Category Archives: Liberal ideas

February 1, 2017 · 3:54 pm

Truly Terrible Trump Tricks

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Yep, I have tried thinking about the many uses for barbed wire and dead cats rather than have to think about what Trump has been doing, and it just isn’t working.  After looking up the tensile strength of various common barbed wires from different barbed wire companies, I could not find one appropriate for a cat-a-pult, and it turned out that the whole idea was a joke anyway.  But he just keeps getting worse.

Here is John Green, an author I love and listen to, explaining the Immigration Boobilly Boo-Boo;

The Trumpinator has gotten the idea that he can hammer the world into a shape he likes using mallet-like executive orders.  But no amount of hammering is going to turn the globe into a giant banana.  His executive orders are not put through a review process, and so, are often nonsensical, inappropriate, and even dangerous.

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The fact that you had to take a moment to decide if you needed to ask me if this photo was real or not tells you a lot about what you already know about Trump.  He is petulant.  He is childish.  He throws tantrums at the drop of a hat, or the smirk of an underling, or the comments of a celebrity… I wonder if he throws tantrums about barbed wire and dead cats?

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“Oh, no!  Thinking about Trump made me accidentally strangle Mr. Tinkles.”

And even worse are some of the detestable deplorables that he has working for him.  A man like Steve Bannon with his Breitbart background and his white supremacist crossword puzzles of racism, antisemitism, and nihilism would never have gotten power in the first place if it hadn’t been for Trump.  And now he is at least the second most powerful man on Earth.  Arguably, he’s the first, depending on how much his Wormtongue skills are affecting the baby mind of President Babyhands.

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So, here is my pitiful attempt at mocking the evil Steve, Darklord Bannon;

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I know, the angry eyebrows are simply not enough.  Let me try again;

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Okay, I know it’s not good enough.  I promise you, if I can find a cartoon way to harpoon the great white whale, Moby Steve, I will, and then post it for all to see.  I would like to be able to make a single cartoon so snarky that Bannon’s pet snake would drop over dead at the shockwaves from little old Republican ladies laughing at it and changing their opinion of Trump forever.  Of course, I know, better cartoonists than I have tried and failed.  That doesn’t mean it is not worth the effort.

You have probably discerned by now that I did not vote for Trump.  And I have given him more than enough chance to prove what he will do for this country.  I will never call him President using his proper name.  He is not my president.  And I do not want to live in Trump’s idea of America.  This I will probably achieve sooner than expected because what he is doing to Obamacare will undoubtedly kill me.

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January 20, 2017 · 11:57 am

A Shakespearean Celebration of Trump

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Yes, I am well aware that I am in the middle of an epic Shakespeare rant this week, explaining in the goofiest of terms the reason I believe Shakespeare is not Shaksper.  But you have to mark a solemn occasion like the onset of the end-times.  So I thought I might pay dissembling dreary lip service to the inauguration of a man who, if he appeared in the middle of a Dick Tracy episode, would be known as the villainous Cheeto-head.122p7s

You see, I don’t recognize this villain as the legitimate head of my government.  So I won’t be using the title of “President” with this villain’s name.  Instead, I intend to practice Shakespearian insults to get the bad taste out of my mouth on this horrible day resulting from the malfeasance of certain bad actors, a concerted effort to suppress the vote in key States like Florida, an inebriated campaign run by a dissolute, dissembling mountebank with a talent for misdirection, and a very unfortunate ill-timed collective brain fart on the part of masses of angry but somewhat intellectually limited white people.  (No, I am not worried that they will get me for that last one.  They don’t know what most of the words mean, and none of them would take the time to read this far through this post.)

The conflagration of Trumpkin Trolls on the internet have been telling me that they have endured eight years of Obama, and now I should just shut up and endure eight years of the Great Orange Face.  But, swaggering lackwits, I say thee nay!  This will not be an eight year reign.  It will either be a zero-year tragedy extravaganza or a permanent reign until the bedeviled Fenris Wolf consumes poor over-wrought Thor on the terrible day know as Ragnarok.  The spoiled bag of figgy pudding that is our new leader and golden king will have a lot to answer to St. Peter for.  Um, or is that Mephistopheles?

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I intend to hold the vicarious viscount of villainy accountable with my words and wit, meager as they may be.  And I will decry everything he and the harpy DeVos will do to my beloved system of public education.  I will probably also expire from the villainy of the wretched Republican pizzle drinkers who are busy disemboweling the health care system that has so recently kept me alive, but I will continue to testify to their perfidy until my last breath expires.

