Kindle Mojo Risin'

 

      Since the fascist twats at Scribd ("We don't do counts") and I have parted company these past few days, I thought it was high time to start marketing my books again. So I set up an account with Kindle Mojo, since it seems to be popular with the young whippersnappers on Twitter and elsewhere on the internet boxes. My profile is here and this is my inaugural post, promoting American Zen.

     I've also got an interview coming up with Florida based indie author Marcia Meara (whose blog, Bookin' It, is here) coming up late next month and I'd like to coordinate that with a promotion of one or more of my books (as well as the possible official Kindle and Create Space publication of my latest novel, Tatterdemalion).

     Until then, this will be it for now. I probably won't be around tomorrow since it's my youngest son's high school graduation and we may go to West Roxbury to visit his mother's grave.

An Electric Guitar Makes Everything More Hip and Exciting

     Meetings! Answering calls! Canvassing! Dusting! Paperwork! Riding bikes! Driving aimlessly! Siccing attack dogs on unarmed black teens wearing hoodies! Raiding empty houses! THIS... is your Miami Gardens PD! (Not shown: Tens of thousands of racist Stop and Frisks that have yielded zero arrests.)
    

Top Ten LA Radio Shows That Are Rated Higher Than Rush Limbaugh's

     On May 15, Media Matters' Eric Boehlert followed up on his April dispatch revealing that powerful conservative icon Rush Limbaugh's flagship station, KEIB, finished 37th out of a market of 45 radio outlets. The May report proved even worse for the AM political pundit: Boehlert reports that KEIB had slipped to 39th place in the field of 45 and there's no end in sight for Limbaugh's plummeting ratings. Included in the Nielsen Radio report is that, beating Limbaugh in the LA radio market, the second largest in the nation, were "12 non-English stations and four college outlets." But the bad news didn't stop there. What were some of the LA-based radio shows that have beaten the pants off Rush Limbaugh's AM radio time slot?

---

10) Bounce My Chevy Talk
9) Advice for the Lovelorn by Mel Gibson
8) Farming Subsidy and Crop Duster Digest in the San Joaquin Valley
7) Free Medical Tips From Dr. Conrad Murray!
6) The NAMBLA Hour
5) Gun Gab with Joe the Plumber
4) The Emergency Broadcast System
3) Let's Talk Abstinence! with Bristol Palin
2) Esperanto as a Second Language
1) 17th century Bulgarian Cabinet Making with Rila Rhodope, in Bulgarian

I, Too, Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

 

(Tip o' the tinfoil hat to Constant Reader Stan the Man for the inspiration.)

