Saturday, October 24, 2009

Just take it like a man

If there's one issue that shows most clearly how completely twisted the American value system is, that issue would probably be homosexuality. Well, OK, homosexuality and race relations. Oh, and the weird fixation on pro football.

(OK, the pro football thing ties in with homosexuality. I mean, really: sweaty guys in tight pants running up and down a field? It doesn't take Sigmund Freud. And then they put on weird padding to look even more buff, and start hugging each other if they do something right, and start prancing around the end zone like a Rockette tweaking on crystal meth. And when it's all over, they go and take showers together. Any random NFL player probably handles more pipe than Joe the Plumber ever did.)

(Speaking of Joe the Plumber - a body-obsessed, head-shaving drama queen fixated on ensuring that he's the center of attention? Was he trying out for the Village People too? This guy's so far into the closet he's probably found those red strappy pumps that look so good with that sequined off-the-shoulder number he got for that trip to Fire Island...)

The wide availability of home video has had an impact on society (wow - was that a non sequiter or what? I think I'm suffering from whiplash...): the Rodney King affair highlighted the problem of police brutality in the LAPD, but also was the direct cause of the 1992 Los Angeles riots where more than 50 people lost their lives. And remember Derrion Albert getting beaten up last month? Suddenly, everybody got concerned over the violence in our schools.

Of course, the flipside to that is that when some white kid gets pounded on by a couple of black bullies up on a bus, cowardly drugged-out sacks of vomit like Rush Limbaugh tried to insist that, because we had a black president, the beating was Obama's fault.

But you have to forgive Rush - logic doesn't really apply to a man who calls for harsher penalties on drug abusers when he's popping oxycontin like Tic-tacs.

(The humor, of course, is found in the fact that it had already been shown that the attack wasn't racially motivated. But why pay attention to "facts"? In Rush's tiny little pilonoidal cyst of a brain, this whole incident was obviously a resurgence of the Mau Mau rebellion.)

However, the videotaped assault on Jack Price, a gay man from Queens, has one possible upside (aside from the fact that, with their faces and names prominently in the local media, the two wads of fuck who attacked him - Daniel Aleman and Daniel Rodriguez - will be spending the next several years getting traded for cigarettes throughout the New York penal system).

This particular assault is evidence that homosexuality is still a boil on the backside of America, and even in the opening decade of the 21st century, we haven't found the right way to lance it.

There is no reason that any American should be discriminated against due to their sexual orientation. This seems like a simple rule, but for some reason, it still causes controversy. The most commonly given reason for homophobia is religion, and most of that is due to misreadings, mistranslations and selective misuse of bible verses. Of course, even when you make an effort to show them why they're wrong, you're not going to change their tiny little minds.

Once in a while, you'll find somebody trying to claim that homosexuality is "unnatural." This, of course, ignores the wide range of homosexual behavior on view in the wild. ("A homosexual species would wipe itself out in one generation!" Well, there's still bonobos around, right? And trust me, they'll fuck anything.)

And with the rest of these losers, they gain their homophobia the old-fashioned way: they were raised to hate gays, much in the way that many people in the South have been raised to hate blacks, Jews, Yankees, and generally anybody who isn't a close relative (of course, with the inbreeding, that's a fairly large pool of people, at least in their neighborhood); these are people who hate gays because they're savage, knuckle-dragging homophobic subhumans who should be hauled out into the alley and beaten with 13-inch dildos until they bleed out their ears.

One of the weirdest quirks of the gay-haters is the fact that they can't seem to stop themselves from conflating consenting sexual practices between two adults, with forced intercourse with a non-consenting partner: bestiality (where Rick Santorum famously prefers german shepherds, John Cornyn apparently gets all hot and sweaty thinking about box turtles), pedophilia, necrophilia. Your average right-wing hater refuses to see a difference (probably because they tend to have suffered brain damage due to the genetic incompatibility of closely-related parents).

And when this rampant homophobia gets to attach itself to the already-present hatred of our first black president, you get a steaming cauldron of odiferous stupidity, just waiting for a chance to pour out all over everybody. For example, in the outcry over Obama hiring an openly homosexual man as head of the Education Department's Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools, people like Rep Steve King continues to try to link Jennings to NAMBLA, even though this claim has been so thoroughly debunked that even Fox "News" was forced to admit it. (And you know that had to cause Rupert Murdoch's bowels to clench up like a vise.)

