Same joke as last week, I am NOT talking about the lynch mob-like crowd scene on the National Mall that was literally choreographed by and for Fox “News” last week on Sept. 12, but the current, equally valid, environmental protesters being pre-harassed by the Pittsburgh PD in advance of this Thursday’s G20 Summit.

Quick reminder: This week economically devastated working class Pittsburgh hosts this year’s annual “G20 Summit.” Leaders of the world will dine on fine foods, couch their agendas in terms that sound magnanimous, size up the new American president, and, if possible, discern the best way to be on America’s best side. Let’s face it, even though China and India are doing blockbuster business in the way of catching up, the US is still the driving economy of the planet. For now.

The G20 Summit is the US’s turn to hang with the best of the rest. The G20 are the countries with the 19 biggest economies in the world plus the European Union en bloc. Long ago and far away, the group used to be a much more exclusive “G6,” also the even luckier sounding “G7,”and, after some entourage adjustment, the more sporty “G8.” Full disclosure: in an earlier feverish bid for inclusiveness back in ’99 they shot all the way up to the sonorous “The G33,” but backed off down to awkward sounding “G22,” which didn’t quite have the ring to it, so two more nations were jettisoned, and there you have it.

Working together, these nations’ economies control about 85% of all the money in the entire world. And their meetings have long attracted world class protests, but not in Rustbelt Pittsburgh, thus the crackdown. Racist posturing, propagandist pandering and mounds of trash on the National Mall to denigrate the president in as vulgar terms as possible = good clean fun for loyal Americans. Groups of environmentalist protesters staging street theater to try to draw attention to the catastrophe unfolding as we ignore Global Warming = clearly anti-American who thus need to be surveilled, and have their vans unlawfully searched and seized.

A lot of environmentalists hope to set the stage at the Summit for the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. It’ll be the first time in a long time that the rest of the world could possibly look to an American president in hopes of leadership in dealing with the pollutions that are poisoning the planet. Previously the Bush presidency played the bad boy and had scorned calls for stricter regulations on carbon emissions. At one point, in typical Bush fashion, he even mocked the assembled body and laughingly called himself, “the world’s polluter.”

Much of the world is wondering, with the rightwing holding Obama to the ropes, will there be hope for any environmental progress? The cultural warfare we’re engaged in as a nation over health care is just the warm-up for the battle we’ll see the Right put up when America tries to adjust our self-destructive addiction to pollution. Already the rightwing/Big Oil cabals are engineering the next set of protests Tea Party type Americans will be suckered into. Already they are working to challenge the president in so many ways that he can’t accomplish much beyond working to defend himself. As Yogi Berra once said, it’s déjà vu all over again.

Just as had happened in 1993 when Clinton came to power, like they had successfully done to Carter over a decade earlier, the right wing organized an all-out assault on the democratic president’s agenda in health care and energy. In Clinton’s case the onslaught took down both his plans for universal health care and energy consumption tax to regulate us off of fossil fuels.

The rest of the world has been waiting for us to join in the effort to keep the planet from choking itself to death. But they could be waiting a long time more if the Right has anything to do with it and it looks like they do. Just as the rest of the civilized world realized long ago that, as Tory MP Tony Benn so delightfully phrased in the Michael Moore movie, Sicko, “If you can find money to kill people, you can find money to help people.” It’s such a basic principle of human, one could even say Christian dignity, and still, look how not-far health care reform has gotten since the Right kicked up the noise machine. Here’s what’s next.

Oil corporations have already practiced staging Astroturf fake energy protests, in Houston no less, where oil company workers were shipped in for the protests, paid their company wages for being there and actual protesting citizens were kept out; and then the event was billed as a spontaneous citizens’ uprising at the American Petroleum Institute’s Energy Citizen event.

And as phony as that is, I just imagine Glen Beck will soon be leading the charge for a December 7th Club or something like that to ‘drop the bomb’ on Obama’s energy policies. And the rest of the world will keep watching while America continues to over-pollute, over-consume, underfund our education, over-fill our prisons, over-export war and weapons, undercut our own health care and overly congratulate ourselves for our freedom.

Meanwhile, while we weren’t looking, we’re losing another war. As of Monday, Sept. 21, 2009, TV news anchors and commentators talk about Afghanistan as if America’s chances are already over. The Taliban have virtually regained control of the country and if we want the control back, it’s going to take four times the manpower and four decades to do it. The president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, had heartily concurred in the call for more troops. You remember Karzai, the former Unocal employee we installed in power within months of Sept. 11th 2001? The guy who recently claimed a reelection victory in an election widely recalled as a fraud. That Karzai. Well, Karzai still has that all that Unocal pipeline project to protect; so you can bet when it comes to getting an army to fight off Taliban, he would much rather borrow ours than create his own.

Currently the best estimates say that if we had the political will to send in 600,000 troops and to have generations of them stay there for 40, count ‘em, 40 years, then we might make some headway. Sounds like a mighty big amount of political will. But these days, most Americans barely have the political will to get out of bed in the morning, unless, of course, they’re being fueled on hatred of all things Obama. So, here’s the silver lining in all this:

That Afghanistan War is likely to go down the tubes too, once the Right Realize they can hate him for that as well. Iraq was Bush’s war to lose, and lose it he did, but Obama is likely to have Afghanistan taken away from him. When right-wingers can claim to be patriotic by calling for an end to “the Awful President’s Illegal War,” then you’ll know peace will soon be at hand.

Oh yeah, I wasn’t talking about the current goof, South Carolina Republican, Addison Graves “Joe” Wilson. The latest in the long line of GOP buffoons to attempt to make their name by calling the president names? No way! Addison Graves Wilson is as much a “Joe Wilson” as Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher was a plumber. I was talking about an actual American hero. Let’s face it, the GOP section’s audience reactions to Obama’s big Health Care Speech Wednesday were anything but heroic. If that was the crowd representing me, I’d hide. No wonder they keep those people in the back row. You saw the kind of behavior that gives neighborhoods a bad name.

The current politician in the news, the latest “brave patriot Republican” to do the brave patriot thing–of hurling insults from afar while in a pack of sullen buddies acting tough in the balcony–is not the kind of Joe Wilson I think we should remember. Joe Wilson is a cool name. It shouldn’t be squandered on jerks in the peanut gallery. Whether you agree that the president lied in saying that government money would pay for immigrant healthcare, or should I say continue to pay for government health care, is beside the point.

But here’s the point as to Wilson’s lie remark: Right now if a person goes into an emergency room and needs care they get it. Just to double check, do you, dear readers, prefer hospitals to deny folks service in the emergency rooms?
Think about it.

If the answer is “no,” you are not the kind of goon who would leave the sick and wounded to die in the streets. Then you have to see that currently, “yes,” the desperately poor and sick get their emergency room treatments as a government treat, citizenship or no. Again the question: leave the sick and dying to rot on street corners because of immigration paperwork?

Do we really want hospitals denying folks service and leaving them to die on the sidewalks. Imagine the fumigation bill that entails to keep downtown areas tourist friendly. If you’re down for that sort of thing, then the rest of America, the majority of Americans btw, though not the majority of Americans shown on TV these days, the majority is right to work against you. But to Wilson’s point: Are there provisions in the health care bills Obama was discussing that set up new protocols for paying for undocumented immigrants? No.

And the fellow, I shan’t call ‘gentleman,’ from South Carolina knew that. Like a herd of jocks over in the corner misbehaving at a school assembly, the Republican supposed leadership paced, taunted, and puffed themselves up, until somebody went too far. And, just like they say, everybody thinks it’s funny until someone gets caught. And now it’s freaking hilarious, right?

Again think of the kind of person who looks up to such behavior. If you’re argument’s good, you don’t have to be a jerk to make it. If you’re wrong being a jerk about it just proves it. Is that the kind of person you’d look up to: the rude jock telling fart jokes while the principal was talking about the cancer fund? It’s not the kind of image I’d want representing me.

Now the real Joe Wilson was very much not a jerk when he told his president off. Of course, back then the president was Bush, it was 2002, and he was illegally assembling fake evidence to prosecute a case for an unnecessary and illegal war. Award winning diplomat, Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, was the “go to guy” on Africa, having served under numerous presidents in African postings going back to the mid 70s. When the Bush propaganda machine was ginning up the war on Iraq, Wilson was sent to verify what was already widely considered as a false accusation that Iraq was buying uranium ore from Niger, the famous false “African Yellowcake” story, the press let us ignore.

At first Wilson followed protocol and reported that the story was false through proper channels. By the way at the time, that was what the CIA was saying about Iraq and nuclear weapons as well. But some speech writer somewhere was in love with the phrase, “the smoking gun in the shape of a mushroom cloud;” so Bush goes ahead and makes the assertion anyway with his famous “16 words” from another presidential speech delivered to the joint Houses of Congress.

After the speech and after Bush got to start his war, you know the one we’re still fighting, the real Joe Wilson also called his president a liar for all the world to see. It wasn’t just a cheap catcall from the bleacher seats either. In fact he didn’t even use the word “liar” anywhere in the text of his piece. Instead Joe Wilson proved it. In a thoroughly documented article published in the July 3, 2003 edition of the New York Times, Joe Wilson published a piece called, “What I Didn’t Find in Africa” demonstrating that the Bush admin knew better when they claimed Hussein was pursuing, not even having, merely pursuing, nuclear weapons. Now in this case, since the president knew something wasn’t true and said it anyway, that makes him a … well, you get the point.

In response back then, a GOP admin to a Dem troublemaker, staffers for the vice president’s office wound up taking the fall for leaking to the press that Wilson’s wife was a CIA covert agent, one with a thoroughly blown cover these days. Though the trail led straight to Cheney’s desk, henchman, Scooter Libby, eventually stood trial and was found guilty of obstruction of justice. As many have noted, exposing the identity of a secret agent in a time of war is the kind of thing folks have faced firing squads for, Bush instead issued a partial pardon.

So we have one situation where a certain Joe Wilson, a fierce supporter of Strom Thurmond and member of a Confederate loyalist group that seeks to justify slavery, I mean, the kind of guy who makes such an ass of himself that the entire GOP ought to swap the Dems for the donkey logo, who calls out “You Lie!” when he’s lying himself. And in the other situation we have a man with a lifetime of distinguished diplomatic service (winner of three different State Department Distinguished Service Awards), who researches the issue thoroughly, risks his career and, ultimately his wife’s life, to speak out at a major untruth, not a quibbling misrepresentation.

I think it’s clear which Wilson deserves to be thought of as a regular Joe.

Yeah, I didn’t think it was funny either.

But at least one atheist group did, as Tara Lohan reported 9/02/09 on Alternet.org, an organization calling itself Earthbound Pets has offered to take care of Raptured Christians’ pets if the second coming came to past. With this being the day that so many the hard core Evangelical Christians have been looking forward to, to have their literally “holier-than the-rest of our” behinds raptured on out of here up to heaven to sit among the chosen 144,000 who sit on the right hand of God and get to hang with the J-man himself while the whole world roils in the torments brought by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and so on.

Insignificant, comic, glorious or absolutely terrifying depending on where you stand in the sliding scale from seriously Christian to seriously non-Christian, today, 9/09/09 is one of the most horrifying days for some true believers, certainly the worst since 6/06/06, when the gods unleashed that horror of horrors, the remake of The Omen and it was so scary it was in fact a bomb.

I’m not surprised if you haven’t kept up on the latest Revelationist lore; but some people do. Some folks take this more seriously than the Super Bowl and are expecting a hell of a light show. Maybe you personally are not a Revelationist, but you shouldn’t ignore the fact that hundreds of millions of people around the world are living their lives expecting that the Beast, the anti-Christ and the Whore of Babylon are soon to be their future dominatrix. Talk about making it hurt so good.

