To contact us Click HERE
MArooned writes of yet another NANNY STATE infestation. To wit:
A Hoke County preschooler was fed chicken nuggets for lunch because a state worker felt that her homemade lunch did not have enough nutritional value, according to a report by the Carolina Journal.
The West Hoke Elementary School student was in her More at Four classroom when a state agent who was inspecting lunch boxes decided that her packed lunch — which consisted of a turkey and cheese sandwich, a banana, apple juice and potato chips — “did not meet U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines,” the Journal reports. (emphasis Guffaw)
link to Deutschland Uber Alles information. Get ahead of the curve! Learn it before it's required!
h/t Jay G, Carolina Journal, Fox News
30 Eylül 2012 Pazar
Blue Bloods, Indeed!
To contact us Click HERE
Sharp as a Marble discusses a recent episode of the Tom Selleck police TV show Blue Bloods.
(I used to watch it, but, I've now another commitment on Friday night - and no DVR., sigh - Guffaw)
Robb reports a plot line wherein a police detective (played by Donnie Wahlberg), after an episode of violence against his family, educates his son regarding safe gun handling and the rules of firearm safety.
He further states: Consider what some eleven million American viewers just saw: a father confronting his son's curiosity about his father's gun, and his son's extreme anxiety over nearly being killed, by delivering the gun safety talk, and putting his gun into his son's hands, while calmly emphasizing the trust he has in his son's good sense and sense of responsibility.
WOW. A watershed moment (on CBS television, no less!) if there ever was one.
Go read the whole post and view the link.
The times, they are a changin'. Indeed.
h/t Robb Allen
Sharp as a Marble discusses a recent episode of the Tom Selleck police TV show Blue Bloods.(I used to watch it, but, I've now another commitment on Friday night - and no DVR., sigh - Guffaw)
Robb reports a plot line wherein a police detective (played by Donnie Wahlberg), after an episode of violence against his family, educates his son regarding safe gun handling and the rules of firearm safety.
He further states: Consider what some eleven million American viewers just saw: a father confronting his son's curiosity about his father's gun, and his son's extreme anxiety over nearly being killed, by delivering the gun safety talk, and putting his gun into his son's hands, while calmly emphasizing the trust he has in his son's good sense and sense of responsibility.
WOW. A watershed moment (on CBS television, no less!) if there ever was one.
Go read the whole post and view the link.
The times, they are a changin'. Indeed.
h/t Robb Allen
Black Powder and Whiskey?
To contact us Click HERE
Back-in-the-day, when I was working for J.R at Phoenix Process Service (the man who christened me Guffaw!) we met for staff meetings every Friday afternoon @ 5:00.
This always seemed like a weird time for a staff meeting to me, but, then again, I wasn't the boss.
And we'd be issued papers for service on the weekend (or in my case, subjects needing location for service) and discuss office issues, recent court decisions and other stuff.
Many times, as six o'clock approached, J.R. would announce something along the lines of, "Oh, crap! Gotta run! Time for my Wild Turkey meeting!" And, he'd be gone.
I just assumed that he was heading for the bar, and was a drunk! Poor bastard.
("never assume" - Don Brown, my criminal law professor)
After a few months, as he'd always been kind and supportive of me, I approached him, and gently suggested he might need some assistance (thinking I might get a bloody nose or fired for my efforts).
He laughed heartily, and explained that the local National Wild Turkey Federation had get-togethers to discuss conservation of turkeys, and subsequent hunting to cull populations.
This fool would travel up to the Mogollon Rim (4000-7000 ft.) North of Phoenix, in the snow, in the cold, to shoot at turkeys in the frickin' snow! With a black powder rifle!
My only experience with black powder was Dave thegenius mechanic making a pistol from kit. Interesting to shoot, but, I wouldn't rely on it for reliable self defense when newer technology was available. I don't get the appeal of freezing my a$$ off in the snow @ 7000 feet to try to shoot a wily bird that I wouldn't care to eat, anyway (not a turkey fan, wild or otherwise).
But, it was his choice.
Glad he isn't a drunk.
h/t Dave, J.R.
Back-in-the-day, when I was working for J.R at Phoenix Process Service (the man who christened me Guffaw!) we met for staff meetings every Friday afternoon @ 5:00.This always seemed like a weird time for a staff meeting to me, but, then again, I wasn't the boss.
And we'd be issued papers for service on the weekend (or in my case, subjects needing location for service) and discuss office issues, recent court decisions and other stuff.
Many times, as six o'clock approached, J.R. would announce something along the lines of, "Oh, crap! Gotta run! Time for my Wild Turkey meeting!" And, he'd be gone.
I just assumed that he was heading for the bar, and was a drunk! Poor bastard.
("never assume" - Don Brown, my criminal law professor)
After a few months, as he'd always been kind and supportive of me, I approached him, and gently suggested he might need some assistance (thinking I might get a bloody nose or fired for my efforts).
He laughed heartily, and explained that the local National Wild Turkey Federation had get-togethers to discuss conservation of turkeys, and subsequent hunting to cull populations.
This fool would travel up to the Mogollon Rim (4000-7000 ft.) North of Phoenix, in the snow, in the cold, to shoot at turkeys in the frickin' snow! With a black powder rifle!
My only experience with black powder was Dave the
But, it was his choice.
Glad he isn't a drunk.
h/t Dave, J.R.
Low Batts!
To contact us Click HERE
Oft repeated in these pages, I'm Old School.
My first police flashlight (from John's Uniforms, of course!) was a 3-D cell Kel-lite. (1974?) And the first 'tactical' technique I learned was to hold the flashlight with my weak hand straight out to the side from the shoulder.
The idea was if fire was sent toward the source of the light, it wouldn't be toward the center-of-mass. (Questionable, anyway, for a lefty like me!)
Shooting was still accomplished one-handed. Not a very solid shooting platform. And difficult to move down a dark, narrow hallway. (I've since adopted better tactical techniques!)
Sadly, eventually, the D dry cells leaked, and I tossed that flashlight away. Subsequently, I found out the switch mechanism could have been repaired. Oh, well.
I now have a 3-D cell Mag-lite. As I'm no longer performing private security, it's standing on the floor, adjacent to my night table. But, it's rarely used. And dusty.
My go-to flashlight is a Streamlight Scorpion. It sits on top of my night table, right near the drawer wherein the Bob Hall Signature Model 1911 lives at night.
Small, handy, and rubber-coated, it's getting worn after it was purchased in 2004. It runs on 2-CR123A lithium batteries.
It's not as cool as the $100+ tacticool flashlights in the same size, but, it works, and was only $35.00 at the gun show! I bought a second one for my then girlfriend, who still carries hers in her purse (with her Nighthawk, of course!) Can't be too careful.
If you're familiar with lithium batteries, then you know they are not like the traditional dry cell. Dry cell light begins to fade, warning you might have a few minutes of illumination left.
Lithium batteries work great-they they don't. Boom. No warning.
So, I always try to keep a few batts in reserve, because, when they fail, it never fails, you need it.
I recently went to Battery Junction.com and bought 2 boxes of 12 CR123A batteries, as I was getting low.
One box for me, one for the ex-g/f. She uses hers mostly to locate keys and other flotsam/jetsam in the deep recesses of her purse. So, she uses more batteries than I do.
My one complaint is on level surfaces, the flashlight is apt to roll. I need a square rubber washer (or something) to stop it. (Looks like the newer models have an octagonal gizmo-good for them!)
Other than that, it's great!
FTC - no funds were exchanged. I purchased the flashlights and batteries retail. Good day!
Oft repeated in these pages, I'm Old School.My first police flashlight (from John's Uniforms, of course!) was a 3-D cell Kel-lite. (1974?) And the first 'tactical' technique I learned was to hold the flashlight with my weak hand straight out to the side from the shoulder.
The idea was if fire was sent toward the source of the light, it wouldn't be toward the center-of-mass. (Questionable, anyway, for a lefty like me!)
Shooting was still accomplished one-handed. Not a very solid shooting platform. And difficult to move down a dark, narrow hallway. (I've since adopted better tactical techniques!)
Sadly, eventually, the D dry cells leaked, and I tossed that flashlight away. Subsequently, I found out the switch mechanism could have been repaired. Oh, well.
I now have a 3-D cell Mag-lite. As I'm no longer performing private security, it's standing on the floor, adjacent to my night table. But, it's rarely used. And dusty.
My go-to flashlight is a Streamlight Scorpion. It sits on top of my night table, right near the drawer wherein the Bob Hall Signature Model 1911 lives at night.Small, handy, and rubber-coated, it's getting worn after it was purchased in 2004. It runs on 2-CR123A lithium batteries.
It's not as cool as the $100+ tacticool flashlights in the same size, but, it works, and was only $35.00 at the gun show! I bought a second one for my then girlfriend, who still carries hers in her purse (with her Nighthawk, of course!) Can't be too careful.
If you're familiar with lithium batteries, then you know they are not like the traditional dry cell. Dry cell light begins to fade, warning you might have a few minutes of illumination left.
Lithium batteries work great-they they don't. Boom. No warning.
So, I always try to keep a few batts in reserve, because, when they fail, it never fails, you need it.
I recently went to Battery Junction.com and bought 2 boxes of 12 CR123A batteries, as I was getting low.
One box for me, one for the ex-g/f. She uses hers mostly to locate keys and other flotsam/jetsam in the deep recesses of her purse. So, she uses more batteries than I do.
My one complaint is on level surfaces, the flashlight is apt to roll. I need a square rubber washer (or something) to stop it. (Looks like the newer models have an octagonal gizmo-good for them!)
Other than that, it's great!
FTC - no funds were exchanged. I purchased the flashlights and batteries retail. Good day!
7 Items You Won't Believe Are Actually Legal
To contact us Click HERE
Cracked.com is the Internet version derived from Cracked Magazine. (You guys remember, the mag next to MAD that no one bought?)
ANYWAY, they have all manner of bizarre, twisted stuff on the site. I found this link entitled,
ANYWAY, they have all manner of bizarre, twisted stuff on the site. I found this link entitled,
7 Items You Won't Believe Are Actually Legal
(Of course, they then place legalese warnings about how some stuff MIGHT be illegal in your area. And your guys, being gunnies and all, will believe they are!)
The list includes Tannerite and GE Mini-guns...
Of course, Cracked isn't libertarian, and asks after every item "Holy Balls, Why is it Legal?"
