This new white format allows me to post complete pics (the other Blogger formats cut them off, practically in half). Pretend you're reading your newspaper or something.
Dates separate each post, barely, so look for the dates on the left. Print is large & readable. Comment section is unchanged. My Profile info was at the bottom, but I moved it back to the top. Deal with it.
ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE.
If you have already abandoned hope,
please disregard this notice.
In this blog, you'll be exposed to the way I see things. Lots of things. Stuff I think of. Things that happen. Random weirdness. Occasional seriousness. My life. My world. My universe. My reality. By reading this, you have given me brief control of your mind....
"Gentlemen! Kindly note that I will be going all Godzilla on your asses and destroying Japan as you know it."
"But please remember to vote for me and my evil mastermind cue-ball head on election day."
If you no speakie Japanese, follow along using the convenient closed captioning.
And breathe a deep sigh of relief, because Japan's newly empowered leader Yukio Hatoyama rushed Monday to select Cabinet ministers after his party trounced the ruling conservatives in elections, sending them out of power for only the second time in 54 years.
Hatoyama said in a victory speech that he would focus on making a quick and smooth transition, and said his priority was choosing the nation's next finance minister.
Official results were still being counted, but exit polls by all major media said Hatoyama's Democratic Party of Japan had won more than 300 of the 480 seats in the lower house of parliament. That would easily be enough to ensure that he is installed as prime minister in a special session of parliament that is expected to be held in mid-September. If Toyama Koichi the video guy, doesn't get a job, I feel he should take a laxative, get laid, and enroll in an anger management class for constipated ninjas. The dude has issues....
Oh, and by the way, The Hatoyamas should make for an interesting couple-in-chief: he's nicknamed "The Alien" thanks to his unruly head of hair, frozen appearance, and large eyes. And, according to Reuters, Miyuki said she's been to outer space.
"While my body was asleep, I think my soul rode on a triangular-shaped UFO and went to Venus," Miyuki Hatoyama, the wife of premier-in-waiting Yukio Hatoyama, wrote in a book published last year.
"It was a very beautiful place and it was really green."
The World According To ME thinks it's about time for a non-satirical rant from one of the good guys (ME), so republican readers are advised to get out their dictionaries, or just fucking leave.
RANT:
It's easy to believe airliners were brought down by guys with box cutters.
For this nation's duly elected president and his progressive policies to be kneecapped by a minority of loud, angry, possibly psychotic right-wing zombots is a sure sign that democracy is nothing more than a gossamer ideal.
And by lazily allowing such ideological idiocy to spread unchecked we now have the cultural equivalent of cancer.
There is no more reason for anyone to grant Republicans any respect. They have abdicated their authority. Their intentions are clear, their leaders too in love with their own salaries, their brazen goal to become the Kamikaze party reaching critical mass. Their credibility is all but dead, reduced to a bitter, gaping, black hole.
And thanks to them, democracy seems poised to tumble in.
Politics may be politics but this has gone way beyond gamesmanship and into the realm of wanton, drunken destruction. So far, no sane Republican---if there is one---has been roused by any nascent patriotism to voice opposition to any of the mad utterances vomited forth from the party's leaders and their "grassroots" infantilized infantry.
They have demonstrated daily that, having lost the presidential election and control of congress they've lost their their cultural relevance and all sense of morality as well, and in a fatally childish tantrum, are executing a nuclear option. The leadership itself has allowed the dead-enders into the fold and purposefully impregnated those soft-boiled egg psyches with apocalyptic imagery. The rest of us were too stunned to think that it was actually happening, that the Republicans would kill everyone and everything to wrest control back from a citizenry which wanted nothing more of their Grand Old Party's grand guignol.
And in monumental self delusion, the daily news cycle spins and spins with a wink as brazen as Sarah Palin's, as if we are all in on it and that this sort of thing is "healthy in a democracy". If anything, that alone means we might really be closer than ever to a real societal calamity, something that makes this economic crisis look like a picnic.
Only if every salvo is met with equal ferocity, if every pseudo fact is countered by reality is there a chance. To lay back and let vitriol burn itself out is unrealistic in a time when such things are the bread and butter of the corporate controlled media, when despair and division is essential to their profit margins. Oh, yeah, and Happy Labor Day, folks.
Birthers, deathers, tenthers, neocons, repubs... yes, there are all sorts of assholes out there. I would like to take this blog to remind everybody that, whether you are or aren't an asshole, we all have one.
