As Plain as the Balls in Your Face

"Ms. Stoeger, my plastic surgeon doesn't want me doing any activity where balls fly at my nose."
"Well, there goes your social life."


The Teabaggers' complaints about Obama's tax plan-- after years of taking it up the yinyang from both Bushes, giving tax cuts 'til it hurts to the richest people in America, then resenting the poor-- reminds me of Mark Twain's comment about the difference between a man and a dog.

The group hug for the bad craziness of Sarah Palin, and the ratfuck Republican co-opting of Teabagger rage, reminds us again that there are some things a rat just won't do.

I do think that the Obama administration will be complicit in its own undoing, if Obama persists in getting Wall Street's stank all over himself. It may be that the Bush-induced bailout couldn't be helped, but Obama has the college professor's knack for not knowing what goes on in the trenches between people's ears. As a public school teacher, who wrestles daily with ignorance, I've seen a lot of his manner at academic conferences, and too many times seen progressives wrest defeat from victory.

You can't scold people for ignorance if you let others educate them. The working class joins the far-right for the same reason orphaned children join gangs; no one else bothers to give a shit. Twice a week, my little country school hosts military recruiters, twice a year I get offers for a free classroom set of Ayn Rand, something Howard Zinn and his admirers never bothered to do.

There are amusing compensations. Was there ever a time when a nude model, impersonating a political figure, sounded more qualified than the political figure she was impersonating? Submitted for your approval, a reasonably safe-for-work interview (warning, some artifical cleavage involved) with "Lisa Ann":
"... This was more of a political piece, so people were asking me my political views and why I did this or that. It wasn’t as much about the sex and it wasn’t as ridiculed as I’ve seen on some mainstream television."

Did you ever have any hesitations about doing the movie?
"Honestly, I didn’t like Sara Palin. I got a chance to do something I felt strongly about. She was just so ridiculous. Such an easy target."

Compare Lisa Ann's syntax with any unscripted speech by Caribou Barbie, and tell me who gets a C and who gets a D-. I don't think we've seen such a topsy-turvy world since Nell Gwynn led the British aristocracy around by the... well, I guess we could call it a nose.

Hotsee Totsee, Another Little Nazi

"[Former Wasilla mayor] Stein says that as mayor, [Sarah]Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. 'She asked the library how she could go about banning books,' he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. 'The librarian was aghast.' The librarian, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn't be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire her for not giving 'full support' to the mayor."
(Time magazine)


And from the Anchorage Daily News:
"Back in 1996, when she first became mayor, Sarah Palin asked the city librarian if she would be all right with censoring library books should she be asked to do so.
"According to news coverage at the time, the librarian said she would definitely not be all right with it. A few months later, the librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons, got a letter from Palin telling her she was going to be fired. The censorship issue was not mentioned as a reason for the firing. The letter just said the new mayor felt Emmons didn't fully support her and had to go.
"Emmons had been city librarian for seven years and was well liked. After a wave of public support for her, Palin relented and let Emmons keep her job.... In December 1996, Emmons told her hometown newspaper, the Frontiersman, that Palin three times asked her -- starting before she was sworn in -- about possibly removing objectionable books from the library if the need arose."

The list making the rounds that claims to be Palin's hit list is a fraud; at least two of the books on the list, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire weren't published until three years after Palin approached the librarian. Like the one false note in an otherwise true story that cost Dan Rather his position, I suspect the fake list of being a bit of Republican disinformation, an attempt to discredit the larger story with quibbling.
Circulating a falsehood is already being used by people like Michelle Malkin as a way to discredit the core truth-- Palin's attempt at banning books-- just as the one forgery in CBS' National Guard story was used to absolve Bush of going AWOL. But screw that; let's see Joe Biden ask Palin why she hates John Steinbeck and Twelfth Night.

I Am John McCain Fudd, Millionaire. I Own a Mansion an a Yacht.

