because it owns the people who have to win campaigns in order to write our laws.

And, as for the cherry of cynicism on top of the sundae of doom, this ruling obliterates John McCain's supposed life's work, McCain-Feingold's campaign finance reform. One would think that the ruination in one fell swoop of all that he claimed to care about would have elicited an immediate reaction from the self-proclaimed reformer, but McCain was too busy trying to prevent others from affording a health care plan one tenth as good as the one he enjoys for free to bother commenting. And then, when he did comment, his disappointment was less than convincing. Perhaps McCain is envisioning a future wherein he can run for higher office again, this time with an unconstrained corporate bankroll. Well, the jokes on you, old man. As far as your party leaders are concerned, from now on, non-centerfolds need not apply.

I remember when I was a little kid, listening to my Dad playing Janis Joplin singing "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose." I remember being a bit shocked at that assertion. I remember thinking "Oh, I hope not." But maybe songwriter Kristofferson knew something we still haven't figured out. Maybe the whole damn thing has to burn to the ground before we can finally understand what makes it worth the trouble. I'm not saying I got nothing. To the extent that I have collected money, I did it to ease my life, and to enable its longevity. And when my government takes my money from me, I hope, I try my best to ensure, that it is with that same goal in mind for my countrymen. I wish we all felt the same way. It seems like such a simple thing to want. How, I wonder, how, from where we started, how the fuck did we get here?

Self-satisfaction guaranteed

The ink was barely dry on Haiti's "you're fucked again!" certificate before the usual cadre of Christian meatheads started in with a chorus of victim-blaming. Those guys remind me of those gorgeous Italian and French actresses that starred in some American films in the '50s even though they couldn't speak English - they learned their lines phonetically, and delivered them on cue, but they had no idea what they were saying. Thus, useless bags of flesh like Pat Robertson either have clue zero what Jesus Christ was on about, or they're all liars who have somehow convinced themselves that they alone are immune to the punishment that god metes out to all others, ostensibly at their request. The worst part is that it's not even worth it to discover which circumstance is the more likely, because they're both pretty equally terrible.

If I were a Christian and believed that Jesus was the Son of God, I might take some comfort in the thought that if Christ were returning some day, the odds of him coming back through Haiti - probably number three with a bullet on the list of Top Ten Desperate Hellholes on the Face of the Earth - are pretty damn good. So condemn away, preachers, because it's well known that Jesus had a huge hard-on for those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, and an appetite for righteousness is pretty much the only commodity that Haiti has in abundance. In fact, I believe it's what their GDP is currently based upon.

It will come as no surprise to my readers that I am not a Christian, however, and so I tend to look at the situation in a more psychological context. If the wretched people of Haiti can be made to appear somehow deserving of their plight, then it's just that much easier for us to plunk down five easy payments of $19.99 each for Ab Circle Pro, an amazing fitness breakthrough that will banish those love handles in 30 days or your money back! It's in our nature, I guess, to want the universe to make some sense, and if the Haitians are all evil voodoo whitey-haters, then a 7.0 nation leveler TOTALLY makes sense, brah.

No doubt the universe is a crazy-ass place. I mean, you don't have to be stoned (although, as usual, let me emphasize that it wouldn't hurt) to quickly become overwhelmed with confusion and angst when contemplating the question "Of all possible worlds, why this one?" - especially if you happen to be watching Bridezillas at the same time. Every time I ponder the profusion of professional wrestling organizations, or the latest hipster fashion trend, I can't help but marvel at the incomprehensibly trivial nature of the majority of our endeavors.

Maybe Jesus, if he truly lived and said all those things, felt the same way. Maybe that's why he reckoned that anyone asking for your shirt might as well have your coat, too. I would never recommend such a drastic liquidation of one's wardrobe; the best that could be said about me, I suppose, is that I am on board with spreading the wealth around - although that only puts me at the 53rd percentile. Not exactly illuminated company.

And look, no one's asking you to personally donate any of your hard-earned bucks to the citizens of Haiti. You can decide that they're all heathen jigaboo thugs, or that our government will send aid using your tax dollars anyway, or that you're suffering already in this tight economy and don't have any dough to spare. That's cool. It's not my business what you do with your money. So, like I said, no one's forcing you to lend a hand up, although, if you ask me, membership in the human race should require, at bare minimum, not kicking them when they're on the ground. I'm looking at you, Reverend.