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So, I guess I can bring an end to this venomous epistle satisfied that I have lectured ass-headed Bottom about having a donkey’s head on his shoulders in the most roundly Shakespearean way I could wrangle.  Shakespeare, if he gave us anything of value, gave us to understand the true power of words.  And it is by the application of powerful and true words we must battle this sanguine, self-satisfied snollygoster who can barely read and is crippled with a dysfunctional slow-working pate which he more often sits on than uses to think with.

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January 6, 2017 · 12:10 pm

Betsy De Vos and the Golliwogs of Education

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I have often said that I don’t really approve of insult humor.  I don’t think calling someone names really adds to the discussion in any useful way, and the real point of humor is to reveal the truth in a way that is palatable because it is surprising enough to make you laugh.  Revealed truth is much funnier than calling someone names.  So when I call Donald Trump the king of rotten cantaloupe rinds, I am really being no more clever than he is talking about Lyin’ Ted or Crooked Hillary.

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Three of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, (from left to right) Famine, Cinnamon Hitler, and the Pale Rider, Death.

So, what in the heck am I doing talking about Golliwogs in this post?

A Golliwog is a Raggedy Ann-type rag doll from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  They were a common doll type for typical little white girls in typical little middle class families.  My Aunt Jean, my father’s sister, had one as a child.  A female one with a red dress with black spots.  You could flip that doll over and underneath her skirt was a different doll, a yellow-haired white girl in a blue and black dress.  The image has become poison in modern culture because the blackface-minstrel roots of the character is now deemed racist and offensive. The Golliwogs in the children’s books of Florence Upton and Grid Blyton, though, were actually quite heroic, good-hearted and kind.

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As much as we vilify people for having them nowadays, there are many people who secretly adore them and wish to collect and preserve them.  I have long been enthralled by the brilliant 1920’s newspaper cartoon, Little Nemo in Slumberland by Windsor McKay.  But there are many who would lecture me sternly about that because there is at least one Golliwog character in the cartoon strip, and it is even debatable that the main character of Flip, the “bad kid”, is just another kind of Golliwog.

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Now, the point of this article is to make relentless fun of Betsy De Vos, the harpy that Donald Trump has put in charge of the implosion of the Department of Education.  There are a number of very bad things about this wicked witch and her policies.  Diane Ravitch does an excellent job of explaining what’s wrong with De Vos and her wicked witch plans in Ravitch’s education blog, linked here.  You should read all about it so you know why I am regressing into vacant-headed teacher burblings about her, and resorting to the kind of insult humor you find me committing in this blog post.

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Betsy De Vos looks at public school children and sees Golliwogs.  She is suspicious of their pedigree and basically doesn’t like them.  Remember, we are talking about public school children, not the children in upper class, rich private schools, the only kind De Vos actually touts.  She wants to give Golliwogs only the minimums absolutely necessary, the spoiled and the spilled milk.  The cream belongs to rich kids.  And she’s not prejudiced or racist, oh, no.  She sees poor white kids as just as golliwoggie as poor black kids, and she would have no problem pandering to Ben Carson’s kids.  Ben has lots of money.  He can be Sleepy McBoing-boing as much as he wants, and take off after phantom luggage whenever he wants, because money keeps you from being the detestable Golliwog.

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But the secret… the revealed truth is… Golliwogs are worth loving and educating.  Diversity and the resilience learned from hardship and poverty are priceless things, resources too rarely put to good use.  Most of the kids I truly loved as a teacher were Golliwogs.  Not just the chocolate-flavored ones, though those were very precious and precocious children, but also the vanilla-flavored ones, the caramel-flavored ones, the blueberry-flavored ones and the grape-flavored ones. (Okay, maybe they were only blue and purple in my crazy old head. And maybe I shouldn’t be making metaphors that suggest I am promoting eating school children.  That was Jonathan Swift’s thing.)  But Betsy De Vos and her boss, Donald Trump, will never understand that, and never see the true value in them.  If we are ever again going to have a fair and just system of education, we have to give value to the Golliwogs.