After weeks of Rovian distortions trying to make the adjective "elitist" stick to Barack Obama, the Obama campaign whacked McCain upside the head with simple fact: an ad describing McCain's more than 12 million dollars worth of houses and condos. More on the Italian shoes later.
And then wonderfully, John McCain couldn't remember how many houses he owns. McCain could still win this election, with the electorate getting exactly what they deserve, but today, at least, Obama's kung fu is strong.
"Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said in an interview Wednesday that he was uncertain how many houses he and his wife, Cindy, own.
"I think — I'll have my staff get to you," McCain told Politico in Las Cruces, N.M. "It's condominiums where — I'll have them get to you."
The correct answer is at least four, located in Arizona, California and Virginia, according to his staff. Newsweek estimated this summer that the couple owns at least seven properties.
And a Politico analysis later in the day found McCain's family owns at least eight properties, according to property and tax records, as well as interviews. "

Cats Rest Easy; Sheep May Safely Graze; Frist Leaves Politics

"By day, I was little Billy Frist, the boy who lived on Bowling Avenue in Nashville and had decided to become a doctor because of his gentle father and a dog named Scratchy. By night, I was Dr. William Harrison Frist, future cardiothoracic surgeon, who was not going to let a few sentiments about cute, furry little creatures stand in the way of his career. In short, I was going a little crazy."
Thus former Senate Majority Leader, presidential dreamer and HMO scion Bill Frist, explaining why he told the staff at three Boston animal shelters he wanted to adopt cats as pets, when in fact he was spending "days and nights on end in the lab, taking the hearts out of cats, dissecting each heart, suspending a strip of tiny muscle that attaches the mitral valve to the inner wall of the cat heart and recording the effects of various medicines I added to the bath surrounding the muscle."

Frist announced this week that he would not be entering the 2008 presidential race. This also fulfills a promise he made in 1994 to leave the Senate after two six year terms.
I know that animal sacrifices-- and human volunteers as well-- have saved millions of lives because of medical research. I also believe it takes a special kind of wickedness to operate on unwilling subjects, as the Axis did in World War II and as happened here in the Tuskegee experiments-- and if an animal must be used in an experiment, let it be done respectfully and NEVER on an animal that's been brought up to think of itself as a citizen. The ease with which Frist committed that kind of casual betrayal is one more reason we are well shut of him.

PERVERTS HAVE TAKEN OVER THE REPUBLICAN PARTY: Please Stop Worrying About Other Men's Penises!

I am waiting for a politician who will ask, "Who are these anti-gay marriage busybodies to be so concerned with other people's penises?" Most of us go through entire days, sometimes weeks, without thinking about other people's genitalia unless we want to have sex with them.

Let's start describing this obsession of the Republican Party, this penis fixation of Wildmon and Falwell and Dobson and crew as what it is: a fetish. Some fetishists obsess about high heel shoes, some about women's breasts (exclusively I mean), some about French maid costumes--
and Rick Santorum worries about other men's penises and what they might be doing with them RIGHT NOW and what that might be doing to America. Whatever crime, greed, cronyism, illiteracy, job loss, environmental neglect and "Growing Up Gotti" might be doing to America, it pales compared to the destructive power of same-sex marriage and genital contact between members of the same sex! (Does Santorum remind anyone else of Paul Lynde? Or Tony Nelson, with Jeannie running around the house and all he wants to do is spend time with Roger?)

In the small but diverse town where I grew up, surrounded by blue-collar heterosexualists, there was none of this perverse gay bashing. It was a truism of my boyhood, learned from my fathers and uncles and the old men in the truck stops and barber shops: heterosexual men who were secure in their own identity simply did not worry so much about homosexual men.

The few openly gay men in the community were no more eccentric than the Sunday painters or photography club. K. and E. were like eccentric uncles whose difference added to the community; their homosexuality was no more irksome than the peculiarities of the camera club or the Jaycees, and I remember hearing more complaints about the Jaycees. If small town gays gravitated to the local arts scene, theatre and architecture and interior design, that was simply because those worlds were more live and let live about their inhabitants.