And so today we'll be examining mine in some detail ("WTF did Doc just say?!?"). Let me explain ("You damn well better!")
I mean that several months ago, my doctor's office referred me to a gastroenterologist to make a much overdue appointment for a colonoscopy.
Shortly thereafter, Dr. Sipple's physician's assistant Vinnie showed me a color diagram of the colon, a lengthy organ that appears to go all over the place, at one point passing briefly through Minneapolis.
Then Vinnie explained the colonoscopy procedure to me in a thorough, reassuring and patient manner.
I nodded thoughtfully, but I didn't really hear anything he said, because my brain was shrieking, 'HE'S GOING TO STICK A TUBE 17,000 FEET UP MY ASS!!!!!!'
I left Dr.Sipple's office with some written instructions, and a prescription for a product called 'MoviPrep,' which comes in a box large enough to hold a microwave oven. I will discuss MoviPrep in detail later; for now suffice it to say that we must never allow it to fall into the hands of America 's enemies.
I spent the next few months before the exam productively sitting around being nervous.
Then, on the day before my colonoscopy, I began my preparation. In accordance with my instructions, I didn't eat any solid food that day; all I had was lime jello for supper, and later on some vegetable broth, which is basically water, only with less flavor...
Then, in the evening, I took the MoviPrep. You mix two packets of powder together in a one-liter plastic jug, then you fill it with water. (For those unfamiliar with the metric system, a liter is about 32 gallons.) Then you have to drink the whole jug. This takes about an hour, because MoviPrep tastes - and here I am being kind - like a mixture of goat spit and urinal cleanser, with just a hint of Crystal Lite lemonade (Vinnie said to add the Crystal Lite --- it didn't help).
The instructions for MoviPrep, clearly written by somebody with a great sense of humor, state that after you drink it, 'a loose, watery bowel movement may result.' This is kind of like saying that after you jump off your roof, you may experience contact with the ground. MoviPrep is a nuclear laxative. I don't want to be too graphic here, but have you ever seen a space-shuttle launch? This is pretty much the MoviPrep experience, with you as the shuttle. There are times when you wish the toilet had a seat belt. You spend several hours pretty much confined to the bathroom, catching up on your reading and spurting violently. You eliminate everything. And then, when you figure you must be totally empty, you have to drink another liter of MoviPrep, at which point, as far as I can tell, your bowels travel into the future and start eliminating food that you have not even eaten yet.
After an action-packed evening, I finally got to sleep around my usual 4 am time, helped along by my usual AmbienCR.
The next afternoon my wife Buffy drove me to the clinic. I was very nervous. Not only was I worried about the procedure, but I had been experiencing occasional return bouts of MoviPrep spurtage. I was thinking, 'What if I spurt on Dr. Sipple?' How do you apologize for something like that? Flowers would not be enough.
At the clinic I had to sign many forms acknowledging that I understood and totally agreed with whatever the heck the forms said. Then they led me to a room where I went inside a little curtained space and took off my clothes and put on one of those hospital garments designed by sadist perverts, the kind that, when you put it on, makes you feel even more naked than when you are actually naked..
Then a nurse put a little needle in a vein above my right wrist. Ordinarily I would have fainted, but she was very good, and I was already lying down. She also told me that some people put vodka or Coors Light in their MoviPrep.
At first I was ticked off that I hadn't thought of this, but then I pondered what would happen if you got yourself too tipsy to make it to the bathroom, so you were staggering around in full Fire Hose Mode. You would have no choice but to burn your house.
When everything was ready, the nurse wheeled me into the procedure room. Dr. Sipple was waiting with a male anesthesiologist (didn't catch his name; let's call him Butch) who looked like someone I knew, but he had what looked like a cleaning rod for a musket strapped to his side with a bronze brush at the end. I sure was hoping that was not what I thought it was. The anesthesiologist ("Butch") kept asking if I had any quarters and giggling to some private joke.... I did not see the 17,000-foot tube, but I knew Dr. Sipple had it hidden around there somewhere. I was seriously nervous at this point.
Dr.Sipple had me roll over on my left side, and then Joe the Plumber aka Butch the Anesthesiologist began hooking something up to the needle in my hand. As I looked over to my left I noticed on the table what I thought was some kind of tabletop weedwhacker machine full of ice. When Butch put the lid on and turned it on I thought "Oh My God" I'm in the wrong room....
There was music playing in the room, and I realized that the song was 'Dancing Queen' by ABBA. I remarked to Dr.Sipple that, of all the songs that could be playing during this particular procedure, 'Dancing Queen' had to be the least appropriate.