 

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December 8, 2016 · 4:09 pm

Bubble People

I was recently gifted with the eye-opening event of having my own personal soap bubble of beliefs, dreams, and hopes popped by an angry, dyspeptic orangutan.  Yes, he got elected to the most powerful position of leadership on the planet Earth.  And, as I was hurt in the fall from my rudely popped bubble, I began to think about the nature of the bubbles we live in and plot my evil revenge.

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You see, people all live in bubbles of perception.  There are limits to what you can see, hear, learn, accept, believe, and understand.  Those limits are the walls of the soap bubble we create for ourselves in the empty warehouse of our own mind.  I know I have just revealed that what I am talking about is completely metaphorical, but all you people out there who live in literal-minded, practically impenetrable bubbles need to be reminded that metaphorical truth is still truth.

In politics, there now seem to be two main classes of bubble that exist separately and prevent many people from seeing and understanding the perceptions of many other people.  There are conservative bubble people.  There are also liberal bubble people.

Conservative is supposed to mean that they like what they currently have and want to preserve it.  I include here not just possessions, but values, goals, religions, hopes, and dreams.  Liberal traditionally means that they are dissatisfied with what they currently have and want change.  Looking at this construct carefully reveals that anyone who is liberal should be seeking change, but once they have it, should then become satisfied and change into a conservative.  Similarly, if they are conservative, but things change into a new set of things that they don’t like, they should become liberals.  But in our political system, these labels have become set in stone.  And I should warn you, putting stone letters on a soap bubble will invariably pop it.  Conservative bubble people have added concrete mix to the walls of their bubbles to harden it, so that it won’t pop.  Liberals have done the same.  Though, I believe Republican conservative bubble people have somehow found a concrete mix that, when it hardens, makes it impenetrable by facts, science, and logic.  Not to be outdone, though, liberals have added bizarre chemicals to their mix that makes their bubbles impenetrable by feelings, emotion, and religion.  The collective effect of all this bubble-fixing is that all bubble people’s bubbles have become dark and no longer transparent.  You cannot see through them.

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It is no wonder that when liberals look at conservative bubbles they think, “These people are just selfish, money-hungry, and evil, and will do anything for a profit.  They don’t care what’s best for everybody.”

Conversely, conservatives look at liberal bubbles and think, “They are unfeeling control freaks who want to take away our freedom to do what we believe in.  They want to tell us what we can do.  They are trying to take away our rights.”

So, humorist and crack-brained nitwit that I am, I have come up with an evil plan to undo this opaque-bubble nightmare.  I intend to look inside lots of bubbles and find ways to make them more transparent again.  I also intend to invite everyone I know, and everyone who reads this, to do the same.  That should help.

But I should warn you, I am not the only one looking to manipulate bubble people.  There are a bunch of rich and cynical folks out there too who are busy playing billiard games with a majority of the fossilized opaque bubbles .  Once bubbles start popping, more people will be hurt.

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December 3, 2016 · 4:28 pm

“Because I Said So!” (Why Bad Guys Always Win – Part 3)

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Didn’t you hate it as a kid when Mom or Dad used to pull the royal decree maneuver on you rather than give you the real explanation?  “Why can’t we get a new dog to replace the one the junkyard dealer ran over with his truck?”  “Because I said so!” 

Yes, they pull rank or site ultimate power of authority or simply bully you into letting them win the argument.  Nixon said, “If it’s the President of the United States who does it, then it is legal.”  Remember, though, that Nixon was forced to resign shortly after that.

Now, Donald Trump says, “The President can’t have a conflict of interest,” by which he means that he doesn’t have to sell off his international real-estate holdings and put his assets into a real blind trust (not one run by Ivanka).

Does he get away with it?  It will mean, according to ethics lawyers from both the Obama and Bush administrations, that he will be in violation of the Emoluments Clause of the U.S. Constitution as soon as he takes the oath of office.  So, of course he will.  Just like Mom and Dad after we buried Scamper.

Obama, as President, was forced to do most of what he did by Executive Order because he was a Democrat, and to a Republican Congress, that means he is automatically in the wrong.  Still, he managed to enforce his will with the I said so’s at least until the righteously heroic Republicans achieved their miracle victory with President-Elect Babyhands Von Clownstick.  Now, of course, his overreaching abuse of the I said so power to do terrible things, like allow undocumented children fleeing from violence and persecution to take shelter in this country, will now all be undone.