The more recent news that Obama is revisiting "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" is causing conservative brains to explode like a Palestinian at the Wailing Wall. And the GOP survivors are really hating the fact that they're going to have to keep that homo-rage bottled up - the new hate crimes bill is about to become law.

Trust me, folks, homosexuality is normal. Some people are into it, and some people aren't. You can try to suppress it, but it will still be around; and the harder you try, the more it will burst out in unexpected places (you know, like in airport bathrooms).

Thursday, October 22, 2009

Another day, another death threat

Hmmm...

Airport guard accused of threatening Obama

NEWARK, N.J., Oct. 22 (UPI) -- A 55-year-old private security guard at a New Jersey airport was arrested for allegedly threatening to shoot U.S. President Barack Obama, officials said.

The New York Post said Thursday John Brek, a security guard at Newark Liberty International Airport, is accused of telling an airport employee he was planning on shooting Obama when the president arrived at the New Jersey airport this week.

Unidentified law enforcement sources said Brek was arrested on Tuesday, one day before Obama arrived at Newark Airport. The president was visiting New Jersey to help campaign for Gov. Jon Corzine.
So, just another murderous right-winger (at least this one doesn't seem like a racist murderous right-winger, but the full investigation isn't in yet).

But, of course, the unhinged right immediately lose their fucking minds: "Demand the death of Bush? You’re safe. Threaten Obama? YOU ARE GOING TO JAIL!... THIS IS CALLED A POLICE STATE BTW" (Vincent dePaul likes his caps lock key - it makes him feel all loud and shouty).

Funny how the Obama-haters have a seriously selective memory, isn't it?

Richard Humphrey went off his medication and made some comment in a bar about a burning bush and was arrested and convicted of threatening the president. Lawrence Ward of Bainbridge, NY, was the subject of a nationwide manhunt after threats he made. And Wilbur Leroy Brown was arrested for a letter threatening the President.

People have been investigated and arrested for threatening the president since the Secret Service started (usually, like in Brek's case, they're arrested by local authorities, though). The difference is that the threat has to be considered credible - the message board entries that Vincent dePaul uses as "proof" obviously weren't (assuming that the Secret Service even saw them - the internet is a big place, and the Bush White House didn't like all this science stuff that much...) See, now this guy, on the other hand, was considered a valid threat.

Of course, not all the threats were valid under Bush. Dan Tilli was questioned for a letter to the editor of his local newspaper, where he mentioned the death of Saddam Hussein and ended with "I still believe they hanged the wrong man." The Secret Service questioned Jesse Ethredge for writing that Bush was a "two-faced murderer" on the back window of his pickup.

Hell, with Dick Cheney, all you had to do was calmly say to him "I think your policies in Iraq are reprehensible," and the Secret Service would have you arrested.

And yesterday in New Jersey, we had a brain-damaged guy with a cubic buttload of firearms, who said to a guy in line for coffee that he had already cut holes in a fence in order to shoot Obama. Yeah, I think the Secret Service should probably take a look at him.

And Mr dePaul should probably try getting his facts straight.
________

Update (10/23/09): Well, we had our little exchange of views, and we have established one thing. VdP is a dishonest wad of fuck. Rather than the usual failure to post dissenting opinions so prevalent in the right-hand side of the blogosphere, he prefers to change them. Many of those words you'll see at his post are mine. The last 2 paragraphs are not.

For the record, what I actually wrote was:
Huh. Well, look at that. You found a couple of sites where Bush' life was threatened. Aren't you something?

Now, just off the top of my head, I'll say that, first, you have no idea whether those people were actually approached by the Secret Service, now, do you? And, even if they weren't, you probably don't have a clue whether their little threats were considered "credible." That's just a theory of mine. Tell me if I'm right...

Oh, yeah. You don't "argue economics with emotional junkies and I don't argue politics with short-sighted moralists." Because you don't have an answer.

