More on the United States as a "Christian Nation"

Here is the Preamble to the US Constitution as it has read since the beginning, way back in 1787:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Here's what it could have been:

(1) We, the people of the United States recognizing the being and attributes of Almighty God, the Divine Authority of the Holy Scriptures, the law of God as the paramount rule, and Jesus, the Messiah, the Savior and Lord of all, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and to our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

That was one version. Here is another:

(2) We, the people of the United States, humbly acknowledging Almighty God as the source of all authority and power in civil government, the Lord Jesus Christ as the Ruler among the nations, His revealed will as the supreme law of the land, in order to constitute a Christian government, and in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the inalienable rights and the blessings of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to ourselves, our posterity, and all the people, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

And yet another:

(3) We the people of the United States, humbly acknowledging Almighty God as the source of all authority and power in civil government, the Lord Jesus Christ as the Governor among the nations, and His revealed will as our supreme authority, in order to constitute a Christian government, to form a more perfect union, ... do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. (ellipses as given in source).

What is going on here, and why don't we have any of those versions in the Constitution?

That's because since the very beginning, the majority of the so-called Founding Fathers at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 wanted it to be clear that there would be a true separation of church and state in the new nation. A vocal but ultimately defeated minority wanted, from the start, to acknowledge the divinity of Christ and the ultimate authority of God over the affairs of state. They were, of course, unsuccessful.

At the time the Constitution was adopted, it was clear to all concerned (even if they accepted it with grave reservations) that this was, in the words of the Treaty of Tripoli just ten years later, in 1797, a government that "is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion".

Fast forward to the Civil War (or, as it's known some places as "The War Between the States" and in the South as "The War of Yankee Aggression"). In 1863 a group of Protestant clergymen from the Northern States saw the Civil War as God's punishment on the nation for turning its back on Him and proposed the wording noted above in (1) as a constitutional amendment.

The next year they founded the Christian Amendment Movement, which quickly morphed into the more neutral-sounding National Reform Movement, and sent a memorial to congress formally proposing the wording in (2) above as an amendment to replace the Preamble to the Constitution. Also in the mix about the same time was the wording of the proposal shown in (3) above.

None of them ever went anywhere, despite getting some support from several senators. Other attempts were made in 1874, 1896 and 1910. In the anti-communist hysteria of the 1940s and 50s, even more proposals were made, including this one in the conventional form of a Constitutional Amendment (i.e., a regularly-numbered one added on the end instead of one changing the actual words of the Preamble):

Section 1: This nation devoutly recognizes the authority and law of Jesus Christ, Savior and Ruler of nations, through whom are bestowed the blessings of Almighty God.
Section 2: This amendment shall not be interpreted so as to result in the establishment of any particular ecclesiastical organization, or in the abridgment of the rights of religious freedom, or freedom of speech and press, or of peaceful assemblage.
Section 3: Congress shall have power, in such cases as it may deem proper, to provide a suitable oath or affirmation for citizens whose religious scruples prevent them from giving unqualified allegiance to the Constitution as herein amended.

It of course went nowhere as well. But the Christian Nation folks did get the consolation prize, which was adding "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance and putting "In God We Trust" on our money.

So the obvious question kind of asks itself: If this is, and was from the beginning, a "Christian Nation", then why did so many people take such great pains over the years to codify it into the constitution? According to such latter-day experts as revisionist "historian" David Barton, professional rightwing wackjob evangelist and founder of the Orwellian-named WallBuilders (dedicated to tearing down the wall of separation between church and state), this is and always was a Christian Nation, the separation of church and state is a myth, and if wasn't for the leftwing-atheist-communist bloc (aka the nine men against America) in the Supreme Court striking down prayer in the schools, kicking God out the back door while inviting Satan in the front, it would be fully acknowledged as such.

So why all of the scrambling, all of the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, all of the desperate attempts to muscle it into the Constitution? As I've often said, it is telling that the framers of the Constitution, although they were certainly free to do so, made absolutely no mention of God or Jesus Christ in the founding document of the United States. There's your "Original intent" right there, Justice Scalia.

And before you even start, shut the fuck up about the date "In the Year of Our Lord" in the signature block. That was the usual and customary form of dating documents, and its presence there means nothing. Nothing. Got that? Nothing. Well, except for the actual date, of course.

Further reading: Blaine Amendment, the Blaine Game and the Christian Right.

Do Dogs Go To Heaven?

I can't believe what passes for "news" any more. Especially after watching the demise last night of one of my favorite television series of all time, The Newsroom.

Now there's this big controversy about whether the Pope believes that dogs go to heaven. One Pope did, apparently, but the current wearer of the Pointy Hat remains silent on the subject, even though somebody may have interpreted something that he may have said to mean that maybe animals do go to heaven.

Jesus, with all the problems in this world, this is what people think "news" is? Somebody in a funny hat may have said something that somebody else may have...blah blah blah.

BTW, wasn't there a movie that answered this question in its very title?

Well, to mildly misquote the great American humorist (and fellow Oklahoma boy) Will Rogers, if there are no dogs in heaven then I don't want to go there -- I want to go where the dogs went.

I mean really. What kind of god allows people to bond with animals that they love, rips them away to an early death and a lonely grave, and then won't allow them to join up with us again in the "paradise" of the afterlife? These are not the actions of a kind and loving and benevolent god. These are the actions of a cruel and sadistic tyrant.

Not that there's much chance that I or anyone else will ever get to learn "the truth" about it. For an insight into my religious proclivities, see other posts on this blog too numerous to mention, typically this rant on the Post-Rapture Emails.

Can 252 Frenchmen All Be Wrong?

Turns out that it really is a World Wide Web. I've been watching my stats pretty closely after my cynical attempt to attract more readership the other day.

The answer to your unspoken question: No, it did not work. I had fewer hits on that page than any other in the last week. Go figure...

Anyway, I did discover something interesting. I have a ton of readers in France!

Here are the top nine total hits by reader location for the week of Dec 7 to Dec 14, 2014:

	United States	602
	France	252
	Germany	157
	Ukraine	65
	China	50
	Belgium	41
	Taiwan	18
	Latvia	17
	Canada	15

The others that surprised me were the number of readers from the Ukraine, China  and, of all places, Latvia. I was also kind of taken aback by the fact that Canada, with only 15, is in last place!

However, it is gratifying that the statistic on total page views has been steadily climbing since I came out of "retirement"; I've had 4,779 views in the last month!

As I've often said, I have literally dozens of readers that I can marshal on any given issue. Advertisers and political operatives take note.

Elizabeth Warren's "Indian Problem"

When she was running for the US Senate a couple of years back, the question of Elizabeth Warren's alleged Native American heritage came up. Naturally all the noxioux nattering came from the wingnuttery.

Warren had said that she was 1/32 Cherokee-Delaware. Sounds pretty easy to check, right? Well not so fast there, Lone Ranger. It turns out that there really isn't much in the way of reliable verification of that can be had.

My whole childhood I was also told that I was 1/32 Native American, also Cherokee to be specific. That means that one of my great-great grandparents had to have been full-blood Cherokee. All I had to do was trace my line back to that person and voilá, I would be an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation. After all, my roots are in Oklahoma, and my ancestors got there in the mid-19th Century, when it was still officially known as "Indian Territory". It's got to be there, I figured.

With much digging around in places like Ancestry.com I was able to track down all 8 of my great-great-grandparents. While none of them had "Indian" names, that was not an uncommon occurrence --  lot of Cherokees had, even before the infamous Trail of Tears, long taken on "white" names in an effort to appear as though they were assimilating. One of them just had to be The Indian. But which one? And proving it was going to be another story.