     As I'd made mention several times over the near decade I've been blogging about politics, I was proud to have cast my first vote for John Kerry in 2004. I was proud that, for virtually all my adult life, he was my junior senator. I was even able to somehow ignore the fact that, during the Democratic National Convention in Boston that summer, the government and Boston PD had set up "Freedom cages" for the protesters to ensure none of the Democratic elite who would show up at the Fleet Center would ever have to see or hear them and that, just to be sure no one got out of hand, snipers were set up. That was out of Kerry's hands, I told myself.
     The convention was remarkable for several other things, including that of a credentialed female reporter (In an eerily prescient moment of another incident three years later in Florida) getting dragged off the convention floor while Kerry's bizarre wife Theresa Heinz-Kerry blathered on about freedom of speech, particularly for women. The late Maya Angelou, who passed away just yesterday, also spoke at the convention. That's why it was ironic to, surprisingly, no one that the nation's unofficial poet laureate who'd lyrically written about the brutality and oppression in the Jim Crow South would speak at that same convention in the Northeast while protesters were literally caged far from the Fleet Center with no tables, no chairs and no sanitation facilities.
     I even felt bad for Kerry while he was being savaged by the Swiftboat Veterans for "Truth", the same John Kerry who'd made it on Nixon's hit list for publicly embarrassing his administration over Vietnam with his pacifistic testimony before the same Senate of which he'd become a part the following decade.
     Then I realized years later that I'd voted not for the aloof, patrician, wealthy Democrat (who'd once been lampooned by the Onion, writing that Kerry would tour the campaign trail from the deck of his yacht) but against Bush. And, just a day ago, John Kerry reminded me how ashamed I was for being fooled by him and how ashamed I am that he's a senior official in my government. Because John Kerry, like most any Cabinet official, is but a stooge of the President, who is himself a stooge for corporate interests beyond his control.
     I'm speaking, of course, of the Edward Snowden interview on NBC against which Secretary Kerry felt the need to push back on the Today show. Taking an embarrassingly immature tactic that was actually painful to watch, the Very Serious Man With the Long Face said, ""If Mr. Snowden wants to come back to the United States today, we'll have him on a flight today. We'd be delighted for him to come back..."
     Oh, I'm sure you would, despite the fact that the Justice Department had, nearly a year ago, charged Snowden with two violations of the Espionage Act of 1917. Later that day, in an interview with Chuck Todd, the Velveeta cheese of journalists, Kerry said, ""There are many a patriot. You can go back to the Pentagon Papers with Dan Ellsberg and others who stood and went to court system of America and made their case... He should man up and come back to the United States." And there's so much that is wrong about Kerry's stoogery that one is hard-pressed to know where to start.
     In the Today show interview, Kerry also said, "The fact is if he cares so much about America and he believes in America, he should trust in the American system of justice." Which, one could say, is the same mistake Bradley/Chelsea Manning had made. The fact is, if Edward Snowden had any faith whatsoever in the federal criminal justice system, I have every confidence he would leave Russia and do so. But the courts' complicity with the federal government to suppress virtually every right granted to us in the first amendment and elsewhere in the Constitution, particularly the 4th Amendment preventing illegal search and seizure of one's papers, effects and person, is Snowden's reason for staying where he is.
     Secretary of State John Kerry's impugning Snowden's manhood (Like Kerry can talk, considering his meek acceptance of the second consecutive theft of the presidency in Ohio and refusal to pursue the Bush junta for war crimes) and patriotism (a word that's taken a significant beating no thanks to the Tea Party) makes him look like a schoolyard bully trying to draw a weaker opponent into a one-sided fight he knows he cannot win. And for a man who's supposed to be a low-level systems analyst and "hacker," as Head Stooge Obama called him at the same time the DOJ was drawing up espionage charges against him, he sure is getting a lot of attention from the most senior members of the administration, even rising to the presidential level. It's the tried-and-untrue government tactic of attempting to discredit and minimize the impact of a whistleblower while at the same time spending unprecedented amounts of time and resources to persecuting that individual.
     Elsewhere, Kerry also trotted out the tired tactic that Snowden is making it harder to track down and apprehend terrorists who would seek to do harm to our free and democratic way of life. In fact, according to the government's official line, short-circuiting our 4th Amendment rights has resulted in the thwarting of 54 terrorist attacks... that the same government can't even begin to prove.
     The fact is, the Obama administration had simply picked up where the Bush administration left off and, in many cases, ramped up the surveillance, the drone killings, the persecution of whistle blowers like Snowden, circumventing the secret FISA courts, you name it. The same so-called liberals who were rightly screaming about this when the New York Times revealed mass surveillance under the Bush administration are now disappointingly and oddly silent when the media reports the same is happening under the Obama administration that has used drones over our streets, vacuumed up massive amounts of metadata from our calls, texts, internet activity and God knows what else.
     And liberals are neatly divided on Snowden. Some of us call him a hero. others call him a traitor (53% of the NBC viewers in an online poll concluded he was the latter). And those alleged liberals who are calling for Snowden's head are trying to claim that he did this simply to embarrass their boy Obama.
     Another fact: Snowden did not make these revelations to the Guardian or the Washington Post or anywhere else against anyone but for the American people. And it's obvious to me and, I'd like to think, quite a few others, that if Snowden had made these revelations during the Bush years, he'd've been hailed a hero instead of a traitor. It seems Cardinal Richelieu was right when he once famously said, "Treason is a matter of timing."
     So, I know why the caged bird sings. It doesn't matter to Edward Snowden who the president is or what party he belongs to. Wrong is still wrong regardless of which party commits it. Snowden essentially sacrificed his entire life, including his job, his career, his income, his home, his girlfriend, everything to do essentially what Daniel Ellsberg did over 40 years ago (and whom John Kerry, outrageously, had brought up as an example of a man successfully standing up to the criminal justice system, conveniently forgetting the fact that the US was a much different country then than it is now).
     And the sooner you stupid liberals who are bleating that Obama's Constitutional crimes are keeping us safer (which is what the Bushbots of the previous decade had bleated) realize that, the better off we'll all be.

Panic in Gunland, Part Two

   

     (It's hard to add on to Joe the Plumber's open letter to the parents of the UCSB shooting and stabbing victims that wasn't already addressed by TBogg at Raw Story. But never let it be said that ole JP didn't give it the college try.)

Dear Joe, Samuel, peckerhead or whatever name you're going by:

     Perhaps it's best if libertarian sociopaths such as you didn't attempt or feign empathy especially since a baseline of honest sympathy seems to be beyond your grasp. Because a right wing nut job attempting to forge a human connection is as doomed to failure as a fat dog walking on its hind legs: It ultimately fails but one is surprised to see it done for any length of time.
     What's even more surprising is why and how you still are given any relevance at all when your 15 minutes were up almost six years ago. You're like Mr. Clean's mentally-impaired twin brother, someone who should be locked in a padded attic and fed a bucket of fish heads daily but somehow still manages to escape and embarrass the family. That's why it mystifies me that your astoundingly heartless letter to the parents of the dead students had catapulted you, however briefly, to the middle of the pack on Twitter's trending topics.
     Were it not for the theoretical effect your screed would have on the parents of these six dead young people (all of whom being under the age of 24) even were they to note it, the attempt to make it all about you and your gun rights would be comical and could be dismissed completely out of hand as readily than as if you'd written this on the wall of your den in your own fecal matter.
     If I hear you right, then it seems your 2nd Amendment rights trump that of a certain Commandment (and the only one worth observing). Reflexively clutching your gun while these poor parents are busy making funeral arrangements for their children whose adult lives were just beginning, and even claiming the shooter was a Democrat and feigning restraint by stopping short of calling him "an Obama voter", reveals you to be of the identical mindset of the shooter himself.
     And I'm sure if we could resurrect young Elliot Rodger from the dead, he, too, would carp about his second amendment rights like the privileged white male he was and that you are. As it is, you've shown about as much respect for the victims and their grieving families as Rodger did in his final Youtube video.
     Therefore, in light of this and your ceaselessly partisan and shockingly ignorant conclusion that such mass shootings are carried out by registered Democrats when mountains of evidence suggest or prove otherwise, perhaps you ought to restrict your contacts with our species to the occasional gun show, completely ignored book signing or Tea Bagger rally where you charge people $5 a pop to shine your head with Butcher's Wax.
     In actuality, there is one or, at the most, two degrees of separation between you and people such as Elliot Rodger and the wouldbe Tides shooter, the white supremacist who shot up the Holocaust Museum and killed an African American guard, the homophobic whackjob who killed two people at a Unitarian Church and said that "liberals should die", the Jewish Center shooter from just last month, the Sikh Temple shooter from two years ago was another of your ilk and...
     Joe, do try to follow the bouncing ball. If you can't see a pattern emerging by now, then you seriously ought to refrain from getting within dangerous proximity to, much less actually using, any writing implements. You also need to refrain from attempts to interact with nice human beings who are now, in violation of everything that is natural, preparing to bury their children. Badgering them with your heartlessly ignorant partisan falsehoods verges on harassing grieving families who had committed no greater crime than in charging wet-legged politicians on both sides of the aisle with political cowardice in giving the NRA everything it demands and then some.
     And if you cannot even feign that much of a baseline of humanity, then gripping your beloved gun and letting loose with one under the chin is certainly a viable solution and no one would think any the less of you for doing so.
     Because, at this moment, no one with a heart or a brain can possibly think any less of you than we now do.

