Author Archives

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I’m melting, melting! Oh, what a world! What a world!

Where to start this week?

Maybe I can start with the most disturbing story since Jerry Sandusky.  WTF?  Can we all agree that no one should abuse children?  What thought process leads someone to think taking pictures of children with blindfolds, tape and/or mouths full of semen, which they thought was “magic candy” is appropriate?  Apparently LA educator Mark Berdt thought that was just fine.  I saw an official from the area say this on CNN, “They just thought they were being blindfolded and gagged as a game.”  There is so much wrong with that statement that I am not sure where to begin.  So, I’ll end my anti-child abuse rant there.

How about Mitt Romney’s compassionate nature? Recently he told a reporter, “I don’t care about the poor, there’s a safety net for that. If it’s broken, I’ll fix it.”  I am sure the nation’s poor — and some estimates have that number as being as high as 42 million Americans — will be greatly relieved to hear that.

Why do we still care what Donald Trump thinks about anything?  Rumor has it, he will endorse Newt Gingrich.  Why do we care?  Oh, right, we’re stupid.

(FYI, if you are not familiar with that quote it from The Wizard of Oz, a movie about which I have written before.  Side note: has anyone heard the story of the suicide on the set that is supposed to be in the film?  Used to scare the crap out of me.  And I was in college when said scaring took place.  Of course I am afraid of velociraptors, so clearly something is not right with me.)

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Newt, Newt, Newt, you really need to stop believing your own press releases

Newt Gingrich’s second 15 minutes seems to be coming to a close.  The self-proclaimed ‘ideas’ person who offered to debate Mitt Romney anytime, anywhere, seemed strangely out of place at tonight’s Florida debate. (My prediction about his candidacy can be found here.)   Newt’s problem has always been that he really believes his own press releases.  He doesn’t need to really prepare for debates or interviews because he is just that smart.  He is always going to be the smartest person in the room, except he really isn’t.  He also doesn’t seem to understand that while our attention spans are short, some of us remember what he was like when he had actual power.

Newt’s resurgence as the GOP frontrunner says more about how the party faithful feel about Mitt Romney than anything else.  Truthfully, I would welcome a Gingrich-Obama matchup because Newt just cannot help himself — his affinity for self destruction is legendary. He would have everyone believe that he is a Ronald Reagan clone who single handedly balanced the budget and is responsible for every GOP achievement since he was born.  Funny, I don’t think Speaker John Boehner feels the same way.

Oh, thanks for a giant fuck you to the residents of Washington, DC.  You want to send people to the moon and let them become a state but don’t want us to have a vote in Congress?  Nice, Newt, nice.

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No harm, no foul? Hardly.

It looks like Army Private Bradley Manning may face a court martial and life in prison.  Good.  I don’t think he is just guilty of theft as the investigator alleges.   That’s not enough.  I think he is guilty of treason.  Downloading confidential military records and giving them to outside sources cannot be tolerated.  One of the arguments his lawyer has been making is that Manning should be released is that the security breach didn’t really cause much damage or jeopardize American national security.  Liberals I know seem to think what Manning was doing was some freedom of speech issue.

Bullshit to both.

Let’s think a bit of what Manning actually did.   Manning was an intelligence officer in the Army.  Under the guise of downloading music, he took classified communications and shared them with Wikileaks.  If he worked at Apple or Microsoft or any other company, taking internal documents and data and sharing it would be grounds to be fired.  For military personnel, who are entrusted with the safety and security of the nation to steal and share classified information with anyone outside the government cannot be considered — under any circumstances — a good thing.  Not only does it set the worst possible precedent, it puts us all in danger.  This isn’t theft, this is treason.

Manning supporters say that he was doing the right thing: He was just exposing war crimes and other atrocities perpetrated by the American military.  The problem with that theory is that the information he released showed no such thing.  Even his defense relies on the idea that the information released did not harm anyone. You can’t have it both ways.  If he had been exposing some great crime committed by the US, we would all know about it.  He released embarrassing communications and the like.