Go check 'em out at the above link!
 | ||
| flamethrower |
 |
| mini-gun |
29 Eylül 2012 Cumartesi
Mom was Right! mom's birthday
To contact us Click HERE
Today would have been my mother's 86th birthday.
And today the most Incredible thing happened.
I've always known that God is by my side. He sends His
angels to watch over me. I know that to be true.
I've started a journey recently, that is out of my control.
I have never been this sure that God is holding me in the
Palm of His Hand and putting me where I need to be, guiding
me step by step and showing me the way. You might even say that
at times He hits me up-side my head and says "Here you go!".
Today was that that kind of message.
As I said, it would have been my
mother's birthday had she not passed away 5 years ago.
Dolores was a devoted Christian who served the Lord throughout
her life. Even as a teen she played the church organ and sang
in the choir. She took pride in the fact that she raised a family
of singers who knew the value of a gift from God. To this day I still
have her organ pedals hanging on my wall as a reminder that music
is an art and something more personal to each musician that
could ever be defined.
In the last couple of years of her life, my mother had only one
dream left pointed in my direction. She wished she could sing a solo
in church one more time. This was heartbreaking to me because I knew
that the Alzheimer's was taking her abilities away more than she
had realized. I worked with her by saying, "how about if we practice
something and see how it goes?" I even took her to the church
one afternoon and we sang and played the organ, but she was
a little bit too nervous that day and the disease told me
that it wasn't meant to be. A public performance wasn't going
to happen.
Six months before my mother's passing, my father suffered his
own final months which led him to Heaven's open arms. The
choice was for all of my family to sing the "Lord's Prayer" with
our mom during the funeral service. It was an experience I will never
forget, but mostly because it was mom's chance to sing once again
in church...for her love of Christ, her family and her husband.
I thought I had closure with this part of my mom's story. But today....
Five years after her passing and on her birthday, something incredible
happened.
On my way to church this mornin I was thinking about mom,
I wished her a happy birthday and how it was funny how people
always seemed to get her date wrong. Some thought her
birthday was the 28th of April and not the 29th. I made extra special
care that I thought about her today, on her date. I even wore her
jewelry (that my niece re-fashioned so beautifully).
(Kleenex alert!) Today I went to church not expecting
to see what I saw and hear what I heard. I didn't expect that
sitting in the front of choir, would be a small humble
postured woman wearing an outfit that my mother would have picked
right out of her own closet. I didn't expect that this woman who had the
same silver gray hair and glasses, like my mother, emphasizing a need for bi-focals
would step slightly up to the microphone and stand in a manner that
would make me nervously wonder if she was able to achieve what
was going to be public performance. My mother came to mind just by
this lady's presence. I was drawn in to her as if she were mine to care for.
And then...
She started to sing.
Just last night I prayed about something I hadn't felt. The
calling to work with the music program at my new church. I didn't know
why, I didn't really feel burnt out from the 40 years of contribution that
I had already made to the other churches and community groups. I didn't
understand it...but I didn't feel the calling.
She continued to sing.
I felt a familiarity about her voice. It was beautiful and confident. I then
started to identify with it...I started to put myself in her position. Would this
be the kind of song I would sing if I were a member of the musicians here
at this church? Could I see myself participating in this manner?
Who is this fail older woman
that reminds me of...my .....mother?
She sang with the voice of an angel...she sang with clarity...she sang with a soaring soprano
voice climbing to the heavens...she sang with the infectious spirit that moves people to
their feet...she sang with the familiar
voice of ...my mother?
She sang....I sobbed.
I had the kind of tears that wouldn't turn off. The kind of tears of happiness, joy,
inspiration and a realized message.
God spoke to me today through Alice- the soloist.
My sign.
Mom was right! I belong with the musicians at Fairhaven.
And today the most Incredible thing happened.
I've always known that God is by my side. He sends His
angels to watch over me. I know that to be true.
I've started a journey recently, that is out of my control.
I have never been this sure that God is holding me in the
Palm of His Hand and putting me where I need to be, guiding
me step by step and showing me the way. You might even say that
at times He hits me up-side my head and says "Here you go!".
Today was that that kind of message.
As I said, it would have been my
mother's birthday had she not passed away 5 years ago.
Dolores was a devoted Christian who served the Lord throughout
her life. Even as a teen she played the church organ and sang
in the choir. She took pride in the fact that she raised a family
of singers who knew the value of a gift from God. To this day I still
have her organ pedals hanging on my wall as a reminder that music
is an art and something more personal to each musician that
could ever be defined.
In the last couple of years of her life, my mother had only one
dream left pointed in my direction. She wished she could sing a solo
in church one more time. This was heartbreaking to me because I knew
that the Alzheimer's was taking her abilities away more than she
had realized. I worked with her by saying, "how about if we practice
something and see how it goes?" I even took her to the church
one afternoon and we sang and played the organ, but she was
a little bit too nervous that day and the disease told me
that it wasn't meant to be. A public performance wasn't going
to happen.
Six months before my mother's passing, my father suffered his
own final months which led him to Heaven's open arms. The
choice was for all of my family to sing the "Lord's Prayer" with
our mom during the funeral service. It was an experience I will never
forget, but mostly because it was mom's chance to sing once again
in church...for her love of Christ, her family and her husband.
I thought I had closure with this part of my mom's story. But today....
Five years after her passing and on her birthday, something incredible
happened.
On my way to church this mornin I was thinking about mom,
I wished her a happy birthday and how it was funny how people
always seemed to get her date wrong. Some thought her
birthday was the 28th of April and not the 29th. I made extra special
care that I thought about her today, on her date. I even wore her
jewelry (that my niece re-fashioned so beautifully).
(Kleenex alert!) Today I went to church not expecting
to see what I saw and hear what I heard. I didn't expect that
sitting in the front of choir, would be a small humble
postured woman wearing an outfit that my mother would have picked
right out of her own closet. I didn't expect that this woman who had the
same silver gray hair and glasses, like my mother, emphasizing a need for bi-focals
would step slightly up to the microphone and stand in a manner that
would make me nervously wonder if she was able to achieve what
was going to be public performance. My mother came to mind just by
this lady's presence. I was drawn in to her as if she were mine to care for.
And then...
She started to sing.
Just last night I prayed about something I hadn't felt. The
calling to work with the music program at my new church. I didn't know
why, I didn't really feel burnt out from the 40 years of contribution that
I had already made to the other churches and community groups. I didn't
understand it...but I didn't feel the calling.
She continued to sing.
I felt a familiarity about her voice. It was beautiful and confident. I then
started to identify with it...I started to put myself in her position. Would this
be the kind of song I would sing if I were a member of the musicians here
at this church? Could I see myself participating in this manner?
Who is this fail older woman
that reminds me of...my .....mother?
She sang with the voice of an angel...she sang with clarity...she sang with a soaring soprano
voice climbing to the heavens...she sang with the infectious spirit that moves people to
their feet...she sang with the familiar
voice of ...my mother?
She sang....I sobbed.
I had the kind of tears that wouldn't turn off. The kind of tears of happiness, joy,
inspiration and a realized message.
God spoke to me today through Alice- the soloist.
My sign.
Mom was right! I belong with the musicians at Fairhaven.
 |
| Dolores (Heberer) Kleinke 1926-2007 Happy Birthday Mom! |
Let's Call In Fed Up
To contact us Click HERE
My family and yours are struggling.
We and/or our neighbors are in peril of losing our jobs.
We and/or our neighbors have already lost billions in retirement investments and home equity.
The suicides piling up, the homeless shelters our better towns try to provide, the overwhelmed emergency rooms, even the animal rescues we struggle to keep open as foreclosures and job losses and preventable burst levees and toxic drywall wipe away what remains of our already fragile security and self esteem . . .
These tragedies exist, in significant part, because Wall Street excutives take billion-dollar bonuses from tax dollars poured on their heads with no thought of conditions or consequences for malfeasance.
Because CEOs depress wages so that they can reap 450 x the line worker's annual pay.
Because the Army Corps of Engineers can't be bothered to build canals and levees adequate to protect the citizens of major US cities.
Because our bankers--let's stop saying "banks" as if brick buildings are behaving badly--are hiking interest rates and late fees, and hawking fraudulent products under militantly harmful terms.
Because our investment advisors blithly give false and fraudulent advice.
Because our corporate board members vote to ship our jobs over there.
Because our corporate executives, managers, and supervisors decide in cold daylight first to import, then to wholesale, and then to retail, and finally to install poison dry wall.
Because US corporate executives feed our troops spoiled food and murder them in electrified shower stalls built with criminal indifferene and negligence.
Because our corporate executives and managers and supervisors choose to sell us beef and chicken and peppers and tomatoes toxic with e-coli; or poisoned dog food, and leaded toys from China, and cribs so dangerous that they must be recalled.
Because while our local, state, and federal governments either actively encourage corporate and government corrupion or nothing about it.
And because we put up with it.
Anyone who knows any history knows that the playing field was never level. Do the names Al Smith, Mother Jones, Joe Hill, Clara Limlich, and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory mean anything to you? (And don't think the horrors ended in the 1930s.) If you don't have a clue, you'd best study up on the reasons why unions formed in the United States of America, and what they achieved for American workers, and what we've lost since Reagan broke the unions' backs in the Air Traffic Controllers' strike. Wages, benefits, overtime . . . these pale by contrast to the exploitation by US corporations of women and children in Third World countries so that you get the great privilege of buying trendy sneakers for prices inflated beyond your dreams, so that corporate executives can maintain their multimillion-dollar lives.
If you do investigate US labor history, you'll quickly discover that there's a story beyond union officers' corruption. You'll quickly not only that when it comes to management and labor, there's always been an uneven playing field in the USA, and not since the Robber Barons has it been the ski slope it is becoming today.
Now is the season when we are being pressured to buy buy buy. We hear it incessantly from the ads and the news, and we hear it incessantly on the money channels. It's up to us, they say, to save the economy. It's up to the American consumer to keep on mindlessly consuming, overdrawing credit cards, stacking up rafts of made-in-China shit, and taking it in every orifice with interest hikes, late fee hikes, and cheap, shoddy, dangerous, overpriced crap.
So what say? Let's make our own holiday gifts. Or even better, instead of buying more shit at extortionist prices, let's give each other contributions to worthy nonprofits. I'll buy a $50 gift to your designated nonprofit, in your honor, for your holiday gift, and you do the same for me.
In other words, let's take back control of this F'd-up situation.
