A tale of two songs

I could probably find something to bitch about in the news, but frankly, it's been a rough couple of weeks at work, and with the coming of Spring (and unlike some parts of the country, we've been getting springlike weather here for a while), my allergies have just gone insane. Essentially, I'm exhaustipated (too tired to give a shit).

So, instead, let's talk about pop music.


I've complained about the music of Bruno Mars before. He has this habit of creating phrases that no ordinary person would ever say: "throw my hand on a blade" being a fine example. But despite him taking some license with the English language, I really like this song.

And he does take a few. He decides to use "shoulda gave you all my hours," which is not only clumsy phrasing, but not even remotely correct grammatically. The same line, phrased as "should have talked to you for hours" would have fit the rhythm, and wouldn't make English teacher wince.

He also has a habit of adding random syllables: he opens each chorus with "It all just sounds like 'ooo-oo-oo-oo-ooo'," which, if you think about it, is completely useless. What use is "it all just sounds like" in that sentence? He could drop it completely, and no portion of the message would be lost.

But those are just minor quibbles, overall. He manages to use very evocative language, and even has a nice lyrical structure: first verse establishes the loss of his relationship, second verse says that it's all his fault, the bridge says that he knows he can't apologize, and then he repeats the chorus, but saying that these are the things that her new man should do.

Technically, "bridge" is a misnomer here, since he doesn't have a third verse waiting for you on the other side, but he gets around that by reworking the chorus. (Admittedly, he also bludgeons the lyrical structure a little here: "'cause all you wanted to do was dance" becomes "'cause I remember how much you loved to dance" - dropping the word "much" would have fit a little better. But, again, quibbles.)

Even the arrangement is perfect: a complete lack of orchestration, no percussion, nothing but the piano and his voice, which captures the sense of loss and emptiness more than adding strings or a horn line could have managed.

Overall, it's a really nice little song. But there's a similar song that's come out in recent months that takes many of the same musical efforts, but somehow fails to get anything right.


Let me start off by saying that a song about a woman who can't stand to lose her man, coming from Rihanna (who got back together with Chris Brown after he almost put her in the hospital) is somewhat ironic. If by "ironic," you mean "evidence of mental incapacity." Particularly in light of the lyric "Funny you're the broken one but I'm the only one who needed saving."

You should probably thank the paramedics for that rescue, Rihanna.

But let's put real life aside for a moment. Consider the lyrics.

Not really sure how to feel about it.
Something in the way you move
Makes me feel like I can't live without you.
It takes me all the way.
I want you to stay

I suspect that the speed of George Harrison's rotation is increasing with each replay of this song.

Listen to the piano part for a while. It's almost a percussion part: repetitive and boring. Listen to it. Now, try to listen to the rest of the song without noticing the piano.

I'm going to ignore the second person in this duet. I don't know what Mikky Ekko has done before this, and I don't care enough to find out. I'll just say that he sings better than she does. But that's a pretty low bar.

So, two remarkably similar songs, but one was done right. The other... let's just say that it was a good effort.

Misguided, maybe. But at least she made the effort.

A quick thought on Steubenville, Ohio

CPAC ended yesterday with the traditional burning of the Reichstag. That has nothing to do with anything else I'm typing; I just wanted to put it out there.

Full disclosure: my father was born in Steubenville, Ohio. Despite that, there have been no suggestions that he ever raped anyone.

However, some high school football players in Ohio filmed themselves raping a woman, and, surprisingly, were convicted (as juveniles, but hey, that's more justice than we usually get); the Right Wing, continuing their outreach to women, explained that it was her fault, because she wasn't wearing a burka and staying locked in the house like a dutiful girl should. Oh, and slut slut SLUT!!!

And across the country yesterday, thousands of men celebrated Irish stereotypes, drank heavily in public, and weren't raped. And the GOP failed to see the irony in that.

Droning on and on

I usually describe myself, when it comes up, as a born-again liberal: I was one of Rush Limbaugh's original audience, back when he started out on KFBK out of Sacramento.

The Trophy Wife spent the first years of our marriage dragging me out of Neanderthal status and up to a level where I wasn't flinging poo and grunting, and I was probably almost there, when George Bush sent me to Iraq. I got back, and started noting the discrepancies: the "weapons of mass destruction," the central argument in favor of invading Iraq, not only didn't exist, but the evidence that they did was openly fabricated.

Yes, to be honest, Iraq had once had chemical weapons which they'd used on their own people. We knew that, because we sold it to them.


Saddam and his government were cooperating with the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, when Bush finally pulled out the inspectors and invaded anyway.

As I learned more and more, I reached a point in 2004 when my wife came home to find me in tears. It had finally come home to me that George Bush had made us a rogue nation, and we'd invaded another country just because we wanted something from them. Exactly as Saddam had in the first Gulf War. (Admittedly, the tears might have been helped along by the lingering remains of the weakest case of PTSD on record, but there it is.)

But overall, I'll admit publicly to being what Stephanie Miller calls a "happy-clappy liberal." I think Obama has done great things, despite a Congress full of Republicans who would rather watch the country burn than let our first black president succeed.

I like that he dismantled "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." I had a number of good friends in the military who happened to be gay, and their life was not a happy one.

I like that he managed to get health-care reform started, so that poor people don't have to die in pain. Despite what Fox "News" wants you to believe, Obama has managed to do a lot of very important things in the face of uninterrupted Republican obstruction.

I've got to say, though, that of all the policies Obama's put in place, the one I disagree with the most is the badly-targeted killing of civilians using unmanned drones. It reeks of Orwellian CIA assassinations: the actions of a corrupt dictator, killing his enemies with impunity.

I'm also a realist. I understand why it's being done. We do have enemies around the world (moreso since we burned down big chunks of the Middle East), and they would like nothing more than to score a symbolic victory by killing a good-sized group of Americans. But I also believe in these weird foreign concepts like habeas corpus, and "innocent until proven guilty."

I think that murder is a bad thing. So the whole subject leaves me a little torn.

In the end, though, I see nothing good about drone strikes. Are you aware that only one out of every fifty people killed by drones have been terrorists? Instead, we're killing wedding guests, innocent schoolchildren, people attending funerals, or even rescue workers:

Based on interviews with witnesses, victims and experts, the report accuses the CIA of "double-striking" a target, moments after the initial hit, thereby killing first responders.

I understand the popularity of the program: no US forces are in any danger of being harmed. But somewhere along the line, we seem to have lost sight of the bigger picture: we're murdering innocent people.

But Democrats don't want to say bad things about Obama, and this program is the only thing Obama does that the GOP actually supports. So nothing gets done.

Weirdly enough, American bigotry is suddenly showing itself to have a stronger moral base than the American government. As long as the deaths were just foreigners and Muslims, nobody cared. But when word got out that the US government was also killing Americans, the possible backlash might just cause the government to rethink their policy.

(The idiot end of the political spectrum, of course, feels an obligation to overreact to this, as it does to everything that the Kenyan usurper does: they're already shrieking about "Drone strikes on American soil!!"

To be honest, if it makes the US rethink its drone program, I don't mind the overreaction this time.

Honky Tonk Women

Brian Jones, the talented multi-instrumentalist, would have been 71 today. I only note that in passing, because I was six years old when he left the Stones, and I only know of him in retrospect.

There was a theory that Mick Jagger killed him; I remember hearing that one as a teenager. The police didn't agree, and it's more likely that his death was an accident. I have no reason to pass this along either, but there it is.