Also, I will admit that after spending the better part of an hour this morning shopping for a pair of shoes I don't really need at DSW before my $5 birthday discount could expire, I suddenly hit a wall of shame I could neither scale nor circumvent. So maybe the Haitians deserve at least what I would spend on a pair of last year's strappy sandals, no?

After all, it is tax deductible.

Talking to Twins

Those of you who have followed me for a while know that I am a huge fan of The Watson Twins. A few months ago, I was privileged enough to be invited to hear a (mostly final) mix of their new album, Talking to You, Talking to Me.

It's an amazing breakthrough album for the gals, and one of my favorite songs from it is Today's Top Tune on KCRW. Download it for free!

E pluribus stupid

In “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,” Jared Diamond examines the decisions that various cultures have made that have led to their own extinction. He famously wonders what went through the mind of the guy who cut down the last tree on Easter Island - if you ask me it was probably something about how his god had ordained that man would have dominion over the Earth.

He also quotes one of the survivors of the Rwandan genocide, who explains the killings in his village, including the murder of his wife and four of his children, this way:

“The people whose children had to walk barefoot to school killed the people who could buy shoes for [their children.]”

Readers, if that statement doesn’t send chills down your spine, then you haven’t been watching enough Fox News.

The genocide in Rwanda wasn’t just a centuries-old tribal conflict taken to its terrifyingly logical extreme, it was also a culture war; a war in which politicians, motivated by a desire to stay in power, urged the Hutu majority to rise up against the Tutsi, a tribe they characterized as privileged snobs who were attempting to take over and impose their elitist agenda on the hardworking regular Joe Hutus.

Yes, if the Tutsis had lattes, they would have been swilling them. Consider them the liberal elite in this cautionary tale. And while you’re at it, consider that Rwanda was a land in which a growing populace found itself in constant competition with each other for a dwindling amount of resources: money, land, food, jobs. In a situation like that, it became advantageous for the rulers to designate one group as an oppressive “other,” and set about to blame the country’s problems on that other, rather than work together to sacrifice and conserve what resources they had, and to agree on methods to renew resources for the future.

Got the chills yet?

And once all the Tutsis in any particular village had been rounded up and killed, the mobs would then turn their machetes on fellow Hutus that they didn’t like: those who owned land or cattle that they coveted, those who were educated in far-off places…

Those whose children wore shoes to school.

Apparently the leaders of Rwanda had to do little more than point and say “he thinks he’s better than you,” for gangs of murderers to turn and converge with a force deadly enough to rank Rwanda as second only to Cambodia in terms of percentage of the populace killed by their own countrymen since the end of WW2.

Now, I’m not, I swear, attempting to force some overworked comparison down your throat. I’m not saying that what happened there could happen here. I’m just saying that…well…I’m just saying.

I’m just saying that, as Jon Stewart pointed out, one of the most successful contributors on Fox News, Gretchen Carlson, attended Oxford, graduated from Stanford with distinction, plays classical violin, and yet on television, she pretends that she doesn’t know what the word “czar” means. She also emphasizes that she has to Google economic terms in order to understand them. Now, why would she do that? Why would someone who is paid to talk about politics and policy on television want to behave as though the only thing she brings to the table is the ability to navigate a QWERTY? Is it because she understands that it wouldn’t do to appear to have more going on upstairs than the average viewer of her network?

Unfortunately, Fox News isn’t alone in fetishizing ignorance. I mean, come on, we live in a country where we are gleefully admonished for being dumber than 5th graders by a man who's made his fortune unironically espousing the charms of living a life of unapologetic ignorance and bigotry.

Even on NPR, a news organization so obsessed with neutrality that even their test of the emergency broadcast system is followed by an opposing point of view, in a story about an “emerging leader of the Dallas Tea Party,” that "leader" was given whole minutes of national airtime to enlighten us with the following explanation of why Obama “annoys” them:

"You know, it's like I wake up every morning, and there's something new on the news that's upsetting that I read about that he does. I mean, if you said, Lorie, list for me everything that he has done that has upset you since he's become president, I don't think there's any way I could list it all. There's so much. You know, the fact that he apologizes for our country every time he goes overseas. I don't know that I've ever heard him say anything good about America. If you look at the way he speaks, the way you - he talks about our country, if you look at the programs and the things he tries to put into place, it really appears that he does not love our country like most Americans do, and like past presidents do."