Of course, when a Republican is President, that’s different.  Republican Presidents are automatically good and patriotic and protecting the people even when they are lying to create a profitable war in Iraq to benefit Darth Cheney’s Halliburton interests.  Lonesome George the Rodeo Clown when he was President issued all sorts of Executive Orders that were not questioned even by Democrats, let alone opposed or reversed.  In the hands of a Republican President, I said so power is more absolute than Emperor Palpatine’s use of the Dark Side of the Force.

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So under President Donald J (for Joker, revealing his secret identity as a Batman villain) Trump, the “Because I said so!” will be absolute.  Rosie O’Donnell, Bill Maher, and Jon Stewart had better get used to the idea of waterboarding in Guantanamo.  We had all better get used to the idea of the White House being plated in gold leaf.  And I had better hope, having written an essay revealing the Cinnamon Hitler’s actual super power, that nobody actually reads this blog anymore.  If you would like to help ease my fears, you could always leave a comment in the comment section that includes the words, “I did not actually read this post.”

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November 12, 2016 · 5:44 pm

Healing From A Fatal Wound

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The Trumpkins and Trolls won the battle and are now busy eating their prisoners… along with the puppies and kittens for desert.  And as far as I can see, the war is over.  We had a chance with the Paris Climate Accords to repair the damage to the life of this planet, even though it was a very eleventh-hour plan to avert the end of life on Earth.  The Trolls and Trumpkins are peeing on that fence too, shorting it out and preventing it from saving us from being eaten by the heat-wolves of corporate polluters.

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I myself wasn’t expecting to live through another decade in any case, but now, I fear the lives of my children and grandchildren will be cut short as well.  You can’t poop where you eat on a regular basis and expect not to get sick and die.  I predicted that the Cubs would win the World Series because they stole key talent from the Cardinals and had a young, rising club to add them to.  I got that one right.  I predicted that Trump would win the presidency because I know a lot of the Trump-voter kind of former middle-class white people who are seriously in financial and existential pain, and I knew who they were going to blame it on.  If I am right about this last thing too, then we are all doomed.  3f96a6e4e030fa8fa38c97da9d206240

“Jeez, Mickey!  You don’t call that humor, do you?”

Well, I guess I do, because humor comes from being able to laugh at the darkness and make fun of the dumpy-lumpy lumbering bears of bad fortune that are about to eat you.  We are going to have a laugh or two before the end at the expense of Trumpkins and Trolls because they make world-shaking decisions based on faith in false facts.  The irony and stupidity of it all is a very laughable absurdity that will build BS mountains taller than Everest.  And those mountains will collapse upon them, burying them in poop.  Never mind that we will also be buried.  They brought it on themselves by the choices they made.  Seeing them get their comeuppance has to be worth a laugh or two.

I have pretty much let Will Rogers speak to this current election result through the memes I have chosen to accompany this gloomy-doomy essay.  I think it is significant that wisdom from a hundred years ago still applies so completely to the politics of today.  With democracy and elections we get what we deserve… not what we want.  We need to change to face the future, if we even get to have one.  But the past clearly shows that we haven’t learned our lessons very well.  I guess there’s nothing left to do but laugh about it… and try to love each other a little better before the bitter end.

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Thanks for sharing, Cousin Will.

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July 9, 2016 · 3:33 pm

Return to the Stone Age

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Pebbles Winchuk, South Texas dino-girl

We are swiftly returning to the Stone Age.  We are dividing into armed camps and shooting each other.  Texas is an open carry State and they are allowed to carry rifles to Black Lives Matter rallies.  Former Illinois Congressman Joe Walsh took to Twitter to declare the conservative position (at least the lunatic half plus at least one per cent).

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Well, if he is coming for Black Lives Matter punks, then he might as well come for me, too.  I believe black people have been unfairly targeted by law enforcement (even black cops who buy into police-culture prejudices).  I think police forces need to be retrained to be more race-sensitive and determined to de-escalate potentially violent situations instead of executing the suspect on the spot.  If they can do that for white suspects, even armed and potentially violent white suspects, then they can do that for everybody.  As a school teacher, I stopped and broke up at least forty fights in my career.  Two of them involved weapons and I stopped at least four high school fights while being forced to walk everywhere on campus with a cane.  You can bring violence to an end by talking to the participants.  You don’t have to shoot Jose and Deshawn to get them to stop punching each other because they both like Maria.  But the government does nothing to move the national conversation in the direction of non-violence.  The Dallas shooting was made so much more complex because there were so many potential “good-guys with a gun” on the scene that the brave policemen who charged towards the shooting had a hard time determining who the bad guy was.  And Joe Walsh is coming for us because we don’t believe we should be shot without due process.