The problem turned out that it was pretty cut and dried that your Cherokee ancestor had to have been listed on the Dawes Rolls or you were flat out of luck. As it happened on the frontier when white women were few and far between, white men would take Native American wives. But those guys were usually looked on with scorn by other whites, derided as "Squaw Man" and "Teepee Creepers", and consequently the children's Indian heritage was something to be hidden away, not celebrated. If you were a Native American woman living off the reservation with your white husband, you likely did not get counted in the Dawes Rolls. Plus a number of Indians just refused to be listed because they did not agree with the allotment system for distributing Indian land to the members of the so-called "Five Civilized Tribes".

My cousin, who can also trace his own Cherokee heritage back through his mother's side of the family, was fortunate enough to have an ancestor with the foresight to allow himself to be registered, so he was able to enroll in the Cherokee Tribe.

So what about a DNA test? You'd think that a DNA test would be conclusive. Some dickhead Boston Globe columnist actually issued a "challenge" for her to take the DNA test and prove once and for all that she is really an Indian. But there's a problem with that as well.

If there is anything that could come back to haunt Elizabeth Warren's candidacy, it is this. It is not at all clear if she really did benefit from claiming her status as Native American for Affirmative Action advantages but she'll still be accused of it.

Oh, and one more thing. A lot was made -- also by the wingnuttery, naturally -- of the fact that she doesn't "look" Indian. If that's a legitimate criticism, then what are we supposed to make of this guy:

That's the principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, Bill John Baker.

Or this guy:

That's Hollywood actor Iron Eyes Cody, or to use his birth name, Espera Oscar de Corti. This has been the iconic image of Native Americans ever since that famous 1970s "Crying Indian" Keep America Beautiful anti-littering commercial. He was 100% Italian.

Ready for Elizabeth Warren

Elizabeth Warren, the Wall Street Pitbull and US Senator  from Massachusetts (it's Teddy Kennedy's old seat!), has said the doesn't want to run for the Presidency. We think that is a mistake.

Let her know by signing the petition at Ready for Warren and let her know that we've got her back.

Read more about this incredible and progressive woman and then join the clamor of the progressive branch of the Democratic Party by asking to change her mind and become a candidate.

She might just be our Last Great Hope to wrest the victory from Rick Santorum Chris Christie, Ted Cruz or Jeb Bush and keep it way from the vast Rightwing Conspiracy that they represent.

Don't let's have another four years of Republican rule. We
can't afford it

Minimum Wage and the Real Job Creators

Every single time the topic of raising the minimum wage comes up, the Republicans chant the same mantra: “It will cost jobs!”

Never mind that multiple studies over many years have shown that to be a totally bogus myth. As we all know, when it comes to Rethug dogma the “truthiness” of something doesn’t really enter into the equation.

I worked various jobs in the administration and delivery of Unemployment Insurance benefits for 30 years, and in that time I never met anyone who became unemployed because the minimum wage increased. Not one. Ever.

I did find some employers who extravagantly claimed that the small boost in the minimum wage drove them into bankruptcy and forced them to close their businesses. But even a casual examination of those businesses revealed that things like poor management or gross mismanagement, inadequate capitalization and non-competitive pricing were the real culprits.

Another article of faith for the Republicans is that business owners are the “job creators”. But are they really? Did they, for example, take those massive tax cuts and corporate welfare payments and create more jobs with the money like they said they would do?

No, they did not. Because they are not the real job creators.

We live in a nation whose economy is based on consumption. That means that, unless people are seeking to buy what you are selling, you are not going to sell it and so you are not going to produce more of it. Goods, services, widgets -- you name it. The demand has to be there.

And what that really means is that people need the money in their pockets before they can go out and buy what they want. It’s the people that spend the money who are the real job creators. They are the demand, the demand drives production and the businessman answers the upsurge in demand with more production, and people get hired to produce. That businessman is not a job creator. He is a job facilitator, doing his own job to meet the demands of the marketplace. As more people are hired, there is more money to spend in the whole economy, and therefore even more demand, which creates more jobs, and so on.

Give a rich person even more money and he will squirrel it away in some tax-free offshore account. Give a person who is making minimum wage more money and you won’t see her opening that super-secret bank account in the Cayman Islands. No, you will see her spending it on the goods and services that she needs and driving the economy.

This is simple. Economics 101. So why don’t Republicans “get it”? Are they that disconnected from reality? It sure looks like it.

Pay Jury Members Minimum Wage

I started thinking about this several years ago when I was called for jury duty. Since I was a state employee, and jury duty was seen as a positive thing for citizens to do, I was paid my regular wage and benefits from the state while I was gone, in a specific category called, not surprisingly, Jury Duty Pay. It wasn't charged to my vacation leave or holidays or anything else.

So it was no loss to me financially to do my civic duty and be on a jury. But what about people whose employers are not so generous? People who are working at a minimum wage job, without those benefits and perks that are enjoyed by union members, state employees, etc.

For them it is a financial burden for them to be impaneled on a jury. True, most states have a "hardship" clause that can excuse them from jury duty. But is that really contributory to a fair and impartial justice system? From my experience, the answer is a resounding "no".

My jury pool, after all of the excused jurors were dismissed, was top-heavy with middle-class retirees, way older than the local demographic would indicate. Wealthier and whiter as well. And about 60-40 female v. male.

A large number of the people charged with crimes severe enough to warrant a jury trial are exactly the opposite. Young, poor, male, persons of color.

 In Washington State jurors are paid a whopping $10 a day. Nationwide jury duty pay runs from a paltry $5 a day (New Jersey) to a generous payment of the minimum wage for jury hours (New Mexico). Most states pay between $10 and $40 per day. Still not much of an incentive.

If we paid our jurors something more than a joke, we might get a more representative cross-section of jurors to serve. When that happens, I think the accused would get a much fairer trial. People can't park their prejudices at the door when they walk into the courtroom, mostly because a large number of them don't even realize that they have those prejudices. When you have panel of jurors that skews to the aged, the wealthy, the white, it's almost impossible to get a reasonable judgment on "just the facts". You know the old saying, "A fish is the last one that's going to grasp the principles of water".

In my jury pool there were a number of people who were more or less blatant about wanting to shirk their duty. While no one actually came out and said, "Just look at him! He looks guilty!", a couple of them came very close to that. I didn't think I would get chosen myself, since at that time I worked in quasi-law-enforcement (I was an Unemployment Insurance fraud investigator), but I skated through anyway and found myself impaneled on an aggravated assault trial jury.

So what happened? After the first day of testimony and graphic evidence (gruesome photos taken of the victim in the hospital) by the prosecution, the defendant saw the handwriting on the wall and pleaded out the next morning. He took a reduced charge instead of putting his fate in the hands of 12 people who were not smart enough to get out of jury duty. He still had to do some prison time, but not nearly as much as he would have when if we found him guilty.

Too bad, since I was looking forward to a Twelve Angry Men scenario in the deliberation room.

Sam Cooke Died 50 Years Ago Today

One of my very favorite performers from the late 50s and early 60s was the legendary Sam Cooke. He died 50 years ago today, shot to death by a motel manager in Los Angeles.

The Los Angeles Morgue Files blog has a moving tribute to his life along with a detailed report on his death. It's worth reading, to get an insight into the troubled life and tragic death of one of America's most influential artists.

In the meantime, here is my own tribute: From 1960, Sam Cooke singing his classic, "Chain Gang", with video from the documentary film American Chain Gang, from Chain Gang Pictures:

I Was Time's Man of the Year. Twice

It's really something to put on my résumé. Twice now I have been Time Magazine's Man Person of the Year.