Or because you're a cock.
Which was, I admit, a little dickish. But at least it was honest. Whereas our boy with the saint's name... well, as the Rude Pundit likes to put it, if there's one thing we know about motherfuckers, it's that they fuck their mothers.

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Music Feeds the Muse: When Two Worlds Collide

reprinted from Mildly Creative
I‘ve always found it sad when people say things like, "I only read the classics," or "I only read mysteries."

What a shame.

Every classic entered the world as just another book, and every story contains its own elements of mystery. It’s perfectly fine to have your favorite genre, but being so exclusive is like reading with blinders on, and you’ll miss a lot of great stuff along the way.

But I don’t think I’ve ever encountered this kind of snobbery as often as I do when I hear people talk about music. Music is a powerful and emotional art form that people identify with, sometimes so much that they latch onto a genre and won’t listen to anything else.

They talk about what they’re into.

“I’m into two kinds of music,” some say, “Country and Western.” Others will have nothing to do with “either”. I hear it all the time. I’m into Southern Rock. I’m into Opera. I’m into Death Metal. And they scoff at anything outside their CD collection.

A Joyous Collision

But music, like all art, grows and evolves through the joyous collision of different worlds.

A musical style like jazz has its roots in earlier forms developed around the world in Europe and Africa and America, and continues to be influenced by everything it can get its hands on. To me, to love music, to love anything really, is to love it enough to let it expand and evolve.

And that’s why I particularly love the following video, a recording of two icons from different musical backgrounds, Luciano Pavarotti, the world famous opera singer, and James Brown, the godfather of soul, allowing their two worlds to collide.

Saturday, October 10, 2009

Where the wind comes sweepin' down the plain

It appears that Oklahoma doesn't believe that South Carolina should take the top spot in my heart. So they decided to pass the stupidest, most partisan piece of legislature that they could come up with.

What they've decided to do is to pass a law stating that any woman getting an abortion in Oklahoma will have her personal information posted on line. (The earliest reports were that this website was going to be named ShameOnYouWhore.com - that name has since been abandoned.) The Center for Reproductive Rights has already mounted the first legal challenge.

This law will go into effect on the first of November - ironically, on the same date as the founding of the first medical school for women in America.

Now, the people of Oklahoma have proven themselves to either be idiots or inhuman already; they've reelected business spokesweasel James Inhofe to one branch of Congress or another in every election since 1987.

This is a man who supports the torture of prisoners: he was only one of nine Senators to vote against the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, and when talking about prisoner abuse at Guantanamo, he famously said that he was "more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment."

He is, of course, opposed to the concept of climate change, and likes to refer to environmentalists as the Gestapo (because the GOP is almost entirely devoid of imagination, and so they have to refer to anybody who disagrees with them as Nazis - they can't help themselves). He also seems to believe that global warming is a conspiracy started by the Weather Channel to gain viewers. (After all, they're such a powerful force in the media...)

Fascinatingly enough, Inhofe is on record saying that the EPA should just be an outlet for the president's environmental beliefs:
It is my view that, regardless of Administration, the President acting through the entire executive branch is fully entitled to express his policy judgments to the EPA Administrator, and to expect his subordinate to carry out the judgment of what the law requires and permits. It can be argued that the "unitary Executive concept" promotes more effective rulemaking by bringing a broader perspective to bear on important regulatory decisions...

Therefore, I consider this debate over censorship within the Administration to be a nonissue.
Unless, of course, that president happens to be a Democrat, in which case the EPA's "process of determining endangerment appears to be marred by bias and, to some extent, political manipulation." (To be fair, it is always possible that the Senator is more upset about the President of the United States being black than he is about Obama's political leanings - it's hard to tell with Inhofe.)

This is the man who's been the face of Oklahoma politics for the past 30 years.

This latest assault on a woman's right to privacy, coming just two months after a state court struck down their last attempt to limit abortions, will cost $281,285 to put into place, and $256,285 each subsequent year, plus, of course, the cost of enforcing of the law. Certainly an excellent use of Oklahoma's money in a recession.