So, if you are not one of the true believers who thinks that today is the day that Obama is going to detonate the world and your little pumpkin patch is among the 144,000 most earnest, then joke lightly on your Christian brethren today, my fellow Americans, you will have no idea of the terror some of our fellow citizens might be feeling all day today. There are so many things to fear.

Like the number 144,000, a darn small eye of a needle to shove a rich man through. Once upon a time, i.e. 1st century AD Judea, 144,000 of the most devout Christians was somewhat selective but a fairly encompassing number of the number of potentially anointed. You could probably even get away with being somewhat of a slack-tivist martyr and still find a ticket in coach. Nowadays, there are something like two point two billion folks around the world who claim to be Christians all competing for a berth in steerage when the Rapture Express lifts off. The math breaks down to only one out of every 15,277.8 Christians will get a golden ticket. It’s enough to have kept the fans of LaHaye and Jenkins up all night planning how to decorate their little piece of heaven when their kingdom comes. And, apparently wondering who will take care of their pets.

Some people will say, ‘why do I pick on these poor people, just trying to practice their religion? Why make it about religion?’ My answer is, of course, I never would want to tease about somebody’s religion. Except, of course, when that religion wants me dead.

But like other vengeful gods throughout history, the Christian god has been used to brutalize the multitudes and the god of Revelations intends to throw a whole bunch of us into a lake of fire. This is how he will show his brotherly love for mankind. Percentage wise, none of us have more than a .0000020571% chance of making it to heaven. That’s some pretty slim odds even for Vegas casinos, even when the fix is in. Sounds like the kind of guy our US government leaders should work against if they were indeed looking out for the people. But sad to say that is rarely the case.

Every since the founding deists created the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution; some Christians have been working on tweaking the rules so they can gain more power. It must be the ones unfamiliar with the passage about the meek inheriting the earth.

In recent history, many of our American Christian religious and political leaders have been openly Revelationist, believing that god’s will is that they should do all in their power to bring about the biblical Armageddon. Two of the most notable would be Billy Graham and his acolyte George Bush. In comparison to destroying the entire planet for the sake of a population the size of Gilbert (though perhaps with better malls), it makes Jeremiah Wright’s little “Goddamn America” dance seem downright silly.

Unless of course you believe you are one of the chosen, one of the very, very few to be chosen. If you are one of those elite then everyone else is expendable, right? In America alone that’s something like three hundred million eight hundred and fifty-six thousands Americans killed, making their fantasized for 9/09/09 something like 102,285.333 times worse than the real world 9/11. So many terrifying thoughts shredding the nerves of poor Christians as they try making their way through 9/09/09 today, which is indeed 666 … if your sense of the whole world is upside down. Like:

What if they’re the ones driving when the Rapture hits and their cars wreck and kill others or even their family. Can lawyers get a hold of the area code for heaven? What if you get Raptured, but your honey does not? Can you borrow one of a Moslem martyrs’ forty-nine virgins? What if you get to heaven and the only other family member that gets there is that one uncle you always hated and he wants to pal around? What if the rest of your family goes, or that annoyingly overfriendly Buddhist down the street is actually the good soul that gets Raptured and it turns out you weren’t nearly as holy as you thought?

And don’t forget the ever pressing issues of whose going to feed Fido and clean the cat box?

But most of all the question that will torment some Christians today is the thought that has terrified Christians for Millennia: what if the whole thing’s just wrong and you and all you devout ancestors have been duped and used as tools? As another foretold date comes (and hopefully) goes unfulfilled, many Christians may have their entire worldview shaken today and have to face up to a different Revelation: the Copernican one—that they and their god are not the center of the universe.

Which makes them only about five hundred years behind the times.

Let’s pray they hurry and catch up.

I practiced my question in the air, to my dogs, at my wife and on the phone with people. I tossed in bed with it in my mind till I wrote it in my journal, then made sure I arrived at the Assembly of God in Kingman, AZ on Saturday, August 22nd, 2009, one hour and forty-five minutes early (as the manual advises—that is the right-wingers’ disruptors handbook as written by Astroturf experts to disrupt, divide and deflect news coverage of townhall meetings when Democrat Congressmen came home for August break, those overweeningly upright fake Patriots, actual big pharma lobbyists, Dick Armey’s Freedom Works).

Once inside, I meticulously hand copied my question onto the required form for the nice local lady from the Republican Women’s group and then had her double-check to make sure it was legible.

Then, as the sprinkling picked up to a drizzling, I went back to the corner of Gates and Stockton Hill Road, the access most would take to Trent Franks’ “Come to Jesus and Learn to Hate Healthcare” Meeting and I set up my protest. Before long the rain blew so hard it melted some people’s signs and streamed from the bill of my “Impeach Bush” ball cap. I stood with a war hero, two mothers and their teen children. And it rained.

We didn’t plan anything and nobody told us what to do. We were there, each because we believed the tone of the healthcare rallies around America where right-wing disruptors had destroyed discussions was the wrong tone for a thinking headed political opposition–because we hoped quietly convey our messages to the stream of cars that filled the church parking lot. We too wanted our voices heard.

My signs, a repeat, “Insure Domestic Tranquility … Promote the General Welfare …,” “These Are the Real American Values” and a new one, “Why Does the GOP Keep Selling Us Fear, Greed, & Hate?” blew in the occasionally gushing winds, but not so much even the gray haired were unable to read them well enough to flash me a feeble finger.

Meanwhile as the rain poured, I practiced my question.

I’d poured over Frank’s voting record as detailed at Vote Smart, a website Franks somehow failed to recommend when he was asked about a good place to check that record in his Saturday afternoon church revival, occasionally billed as a townhall meeting. Franks also couldn’t mention Congress.org another less complete but well regarded source for congressional info used by millions across America. Franks’ lack of answer on that question was telling. That question had come from one of his fans, not me. My question was this:

“Mr. Franks, you are part of the same crowd who sold us the George Bush Administration with its WMD deception that led to the deaths of over a million people, that sold us tax cuts which created massive deficits, which have crippled our economy, which sold us the stripping of American liberties in the name of security. As a millionaire you have worked very hard to help the wealthy at the expense of the many, and that appears to be what you are doing now. When our healthcare system is the most expensive in the world with worst record among developed countries for actually helping the sick and the poor, here you are feverously working to spend more on weapons, but not on saving lives. My question for you is this: with such a long and distinguished record of doing what is wrong for America, why should we trust you now?”

As duly reported in the Mohave Valley Daily News, for the most part I was drowned out by booing shortly after the WMD deception clause. To their credit both Rep. Franks and the reporter from the Kingman Daily Miner did their best to follow me through the yelling. Here’s what KDM’s Suzanne Adams thought I asked, “Rep. Franks, you’re part of the same group that during the Bush administration sold us on weapons of mass destruction, tax cuts that led to massive debts and the stripping of American liberties in the name of so called security. Right now we have a health industry that works against taking care of its citizens and you’re working to maintain that status quo. Why should we trust you now?”

Which is accurate enough for me. I couldn’t even hear my own speaking. One of the nice Republican ladies, the one who had seen to it that I got a turn with a question after watching me hold my hand up for about 30 minutes, suddenly, and understandably, turned fire-eyed, somewhere around the line about tax cuts and deficits; and she leaned into me so fast that I pulled back a bit. “You’ve got one minute,” she whispered just above a hiss.

With that kind of noise and hatred around you, a minute is a very long time. I don’t think I lasted twenty seconds.

This was after we’d already witnessed the “good citizens” of Kingman amble on for paragraphs about the prestige of their own backgrounds, the glories of their faith in Mr. Franks and Jesus, or the umpteen ways they, personally more than anyone else in the whole world knows Obama has no birth certificate. But as if a dream came true, I actually got my question asked. At least this one part of America worked this one time like they teach us to believe in schools.

And, for an instant Franks flinched. But, it turned out his answer was better still.

(Next, PART 2: Rev. “Right’s” Hell House: the 33 Minute Hate)

A call: “Tell me what Democracy looks like?”

And an answer: “This is what Democracy looks like!”

We were angry. And, history has shown, we were right to be. By that point the train of abuses had already been long and bitter. The lies about WMDs had long been thoroughly debunked—as we said they would be. And the country we’d claimed we were saving, we were clearly hellbent on destroying. The torture scandals were coming out. The Halliburton scandals were coming out. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people were already dead, killed in our beloved country’s name and the mission that had supposedly been accomplished a year earlier had already devolved into full-blown quagmire—as we said it would. As Cheney also once said it would, before setting out to create just that.

Millions around the country and ten of millions around the world had already been protesting, marching, signing petitions, demanding their fair voice in the public arena of ideas and steadily been ignored. We’d been branded traitors for telling the truth. So when the Republican National Convention came around in the August of ’04, once again tens of thousands, some said hundreds of thousands, took to the streets to tell our leaders, “We object.”

Tell you what Democrcy looks like? That is what Democracy looks like. And today, as I look back on the groundswell of passion, inventiveness, mobility, and anger at that time, I never would have imagined I would see anything like it, albiet on a lilliputian scale, by the right-wing of our country and never over anything as shallow as the selfish impulse to refuse to aid our fellow man. Nor would I have ever expected to see such love of hatred, such glee in condemnation, such lust of violence or such openly treasonous behavior from the same people who used to scream death threats at me because I wore a peace sign.

Fast forward five years and as the astroturf grows long on the “healthcare rebellion” of the fall of 2009, this past Monday I took my wife and daughter to see Obama and what we saw were ugly Arizonans instead. Whipped up by the fake grassroots efforts of Dick Armey and his junta of goons, enflamed by a propagandist media machine so toxic it makes Radio Rwanda seem tame, a thousand or so anti-healthcare reform activists surrounded the three thousand person pro-healthcare reform rally, taunting us with hatespeak for over four hours.

Quite impressive. The igonrance was astounding and so was the danger level.

I personally do believe that health care should be a universally provided service, like police care, or fire care. And so when the temperature rose into the low 100s by mid-morning, I carried water to both sides of the street because when it’s that hot, water is healthcare, preventive healthcare. Unlike the Republican leadership currently disgracing Arizona’s reputation the way Bush once did to our country’s, I also believe education should be a universally provided service.

And so, though I disagree with your message very much, I’m willing to give you some schooling.

First and foremost, “because you’re stupid, that’s why!” is never going to be regarded as a cogent argument in any debate. Spending three hours designing an elaborate sign that wittily insults Democrats, but which you cannot defend when politely asked about is no way to sway people. Simply chanting “Read the Bill” also does not qualify as an in-depth explication. And since it implies that the all the chanters actually did themselves read each and every page of every version of the several bills out there. It makes them look pretty silly in the hundred degree weather to be standing there with so many of their pants so obviously on fire.

And to angry people on both sides … Shut up. For those on the left side of the street, shouting with vengeful glee, “WE are the Majority!” does not guarantee the other guys are wrong. Remember? The majority once thought Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, though we told ‘em and told ‘em no. They also once thought Saddam did 9/11 and that George Bush was a good man. Being in the majority doesn’t mean you are right; it just means you can be swayed.

And you guys on the right? Please. These same people advocating violence and hatred to solve problems today are the folks who hated the 60s protesters for acting up during Vietnam. The folks carrying guns to the rally this past Monday are the same people who a year ago were calling for the extremination of Bill Ayers because he’d tried to use violence to stop America’s other great shameful war. And all Monday’s group wanted was to not pay taxes, especially if it was going to help the sick.