Every year since 1927 the editors of Time Magazine have chosen a Man of the Year -- since 1999, Person of the Year --  that features and profiles a person, group, idea or object that  "for better or for worse...has done the most to influence the events of the year". It's a pretty elite and diverse group. Everyone from Charles Lindbergh (the first MOY) to Adolph Hitler to Wallis Simpson to Henry Kissinger to the Ayatollah Khomeini has been chosen for the somewhat dubious honor. Dubious in that, prior to Faux News, Time Magazine was the propaganda arm of rightwing American-exceptionalist jingoism for most of its life.

In 1966 the Man of the Year was "The Inheritor", which was everyone 25 and under, and I was in that target demographic, having just turned 21 that spring. Of course over half of the US population also fit into the demographic at the time. If you click on The Inheritor from that Person of the Year page, you get redirected to Baby Boomers, but that's not entirely accurate since, as I've taken great pains to point out (pedantically some might say...) over the years that I am not a Baby Boomer, having been born when WWII was still being fought. Officially the Baby Boomer generation started popping out on Jan 1, 1946. (Yes, I am that old...)

Then exactly 40 years later, in 2006, Time's Person of the Year was, simply, "You". In other words, everybody, thanks to the pervasive influence of the Internet and the World Wide Web, the "millions of people who anonymously contribute user-generated content to wikis (including Wikipedia), YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and the multitudes of other websites featuring user contribution" became Person of the Year.

Actually I've technically had it three times -- if you want to count 2011's award, The Protester, honoring everything from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street. But since my activities were strictly limited to local fair-weather demonstrations, I don't feel right about putting myself in the same league as the real protesters.

Pretty much all of you fall into the demographic for the 2006 Person of the Year. But if that's not enough for you, you can create your own with a simple Facebook app that puts your photo on a faux cover.

Millionaires For Clinton

A recent poll has Hillary Clinton ahead of Jeb Bush among millionaires by a whopping 72%. Of course that's among Democratic millionaires. Still, she pulled a respectable 31% among all millionaires.

Yeah, that's a surprise -- NOT. She's been a Wall Street sockpuppet/mouthpiece for years, and I really hope the Democrats will come to their senses before 2016 and find someone else to run. But that's like hoping the sun won't come up. At this point, without her even saying she's going to run, she has the nomination locked up.

After eight years of Clinton fatigue, immediately followed by another eight years of Bush fatigue, is this the best that either party can do for our country?

My fear in all of this is that a lot of Democrats view her with scorn, and a lot of people seem to have just a visceral dislike of her. We on the Left also didn't like the way Bill Clinton ran the country during his term in office, the way he had of dividing by triangulation the very people who should have been his chief supporters, the way he "ended welfare as we know it", the way he pandered to the right wing -- of both parties -- and the way he tried to carve out a "New Covenant" position in the middle of the road. To crib from the title of one of the great Jim Hightower's books, the only you thing you find in the middle of the road is dead armadillos.

There's no reason to think Hillary would do much differently than Bill, and gauging by her being in bed with so many Wall Street types, probably worse, and I think a lot of Democrats are going to basically sit the next one out if she's the candidate. I know that I will be hard pressed to find it in me to give her the kind of enthusiastically intense shoes-on-the-sidewalk campaigning that I did for Obama or John Kerry.

And if enough liberals are like me, then we'll end up with a Republican president. None of them are worth, as former Vice President John Nance "Cactus Jack" Garner said, "a bucket of warm piss". (Sidebar: This was reported for years euphemistically as a "bucket of warm spit".)

If Jeb runs, he'll probably get the nomination. That would be marginally acceptable, I suppose, despite the fact that he's another Bush. Even though he's supposed to be "the smart one", he's still a fucking Bush! What would not be acceptable would be if he does not run and Ted Cruz gets the nomination and wins the election.

Then it's Katy Bar the Door for all of us liberals. I'll have to start looking for another country to move to if that happens.

In the meantime, Elizabeth Warren, please change your mind! I'm too old to have to pull up stakes and move out of the country.

Chicks With Dicks

Gotcha. Sorry, this is not really a post about those Thai "ladyboys", the Kathoey, the transgendered men/women who occupy a certain niche of the Pornonet.

In fact, it's an experiment -- which, it could be said, is actually a blatant and cynical attempt to drive more hits to this blog. Right before the 2008 election, I wrote a post entitled "Sarah Palin Camel Toes", and that particular post got an astounding 47,629 hits. (If you click on that link, you will note that the offending image has been "disappeared" by Google. Probably a "copyright issue". But you can still see it here.)

Almost 48,000 page views. That's nearly four times the number for the second place "Forgotten Men" of Black History 1: Homer Plessy, which topped out at 12,879. Now that is a sad commentary on the quality of political discourse on the Internets.

So anyway... Back to the topic for today.

At this point, thanks to professional dirty old man Sigmund Freud, "everybody" knows -- especially freshman psychology students -- that a gun is an extension of/substitute for a penis. Specifically, a small penis. Especially this guy. But I digress.

Here are some women exercising their 2nd Amendment rights by waving their dicks around:

I wonder how many of them are equally concerned with their other rights. You know, the ones they are actually in danger of losing:

"We Don't Torture People"

Back in the day, George W. "Baby Doc" Bush and especially his Dark Dick Overlord, Darth Cheney, went around saying, "we don't torture people."

Even then, most of us intuitively knew that at best it was a finely-parsed claim on a par with "that depends on what the definition of 'is' is": If you don't define "waterboarding" as torture, then you can say you didn't "torture" someone with it. You were using "enhanced interrogation techniques".

Fuck that. Everyone instinctively knew that what the CIA was doing was torture. Even the Bush maladministration knew it and all of the adept Orwellian phrasing in the world was not going to change it.

Now we can all really know the facts. The long-awaited Senate Report on Intelligence has been published, and you can read it in all its gory detail at this download link.

It may be too late to impeach the bastards, but I don't think there's a statute of limitations on war crimes.

Off to The Hague with them. Frog march. Frog march.

And maybe it's not too late to repossess that replacement heart beating away merrily in Cheney's chest. It's a good thing that organ donation is generally done anonymously. If one of my loved ones had given up his heart only for me to find it installed inside Darth Cheney's chest of darkness, I would be pissed.

"Uppity Negroes" and Outside Agitators

The great and wise and powerful Oz wingnut pundit Bill Orally has pronounced that all of the nationwide protests over the Ferguson and Garner grand jury decisions were not the spontaneous reaction by a trodden-down community, but instead were orchestrated by a tiny cabal of race-victimization-thumping far-left radicals. After all, Bill Orally is exactly the kind of person god would choose to "understand" and to pass judgment on the actions of "The Negroes" and their leaders.

I am old enough to recall the first Civil Rights protests -- well, not the real first first, but the ones that made it to the Big Time, i.e., national television, in the mid-1950s. No less a personage than J. Edgar Hoover himself said, in his masterfully-ghost-written Masters of Deceit, that the whole civil rights movement was definitely a communist plot. No less an authority on the communist menace, and Genn Beck role-model/object-of-worship, W. Cleon Skousen, said the same thing in his totally factual and completely unbiased study, The Naked Communist.

I can also remember people saying, "Them damn niggers were happy before them goddam communiss agents started stirrin' 'em up 'n' makin' 'em all uppity!"

No, really. I actually heard that. From a member of my own extended family -- remember, I grew up in rural Oklahoma, and sadly not all of my family was of the liberal-progressive Agrarian Socialist line.

That sentiment is still around, although that particular expression of it may have gone underground, more or less -- but like a bloodstain that you can't get out, it's still there in the fabric.

It takes a certain amount -- no, a huge amount -- of racist arrogance to really believe that blacks were happy with their lot under the Jim Crow laws that ruled for a century, until they were provoked by "outside agitators" into believing, against all proof of reality, that their former-masters-and-still-racially-superior overlords, i.e., the white race, were only concerned about their welfare.