Among other information that will be posted on the internet, the first eight questions that are required by Oklahoma law to be disclosed are:
1. The date of the abortion
2. The county in which the abortion was performed
3. The age of the mother
4. Her marital status (married, divorced, separated, widowed, or never married)
5. The race of mother
6. How much education she's had ("specify highest year completed")
7. The state or "foreign country of residence" of the mother
8. The total number of previous pregnancies (including live births, miscarriages and other abortions)
Now, the average city or town in Oklahoma has less than 4,500 victims residents. However, a quarter of the population of Oklahoma (838 thousand people out of 3.5 million Oakies) live in rural areas or unincorporated communities which usually have a population of a hundred or less. So this law doesn't make it particularly difficult to narrow down the whore in question, does it?

On the other hand, maybe this law is just another type of economic stimulus program. After all, the first time a woman gets identified because of the information on the website, she'll be able to sue the state for millions of dollars in damages.

Then again, it's a strange use of state funds, because if she's smart, she'll use the money to move the hell out of Oklahoma.

Why Obama deserved the Nobel Peace Prize

by Joan Walsh (Salon.com)
I was as stunned as anyone when I heard President Obama had been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize Friday morning. Of course it felt oddly premature. It's enough to send Obama lovers and haters back to the jokes about his being the Messiah; so much seems to come easy to the man. Sometimes Obama makes me think of the old saying: "To whom much is given, much is...given." Yeah, he turns that old proverb on its head.

A few hours of reflection, and reading what the committee said about the award, and I could see its point and purpose. In recent years the Nobel Peace Prize has more often honored promise and encouraged progress than it marked concrete, permanent achievements in the realm of world peace. So the prize went to President Carter's ultimately unsuccessful 1978 Middle East peace drive; and to the same still uncompleted effort by Yassir Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin in 1994. In 1991, Aung San Suu Kyi won the prize in her jail cell, but the point was to support democracy in Burma (and 18 years later, she is still under house arrest).Thinking about the Northern Ireland Catholic and Protestant "Peace Mothers" who won the award in 1976, years before real peace accords, I suddenly saw Obama's win as strangely humble, and personal: One man trying to reverse the bloody tide of recent American history.

Obama's prize is a measure of how far the Bush administration pushed the United States, and the world, away from peace. So far that Obama's small but fervent efforts in the opposite direction -- new diplomacy on Israel, Palestine, Iran, Russia and North Korea; slow but steady withdrawal from Iraq and now a painful reappraisal of the increasingly bloody war in Afghanistan; a pledge to eliminate nuclear weapons; new initiatives to the Muslim world -- could win him this prize. But let's take that measure. Let's take in what that said about the way our country had become a source of aggression, belligerence and hostility, and never peace, in the last eight years. And in the midst of all of our partisan squabbling about health care and cap and trade and everything else -- and even as we acknowledge disappointment with Obama on state secrets, torture, Iraq and Afghanistan -- this should be a moment to reflect.

Of course all of Obama's encouraging moves are pledges and initiatives and discussions and promises, truly. We are right to press for more. But they are pledges and initiative and discussions and all kinds of slow but necessary efforts that weren't taking place at all for eight years under the Bush-Cheney regime. So about mid-day on Friday I abandoned my head-shaking, and instead held my head high. I was impressed by Obama's own humble speech, in which he said flatly he didn't "deserve" the award, by the standards most of us hold for this crucial prize:
"Let me be clear: I do not view it as a recognition of my own accomplishments, but rather as an affirmation of American leadership on behalf of aspirations held by people in all nations.

"To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who've been honored by this prize -- men and women who've inspired me and inspired the entire world through their courageous pursuit of peace.

"But I also know that this prize reflects the kind of world that those men and women, and all Americans, want to build -- a world that gives life to the promise of our founding documents. And I know that throughout history, the Nobel Peace Prize has not just been used to honor specific achievement; it's also been used as a means to give momentum to a set of causes. And that is why I will accept this award as a call to action -- a call for all nations to confront the common challenges of the 21st century."
The right-wing's idiocy about Obama's Nobel win is no longer even interesting. So Rush Limbaugh sides with the Taliban now. Good. Both Glenn Beck and Mark Halperin suggested Obama should decline the award; now we know where Halperin stands, that's good too. The country will move on without them. I loved what French President Nicholas Sarkozy (not always an Obama fan) said about why the U.S. president really got the Nobel Peace Prize: "The award marks America's return to the heart of the people of the world." That deserves a prize.