Is that the image you want for yourself? Probably not. Christians steer clear of this healthcare debate: not wanting to take care of the sick and the poor is guaranteed to make you look like a hypocrite.

Next, distance yourself from the angry nutjobs. It discredits your whole movement. I want to immediately acknowledge as I walked both sides of the street, still wearing my peace signs, I talked to several clearly passionate but also clearly spoken people who made the effort to communicate fairly and I learned once again that there is a lot of common ground between the left and the right when it comes to the problems we see in this country. Imagine what all we could accomplish together if you weren’t so intently busy calling us all those names they keeps telling you to call us.

If you really want people to think of you as good Americans, then when those nutjobs come around whipping up your anger to the point you want to hit somebody, tell them to go away. They are making you all look nuts. And, who knows but that they could be agents of the current COINTELPRO operation. You guys remember Operation COINTELPRO?

Started in the 60s, COINTELPRO was/is an effort to discredit and demonize anti-war/political opposition groups by infiltrating them with folks who would incite violence, embarrass, disrupt, divide or disorganize the group. Operation COINTELPRO and its subsequent generations have been implicated in protester misbehavior and violence in every anti-war movement since then and in the WTO mayhem in Seattle, as well the protests at both the 2004 & 2008 RNCs. Besides, do you really want to be associated with the ugliest of those images? Is that actually your impression of the American way?

If you really think the guy with the diapered donkey hung in effigy yelling demeaning epithets face to face with an opposing crowd of two thousand actually make your cause look noble, better check the old think machine because it’s obviously malfunctioning.

Also, and I’m sure you already know this, carrying weapons to a healthcare rally is clearly not about healthcare or freedom, it’s about threatening. We know it, you know it. Pretending it’s about your right to have a gun in Arizona only makes you look like a liar. It’s about being so scary your opponents are silenced: it’s a message—if you annoy me too much I’ll shoot you. No, it’s not about self-defense when you’re the one doing the bullying. It’s called assault with a deadly weapon. After all, it is an assault rifle. And no, no stampeding herd of deer were likely to attack us that morning in downtown Phoenix thus require the twenty shot clip and backup pistol on your hip, so you can’t call it hunting either. We know what you wish you were hunting and in America that’s not called patriotism, it’s called murder.

If your message is good, you won’t need to act badly to convince others of it. Speaking of which, the whole Hitler thing would really be comic if it weren’t so pathetic. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we did it too; but we were comparing Bush to Hitler for taking millions of lives, not saving millions of lives. Get a new slogan, that horse won’t run.

And lastly, you people who claim you hate socialism, better face it, a government at all, any type, is a socialist enterprise. Everyone of us protesters there that morning, both the pros and conned, all rode on roads built on the public dime, were protected by military and police forces paid for with taxes, and enjoy parks, schools, standard weights and measures, sewage systems and a host of other luxuries of the supposed developed nations. If you choose to live in society, you are part of the socialism.

The Preamble to the Constitution establishes the goals for the new government it was designed to create. The media and the GOP leadership as well have been quite willing to forget that insuring domestic tranquility and promoting the general welfare are both among our highest goals and both clearly socialist. For that matter, “For the People, Of the People, By the People” is the epitomy of socialism. And if you aren’t willing to work for those goals, then who is the real anti-patriot?

2. Right-wing protesters whose unfurled American flags are in the position to look like swastikas.

3. A rich mom is dragging her child away from staring at a poor person. The mom is also tipping the valet some coin change for bringing their car around. The mom says, “charity begins at home.”

4. A little touchy (maybe over a line): or white guy w/ a crew cut is pointing at the TV where Sotomayor is being confirmed and he’s screaming, “I knew that N____ would hire a racist!”

5. Homeless guy sleeping under newspaper w/ the headline, “Goldman-Sachs Executives to Receive 11 Billion in Bonuses” He murmurs, “Knowing they’re safe helps me sleep at night.”

6. On the same theme: kid sleeping in a cardboard box is enviously looking through a fence at a shaggy dog sleeping in a doghouse.

7. Very cartoonish: a fat guy is floating in a dingy in the shape of the USA, around him are others floating in the water and they and the waves they make are in the relative shapes and positions of you know, South America, Africa and Asia and so on. He’s got mounds of supplies all around him. He says, “If there was only more room i could let some of you ride along.”

8. An Arab is fallen in barbed wire in the shape of a crucifixion, that’s the scene on TV. The scroll says, “Afghan Civilian Death Toll up 25%.” The viewers say to each other, “Those people are so godless.”

9. Middle class guy is standing in front of his foreclosed home between two streets. On one side a limousine is coming towards the front of the picture. On the other nondescript dark figures are walking off carrying all their worldly possessions. He yells at the poor people, “Look at the mess you made.”

10. Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, and Glen Beck in a radio studio: on the wall it says “RADIO RWANDA.” On a calendar it shows April 1994.

Infidels, non-believers, berserkers, in short, followers of Islam had gained control of the Holy Land and our armies were proving helpless against them. Though most of us had only heard of the fabled Holy Land , we were continuously exhorted that it was worth dying for. The people there had the wrong beliefs. It’s like they weren’t even people at all.

Across the land a cry rang out and the simple people, the children, the innocent and guileless rose up to take the matter into their own hands. Surely their purity of spirit and true faith in the Lord, our very Christian god, would overcome the heathen whereas our weaponry had not. The sheer power of our unwavering belief in the rightness of our Christian god would surely be enough to overcome any lesser beings’ superstitious hocus-pocus over their tawdry talismans.

So we massed, in our anger and our righteousness, first to Genoa , then eventually around to Marseilles, where in 1212, two kindly merchants at tremendous personal sacrifice agreed to help us in our final leap of our noble crusade, and so, like lemmings we boarded their ships . . .

Never to be seen again. Sold as slaves the thirty thousand European peasants and youth who took part in the fabled “Children’s Crusade” disappeared from history into a fate generally imagined to be “worse than death.” And those two “kindly” merchants of Marseilles, the Halliburtons and Raytheons of their day, were in cahoots with the bogeymen Muslims all along and sold the questing Christians for a clear eyed profit. In some versions of their legend, the merchants are later captured and hanged for a plot to kidnap a king, but that would be in a world where the wicked get punished and the kind are redeemed.

A place decidedly not the Obama America of 2009, where banks are rewarded for impoverishing the rest of us and religious war in the Holy Land is still framed to demonize the Muslim. Though Muslim religious extremists are blamed for inciting violence in the name of their vision of god, America steadfastly and incrementally has retrofitted our military to march onward as Christian soldiers. Because, after all, our Christian religious intolerance is so much more sanctimonious and thus justified than any other religion’s zealotry.

Now with the stage duly set by last week’s news item of Muslim guys plotting to launch RPGs at a synagogue, this week a Muslim convert guy is accused of shooting up recruiting station in Little Rock . And in the same time and news cycle, ironies of ironies, in the latest of what is appearing to be an inexhaustible series of right-wing gun users intent on lighting up America like it was their personal amusement park, an abortion doctor has been shot and killed in his own church in Kansas, by yet another right-winger following orders from his minister du jour, in this case Bill O’Reilly.

As the day to day gun violence of American life begins to approach Bruckheimer-esque levels, I think it is safe to say, or rather unsafe to say, that the shooting war for the post-Obama America has now openly begun. And, as the summer thrill season heats up, it seems our box office isn’t the only aspect of the public arena enthralled by angels and demons.

Of course the advantage the rest of Europe had in 1212 over America today is that the Christian fanatics and opportunists who comprised the thirty thousand or so that took part in the crusade walked out of their society, not among it. The Holy Land was a lot farther away from their day to day life than the religious war that is on the edge breaking out right here at home, in racially and religiously mixed America .

Also, modern day America is a whole lot bigger than Europe of the early 1200s and even though Christianity is in decline here, and thus feeling embattled, there are still millions more American Christian zealots ready to kill for their love of man, with most of them living near most of you.

Good luck, America , welcome to Marseilles 1212. Simply follow the kindly merchants who will lead you on your way. Perhaps your faith will set you free . . .

In Bush’s case that base had been the millions of deluded mainstream, other-wise moderate, Christians who were shamed by their rabid evangelical brethren into voting for Bush because, no matter what else, the man kept saying he believed in the sanctity of life. W, of course, went on to prove this sentiment by blocking stem cell research and killing one point three million Iraqis.

In Obama’s case, it means, as it has since the Rev. Wright days, jettisoning any and all whose press begins to compete with his own. Lately gays have been making too much noise, somehow believing that as Americans they had a right to draw attention to injustices, but Obama has been steadily distancing himself from gays ever since he decided the demographic that follows Rick Warren looked sexier in a voting booth.

While the GOP supposed “big tent” turns out to barely big enough to be a bathing suit for Rush Limbaugh, the coalition that put Barack Obama in the Whitehouse was even a greater mix of elements than the man himself. Basically last fall Obama was supported by everyone who felt the GOP and Bushco had betrayed them, in other words the clear electoral majority of the American public. But bit by bit, Obama has tossed away the various special interests groups who gave their hopes to him. At the time it seemed like the man had won himself a mountain of hard-earned political capital. Nowadays it seems like he’s at a roulette wheel staking it all on the banks will come up in the black, but so far the only numbers we’re seeing are “00”.

Bush had once started out claiming to be a “uniter,” then quickly opted for the far easier “you’re either with us or against us” routine, narrowing his message till eventually even most Americans began to realize why the rest of the world detested him. Once upon a time we endured Obama’s tortured prose about how great everything would be if we would only put him in office. Now we’re expected to put up with it as that office stealthily prepares to exonerate all of the Bush era torture pros.

It seems to be a trend that won’t stop continuing until one day we’ll turn on our TVs to Obama awarding W himself a Presidential Medal of Freedom. Here’s hoping Obama doesn’t feel the need to take it quite that far, but after his 1st hundred days of evolution who can tell where Obama will wind up. I heard Cheney is looking for a running mate.

Reversing himself on taxing the rich, on the environment, on ending the war quickly, on tightening the screws on executive compensations, on releasing info on Bush era prisoner abuses, now he’s even bringing back Bush-era military tribunals and again turning his back on gays. The man has changed sides more often than the serve at a tennis match. As each passing day of these second hundred days further defines him, it is beginning to look like the only kind of liberal Obama is really aiming to work for are the neo- kind.

Not that Congress, the Democratically controlled Congress that is, have helped him much. After making sure they forced the public to sacrifice to keep billionaire bankers in their cushy penthouse offices, they then turned their back on American homeowners, all the while taking care to make sure bank execs didn’t get their feathers ruffled by too much scrutiny of the bailout spending. Now this week Congress has watered down the credit card protections bill AND refused to close Guantanamo Bay, or technically, is refusing to fund the 80 million dollar plan to allow the inmates housed there to be imprisoned on US soil; so yet another Obama promise turns into a mouth full of dust.

Cowing to one of the most obscenely outrageous, “Not-In-My-Back-Yard” campaigns in recent memory, your government has decided our US prison system is not secure enough to jail criminals. While this begs the question, “well then what about the other 2.3 million some odd others already housed in US prisons.”

Of course Cooper is probably unaware of the conditions in US prisons. Cooper is just now finally learning that Nancy Pelosi knew and tacitly abided by Bush era torture policies. As could be predicted the revelation is causing Cooper to flex his patented scowl muscles. Of course judging by the content of a fistful of recent CNN primetime segments it appears Cooper just now discovered pot. Poor Anderson Cooper, who knows what sudden shockers tomorrow’s headlines will bring, or how long it will take Anderson Cooper to find out.

