The Garland Shooting? It's Obama's Fault

Of course, Ted Cruz is going to say that it's Obama's fault that two wannabe jihadiboys shot up Pam Geller's "celebration of free speech" in Garland, Texas.

Well, that makes sense. After all, who else's fault could it be? Certainly not Pam Geller, the foaming-at-the-mouth-rabid Islamophobe wackjob who set up the phony "contest" to draw cartoons of the prophet Mohammed. She was only exercising her god-given rights to "free speech".

And it's not really the fault of the two Islamists who shot the place up and ended up dead themselves. No, they were just innocent-ish pawns, unwitting foot soldiers in the Long Con that Obama, the Islamist-in-Chief, is running on the Amurrican People. Is it a mere coincidence that this shooting happened in Texas, which it now appears is Ground Zero in the Obama Muslim Secret Plan to take over America (aka the military training exercise dubbed "Jade Helm 15")? I don't think so.

We should listen to the sage advice of such wise men of politics as Chuck Norris, aided and abetted by that brilliant geopolitical genius of South Texas, Louie Gohmert, and -- wait for it -- none other than ... Ted Cruz. Oh, and be afraid! Be very afraid!!!!

As we all know, thanks to Faux News, ISIS/ISIL has, literally, battalions, brigades, divisions, even regiments of jihadis camped out on secret bases in the Mexican desert, right across the river from ... Texas!!! From El Paso you can see the flickering flames of their camel-dung cooking fires at night! Need I say more? Wake up, America!

Just as an aside, does anyone besides me find it odd that the takeover is starting with Texas? This begs the obvious question: What the fuck do ISIS/ISIL and the Islamic Jihadists even want with Texas? Have they ever even been there?

Anyway, back to professional anti-Islam wingnut nutjob Pam Geller, who can protest all she wants that it was only a "free speech" issue, when we all know -- and she knows -- that it was the moral equivalent of falsely shouting "fire" in a crowded theater. Of seeing a small fire and throwing gasoline on it to try to put it out. Or even the guy who killed both of his parents and pleaded with the judge for leniency because he was an orphan.

One thing is sure: We can look forward to more of these irresponsible and dangerous provocations from Geller. If "looking forward" is the correct term. I'm sure she won't be satisfied until she's dragged us into WWIII.

More Advice to Obama: Don't Be Seen With an Umbrella!

One of the most common "lost" items in this household is the ordinary umbrella. For the record, it is not me who loses them -- it is She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed. For as long as I've known her she has had a variety of umbrellas, and almost all of them have been lost, mislaid, stolen, forgotten, left behind, disappeared, beamed up by aliens, etc.

And me? Of course I can't lose one because I don't carry one. For people of my age and older, the umbrella is the very symbol of "appeasement".

For those who were homeschooled, that's the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain being greeted by Adolph Hitler at the 1938 Munich Conference that led to Hitler invading the Sudetenland, sealed the fate of Czechoslovakia and led to charges of "appeasement" against Neville Chamberlain, who gave in to Hitler's demands for "liebensraum" and secured, in Chamberlain's own words when he arrived back in the UK, clutching that umbrella firmly in hand, "peace in our time".

We all know how that turned out.

Note the umbrella in the picture. BTW, also note the physical placement of the two world leaders. Chamberlain is two steps below Hitler in that photograph, so it appears that he is trying to supplicate to Der Führer. I don't even have to be told to be sure that it was taken by a photographer from the Third Reich. Hitler and his Nazis were nothing if not cognizant of the propaganda value of ... well, everything.

And this, in short, is why people of a certain generation and older see the umbrella as the symbol of appeasement.

And Neville Chamberlain, meanwhile, has recently become, long after his death, a ridiculous obsession of the Right Wing in this country, because of that umbrella ... appeasement! 

Even if they don't always know what appeasement means:

"Appeasement" has become become a dirty word, rightfully so, and no red-blooded Amurrican would be seen dead with its symbol, the umbrella. And that's why Obama needs to just stop it with the umbrellas already!

Sidebar: There is a school of thought which holds that Chamberlain's actions, while they did result in the invasion of Czechoslovakia, bought some valuable time for England (and England Jr., aka the United States) to build up her forces and prepare for the war that everyone knew was inevitable.
The after-the-action analysis indicated that Hitler was all bluff and if, at any time during his initial blusters -- marching into the demilitarized-after-WWI Rhineland, for example -- he had met any resistance he would have backed off.