There's another, weirder urban myth around the Stones that I remembered for many years. I even recall believing it, and passing it along. Somewhere along the line, as a teenager, I was told (or read, or pulled out of my ass) the "fact" that the Rolling Stones song Honky Tonk Women was one of the few crossover hits that charted on both the country and rock charts. It was, as far as I was concerned, a fragment of Holy Writ, a little chunk of reality that you couldn't argue with.



It also happened to be complete crap. But why should I let that bother me?

To be honest, there was a germ of truth in there. If you took that germ, twisted it into a pretzel, inflated it to 165 psi, and looked at it in a funhouse mirror, through someone else’s glasses. While squinting.

See, if you owned a copy of the album Let It Bleed (1969), then halfway through side one (right after an old Robert Johnson song called "Love in Vain"), you had the original version of the song, called "Country Honk," with slightly different lyrics and a completely different (mostly acoustic) arrangement.

(Let It Bleed, incidentally, was the last album with Brian Jones, so it all ties together reasonably well. Of course, there’s no evidence that Jones played on this particular track, but let’s just ignore that and move on, shall we?)

The version we're all more familiar with was actually a re-recording, and had only been released on the 45 (back in those heady days of vinyl and magnetic tape, full-sized albums spun on the turntable at 33 rpm, and "singles," much smaller disks, had a higher fidelity because of the faster playback speed of 45 rpm).

It also appeared on Through the Past, Darkly (Big Hits Vol. 2), which contained a number of other familiar songs which had originally been released only as singles (including "Jumpin' Jack Flash," "Let's Spend the Night Together" and "Ruby Tuesday"). Through the Past, Darkly was also dedicated to the (by then quite dead) Brian Jones. So there you go.

Although singles have never really disappeared, they fell out of fashion in America sometime in the late eighties. Of course, now, with iTunes and other download sites, the music business is getting back to selling singles, without ever pressing a single 45 rpm disk. Which would be ironic if anybody actually cared that much.



The fiddle track, incidentally, was played by Byron Berline, one of America's preeminent fiddle players, and a member of the underrated "Flying Burrito Brothers."

A little more trivia: in 1971, Ricky Nelson played "Country Honk," to a moderately negative reception, at the Rock 'n Roll Revival concert at Madison Square Garden. He refers to that in his last hit, "Garden Party," which includes the line:

then I sang a song about a honky-tonk, and it was time to leave.

Gun in 60 Seconds

As we slowly drag some of America's less-evolved citizens toward the reality that the Second Amendment is not Holy Writ, I've noticed a number of very specific bad debating tactics that the NRA likes to use.

There's all the usual suspects: attacking the messenger ("you liberals hate guns! And the Constitution!"), the slippery slope argument ("if they ban assault weapons, next they'll ban all guns!"), and on and on.

Most of them are pretty easy to combat, if you know what you're talking about. And let's be real: if you are required to accept "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" without any limitations, then the Second Amendment isn't restricted to guns, either. Nuclear weapons are "arms," and therefore all citizens should be allowed to own them.

Since even the most conservative member of the Supreme Court says that there can, in fact, be limitations on gun ownership, maybe it's time for somebody to put a muzzle on Wayne LaPierre and let the adults talk.

But on that subject -- knowing what you're talking about -- there is one little thing that bothers me. In blogs and on talk shows, I keep hearing people making obvious, blatant mistakes that occasionally get them in trouble. So let's put a little reality into our side of the argument. Here's some little facts relevant to the gun debate that you should probably know.

Guns aren't difficult to understand, nor are they difficult to use. Literally any idiot can learn to use one, and most of them can learn to use them very well. (Here's where I want to follow up with "...for example, look at the Marines," but my son is a Marine now, and I've promised to be good.) However, just like any other hobby enthusiast, there is a certain amount of specialized knowledge involved.

To put it another way, gun nuts are like LARPers or comic book geeks: they have specific terminology, and a knowledge of trivia that is unique to their hobby, and if you get any of it wrong, they'll scream like little bitches and try to say that you don't know anything about the subject.

Trust me: having carried one for 21 years, I'm reasonably familiar with the subject, and it isn't rocket science. So here's the least you need to know.

Always be sure that you're using the right terminology. We want an "assault weapons ban," not a ban on assault rifles.

There's are important reasons for this, and most of them have to do with the legal definitions of these two terms. See, an "assault weapon" is a generic term, and can be expanded or contracted to cover a multitude of sins.

An assault rifle, on the other hand, has a very specific definition (and yes, I'm using Wikipedia here - it's the most accessible source I found, and it is at least getting this part of the debate right):

An assault rifle is a selective fire (selective between automatic, semi-automatic, and burst fire) rifle that uses an intermediate cartridge and a detachable magazine....

Assault rifles are categorized in terms of using an intermediate cartridge power that is between light machine guns firing full power cartridges, which are intended more for sustained automatic fire in a light support role, and submachine guns, which fire a lower powered pistol cartridge rather than a rifle cartridge.

Fully automatic fire refers to an ability for a rifle to fire continuously until the magazine is empty and no rounds remain; "burst-capable" fire refers to an ability of a rifle to fire a small yet fixed multiple number of rounds with but one press of the trigger; in contrast, semi-automatic refers to an ability to fire one round per press of a trigger.

I could go on about the difference between the full-auto sear (a little metal piece on the inside of the M-16 that allows it to keep firing until you run out of ammo), and the burst-fire sear (which I thought was an awesome innovation when it came out), but all you really need to know is that replacing a sear isn't difficult.

More than that, though, there are conversion kits that make it even easier. So don't let anybody try to tell you that it takes some kind of mystic metalwork to convert a civilian AR-15, which is an assault weapon, into a functional assault rifle. A couple of pliers, a small punch (I usually ended up using a small screwdriver) - there are specialized tools that make working on an M-16 easier (like a barrel wrench), but damned few of them are required.

There are other terms that drive the gun hobbyists crazy: the bullet is the metal bit that flies out of the gun. The whole thing, including the casing, the powder and everything, is a shell, a round, or a cartridge. Never call it a bullet.
For some reason, this makes them crazy (or "crazier, maybe).

Also, don't say "clip," say "magazine." This is another of those stupid pedantic things that make spittle fly across the room. A clip can feed ammo into a magazine - a magazine feeds ammo into a weapon. If you really care enough to read about it, go here - but otherwise, just avoid it.

They also can get really cranky about the word "gun" - it's a very generic term that covers everything from handguns to Howitzers. Just so you know.

(Overall, I find the whole thing funny - it's like listening to comic nerds screaming "You don't even know the relationship between the Golden Age and Silver Age Superman! Why should we listen to you about anything?" But I find a lot of things funny, even when nobody else does.)

__________

(If you want to get even farther into the argument, here's a piece I ran across in gathering links for this post. I tend to avoid DailyKos just out of habit, but the writer gets into a lot of the tactics and terminology that might come in handy for somebody.)

Jindal and Tonic

Bobby Jindal got some traction last week by telling the GOP that it was time to "stop being the stupid party." And, you know, it would be awesome if they could do that. But let's consider the source, shall we?

This is Bobby Jindal, after all. The man who claims to have exorcised a demon from his girlfriend in college. An act which apparently made him believe in an even stronger-than-average "War on Christianity," since he decided, a few years ago, that churches should be allowed to set up their own armed security forces. Because that's worked so well throughout history, like with the Inquisition, or the Crusades.