And the reporter interviewing this emerging political "leader" responds by saying what, do you think?

a. Can you give an example of an Obama administration policy that you oppose and tell us why you oppose it?

b. When, or during what overseas speech, did you feel that Obama was apologizing for our country?

c. Other presidents have advocated policies very similar to Obama’s. What specifically has he done that you would characterize him as not loving his country?

d. Nothing.

If you guessed “d,” you’d be right. The reporter had nothing to say. When faced with an alarmingly colossal show of ignorance about things that really sort of matter from someone they themselves refer to as a local political leader, they opted not to follow up. Why? Did he think that he had stumbled into some kind of political Special Olympics, where everyone gets to win?

Readers, I had dared to believe that the Age of Ignoramus might be on the wane. After drinking deeply from the golden chalice of stupid for eight long years, I thought that maybe, MAYBE we had finally figured out that “CEO presidents” were about as swift as most CEOs are in real life – which is to say, pretty fucking stupid. I mean, look at the U.S. auto company CEOs. In a market where American consumers are clamoring for innovative vehicles such as Toyota Priuses and Smart cars, our home-grown titans of industry decide it’s time to…rerelease the Ford Fiesta?

And I dared to think we were on the intellectual mend because at least that willfully moronic Mike Huckabee had been defeated for the 2008 presidential nomination. I dared because while I believed McCain to be an unabashed butt boy for unregulated capitalism disguised as a reformer who gives a shit about anyone other than himself, at least he wasn’t running on a platform of God Hates Book Learnin’.

But I had dared too soon. Because McCain brought to the national stage a running mate so dim that she made the Three Stooges look like Nobel Prize Winners - and not Peace Prize winners, either – I mean one of the hard prizes. The very personification of the blind, the halt, and the lame, this woman captured the heart of about half of America. Unfortunately, it’s the half that’s armed.

Just like her intellectual doppelganger George W. Bush, the jokes about the stupidity of Palin could not compete with the reality that assaulted us like so many drunken baby daddies every time she opened her mouth. Palin’s mental shortcomings were not so much epitomized by her failure to, at Katie Couric’s urging, name one publication that she read, but by the fact that she later characterized the query as a “gotcha” question.

Stupid people love Palin, and it’s hard to imagine a reason why other than she makes them feel less stupid. She also tells them that their dumb-ass religious bigotry is straight from the mouth of God. You can just imagine how relieved they must feel, hearing that! She’s also the living embodiment of the notion that it’s okay to suckle at the government teat, as long as you simultaneously condemn everyone else who wouldn’t mind a squirt or two.

Yes, it’s the numbskull triple-play, the George W. Bush hat trick, and it hasn’t gone out of style at all, not even close.

Tammany Hall was a corrupt political organization that ruled New York City for decades, and it was the poor that suffered under it the most. But Tammany leaders continued to be elected by the very people they victimized. The same men who let the docks rot and the buildings collapse and the dead horses pile up in the streets, also came down into the slums before every election, and handed out pennies and glasses of beer. And all the Joe Six-Tankards decided that hey, those politician guys might not be so bad after all. They understood their needs. They were just like them: concerned about negroes being able to marry, worried about illegal Irish immigrants taking over their culture, and convinced that the Italians were religious extremists beholden to a foreign leader who wanted them murdered in their beds.

And so it goes, readers. So it motherfucking goes. For all our steps forward technologically, we still fall for the same shill every goddamn time.

We’re about to cut down the last tree on our own big Easter Island, but we don’t care, because we heard somewhere that those liberal pro-tree scientists are conspiring to exaggerate the benefits of trees, anyway.

Peace On Earth

It couldn't hurt.

An Immodest Proposal

Wow, seems like you can’t swing a disabled child whose lifetime insurance coverage has been maxed out in this country without hitting some pundit whose take on health insurance reform is based on the notion that using tax dollars to fund universal coverage is akin to having his pocket picked by some deadbeat who is too poor (read lazy) to buy insurance for himself.

I couldn’t agree more. And if US citizens are going to continue to die because they can’t afford to buy the health care their body needs, then excuse me, but they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.

But believe me, the cost of health care is peanuts compared to what US taxpayers are paying to support a system that hasn’t been relevant to their own lives for many, many years. But because the operating budget is primarily comprised of state and local dollars, and only about ten percent on average comes from the federal government, it’s difficult to get the national pundits worked up enough to lobby for its demise.

Of course I’m talking about public education.

Like most responsible adults, I don’t have children. And I fail to see why I should have my pocket picked to pay for the progeny of those less fiscally conscientious than I.