But that's all Monday-morning quarterbacking. Without that time machine, there's really no way to know.
And, even though I live in one of the wettest corners of the country, I still won't carry an umbrella...

Barack Obama the Finger Jihadist

Here's an image that's making the rounds of the wingnuttery, especially on a site called American Thinker, the very title of which, given its overall content, is an obvious oxymoron:

Yep, that's our Jihadist-in-Chief Barack Hussein Obama giving the "Islamic Gang Sign" of the one-finger salute. (No, not THAT finger, dirty-mind!). It's the "distinctive and well-known" Islamist index finger salute to Allah (blessed be his name), so Obama can let the leaders of the African nations know that secretly he is with them.

But if that is the case, then what are we to think about this?

OH MY GOD!!! It's worse than we ever thought!!! Yeah, we "get" the Billary Clintons -- that goes without saying. But sweet Jesus, Richard Nixon, Margaret Thatcher, George W. Bush and for fuck's sake, is that Ronald Reagan???!!!

I hate to be all smug about this, but it all goes back to those goddam hippies. Check this out:

Yes, that is none other than Mister Natural, who happens to be my personal guru, and just look at that fucker. He's doing it too!!!

OMFG, we are SO fucked!!!

An Open Letter to Obama Haters: You Just Wasted Ten Years of Your Life

Thanks to bernardpliers over at The Daily Kos, here is Dear Obama Hater - You Just Wasted A Decade Of Your Life:

Lots of you  continue to get unhinged emails from people on Facebook, your drunk uncle, and various Tea Party relatives. Here's a gentle response to them....
Pretty soon Obama will be gone and you will have to face up to the fact that you will have lost a whole decade of your life passing around conspiracy theories and whipping yourself into a frenzy of hatred.  All of you lost friends, severed relationships with family members, and some of you even lost your job or your marriage due to your unhinged behavior.
You lost that decade wailing about Obama the gay Communist Muslim narcissist dictator who was going to let the UN invade America and various hoaxes like "death panels," birth certificates, and the "Ground Zero Mosque" (remember how you wasted two years of your life over that?).  Just think of what you could have accomplished if you hadn't wasted all that time.  You could have gotten a college degree, you could have written a book, you could have run your first marathon, you could have built a boat and sailed it around the world. You could learned to speak another language - oh wait, you never would have done that.
You kept waiting for Obama to be impeached or for the GOP candidates to "take off the gloves." But they never did because your favorite stories were hoaxes, and the GOP can't impeach or win the White House based on hoaxes. No doubt you were waiting for someone, anyone,  in the White House to be indicted or arrested, like all those people under Nixon and Reagan and Bush, but no dice.  
Many of you will never recover from this experience.  Physically, your health is no doubt worse for having lost a decade watching television and whipping yourself into a frenzy of hatred. Your ability to reason is probably permanently damaged, and nobody really wants to listen to your opinions anyway. Yes, you can successfully annoy the waitress at the diner, because she can't run away from a customer, but that doesn't mean she agrees with you. Some of you will be going into nursing homes because people gave up on you a long time ago and nobody can stand to listen to one more day of you babbling about Saul Alinsky (who died in 1972, by the way).
Some of you have no doubt suffered financially from all the time you wasted hating Obama.  But some of you have actually done very very well under his "anticapitalist," "communist," "dictatorship." You do know that the economy usually does much better under Democrats, right? And that the best four years of job creation in the last 50 years was under Jimmy Carter, right?
The next two years would be a good chance to start making amends to your families and trying to rebuild relations with people in your life.  Yes we know there's another election in 2016 and you'll be falling down the next rabbit hole of insanity, but try to leave your families with a few memories of you acting like a normal human being.
And the next time there is a GOP president, just remember that there will be fatal embassy attacks under the GOP president, just like the dozens of fatal embassy attacks that occurred under previous Republican presidents.  Except Democrats won't be working themselves into a frenzy of conspiracy theories when it happens, they won't be cheerleading for the terrorists, and they won't be trying to overthrow the US government every time something happens.

I'm taking the unusual step of quoting it in its entirety. I think it's that important.

Some Free Advice for President Obama

The Republican-controlled Congress shows no signs of letting up for the next two years. It will be next to impossible for the President to get his legislative agenda through .

Unless...

Since the Republicans are acting like a rowdy bunch of stinky two-year-olds, treat them like two-year-olds and do a little of the old "reverse psychology" on them.