Of course, Bobby is also a big supporter of handing tax money to churches. Like giving them education funds. Even if they use biology textbooks that teach that the Loch Ness monster is real:

"Are dinosaurs alive today? Scientists are becoming more convinced of their existence. Have you heard of the 'Loch Ness Monster' in Scotland? 'Nessie' for short has been recorded on sonar from a small submarine, described by eyewitnesses, and photographed by others. Nessie appears to be a plesiosaur."

Which goes to explain, in part, why Louisiana's education system ranks third worst in the nation.

Jindal also thinks it's a good idea to drastically cut Medicaid, which doesn't make much sense when there's only one state with more people below the poverty line (per capita) than yours.

(Mississipi, if you were wondering.)

But maybe it just makes sense. When your hellhole of a state also sports the highest infant mortality rate, the fifth-highest maternal mortality rate, the fourth-worst life expectancy rate, and the fifth-highest obesity rate in the country, all that medical care is just being wasted, isn't it?

It does lead you to wonder, though: how low do you have to go before Bobby Jindal can see that the GOP is being the stupid party?

Carry his rape-baby or go to jail.

One of the reasons that the Republicans couldn't win the election in 2012 was that they were continuing to appeal only to the white male demographic.

They didn't bother worrying about hispanic vote: look at their reaction to the Dream Act. Or their "walls, razor wire and armed guards" view of immigration policy. Or the continued push toward "English-only" legislation.

They didn't give a tanned damn about the black vote: check out their full-throated support of George Zimmerman, who apparently felt threatened by the existence of skinny teenagers armed with Skittles. For that matter, note the dog-whistles (and occasional open racism) distributed through their attacks on our first black president.

And going into the home stretch of the election, the GOP seemed to double down on their "War on Women," with lawmakers talking about "legitimate rape" and trying to make it harder for a woman to get a legal medical procedure, than it is for a convicted felon to buy military-grade hardware.

Full disclosure: I am not a big fan of the term "War on Women," but I'm at a loss what else to call it. The opposite of "Women's Lib" would be "Women's Enslavement," but that's a bit hyperbolic, so I'm not going to even touch it. In fact, "War on Anything" is pretty well over-used, because they can be such a convenient shorthand. Will some linguistics major please look into this for me?

In regards to the GOP policy toward women, they have a radical portion of their party who keeps trying to turn back the clock to a mythical Fifties, where the blacks and hispanics were all happy in their low-paying jobs, and the few women in the work force (the ones who weren't staying at home baking) were available to be chased around the desk playing hard-but-not-impossible-to-get.

See, in their views, a Woman's Purpose (subtitle: "Assigned To Her By God") is to be forever in a subservient role, helping Her Man, cleaning, cooking, and procreating. If she gets a job, she's still expected to get home in time to get the kids from daycare and cook dinner. And this is pretty obvious by how they try to legislate.

Hell, at least blacks were considered three-fifths of a person. In some quarters, women are lucky to get that much appreciation today, especially in in the paycheck.

(And I'm not saying that the melanin-enhanced peoples have it much better; I'm just trying to make a rhetorical point here...)

And one of the things they want to avoid is even the possibility that a woman will have control of her own genitals.

Simple logic and actual scientific studies have shown that adequate sex education and access to contraception both decrease abortions (and we even have the actual examples of places like Denmark, where abortion is available, but almost unheard of), but we still have the insane cognitive dissonance of opposition to abortion, and contraception, matched up with support for abstinence-only education.

Which brings us to my own (adopted) state of New Mexico.

Now, I'll admit that I have little or no use for Huffington Post. There are a number of reasons for this, but I'm going to give them credit for one thing: they were the first news outlet to break this one.

A Republican lawmaker in New Mexico introduced a bill on Wednesday that would legally require victims of rape to carry their pregnancies to term in order to use the fetus as evidence for a sexual assault trial.

House Bill 206, introduced by state Rep. Cathrynn Brown (R), would charge a rape victim who ended her pregnancy with a third-degree felony for "tampering with evidence."

Now, since Huffpo broke the story, it's been picked up by other news groups, and the public outcry against this brain-meltingly obvious idiocy has made Representative Brown very sad. She's now trying to explain to everybody how she was being "misrepresented."

Rep. Cathrynn Brown, a Republican from Carlsbad, said Thursday she will revise the bill, which she said was intended to target perpetrators of rape or incest who try to cover their tracks by forcing their victims to have abortions...

Although the clause regarding intent would seem to preclude rape victims from being charged, several critics read the bill as possibly including them. Brown said she will clarify the language to remove any ambiguity.

Yeah, but while that may be the way she tried to sell it (and I'll give a tip of my hat to Ted for pointing it out to me)... well, in her defense, she's an idiot. Just how often, exactly, does a rapist drag a woman to a doctor to abort his rape-baby?

Because, yeah, the way she was selling this to her friends and supporters probably sounded just like that. The version on her own website has been undergoing daily changes since it went up, but has been warm and friendly to the poor beleaguered victim since day one. But the one that was introduced to the state legislature had some... well, let's just call them "inconsistencies" from the story Ms Brown has been trying to sell.

See, here's how it was presented:

AN ACT

RELATING TO CRIMINAL LAW; SPECIFYING PROCURING OF AN ABORTION AS TAMPERING WITH EVIDENCE IN CASES OF CRIMINAL SEXUAL PENETRATION OR INCEST.

BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF NEW MEXICO:

SECTION 1. Section 30-22-5 NMSA 1978 (being Laws 1963, Chapter 303, Section 22-5, as amended) is amended to read:

"30-22-5. TAMPERING WITH EVIDENCE.--

A. Tampering with evidence consists of destroying, changing, hiding, placing or fabricating any physical evidence with intent to prevent the apprehension, prosecution or conviction of any person or to throw suspicion of the commission of a crime upon another.

B. Tampering with evidence shall include procuring or facilitating an abortion, or compelling or coercing another to obtain an abortion, of a fetus that is the result of criminal sexual penetration or incest with the intent to destroy evidence of the crime.

C. Whoever commits tampering with evidence shall be punished as follows:

It then goes on to explain, if you're curious, what crimes will be added (or applied) to everybody involved, with no question about who it is (the rapist, the victim, or the doctor). And that's it. Short, sweet and stupid.

So, if you get raped, and then you get an abortion, you go to jail. It's a simple equation.

"Ah," but the calm, rational side of you explains, "it's right there in the bill! You have to have 'the intent to prevent the apprehension' of the rapist! Obviously, a victim isn't going to do that, right?"

Well, aside from the fact that "calm" and "rational" can rarely be applied to the anti-abortion lobby, let's consider for a minute. There's a term that needs to be applied here: "Thought crime." It's illegal to get an abortion that might tamper with evidence. Unless you can prove that you hadn't intended to tamper with evidence. You have to prove what you'd been thinking about.

"But... but... but..." your calm, rational side sputters, not yet willing to give up. "That isn't true! The state has to prove that you were planning to tamper with evidence!"

No, afraid not. The state has to prove that you did tamper with evidence, and then show that you might have still harbored feelings for the rapist. (Not hard to do, if it's, say, your dad, or some guy you haven't actively attacked with a knife...) After all, you got the abortion. They can prove that happened.

A woman still gets blamed for getting raped if she dresses "too provocatively" or goes to the wrong part of town. We tell women how to avoid getting raped; we don't tell men "don't rape."

We just assume that the natural state of man is "rapist." Since he's going to try to have sex regardless of any other factors, it's her job to avoid getting in that position.

