Phooey

Aw Dang!  I wanted President Obama to veto the Keystone XL pipeline bill so I could see Senator Mitch McConnell's head explode. But Congress beat me to it; the Senate defeated the bill . . . for now.  Dang!

Then I wanted President Obama to issue his executive order on immigration so I could watch John Boehner's head explode, but I guess I'll have a wait a bit for that. Maybe that will happen in time for Christmas.  What a present!

Of course, the immigration thing will also cause Senator Ted Cruz's head to explode, after which he'll start impeachment proceedings, which will cause all the Democrats' heads to explode.  Which is going to make the floors in Congress pretty messy, and that's why I'm now heavily investing in several major cleaning service businesses. 

I'll also have to wait for the Supreme Court to rule on the health care issue.  I want them to rule so that Obamacare can be totally dismantled so "Freeeeedom!" will prevail and all those millions of people who now have health care will lose it.  And everyone else can return to the good old days when they could be denied coverage for pre-existing conditions, or be tossed off their insurance when their illnesses got too expensive, or go bankrupt when they got ill.  Since "everybody" hates Obamacare (except those who actually have it; most of them are satisfied with their coverage) I say, get rid of it and make the insurance companies very happy. Then everyone can return to harping about how awful our medical care system is while doing nothing about fixing it.  And we can go back to choosing between buying food or paying for our medicines.  Like God intended.

Once the Republicans take over both houses of Congress in January,  I'm hoping all regulations and restrictions on gas, coal, oil  are lifted (More Freeeeedom!) and we start burning every last bit of it -- especially that really, really dirty tar sand oil that the XL pipeline will be bringing across America to be sold overseas. I also want lots of oil spills from that pipeline.  Oil spills are job creators! 

And I want us to bring back the SUV!  We need to drive more!  It's Burn, America, Burn. And I want every nation on earth (especially China and India) do the same. The bigger the burn, the faster the weather will change.  And I want the weather to change because the sooner it does, the sooner Senator Jim Inhofe's beloved state (Oklahoma) will be wiped off the face of the earth by super tornadoes generated by Global Warming (which he doesn't believe in) and so I want to see if, standing amidst the rubble, he finally "gets it" and that causes his head to explode.

Right now, polar bear numbers are dropping by 40%.  We've got to do better than that, people.  There's oil under that ice so the quicker we get rid of the ice, the quicker we can get to that oil. It's a matter of national security now because we'll soon be fighting global Resource Wars -- food, water, energy, governmental collapse, massive immigration, disease -- so we'll need all the oil we can get.

Otherwise all our heads will explode and the only thing that will be left on our self-destroyed planet will be cockroaches and dead-battery iPhones.   

Darrell's Dashed Dream

Calhoun's Cannons for Aug 1, 2014 

Darrell ( I'm Ready For My Close Up, Mr. DeMille) Issa is dreaming.  That sweet, sweet dream.  He's the cynosure of all eyes, the subject of all headlines, his camera-ready teeth gleaming in the lights as he heads for the reporters and the microphones waiting just for him. And they'll be waiting for him day after day after day for months.  Every headline will be about the Select Committee he's heading.  He'll be the biggest thing since Monica Lewinsky! 24/7 Issa! Issa! Issa!

Suddenly, his eyes flutter and beads of sweat pop out on his forehead. " UhnnnNooooo," he moans. The nightmare has returned.  That awful, awful nightmare.  In it, the lights suddenly fade, the cameras disappear, reporters are nowhere in sight, and those who remain keep asking, "What did you say your name was?"  Then the halls are empty and he's alone in the dark. 

With a shriek, he sits bolt upright in his bed and realizes in horror that it wasn't just a bad dream.  That damned Boehner and his fellow Republicans -- those FOOLS! -- had blown it! And Darrell starts to blubber, Boo-hoo-hoo. 

