Twenty Bucks, Same as in Town: Sacrilege on the Sabbath edition

Blogwhoring. You do it, I do it, we all do it. What have you been up to?

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By way of Jill Hussein over at Brilliant at Breakfast comes this story that proves Jebusburg, aka Texas, ought to summarily be given its fondest wish and shown its proudly big ass right out the door, to be immediately replaced with Puerto Rico or maybe the Barnum & Bailey circus.

When school begins next month, among the many books electively offered to schoolchildren this year will be the Bible. You have the Texas state legislature to thank for that, who apparently never heard of that Separation of Church and State thingie that was ratified by the Founding Fathers before we'd gotten around to stealing Jebusburg from the Mexicans for the intention of making it our biggest national embarrassment.

You have to wonder about the next step: Are Texas schoolchildren who are Jewish, Muslim, Hindi, Buddhist or any other heathen religion going to be forced to read the Bible and maybe get quizzed on it?

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To commemorate the 40th anniversary of Woodstock, Tom Degan over at The Rant gives us some first impressions of it as it was happening in Sullivan County. Tom's just a few months older than me and he reports that during the festival there were so many people there they had to shut down the NY Thruway, which hasn't been done before or since. Btw, stop in and wish him a happy 51st birthday because it's today.

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My conservative/libertarian colleague William Grigg has a horror story to tell about his state's CPS (Child Protective Services, their version of Massachusetts' DSS) and how they came to his home not too long ago to investigate him. In a focused panic, William got his wife and their six kids of out the house after telling the CPS caseworker to leave and not come back unless they have a warrant and they'd given him a chance to speak with his attorney.

After dropping the kids off at a predesignated safe house, he then went back home alone and was soon talking to a cop who told him that his weeds were overgrown. The cop even admitted that it was probably the owner's responsibility to cut (the Griggs' rent). This was shortly followed by the caseworker who brought along a cop on good terms with the family and she confirmed that her child endangerment investigation was started when someone complained about a few weeds, invisible from the street, being overgrown. The investigation died right then and there but only after she intimated to Griggs that she may not have been so cooperative if he hadn't kissed her bureaucratic butt the first time.

Moral of the story, boys and girls: You better keep your weeds trimmed or Mrs. Kravitz will report you and have your children taken away. How come these fucking curtain-clutching busybodies (basically lazy stalkers) never live next door to people like John Wayne Gacy and Jeffery Dahmer?

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Usually, d r i f t g l a s s refers to his little corner of cyberspace as Castle D r i f t g l a s s but to me, stopping off at his little nook is more like going to an air conditioned corner bar on a steamer of a day, a place where you have your own stool and everyone knows not only your first name but that of your wife and perhaps all of your kids. It's been a pleasure reading his 2000+ plus screeds over the years, especially since he put up his shingle at roughly the same time I did.

Earlier this week, Sir Drifty wrote a highly amusing article about consultants, those apparatchiks who, to quote James Billington, are "men not of grand plans, but of a hundred carefully executed details." I lost my last good job seven years ago to consultants, management gurus called in to turn our business from a $12 million a year operation into an $18 million a year operation. The geniuses they called in thought they'd get off to a flying start by laying off the QC inspector who made barely over $20,000 a year and did two thirds of the inspections.

So on the Respect-O-Meter, consultants rank for me somewhere below child molesters but just above right wing, child-molesting hedge fund managers.

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Bringing up the rear is Kyle, one of the long-suffering poor bastards who make up the indispensable Right Wing Watch. Kyle makes a find for the ages, one Jane Burgermeister (I swear that's her real name) who appeared on a program run by Janet Porter of Faithaction.org. Porter, who was attached to Mike Huckabee's campaign, goes the deathers and their death panels one better: According to she and Burgermeister, the Obama White House is planning on releasing massive amounts of the swine flu virus and have the victims shoved off to FEMA internment camps and she has the proof!

Turns out Jane's "proof" consists of a a picture of an evacuation bus that doesn't even have FEMA's name or logo printed on it. Far from being a concentration camp on wheels, the vehicle is actually a bus ambulance that can accommodate up to 40 wheelchair patients, something ideally suited for evacuating people, like, in an emergency such as Hurricane Katrina. Two quick Google searches on Kyle's part revealed the bus's eviiiiil intentions.

But the black guy's trying to kill you through bioterrorism, according to right wingers, doncha know?