If you then factor in the concept of "Stockholm Syndrome," please try to explain where this won't go wrong. Women already get accused of fabricating rape charges because they had sex, but then had "second thoughts" the next day.

Our society has some seriously messed-up priorities when it comes to rape.

_____________

Update (1/28/2013): So, I just corrected the formatting in the text of the bill. I tried to show it the way it was presented on the legislative website (with paragraph B underlined and the rest of it) and just managed to make it invisible. So now it's just shown as text, because some people shouldn't be allowed to use HTML.

Hillary vs. the Man-Child

I don't know if you heard, but on September 11, 2012, there was an attack on the Benghazi Consulate that killed 4 Americans. Since then, the GOP, who's always been jealous that Bush had his "My Pet Goat" day over a decade ago, has been trying to spin it into some kind of monumental failure of intelligence. They've also been trying to claim that it's evidence of the incompetence of President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton.

Let’s look at it from a clear-eyed perspective, though. It occurred at the same time as riots across the Middle East, because of the trailer for a film called Innocence of Muslims, which was seen to be blasphemous by followers of Islam.

The timing of the attacks caused some confusion, which the Republicans have been trying to exploit politically ever since.

Secretary Clinton set up an Accountability Review Board to investigate the actions of the various players, and while it pointed out some failures in the process, none of the problems were the fault of the Secretary of State.

Despite the fact that the review had already taken place, the Congressional GOP wanted to waste time holding their own hearings on the attack. Because if there’s one thing that Republicans enjoy, it’s getting to waste their time and other people’s money while getting to act like massive dicks on television. And one of the biggest dicks at the hearing was Rand Paul (whose hair looks suspiciously pubic anyway), who decided that he didn't need to ask questions, he was just going to lecture his betters for just under 2 minutes.

(You have to appreciate how, at right about the 40 second mark, Hillary realized that somebody had pressed his "bag of douche" button, and just closed her notebook, put her chin in her hand with a bored look, and just let him hump her leg until he was done.)



Couple of thoughts on that.

First of all, it isn't the job of the Secretary of State to read every cable from every one of the 285 embassies, consulates and other diplomatic facilities worldwide.

Second... well, let's put it this way.

For fiscal 2013, the GOP-controlled House proposed spending $1.934 billion for the State Department’s Worldwide Security Protection program — well below the $2.15  billion requested by the Obama administration. House Republicans cut the administration’s request for embassy security funding by $128 million in fiscal 2011 and $331 million in fiscal 2012. (Negotiations with the Democrat-controlled Senate restored about $88 million of the administration’s request.) Last year, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned that Republicans' proposed cuts to her department would be "detrimental to America’s national security" — a charge Republicans rejected.

But really, that's not the best part here. Let's consider just five short sentences from the middle of Little Randi's spew.

"I'm glad that you're accepting responsibility. I think ultimately with your leaving that you accept the culpability for the worst tragedy since 9/11. And I really mean that. Had I been president and found you did not read the cables from Benghazi and from Ambassador Stevens, I would have relieved you of your post. I think it's inexcusable."

Isn't that great? He thinks this is the worst tragedy since the original 9/11. You know, I'm curious how he came to that conclusion. Really. I am.

Is it because it was an attack on an embassy? Well, we've had seven embassies and consulates attacked since 2001.

Was it because four Americans were killed? Well, hell: we lost 4,409 military, 13 DoD civilians and 2 journalists in Iraq since we invaded in 2003; we've lost 2,047 US military personnel, 3 DoD civilians and 27 journalists (of varying nationalities) in Afghanistan since 9/11. And little Randi, who's served a big two years in the Senate, supported the war in Afghanistan and was opposed to withdrawing troops from Iraq.

And bear in mind, Junior said "worst tragedy" - we have to consider hurricanes, fires, floods, shipwrecks, car pileups, school shootings, and cases of horse-induced arson or airborne fire extinguishers.

Had I been president... I would have relieved you of your post

We should just ignore the monumental ego that it takes to cough up a joke like that, and just be thankful that Rand Paul has less chance of getting elected President than his father ever did.

Dear Josh,

As a side note, I honestly intended to send this out. Unfortunately, I found 6 Joshua Bostons in Kentucky, two of whom were in Louisville, and I don't randomly spam people just because they MIGHT be the right person. If anybody finds an actual physical (or email) address for him, please advise. (Just like in school, be sure to show your work.)

So, just after Christmas, an ex-marine named Joshua Boston posted the following open letter to Dianne Feinstein on CNN's attempt at social media, CNN iReport.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, I will not register my weapons should this bill be passed, as I do not believe it is the government's right to know what I own. Nor do I think it prudent to tell you what I own so that it may be taken from me by a group of people who enjoy armed protection yet decry me having the same a crime. You ma'am have overstepped a line that is not your domain. I am a Marine Corps Veteran of 8 years, and I will not have some woman who proclaims the evil of an inanimate object, yet carries one, tell me I may not have one.

I am not your subject. I am the man who keeps you free. I am not your servant. I am the person whom you serve. I am not your peasant. I am the flesh and blood of America. I am the man who fought for my country. I am the man who learned. I am an American. You will not tell me that I must register my semi-automatic AR-15 because of the actions of some evil man.

I will not be disarmed to suit the fear that has been established by the media and your misinformation campaign against the American public.

We, the people, deserve better than you.
Respectfully Submitted,
Joshua Boston
Cpl, United States Marine Corps
2004-2012

There. Now you have the backstory, in case you missed it.
_____________________

Mr Boston,

You don't know me, but, just like you, I was in the military. Unlike you, I did more than just two tours - I retired after 21 years. On the other hand, I only had two vacations in the Middle East, to your four. So, things even out, I guess.

I read your "open letter" on the CNN website with some interest. I get the general impression that you don't support the idea of gun control: if I'm wrong about that, please tell me.

Oh, and congratulations on learning to use Spellcheck: so many of your fellow lunatics can't manage even that much. But next letter, maybe you should see about getting somebody to help you with the punctuation. I know that's hard for a Marine (or even an ex-Marine), but we all need help sometimes.

I could argue with you on the subject of gun control - it's actually not that difficult to refute every one of the NRA's talking points. The hardest part of the debate is keeping you guys from yelling; you seem to feel that your arguments are more valid when they're louder.

Now, since then, you've become something of an internet celebrity. Your letter has gone viral. You've appeared on Fox News several times, you've been interviewed by Piers Morgan (that one seems particularly popular), and there seem to be people lighting candles and incense under your picture. You're another Internet celebrity. Enjoy it while it lasts, I guess - those 15 minutes die out pretty fast.

I'll tell you the truth, though: I'm not impressed. To be honest, other marines aren't impressed. But I'm not going to try to argue the Second Amendment with you, despite the fact that even the most extreme right-wing Supreme Court justice has said that it's not as all-encompassing as you seem to think.

I could even argue history with you. You seem to ignore the first half of the second amendment, because the full text is "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

See, back then, every town had a militia. Where we've got the National Guard, they had the local militia. And when they said "well-regulated," they meant it. They had volumes of regulations covering the behavior of the militia.

The founders had a simple reason for curbing this right: Quakers and other religious pacifists were opposed to bearing arms, and wished to be exempt from an obligation that could be made incumbent on all male citizens at the time.

When the Second Amendment is discussed today, we tend to think of those “militias” as just a bunch of ordinary guys with guns, empowering themselves to resist authority when and if necessary. Nothing could be further from the founders’ vision.