Indeed, they did.  No longer content with spending years systematically poisoning Barak Obama and all his works, drop by drop, until the public's eyes glazed over and they gave Congress the lowest ratings in history, they sensed that even their base was growing weary waiting for the Prez to keel over, something he stubbornly refused to do, so they started teasingly floating the "I" word about the TwitterVerse.

Impeachment!  Ah, that magic word, glittering in all its power, promising a fabulous opportunity for Lies to get twice around the world before Truth could even put on it's shoes.  The perfect excuse for a Do Nothing Congress to continue doing nothing while self-righteously posturing in the public eye 24/7.  A glorious  piece of Theatre for feeding the Republican base with huge hunks of red meat.  Constant headlines, media punditry on steroids, this would be BIG.  Waaaaay bigger than Benghazi!  Bigger than ObamaCare!  Bigger than Birth Certificates!  BIG!

And what did the cowardly Republican Congressmen do?  Instead of a go-for-broke  Grand Spectacle, they file some sort of crummy lawsuit.   A lawsuit, for God's sake!!   No lights.  No cameras.  No grandstanding. After a flurry, no headlines.  Just dishwater-dull, mumbling lawyers -- LAWYERS! -- with their clause A's and sub-paragraph B's, endlessly  gathering in quiet courtrooms to argue and object over incomprehensible minutia until everybody's heads explode and they change the channel.

"Fools!" Issa mutters, peering glumly into his morning coffee.  "Not only are the Republicans in Congress unwilling to govern, they're now unfit to govern!  Can't even get an article of  Impeachment right.  Instead, a pissant lawsuit?  And now everyone is laughing at us.  Bwa-Hahahahah. Weenies!  Girly Men! Bring it on! HaHaHaHa!"

Meanwhile, both parties hit the airwaves. Eeek! Impeachment! Send us money, they cried.  No, send us the money!

Which absolutely blows Darrell (I'm Ready For My Close Up, Mr. DeMille) Issa's sweet, sweet dream of heading up the Select Committee running the impeachment proceedings. Poor Darrell. Camera-ready teeth and no cameras.

And poor America.  Two more years of wasting time while the world burns.  And now, no bread or circuses for the mob. Just a coterie of plodding . . . lawyers.

Bummer.

The United States of Wonderland

Calhoun’s Can(n)ons for August 31, 2012

The demagogue is one who preaches doctrine he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.

        H.L. Mencken

             Are you kidding me?  That’s all I could think of as I watched hour after hour of the brain-scrambling Republican convention.  Are you kidding?

            True, when someone starts out with a lie, it’s always fun to see where they’re going to go from there without constantly stepping in it, unless they’re a Republican and stepping in something as mundane as a “lie” has apparently ceased to be a concern anymore.

            But three days of cynical mendacity combined with collective amnesia turned the convention into one long Saturday Night Live Emily Latella skit.  You remember Emily, Gilda Radner’s loopy old lady who kept getting things wrong, but that didn’t stop her from steaming off into outrage about some misperceived topic, like “violins in the street.”  When corrected that it was “violence, not violins,” she would squint unrepentantly at the camera and blithely change the subject.

            Only the Republican Party is no loopy, addled Emily.  Instead, what was on tap was a convention cynically built around a lie – the repeated and deliberate misstatement of a reference made in one of President Obama’s speeches.  In that speech, while the President lauded individual enterprise, he also pointed out the obvious:  Success isn’t strictly singular, that businesses benefited from communally built infrastructure and the “that” in “you didn’t build that,” reference was to “bridges, roads, etc.” which were built by taxpayers. 

            True, it was an awkward sentence, but the meaning was absolutely clear to anyone not language challenged.  Or a political party willing to disgracefully take that clear meaning out of context, twist it into a lie, brazenly plaster signs saying “We Built It,” all over the convention center and make that lie the singular leitmotif on the lips of almost every speaker at the podium. And even though they had to know it was a lie, they spoke it anyway. Which raised an awful question:  Who could possibly trust anything those guys say?