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A picture of the Pebbles Winchuk picture taken with my brighter light.  Still not as good as sunlight.

So, we are returning to the Stone Age.  I need to start chipping away at pieces of flint to make more spear points.  I probably need to brush up on my dinosaur-training skills, or at least, watch Jurassic World another couple of times.  The Walshian tribe is coming, shouting “Ugga-bugga Thump! Thump!” and getting ready to throw more stones.

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May 19, 2016 · 6:27 pm

Point by Point

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I was enumerating yesterday all the bad things that make my life exactly the way I expect it to be as a total pessimist.  Of course, I left out that I am fully expecting Donald Trump to be the next president of this country.  Yes, I expect the worst to happen.  Hillary Clinton will not beat Trump either because of her toxic unfavorability or because the email thing will bring down an indictment to nullify her eligibility to be president.  And all my conservative friends who love Trump will continue to dance happy dances and sing about me being a hopeless “lib-tard” who doesn’t really know anything about anything as Trump continues to rob them and make their lives more miserable with the help of the government he will control from the inside.

Yes, one of the biggest downers about being too smart for your own good is, you see past the lies everyone tells themselves, and perceive the darkest of the truths that lurk behind them.

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I got this meme from a high school friend who served in the Navy and became a firefighter… an honorable public servant no matter how you look at it.

In the meme to the right, I am characterized as a self-centered numb-noggin who thinks his opinion is more important than the realities of this person’s life.  It makes me sad that my childhood friend believes this is true about my political beliefs.  But I am not claiming to be oppressed.  Well, maybe by Trump once he does away with the healthcare law that guarantees insurance companies will cover me despite six pre-existing conditions.  This is a straw man argument that sets up liberals as unreasonable norks that want the law to dictate that everything should be the way liberals want them to be.  That is not the way I see being a liberal.

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I choose rather to look at what people are saying on all sides and make decisions based on my hopefully broad and enlightened mind.  I would never advise someone to have an abortion.  But I do care what happens to children once they are born.  Are we limiting their suffering when they are not wanted by anyone?  When they are born into poverty?  When they drink lead-contaminated water and are subjected to brain damage and death because the conservative government decided saving money was worth the risk?  I believe all people are deserving of respect and all people have value.  I have gay friends and former students.  Their existence in this world enriches it, and I am not ashamed to know them.  I would never ask one of my conservative friends to marry another man… or marry anybody.  I have a wife who is from a foreign country and her road to citizenship is still not traversed.  Could we be making that road harder than it needs to be?

I am a liberal.  But I would not call myself a tax-and-spend liberal.  I would rather see the money we already pay in taxes go for better public schools, better roads and bridges and public works, less expensive, or even FREE college education for my struggling children, rather than tax breaks and corporate wellfare for GE, Pfizer, and Exxon.  Is it too much to ask that our taxes be spent on us rather than enhancing corporate profit margins?  And couldn’t millionaires and billionaires afford to pay the same percentage of taxes that I do?  Maybe even more because they have more?  Why does believing these things make me evil?  Or stupid?  Or any of the other things that my conservative friends tell me that I am because I am a liberal?  I would rather reason things out than simply insult others, something the other side of this argument doesn’t make a habit of doing.

I have no problem saying, “Black lives matter.”  They do matter.  And they have not been treated fairly.  Not Trayvon Martin.  Not Michael Brown.  Especially not Tamir Rice, the twelve year old shot to death for having a toy gun.  These are children who are not to blame for their own deaths.  So I am not burdened to add “…All lives matter” because it goes without saying.  White and Asian lives have not been snuffed out in Walmart’s toy section for handling an air rifle.  I guess I must be a reverse-racist for saying this like I have been told on Facebook.

I am a liberal.  So shoot me.  Er… rather, don’t shoot me.  But be patient with my fact-heavy and logic-heavy arguments.  If you are a Christian, then weigh my arguments against what you know in your heart Jesus actually would do.  I know scripture.  I have read the entire Bible more than once.  I am confident my wanting government to do what helps the greatest number and harms no one will stand the test.  And I am preparing to deal with a President Donald Trump who probably won’t see it that way.

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