Militias were tightly controlled organizations legally defined and regulated by the individual colonies before the Revolution and, after independence, by the individual states. Militia laws ran on for pages and were some of the lengthiest pieces of legislation in the statute books. States kept track of who had guns, had the right to inspect them in private homes and could fine citizens for failing to report to a muster.

(Saul Cornell, author of "A Well-Regulated Militia: The Founding Fathers and the Origins of Gun Control in America")

Yeah, but, see, that kind of argument doesn't do much for you. Logic has left the building. The historical reasons for the Second Amendment don't matter so much as your ability to take out your automatic weapons and blow the shit out of everything in the neighborhood, does it?

I just want to point out a couple of little things you should consider, outside of the Freudian glories of firing off your boom-stick.

First off, Senator Feinstein doesn't carry her gun everywhere. She just happens to own one. That's not hypocritical: she isn't trying to ban all guns everywhere - she wants some simple, common-sense laws to be instituted. Are you aware that out of the 23 executive orders the president just signed into law (yes, they're legal and they're constitutional, despite what you'd like to believe), one of them made it legal once again for the CDC to look into gun violence?

Yes, did you know that the NRA had gotten some of their trained Congressional poodles to make it illegal to even examine one of the 15 most common causes of death in the US? That's how afraid they are of reality.

But, of course you'd see Senator Feinstein's actions in the worst possible light: after all, she's a woman, and I hate to break this to you, but you're sexist.

Yeah, I know. You'd like to deny it: either to call it a lie, or to attack the messenger (it's a pretty common tactic: "liberals always call conservatives racist," as if simply denying it makes it less true).

I mean, it's pretty obvious just from your choice of words. "I will not have some woman... tell me I may not have one," or "I am the man who keeps you free... I am the man who fought for my country. I am the man who learned."

Those are your own words. But that's just subtext, so maybe that's too subtle for you. Let's look at some of your other words. "I will not register my weapons should this bill be passed, as I do not believe it is the government's right to know what I own. Nor do I think it prudent to tell you what I own so that it may be taken from me..."

That's adorable. Paranoid, but adorable. So I suppose that your car doesn't have a license plate, right?

Let me explain what you've done with your idiotic little rant. You made this statement on a nationally-read website. You told the American public that you weren't going to comply with the law. Now, hypothetically, some members of that same public might just work for the government. And they might just file your little letter away for future consideration.

And then, later, a couple of people might just knock on your door. With pictures of you at a shooting range, firing an unlicensed weapon. Since you aren't listed as owning, say, an AR-15, that could very well be considered "probable cause." And then you get a citation: even then, the government would be unlikely to confiscate your guns - they'd just take them as evidence, and you'd end up with a fine.

Of course, if you still didn't register your weapons, then they would be perfectly within their rights not to release the weapons back into your custody. Which may seem like "confiscation" to you, but it's something that they wouldn't be able to do if you'd just complied with the law.

I'm not saying that this is a likely scenario. I'm just pointing out the obvious flaw in your logic. The most likely way that your stubborn ignorance would turn around to bite you would be if you ended up arrested on, say, drug charges, or suspicion of being a terrorist: some charge that resulted in a search warrant against you.

Licensing your guns doesn't put you on a "confiscation list," despite what you read in The Turner Diaries. It just keeps you from getting further charges filed against you when the guns turn up in your possession.

But mostly, I'd like to thank you. When people see the immediate and illogical overreaction of people like you, to the mere suggestion of guns getting at least as much regulation as a car? It highlights the insanity of certain parts of the American public. And maybe suggests to them that there are some people who probably shouldn't be allowed access to firearms. People like you, Josh.

So thanks for your efforts to get some common-sense gun laws put into place.

Bill Minnich
TSgt, United States Air Force
1983-2004

Winning the messaging wars.

Our Republican friends seem to be fond of bumper-sticker ideology. Well, let's give them simple statements, and use their own catch phrases against them.

Here's my current favorite. Feel free to spread it as far as you can.

Copy it and post it on Facebook. I'm not proud. Go crazy. Take credit for it yourself, if you want. I'd just like to see it out there.

Poor, poor Pammycakes

There are, to be honest, a number of bat-shit insane people in America today, who somehow manage to continue to walk among the normal citizenry as if they were useful, contributing members of society.

But we're talking about one specific drooling lunatic at the moment. And her name is Pamela Geller.

Ms Geller, most famous for blogging in a bikini, is a woman of many talents. She's a raving racist and a willing contributor to any conspiracy theory to come down the pike. She was an early birther, a right-wing blogger, and, two years ago, she was added to the stable of contributors to that Mecca for right-wing conspiracy theories, World Net Daily.

Experience, though, doesn't necessarily lead to wisdom, despite what many people want you to believe. I suspect that she's had full-blown syphilis for so long that she has relatively few brain cells that don't misfire on a regular basis.

As evidence, I present this little essay, entitled The end of America: Why Romney lost.

Most of us are pretty clear on why Romney lost: because Mitt Romney was roughly as electable as Vermin Supreme. But not to the rabid Republicans. To them, Obama won because he was giving out "free stuff." It's their latest idiotic catch-phrase.

It's also the thrust of Pammy's argument here: Obama won because of "free stuff," and America is now being destroyed from within. And then she pulls out some random rabbi, who has the most fascinating non sequitur ever: because Obama was elected, the Jews have to leave America.

And given Obama's relentless hostility to Israel, Pruzansky says, "this election should be a wake-up call to Jews. There is no permanent empire, nor is there is an enduring haven for Jews anywhere in the exile. The American empire began to decline in 2007, and the deterioration has been exacerbated in the last five years. This election only hastens that decline. Society is permeated with sloth, greed, envy and materialistic excess. It has lost its moorings and its moral foundations. The takers outnumber the givers, and that will only increase in years to come." His conclusion for American Jews is stark: "We have about a decade, perhaps 15 years, to leave with dignity and without stress."

See, that's another insane meme that they like to peddle: "Obama hates Israel." Because, you know, ignoring the billions Obama gives Israel in foreign aid and the fact that US-Israeli relations are at an all-time high, Obama must hate Israel! Because... because... because blacks don't like Jews, right?

(At least, not since Sammy Davis, Jr. died...)

In order to get to the conclusion that Obama hates Israel, you have to blatantly, openly ignore reality, but that's what they do best at Whirled Nut Daily. Reality and its left-wing bias have no place in their dark, fetid imaginings.

Which is when Pammycakes decides it must be time to openly break Godwin's Law.

And scarier still is the tenuous status of Jews in America. It’s hard not to draw parallels to persecuted Jews in once-friendly nations and their subsequent persecution, expulsion and slaughter. To think that Poland was once the Israel of Europe. Millions of Jews made Poland their home and had a long history there of over a thousand years. And in three short years … complete annihilation.

German Jews, meanwhile, were so very vested in the motherland they considered themselves Germans before Jews. They were war heroes for Germany in World War I.

How long do Jews have in Obama's America? How long before we can't walk down the street with a kippah or a Star of David? This is already reality for Belgium Jews, Swedish Jews and French Jews. Large portions of Norway are already Judenrein.

Judenrein - "clean of Jews." It's a Nazi term from the Holocaust.