            But that wasn’t the worst of it.  What became truly creepy was the collective willingness of everyone to go down the memory hole. (It’s the internet age: does no one google FactCheck anymore?) This signal amnesia wasn’t just hypocrisy, like Delaware businesswoman, Sher Valenzuela, who lauded her “I Built It” successful business but “forgot” to mention it was aided by $2 million in (government funded) SBA loans and $15 million in (government funded) contracts.  Or the parade of  “I Built It” governors crediting their state’s recovery on their own singular efforts while ignoring the GM taxpayer bailout and all those Washington stimulus checks they happily cashed. (Talk about a gaggle of serpent-toothed ingrates chewing the hand that fed them.)

            No, this was not run of the mill hypocrisy at work, but a profound disconnect from the historical record, the factual narrative.  Listening to speaker after speaker spin their tales was like reading a complex historical novel from which Republicans had redacted any reference to their role in that story.  Down the memory hole they went, bemoaning the terrible state of affairs while utterly ignoring their part in creating the crisis and/or making the crisis infinitely worse.   There is a reason this Party-of-No, Do Nothing, Republican-led Congress is so loathed by the voters.  On day one of Obama’s election, Republican Senator McConnell clearly stated that his party’s one over riding goal wasn’t jobs or helping American workers retool or working across the aisle to set things right, but to get rid of Obama – throw the bum out of the bar, in the inelegant parlance of Speaker Boehner.  And it was the lock-step Republicans, monkey-wrenching Tea Partiers and a gaggle of Democratic hacks that brought pointless pain to millions of ordinary Americans caught in the crossfire of their spite, their destructive policies, fantasy math, and the overriding political strategy that keeping the country in dire straits would mean a guaranteed Republican win in 2012.

            All of which went missing for three nights of astounding amnesia and false narratives. That’s not normal hypocrisy, that’s pathology. And while you can campaign on lies and rabbit hole history, you can’t govern that way.

            Which is why, when Paul Ryan, the fresh-faced Leave It To Beaver veep nominee stood before the American people and repeated that foundational lie, a lie he had to know was false, then fell down the memory hole of “fake facts,” and Mitt Romney slid from a sweet, smiley-faced wish list of unsupported platitudes and into irresponsible, bellicose war-talk, and we were left with Anne Romney telling us we should “trust Mitt,” well, my only response had to be, “Are you kidding me?”

            Then my head exploded.

                        .

.     

Aw, Honey, I Was Only Joking

Calhoun’s Cannons for March 5, 2012

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them.”

            When Don Imus called some Rutgers University black female basketball players, “nappy-headed ho’s,” the wrath of the world fell down upon his Radio Jerk Boy shoulders and he was bounced off the air.  Slam dunk! Imus’ ugly comment was blurted out once and once only. No matter.  Boom! Gone.

            When Rush Limbaugh, the de-facto Big Daddy spokesperson for the Republican Party went on air and not once, but day after day repeatedly called out by name a  Georgetown University white law student, Sandra Fluke, and declared her to be a “slut” and a “prostitute,” and suggest she make a video of herself having sex and put in on the internet so he could watch, the wrath of women and Democrats fell down upon his drug-addicted, Viagra-addle, Creepy Boy voyeuristic head. President Obama even called Ms. Fluke to offer her his support in withstanding Big Daddy’s un-called for, ugly, slanderous attacks. But his time, there was no slam dunk.  This time, with this Radio Jerk Boy, there was no getting booted off the air. Clear Channel’s CEO obviously didn’t have a problem with Rush’s slandering Ms. Fluke. Perhaps she wasn’t black enough.  Or wasn’t a terrific athlete.

            And no wrath was forthcoming from the Family Value’s crowd either.  Speaker of the House John Boehner’s response, given days after the event, was so tepid and feeble I was afraid that even that minimal effort to respond to Big Daddy would cause Boehner to have the vapors and sink down in a faint on the floor of the House.  The Republican candidates, tub-thumping around the country on platforms of purity and Christian virtue, were equally febrile in their non-denunciation of their philosophical Soul Master, The I Want To Watch Jerk Boy.