And that's why a Google search for the simple phrase "Slavery Good for Blacks" comes up with 9,940,000(!) hits.

So it all comes down to this: According to this line of thought, Black folk are simple, docile, wooly-headed semi-retarded children who would be happy with a shiny set of keys, if it weren't for all those communist/socialist/fascist/Islamist/fuck-if-I-know-ist agitators who just want to stir them up, make them riot and urge them to kill whitey, but don't really want to improve their lot in life. Improve their lot in life? Why would anyone want to do that for those uppity Negroes? After all, as Richard Nixon's Secretary of Agriculture, the appropriately-named Earl Butz, famously once said, "I'll tell you what the coloreds want. It's three things: first, a tight pussy; second, loose shoes; and third, a warm place to shit."

Jesus, when it comes down to it, who doesn't want that? Why would they even think they wanted more?

For a deeper analysis of Bill Orally and his pontifical judgment of this issue, see the always-valuable NewsCorpse site and its Black Folk Sure Is Lucky To Have Bill O’Reilly To Tell ‘Em Who Their Leaders Oughta Be referenced above.

Hate Speech on Fox Nation Site

Our friends over at the always valuable media watchdog site News Corpse have collected the most egregious examples of hate speech posted in the Fox Nation forums and have collected them here for your "enjoyment".

Go ahead and read through them. If you can. Fair warning: They are not for the faint of heart. The wingnuttery will defend themselves, as always, by saying the Democrats do it too, but I challenge anyone to find a liberal equivalent of this very angry race-based invective, even a remote or obscure liberal example.

You can likely find a lot more of this on your own if you go yourself to their site. I won't provide the link because I don't want to contribute to their page-driven link stats, but you can find it easily enough on your own (note: it's wwwDOTfoxnationDOTcom). It's fucking disgusting and they appear to have given up even any semblance of supporting their "fair and balanced" slogan.

Mormon Missionaries

A ring at my doorbell yesterday reminded me that I haven't railed against Mormons since shortly after the last presidential election.

That's no way for me to get myself onto that infamous Mormon Blacklist. I'll have to work harder.

Which brings us to today's topic: Mormon missionaries. For years the streets have been peppered with earnest young men with fresh-scrubbed faces, short-clipped hair and no facial hair (a HUGE no-no), riding bicycles in the white shirts and ties in all kinds of weather, knocking on your door to bring you The Word. Well, actually a lot of words, most of them gibberish once they got past their basic memorized spiel and you started asking them some tough questions.

Such as this: "You say that The Book of Mormon is a historical record of the tribes of Indians that originally came across the Pacific, from Israel(!), in closed boats a thousand years before Columbus, right? Well answer me this question -- the Book of Mormon is full of references to things like camels, horses, elephants, pigs, cows, etc. [and not just animals; there's actually quite a list of impossible anachronisms in the BOM, things of which there is no historical or archeological records of prior to 1492] so where did they all go -- there is absolutely zero evidence for them in any anthropological/geological/archeological studies anywhere? [Outside the confines of church educational institutions, anyway]"

They would usually mumble something about all things being possible with god and shamble away.

I kind of feel bad for doing this, but for a long time it kept them away from my door. I think they must use secret signs, like hobos used to use, to mark my house.

Then when they started coming around again a few years later, they were able to produce some mealy-mouth type of rationalization handed down from the Brethren (i.e., Church honchos), that the Israelites who landed here did not have words for the animals, etc., they saw and applied the name of the animals they knew already to the strangers who looked like them. Okay, that's not bad, and for the sake of discussion I am willing to stipulate that they were actually that stupid and unobservant and unimaginative.

So then I ask them: "You say that the American Indians are descended from the original settlers from Israel who came here around 600 BC, who were once a 'white and delightsome people' until they angered God and he smote them with a darker shade of skin? And when they finally proved they could follow all of god's commandments and precepts, they would turn back into a 'white and delightsome people' again. Then why is it that not a single trace of DNA from the Middle East shows up in the cells of any Native Americans?"

The way they explained that away is kind of creative, even if they had to go against what had been until very recently their entire core of beliefs and their church history to do it. "Nobody ever said that ALL of the Indians were descended from the immigrants [fact: just a few years ago they were claiming exactly that]. The Indians were already here when they landed." Not what it says in the BOM. Sorry. Still, that shook 'em up a bit more and they stayed away again.

And then after a while they came back. Okay, I said. "Now explain to me why your church was racist against black people until 1978."

Blank stare. And at that point I knew that these two hadn't even been born when the curse of black skin was lifted off of the sons of Cain and his grandson Ham, and had never heard of the Mormon doctrine concerning blacks and had never heard of the iron-clad pronouncements of Demigod Brigham Young and his successors to the post of Prophet, Seer and Revelator of the One True Church. All of those grand old -- and white -- prophets had said that black people could not have the full fellowship of the church and could not hold The Priesthood. Not in this life. That sounds like a minor thing, until you realize that every male member of the church, except the ones who were black, held the priesthood, and there was no way anyone could advance in the church without this priesthood. It even extended to the Boy Scouts (the Mormons were and still are big into Scouting) and aspiring Scouts had to show their progression through the three ranks of the "lower" priesthood even as they advanced from Tenderfoot to Second Class to First Class and onward...

"I don't think that's true," the taller one said, a bit hesitatingly I thought.

"Go study up on it and then come back and explain it to me then," I said.

Well, that kept them away for another long time, and just when I thought I'd gotten the permanent "stay away from this guy" hobo marking in front of the driveway or on the mailbox, two more showed up yesterday.

And these two were girls. Young, cute, wide-eyed fresh-faced eighteen-year-olds just exuding pious innocence out of their very pores. Working the mean streets of suburbia after dark. Jeez, when did the Mormons start sending out girl missionaries? They were bubbly and perky and delighted to spend a couple of years working in the mission field to seduce people into the bonds arms of The One True Church.

Turns out it was kind of smart move, since I actually felt sorry for them -- they could have been my granddaughters who are about that age -- and if I had started snarking out on them with some impossible questions to make them think and thereby ruining their week, it just would have felt mean. I just said I wasn't interested.

"Well, can we do anything for you?" the blonde said in a perky valley-girl voice.

"Like take your garbage out," the other one, a brunette, said. "We'd love to take your garbage out."

Take my garbage out? What the fuck is that supposed to mean?

"No, that's all right," I said. "Thanks for stopping by, but I'm really and truly not interested."

We parted on friendly terms, and they haven't come back yet. But it's only been a day, after all. But when they do, I will be ready for them this time: "I'd love to be able invite you in to talk to you, but there's still a restraining order in effect from the last time I invited a teenage girl in, and besides that, I have been excommunicated from The Church for adultery, apostasy and sodomy."

That ought to do it.

Oh, and any Mormons who are reading this and who are questioning their faith, you don't have to suffer your spiritual crisis all by yourself. Drop by PostMormon.org and they will help you. You don't have to do it alone.

The UVa Fraternity House Rape Case -- Something Happened

It's been all over the news in the last few days, and I'm afraid that it's another one of those things that we will never get to the bottom of.

I'm willing to stipulate that something happened to UVa student "Jackie". But, since she did not go immediately to report it and get swabbed with a rape kit, I'm not willing to conclude exactly what that was, except that her rape story seems to be coming unraveled.

One of the problems with the original story in Rolling Stone, and how it grew "legs", was that there was hardly a person in the country who was not able believe that members of a college fraternity could be involved in something like this. Anyone who attended a major university is familiar with the whole frat-rat "Greek" culture, and how they tend to come off as a bunch of snobby self-important entitlement-elitist exclusionary assholes. Anyone except the members themselves, of course.