Yes, that's right. Pammy thinks that Obama will be setting up concentration camps now. Because... because... I don't know. I'll be honest: her "logic" broke down so thoroughly that I have no idea how she got from the top of the page to the bottom. Her rambling and gibbering looks a lot like English, but you can almost see the crazed eyes and the drool pooling on her tits.

Let me see if I can help you out a little, though. That last little bit there, where she's talking about the terrible fate of Jews in Belgium, Sweden and France? Yeah, I don't know where she gets that. But that bit about "large portions of Norway are already Judenrein"? Yeah, I tracked that one down: it's from an urban legend that was going around, mostly on email, that there were only 800 Jews left in Norway, and they were preparing to leave because of anti-semitism. No less an authority than the Anti-Defamation League already smacked that one down. But hey, just because it's a lie doesn't mean we shouldn't keep it going, right?

Fortunately for Pammy, the Affordable Care Act that she hates so much will cover psychiatric counseling. Maybe now she can get the help she so desperately needs.

Facebook games

When I first got on Facebook, I played some of their games. Gave up after a while, but not before I had a buttload of "friends" who I've never met. I suppose I could go through and delete them, but I don't care enough to do that, and some of them have actually been interesting.

But the other night, I was finishing my drink before I started the dishes, and, for lack of anything else to do, thumbing through Facebook. And I came across this message.

K: Kade is complaining of hear pain and can't sleep does anyone know what I could do even if I took him to the ER Walgreens is closed

Huh. Teenaged mother, hoping for help. I took another drink, and noticed the top three comments.

A: Try olive oil with garlic. Take cotton balls and put them in his ears. The warmth will help him feel better.

K: I'll try that thank u

C: peel and cut an onion in half. place the sliced part of the onion over his ear and have him hold it there until there is relief. The onlion will draw out the toxins that are causing him pain. Works for me everytime. When ur done, look at the onion. The proof is in the rings.

I nearly swallowed an ice cube. Really? Predatory peddlers of woo? Hell, for all I know, they're all from the same town in [click] Wisconsin, apparently.

What the hell: give me a second to change into my superhero costume, and I'm...

Unfortunately, my Captain Obvious underpants were in the wash, and all I had left in the back of the closet was an old Dazzler costume from the 70s, when I... well, let's just skip it, OK? It's a long story.

I'll just have to go in as me.

Me: Oh, god. A little onion juice in the ear could make an infection worse. Same with garlic. Jesus, people, this isn't the 14th century - magic doesn't work. Homeopathy doesn't work. The ER could give him medicine that could help - it might be a cold, it might be infection.

Was that harsh? There are some who might say it was a little harsh.

The ladies, however, weren't done.

A: Garlic actually does work. But I prefer my 14th century methods as opposed to running out and getting tons of medicine before trying a home remedy.

C: excuse me? dr's even tell u to use onion capsules. This works jsut like it did in the "14th century"

Me: Yeah. Really helped with the Black Plague, didn't it?

C: sure, do u see the plague now?

Me: Yeah. I live in New Mexico. Look it up.

You know something? Some of those people may be right. Apparently, I can be a dick.

Me: Let's go over it one more time. If it says "alternative medicine," it's crap. if it works, it's called "medicine."

I'm also not above stealing jokes from Tim Minchin, either.

C: i dont see "alternative medicine" written on an onion, do you? hmmmm that why most pills and medicine contain garlic and onion.

Me: Because sympathetic magic is crap. Because an onion doesn't "suck out toxins." That's called "crap"

A: That's why there's MRSA. And tons of drug overdoes from taking medicine as prescribed. In the morning she can go to the doctor, but for tonight if this provides relief let her do it. Calm down, your jizzing all over your medical magazines.

Me: Yup. Overuse of Methicillin has led to MRSA. Meanwhile, underuse of it leads to situations you can find in third world countries. It's a fine line, but waving your wands isn't going to drive the spirits away.

Has anybody noted that I didn't mention their miserable spelling? Or the fascinating claim that onions and garlic are in most pills?

Me: Heat can help with inflammation, if that's the problem. If it's an infection, those darned antibiotics that Andrea hates can knock it out pretty quick. Aspirin has very few side effects (and comes from willow bark - oooh... natural!). Medicine helps, magic doesn't. Raised 3 healthy kids. Saw a lot of bad advice. Good luck, Ms K.

Oh, one last note The next morning, her status read as follows:

K: Well didn't want it to happen but I had to take Kade to the ER he has a bad ear infection but I won't complain it's only his third ever

See, that's the thing. You can be a dick, and still be right.

Blow me, Pink.

I really hate to be the arbiter of morality.

Anybody who's ever met me knows that I don't have any significant objections to what my grandmother used to call "strong language." Anybody who's read my stuff, or walked near me, or sat next to me in church...

A very wise man once said "sometimes, you just have to say 'what the fuck'," and I've always tried to live by those words.

That being said, Pink's latest hit bothers me just a little.



There's a difference between "some inappropriate language," and the carefully calculated insertion of cuss-words, specifically to make your song appeal to 13 year olds (when the radio-edits are specifically built in to the phrasing, that can often be a giveaway).

I'm not the biggest Pink fan, but I like her well enough. And several of her previous hits had a "bitch" here or a "damn" there, and I had no problem with that. But with this, it's like she decided that part of her popularity was due to the prurient value of her language.

(That's your new vocabulary word of the day, folks.)

I don't know anybody who says "I had a shit day." Maybe that's local slang from someplace; as an adjective, the word should be "shitty." But then she goes and conjugates it (or, you know, would have, if first-person, second-person and plural had different forms in English).

I'm not likely to clutch my pearls and swoon about this being Hollywood having an agenda and trying to destroy civilization as we know it. This isn't some Satanic influence over a singer, this is just a musician trying to make money with some carefully-inserted controversy.

But that's kind of fucked.

He's more than just an abbott - he might be the pope.

There's something about the music of Declan Patrick MacManus that I can't get out of my head.

The son of a jazz trumpeter, Ross MacManus (who performed under the stage name "Day Costello"), Declan took his manager's suggestion and formed his own stage name by combining Elvis Presley's first name with his father's stage name, and Elvis Costello was born.

His voice, which is admittedly harsh and slightly nasal, throws off a lot of people, but I have no problem with it. He has spanned the entire range of musical styles in various songs: jazz, pop, punk/New Wave, classical, country. He's mostly avoided metal, probably for a good reason.

I'll admit that I died a little inside when he worked with Burt Bacharach in the late 90s, but I might forgive him for that eventually. (And yes, I do own a copy of his album of country and western murder ballads.)

I actually started listening to him in the 80s, which remains my favorite era in his musical library. Several of his songs during this period are carefully layered, wall-of-sound style romps, layered with some of the most amazing lyrics, filled with amazing imagery and wordplay: he once self-mockingly described himself as "rock and roll's Scrabble champion," but his early lyrics are probably what attracted me to his music in the first place.

He has always been stubbornly anti-authoritarian, both politically and in his own life and career. He started with Stiff Records, which were only distributed in the UK. Protesting the fact that he could't get distributed in America, he was arrested for busking outside of a convention of CBS executives. It seemed to have worked - within months, he had a contract with CBS.

But then, on his first appearance on US television, the record executives wanted him to perform the first single that had been released off of My Aim is True, called "Less than Zero." It was a song about Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists, and Costello felt it would have no bearing on the American audience. So he famously stopped a few bars into the song and said "I'm sorry, ladies and gentlemen, there's no reason to do this song here." He then burst into "Radio Radio," which skewers the power of music executives.