Everybody knows how this works:

• Say that Global Climate Change (aka "Global Warming") is a fraud and a hoax, and there's no reason to do anything about it.
• Say that you want to repeal the Affordable Care Act (aka "Obamacare") immediately.
• Say that you will imprison and mass deport each and every "illegal alien" in this country.
• Say that you are in favor of the Keystone XL pipeline.
• Say that you want to reduce Social Security benefits and eliminate the "socialist" programs Medicare and Unemployment Insurance.
• Say that you want to eliminate the minimum wage and under no circumstances increase it to anything approaching a livable wage. 
• etc. etc. etc.

Because the Republicans are at this point beyond being anything other than the knee-jerk party of "No", they will immediately say that he's wrong and rush through a set of bills to counter his ideas.

Then Obama pulls the "old switcheroo" and signs them.

Problem solved.

Must See Animation Video

Really, truly, you have to see this:

Obama, Romney and Science

The prestigious journal Scientific American has just published Obama and Romney Tackle 14 Top Science Questions, and it's well worth the read to find out where the candidates stand on top science issues in this campaign.

But if you don't want to read the whole thing, let me summarize it for you:

OBAMA: [Really smart stuff about hard science and its answers to the issues we face].

ROMNEY: [Blah blah blah GOP Talking Points Blame Obama blah blah blah].

And there you have it.

I Voted!

Here in Washington state we've had mail-in-only ballots for years. I kind of miss the old days, though, when you showed up in the morning before work at the nearby grade school, chatted with poll workers and flirted with the old ladies, signed in, and went into a little curtained booth to try to punch out your hanging chads. Then they gave you a little oval sticker that said "I Voted!" that you could wear to work and be all smug with your fellow employees who didn't have one.

As much as I like the convenience of mail-in voting, I think we've lost some of our civic pride when we left the old system behind. So, after we went to pure mail in, I used to hang on to my ballot until election day and then drop it at one of the many drop boxes around town. That way if an election were close I could have the feeling that my vote actually made a difference.

However, after several elections' worth of showing up at phone banks and calling people to vote for my candidates, I learned that if you get your ballot in early, you drop off the phone lists. So I filled mine out on Saturday and dropped it in the mailbox with a stamp. They will get it tomorrow, record that I sent it in, and the phone calls will magically cease.

And that will free up time for the phone bank volunteers to call other people who haven't voted yet.

Obama is way ahead in Washington State, so far ahead that my presidential vote won't really count, and I was tempted to cast a protest vote for one of the minor candidates. I haven't been above that in the past. In 1980, when I knew that Reagan was going to win, I voted for John Anderson (Independent). In 1984, when I knew he was going to win again, I voted for Gus Hall and Angela Davis (Communist).

But this year I just couldn't do it. I had to vote for Obama anyway, even though he's done a bunch of shit that I don't really like. But here's a piece from Daniel Ellsberg that pretty much sums up my feelings about it: Defeat Romney, Without Illusions about Obama.

Read it, suck it up, bite the bullet and vote for Obama. Romney would be so much worse that it is beyond comparison, almost beyond comprehension.

I even finally put up my "Veterans for Obama" yard sign left over from four years ago. I'm in!

27 Lies in 38 Minutes

Twenty-seven lies. Thirty-eight minutes. That's the score for Mitt Romney, the King of Smirk, in last night's debate. That comes out to about one lie every 90 seconds. That's gotta be some kind of record.

And where the fuck was Obama during all this? Standing there with his head down like a chastised child for most of it. Even when Romney basically called him "boy"...

Mr. President, this is not the way to do it.

I've read some analyses today that say that this was all part of some grand give-him-enough-rope-to-hang-himself strategy, a neo-Muhammed Ali political rope-a-dope, but I think if that's true it's a dangerous tactic. It's political Russian roulette.

Eight years ago in the debate between Darth Shoot-An-Old-Man-In-The-Face Cheney and John I-Can't-Keep-It-In-My-Pants Edwards, Cheney said something to the effect that he presided over the US Senate for four years and this was the first time he'd ever met Edwards. That was a lie. The debate wasn't even over before someone put up a photo of the two of them together.

Edwards had to have known it was a lie. Why didn't Edwards call him out on it? I never got an answer to that, and I don't suspect that I will. But that's all kind academic now.

Now we are dealing with the question as to why didn't Obama call Romney out on those lies?