'You want me to turn it up?' said Dr.Sipple, from somewhere behind me.
'Ha ha,' I said. And then it was time, the moment I had been dreading for more than a decade. If you are squeamish, prepare yourself, because I am going to tell you, in explicit detail, exactly what it was like.
I have no idea. Really. I slept through it. One moment, ABBA was yelling 'Dancing Queen, feel the beat of the tambourine,' and the next moment, I was back in the other room, waking up in a very mellow mood.
Dr.Sipple was looking down at me and asking me how I felt. I felt excellent. I felt even more excellent when Dr.Sipple told me that it was all over, and that my colon had passed with flying colors, several in fact. I have never been prouder of an internal organ.
[Butt seriously folks, anyone over 50, male or female, should have a colonoscopy. It might save your life, and only needs to be repeated once every ten years.]
Many conservatives have expressed outrage at President Obama's plan to broadcast a speech to children at public schools, complaining that his ulterior motive is obviously to indoctrinate the youngsters with sensual ideas, then engage in disgusting, illegal intercourse with them.
Republican Party of Florida Chairman Jim Greer released a statement condemning President Obama’s use of taxpayer dollars to indoctrinate America’s children to his socialist agenda.
Outraged parents say that this is the last straw in what they perceive as a long line of terrible transgressions committed by the President, including his false birth certificate and fancy talkin'.
"Oh my God, my boys," bawled one Kansas woman, clutching her four children to her chest as she simultaneously vomited and defecated in terror. "How could our President want to have sex with my boys?"
"HRRRNNGGHHH," grunted her husband, clutching his chest as he imagined the President's soft-yet-firm hands caressing his sons' faces. "HRRNNTTT." His wife shrieked and began bucking wildly about the room, leaving bloody dents in the wall as she furiously smashed her head into it.
An autopsy would later confirm that the man died of a simultaneous heart attack and brain embolism. Texas authorities are now considering charging Obama with murder.
Although Obama claims that he will simply tell students to work hard and stay in school, citizens like Texas resident Matt Curtiss -- who unfortunately misspelled his own last name at birth -- say such an outlandish-sounding speech could only be a cover for sweet serenading interspersed with pictures of hardcore fetish pornography.
"What the hell President has ever told our kids to stay in school? That's ridiculous bullshit," he spat. "I'll tell you what Obama will show during his little speech: a woman urinating on an American flag, with extreme close-ups of the urine."
"How could we ever allow our President to speak to our children?" Curtiss asked, with tears of frustration in his eyes. "What were those Washington idiots thinking?"
Former President George H.W. Bush also made a speech directly to school students that was broadcast live. However, critics say Obama's is different, because he intends to date rape the children after talking to them, while Bush merely bored and slightly frightened everyone.
Conservatives do disagree over how many students the President will attempt to bed. Some believe it will only be those in Republican-leaning states, while others are afraid that Obama has the power to visit all the nation's children in a single night, like some sort of rapist Santa Claus.
"Obama intends to use taxpayer dollars to build a high-speed rail system to enable him to travel across the nation at supersonic speeds, having intercourse with our sons and daughters at every stop," reported Rush Limbaugh on Wednesday. "This is exactly what's wrong with liberals today."
Limbaugh added that he was also concerned about Obama's speech including a 30 second instruction to instantly convert the nation's children into socialists, but added that this was a given.
Reports from the Department of Education also indicate that Obama will appear in new editions of history textbooks this year, much to the consternation of some Republicans, who say pages on his illegitimate presidency should be blacked out and replaced with a large block of text that says "NOTHING HAPPENED" over and over again.
"It's a god damn good thing that so few schools have the money to order new textbooks," said Matt Curtiss. "First, because they won't be exposed to that bastard Barack Hussein Obama when they try to read, and second, because the state should not be paying for anything for our children."
Sarah Palin is planning her first trip to Hong Kong, having accepted one of a over a thousand speaking invitations.
She may have chosen poorly.
Business Insiderreports that the request from brokerage firm CLSA was made "almost certainly as a practical joke."
In the past, they've polled Asian fortune tellers for index targets, hired anime cartoonists to draw Japanese research, and generally love to push the boundaries between entertainment and analysis. They are a real research firm, it's just that they love to sprinkle in some hilarity every now and then as a smart marketing gimmick.
Sarah Palin is this year's big laugh for them.