Couple that with the cultural-shift backlash that has happened over the last few years to counter the traditional "blame the victim" mindset that had afflicted the police, the courts, university administrations and (according to some) the whole male half of the population, and it's a fertile field for the kind of sensationalism that the original Rolling Stone article, aided and abetted by the "if it bleeds it leads" media, was willing to plant, till and nurture.

Now that counter mindset has become institutionalized in our culture, to the point where anyone who even tries to raise any reasonable doubts, or even concerns, about facts in a particular case is dismissed as a blame-the-victim reactionary.

If it turns out that "Jackie" was not telling the whole truth about what happened, then that will give inestimable aid and comfort to the old blame-the-victim crowd. Remember the Duke University lacrosse team case? It happens that people sometimes make up stories. In other words, they lie. And sometimes the alleged perpetrators are, in fact, innocent.

If in fact, "Jackie" is not telling the truth, then what will that do to the people who are still being raped and victimized? Are they going to be so willing to come forward and level charges in the face of this onslaught of disbelievers? Go through that battery of semi-invasive and humiliating medical tests? I think if I were a woman, I'd have to think twice about it: Victimized once, then victimized again. Uh, no thanks...

And on the flip side of this, how many rapists are going to be emboldened by this story? They can claim that the sex was consensual, that "the chick was asking for it the whole night" and then got an attack of moral conscience afterwards and is lying about the rape, and they will have a good chance of getting away with it.

The whole sordid mess raises some questions that are not easy to answer. Rolling Stone itself has taken a big hit in credibility with this, and it will suffer for it as well.

It's a lose-lose-lose situation for everyone, from the victim to the administration to the police to the courts to the media. And the bigger it becomes, the more play it will get in the slavering-for-a-scandal media, and it's these big cases that people will remember. Look at Duke Lacrosse -- eight years later it's still be used as a example of wrongful prosecution that defense attorneys can pull out of their bag of tricks.

Poe's Law and the Landover Baptist Church

There's a thing called "Poe's Law" which holds that "without a clear indication of the author's intent, it is difficult or impossible to tell the difference between an expression of sincere extremism and a parody of extremism".

Or, as George S. Kauffman said, "Satire is what closes on Saturday night."

Context may be everything, but sometimes even that is not enough. Which brings us to the topic for today, the Landover Baptist Church.

Go ahead and check out their websites here and here. The smart reader (and everyone who reads this blog is, by definition, a smart reader) gets it immediately. But tell me you don't feel kind of sorry for some poor wide-eyed "really-and-truly true-believer" sap who happens to accidentally stumble onto those sites.

Yeah, I didn't think so. Me neither.

Two years ago I wrote a post entitled Oh Woe Is Me ... Ten Things That Spell THE END of America wherein I stated, tongue firmly in cheek, what the 2012 election really meant, among them that "my wife and I had to get a divorce since gay marriage was legalized in Washington State and that destroyed 'traditional marriage', the god damn Fascist/Communist/Socialist/Atheist/Islamist gov'ment has put its lousy stinking hands on my Medicare and my Social Security and my Veterans benefits, and gotten them all dirty and greasy and stinky and fingerprint-y", and so on in that vein. ("Humor in a jugular vein" as Mad Magazine used to call it back when it was still a comic book; of course at my age it's now "humor in a varicose vein"...)

Anyway, afterwards I had to go in and edit it with the mock-HTML tags <satire> </satire> -- these tags don't actually exist but should -- clearly marking it as "satire" since apparently Poe's Law was in effect and the casual readers of even this blog were taking it seriously.

It's Long Past Time to Impeach the President

In my humble opinion, it's long past time to impeach the president. I've taken the liberty of drawing up a bill of particulars concerning the Constitutionally-required "high crimes and misdemeanors" for which he should be impeached:

• He placed a bunch of US servicemen in a hostile country without any clear mission or reason to be there, and when over 200 of them were killed in a terrorist car-bomb attack, he withdrew -- cut and ran -- from that country without explanation and without going after the terrorists responsible¹.
• Immediately after that, he shifted attention from that debacle to a new and different country and invaded it on the flimsiest of pretexts².
• He negotiated with terrorists and ultimately gave them weaponry in exchange for a few hostages, and through those same terrorists funneled armaments to a group of thugs in a completely different part of the world who were trying to violently overthrow their own government³.
•  He lied repeatedly to the American people on television, and sent his representatives to lie to Congress, under oath, on his behalf. To cover up those lies, he directed that evidence be destroyed⁴.
• He granted amnesty to several million "illegal aliens"⁵.
• He...

Wait, what?

That wasn't Obama? That was Ronald Reagan???

Well, in the words of Miss Emily Litella, "Oh, that's very different. Never mind."

I told you up front that it is long past time to impeach the president. About 33 years past time.

Republican hypocrisy -- it knows no bounds.

---

Footnotes:
1. Beirut 1983
2. Grenada 1983
3. Iran-Contra 1985-87
4. Ibid.
5. IRCA 1986

Last Thanksgiving Update I Promise

I forgot to tell you about the one successful food item I fixed for Thanksgiving that was met with the opposite reaction to the first three. I got a recipe for cranberry chutney and whipped up a batch that went better than the unpalatable-to-some foods I was serving with it.  In fact everyone loved it just as a substitute for the regular cranberry sauce. I still have some left and the flavors get more mixed and become more subtly complementary to each other every day. Now, with all the other food gone, just a smear of cream cheese and a small spoonful of chutney on a cracker makes a filling and delicious snack.

As you may not know, Chutney is a "family of condiments associated with South Asian cuisine" -- that pretty much means Britain's former Empire, The British Raj in India, including Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangla Desh.

We had chutney for the first time we went to London back in the 80s and loved it. After fighting to a few armed standoffs with Spotted Dick, Toad in the Hole, and that Scottish delight, Haggis, we started eating exclusively in Indian restaurants. Fortunately a century of British colonialism had resulted in a large number of immigrants from South Asia living in London, and it seemed like all of them had started restaurants. Almost all of those restaurants we ate in were very good, and they had plenty of chutney in a wide variety of flavors. It goes with anything, and the spices in it add an extra taste dimension to pretty much any "regular" food you garnish it with.

And it's really easy to make. See the recipe. The only thing I'd do differently next time would be to reduce the sugar by about one-third, and maybe add some chopped walnuts to it. But Chutney is one of those things you can add a multitude of ingredients to and it will still be chutney and it will still be good.

Rick Santorum, Communism, and the Separation of Church and State

Rick Santorum. Just when you thought he'd gone away, he's ba-a-a-a-ack! And true to form, he's whipping himself up into an ill-informed frenzy about shit that he knows nothing about.

Yesterday, in a radio appearance that not only telegraphs but also semaphores and bullhorns his intent to run for the presidency again, he ran off the rails about the separation of church and state, and how it's not "American" -- no, it's a communist idea that has no place in the good ole USA.

I'm sure that this will come as a surprise to the ghosts of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who were moldering in their graves long before Karl Marx and Friedrich Engles wrote The Communist Manifesto. (For those of you who were home-schooled, that was the "revolutionary year" of 1848.)

In addition, Santorum says that the words "separation of church and state" are NOT in the US Constitution, but are in the constitution of the former Soviet Union. True enough, that phrase does not exist in the constitution, but the idea, the concept, of separation of church and state is inherent in the document and in Jefferson's and Madison's writings about their "original intent".

A caller to the program which featured Santorum stated that “a number of the things that the far left, a.k.a. the Democrat [sic] Party, and the president is pushing for and accomplishing actually accomplishes a number of the tenets of ‘The Communist Manifesto,’ including the amnesty, the elevation of pornography, homosexuality, gay marriage, voter fraud, open borders, mass self-importation of illegal immigrants and things of that nature.”