Let's all call in fed up.
If we're going down, let's take them with us.
Behold the City on a Hill. Or, I Can't Make This Stuff Up
To contact us Click HERE
If you secretly want to know what a far-Right Republican regime looks like, visit Arizona.
From my favorite AZ blogger about a pending AZ House bill: "HB 2650 would increase the waiting time for a divorce by 4 months, to give couples a chance to reconcile their differences."
Like they hadn't thought about that already? This is like handing your mom a cork after she's poured the champagne down the drain.
HB 2650 was written by the Center for Arizona Policy. This is the same outfit that used the proposition option to ban gay marriage in AZ. I just can't wait to find out how good, white, upscale, Republican, straight Arizonans will feel about having their good, white, upscale, Republican, straight private lives managed by the gov'mint. But wait. I forgot. Those people never get divorced, do they?
And then there's AZ state Sen. Frank Antenori's inspiration, SB 2770. That's Antenori there in the photo, proving still yet again that pictures DO speak louder than words. Antenori wants to set up a 1-800 number so you can report anybody you see using food stamps to buy smokes or booze or a cell phone. FANtastic!
What's next?
Any day now, watch for a bill from the Center for Arizona Policy that will set up a call line so you can report single people who buy condoms. I'm so LOVIN' this.
Honey, if you think it's right to ban a poor man from using food stamps to buy booze or cigarettes, can you spell DEMAGOGUERY? This is where fascism meets Mao Tse Tung.
Sure. Nobody, including moi, likes to see waste of federal or state aid, or a display of really bad judgment. But like many another morally superior Republican, Antenori makes his laws out of 3 parts ignorance, 2 parts hypocrisy, and 1 part frustration.
Think about it. It's a curiously anti-market approach for a Republican. The bill requires the state to interefere in personal choice. It interferes in free market transactions, and it punishes poor people for believing all they need for the Good Life is a six-pack and a Camel cigarette.
It's not just stupid. It's brutal. It's demagoguery that pits folks lucky enough not to have bought an overpriced house right before Bush's market collapse against those who weren't so lucky. Or well connnected. Or educated.
But I guess it's better we should criminalize poor people than go after the bankers and insurors who've brought us the Second Great Depression, the Iraq Occupation, Blackwater and Halliburton frauds on the Treasury, and no health care. It's the Republican way.
I Know What's Wrong with America
To contact us Click HERE
This week's 9-11 lie from George W.'s former speech writer Marc Thiessen is just the latest case. For close to eight full decades, the Right has steadily poured a deathly poison into Americans' eyes and ears. The result is that today we're sickened almost to the killing point.
There's a word for this. It's treachery. That's what a lie is, and take note: Treachery stems from the same root as treason. It means--please take these synonyms slowly, mull them over one by one--betrayal of trust, faith, or allegiance; perfidy, disloyalty, and treason.
Propaganda--let's be frank--lying in politics--is nothing new. What is new is today's lethality, systemization, ubiquity, and respectability. They aren't playing for partisan gain. They're playing for keeps.
And what is new is the credulity, ignorance, and apathy of the American public. Face it. We're a lot less educated and a lot more easily stampeded now than we once were. One such malady would be bad enough, but afflicted with all three? Baby, we just don't stand a chance.
For malicious lethality, I give you "baby killers," "the homosexual agenda," the hyped-up hoardes of "criminal, leprous immigrants," the "death panels." In fact, I give you the far Right's vicious Balkanization of all the American people into just so many expendable parts.
Journalist and blogger David Neiwert has aptly named this phenom "eliminationism." Unarguably, its inevitable consequences are the murders of Dr. Tiller, Matthew Shepard, Stephen T. Johns and thousands of nameless GLBT people, African Americans, immigrants, and desperate poor whose assassinations didn't make the national headlines. Not to mention the chance for millions of uninsured Americans to see a doctor, get a prescription, or have a life-saving surgery. Or prosecution of the Robber Barons of Wall Street. Or indictment of the last Administration for war crimes and theft on a galactic scale.
For systemization and ubiquity, I give you hidden corporate funding and uber-wealthy patrons. I give you Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, the Trinity Broadcasting Network, Clear Channel, and the rest of talk radio, all full- or part-time propaganda arms of the Republican Party, all heirs of the John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan, and HUAC.
Add to far Right media the thousands of ultra-conservative nonprofits deputized (and given tax breaks) to incite us to lethal rage by telling lie after lie after lie. Citizens United, for instance. Focus on the Family. Eagle Forum. The 700 Club, and the numerous (tax-exempt) national curriculum coordinators for far Right, Christianist, activist home schooling. Front groups like The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition.
It's not just the far Right media impact or its voter recruitment, registration, and "education" consequences. It's also taxpayer subsidized direct mail avalanches of lies, distortions, and invective unleashed deliberatly for decades to whip up the base (and steal its money).
To these, add the astroturf websites and organizations, the tweets, and even the bumper stickers. Then from the total, subtract competing organizations as media consolidation, deregulation, and the Second Great Depression purge the airwaves and the presses of counterpoint, of fact.
Critical to understanding all this is grasping that there are thousands of heavily funded far Right organizations. If the far Right was once a "fringe," today it is pretty much the center of our culture. Its devotees occupy every sector of government, church, and culture, and just recently occupied even the White House.
Most of these organizations have innocuous or even positive names designed to confer credibility and respectability on ideas that nauseate and repel people of integrity. Americans for Truth, for instance, all about the "homosexual agenda." And FAIR, which the Southern Poverty Law Center long ago unmasked as one of at least ten manufactured virulent propaganda tools created by veteran racist Tom Tanton.
Such groups exist specifically to flood the media, to bury the gullible millions in "talking points" intended to whip up moral outrage, pit the well-off against the desperate, spur voter backlash and ultra-right lawmaking, and meanwhile to distract us all from the orchestrated Republican hosing of the American middle class.
This isn't made up. It's real. You know it to be true if you drew breath at all in the last 10 years.
Daily Media Matters e-alerts attempt to correct the rain of lies, but its circulation pales by contract to Rupert Murdock's reach.
For respectability, I give you United States senators, judges, sherrifs, Members of Congress, state legislators and governors, bishops, clergymen, physicians, heads and staffs of federal departments and agencies, professors, teachers, high school principals, librarians, and pharmacists.
It gets worse. The states are bristling with armed militias and so-called "patriot groups" poised to slaughter anyone they perceive as "not us." It will take only a spark. To provide it, talk show hosts incite murder every day. Murder, rebellion, whatever it takes.
Even so, and fully aware of what's at stake, "respectable" pundits and news anchors let the lies pass. Those who don't actually amplify the treasonous far Right Jihad on America (e.g., Lou Dobbs) either don't bother to get the facts themselves or are silent, baldly complict (e.g., Wolf Blitzer, Andrea Mitchell). Their jobs depend on their playing ball. After all, their corporate masters are heavily invested in a fascist America, because corporatism is a main tenet of fascism.
For eighty years or more, the American people have been systematically goaded by ever more concentrated poisoned prods into a brimming rage--over largely invented actions, omissions, and words attributed to this pro-Constitution, egalitarian Democratic President or that Democratic Justice or just to Lib'ruls in general.
But somehow, nobody's talking about how the heat is mostly over made-up, imaginary affronts to imaginary values (family values), imaginary traditions (the, um, unconstitutional "Judeo-Christian" nation), imaginary heroes (Ronald Reagan,fiscal conservative. George W. Bush, fighter pilot).
The War on Christmas? The "illegal takeover"? "Welfare Cadillacs"? The "Myth" of Global Warming? Liberals Appease the Enemy? See Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, and before them, see Paul Harvey, Joe McCarthy, and that high-toned FDR assassination cabal.
If you want to know what's wrong with America, or why the two parties can't cooperate, start right there.
The Left may not be spotless, but there's NO comparison, either quantitatively or qualitatively, between the Left and Right when it comes to corrupting the American cerebellum. In fact, one of the magic carpets under which this all hides is the lie of equivalence: "They all do it." Well, no. Doubt it? Go on: Name one Left counterpart action, organization, or person for every indictment in this rant. You can't. There is no counterpart to Fox. No counterpart to Limbaugh, or Lou Dobbs, or Pat Robertson.. Sen. Coburn. Sen. Santorum. Alan Keyes. None. Nada.
Again, there's a word for this.
This poison--certainly known in advance to be toxic waste--is both source and foundation of the unprecedented paralysis in Washington, DC that already threatens our capacity as a nation to respond to huge and growing national security, fiscal, environmental, and infrastructural threats.
The same polluted swill is also both source and foundation of the "Birthers," the Tea Partiers, the milititant Christianists, the Sarah Palin groupies, the wanna-be Joe the Plumbers (another hoax). This is the amniotic cesspool in which the whole dim-witted, fact-phobic, fear-drunk, anti-poor, anti-immigrant, anti-woman, anti-pigment, anti-sex, anti-environment, anti-gay, anti-labor, anti-humanist, anti-Constitution American Right has been steeped for 80 years.
Why's nobody talking about how all this is mostly over made-up stuff?
It would be funny except that America held such sacred promise.
It would be funny except that my dad lost his eye defending that promise.
It would be funny except that millions of people have already died, and millions more will follow, because those who perpetrate these hoaxes are who profit most. profits of perpetual war and the swindles of Wall Street. I give you Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, the Neo-Cons all, and Paulson and Greenspan and Rice and pharma lobbyists and Dobbs-Limbaugh lapdogs.
For sure, the redneck hard-hats and the truck drivers who make up their conservative base won't profit. They're every bit as expendable as you or me: Remember W's repeal of the Davis-Bacon Act for Gulf Coast states right after Katrina? Remember what you learned from The Shock Doctrine? Remember for-profit, paid-per-capita prisons stuffed to the rafters through hard-Right propaganda and the not-coincidental suddenly intense war on Mexican immigrants? Remember "privatization," the plan that replaces public control of our infrastructure, water, utilities, hospitals, highways, and energy, and replaces them with with private ownership of water, utilities, the military, energy, hospitals, etc. Can you say ENRON? HCA? Blackwater/Xe? Hello?
So it turns out that the garbage we've been forcefed all these years isn't just false. It's also a boondoggle. Turns out that all this Rightwing raving isn't about (the bogus) "homosexual agenda" or the (made-up) illegal takeover, or the "emasculation" of the 'Merkun male at all.