But the problem is this time Old Larry got the goods, the real deal, the Baghdad Bunker Buster of addictive substances, the stuff you’ve been waiting for. The stuff your mom said to not even look upon. Absolute poison, if you ingest it you will die. You know I’m talking Twitter. It’s the new crack — one hit, you’re done for, addict for life, and here’s comes old Larry with a straw to suck up the cerebellum slurpy.

Translation: As I type this I am getting the impression Mainstream Media, er, at least CNN, is consciously trying to Twitter-fy my brain, trying to get me and mine hooked on the latest marketed fad, fully well knowing, as I do because I saw it on their channel, that Twitter destroys all it touches.

Or so says the fine folks at the National Academy of Sciences. Straightforwardly, in an advanced publication, in a summary that runs quite a bit longer that 140 characters, concerned scientists are now warning America, and the rest of the world for that matter, that Twitter desensitizes you, demagnetizes your moral compass, destroys your ability to feel empathy, in addition to creating several other zombie-like moral effects that make a person all the more easy to control and to tolerate outrageous violence.

Luckily CNN was on the scene with a modem and a TV camera before the entire nation fell into drooling zombie-dom. In fact, you’d think they were our heroes. Once more, just to clarify, on April 14th , both on that evening’s scroll and in the expanded headlines, and still available on their website, CNN quite clearly reported, with scientists they presented as credible, that Twitter can be more dangerous to our country than a whole host of Osamas.

Then — as can generally be expected in a comedy — they turn right around and market the crap out of the very product they bashed with a whopping 129 different articles about Twitter in their online archive, including some artificially manufactured “funny” business masquerading a supposedly interesting supposed human interest series of clips and digressions involving Larry King as a comically rendered full-blown Twitter-holic trying to tweet up or out tweet all comers.

CNN loves Twitter the way Fox loves its Tea Parties. These days, catching Larry King pitching Twitter on his show has become as common as catching Wilford Brimley hawking adult home health care and just about as phony. After all, what is the message behind posting a news article condemning a product, then providing it with free ad time, as Larry King’s shows have recently become?

Twitter: it’s bad for your brain, why don’t cha try it kiddies?

Sunday April 19th King sank to his new low regarding this naked marketeering of the magic Tweetie- Tweet- Tweet, bringing on as guests a studiously post-Punked Ashton Kutcher, Sean Piddly-Puff Coombs, Queen Oprah herself, a remote of Jimmy J-Dawg Fallon failing to seem sincere and the ever ubiquitous, ever artificial Ryan Seacrest literally phoning it in. What could bring so much stellar “talent” together on a Sunday night? Well, guess what? All of them were shilling for Twitter.

That many celebrities pushing a drug and it becomes a new cocaine. Like gangster rap, like chat rooms, Goth fashion, punk, hippies, like rock in roll itself, like TV, like whatever the next new drug is that we’re always not supposed to like even as we’re being taught to. Mainstream media has always made itself a fat dollar selling us stuff they tell us we should be ashamed of ourselves for enjoying. Even AlterNet is in on the game, following the fad with well over 120 articles of their own on the subject. This is just the latest step in our culture-makers’ ongoing efforts to keep us lazy and stupid, at least dumb enough to be their adherents. They are hoping we will stay stupid long enough so they can get the next war set-up.

Word on the street is they’re resuming casting for the next Hussein.

Right about now, Barack Obama could sure use some Hussein. And no, I’m not talking about his middle name. The purpose of this column is not to make lame jokes about our president’s middle name. (Besides that one I mean.) No, the purpose of this column is to ponder who will get the part of the New Hussein. You remember Hussein, right? Saddam Hussein?

I ask if you remember because we Americans aren’t so good at remembering history; which is why we spend so much of the time having to repeating it. To prepare this article and see what I remembered about Hussein I went looking for my earliest reference to fabled Iraqi Strongman and I found one in a piece from back in January of 1991 called “I Go to War”:

“The real reason we’re at war with Hussein isn’t that he didn’t buy American when we gave him money for guns, that’s for sure. The real reason is that we TV generations are stupid. We can’t remember any of the lessons that sneak out through the networks unless they’re talking about cool new ways to consume or not consume whichever is the current fashion. We don’t even know how to think and don’t have the patience to learn. The war is breaking us into three camps — those who find war wrong, those who find war right and those who find war boring.

“Once the majority of a population finds mass murder and systematic destruction of a culture too boring to consider and just wish they could find another channel to watch, and then we can wage continuous war with one stooge or another for the rest of all time. Of course, even if somebody figures out scam, we can always just stop the current war and start a new one. Long as our economy is so based on military issues, it doesn’t matter what the people might think, the national budget is going to require wars on a regular basis to keep itself afloat. People are so pissed off with current conditions it isn’t hard to make them want to fight somebody.”

And so on, same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. Just change out a name or two and that same passage could’ve been written about either Bush or, more and more lately it seems, Obama. If we’re unlucky, it could be written next year. If the dogs on the right and those blue dogs that trail them for scraps actually start to catch a little skin one these days while nipping at his heels the new Hussein could be debuting as early as next month.

Is there a Saddam in your future? For longer than I’d like to remember Saddam Hussein served as America ’s favorite bad-guy love/hate relationship. He was so easy to hate, yet for 25 years it was like we dated the guy. For the first ten years for sure he was a bastard. But doggone it, he was our bastard in the Middle East, so everything was all right. When he did bad things, like passing gas, we forgave him Despite the fact that during our 21st Century Iraq Occupation we would help make sure he was put to death for that very act, back-in-the-day successive US governments forgave Hussein for gassing his own people. Turns out it was our gas in the first place and Saddam only knew how to use it because we taught him how.

Then when Bush the First needed an enemy in the way that any floundering president needs a good enemy, to hide son Neil’s S&L scandal, Saddam became our favorite Boogey Man. They sold more pictures of Saddam than Satan for a while there. It got to the point Trey Parker and Matt Stone could poke fun of Saddam’s absolute demonization in South Park: Bigger Longer and Uncut. Four years later Bush Jr. would recycle that hatred to sell us his phony war. Junior managed to get himself another five years of kicking around Saddam before we accidentally let the Iraqis kill him. Good ol’ Saddam, the kind of guy you’d love to hate. His legend really comes to life now that he’s not around to enjoy it.

But with Saddam so dead, Obama is in the market for a new international whipping boy. As luck would have it, the recent news cycle brought two applicants for that coveted support role: “Guy we hate so much we don’t mind spending billions and spilling millions to go to war with him because he so very much sucks.”

Ladies and gentlemen it looks like Obama is celebrating Earth Day by recycling, recycling Bush-era Boogeymen, I mean. Among the top contenders for the role of “guy who gets his ass kicked, but has a lot of close-ups” are: another South Park alumnus Kim Jong-Il, of late returning to his old ways of tossing around war threats and then there’s the ever detestable Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, perhaps the one person in the world who could make Israel look sympathetic.

One thing’s for sure, if things begin to get rough for the current admin, as they once did for Bush, as they did for Clinton, as they did for Bush I, and on and on, you can bet Barack Obama will find his very own Hussein soon enough.

And if we don’t stop Larry King now, by then America will be too Twitter-fied to care. But I promise dear reader that Larry King is not going to slurp up my brains. I’ll fight, I’ll resist, I paint protest signs, “I have no time for Twitter!’

Thank you for your time America. Excuse me now, while I go check my Facebook . . .

Understand the candidate himself was not being accused of actually being a liberal, per se. It was the mere appearance of liberalism in his personal circle that was the damning mark. It seemed the candidate in question was, of all things, a Christian. Worse that that, the church where the candidate had genuflected for umpteen years was run by former American military hero-pastor, an exciting, altruistic, outspoken charismatic preacher who inspired millions the world over with his calls for humanism and justice.

Not surprisingly the candidate nearly lost his candidacy over such an outrage.

(The columnist, btw, nearly lost his 10 year job as a social studies teacher for writing such heresies as to defend a black man in print when townsfolk questioned whether he was dutifully attending to his day job as the village brainwasher of the future proletariat. The columnist however prevailed when the townsfolk came to realize that keeping up with the teacher’s supposed blasphemes might possibly require actual reading.)

What the mainstream media really wanted to say was that since Obama was a black man it was a guarantee that if he got to be president he would raid the chicken coop once the overseer took to wenching. But they couldn’t quite say that. So, they took to “God-damning” Obama’s far more phenomenal minister, the right Reverend Jeremiah Wright, a notable civil rights activist as if that were enough to darken Obama’s image. The suggestion was that since Obama had attended Wright’s sermons for twenty years he must’ve heard as least some of them.

The thinking went that if Obama had paid attention to Wright’s ideas about reshaping America so it actually was for-of-and-by the people, he then was now heir to the responsibility for pursuing the social justice ministry of the liberation theology so popular in certain Black churches — the types of churches that aim to free their parishioners from the earthly chains of oppression, rather than be the propagandists for those who sell such chains as “god’s will.”

So, that meant having a guy like that in charge would mean everything about the way America operated was bound get over-scrutinized then over-turned and generally and justly screwed over, because we all know America has been run for the elite oppressive few, not the huddled many. Any president who might actually work to improve the lives of his people and the world in general was obviously far too great a threat to go unchecked.

Immediately, throughout the blogosphere, all of America’s hard right pundit might was marshaled to do their combined best to lynch both men from the same tree in an effort to stop Obama from spreading Wright’s filth before it could infect the minds of young Americans.

Welcome to one year later.

Candidate Obama is now the current edition of the imperial president while Reverend Wright is nowhere to be found. And we discover, to little surprise, the poor old Right-wing got it wrong again. Obama wasn’t listening to those sermons.

For example, Wright wrote war was wrong. Having been there himself, he condemned the Bush violence and so must be cheering somewhere in absentia to see members of the Bush administration indicted in Spain thus launching an international investigation that will soon enough make their way to Obama’s front door though he has done all he could to ignore the pitter-patter of six billion little feat marching for justice. Meanwhile, in that same Democracy Now! ebullient broadcast which brought the news of the Bush indictments in Spain , Obama admits to committing to an extra twenty thousand American invaders in Bushco’s War of Terror in Afghanistan and then re-brands Bush’s genocidal occupation in Iraq as “advisory and assistance brigades.”

Wright wrote repeatedly about poverty and racism while Obama allows Wall Street bed-partner Tim Geithner to tax the poor for the profit of the rich on the one hand, then closes his eyes to the apartheid in Israel and distances himself from his own Attorney General’s efforts to bring race into the spotlight in America in much the same way he once betrayed his once beloved minister.

Wright also wrote about the retribution America would face for our misdeeds if we will not change our ways, the karma we were creating. One wonders if Obama also missed the part of Rev. Wright’s sermons about chickens coming home to roost and unjust leaders meeting, not meting, justice someday.

This one certain columnist certainly is taking the audacity to hope that Obama wasn’t napping the time Wright wrote of the justice to come. That day might be coming his way sooner than Obama thinks.

Look at your hands. That is the number 10. It takes but an instant to visualize the sight of them, just as it takes an instant to apprehend the concept of ten. Of course, in concept, it only takes seconds, fractions of seconds, to apprehend any number — seven point seven, four hundred and ten, eight thousand five hundred and seventy, a million, a billion, $10,997,999,164,142.97 (as of 17 Mar 2009 at 06:03:57 PM GMT ). See? They’re all just numbers.