Look readers, I need roads to drive on. I need this fakakta LA freeway system improved so that I can get to work faster. I need the FAA to get its shit together before I have to do any more holiday flying. I need the CDC to get me some of that swine flu vaccine. I need farming subsidies that will quit propping up livestock feed and instead bring down the price of the things I eat, and I really, really, need more public radio and television funding so I don’t have to sit through so many pledge drives.

And while I’m at it, I would like a nice subsidy on a new football stadium so that LA can attract an NFL team, and local meatheads will stay contained in their homes and sports bars on Sunday and stay out of the public places that I like to frequent for one goddamn idiot-free day a week if that’s not too much to ask.

Those are the things I need. And yet my money is going toward an educational system I don’t need anymore, and couldn’t be admitted to even if I did. Say, for instance, I should discover that algebra is useful in life. Well, I’ve forgotten algebra. It’s not my fault. I only have so much memory available, after all, and operating my TV/DVR is not getting easy easier. So, in order to make room in my brain, algebra had to be sacrificed, along with chemistry, world capitals, and pre-WW2 European heads of state. That’s right readers, Franz Ferdinand is just a indie band to me. So what would happen if I showed up at my local high school, and asked for an algebra refresher? I mean, after I was tackled to the ground, frisked, and held for observation? Why, they’d tell me to take a hike, of course, and I’d have to find a way to pay for algebra myself. Whereas, any snot-nosed brat with a pencil and a zip code can walk into their own local completely free-of-charge school and avail him or herself of thirteen years of education that is no longer offered to me – and all on my dime.

So how is that fair? I’m the responsible one. I’m the one not taking off work to watch some badly-performed recital or some soccer game in which one would be hard pressed to determine which side were the more untalented. I’m the one who uses my sick days when I’m sick, and not because my kid’s day care isn’t insured for a fever above 99 degrees. Let’s just say it - I’m the one who figured out how birth control works, and for that I am punished not only with the theft of untold thousands of dollars from my hard-earned salary, but also by having to hear, year after tedious year, about how little good my money is doing, and how generally stupid those ungrateful brats are for the passport to the good life that I am subsidizing for them.

Well, I’m finished being gracious about the whole goddamn thing. Let the fucking rugrats pay for their own goddamn education, and if they can’t, let their parents do it for them. And until they do, I don’t want to hear one more person with children in public school complain about universal health coverage, or unemployment assistance, or the stimulus package, or even the goddamn price of a fucking postage stamp. You free public education people have gotten away with the biggest fucking socialist scam ever pulled on the fine and patient and totally non-hypocritical American public, and I don’t want to hear another peep out of you.

#25 Humorless Blogger

Much has been made in the last couple of weeks of the iPhone app released by PepsiCo’s AMP “energy drink,” and the feminists whose criticism of it caused it to be removed. The app instructed men on how to “score” with 24 different “types” of women by supplying them with pick-up lines tailored to each “type.” It also provided practical information, such as nearby hotels where the “scoring” could take place, and finally, it encouraged men to share a "brag list" that contained the details of the “scoring” via that preferred medium of self-important douchebags everywhere: Twitter.

AMP’s irony-free and apparently straight-faced “apology” was also delivered via Twitter: “Our app tried 2 show the humorous lengths guys go 2 pick up women. We apologize if it’s in bad taste and appreciate your feedback.”

Yes, it’s the classic “I’m sorry if you’re offended” non-apology apology, delivered with preposition-dropping and character-conserving numerical lol speak.

Who could ask for anything more? Surely not the bonerkill feminists, who had criticized the app by once again advancing the tired argument that women were being objectified.

Yes, that old chestnut.

Readers, I would never suggest anything so esoteric and also impossible to prove, statistically. Besides, it’s not as if we’re still living in the ‘80s, when women had to sleep with dogs to gain access to cheap beer. This is the 21st century - an enlightened, post-feminist era when you don’t have to be a GOP broodmare to come terrifyingly close to being terrifying close to the employment of the 25th amendment, but it sure helps.

My argument against AMP, I mean, besides that I find the term “energy drink” to be a hilariously obvious attempt by marketing men to sell a cultural zeitgeist in which a man drinking a “soft drink” would be roughly equivalent to him cutting off his dick and lobbing it into the crowd at Lilith Fair – besides that, my argument against AMP is simply that I find 24 “types” of women to be a fairly confining number.