I've actually read The Communist Manifesto in the past and -- because memory can be hazy -- I just now refreshed my memory of it by reading through the text again.

Funny thing, but I just couldn't find any "tenets" in that document that deal with the amnesty, the elevation of pornography, the homosexuality, the gay marriage, the voter fraud, the open borders, the mass self-importation of illegal immigrants and "things of that nature". Not even in an indirect way. And pornography? Really?

But maybe it's just me. Rick Santorum must see it in there; otherwise wouldn't he have corrected the caller?

Yeah, silly question.

I'm actually glad to see him running. It will give me and a bunch of other politicky-snarky people a lot of enjoyment, having such a fat and floundering fish in the barrel to shoot at.

And one more thing: Given that the collapse of the Soviet Union signaled the death knell of the Communist worldwide conspiracy -- in fact, consigned it to "the dustbin of history" -- why are we still trying to find communists lurking under every "red" rock?

One of Many Reasons Why I Don't "Twit"

You may have noticed a new commenter on this blog since I came back from hiatus. She's Katy Anders and I welcome her to the fray.

She said, in a comment on my post-Thanksgiving report, that she is an adventurous eater but had never had the opportunity to eat pickled pig's feet. Okay, that happens. If you live in Borough Park, Brooklyn or Dearborn, Michigan, it's likely you won't find them in the neighborhood deli. But then I finally dropped by her site, the quirky and interesting and entertaining  Fascist Dyke Motors, and learned that she lives in ... Texas!

Come on Katy, if you haven't had a pickled pig's foot by now, you're going out of your way to avoid them.

Anyway, that's not really the topic under discussion here. What I also found on her site was an account of the Twitterverse imploding on her. Read Why Mia McKenzie Tried to Have Me Lynched for an in-detail report of what happened when suddenly everyone in the world went ape-shit on her. To the point of physical threats and drive-by harassment of her daughter in front of her own house.

Really, this shit has gotten out of hand. Reading that account solidified my belief that I do not need another source of drama in my life. I have She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, along with four children, eight grandchildren, five-and-counting great-grandchildren, which adds up to 18 people and they all seem bent on doing their level best to keep my life in turmoil. I don't need to go asking for more of it. I had a small taste of that kind of thing back in the good old days of 2004 when I was on my state's Veterans for Kerry steering committee. One guy in Missouri even said he was "gonna git on a plane and fly out there and give you a good ol fashion ass-whuppin".

Yeah, thanks but no thanks. Like the great Joe Pesci in My Cousin Vinny, as much as I might need a "good ol fashion ass-whuppin", I'll have to pass on that generous offer. Besides, that guy probably couldn't even find his way out of Lake O' the Ozarks to an airport. I'd have to take my ass to him for that whuppin.

But that said, more power to Katy if she's willing to put up with it. You go, girl!

Are The Republicans Finally Learning Something?

Big news over the weekend. Elizabeth Lauten, a GOP staffer for a Republican Congressman, made a snarky mean-girl FaceBook post about the Obama daughters acting like the teenagers they are at the yearly "pardoning of the turkeys" ritual.

When the backlash happened, she immediately issued one of those non-apology apologies that the GOP is so good at -- "I'm sorry if you took offense at my words", etc. etc. And then, when that didn't mollify the critics, she "resigned" her post. You know, Republicans never get fired -- they just "want to spend more time with my family" or some such nonsense.

Look at that FB post again. "Dress like you deserve respect, not a spot at the bar." I'd like to point out that we are talking about a couple of kids here, not the Bush Twins, who were notorious for entering and drinking at bars when they were nineteen-year-old semi-adults, and who were asked to leave Argentina because their wanton partying had become an embarrassment to the United States. In fact, that whole post could have very easily been about the Bush Twins. Read it over again but with "Dear Jenna and Barbara" in the salutation, and see if you agree with me.

I took a lot of flack for my relentless posts about the Bush Twins on this blog. Apparently White House children are supposed to be totally off limits.

Harry Truman took a bit of flack when he fumed at a critic of his daughter Margaret's musical ability, "Some day I hope to meet you. When that happens you'll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below!"

And Margaret Truman was an adult when that happened.

Let's also not forget that Rustydick "Pimple-ass Draft Dodger" Limbaugh will go down in infamy for his comment about 12-year-old Chelsea Clinton being "the White House dog".

He never apologized for that, not even the patented Rethug "sorry that you took offense" apology-that-is-not-an-apology. Which shows that the more money you have, the more money you can raise for The Party, the less responsibility you have to shoulder when you say stupid stuff. Poor Elizabeth Lauten didn't have the cash or the clout, it appears.

So back to the question: Are they finally learning something? No.

Thanksgiving Update -- Anyone for Pickled Pig's Feet?

Well, as I should have expected, my Super Supper Salad Loaf/bologna log didn't go over all that well. And neither did the snacks I put out for hors d'oeuvres -- Squealies (deep fried pork rinds) and pickled pig's feet.

Even though, as I strenuously pointed out, at least the Squealies are actually a healthy(ish) snack.

"They're gluten free!" I said. "They're low-carb!"

"They are disgusting!" my granddaughter countered. "And I don't even want to talk about those...those...whatever they are!"

"Pickled pig's feet," I said. Patiently enough, I thought.

Then I turned to my daughter for support. "Remember when you were little? You loved pickled pig's feet. Couldn't get enough of them."

"Yeah, before I knew what they were."

"It says 'pickled pig's feet' right on the jar. How could you not know?"

"Those bags of candy were called 'chicken bones', but they didn't have real chicken bones in them, did they?!"

Well, there is that...

Okay. Point, set and match. I should have known that these kinds of snacks wouldn't go over when I learned that they were bringing their own main course -- a "Tofurkey", which is actually a loaf of tofu turkey(!), with its own stuffing, since they are still pretending to be vegetarians.
  
Yecch!

Another thing I discovered. Actually, I didn't "discover" it as much as remember it. Once you open a jar of pickled pig's feet, you are committed to eating them all right away. They don't really save well. I ate about a third of them and put the jar in the fridge. When I opened it up again on Friday, I was faced with an oleaginous mass of lard that had solidified into long crystal-like shapes, like a disgustingly pale-white meat version of the kind of lava you see in the old basalt lava cliffs in Eastern Washington.

At least the Super Supper Salad Loaf is something that won't go bad. It can't, because it didn't start from "good" to begin with. I'll still be eating it when Easter rolls around. By myself, since the rest of the people in my family are smarter than I am, apparently.

Time Off for the Holiday -- Plus Recipe!

Yeah, I know what you're thinking. The guy's on the job for half an hour and already he wants a break. Well, despite the cautions of Felix Clay over at Cracked.com, I'm devoting some time to my family.

My youngest daughter moved to town last year and now I have no excuse to avoid being with family for Thanksgiving. In the past, when all of the kids lived about an hour and half south of here, it was easy to beg off with some flimsy excuse or another -- It's too dark. It's too cold. It's too wet. My probation officer won't let me leave the county. You know, the usual stuff. But now that she and two of my grandchildren live here, that's not so easy.

So we are committed to having dinner here (despite the fact that my granddaughter has to work on Thanksgiving night -- need I mention that she works in retail at one of the local malls?) and that means that I have to actually do stuff. Like prepare food.

I'm thinking about fixing this:

Chances are good that I won't be expected to contribute anything foodwise, ever again...

---

Note: This was, obviously, a Hellman's Real Mayonnaise ad from WWII, when housewives had to be conscious of conserving their food ration points, hence the "low-point-cost" reference. Even in WWII, baloney was not rationed.

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.