     Sincerely,
     Jurassicpork (Robert Crawford)
(Editor's note: I see that I got linked by the inestimable Tengrain at Crooks and Liars. If you liked what you read here, please, please, please consider making a donation to keep us afloat for another month. We'd deeply appreciate it. -JP)

What Memorial Day Means to Me

     It wasn't Memorial Day but a particular Veteran's Day in November 2008. It was on the 11th, exactly a week after Obama got elected President of the United States. Bush, who vowed to "sprint to the finish" of his illegal presidency, couldn't be bothered to lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns in the last Veteran's Day of his administration. Instead, he sent Dick "Five Deferments" Cheney, which was kind of like sending Jack the Ripper to Lilith Fair.
     The choice of sending Cheney was an odd one, considering his craven refusal to get drafted, even going as far as to impregnate his wife Lynn so he could weasel out for the fifth time. Bush laying the wreath himself was audacious, considering the champagne flight playboy joined the Texas Air National Guard to himself avoid getting sent to Vietnam. After all that money spent and all that media exposure from the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth strenuously trying to get us to believe that Bush was the real military man and Kerry just an imposter and Bush couldn't be bothered to go to the Tomb of the Unknowns on his last Veteran's Day as Commander in Chief.
     Nothing seemed right about that administration, starting with its legitimacy (You may remember Bush got pelted with eggs on January 20, 2001 by people who knew the election was stolen, making W break from Presidential tradition before he was even sworn in and was forced to ride instead of walk down Pennsylvania Ave.). There was this odd detachment on the part of the administration that ignored Richard Clarke's warnings about al Qaida, ignored warnings from several nations and its own Central Intelligence Agency that an attack by bin Laden's people, and where and how, was in the works. There was a strange detachment on the part of Dick Cheney, he who infamously said that "deficits don't matter."
     An administration and, as it would prove, a greatly bloated government, was fully in place, the transition had proceeded smoothly, much more smoothly than the chaotic Clinton transition eight years before but at the same time there was something that wasn't right about our White House. It was like looking at a hyper realistic wax mannequin from a distance. It looked right, but one harbored increasingly uneasy doubts it would actually move.
     Then on September 11th, 2001, after essentially a sleepy, uneventful first 8 1/2 months, America changed forever and not for the better.
     The administration that didn't care to hear reports that bin Laden was "determined to strike" within our borders suddenly got very concerned about al Qaida and showed it by attacking two sovereign nations where al Qaida's leader was not. Like a crow on a dunghill, Bush blared platitudes from a bullhorn atop the rubble of the first and most catastrophic failure of his "presidency" and we declared him a conquering hero and gave him 90+% approval ratings simply because he was the boob in the Oval Office.
     So, when we sent too few troops to pacify a nation whose military was nonexistent but whose insurgents were very good, indeed, when we were told by bozos like Wolfowitz the war would cost a billion dollars tops and would be paid for by Iraq's oil industry, when that billion dollar war turned into a multi trillion dollar boondoggle in which contractors were spoiled and pampered like royalty while our troops, without adequate vehicle armor or adequate body armor were getting slaughtered, when Bush essentially put the entire Constitution, and our rights and civil liberties, into suspended animation, we trusted him, a guy who couldn't even eat a pretzel without adult supervision.
     And the few of us who railed against this were called traitors, seditionists, fifth columnists, terrorists. Because most of us fell into Bush's reductionist and paranoid, "If you're not with us, you're against us" mindset.
     And then Dick Cheney. of all people, was sent to the Tomb of the Unknowns to lay a wreath. By this time, Bush was plainly phoning it in, most of his time spent, it now seems, in looking over a growing list of felons he could pardon in his last days in office. He'd had enough and was very akin to Wilfred Owen's "devil sick of sin."
     And nothing is ever learned. We lay wreaths, watch wreaths being laid by statesmen who'd never served in the military, put up flags, set off fireworks, gorge ourselves with barbecued animal carcasses, drink to excess and say stupid things to each other such as, "Happy Memorial Day," blithely forgetting the fact it's not supposed to be happy and isn't to many families who had lost loved ones to war.
     And few, if any, of us realize on Memorial Day that due to old men, oil cartels and the diktats of the Military Industrial Complex who gasp for air in peacetime, more and more families across America will be visiting cemeteries, looking at and receiving triangular folded flags and forlornly looking at the eternally empty spaces in beds and dinner tables.
     Nothing is learned. Like Charlie Brown, like a PT Barnum audience, we keep getting suckered into supporting another war, another police action, another corporate intervention dressed up as something vitally  necessary and patriotic. No war is ever too expensive until the VA medical bills start coming in, when veteran's mortgages are foreclosed on, when veterans wind up on the streets and can't find jobs. Then, suddenly, the Republican Party starts waving price tags around and saying, "We can't afford this!" while lobbying for yet another round of tax cuts for the wealthy and taking hostages until they get it.
     And honorable, truly honorable men like Gen. Smedley Butler and his jeremiad against war and the reasons for it, is someone well known only to a handful of liberals who remember what a democracy is supposed to stand for.