For example, I find no entry in their list of “types” of women that would advise men on how to score with chicks like that 15-year-old girl in Richmond, California who was gang-raped by ten males after a homecoming dance for two and half hours while as many as 20 other men and boys looked on and recorded photos and video. I mean, sure, she’s proven she’s not difficult to “score” with, but still, you’d expect a conscientious corporation like Pepsi to at least provide guidance on the best ways to inebriate and overcome your average underage girl. Maybe a companion app that figures pounds of resistance times blood alcohol level divided by the number of bros in your posse?

Come on, Pepsi, get on it, before Budweiser beats you to the punch!

Also disappointingly absent from their list of “types” of women is your basic women with power-type deal. Your Nancy Pelosis, your Hilary Clintons, your Sonia Sotomayors. I mean, sure the app offers “married,” and “businesswoman,” and “political girl,” and even “women’s studies major,” but none of those “types” really adequately covers a group with such aggressive unwillingness to concede to the broham desire for conquest that is so fundamental to his nature, not to mention Madison Avenue’s bottom line. So exactly how does one go about tapping a choice piece of wise Latina? Thanks to Pepsi, a bro will never know. Seriously, they could at least offer a few strategies for getting around the security detail, because in spite of their gender makeup the Secret Service has in the past shown a real reluctance to play wingman.

Sadly, I find myself also absent from AMP’s helpful guide to the 24 flavors of female. My age and sexual appetite might suggest I fall under “cougar,” I suppose, but then again, I think I am disqualified from that group by my aversion to stupid young men. So, in the interest of post-feminist helpfulness, I now offer to iPhone app programmers the outline of a guide to “scoring” with me.

1. Get a real drink
2. Take off that stupid hat
3. Put down your fucking iPhone

See? I’m easy.

hold on

I'm not gone, just buried. I swear I'll be back.

A free ride when you've already paid

Did Obama win the Nobel Peace Prize for not being George W. Bush?

Maybe, although, hey, let’s not underestimate the value of not being George W. Bush.

Across the country, the heads of right-wing chicken hawks are exploding, as they are confronted once again with proof of their own ideological isolation, and the possibility that their emotional investment in their belief system might be preventing them from seeing a more moderate truth.

One dinkus I saw this morning even quoted Neville Chamberlain. Yes, really. I mean, come on, right wingers, quoting Neville Chamberlain is so 2008. Neville Chamberlain quotes are the wingnut version of Tuesdays with Morrie. So here’s the quote:

"I believe it is peace for our time. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts. And now I recommend you to go home and sleep quietly in your beds."

The above was said after Chamberlain signed the Munich Agreement in 1938, which essentially was the treaty version of giving a shark a nice big piece of chum in the hope that it will agree to stop being a shark. The right-winger who was quoting Chamberlain was attempting to make a point about appeasement and Iran. Because Obama, who has agreed to actually talk to the leaders of Iran, is an appeaser. GET IT?

What conservatives miss…um…or rather, one of the myriad of things that conservatives miss in this analogy is that ENGLAND WAS NOT PREPARED TO GO TO WAR. England had fuck all to fight with, people. They were still in the process of building up their armaments, including what would eventually become the truly awesome Royal Air Force of WW2.

Mmmm…Spitfires…

But the analogy is perhaps apt in an unintended way. Because beginning in the early 1930s, Chamberlain embarked on a controversial policy called rationalisation, in which the obsolete and crumbling industrial infrastructure of the country was knocked down and rebuilt with government funds. As in taxpayers’ moolah. The conservatives in the government (including Churchill) opposed this, shall we say strongly? But it was this initiative that allowed, among other things, for the buildup of the U.K.’s war machine. Until then, the RAF was still flying WW1-type biplanes, for pete’s sake. If England had entered WW2 before 1939, it would have been fighting against Germany’s state-of-the-art Messerschmitt with what was essentially Snoopy’s Sopwith Camel.

So, I’m not going to speculate about whether Chamberlain would have entered WW2, and at what time. His support eroded, and he stepped down to make way for Churchill, so we will never know. What we do know, however, is that he negotiated peace as he prepared for war, and I really find it interesting that any person claiming to be a conservative would find fault with such an eminently practical policy.

Also, for all those conservatives out there who use the Chamberlain quote in an attempt at irony…please don’t. Don’t attempt irony. Because irony is, contrary to popular belief, nothing like rain on your wedding day. Irony requires self-awareness, and an ability to see situations from a perspective other than your own self-centered one. So you kinda suck at it.

