MEA CULPA... A SARCASTIC ASSHOLE APOLOGIZES...

      Earlier today I posted a sarcastic rant about those pious assholes who point to disasters and blame the suffering of those victims on sinful behavior... as if it's all part of God's wrath on the sinful who ignore "traditional values".  I pointed to hurricane Katrina, the earthquake in San Francisco, and the terrorist attacks in New York City, and then referenced accusations made by Pat Robertson and other fundamentalists who attributed those disasters to America's sinful ways.

        I've deleted that post.  After this afternoon's tornadoes in Moore, Oklahoma, there's no excuse for any attempt at levity or sarcasm.

         I apologize to anyone who might have read my comments, despite the fact that they were written and posted hours before the tornadoes struck in OK.

         I don't pray, but if I did, I'd be pulling for those kids trapped in that elementary school I'm watching on the news.

         Thinking about all of you folks, and hoping for the best.

 

FOR FOLKS LIKE ME WHO COULD ALWAYS USE A LITTLE BALANCE IN OUR LIVES...

        And I can't walk from the kitchen to the office without spilling coffee on my socks...

 

OBAMA'S DRUNK WITH POWER (says the sot with the scandal sheet talking points...) A MINI-GUANO SET FOR YOUR SATURDAY

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE NICOTINE DEVIL MADE HER DO IT...

        I've read stories where drunken fools have called 9-1-1 to report an emergency, then asked the dispatchers to have the responding police officers bring a pack of cigarettes when they come to the scene... basically using the emergency number to have cigarettes delivered.

       Those idiots are usually surprised to find themselves being arrested for making false emergency claims, and sometimes get hauled off to jail.

        A woman in California found a quicker way to get cuffed, but for an entirely different reason.  Etta Lopez, 31, allegedly waiting outside a police station, then deliberately stepped up and slapped a police officer as he was leaving the building.  She later told investigators she wanted to be arrested so that she would be put in jail where she would be forced to stop smoking.

                            "Out!  Out nicotine devil!"


        That's right... She wanted to quit so badly, she slapped an officer to get placed in a jail cell where her habit wouldn't be allowed.

 

THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES WOULD HAVE CONFUSED EINSTEIN ( but Freud would have diagnosed them perfectly)

 

          "Insanity:  Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

          That quote is attributed to Albert Einstein, who was able to see quite a few things clearly that we're only now beginning to understand as reality.  I have no idea how Einstein was able to predict our current House of Representatives.

           For the 37th time (yawn...) the House, under the 'leadership' of John Boehner, has voted to repeal part or all of the Affordable Care Act, and each time their bill has been deemed dead on arrival the moment it was passed.

 

 

 

           In what might seem to be an equally insane quest, I've been purchasing the exact same Powerball number for every drawing since 1995, with the exact same results:  dead on arrival.



          Of course, the difference between House GOP insanity and my pie-in-the-sky Powerball dream is that my number MIGHT be selected in the next drawing, whereas the Affordable Care Act is still going to be the law of the land no matter how many times the House votes to repeal or defund the measure.

 

 

             I was listening to NPR yesterday afternoon when one of their reporters asked John Boehner why the House would waste its time passing bills to defund or repeal Obamacare, knowing it was an exercise in futility.  He responded by saying that many of his caucus members had run on the promise of repealing Obamacare and hadn't yet had the opportunity to have a vote against the law on record.  Another GOPer told the same reporter that he thought periodic votes to repeal the law were a great idea, because if you do the same thing over and over again, sooner or later the public comes around to your way of thinking.

            Einstein would have probably been perplexed by the current House of Representatives.

            Freud would have understood them perfectly.

 

LOUIE GOHMERT OF TEXAS AIN'T GONNA LET THE ATTORNEY GENERAL CAST ASPERSIONS ON HIS ASPARAGUS (by god!)

          They must be so proud of this guy down in Texas...

          Rep. Gohmert, one of the most entertaining idiots to hold elected office in my lifetime, has done it again.  During Attorney General Holder's testimony before the House committee, Gohmert went into one of his patented spittle-spewing, vein-bulging rants (this time concerning what Holder had asserted about Gohmert's knowlege of the FBI's investigation of one of the Boston Marathon bombers) and managed to do what he always does:  make an ass of himself on national television.

          Gohmert went into full-blown asshole mode, arguing with both the witness (Attorney General Eric Holder) and his own committee members when they tried to enforce parliamentary procedures to move the hearing along on a more sane and relevant path.  Finally, little Louie tossed out this gem as he relinquished his microphone:

        "The Attorney General will not cast aspersions on my asparagus!"

         Something tells me this guy was dropped on his head when he was little...

 

WHILE WE WAIT FOR THE GOP'S LATEST FAUX SCANDAL DU JOUR, LET'S POKE THROUGH THE GUANO...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

WORSE THAN WATERGATE (or Pearl Harbor, or Hitler, for that matter....)

             The most obvious problem with hyperventilating over every perceived "scandal" that comes your way, including the daily doses of faux outrage expressed over every hiccup in the news, is that after a few years people begin to yawn and ignore your cries that "the sky is falling!"  You can only cry "Wolf!" so often before your warnings are seen as background noise, an annoying minor chord droning on behind the scenes, there only as a reminder that your party is still out of power and pissed about it.