Now if you are still looking at your ten digits (which means I suppose, you’re not reading these instructions, but anyway), imagine, briefly, that you have a terrible accident, an axe-related accident, Jerry Garcia-style, an errant swing, a simple instant, you look down and it’s gone. Your life is changed forever. Immediate agony, the spray of blood, the mad dash to find the finger, hopefully with access to modern medical facilities, the continuing sight of its absence, the ever expanding amount of blood; and if it can’t be reaffixed, your life and your entire conception of mathematics screwed for good. In your imagination, which digit did you choose to lose?

That is the power of one.

Now, let’s talk about scale. Scale is why little kids fall down and go boom all day long without so much as a scrape when we full size adults would break a hip. Scale is why a flea can jump 100 times his height; but it is also why we can still kick his ass with our mere fingernails. Remember the power of one? Now ten times that, all the fingers you have, both of your hands. OMG. That is ten; and it just gets bigger from there.

But for now let’s start back with one. If you took one second to count to one and kept counting at that pace, it would take, obviously, ten seconds to count to ten. That is about how long it takes to know if your car is going to start as you’re driving yourself to the ER with your severed appendage sloshing in a Ziploc baggie w/ ice cubes. It would take you just under two minutes to count to one hundred. In that length of time you could have called 911 and gotten the directions. That’s if you didn’t get the phone too bloody. That’s if you had a phone. One hundred seconds can be an incredibly long time indeed.

It will take about 17 minutes to count to one thousand. If it takes much longer than that to get to the hospital you are liable to lose quite a bit of pinkie mobility. It will take you just over eleven and a half days to count to one million and by that time you should be able to know if you will ever have use of that one finger again. It would take an entire generation, almost thirty-two years, to add up to a billion seconds. But even at that length of time, it might still be hard to reconcile one’s self if there had not had access to the best of modern medical care.

And a trillion? Well that number is so large as to dwarf our very conception of time — to consider a trillion seconds. It is a measure longer than history itself. A trillion seconds ago, some caveman was leaving his nine fingered paw print on a wall somewhere and wishing someone would invent fire so he could cauterize the wound. A Trillion? That’s thirty-one thousand years. A trillion seconds ago it would still be another 300 generations till humans would even invent agriculture, much less sutures. And another 595 or so generations after that before anyone would even have a chance of saving a lost digit. The loss of which, of course, could happen in a simple second.

A trillion, a billion, a million, one — that is what we mean when we talk about scale. Scale is, when you look at it, such a major consideration that entire academic disciplines have sprung up to explain the concept and importance of scale to generations of cavemen, who still continue to swing their axes far too casually for safety sake. And still occasionally, the nine-fingered among us come to understand the power of one all too well.

Media, on the other hand, gain no benefit from conveying distinctions in scale. From their mediated distance numbers are forever mere concepts and not the fingers of the audience — unless of course you are the one doing the bleeding. It’s the media’s stock and trade to slosh around numbers like “billion” and “million” and ever more often lately, “trillion,” as if they would all fit somehow into the same Ziploc baggie along with a couple of ice cubes.

That in mind, thank god, or if not him then somebody, the media has stopped yapping about earmarks. In the absence of a Republican outrage, mainstream media recently acting as if pundits, pummeled Obama for not quashing the omnibus spending bill due to the wealth of pet projects. More than 8,000, count ‘em earmarks. Wow. Almost eight billion dollars. Double Wow!

Seriously that is a great big number: that’s all sorts of projects in all sorts of places for all sorts of people everywhere. No wonder Repubs hate it. Besides it’s also a whole lot of fingers in a whole lot of pies. Imagine how many hands that number must tie to. That is the power of jobs, which ultimately are the currency of earmarks: somebody hired to do something. And earmarks are not some secretive private thing. It is a public project being started, a company put to work, a goal set and a landscape or a society, hopefully, being improved through judicious government spending.

An earmark is also your congressman doing precisely what he was elected for, which is to represent his part of the country and do his best to promote tranquility and prosperity for his constituents.

Republicans in general have traditionally railed against earmarks, all the while racking them up with the best of the Dems. Of course I live in a state where my iconic congressman is so proudly anti-earmark, he refuses to do a darn thing for the homefolk at all. Thanks again, John McCain.

Obama speaks the language of earmark, being a former master of them while in the Senate. Let the media chaff about earmarks all they want. Obama’s touch on the Omnibus Spending Bill buys hands full of good will. Further, unlike his vengeful predecessor, Obama allowed both sides of the aisle to stud the bill with earmarks. Repubs, besides McCain, aren’t whining this go-round because they too scored big time.

The Whitehouse has been careful to frame the argument on this one as “last year’s business” as Obama calls for the new standards he hopes to set. Perhaps, since Obama claims he wants to improve the education of the cavemen who still try to rule this country he could hire some teachers to remind them of the power of scale.

As in that even if eight thousand five hundred and seventy is a great big number (as in the number of earmarks in the bill), seven, as in seven point seven billion dollars of the total four hundred and ten billion for the Omnibus Spending Bill overall. It’s about two percent.

Yes, a billion is a very big number, but to spend a billion or even seven point seven of them spent for the good will and PR these 8,000+ jobs projects around the country will generate is not a bad way to spend two percent of the overall budget on a government bill. Bush used to spend more than that on rendition.

That’s right, praise Jesus, this just in: being a Christian isn’t the given it once was in this land of freedom of religion, but not necessarily of freedom from religion. As a parent of one of my students once told me, she didn’t guess she “cared that much what religion a person might be . . . just as long as they wuz Christian.” And, until recently, that about summed it all up in the theocratic quasi-republic Christian oligarchy known as the United States of America.

As you may recall, though the official founding fathers, Washington, Jefferson, Franklin and that bunch were decidedly non-Christian, deists in fact, the marketers who have shaped our American religious traditions prefer to hearken back to an earlier, more devout time, the 1620 pilgrimage of the Puritans to the Americas. Stern, ascetic, vengeful, and industrious, the Puritans built their church on Plymouth Rock and raised the colony of Massachusetts, and thus the mythology of a Christian America.

Of course the idealized version bought and sold from pulpits and politicians is that these wonderful Christian forbears laid out an admirable and irrevocable tradition for us, a theological manifest destiny as it were. This version of the tale leaves out the fact that three separate colonies and thus states — Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Hampshire — were created by folk trying to flee the tyranny of those oppressive and rapacious religious fanatics. It fails as well to mention the dead Indians, and such, in their wake.

And so, America for the most part remained a Christian theocratic hegemony. Jefferson, et al, had to be specifically, legislatively, non-secular in their formation of the new America to overcome the rampant religious oaths and other sanctimonious oppressions of civil liberties common at the time and continuing right on up into the 20th century. Even so, religiously inflicted misery or no, Americans had remained steadfastly self-professed Christians in near unanimity.

However in 21st century pluralist America, one out of every four Americans now days no longer affiliate themselves with any Christian sect. According to the American Religious Identification Survey from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, the last twenty years has seen a ten percent decline in Americans claiming Christianity as their religion of choice. Understand Jesus would still have a hard time walking across the parted waters without bumping into an American Christian. Even with that ten percent decline, as of 2008 a full 75% of those surveyed identified themselves as Christian.

And no, this decline does not mean that the Muslim terrorists have won just because you saw a lot of brown skinned people with Oscars at this year’s Academy Awards. Quite the contrary, though the American Muslim population has doubled since an earlier 1990 Trinity College survey, Muslims still only account for less than one percent of the population. Even Wiccans outnumber Muslims.

Catholics and Baptists remain the #1 and #2 most popular religious choices, coming in at 25% and 15.8% respectively; but, wait a minute, who is that dark horse coming up on the outside lane at 15%? That’s right, the number 3 choice in America these days is . . . “no religion at all.” As the report explains, “the challenge to Christianity … does not come from other religions but from a rejection of all forms of organized religion.”

So is Atheism the new black? The USA Today coverage of the survey shows a stylishly dour dreadlocked Bostonian ex-Catholic moping that he doesn’t “know anyone religious and hardly anyone ’spiritual.’” Of course since few can trust being alone in the confessional booth with a Catholic priest anymore, it is small surprise traditional papist population centers in the northeast are being bled dry.

Also as “Evangelicals” have devoured other more mainstream Christian sects, such as Lutherans or Methodists, old line mainline religions in America are seeing declines by as much as 50%, with the fastest growing religious preference being “none of the above.” The survey asserts further that it is exactly this expansion of the “born-again evangelicals” that are the GOP hard core conservative breeding ground that have pushed many Americans away from religions entirely.

Evangelicals form the business end of a spectrum of “Christians” that ranges from the Mother Teresas of the world to Vinnie the kid who just jacked your car to buy some meth but wears the prominent solid gold crucifix bling along with his 50 Cent piece, so don’t you dare say he’s not a Christian, goddammit.

In other words, lots of people claim to be Christians though not all of them hold themselves to the same standards. The evangelicals are the wonderful folks who bring you mega-churches, abortion clinic bombings, Gay-baiting, tent revivals, speaking in tongues, televangelists, and those dopey little pamphlets that litter street corners occasionally. They do these things, of course, so they can share god’s love and fund and thus dominate the Republican Party. Somehow, some people seem to think this sort of thing works and so traditional variations of Republicanist philosophies have lost their role in shaping party ideology. At the same time on at the expense of Christian variants and traditions hundreds of years old, the evangelicals have risen as their brethen fall.

Quoting from CNN’s online coverage of the release of the report, Trinity College’s Mark Silk claimed the rise in evangelical Christianity is contributing to the rejection of religion altogether by some Americans. “There [is] a long-lasting ‘religious right’ connected to a political party, and that turned a lot of people the other way,” Silk said linking the Republican Party to such groups as the Moral Majority and Focus on the Family.

Currently, about one third of American are claiming to be evangelicals. As the success of the evangelical Christian conservatives doom their Christian alternatives, it is small wonder more and more Americans are choosing to follow in our other American Religious Tradition of fleeing the zealots.

If this trend were to continue, with decidedly non-religious Americans and evangelicals sorting out the wheat from the chaff among the non-committed semi-religious Christians, one could imagine that, politically, the rabid born-again right-wing GOP cult that has so shaped America for the last 30 years could theoretically occupy as little as a third of the political spectrum by 2030. That is if the rest of America could endure another 20 years of keeping up with the Swaggarts and Haggards and Baakers and Jim Joneses.

One hopes that the now-fading Christian majority will not react the same way the White male and later Republican majorities have when challenged and then turned to shrill doctrinaire posturing. Not that Christians have ever been known for that.

Only most nights.

Monday March 2, 2009 was one of those nights. Let’s admit it: not many of us have ever doubted that the supposed “Most Trusted Name in News” was part of the propaganda machine, but the channel was easier to watch when it was the presidential ignorance channel as configured during the Bush years. With Fox’s “F & B” BS blatantly beating the war drums and even getting their scripts from Oval Office talking points, it didn’t take much for CNN to appear objective-ish in comparison.

Back in the day, it was all about Paris Hilton and her love tryst with the “Runaway Bride” and Lacey Peterson; and the way Michael Jackson and JonBenet, and whatever and ever amen, meanwhile our Constitution burned and the US went from appearing to be the great force for good in the world to a squanderer of trillions, murderer of millions and gleeful despoiler of the entire planet.

However for the last few years CNN’s sister station Headline News’ Nancy Grace has sucked up all the celebrity crime time-wasters leaving Anderson Cooper and even poor old Larry King himself to resort to at least the appearance of being actual reporters and pretending to focus on actual news. Of course even a casual survey of the rhetoric of CNN (which appears to at some point been re-initialed to stand for Conservative Nightly Nudge) leaves little doubt as to which side of the butter is breaded.