Nice Guys Finish Last, Then Go on Killing Sprees

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.) "How could an inferior, ugly black boy be able to get a white girl and not me? I am beautiful, and I am half white myself. I am descended from British aristocracy. He is descended from slaves. I deserve it more." - Elliot Rodger's manifesto, My Twisted World

     The case of Elliot Rodger's shooting and stabbing rampage at the University of Santa Barbara last Friday that ultimately claimed seven lives provides commentators both professional and amateur alike with a crossroads of much that's wrong with this once-great nation of ours. It is about male entitlement. It is about white entitlement. It is about the sense of entitlement gun owners feel. The number of touchstones this latest mass shooting provides is mind-boggling.
     While it would be a stretch to say the late Mr. Rodger represented virtually everything that is wrong with the country, it would be an equally reckless stretch to say that Rodger was an anomaly, the exception rather than the rule. And Rodger's horrifying rampage through the USB campus is like a cross between Leo Durocher and Bret Easton Ellis- It's a case a "nice guy" finishing last for the last time and getting some payback.
     What you see above is a reproduction of the video Rodger put up on Youtube mere hours before Friday's rampage (Youtube's "community," oddly, took it down right after the spree because, apparently, the threat of violence is much more intolerable than the videos of people actually getting killed that Youtube keeps in circulation). If you can stomach his jeremiad against women who refused to sleep with him, you'll note he comes across as a bad amateur actor essaying a screen test for a badly-written villain, complete with the bitter fake laughs.
     The performance (and this is a preamble for horrid performance art, make no mistake about it) is chilling only in retrospect when one combines it with the killing spree that was promised. In it, Rodger essentially whines about being 22 and still a virgin and unmistakably makes a case for white male entitlement. His 141 page manifesto/autobiography on Scribd, which is getting roughly 1000 hits a minute (At this writing, it's up to 158,600 reads), is about as repugnant a commercial for white, male entitlement as the laudatory comments it's received from people tuning in for the freak factor, the cybernetic equivalent of police band owners running to the scene of every accident or natural disaster.
     Looking at this kid's sense of histrionics, it's not difficult to see why females by and large found this young man so repugnant. He felt women should have willingly given their vaginas to him by dint of his alleged descent from British aristocracy and he was a racist. We have no idea what his family's finances are like but one gets a strong sense he came from the landed gentry and the sense of entitlement that goes hand in hand with what one lawyer successfully argued was "affluenza."

Mr. Rodger's Neighborhood

      It's inconceivable to those of us still in full possession of their mental faculties to see how a self-proclaimed "nice guy" can then justify going on a killing spree. But this is part and parcel of the necessary delusion that monsters like Rodger require. The fascists felt they were doing a public service ridding the world of Jews. American presidents of both parties think little if anything about ending human lives from thousands of miles away as long as they were ended against a backdrop of Communist aggression or Muslim terrorism. And Republicans think they're doing a public service by denying the neediest among us food stamps, Medicare and Social Security.

     Elliot Rodger had, at best, parochial ambitions, most likely personal ones. Like many young men with raging hormones, he simply wanted to get laid and be accepted by the opposite sex. But never once in the face of these countless rejections had Rodger looked within himself, as would many of us, for the root cause of this rejection. And his mindset, while personally motivated, is absolutely indistinguishable from the almost invariably white entitled male gun fanatics who'd begun targeting women with terrorist tactics just before Rodger's rampage.

     Violence, as I'm sure many of us can agree, is the first refuge of the morally and intellectually defeated. They're too immature or too willfully ignorant to engage in a fruitful dialogue and think using domestic terrorist tactics on those they perceive to be weaker makes a suitable substitute for rational debate. The persecuted mindset is also as common a trait as the psychological protocols we see in serial killers: Everyone's out to get us (despite still comprising the vast majority of the population), everyone's out to get our guns (despite the Obama administration doing or threatening no such thing).

     And the sense of entitlement is encouraged when one white man after another gets away with taking innocent lives and having his spoiled upbringing blamed. George Zimmerman, an honorary white man, proves with every violent incident of just how much this country has gone to the dogs just by staying out of prison despite being every bit the loose cannon Rodger was.

     And it would be easy to say that somebody failed young Elliot and perhaps somebody or some people had. He was, after all, under mental care but even the best psychiatrist or psychologist is powerless to overcome and counteract an ingrained sense of white entitlement that, more often than not, is infused with an unhealthy dose of racism and misogynism

     Until we as a nation grow a set and learn to connect the dots and note that most gun fanatics are angry white males, exactly the type still surrounding Cliven Bundy and sighting down on federal agents, then nothing will ever change. There's no substitute for pushback. And it seems the only ones doing the pushing back, and successfully at that, are those selfsame angry white males acting against the public welfare with an inexplicable sense of entitlement and persecution.