It's about corporatism and privatization. It's about perpetual war for perpetual profit, and a "free market" stripped of regulation and stripped down for plunder. I give you Halliburton, KBR, Xe, Pepsico, Monsanto, the Carlyle Group, and the Wall Street con men. Even our far Right state legislatures, like Arizona's, and avowed racist lawmakers like Russell Pearce are penny-ante demagogues, pawns in a way bigger chess match and too stupid to know it.
There's a word for this. It's called treason. Yet the Legislative and Executive branches are either immobilized or co-conspirators, and our highest Court--that tool of the Right responsible for empowering W and Dick and legitimizing their Reign of Plunder--just took it over the top. When the US Supreme Court ruled recently that restricting corporate funding of political candidates is unconstitutional, they unleashed a corporatist muck tsunami that very well may choke us all to death.
For 30 pieces of silver, a platform, and a megaphone, men and women like Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia, John Roberts, Sarah Palin, John McCain, Jon Kyl, Mitch McConnell, Rush Limbaugh, John Boehner, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Michelle Malkin, Tom Tancredo, Karl Rove, and a host of lesser infidels have sold their mortal souls.
They've sold ours, too, and any hope our children ever had for the American Dream.
There's a word for this. It's treason.
I'm Back
To contact us Click HERE
Nothing like a year's vacation to make you miss blogging.
Hope you missed me! I missed you!
In that time, I've solidified the first-ever nonprofit, statewide Doberman Pinscher rescue in Arizona, which I founded from thin air in January 2009. Now, today, it is strong, vibrant, and able to blossom under the transition to a new Executive Director, which frees me to get back to writing and to polymer clay art making. More about that later.
Stay tuned. The dissolution of our constitutional democracy to a bona fide fascist pluto-oligarchy should give us all plenty to talk about. And if that fails, there's always this crop of Republican whores running for President, right? What else? Email me at picodegallo@cox.net and let me know what else you'd like to chew on and who else I should add to my Pico's Wee-Wee List!
28 Eylül 2012 Cuma
Mom was Right! mom's birthday
To contact us Click HERE
Today would have been my mother's 86th birthday.
And today the most Incredible thing happened.
I've always known that God is by my side. He sends His
angels to watch over me. I know that to be true.
I've started a journey recently, that is out of my control.
I have never been this sure that God is holding me in the
Palm of His Hand and putting me where I need to be, guiding
me step by step and showing me the way. You might even say that
at times He hits me up-side my head and says "Here you go!".
Today was that that kind of message.
As I said, it would have been my
mother's birthday had she not passed away 5 years ago.
Dolores was a devoted Christian who served the Lord throughout
her life. Even as a teen she played the church organ and sang
in the choir. She took pride in the fact that she raised a family
of singers who knew the value of a gift from God. To this day I still
have her organ pedals hanging on my wall as a reminder that music
is an art and something more personal to each musician that
could ever be defined.
In the last couple of years of her life, my mother had only one
dream left pointed in my direction. She wished she could sing a solo
in church one more time. This was heartbreaking to me because I knew
that the Alzheimer's was taking her abilities away more than she
had realized. I worked with her by saying, "how about if we practice
something and see how it goes?" I even took her to the church
one afternoon and we sang and played the organ, but she was
a little bit too nervous that day and the disease told me
that it wasn't meant to be. A public performance wasn't going
to happen.
Six months before my mother's passing, my father suffered his
own final months which led him to Heaven's open arms. The
choice was for all of my family to sing the "Lord's Prayer" with
our mom during the funeral service. It was an experience I will never
forget, but mostly because it was mom's chance to sing once again
in church...for her love of Christ, her family and her husband.
I thought I had closure with this part of my mom's story. But today....
Five years after her passing and on her birthday, something incredible
happened.
On my way to church this mornin I was thinking about mom,
I wished her a happy birthday and how it was funny how people
always seemed to get her date wrong. Some thought her
birthday was the 28th of April and not the 29th. I made extra special
care that I thought about her today, on her date. I even wore her
jewelry (that my niece re-fashioned so beautifully).
(Kleenex alert!) Today I went to church not expecting
to see what I saw and hear what I heard. I didn't expect that
sitting in the front of choir, would be a small humble
postured woman wearing an outfit that my mother would have picked
right out of her own closet. I didn't expect that this woman who had the
same silver gray hair and glasses, like my mother, emphasizing a need for bi-focals
would step slightly up to the microphone and stand in a manner that
would make me nervously wonder if she was able to achieve what
was going to be public performance. My mother came to mind just by
this lady's presence. I was drawn in to her as if she were mine to care for.
And then...
She started to sing.
Just last night I prayed about something I hadn't felt. The
calling to work with the music program at my new church. I didn't know
why, I didn't really feel burnt out from the 40 years of contribution that
I had already made to the other churches and community groups. I didn't
understand it...but I didn't feel the calling.
She continued to sing.
I felt a familiarity about her voice. It was beautiful and confident. I then
started to identify with it...I started to put myself in her position. Would this
be the kind of song I would sing if I were a member of the musicians here
at this church? Could I see myself participating in this manner?
Who is this fail older woman
that reminds me of...my .....mother?
She sang with the voice of an angel...she sang with clarity...she sang with a soaring soprano
voice climbing to the heavens...she sang with the infectious spirit that moves people to
their feet...she sang with the familiar
voice of ...my mother?
She sang....I sobbed.
I had the kind of tears that wouldn't turn off. The kind of tears of happiness, joy,
inspiration and a realized message.
God spoke to me today through Alice- the soloist.
My sign.
Mom was right! I belong with the musicians at Fairhaven.
And today the most Incredible thing happened.
I've always known that God is by my side. He sends His
angels to watch over me. I know that to be true.
I've started a journey recently, that is out of my control.
I have never been this sure that God is holding me in the
Palm of His Hand and putting me where I need to be, guiding
me step by step and showing me the way. You might even say that
at times He hits me up-side my head and says "Here you go!".
Today was that that kind of message.
As I said, it would have been my
mother's birthday had she not passed away 5 years ago.
Dolores was a devoted Christian who served the Lord throughout
her life. Even as a teen she played the church organ and sang
in the choir. She took pride in the fact that she raised a family
of singers who knew the value of a gift from God. To this day I still
have her organ pedals hanging on my wall as a reminder that music
is an art and something more personal to each musician that
could ever be defined.
In the last couple of years of her life, my mother had only one
dream left pointed in my direction. She wished she could sing a solo
in church one more time. This was heartbreaking to me because I knew
that the Alzheimer's was taking her abilities away more than she
had realized. I worked with her by saying, "how about if we practice
something and see how it goes?" I even took her to the church
one afternoon and we sang and played the organ, but she was
a little bit too nervous that day and the disease told me
that it wasn't meant to be. A public performance wasn't going
to happen.
Six months before my mother's passing, my father suffered his
own final months which led him to Heaven's open arms. The
choice was for all of my family to sing the "Lord's Prayer" with
our mom during the funeral service. It was an experience I will never
forget, but mostly because it was mom's chance to sing once again
in church...for her love of Christ, her family and her husband.
I thought I had closure with this part of my mom's story. But today....
Five years after her passing and on her birthday, something incredible
happened.
On my way to church this mornin I was thinking about mom,
I wished her a happy birthday and how it was funny how people
always seemed to get her date wrong. Some thought her
birthday was the 28th of April and not the 29th. I made extra special
care that I thought about her today, on her date. I even wore her
jewelry (that my niece re-fashioned so beautifully).
(Kleenex alert!) Today I went to church not expecting
to see what I saw and hear what I heard. I didn't expect that
sitting in the front of choir, would be a small humble
postured woman wearing an outfit that my mother would have picked
right out of her own closet. I didn't expect that this woman who had the
same silver gray hair and glasses, like my mother, emphasizing a need for bi-focals
would step slightly up to the microphone and stand in a manner that
would make me nervously wonder if she was able to achieve what
was going to be public performance. My mother came to mind just by
this lady's presence. I was drawn in to her as if she were mine to care for.
And then...
She started to sing.
Just last night I prayed about something I hadn't felt. The
calling to work with the music program at my new church. I didn't know
why, I didn't really feel burnt out from the 40 years of contribution that
I had already made to the other churches and community groups. I didn't
understand it...but I didn't feel the calling.
She continued to sing.
I felt a familiarity about her voice. It was beautiful and confident. I then
started to identify with it...I started to put myself in her position. Would this
be the kind of song I would sing if I were a member of the musicians here
at this church? Could I see myself participating in this manner?
Who is this fail older woman
that reminds me of...my .....mother?
She sang with the voice of an angel...she sang with clarity...she sang with a soaring soprano
voice climbing to the heavens...she sang with the infectious spirit that moves people to
their feet...she sang with the familiar
voice of ...my mother?
She sang....I sobbed.
I had the kind of tears that wouldn't turn off. The kind of tears of happiness, joy,
inspiration and a realized message.
God spoke to me today through Alice- the soloist.
My sign.
Mom was right! I belong with the musicians at Fairhaven.
|
| Dolores (Heberer) Kleinke 1926-2007 Happy Birthday Mom! |
Pop goes the swimsuit!
To contact us Click HERE
It seems impossible that in the matter of one week I could have gained 20 lbs!
Thusly it also seems impossible that I have lost 40 pounds since May.
I didn't...really!!!! I'm sure..... It's totally the difference in scales.
Yes, I made a pan of brownies to take to a Bunco Game and yes,...I did eat some of the afore mentioned brownies...but nooooooo way did I gain 20 lbs. This is what the scale at the fitness center is trying to tell me.
For this reason I am going to list my top 10 ways to tell that I have lost weight.
PROOF of WEIGHT LOSS
10. My flip flops don't fit anymore. They slide around on my feet (yes, I lost weightin my feet!) to the point of the thong going in-between the wrong toes..(sometimes
it's annoying but mostly just kind of fun to play around with).
9. Every pair of pants fits better or I've had to take-them-in (that's slang for sewing the seamsto make them smaller).
8. The dress I used to need to wear a girdle with..looks just fine without the girdle! Yay!
7. I am no longer ashamed to go sleeveless. This is also good news for keeping cool in the
recent 100 degree weather spurt.
6. Men are opening doors for me. And even starting to look in my direction. (it has
been a while since that's happened).
5. I think, and this may just be wishful thinking, but my own children are respecting
me more. I really think it's because they're proud that I'm getting my act together
and doing something instead of just being a couch potato.