I know what you are thinking, I am a hawk. I am no such thing, though pacifism isn’t my thing either.  We need to fight some wars — like WWII — we need to avoid others.  Our military makes mistakes and does things I don’t agree with.  The Marines urinating on corpses comes to mind as does what happened an Abu Ghraib.  None of that excuses Manning.

Private Bradley Manning was put in a position with access to classified information and entrusted with protecting the nation and he abdicated his responsibilities by leaking the data to Wikileaks.   I don’t understand why anyone would think that is a good thing and think he should spend the rest of his life in jail.

PS.  I don’t think the US has any reason to prosecute Julian Assange for anything as I know the Department of Justice is trying to do.  He broke no laws nor did he violate any trust.

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Why I like Jon Huntsman

I am a liberal Democrat and always have been.  I want President Obama to win re-election.  So why on earth am I pulling for Jon Huntsman to win today in New Hampshire?  He has the best chance of beating the president.  And yet, here I am, hoping he pulls it out.  Intellectually, it makes so sense.

Even if Huntsman didn’t have the best chance of beating the president, I shouldn’t like him. He is really a conservative guy — ‘pro-life,’ supports the horrible Paul Ryan plan to dismantle Medicare, is all about the Second Amendment, you know, my type of person.  So what the hell am I thinking?

Running for president is serious business.  It’s a serious job.  I write political satire so the whole circus that has been the GOP presidential nomination process has been like a gift from God.  Come on, I was all about the Cain Train.  But as a citizen, the idea of a President Cain, Santorum, Gingrich or Bachmann scares the crap out of me. Whenever I want to bring up Ronald Reagan as a positive an angel loses its wings but one thing he had in his arsenal when negotiating with the Soviets was intelligence. (Oh, and hell just froze over a little bit.)  Can you imagine a Herman Cain in that kind of situation?  No?  That’s because we all probably wouldn’t be here now to think about it.

When did we go from picking the best candidate to picking the least insane?

That is why I like Jon Huntsman.  I like that he is sane and reasonable.  I like that Pew called Utah the best run state in the country when he was governor.  And to me, it is a plus that he served in the Obama administration.  What happened to politics ending at the coasts?  When I travel overseas, I am am American first and a Democrat second.  That is what I like about Jon Huntsman.

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Things that make me rowdy enough to be pepper sprayed

It seems like every day I read about someone doing something that gets ’em pepper sprayed.  Maybe they’re peacefully protesting proposed tuition hikes and the police overdose them on the stuff.  Maybe they’re just trying to get a little Black Friday action when a fellow shopper douces them with the stuff.  This morning I saw some shoppers looking to get new Air Jordans were the most recent pepper spray victime. (Read story here.)  I can’t speak for you, but nothing gets me quite as rowdy as sneaker shopping.

This whole thing got me thinking about my behavior. Do I do anything that might warrant a pepper spray?  What gets me upset?

  1. The Mets.  If you say you are a Met fan and they don’t get your ire up, you are lying about being a fan.  It is impossible to watch them — on the field, off the field, having breakfast somewhere — and not want to punch someone.
  2. Fresca — nothing gets my knickers in a twit like when Safeway is out of the stuff.
  3. Glee:  Man, if I forget to set my DVR and miss an episode the fur does start a flyin’.
  4. DC Metro.  It sucks.  Every year the tourists descend like locusts on the city and try to hold the metro doors open during rush hour.  They force the doors open and everyone has to get off the train.  I would not be the pepper sprayee in this scenario.
  5. People who think I do things for sympathy.  I don’t need your sympathy.
  6. Inappropriate apostrophe usage.  On a business trip my colleagues wanted to go to a restaurant with a great happy hour.  I refused to go because of the sign they had out front.  Unless there was a woman there named Margarita and she was having a personal special, I was not going.  Seriously, plural words do not need an apostrophe.  There won’t be enough pepper spray on earth for how irate this gets me.

More to come…