Good Times at Pottersville #20

Subtlety Has its Time & Place. This Isn't One of Them

 

(Editor's note: Rather than write anther one of these damned things so soon, I'd like to keep this at the top of the page for the weekend considering the first response has been so relatively anemic. If I write any new posts, they'll be right below this one.)   
     Perhaps I was being a bit too subtle in my last post in which I'd provided an editor''s note at the end. I've uploaded way too many of these fundraising posts over the years because circumstances had forced me to do so. With a disabled girlfriend and a cat to support, somehow, I've been obliged, time and again, to do things and reach levels of audaciousness that no doubt has been contributory to my readership falling off this year as it has. After all, I get begging emails and snail mails from every liberal organization out there as contrition for every small charity check I've sent off over the years. It seems for every check I've sent out, I get put on the mailing lists of ten others. So, yeah, I get it.

     Be that as it may.

     I was trying to soft pedal our incipient desperation because first and foremost, I wanted to entertain you guys as a way of repaying and justifying the money I've gotten from you over these last few months to years. Since the winter of 2009, I've been the magnet of bad luck on a par with Job and I know even the most bleeding heart liberal gets weary of hearing about one person's neverending problems. I know. I get compassion fatigue from time to time myself, especially when the funds aren't there to help others as I'd like.

     But what I've been going through these past 5+ years isn't luck I made. It can't be said I've made bad choices and that I have to lie in the bed I made. I did not deserve to lose my last job in 2009 because my boss was an embezzling, right wing scumbag nor did I create this nightmarish economy and job market where guys having to start all over again in their 50's get skeeved for even interviews let alone jobs by hiring managers and with complete impunity. It's none of my doing that US corporations get to skate away and incorporate overseas so they can dodge taxes while the IRS and the Massachusetts DOR go after guys like me for a few hundred dollars in unpaid taxes. And I did not create the publishing environment in which unknowns like me, talented though we are, have no chance of getting an agent much less a publisher unless we have an "in" in the publishing business.

     I've said it before- I live a Rodney Dangerfield routine only without the laughs. I'm just a cash cow for various utility companies, state agencies, brokerages and other entities but no one wants to give me the chance to earn the money I need to pay my debts. It's a terrible situation to live in, having to work harder and harder each morning to find excuses and reasons to stay alive when it increasingly seems that pinprick of light at the end of the tunnel will never appear. And, to make matters worse, the car insurance payments will resume when I have to reup in June and our landlord just informed us he's raising our rent this September when our lease gets renewed due to "maintenance costs." AAA will have to be renewed this August and the car still needs some serious work.

     I love you guys for your past kindnesses and readership and compassion and you have no idea how much I hate myself for having to post these time and again because the America I grew up in, that we all grew up in, will never again return, an America where a man who wants to work and stand on his own two feet will have a fair shot of getting a job.

     I know some of you are down and out or have stopped coming here on account of all the solicitations for help. I can't fault any of you if those are the cases and I know all too painfully well that no matter what I do on the internet, no one owes me a damned cent.

     But my last post netted us barely over $100 from all of two people and we desperately need help if we''re going to survive even another month. I have a girlfriend and a cat depending on me for EVERYTHING and you have to believe it's getting harder and harder to tread water considering the readership hence the money isn't there as it used to be. So whatever you guys can do would be appreciated by not just me but Mrs. JP and our cat. I'm all they have and you're all I have and every day I doubt more and more that I'm up to the task. So please help however you can even if it's just to pass the word to others through blog, email, social networking, word of mouth, whatever. Thank you in advance.

In All Seriousness...

Good Times at Pottersville, 5/23/14

Good Times at Pottersville, 5/22/14

Open Thread: Pat Sajak edition

Sarah Palin is Now Officially a Parody of Herself

     Sweet Jesus, when is this woman going to shut the fuck up before she permanently skews the national IQ?
     When TBogg copied and pasted what follows from Sarah Palin's Facebook page (hereafter referred to as Mooselini's balcony), I thought he was engaging in some creative writing or rewriting. I mean, as hideous as Sarah Palin's Engrish has been in the past, there was some convoluted, Mad Hatter, Peggy Sue trailer park trash sense tortuously woven deep in the verbiage like mental boll weevils in cotton fibers. There was absolutely no way she could've written something effortlessly outstripping the writers of the Onion or Andy Borowitz or yours truly on our best days.
     Could she?
     What follows below is an actual word-for-word transcript from Mooselini's Facebook balcony which was lapped up by the masses below (read the comments, if you can stomach them. I took a lot of hits for the team, which alone should get me some Paypal donations) like manna from the the giant, Godly moonshine jug (complete with the three x's) of the Queen of Mean.

Hillary’s Brain; Hillary’s Brain on Drudge

An article linked today on Drudge:
http://on.wsj.com/1jOqOJR

Hey! Hillary’s brain is off-limits! Leave her health records alone! Democrats are right – scouring records of a female candidate is just politics of personal destruction, and for the media to engage in it would be unfair, unethical, and absolutely UNPRECEDENTED. You can’t probe a woman like that because, well, it’s a war on women!

Bunch of sexist, big meanies engaging in something heretofore unheard of, for shame.

America, you deserve fair and consistent coverage of relevant issues before deciding a Presidential/Vice Presidential ticket, so have faith the agenda-less media will refuse to push whispers and wildly inaccurate information about a partisan politician’s body part. Goodness, no one credible would print lies, continually harass a candidate’s doctor, disrupt local hospital staff, or even offer to pay locals to give “quotes” about her health records to be included in a “research book” by a public university professor (your tax dollars at work?) which the candidate’s attorney will need to respond to.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0411/53641_Page4.html
http://www.salon.com/2011/04/22/sarah_palin_trig_conspiracy_theory/
http://bit.ly/1jiTwGZ
http://bit.ly/1qQdoGQ
http://bit.ly/1lWcDGQ

Thank goodness liberals are consistent in refusing to apply double standards, thanks to their disdain for hypocrisy – so they’ll come through once again! Rest assured these self-designated protectors of what they obviously believe is the “weaker sex” needing protection in the political arena will elevate political discourse. Apparently, Democrats demand their next chosen one’s brain must be absent. Opposition – go there exploring a liberal’s brain and you find nothing; or, find something and you’re just trying to distract voters from the REAL issues.