4. I can cross my legs...put my tennis shoes on...and tie them without feeling that my
stomach is bulging into my esophagus while cutting off all air flow and circulation to
my face. yay!
3. Sucking in my gut results in a flatter looking gut. (Now I just have to tone, tighten,
sculpt and tan. lol!)
2. I can carry the laundry basket up and down the steps without my knees giving out. Big Yay!
1. And finally, I have lost enough weight to create a slag in the back clasp of my swimsuit
resulting in it's ability to un-clasp while exercising. Embarrassing yet rewarding
at the same time.
I'm excited to keep this journey afloat. No pictures until I'm ready for them.
Thusly it also seems impossible that I have lost 40 pounds since May.
I didn't...really!!!! I'm sure..... It's totally the difference in scales.
Yes, I made a pan of brownies to take to a Bunco Game and yes,...I did eat some of the afore mentioned brownies...but nooooooo way did I gain 20 lbs. This is what the scale at the fitness center is trying to tell me.
For this reason I am going to list my top 10 ways to tell that I have lost weight.
PROOF of WEIGHT LOSS
10. My flip flops don't fit anymore. They slide around on my feet (yes, I lost weightin my feet!) to the point of the thong going in-between the wrong toes..(sometimes
it's annoying but mostly just kind of fun to play around with).
9. Every pair of pants fits better or I've had to take-them-in (that's slang for sewing the seamsto make them smaller).
8. The dress I used to need to wear a girdle with..looks just fine without the girdle! Yay!
7. I am no longer ashamed to go sleeveless. This is also good news for keeping cool in the
recent 100 degree weather spurt.
6. Men are opening doors for me. And even starting to look in my direction. (it has
been a while since that's happened).
5. I think, and this may just be wishful thinking, but my own children are respecting
me more. I really think it's because they're proud that I'm getting my act together
and doing something instead of just being a couch potato.
4. I can cross my legs...put my tennis shoes on...and tie them without feeling that my
stomach is bulging into my esophagus while cutting off all air flow and circulation to
my face. yay!
3. Sucking in my gut results in a flatter looking gut. (Now I just have to tone, tighten,
sculpt and tan. lol!)
2. I can carry the laundry basket up and down the steps without my knees giving out. Big Yay!
1. And finally, I have lost enough weight to create a slag in the back clasp of my swimsuit
resulting in it's ability to un-clasp while exercising. Embarrassing yet rewarding
at the same time.
I'm excited to keep this journey afloat. No pictures until I'm ready for them.
Long Story......Longer....
To contact us Click HERE
I like to tell stories...
I like to tell long stories. I don't know - how NOT - to make a long story short. In fact I've been known to tell a long story and let you think I have come to the end of the story, but then just as you think it's over....I'll give you one last surprise ending.
This is one of those.
So as not to repeat myself, this link will take you to the beginning of this story by way of modern technology.
(click here for long story)
Now...for today's added edition:
Alice (from the last story) invited me to view her watercolor entry at a local art gallery. I was happy to oblige and as it turns out...she is a very talented painter. I highly recommend her work..but I digress, her painting is not what this blog is about.
To further support Alice and the art gallery I purchased 2 raffle tickets, one for me and one for my friend Colleen. The painting, that was to be raffled, was a superlative watercolor of a beautiful 'bouquet of flowers'. Very beautiful. Alice was pleased that I had purchased my tickets from her and thanked me and said "Now I can turn my tickets in" as if I had just made my purchase under the gun. I told my friend the story of how Alice and I met, and we both pondered what God's plan was for bringing this lovely lady into my life.
Colleen and I said our goodbyes at the gallery by jokingly saying to Alice "Please let us know if we win". We left the gallery and continued on to our next destination, a friend's consignment shop, which is in the next town over. We spent an half an hour enjoying the gorgeous antiques and menagerie of unusual and unique collections that she has on display. At the end of our visit we were trying to decide where to go next.
My cell phone interrupted us... It was someone from the art gallery.
She said "You Won the Door Prize! would you like to come back and pick it up?"
WOW! I won! I was so excited!!!!!!
Colleen and I made a quick stop at my favorite bakery (c'mon it was only a block away from where we were) and then headed over to pick up my Beautiful-New-Watercolor. Where should I hang it? I have never had anything so special. I guess I knew exactly where to put it. I have a huge open spot in the middle of my dining area wall....just waiting for this...I guess. We thought it was just too perfect. I couldn't believe I had won.
We entered the gallery....I walked up to the reception area...I announced..."Hi, I received a call, I won the door prize" :).
The smiling lady said "here you go" as she reached behind her to get the 1' tall box lying on the floor. She handed it to me stating "it's a butterfly house".
"Huh?" said I.
"Yes, the door prize is a butterfly house" she said as she smiled happily for my win.
"O0h, I thought I won the painting" said me : (
LAUGHTER from the crowd...was all my ears could hear. .."That drawing isn't until NOVEMBER! ~sigh~ "she thought she won the painting".
I guess the lesson here might be....don't expect to know God's plan. He's got it under control....
or
God has a sense of humor!
............
Directions: Put the house 3ft off the ground, in a sunny spot...near a bush that attracts butterflies.
I like to tell long stories. I don't know - how NOT - to make a long story short. In fact I've been known to tell a long story and let you think I have come to the end of the story, but then just as you think it's over....I'll give you one last surprise ending.
This is one of those.
So as not to repeat myself, this link will take you to the beginning of this story by way of modern technology.
(click here for long story)
Now...for today's added edition:
Alice (from the last story) invited me to view her watercolor entry at a local art gallery. I was happy to oblige and as it turns out...she is a very talented painter. I highly recommend her work..but I digress, her painting is not what this blog is about.
To further support Alice and the art gallery I purchased 2 raffle tickets, one for me and one for my friend Colleen. The painting, that was to be raffled, was a superlative watercolor of a beautiful 'bouquet of flowers'. Very beautiful. Alice was pleased that I had purchased my tickets from her and thanked me and said "Now I can turn my tickets in" as if I had just made my purchase under the gun. I told my friend the story of how Alice and I met, and we both pondered what God's plan was for bringing this lovely lady into my life.
Colleen and I said our goodbyes at the gallery by jokingly saying to Alice "Please let us know if we win". We left the gallery and continued on to our next destination, a friend's consignment shop, which is in the next town over. We spent an half an hour enjoying the gorgeous antiques and menagerie of unusual and unique collections that she has on display. At the end of our visit we were trying to decide where to go next.
My cell phone interrupted us... It was someone from the art gallery.
She said "You Won the Door Prize! would you like to come back and pick it up?"
WOW! I won! I was so excited!!!!!!
Colleen and I made a quick stop at my favorite bakery (c'mon it was only a block away from where we were) and then headed over to pick up my Beautiful-New-Watercolor. Where should I hang it? I have never had anything so special. I guess I knew exactly where to put it. I have a huge open spot in the middle of my dining area wall....just waiting for this...I guess. We thought it was just too perfect. I couldn't believe I had won.
We entered the gallery....I walked up to the reception area...I announced..."Hi, I received a call, I won the door prize" :).
The smiling lady said "here you go" as she reached behind her to get the 1' tall box lying on the floor. She handed it to me stating "it's a butterfly house".
"Huh?" said I.
"Yes, the door prize is a butterfly house" she said as she smiled happily for my win.
"O0h, I thought I won the painting" said me : (
LAUGHTER from the crowd...was all my ears could hear. .."That drawing isn't until NOVEMBER! ~sigh~ "she thought she won the painting".
I guess the lesson here might be....don't expect to know God's plan. He's got it under control....
or
God has a sense of humor!
............
Anyone want a Butterfly House?
Directions: Put the house 3ft off the ground, in a sunny spot...near a bush that attracts butterflies.
No Finger Feeling
To contact us Click HERE
This is a very hard blog to write, physically.
Two of my fingers have been asleep for 3 weeks now.
Left hand...pinky and ring finger.
The doctor said she's pretty sure she knows what's wrong and has put me on prednisone for two weeks to reduce the swelling. I think she's probably right...it's a nerve.
Tomorrow is my follow up apt. She'll let me know then what we will do..I'm so ready to be done with this.
Here is a list of things I can't do because I have no feeling in my fingers:
Type, play the- piano, guitar, or accordion.
arggghhhh this is crazy...
FINGERs......PLEASE WAKE UP!
Two of my fingers have been asleep for 3 weeks now.
Left hand...pinky and ring finger.
The doctor said she's pretty sure she knows what's wrong and has put me on prednisone for two weeks to reduce the swelling. I think she's probably right...it's a nerve.
Tomorrow is my follow up apt. She'll let me know then what we will do..I'm so ready to be done with this.
Here is a list of things I can't do because I have no feeling in my fingers:
Type, play the- piano, guitar, or accordion.
arggghhhh this is crazy...
FINGERs......PLEASE WAKE UP!
How Cheap Am I?
To contact us Click HERE
I like the word cheap!
Some people think I should use the expression "in-expensive" but really I'm O.K. with the word "Cheap".
I feel a challenge in the word cheap, like I've been hunting for something and wouldn't stop to buy it until I was satisfied with the price...or else I wouldn't buy it at all. That kind of makes me finicky or persnickety too. I'm O.K. with these nomenclatures as well.
It took me two trips around the pharmacy section to find exactly the correct product for the correct price...but I did it. And, yes...it did take a longer time than it could have..and no, I wasn't in a hurry. I didn't have any children pulling on my purse strings either. I'm alone in my shopping time and I have the luxury of spending as much time and energy as I want to on one item's hunt.
Want to know what I bought? Here's my purchase of the day:
Instead of the usual liquid soap (by the 64 oz container) I purchased a two pack of bar soap, 88 cents, which I cut into slices, forced those slices into the old liquid soap pump bottle and added water. Ta-da! I'll have some great liquid soap that will last a really long time because I'll just keep adding water until it stops producing bubbles.
Great idea right?
p.s. I should add that there are recipes out there using glycerin, and boiling water, shaving your bar soap etc.....I don't care. I'm too cheap for that. Extra added time, energy and added products are not my style. Simple is better. This method works fine for me.
What is your cheap trick?
Some people think I should use the expression "in-expensive" but really I'm O.K. with the word "Cheap".
I feel a challenge in the word cheap, like I've been hunting for something and wouldn't stop to buy it until I was satisfied with the price...or else I wouldn't buy it at all. That kind of makes me finicky or persnickety too. I'm O.K. with these nomenclatures as well.