(If you're interested, you can see that here - somewhere between Warner and NBC, it's a pain to find an embeddable version.)

Elvis Costello has literally worked with all of the greats in music - Paul McCartney compared their collaborations with his time with John Lennon. There are few voices in music who have moved me as much as Mr MacManus.

__________

Full disclosure - I wrote this under the influence of Imperial Bedroom, one of the two Costello albums I got for Christmas.

The place where optimism most flourishes...

The Republican party has been sinking slowly into the depths of madness for almost 40 years now.

An argument can be made that the problem began with Ronald Reagan, but if you look back at Nixon and his hatred of the "elite, East Coast liberals of the media," you can see where the Fox "News" mantra about "liberal media destroying the country" began.

(Plus, Nixon was a paranoid totalitarian who kept an enemies list and had a racist side he tried to keep hidden. He'd fit right into the new Republican Party.)

Thanks to the Supreme Court and Citizens United, the GOP had an open money-faucet flowing into the election. And despite that, the Republicans took a magnificent electoral pummeling. You would think that this might have caused Republicans to look into their souls, and perhaps reevaluate their priorities. Instead, they've decided to double down on the crazy.

You see, in the theory that "we can't afford to lose a single vote," the GOP embraced people who should be shunned by any reasonable human: conspiracy theorists, racists, and all the worst examples of the darkness and pettiness that creeps into the fringes of society. And for a number of reasons, those people have moved into the leadership of the party, and make up the public face of the GOP. Now, the entire party can be broken down into four types of people: the lunatics, the con-men, the marks, and the Old Guard.

You have the lunatics: they don't just spread the lies - they believe them, down to the depths of their souls. In essence, they're just marks or rubes, with a little more charisma and no fear of public speaking. People like Glenn Beck, Michele Bachmann, Louie Gohmert.

In days past, they might have been found on streetcorners with bullhorns, and people walking past, looking the other way. Now, they're elected to office, or given TV shows.

Then you have the known liars, who see the truth as something that needs to be to be bent to match their political agenda: Rush Limbaugh; the late, unmourned Andrew Breitbart; Karl Rove; and now, Mitt Romney. People who will lie, and then double-down on those lies, without compunction or shame.

(Please note: this is by no means an exhaustive list; not even scratching the surface. Just four of the biggies off the top of my head.)

And then you have the hapless rubes who believe them: the Teabaggers, the Fox "News" viewers; the easily-deluded fools who desperately cling to any idea that fits their preconceived world views, because it's so much easier than actually thinking.

And finally, you have the Old Guard. People like my father, who bought into the Republican line back when they had some shred of morality left to them, and haven't looked closely at the people who now make up the party. It's not clear whether they're a minority, or simply not loud enough to be heard over the din of the lunatics and criminals, but they don't seem to have any interest in being visible.

And it doesn't matter if the lies are easily debunked: the Republicans want to believe them, so little things like "facts" and "truth" get ignored for weak twistings of logic, and occasionally for simple repetition of the same lie, over and over again.

It doesn't matter how many birth certificates you release, the birthers will just keep on going.

Former Ron Paul staffer Eric Dondero has declared that he's "soured on electoral politics" and is now promoting "outright revolt." Of course, his definition of "revolt" is pretty much just to be a dick to anyone who doesn't express rage and hatred for the duly-elected President of the United States.

Starting early this morning, I am going to un-friend every single individual on Facebook who voted for Obama, or I even suspect may have Democrat leanings. I will do the same in person. All family and friends, even close family and friends, who I know to be Democrats are hereby dead to me. I vow never to speak to them again for the rest of my life, or have any communications with them. They are in short, the enemies of liberty. They deserve nothing less than hatred and utter contempt.

I strongly urge all other libertarians to do the same. Are you married to someone who voted for Obama, have a girlfriend who voted 'O'. Divorce them. Break up with them without haste. Vow not to attend family functions, Thanksgiving dinner or Christmas for example, if there will be any family members in attendance who are Democrats.

Do you work for someone who voted for Obama? Quit your job. Co-workers who voted for Obama. Simply don't talk to them in the workplace, unless your boss instructs you too for work-related only purposes. Have clients who voted Democrat? Call them up this morning and tell them to take their business elsewhere.

So, yeah. He's going to have a lot of friends.

But the right wing refuses to accept the simple fact that they were beaten by Obama fair and square. Exit polls clearly showed that Obama destroyed Romney on the issues, but what is the chant we hear from the right? "He ran a negative campaign!" Or, to put it another way:

What they won't say is that President Obama won a mandate for his vision, or that the GOP has veered too far right in its outlook.

"The president won the election. But I think it wasn't on the issues," Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad said Thursday at the annual Republican Governors Assn. conference. "He ran a heck of a good grass-roots organization and was able to basically convince enough people that they couldn't trust Gov. Romney."

Face it. The truth is, Obama didn't have to work to make Mitt Romney seem unlikable. The person doing that job was Mitt Romney.

Another theme that's being repeated over and over is "Obama cheated!" (Because, you know, hundreds of repeated attempts at voter suppression by the right don't mean anything at all! Hey, if you didn't win, it must not have been cheating!)

The head of the Republican Party in Maine, Charlie Webster claimed that blacks were bussed in to steal the election.

"In some parts of rural Maine, there were dozens, dozens of black people who came in and voted on Election Day," he said. "Everybody has a right to vote, but nobody in (these) towns knows anyone who's black. How did that happen? I don't know. We're going to find out."

"I don't know any blacks! They must not exist!"

Sorry, Charlie. There are over 17,000 blacks in Maine, and the state went for Obama by a margin of 108,000 votes. I'd say that a few white people probably voted for Obama too. Whaddya think, Charlie?

And things are only getting worse. From the woman in Phoenix, in despair because Romney lost, who ran her husband down with a car (not because he voted for Obama, but because he didn't vote at all), to the paranoid separatists building an armed compound in Idaho (where you can get a good-paying job making guns).

From the man who murdered his family, and then killed himself, because he was afraid of a second Obama term, to the porn-stached Joseph Farah, who once claimed that Obama's reelection would lead to conservatives being "hunted down like dogs," and is now saying we should boycott the U.S. military because Obama's in charge.

The right wing is insane. And they're not getting any saner.

Random thoughts on a school shooting.

Since Adam Lanza shot 27 people in a Connecticut school, I've been having a number of conversations over the last several days, primarily on Facebook and in what we laughingly call "real life." (I have yet to work up the interest in trolling right-wing blogs, though. Not sure why - perhaps the open futility of logic in this case.)

It's surprising how often I've been hearing the same tropes, too.

You know, if one of those teachers had owned a gun, none of this would have happened!
Actually, one of them owned several guns. Her son used them to kill her, and 26 other people.

And in fact, if you review the data (and this analysis is slightly flawed, but data is data), of the 17 mass shootings he analyzed, 11 were, in fact, stopped by civilians. But only in one of them was the shooter gunned down by someone carrying a weapon (one other was wounded by a civilian with a firearm, but he escaped, and later shot himself). The most common endings for these situations is a gunman shooting himself, or getting tackled by unarmed civilians; police killing the gunman actually came in third.

In fact, the most common ending for armed civilians entering the fray? Increased confusion, more collateral damage, and more wounded bystanders. So, once again, the "conventional wisdom" turns out to be completely inaccurate.

Students were killed because liberals ended prayer in school!
Or any of a thousand variations on a theme. Really, there's only one answer to statements like that.