Sunday, October 04, 2009

Is That You, Honey?

Several years ago, my wife decided that I needed a hobby, and I ended up with a wine making kit. I did manage to pull off some decent fruit wines (never really got into the whole grape thing - no press, y'know), but percentage-wise, my efforts at the oenophilic arts have not been a complete success.

To put it another way, I've probably ruined a truckload or two of fruit trying to drink it. And there's very little that's good about 5 gallons of battery acid. (Although, come to think of it, the one attempt that really qualified being called "battery acid" would have been that attempt at orange wine, but I only made a one gallon batch of that.)

We have discovered, though, that I can make a mean mead. And as a fairly direct result of that discovery, I've got about 5 gallons of honey bubbling away in a corner of my kitchen right now.

OK, technically, only about 16 pounds of it is honey. And another one ounce is made up of yeast. In a couple of weeks, it gets racked into a secondary fermenter, and a couple of weeks after that, it gets bottled and put away for at least a year. Maybe longer. (This is a long-term hobby; there's not a lot of instant gratification going on here.)

Honey is a fascinating product. Evidence shows that humans have been cultivating it for around 10,000 years - roughly 4000 years longer than some people believe that the world has been around. So it's literally a Stone Age skill, if you still use that pop-culture, ethnocentrically-biased term, anyway. (I do, but I'm shallow.)

As Alton Brown will tell you, honey is the only food produced for us, by animals. What about milk, you ask? Well, you actually have to work to get the milk out of the cow - now, if the cows milked themselves, and stored the milk in little bladders, and then stored the bladders in giant cow-hives, it would be an equivalent situation. (Of course, then you'd have to shoo off the angry hordes of cows before you could harvest the milk, and that would probably take bulldozers and massive, pitchfork-shaped cattle prods. So overall, it's probably best that bees are small.)

Honey has been used in medicine for centuries, and for good reason. It's hygroscopic, antimicrobial, and even antioxidant. If you get a cut, you could easily smear honey on it (like they did for centuries), and the antibacterial qualities could keep it from getting infected, the hygroscopic qualities would keep the wound moist and cut down on scarring, and all you'd be left with is figuring out how to deal with all the ant bites.

If you really insist on it, you can get all mystical about the stuff. On a bookshelf in the kitchen (next to The Joy of Home Wine Making), I've got a copy of Mad About Mead. I suppose that the subtitle should have warned me - "Nectar of the Gods." It's about 150 pages long, and the first 40 are taken up with mysticism, ancient religious beliefs and questionable history. I suppose it must be useful to somebody (even if you build your own religion from scratch, you've got to get building materials from somewhere). But I was definitely not the target audience.

The second two thirds of the book contain some decent tips, although I take many of them with a grain of salt, as well. For example, I don't support the idea of the "open fermenter" method: when the mead is in its initial, most active phase (where the yeast is bubbling away like mad), the author believes that an open drum covered with a sheet is the perfect container. I don't agree - although I can laugh at the idea of pulling an angry cat wrapped in a honey-soaked sheet out of a large trash can, I'm pretty sure that the reality would be much less entertaining.

On a related note, even though he barely touches on mead-making, I strongly recommend The Joy of Home Wine Making, which was written by Terry A. Garey; he also has a website, joyofwine.net, which is an equally important resource. Mr Garey's book is the bible of wine-making (only more readable, and more useful, than the actual Bible). Everything you need to know about making alcohol from various forms of sugar is in that book.

Mead is relatively bulletproof (which is probably why I can do it without screwing up too badly). At its core, mead is really just honey, water and yeast; in fact, if you make it this way, the result used to be called a "show mead," and it was the only type eligible to be entered into competition in the UK.

There are other varieties of mead, too. For example, if you use herbs and spices to flavor it, you have "metheglin," and if you use fruit, you end up with "melomel." (Don't blame me - that's what they're called.)

Almost every culture has their own version of honey-wine. This is probably because honey often has strains of "wild" yeast in it, and will sometimes, if mixed with water, ferment itself. This isn't recommended - the yeast won't be very good at making alcohol, and might screw up the flavor to the point where you can't drink it.