It took me two trips around the pharmacy section to find exactly the correct product for the correct price...but I did it. And, yes...it did take a longer time than it could have..and no, I wasn't in a hurry. I didn't have any children pulling on my purse strings either. I'm alone in my shopping time and I have the luxury of spending as much time and energy as I want to on one item's hunt.
Want to know what I bought? Here's my purchase of the day:
Instead of the usual liquid soap (by the 64 oz container) I purchased a two pack of bar soap, 88 cents, which I cut into slices, forced those slices into the old liquid soap pump bottle and added water. Ta-da! I'll have some great liquid soap that will last a really long time because I'll just keep adding water until it stops producing bubbles.
Great idea right?
p.s. I should add that there are recipes out there using glycerin, and boiling water, shaving your bar soap etc.....I don't care. I'm too cheap for that. Extra added time, energy and added products are not my style. Simple is better. This method works fine for me.
What is your cheap trick?
27 Eylül 2012 Perşembe
Alabama Football 2000
To contact us Click HERE
To contact us Click HERE
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Let's Call In Fed Up
To contact us Click HERE
My family and yours are struggling.
We and/or our neighbors are in peril of losing our jobs.
We and/or our neighbors have already lost billions in retirement investments and home equity.
The suicides piling up, the homeless shelters our better towns try to provide, the overwhelmed emergency rooms, even the animal rescues we struggle to keep open as foreclosures and job losses and preventable burst levees and toxic drywall wipe away what remains of our already fragile security and self esteem . . .
These tragedies exist, in significant part, because Wall Street excutives take billion-dollar bonuses from tax dollars poured on their heads with no thought of conditions or consequences for malfeasance.
Because CEOs depress wages so that they can reap 450 x the line worker's annual pay.
Because the Army Corps of Engineers can't be bothered to build canals and levees adequate to protect the citizens of major US cities.
Because our bankers--let's stop saying "banks" as if brick buildings are behaving badly--are hiking interest rates and late fees, and hawking fraudulent products under militantly harmful terms.
Because our investment advisors blithly give false and fraudulent advice.
Because our corporate board members vote to ship our jobs over there.
Because our corporate executives, managers, and supervisors decide in cold daylight first to import, then to wholesale, and then to retail, and finally to install poison dry wall.
Because US corporate executives feed our troops spoiled food and murder them in electrified shower stalls built with criminal indifferene and negligence.
Because our corporate executives and managers and supervisors choose to sell us beef and chicken and peppers and tomatoes toxic with e-coli; or poisoned dog food, and leaded toys from China, and cribs so dangerous that they must be recalled.
Because while our local, state, and federal governments either actively encourage corporate and government corrupion or nothing about it.
And because we put up with it.
Anyone who knows any history knows that the playing field was never level. Do the names Al Smith, Mother Jones, Joe Hill, Clara Limlich, and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory mean anything to you? (And don't think the horrors ended in the 1930s.) If you don't have a clue, you'd best study up on the reasons why unions formed in the United States of America, and what they achieved for American workers, and what we've lost since Reagan broke the unions' backs in the Air Traffic Controllers' strike. Wages, benefits, overtime . . . these pale by contrast to the exploitation by US corporations of women and children in Third World countries so that you get the great privilege of buying trendy sneakers for prices inflated beyond your dreams, so that corporate executives can maintain their multimillion-dollar lives.
If you do investigate US labor history, you'll quickly discover that there's a story beyond union officers' corruption. You'll quickly not only that when it comes to management and labor, there's always been an uneven playing field in the USA, and not since the Robber Barons has it been the ski slope it is becoming today.
Now is the season when we are being pressured to buy buy buy. We hear it incessantly from the ads and the news, and we hear it incessantly on the money channels. It's up to us, they say, to save the economy. It's up to the American consumer to keep on mindlessly consuming, overdrawing credit cards, stacking up rafts of made-in-China shit, and taking it in every orifice with interest hikes, late fee hikes, and cheap, shoddy, dangerous, overpriced crap.
So what say? Let's make our own holiday gifts. Or even better, instead of buying more shit at extortionist prices, let's give each other contributions to worthy nonprofits. I'll buy a $50 gift to your designated nonprofit, in your honor, for your holiday gift, and you do the same for me.
In other words, let's take back control of this F'd-up situation.
Let's all call in fed up.
If we're going down, let's take them with us.
Behold the City on a Hill. Or, I Can't Make This Stuff Up
To contact us Click HERE
If you secretly want to know what a far-Right Republican regime looks like, visit Arizona.
From my favorite AZ blogger about a pending AZ House bill: "HB 2650 would increase the waiting time for a divorce by 4 months, to give couples a chance to reconcile their differences."
Like they hadn't thought about that already? This is like handing your mom a cork after she's poured the champagne down the drain.
HB 2650 was written by the Center for Arizona Policy. This is the same outfit that used the proposition option to ban gay marriage in AZ. I just can't wait to find out how good, white, upscale, Republican, straight Arizonans will feel about having their good, white, upscale, Republican, straight private lives managed by the gov'mint. But wait. I forgot. Those people never get divorced, do they?
And then there's AZ state Sen. Frank Antenori's inspiration, SB 2770. That's Antenori there in the photo, proving still yet again that pictures DO speak louder than words. Antenori wants to set up a 1-800 number so you can report anybody you see using food stamps to buy smokes or booze or a cell phone. FANtastic!
What's next?
Any day now, watch for a bill from the Center for Arizona Policy that will set up a call line so you can report single people who buy condoms. I'm so LOVIN' this.
Honey, if you think it's right to ban a poor man from using food stamps to buy booze or cigarettes, can you spell DEMAGOGUERY? This is where fascism meets Mao Tse Tung.
Sure. Nobody, including moi, likes to see waste of federal or state aid, or a display of really bad judgment. But like many another morally superior Republican, Antenori makes his laws out of 3 parts ignorance, 2 parts hypocrisy, and 1 part frustration.
Think about it. It's a curiously anti-market approach for a Republican. The bill requires the state to interefere in personal choice. It interferes in free market transactions, and it punishes poor people for believing all they need for the Good Life is a six-pack and a Camel cigarette.
It's not just stupid. It's brutal. It's demagoguery that pits folks lucky enough not to have bought an overpriced house right before Bush's market collapse against those who weren't so lucky. Or well connnected. Or educated.
But I guess it's better we should criminalize poor people than go after the bankers and insurors who've brought us the Second Great Depression, the Iraq Occupation, Blackwater and Halliburton frauds on the Treasury, and no health care. It's the Republican way.
I Know What's Wrong with America
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This week's 9-11 lie from George W.'s former speech writer Marc Thiessen is just the latest case. For close to eight full decades, the Right has steadily poured a deathly poison into Americans' eyes and ears. The result is that today we're sickened almost to the killing point.
There's a word for this. It's treachery. That's what a lie is, and take note: Treachery stems from the same root as treason. It means--please take these synonyms slowly, mull them over one by one--betrayal of trust, faith, or allegiance; perfidy, disloyalty, and treason.
Propaganda--let's be frank--lying in politics--is nothing new. What is new is today's lethality, systemization, ubiquity, and respectability. They aren't playing for partisan gain. They're playing for keeps.
And what is new is the credulity, ignorance, and apathy of the American public. Face it. We're a lot less educated and a lot more easily stampeded now than we once were. One such malady would be bad enough, but afflicted with all three? Baby, we just don't stand a chance.
For malicious lethality, I give you "baby killers," "the homosexual agenda," the hyped-up hoardes of "criminal, leprous immigrants," the "death panels." In fact, I give you the far Right's vicious Balkanization of all the American people into just so many expendable parts.
Journalist and blogger David Neiwert has aptly named this phenom "eliminationism." Unarguably, its inevitable consequences are the murders of Dr. Tiller, Matthew Shepard, Stephen T. Johns and thousands of nameless GLBT people, African Americans, immigrants, and desperate poor whose assassinations didn't make the national headlines. Not to mention the chance for millions of uninsured Americans to see a doctor, get a prescription, or have a life-saving surgery. Or prosecution of the Robber Barons of Wall Street. Or indictment of the last Administration for war crimes and theft on a galactic scale.
For systemization and ubiquity, I give you hidden corporate funding and uber-wealthy patrons. I give you Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, the Trinity Broadcasting Network, Clear Channel, and the rest of talk radio, all full- or part-time propaganda arms of the Republican Party, all heirs of the John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan, and HUAC.
Add to far Right media the thousands of ultra-conservative nonprofits deputized (and given tax breaks) to incite us to lethal rage by telling lie after lie after lie. Citizens United, for instance. Focus on the Family. Eagle Forum. The 700 Club, and the numerous (tax-exempt) national curriculum coordinators for far Right, Christianist, activist home schooling. Front groups like The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition.
It's not just the far Right media impact or its voter recruitment, registration, and "education" consequences. It's also taxpayer subsidized direct mail avalanches of lies, distortions, and invective unleashed deliberatly for decades to whip up the base (and steal its money).
To these, add the astroturf websites and organizations, the tweets, and even the bumper stickers. Then from the total, subtract competing organizations as media consolidation, deregulation, and the Second Great Depression purge the airwaves and the presses of counterpoint, of fact.
Critical to understanding all this is grasping that there are thousands of heavily funded far Right organizations. If the far Right was once a "fringe," today it is pretty much the center of our culture. Its devotees occupy every sector of government, church, and culture, and just recently occupied even the White House.
Most of these organizations have innocuous or even positive names designed to confer credibility and respectability on ideas that nauseate and repel people of integrity. Americans for Truth, for instance, all about the "homosexual agenda." And FAIR, which the Southern Poverty Law Center long ago unmasked as one of at least ten manufactured virulent propaganda tools created by veteran racist Tom Tanton.
Such groups exist specifically to flood the media, to bury the gullible millions in "talking points" intended to whip up moral outrage, pit the well-off against the desperate, spur voter backlash and ultra-right lawmaking, and meanwhile to distract us all from the orchestrated Republican hosing of the American middle class.
This isn't made up. It's real. You know it to be true if you drew breath at all in the last 10 years.
Daily Media Matters e-alerts attempt to correct the rain of lies, but its circulation pales by contract to Rupert Murdock's reach.
For respectability, I give you United States senators, judges, sherrifs, Members of Congress, state legislators and governors, bishops, clergymen, physicians, heads and staffs of federal departments and agencies, professors, teachers, high school principals, librarians, and pharmacists.