A much more relevant ironic observation we could make, as the world attempts, with this Nobel Peace Prize, to nudge the American people toward peace, involves Iran. Because I personally find it ironic that during the Clinton administration, when Iran elected a liberal leader, it was the opposition conservatives in that country’s government who stymied progress to end their isolation. Even now, as the people of Iran once again show overwhelming support for a more liberal government, it is the conservatives who keep the country from agreeing to the U.N. initiatives, and they do so because they object to a policy of appeasement.

Perhaps the conservatives of the U.S. and Iran would agree to duke it out in some remote corner of the world, so that those who are truly interested in peace could go about making it manifest. I would be in favor of this policy. And as for that remote corner where they may proceed to battle to the death – may I suggest Alaska?

Many thanks to my blogger friend SJ for the inspiration for this post.

Oh, God! Book III

Some would say that God is clearly punishing Georgia with floods of Biblical proportion. The question, I guess, is why? When presuming to know the mind of God, it’s important to get your facts straight, otherwise you might, for example, jump to the conclusion that God hates fags.

We now know this to be false. God doesn’t hate gay people. He hates people who hate gay people. Actually, God might be a total fag hag, although the evidence on this is not yet in. We’ll have to see what kind of weather He dishes up for Maine this winter.

Personally, I don’t think Georgia is being punished. That would be cruel. I think what’s happening is that Georgia is experiencing what President Obama would call a “teachable moment,” and no, I’m not talking about its 2004 referendum to bring back the Confederate flag.

That Georgia’s two Republican senators are opposing health care reform is not a stunning revelation to anyone, even to those north of the Mason-Dixon. However, a few people on both sides were perhaps mildly surprised when Senator Saxby Chambliss warned Obama that he should address the joint session of Congress “with humility,” even though, according to Chambliss, “that’s not his inclination.”

Uppity negro-esque comments aside, or, on second thought, perhaps not aside, Georgians seem to like Chambliss, and his chances of reelection are good. He’s a tough campaigner! What other candidate with a deferment from serving in Vietnam would dare to compare his rival, a wounded Vietnam vet - a triple amputee, no less – to Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden in a campaign ad? That takes balls, my friends, and Saxby Chambliss has them in no short supply.

You know what else takes balls? Joining the other Republican Senator from Georgia to vociferously oppose Obama’s stimulus plan, then arranging for a healthy portion of the funds to go to your own constituents.

To say nothing of the two senators’ recent pleas to our president to declare Georgia a federal disaster area, thus enabling the state to access federal funds and resources for rescue and clean-up.

Of course I would never, ever, deny my brothers and sisters in the great state of Georgia any help that they needed. We are, after all, one nation, and we fought hard to keep it that way. At least, my side did.

What I would suggest to Georgia, is that when they watch the news, and they see the victims of the floods of their state being sheltered & comforted with my tax dollars, that they stop and consider that we are all in this together, and that doesn’t mean that we’re socialists. And if they were fortunate enough to have purchased the flood insurance available to them that is subsidized with my tax dollars, then maybe they should also consider that what we do for property, we should do for people.

Just one more little story for 9/11

Several days after 9/11, my then-husband and I ordered dinner from our favorite Middle Eastern restaurant. When the delivery guy pulled into our driveway, I saw that it was the same guy as always, the one who loved our little mutt, Comet, so much that he could barely tear himself away from her after his business had been concluded. So I opened the front door to let her run to him, as usual, and he knelt down to pet her and rub her ears, as usual. A moment later, he looked up, and I saw tears running down his face. I was confused, and he turned back and gestured to a sign that my husband had hand-lettered and stuck in the ground in our front yard.

The sign said "Justice, not war."

"Thank you for that," he said. "Thank you." He wiped his tears with the back of his hand and walked toward me, handing me our order. "It has been so hard. We get calls all day long. Threatening calls. And my cousin...someone threw a rock through his window."

"That's terrible," I said. "That's shocking," I said, though I did not really think it was shocking.

"We are Lebanese," he continued. "We are Christians. We are not Muslims."

"It shouldn't matter," I countered, softy. He looked at me, and I shrugged.

"You are good people," he said finally.

"So are you."

After I paid him and he drove away, it occurred to me, I mean I think it really hit me hard for the first time that a tremendous price was about to be paid for what had just happened, and it was going to be paid by all the wrong people.