The first step to making mead is to boil the water and honey, to kill off the "wild yeast" and break up the proteins. Most people also add acid (to make the yeast more comfortable), yeast nutrient (sometimes called "yeast energizer," to round out the yeast's diet a little), and tannin (to help the flavor). While it's boiling, a lot of proteins will break and rise to the surface as foam, which you skim off.

Then you pour it into a primary fermenter (in my case, an airtight jug fitted with a pressure-release valve called a "bubbler"), along with enough water and ice to make 5 gallons. (You need to reduce the temperature to around 70-75 degrees, or you kill the yeast; if it's too cold, you put it to sleep. So you have to be careful with the ice.)

And then you sit back and let the yeast do its thing.

"Its thing," if you're taking notes, is to eat sugar, belch carbon dioxide, and crap alcohol. (Yes, I could have said "excrete alcohol," but let's be real here, OK?) The yeast dies when the alcohol content is too high; this used to be around 10-13 percent, but some of the more modern wine yeast can produce around 18 percent alcohol.

You get some sludge settling at the bottom of the container as it ferments, so, as the first stage of fermentation starts to settle down, you siphon it into a secondary fermenter (most people use a big jug called a carboy), leaving the sediment (or lees) behind. You can "rack" it (which just means siphon it out, basically) a couple of times to clear more sludge; some people recommend it, some people say anything more than once is too much. I figure it's all waste, and cleaning the toilet is a good thing.

Once the bubbling is pretty much done, you bottle it and store it in a cool dark place for a while; in the case of mead, like I said, the absolute minimum is a year. I've never had it last long enough to tell you what the top end is, but I'm told that seven to ten year old meads are incredible.

(Quick disclaimer - that was less than you needed to know to make the stuff. There's all kinds of chemistry you can do - which I mostly fake - and other steps you need to know about. This was the 5-minute overview for the layman.)

On this batch, I'm experimenting on a couple of steps. First, I didn't boil it. I've been reading that boiling destroys a lot of the "nose" (smell) of the mead, and you only need to heat it to 152 degrees to kill off the wild yeasts. I admittedly went closer to 160 degrees, but I never let it boil.

Secondly, I went semi-natural. Instead of a powdered acid, I used the juice and zest (peel, with as little pith - the white stuff inside the peel - as possible) of two lemons and three oranges. And instead of powdered tannin, I brewed strong black tea and added that.

However, I did add yeast nutrient (hence, semi-natural). I could have added raisins, but that isn't the flavor I wanted. And the other top choices I found were bee pollen (didn't have any), and crushed bee larvae (umm... ick). And besides, I had yeast nutrient, so I'm pretty happy with my choices here.

This might be the first batch I've made that turns out badly. I won't know for a year. But as I write this, on day 2, it's over there popping like a tenor drum about once every three seconds. So it seems like I've done something right.

Only time will tell.

Thursday, October 01, 2009

Rep. Alan Grayson May Just Fuck Your Shit Up

reprinted from the Rude Pundit
It's too soon to tell, but there's a good chance that Representative Alan Grayson, he of the "Die Quickly" Republican health care plan, will end up fucking your shit up. Too rich to be bought off, Grayson's been fucking with the powerful for a few years now. As an attorney, he represented whistleblowers, going after the hundreds of millions of dollars in fraud committed by contractors and others in Iraq. He told CNN in April 2006, "The development fund of Iraq was looted by war profiteers and war whores." Check out the huge ass article on him in Vanity Fair from 2007 (and check out that goatee). He went after Halliburton and KBR; he fucked with Dick Cheney. You think a man whose name is a homophone with "boner" is gonna trouble him?

Look, let's be clear: Grayson of Orlando, Florida, is something of a drama queen. Defeating an incumbent Republican in a previously solidly Republican district as part of the Obama wave in 2008, he's an attack dog straight out of old school progressive politics. Here he is in January on President Obama's stimulus plan: "It shelters the homeless, and it heals the sick. It helps us to look forward to a day when we beat our swords into plowshares, our spears into pruning hooks, and when a nation does not lift up a sword against nation anymore." It's a bit over the top, like his Holocaust remark yesterday and his demand that AIG's CEO "name names" of those who received bonuses.