            Interestingly, while the Family Values Crowd remained strangely quiet, six of Rush’s sponsors walked.  Apparently Sleep Number, Quicken Loans, Sleep Train and Carbonite, among others, suspended their ads because they felt Limbaugh’s statements “do not align with our values.”  Which begged the question:  Really?  You’ve been advertising with the guy for years, you know who and what he is, and you just now figured that out?  Well, who knew? 

            But this is America and I have no doubt a dozen other corporations will have “values” that will allow them to fill those missing advertising slots.  After all, pandering to ugly, abusive, misogynistic Jerk Boy Radio fanboys is a sure-fire money maker.  And, as we know, in America, money trumps all.   

            Meanwhile,  MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow had a gleeful time explicating one of Rush’s rants at Ms. Fluke, pointing out in great detail, complete with a lady-parts medical diagram, that Rush had obviously confused Viagra with birth control pills.  He had excoriated slutty Ms. Fluke for “having so much sex she can’t pay for it,” making the false assumption that birth control pills work like Viagra -- one snog per pill and so, if you can’t afford all those pills, don’t have so much sex. 

            And, need I point out that Rush’s rant completely ignored the fact that, so far as I know, Viagra is routinely covered in health insurance policies without question? So, if paying for people to have sex is Rush’s problem, why wasn’t he crusading to get those expensive Viagra prescriptions out of our insurance policies as well?

            Unless this wasn’t about people having sex, it was about women having sex.

            And there is the true dark heart of the matter. In the center of the culture wars now raging, control over women’s bodies, women’s reproductive rights, once again takes center stage. And any woman speaking up for herself or her rights is fair game. 

            After milking his attack for as long as he could (improves his ratings, hence his income), Rush was finally dragged, kicking and screaming, to a feeble apology.  But it was the apology of an abuser – “Awww, honey.  I was only joking. It won’t happen again.” 

            But it will.  Rush is the acknowledged, unchallenged and unchallengeable Philosopher King of the conservative movement and what he says matters.  His is the true face of what the Republican Party has become.  So all of you millions of birth-control-using American Sluts, you need to pay attention.  Rush and the Republican Party is talking to you.

            And when someone shows you who and what they are – believe them.

Nope, Republicans Reeeely, Reeeeely Aren't Fit To Govern, Nope, Nope, Nossir.

Poor John Boehner.  Stuck herding crazed extremist Republican/TeaParty right wing batshit crazy feral cats.  Crazed extremist Repbulican/TeaParty right wing batshit crazy feral cats funded by AstroTurf groups financed by folks like the Koch Brothers and voted into office by addled, misinformed and frightened voters who have been unhinged by 9/11,  by the horror! the horror! of having a black president (OMG), and with their final mental meltdown arriving with the bursting of the economic Wall Street bubble. Unhinged!  So unhinged, old grampy, grumpy John McCaine went on the floor of the Senate to crankily point out that the Tea Party mentality was now residing in "Lord of the Rings" fantasy land.  Which is perfectly illustrated by Presidential candidate, MoonBeam Michelle Bachman, blandly declaring that defaulting is no big deal, nothing will happen, don't worry, it's all a liberal lie, thereby proving that she is unfit to govern whatever office she's running for. 

So here we are: a nation unhinged, angry, bellowing like a blind bull, but still held hostage by elected crazed extremists -- economic terrorists if you will -- funded by corporate interests, a country self-destroyed by fake Republican "trickle-down" economics, fake "job creation myths," our wealth gutted out by outsourcing multinationals, the massive profits moved up into fewer and fewer hands -- America the Oligarchic, from sea to shining sea.  All supported and voted into being by the American people, the most astonishing suicide pact the world has seen.  An immolative auto de fe set alight when the twin towers fell.

Yee, haw!

Mullah Joe Rides Again

Calhoun’s Can(n)ons for March 11, 2011

Are you now or have you ever been . . . .?