See, the country’s just swell under the Obama regime (which includes any cabinet member who’d lie and prove ineptitude by shining the boot that’s now on America’s neck). With enormous issues to debate before choosing a Presidential/Vice Presidential ticket, have confidence no mean-spirited salaciousness will be pushed by “real journalists.”

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2012/04/25/Obama-Andrew-Sullivan-Rolling-Stone

Nope. This just doesn’t happen at this respectable level of American politics.

Just ask me. And Trig.
     Now, if you haven't already been literarily lobotomized by this Vagina Monologues wrenched to 300 decibels and put through a scrambler, let's try to parse what Bible Spice tried to say:
     Without ever once mentioning his name, Sarah has somehow found a way to make Karl Rove's ignorant and despicable comments on Hillary Clinton's mental faculties all about her and Trig. It's also the mean libr'al lamestream media (at least, the part that doesn't help her pimp her ghost-written doorstops and pre-doomed reality TV shows) to blame for perpetuating such lies and being prurient-like in investigating a woman's woman parts like her brain, for instance. Because... me! Trig!
     Not only can Sarah Palin not get away from her Hindenburg of a VP candidacy from five and a half years ago, everything said about a woman, by a Republican or no, somehow relates back to her because, after all, Sarah Palin is the center of her own little funhouse mirror of a universe.
     So, it's we liberals' fault and our George Soros-financed media that's to blame for the aspersions cast on Hillary's brain and not the right wing nut job who'd advanced the "theory". No, the bad guy here is not Bush's Brain but that ultra, super, double-double-toil-and-trouble arch liberal Andrew Sullivan. That would be the guy who's the reluctant apostate when he'd finally rubbed his eyes after Bush's Reign of Error and realized, oh shit, I waved my pom-poms for the wrong side and rah-rah, sis-boom-bahed for the murder of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, the displacement of millions more, not to mention the casual slaughter of almost 4500 US troops over a rancid pack of lies.
     Oh, and to his neverending surprise, he also discovered they didn't like his kind, ifyouknowwhatImean.
     Sullivan's liberal crown o' thorns, as I'm sure many of you remember from years ago, was earned when he'd proposed what Palin insists on calling a "conspiracy theory" (while referencing Conspiracy Theorist Extraordinaire Andrew Breitbart, O irony of Ironies). I'm speaking, of course, of her alleged birthing of Trig, which has more holes in it than a Mossberg testing range.
     So, this is all Sullie's fault, not the Fox "News" that has given her a massive megaphone and has happily passed along the "evil genius's" stupendously ignorant jeremiad on Clinton by High Five-ing him for his own whack-a-doodle conspiracy theory.
     And, in true megalomaniacal fashion, anything and everything ever said somehow pertains to Sarah Palin and is an indictment of the liberal mind and its liberal, lamestream media and George Soros and everything and everyone else she can vacuum into her all-sucking black hole of what passes for a mind.
     And despite essentially using Rove's comments on Mrs. Clinton as an intellectual emetic and vomiting all over the eyes and ears of whoever still deluded enough to think this woman possesses the political relevance of Willie Horton, the aforementioned Goobers still look at this Mad Libs type of screed as deathless prose proving once again she should have been elected Veep and that she should be a Senator.
     Luckily for us and unluckily for these organ donors, Sarah knows she can't win an election except maybe if Wasilla is desperate enough for a dog catcher and that she can milk her Sarah PAC dry as she cock-teases her lemmings by dangling one campaign or another before their snouts like a rotten, tiny carrot. She knows she can trowel out whatever toxic waste that's belched out of her mind because in the absence of a public, elected office, all's fair in love and war on Facebook and Twitter and that she's not responsible for anything and loses nothing because her irrelevance saddles her with no accountability.
     Which is exactly where every Republican is or wants to be.

Good Times at Pottersville, 5/19/14

Top Ten Reasons Operation American Spring Went Flat

     Operation American Spring, the Tea Party protest which was expected to draw 10-30,000,000 people to the nation's Capitol yesterday, turned out to be a huge flop. Rather than the tens of millions hoped for, only a few dozen showed up and the turnout was so dismal, even the conservative outlets The Blaze and the Washington Times couldn't even begin to spin it. But there were several excellent reasons why yesterday's protest in Washington DC wasn't quite what was hoped for. What were they?
10) We done tried but couldn't get away from Benghazi.
9) Klan costume got yellowed when washed with Gadsden flag.
8) You try driving a Rascal scooter to DC from Alabama and tell me how easy it is!
7) Turns out free pizza from Arab nations was just a vicious rumor.
6) It's not the quantity, it's the quality.
5) Investigating who put the bop in the bop shoo bop. It was Obama, to distract from Benghazi.
4) Most of them went west by accident to Washington state.
3) Overestimated the number of insane asylums that would grant furloughs.
2) Discovered Ted Nugent concert and NASCAR race around the White House another vicious rumor.
1) Sign shop got all the spelling right.

(Editor's note: If you've come from Democratic Underground, please read the comment I left and post it in the comment section of DU.)