But sometimes those kinds of dramatics can be absolutely energizing, like the second shot of cheap tequila, as when Grayson said, "Rush Limbaugh is a has-been hypocrite loser, who craves attention. His right-wing lunacy sounds like Mikhail Gorbachev, extolling the virtues of communism. Limbaugh actually was more lucid when he was a drug addict. If America ever did 1% of what he wanted us to do, then we'd all need pain killers."

And this dude knows how to apologize to right-wingers. Pushed by Michael Steele to beg forgiveness from Limbaugh like so many Republicans did, Grayson offered, "I’m sorry Limbaugh called for harsh sentences for drug addicts while he was a drug addict. I’m also sorry that he’s bent on seeing America fail. And I’m sorry that Limbaugh is one sorry excuse for a human being."

Grayson was the member of Congress who authored the grandly symbolic bill attacking executive compensation in the financial firms now owned by all of us, also known as the "Pay for Performance Act," currently somewhere on hold in the Senate after passing the House in April. This would be back when "populist anger" was actually about people against corporations, which, of course, meant conservatives thought it was wrong. Grayson said, "You should not get rich off public money, and you should not get rich off of abject failure... This bill will show which Republicans are so much on the take from the financial services industry that they're willing to actually bless compensation that has no bearing on performance and is excessive and unreasonable. We'll find out who are the people who understand that the public's money needs to be protected, and who are the people who simply want to suck up to their patrons on Wall Street."

The bill caused Fox "news" host Neil Cavuto to lose his shit on the air with Grayson, to the point where Grayson said that Cavuto was conjuring a "paranoid fantasy" about the implications of the bill. Cavuto cursed and spat while Grayson looked like he was wondering if he was going to have to grab Cavuto's jaws to keep him from biting.

Since Grayson said that the Republican plan for health care is "Don't get sick" and "Die quickly," Grayson has become this week's punching bag for conservative wads of fuck who want to equate his words with Rep. Joe "Insert Banjo Music" Wilson's loud "Don't lie" fart during the President's health care speech. Beyond the hypocrisy of the death panel people saying someone's being too mean, it should also be pointed out that Grayson didn't just bray out of nowhere like he was getting fucked by a donkey. He was recognized and speaking in turn. Robert's Rules of Order don't say anything about whether or not a speaker can drip with savage sarcasm.

Yesterday, on The Situation Room with Wolf "Bow Down Before the Sartorial Magnificence of My Beard" Blitzer, the gathered CNN superfriends couldn't comprehend Grayson, as if anger and honesty coming from a Democrat is some unknown species of rhetoric. "They should apologize to America," Grayson said of Republicans calling for him to beg forgiveness. He may as well have said, "Suck my balls."

The best part was when designated Republican Alex "Douche 'Stache" Castellanos asked Grayson which people does the Congressman think he wants to die. Grayson went right back at him, calling Republican ideas "amorphous nonsense," and "Do you really think that tort reform is going to take care of 47 million people?" By the point that Grayson said Republicans were just using the "usual cliches," Castellanos had the look of a straight man who was just shown the cock that was going to fuck him.

It was truly something beautiful because Grayson walked into Wolf Blitzer's house, drank his whiskey, and took a giant shit on CNN's floor. The pundits from Carville to Castellanos to Borger didn't know what the fuck to do with this guy who wasn't going to play by the usual rules of suck up and pander and call for bipartisanship like other Democrats. The closest they've gotten is the occasional Barney Frank appearance, but Grayson is something different, a Democrat who not only has his own balls, but is ripping the nuts off others. "They've been dragging their feet. These -- these are foot dragging, knuckle dragging Neanderthals who think they can dictate policy to America by being stubborn. And I think it's -- the time is over. We had an election. That's it. Now we have to move ahead in just the way the president wants us to," Grayson said, and, oh, the sputtering that happened.

James Carville asked Grayson at the end if he was ready for how his life was going to change. What ought to be happening is that Democrats should be using Grayson as their point person, sending him out to take a wrecking ball to the stick houses of arguments Republicans keep constructing. Republicans have never known how to deal with it when someone fights back with the same brutality they use. Grayson just pointed out that motherfuckers fuck their mothers. It's that simple.