Why Obama Sucks ... at Being the Antichrist

Jeez, can a brother catch a break? When they are not ranting about Obama being a Fascist/Socialist/Communist/Kenyan/Indonesian, they are boiling over with religious rage that he is the fucking Antichrist!
If you ask me, they just might be heading down the wrong path with that one...
And I'm not the only one that thinks this. The humor site, Cracked.com has an insightful analysis as to why, if Obama really IS the Antichrist, he has got to be the worst one ever:

When he should have been breaking his covenant with seven nations and declaring himself God within their temples, instead he bought a dog. When he was supposed to be searing his mark into the hands and foreheads of his worshipers and executing anyone who refused the brand, he was off singing Al Green songs at the Apollo.
...
But the antichrist is already supposed to be slaughtering the righteous and governing the world from a throne in Israel by his third year in power. Obama has done nothing but drag his feet and procrastinate about being unabashedly evil deep into his fourth year. Where is the colossal statue of him that springs to life and kills Christians? Where is the fire pouring out of the sky into the eyes of men? I don't even think he's drawn up any schematics. [emphasis added]

There's more of this trenchant analysis on the Cracked website, complete with source material links for the skeptics, but it seems as if those of us over here in the Satanist Circle are going to have to look elsewhere for our Antichrist. Obama just isn't cutting it.

Closing "Loopholes"

So far Mittens has kind of doubled down on his ridiculous and elitist claims about the 47% while at the same time trying like hell to backpedal his way out of them. While his campaign is long on "trust me I'm rich and I know best" and short on actual details, one thing keeps popping up: Closing so-called "loopholes" in the tax system.

A totally-not-even-careful analysis of that claim results in one inescapable conclusion. The loopholes he wants to close have to be things like the mortgage deduction, the dependents deduction, the charitable giving deduction (unless it goes to a church, naturally) and the state and local (income, sales and property) tax deductions.

In short, the last refuge of the vanishing middle class. But hey, since he thinks that median income in this country is in the $250,000 a year range, it won't really be a burden on citizens. Besides, if you really need some quick cash, you can always borrow $20,000 from your parents...

Even though Obama is ahead in the polls (for now) I'm still having anxiety over the possibility that we are still just one October Surprise away from having a Romney-Ryan administration come January. That's why it is so important that we all do whatever we can to ensure the re-election of Barack Obama. If you aren't already doing so, volunteer for phone banks, do doorbelling, wave signs, anything. Contact your local Democratic Party headquarters and tell them you are ready to go to work. We can't afford to let the Ayn Rand Romneyites win this one!

And don't forget the down-ballot races. It's equally important that we elect Democrats to all offices. In the timeless words of my good friend the retired Navy captain(!), "I don't want a Republican to be elected dog catcher!"

What do the Birthers Really Want? To Deport Obama

What is it with the Birthers? They just won't give up, not even in the face of overwhelming evidence that Barack Obama was actually, physically, really and truly born in the then-Territory of Hawaii in 1961. World Net Daily has pretty much given over its entire editorial sections to shrill screeds on the topic from Orly Taintz and her flying-monkey minions.

Like many of us over here in the Reality Based Community, I've been vacillating between being just bemused and totally nonplussed by their neurotic OCD obsession with the whole thing. I've been at my wits end for going on four years now, trying to figure out what the fuck the "Birthers" really want? I've tried asking them, and even the few who will still talk to me (i.e., my wackjob cousin) can't -- or won't -- answer my question.

And to me the question is a pretty simple one: If Obama's mother was a US citizen -- which no one is disputing -- then isn't her son automatically a US citizen, regardless of where he was born? Hasn't that been the law since like, forever?

Well, that's what I thought, anyway, but when I did my own research, it turns out that this isn't such a straightforward question with a straightforward answer. It all depends on WHEN he was born. Over at VisaLaw Immigration Information, I found this:

What are the rules for people born between December 23, 1952 and November 13, 1986?
Again, children born abroad to two US citizen parents were US citizens at birth, as long as one of the parents resided in the US at some point before the birth of the child.
When one parent was a US citizen and the other a foreign national, the US citizen parent must have resided in the US for a total of 10 years prior to the birth of the child, with five of the years after the age of 14.  An exception for people serving in the military was created by considering time spent outside the US on military duty as time spent in the US. [Emphasis added]

Yes, now it all makes sense to me. Obama was born in 1961, and his mother was just 18 at the time of his birth, and so it is temporally impossible for her to meet the "five of the years after the age of 14" stipulation.