As the old phrase goes, the liberal media is only as liberal as their conservative owners allow them to be. Take CNN’s March 2nd Monday night “Welcome Back to the Weekly Dread” evening lineup for example. As somehow happens so many times in the course of so many evenings, the panelists again found themselves asking what can the GOP do to win in 2012? What are Republican strengths? How can they challenge the president? What are Obama’s weaknesses? You know, the basic non-partisan questions all Americans are always asking themselves.

That Monday, Obama’s greatest weakness, according to David Gergen anyway, was he is trying to do too much. Not doing enough, trying to do too much, not taking it seriously enough, being too serious, spending too little, spending too much, with that Obama there’s always something to blame. But that was just the appetizer.

All the attention, as it had been for the previous two nights, was on how gargantuan Rush has become lately and the ever important blow by blow from his CPAC speech, February 28th.

Two days earlier Rush’s CPAC speech was so not-news and so annoying that my teenage daughter almost actually came to the point of legitimate housecleaning when she more or less dusted the furniture as her frustration level maxed out to the point she jumped up to the TV and started trying to smack some of the silly off of the boob on the tube.

Once upon a time CNN would have led with the story of the NFL footballers lost at sea and been done with it. But that night it was Rush, the Lord of Limbaugh keeping us from looking at the real 500 pound elephant that just entered the room. He gave it his best shot anyway.

CNN probably used up all the talking heads they could round up to drive us away from the actual news of the evening, this Yahoo News item: “Obama Releases Secret Bush Anti-Terror Memos.” Those of us craving indictments had our hearts skip a beat with the immensity of this news when the little e-mail link lodged in our inboxes. Seriously, it’s beginning to smell a bit indictment.

Releasing nine legal opinions, the Justice Dept. made public thousands of Bush era emails and other documents that trace his administration’s determined assault on the American people. In a speech a few hours before the documents were released, Attorney General Eric Holder, our go-to quote from last week as well said it best: “Too often over the past decade, the fight against terrorism has been viewed as a zero-sum battle with our civil liberties.”

All the stuff we’d been dreading they’d been hiding was there all along: torture, wiretapping, extraordinary rendition, John Yoo in a supporting role as Torquemadas. Even more chilling, comes verification of that supposed urban legend: the tale that videos were made of torture sessions, excuse me, interrogation sessions, and that they now were missing. Turns out it wasn’t just a few videos of fun-loving folk getting a little too splishy-splashy in a friendly game of waterboard that got out of hand. We’re talking 92 tapes and the suggestion of possible secret deaths.

ACLU attorney Amrit Singh said, “The large number of videotapes destroyed confirms that the agency engaged in a systematic attempt to hide evidence of its illegal interrogations and to evade the court’s order.”

If that doesn’t smell like indictments to you, you better stop sniffing the paint thinner. Yet somehow, CNN failed to even mention the news of the Holder speech or the files. No, instead the viewers of the supposed most trusted name in news got to watch day three of Lord Limbaugh bloviating about Obama’s “bastardization of the Constitution.” Some great words from a man who knows more than a little bit about bastardizing the Constitution himself.

Here is some of his own handiwork from earlier in the same speech: “We believe that the Preamble to the Constitution contains an inarguable truth that we are all endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights.” And among those rights I guess is the right to act like you know what you’re talking about when you haven’t got a clue.

[Crowd murmurs “howdy” and “welcome.”]

Sure nice of you folks to have a support meeting like this here group, Fakers Unanimous. I just never knew that there were enough folks in America willing to face up to their own falseness to where we could even have such a support group. I never would have guessed this many Americans were finally ready to acknowledge our economy, our country’s sense of self, in fact our very existence has been a-swirl in a Chomsky-esque wash of necessary illusions and the truths that were always mounting behind the masks are now massing to destroy us. The threads are at last unraveling; and the emperor’s new suit has arrived worn and wrinkled, shoddy and soiled.

And we ourselves are to blame.

Yipes! I am duly impressed by the pitiless self-awareness of the members of the F.U. group; but I am not sure I am ready to join just yet. There’s all that stuff about admitting we are powerless to our weakness, acknowledging our mistakes, making amends. Twelve steps may be a little bit further than I am currently willing to walk to change the channel. I am an American after all.

I want my MTV. I want all that and a bag of chips. I want to feel wanted and safe and plush and adorned and forever young and forever oblivious and I am willing to spend like crazy to get that feeling. I want it my way or the highway.

Look, I’ve already spent all of your money and all of mine. Talk about generational theft, I’ve already spent your kid’s future and my parents’ past. Yes, like most Americans I want more than my share and want you to leave me alone about it, OK? I mean it’s a free country, isn’t it? I can believe what I want to believe. I’ve got the right to do what I want, even the right to be wrong.

So that’s why I don’t want to make the effort to fix our health care and education systems. We know both continue to slide in comparison to the rest of the civilized world. In health care you have a better chance of getting struck by lightning than of affording health care that can save your life and at least with the lightning the charges would make more sense. In education, American urban high school students rank in achievement somewhere between Romanian meth-baby dropouts and moldy sweat socks.

It’s easier to pretend it’s not broken than to try to seriously fix education, so that’s what we do. We say schools are about the joy of learning then budget-cut all the fun out of it. We say there is so much they need to know then only teach them how to pass one test. We teach our kids to glory in stupidity then wonder why they’re not bright. We create every convenience item we can imagine then wonder they’re so lazy. We make money off of the punks and twerps and criminals we sell to them as idols and then wonder how it happened we’ve raised all these punks and twerps and criminals. We teach them sluts are cool, and then wonder why abstinence-only education isn’t the only thing around here that sucks.

We also tell our children how important learning is then invent every other way for them to fill up and thus empty their time. We say we love entertainment because it relaxes our mind when in fact we know it destroys it. The visual mediums, whether TV or the Internet, are meant to limit our interests not expand them. Megabyte by megabyte we get trained to learn nothing quite so much our impatience for the next thing to the point we understand no thing as seriously as our urgency for the new.

I would Twitter you about it, but if I tried to actually discuss substantial ideas then this paragraph is too long and I haven’t even said–

Economy’s a fake, entirely. The people on top won’t stop selling us the idea that we could spend all the money in the world because they make all the money in the world peddling the idea to us like dope. Since they won’t stop selling it, we don’t stop buying it and over-spending on it, even though for years folks have been telling us we should know better. We did know, but we did not care.

Small wonder this whole hopped-up fantasy economy had to crash. Every few years a new speculative bubble built up to bursting — now our very homes. Too many houses sold, some say; but from where I stand I see too many houses foreclosed. ARMs made to strangle the homeowner, the banker’s handshake that turned into a clenched fist.

Pundits like to rag on the buyers they claim should have known better. But buying a house is the American dream. It is what we were told to do. We looked to the experts, our realtors and our banks, who told us they were out for our trust when in fact they were just after a piece of our ass. The deals seemed too good to be true, but the banks and the realtors said it would work. We wanted to believe it would work, so we did. We signed on the dotted line, just like they did; but the difference is they knew it would all have to collapse one day. They simply had already planned their way to make their pile of dough first off of our dimes. Become too big to fail, so the poor have to feed the rich.

And it wasn’t just banks. If you really want to see where to start fixing the problem, look in the mirror. Everyone knew that that same house we sat in for five years while the paint rotted did not legitimately gain 100K in value. But somebody told us it did and some other idiot offered us the crazy money for it. We knew we’d get ahead so we went along.

Everyone took a hit. It was the drug of choice. Government officials swam in seas of lobbyist lucre and bent the rules for their newfound friends. Big business and big banks bent the rules for each other. Everyone was the richer. No one was the wiser.

It wasn’t like we’d learn anything from the news. News is a fake. Once upon a time news worried about its myth of impartiality. Now no news is safe from the TV newsreader’s opinion of it. Press can purport a new doggedness claiming they regret the slack attention they paid to Bush. So they pretend to be aggressive in their examination of every potential Obama flaw on the horizon. But this isn’t a case of new dogs up to old tricks. They are mostly aping the Elephant line. After eight years of cheerleading for Bush they don’t know where else to go. So nowadays CNN starts every story with a hostility they’d never have dared with Bush. Perhaps they’ve become “fair and balanced.”

Maybe so, but I think they’re fakes. I think Holden’s right, they’re all fakes, phonies. That’s why I’m here, with all of you at F.U. because I’m a fake too. And it takes one to know one. So, so are you too.

[Crowds grumbles]

War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.

[Crowd murmurs in ascent.]

And Eric Holder is also right: we are a nation of cowards, merely faking it when it comes to race relations and many other taboo topics as well, and not in that ultra-qualified and mitigated way Holder used when he spoke commemorating Black History Month. Still right wing pundits from Rush Limbaugh to Anderson Cooper umbrage at his remarks, offering us yet another opportunity to watch rich white guys scold a black man because he doesn’t understand race relations.

But if America now attempts to claim to be a post-racial society, it is not because we no longer act based on the built-in biases 400 years of subservience cannot help but inbreed, it’s not because we no longer see in black and white. It’s because we’re all just wearing masks.

Happy Black History Month, Mr. Holder, no faking.

This year our most famous groundhog, Pennsylvania’s Punxsutawney Phil did indeed see his shadow which mean he’ll have 6 more weeks of looking over his shoulder to see whether we seriously intend to blame him for the next six weeks of messy weather we’ll have to endure whether we believe in him or not–ultimately powerless against the weather under most conditions, much like any other groundhog.

Take presidents for example, as likely a deity as an oversized rodent any day. Also as when dealing with rodentia, how can one know if they’ve selected the correct icon to worship and not wound up with a nutria in their ignorance? Like our own personal groundhog, Americans look to Obama to guide them through the stormy weather through his actions in one symbolic moment as if he had the power to change where even one raindrop fell.

To be sure Obama has a heftier hand at the tiller than most North American fur bearing mammals, but with all sectors of the population expecting Obama to solve their personal problems, with our numerous cross purposes, not everyone can get what they want.

Republicans, for example, currently want to still play by rules and with the same moves that they just lost with as if their former game still functioned. They’re once again resorting to the same copy-cat stale strategies that brought you an ersatz war hero they’d kept on a shelf for eight years and in ’08 were finally getting around to selling to you as if the contents of the war-hero box were still either fresh or new. More than anything else, McCain’s recent lame delivery of the cliché classic, “that’s typical liberal spending,” reminded everybody why we didn’t vote for him.

Stalling the nomination hearings in a fit of pathetically partisan passion, John Cornyn from Texas reached back even farther into the stereotype bin when he was caught holding Holder’s nomination up in fear Holder would seek to prosecute torture, because the Southern White Man didn’t want a Black Man to seek justice. In yet another variation on this theme, the new Aunt Jemima’s face of the newly repackaged pachyderm party is (oh all things where did they find one) a Black Man, Michael Steele, thus recreating a GOP stereotype going all the way back to Harriet Beecher Stowe.

The decrepit GOP brand is running so desperately old school these days, the Arizona branch office of this cabal of Republicans has vowed to go all the way and taken to beating up on school kids to make themselves look like heroes. Despite protests on the state capitol lawn of 2000 educators from around the state; with the help of her statehouse henchmen, newly installed Republican governor Jan Brewer has pulling 275 million out of the state education budgets and taken her first steps to tax cutting her state back into the Stone Age.

Meanwhile the Dems want us to stop listening to the GOP and begin to think of the Dems as the tax experts, but it turns out that even the best possible Dems Obama could possibly find to be his hand picked advisors — Tim Geithner and Tom Daschle — don’t even know enough about taxes to pay them.