Men who exhibited homosexual panic, who talked about “goddamn queers tried to rape me” and such, were sniffed at by the rest of the truck drivers as being worried for a reason. When my turn came at 19 to be propositioned by a gay man (I was young and pretty then), I politely declined with no one’s feelings or noses being hurt.

My uncle’s concern baffled me. It would have seemed silly to have someone worry about me being seduced by our local gay theatre director. It seems silly now. How could a homosexual take my penis in his mouth unless I wanted to put it there? That would have been a poor substitute for the girls and women I had crushes on, who swirled around my adolescent brain in an unattainable hareem.

In panicky times like these, we must speak calm truth to hysterics. Anne M. Gobi, a Representative of Massachusetts, says,
"I haven't talked to any married heterosexual couples that have felt threatened by same-sex marriages."

Simply put, there aren’t enough hours in the day, what will all the other things I have to worry about. When clouds of the day part, when the demands of art and commerce are met, I selfishly start worrying about my own sex life. I'm not a patriot like Rick Santorum. Indeed, I hardly ever worry about other people's sex lives, excepting them as might intersect with mine.

It is time to confront public figures who espouse this kind of hatred against gay men and lesbians. The men and women who are born with an attraction to the same or rarely, both sexes, deserve to be left alone so long as they don’t do it in the streets and frighten the horses. It is the Republican party and the so called Christian church that has been overrun by perverts.

Only three groups are so curious about unfamiliar genitals:

* Researchers and physicians, who have legitimate research questions;

* Pornographers, who entertain Americans to the hypocritical tune of $500 million to $1.8 billion dollars a year (the “$10 billion” often cited by crusaders and producers has been shown to be impossible);

* And Republican politicians and evangelical clergymen, who in a world of corruption, pain and ignorance can find nothing better to do their time.

Flaming Asshole of the Week: the Nominees

More antique Dane than Roman, I often berate myself for impulsive words that caused hurt while I was all of fourteen. When I was twenty, I so embarrassed myself in a conversation about existentialism that I went on to minor in philosophy until some of the sting went away. And the worst thing I ever said… bad enough to cut my own tongue out before I’d confess in print.

Happily, those who feel chosen to lead us through the flood have no internal editor to protect them from speaking too soon. They ignore the old saw: rather than be thought a fool, they are compelled to open their mouths and remove all doubt.

Whoever wins— and I’m sure there’s more to come! Will have to compete for Flaming Asshole of the Year against last week’s classic: "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." (C. in C. Bush on "Good Morning America," Sept. 1, 2005.) Good luck to you all!

The nominees for Flaming Asshole of the Week are:

Dennis Hastert on rebuilding New Orleans:
"It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed," the Illinois Republican said to the Daily Herald of Arlington Heights, Illinois. "We ought to take a second look at it. You know we build Los Angeles and San Francisco on top of earthquake fissures and they rebuild, too. Stubbornness. I don't know. That doesn't make sense to me." … And Los Angeles had better not come crying to me after the Big One hits.

Trent Lott to three child refugees, resting on cots:
“Now tell me the truth boys, isn’t this kind of fun?” …Yessuh, Huckleberry, it JEST like camping out. Hope you rebuild your beach house porch in time for Mr. President G.W. Bush to SIT his SILLY ass DOWN.

Rick Santorum, who saved us from dog-fucking by holding the line on gay marriage, now sees a need to punish those who didn’t get out in time:
“There may be a need to look at tougher penalties on those who decide to ride it out and understand that there are consequences to not leaving.”

Barbara Bush the Elder, visiting refugees in the Houston Astrodome:
"What I'm hearing which is sort of scary is that they all want to stay in Texas. Everybody is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway so this (chuckle) – this is working very well for them." Sept. 5, 2005, first aired on American Public Media's "Marketplace"

But the president himself may take the palm for the second week in a row, after this endorsement of FEMA director Michael Brown on September 2:
"Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."