That's why it's so fucking important to the Birthers to establish that Obama was born in Kenya. Or Indonesia. Or where the fuck ever Orly Taintz wants us to believe this week, just as long as it was outside the borders of the United States. By the simple fact that if he was not born in the United States, he is, ipso facto and QED, not a United States citizen.

Jeez. I wasn't expecting that... But okay. what then? Well, I'm more than 100% certain that, not satisfied to strip him of the presidential mantle that he paraded around in so arrogantly, so illegally, so blackly, for the last four years, they will also insist on deporting him as an illegal alien. You know how the whole right wing feels about so-called illegal aliens, and here would be the biggest illegal alien of all, right in their sweaty grasp. He is so outta here!

But wait. First I want to relate a story from my own family. My cousin Jimmy* was born in occupied Berlin, in a German hospital, in 1948 to my uncle, an American soldier who was just nineteen and had been shipped there after advanced individual training, and a young German mother (they were married at the time, but just barely, having just achieved that status before Jimmy was born, in a traditional German Zwangsheirat). He eventually grew up in my home state after his father was discharged and moved his family back to the US. Jimmy graduated from high school in 1965 and enlisted in the Army, following in his father's footsteps.

Unfortunately he had the bad luck to be assigned to the25th Infantry Division near Cu Chi, and after less than three months in country he was shot up severely, ambushed while he was on patrol, injured to the extent that he has to spend a substantial amount of his remaining time in a wheelchair, to the extent that he was awarded a VA disability pension of 100%.

He eventually got married, had two children (that part still worked!), and went on to college (GI Bill, naturally); afterwards he got a job, from which he is now retired and drawing Social Security. He just finished paying off his house and putting his youngest child, a girl, through college. He has two grandchildren by way of his oldest daughter.

Got the picture? Now let's go back at take another look at that immigration law, cited on the VisaLaw page, this time another section:

What are the rules for people born between January 14, 1941 and December 23, 1952?
As before, children born abroad to two US citizens, with one parent having resided in the US, the child was a US citizen at birth.  No further action was required to maintain citizenship.
When one parent was a citizen and the other a foreign national, however, the rules changed substantially.  To pass citizenship, the citizen parent must have resided in the US for at least 10 years before the birth of the child, and at least five of those years had to be after the parent turned 16.  Because this rule made it impossible for parents under 21 to pass citizenship, in 1946 the requirement was amended to create an exception for parents who had served in World War Two. [Emphasis added]

Oh, okay. Whew. That WWII exemption ought to take care of it. But wait a minute, no it doesn't! Uncle Bud was born in 1929 and didn't join the Army until after WWII. He was barely 19 when Jimmy was born. So he didn't meet the residency requirement, either.

Wow. Based on the law in effect at the time, it turns out that Jimmy is not really a citizen of the US after all. So it would seem that he will have be deported as an illegal alien along with Barack Obama, and probably lose both his VA disability and his Social Security. This deportation will, of course, come as a wrenching shock and appalling surprise to him and his family, especially his grandchildren. Everyone except for his ex-wife, who will no doubt be glad to see him go...

The only fortunate thing is that he will get to be repatriated to Germany, which has a solid social safety net and which will take care of him. He also still has some cousins there on his mother's side who know him and like him, and who already call him "Jakob"; they will be glad to help him out.

Unlike my old Army buddy Eladio, who served with me in Vietnam and if the same rule applies to him (my memory of his situation is a little hazy after all these years, but I think it is in large measure basically the same as Jimmy's), he will have to return to El Salvador, where things are short in social safety nets but long in military junta dictatorships who work with United Fruit (a partially-owned subsidiary of the CIA) using their US-made military weapons to torture and repress the common people, especially Johnny-come-lately types who have been expelled from the great El Norte.

It will also come as a surprise, I would imagine, to the officials in the Reagan State Department who first issued Jimmy a US passport, apparently assuming he was the citizen that he claimed to be, and that common sense dictated that he was. Too bad for them as well -- I'm sure heads, if there are any still around 30 years later, will roll over that decision.

Now you have it. It's not all so cut and dried after all, is it? You goddam Birthers, you really want to strip my disabled Vietnam veteran cousin Jimmy of his citizenship -- which he apparently never really had -- and deport him? Strip away his Social Security and his VA disability pension? And Eladio's too, as long as you're at it, even though he's been a productive member of society and has run a successful small business in Texas for the last forty years, employing nearly 20 (legal, he assures me) workers?