Millionaire congressmen want to condemn socialism except for their millionaire farmer friends and their buddies in banking and they want you to pay for it with your kids. Rich CEOs want to buy their 50 million dollar jets and get drunk on bailout dough too. You know that sort of “have-their-cake-and-eat-ours-too” attitude also known as the Bush Doctrine?

And Obama, bless his heart, with some social equality coming through, wants salary caps for CEOs to be equal to his, about 400K a year and a bunch of killer perks. Once upon a time Babe Ruth could laughingly crow that he deserved a bigger paycheck than then President Herbert Hoover because Ruth had had a better year than Hoover. In 2009, Wall Street could not try the same crap with Obama, it’s just not so. Imagine that, a black man seeking social justice. Surely some Republican will figure out a way to get in the way of this in the weeks to come.

Meanwhile millions of Americans want the latest near trillion dollar stimulus package to save their butts or at least keep them in out of the cold. With the money being given to banks, they could pay off hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of loans of the people caught in the ARMs of evil. It would seem this sort of thing could be the win-win; but that’s not going to happen. The banks and credit industry don’t just want you to have your house and them to have your money; they also want to keep your interest.

It’s not about win-win, it’s about profit and growth. It’s unfortunate that the American economic system and cancer are the only organisms that pursue unlimited growth since that pursuit will inevitably lead to killing the host.

When the climate of our country has elected officials turning the sick from their hospital beds, firing your children’s teachers, feeding the rich with the bread of the poor, and muzzling justice, and then claim themselves heroes, the power of prognostication by a groundhog or a president must be limited at best. That’s a whole lot of rain on a parade.

So, which groundhog will you worship? I would rather not worship one, but looking at Obama’s uphill battle, if I had to pick, Punxsutawney Phil would be just fine. He’s only predicting six weeks more of stormy weather, which is a lot brighter picture than my forecasts for Obama.

You know, at what point did the whole spectacle of that whole thing last Tuesday get to you in that break-down-sobbing “There’s hope for this country after all” kind of mood, where you clutch to your loved ones and look around at the world with new eyes? At what stage along the way did it finally get to you–that rush of release at the personal sensation of having an immense weight lifted off of our national karma? Did that happen for you?

Got me about the third day, I clearly remember the moment.

Understand I am a professional cynic. I don’t give-in easily to the idea of trust or hope in my government. As a child of the 50s, I’ve been lied to by said government about the Kennedy assassination, the King assassination, the other Kennedy assassination, and oh yes, the Kennedy assassin at Chappaquiddick, and that’s just the Ks.

Vietnam, Cambodia, (nukes, oil, banks, sex, drugs, AND rock n roll), Russia, China, Watergate, Chile, Afghanistan, South America, Central America, the Schools of the Americas, Iran-Iraq, Iran-Contra, Star Wars, the S& L Crisis, the Gulf War, Gulf War Syndrome, New Taxes or the lack thereof, Clinton’s Women, and on and on; and all that was last century before the real pros took over. As the man says, “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” And that slave rapist was supposedly one of the good guys.

So, despite the inauguration fever all around me, I was slow to embrace the possible joys of living under an actually democratically elected well-intentioned leader as opposed to the mass murdering kleptocrat I’d been enduring. I was duly awed at the sight of a million and a half people on the National Mall. So much happiness it was contagious. And, I admittedly took pleasure as I analyzed Obama’s speech with one of my classes to search for clues of intentions and condemnations and nodded at their admiration as they stared at the screen at a black man they wanted to be like who was not limited to doing something with a ball, swilling champagne while mumbling obscene rhymes, or capping someone’s ass with a nine. It felt real good, I admit it, but still—

The liberal in me had already tapped out a long laundry list of various Obama positions to be wary about. Still, I hummed along with my wife’s recurring mangling the “Obama, Obama” song as we watched ball-watching commentators gush. And I smiled proudly at my four year old granddaughter when she squealed with delight, “That man is Obama” as she pointed at the TV screen throughout the following days.

Then that Thursday night after watching my wife continue to pour over the newly Obama-fied Whitehouse.gov website, I heard her gasp with excitement, “New executive orders!” as she leaned into the screen of her laptop with wonder.

Now, having been a frequenter of the Bush Whitehouse site while showing students how to write research papers over the last eight years and a peruser of Obama’s Change.gov site, I could not recall ever having a moment like that when I felt such joy about any page I’d ever found. So I had to give a look.

And that’s where I got hooked. It was the Jan. 21st presidential records executive order that first set my heartstrings a-twittering. After clawing my way through the boiler plate I found this nugget in section 3 (b), “The Attorney General and the Counsel to the President, in the exercise of their discretion and after appropriate review and consultation under subsection (a) of this section, may jointly determine that invocation of executive privilege is not justified.”

For the first time in eight years I saw it written in plain English that someone with the power to do so might actually tell Bush “No.” That moved me I must say; but I think it was when I opened the agenda menu and read that the first item was Civil Rights, that I first realized I was falling in love.

End racial profiling, civil unions formalized and equalized, equal sentencing for all forms of cocaine? A president who not only knows what the term LGBT means and has an entire set of policies on LGBT issues beyond something along the lines of “Well, equal rights may be OK for some of us, but the Bible says them folks is sinners.” Was this to be an America I was familiar with?

When I scanned my way to the other end of the impressively long alphabetical list and saw the word “Women,” I was genuinely curious instead of smirking as I had whenever the words “Clinton” and “Women” were juxtaposed or, groaning as I had during the Bush years when the term “women” only came up in the GOP’s policy considerations as it related to ways to overturn Roe V. Wade.

The tears finally began to well when I opened the Immigration page. It opens with a quote from Obama’s senate days that ends with the line, “Where we can bring in more foreign-born workers with the skills our economy needs, we should.” — Barack Obama, Statement on U.S. Senate Floor, May 23, 2007. Instead of Bush’s stall, this felt like a good start on an under discussed ultra urgent issue. As I read through the details of how to deal with the millions of undocumented émigrés already with us I started to balk, till I looked again at the words “Bringing People Out of the Shadows.” There was something about the humanity in those words. Maybe I didn’t agree with some of his methods, but at least now there’s hope.

And in the instant I realized I was feeling hope in America because of my president, not in spite of him, that’s when I got “got” by that inauguration feeling and that’s the moment I cried.

They were stored up bitter tears. I’ve been grieving for my country a long time. The change is going to do me good.

Noting that in the length of time it had taken for Illinois to execute 12 death row prisoners, another 13 had been able to prove their innocence, the noble statesman issued these heartfelt words as duly reported in Wikipedia: “We have now freed more people than we have put to death under our system …There is a flaw in the system, without question, and it needs to be studied.”

Of course it was all BS.

Ryan’s ass was in trouble up to his earballs and the whole thing was a sham. In an earlier election, state workers at state truck inspection stations were raising money for Ryan’ campaign by strong-arming truckers for donations, instead of inspecting for competence, they just asked for bribes. They were basically selling trucking licenses for campaign cash. It all blew up in everyone’s face when a wreck killed someone.

Ryan needed to change the subject, thus the death row pardons. It was a good thing to do, a noble act in and of itself, and, famous enough to get him nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. But it didn’t get him off the hook for selling driver’s licenses. As of this writing he’s still serving time near Terra Haute, IN.

All of which, obviously brings up embattled corrupt Illinois governor du jour, Rod Blagojevich, Roland Burris, and that funny little word “taint.” In this fast paced world of today’s punditry, a phrase with all the lurid appeal of criminality, sex, open wounds and spoiled vegetables was bound to be so overused, unto death, that in a matter of days, no, hours, Stephen Colbert could make fun of said overuse with plenty of clips to spare of supposedly serious people intoning the word “taint” as if it were a physical badge, a Scarlet A soldered onto one’s chest they saw on Roland Burris and not in their own souls.

Many people are unaware that the word “taint” also has another meaning, which doesn’t appear in most dictionaries. But for folkie midwives and natural childbirth granola crunchers familiar with the hippie birthing commune known as “The Farm” or proud owners of Ina May Gaskins’ timeless tome Spiritual Midwifery, “taint” has a different meaning entirely. “Taint” is the slang term that inch or so of skin between the anus and the vagina so well known to ejecting babies, medical personnel, including midwives, and porn aficionados worldwide.

In midwife parlance, as far as I can tell, it is the direction NOT to go when considering an episiotomy; but please do not quote me. I am not a midwife, a member of the medical personnel nor could I play one on TV.

But beyond that narrow little window on the world however, “taint” used in this way refers to a “neither/nor” situation as in “’t ain’t this one nor that one.” And such is the case with Roland Burris. As Illinoisans know, having had to endure his multiple campaigns for the last dozen years or so, Roland Burris is neither so much an anus nor a vagina. At least not in any sense beyond the average asinine behavior expected from any politician.

In fact Roland Burris actually had a respectable enough reputation long before Blagojevich came along looking for a lifeline to tie his sinking ship to. Blagojevich may be being his typical venal, conniving self. It is after all, as demonstrated, an Illinois gubernatorial tradition; but that doesn’t mean that Burris was not a good choice for US senator, not that there is some secret disease infested connection between the two men.

There is however an obvious association between Blagojevich and Burris that connects them in a way that discredits both their reputations. If a person were to look for “taint” as in the way that stain of an association colors, infects, putrefies a body, anyone associated with the Democratic party’s senate contingent is indeed at risk for sharing their reputation as sullied, tarnished, “offensive or deleterious.” The shenanigans of Harry Reid and his donkeys remind the American public that no matter what kind of statesmen we work ourselves into believing we’ve elected, what we get is petty egos playing childish games.

No matter which way it turns, anus or vagina, Blagojevich or the US Senate, Burris is going to end up contaminated by some discrediting association. A man in the middle, Burris is only now realizing he’s tainted, but it’s been going on for a long time. In all truth the negative associations Burris have to deal with today began long ago, when his own low ego and large ambition set him down the path of glad-handing jackasses and kissing babies.

Once again I have been stiffed out of my Xmas wish list. What gives?

Did you not get my list? Should I show you anew?

I know last year, I said I wished for a Democratic president and I didn’t care who it was so long as they could beat the legacy of Bush. OK, technically you’ve come through. Thanks again for the Obama puppet. No matter how much I complain, don’t think I don’t appreciate the horror show the McCain-Palin puppets would have been. You can indeed milk that particular piece of gratitude all the way till the cows come home.

But, you know, a Xmas wish list doesn’t have to be a strict guideline or anything. Remember, with my last year’s Christmas wish when I asked the Dem president, I had actually specified the “Kucinich” model? Missed a little detail there I guess.

Anyway, Dear Santa, Janus, whoever, here’s what I am after this year. Even though you didn’t get me any of this stuff for Xmas, it’s not too late. You could make it a New Year’s Resolution to try a little harder.

New Year’s is as good a holiday as Xmas to represent hope, and it lasts all year long. I know this wish list is reads a little extreme, but if you’re all out of “world peace,” I’ll settle for that cheesy sweater you keep re-gifting me.

1. Dump Israel. I know I’m going straight for the jugular of the AIPAC consortium that Obama and Emanuel are beholden to. But, just like America finally admitted it had to disassociate itself from the Suharto-like conduct of Bush to regain our international credibility, we are going to have to reject the Nazi-like behavior of our ally that occupies Palestine as if it were Birkenau if we are going to maintain a reputation for giving a shekel for the sanctity of human life. I know Revelationists and Neocons have been wet-dreaming about a confrontation like this for decades. It’s ironic how the same crowd who claim to love the sanctity of human life are always so willing to kill for it. But even Olmert admits it’s a “Pogrom” and Bush loves to defend a tough Israel, so come on Obama, you want to be thought of in that group? Take a clue.