Point of Order -- The Army-McCarthy Hearings

The other day I posted Operation Abolition and the Red Menace, containing embedded YouTube movies about the student "riot" at the HUAC hearings in 1960 in San Francisco.

Reader Nan the Historian brought up the 1964 documentary Point of Order and asked if I'd seen it. Yes, I saw it once years ago, but now it is available of course on The Internets, and I was able to find it on YouTube.

It's about the 1954 Army-McCarthy Hearings, and it consists of nothing but the television coverage of the hearings. Two television networks provided live gavel-to-gavel coverage of the hearings, which was a novelty then. The producer of this film, Emile De Antonio, also did something novel: He used nothing but the footage itself, with no voice-over narration and no music. You get nothing but the actual hearings.

Of course, since the hearings took place over some 40+ days and this is only an hour and half in length, you are not getting all of it. But what you do get is a clear picture of Joseph "Tailgunner Joe" McCarthy.

One thing is clear from viewing this film. Tailgunner Joe was a bully.

Check it out:



As an aside, if you look carefully, you'll see the youthful visage of Bobby Kennedy (that's him fourth from the left). It was a fact that that the Kennedys didn't particularly want publicized after his brother became president, but RFK had been counsel to the McCarthy-run Senate Committee on Government Operations. This committee was infamous for its role in rooting out "communists" from government, especially the "205" (the number changed depending on who McCarthy was talking to at the moment) in the US State Department.

November 22, 1963

Those of us of a certain age can tell you, for a certainty, exactly where we were 51 years ago today. That date is burnt into our souls the same way that December 7, 1941 was for our parents, and September 11, 2001 is to our children.

Much has been made of the JFK assassination over the years. JFK Conspiracy Theory has gone from a cottage industry with the publication of Who Killed Kennedy? by Thomas Buchanan in early 1964 (the first "conspiracy theory" book) to the lucrative field it is today, with every possible scenario, from the military-industrial complex to the Mafia to the CIA to the South Vietnamese (as retribution for the killing of Ngo Dinh Diem, just three weeks earlier!) to the French.

And yet we are no closer to solving the case than we were in November 1963. Most serious critics of the Warren Report believe that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone. From that basic premise it spirals out into the Oswald-Was-A-Patsy to Oswald-Was-An-Active-Communist-Agent and everything in between.

I've read extensively in the case, examined all of the evidence I could get my hands on, and I have yet to formulate a "unified field" theory of the assassination. No matter which scenario you follow, too many loose ends are left hanging.

I once heard it described this way (and I can't remember the source or I would credit him): At Judgment Day, when all will be revealed, the Big Question of Who Killed JFK? will be answered. Some nondescript guy in the back will say, "It was me. I did it."
And all of the assassination researchers will turn around to look at him, and then turn to each other and ask, "Who the fuck is that guy?"

November 22, 1963. That was 51 years ago today, and people of that "certain age" have crept up in years, to the point where now the person you are asking pretty much has to be older than 55 -- and that's stretching it a bit. But go ahead and ask anyone you know over 60. The only people who didn't know where they were that day were, of all people, Richard Nixon, George H. W. Bush and Howard Hunt.

Make of that what you will...

Reading The Wall on Veterans' Day

Since I am fairly well known in my community as "public veteran", i.e., I appear at a lot of functions and events wearing my Vietnam Veteran ball cap, I was asked to help a local grade school with their Veteran's Day celebration.

"I'll need to check with my parole officer first," was my first response. It was followed by a sharp intake of breath at the other end of the phone.

"I'm just kidding," I added quickly. "So what will I need to do?"

"Just read something to one of our classes. We have kindergarten, 3rd grade and 5th grade classes available for you to volunteer in."

A moment's thought. "Jeez, kindergartners are messy and smelly and have the attention span of a gnat, and fifth graders these days are already hitting puberty and some of them may be packing heat. I'll take the third graders."

Which is what I got. When I showed up at the Garfield School they gave me my reading material, a children's book called The Wall, by Eve Bunting and illustrated by Ronald Himler(!). When I first heard the title, I was expecting maybe an abridged version of John Hersey's great book about the Warsaw Ghetto, The Wall, which I thought might be a little age-inappropriate for ten-year-olds.

But no, to my surprise, it was a book about a young boy's visit to the Vietnam Veterans Wall in Washington DC with his father to look for his grandfather's name.

It was actually a very moving book and I could hardly keep myself from choking up a couple of times while reading it. If you know children about that age, I highly recommend that you get it for them. As I say, it was a very moving story and a great introduction for children to the concept of the Vietnam War.

The kids were great, each and every one of them was quiet and well-behaved, and either really interested in what I was reading or making a great face of looking that way. Afterwards they came up and asked a bunch of ten-year-old questions. At that age they can be fairly blunt: "Did you kill anyone?" No. "Did you have friends who died and are on the Wall?" Yes, about a dozen of them. And so on.

And then we all filed out of the classroom and down what seemed to me to be a tiny hall -- it was constructed for gradeschoolers after all -- to the gym, where I joined up with about a dozen more veterans who had volunteered for an assembly where we were all honored and thanked for our service.

It was really nice, a really sweet thing to do, and I was happy to be able to do it. Now I thinking of volunteering more at the school, since everyone knows that the public schools need our help. If you ever get a chance to do something like this, go for it. You will surprise yourself at what happens when you do.

Operation Abolition and the Red Menace

The Red Menace. It almost has a quaint ring to it now, but in the 1950s it was the scariest thing imaginable for a gullible American populace. The US had just fought to an uneasy standstill in Korea, the Evil Empire that was the Soviet Union had nuclear weapons -- thanks to its spies at Los Alamos (including the most famous of the "atom spies", the Rosenbergs) -- and there was much fear and loathing in the land.

It became a terror-based witch hunt propped up by the likes of Senator Joseph "Taligunner Joe" McCarthy and his crowd, and by the most reactionary congressmen, who seemed to overpopulate the House Un-American Activities Committee.*

Lives were ruined from just the innuendo that someone was a Communist. People lost their jobs, especially schoolteachers and other government employees, their houses torched by arsonists, their children harassed at school, and for a while during the 50s you would have suffered less from an accusation of child molestation than you would from an accusation of Communism. With the passage of Communist Control Act of 1954 it actually became illegal to be a member of the Party.

In May of 1960 the Committee decided to hold its witch-hunting hearings in San Francisco. Stretched over three days, from May 12 to May 14 at the city hall, the participants included several dozen suspected Communists. The witnesses were characterized as active members of the communist conspiracy, their deluded supporters and their "commie dupes".

It was there that the 1960s got its kick-start when students from nearby Berkeley and San Francisco State staged protest demonstrations. On Friday a demonstration turned into what was labeled at the time -- by the HUAC -- as a "riot" when police turned fire hoses on the demonstrators. That weekend really set the stage for the rest of the 60s, and I believe that it marked the first time that large numbers of white middleclass youth felt galvanized into action.

Naturally, HUAC put the blame squarely on the Communists and their nefarious plans to subvert American youth. The students, in the view of the Committee, were nothing more than pathetic dupes who were tricked by their handlers in The Party to come out and protest the Committee. And create a riot while they were at it.

To further its ends, the Committee subpoenaed -- confiscated -- television and newsreel film shot over the three day period and then had their own sympathetic editor and hired-gun narrator stitch together a 45 minute "documentary" intended to show how the hearings were sabotaged by the Communists and their dupes.

They called the film "Operation Abolition", because the Communist goal was to abolish the committee.

Here it is in its entirety:


Joseph Goebbels himself would be proud of the Committee's work if he could see this film.