Never mind, I already know the answer to that. I heard it during the Rethug presidential debate when the audience screamed, "Let him die!"

Even Baby Doc Bush claimed to be a "compassionate conservative". I don't even hear that weak pabulum puking out of the craven vulture craws of any of the new "leaders" on the right.

One final note: Fuck you, Birthers! You are an embarrassment to political discourse and to rational thinking. And to the whole Human Race as well.

----------------

[Footnote: Please respect the man's privacy. No, Jimmy is not his real name, he has a different last name from me, and he is not even on the same side of the family as my infamous "wackjob cousin" --she doesn't even know him.]

Obama Speech Kind of a Letdown, but Kerry! Wow!

Okay, the Democrats convention is over, and while I'm not in the business of picking winners and losers, I gotta say that the president's speech was kind of a letdown.

Of course no one could top Bill Clinton in the "speechifyin'" department, so maybe Obama is suffering from a "pales by comparison" effect. I'm willing to cut him some slack, but I'm a little concerned that his overall lackluster performance will suppress some of the bounce I was expecting him to get from the convention.

Or am I just another whiny-ass liberal who's never satisfied?

I do want to say one thing about the convention, though: If the John Kerry that showed up last night had managed to make an appearance eight years ago, then The Shrub would have been a one-term president and only a footnote to history.



Wow, what a speech! None of that subtly nuanced word salad that Kerry was famous for in the 2008 campaign, when he sounded like he had a mouth full of mush half the time (and a mouthful of shit the other half). This time he came out hitting, and even managed to poke a little fun at himself in the process.

State of the Union and Kerry's Face

Like many people, I watched Obama give the annual State of the Union speech last night. Blah-blah-blah, election year, yadda yadda yadda... I kind of miss the days when Baby Doc Bush was bound to come out with something totally fucking off the wall, like "human-animal hybrid switchgrass" and shit like that. I used to watch him just for those little surprises, and I was rarely disappointed.

But no doubt about it, Obama is a dynamic speaker, and he came out aggressively, if not combatively, in sticking it to the Rethugs on a lot of points. The most fun of the night was watching de facto Speaker of the House and full-time asshole Eric Cantor keeping a stone face but squirming in his seat like a schoolboy with pinworms every time they cut away to him.

Beyond that, did everybody see John Kerry's face? He looked like he'd been mugged. Jesus, what the fuck happened to him?

She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed had an answer: Teresa (his wife and inadvertent heir to the Heinz fortune) smacked him up the face with a ketchup bottle when he came home late. reeking of cheap whiskey and cheaper perfume.

Of course the "truth" is a little more mundane -- he was playing hockey and got smacked with a hockey stick. At least that's the official word from Kerry's office... Which I suppose is believable, if you've ever been to a hockey game. As Rodney Dangerfield once said, "I went to the fights and a hockey game broke out."

La-La-La I'm Not Listening!

Jeez, Obama hasn't even started his jobs speech and already, according to Norman Goldman, the monkey-boys of the wingnuttery are shouting, in unison, "we don't agree"...

What is this, third grade?

Never mind. I haven't been in third grade in 58 years or so, and even I know that third graders are more advanced, more aware, more intellectual, more reasonable than the nattering nabobs of negativism on the right.

This isn't even kindergarten, where one of the goals was on "gets along well with others"...

I'm Back

Of course you probably already knew that, from my Sept 1 posting of the Book of the Month. Nevertheless, I'm now back pretty much full time, with my usual rants, raves and kicking against the pricks*, taking arms against the slings and arrows... well, you get the idea.

The 2012 election is just 426 days away, and I keep watching the unraveling of the progressive dream with some alarm. If this keeps up, I will be reluctant to give the Obama reelection campaign the full-court press next fall, at least not the way I did in 2008. As I saw someone comment a month ago or so, "The thrill is gone"...

Still, all we have to do is imagine the presidency of another legal-execution-serial-killer governor of Texas, long on swagger and short on humanity, in the White House and that ought to scare us enough to campaign for pretty much anyone who is not a Rethug. But I hate having the feeling that I am voting for just the lesser of two evils. After all, the lesser evil is still an evil.