              So it goes with the scandals du jour being trumpeted on the cable news networks.  Remember Fast and Furious?  Remember how it was "worse than Watergate"?  Remember the Socialist overreach of The Affordable Care Act?  How it would end democracy and the free market as we know it?  Remember those Death Panels the individual mandate would cause?  Remember Shirley Sherrod at the Department of Agriculture?  Remember the ACORN "scandal"?  Remember when Obama used executive orders to stop deep-water drilling in the Gulf after the Deepwater Horizon BP oil rig disaster?  The War on Christmas?  The War on the Easter Bunny?  The bailout for General Motors?  The Dodd-Frank financial reform law?

              "OH MY GOD!  HE'S RUINING AMERICA!  WHERE'S THE OUTRAGE?"

              And in every single one of those cases we had talking heads pointing back to the darkest days of America's most corrupt and paranoid political administration:  It's worse than Watergate!

               Even if Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hunkered down in the Situation Room and watched the Benghazi attacks in real time (as some suggest they did), and even if they concocted an elaborate scheme to obfuscate and then cover-up the real reasons for the attack in an effort to protect both his and her political ambitions, this wouldn't be worse than Watergate.  Even if Barack Obama directly ordered the IRS to target teabagger groups (and why WOULDN'T the IRS look into the tax exempt status of folks with "Taxed Enough Already" in their damn name?) it wouldn't be worse than Watergate.

              Heavy sigh.

              So out from under his rock in his undisclosed, Google-Earth proof location crawls the Dark Lord himself, to point to the Benghazi tragedy and grumble, "I think it's one of the worst incidences, frankly, that I can recall in my career".

              For Dick Cheney, the guy who helped out an active CIA operative, the guy who helped orchestrate the illegal and immoral invasion and occupation of Iraq, the guy who signed off on our Guantanamo Bay gulag, the asshole who smugly shrugged off the torture and abuse of detainees from Abu Ghraib to a hundred dark op sites around the globe, the guy who got stumble drunk and shot a friend in the face, then flew back to an undisclosed location while his aides sobered him up and hid him from public scrutiny, the guy who... well, I could do this all fucking day and not have time to eat.

              So it's worse that Watergate?  Where the White House directly ordered the break-in of a rival Party's headquarters to gain inside information, then micro-managed the ensuing cover-up.  It's worse than Watergate, where the President of the United States had the director of the FBI conduct unconstitutional probes into that President's political enemies lives and finances.  It's worse than Watergate, where a special prosecutor resigned after mass firings at the Justice Department left him no option to proceed with his duly-appointed investigation.

              You can only cry Wolf, or Watergate, so often...

              And you can only ignore your own Party's crimes against humanity for so long.

              At some point, history will provide the needed perspective on the day's events, and when those books are written this administration's worst offenses will seem a whiter shade of pale next to those of the last.

             

         

A WEBSITE FOR ALL YOU ARTSY-FARTSY TYPES... (or anyone who wants to have fun!)

         I stumbled across a site that's just WAY COOL!  Go to www.weavesilk.com and give it a try, but take a few hours of play time with you, 'cause you're not coming back anytime soon.

         Once you're there, click to get started, then find the little color orb icon in the upper left hand corner to bring up the color pallette.  There are symmetry controls, mirror effects, etc.  Once you've played around with it for a minute you'll start to amaze yourself.

         If you click on the camera icon you can save your image to a folder, or print the thing.

Here are a couple our niece Sarah (seven years-old) did in her first two minutes playing with it:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

OUR REPUBLICAN GOVERNOR STEPS UP, VETOES AG-GAG BILL DESIGNED TO PROTECT ANIMAL ABUSERS FROM CRIMINAL INVESTIGATIONS (tip of the hat for doing the right thing, Governor Haslam)

          When the so-called "Ag Gag" bill was proposed in the Tennessee legislature, it had all the trappings of a typical bidness friendly GOP no-brainer.  It would call for the prosecution of anyone who surreptitiously filmed animal abuse on corporate farms or at horse training facilities if they didn't turn over their evidence within 48 hours, thus making complete long term investigations impossible.  One of the sponsors of the bill is a big time hog farmer.  Go figure.

          But the bill had critics from the start, many of them coming from the entertainment industry, as well as the Humane Society and PETA.  In the state of Tennessee, the walking horse industry is big business, times ten.  There are walking horse celebrations in middle Tennessee that draw in hundreds of thousands of visitors and generate millions of dollars for the local economies.  But repeated cases of soring and other abusive tactics meant to "encourage" walking horses to learn their world famous exaggerated gait were exposed due to investigations that required time to collect criminal evidence.  The Ag-Gag bill would effectively limit those investigations by requiring whistle blowers to come forward immediately with their evidence.

          So it came to be that Governor Haslam had to decide between allowing a bill popular among his fellow Republicans to become law, or side with the majority of Tennesseans who found the proposed law offensive.  The Governor stepped up.  For only the second time in his two year term in office, the Governor of Tennessee vetoed a bill.

          I don't say this kind of thing often about Republicans in this state's political circles, so you might want to take note:

          Governor Haslam, we're proud of your decision in this case.  Well done, sir.

          Oh, and hey?  You might want to check out this morning's edition of The Tennessean (motto: "The newest photo of Taylor Swift is in its usual spot on page three today!") because they're running another story about criminal abuse of walking horses that's been exposed through an investigation in east Tennessee.