It gets worse. The states are bristling with armed militias and so-called "patriot groups" poised to slaughter anyone they perceive as "not us." It will take only a spark. To provide it, talk show hosts incite murder every day. Murder, rebellion, whatever it takes.
Even so, and fully aware of what's at stake, "respectable" pundits and news anchors let the lies pass. Those who don't actually amplify the treasonous far Right Jihad on America (e.g., Lou Dobbs) either don't bother to get the facts themselves or are silent, baldly complict (e.g., Wolf Blitzer, Andrea Mitchell). Their jobs depend on their playing ball. After all, their corporate masters are heavily invested in a fascist America, because corporatism is a main tenet of fascism.
For eighty years or more, the American people have been systematically goaded by ever more concentrated poisoned prods into a brimming rage--over largely invented actions, omissions, and words attributed to this pro-Constitution, egalitarian Democratic President or that Democratic Justice or just to Lib'ruls in general.
But somehow, nobody's talking about how the heat is mostly over made-up, imaginary affronts to imaginary values (family values), imaginary traditions (the, um, unconstitutional "Judeo-Christian" nation), imaginary heroes (Ronald Reagan,fiscal conservative. George W. Bush, fighter pilot).
The War on Christmas? The "illegal takeover"? "Welfare Cadillacs"? The "Myth" of Global Warming? Liberals Appease the Enemy? See Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, and before them, see Paul Harvey, Joe McCarthy, and that high-toned FDR assassination cabal.
If you want to know what's wrong with America, or why the two parties can't cooperate, start right there.
The Left may not be spotless, but there's NO comparison, either quantitatively or qualitatively, between the Left and Right when it comes to corrupting the American cerebellum. In fact, one of the magic carpets under which this all hides is the lie of equivalence: "They all do it." Well, no. Doubt it? Go on: Name one Left counterpart action, organization, or person for every indictment in this rant. You can't. There is no counterpart to Fox. No counterpart to Limbaugh, or Lou Dobbs, or Pat Robertson.. Sen. Coburn. Sen. Santorum. Alan Keyes. None. Nada.
Again, there's a word for this.
This poison--certainly known in advance to be toxic waste--is both source and foundation of the unprecedented paralysis in Washington, DC that already threatens our capacity as a nation to respond to huge and growing national security, fiscal, environmental, and infrastructural threats.
The same polluted swill is also both source and foundation of the "Birthers," the Tea Partiers, the milititant Christianists, the Sarah Palin groupies, the wanna-be Joe the Plumbers (another hoax). This is the amniotic cesspool in which the whole dim-witted, fact-phobic, fear-drunk, anti-poor, anti-immigrant, anti-woman, anti-pigment, anti-sex, anti-environment, anti-gay, anti-labor, anti-humanist, anti-Constitution American Right has been steeped for 80 years.
Why's nobody talking about how all this is mostly over made-up stuff?
It would be funny except that America held such sacred promise.
It would be funny except that my dad lost his eye defending that promise.
It would be funny except that millions of people have already died, and millions more will follow, because those who perpetrate these hoaxes are who profit most. profits of perpetual war and the swindles of Wall Street. I give you Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, the Neo-Cons all, and Paulson and Greenspan and Rice and pharma lobbyists and Dobbs-Limbaugh lapdogs.
For sure, the redneck hard-hats and the truck drivers who make up their conservative base won't profit. They're every bit as expendable as you or me: Remember W's repeal of the Davis-Bacon Act for Gulf Coast states right after Katrina? Remember what you learned from The Shock Doctrine? Remember for-profit, paid-per-capita prisons stuffed to the rafters through hard-Right propaganda and the not-coincidental suddenly intense war on Mexican immigrants? Remember "privatization," the plan that replaces public control of our infrastructure, water, utilities, hospitals, highways, and energy, and replaces them with with private ownership of water, utilities, the military, energy, hospitals, etc. Can you say ENRON? HCA? Blackwater/Xe? Hello?
So it turns out that the garbage we've been forcefed all these years isn't just false. It's also a boondoggle. Turns out that all this Rightwing raving isn't about (the bogus) "homosexual agenda" or the (made-up) illegal takeover, or the "emasculation" of the 'Merkun male at all.
It's about corporatism and privatization. It's about perpetual war for perpetual profit, and a "free market" stripped of regulation and stripped down for plunder. I give you Halliburton, KBR, Xe, Pepsico, Monsanto, the Carlyle Group, and the Wall Street con men. Even our far Right state legislatures, like Arizona's, and avowed racist lawmakers like Russell Pearce are penny-ante demagogues, pawns in a way bigger chess match and too stupid to know it.
There's a word for this. It's called treason. Yet the Legislative and Executive branches are either immobilized or co-conspirators, and our highest Court--that tool of the Right responsible for empowering W and Dick and legitimizing their Reign of Plunder--just took it over the top. When the US Supreme Court ruled recently that restricting corporate funding of political candidates is unconstitutional, they unleashed a corporatist muck tsunami that very well may choke us all to death.
For 30 pieces of silver, a platform, and a megaphone, men and women like Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia, John Roberts, Sarah Palin, John McCain, Jon Kyl, Mitch McConnell, Rush Limbaugh, John Boehner, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Michelle Malkin, Tom Tancredo, Karl Rove, and a host of lesser infidels have sold their mortal souls.
They've sold ours, too, and any hope our children ever had for the American Dream.
There's a word for this. It's treason.
I'm Back
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Nothing like a year's vacation to make you miss blogging.
Hope you missed me! I missed you!
In that time, I've solidified the first-ever nonprofit, statewide Doberman Pinscher rescue in Arizona, which I founded from thin air in January 2009. Now, today, it is strong, vibrant, and able to blossom under the transition to a new Executive Director, which frees me to get back to writing and to polymer clay art making. More about that later.
Stay tuned. The dissolution of our constitutional democracy to a bona fide fascist pluto-oligarchy should give us all plenty to talk about. And if that fails, there's always this crop of Republican whores running for President, right? What else? Email me at picodegallo@cox.net and let me know what else you'd like to chew on and who else I should add to my Pico's Wee-Wee List!
26 Eylül 2012 Çarşamba
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To contact us Click HERE
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Let's Call In Fed Up
To contact us Click HERE
My family and yours are struggling.
We and/or our neighbors are in peril of losing our jobs.
We and/or our neighbors have already lost billions in retirement investments and home equity.
The suicides piling up, the homeless shelters our better towns try to provide, the overwhelmed emergency rooms, even the animal rescues we struggle to keep open as foreclosures and job losses and preventable burst levees and toxic drywall wipe away what remains of our already fragile security and self esteem . . .
These tragedies exist, in significant part, because Wall Street excutives take billion-dollar bonuses from tax dollars poured on their heads with no thought of conditions or consequences for malfeasance.
Because CEOs depress wages so that they can reap 450 x the line worker's annual pay.
Because the Army Corps of Engineers can't be bothered to build canals and levees adequate to protect the citizens of major US cities.
Because our bankers--let's stop saying "banks" as if brick buildings are behaving badly--are hiking interest rates and late fees, and hawking fraudulent products under militantly harmful terms.
Because our investment advisors blithly give false and fraudulent advice.
Because our corporate board members vote to ship our jobs over there.
Because our corporate executives, managers, and supervisors decide in cold daylight first to import, then to wholesale, and then to retail, and finally to install poison dry wall.
Because US corporate executives feed our troops spoiled food and murder them in electrified shower stalls built with criminal indifferene and negligence.
Because our corporate executives and managers and supervisors choose to sell us beef and chicken and peppers and tomatoes toxic with e-coli; or poisoned dog food, and leaded toys from China, and cribs so dangerous that they must be recalled.
Because while our local, state, and federal governments either actively encourage corporate and government corrupion or nothing about it.
And because we put up with it.
Anyone who knows any history knows that the playing field was never level. Do the names Al Smith, Mother Jones, Joe Hill, Clara Limlich, and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory mean anything to you? (And don't think the horrors ended in the 1930s.) If you don't have a clue, you'd best study up on the reasons why unions formed in the United States of America, and what they achieved for American workers, and what we've lost since Reagan broke the unions' backs in the Air Traffic Controllers' strike. Wages, benefits, overtime . . . these pale by contrast to the exploitation by US corporations of women and children in Third World countries so that you get the great privilege of buying trendy sneakers for prices inflated beyond your dreams, so that corporate executives can maintain their multimillion-dollar lives.
If you do investigate US labor history, you'll quickly discover that there's a story beyond union officers' corruption. You'll quickly not only that when it comes to management and labor, there's always been an uneven playing field in the USA, and not since the Robber Barons has it been the ski slope it is becoming today.
Now is the season when we are being pressured to buy buy buy. We hear it incessantly from the ads and the news, and we hear it incessantly on the money channels. It's up to us, they say, to save the economy. It's up to the American consumer to keep on mindlessly consuming, overdrawing credit cards, stacking up rafts of made-in-China shit, and taking it in every orifice with interest hikes, late fee hikes, and cheap, shoddy, dangerous, overpriced crap.
So what say? Let's make our own holiday gifts. Or even better, instead of buying more shit at extortionist prices, let's give each other contributions to worthy nonprofits. I'll buy a $50 gift to your designated nonprofit, in your honor, for your holiday gift, and you do the same for me.
In other words, let's take back control of this F'd-up situation.
Let's all call in fed up.
If we're going down, let's take them with us.
Behold the City on a Hill. Or, I Can't Make This Stuff Up
To contact us Click HERE
If you secretly want to know what a far-Right Republican regime looks like, visit Arizona.
From my favorite AZ blogger about a pending AZ House bill: "HB 2650 would increase the waiting time for a divorce by 4 months, to give couples a chance to reconcile their differences."
Like they hadn't thought about that already? This is like handing your mom a cork after she's poured the champagne down the drain.
HB 2650 was written by the Center for Arizona Policy. This is the same outfit that used the proposition option to ban gay marriage in AZ. I just can't wait to find out how good, white, upscale, Republican, straight Arizonans will feel about having their good, white, upscale, Republican, straight private lives managed by the gov'mint. But wait. I forgot. Those people never get divorced, do they?
And then there's AZ state Sen. Frank Antenori's inspiration, SB 2770. That's Antenori there in the photo, proving still yet again that pictures DO speak louder than words. Antenori wants to set up a 1-800 number so you can report anybody you see using food stamps to buy smokes or booze or a cell phone. FANtastic!
What's next?