I hope you all had a good summer. Our weather here FINALLY started cooperating with the calendar. A little late if you ask me, but it's going to be in the 80s all week, with clear skies. I've been wanting to get the telescope out all summer and do some star gazing and planet watching, and it looks like I'll finally get that.
---
[* The Xian Bible, from the writings of the most macho of the followers of Jesus, a guy named The Axe of the Apostles; apparently this phrase, like "pussyfooting", is not what it sounds like...]

Having it Both Ways

Yeah, I know that's a major "nudge-nudge-wink-wink" headline, which of course I write with a measured amount of trepidation, given the content of my earlier post today, but come on. Donald Trump and Sarah Palin as Neo-Birthers? Really???

The Donald, as he is unaffectionately known, is trying to carve out his own niche in presidential politics by attempting to resurrect the birther controversy about whether Obama was born here, etc etc blah blah blah.

So, in response to The Donald's sojourn into Total Fuckwackery, our favorite Great Huntress of The North, Caribou Barbie, aka Sarah Palin, is now on record as saying that (1) she "appreciates" Trump's questions, and she (2) "thinks" Obama was born in Hawaii because "there was the birth announcement put in the newspaper...[b]ut obviously there is something there that the president doesn't want people to see on that birth certificate, that he sees going to great lengths to make sure it isn't shown. And that's perplexing for a lot of people..."

All hail the final triumph of Fuckwackery over reason. Just because he is Donald Fucking Trump, all of a sudden he's a fucking expert on the topic. Perplexing, is it? Just to the feeble-minded and their cynical manipulators. Like you, Sarah and Donald.

But, to give credit where credit is due, supposedly The Donald has a "crack team" of investigators (by which I assume he does not mean "investigators on crack") on the job, and they undoubtedly will, once and for all, discover "The Truth" behind the secret Obama birth certificate.

But the proof of the pudding, as we all know, is in the eating, and I'm looking forward with baited breath to masticatingly mauling that lumpy, chewy indigestible mass, even as we speak.

And Sarah? She's trying to have it both ways.

No, stop it, get that mental image out of your diseased imagination. That's not what I meant. No, really, I mean it... Stop it.

The "Afghanistanization" of the Afghanistan War

I gotta tell ya, I didn't watch the speech. I was busy doing other stuff, but by now I've seen and read enough to know this:

Vietnamization of the Vietnam War didn't work 40 years ago, and Afghanistanization of the Afghanistan War won't work now.

I hate to see Obama pouring even more military and money into that rathole. But at this point I don't know what else can be done--there's no easy solution now. We've stepped into another lake of quicksand...

I'm still not sorry I voted for him. I can only imagine what Mad Dog McCain might be doing right about now. Assuming that Sarah Palin hadn't already arranged for that little cardiovascular "accident" and she, god forbid, was the president...

I knew all along that our foreign adventures in the Middle East would become "tar babies" and sure enough, here we are.

It's especially galling to learn that Baby Doc Bush reportedly had Osama Bin Laden in his grasp in late 2001 and let him wriggle away.

Remember when the GOOPers were champing at the bit to pillory Bill Clinton on the same exact charge?

I can't believe that there are still people who are willing to stick up for that fucking liar Dubya Bush and his evil meat-puppet-master Darth Cheney. It boggles the mind. It really does.

Obama as Hitler. Again.

Jesus, will somebody give this a rest? In Sunday's edition of our local newspaper, some moron wrote a screed on that favorite wingnut topic, Obama is like Hitler Because...

Here's the full text of the letter (without the dope's name -- I don't want him to get any more publicity than is necessary -- but it does rhyme with "dunce"...):

A recent Olympian article by Leonard Pitts, columnist for the Miami Herald, strongly objected to comparing Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler.
Hitler was a skilled schemer, politician, organizer. Obama definitely exercises the same skill levels.
Hitler acquired his following through his ability to arouse street crowds with his speeches. Obama, with his teleprompter, accomplishes the same.
Hitler and Obama began their political careers with small groups; Hitler with the German Workers Party, later becoming fuhrer (leader) of the Nazi Party. Obama, with the infamous political group ACORN, as a community organizer and now a U.S. president.
Hitler organized his private army of hoodlums known as storm troopers and later the SS or Schutzstaffel. Obama has expressed his demand for a civilian youth corps equal to our military. Kindergartners next? Why?
Hitler involved himself strongly in labor unions, business, industry, agriculture. Why? Obama destroys our infrastructure, demanding government intrusion into our financial world, industrial capacity, labor unions, energy, health care, education, communications. Why? Obama is making fools of us all.
For every "why" the answer: Conquest, power, control, mind manipulation — socialism. Hitler demanded a strong socialistic central government. Obama, demanding the same, is still in the process of implementing his socialistic master plan for America. Where will it end?
History will judge.
Hitler in hating Jewish people became a racist monster, spreading death as no man before.
All true Americans, blessed by our Constitution, freedom and liberty, absolutely must keep this nation a free republic, for our children and future generations.