"Our keynote speakers are notable luminaries who often address topics that go beyond traditional finance such as geopolitics," company spokeswoman Simone Wheeler said in a statement.
"We just felt it would be a fabulous opportunity for CLSA clients to hear from Mrs. Palin," Wheeler said, adding that CLSA approached Palin with the offer.
Alaska blogger Shannyn Moore said the story makes sense, given that Palin is hardly an investment expert: "If CLSA's purpose is comic relief in hiring her, they may get their money's worth... that's if she shows up."
As the debate continues to rage on over whether or not the U.S. should include a public, government-funded plan in its healthcare reform, many citizens abruptly noticed that the federal government funds and regulates all Interstate Highways in the nation, and has done so for over 50 years.
Now, many are up in arms over the largest public works project in history, which has somehow gone unnoticed since the mid-20th century.
"I can't believe I didn't think of this before," said conservative analyst Paul Dobson, slapping his forehead in disbelief. "We were all so focused on the idea of the government ruining healthcare forever that we forgot how President Eisenhower -- who was obviously tricked by President Barack Hussein Obama -- already ruined our highways by building and then socializing them in the 1950s."
Dobson further clarified that Obama is not a U.S. citizen, but rather a time-traveling fiend who was born in the strange, alien fields of Mars.
Republican Senator Jim DeMint agreed, saying that like public healthcare, the government-funded Interstate is unconstitutional.
"Despite the obvious private applications of the Interstate, some people have tried to pass this $425 billion boondoggle off as purely a military exercise," he scoffed. "That makes about as much sense to me as saying that public healthcare could be considered a matter of national security because we'll be less safe if large portions of our populace are broke and sick all damn the time."
Now that Americans like Dobson have remembered that the U.S. has a public highway system, they are beginning to assemble and organize against it, demonstrated at a recent rally in a remote, roadless area of Montana that attracted over three people.
"If we rely on the government to build our roads, we'll all be waiting in line for seven years, just to enter an onramp!" shouted one man, holding a sign reading "A Road Is A Road To Socialism Road". "Well, I said no to socialism transportation, and to date, I've built over 14 feet of my own road that I can travel on, tax free."
Critics of the Interstate say that opening the entire system up to the free market would allow a few large corporations to control the nation's transportation grid, which they would profit from by charging high tolls to people with pre-existing crappy cars.
For those with no cars, Dobson says access to the Interstate -- now renamed the Best Buy Street Zone sponsored by Microsoft -- could be gained by simply buying a car.
"It's pretty simple," he beamed. "And while they were at it, those people could also go ahead and go to college, and be sure to save lots of money for retirement, too. Those are all smart ideas that anyone should feel free to use."
In one recent poll, a certain number of Americans said that now that they've heard the Interstate is a socialist nightmare, they want no part of it.
"I heard that once you get on a nationalized road, tanks will run you over if you aren't a liberal," said one elderly woman, shaking with fear. "We ought to make government stick to decent American causes, like building the military and running Medicare."
"I heard," added another man ominously, "that if you surpass a certain speed, you run the risk of being tossed into jail by some kind of government police force...probably because they're afraid of you discovering time travel and realizing that President Barack Obama is an alien fraud."
In a recent FOX NEWS interview, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MENTAL) accused health care reform supporters of "forg[etting] what the Constitution says."
Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SOUTH CAROLINA), who once called for his Party to defeat health reform because it will "break" President Obama, claimed that health reform violates the Tenth Amendment and urged state legislators and governors to "champion individual freedom" by resisting the bill.
Numerous state lawmakers -- including secessionist TEXAS Gov. Rick Perry (R) -- have struck a similar tone, endorsing "state sovereignty resolutions" that demand the federal government "cease and desist" enforcing many laws with which conservatives disagree.
(Emboldened by Perry's hardline stance, TEXAS "tenthers" held a pro-secession rally at the state capital yesterday, demanding that their political opponents "go back to the U.S., where you belong." Apparently TEXAS believes it has seceded from the U.S. See video below. )
Indeed, while "birther" conspiracy theorists make increasingly outlandish attempts to dismantle President Obama's legitimacy, "tenther" constitutionalists like Bachmann, DeMint, and Perry hope to dismantle an entire century's worth of progressive legislation.
THE 'TENTHER' AGENDA: In a nutshell, tenthers believe that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt led an illegal coup against the U.S. Constitution, exploiting the passions of the Depression Era to expand federal power to unconstitutional levels.