The ghost of Joe McCarthy is now haunting the halls of Congress again. This time, under the guise of a “hearing” to determine the extent of just how dangerous and disloyal American Muslims are and just how terrorist-filled their mosques are. The hearing is being run by Congressman Peter King, a Republican, at a time when the GOP has degenerated into a party that even conservative columnist George Will has accused of generating vibes of weirdness, so holding hearings on “Muslims” in a poisonously radicalized country like America while claiming you’re just after the facts, Ma’m, is ingenuous at best, malicious at worse. Dealing with the issue of targeting and recruiting young, disaffected, radicalized American Muslims to serve as foot soldiers for Al Qaeda is a job now being dealt with very well by local law enforcement in cooperation with the Muslim community. So what we’ll have with King’s committee, (which has the full blessing of Speaker of the House, John Boehner, so it isn’t like King is some kind of weird-vibed wacko running off the rez,) will be mostly a piece of Republican Political Theatre, a movie-trailer intended to feed the base and keep them riled up and ready for the 2012 election.

And I have no doubt that like the ginned up fake Ground Zero Mosque controversy, we’ll see a whole new round of hoiked-up up Islamaphobia. Which is all red meat for the GOP base --dog-whistle language of the uninformed, the fear-filled, the “birthers,” the AstroTurfed dupes who live in terror that Sharia Law is coming to their town and some Mexican-looking guy in a turban will go all hijab on their asses.

And if this little piece of political theatre results in generating more fear resulting in further scaring and alienating Muslim Americans, well, no matter. The 2012 election takes precedence over any long-term harm done to our social fabric. Social fabric, even our basic core beliefs are of no use in these Joe McCarthy hard times. Instead, the winning strategy for 2012 to keep fear alive, divide neighbor from neighbor, the have-less from the have-nothings, and make clear the battle lines are between Us (white, Christian) and Them (non-white, non-Christian, those not-really Americans du jours who have taken our Country away from us). Dog whistle music.

Mr. King claims that his hearings will be very informative and will educate the public. If that’s really his intent, then what Mr. King should be doing is broadcasting a National Education Workshop, a series of informative lectures about the history and basic belief systems of the world’s great religions. As it is, Americans are woefully uninformed on even the most basic principles of their own religion and disgracefully ignorant about other faiths. This lack of accurate information is what allows otherwise good people to behave so badly when the weirdness-vibe fear-mongers come to town.

Mr. King also claims that his hearings will focus on “terrorism.” If that’s really the topic, then shall we expect Mr. King to move onto hearings focused on Mexican Americans since narco-terrorists are recruiting young, disaffected Mexican American youth to go to work for their lucrative drug cartels? True, the narco-terrorists represent a lucrative business opportunity for American gun manufacturers, but they also are busy terrorizing American tourists, so surely Mr. King would want to next target the Mexican community and get some informative, educational answers?

No? Well, surely Mr. King will next target “Catholics” to find out why they are recruiting and sheltering dangerous pedophile priests in their midst? In Philadelphia alone, 21 priests were just suspended following a grand jury investigation. Surely, the Catholic community is a hot bed of radical clerics terrorizing children?

No, again?

Then how about targeting the Irish? After all, King was good buddies with the IRA, a known terrorist organization. Surely he needs to investigate the threat from his old Irish terrorist pals?

But, no. Irish terrorists, Mexican mafia, Catholics, even home-grown Christian Militia groups don’t have the cache that Mr. King can get from “Muslims.” And so we enter our burning time -- A feverish country filled with fearful people who have forgotten what it means to be an American, a populace with bulls-eyes on their backs, their homes stolen, their jobs off-shored, good men and women who are turning ugly in their fear and ignorance as they begin to understand that they have no future, except to be targeted and fleeced by demagogues and scoundrels with books to sell and TV shows to flog.

Demagogues and scoundrels. Now there’s a terrorist group that really does need an investigative hearing.