Good Times at Pottersville, 5/17/14

Assclowns of the Week #98: Get Bentghazi edition

     Well, despite 13 Congressional hearings and over $125,000,000 blown on Benghazi investigations, the GOP Krazy Klown Kar roared out of the motor pool packed with Republican assclowns who are bound and determined to get to the bottom of an embassy attack they singlehandedly created and that then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned us about.
     But, despite the House GOP's (1) and right wing media's (3) best efforts, Benghazi wasn't the only topic of conversation this past week.There was Cliven Bundy's Merry Pranksters (10) for going all Ken Kesey on sacred Native American burial grounds; Ann Coulter (7) for basically saying, "Don't think about those little darkies. Look at me, look at me!" and Judge Rudolph Randa who literally ruled that campaign finance corruption was protected "free speech".
     So, let's step into a Bundy ATV and tour the right wing landscape of assclownery (and Benghazi!) and much, much more!

10) Cliven's Patriots

     Cliven Bundy and his little army of patriots of a country they claim doesn't exist took white privilege to a whole 'nuther level by going on an unauthorized little joyride through Recapture Canyon. OK, I get the symbolism of patriotic conservatives intent on recapturing an America they once knew and loved but why was this verboten? Well, Utah's Recapture Canyon also happens to be the resting place for ancient Pueblans and, as those of us who recognize the existence of the US government know, Native American burial grounds are sacred.

     The so-called protest, which was organized by San Juan County Commissioner Phil Lyman, also included some of Bundy's moocher offspring. They could have used any of 2800 miles of open trails for their little flag-waving, gun-toting stunt but they chose to ride their redneck jeeps on the 14 miles that are closed to the public.

     No doubt, this is how they preferred to perceive themselves. 

     This is what they actually looked like as they marked "their" territory.

9) Donald Sterling

     And, speaking of white privilege, as if exposing himself to ridicule and censure wasn't enough, Clippers owner Donald Sterling did what many racist right wing nut jobs do when caught white-handed making racist statements: He doubled down on his Jim Crow world view while supposedly in the act of making an "apology." Last night, as Ann Coulter (below) was making herself a national laughingstock again, Sterling went on CNN's Anderson Cooper's 360 and, against all odds, somehow managed to make himself more loathsome and offensive than ever.
     Essentially, Sterling blamed his girlfriend for entrapping him into candidly talking and said Magic Johnson, with whom he's not at all obsessed, wasn't a good role model for kids "because he has AIDS" and "ought to be ashamed of himself." Forget the fact that Mr. Johnson runs or participates in several charities and foundations geared toward bettering the lives of disadvantaged youth. He has AIDS!

     Of course, by making himself the most loathed man in the NBA for the second month in a row, Sterling just fell back on the same tactic used since time immemorial by other privileged white people who are called on their racism and present themselves as the victims for being called out on their bigotry.

8) #RWNJs on Twitter

      The rabid right wing is right. We shouldn't be paying so much attention to Mizzou defensive end Michael Sam getting drafted by the Rams. Because, as with all the drafted players, we ought to be focusing on Sam's promise and athletic abilities, not his sexual orientation, once he gets into the NFL. But, wait, that's not the point the aforementioned rabid right wing was making on Twitter and elsewhere. Thanks to Right Wing Watch, we ought to be appalled, appalled, I tells ya! that ESPN cut away to show Mr. Sam kissing his boyfriend on hearing he was drafted by the Rams. We should, instead, be paying attention to Tim Tebow, an overrated hasbeen who isn't even in the NFL, anymore, since the Patriots shitcanned him.

     In fact, the hysteria reached such heights that a so-called coalition of evangelical leaders is calling for a boycott of the NFL (let's see how long that lasts in Texas, for instance) and Peter Hanna Barbera claimed he was "forced to watch" the icky gay kiss. And Justin Phillips of Tea Bagger Nation called for the NFL to lose its tax-exempt status (unlike churches that engage in political activity) if it continues to "push an agenda." I pronounce these hind leg chewers guilty of homophobia and sentence them to aversion therapy consisting of watching an endless loop of Johnny Weir highlights to a Clay Aiken soundtrack.

7) Ann Coulter

      Poor Ann Coulter is longer in the face than usual. The day before yesterday, Coulter thought she'd try to regain some of her relevance by hijacking the #Bringbackourgirls hashtag for her own ends. Well, the old girl got more than she'd bargained for and was ridiculed by every other wag on the internet (including yours truly).
     Because the ex-Queen of Mean doesn't think nearly 300 kidnapped Nigerian girls for Boko Haram's nefarious ends are worth nearly as much as getting back "our country" that one suspects is, in Coulter's mind, paler than buttermilk.

6) Judge Rudolph Randa

     When Scott Walker announced years ago that "Wisconsin is open for business," little did anyone realize that the business would be buying federal judges.
     Last week, HW Bush appointee Rudolph Randa, who looks like a Hollywood mob lawyer, issued a remarkable ruling regarding the Wisconsin Club For Growth and their shady role in electing, and re-electing Scott Walker in 2012's recall in what is now known as the John Doe case. Randa was somehow able to rule on a case that was still being adjudicated in state court. Randa had ordered the probe on Walker and the WCFG be stopped and all the evidence obtained by prosecutors be destroyed. This was immediately halted by the 7th Circuit that's had to step in many, many times to reverse Randa's prior pro-Republican decisions.
     But the most remarkable thing about Randa's ruling was this little nugget: "(The WCFG) found a way to circumvent campaign finance laws, and that circumvention should not and cannot be condemned or restricted. Instead, it should be recognized as promoting political speech, an activity that is ingrained in our culture."
     Yes, you heard him: Campaign finance corruption is free speech, according to the equally corrupt Supreme Court and their recent McCutcheon vs the FEC ruling. This left legal scholars scratching their heads and asking questions. Here's another one: Did Judge Rudy have a conflict of interest in the case that he chose to ignore, considering his clerk is married to a top lawyer in the Walker administration?