God, I am so fucking sick of this shit, and this one was the last straw. So here is my response to this dickhead, submitted to the paper that same day. On Monday I got called with the usual questions (i.e., "did you write it yourself?" "Is it a form letter?" etc.), so it ought to be in print within a week.

Fox News followers and lockstep Limbaugh listeners (aka "dittoheads") can apparently parrot the "Barack Obama is like Adolf Hitler because…" crap endlessly, with reckless abandon, as we saw in Sunday's letters. And sadly, the reasonable-sounding sophistry of this specious "proof" can have a certain superficial appeal.
While you can use those same arguments in a comparison between pretty much any politician and Adolf Hitler, I am particularly amused by applying them to a much different icon of the US Presidency, Ronald Reagan.
Reagan, too, "acquired his following through his ability to arouse … crowds with his speeches"; "involved himself strongly in labor unions, business, industry, agriculture"; "was a skilled schemer, politician, organizer"; and "began his political career with small groups" (e.g., the Screen Actor's Guild and the GE board of directors, at whose bidding he once railed unsuccessfully against the freedom-killing "socialist slavery" of Medicare).
Those who blindly follow the rightwing's marching orders, without exercising a single iota of critical thinking, are the sheep that the true wannabe dictators of this nation can happily call on to bleat on command whatever absurd talking-points they want them to spout.
Thus we have a litany of "Obama is not an American; Obama is a socialist; Obama is a fascist; Obama is a communist" etc. etc. Who knows what'll be next, but I don't think they can do much better than their "Obama is a fascist-communist-socialist-racist-atheist-Muslim-Kenyan-radical" rant.
About the only thing left is "Obama is a War-of-the-Worlds Martian".
Watch for it.

While I was pretty much free to choose most any politician as representing those talking points, I was more than happy to apply them to Saint Ronald, in a blatant attempt to piss off the letter writer and the literally dozens of Rethugs that we have in the liberal bastion of sanity (mostly) that is the state capital.

Still More Treasonous Rethugs

Remember that movie from the early 60s, Seven Days in May?

The story was a fictional account of a planned military coup of the President of the United States. Altogether a fascinating premise and a terrific motion picture, but it was obviously speculative fiction of the it-can't-happen-here genre.

But now we're forced to ask, "Or can it?"

Some dickwad named John Perry, a regular columnist over at über-fascist rag and wingnut website Newsmax -- which is a monetarily-supplied quasi-subsidiary of the RNC, no less -- just came out with one of his regular columns, this one entitled "Obama Risks a Military Intervention", wherein he appears to fall just milimeters short of calling for the military to overthrow the Obama Presidency. As a backdoor trapdoor escape from charges of blatant treason, he says that that he is "describing what may be afoot" but that "is not to advocate it".

Bullshit. I don't give a rip how many mealy-mouthed fake "disclaimers" he struts out, he is calling for a military takeover, an armed coup.

Which he claims will be "bloodless". Yeah, right, and I can play center field for the Yankees.

Immediately after the leftwing blogosphere got ahold of this, Newsmax took it off of their website. But never fear, Con Web Watch, which keeps a constant eye on this kind of thing, managed to get a copy off of Newsmax and onto their own server. You can read it at http://conwebwatch.tripod.com/graphics/nmperrycoup.pdf.

And I think I'll keep my own personal copy as well. If there was ever a candidate document for permanent flushing down the Memory Hole, this is it, so a few months from now that can deny that it ever existed.

What am I saying? If Obama papered the Washington Monument with copies of it and projected on the wall of the Pentagon, they'd still deny that it ever existed.

Anyway, what Perry is advocating (his denials aside) stops little short of treason. The question is how much longer can we as a nation continue to function with this constant yapping in the background, these constant calls for the overthrow of the US Constitution and the end of our representative democratic republic?

Of course I think that was is partially behind this crap is the feeling on the part of those doing it that they are hoping for a confrontation and a silencing. That way they can dance around like headless chickens shouting, "See, told ya so. Police state! Repression! Communist Fascists killed free speech!"