Killing health reform is only the beginning of their agenda. Under the tenther constitution, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, federal education funding, the Veterans Affairs health system and the G.I. Bill are all illegal.
The minimum wage, the requirement that employers pay overtime wages, and the ban on child labor are all beyond Congress' power to enact, and the federal ban on whites-only lunch counters is an unlawful encroachment on local business.
Indeed, nearly every single law that Americans cherish -- from laws protecting workers' right to organize to laws forbidding race and gender discrimination -- could be eliminated overnight if the tenther constitution ever became law. One prominent tenther, a TEXAS official charged with rewriting that state's public school textbooks, even declared the federal highway system to be unconstitutional, to which The World According To ME responds: if you don't want to drive on our highways walk in the fucking ditch.
DISTORTING THE DOCUMENT: Tenthers derive their narrow vision of the Constitution from a strained reading of the Tenth Amendment, which provides that the Constitution contains an itemized list of federal powers, and anything not contained in that list is beyond Congress' authority.
In the tenthers' eyes, Congress' powers must all be read too narrowly to allow most federal statutes to exist. However, the tenther constitution bears little resemblance to the words of the document itself.
Contrary to tenther claims that federal spending programs like Medicare or Social Security are unconstitutional, Article I of the Constitution empowers Congress to "lay and collect taxes" and to "provide for...the general welfare of the United States," which unambiguously authorizes it to spend money in ways that benefit the nation.
Similarly, Congress' broad authority to enact regulatory schemes that "substantially affect interstate commerce" easily encompasses laws like the federal minimum wage and the requirement that businesses do not discriminate on the basis of race, not to mention the highway system for interstate commerce (again, walk in the fucking ditch, tenthers).
As Roosevelt chided tenther-like CONSERVATIVES from his era, "The Constitution of 1787 did not make our democracy impotent."
A LEGACY OF RADICALISM: Sadly, tentherism's assault on democracy is nothing new; indeed, retreat to outlandish constitutional theories is a favorite tactic of the right during times of historic upheaval.
Tenther "state sovereignty resolutions" are little more than new names for the "interposition resolutions" enacted by SOUTHERN STATES in the immediate wake of Brown v. Board of Education, which claimed that the federal government exceeded its constitutional authority when it extended the Constitution's promise of "equal protection of the laws" to the AMERICAN SOUTH.
Tenther claims that health reform is unconstitutional -- because the Constitution does not specifically use the words "health care" -- echo the infamous SOUTHERN Manifesto's argument that Brown was wrong because the "Constitution does not mention education."
Much of the intellectual framework for tenther assaults on economic regulation comes from discredited Depression-era Supreme Court decisions that struck down essential provisions of the New Deal on the grounds that they exceeded Congress' lawful authority.
Indeed, CONSERVATIVES even justified the greatest act of treason in American history, the CIVIL WAR, by claiming that that the Constitution permits each state to leave the union at will. Now that America is slowly emerging from its most recent crisis, tenthers once again hope to exploit the nation's fears to fuel a radical constitutional agenda.
Watch tenthers and other damaged FOX NEWS watchers insanely protesting:
You may have noticed in today's blog that words such as FOX NEWS, CONSERVATIVES, SOUTH CAROLINA, THE SOUTH, SOUTHERN STATES, and of course TEXAS have been in caps. We believe it makes it easier to spot the source of ignorance that ties the tenther movement together (see yesterday's blog on the bible belt).
The United States of America has admitted that the Bible belt it has worn around its Midwest and Southern regions for the past 200 years was never meant as anything more than an accessory.
The admission comes on the back of reports that America’s Bible belt showed signs of becoming tight around the waist. “It used to fit really well, but the growing waistline of America’s Midwest seems to have caused the buckle to break,” said best friend, the United Kingdom. “I think it’s time she got herself a new belt.”
Over the years, America has received a deluge of negative comments regarding the belt, with criticism being centred on its “failure to coordinate well with the rest of her outfit”. The nation of Canada went as far as to call it “ugly, old fashioned and redundant.”
Responding to these jibes, America today announced its intention to “give the damn thing away to charity.” “There’s just no space for it in my wardrobe,” it said, throwing the belt down. “I mean, I just bought a shitload of really nice burqas, and I have to make room for my funky new kippah. Yeah, it’s gonna have to go.”
In a complete overhaul of her extensive wardrobe, America today boxed up a large collection of religious ties, which included Pat Robertson and Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who are expected to be offloaded in exchange for more Jews, Muslims and Scientologists.