2. Somebody clue those kiddies high on the last 8 years of Jesus Juice to learn some Christian-like humility because here in America, the supposed land of religious freedom, the big JC is no longer in charge. Desperate ditto heads are now turning the flames up on the old fire and brimstone routine in the hopes of shouting down the wardrobe malfunction of the Religious Right getting caught with their pants down backing the wrong guys in the last election.

To make matters worse for the theocrats, just a couple of days after the Solstice, New York Times Charles Blow’s “Heaven for the Godless” revealed that the vast majority of Americans are ready not only to equally respect non-Christian belief systems, but even essentially godless ones. As far as most Americans are concerned, being a good person is now more important than which god you have to bow through to get there.

3. Hey Santa, despite the Illinois government officials concerted best efforts, I know you have plenty of these items left over, so I say “indictments all around.” Just on the charge of treason we could fill a whole GEO Group regional operation. Sure, I’m talking the Bush in-crowd, the Bush out-crowd, and Pelosi and her co-conspirators who reduced Congress to ditherers and the propagandists who put that crap in our face 24/7 while the Bush crimes against humanity continued. But why stop there?

Before it spreads any farther we have to address the criminality of the whole Bail-out Bubble and the bubble-makers in general. And, not just the folks who dismantled Glass-Steagall, but the many who have profited knowing the plunders they were committing: all the big Greenspans and Paulsons and especially all the little Bernie Madoffs in banking and real estate in general, who knowingly made their money out of air and then expect real people to pay the real bills.

And while we’re at it, let’s include businesses who’ve denied their workers healthcare or outsourced their workers’ incomes while selling their products wrapped in Red-White-Blue. And not just the car companies execs who have willingly screwed not just America’s, but whole world’s economy and environment. For sure we need to roll in the oil execs who colluded with them against our country’s best interests. Bare minimum, only give bailout money to companies that replace their executives.

4. Fire anyone who has gotten their job by saying they want to reform education, for just like Reagan they aim to fix what ails government by starving it to death. The same people who have been in charge since the days when the 3Rs of education meant “Reading, ’Ritin’, and Repetition” are the same people who have risen to their power by promising “Reform.” Education has been in the process of reform for the last 40 years and gotten worse every year. It wouldn’t stay broke if you didn’t keep fixing it. Like George Washington and James Garfield the doctors in charge are killing the patient. Education will not be reformed until those in power actually address the needs of teachers and students and not the needs of each other.

But hey, times like these I hate to create unemployment, so let all educational administrators be rehired as janitors in the schools they’ve destroyed through inadequate funding and excess legislation. It’s going to take a lot of new staff to clean up the mess they’ve made. In fact, talking about firing people, downsize all the people (politicians, commentators and bean counters alike) who have been talking to you about saving taxes by cutting services. Government services are not supposed to be about saving our tax money, they are supposed to be about spending. It’s an old truism, but it certainly applies in this time of a changing of the guard: if the government can print funny money to buy wars and bailout businesses, then there is no excuse to not spend much, much more on the services our governments claim to be providing.

5. Let’s get some saucy goose for all those saucy ganders who voted in anti-gay legislation across the country. Allow civil unions for LGBT and demote all straight marriages to the same, thus equal, civil status. Separate religion from state … as it says somewhere.

6. Install an automatic “no confidence vote” mechanism in the presidential approval rating polls, you know, like a democracy would have? It should kick in automatically when Obama fails to act on his numerous dormant campaign promises to liberals, like corporate and plutocratic tax adjustments, or some truth and reconciliation for the crimes of the scoundrels of the last eight years.

7. How to pay for it? Simple. Raise Taxes. In specific, raise the tax on a certain vegetable both homegrown and domestic and by regulating the citizen spending on this certain vegetable through taxation, we can reduce government spending on incarceration of our fellow Americans.

8. And, Cut foreign aid spending. Americans recently were in an uproar over our government’s choice to tolerate the Pentagon’s efforts to introduce a military presence in the homeland to police us from ourselves. In response we were told having an army trained to attack our own citizens was good for us. Reduced to this—policing a democratic people with an armed military—is clearly not good, and basically wrong. And if it is wrong to do it to our own citizenry, then we shouldn’t be forcing our military on the citizens in others countries occupied by our thousand or so military bases and installations. Don’t merely imagine the savings, imagine the redirected spending. For the truth of the matter is the best way to aid our friends in foreign countries is to stop spending so much money on threatening them with our military.

I know it’s just a Xmas wish list, but it would make a great set of New Year’s Resolutions. What do you think, Mr. Santa? If not, please still send the cheesy sweater. I can give it to the next homeless guy I see. Happy Season of Hope,

–signed me.

While there has been quite a bit of speculation as to which holiday hits fist dap the top of the charts with the First Family-elect, there is building evidence that current White House occupants intend to bah-humbug the whole season. After all, Bush isn’t expecting much from Santa this year (there’s that whole “naughty or nice” thing), but at least a member of the Iraqi press made him a present of a nice pair of shoes.

Meanwhile the rest of the regrouping Republicans are gathering around the yule log of American Democracy as their Teutonic forebears once did, trying to reignite it with these festive lines:

Auto Industry, Au-to Industry
How fast we see you fading
You wanna pass for wasting all that gas
What made you keep on waiting?
Global war-ming’s
Way past proof
Gore inconven-i-enced us with that truth
Ignore rich whores
Who run the show
Fox News’ll still
Blame the workers though
Auto Industry, Auto Industry
We used to say buy USA
Till you pissed all that goodwill away
Auto Industry, Auto Industry
Ya make hybrid Hondas looks better everyday

As for Obama, however, the consensus seems to be that his choice for holiday hit is a tie between the holiday chestnut “It’s Beginning to Look A Lot like Clinton ” or that old evergreen “Chicago Pols Are Coming to Town.”

While the Dem mainstream seems to prefer the old-time rhymes of the former –

It’s beginning to look a lot like Clinton
In every cabinet post
Got Richardson back again
And that Summers that won’t end
And Geithner to keep the economy burnt as toast

– as for that song and dance, I just have to sing right back:

On the twenty- seventh day of the Transition Obama sent to me
A woman I’d rejected in the name of Hil-lar-y

The case for or against “Chicago Pols Are Coming To Town” is a bit more complicated, like trying to explain anyway Obama’s not-very-lifelike denial of a connection with the Illinois governor’s attempt to market Obama’s vacant senate on EBay as if it were used tinsel. Appointing the head of Chicago public schools, Arne Duncan, Secretary of the Dept. of Education is like appointing Mrs. O’Leary’s cow chief fire safety inspector. Bush did the same thing with Rod Paige, from the soon-to-be discredited Houston school district and look what that brought us: 7 years of “No Child Left with Mind.” Oh come on, with fellow Chicago pol, Rahm Emmanuel already ransomed and captive to Israel, one wonders whose silver bells Obama will be answering to?

Chicago politicians have long held a reputation for jingling all the way to the bank. It is no coincidence that Chicago ’s city hall was once the inspiration for the perennial season favorite “God Arrest You, City Councilmen.” As David Moberg writes in his article “State of Disgrace” for The New Republic: “Since 1971, according to University of Chicago political scientist Dick Simpson, at least 1,000 state and local politicians or businessmen have been convicted of political corruption charges, including 30 Chicago aldermen, as have two of the last four governors (with Blagojevich poised to make it three out of five).”

Speaking of which, one thing’s for sure, despite his Windy City roots, Obama won’t be caught dead humming along to any tune involving a certain governor currently roasting over an open fire. Right now he is a lot more likely to be favoring “All I want for Xmas is to knock out Blagojevich’s two front teeth” over the more traditional “Gov. Blagojevich Song.”

Blagojevich arrives just in time as an almost too perfect spoiler, plopping into this auspicious news cycle to remind Americans of the long established Democratic reputation as cheats and scammers. It is a tradition that goes back to the party’s roots in Andrew Jackson. Blagojevich may be dreaming of a black and white prison jumpsuit colored Christmas, meanwhile Obama must grit his teeth at the strains of his very first and sure to be least favorite gift this season: a brand new scandal:

Gov. Blagojevich looked down
On a prized seat in the Senate
While Chicago pols bumbled all about
Like cops choreographed by Mack Sennett.
Asking for a cool one mil
and a cushy job for his honey
who knows how far this mess might spread
if Fitzgerald chases the money?

At night, the stars trail down out of the mountains to crawl across Golden Valley below. It’s quite a sight, endless. These days 68 flows through here day and night. It is the alternative route for points East to Vegas and the only one for trucks and heavy vehicles, a detour around the Hoover Dam, every since the terrorists won back in ’01.

I see my share of traffic up close as well.

I drive that pass to work and often watch the trucks along the way, noting the armored vehicles being hauled west. I spot them more often than I’d like. Flat bed trailers, not always military rigs towing them, weaponry lunging like roped animals with each highway jostle, cannons strapped to the deck tugging at their tether. Machine gun barrels ropes in place, windows taped over. Bradleys, Humvees, tanks, at least a tank a month that I see, driven through this route, west. Where do they go, you can’t help but wonder.

This week, 9/22/08 , I hope I didn’t get an answer. But it appears this election round’s October Surprise may be a little livelier than I’d been expecting. It looks like the Bush Admin Homeland Security is preparing for the next front in the War on Terror right here at home: terrorizing Americans so we’ll shut up about Bush. Army Times reported it, Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman echoed it, and now everyone’s message board from Ron Paul to Nine Inch Nails is buzzing with the fact that a unit from our forces in Iraq, the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team, is being deployed to . . . the US.

That’s right, the enemy is now us.

Somebody page Alex Jones and let him know his padded cell at the Denver Detention Center is ready. If there really are Bilderbergs, this looks like an EndGame. The article goes on to say that the unit is being prepared if “called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control. The soldiers are learning to use so-called non-lethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals and crowds.”

Flaunting the once sacrosanct Posse Comitatus Act prohibiting the use of US soldiers against US citizens, the move is the first time an actual active army force has been designated to military group known as the US Army North. That’s right from the Northern Command, every conspiracy theorist’s worst nightmare, the same folk who bring you the martial law drills every year. They would also be the same ones back about seven years ago who created those hijack plane drills that happened to take place on the exact same day real planes were crashed into the Twin Towers — the ominous mystery men in films like Dylan Avery’s Loose Change and Zeitgeist.

Perhaps the soldiers are in actuality preparing for something that will never take place and we leftwing discredited are panicking over nothing. The government is just being prepared, providing for a common defense. Hey, there will probably be a peaceful transfer of power come January and no one will object in the slightest to any of Bush’s actions between now and then and any election results between now and then. Maybe I’m just nuts. OK, nuts and wrong.

But maybe Bushco is scared. The house of greed Repub policies have put in place have opened the door for the greatest economic disaster/swindle in history, a national economic disaster to the tune of $700 billion, even topping Brother Neil Bush and company’s half a trillion S&L scandal in the 80s. First Bush gives social program money to war profiteers with a phony war he knows is unwinnable while neglecting the war in Afghanistan and the misery we still manage to create there and now, giving what’s left to Wall Street, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and AIG for screwing up by being too greedy.

And the millions of mortgages that have been held by those companies, will now be owned by your favorite uncle, Big Brother Bush. No need for elections when this kind of class warfare turns to shooting warfare. Call in the army and open the cages. This could make Hoover ’s Bonus Army debacle look like an Easter Egg roll.

Now I know where all those tanks and trucks and weapons of mass destruction are headed: home to roost.