Just Another Day

Calhoun’s Can(n)ons for January 14, 10

The shooting was nothing special. Just another unbalanced, angry young man with a gun. A rapid-fire Glock-9 with a 30-round clip that can kill a great many people in a very short amount of time. In this case, six people, including a 9 year-old girl. Nothing special in a country awash with gun deaths.

Except for Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. That was a bit unusual. But not enough to make a real change in how easy it is for unbalanced angry young men to get rapid-fire guns. This particular shooting took place in Arizona, the Tombstone state, a state with one of the most lax gun laws in the nation, a state where armed citizens no longer even need a permit to carry concealed weapons. And Arizona likes it that way. It has even proposed a law that would allow college students to carry weapons to school. And the Congresswoman herself had a Glock-9 and noted that she was “a pretty good shot.”

Since it was a Congresswoman who was shot, the talk turned immediately to the possibility that this unbalanced young man’s anger had been fueled by the angry political rhetoric sloshing around in our polarized, angry nation. Clips and sound bites of “reload,” and being “armed and ready,” “blood of patriots,” “the Second Amendment remedy,” “if ballots don’t work, bullets will,” and Sarah Palin’s now infamous web page showing gun-sight “targets” zeroing in on various contested congressional races, including the Arizona district where Congresswoman Giffords was running for election. Indeed, a few weeks before the shooting Ms. Giffords herself was on TV complaining about Ms. Palin’s “targets,” saying that rhetoric like that was likely to result in “consequences.”

For Congresswoman Giffords, it certainly may have. A bullet through the brain. And six dead.

But Americans love their toxic talk and both sides of the political spectrum got busy pointing fingers at the other, though by sheer sound-bite numbers, the right wing won that contest. You can’t beat TV clips of armed “tea-party” folks showing up at political rallies wearing weapons and carrying signs lauding blood-spilling “patriots.” And those targets on a map, about which, Palin’s spokespeople spent a great deal of time explaining they weren’t, uh, gun sights, no, they were just “target marks” like you would use on a survey map. Thereby illustrating that the Palin camp must think Americans are truly dumb because nobody with any sense was buying that story. Not from the Moose-shooting Mama with her own “reality” show featuring her blasting away at furry animals for her cook-pot. If a person knows what a gun sight looks like, it’s Palin.

So, no, it was a lock ‘n load gun sight and part of the “armed and dangerous” right-wing rhetorical meme: We’re angry, aggrieved and armed and we’re gonna target and take “our” country back from, well, all those people, and if we have to use bullets instead of ballots, so be it. But that didn’t stop our Sarah from going on Facebook to play the appalling inappropriate “blood libel” victim card in response to left wing finger pointing. Then everyone ran for cover, pretending they knew nothing about anything.

So that discussion will soon fade from the airwaves and it’ll be back to attack-dog business as usual. Toxic, poisonous, raging talk radio is both popular and highly profitable to the sponsors and stations that carry it, and to the stations’ corporate owners. Asking people like Limbaugh or Beck to “tone it down” might cut into the bottom line, so that won’t happen. Rage sells. Fear sells. And paranoia is the American Style.

Lost in much of the partisan rhetoric was the mentally unstable young man. Speaker of the House, John Boehner has stated that America has the finest health care in the world. But I suspect that the shooter, the unstable young man with voices in his head, found that in his America, his finest health care in the world likely didn’t cover treating mental illness. Few insurance policies do and state-run mental health facilities are under-funded, or broke and failing. This is in part because in finest-health-care-America, we have the odd notion that somehow the mentally ill “choose” to be mentally ill and while completely insane have the right to refuse treatment, have the right to live under bridges, and the right to starve in the streets while talking to non-existent people. And, of course, the right to buy guns.

So there it all was. The usual suspects. Guns. A toxic, angry culture. A mentally disturbed angry young man. Lousy mental health care. Nothing special. Nothing unusual. It was just another day in America. Nothing has changed and nothing will change.

Except for six people, including a 9 year- old girl.