The Northern California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union took the same footage used by the Committee and analyzed it for its handling of the truth of the protests at the hearing. With a different voice-over narrator and some telling subtitles it shows that much of the film footage was used out of chronological order in order to enhance the false narrative.

Here it is in its entirety:


I first saw these two films in college in the spring of 1969. They were shown in an English class with the purpose of illustrating how easy it was for "documentary" films to show a distorted reality. However, since the professor was also the leader of the local chapter of the ACLU, I suspect he had an ulterior motive. Especially when he was instrumental in bringing Frank Wilkinson (whom you will see in the movie) to speak on campus.

Oddly enough, by 1969 the New Left had taken over the political discussion on the left and Wilkinson was viewed as an odd historical artifact, a quaint flashback to a different time. I expected some kind of protest, if only a weak one, from the right wing element on campus (yes, there were some), but they were strangely silent. Probably none of them really knew of his Communist pedigree, or even his name.

So go ahead and watch both of these movies, and keep in mind that the "false narrative" is still alive and fully active, especially in the "documentary" productions of Faux News. But not only there. Pretty much all of the "news" media does it, which is why we all need to be informed consumers of the news, get our updates from numerous sources, and take everything with a grain of salt. A giant grain of salt. Or maybe a 50 lb. pound of salt...

Further Reading: A Focus on Rebellion, by Albert T. and Bernice Prince Biggs Anderson, 1962. Looks at the larger picture of student revolt, and has a long section on the San Francisco hearings, the "riot" and the trial of Robert Meisenbach, the only protester to face criminal charges resulting from the riot. Spoiler alert: He was found Not Guilty.

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*As an aside, it should come as a surprise to no one that one Richard Milhouse Nixon was on the Committee when he was in the House before he moved on to the Senate, the Vice Presidency and finally the Presidency and the personal and political disaster that was Watergate.

Breastfeeding in Public and Wackjob Cousin II

My wackjob cousin hasn't sent me anything from the rabid right in a long time. She's probably written me off as a lost cause. It's likely I won't be invited to the next family reunion. And that's just as well, since there's an old saying among the men in the Farnsworth Clan that the best place to hook up with women is at family reunions and funerals... (we do have our roots in Appalachia, after all).

But, living proof that nature abhors a vacuum, we now have a contender for the official title of Wackjob Cousin II. This time it's a cousin of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed who fortunately, for all concerned, lives in SoCal and gets up here only once a year or so.

Sidebar: She works with the chronic poor and the thinking impaired in the WIC program, the significance of which will be apparent shortly.

So I'm doing my level best to avoid her, but SWMBO came into my study and asked me point-blank to come out in the living room or she'll think I am avoiding her.

If there was ever a Duh! moment, that was it. But those of you who have been in a "significant other" relationship for any length of time will understand why I didn't belabor the obvious and why I agreed to show my face for a while.

The saving grace was that we watched a movie on Netflix and that ate up about two hour and a half hours -- the movie was genius director David Lynch's great Mulholland Drive".

Then things turned to shit on me.
"So, do you ever watch The Daily Show?" I asked. Innocent question, right? I thought so too, but apparently WJCII had an issue.

"No," she shrieked, frightening the cats who ran under the furniture. "Jon Stewart said that women breastfeeding in public was disgusting!"

"Huh?" was my considered response, followed shortly by. "I don't believe it."

"I heard him say it! I heard him say it! Are you saying I'm lying???"

"Uh, okay, no...I believe you think you heard him. I don't believe he really said it."

"I heard him say it! I heard him say it!"

"Okay, maybe he did, but gimme a break. It was part of a bit. It's a comedy show."

"You just don't know! They are very subtle..."

"Okay, prove it to me. That show is online with all the episodes. It ought to be easy to find it."

And then the "conversation" took an unsuspected turn: "This is the only country in the world where a woman can't breast feed in public! And it's all because of Hugh Hefner!"

Me: "??!"

As you can imagine, this caught me flat-footed. I didn't think until it was too late to ask if that statement was true for places like Saudi Arabia or Yemen (I think not) or what the hell Hugh Hefner had to do with it, since boobs have been around since long before he was born.

"These," she yelled, pointing at her relatively flat chest, "are FOOD! How would you like to eat under a blanket?"

"It's a fucking baby! It doesn't know and doesn't care where it eats. If it comes with your attitude, then it IS disgusting!"

Well, given that this is an issue about which she obviously feels very strongly -- irrationally, some would say -- some more verbal dueling ensued in the heat of the moment, culminating in her screechingly repeated, "I am not coming back here! I am not coming back here! I am not coming back here!"

Jeez, have a cracker, Poll Parrot. So then I retreated back into my man cave. She whipped out her Apple laptop and started a search. Not trusting her, I did my own search.

This is what I found: Absolutely NO reference to Jon Stewart saying anything remotely like that, which didn't surprise me since it would have been totally out of character for him. But what I did find is that Bill Maher was the one who said it. And, as I suspected all along, it was a fucking joke. If you've ever watched Bill Maher in action, who can be an obnoxious asshole, you'll understand.

So, long story short, I ended up apologizing for my part in this. After all, I was as SWMBO pointed out baiting her. Kind of. But I also swore that if she goes back on her threat and does come back here, I will have some important business out of town to take care of during her visit. Like volunteering to pick fly shit out of pepper in a school cafeteria in Walla Walla.

I think I prefer my wackjob cousins to be in touch by email. If at all. It's too hard on me to deal with it in the personifiction of an escapee from the Atascadero State Mental facility.

We've Had Quite Enough of Kim Kardashian

Jeez, let's just stop with all this Kim Kardashian crap. She has eaten up enough bandwidth already. (For those of you who have been living in a cave in Tora Bora, she is of course the poster girl for being Famous for Being Famous and nothing else.) Now apparently she has felt her fame slipping a bit, so she's come up with a new hook. Nakedity. Nudeness. Full frontal and full backal nudity. Showing off her butt and boobs with the hope of "breaking the Internet".  

"Breaking the Internet"? Really?

But I guess if it's all you've got going for her,  you go with what you've got.

Over at theGrio there's an interesting story about this cheeky display, called Kim Kardashian doesn’t realize she’s the butt of an old racial joke (ha-ha) that puts that famous-for-being-famous ass of hers in a little historical perspective.

Consider this: Black women with extremely large derrieres were quite the vogue in sideshows and freak exhibits (yes) in the 19th century, and Kim has -- wittingly or unwittingly -- brought that racist concept back into focus.

Read the whole story for a round and firm and fully packed insight into this. It's even got pictures (nudge-nudge, wink-wink)...

BTW, the Urban Dictionary has an apt (if marginally offensive, but hey, it's the Urban Dictionary...) appellation for Kim Kardashian and her ilk: Celebutard.

I'm Still Alive!

In the words of Mark Twain, "The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated." After posting I Didn't Mean to Leave You All Hanging, what's the first thing I do? Leave you all hanging.

I guess I didn't realize that it's now been a year and half. I still have the eye problem, and after getting a second opinion, and a third opinion, the consensus is that it's basically incurable and I'll just have to get used to it.

Which I have done, more or less. It's marginally better than it was, and I've adapted to it somewhat. It's meant things like moving my chair close to the television, getting a brighter light to read by, and monkeying around with the font and brightness settings on my Nook. And I am hesitant to drive at night, but I guess that's normal at my age.

I also had some "minor" surgery this fall, the recovery from which has been anything but minor. Add all this to the normal aches and pains that are attendant to someone of my advanced years and it was easier to laze back and retire.

But now that the Republicans have seized control of the Congress, I ought to have plenty to rail at. After the hectic frenzy of the holidays, I ought to be back in the saddle again after the first of the year. I'm sure they will provide me with more than ample fodder.

Thank you all for being concerned about me.

--The F Man