Any day now, watch for a bill from the Center for Arizona Policy that will set up a call line so you can report single people who buy condoms. I'm so LOVIN' this.
Honey, if you think it's right to ban a poor man from using food stamps to buy booze or cigarettes, can you spell DEMAGOGUERY? This is where fascism meets Mao Tse Tung.
Sure. Nobody, including moi, likes to see waste of federal or state aid, or a display of really bad judgment. But like many another morally superior Republican, Antenori makes his laws out of 3 parts ignorance, 2 parts hypocrisy, and 1 part frustration.
Think about it. It's a curiously anti-market approach for a Republican. The bill requires the state to interefere in personal choice. It interferes in free market transactions, and it punishes poor people for believing all they need for the Good Life is a six-pack and a Camel cigarette.
It's not just stupid. It's brutal. It's demagoguery that pits folks lucky enough not to have bought an overpriced house right before Bush's market collapse against those who weren't so lucky. Or well connnected. Or educated.
But I guess it's better we should criminalize poor people than go after the bankers and insurors who've brought us the Second Great Depression, the Iraq Occupation, Blackwater and Halliburton frauds on the Treasury, and no health care. It's the Republican way.
I Know What's Wrong with America
To contact us Click HERE
This week's 9-11 lie from George W.'s former speech writer Marc Thiessen is just the latest case. For close to eight full decades, the Right has steadily poured a deathly poison into Americans' eyes and ears. The result is that today we're sickened almost to the killing point.
There's a word for this. It's treachery. That's what a lie is, and take note: Treachery stems from the same root as treason. It means--please take these synonyms slowly, mull them over one by one--betrayal of trust, faith, or allegiance; perfidy, disloyalty, and treason.
Propaganda--let's be frank--lying in politics--is nothing new. What is new is today's lethality, systemization, ubiquity, and respectability. They aren't playing for partisan gain. They're playing for keeps.
And what is new is the credulity, ignorance, and apathy of the American public. Face it. We're a lot less educated and a lot more easily stampeded now than we once were. One such malady would be bad enough, but afflicted with all three? Baby, we just don't stand a chance.
For malicious lethality, I give you "baby killers," "the homosexual agenda," the hyped-up hoardes of "criminal, leprous immigrants," the "death panels." In fact, I give you the far Right's vicious Balkanization of all the American people into just so many expendable parts.
Journalist and blogger David Neiwert has aptly named this phenom "eliminationism." Unarguably, its inevitable consequences are the murders of Dr. Tiller, Matthew Shepard, Stephen T. Johns and thousands of nameless GLBT people, African Americans, immigrants, and desperate poor whose assassinations didn't make the national headlines. Not to mention the chance for millions of uninsured Americans to see a doctor, get a prescription, or have a life-saving surgery. Or prosecution of the Robber Barons of Wall Street. Or indictment of the last Administration for war crimes and theft on a galactic scale.
For systemization and ubiquity, I give you hidden corporate funding and uber-wealthy patrons. I give you Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, the Trinity Broadcasting Network, Clear Channel, and the rest of talk radio, all full- or part-time propaganda arms of the Republican Party, all heirs of the John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan, and HUAC.
Add to far Right media the thousands of ultra-conservative nonprofits deputized (and given tax breaks) to incite us to lethal rage by telling lie after lie after lie. Citizens United, for instance. Focus on the Family. Eagle Forum. The 700 Club, and the numerous (tax-exempt) national curriculum coordinators for far Right, Christianist, activist home schooling. Front groups like The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition.
It's not just the far Right media impact or its voter recruitment, registration, and "education" consequences. It's also taxpayer subsidized direct mail avalanches of lies, distortions, and invective unleashed deliberatly for decades to whip up the base (and steal its money).
To these, add the astroturf websites and organizations, the tweets, and even the bumper stickers. Then from the total, subtract competing organizations as media consolidation, deregulation, and the Second Great Depression purge the airwaves and the presses of counterpoint, of fact.
Critical to understanding all this is grasping that there are thousands of heavily funded far Right organizations. If the far Right was once a "fringe," today it is pretty much the center of our culture. Its devotees occupy every sector of government, church, and culture, and just recently occupied even the White House.
Most of these organizations have innocuous or even positive names designed to confer credibility and respectability on ideas that nauseate and repel people of integrity. Americans for Truth, for instance, all about the "homosexual agenda." And FAIR, which the Southern Poverty Law Center long ago unmasked as one of at least ten manufactured virulent propaganda tools created by veteran racist Tom Tanton.
Such groups exist specifically to flood the media, to bury the gullible millions in "talking points" intended to whip up moral outrage, pit the well-off against the desperate, spur voter backlash and ultra-right lawmaking, and meanwhile to distract us all from the orchestrated Republican hosing of the American middle class.
This isn't made up. It's real. You know it to be true if you drew breath at all in the last 10 years.
Daily Media Matters e-alerts attempt to correct the rain of lies, but its circulation pales by contract to Rupert Murdock's reach.
For respectability, I give you United States senators, judges, sherrifs, Members of Congress, state legislators and governors, bishops, clergymen, physicians, heads and staffs of federal departments and agencies, professors, teachers, high school principals, librarians, and pharmacists.
It gets worse. The states are bristling with armed militias and so-called "patriot groups" poised to slaughter anyone they perceive as "not us." It will take only a spark. To provide it, talk show hosts incite murder every day. Murder, rebellion, whatever it takes.
Even so, and fully aware of what's at stake, "respectable" pundits and news anchors let the lies pass. Those who don't actually amplify the treasonous far Right Jihad on America (e.g., Lou Dobbs) either don't bother to get the facts themselves or are silent, baldly complict (e.g., Wolf Blitzer, Andrea Mitchell). Their jobs depend on their playing ball. After all, their corporate masters are heavily invested in a fascist America, because corporatism is a main tenet of fascism.
For eighty years or more, the American people have been systematically goaded by ever more concentrated poisoned prods into a brimming rage--over largely invented actions, omissions, and words attributed to this pro-Constitution, egalitarian Democratic President or that Democratic Justice or just to Lib'ruls in general.
But somehow, nobody's talking about how the heat is mostly over made-up, imaginary affronts to imaginary values (family values), imaginary traditions (the, um, unconstitutional "Judeo-Christian" nation), imaginary heroes (Ronald Reagan,fiscal conservative. George W. Bush, fighter pilot).
The War on Christmas? The "illegal takeover"? "Welfare Cadillacs"? The "Myth" of Global Warming? Liberals Appease the Enemy? See Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, and before them, see Paul Harvey, Joe McCarthy, and that high-toned FDR assassination cabal.
If you want to know what's wrong with America, or why the two parties can't cooperate, start right there.
The Left may not be spotless, but there's NO comparison, either quantitatively or qualitatively, between the Left and Right when it comes to corrupting the American cerebellum. In fact, one of the magic carpets under which this all hides is the lie of equivalence: "They all do it." Well, no. Doubt it? Go on: Name one Left counterpart action, organization, or person for every indictment in this rant. You can't. There is no counterpart to Fox. No counterpart to Limbaugh, or Lou Dobbs, or Pat Robertson.. Sen. Coburn. Sen. Santorum. Alan Keyes. None. Nada.
Again, there's a word for this.
This poison--certainly known in advance to be toxic waste--is both source and foundation of the unprecedented paralysis in Washington, DC that already threatens our capacity as a nation to respond to huge and growing national security, fiscal, environmental, and infrastructural threats.
The same polluted swill is also both source and foundation of the "Birthers," the Tea Partiers, the milititant Christianists, the Sarah Palin groupies, the wanna-be Joe the Plumbers (another hoax). This is the amniotic cesspool in which the whole dim-witted, fact-phobic, fear-drunk, anti-poor, anti-immigrant, anti-woman, anti-pigment, anti-sex, anti-environment, anti-gay, anti-labor, anti-humanist, anti-Constitution American Right has been steeped for 80 years.
Why's nobody talking about how all this is mostly over made-up stuff?
It would be funny except that America held such sacred promise.
It would be funny except that my dad lost his eye defending that promise.
It would be funny except that millions of people have already died, and millions more will follow, because those who perpetrate these hoaxes are who profit most. profits of perpetual war and the swindles of Wall Street. I give you Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, the Neo-Cons all, and Paulson and Greenspan and Rice and pharma lobbyists and Dobbs-Limbaugh lapdogs.
For sure, the redneck hard-hats and the truck drivers who make up their conservative base won't profit. They're every bit as expendable as you or me: Remember W's repeal of the Davis-Bacon Act for Gulf Coast states right after Katrina? Remember what you learned from The Shock Doctrine? Remember for-profit, paid-per-capita prisons stuffed to the rafters through hard-Right propaganda and the not-coincidental suddenly intense war on Mexican immigrants? Remember "privatization," the plan that replaces public control of our infrastructure, water, utilities, hospitals, highways, and energy, and replaces them with with private ownership of water, utilities, the military, energy, hospitals, etc. Can you say ENRON? HCA? Blackwater/Xe? Hello?
So it turns out that the garbage we've been forcefed all these years isn't just false. It's also a boondoggle. Turns out that all this Rightwing raving isn't about (the bogus) "homosexual agenda" or the (made-up) illegal takeover, or the "emasculation" of the 'Merkun male at all.
It's about corporatism and privatization. It's about perpetual war for perpetual profit, and a "free market" stripped of regulation and stripped down for plunder. I give you Halliburton, KBR, Xe, Pepsico, Monsanto, the Carlyle Group, and the Wall Street con men. Even our far Right state legislatures, like Arizona's, and avowed racist lawmakers like Russell Pearce are penny-ante demagogues, pawns in a way bigger chess match and too stupid to know it.
There's a word for this. It's called treason. Yet the Legislative and Executive branches are either immobilized or co-conspirators, and our highest Court--that tool of the Right responsible for empowering W and Dick and legitimizing their Reign of Plunder--just took it over the top. When the US Supreme Court ruled recently that restricting corporate funding of political candidates is unconstitutional, they unleashed a corporatist muck tsunami that very well may choke us all to death.
For 30 pieces of silver, a platform, and a megaphone, men and women like Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia, John Roberts, Sarah Palin, John McCain, Jon Kyl, Mitch McConnell, Rush Limbaugh, John Boehner, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Michelle Malkin, Tom Tancredo, Karl Rove, and a host of lesser infidels have sold their mortal souls.
They've sold ours, too, and any hope our children ever had for the American Dream.
There's a word for this. It's treason.
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