(On a side note and something of a non sequiter, Westboro Baptist Church announced their intention to picket the funerals of the children. And within hours, the hacker group Anonymous released the contact information of many of the more public members, so you can contact them and tell them how you feel. Just thought I'd mention.)

There've been a few new tropes of late, though. I had the following exchange after tossing out a simple picture like this:

Guy: I would only point out that they should be focusing on the societal issues that causes this piece of dirt to think this was a viable option.

Me: And one of the societal issues? The easy availability of guns. How is it that every other 1st world country can handle this problem but us? Why are we down with the 3rd world countries in per capita gun deaths?

Girl: It's been said many times before: guns don't kill people, crazy idiots with guns kill people

Me: Guns don't kill people. People kill people. By throwing bullets at each other.

Still me: 27 children. Dead. I'm just saying.

Guy: Lol at your wikipedia reference. it would be a little more believable if the dates the data was cherry picked from matched and if the US didn't have three years of data to every others one year (exception being Argentina)

Still the guy: and yes 27 people killed is a horrible tragedy. Maybe we should spend some time grieving first and then discussing why it happened at a more appropriate time.

Me: Huh. Interesting theory. Ignoring your wish to get all the data from a source that doesn't exist, there have been 4 mass shootings this year alone. There have been two a year for the last 3 decades. If we followed your advice and waited until an appropriate time, it's a discussion that would never happen. So, since we obviously need it, when do you suggest? And how many people need to die before we do?

Please note the two newest tropes on display up there:

We should take care of the societal issues that cause the problems, not the problems themselves.

and

Now is not the time to talk about this. There should be time to mourn. We should wait until emotions aren't running as high.

I believe Jon Stewart pointed out the problems with that last point.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

So in the end, there are no new arguments. Just the same ones, louder.

A few thoughts on religious extremists

Anybody who meets me will slowly come to realize that I have no time for religious extremism. Adding even more stupidity to an already illogical belief system is just compounding the brain damage.

On a (potentially unrelated) side note, I like to say that I use Facebook much in the way most people use their refrigerator door: as a place to hang things I find interesting/funny/unbelievable. I think it's a better idea than sticking things to my computer with refrigerator magnets.

(This is not a non-sequiter - it just looks like one. I once worked with an older woman, and one day I caught her using a magnet to put a picture of her grandkids on her hard drive. And just to make it better, she was putting it over her air vents. She didn't appreciate my input on the subject.)

My sister, the Episcopalian priestess, gets a little cranky with my lack of respect for her chosen profession. (By the way, she really dislikes the term "priestess." Just so you know...) She even wrote me, on Facebook, to ask why I kept putting down Christianity, and no other religion. You can probably insert a little "why do you hate god?" into that, too, if you'd like. Entirely subtext, of course.

My answer included the fact that there were plenty of other people out there bashing Islam, so they don't need any help on that front.

But overall, my opinion of religion is pretty much like the somewhat-overused joke:

Religion is like a penis. It's fine to have one and it's fine to be proud of it, but please don't whip it out in public and start waving it around... and PLEASE don't try to shove it down my child's throat.

There's a thousand variations on that one, but there it is.

With all that being said, I came across the following video clip, which is worth the ten minutes out of your day that it will take to see it. It's a bit from Russell Brand's talk show, where, inexplicably, two members of the Westboro Baptist Church agreed to appear.

For any of you that are unaware, Westboro Baptist is a cult dedicated to the idea that the Prince of Peace wants them to picket funerals and sporting events holding up colorful signs saying that "God hates fags" and explaining that you're all going to hell.

There's a lot of people out there, who've spent a lot of time and venom talking about the Westboro Baptist Church, so I'll let you look them up on your own. (At this point, all you need to google is "Westboro," so it isn't like the material is difficult to find.)


So, a couple of takeaways from this.

1. Russell Brand has a talk show? I mean, admittedly it's on FX, so how many people actually see it? But still... really?

2. Nobody should be surprised about them appearing on this show. The Westboro Baptists have made a life out of putting themselves on display, so this is just a logical extension of their standard behavior.

3. The guy with the hair, Steve Drain, can at least fake having some kind of charisma. The head-shaver, Timothy Phelps, can hardly hide his disdain for this crowd of heathens. Even when he tries for a crappy joke, his hatred for everyone and everything peeks out: "Well put. Other than the accent, very well put."

3a. Really? You dislike the fact that he's British? When there's so much else to hate there?

4. That being said, Russell Brand definitely came out on top here. (There's no double entendre there. Trust me.) He was polite, kept his audience in line, and, although he was in full Tease mode, he managed to keep it friendly and avoid most of the snark. But he didn't really take it easy on them, either.

Brand: "Have you considered that the Bible, like all religious doctrine, may be allegorical and symbolic to direct us toward one holy entity of love, as opposed to a specific litiginous text to direct the behavior of human beings? The Bible wasn't literally written by a cosmic entity. It was written by people."

Drain: "It was written by the holy spirit."

Brand: "The holy spirit ain't got a pen!"

And really, that's the only way to deal with people like that. Point and laugh.

Wild Wild West

You know, it's odd. I apparently have a love/hate relationship with Rep. Allen West.

It's weird. Before this month, I would have said it was entirely hate. I mean, West is exactly the worst type of human being in America. He is a miserable, unlikable, lying sack of smegma, with the morals and integrity of a pustulent, diseased maggot. And many people think that he's just being a sore loser, refusing to accept the election results two weeks after Election Day.

But as it turns out, he's doing, for once in his life, exactly the right thing. Admittedly, for all the wrong reasons. But, like Hermann Göring saving a kitten from drowning, Allen West is doing a good thing.

See, here's the problem. For Allen West, losing the race for reelection would be evidence the the world is not falling into chaos. He has had one of the most evil, dishonest and hate-filled political careers of any political operative since Joseph McCarthy, and if anyone deserves to lose, die in ridicule and be crushed in the trash compactor of history, it would be Allen West.

He is, after all, the man who claimed, with nothing more than his own paranoid feelings as "proof," that all of the Democrats in the House of Representatives were Communists and essentially slaveowners. (Not to mention his history of torturing prisoners and endorsements by the worst figures of recent Republican history: Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and Ted Nugent, among others.)

But West has every right to ask for a recount, especially on a razor-thin margin of loss: the last recounts, late though they were, show West's campaign trailing by a margin of 0.58 percent; any spread of less than 0.50 percent would have triggered an automatic recount. That's pretty damned close, though - well within the margin of error.

And here's the thing: we just finished a campaign season full of voter suppression by the GOP, and outright fraud, incompetence and election theft for the last decade or more, and so any attempt to ensure a fair and complete election has to be taken seriously.

More than that needs to be done: laws need to be passed to punish the criminals who try to subvert the democratic process, and laws need to be repealed (I'm looking at you, Citizens United) to ensure that people can't just buy an election.

And, admittedly, Allen West's fight to continue the recounts, much like the rest of his political career, are based in fear-mongering and conspiracy theories. But there is enough actual evidence of impropriety, or at least mismanagement, that the Allen West fight must be allowed to occur.

It would be a tragedy of Biblical proportions, but Allen West might not have lost his seat in Florida. And the only way to be sure is to get a full and fair accounting of the votes in every county affected by this election. (You know, the thing that the Supreme Court wouldn't allow in Florida back in 2000?)

Few people in America deserve to lose as much as Allen West. But his fight must be allowed to continue.

It's called "democracy." And we have to support it.