5) Karl Rove

     Talk about the pot calling the tea cup black.
     Karl Rove went on national television a few days ago and kicked off his latest whisper campaign by suggesting that Hillary Clinton is brain damaged as a result of her fall a year and a half ago. It's no coincidence that former Secretary Clinton (who currently holds no office, has announced no further political ambitions and wields no official power) is being made the focus of Benghazi as momentum builds for a 2016 presidential run.
     Of course, the impugning of Mrs. Clinton's mental faculties, which are as sharp as ever, come from a guy who had a legendary meltdown on Election Night 2012 and hoarsely screamed we needed to hear from Ohio, thought a brain transplant candidate like George W. Bush would make a great president, outed a secret agent at the peril of national security and bugged his own office to smear a Democratic gubernatorial incumbent.
     Coming up after the break...

4) Allen West

     Lord only knows why and how Allen West still finds himself on TV and in the news. Voted out by even the mouth-breathers of Florida's 22nd District after just one term, West comes off as looking and sounding like the kid who wasn't picked for sides for a kickball game and continues harassing the other team from behind the fence. Last Monday in his blog, West accused the Obama administration of meddling in the Boko Haram kidnapping of nearly 300 Nigerian girls so they could distract from... all together now... Benghazi!

     Because we all know the Republican Party would never stoop so low as to use Benghazi for their own ends to in turn distract from the painfully obvious facts that their 113th Congress needlessly shut down the government last fall, costing us tens of billions, nearly ruined our bond rating, tried and failed over 50 times to repeal Obama Care, proposed let alone passed not one jobs bill and, oh yeah, cut embassy funding by nearly $400,000,000, which made the Benghazi attack possible.

3) Rush Limbaugh & the Mighty Right Wing Wurlitzer

     If Africans or African Americans and black people make the news, you can be sure that Rush Limbaugh will weigh in as surely as a string of greasy farts follows a Tex-Mex dinner. And no sooner than the Nigerian schoolgirls getting kidnapped by Boko Haram made the international news, el Rushbo immediately sneered at the president's commitment to help get the girls back and at former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for not designating them as a terrorist organization (a nonfact immediately parroted by Fox "News"). Said Limbaugh in a fit of hilarious projection,

“We can’t call them terrorists because they look like African-Americans, and we just can’t go there. Nobody will ever convince me that that’s why they didn’t call this group a terror group. Just can’t do it. Just can’t go there because the left doesn’t go any deeper than skin when identifying people.”

     In point of fact, Secretary Clinton did name three leaders of Boko Haram as terrorists but not the organization because they did not pose a threat to US interests any more than they do now. But, more than a year after Clinton left Foggy Bottom, this is retroactively her fault (just as Katrina, according to most Republicans in LA, is Obama's and not Bush's fault). Says the Christian Science Monitor, "The Clinton State Department did add three Boko Haram leaders to the US list of individual terrorists, including Abubakar Shekau."

     As John Adams once said, "Facts are stubborn things" and you can always count on the racist, misogynistic right wing to be even more stubborn to admit to them.

2) Ehud Olmert 

     The former Israeli Prime Minister and boastful architect of Bush's foreign policy recently got sentenced to six years in prison and, in the process, just perpetuated a Semitic stereotype one bag of money at a time. So, what did Olmert do?

     Oh, nothing much, except to accept bags o' cash in a real estate scam named "Holyland" that went down when he was still mayor of Jerusalem (not to be confused with the corruption charges that dogged him when he was Prime Minister of Israel six years ago).

     This is really a shame, too, since Israel is ranked a lofty 36th out of 177 on the international corruption scale, a much-coveted ranking that'll no doubt sink like a mob hit in the East River considering all the Israeli politicians who have already gone down or will go down for bribery, rape and other crimes.

1) The House GOP

      As proof that the Republican Party's actual agenda is as empty as its collective soul, John Boehner announced a select committee on Benghazi while packing it with lawyers from his own party to give the appearance this is a serious investigation and not a partisan exercise. Because, as we all know, nothing could be less partisan than white, southern Republican lawyers going after a black president.
      To add a special Theater of the Absurd feel to it, Boehner, for some unknown reason, named Trey Gowdy (R-Super Cuts) as chairman. And the day after being named ring master of this newest sorry-ass clown show, Gowdy went on Morning Joe and spoke as if he was taking President Obama to court on criminal charges instead of heading a select committee investigation.
     Oh no, the GOP isn't delusional at all, folks. How can you say that of a party that's shedding more crocodile tears over four dead in Benghazi than the 4400+ dead from the Iraq War and the nearly 3000 that were killed on 9/11 over another intelligence failure?

Dishonorable mention: Dr. Gordon Klingenschmitt
     Apparently, "Chaps" is still living in 1942 because he's afraid the Godlessness of California that's supposedly taken away all their guns will tempt the Japanese into attacking that state. No, seriously, he said that. Also in his radio address, he asked that the person who stole his Glenn Miller and Andrew Sisters 78s to bring them back.

(Editor's note: I hope you enjoyed reading this feature as much as I'd enjoyed writing it these past two days. If you could see your way clear to helping out Mrs. JP and me, we'd deeply appreciate it, as June is looking grimmer and scarier by the minute.)